Claire sat up, her hairline sticky with blood, and shivered. She prodded experimentally at the bruise on her forehead, recoiling from the pain, and looked around. Some kind of cooler room, she decided. Maybe for chemical storage. But she'd been inside the snow-truck… Whatever Steve had seen in the mirror, it had dragged her back to the Antarctic facility.
As cognizance washed over her in slow waves, Claire became aware of how much her body hurt, and how cold she was. Shuddering, she checked her extremities, found she'd somehow broken nothing, and there were no signs of frostbite either, thanks to the layered arctic gear she wore; though some of it had been torn from her trawl through the snow, it was still in pretty good shape, all things considered. At least, she thought, it kept her warm enough, and that was all she could really ask for in Antarctica.
She stood up and tried the door, found it was locked. She didn't see a keyhole, so she assumed it was electronic. Her breath steamed in the air. Ice crusted the shelves, the empty crates, pieces of inert equipment. A cooling fan rattled in its nacelle, blowing a continuous stream of frigid air, and Claire had to duck behind a stack of crates to keep her face from freezing up.
Folding her arms across her chest, Claire wandered the room and looked for a way out, before whatever had put her in here came back. "Bingo," she said aloud, spotting an old vent, just big enough for her to squeeze into, behind a stack of pallets. Sherry had gotten around the RPD in the vents, and if a kid could do that, so could she.
The grate was a bit rusted, and it only took a few solid kicks to loosen it. She moved it to the side, got on her hands and knees and stuck her head inside. The vent went left and up toward the cooling fan, and right, toward a junction. She belly-crawled right, her shoulders touching the sides; it was a tight fit, and the whole time Claire felt the very real terror of getting stuck in there, of dying in the vents like some over-sized rat. But she pushed on to the junction, looked left, then right. Left led to deeper shadow, and there might have been a drop at the end of it, so Claire shimmied right instead and kept going.
She saw a body up ahead at the dead-end, felt her heart shudder. A man in bloody technician's coveralls. A grate stood on her right, flickering lights beyond it. She tried it, found the grate was stuck. Claire rammed it with her shoulder in a panic. The man roused with a groan, started crawling toward her. "Shit, shit, shit, shit," she said to herself, and she threw her shoulders into it again.
The man's glaucous eyes stared hungrily at her, and he wailed, gore bubbling up from his throat like regurgitated jelly and dripping from his chin.
She smashed against the grate again, and this time it crumpled, popped. Claire scrabbled out of the vent and clambered to her feet. The man grabbed her ankle, and she twisted around, brought her other foot down on his head. She stomped again, hard, his brittle skull giving way under her boot with a crunch, and then the man stilled, a soupy mixture of brain and blood puddling on the water-stained concrete.
Claire sagged against the wall, sweating, her heart jackhammering in her chest. Too close. A low-pressure sodium light flickered above her, washed the hallway in a sickly orange light. Pipes snaked along the walls and ceiling, brownish icicles dripping from them, and the floor was slick with black ice. Faded, damp Umbrella posters crusted the walls, each one displaying some company reminder to employees, a hazard warning or safety protocol, and the graphics and typography on them were old, maybe late 60s or early 70s. Wherever she was, Claire decided, it was likely the oldest part of the Antarctic facility.
She started walking, careful not to slip on the ice, and turned a corner into an identical hallway. This one was lined with doors, each one equipped with an electronic lock, the little lights on them winking red. Some of the doors had vertical shatterproof windows like the classroom doors in her college, and when she peered through the glass, she saw lab equipment that looked as if it had been cutting-edge twenty years ago.
A placard mounted to one of the doors read HOT LAB 01. "Must be in a research wing," she said to herself, and walked on.
She paused, hearing something up ahead. Claire waited, comforted by the weight of the gun in her hand.
A shadow slithered in the semi-darkness, and she wondered if maybe she was seeing things, had banged her head a little harder than she'd thought. No, she told herself, you're not crazy. Something was slithering, and it was coming her way.
Claire wasn't sure what the fuck she was looking at. At first, she'd thought it was some mutant snake—Jill had mentioned the giant snake she'd encountered in the Arklays—but soon realized it was some sort of tentacle, like the tendril of some enormous prehistoric plant, and it was covered in a fuzzy layer of reddish barbs.
Her first instinct was to shoot, but the thing didn't seem to notice her. As it crept closer, Claire flattened herself against the wall, holding her breath. It was headed in the direction of the vent she'd kicked out, or at least it had seemed that way, and she wondered if, whatever it was, it had heard the noise, maybe had even sensed her movement when she'd tussled with that zombie.
She tried to run. The thing suddenly snapped around and came at her, and she bolted, firing a few rounds into its caterpillar-haired body. It made a noise like a wounded animal, greenish-blue liquid trickling from its wounds and beading on the ground with a noise like sizzling grease.
Claire scurried, narrowly avoiding the thing by ducking right, and then she zigzagged down the hallway and swung around a corner. She could hear the vine-thing crashing through things behind her, and she turned, popped off three shots. The tendril slowed, and after she emptied the rest of her clip into it, it went limp and retreated with a groan, leaving in its wake a fizzing stream of fluid that smelled of decaying plant-matter and chemicals.
Whatever it was, Claire knew it would be back soon, and so she went inside the first room that wasn't locked, wanting to be anywhere but that hallway.
Barricading the door with whatever wasn't bolted down or too heavy to carry or push, she slumped against the wall and reloaded her gun. Only two clips left, plus the one she'd loaded into the gun, which meant that she only had three chances to beat the thing back once it returned from licking its wounds, and those were some real shitty odds.
A counter and some stools stood on her left, lab equipment on her right. A large window opposite the door looked into some sort of operating theater, and a body lay on the op-table in there, wrapped in grimy plastic. The door to the operating theater was electronically locked, and Claire could see another door inside the theater, just beyond the body, that looked like it could be an elevator.
Since she didn't know the password to the door, Claire resorted to brute-forcing her way inside the theater: she grabbed a stool and smashed the observation window. Setting the stool down, she climbed over the sill and was greeted by the ripe, nauseatingly sweet stench of rot, and it was coming from the body.
"You're definitely not gonna be getting up," she said to the body. "Smell way overripe."
Part of the plastic had peeled back, and Claire could see the decayed face of a man with clumps of reddish hair still clinging to his skull, an emerald earring glinting in his ear. He'd mutated: several sinewy appendages, like spider legs, had sprouted from his back, hanging limply off the sides of the op-table. His corpse had started to liquefy, putrid flesh oozing from the plastic and dripping to the floor. Claire gagged, tasting the edge of vomit in her mouth.
The door on the other side of the theater was an elevator, and she entered its bright chromed interior with a grateful sigh. Wherever it went, she decided, it was better than down here. She thumbed UP on the panel, and the elevator hummed to life, the doors rattling shut, and it started its ascent. "Hope you're doing better than me, Steve," she said to nobody, and slouched against the wall.