River of Pain

by Christopher Golden

  “I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t let me take him home,” she rasped, looking at Dr. Komiskey.

  “Can I do anything for you?” the doctor asked. “Reese is in my lab, and Mori and Hidalgo are looking over the others who’ve been brought in with those creatures on them.”

  “Have any of the others…” she began.

  “Not yet,” Dr. Komiskey said. “But they will. And there’s been no luck finding the one who… the one that got away.”

  “Can’t they cut the things off? Or do surgery to remove whatever’s been implanted in the poor folks with those things on their faces?” Anne asked.

  She couldn’t believe such questions had to come out of her mouth.

  “You know what happened when we tried cutting the one off of Russ. They bleed a powerful acid. Try to remove the thing and the patient is likely to die—never mind the way its proboscis wraps itself around the patient’s…”

  Dr. Komiskey faltered and glanced away.

  “You know what, never mind,” she said. “You shouldn’t be hearing this. You should take the kids and go back to your place. I’ll update you myself if we learn anything.”

  An icy ball of dread had been growing in Anne’s gut, and now it doubled in size.

  She shook her head.

  “Not going to happen, Theodora,” she said. “You’ve got marines out there. I want to be wherever they are. More of those things means more of the damn creatures in the walls or wherever they’re going. We’re in the middle of something no one’s ever had to deal with before. With Russ…”

  She stopped and glanced at Tim, saw the way his mouth had tightened into a white line as he forced himself not to cry.

  “I’m on my own,” she continued. “And I’m going to keep these kids safe. That means I want to be where the investigation is taking place. I want to know what you know, when you know it, and I want a marine or two within screaming distance.”

  She thought of Demian Brackett, but didn’t mention him by name. Theodora wouldn’t have understood, and Anne wasn’t sure that she did, either. Given their history, she ought to have felt terrible guilt over how profoundly she desired his company just then, but she felt nothing of the kind. She loved Russ. He remained her husband in her heart, and she couldn’t imagine the day when that would no longer be the case.

  But Demian was still her friend, and a Colonial Marine, and she trusted him to do everything he could to look out for her and her children, partly because she knew he was still in love with her. Perhaps she ought to have felt badly about taking advantage of that love, but she was a mother, and her children’s safety took precedence over everything.

  “How many have been brought back so far?” she asked.

  For several seconds, Dr. Komiskey looked everywhere but at Anne.

  “How many?” Tim asked.

  Newt rustled a bit in her sleep.

  “Twelve or thirteen,” Dr. Komiskey replied. “With more on the way.”

  “Are they stupid?” Anne said. “They need to get out of there now, and stay out!”

  “From what I hear, they are,” the doctor said. “All of these happened within just a minute or so of each other, in two waves… The first ones latched onto the marines who walked in among those eggs—or whatever they are—and the second wave attacked the people who were trying to rescue the first group.”

  Anne sighed, held her children close, and looked up at her.

  “What are they, Theodora?” she asked, not really expecting an answer. “What the hell have we stumbled upon here? I mean, the company sent us out there, gave us specific coordinates and everything. Did they know what we would find?”

  From the haunted look in the doctor’s eyes, Anne knew she had been wondering the same thing.

  “I wish I knew,” Dr. Komiskey said. “But even if we did—”

  “What, it wouldn’t help?” Anne snapped, disturbing Newt. “If they know anything that we don’t, I think it’s time they clued us in. Don’t you?”

  The doctor exhaled.

  “Whatever I learn, I’ll share.”

  Then she turned and was gone, leaving Anne alone with her children again. They were the Jordens now, just the three of them. Without Russ, she was the only one who could protect them, and she intended to do that.

  No matter what it cost her.

  19

  CAPTURE – FOR – STUDY

  DATE: 23 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1837

  Brackett held tightly to his gun, trying to keep his frustration in check. He led the way for a lab assistant named Khati Fuqua and a surveyor called Bluejay. The origin of the nickname was a mystery the captain hadn’t the time or inclination to solve.

