Reese knew that Weyland-Yutani put their greatest efforts into exploiting science, both developed and discovered. To find more effective ways to kill and conquer. He had never had a crisis of conscience.
But to abandon Dr. Mori…
Dr. Reese told himself that Mori was not his friend.
No, he thought, but he’s the closest thing I’ve got.
Forcing all guilt away, he began to turn, just as a slender figure came around the corner and onto the landing at the top of those twelve steps.
Dr. Reese stared.
“Khati?” Dr. Mori said, and he started toward the bottom step.
Reese grabbed his shoulder.
“Stop, you fool.”
The woman had been one of their researchers, but had vanished the previous evening. The science team had assumed that she had been dragged off by the aliens, but now here she was. The left side of her face had a huge purple bruise and multiple scrapes. Her hair was matted and wild and her torn clothes were in disarray.
Khati Fuqua looked down at them, eyes full of sorrow.
“Please…”
She shuffled toward the top of the steps, grunted in pain, and bent slightly as she reached for the railing. Her hand missed the rail and her foot missed the step, and she fell, tumbling end over end, reaching out to try to arrest her fall, but failing.
“Damn it!” Dr. Mori snapped, rushing to her side.
Dr. Reese approached warily, looking over Mori’s shoulder.
“Is she all right?”
Groaning, Khati rolled over. She had one hand over her sternum and Dr. Reese wondered if she had slammed her chest on the edge of a step.
She bucked in pain.
“Oh no,” she whispered.
“Oh no,” Dr. Reese echoed.
Dr. Mori stood and stared at her.
“Khati, I’m so sorry.”
Reese shifted the case to his left hand. With his right, he snatched the gun from Dr. Mori’s grasp. Stepping over the researcher, he went halfway up the steps, back the way they’d come. He needed the vantage point.
“How did she follow us?” Dr. Reese demanded. “Didn’t you shut the door?”
“I didn’t lock it,” Dr. Mori said. “I never thought—”
“Bullshit!” Dr. Reese swallowed hard, sweat beading on his forehead. “You couldn’t have even shut it tightly, not and have her follow us. I don’t want this, Mori, do you understand me?” His voice had turned shrill. He heard the edge of panic in it, but couldn’t help himself.
“Do you think she wanted it?” Dr. Mori asked, staring down at Khati as she began to buck and cry out, hyperventilating as she tried to process her pain.
From halfway up those dozen steps, Dr. Reese pointed the gun at her and let out a long breath. He wanted desperately to pull the trigger, to just end her pain and any danger she might present.
“Do it,” he whispered to himself.
But he couldn’t pull the trigger, could not murder the young woman in cold blood, though to his mind it would have been a mercy.
Khati bucked again and he could see the skin of her chest push upward as the parasite burrowed its way out.
We don’t have time for this, he thought.
But of course, it wouldn’t be long.
28
MONSTER MAZE
DATE: 26 JUNE, 2179
TIME: 1407
In the midst of the screaming and gunfire, a strange calm enveloped Anne. It was as if the ops center had shifted into some parallel dimension, and she had been left behind.
Bill Andrews and Stefan Gruenwald were in the front line, strafing the aliens with plasma rounds that blew two of them apart. Acid blood splashed Gruenwald in the eyes and the man screamed and fell to his knees. He reached up and covered his face with the palms of his hands—and then screamed louder, in a melody of anguish and surrender, as the acid on his eyes also burned through his hands.
One of the Xenomorphs grabbed Bill Andrews and smashed him against the wall, breaking him without killing him. Saving him for later.
Those who weren’t shooting were cowering, or searching for something with which to fight back.
Anne raised her pistol, exhaled, and fired three times as she backed up. She glanced over her shoulder at her children. Newt hugged her Casey doll so tightly that it looked like she might squeeze its head off. Tim had picked up a monitor screen, the only weapon he had close to hand.
No, she thought, the single word engraved in her mind.
No.
Then she saw the dark square on the wall behind her children.
“Tim! Newt!” she cried, her voice breaking. “Monster Maze!”
She saw them spin around, watched them realize what she wanted them to do. Then she turned back toward the screams and the carnage. The smell of blood and fear came at her like a stormfront. One of the aliens crouched above Newt’s friend, Luisa. The little girl screamed so loud the shrieking seemed like a kind of madness that tore at her throat, and then the alien vomited its sticky resin into her face. The girl choked on it, and went silent. Her whole body jerked and then went still, driven into unconsciousness by shock and terror.
Something broke inside Anne.
“Leave her be!” she screamed, firing twice at the alien, her heart full of more hate than she had ever imagined it could hold.
One bullet cracked its carapace at the temple while the other punched a hole in its lower jaw. The small blood spatter missed Luisa, but Anne’s heart stopped when she realized what she’d almost done.
The alien turned, and took a step toward her.
“Newt! Tim!” she shouted.
As the other colonists died or were dragged away around her, Anne’s children were screaming for her. She turned and saw that they’d pried the grating off of the vent, but they’d paused, calling out for her to come with them. The anguish in their faces carved deep into her heart.
“Inside!” she shouted, running toward them. “Get inside!”
