River of Pain

by Christopher Golden

  It’s like a demon, he thought. But demons only existed in stories, and this alien creature was all too real.

  How big would it grow? The question snapped him out of his shock.

  “Simpson?” he said into the comm. “Simpson, this is Captain Brackett, are you there?”

  “I’m here, Captain,” the voice came back, weary and arrogant. “Doing my job. What can I—”

  “How many are there now?” Brackett demanded. “How many people with those facehuggers on them?”

  “There were thirteen,” Simpson said. “Only nine now. Why?”

  “What do you mean, ‘only nine now?’”

  “Four of the things have fallen off and died, just the way it happened with Russ Jorden,” Simpson said. “We’re keeping a close eye on them. Now, do you want to answer me?”

  “You need to do a head count of the whole colony,” Brackett said anxiously. “Make sure everyone is accounted for, top to bottom, and warn them to keep an eye out. We’ve seen the alien, down here in the laundry room. It’s killed at least three people that we’ve seen, but I think it’s taken others.”

  “Taken?” Simpson said. “What do you mean—”

  Brackett silenced his comm and turned to Coughlin.

  “Get to the med lab, right now. Keep watch over the patients there. If any of them have these things come out of them, you kill those damn snakes before they can get into the ducts, like this one.”

  Coughlin stood at attention, grim eyes gleaming through the pain.

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  Khati bristled. “You can’t—”

  “Did you not see that thing?” Brackett snarled. “Fuck if I can’t.”

  * * *

  DATE: 23 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1903

  On his way to the med lab, Coughlin passed the research laboratory used by the science team, just as one of Dr. Reese’s assistants came out through the door.

  The sergeant glanced inside and stopped short, staring through the gap in the door as it swung closed. In a cylindrical glass tank in the middle of the room—one of a row of such tanks—one of the facehuggers floated in a bubbling bluish liquid. Just before the door clicked shut, Coughlin saw the thing twitch, saw its coiled tail snap out and strike the glass of the tank like a scorpion’s sting.

  The lab assistant gave him an admonishing glance. “You’re looking at me like that?” Coughlin asked. “What’s going on in there?”

  “Need to know, Sergeant,” the young man said. “And you—”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Coughlin interrupted. “You’re running tests on the thing, maybe to try to help, or maybe just because Weyland-Yutani wants their damn data. But what I want to know is how did you get it? From what I hear, there’s no way to get one of those things off someone without killing the patient. Did you manage to get one of those eggs back from the derelict or did you murder someone for science?”

  The assistant frowned disapprovingly.

  “Every single one of those people with the stage one Xenomorphs on their faces is as good as dead already.”

  Coughlin clenched his fists. “What are you saying?”

  The assistant smiled thinly. “I’m saying you don’t need to know, Sergeant.”

  The guy walked on.

  Coughlin wanted to shoot him.

  When he reached the med lab, the sergeant found Dr. Komiskey sitting in a chair near the door with her arms crossed like a petulant child, but Coughlin could see why. Normally Komiskey’s domain, the med lab had been taken over by the science team. Dr. Mori hovered over patients while Dr. Hidalgo went from cot to cot checking vital signs. One of their assistants sat on a cot, putting some kind of ointment on a nasty, ragged wound on his own arm.

  Coughlin stared at the injured man and swore under his breath. Dr. Hidalgo looked unnerved, even frightened, but Dr. Mori’s eyes were lit with a strange excitement.

  “Pardon me, doctors, but Captain Brackett has assigned me to—”

  “We’ve been informed,” Dr. Mori said coldly. “Come in and stay out of the way.”

  But Coughlin didn’t move. He counted seven patients with facehuggers, and two without.

  “Where are the other four?” he asked.

  “The morgue,” Dr. Hidalgo said, blanching as she spoke.

  “Son of a bitch,” Coughlin whispered, cupping a hand to his skull. “And the parasites? Did you kill them, or stop them at least?”

