The Thing 2: Infection✔️

Chapter 14: Hostile Territory

Blake nodded. "Okay. Good. It's good to have someone to watch your back. Come on, let's see what we can see."

They made their way down to the door and Blake opened it. They came to a divider room. There was nothing in it save for a corpse leaning up against a wall, its brains splattered all across the wall behind it. Just one door. Blake went through it first as well. He saw a gasmask wearing soldier making his way across the room towards him. The man held an MP-5. Blake snapped his own piece up and hosed the man down with a dozen bullets. He screamed as bloody holes opened up all over his body and he was thrown off his feet.

"Damn, Blake," Lavelle muttered.

"Yeah, well, he had it coming," Blake replied.

He crossed the room after making sure no one else was coming, knelt and carefully patted the man down. He retrieved only a single magazine for his MP-5 and then straightened back up. This time, he had two doors to choose from in an L-shaped room. One door, to the left, led to an even smaller room, no larger than a closet. It had a window built into it, and through that window Blake saw a table with a test kit on it.

He tried to open the door, but it was locked.

He sighed. "Goddamnit, I want in there," Blake muttered.

"Let me look," Lavelle said.

He wasted a few minutes trying to find a way in, but the door was locked firmly. Heaving a sigh, he shrugged. Blake turned and made his way to the other door. It opened easily enough. This time, they came into a larger room with several niches and little alcoves along its peripheral. Blake had time to see a couple of doors, one them an elevator door, and a pair of gasmask-wearing soldiers in the center of the room, facing away from him.

They were just turning around when Blake and Lavelle mowed them down. They waited to see if anyone else would show up, but no one did.

"Man, they do not have their shit together," Blake muttered.

"This operation has always been a little shoddy," Lavelle said. "Whitley and the other execs liked to act like they had this all under control, like it was just one big machine and they were riding high on perfection, but shit got fucked up all the time. People went missing, orders went unanswered, stuff broke down all the time."

"Great. The greatest threat to humanity in its short history and the three goddamned stooges are handling it," Blake muttered.

They did a quick search of the room that didn't turn up much. One of the doors was also locked firmly, the elevator doors were closed and the two magazines of ammo they found on the soldiers were given to Lavelle. What was really creepy however was a stack of three clear crates that looked like blocks of ice. Inside of each block was a Scuttler, frozen, no doubt being prepared for shipment somewhere else.

"God," Lavelle muttered, staring at them. "Ugly things."

"Hideous," Blake agreed.

They opened the final door and stepped through into another corridor. At the end of it, Blake saw someone just disappearing from out of sight. He heard someone shouting not to shoot. The scene was hauntingly familiar. He imagined it was more so for Lavelle, who Blake had rescued from his exact situation less than an hour ago. The pair of them raced down the corridor. Blake whipped out his pistol as he rounded the corner, finding himself in another short corridor with an open door at the end. He saw two men standing just inside that room.

Racing forward, he put the gun to the back of the head of the nearest man, who was menacing a cowering engineer across the room, and pulled the trigger. Before the second man could say or do anything, Blake shifted his aim and fired again. The gasmask flew off the soldier's face as he crashed to the floor in a spray of blood and brains. Blake waited that crucial few seconds, still keyed up on adrenaline, ready for anything, but nothing happened. The engineer at the back of the room slowly lowered his hands.