GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Chapter Thirty-Five

Snake Eyes paused at the end of the hallway, peering out around the corner, his assault rifle cradled in his arms. Scarlett snuck up behind him and leaned over his shoulder, brushing her hair aside. She glanced down to check how much ammunition she still held in her gun, and decided it was enough for now. Strangely, they had not encountered any more resistance since they had descended unto the tunnels underneath the school.

The hallways were dimly lit with recessed lighting, giving the gray and silver corridors and shadowy rooms a foreboding, twilight appearance, as if illuminated by moonlight.

Snake Eyes held up two fingers. Scarlett nodded briskly and raised her mini-crossbow before following him out into the hallway. They moved silently along the edge of the hall and emerged into a wider foyer where two Cobra agents were impatiently standing guard.

As the first guard turned and saw them approach, a crossbow bolt struck him right in the throat before he could utter a warning, and we went down gurgling blood. The second guard spun around and met the tip of Snake Eyes' katana blade as he rammed it into the guard's stomach. Snake Eyes' hand went to the handle of the guard's machine gun to stop him from squeezing the trigger in his death throes. The guard slipped to the floor and Snake Eyes set the gun down beside him.

Scarlett kneeled down and whispered into her mic. “Duke, we made it safely inside. How close are you to our location?”

When there was no response, Scarlett repeated herself and then looked up when once again there was no response from Duke or from anyone else. “Do you think the walls here are blocking my reception?”

Snake Eyes nodded. Although their radios should have been able to transmit from underground, it was possible that Cobra had installed jamming equipment for any number of reasons, such as to block any unwanted communication from inside the base. Scarlett shook her head and stood back up in frustration as Snake Eyes slid his katana sword back into its sheath.

“Maybe we should head back out and contact them,” she suggested.

To her surprise, Snake Eyes nodded in agreement. He gestured back in the direction they had come, indicating that she was free to go back up the stairs, and then turned and walked off farther down the hallway.

Scarlett quickly caught up with him and said quietly, “You aren't getting rid of me that easily.”

“This is very dangerous,” Snake Eyes signed, without looking at her. “I can handle myself, but you should go back.”

“Are you suggesting that I'm not able to handle it?”

“One of us should go back and call for reinforcements, and you're the only one who can talk over the radio.”

In a way, it did make some sense in a weird way, but Scarlett wasn't going to fall for something that easily. So she didn't respond, and simply followed Snake Eyes down the hall. She wasn't going to let him go into danger alone, and besides, she knew that he was hiding his true motivations. For some reason, he wanted to go in alone. And Scarlett had a feeling that she knew why.

“He's here, isn't he?” she asked softly, as they made their way around another corner and through another foyer. “That other ninja. You know who he is, don't you?”

“No,” Snake Eyes signed quickly. “But I know where he is from.”

“The symbol on his sword is the same as the symbol on yours.”

“Yes. We were trained at the same academy in Japan.”

“So you want to find out who he is?”

“Yes.”

At the end of the hallway, they came to a large square room, brightly lit with long fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling, and featuring a huge Cobra symbol on the floor. As they entered, Scarlett lowered her gun and stared around the room in disbelief. Snake Eyes paused in the doorway, as if unwilling to enter, as Scarlett walked inside.

There were more than one hundred cheap cots lined up in the room in long rows, with IV bags hanging nearby on metal poles. Almost all of the beds were empty, but near the door in one corner, there were three beds still occupied. Near the beds there was a metal desk with some scattered papers.

Scarlett walked over to the beds and looked down at the three men laying there. They were alive and breathing, but each of them stared up at the ceiling lights in an unresponsive, catatonic state. They were each dressed in plain blue shirts and pants, similar to the uniforms the Cobra soldiers wore, but the clothes were wrinkled and dirty.

Scarlett snapped her fingers in front of their eyes and lightly touched their cheeks, but they looked like mental patients loaded up with sedatives, except that there were no straps tying them down or any other restraints that she could see. The three men just laid there motionlessly, eyes unblinking, mouths gaping open. One of them had a pair of headphones hanging around his neck, but Scarlett pulled the cord and found it was no plugged into anything.

“What were they doing to these men?” Scarlett whispered, picking up the papers sitting on top of the desk. She perused them and folded them up to tuck into her suit, to be examined later. She knew that if Cobra had deliberately abandoned these men here, then they had likely not left any meaningful evidence behind along with them.

“We have to do something,” she said as she turned to Snake Eyes. “We can't just leave them here like this.”

But when Scarlett looked back at Snake Eyes, she saw that he was no longer in the room with her. She hurried to the doors, but Snake Eyes was gone.

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