  Khati carried a three-foot shock-stick, while Bluejay lugged a light mesh soil sifter he intended to use as a net. They were approaching a junction on the basement level of D-Block, beneath the wing that held the med lab and operations. Though the hallway was quiet and abandoned, he was distracted by the voices coming through the comm unit in his ear. Al Simpson. One of Dr. Reese’s assistants. Julisa Paris. Sgt. Coughlin.

  “Did you join the marines to be a glorified exterminator?” Bluejay asked, his smile rustling his thick gray muttonchop sideburns.

  “I’m not an exterminator,” Khati snapped. “We’re not going to kill this thing. Standing orders are that we take it alive.”

  “Not my orders,” Brackett said.

  “You may be stationed here, Captain Brackett,” Khati said, “but this facility is under the operational control of Weyland-Yutani, and standing orders from the company are that any newly encountered alien species falls under the capture-for-study edict.”

  “Unless it represents a threat to human life,” Brackett replied.

  “There’s nothing about that in the handbook,” Bluejay told him, darting his head around a doorframe and peering into a bathroom where the door had been left propped open.

  “You think this thing presents a danger to the colony?” Khati asked, arching an eyebrow. “From the way Dr. Reese described it, the creature looks like a fat snake with little arms. I don’t think it’s going to give us much trouble.”

  “That’s if we can find the damn thing,” Bluejay sighed. “Hold up for a second.” The surveyor dashed into the bathroom, searched the stalls and glanced through air vents.

  After the death of Russ Jorden and the escape of the alien parasite that had burst from his chest, Brackett had brought his squad into a room with Al Simpson and two-dozen colonists—some from the science team, and others from the colony staff. Dr. Reese had spoken to them about the parasite, given them a rough description, and asked them to search for it as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. It was vital, he’d said, that the alien be captured alive.

  It had been Marvin Draper, of all people, who’d asked the most salient question.

  “We catch this thing,” Draper had said, “are you going to be able to stop the same thing from happening to those poor bastards we hauled back from that derelict ship?”

  Dr. Reese had adopted a sad expression and nodded slowly.

  “That is our hope, yes.”

  Somehow that had turned what Brackett would have expected to be a bug hunt into a search-and-rescue operation. Search for the parasite, rescue those who still had facehuggers attached to their heads.

  “Come on, Bluejay,” he said, starting along the corridor again without waiting for the surveyor. “We need to be faster.”

  Khati gave him an approving glance and caught up with him. In the bathroom, a toilet flushed and Bluejay came running out with his net over his shoulder, zipping up his pants. Brackett scowled as he reached the next door.

  He rapped lightly on it and waited for a response.

  Simpson’s number two, Lydecker, had gone onto the comm system and instructed everyone in the colony to shut themselves into whatever room they were in. They were to stay there until further notice, and to report anything out of the ordinary.

  No answer. />
  “Open it,” Khati said.

  Brackett bristled. He needed to have a conversation with this woman. But it could wait.

  Supposed to be a quiet post, he thought. A nothing little colony on the edge of nowhere. Instead it had been crisis upon crisis since his arrival. Maybe I’m bad luck. He thought of Anne Jorden and her children and their grief, and decided he didn’t want to take responsibility for any of this—not even jokingly.

  “Let’s go,” he said, turning the latch and pushing the door open.

  Khati went in first, shock-stick held out ahead of her.

  Brackett and Bluejay followed, scanning the floor of what appeared to be some kind of stockroom. Lights flickered on as they entered, and Brackett crouched to look on the lower shelves as Khati and Bluejay did the same along aisles of lab and med supplies.

  “Is this stuff manufactured here?” he asked.

  “Some of it’s brought with our monthly supply run,” Khati answered. “The rest we make.”

  Brackett swore, peering into a vent.

