Alien: Out the Shadows

As he backed through the clear-curtained doorway with his crewmates, he could see her silhouetted against a wall of white-hot flame that still burned across the left half of the room. Her hair was wild, her stance determined, as something emerged from the flames and came at her, blazing.

She fell, rolled, kicked out with one boot. The alien tripped over her leg and went sprawling, spilling one queen’s egg onto its side. Ripley screamed in pain as her wounded leg was jarred, but then she was standing again, aiming the charge thumper and firing her last shot into the monster’s face.

She burst back through the curtains as the charge exploded. It shoved her through, fire blooming all around her, arms outstretched. She let go of the empty thumper and broke her fall, grunting as her already wounded body was subjected to another impact.

Ripley stood quickly and went for Kasyanov. She grasped the spray gun, tugged, and Kasyanov pulled back.

“Ripley!” Hoop said. She was bleeding from the leg and hip, slashed across the shoulder and side of her neck by an alien’s tail. Her face was blackened from an explosive blast. A large patch of her hair had been burnt away, and her right eye was almost closed. She should have been down on her knees, at least. But something kept her going.

“Give it to me!” she demanded.

A rage, a burning fury at these things and what they meant.

“Let it go!” she screamed.

Kasyanov slipped the strap from her shoulder and stepped back, looking at Ripley as if she was one of those things.

Hoop went to shout at her again. But she was already turning back to the clear curtain, shouldering it aside and facing the terrors within. The fires. The bursting eggs. And those things that remained, waking, rising, coming to kill her.

* * *

She stood before them, and the thing that drove her fury wasn’t the memory of dead friends, but the unreal vision of her tortured daughter. She could do nothing about Dallas and the others on the Nostromo, and she was beginning to fear that she and the Marion’s survivors would never survive.

But she could protect the daughter she had not seen for more than thirty-seven years. She could make sure these things were wiped out, and that if and when more people came here, there was no risk that they would ever be found.

Two queen eggs burst apart beneath the flames, and Ripley held her breath and fired a spray of acid across their remains. Just to make sure.

A large creature staggered at her, elements of the dog-aliens even more apparent now that it was up and moving. She hosed it down, sweeping the spray gun left and right and slicing gushing wounds in the thing’s carapace. It stumbled and fell, its tail whipping through the air and catching her across the stomach. She just staggered for a moment.

Fires danced, shadows wept, and nothing else moved in that strange, ancient laboratory. Why the dog-aliens had kept and nurtured the queen eggs, what they hoped to gain, if they had even known the terrible dangers they toyed with, she would never know. But she didn’t care. Knowing would change nothing.

They all had to die.

Three eggs remained, awake and ready, pulsing as the flaps slowly drew back to disgorge their charges. She fired an acid blast at each one, ensuring that their insides were destroyed. Something squealed as it died, and she hoped it hurt. However old the eggs and their contents might be, they were always ready to invade another host, and plant their dreadful larvae.

“Not anymore!” Ripley shouted. “Fuck you, Ash!” Maybe he was a good target for her ire, maybe not. But having someone to curse other than these beasts felt good.

Then they were done. Dead and gone. The queen eggs—so much potential, so much promise of pain and heartbreak—were cooking, melting, bubbling messes on the floor. She lowered the spray gun and blinked the fumes away, and flames flickering through tears made the scene look almost beautiful.

Something grabbed her and she turned, seeing Hoop standing behind her and realizing only then how much pain she was in.

“Ripley, we have to…” he said, eyes going wide at something he’d seen.

“What?”

“We need to patch you up.”

“I’m fine,” Ripley said, not feeling fine but finding the strength to move. “There’s Sneddon and Baxter… you can’t carry me as well. I’ll walk ’til I drop.”

And she did. Five paces out through the curtained opening, a few more across the open space beyond, and then her whole world started to spin. She was bleeding, burning, maybe even dying. And though she held on as hard as she could, Ripley couldn’t fight back the darkness descending all around her.

Faces watched her fall. She only hoped she would see them all again.

* * *

“They’ll be coming,” Hoop said.

“She’s bleeding badly,” Kasyanov said. “Her shoulder and neck, her stomach, they’re slashed up pretty good.”

“Will she bleed to death?” Hoop asked.

Kasyanov waited for only a moment. “Not in the short term.”