River of Pain

by Christopher Golden

  But Coughlin wanted a reply, and so he forged on.

  “All of you people with your medicine and your science, acting like you know everything, and you’re not even going to try—”

  “Sergeant!” Dr. Hidalgo snapped.

  Coughlin looked up to see the older woman glaring at him. She had a small metal canister in one hand. Navarro had stopped, too—he held a pair of forceps and a steel tray. They were standing on either side of Zak Li, as if they’d been about to do something more than just observe.

  “Let up on Dr. Komiskey, Sergeant,” Dr. Hidalgo said. “We’ve all gone days with only a few hours’ sleep. She’s done all she can for these people—everything we can think of. Do you know the term ‘triage?’”

  “Of course. It means you figure out who’s injured the worst, and in what order you need to treat them. We do the same thing in the field.”

  Dr. Hidalgo nodded slowly, gesturing at the half-dozen patients who lay on cots around them.

  “It also means you treat the people who have a chance of surviving, and learn to recognize the ones who don’t. We’re in triage mode, Sergeant. We can’t save these people. If we’re to have any chance at all of saving the rest of the people in this colony, we need to learn everything we can about the aliens, and find a way to defeat them.”

  Coughlin stiffened, but as he glanced at Zak and Mo and the other people with those alien things on their faces, he began to see them not as patients, but as casualties. Only one of them—a fellow marine named Joplin Konig—had already lost the facehugger. He’d woken briefly and started to scream, his eyes wild, until Navarro had gotten a needle into him. Now Joplin was heavily sedated.

  “That sucks,” he muttered.

  “I agree,” Dr. Hidalgo replied, but she had already resumed what she had been doing. She bent over Zak Li and sprayed something from the canister onto two of the spidery legs on one side of his face. The legs turned white with frost, as did the patch of Zak’s cheek that was visible between the alien’s legs.

  Liquid nitrogen, Sgt. Coughlin thought.

  “Go,” Hidalgo said.

  Navarro used the forceps to pry one of the frozen legs away. It snapped off, and everyone in the room went still.

  “No blood,” Navarro said.

  Dr. Komiskey stood up, sipped her tea, and crossed toward them.

  “Might be a way to get the damn things off them safely after all…” she said cautiously, “but you’ve just killed the flesh on Mr. Li’s cheek, as well.”

  The monitor began to beep loudly, and then to peal.

  “Damn it!” Navarro shouted.

  “The alien’s cut off his oxygen,” Dr. Hidalgo said, grimly resigned. “Back away. There’s nothing we can do for him now.”

  So they stood there—the doctor, the scientist, her assistant, and Sgt. Coughlin—helpless to do anything. As the frozen portion of the alien’s spidery legs began to thaw, the stub of the snapped one began to bleed. Acid blood burned through Zak’s cheek, down through the cot, and into the floor beneath it.

  Zak Li couldn’t even scream.

  “That’s it,” Coughlin said, lifting his weapon. “There is something we can do for these people, a way to stop their suffering. If they’re going to die anyway, then let’s put them out of their misery and kill these alien cockroaches all at the same time.”

  Dr. Hidalgo lunged forward, putting herself between Coughlin’s gun and the patients.

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind!”

  Coughlin frowned. “Why not? So you can continue studying your precious Xenomorphs?” He shook his head. “Do it without these poor bastards. I know Mori and Reese are over in the research lab, doing God knows what. Go join them, Dr. Hidalgo, and let me worry about the human end of things here. As far as I can see, it’s something you and your team aren’t very good at.”

  Navarro cleared his throat.

  “Um, folks?”

  Dr. Komiskey hurried over to Mo Whiting’s cot. She took a pen from her pocket and used it to nudge the alien that was straddling Mo’s face, and the spidery thing slid off, trailing the long dried gray proboscis that had been down her throat like it was some kind of withered umbilical cord.

  Coughlin felt sick.

  Fuck, he thought. That’s exactly what it is.

  “I’ve got a second one off over here,” Navarro said. “We’ve got no consistent gestation period as yet, but these two are going to wake up soon. Someone’s going to have to have ‘the talk’ with them.”

