Alien: Out the Shadows

“Then she can bleed while we run. Come on. We’re almost out.” He grasped Ripley and tugged her to her feet. She tried to help, but barely had any strength. Blood shimmered on the front of her suit, flowing across her boots and speckling the floor. They’ll pick up the scent and follow us, he thought. But he didn’t even know if the aliens could smell, and his priority now was to move as far away from here, as fast as they could.

Back up into the mine, to the second elevator, and out of this hellhole.

Baxter started hauling himself up the shorter staircase toward the outside, wounded ankle dragging behind him. It looked less painful, though, since he’d had the injection. Lachance and Kasyanov lifted Sneddon and pushed her up, step by step. As Hoop pulled Ripley up onto the first step, her feet kicking feebly, she started talking.

“…take her…” Ripley muttered.

“Huh? We are. We’re all getting out.”

“No… don’t take…”

She fell silent and he thought perhaps she was dreaming. Her eyes rolled, blood flowed. She looked a mess. But her strength was humbling, and on the next step she opened her eyes again, looking around until they focussed on those ahead and above them. “Sneddon,” she said, quietly so only Hoop could hear. “We can’t take her.”

He didn’t even reply. Ripley groaned and seemed to pass out again, and when he dragged her up to the next step the trail of blood she left behind glimmered in the light.

But he lifted her, pulled her up. Because he wasn’t leaving anyone behind. Not after everything they’d been through. Hoop had lost so much in his life. His wife, his love, his children, left behind when he fled. Some of his hope, and much of his dignity. And at some point the time for loss would have to end. Maybe now, when he was at his lowest and everything seemed hopeless, he would start winning things back.

This is it. His friends, bleeding and in pain yet forging on as hard as they could, inspired him. And Ripley, the strange woman who had arrived in their midst, her own story tragic and filled with loss… if she could remain so strong, then so could he.

He climbed up the next step and pulled her up after him, and for some reason she felt lighter.

Outside, the others hunkered down close to where the folded access opened onto the ship’s upper surface. They kept low and quiet, as if being suddenly exposed after their nightmarish trip through the tunnels and corridors scared them even more. Hoop handed Ripley to Lachance, slipping the charge thumper from her shoulder as he did so. Even hazy and balancing on the edge of consciousness, she grabbed for the weapon. He eased her hand aside.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got it.” And she relented.

“What are you doing?” Lachance asked.

“Insurance,” Hoop said. “Giving us the best chance I can.” He held up two fingers—two minutes—then slipped back through the opening.

By his reckoning, there was one charge left in the blaster.

Now that he was facing it alone, the ship’s interior felt even stranger, more alien than ever. They had only left it moments before, but already he felt like an invader all over again. He wondered one more time just how alive that huge ship was, or had once been. But it was ancient, and whatever intelligence might once have driven it was now surely in the deepest of slumbers, if not dead.

He edged down the first high step, then the second, and then he heard something that froze him to a halt. Everything in his world came to a standstill—the past, the future, his breathing, his thoughts. His heart skipped a beat, as if hiding from that sound.

A high-pitched keening, so filled with pain and rage that it prickled his skin, the sound itself an assault. He was chilled and hot at the same time, his soul reacting in much the same way as skin when confronted by intense heat or cold. He might burn or freeze with terror, but for a moment he couldn’t tell which.

What have we done? he thought. He could smell burning flesh, though there was no similarity to any meat he knew. He could hear the roar of the flames they had left behind, consuming what was left of the aliens, the eggs. And dropping down one more step, he could see the three creatures that had come after them.

They were the same as the first ones they had encountered, back on the Marion. No dog-like features, no attributes that might have made them a queen. Warriors, perhaps. Soldier aliens. And they were whining and keening as they stood outside the burning, ruined lab, swaying from side to side, their tails waving, heads dipping to the left and then right. It was a dance of death and mourning, and for the briefest of moments Hoop felt almost sorry for them.

The one in the middle bent to the ground and seemed to take a long, deep sniff of the blood trail there. Ripley’s blood trail. Then it hissed, a purposeful sound very different from the wails of grief, and the other two creatures also bent to the trail.