The stairwell led into another, larger storeroom, also packed with all sorts of crap. Neither man spoke as they ran through towers of crates and shelves and lockers. Overhead, a fierce firefight was in play and they could hear the faint sounds of screaming. For now, Blake just wanted to put some distance between him and the bursting out Thing beasts. He felt naked without a flamethrower. He didn't even have his pistol anymore. As he walked through the storeroom, he patted himself down and found that he had nothing.
Not even a bullet to his name.
"Burrows, where are we?" he asked as they reached the end of the underground storage area.
"We're about to enter a network of tunnels that Gen Inc set up over the past month. They lead all over the region and they were supposed to take the weather problems out of the equation of moving troops, equipment and specimens," Burrows replied.
"Supposed to?"
"Yeah. They lost control of most of the tunnels. There's tons of Thing creatures down here," Burrows replied. He stopped as they came to another door, turned to face Blake, who stopped and took a step back.
"I'm not infected," Burrows said.
"You know that statement is basically a waste of breath, right?"
Burrows sighed. "Yeah, it is. Sorry, force of habit. I, uh...well, let's just say that, where I grew up, a man was his word, and I worked hard on making sure I could be trusted by my word. Kind of tough to make the adjustment. Here."
He set his pistol down on a nearby barrel. Blake realized the thing he'd snagged on the way out was a flamethrower.
"Maybe I should have the flamethrower," Blake said. "I mean, I've had more combat training and experience."
Burrows stared at him for a moment, then he sighed. "All right, look, I'll give it to you on one condition. I've got one test kit on me. You use it, and pass, you get the flamethrower."
"Fine."
He pulled out a test kit from his pocket and set it down next to the pistol. Blake reached out and picked it up, noting that Burrows was covering him with the flamethrower. He did the test as quick as he could. When there was no reaction, Burrows sighed softly, then reached out, grabbed the pistol and replaced it with the flamethrower.
"Fair enough," Burrows said.
"Thanks," Blake replied. "So...what happened to you?"
Burrows nodded towards the door. They moved over to it and opened it up. Beyond it was a huge, open space, a tunnel, Blake realized. It reminded him, as he stepped cautiously out into it, of the tunnel he'd been in earlier, the one that ended in a giant Thing beast and a bomb. He hoped this one turned out a bit better. Overhead and off in the distance, there were a few working lights, most of them were flickering. From what he could see, the tunnel was choked with debris, abandoned vehicles, crates and dead bodies.
"Jesus," Blake muttered.
"Come on," Burrows said, leading him away, off to the right, sticking close to the wall. "After we got dropped off back at Carpenter Station, we stuck around for awhile. Then Whitley sent us out again, gave us another Captain. We ended up getting attacked as soon as we arrived at the other outpost. Knocked us all out with tranq darts. We woke up in holding cells, where they held us until Mac led his breakout. Managed to find North and Weldon again. Dunno what happened to the Captain. What about you? You kill Whitley?"
"It's a long story," Blake replied. "But yeah, MacReady and I did. Whitley burst out, he infected himself like a goddamned moron. Lost a lot of good men hunting that bastard, but in the end, we got him. Now it looks like we've got someone else to kill."
"Yeah, Graves...he's a real bastard."
They passed in between a huge pair of crates and something in the distance let out a loud roar. The sound came echoing down to them. The two men froze in the dim lighting.
"Where are we going?" Blake asked finally, his voice lowered.
"Mac likes to think ahead. He knew something like this might happen, so he sent us scouting into the tunnels for a secondary outpost. Basically a fall-back base. We found a decent place underground and had been doing our best to repair it. Unfortunately, all we could spare was a skeleton crew. At the moment, there should just be one guy there, Peltola. Anyway, it's a little ways from here, but we should be able to make it there."
"Sounds like fun," Blake muttered. He continued studying his surroundings as they came out from in between the two shipping container-sized crates. There was a more open area now, though it had a perimeter to it. Besides the two walls on either side of them, there was a snarl of two wrecked dump trucks behind him and, ahead of him, another huge crate with other, smaller crates around it. Some of the nearby wall was scorched and blackened.
"I can't believe they built all of this in a few months," he said.
"Yeah, Gen Inc works fast and efficient. I think some of this may have been here already, maybe part of some older project that was abandoned, maybe for the same purpose, of moving things underground because of the weather, but based on the facility me and the others were imprisoned at, I'd say that Gen Inc works crazy fast."
"We've got to stop them," Blake replied.
Burrows nodded. "That we do."
As they made for the mess of crates ahead of them, looking to navigate around them, a hissing rattle suddenly made them both freeze up. Blake was intimately familiar with the sound. How many times had he heard it, or something like, it, during the past few days? It was a Scuttler. Worse, he saw as he scanned the area ahead of him, it was more than one Scuttler. One of them crawled out from beneath a pair of crates that were smashed against each other, forming a small, shadowed niche. Then another one leaped down from the larger crate, and two more followed it, and then another three came from elsewhere.
"Burrows, you've got the pistol, take them out," Blake said as he took a step back, readying the flamethrower in case any of them got close.
