Alien: Out the Shadows

“Why must there?” Kasyanov challenged.

“Because if there isn’t, we’re fucked!”

“If there isn’t, we can make one,” Lachance said. “Just not here.” He turned and looked around the edges of the cavern, gaze constantly flickering back to the huge buried structure.

Ship, Ripley said, reminding herself of the impossible. We’re standing a stone’s throw from an alien ship! She had no doubt that’s what it was. Lachance’s assessment made sense, and so did the idea that the aliens had come from here.

She had seen all this before.

“There has to be another way in,” Hoop said, a hint of hope in his voice. “The lights are still lit. The plasma torch fried those cables behind us, so there must be others coming in from elsewhere.”

“Let’s track around the cavern’s edges,” Sneddon said, pointing. “That way. I reckon that’s in the direction of the second elevator, don’t you?” She looked around, seeking support.

“Maybe,” Lachance said. “But the mine tunnels twist and turn, there’s no saying—”

“Let’s just move,” Hoop said. He started walking, and Ripley and the others followed.

To their right, the mysterious buried object. To their left, the cavern’s uneven edges. Shining their flashlights against the walls did little to banish the shadows. They only crouched deeper down, further back. And it wasn’t long before Ripley started to sense the greatest danger coming from that direction.

She held her breath as she walked, trying to tread softly so that she could hear any sounds coming from the shadowed areas. But there were six of them, and though they all tried to move as silently as possible, their boots made a noise. Scrapes on rock, the grumble of grit being kicked aside, the rustle of clothing, the occasional bump of metal on stone.

Hoop froze so suddenly that Ripley walked into him.

“We’re being stalked,” he said. His choice of word chilled her. She wasn’t sure those things could stalk.

“Where?” she whispered.

Hoop turned around, then nodded toward the cracks, fissures, and tumbled rocks that made up the edge of the cavern.

“Yeah,” Sneddon said. “I get that feeling, too. We should—”

A soft hiss, like pressurized air escaping a can.

“Oh shit,” Kasyanov said, “oh shit, now we’re—”

Baxter scrambled back, his bad ankle failed beneath him, and he must have had his finger on the plasma torch trigger. White-hot light erupted from the weapon, scorching the air and splaying across the low ceiling at the edge of the cavern. Someone shouted. Ripley threw herself against Kasyanov just as a hail of molten rock pattered down around them. Someone else screamed.

The eruption ended as quickly as it had begun, and Baxter jumped to his feet and backed away.

“Sorry, sorry, I heard—”

“Damn it!” Hoop hissed. He was tugging at his trousers, getting more frantic with every moment. “Damn it!”

Lachance pulled a knife from his belt, knelt beside Hoop, and sliced his trousers from knee to boot, dropping the knife and tearing the heavy material apart. Then he picked up the knife again.

Hoop had started shaking, breathing heavily.

“Hoop,” Lachance said, glancing up. “Keep still.” He didn’t wait for a response, but held the leg and jabbed at it with the knife’s tip.

Ripley heard the hardening pellet of rock strike the ground. She smelled the sickening-sweet stench of burnt flesh. Then from in the shadows behind them once more, another long, low hiss.

And the clack of terrible teeth.

“Let’s go,” Hoop said. He was looking past Ripley, back into the shadows. When she saw his eyes widen, she didn’t have to look. “Let’s go!”

They ran, down into the cavern and toward the sloping wing structure that curved up out of the cavern floor. Hoop groaned as he went, limping, his tattered trousers flapping around his injured shin. Baxter hobbled, one arm over Lachance’s shoulder. The others hefted their weapons and moved quickly, carefully, across the uneven floor.

There was only one direction they could take, and the blasted opening into the ship’s interior looked darker than ever.

Ripley’s single thought brought only terror.

They’re herding us…

12 CATTLE

…Toward the ship, Hoop thought. Driving us like cattle. And we’re doing exactly as they want.

There was no other explanation. The aliens hadn’t attacked, but instead were slinking around the party of survivors, moving through shadowy fissures in the rock, making themselves known yet not exposing themselves. Everything Hoop had seen of them—everything he knew from what had happened aboard the Marion, and to Ripley more than thirty years ago—pointed to the creatures being brutal and unthinking monsters.

This was different. If he was right, they were planning, scheming, working together. That thought terrified him.