The elevator was a pristine, shiny, smooth box of chrome that slid on its rails perfectly as it brought them down into the dark depths of hell that no doubt existed down there, buried beneath the antarctic ice. Blake felt his stomach grumbling and couldn't decide if it was from hunger or fear. Or maybe it was from exhaustion. He was suddenly grateful for that very long helicopter ride down there. Spending eighteen hours either asleep or otherwise immobile meant that he had a large reserve of energy. But he knew he'd need to eat and drink soon. The last thing he'd put in his stomach was that bottle of water at the fake weather research center.
That made him think of Pace and Williams...which made him think of the current group of men he was with. He still felt fairly confident that he could trust Falchek, but what about Fisk or Dixon? Either man had the complete and utter ability to be infected. To be one of those...Things, masquerading as a human being, right next to him. It was bad enough having to fight these mutated horrors and, he imagined soon, Whitley's goons, if those guys in gasmasks back at the warehouse were any indication, but he also couldn't trust his own men?
The elevator abruptly stopped and the doors slid smoothly open into what appeared to be some kind of basement region. The only thing in view was a dirty concrete wall and some thick pipes. Blake hesitated, he only had a flamethrower.
"Fisk," he whispered, then pointed sharply forward.
Fisk nodded, tucking his shotgun up into his shoulder. He moved to the edge of the open door, poked his head out, then moved out of the elevator. After a moment, he sounded the all-clear. Blake, Falchek and Dixon followed. The room they'd come to wasn't very big. It reminded Blake of the basement of an old apartment building he'd once lived in in New York. Concrete walls, pipes everywhere, railings separating the pipes from the rest of the room. There were only two doors, one on either end.
"Okay," Blake began. "Where-"
The door to the right suddenly burst open and a man in a suit of dark camouflage with a gasmask on rushed inside, toting an MP-5.
"I've found the targets!" he called, raising the gun. "Get in-" Abruptly, his head, gasmask and all, disappeared in a misty plume of crimson gore. The headless corpse dropped to the dusty concrete floor and twitched spasmodically.
"Hostiles!" Blake shouted, a little unnecessarily.
Another man stepped into the room and was cut down by a combination of Falchek's MP-5 fire and another two blasts from Fisk's shotgun. Blake raced forward and scooped up the first fallen soldier's machine gun. He had a clear view of the hallway beyond the door and saw three more men coming towards him.
Knowing that he had no chance to hide, he raised the machine gun and opened fire, squeezing the trigger and spraying the corridor down. The men all screamed as they were peppered with bullets. Fisk hurried up to join him and together they finished off the troopers. The hallway didn't extend very far, but Blake could hear an alarm cycling and a red light was flashing deeper within. He didn't feel like dealing with it for the moment, so he threw the switch next to the door and it slammed closed. Blake let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
"Which way goes where?" he asked as he dropped to his knees in between the two corpses they'd produced that were actually in the room and began to carefully pat them down.
"The way you just closed leads deeper into the base. The other door leads to some kind of storage room, I think," Dixon replied.
"Great," Blake muttered. "Well, we'll check out the storage room, see if there's anything useful in it, then we'll deal with what's beyond that door."
He salvaged four magazines from the corpses and used one of them to reload the MP-5. At least he had an actual gun now. He turned and led the men quickly across the room to the only other door. It opened to reveal a short length of concrete corridor, the only notable things being a decapitated corpse leaning up against the back wall and a door next to it, to the left. Blake hurried down the hall and saw the door had a window in it.
He peered cautiously in. No gasmask-wearing soldiers, just what appeared to be a large forklift hoisting a load of...something overhead. Blake activated the switch to open the door and stepped carefully inside.
"Okay, Fisk, Falchek, which our backs. Dixon, with me," Blake said.
The three men replied affirmatively. Blake led Dixon into the room and began walking around the forklift. There wasn't much to the area. To the left were a trio of huge, cylindrical tanks fitted up against the wall. To the right was a door with a sparking fusebox. Behind the forklift was a small, elevated room that looked a little like an observation area a foreman might stand in, overseeing his work space. Blake led Dixon up it.
