Chapters 10 AND 11

AN: Realised these were quite short, so stuck them together for you guys.


With nowhere else to run, and no hope of fighting it off, we ran through the door into the lab. The doorway was, thankfully, too small for the Thing to fit through, but it was straining against the wall, and I reckoned we had maybe a few minutes before the wall collapsed. Ven looked at me. "Anything useful in the manpurse?" "Nothing more exciting than pepper spray and a knife in there, but I did have the foresight to bring my gun. You're welcome." Taking said firearm out of a pocket in my jacket, I loaded a bullet, aimed it at the Thing's head, and fired. The bullet passed clear through the head of it, but the Thing didn't so much as flinch. I swore again, but it was a long, whiny, drawn-out swear. We busied ourselves with trying to find alternative methods of incapacitating the beast. Searching different sides of the lab, we scrabbled for something- anything- that would at least slow it down. It was Venice that found the thing we needed. "I can haz highly explosive chemicals!" she yelled. Don't ask me how she did it, but you could hear the misspelt word in her voice. She handed me the bottle, which did, indeed, have the safety symbols for "Highly Flammable" and "Explosive" on the bottle. "Anything vaguely fuse-worthy?" she asked. "I still have some rope, I think." Scrabbling in my satchel, I found some, and cut a section off, before handing it to Venice. She unstoppered the bottle and shoved the rope into the neck. "Matches?" "Better," I said, pulling out a lighter from my bag of holding. Ven lit the rope, and rolled the bottle towards the door, before we both retreated as far back into the room as possible. After a few rather anticlimactic seconds, the bottle of fluid exploded. The explosion was loud enough to make our ears pop, and we were confident the Thing was down and out. We were sadly mistaken. SP Fic: Chapter Eleven  The Thing was down, but it was most definitely not out yet. The blast had torn its legs completely from its body, but the thing was not quite dead. Lying flat on its stomach, it tried to drag itself towards us. I felt sorry for it, frankly. Looking at its face, I saw that its eyes were still very human indeed, and they were filled with sadness. As it tried feebly to force itself through the doorway, torso dripping blood, I clutched Ven into a hug. It was more for my benefit than hers, if I'm being honest. After a short while, the Thing slumped onto the floor and stopped moving. The eyes were now dead, and I clutched Venice tighter, partly in relief, partly in grief. I supposed I should have felt triumphant, but I didn't. Not at all. Venice wriggled out of the hug and looked at the recently deceased Thing. "Well, that's one less problem." She didn't sound particularly happy, either. As if to add insult to injury, the only way out of the lab was over the Thing's corpse. As we passed, Venice bent down to his head and closed his eyes. It was only fair. We clambered over him, and came out in the hallway. After a short time pondering, we found that there was simply no way back up through the hole. "Where to now?" I asked. "Only one place TO go," Venice said, pointing down into the dark corridor. "Yay," I said, deadpan.