Alien, page 13
She nodded, turning her head to hide the tears in her eyes. The sadness, though, once again began to harden into anger. These poor people didn’t deserve any of this. They had been so close—so frustratingly, agonizingly close—to getting off BG-791 for good. To say that it wasn’t fair was a gross understatement.
Further, Weyland-Yutani was criminally responsible for their deaths, as was their chief mad scientist, Dr. Fowler, and Siobhan was going to make damned sure people knew about it. She picked up a digital framed photo of Arthur and Leo, relaxing on the beach of some far-away planet or moon, and swiped it to the right. The new image which appeared showed them in matching sweaters from one of the holiday parties. She swiped one more time and the image changed to a picture of them in front of Mount Rushmore on Earth.
She set the frame down gently, but her hands trembled with rage. She glanced from Alec to Hank.
“Let’s go,” she said. “There’s nothing… there’s no one left.”
Alec took her hand and looked into her eyes. “I’m sorry, Von. I really am. I’m sorry. I know you feel responsible for these people, but it’s not your fault.”
She tried to meet his eyes but couldn’t. “I was supposed to get them off this moon. They were supposed to be saved.”
“I know,” Alec said gently, “and Compton and McGowan were up for time off after their rotation here. Believe me, I do understand. You did everything you could.”
She looked up at Alec finally and offered him a small smile she didn’t feel. Tears blurred her vision.
“Thank you.”
He nodded once, then led her back into the hallway to join Hank. The trio headed down the hall.
“I feel like I failed them. They were my responsibility, and I failed them,” Siobhan said.
“You didn’t fail them,” Alec said softly. “If anyone did, then it was me. My job here was supposed to be to protect you, to protect the colonists.”
“It’s no one’s fault,” Hank broke in. “Well, that Fowler guy—it’s his fault. His company’s fault. But neither of you failed anybody, you hear? You couldn’t have known what they were doing at the other lab. How could you know? I think—”
Hank’s words were cut off by a loud rumble from deep beneath them. The floor shifted and tilted beneath their feet. A dark crack formed at the base of the wall to her left, zigzagging its way up toward the ceiling, which was shaking loose small chunks and dust.
Alec wrapped a protective arm around her. The three of them ducked, huddling close to the nearest doorframe and to each other. A small chunk of wall bounced painfully off her shoulder, and dust snowed onto her hair.
A moment later, the hallway fell silent and still.
“Are you okay?” Alec asked her, then to Hank, “How about you?”
Hank nodded. “You?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Alec said. He noticed Siobhan rubbing her shoulder. “Von?”
“I’m okay,” she replied. “A little bit of the sky falling, that’s all.” She gave him a reassuring smile. “Let’s go. I’d like to get back to the lab and…”
The words died in her throat as the silhouette at the end of the hall in front of them arrested her attention.
“A Dios mio,” Hernandez said beside her. “Is that…?”
Alec followed their stares over his shoulder, then turned slowly, raising his gun. The tall, dark shape at the end of the hall made a throaty clicking sound, kind of like a jittery purr. It flicked its segmented shadow-tail and turned its elongated head.
“Fuck,” Alec whispered.
“What now?” Siobhan’s heart pounded.
Alec glanced through the doorway to the apartment suite behind them, then at Siobhan, before focusing his attention on the shape again.
“We kill it.”
Before Siobhan could respond, the shape charged them, squealing, its claws scraping against the floor tiles. Alec shoved her behind him, through the doorway and into the apartment, then opened fire on the Xenomorph galloping toward them. Hank fired at it, too, cursing at it in Spanish.
Siobhan looked around the shadowy apartment’s living room for something with which to defend herself if it got past Alec and Hank. She dropped to her knees by the couch and opened the medkit, rummaging through it. As she had suspected, nothing in it would really help against the thing in the hall. She stuffed a few of the painkillers into her pocket and took out the laser scalpel. Then she stood.