  On his cot, over near the door into the testing room, Pvt. Joplin Konig began to choke and jerk. Unconscious, he started to moan, and his body shook as if in a seizure.

  Coughlin tapped the comm on his collar.

  “Captain Brackett, do you copy? This is Coughlin.”

  Crackle on the line, and then Brackett’s voice.

  “Copy, Sergeant. Go ahead.”

  “It’s going down now!”

  “Do not let another one of these things leave that lab alive,” Brackett snapped over the comm.

  “Yes, sir!”

  Navarro snatched up a complicated-looking device that he’d rigged with a net, still determined to catch the parasite as it burst from Joplin’s chest.

  “Back away, Navarro,” Coughlin said. “This isn’t a capture situation.”

  “Sergeant—” Dr. Hidalgo began.

  Theodora Komiskey put both hands up, trying to referee, as if they had time to discuss it. Too many people were trying to keep Coughlin from doing his job. He needed reinforcements. He’d left Ginzler in the hall, guarding the lab from outside.

  As Konig bucked on the table, eyes flying open as he gasped for air, Coughlin backed up to the automatic door and slapped the panel that slid it open. As he heard it shushing open, he spun to call for Ginzler.

  An alien stood on the other side of the door, seven feet tall, ebon-skinned and ridged as if designed by some mad architect of the flesh. Stinking, viscous drool slid from its jaws as it reached for him.

  Coughlin shouted in terror and brought up his weapon, but too late. As it grabbed him, its grip crushing his arms, he pulled the trigger and bullets tore into the floor and wall and killed Zak Li on his cot. Then the alien brought its tail around and impaled his heart with the precision of a swordsman.

  Dying, Coughlin heard Dr. Hidalgo scream.

  In his mind, he called for her to run, but he had neither words nor breath remaining to him.

  Darkness claimed him.

  * * *

  Dr. Hidalgo shut her mouth, her own screams echoing in her mind. Fear surged through her, a terror unlike anything she’d ever known, but she shut it down.

  The alien withdrew its blood-dripping tail from Sgt. Coughlin’s chest with a sickening crunch of bone and the wet suction of a killing wound.

  Navarro spouted frantic profanities and staggered backward, tripping over Mo Whiting’s monitor and falling to the floor. The alien stalked toward him, almost bouncing with each step, its motion vaguely birdlike in a way that sickened her.

  “Oh my God,” Dr. Komiskey said. “Ohmigod.” Her voice came from behind Pvt. Konig’s cot, where she huddled now, thinking she could avoid death. A second creature crept through the door, stepping over Sgt. Coughlin’s corpse.

  The first one moved toward Mo Whiting, and Navarro screamed and jumped up, trying to flee. The creature caught him by the hair and dragged him back, regurgitating a thick liquid into his face. Navarro choked and flailed but quickly became sluggish, and the alien kept dragging him toward the door.

  The second alien leapt onto Pvt. Konig just as the man’s chest burst open and the newborn creature slithered out. The two monsters ignored each other. The parasite slithered off the cot and darted across the floor, just as the adult alien reached for Dr. Komiskey.

  Dr. Hidalgo backed away slowly, keeping them in view. Gradually she picked up her pace. As the second newcomer stabbed its tail through Komiskey’s shoulder—not a killing blow—the first paused and turne
d toward Dr. Hidalgo, and she froze a moment. It had no eyes that she could discern, but it cocked its head as if evaluating her, then hurried about its business with Navarro, dragging him from the lab.

  Heart hammering inside her chest, barely able to breathe, she turned and fled toward an adjoining testing room, slapping the pad. When the door swished open, she darted inside, closed and locked it, and ran to the intercom on the wall. She held down the red button there, heard a wash of crackling static, and forced herself not to scream.

  “This is Theresa Hidalgo in the med lab,” she said quietly, the hushed words coming over the speakers above her head—and on every other speaker throughout the colony. That was the purpose of the red button.

  “They’re here,” she rasped, her lower lip quivering as she glanced toward the door, wondering how long it would be before they came for her.

  “Please, someone help.”