  “We’ve got maybe sixty people looking for this thing when it could be anywhere in the complex. No way are we finding this little bastard if it doesn’t want to be—”

  A scream tore along the corridor. Brackett ran for the door, but Khati beat him to it. Out in the hall they darted to the right, racing toward the source of the scream—a cry that had been abruptly cut off and now echoed only in his head.

  Bluejay followed, but Brackett felt as if he and Khati were in a race until he grabbed her shoulder and shoved her back a step.

  “What the hell—”

  He turned on her. “That sounded like danger to me, which means you hang back, and I will investigate.”

  “Those aren’t my instructions,” she barked.

  “They are now.” Without waiting for a response, he hurtled down the corridor, gun at the ready, with Khati and Bluejay in his wake. At the junction he paused, trying to sort out whether the scream had come from the left or right, a question solved almost immediately by the sudden appearance of Sgt. Coughlin and two unfamiliar faces coming along the corridor from the left.

  “You heard that, Captain?” Coughlin asked.

  Brackett ignored him. The new arrivals were coming from the left, which meant the scream—that one, horrible, lonely scream—had come from the short corridor on the right. It ended in two broad, swinging double doors.

  He ran toward them, and then stopped short. Khati raced up beside him again. Hot, humid air emanated from behind those doors, along with the thrumming vibration of machinery.

  “What’s through here?” Brackett asked.

  “The laundry.”

  He signaled to Coughlin, who ran up to stand beside him. With his left hand, Brackett counted off three fingers, and together they burst through those double doors, gun barrels sweeping the room in opposite arcs. The churning noises of the washers assaulted them and the hot, damp scent of industrial cleaner made his eyes sting.

  “Stay lively,” Brackett said, motioning Coughlin forward and then holding up a hand to indicate that the others should stay back.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Khati said, “it’s an alien snake, not the bogeyman.”

  Brackett shot her a hard glance and she rolled her eyes, but did not advance.

  The two marines moved into the vast room, where soiled clothes and linens stood in wheeled baskets below open ducts that Brackett realized must allow for dirty laundry to be dumped into hatches on the upper levels. An open doorway on the far side of that room led to another chamber, the source of the thundering machine noise.

  Brackett and Coughlin hurried toward it.

  Suddenly a laundry cart moved and a figure lurched up toward them. Brackett swung his gun around, finger on the trigger as he saw the wide, terrified eyes of a tall, white-haired woman staring back at him.

  “What—” Coughlin began. Before he could react, the woman pushed past him, bolted past Khati and the rest, and vanished out into the corridor. The fear in her eyes was intense.

  An alien snake, Khati had said. The thing might be ugly as hell, but to inspire that kind of fear, it had to have done something terrible.

  At the broad open doorway that led into the humming, thundering room full of laundry machines, Brackett and Coughlin paused for a moment. Then Brackett nodded, and they went through.

  At first he wasn’t sure just what he was looking at. Machines washed. Machines dried. Machines folded and stacked. But stacks of clean laundry that must have belonged in carts like the ones out in the duct room had spilled onto the floor.

  “Captain,” Coughlin said, pointing at one of the huge folding machines.

  White sheets made their way through the machine, stretched and creased and folded and then folded again. But one of the sheets wasn’t purely white—it had a long red streak down the middle—and the next one had been soaked through with crimson.

  Brackett’s heart sped up. An ugly little parasite had done this?

  “Move,” he said, voice low, and he and Coughlin hurried around the other side of the huge folding machine.

  Both of them froze as the machine started to whine and clank. Two huge rollers attempted to draw in the body of a slender man whose left arm and shoulder had been chewed up by the folding mechanism. The hole in his forehead, however, had not been made by the machine.

  Blood and gray matter spilled onto the floor.

  A second corpse lay fifteen feet away, near one of the thumping, swirling dryers.

  “How many people normally work down here?” Brackett asked.

