The Thing 3: Assimilation✔️

Chapter 10: Jailbreak

"Hey...can you hear me?...come on, wake up..."

Blake uttered a thick groan as the world came back to him in bits and pieces. The first thing he became aware of was the fact that he had a pounding headache. The second was the smell: it smelled like he was in a hospital, which set him on edge. He'd never liked hospitals. Someone was trying to talk to him, a voice he didn't recognize. As he shifted and opened his eyes, a brilliant white light cut into his head, making the pain flare.

"Come on, get up, it's important," the voice insisted.

Groaning again, feeling a million little aches and pains assault him, Blake shifted once more and slowly sat up.

He was in a cell of stainless steel. A single bright light was bolted to the ceiling overhead in a metal grille. Looking around, he found that he was on a thin metal slab jutting out of the wall, sharing company with a stainless steel toilet and sink and nothing more.

"Hey! Here!" the voice whispered intently.

Blake turned his head. There was a small window over his bed. A man with wild white hair, pallid skin and dark bags under his eyes stared in. He looked crazy.

"Who are you?" Blake asked, rubbing his head and remembering how he had stupidly walked right into a trap.

"Nuzzi," the man replied. "Doctor Dario Nuzzi."

"Captain Blake."

"Ah! Perfect, I was hoping it was you. Graves has had a lot to say about you and MacReady," the man said.

"Fantastic. What do you want?" he grumbled, leaning his head down and massaging the back of his neck.

"I want to help you escape, and, in doing so, help myself escape. I was one of the lead scientists for Gen Inc. I'm a biologist and geneticist and I was helping them map the genetics of the Cloud Virus," Nuzzi explained.

"So what the hell are you doing in here then?"

"When we started capturing people, using them as live test subjects, when the experiments grew brutal...I could no longer be a part of it. I tried to stop them. I failed and they locked me up. Now I'm going to be experimented on along with the others."

"So...you said you had a way out of here?" Blake asked.

"Yes. I've studied the schematics of this facility intently. I was always concerned something like this might happen. Beneath your bed is a maintenance hatch, locked tight. But, here, take this." He fed a thin metal rod through one of the narrow holes in the glass. "Use it to unlock the hatch. That hatch will lead you down into the maintenance areas. Once you get down into the tunnel below these cells, go left, follow it to the end, then take a right and follow that corridor to an end. You will find several doors. Go through the one marked Electrical B Three. Find the master control switch in that room and throw it."

"What will that do?" Blake asked as he got up and then crouched down beneath the bed. He found the hatch the man was talking about and began to fiddle with the locking mechanism.

"That will cut electricity to a good portion of the base, including these cells and the cells containing the specimens."

"This doesn't sound like a safe plan," Blake murmured. There, he had it. The locking mechanism popped open, and thus did the hatch.

Nuzzi laughed. "Nothing down here is safe, but it's our only option. Listen, when you do this, come back and find me. I have vital information and I can help you take down Graves and Gen Inc. They've gone completely mad."

"All right, I'll be back as soon as I can. Don't die."

"I haven't so far."

Blake crawled down into a narrow shaft that the hatch led to and made his way quickly down the ladder, trying to get his thoughts sorted. How long had he been out? Had anything happened to him while he'd been unconscious? Was he infected? He didn't feel infected, but then again, what if you didn't know? He didn't particularly like this train of thought, because there was nothing he could do about it at present, so he derailed it. Just in time, too. The ladder came to an end. He found himself in a small niche in a metal wall.