  * * *

  DATE: 25 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1013

  Brackett reached the med lab with Yousseff, Hauer, and two other marines in tow. Silent and smooth, practically vibrating with adrenaline, he gestured for them to take up positions around the open door. Blood smeared the floor and had spattered the walls in patterns he read immediately.

  Two dead, at least.

  He scanned the corridor in both directions but saw no sign of aliens or any other personnel. The science team’s research lab was at the far end of the corridor. He gestured to a tall, brutish marine whose name he hadn’t even had time to learn, indicating that the man should check on the research lab. The door down that end was sealed up tight, but with the aliens using air ducts to travel, he thought it best to be sure.

  “Cap,” a low voice said, and he turned to see Hauer crouched in the elevator alcove fifteen feet away. Brackett held a hand up, palm out, to indicate that the private should stay put and wait for him.

  With a nod to Yousseff and the other marine—a scarred, unshaven career grunt named Sixto—Brackett stepped into the med lab, sweeping the barrel of his gun in an arc across the room.

  “Oh, man,” Sixto whispered.

  “Search it,” Brackett said, and the three of them spread out.

  They checked behind machines and kicked cots over, stepped around puddles of blood and shone lights into dark vents. There were three corpses in the room, Coughlin and two colonists who’d had facehuggers on them, but now had big holes in their chests. The rest of the people who’d been there, patients and doctors and marines, were all missing.

  “Captain Brackett,” Yousseff said, “what the hell is this?”

  She knelt on the floor near a cot, touching a small pool of thick, sticky, resinous liquid that stretched between her fingers. With a grimace of disgust, she wiped her fingers on the cot.

  Brackett heard a thump and glanced around to see Dr. Hidalgo looking at him through the small window set into a door at the other side of the room.

  “Fuckin’ miracle,” he whispered as he rushed to the door and tried the latch.

  The doctor stared at him through that little window, eyes wide, and it seemed to take her a moment to realize she had to open the door from inside. She shook her head as if coming out of a daze, and then worked the lock so that the door shushed open, sliding into a pocket in the wall.

  “How are you alive?” Brackett asked her.

  “Tes… th’ tsst…” Dr. Hidalgo tried to speak but faltered, one hand fluttering up to cover her mouth. Her eyes filled with moisture, but as he watched, she seemed to force the tears not to fall. Steeling herself, taking slow breaths, she stood a bit straighter.

  “The testing room,” she explained, clearly now. “I said I was in the testing room.” The words sounded like some kind of accusation, and Brackett frowned. They’d all heard her on the compound’s intercom system, but Yousseff had told him that meant the med lab. Was the old woman angry that they hadn’t come directly to her before searching the lab for threats?

  Maybe she wasn’t thinking clearly.

  “I don’t understand,” he admitted.

  “It’s a sealed area. Sterile,” Dr. Hidalgo said, hand still shaking as she tucked a gray strand of hair behind her ear. “My guess is that they couldn’t get my scent in there.”

  “Or they got what they wanted, and didn’t want to stick around and wait for the odds to shift against them,” Pvt. Yousseff said, kicking at the desiccated body of a dead facehugger. “They dragged everyone else out of here, including the ones who were incubating more of the damn parasites.”

  Static crackled in Brackett’s ear.

  “This is Simpson for Captain Brackett. Do you read me, Captain?”

  “Hang on, Mr. Simpson,” Brackett said, poking his head into the testing room. He glanced around, then turned back to Dr. Hidalgo. The woman was tougher than she looked, but he could see she was still shaken. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Dr. Hidalgo exhaled. She reached out and put a grateful hand on his shoulder.

  “Not even close, Captain, but thank you for asking. And for coming. I don’t think I’d ever have left that room otherwise.”

  Brackett shifted his gaze back toward the interior of the testing room.

  “Might turn out that you were safer in there.” He turned to Yousseff. “Private, please stay with Dr. Hidalgo. I’ll be back in a second.” Then he headed into the corridor, where Hauer stood guard near the elevator alcove.

  “I’ve got a feeling they’re growing too big for the air ducts, Cap,” Hauer said.

