The Thing 2: Infection✔️

Chapter 08: Questionable Ethics

Blake dropped into a corridor and was immediately greeted by three corpses. Two of them were huddled up in one corner, twined together, half-burned, nastily mutated. Someone had obviously been in the middle of bursting out. Behind him, a third corpse, or part of one. It was little more than a torso and an arm in a pool of blood. Ahead and behind him, Blake spied open hatchways. The one behind him led to a short corridor that immediately turned right, the other one led into a room that seemed to be filled with a thin haze of steam.

Next to him was a thick window. He frowned, staring at the dark blue water beyond it, and felt strangely dislocated from himself. Here he was, in Antarctica, below the ice, cutting his way into a government conspiracy, fighting an alien virus that assumed the form of those it killed. How could he possibly hope to stop either of these threats...let alone try to stay alive? With a growing difficulty, Blake did what he always did when the situation seemed hopeless: he told himself to stop trying to look at the big picture, focus on the here and now.

It was a low, menacing growl that grabbed his attention. It was coming from behind him, opposite the steam-filled room. Turning, he switched to his flamethrower and cautiously made his way to the door and into the short corridor. It turned into a small room with three more doors, one on each side and one dead ahead. They were all numbered, all shut and all firmly locked. Also, they had windows in them. Blake tracked the source of the growling to the door on the right. The noise almost sounded like respiration.

It had a 3 over it, nothing else. Through the glass, Blake could see a small cell with a body, a table and a Walker standing in it. The thing began to pace back and forth. It had no head, was wrapped in a sickly white skin and had mismatched arms. One seemed to have not only grown in length and size, but had split into two arms at the base. The other was withered and twisted, looking useless. It was nearly the same deal for the legs: one was a lot larger and thicker, the other was withered, only on the legs it was reversed.

Blake left the thing alone and moved over to the opposite door, this one marked with a 2 overhead. A fire was raging inside. Great. He moved down the corridor to its end. This door had a 1 over it, but also a sign: PREP LAB. He caught a hint of thick medical shelves and something in a depression in the floor, glass and metal, but the lighting wasn't all that good. Sighing, Blake retreated back to the original corridor he'd dropped into and stood at the entryway to the steamy room. Overhead, he saw a sign marking it as the heat exchange.

Of course.

He began making his way into the room. It wasn't very big, and seemed claustrophobic. All manner of piping ran along the walls and the ceiling, not to mention a pair of open ventilation shafts. There were two more doors along the left side of the room, but they seemed to have been wedged shut in some kind of explosion or structural damage, and, on top of that, Blake didn't see anything useful through the windows in either of them. He was just about to make his way towards the final door, across the room, when he heard something.

It was a dull thud, followed by a familiar growl.

Scuttlers.

Turning, he raised his MP-5. He had to be careful, the only magazine he had left was currently in the gun. After that, well...he spied the Scuttler in one of the two open vents. It was growling at him, one of the chicken-legged uglies, and probably preparing to leap at him. He put it down with a couple of well-placed shots, splattering its black blood all over the interior of the vent. Even before it flopped forward out of the vent and splattered to the floor, another one dropped down, then another one in another vent across the room.

Blake cursed and fired again, putting down the second one he already had in his sights. The third one had dropped down onto the floor and was coming to him. He shifted aim, fired, missed, fired again and sprayed its blood all over the floor. Blake waited, remaining tense and still, but no more came. He sighed softly. By his count, he had about half a magazine left in his MP-5. After that it was just his flamethrower. Not good.