I’ve studied thousand of alien specimen over my few short years of practice, but none were as unique and scary as the “eggs” found on Lt. Ellen Ripley’s ship when a deep salvage crew happened upon her in deep space. It was a million to one shot that she was ever found. And now, reflecting on her rescue, I personally think that they should have left her out there.
I met Lt. Ripley a few times. I was one of the firsts to interview her about the particulars of the alien race she discovered. Nobody believed her at first. But I proved her story to be true. If it hadn’t have been for my colleague, Dr. Collin Brody, and me, Lt. Ripley wouldn’t have gone back to LB-426 to face her nightmares once more. She could have stayed here on earth and faced them with us…
“Looks like some sort of egg or something. The Milmed’s just brought them over too us.” Milmed’s are our term for the military medical personnel. “They were hoping that whatever was inside could be used for military purposes, but they couldn’t get the pod’s open, so they brought them to us to help.”
“Keep them in isolation, Scollari. Zero G’s, no oxygen, I want a constant vacuum held in the isolation booth. I don’t want to risk them hatching till we can interview Lt. Ripley and get a better understanding of what we’re dealing with.” Brody seemed scared. I’ve never seen him scared before.
We arrived back at med-lab in the wee hours of the next morning. The eggs were still where we left them and so far, no changes. That was fine by us. I was scared to be within eyeshot of them.
“Go home,” Brody told me. “There’s nothing we can do right now anyway, we’re just too tired.”
“I agree,” I said, yawning at the same time he did. We should have never gone to bed…
“Scollari, meet me in med-lab, quick! Come armed!” He cut off the transmission before I could ask what was wrong.
Now, come armed? Brody was probably referring to a small side arm, and I didn’t own one. In basic’s I was top marksman in my group with the MP-1 assault rifle. I own four of them and that’s the only weapon I own. One of them was modified with a grenade launcher, but I left that one in the strong box and took one of the others and a fanny pack full of extra ammunition.
It seemed to take me forever to reach the med-lab where I found Dr. Brody bent over the body of a lab-tech. There was some sort of creature attached to his face. Beyond this man’s metal gurney were three others bodies with the same sort of creature attached to them as well.
I approached Dr. Brody and he turned to glance in my direction. “Get on the com-link and order the evacuation of the facility. I want total lock down. Then get back on with the military and have them send us twelve marines with all the firepower they can carry.” Lt. Ripley’s story was becoming a reality overnight.
All four men were lab technicians that had reported to work right on time that morning. The computers that monitored the vacuum chamber, which contained the eggs, were programmed to deny access to anybody but Dr. Brody or myself. Somehow, these men had hacked into the computers to allow them access to the eggs. All just to satisfy their curiosity. Dr. Brody and I watched the whole episode transpire on security video while we waited for the face huggers to fall off and die. According to Ripley, we had about twenty-four hours till the alien embryo’s burst from the chest of their human hosts. And since Dr. Brody had me call in the military, they placed jurisdiction over the bodies and wouldn’t allow us to terminate them before the embryos could hatch. Damn military, all they were looking for was a weapon they could use that wouldn’t extend any of their precious personnel. Damn them.
We tried to remove one of the face huggers, but it held on so tightly and so strongly that it threatened to choke the technician with it’s snake-like tail. Secreted white ooze dripped from each digit in the alien’s six legs and stained the metal. They were repulsive, leathery things with flat, slick bodies with what looked like fish gills. They were breathing for the technicians, pumping oxygen into them in order to ensure that the eggs they passed from alien to human host would live.
Dr. Brody and I stepped out of the clean room where all four men lay. The observation room was full of cursing, smelly, marines with muscle and attitude. They didn’t like the fact that I was armed.
“What do you think,” he asked me.
“I think we should kill them and get it over with.”
“Uh-uh, little woman. I don’t think so.” In my mind, the Sargent that spoke to me looked like a figure straight out of a comic book, Judge Dread or something, but his name was a completely opposite his build.
“Lt. Scollari, I’d like you to meet Sgt. Weaks.” I didn’t shake his hand, though he offered it.
“So, Sargent. What do you plan on doing when the creatures hatch?”
“We’re here to eliminate them, nothing more.”
“I’ve heard that before.” I didn’t trust them at all. “We’ll see.”
