The Thing 3: Assimilation✔️

Chapter 08: Priorities

Back in the tunnels again.

Blake hadn't been looking forward to it, but honestly, it was too valuable a strategy to give up. He wondered why Gen Inc kept overlooking this disadvantage. He supposed, from their point of view, that although the tunnels were overrun with Thing creatures, they were just that: creatures. Beasts. And the only human beings opposing them had only very recently entered the playing field, at least from their perspective.

Although they were technically wrong on both accounts, Thing creatures were smart and he'd been leading a campaign against Whitley and Gen Inc for days now, he thought it mainly came down to one thing: they were arrogant. They assumed that their superiority was the natural order of things. If that guy Graves was running the show, then it had to be doubly true. The guy was obviously full of himself and addicted to power.

It would be his, and Gen Inc's, downfall.

Blake would see to that personally.

The only good news from their excursion was that it didn't have to last very long. The armory was barely thirty meters away from the temporary holding area they'd just assaulted. The bad news was that there was more than likely going to be a lot more security around it and they were more than likely going to be on alert. Which was going to make this assault a lot harder. He was glad to have three Special Forces personnel at his back.

"Here it is," he said, stopping before a ladder bolted to the far wall. In the distance, they could hear Thing creatures lurking in the shadows.

Glad to be out of this miserable nightmare, Blake hustled up the ladder and opened the hatch he found at the top. He peered out and found himself in a storeroom. As he got out and secured the area, he realized that he wasn't in a storage room, he was in a storage shack. And, judging by what he saw out the windows, it wasn't all that close to the base. Not good. There was a lot of bad space in between the shack and the base.

Blake pulled out his radio. "Taylor, how close are you to the base? Over."

"We're pretty much there, hiding in the snowstorm, though I don't know how long we can keep it up. Over," Taylor replied.

"Begin your assault, we need some cover fire. The exit from the tunnel leads to an exterior shack. Over."

"Understood. Beginning our assault now. Out."

Blake updated the others on the situation, though they'd picked most of it up from the conversation. "We're gonna split up," Blake said. "Chase and I, Nichols and Miller. Get into the base however you can and start doing damage until everyone inside is dead."

The three men nodded tightly to him, holding up the weapons they'd retrieved from the corpses produced by the last mission. Almost immediately, Blake heard the churning drone of a chopper-mounted chaingun earning its keep. An explosion ruptured the area, briefly visible through the swirling gray-white snow.

Blake opened the door and burst out into the cold, sprinting for the base. Chase joined him and the other two broke away. He spied a doorway in the metal, snowbound walls. Overhead, the chopper swooped low and circled back around, doing another strafing run. A few streams of gunfire spat back at it. Blake hit the door and tried it. Locked. He cursed, aimed for the locking mechanism and fired a few times.

The door swung open.

Well, no sense in trying to stay quiet now. Blake and Chase hurried into the room, finding themselves in a small entryway. Hard-edged voices came from further within the base. Blake approached the open door at the other side of the room and then froze as several men in white camo rushed past. As soon as they were clear of the door, Blake hurried up to it, quickly looked back the way they'd come, confirmed no one else was coming and then stepped out into the corridor. He leveled his MP-5 and opened fire.