Tim shoved Newt into the narrow duct—much too small for one of the creatures—and then began to climb in behind her.
Anne heard a low hiss. She could practically feel the alien as it reached for her.
Russ, she thought. I’m sorry.
She turned, took aim, and fired once before its jaws punched through her forehead.
* * *
Newt heard her brother scream for their mother. He scrambled, banging against the inside of the duct as he climbed out again.
“Timmy, no!”
She grabbed his t-shirt but he tore free and turned toward her, furious tears streaming down his face.
“Go, Rebecca!” he roared. “Don’t wait!”
But she watched him turn, watched him run over and bend to pick up the gun their mother had dropped.
“I’ll save you, Mom!” Tim yelled.
But he couldn’t. It was too late for that. Too late for their mother. Too late for Tim.
Numb, Newt turned away, but still she heard the scream—the last sound her brother—her best friend—would ever make.
She felt the alien coming for her and hurled herself deeper into the duct, crawling away as fast as possible. Monster Maze, she thought. But now these ducts were the only place the monsters weren’t. She knew them better than anyone, but she’d never crawled around inside them alone.
Alone. The word echoed in her head the way her movements echoed along the ducts.
All alone.
* * *
DATE: 26 JUNE, 2179
TIME: 1407
Khati sucked air in through her teeth, breathing in the pattern taught to women who were about to give birth. Then she bucked again, blue eyes wide as she let out a scream that tore down the walls Dr. Reese had built inside himself to hide away his emotions. He’d known this woman, dined with her, enjoyed the sound of her laughter.
“Why are we still here?” Dr. Mori shouted from below him. “We should just go!”
Reese stood halfway up the steps, looking
down on that small space and the entrance to the next segment of the evac corridor. Dr. Mori took another step into the corridor, hesitating and confused, and Reese knew he was right.
No delay, he thought.
What the hell was he waiting for? Khati was in agony and would be dead moments after the thing burst from her chest. His instinct had been to wait for the parasite to emerge, and to kill it before it could grow.
They ought to be running.
Khati’s anguish kept him frozen there.
He remembered the way she had smiled at her first sip of coffee in the morning, the little hum of happiness she made when she tasted it.
He pulled the trigger, shooting her half a dozen times in the chest. Dr. Mori cried out and spun away. Khati slumped to the floor, falling still. The thing inside her body pulsed once, as if making one last attempt to break free, and then it, too, went still.
Dr. Reese exhaled, grieving for the woman as her blood and the parasite’s pooled under her body, hissing as the acid ate at the floor beneath them.
“Son of a bitch!” Mori said, turning to look up at him again.
He’d been shot.
Dr. Reese frowned, not understanding for a moment, and then he realized that when Mori had spun away it hadn’t been out of horror or disgust. A ricochet had struck him in the left shoulder, and now he clutched at that wound. He hissed up at Reese.
“Asshole!” Mori barked. “Let’s go!”
Dr. Reese stared down at Khati and told himself that he saw relief in those dull, dead eyes. He lowered the gun and nodded, starting down the steps.
Mori whispered his name.
Frowning, Reese glanced up and saw the terror in his colleague’s gaze. Then he heard the hiss behind him, the creak of weight on the stairs, and the dappling drip of liquid hitting metal.
He hung his head, not bothering to turn, knowing it was futile to try to run.
The alien’s hands wrapped around his right shoulder and his throat, drawing him toward it like an insistent lover. Only when he felt its drool sluicing hotly down onto his neck did he begin to scream, thinking of the suffering he’d just witnessed in Khati.
He turned the gun upon himself, and pulled the trigger.
* * *
DATE: 26 JUNE, 2179
TIME: 1408
Brackett was the first one through the door. They’d heard the screams and gunfire coming down the hall, but by the time they reached the surveyors’ ops center, the room had gone silent—except for the hiss of the aliens.
He slid along the corridor wall, then saw that only one side of the double doors stood open. Holding up a hand to halt the others, he raised three fingers, counted down, and then spun through the open part of the doorway. His eyes widened as he tracked the five aliens in the room, all of them bent to the task of covering living colonists in the sticky resin that slid from their mouths.
Brackett opened fire as Yousseff slammed into the other half of the double door, only to find it had been welded at the hinges.
“Make way, Cap!” Lt. Paris shouted. “Let us in!”
Brackett’s plasma rounds blew apart one alien and wounded a second as they turned to come for him. Advancing would have been idiotic—trapping him in that small room with the demons. Instead he backed out, barking at the other marines, and all four of them retreated back down the corridor the way they had come.
“They’ve got to come out one at a time,” he snapped, heart racing, his body flush with adrenaline. “We’ve got them!”
Pettigrew whooped in triumph as he realized Brackett was right. The four of them lined up across the corridor and shot the hell out of the aliens as they barged through the opening one at a time. Acid blood splashed all over the floor, burning holes in scattered patterns.
When it was over, the gunshot echoes still hammered at Brackett’s eardrums. He took a moment to stare numbly at the carnage of shattered ebon carapace and limbs and tails, and then he started forward again.
