Alien: Out the Shadows

“Mummified. Preserved.” The room was lit with a bright flash as Sneddon started taking pictures of the eggs. “They’re almost like fossils.”

Hoop swept the spray gun and its attached flashlight from side to side, searching the extent of the chamber and looking for an exit. He saw one at the far side of the room, a tall, framed opening. He also saw something else. He aimed his flashlight up.

“Look.”

The string of lights was slung from wire supports fixed into the room’s high ceiling. Some of the lights were smashed, others seemed whole, but no longer worked. Or they had been intentionally deactivated.

Hoop didn’t like that one little bit.

“Look here!” Sneddon said. She was at the far edge of the room now, standing back from one of the eggs and taking photographs. The flashes troubled Hoop—for a second after each one his vision was complete blackness, his sight returning slowly every time. He didn’t like being blind, even for a moment.

The egg before her was open. Unlike the others, it didn’t look old and fossilized, but newer. Wetter.

She flashed off another shot, but this time Hoop blinked just as the light seared around the room, and when he opened his eyes again his vision was clear. In the final instant of the flash, he saw that the old-looking eggs were opaque beneath the camera’s flash. Inside, there were shapes. And he was certain that some of those shapes were moving.

“Sneddon, don’t get too—”

“There’s something—” Sneddon said. She took one step closer.

Something leapt from the egg. In an instant it wrapped itself around Sneddon’s face. She dropped the camera and it started flashing on automatic, the white-light searing the room at one second intervals as she grabbed the thing and tried to force her fingers beneath its grasping claws and the long, crushing tail that coiled around her neck. And then she dropped to her knees.

“Holy shit!” Lachance said, swinging the charge thumper up and toward her.

Ripley knocked it aside.

“You’ll take her head off!”

“But that thing will—”

“Keep her still!” Hoop said. Then he was beside Sneddon, trying to assess what was happening, how the thing had attached, what it was doing to her.

“Oh, shit, look at those things!” Kasyanov said.

Other eggs were opening. Even beneath the shouting and panic Hoop could hear the wet, sticky, almost delicate sounds of the flaps peeling back, and the slick movements of the things inside.

“Don’t get too close to any of them!” he said. “Get over here, everyone get close to—”

“Fuck that!” Kasyanov said, and she fired her plasma torch across the room. Sneddon’s still-flashing camera was nothing compared to the blazing light. The doctor swept it from left to right, the fire rolling in a white-hot wave across the space, and beneath its concentrated heat the eggs began to burst. They split apart and wriggling, thrashing things emerged, sliding out in a slick of fluid already bubbling beneath the heat, their legs and tails whipping for purchase. Then they began to shriek.

It was a horrible sound, ear-splitting, far too human.

“Help me drag her!” Ripley said, trying to grab Sneddon beneath one arm. But the science officer slumped forward, her shoulder striking an egg, before falling onto her side. “There!” Ripley shouted, nodding at the opening across the room. “Help me!”

Lachance pulled the spray gun from Sneddon’s other shoulder, grabbed her beneath the arm, and began to haul.

The egg that Sneddon had nudged against opened. Hoop saw it, and without thinking he swung the spray gun to bear. Ripley saw the barrel aiming at her and opened her mouth to shout a warning, but then she sensed the movement as well, turned, and swung the charge thumper from her shoulder.

“Not yours!” Hoop shouted. He’d given her real charges, and if she fired one in this confined space, it might kill them all.

Lachance was quick. He dropped Sneddon, stepped back, and fired his own charge thumper, loaded with nonexploding ammunition. The egg shuddered as something passed through it, and the flaps drooped as a thick, viscous fluid leaked out.

“Don’t step in it!” Ripley warned as she and Lachance grasped Sneddon again.

Kasyanov was staring at her handiwork. Half of the room was ablaze, plasma having stuck to the walls and the eggs and seeded multiple fires. Several more eggs— the ones not caught in the initial blast—burst open, their boiling insides spraying across the room. Kasyanov winced back, wiping at something that had landed on her forearm and glove.

“Don’t spread it!” Hoop shouted.

The doctor glanced back at him, shaking her head and holding up her gloved hand.

“It’s okay, it’s not acid,” she said. “I think it’s…” Then her face changed, as the suit material began bubbling and smoking as the liquid started to eat through.

Kasyanov screamed.