  “Could be as many as four at a time,” Bluejay said.

  “Spread out!” Brackett shouted. “You see anything, don’t approach. Just sing out.”

  The six of them moved among the various machines, the thrum and churn creating a blanket of gray noise that made it all the more vital for them to use their eyes. Brackett aimed his weapon up into the mechanical workings of the bloody folding machine, and then moved on to the other, while Coughlin began to search between and behind the dryers.

  “Captain!” Bluejay shouted.

  Brackett followed his voice, joining him in a corner where a massive fan in the wall drew superheated air out of the room. There were half a dozen of these spread out across the laundry. There were other large vents, as well, and Bluejay was staring at one of them.

  “It’s the return,” he said. “Pushes cooled air back into the room.”

  Brackett stared. The grate had been destroyed, the metal latticework torn apart from within. The parasite had come through here.

  “There,” Bluejay said, pointing to the floor nearby.

  But Brackett didn’t need the surveyor to draw attention to the object that lay there, just a few feet from the torn grating. It was a bloody shoe, left behind. A sick dread knotted itself up inside his gut—no “little parasite” could drag a fully grown human into an air vent.

  Weapon aimed at the ruined grate, Brackett backed away.

  “All civilians, out of here right now!” he barked, glancing over his shoulder at them.

  Khati shot him a dark look. She’d been moving around the huge washers, probing the shadows between and behind them with her shock-stick. Now she started toward him, that insatiable curiosity lighting her eyes.

  “What’ve you found?” she called.

  Brackett turned to Coughlin.

  “Get them out of here,” he said. “I’ll call Paris, and get some reinforcements down here.”

  “If it went into the vents it could be anywhere,” Bluejay said.

  “Just go,” Brackett said.

  The surveyor held up his one free hand.

  “You don’t have to tell me twice. I don’t wanna end up like those poor bastards.”

  Coughlin snapped orders at the two civilians who had accompanied him and ushered them—along with Bluejay and Khati—toward the duct room. Brackett kept his eyes on the torn grating, and backed further away. Had he seen something moving in the da
rkness there? Somehow they were going to have to flush the thing out, but he had no idea where to begin.

  He tapped the comm link on his collar.

  “This is Brackett. I need Simpson on the line.”

  This time, the scream came from behind him.

  Brackett spun, and saw one of the civilians dive back into the laundry room. The captain ran for the open doorway. A woman shouted frantically, and then Coughlin’s gun barked, rapid-fire.

  “Khati!” Brackett shouted as he barreled into the room, weapon up.

  Something dark and swift scrambled up a shelving unit standing against the wall. He took aim and fired, bullets punching the wall and pinging off the metal shelving. Coughlin ran over beneath the alien and fired at it from close range, spattering blood onto the floor, where it hissed and smoked and burned straight through. Coughlin screamed and dropped to the floor, tearing off his left boot.

  The creature leapt up into a laundry duct, and was gone.

  Brackett took two more shots at the metal duct, and then he could only stand there, Khati at his side. She was whispering something that sounded like the most profanity-laced prayer he’d ever heard.

  Turning to survey the room, Brackett saw Bluejay lying in a sprawl on top of a spilled cart of filthy towels and sheets, blood pumping out of a hole at the center of his chest. His eyes fluttered once and then glazed over, dark with death.

  On the floor, Coughlin scrambled backward from beneath the duct and tore off a thick sock with a cry of fresh pain. He sat staring at his foot. Bloody, raw stumps were all that remained of his last two toes—the acid had burned right through his boot.

  “Whatever that thing is, it’s no snake,” Khati said.

  Brackett nodded. In the space of a few hours it had grown to the size of a large dog or a chimpanzee, though it didn’t look anything like those creatures. It now had black skin, like a shell, along with a whipping, ridged tail, and its head was huge. He’d caught a glimpse of teeth in its mouth, and felt as if he’d seen something that belonged only in nightmares.