I exchanged glances with Dr. Brody and I could tell that he was thinking the same way I was. “We’ve got about six hours before their supposed to hatch. I suggest you get a little more rest.” He patted me on the shoulder and walked out the room into the corridor beyond.
I turned to Weaks. “The compound is locked down right? There’s nobody here but us?”
“You know it, toots.”
God, how I wanted to put a bullet in him right then and there.
What was this that was nagging at me so hard? I wondered the corridors of the 28th floor twice. There was no one here and I found myself standing at the elevator doors. For some reason I pushed the down button, knowing that the elevators, like the complex, should also be locked down tight. I could hear the sound of the elevator beyond the door ascending. This shouldn’t be happening.
The doors slid open before me and I sat my rifle on the floor next to the doors. I stepped onto the elevator and pressed the button for the 27th floor. A security firm held the offices below the medical facility in which I worked and for some reason, I wasn’t surprised to see that people were milling about talking. I pressed the door close button before they had really opened completely and quickly went up to the next floor.
I grabbed my rifle and was streaking down the corridor and into the lab. I hit Sgt. Weaks before he could get completely turned around. I was so proud of myself. My fist drew blood from his lip.
“You lied to me!” I shouted. “You told me the complex had been evacuated. There are still people down there.”
“Yah, so?”
“You’re putting thousands of people in danger. Don’t you know what those things are in there?”
“Yes I do, ma’am. And I think we’re perfectly able to take care of this and everyone down there will be none the wiser.”
Monitors began to shriek from the other room and I turned to see that all four bodies were void of their alien visitors. The face huggers lay on the floor, beneath the metal tables. They didn’t move.
“Ok, people. Let’s get in there and clean up those things.” Sgt. Weaks voice was jumpy and animated, like he was on remote control.
Two men donned facial masks and stormed the room like it was on fire and they were in a race to save the damsel in distress. But they didn’t go after any damsel’s, one had a bag and the other had a long pair of tongs. The one with the tongs picked up the creatures and placed them in the bag the other was holding open.
The two men returned from the other room and Weaks told them to get the creatures into a specimen jar and to use a preservative that I had never heard of before. Then he turned to me.
“Lock that door, please, ma’am.” He was pointing to the door that led to the inner room.
“What? Are you crazy? We’ve got to treat those men. They’ll need our help.”
“I’ve got my order’s, ma’am. Now. Lock the door.”
“Orders? Orders? From who? The military brought us these specimens. They’re ours.”
“I beg to differ, ma’am. The military brought you those eggs for one reason and one reason only. Because they knew that you would totally botch this up and give us what we wanted, without using any of our own personnel.”
“You set us up?”
He didn’t speak, but the grin on his face did all the talking I needed.
For security reasons, Dr. Brody and I traded pass codes, allowing us to have access to each and every room on our floor, and the two other floors above us, which were also part of Dr. Brody’s research facility. I quickly pressed the access numbers into the keypad attached to the wall by the door, just as the sound of heavy booted feet began to echo in the hallway.
What’s going on here? I wondered, as I slipped into the door and closed it behind me.
“Light’s,” I said to the room, and the computer, recognizing the signature of my voice, turned on the lights.
Dr. Brody lay face down on the floor in a pool of wet crimson.
“Open up, lady,” came a husky voice from outside as a pounding hand began to beat against the door behind me. I turned quickly to the keypad on the wall. It was an exact duplicate of the one on the other side except this one had several function keys. I pressed function 1 as quickly as I could and answered each of the prompts on the screen until I had changed Dr. Brody’s passcode to a random number that even after I punched it in, I couldn’t remember. I could barely hear the sound of the keypad on the opposite side of the door being punched repeatedly and the sound of cursing as access to the room was denied.
I had just bought myself a few minutes to escape. But why were they after me now? And why would they kill Dr. Brody? Bio-weapons. That was the only explanation. The military wanted the creatures Lt. Ripley described as a weapon to use for themselves and they used us as the incubators. It was just like Weaks said, they didn’t want to risk any of their own personnel.
Now, to get myself out of this mess. I obviously couldn’t go back out into the corridor with Weaks’ military freaks after me, and if they’d kill Dr. Brody, then they would have no qualms about killing me as well.