Burrows responded with action instead of words. He took aim on the one nearest to them, a two-legged head with with a grim, twisted face wrapped in dead, ashen gray skin, and opened fire. The first bullet took it in the eye and the beast released a high-pitched shriek. Burrows fired again and this time the bullet hit its forehead and tore away a good portion of the skull. It flew back a few feet and remained down.
The engineer started working through the others. Blake counted off the bullets, knowing the pistol, provided it was fully loaded, came with twenty of them. The second Scuttler went down, then another, and a fourth. Burrows was doing well, but they were still advancing. When it looked like two of them were getting ready to leap, Blake stepped forward, aimed and let loose with the flamethrower. Both of them went up like dry kindling, offering up shrieks of furious, alien pain. Both he and Burrows backed away from them.
They made it a few steps further, looking like they were going to try and take a leap again, and then their little bodies gave up the ghost and they collapsed into burning, smoking heaps on the concrete floor.
Burrows finished off the survivors after slamming a fresh magazine into the pistol.
"My last one," he said morosely.
"Don't suppose you have any more fuel canisters?" Blake asked.
"No."
He sighed and shook the flamethrower lightly, judging that there was maybe half a canister left. Not exactly inspiring.
"How far is this place?" Blake asked as they set off again. "And where is this place?"
"It's about another hundred meters down this main tunnel. It's in the left side, marked Security Checkpoint Four B."
"All right. Well, the sooner we get going, the better. I fucking hate this place."
"Me too."
They set off again, heading to the far left side of the battered crates. He prepared himself for more surprises, but no Scuttlers jumped out at him or Burrows as they stuffed themselves between the tunnel wall and the shipping container. They squeezed out the other side and found themselves in a relatively open space. Blake tried to take stock of himself, tried to gauge how much further he could go. Right now, he felt like dogshit. Most of his muscles were sore, aching and crying out for a break. He'd been going almost nonstop for how long now? It couldn't have been more than a day and half, but it felt like weeks.
He was also starving. What had been his last meal? He thought it must have been that food he'd eaten in a forgotten break room with a handful of other men, a temporary eye in the storm that was his campaign against the Thing and the men who planned to profit from it. He was thirsty, he needed to take a leak pretty bad and, probably worst of all, he was flat-out fucking exhausted. He'd been knocked out a few times so far, (which seemed like a death sentence in a place like this, but he was still going), but that wasn't the same.
He needed sleep. Honest to god sleep. Was that so much to ask? It did seem kind of unrealistic given the nature of the Thing. But he knew he couldn't keep going like this for much longer. He needed food, sleep, fuel for his body, otherwise he was either going to straight-up pass out or make a crucial mistake.
As he was thinking this, he and Burrows had come into a maze-like section of smashed crates and wrecked vehicles. Seeing as he had the flamethrower, he was leading the way. And then he did exactly what he was worried about.
He made a mistake.
He should have heard the huffing breath, should have noticed the way the crate shifted ahead of him, should have heard the plodding footfalls. He did...but not quick enough. Burrows however, did. As one of the Thing beasts, what Williams had called a Walker, stepped out from behind one of the crates, he simply stared at it, dumbfounded. It was another example of hideous construction, of twisted flesh and bony protrusions.
It was easily seven feet tall, its flesh the color of gray ash. It had one long arm that ended in a spike and another, stunted, short arm that ended in a huge crimson pincer. Its face was a twisted caricature, with one huge, black eye and a slash for a mouth stuffed with blood-smeared teeth. It let out a horrid shriek and came for Blake.
Burrows reacted, grabbing him from behind and pulling him to the left, shoving him hard. Blake grunted as he stumbled and went crashing to the floor of the tunnel. He heard Burrows scream and looked up in shocked horror as the Walker buried its longer arm in Burrows' stomach. His guts exploded out of his back in a foamy spray of blood, loops of steaming intestines hung on the Thing beast's spiked arm.
Blake let out an inarticulate scream of pain and fury and misery as he raised the flamethrower from where he lay and squeezed the trigger, lighting up the Thing beast. He saw, at the last second before he prepared to turn the flamethrower on Burrows, the man raise the pistol he was still holding to his head and pull the trigger. It was a grim, horrible, wretched sight...but now he would be spared the pain of infection and the flamethrower death he was about to face down. Blake turned the flamethrower's black muzzle onto the engineer and torched him.
Once he was sure they were both burning, he quickly regained his feet and backed away, making sure they were dead. With that grizzly task completed, as he felt an agonizing guilt start to settle in, Blake turned and began making his way towards the secondary outpost, trying not to think about anything but survival. He could collapse into a heap of guilt and fury later, not now, not yet. He kept walking, keeping a sharp eye out for more Things.
But he encountered nothing and no one by the time he reached the door that Burrows had indicated. It was a battered but intact steel door beneath a sign, painted in flat black, broad lettering: SECURITY CHECKPOINT 4B. It was there, all right. Now just to see if anyone else had made it. Blake tried the door.
It opened up easily enough. Probably not the best of signs. He stepped slowly into a dim room. As he began checking the corners, something slammed into the side of his head and knocked him right back into unconsciousness.