  Brackett walked over and stared at the elevator doors, which had been forced open and now sat jammed at wrong angles inside their frame. The darkness of the elevator shaft yawned wide, a coldness emanating from within. He kept his weapon trained on the opening, but did not venture any closer.

  He tapped the comm on his collar.

  “Simpson, this is Brackett,” he said. “You rang?”

  “You sound pretty cavalier, Captain.”

  “I’ve had about six hours’ sleep in three days, so I’m a little punchy. I’ve lost track of how many we’ve got dead, and how many have been abducted, and I’m trying to count up how many of these aliens we might be facing now. Everyone in the med lab is either dead or missing, except for Dr. Hidalgo—”

  “Shit.”

  “—so it won’t be long before their numbers rise significantly. We’ve got to locate these things, and I mean now.”

  “What about the research lab?” Simpson asked.

  Brackett glanced along the corridor. The marine he’d sent to check on Reese and Mori walked out of their lab. He gave Brackett a thumbs up.

  “All clear,” Brackett said.

  “Okay. All right, listen,” Simpson went on, static fuzzing his words. “I want you to call in all of your people. We’re moving all of the personnel together. I want your squad there protecting them.” He paused, then added, “When the aliens come for us, you can kill them then.”

  Brackett scowled, staring into the dark maw of the elevator shaft.

  “You’re out of your mind, Simpson. They’re breeding right now, and the ones already in here with us are growing bigger… stronger. We need to hunt the bugs down and wipe them out before there are more of them. It’s our only hope.”

  “I disagree,” Simpson said through the static.

  “Yeah? Well, I’ve got a question for you,” Brackett said, turning to see Dr. Hidalgo emerging from the med lab, stepping into the hallway. “Are you sure it’s a good idea clustering everyone together? ’Cause if my squad can’t track these bastards down, I think you may just be setting the table for dinner.”

  * * *

  DATE: 25 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1107

  Anne jerked awake in the dark, gasping from a nightmare, her memory already splintering and skittering off into the recesses of her mind.

  She caught her breath, felt the clammy sweat on her skin, and then exhaled as she realized it had been a dream. Glancing around, she saw Newt and Tim sprawled on a blanket t
hat had been thrown on the floor, jackets and sweatshirts and seat cushions for pillows, and she remembered it all. The derelict spaceship and its abhorrent cargo, and what had happened to her husband.

  “Russ,” she breathed, eyes welling with tears that she quickly wiped away. She had to be stronger than that, for her kids.

  Others slept around them, nearly a dozen people she had known for years but who seemed distant from her now. Some of these people were her friends, others her neighbors or co-workers, but her only priorities were Newt and Tim.

  And Demian, she thought. No matter what else their past had held, once he had been her dearest friend. Whatever she intended to do, she ought to include him.

  In the back of her mind she was aware that Demian Brackett hadn’t made the rank of captain in the Colonial Marines without proving his mettle. She and her kids would have a much better chance of survival with him than without him.

  “Mom?” Tim asked quietly. “Are you okay? You made a sound.”

  “Just bad dreams, sweetie,” she said, hoping she sounded calmer than she felt. “Go back to sleep.”

  “I haven’t been sleeping. I can’t. Every time I close my eyes…”

  You see your father die, she thought.

  Whimpering softly, she grabbed her son and hugged him tightly.

  “I know, Timmy. I know.”

  They’d been holed up in clusters for almost two full days, waiting for Simpson and Demian to give the all clear. From what Anne had heard, the reason that hadn’t happened was that no trace had been found of the colonists who had gone missing, nor of the aliens that were presumed to have grown from the parasites. Then, last night, someone had noticed that some of the livestock were missing.

  The door opened abruptly and she and Tim both flinched away from the light that knifed into the room. The two mechanics near the entrance jerked upright, aiming weapons at the figure that barged in, silhouetted by the glare from the corridor. Then the figure snapped the lights on, and the room flickered into illumination, people grumbling and shielding their eyes.

  “Everyone up!” Lydecker said. “We’re relocating all personnel immediately.” He pulled the two armed mechanics aside for a private word while everyone began to rise, picking up bedding and pillows and other belongings. There were two other children in the room, and they had games and books with them. Anne wished she had brought such distractions for her own kids.