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John Carpenter's
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Assimilation
By ElliotAppleton
Windows suppressed a shudder as he looked at the hideous man-monster under the sheet in the
storeroom. He knew the insanely warped carcass would dash his hopes for a sound sleep tonight. "We
oughta just burn these things." he said to Bennings across the room.
"You can't burn the find of the century," Bennings replied, a little surprised at Windows' fear of a dead body.
"That's gonna win somebody the Nobel prize."
Still wary of the dead Thing, Windows placed the sheet back over it, hiding the gory sight from his eyes. He
wondered what horrors it had subjected the crew of the Norwegian outpost to, but he knew he would
probably never know. Refusing to cast his mind to what the Dog-Monster had done to the other dogs in the
kennel, he turned away from the table. "You got the keys?" he asked
Bennings.
"Go get them from Garry," Bennings said, going through some boxes and equipment on the shelves. "I want
to get some stuff out of here." He turned away and heard Windows leave. Placing boxes on the floor, he
thought about the massive fame a man would get from presenting evidence to the world that intelligent life
existed in outer space. He would rank alongside Newton, Darwin and Einstein. People would never look at
the night sky in the same way again. That person could be me, he thought to himself with a slight chuckle.
Bennings stopped. What was that sound? It sounded like something wet and slimy moving around close to
him. He thought of the alien carcass on the other side of the room and broke out in a cold sweat. No, it isn't
possible, he thought. The Thing was burned to death. Nothing could survive.
Just as he was about to walk out of the room and get the others, he heard the slimy sound again and felt
movement behind him. His eyes bulged with horror as he spun round and saw fleshy, sinuous tendrils
writhing toward him from under the sheet on the table, oozing translucent
goo. Before he could scream out
for help, one of the bloody whips lashed across his mouth with lightning speed, blocking any calls he could
make. Then several more coiled around his legs and torso and dragged him to the chair.
Bennings struggled against the tendrils, but to no avail. I'm gonna die! he thought. He felt a strange pain as
the tendrils pierced his flesh and slid greasily inside his body, wrapping themselves around his internal
organs.
It was assimilating him.
As Bennings felt his entire body start to dissolve in the Thing's grasp, he thought of his wife and children
back home. He had promised he would visit them after winter. Now he knew he would never see them again.
Moments later, Bennings had been reduced to a fleshy mass of organs. Tearing off his last shreds of
clothing, the Thing hauled it closer to itself and began the process of imitating
Bennings' genetic structure
by mixing and merging cells. When it finished, his friends would never know the difference.
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