  The scientists said nothing, but Dr. Hidalgo glanced at the man who was now wrapping his wound. At least one of them had tried to stop the parasites from escaping.

  “You people are lunatics,” Coughlin said, shaking his head. “Don’t you understand? The things growing inside them… they come out of there small, but they grow—fast. And now we’ve got, what, five of them out there? We’re going to have to get everyone together for their own safety, or at least group them in certain locations, and with armed guards.”

  Dr. Hidalgo used forceps to touch the long, spindly legs of the facehugger that covered Saida Warsi’s eyes, nose, and mouth. The thing slid off and flopped to the floor, dead, the trailing proboscis sliding from her open mouth as she coughed herself back to consciousness and began to scream. Coughlin wondered if she had been aware of what was going on around her, of the hideous fate that awaited her.

  “Well?” Dr. Mori said. “What are you waiting for? Get hunting.”

  “Oh no,” Coughlin said, raising the barrel of his gun, ready to kill anything that emerged from these poor afflicted bastards. “I’ll call it in to Captain Brackett. Me? I’m staying right here.”

  20

  THE WORST QUESTION

  DATE: 23 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 2209

  All uncertainty had left Demian Brackett’s mind.

  He moved along the basement corridors of F-Block with the military precision that had been drummed into him from the first day of training for the Colonial Marines, back to the wall, sweeping the barrel of his weapon in short arcs. Across from him, Pvt. Yousseff did the same, alert and on point. She might be one of Draper’s cronies, but she’d proven more than capable of thinking for herself. Her eyes were alight with intelligence, courage, and just the right amount of fear to keep her on her toes.

  Hours had passed since Bluejay’s death and information had been coming in fast and furious. Coughlin had reported the activity in the med lab, the little science project Dr. Reese had going on. When this was all over and the aliens—what the science team were calling the Xenomorphs—had been eradicated, Brackett intended to have an ugly conversation with the doctor about how they had acquired the living facehugger. If there had been any misconduct—if Reese had endangered lives—Brackett would take the son of a bitch into custody himself. Weyland-Yutani might give their scientists a lot of leeway in accomplishing their goals, but not even they could countenance negligence that led to the death of innocents.

  A quiet cough made Brackett glance back. Khati had stayed with him after Bluejay’s death, still carrying her shock-stick. Yousseff shot her a withering glare.

  “Sorry,” Khati said. “I don’t know why we have to be so quiet, anyway. If they hear us, these things aren’t going to go scampering off. They’re going to try to kill us.”

  Brackett grunted and turned to Yousseff.

  “She has a point.”

  Still, they moved on in relative silence, traveling quickly from room to room, checking shadowed corners and behind furniture, carefully peering through grates and vents. Every time Brackett looked into one of the air ducts he felt sick to his stomach, knowing that Newt and the other children had routinely played there. Some parts of that air circulation system were wide enough for the growing Xenomorph, but other sections were narrower, and he thought the aliens would have trouble getting through there.

  “Control, this is Brackett,” he said into his comm. “I need a schematic of the ventilation system.”

  Static on the line, and then a voice.

  “Captain, this
is Lydecker. We’ve got it open now, actually. As we’ve been evacuating sections of the colony—isolating the population in more easily protected pockets—we’ve sealed off other areas as effectively as possible. Once your team has completed its sweep, you’ll be able to access those areas one by one.”

  Brackett and Yousseff turned and entered an enormous concrete room full of pipes and chemical odors. Water dripped from poorly sealed pipe joints and stained the floor, and the smell of earth and growing things mingled with the chemicals.

  “I owe your team an apology, Lydecker,” Brackett admitted. “I underestimated you guys.”

  Static again, then a different voice.

  “Save the hugs and kisses for later, Captain,” Lt. Paris said. “I’ve got reports from three different relocation details. We’ve got the population temporarily settled into four locations, but there are people unaccounted for.”

  “Shit,” Brackett muttered. “How many?”

  No answer.

