That Thing

"What do you think of this, doc?"

Using his rifle, he is careful as he lifts the bleeding fleshy part off the cracked white tiles. It drips some bile as he angles his gun to avoid getting any near his fingers.

"Ever seen anything like it?"

He gives time for the doc to take another quick photo.

The doc crouches down as he zooms the camera to catch all the details of the haemorrhaging mystery flesh. It looked both rotten and still alive. Irregularly shaped bones seemed to stick out of it as it bent at an angle in the middle. Like some "arm" that had been cut off. Maybe even recently.

"No. Looks like something out of a movie."

He lets the appendage drop back down to the ground. The rifle is covered in slime. Being curious enough, he sniffs it before trying to wipe it off on something around him.

The room looks to have been some sort of communications office. Old radio tools lie amongst the debris. It felt almost like a museum. Obsolete technology from only a few decades in the past is scattered about and falling apart.

"You don't find stuff like this anywhere anymore. If it were in all good condition, this would be a small fortune for some collector."

"I knew a guy, he liked stuff like this. Analogues and radios. He'd tell me how things were different and not like today. He liked it more back then, I guess."

The mystery flesh seemed out of place if not for the whole room barely standing. The ceiling had signs that it was beginning to collapse. Snow and the cold wind were already leaking through one of the shattered windows.

"Regardless, let's keep searching. This place gives me the creeps."

They move on to the next room. Once they're all gone, the fleshy hand begins to twitch.

The body in the next room is frozen in place. It's a lasting image of their hands reaching out for some sort of relief that never came. Their face is heavily deformed. A row of teeth like a decaying picket fence spiked across the gums. Eyes bent into elliptic shapes. Those fingers too. I notice there are a few too many on one hand, like they were splitting off from each other.

"So the reports were true after all."

He scoffs at me.

"The reports didn't give us enough info here. This is beyond some sort of radioactive mutation patterns, as they claimed. The changes are too quick and too aggressive. This isn't anything I've seen, and I'm beginning to feel we should leave soon."

I don't disagree. The old base is in disarray, and we've barely scouted but a few rooms that still stand. It should be a regular chop job as expected for sensitive cleanup jobs. But the hazards here don't feel gone. We didn't want to admit it, but we felt very vulnerable. As though at any moment, the longer we lingered, the more we were asking to find out what destroyed the base.

Somehow, someway, maybe they sent us here by mistake. We took the wrong directions, the wrong detour. Maybe the higher command can clear things up. As long as we get the fuck out of here first.

"Cooper! Cooper, get in here!"

I come running over as I hear Doc Marrel call me over. He's in the laboratory at the end of the hall. My boots clamber over the debris of dust, snow, metal, and charred wood. When I arrive in the room, I'm hit with a strong and noxious odour.

"What the fuck is that smell, Doc?"

"Get your mask on, you idiot. We can't trust these fumes."

The 'fumes' the Doc mentions seem to be leaking out from the floorboards beneath the lab. If you looked closely, you could see a thin mist emerging. Was that where the smell was coming from? What could be rotting out here in cold wastelands?

"They kept something here, I don't know what or how to find out. But it's rotting or something. Except nothing I know rots like that way out here."

Things freeze and dry out here. The moisture joins the cold with the dead.

"You really think they'd keep something down below the lab?"

I look around the place and notice the lab's equipment is in fairly decent shape. As though someone had still taken care of it despite the conditions of the rest of the deteriorating base.

"There's no protocol for what we're facing here. Let's find a way down here. Get me an axe."

Something tells me to not be here, standing over what might as well have been an active volcano. I tell the Doc I'll look for the axe back at the tool closet. It's mostly an excuse to leave the lab. Maybe the Doc had too much of those fumes before he got the mask on.

"Wait—hang on. There's something here!"

"Impossible."

The Doc shows me a little flower growing out of the corner. It had burst through the floor and tiles. I had never seen a flower like it before.