Inside was a small bank of equipment and monitors, but they were all dark and dead. They weren't of any use, but Blake could finally see what was on top of the forklift. Three glass containers with white pedestals, each containing a chicken-legged Scuttler. They were all staring at Blake and Dixon. The engineer made a quiet sound as he saw them.
"Fuck-ugly things, aren't they?" he muttered.
"You don't seem bothered by them," Blake said.
"I am...I'm just not a very emotional guy. They freak me out, but I've seen a lot of shit. Watched a lot of movies, read a lot of books, you know? And I've already been working around them for close to a month now."
"Jesus, how long have they been down here, experimenting? This seems like a huge operation," Blake marveled.
"All I know is that they were already chugging along nicely when I first showed up, so probably longer than two months, maybe more than three," Dixon replied.
"Fuck...come on, let's see what's in that room, and then we press on."
They moved back down to the ground floor and Dixon quickly repaired the sparking fusebox. Blake stepped into the room beyond. It was very small, stuffed with crates and shelves, clearly a storage room. He cautiously poked through the supplies, determined not to let this venture be a total bust, and, after five minutes, was rewarded for his stubbornness. He found a trio of grenades tucked away behind a crate.
"Someone was saving up for a rainy day," he said, pocketing the grenades. They looked to be standard fragmentation grenades.
Dixon opened his mouth to say something, but abruptly the sound of gunfire cut through the air. The booming report of a shotgun and the pop-pop-pop of MP-5 fire. By the time he and Dixon had rushed back to where Fisk and Falchek were, they saw another pair of dead soldiers. Down the length of the passageway and across the original room, Blake could see that they'd gotten the door open. There didn't seem to be anyone else in his line of sight at least.
"Can we go?" Fisk asked.
"Yeah, let's go," Blake replied.
They went back to the room with the elevator and passed through it, pausing to police up more ammunition from the soldiers. By the time they'd reached the room with the blaring siren again, Blake had found another three magazines. He stood in the doorway to the corridor yet explored and felt a headache begin to well as the alarm continued to cycle. Frustrated, he raised his MP-5 and fired out a small slew of rounds at a red light down the way that was flashing in sync with the siren. Abruptly, the siren cut off.
"Thanks," Dixon muttered.
"Happy to help, now be ready," Blake replied.
The corridor continued for a good twenty feet, then veered sharply left. He made his way down it and pressed his back to the wall by the corner. In the dead silence of the corridor, he could hear nothing moving. Cautiously, he poked his head around and found himself staring down another length of corridor scattered with metal crates. No bad guys, though. Blake led his men down the corridor, staying cautious, until he came to another turn.
This one turned out to be a dead end...of sorts.
"Well...this sucks," Falchek muttered.
There was a bulletproof pane of glass stuck into the wall to the left, showing them the way yet gone: another dirty, industrial looking room. The only way into it was through what looked to Blake to be a gas chamber where two Walkers lumbered around. Soot-stained nozzles were above their heads, and Blake suddenly realized it was a burn pit of some kind. He sat there, frowning, staring at it, the Walkers, the burn nozzles.
"Who the fuck would design something like this?" he muttered.
"I think it's some kind of counter-measure," Dixon said. "Kind of like an airlock, you know? Put people in there, make them do the test, if they fail, you can burn 'em up quick."
"Ugh...and now there's two of those damned things in there. I guess we'll have to kill them the hard way since I don't see any controls out here," Blake said. He walked over to the door, studied it for a long moment, then turned to Dixon. "How do you get it open?"
"I think the only way to get it open is from the other side," he said after considering it for a moment.
Blake groaned. "Well how the hell do we get over there then!? This glass is bulletproof, the walls look tough, and there's no-" His eyes fell on a ventilation grate in the wall, low to the floor, opposite the bulletproof window. "Aw crap," he muttered.
"What-oh yeah, that makes sense," Dixon said.
Blake considered it for a moment. He wasn't sure why, but his gut was telling him he needed to go alone. But that didn't make any sense. Unfortunately, the last time he hadn't listened to his instincts, people had gotten hurt.
"Stay here," he said, walking over to the grate and prying it off the wall.
"What? No way," Falchek said.
"Yeah, I thought we were sticking together," Fisk complained.