  “Lydecker!” Julisa Paris snapped over the comm. “How many in total?”

  Static. Then Lydecker replied.

  “Fifteen.”

  The number stopped Brackett short. He froze inside the room with the dripping pipes, and tried to just breathe.

  “What is it?” Khati asked.

  Yousseff—who was on the same communications channel as Brackett and had heard the exchange—turned to her.

  “Trouble.”

  Brackett exhaled and glanced around at the dripping pipes.

  “What the hell is this room?”

  “We’re underneath the greenhouse,” Khati replied.

  Okay, Brackett thought. That explains a lot.

  “Lydecker, this is Brackett,” he said into his comm. “We’re going to keep hunting, but hunting isn’t enough. Once you’re sure you’ve sealed off the population groups, I need you and Simpson to get Dr. Reese and his team in a room, and work on the only question that’s going to matter pretty soon.”

  “What question is that?” No static this time.

  “Where are they taking these people?” he replied. “There’s got to be a reason they’re taking them off somewhere, instead of just killing them and leaving the corpses. I’m going to guess that means they’re all gathering in one place, like a nest or a hive or something. We need to figure out where that is, and take the fight to them there.”

  Many seconds passed with the crackle of static in Brackett’s ear. He gazed at Khati and then at Yousseff.

  “You think they’re using those people to breed,” Lydecker said at last. “But we’re fairly certain none of the aliens have left the colony—none of the outer doors have been opened or breached in any way—and they’d have to go back to the derelict to reach those… eggs, or whatever they are.”

  “We don’t know that,” Yousseff chimed in. “We’ve never encountered this species before. We don’t know what they’re capable of.”

  “Those people might still be alive,” Brackett said grimly. “So when you know the rest are safe, you start looking. If they can be saved, we’ve got to try.”

  “I’m with you, Captain,” Lydecker said. “Mr. Simpson just came in and he wants me to assure you that he is with you, as well.”

  “All right,” Brackett said. “Completing the sweep of F-Block’s basement level and then moving upstairs to—”

  Krrkk. A burst of static on the line. Then shouting.

  “—got one! I’ve got one of the fuckers right here! Level one, northwest corner—”

  Krrkk. Screaming in the background.

  “Draper!” Yousseff shouted into her comm. “Backup’s coming!”

  Brackett was already in motion, racing out of the pipe room. Northwest corner of level one was practically right above their heads.

  “Stairs?” Brackett called. Khati ran beside him with her shock-stick, a pitiful looking thing.

  “Turn left, the door’s on the right, next to the lift! You can’t miss it.”

  Yousseff caught up, still shouting for Draper but receiving no reply on her comm. She swore several times. Brackett gritted his teeth, trying to remember who else had been paired with Draper for the sweep. They skidded around the corner, and he spotted the door with a huge B painted on it.

  “Watch your ass!” he said. “There’s more than one of these things.”

  Brackett turned the latch and banged the door open. Yousseff charged through, weapon ready, but the stairwell was empty. They raced up two steps at a time in the flickering, failing light, and could hear the shouts and screams before they reached the door into level one.

  “Again!” Brackett said, grabbing the door and dragging it open.

  Yousseff went first and Brackett burst through behind her, with Khati bringing up the rear. They nearly tripped over the bloody and broken corpse of a marine only recognizable by his uniform. For half a second, Brackett thought it was Marvin Draper, but then he heard the roar of a man’s voice, and he and Yousseff ran to the corner.

  Weapons up, they rounded the corner.

  “Holy shit!” Yousseff barked.

  Marvin Draper had braced his body against a door to keep one of the aliens from coming through. He had only a handgun for defense, his rifle on the floor half a dozen feet away. He roared profanities at it as the Xenomorph—so much bigger than it had been only four hours before—clawed at the door and slammed its head and body against it, knocking Draper back half a foot before the marine threw himself back again.