A scream from the hall turned her stomach. She whirled around to see Alec firing in the opposite direction. She dove back into the doorway and saw the Xenomorph dragging Hank down the hallway. The claws of one of its massive hands had sunk into the man’s shoulder, and his shirt was already dark with blood. He fought like hell anyway, kicking his feet and pulling and slapping at the claw which held him.
Siobhan saw that his gun lay at her feet and picked it up, leaving the laser scalpel on the floor. She aimed it at the back of the Xenomorph, right between the shoulder blades, and fired.
The creature jerked from the blast to its back, screeching in anger. It took off at a sprint and Siobhan found herself running after it. She heard Alec call her name, and then the thumping of his footsteps as he ran after her, but her focus was on Hank.
The Xenomorph moved fast, slipping in and out of the pockets of shadow. Siobhan raised the gun again to fire, but now that they all were running, she was afraid of hitting Hank. Perhaps worse, she might hit the alien itself in a spot where it would bleed on him, and that blood would eat right through him. Alec was probably thinking the same thing. He was a better shot, but just as cautious of the creature’s blood.
Still, it would have to run out of hallway eventually. They’d kill it when it was forced to stop.
The creature wasn’t about to give them that chance, though. With another screech, it dragged Hank up as it scaled the wall. When Siobhan saw the vent high up near the ceiling, she cursed under her breath. In the next instant, it slipped through the dark square hole in the wall, pulling Hank, who was still screaming, into the vent shaft with it.
“Damn it,” Alec said, slowing to a stop. He paced back and forth, seemed to consider punching the crumbling wall, then decided against it. “Damn. Fuck!”
Siobhan stopped a few feet away from the vent. Her gaze traced the trail of Hank’s blood from the floor up the side of the wall and into the vent shaft. The blood looked very dark to her, so much darker than the wall. Hank’s blood. Hank, whose wife was dead and whose poor little granddaughter had no one left—no family, no friends, no one.
She fought the urge to cry, and this time the anger swallowed the grief.
“The vent shafts go to the basement,” she said. “From there, they go outside.”
“Siobhan—”
“He might still be alive,” she said, and her tone made it clear that she would not stand for an argument.
He joined her by the vent. Turning to her, he placed a hand on each of her shoulders and looked into her eyes.
“He might still be alive,” she repeated more softly.
He nodded. “Okay. Let’s go find out.”
* * *
In the quarantine room of the Seegson lab, Martin Fowler dreamed of monsters.
The landscape in the dream was much like that of BG-791—above, a sky in shades of gray, a dusty, cracked terrain, nearly barren and colorless, with distorted hexagonal mountains hemming him in. At the base of the mountains, the thick brambles, rough brown with long black thorns, grew well over his head. The darkness within them was almost a tangible thing, a kind of blackness that would seep into the nose and throat, filling the lungs, weighing heavy in the stomach, blotting out sound and vision.
Martin could hear the most terrible sounds in there—the screaming of the vurfur as far worse beasts tore them apart.
Overhead, storm clouds gathered like dirty wool stretched across a loom of endless night. The monsters had come from somewhere out there, beyond the clouds. And he—Martin Fowler—had brought them here. He and the higher-ups at Weyland-Yutani had brought the monsters and messed with them in the vain hope that they could manipulate them, make them stronger, more aggressive, more lethal.
And the monsters had broken free.
In the dream, Martin knew the things had overrun the bramble forest, which seemed to be spreading to close him in. He couldn’t see them, and could barely hear them, but he knew they were there, cloaking themselves in the shapes shadows make, moving among the branches and around the thorns.
Overhead, there was a clap of thunder so loud it jarred his bones, and then it began to rain. Martin could feel the wetness on his upturned face, his chest, his shoulders. When he opened his eyes, though, he gasped. The sky was pelting him with a shower of liquid ash… no, not ash, he realized with horror. He scanned the ground around him and saw globules of black pulling together into puddles, seeping into the thorny growths and changing them, dissolving and reforming the very dust of the ground itself.