"I want you guys to stay here while I go figure this out," Blake replied. The men stared at him silently. He sighed. "Look, you know I'm human, I've proved it, and it takes longer than the five minutes I was out of your actual eyesight. And Dixon was with me and you'll notice that I'm not taking him or trying to get one of you alone with me. Just...trust me on this."
"Fine," Falchek said after a moment.
"Whatever," Dixon said, frowning.
Fisk just nodded.
"Thanks. I'll be back."
"Hurry up," Fisk said, "you've got the only flame-based weapon."
That was something that, for some reason, hadn't occurred to Blake. He really was starting to lose it from lethargy and hunger. He nodded tightly and dropped down onto his hands and knees. Like before, crawling through the vent was about as appealing as it sounded, but he got it over with without running into any Scuttlers or any real trouble. He kicked the corresponding vent grate off when he got to the end and found himself overlooking another concrete dead end room. The only way out was a stairwell that led up and off to the right.
He hopped out onto the floor and abruptly realized that life seemed to have been saving up all the trouble he'd avoided in the vents just so that it could loose it on him now. Something sparked across the room, and fire lit up on the floor, which, he realized, was coated in something slick and smelly. Fuel. The fire licked towards him like a living thing. He let out a small shout, turned and ran up the stairs. The flames continued to follow him.
Blake ran down a short corridor, took a sharp left, ran a few more feet, then took another left and nearly ran into the arms of a Walker. Screaming again, reacting purely on instinct, he ducked beneath the Walker's long grasp and kept running down a long stretch of dark, concrete corridor that was fast becoming lit up. He heard a furious roar and the pounding of uneven, misshapen feet as the Walker gave chase after him.
Another turn, and suddenly he found an open door. Squeezing in between the edge of the door and the wall, his heart thundering in his chest, Blake pushed himself into the room he'd seen on the other side of the bulletproof glass, whirled around and yanked down on a lever beside the door. A moment later, he heard banging on it, saw dents appear in it. He backed away, his MP-5 raised. The banging intensified for a moment...then, suddenly, a loud, pained shrieking roar sounded as the fire reached the Walker.
There was a loud thud, then silence.
Blake breathed a heavy sigh of relief...then heard a squeal behind him. Spinning around, he spied a quartet of Scuttlers making their way towards them. Two of the chicken-legged ones, two of the ugly spider-like creatures. He aimed and fired, hosing the hideous things down with a liberal spray of gunfire, turning them into so much smoking, chewed up meat. Blake squeezed the trigger until the gun clicked empty, then kept clicking.
Finally, shaking, he released the trigger.
He was alone now. Still shaking from the adrenaline, Blake reloaded. If the men had come with him...one, if not all, of them would be dead right now. Maybe even him, too. He began looking around the room he'd come to. There was the door that led to the burn chamber and the two Walkers. He could see all three of his men through the window, intact, alive, staring at him. He nodded to them, they nodded back.
He noticed a little number 3 over the door, and a 2 over the window looking into the burn chamber. He spied corresponding switches across the room. Of course, it had to be. He heaved a sigh, spying four switches in all. One of them must have opened the door that'd let the men in and the fourth one...he spotted a 4 over another door, right next to the one he'd entered through. He tried that door quickly, but found it locked firmly.
"Wonderful," he muttered.
He stared at the switchboard for a moment, then finally reached out and threw the number two switch. It went without trouble and immediately the room lit up. Blake turned around, spying jets of flame shooting from the nozzles overhead in the burn room. Both Walkers went up like dry leaves and began shrieking, racing around the confined space. Soon, they were dead, burning heaps on the wire-mesh floor. Blake flipped the switch back, then opened the inner door. He spied a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall, grabbed it and quickly put out the remaining fires in the burn room. He tried to ignore the awful stench.
When the fires were out, he opened up the outer door and called the men through. Soon, all four of them were on the other side.
"Well...that's that, at least," Dixon muttered.
"God that shit stinks," Falchek growled.
"Yeah, come on, let's press on. I want out of this place," Blake said.
He flipped the final switch, opening the only remaining door in the room. It led to another short corridor that ended in gleaming, silver elevator doors.
"Down, down, down," Dixon muttered unhappily.
"Yet further still downwards," Falchek replied.
"Come on, suck it up," Blake said, making for the elevator. "We've got more work to do."