The Thing 2: Infection✔️

Chapter 11: Beneath the Ice

The elevator was a pristine, shiny, smooth box of chrome that slid on its rails perfectly as it brought them down into the dark depths of hell that no doubt existed down there, buried beneath the antarctic ice. Blake felt his stomach grumbling and couldn't decide if it was from hunger or fear. Or maybe it was from exhaustion. He was suddenly grateful for that very long helicopter ride down there. Spending eighteen hours either asleep or otherwise immobile meant that he had a large reserve of energy. But he knew he'd need to eat and drink soon. The last thing he'd put in his stomach was that bottle of water at the fake weather research center.

That made him think of Pace and Williams...which made him think of the current group of men he was with. He still felt fairly confident that he could trust Falchek, but what about Fisk or Dixon? Either man had the complete and utter ability to be infected. To be one of those...Things, masquerading as a human being, right next to him. It was bad enough having to fight these mutated horrors and, he imagined soon, Whitley's goons, if those guys in gasmasks back at the warehouse were any indication, but he also couldn't trust his own men?

The elevator abruptly stopped and the doors slid smoothly open into what appeared to be some kind of basement region. The only thing in view was a dirty concrete wall and some thick pipes. Blake hesitated, he only had a flamethrower.

"Fisk," he whispered, then pointed sharply forward.

Fisk nodded, tucking his shotgun up into his shoulder. He moved to the edge of the open door, poked his head out, then moved out of the elevator. After a moment, he sounded the all-clear. Blake, Falchek and Dixon followed. The room they'd come to wasn't very big. It reminded Blake of the basement of an old apartment building he'd once lived in in New York. Concrete walls, pipes everywhere, railings separating the pipes from the rest of the room. There were only two doors, one on either end.

"Okay," Blake began. "Where-"

The door to the right suddenly burst open and a man in a suit of dark camouflage with a gasmask on rushed inside, toting an MP-5.

"I've found the targets!" he called, raising the gun. "Get in-" Abruptly, his head, gasmask and all, disappeared in a misty plume of crimson gore. The headless corpse dropped to the dusty concrete floor and twitched spasmodically.

"Hostiles!" Blake shouted, a little unnecessarily.

Another man stepped into the room and was cut down by a combination of Falchek's MP-5 fire and another two blasts from Fisk's shotgun. Blake raced forward and scooped up the first fallen soldier's machine gun. He had a clear view of the hallway beyond the door and saw three more men coming towards him.

Knowing that he had no chance to hide, he raised the machine gun and opened fire, squeezing the trigger and spraying the corridor down. The men all screamed as they were peppered with bullets. Fisk hurried up to join him and together they finished off the troopers. The hallway didn't extend very far, but Blake could hear an alarm cycling and a red light was flashing deeper within. He didn't feel like dealing with it for the moment, so he threw the switch next to the door and it slammed closed. Blake let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

"Which way goes where?" he asked as he dropped to his knees in between the two corpses they'd produced that were actually in the room and began to carefully pat them down.

"The way you just closed leads deeper into the base. The other door leads to some kind of storage room, I think," Dixon replied.

"Great," Blake muttered. "Well, we'll check out the storage room, see if there's anything useful in it, then we'll deal with what's beyond that door."

He salvaged four magazines from the corpses and used one of them to reload the MP-5. At least he had an actual gun now. He turned and led the men quickly across the room to the only other door. It opened to reveal a short length of concrete corridor, the only notable things being a decapitated corpse leaning up against the back wall and a door next to it, to the left. Blake hurried down the hall and saw the door had a window in it.