Lincoln and Haiku landed back at the base, ready to take the Norwegian research to Lisa for study. Once the chopper's rotors quieted down, they heard the fire alarm coming from inside the base. The duo rushed into the kennel to see what happened. They found Lynn standing away from the cage, shaking from fright. She pointed at the cage, warning them not to go near it.
"I don't know what the hell's in there." She stated. "But it's weird and pissed off."
"Doc, go get Santiago!" Lincoln ordered.
Everyone else in the rec-room was startled. They couldn't smell any smoke, so they wondered, out loud, why someone had pulled the alarm. Ronnie Anne was just putting on her coat when Haiku ran to her open doorway. "Linc wants the flamethrower!" She yelled.
"Linc wants the what?"
"That's what he said, now move!"
Ronnie Anne cursed under her breath and went to fetch the flamethrower. Everyone else saw Haiku running back outside and decided to follow her. By that time, Lincoln had gone back to get a shotgun out from his chopper and Lynn picked up the flashlight. When everyone, sans Ronnie Anne, was inside the kennel, Lynn shined the flashlight on the the source of the confusion.
Everyone gasped. Lying there, feeding off of the dogs' corpses, was a horrific creature made of shifting flesh. It's head looked like that of a dog, but it was twisted and disfigured and snarled at them. Its tendrils had finished pulling the dogs into its body and were now reaching out for the others. Lincoln took that as a signal to open fire.
He managed to hold it back until Ronnie Anne entered with the flamethrower. She stopped dead in her tracks when she got to the gate and saw the thing. "Madre de Dios…" She whispered under her breathe.
"Get your ass over here!" Lincoln snapped. Ronnie Anne shook her head, activating the flamethrower. Lincoln opened the cage. "Burn it!" But Ronnie Anne froze once again. "Damn it, Anne! TORCH IT!" As one of the tendrils lashed out again, Ronnie Anne finally pulled the trigger, engulfing the monster in flames.
The thing emitted an unearthly roar as it trembled in pain. Anne blasted it a few more times until it finally stopped moving. The fire was beginning to spread, so Clyde and Rusty rushed in with the fire extinguishers. Smoke billowed everywhere until the cold CO2 put out the flames.
No one got any sleep that night.
Everybody helped carry the deceased monster into Lisa's lab for study. Clyde, her fellow biologist, helped her dissect the remains all night. Much to both of their shock, horror, and disgust, each layer revealed another terrifying face or limb. The others had retreated back into the rec-room, waiting for them to come out of the lab.
The next morning, everyone was still waiting until, "You guys need to see this." Clyde beckoned the group. Everybody crowded around the dissected creature, unsure what to make of it. Leni lasted five minutes before she gagged and left the room.
"You see," Lisa began. "What we have here is what appears to be an extraterrestrial organism that imitates other life-forms. And does so, perfectly. When this specimen attacked our dogs it was trying to digest them. Absorb them. And, in the process, reshape its own molecular structure into an exact copy of theirs." Lisa tapped one of the severed heads with a pencil. "This for instance… it's not a dog, it's an imitation. We managed to discover it before it had time to finish."
"Finish?" Lynn sounded, perplexed. "Finish what?"
"Finish imitating these dogs." Lisa clarified.
"So that Norwegian feller was tryin' ta help us." Liam suddenly felt guilty. "An' we killed 'im."
"Indeed…" Lisa said, gravely. "Now, I highly recommend that we-"
"Alright!" Leni stormed into the lab with a frustrated expression. "Which one of you disrespectful slobs has been throwing away their dirty underwear in the kitchen trashcan?!" She threw the torn and tattered long johns onto the ground, next to Lincoln's seat. "From now on, I want my kitchen to be clean! That means fifty percent germ-free; twenty percent sterile; and forty-five percent un-dirtied!"
"...That adds up to one hundred and fifteen percent." Haiku cocked an eyebrow at Leni's logic. Leni was well-know as one of Lincoln's nicer sisters, but that didn't mean she couldn't still get annoyed. As the chef went away to prepare dinner, Lisa glanced at the shredded clothing before turning back to the thing.
"Ahem," Lisa broke the silence. "As I was saying; I highly recommend that we isolate the specimen for further study. Lincoln, you will have to move your possessions out of the storage room so we can put it in there. Additionally, I propose that we quarantine the remaining dogs until further notice to ensure they were not infected."
"Alright." Rusty agreed. "Penelope, Liam, Zach; you guys take this thing to the storage room. Then we should all get some rest."
"Easy… easy boy…" Lynn kept the dogs docile while her younger sister drew blood from them. Once Lisa was finished, she gave each of them a dog treat to make them feel better.