But something other than my own safety was eating at me. The aliens. I had to destroy them, and now was the best time, while they were still waiting to be birthed from their human hosts. There were thousands of people in this building and all their lives were in danger. My training in xenomorphic anatomy and my limited military training has me programmed to put others first. I could be selfish and escape with my life, but what happens a year from now, when the four aliens in that laboratory escape the capture of the military and begin to breed and multiply on Earth? I had to do something now.
First, I had to get the building evacuated, which would be easy enough. All I had to do was find the nearest fire alarm and set it off.
The ventilation system seemed like the best bet. I could maneuver between the 28th and 29th floors very easily and I could also move from Dr. Brody’s room to the laboratory. If I wasn’t mistaken I could launch a grenade from the vent in the ceiling and take out all four bodies at once. Of course, now I had another problem…I left my assault rifle with the grenade launcher in the strong box back in my room. I would have to make due without it.
I went into the Dr.’s bedroom and found the return air duct. I removed the grill and the filter as the banging in the other room started to get louder. The heavy door in there was finally giving. I crawled into the air duct and reached behind me and pulled the grill back over the hole. I couldn’t latch it, but hopefully Weaks’ men wouldn’t notice. I should have opened one of the windows and maybe they would think that I had jumped.
I was halfway up the air duct when I heard the door crash in. They didn’t even wait for a target but started spraying the room with bullets even before the door hit the floor. I reached the top of the air duct where it split off horizontally to the left and right across the width of the building. It also continued on upward to the next floor. There was another grate just a few feet away and I scrambled upward as fast as I could, using my arms, legs, and back to push against the walls of the air duct to keep me from sliding down. The grill snapped off the wall with just a little effort from me and I spilled out into an office. The office was deserted, just as the hallway outside the office was also deserted.
Well, at least they told me the truth about this floor. Weaks must have deserted the top three floors.
There, just a few feet away was the object of my search. I pulled the alarm lever and the entire building erupted with a shriek or alarms. Red lights along the hallways began to spin in cadence with the noise of the alarms.
Now for the lab. The lab was located on the opposite end of the building and instead of crawling the entire way in the air ducts, I ran to another office in the general area of the lab, found another air vent and shimmied into the small space, letting the barrel of my gun lead me. I had no way of knowing whether or not the aliens had birthed and I hoped that they weren’t smart enough to take my idea and use the air ducts for themselves. I’d have to take my chances.
As I lowered myself to the crawlspace between the floors, more gunfire erupted from below me. I slipped as an explosion racked the building and I fell a few feet down the duct before catching myself.
Something occurred to me then and it’s something that I hadn’t thought about until that moment when I was falling. I looked down. Below me was a tunnel of darkness interspersed periodically by squares of light spilling through an air vent or grate like the one’s I had used to enter these claustrophobic pathways. I’d never been one to be afraid of heights, but at that particular moment, I was terrified that another explosion would shake the building and I would fall almost thirty stories to my death.
I couldn’t move. I was so petrified by the thought of falling that I never heard the slimy scurrying sound coming from above me. My breath was coming in such gasps that I knew anybody in the surrounding rooms could have heard me. More gunfire erupted from the lab and the sound of it got me moving.
I was pretty sure that there was a vent looking down into the lab so I hurried back up to the horizontal section of ducts. The ducts were large enough to crawl down, but after being in them so long and having to shimmy up and down the vertical sections my body was beginning to wear down and tire. I saw a square of light up ahead with a cloud of smoke issuing up out of the room below. The air currents were blowing the smoke to the other side of the building, so I didn’t have to try and breath it for the time being, but it there was still a fire down in the lab the air ducts would soon provide me with little or no air. I would die in here.
The grill that covered the vent was bent at an odd angle toward the top of the air duct and a slimy, clear residue slid down the metal and covered the floor of the air duct. I didn’t notice it for what it was.
I peeked down into the room below, relieved to find that there was no fire. A foul stench waifed up at me from the room and I saw the source immediately. The military bums had set the lab technicians on fire. There was a jagged hole in the chest of each of them and blood covered the floor.
At least they died quietly. Dr. Brody and I had administered an IV drip of local anesthetic so no matter what kind of pain they went through, they would wake up. I was glad. I could bear the thought of the torture they would have experienced if they’d been awake to see some alien lifeform burst from their own chests.
