WARNING: CHARACTER DEATH
Author's Note: Not everyone is human. After this chapter, let me know who you think is a Thing. You may be right!
Achilles453 - I'm glad you liked the last chapter! Yeah, I borrowed some lines from the novella "Who Goes There?" for Saw's reasoning. I totally agree with you on the dogs. It's actually my least favorite scene in the movie and it hurt to do this to the dogs, but it's an important plot point later on. I'm sorry, but it was a necessary evil.
teresa. spanics - Thank you, I'm happy you loved the last chapter! Yeah, I think there was a scene in the 2011 prequel movie that showed how the Thing was a part of the spacecraft's cargo and that it broke free. Sadly, it was cut from the movie. I hope you enjoy this chapter as well.
Exterior US Oupost 17, March 10, 1987 0045 hours
The ten other people in the kennel turned to Kallus, who gave out the orders, "Jai, I want you to stay here and take a look at that bruise on Zare. Gooti, round up those remaining dogs and dope them. Then return here and guard this." They nodded and Kallus looked at the seven others, "Alright, split into teams of two. Sabine and Ezra, search the garage. Jyn, you and Ketsu search the west side of the base. Saw and I will search the east side if the base. Sumar and Mart, search the outlying buildings: the food cache, the tool shed, and my shack. If you find it, engage immediately."
They turned to leave and saw the severed tentacle. It was wriggling across the floor, hoping to find some cover. Jyn didn't let it, shooting it with a short burst of flame. The tentacle let out a tiny scream as it spasmed in the flames. Kallus raised an eyebrow, "Interesting."
They filed out of the base, flashlights lit and weapons prepped. Sabine and Kallus carried shotguns and flares, Ezra, Ketsu, and Saw held fire extinguishers, Jyn hefted the flamethrower, and Mart and Sumar held flares and buckets of kerosene. Sabine and Ezra walked towards the garage, which stood independent from the main building. Slowly, they entered, keeping their weapons raised. The helicopter outside was empty, and the snowcats inside were intact. Sabine sighed, "Well, wherever it went, it isn't here."
Meanwhile, Kallus and Saw searched along the east side of the base. There was nothing in the snow, no prints, no remains, nothing. Kallus turned to Saw, "What was that thing doing to those dogs?" Saw deflated a little, "I... I don't know. We don't have time to talk about it now though. I'll be able to tell you once we've killed the other one and I can conduct an autopsy." Kallus nodded.
Then they heard the scream.
-0-
Mart and Sumar had checked Kallus' shack and the tool shed, finding nothing. Mart grumbled as they approached the food cache, "Last one." The only sound they could hear was the wind whipping about them. The only thing they could see was the reddish glow of a flare or the beam of the flashlight. It was this that Mart hated about the Antarctic. And add the fact that they were looking for an extremely dangerous alien, Mart so wished he had stayed in the US.
As they approached the cache, Sumar's flashlight flickered, prompting an angered curse from Mart. But Sumar heard something else, through the wind and Mart's griping. A strange, low growl, almost a purr, coming from under the building. He turned to Mart and motioned for him to be quiet. "I thought I heard something, under there." He whispered as he pointed towards the base of the cache. He turned the beam of his lantern towards it, and saw a strange silhouette. He knelt, but Mart's grabbed his arm, "Be careful." Sumar nodded and moved closer, "I need a better look." The beam of light displayed a sickening mass of flesh, the Thing. Sumar quickly turned and shouted, "It's here! Get the fuel-" He never finished his sentence.
It was too late. A tentacle lashed out, puncturing Sumar through the chest. Mart jumped back in horror, dropping the buckets of kerosene. The tentacle split into four barbs, becoming a grappling hook-like weapon, and pulled him towards the base of the building. Sumar screamed in terror and pain as he desperately clawed the snow. Finally, he managed to grab two pipes leading from the bottom of the shead. Sumar tried to hold with all his might, but the Thing was too strong. He looked up, pleading desperately to Mart for help, but there wasn't anything Mart could do.
Sumar's grip finally slipped, and he screamed as he was pulled into the dark, waiting jaws of the Thing.
-0-
Sabine heard the screams and turned towards Ezra, "Did you hear that? It sounded like Sumar." A new yell resounded across the frozen wastes, that of Mart. Sabine and Ezra ran towards the source, the food cache. They met up with Kallus and Saw right before it and saw Mart. Mart's face was covered in blood, Sumar's blood. He was staring at the building in shock and yelling out, "HELP! SOMEBODY! ANYBODY! HELP! OVER HERE! HELP!"