Lisa put the blood in a safe case, and looked back at the dog handler. "Lynn?"
"Hmm?" Lynn looked back at her.
"Before you placed it in confinement, did the canine unit exhibit any unorthodox behavioral patterns?"
"Did the what do what now?"
Lisa groaned; it was so annoying to have to dumb down her lingo for others. "Did you notice anything strange about the dog? Anything at all?"
Lynn pondered. "No, not really. Why?"
"What was the dog doing in the rec-room?"
"I dunno, just wandering around camp all day." Lynn shrugged.
"Are you telling me you didn't put that dog in the kennel until last night?" Lisa sounded a little nervous.
"Yeah, I guess so."
"...how long were you alone with that dog?"
"I don't know. An hour? An hour and a half, maybe?" Lynn was starting to feel agitated. "What the hell are you looking at me like that for?"
"Um… I dunno." Lisa muttered under her breath, trying to hide her anxiety.
"What?" Lynn leaned closer to her.
"I, uh… I don't know…" Lisa said, a bit clearer this time. She adjusted her glasses and headed back to her room. "It's most likely nothing. Nothing at all."
When the twenty-year-old scientist entered her room, she locked the door and sat down at her desk. She took out a piece of paper and began doing the calculations herself. After thirty minutes of scribbling, she reached a conclusion that made the usually-stoic woman shudder.
"Odds of one or more members of research team being infected: 86%. Projected calculations: If creature reaches civilization; entire world population would be assimilated in ~13,000 hours."
Lisa was never one to suffer from paranoia, but the math didn't lie. She opened her desk's top drawer and pulled out her own revolver.
Meanwhile, Lincoln had just finished collecting his gear out of the storage room as Penelope, Zach, and Liam carried the thing inside. He was just about to leave when Clyde bumped into him.
"Hey, Linc, I need to talk to you."
"I'm tired of talking, buddy." Lincoln sighed. "I just wanna get up to my shack, get drunk, play videogames, and go to bed."
"Linc, please… it's about one of your sisters." Clyde looked genuinely worried.
"If you're gonna ask me how to get Lori to divorce Bobby so you can win her heart-"
"Linc, please!" Clyde snapped. Lincoln sighed, set his gear on the ground, and followed his oldest friend out to the snowcat.
Back in the storage room, Liam had left Penelope and Zach to go get some dinner. Penelope was just finishing covering the thing with a tarp. Her face twisted in disgust at the mangled flesh. "We ought to just burn these things." She grumbled.
"You can't just burn the find of the century." Zach snorted. "That's gonna win somebody the Nobel Prize."
Penelope finished covering up the burned specimen and went to find Rusty for the keys to the room. Zach stayed behind to finish tidying up. If either of them had looked at the right moment, they would have seen the creature shifting under the tarp. A bloody tendril sneaked out from the burnt body and made its way towards Zach.
Outside, Clyde and Lincoln were shivering in the snowcat's cab. "It's Lisa." He started. "She's locked herself in her room and won't come out. So, I went through some of her notes she left in the lab. Listen." He opened the manila folder and began to trace his finger along the text as he read it out loud. "'It could have assimilated a million life-forms on a million planets, could have turned into any one of them at any time. Now, it wants life-forms of Earth.'"
"It's getting cold out here, Clyde." Lincoln grunted.
"Wait a minute, Linc! Listen." Clyde continued. "'It needs to be in close proximity to its victim to assimilate it. The chameleon strikes in the dark-'"
"So, is Lisa cracking up, or what?" Lincoln was running out of patience.
"Dammit, Linc!" Clyde jumped ahead. "'There are still signs of cellular activity in these burnt remains! It's not dead, yet!'"
This time, Lincoln looked interested in what Clyde was saying. Neither of them were as smart as Lisa, but they had read enough comic books as children to know what that note meant. "Go get Rusty. I'll find Leni and the others, we'll get rid of the thing and meet back at Lisa's room in ten minutes."
Clyde nodded and the duo exited the snowcat and walked back to the outpost. But before they could reach the door, Penelope burst through with a panicked expression.
"It's Zach!" She shuddered. The three friends rushed back inside. But when they reached the storage room, it was empty. "Zach was right there! It had a hold of him!" Penelope shrieked. Lincoln noticed that the room's window was smashed open and pulled the fire alarm.
Zach was stumbling out of the building, trying to get to a snowcat, but he tripped before he could reach one. Lincoln was the first to find him, followed by Clyde, Penelope, Leni, Rusty, Liam, Lynn, and Haiku. "It isn't Zach!" Lincoln warned. He lit an emergency flare to help them see.