Plagiarus Praepotens.
It was the pathogen—the black goo.
He rubbed vigorously at his eyes, his face, his hair, trying to wipe away as much of it as he could. His vision blurred; squiggling black lines crawled over his irises and he flinched. Then he saw the backs of his hands.
The color had drained out of his flesh. The black goo was carving veins of disintegration into them as old cells broke down and new, tumorous ones formed. It was happening all over his body; he could feel it, and the pain was immense.
Martin fell to his knees. He couldn’t see now, not more than hazy silhouettes, but he could hear the squealing and chirping of the monsters from beyond the thorns as they closed in on him. When their shadows melded with the black goo on the ground all around him, he began to scream.
* * *
He jerked awake, blinked a few times, and saw the little girl from the Seegson residential building sleeping soundly in the medpod next to him. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers—a headache was starting there—reached over to the small table between the pods, and picked up his glasses.
That was when he saw Private First Class Rutiani and Lance Corporal Elkins standing at the foot of the pod. Martin slipped his glasses on and saw that the men’s expressions were a mix of low-key anger and concern. Rutiani’s hair was askew, and the sleep had not quite dissipated from his eyes. Both held their guns, though.
“Can I help you, gentlemen?” Martin said.
“Camilla’s missing,” Elkins replied. “You wouldn’t know where she is, would you?”
Martin sat up. “No, I wouldn’t.”
“You didn’t see her?” Rutiani asked, cocking an eyebrow at him.
“I don’t see how I could have. I was sleeping.”
“And she didn’t say anything to you?” Elkins glanced slowly around the room as if he thought maybe Martin was hiding the synthetic somewhere.
“Why would she?”
The men seemed at a loss for words. Their faces, though, told him they were thinking a lot that they weren’t saying.
The synthetic worked there in the lab, so Martin didn’t think the marines were worried that she was lost, nor did he think they were worried for her safety. In Martin’s experience, the Xenomorphs weren’t interested in synthetics because they could, on some animal level, recognize the artificial beings’ inorganic nature. To the Xenomorphs, synthetics were of no more interest than a table or a chair, useless to incubate their young and of no real threat unless they got between the alien and its target lifeform.
Further, synthetics were strong and durable. If Martin recognized the model correctly, this Camilla was a Seegson 226-B/2 synthetic, and those were built to withstand a number of toxic substances, allergens, acids, and the like. They were an inferior brand of synthetics, in Martin’s opinion, to the Weyland-made ones, and prone on occasion to malfunction. Perhaps fear of that was what made the Marines clutch those weapons so tightly.
“Listen, gentlemen. I understand that you’ve had a very long night, and that you blame me for being the root cause of it. However, I assure you that whatever you think happened to… Camilla? Is that her name? I promise it has nothing to do with me. I haven’t seen her or talked to her since you put us in here, and I have no idea where she is.”
“We need to find her,” Elkins muttered to Rutiani. “You stay with them. I’ll go look.”
“Copy that,” Rutiani said with a small nod.
“Can I ask why such concern?” Martin leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. They didn’t answer him, and he wasn’t surprised.
“Elkins,” Rutiani called over his shoulder, and the other man paused, turning.
Rutiani glanced back at him. “Be careful.”
15
The basement of the Seegson residential sector was a mess. Organized as a series of subterranean rooms, each basement area corresponded to an apartment suite above it. The maintenance and utility section ran the length of them, accessible from the far ends of the hallways. Along it, one could open each cellar door with an apartment-specific card key, or all the rooms with the master maintenance key. Siobhan looked for the latter in a small, caged-in office below the lobby.
“Found the key,” she said, taking it from a desk drawer. “Let’s go.” She also found another flashlight and snatched it up.
“We listen first,” Alec said as they approached the first door, “and maybe figure out what’s there before we go in.”
“Got it.” Siobhan clutched both Hank’s gun and the key card. She hoped her hands weren’t shaking and that she didn’t look as nervous as she felt. “Let’s do this.”