“Watch ’em, Cap!” Pettigrew called, but Brackett knew they were all dead, or they would’ve just kept coming, following what seemed a genetic need to destroy everything they encountered.
He stepped carefully around the acid-eaten floor and the remains of the aliens and slipped back into the ops center. He took a deep breath as he scanned the bodies there, and then he started moving among them, checking for pulses, taking note of which were obviously dead, and who might still be breathing, having been intended for breeding by the aliens.
Those still alive had been in the process of being cocooned, and were unconscious.
“What are we going to do with them, Cap?” Julisa Paris asked as she came into the room and began following his lead, searching for survivors. The stench of blood and death made Brackett knit his brows. It hurt his head. He did not answer, because he knew they weren’t seeing these people the same way. Paris saw friends and acquaintances where Brackett saw people who were mostly strangers. He sought three faces only.
Anne. Newt. Tim.
“There are other aliens,” Paris went on. “More will come. How are we supposed to get these people free before—”
“We don’t,” Yousseff said, coming into the room behind them. With her helmet on, she almost looked like a little girl playing make-believe. The grim glint in her eyes revealed the truth. “It’s a noble thought, Lieutenant, but as far as we know, there’s room for five or six passengers on the evac ship.”
“We’ll make room,” Lt. Paris said.
“Who will you leave behind for them?” Yousseff asked. “Me? Corporal Pettigrew?”
Brackett stopped hearing them.
He stood above a familiar corpse. Recognized her clothes and her hair. Not enough of her face remained for him to identify her that way, but he knew, and he felt ice sliding through his veins as a hollow opened up deep inside him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, lowering his head.
He kneeled beside her, putting down his weapon, and he covered his head with his hands as if he could trap the grief inside. In his mind he could still see the girl she’d been when they had first met. His body remembered her touch. His heart remembered the pain as he felt forced to break off the relationship when he shipped off to join the marines, and then the regret when he learned of her plan to marry Russ.
It would’ve been better if I’d never come, he thought. Never seen you again.
Pettigrew had remained out in the hallway, guarding their exit. Now he stuck his head into the room.
“Make it quick,” he said. “I heard something out here. Back the way we came.”
Yousseff came to stand beside him, staring down at Anne Jorden’s corpse.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” she said, “but we can’t stay. If we don’t make that evac ship, we’re all dead.”
Brackett nodded slowly. Blinking as if waking from sleep, he glanced around at the corpses and the cocooned, so many of them unrecognizable like Anne. Then he froze a moment, shook it off, and staggered to his feet. Six feet from his mother’s corpse lay the body of Tim Jorden, a gun in his small hand.
“Newt?” Brackett said, glancing around. “Do any of you see Newt?”
“Holy shit, here!” Lt. Paris snapped as she ran toward a small, cocooned body.
Hope surged in Brackett, images of the little girl filling his head. He raced over and set to work beside Paris, the two of them tearing the hardened resin away from the little girl’s body while Yousseff stood near the door and Pettigrew kept watch in the corridor.
When they broke away a piece of the material that had hidden her eyes, the hope withered inside Brackett.
“I’m sorry,” Paris said quietly. “It’s not her.”
Brackett nodded. “Who is she, this little girl? You know her?”
“Her name’s Luisa. One of Newt’s friends.”
Yousseff gestured to the far side of the room, where other bodies lay bloody and broken. “She must be one of those.”
“Search,” Brackett said.
“Please, the two of you, see if you can confirm, one way or another.” Confirm that Newt is dead, he meant, but they didn’t need him to explain that, and he was glad. The words wouldn’t come.
Brackett tore away more of the hardened cocoon, reached in and lifted Luisa out. Her red hair was matted with the stuff and she looked inhumanly pale, but as he stood with the little girl in his arms, she moaned softly and her eyes fluttered.
She would come around soon. She would live. He intended to make sure of that. There was nothing more he could do for Anne or Tim, but he could do this for Newt. He could save her friend.
Yousseff and Paris continued searching the rest of the room.
“Guys, we’ve gotta go!” Pettigrew called from the hallway. Gunfire rattled and echoed out in the corridor, and that was that.
They had run out of time for humanitarian acts. If they stayed and tried to defend those who were still alive, they would all surely die. There were simply too many aliens, too hard to kill, and the monsters were still breeding. Brackett glanced at the little girl in his arms.
You’ll have to be enough, he thought. If I can keep you alive…
If he could keep Luisa alive, then he could live with the decision to run. To survive.
“You heard the corporal! Move!” Brackett commanded.
Yousseff was the first to join Pettigrew in the corridor. Brackett followed, carrying Luisa, and Paris brought up the rear. As the lieutenant came through the door, Pettigrew shouted a warning and opened fire. Brackett turned to see two aliens rushing toward them from down the hall. Paris and Yousseff fired as well, tearing the aliens apart so that their blood sprayed and their carcasses crashed to the floor thirty feet away.
The little girl squirmed in Brackett’s arms, whimpering but not regaining consciousness. He held her more tightly and shushed her as the gunfire echoes died away.
“Quickest way to the med lab?” Brackett asked.
River of Pain Page 26