Zach lifted himself up onto his knees. He appeared to be unharmed, but his hands were elongated claws, covered in blood. He opened his mouth, shouting a familiar unearthly roar at Lincoln. The pilot kicked over a barrel of fuel, letting the hazardous liquid cover the imitation before throwing his flare onto it. The creature bellowed in pain as the flames melted away its body.
Lincoln rushed back inside to collect the flamethrower, Rusty followed closely behind him.
"My God." He gasped. "What was happening to him out there?"
"If it'd had another minute, it would've looked, sounded, and acted exactly like Zach." Lincoln replied.
"I-I don't understand what you're saying." Rusty pressed on.
"That was one of those things out there, trying to imitate him." Lincoln explained as he strapped the weapon to his back. "Let's go."
"Linc, we know Zach!" Rusty spluttered, still shocked by the horrific event. "We've known him for ten years. He's our friend."
Lincoln could tell Rusty was upset, but this was no time for mourning. "We need to burn the rest." The entire crew spent the last forty minutes gathering up the remaining samples of the thing, making sure not to physically touch it, and stacked it with Zach's burning body. Lincoln blasted the things with his flamethrower until a tall pillar of smoke climbed up into the air.
"Is that all of it?" Lincoln asked.
"We've cleared out the storage room, the lab, mopped up all the blood, there is nothing left." Haiku answered.
"Where's Lisa?" Rusty looked around. Everyone looked around the group, but they couldn't find her.
A few minutes later, Lincoln was still blasting the things until they were nothing but ashes. Clyde walked up to him and pulled down his scarf. "I can't find Lisa." He breathed, heavily.
"Where're the others?"
"Well, Penelope's in the radio room trying to get a signal out, everyone else's in the rec-room."
"Alright, let's get back inside and we'll all look for her together."
Clyde nodded again and headed back inside. Lincoln waited a few more moments to make sure the thing wouldn't get up again, and headed inside. But just as he left the fire, he heard a crashing noise coming from the chopper. Someone hopped out of it and headed into the radio room.
"Lisa?" Lincoln called. He went to check on the helicopter, finding its control console in shambles. A gunshot rang out into the night, making him jump. He rushed into the building, rounding the corner to find everyone huddled outside of the radio room.
"Stay back! She's got a gun!" Liam warned. Lincoln ducked, quickly.
"If anyone comes in here, I'll kill them!" Lisa yelled, firing a warning shot out the door. Penelope had hid in the corner, trying to put pressure on her wound. Lisa continued to vent as she demolished the radio room with her axe. "You all think I'm crazy?! Well, that's fine! Most of you don't even know what's going on! But, I damn well do!"
"She smashed up the chopper pretty good." Lincoln turned to the mechanic. "Anne, go see if she got to anything else." Ronnie Anne rushed outside and Rusty pulled out his revolver, but Lincoln stopped him. "Wait! Liam, go get a table out from the lab. Leni, go around to the other door. Talk to her."
The two did as they were told. Liam had gotten the table just as Leni peeked her head through the door. "Lisa?" She spoke softly. "Lisa, just calm down. You don't want to hurt anyone, right?"
Lisa shot off two more rounds in Leni's direction. Fortunately, the chef moved out of the way just in time. "I'll kill you!" Lisa snarled, and fired her three remaining shots. After she threw the empty revolver at the doorway, all she was left with was her axe. That was when Lincoln rushed her.
Using the table as a shield, he blocked the axe and pinned her to the ground. Clyde and Liam held her down, giving Lincoln a chance to knock her unconscious. Haiku went to check on Penelope while the others carried Lisa out of the room.
Ultimately, the group decided to have her locked in the tool shed with enough canned food to last a few days and a kerosene heater. Leni gingerly placed her on the bed just as she started to wake up. Haiku injected her with morphine, both to help her with the pain in her head and to keep her docile.
"Why am I here?" She asked, groggily.
"For your own protection, Lisa." Leni assured her and planted a feather-light kiss on her forehead.
Lincoln looked back to make sure everyone else was gone, then took out a bottle of scotch. "So, what's wrong, lil' sis?" He took a swig of the scotch and left the rest for her.
"... I don't know who to trust." If she was trying not to sound paranoid, she wasn't doing a very good job.
"I know what you mean, Lisa." Lincoln said, soothingly, as he tucked her into the makeshift bed. "Trust is a hard thing to come by, these days. But, I'll tell you what," He smiled, genuinely, and patted her head. "Why don't you just trust in the Lord?" He knew it was an odd thing to suggest to a person of science, but he had to offer something. He was almost out the door to meet up with the others when she spoke up again.
"Watch Lynn."
"...what?" Lincoln asked, confused.
"I said 'watch Lynn.' And watch her close, do you hear me?"
"Yeah…" Lincoln nodded, and went out to join the rest of the group.