Kallus ran up to him, "What's wrong? What happened?" Mart was near hysterical, "It attacked him. It killed Sumar." They heard the screech of the Thing and saw a tentacle lashing out towards them. Kallus brought up his shotgun and fired a round. The tentacle was obliterated by buckshot fired from pointblank range. The thing charged. A stream of chemical spray hit it full force from a fire extinguisher held by Ezra. The chemical spray blinded the Thing, disorientating it. It fell back, taking more buckshot from Sabine and Kallus' shotguns. An errant piece of buckshot broke a pressure pipe, sending a superheated stream of steam into the Thing. The Thing screamed, in a way that nothing on Earth would. It jumped up through the floor into the food cache.
Sabine turned and raced back for the garage, and started rolling a drum of gasoline towards the food cache. Footsteps came running up and she spun and pumped the shotgun, "Who goes there? Stop or I shoot!"
"Don't shoot, Sabine! It's us!" Jyn and Ketsu rounded the corner, having run from the other side of the base. Ketsu stopped in front of her, "What's going on? We heard a scream and gunshots." A piercing, unearthly shriek resounded through the air. Sabine yelled, "It attacked Sumar! Help me with this!" The three picked the drum up and carried it towards the shack, while the rest of the crew kept the Thing at bay with fire extinguishers and shotguns.
They broke the sides of the fuel drum with an ice-ax, threw it under the shack, and backed away. Sabine threw a flare while Jyn leveled her flamethrower and pulled the trigger. The fuel drum exploded and the shack burst into flames. The Thing flailed wildly, trying to escape the fire. It's limbs punctured the walls of the building, where they were hit by more flames from Jyn's flamethrower. The Thing gave a final, bone-rattling screech as the intense heat of the flames consumed it.
-0-
March 10, 1987, 0530 Hours
The base was shocked. No one slept. The jubilant atmosphere of a few hours prior was gone, replaced by one of glumness and despair. Sumar was well-liked by most of the crew, even though he often liked to be alone. Ezra was extremely dejected, Sumar was a family friend of his. "Sumar had a family. A wife and a small child." All attention was focused on the two masses on the infirmary tables. One was the remains of the kennel-Thing. The other was the charred corpse of the Sumar/cache-Thing. Sumar's booted and charred feet poked out from the bottom of it.
Saw stood in the middle of the two, and began cutting them open with Jai's help. He first cut open the cache-Thing. A white, translucent sheen was encased by the hard, solid shell of the exoskeleton. Sumar cut through the sack-like material to reveal Sumar's face. Saw turned to the rest of the group, "His body appears to be encased in some kind of amniotic sack. The skin looks almost new, but there are several tendrils connected to his head." Saw stepped back to allow the crew to see. Many of them stumbled back in revulsion. Kallus squinted, "Saw, what was it doing to him?"
Saw shrugged, "Hard to tell. My best bet would be that it appears to have been in the process of absorbing Sumar." Saw extracted a blood sample from Sumar's corpse and turned to the microscope. What he saw astonished him. There were two different cells, one round, one spiked. The spiked alien cells seemed to be injecting themselves into Sumar's, absorbing them, then spitting them out. But the cells that were spit out looked exactly the same. The alien cells were replicating them.
Saw turned to the other thing, drawing more blood from the dogs. The results were the same. The Thing's cells were copying and imitating the cells of Sumar and the dogs. He turned back to the group and indicated the kennel-Thing. "You see, what we've got here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and it imitates them perfectly. When this thing attacked Sumar and our dogs it tried to digest them, absorb them, and in the process shape its own cells to imitate them. This for instance." He pointed to a dog head found in the kennel-Thing, "That's not dog. It's imitation. We got to it before it had time to finish."
Jyn spoke up, "Wait, you mean this Thing can imitate anything and everything?" Saw nodded, "You see, this creature isn't wildly beyond what we already know of. Only in this creature, the cell nuclei can control those cells at will. It digested Charnauk, the huskies, and Sumar, and as it digested, studied every cell of their tissue, and shaped its own cells to imitate them exactly."
A collective silence fell over the group. Kallus broke it, "What do you think it was planning to do? Is it completely dead now?"
Saw became silent immediately. Kallus picked up on this, "Saw? Are you okay?"
Saw shook himself, "I'm fine. As for the former, I... I don't know. For the latter, yes it is. Nothing can survive being on fire for an extended period of time. It is dead, and cooked."
Jai cut further into the Sumar-Thing combination, "Wait. I've found something." Using tongs, he pulled out several silvery objects. The rest of the crew crowded around him, peering over his shoulders.
Ezra asked, "What are those?" Jai dropped them onto a cloth and opened Sumar's mouth. His teeth were perfectly healthy, "Dental fillings. I don't understand why they would be outside the body though, or why his teeth are perfectly healthy. It appears to have spit them out."
