The Thing 2: Infection✔️

Chapter 17: End of Days

When the elevator settled into place, Blake felt a wave of unease wash over him. The room they had come to was utterly, totally empty. Everything was gone. It was just a big, empty area. His boots echoed as they hit the floor.

"What happened?" he murmured, stepping out of the lift.

"I don't know," Stolls said. "I thought there'd be more stuff here."

"Maybe...maybe they pulled out," Cohen suggested.

"Christ, if they're fleeing...come on!" Blake called.

He ran towards the nearest door and yanked it open. An equally barren hallway awaited his inspection, just a bleak length of metal. The trio ran down the corridor, past open doors and vacant rooms. Occasionally they would spy signs of battle: spent shell casings, blood on the floor, bullet holes in the walls.

But no bodies.

Not even parts of bodies.

Blake had a demented thought about not wanting to waste anything, even the corpses of the fallen. Gen Inc. and Whitley's gasmasks must've decided to pull everything out, either to another facility in Antarctica, like Stolls had suggested, or possibly off the continent entirely. All the more reason to hurry up and find that psycho.

As Blake led the engineer and the medic through the abandoned facility, he felt a curious sense of dislocation settle over him. This far away from civilization, in an abandoned facility that had clearly seen its share of brutal warfare, it was easy to feel that perhaps he and these other two were to be counted among the last humans left alive on the entire planet. Blake made himself focus, made himself concentrate. He felt like he was close to some kind of conclusion, and he couldn't screw it up now, not after he'd come so far.

Finally, they came to the end of the facility. Their exit to the world, back into the frigid, antarctic wastes, came in the form of a large garage-style door. It opened to a cargo ramp. The light was better, which meant that the storm must be lessening, giving the sun a chance to actually do its job. At first, Blake was grateful for this light, it meant that their work would be that much easier. Even the lessening of the winds meant that they had less snow blowing around and that visibility would be better than freaking three feet in front of him.

And then he instantly regretted this development because no sooner had they approached the garage door than did a sniper round come shrieking through it and drive a path directly through Stolls' head. Blake screamed and stumbled away, sprayed with blood, and had a momentary glimpse of a headless corpse still standing. Then Stolls' body fell to its knees, spurting blood like a broken fire hydrant directly into the air.

"Sniper!" he screamed.

Cohen didn't have a chance.

While Blake was diving to get out of the bastard's line of sight, Cohen was screaming, stumbling away, and then poof! His head disappeared in a plume of crimson gore. Blake screamed again, involuntary, as if he himself had been shot, and then finished rolling out of the way. There was another shot, one that came uncomfortably close to him, he could feel the fucking thing as it displaced air, traveling very close to him.

But he was safe.

He finished rolling and made for the wall. As he regained his footing, Blake looked around frantically, expecting some kind of attack. But there was nothing. His eyes fell on Cohen and Stolls. Two good men, gone, just like that. It made him sick, but he didn't have the luxury of time or emotions. The time to kill was upon him.

He had seen something before, something he'd been in the middle of looking towards when the sniper hit, and now he looked at it again. A small set up, a pair of crates really, were pushed up against the wall to the side of the open door. It was on his side of the room, thankfully. Atop it was a small cache of weapons and ammunition. Perfect. Blake hurried over and looked over his treasure trove. A quartet of flash-bang grenades, a sniper rifle with a small stack of ammo, some magazines for an MP-5. Blake immediately grabbed the rifle.