I also noticed several smaller forms on the floor as well. They were long, snakelike creatures that had been charred from the fire and looked just as Lt. Ripley had described them. She had said that they started out small, obviously, but within just a few hours they grew rapidly, into one of the largest, most efficient killing machine she had ever witnessed. Dual jaws, one inside the other. The exterior jaw was used for grasping prey and hid the second, more lethal jaw from view. This second jaw was small, cylinder shaped with rows of tiny teeth made for ripping instantly through flesh and bone. When the first jaw would open, the second one sprang out like a deadly piston, clamping and chopping at its prey. These creatures also possessed acid for blood, making it impossible to be anywhere around them if shot or wounded. Then there was the tail, what Lt. Ripley described as one of the most deadly, but overlooked weapon of the creature. The alien could curl the tail up behind them and thrust it forward like a spear, impaling anything in its path.
I saw only three carcasses on the floor of the lab. The fourth could be under one of the tables, out of my view, but I sincerely doubted it. That’s when I noticed the scurrying sound coming from further down the air duct. I looked back over my shoulder, hoping not to see what I expected to see.
There it was, watching me. It was still very small, but already twice the size of the others. And much different too. Ripley described their heads as being long and round, shaped like a huge black bean or grain of rice. This one before me had a head that was flat and flared out behind it like a bony crown. This wasn’t anything that Ripley had seen before, this was something more infinitely dangerous. In a flash it was gone, and I realized that I had been holding my breath the entire time.
“Give me your gun,” I said, and he did. “Now. Go sit in the corner like a good little boy.” He did, and I locked him in the room. As soon as the lock engaged he was up at the observation window, screaming and yelling for help.
“That creature is still out there, don’t you leave me in here you b…” I was out of earshot by then.
I found his men in the corridor and luckily, every one of them were there, six on my right, five on my left. Weaks’ gun had a grenade launcher under the barrel and I fired one round to my right. It exploded to the sound of screams and death. I chambered another round and pointed it at the other five.
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave me be and get the hell out of here before I turn you into hallway soup like your buddies back there.” I cocked my head to the men whom I’d just exploded. “Leave your weapons.” I’d never seen men run so fast in my life. One second they were there, and the next, they were gone, the hydraulic arm on the stairway door protested it’s being opened by adding its deafening scream to the sounds of the fire started by my grenade.
Now then, to recruit my help.
I walked back into the observation room and looked into the lab at Weaks. He backed into the corner, away from me as I approached. Both guns were trained on the huge glass window. I opened the door and entered. He stood as far away from me as possible.
“Now, It’s time to make a deal. I need some help, and your going to help me.”
“I didn’t think you liked me very much.” He joked badly and his grin sickened me.
“You and your goons set us up to take the fall for this, hoping you could gain power by controlling the creatures and using them for a military weapon. This is all just guess work, mind you, but your welcome to correct me any time I’m wrong on something.” His grin faded to a thin line. “Now, I really doubt the military would sanction such an act against us, and so I believe that somehow, you took it upon yourself to set us up for the fall. Our call never got to the military. You intercepted it first. You wanted the creatures for whatever evil game you were planning.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore. At first I thought that all this would prove to be mindless babble, but as I watched him I knew that I was actually hitting the mark. “Am I close on this?”
“What do you need help with?” He realized that I had the upper hand. I could leave now and expose his little conspiracy, which would surely mean his death. But I was willing to let it pass if he’d help me find the alien and kill it.
“Are you nuts?” he shouted. “Those things were nothing compared to the one that got away.” He was pointing at the three charred husks on the floor in the corner. “That other one came out fighting mad and literally tore apart the wall getting out.”
I hadn’t noticed the wall before, and he was right, there was a two-foot section of wall that had been demolished. Actually, not demolished. I went over and had a closer look at the hole. The edges were burned and were still smoldering. “Acid,” I said, out loud.
“What?” asked the grunt.
“It got through the wall using it’s acid.”
“How could it do that.”
“I don’t know, Weaks. I don’t know.”
“Well, from what little we know from Lt. Ripley, these things like cold, damp places.”
“This place have a basement?” he asked.
“It’s got three.”
“Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
Even though most of the 28th floor was now on fire, the internal water sprinklers were just kicking in. We also disregarded the old saying that in the event of a fire, never use the elevator. We entered the elevator and Weaks pushed the button labeled B3. It didn’t take long to reach our destination. The doors hissed open on a scene of hissing pipes and steam. We searched for hours just on that one floor, peeking in every nook and cranny we could find. Weaks was obviously searching for something small while I was looking for a creature that was at least twice the size of myself, maybe more. There was nothing down here.
Level B2. It was much the same as the one below, but this one held the pipes for the natural gas. They were cold to the touch and in lots of places were iced over.
This was where we found her, sitting on a huge transparent sack that could only be a birth canal. Hundreds of round objects could be seen in the sack. I checked my watch. From birth to search to now, a total of eighteen hours had transpired and the alien was already creating more eggs for the infestation of earth.
She hissed at us when we approached. She was obviously upset at our appearance.
“Well, miss high and mighty. What do we do now?” Weaks looked over at me and I shrugged. So far, the alien hadn’t moved from her perch.
A giant tube emerged from the sack and many of the round objects within the sack moved into the tube. As we watched, a large egg emerged from the sphincter end of the tube. It was surrounded in a hairy protective shell that was semi-transparent. A face hugger moved within the egg.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Weaks grunted his agreement.
Weaks lifted his gun to shoot.
“No!” I shouted. “Don’t you see where we are? These are gas pipes. You puncture one of these and create a spark and you’ll have the whole city block up in smoke. Not mention killing me in the process.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
He looked around at all the pipes and I wondered how he ever could have become a Sergeant. Of course, he could have been lying about that as well.
“So, what are we going to do?”
I thought about it a second, then said, “The only thing we can do.”
He waited a heartbeat for me to tell him, and when I didn’t speak he said, “Well? What are we going to do?”
“Blow up the building and the entire block.”
“But you just said…”
“I know what I said,” cutting him off in mid sentence. “My concern wasn’t about the destruction of private property, in my mind, that’s more than justified when you weigh it against the threat.” I nodded at the creature on her egg sack. “My concern was getting killed in the process. I’m not quite ready to die.”
“So, what do you suggest we do?”
“Did you and your boys bring any explosives, timers, stuff like that?”
“Sure. It’s all in the helo-carrier up on the roof.”
“Good. Go get as much of it as you can carry and put it in the elevator and send it down to me. I’ll start wiring this place to blow.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Starting with the top floor, I want you to work your way down skipping two floors at a time. Find the maintenance room on each of those floors. They should be in the same place on each floor because that’s where all these pipes and tubes will run straight up through the building.” I moved over to one of the pipes, keeping a wary eye on our guest. “Do you see this blue band running around this pipe?”
“Uh-huh. Sure.”
“There should be an emergency release valve at every maintenance station. I want you to open each valve on those floors, flooding the building with gas. Be sure you stop on the top three floors and make sure that there’s nobody there. There should be a team of firefighters assessing the damage up there and maybe a police crew. Make sure that you tell them to evacuate the building.
“Whatever you do, don’t let them catch you, we’ve got to level this building before any of those aliens get out of those eggs.”
Just as I spoke, another egg passed out of the birthing canal and stood gleaming in the weak light next to the other egg. I checked my watch. It had only about six minutes for two eggs to be laid.
“What about her?” Weaks asked. “You don’t think she’ll attack you?”
“No.”
“Why.”
“I have a feeling that if she separates from her egg sack and the birthing canal, she won’t be able to start the process all over again. If she separates, she’ll probably die with a little time. Besides, so far I’m not a threat to her.”
“What about them?” Weaks asked, pointing the muzzle of his rifle at the eggs. Another one was dropping through the sphincter as we were speaking.
“Hopefully, we’ll be gone before they hatch. Now get moving.”
He started toward the elevator and I stopped him. “Weaks?”
“Yah?”
“If you screw me on this, I’ll get out of here, hunt you down, and kill you like a rabid dog. Do you understand?”
“Sure.” He didn’t look convincing, and I was sure hoping that he would come through for me too, because I didn’t think I could get out of this alone.
He got on the elevator, the doors closed behind him and he was gone.
I turned back to our visitor and we stared at each other for what seemed like hours. By the time the elevator returned to B2, there were a dozen eggs lying around the alien. None had opened and didn’t look like they would any time soon.