  The alien hissed, spindly arms reaching through the gap. On the floor of the corridor, a man in a gray jumpsuit sat screaming and staring at his left arm, leg, and abdomen, where the alien’s acid blood had eaten through flesh and even now eroded bone. Smoke rose from the wounds.

  Brackett ignored the screaming man—he would be dead in minutes at best.

  The alien banged its head through the gap, twisted and hissed. From within its jaws came a second set that slid out, punching toward Draper’s face.

  “Motherfucker!” Draper shouted as he darted aside. He jammed his gun against the alien’s mouth and pulled the trigger, then spun away, using the door to shield himself from the acid spray before slamming against it to keep the furious alien from crashing through.

  He’d never be able to hold it back for long.

  “Draper!” Brackett shouted. “Let it out!”

  He expected an argument, but he saw the flicker of understanding in Draper’s eyes, and the marine gave him a nod.

  “One!” Yousseff shouted, taking position beside Brackett. “Two!”

  “Three!” Draper called, and he backed away from the door, darting along the corridor.

  The alien crashed through, stood its ground, and glared at the newcomers.

  Brackett and Yousseff opened fire. From a safe distance, Draper did the same. They blew the alien apart and it fell to the floor, twitching but dead, its blood eating through the floor in seconds.

  Draper whooped triumphantly and shot the alien again. Brackett couldn’t celebrate—not with the dead marine behind him and the dying civilian only fifteen feet away. The civilian lay on the floor now, bleeding out, eyes dull and glazed. He’d breathe his last breath at any moment. There wasn’t a thing they could do for him, and Brackett didn’t even know his name.

  The man exhaled, a damp rattle coming from his throat, and then slumped.

  His pain had ended.

  “He got a few shots in with Valente’s weapon after Valente went down,” Draper explained. “Too close, though. The blood.”

  “We know,” Yousseff said, turning to look back at the corner, beyond which Valente’s corpse lay. “Damn it, Jimmy.”

  “He was a good marine,” Draper said.

  In Brackett’s mind, that was the only eulogy any of them could hope for.

  “Good timing, sir,” Draper said, holstering his weapon and giving Brackett a salute.

  Brackett casually returned the salute.

  “Nice job staying alive until we got here.” They st
ared at each other for a moment, united in mutual dislike, but both, Brackett thought, understanding that each had underestimated the other. From what he’d seen, Draper was a hell of a marine.

  “What do they want with us, Captain?” Yousseff asked, approaching the dead alien, staring at its remains. “If they just want us dead, or want to eat us, why not just do that instead of taking people away?”

  Khati walked over to the dead Xenomorph, studying it as closely as was safe.

  “Now that we’ve got one to examine, maybe we’ll start to figure that out.” She noticed Brackett staring at her shock-stick and gave it a shake. “Yeah. I think I’m going to get myself a gun.”

  21

  INCUBATION PERIOD

  DATE: 25 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 0954

  Coughlin liked Dr. Hidalgo. She could be cool and clinical, like any scientist he’d ever met, but she also treated people with courtesy and had a kind smile. She seemed to notice people, which her contemporaries never did.

  Yet as he stood in the med lab and watched her work, he wasn’t so sure. The doctor and her assistant—Wes Navarro—monitored the life signs of the people who still had those alien spider-things attached to their faces. But the medics made no effort to save lives. They had given up on the seven people who were still afflicted, surrendered them to imminent death, and it made Coughlin sick. One thing his parents had taught him as a kid was that you never surrendered, never gave in to despair.

  Dr. Komiskey sat in a chair between two cots, drinking tea. The patients who’d been on those cots were dead now, carted off to the morgue by Volk, the orderly.

  “You’re just gonna sit there?” Coughlin asked. “These people are gonna die. Zak Li there, he can carve a flute with his own hands, and he plays the hell out of a guitar. Mo Whiting is like an exo-biologist or something, right? Nice lady. And you’re just gonna let them die?”

  Theodora Komiskey did not glance up from her tea. Her sorrow hung around her like a cloud.