Alien: Out the Shadows

“No,” Ripley said again, louder. Kasyanov looked across at her, Baxter glanced up, both alarmed. “We can’t take her,” she said, nodding at Sneddon. “She’s infected. We can’t save her, and we mustn’t take her.”

“Well, there’s no way we’re leaving her!” Kasyanov said.

“Haven’t you got something for her?” Ripley asked.

It took a while for Kasyanov to understand what Ripley was really asking. When she did her red-rimmed eyes widened.

“And who the hell are you?” she asked. “You don’t even know Sneddon, and you’re asking me to kill her?”

“Kill?” Baxter asked, looking confused.

“No, just help her,” Ripley said.

“How exactly is killing her going to help her?” Kasyanov snapped.

“Have you seen what they do?” Ripley asked. “Can you imagine how much it would hurt having something…” Amanda, screaming, hands held wide as a beast burst its way outside from within. “Something eating its way out of you from the inside, breaking your ribs, cracking your chest plate, chewing its way out? Can you even think about that?”

“I’ll take it out of her,” Kasyanov said.

Something creaked.

Ripley frowned, her head tilted to one side.

“Don’t you go near her,” Kasyanov continued. “None of us knows you. None of us knows why you really came, so you just—”

“Listen!” Ripley said, hand held up.

Creak…

She looked around at the eggs. None of them seemed to be moving, none of those fleshy wings were hinging open, ready to disgorge their terrible contents. Maybe it was a breeze, still tugged through the tunnels and corridors by the fires they had set deeper in the ship. At the doorway, those strange curtains hung heavy. Around the room nothing moved. Except—

Scriiiitch!

It was Kasyanov who saw it.

“Oh… my… God!”

Ripley spun around, backed away toward where the others waited by the doorway, clasping the charge thumper and immediately realizing that they were very close to being fucked.

It wasn’t just one of the mummified aliens that was moving.

It was all of them.

She squeezed the trigger, Kasyanov opened up with the plasma torch, and Ripley felt the ice cold, blazing hot kiss of fire erupting all around her.

She screamed.

* * *

“Back back back!” Hoop shouted. Baxter was already trying to haul Sneddon out of the room, and Kasyanov was grasping the unconscious woman’s boots, trying to lift with her one good hand, plasma torch sputtering where it hung from her shoulder.

As Lachance and Hoop entered there was a thudding explosion from across the room. Shrapnel whistled past Hoop’s ears and struck his suit, some of it dry, some wet. He winced, expecting more pain to add to his throbbing arm. But there were no more sizzling acid burns. Not yet.

Ripley stood in front of them all, charge thumper at her hip as she swung thirty degrees and fired again.

“Back!” Hoop shouted again, but Ripley couldn’t hear, or wasn’t listening.

The frozen, statue-like aliens were moving. Several were down already, burning from Kasyanov’s plasma torch or blown apart by Ripley’s first shot. Others moved across the room toward Ripley. Some were slow, stiff, hesitant, as if still waking from a slumber Hoop could not comprehend.

One was fast.

It streaked toward Ripley from the right, and if Hoop hadn’t already had his finger on the spray gun trigger, she might have died. Instinct twitched his finger and sent a spurt of acid across the room. The alien’s movement made the shot even more effective, the acid slicing across its middle section. It hissed, then screamed, and thrashed backward as Lachance’s thumper discharged. He fired three bolts into its head and it dropped down, dead.

Ripley’s second charge exploded. The whole room shook, detritus whizzing through the air and impacting walls, faces, flesh. She cried out and went to her knees, and Hoop saw that she’d already suffered burns across her right hip and leg from a plasma burst. It couldn’t have actually touched her—if it had, it would have eaten through her suit, flesh and bones—but she’d been too close when Kasyanov had fired her torch. If the torch’s reserves hadn’t already been nearly depleted, Ripley would have died.

Hoop turned to the right, away from everyone else, and let loose another concentrated stream of acid, squeezing his eyes almost entirely closed against the fumes, holding his breath. An egg exploded, gushing sizzling insides. Another fell in two, the thing inside thrashing briefly before growing still.

Ripley was on her feet again.

“Get out!” she shouted at them all. “Get back! Now!”

Three more aliens surged through a cloud of smoke and came at her. She fired another charge at them, striking the foremost creature and driving it back into the other two, the glimmer of metal obvious in its chest. She turned her shoulder and crouched as the blast came, then she quickly stood again.

Hoop helped Kasyanov with Sneddon’s dead weight, and Lachance backed out with them.

“Ripley!” Hoop shouted. “Out, now!”