I backed to the elevator, keeping one eye on the eggs and the other on where I was going. I dragged the heavy bag out of the elevator. The doors closed and I sat down with my back to the closed doors. Unzipping the bag, I found more than I was expecting. There were six bricks of plastic explosive compound, a couple dozen fuses, ignitions, splitters, several hundred feet of wire and two timers. I pulled out my knife and began to saw the bricks of plastic explosives into two. I’d place twelve charges around the perimeter of the basement and run all the wires to a single timer that I’d leave by the elevator doors.
I started to approach the alien but jumped back when she hissed and spit a long stream of acid at me. It dropped short and immediately began to eat a large, steaming hole in the floor. My heart was racing, pounding for escape from the confines of my chest. It any of that would have gotten on the gas pipes, I would have been history.
I stayed clear of the alien, and set up the charges all around her and in every corner. She knew something was going on too. She hissed and watched me everywhere I went and her tail began to twitch spasmodically behind her. She didn’t spit at me any more, I didn’t get close enough to let her.
Checking my watch, I decided that Weaks should be arriving shortly, if at all. I didn’t think that I had been working of the explosives that long, but when I returned to the main area that the alien had chosen for her nest, I saw that there were fifteen eggs now.
Then I noticed that four of them had spread open like the petals of a flower. I approached slowly, thumbing off the safety on the rifle.
The eggs were empty…
I reached the doors to the elevator and dropped to the floor. I wrapped the exposed ends of the wires to the bolts sticking out of the back of the timer and spun the lock nuts down tight over the wires to hold them. I flipped the timer over, glancing up every second or so to make sure I wasn’t being stalked by one of those six-legged insects with attitude.
“Where are you, Weaks?” I asked to no one in particular, but said it just to hear the reassuring sound of my own voice. Big mistake. My voice was shaky and frightened and didn’t calm me one bit.
I turned the timer over in my hands and set the timer to five minutes.
Now, all I had to do was press the execute button.
Five minutes was too long. I reset it for three.
Behind me I heard the elevator motor running and hoped to God that Weaks was coming back down.
I heard a slithering sound above me and looked up in time to see the thin legs of one of the face huggers. I lifted my gun to shoot, but didn’t. It was directly above me. Shooting it while it was up there would spray acid all over me. I moved away from the door as fast as I could, rolled onto my back and sent a spray of bullets unto the pipes above where I had been sitting. I couldn’t afford to strike a gas line, but the present situation left me no choice.
Behind me, the alien screamed. She didn’t like the noise I was making, or the fact that I was shooting at one of her children.
Acid dripped from the ceiling and melted through the pipes up there. It dripped down onto the floor and began to eat away at it too. Of course, now there was a gaping hole in the floor in front of my intended exit out of this hell.
Another face hugger sprang across the floor at me and I shot it before it got within ten feet of me. Behind me, the alien screamed some more, shaking her head violently and exposing the second set of jaws, lined with teeth as clear as glass. Three more eggs opened.
There were still two out there somewhere, and as I watched, the other three began to crawl from their slimy wombs.
I had to get out of here. I spun around in a circle, searching for more of the little creatures. I didn’t see any. The elevator dinged and the doors slowly opened. Weaks was there; gun pointed up at the ceiling. He didn’t look into the room but kept his attention on the ceiling of the elevator.
“Scollari? You there?”
“Yah. I’m here. But don’t step out of the elevator. I bagged one in front of the door and there’s a hole there now.”
“Yah, Well, getting off this death trap is the first thing on my mind right now. I think there’s one on the roof.”
He ran then, and took a flying leap out of the elevator, while behind him the roof to the elevator crashed inward and another face hugger landed on the floor right where Weaks had been standing. I ran forward, firing into the elevator just as the alien tried to jump out at Weaks.
After killing it I told Weaks to press the execute button on the timer. He rushed back to where all the wires connected with the timer and turned it over in his hand.
“It’s dead,” he said.
“Do what?” I rushed over to him, taking the box from his hand. Behind me, two more eggs flowered open. “Quick, get the other one out of the bag.
As he scrounged in the bag I undid the wing nuts off the wires. He handed me the other timer and I reattached the wires to it, tightening the nuts down over the wires for the second time that day.