Saw suddenly became pale, as if he had seen a ghost. As if in a daze, Saw watched the crew as they conversed amongst themselves. Suspicious, frightened. He ordered everybody out. Nobody was allowed in the lab without his explicit permission.
-0-
March 10, 1987, 1600 Hours
The day dragged on and on with the heavy feeling of despair lingering. It only deepened when Ezra delivered the latest atmospheric reading to Kallus, there was no question anymore. A blizzard was coming. And the blizzard was due to hit in an hour or so. And when blizzards hit, communications got fouled up.
The Thing knew it had to take advantage of this blizzard. All the humans were bundled into this cramped building, ripe for the taking. It had been smart to plan a backup in case the first Thing had been discovered at the dogs. The humans were still unaware of its existence, it would use this to its advantage.
One of the humans was apart from the others, alone in a room. The Thing cautiously crossed the hallways, it was still outnumbered and needed to remain hidden. It crept into the room, arms up to cover the human's mouth. The Thing's hand was covered in acid, to fuse to the human's skin easier, and its other arm had turned into a long sword of bone, ready to kill the human if things got out of hand. It reached for the human.
-0-
Saw did not come out of the lab for hours, and when he did come out to eat or use the bathroom, he was very quiet, not talking to anyone.
In the lab, he sat at the computer inputting information. Running simulations. He had drawn more blood and hooked the microscope to his computer. The results were shocking. The simulation displayed how the process of assimilation occurred on the cellular level, the alien cell taking control of the other blood cells, and not losing any mass. Almost like a virus. Saw turned and wrote in his notebook.
The Thing could have imitated a million life forms on a million planets. It could change into any of them at a single time. Now it wants to imitate life forms on Earth. It needs to be alone and in close proximity with the life-form to be absorbed. The chameleon strikes from the shadows. There is still cellular activity in these burned remains, the Thing isn't dead yet.
A study of the blood extracted from the remains of Sumar and the Thing found in the kennel reveal a startling discovery. The assimilation process not only copies the cells of the host perfectly, Sumar and the dogs in this case, but also does so without losing any body mass whatsoever. I wasn't sure at first, but now I know that the Thing wants to take over this world, to spread and reproduce. Each time it takes something over, it retains its initial body mass. The computer simulation has laid down that there is a 75% probability that one or more of the members of this base have been assimilated by now. If one of them escapes, everyone and everything on this world will be assimilated in 27,000 hours. Three years. The others do not know what they are up against, but I do. I know what needs to be done.
Saw put down his pencil and opened the drawer of his desk. He pulled a 3rd Generation Colt Detective Special revolver from it and opened the cylinder. Six bullets lay in the chambers, ready to fire. The gun would help, but Saw would also need a bucket of kerosene to fight the Thing. A flamethrower would be nice, and Jyn had one on her at the moment, but the other was in the weapon's locker. Jyn had the only key. The others may not know what to do, but Saw was certain that some of them knew what was going on. It would be up to him. No one could escape.
-0-
Kallus and Ketsu were in the radio room trying to reach McMurdo, but the blizzard kept interfering the signal. After the fifth failed attempt, Ketsu took off her headset and turned to the Navy officer. Kallus asked, "Any luck?" Ketsu sighed and slammed her fist onto the table, "Any luck?! Hah! I haven't been able to reach shit through this blizzard! It's not going to get any better, and it's probably about to get a hell of a lot worse. Nobody is picking up."
Kallus crossed his arms, "Nobody. Get a hold of somebody! Get a hold of anybody! We have to report this mess."
A voice came from the doorway, "Hey, calm down guys. We're all on edge, but we can't just devolve into chaos!" The two turned to see Sabine in the doorway, bottle of alcohol in hand. "Try to get your mind off what's happened." She quickly put her hands up, "I'm not saying we should forget about what happened to Sumar. I'm just saying take it easy and don't let this completely unhinge you."
Kallus nodded, "Alright, what do you have in mind?"
"Well, Jyn, Ezra, Mart, and I were going to start a game of cards in the rec room. You know, Capitalism, BS, poker... stuff like that. You two are welcome to join. There's alcohol as well."
Kallus nodded, "Sounds good. But Zare and I are going to need some help later. He wants to see if anything is salvageable from the food cache." However, Ketsu shook her head, "I'm fine. Something might come through these storms and I'll need to be here if they do." Kallus and Sabine nodded and left the radio room.
They did not notice the figure watching them at the end of the hallway. It slowly stalked after them.
-0-
As the blizzard fell over the camp, Saw walked through the corridors, his first target being the kennel. Two of the dogs had escaped, but Saw knew that they had probably ingested part of the Thing. That meant that they could not be left alive. He picked up an ice-ax and opened the kennel door. The two surviving huskies looked up at him. He swung the ax.
Next chapter: Tensions Flare.