The Thing 2: Infection✔️

Chapter 01: The Worst Place on Earth

"Hold on, Blake! Enemy fire coming in!"

Blake stared out the open side of the Blackhawk at the constantly shifting mass of jungle below. He could see gunfire, tracers spitting back and forth across the landscape. Soldiers from both sides of the conflict writhed beneath the thick canopy, locked in the intricate choreography of combat. Screaming came from below. Men dying, men shouting orders, men roaring at each other as they lost themselves to the bloodlust of warfare.

He looked back into the chopper. His team was seated around him, geared up, faces painted with dark smears of burnt cork ends, their eyes wild, wide and set. They were ready to do this. The chopper lurched to one side, then did it again. Blake's stomach tossed and turned, threatening vomit. Not here, not now, he'd gotten over this fear thing a long time ago. Or so he told himself. The men were staring at him, waiting for him to say something.

The chopper lurched on, pressing deeper into the combat zone.

Blake stared back at his men. He opened his mouth to say something, to outline the objective again, give them some words of encouragement, crack a joke...but suddenly, the knowledge of what he was doing, what was going on, abruptly slipped away.

He had no idea where he was, why he was there or what was even going on.

The chopper lurched again, violently, and he realized, a second too late, that he'd somehow forgotten to latch himself in.

He was up, out and over the side, and falling.

Falling...

Blake snapped into the awareness that the feeling of falling was still present. He had just enough time to realize that he was in a helicopter. Reality was, for several seconds, a confusion of fear. Gray-white snow blew past the windshields ahead of him and the chopper seemed to be falling. The it stopped and they were gaining air again. He looked over at the pilot.

"Sorry!" the man shouted. "Bad turbulence!"

Blake just nodded, trying to make himself relax. Memories of the past day came back to him. Unhappy memories.

Blake was in Delta Force, one of the groups in the Special Forces segment of the United States Army. He was used to a lot of crazy things that most people weren't. When your job was rescuing hostages, trading bullets with insane guys in a variety of different environments and all manner of counter-terrorism, you learned to put up with a lot. Blake had been in the Army for five years before joining up with SFOD-D, or Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta, for an additional five years. He liked his work.

At thirty one, he was in the best shape of life, had more than enough money to retire on and had no intention of changing careers. He could see doing his job until the day he died, or the day he was no longer capable of dragging his ass out into the field. But that day was a long way off...he hoped. So what was he doing in a helicopter heading towards one of the worst, most isolated and lethal places on the face of the planet?

After a three month counter-terrorism op in the Middle East, Blake had finally earned some rest and relaxation. He'd been shipped back to the States and was staying at Fort Freeman in Virginia while he decided where he was going to go. He'd just made the decision to head to the opposite coast and relax in California when fresh orders came through in the form of a frowning pilot in blue sunglasses kindly asking him to get his ass on the chopper, no questions asked. He had the appropriate papers, so Blake was obligated to go.

They'd flown down without a word spoken between them to Florida, switched to a helicopter with extra, external fuel tanks and kept going south. Blake had had missions like these before, where he was whisked away in the middle of the night, or the middle of some well-deserved R & R, but never so far south. At first he thought they might have been going to South America, but for hours upon hours it had been nothing but ocean.