“Where’s the stairs?” he asked after I’d reset the timer for three minutes and pushed the execute button.
2 minutes 58 seconds…
“I don’t know,” I said. And honestly, I hadn’t seen any stairs, but the basement was so dark that I could have missed them.
“Come on,” he said, leading me through the maze of pipes, air ducts, and storage crates. Another face hugger attacked us but Weaks made quick work of it before it could get near us. I happened to look down at the ammunition counter on the top of the gun and saw that there were only two rounds left in the gun. I fished another one out of my fanny pack and slammed it home into the gun.
The only part of the basement that we hadn’t covered was the corner that the alien was using as her nursery. We circled around her at a run, knowing that time was running out, and there, with a single light lighting the next landing between this floor and the next, was the stairwell.
“We can’t go up that way.” Time was running out.
1 minute 50 seconds…
“Now what?” Weaks asked. I looked him over carefully and decided that the only way out was to use the means of escape I had used earlier in the day.
“Come on,” I said, leading him to an air duct I had noticed earlier.
“I can’t fit in there,” he said as I removed the grate.
“You can, and you will. Now take off all that armor, we’ve got to slim you up.
I looked at my watch and didn’t like what it told me.
1 minute 3 seconds…
We shimmied up the air duct as something shimmied up after us. It was too dark in here, but I wedged myself in place in the vertical hallway and fired down in the direction we had come. The muzzle flashes revealed two other aliens scurrying up toward us. Acid exploded out of them and a pungent steam began to rise. It stung the nose and burned my eyes.
“Go, Go,” I shouted.
45 seconds…
Weaks crashed through a grate and birthed himself onto the floor. I spilled out right behind him. The clang, clang, clang of the alien’s legs striking the metal wall of the air duct echoed out to us from the vent. I pushed Weaks out of my way and scrambled to the stairs.
30 seconds…
I took the stairs two at a time and burst out the first floor exit and into the main foyer. The exit lay just ahead.
“Hurry up,” I shouted behind me. Weaks was on the floor, half in the door to the stairwell, and half out. A face hugger was attached to his back and it’s long, segmented tail was wrapped around Weaks’ neck. Using its long, finger-like legs, it maneuvered around him to get at his face. Weaks had one forearm between it and his mouth and there wasn’t a whole lot of time left.
20 seconds…
I did the only thing I could think of. I took the five steps between Weaks and I at a dead run, and kicked the crap out of the little bastard. It sailed through the air into the darkness of the stairwell, turning end over end. I helped Weaks up and we rushed for the door.
10 seconds…
Police cruisers, fireman and a huge crowd of bystanders lined the street.
“Get out of here,” Weaks shouted. “Move! Move!”
Nobody moved.
“Bomb!” I shouted, hitting the street at a dead run.
That got everybody moving.
3 seconds…
Weaks and I ducked behind a large fire truck and I cupped my hands over my ears.
Zero…
The explosion stopped my heart it was so loud. Actually, it wasn’t just a single explosion, but a multitude of them as the gas ignited from one floor to the next. The fireball was so large and bright that it could be seen from space. Dust and mortar showered down on everyone, punching large holes in the roofs of the patrol cars and knocking people unconscious. The shock wave was so great that every window shattered within a mile of the compound. Two men died in the explosion.
“What now,” Weaks asked after everything had quieted down. We were walking down a side street after ditching the police who were obviously looking for the heavily armed man and woman who had emerged from the building only seconds before it exploded.
“It’s not over yet.”
“Do what?”
“I said it’s not over.”
“How do you know?”
“Gut feeling.” I knew that at least one of them got out, maybe more. “Wait a couple day’s you’ll see.”
“I hope your wrong about this.”
“So do I, Weaks. So do I.” I took his hand. He had come through for me when I needed him, and that loyalty he showed me when he could have run to save himself, hit me in a spot that hadn’t been touched in a very, very long time. I wanted him to hold me, not as a lover, but as a comforting friend, because I knew that our fight with the aliens was just beginning.
Just four days after the Brody Tower explosion, twelve dead bodies have been found. The condition of the bodies is in perfect conjunction with those four bodies that had reportedly being seen in the laboratories of Dr. Brody.
The bodies were in such a condition that the chest cavities had exploded outward from the inside…
Copyright February 2001 by Christopher J. Thomasson