They listened at the first door and heard nothing. Alec nodded to her, and Siobhan slid the key card into the reading slot. When it lit up green, she turned the handle and opened the door.
The room was empty. They did a cursory sweep to make sure, but found nothing except old junk that the residents were leaving behind—a broken chair, a pair of pants with a long tear in them, an old computer. There was something sad about the forgotten remnants of someone’s life, even on BG-791. Soon, Siobhan thought, the whole moon would be left behind, and with it, any trace that humanity had ever been there.
They searched the next few rooms the same way, quickly shuffling aside old carpets, boxes, broken holiday decorations, even a USCMC medal. Siobhan saw Alec pocket the medal, and she thought she understood why. It was an honor the USCMC didn’t give lightly, and she supposed he couldn’t bear the thought of it buried under the rubble, the act of valor for which it was awarded simply forgotten.
In one of the rooms toward the middle of the hall, they came upon a body. They could smell it before they saw it—a thick, nauseating rot-and-blood smell that made them both wince. They crept slowly into the room, Alec leading the way, and found the remains near a shelf of canned goods.
The body had been torn in half. The legs and feet had been carelessly tossed against a wall, with part of the entrails splattered against the concrete polymer and the rest spilled out on the floor. The limbs themselves were little more than a jumbled heap, coated in blood.
The top half was in equally bad condition. The face had been caved in, with most of the flesh clawed off. One arm had been pulled from the socket and lay at a terribly wrong angle, bent the wrong way at the elbow. The chest, too, appeared to be caved in, as if the creature who had done this had stepped on it as it walked away.
“Is that Hank?” Siobhan peered around Alec to look at the corpse.
“Hard to say,” Alec said. “I don’t think so. Too small. I think it’s a woman. Look at the hair.”
Siobhan forced herself to look at the ruined head, her gaze glancing over where the face should have been. The hair wasn’t terribly long, but it was certainly longer than Hank’s, and curly, too—or at least, it had been before it had been matted and stuck to the floor by all the blood. When she saw the little rose tattoo on the shoulder where the robe had been torn away, she let out a sob and turned away.
“It’s Vickie,” she said. “Hank’s wife.”
She felt Alec gently touch her arm.
“Let’s go,” he said softly. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
They moved out into the maintenance hallway again, and finished off the rest of the storage rooms. There were no more bodies, but no survivors, either. She shuddered to realize it had probably taken their remains up into the vents.
“Let’s get back to the lab,” she said finally. “They’re not here, and if there’s no one left to find, then…” She paused, absentmindedly pocketing the master key card. “It’s going to be drawn to the survivors in the lab, Alec. I can’t… I won’t let them end up like Vickie.”
“They won’t,” Alec said. “Not if I can help it.”
They climbed the stairs and followed the first-floor hallway back to the lobby. A streak of blood—had it been there before? Siobhan didn’t think so—had soaked into the carpets near the front desk. More blood—just little droplets, really—dripped off the desk’s surface in tiny patters. Alec pointed his gun toward the door, which still rocked a little where it had landed, while Siobhan made her way around the desk.
More blood—a lot more—had drenched the carpet where the chair should have been. Something glinted in a patch of early morning light that fell on the soaked spot. She crouched beside it.
The object which had caught the light was a wedding ring. This time, it was Siobhan who picked it up, then slipped it into a pocket of her pants. Her reason, she thought, was probably not much different from the one Alec had for keeping the medal—remembrance of lives that had meant something.
She stood and made her way back to the center of the lobby.
“Everything okay?” Alec glanced between her and the outside, his gun still trained on the open doorway.
“I think I found Hank’s ring. A lot of blood, too. I think he—”
She froze.
There was a clicking sound, like chattering teeth. The hairs on her arms stood on end.
Alec looked over her head, up at the ceiling. He swung the gun around, so it was pointing up now, too. Sweat had broken out on his forehead, and although his mouth was set in a tight, straight line, his eyes looked worried.
