AVP: Alien vs. Predator Page 19

  Tilting its crested head back as far as the restraints allowed, the Queen opened its slavering mouth and unleashed an awesome, ear-shattering shriek of rage, frustration and utter despair, which reverberated throughout the pyramid.

  In the Labyrinth

  The alpha-Alien with the net-ravaged hide was pounding its fists against the stone door in a futile effort to reach Scar and Lex when it heard the keening distress call. Pausing, the Alien lifted its misshapen head to listen.

  When the Queen’s cry came again, the alpha-Alien hissed and bared its teeth, alert for danger. His entourage folded into the shadows, where they swayed like coiled pythons, watching and waiting for its lead.

  Tail-stump thrashing, the alpha-Alien turned and hurled itself down the passageway in the direction of the Queen’s chamber. The swarm followed, their ebony claws scouring the stone as they scurried into the gloom.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the slab, Scar continued to sheathe Lex in a crudely fashioned battle suit. Using the rib cage of the dead Alien, the Predator created a chest plate, holding it in place with the Velcro straps from Lex’s backpack.

  Scar had retained his own face mask and the metal powerpack he wore on his broad back. He also kept his shoulder armor with gun mount. These seemed to be the most vital components of his original battle armor, the ones that contained his life-support and internal power systems, and the sensory equipment the Predator relied upon to hunt down its prey. The mesh heat-netting was in place under the Predator’s makeshift suit, and Scar also gripped his long, barbed spear in one fist. The other fist was encased in armor, studded with the shattered blades from the Predator’s ruined throwing disk.

  Lex was smaller, lighter and far less powerful than the Predator, and as necessary as it was to wear this hastily assembled protection, she groaned under the weight of it. Her chest was covered in a segment of Alien plate that had formerly sheathed the creature’s thigh. On her extremities Lex had strapped pieces of Alien forearm and shin armor, and she kept them in place with waterproof adhesive tape from her first-aid kit.

  Scar had fashioned a large, curved shield out of the Alien’s skull for her to carry, and Lex had made a helmet from bits and pieces of chitin held together with rope and Velcro, along with shoulder pads formed from hollowed-out Alien ribs.

  In her gloved hand Lex gripped a long, wickedly sharp slashing club made from the piercing barbs of the Alien’s segmented tail. She’d also arranged the pitons in her utility belt so that she could pull them out and stab or slash with them in a single easy, quick motion. Next to them, she kept her few remaining flares and her survival knife, unbuttoned and ready for instant use.

  Finally, Lex and Scar were ready. They stood side by side, weapons poised, as the Predator’s long fingers danced on the ancient keypad. With a grating rumble, the stone slab rose again into the ceiling as the newly attired warriors leaped into the passageway, weapons poised and ready for the savage Alien attack. But to their astonishment, it never came. The corridor was empty, the Aliens gone.

  CHAPTER 28

  In the Sacrificial Chamber

  Feet pounding on the stone floor, the Predator raced through a dark passageway lined with pillars. Lex struggled to keep up. Though a phenomenal athlete in her own right, she was incapable of matching the brutal pace set by Scar. His massive strides more than doubled her own footsteps. Lex was sweating under her winter jumpsuit and heavy Alien armor, and she was also taking in great gulps of frigid air.

  Thirty paces ahead, Scar paused at an intersection, as if uncertain which direction to take. Suddenly he bolted to the right.

  “No! No! That way,” she pointed. “Go left.”

  The Predator whirled around and spied one of the strobe lights, still flashing where Lex had left it hours before. Lex caught up with him and recognized the area—it was the corridor that led up to the sacrificial chamber where they’d left Thomas, Adele Rousseau, and several archaeologists.

  “It’s this way up!” she cried, gesturing as she hurried forward.

  For a moment it looked as if Scar wasn’t going to follow her. Then he took off, running past Lex, leading once more.

  “Slow down a little,” Lex huffed. “Let me catch up.”

  To her surprise, he did. After that, Scar paced himself to match her stride, and they ran side by side. It seemed the Predator was beginning to regard her as an equal. Lex didn’t know whether she should be flattered or appalled.

  Ahead of them a black doorway yawned, two strobes blinking on either side of it.

  “The sacrificial chamber,” Lex cried.

  They slowed and cautiously entered the circular chamber. On the floor, Lex spied a blood-splattered handgun—Adele Rousseau’s Desert Eagle. Lex scooped the weapon up and checked the magazine. One bullet left.

  From somewhere inside the chamber, Lex heard a faint, ghostly echo. Scar heard it, too. Lex strained to listen, and finally she could make out the sound of a human voice calling her name.

  “Lex…”

  “Sebastian!”

  Eyes darting, Lex peered beyond the slabs and the mummies. In an antechamber, she saw a cluster of ghastly statues mounted on the wall—statues she did not remember seeing the last time she was in this room.

  The voice called again.

  “Lex… Help me…”

  She looped her club to her belt and pulled a spear fashioned from the tip of an Alien’s tail off her back.

  Then she slowly approached the stone sculptures, her weapon raised and ready. As her eyes strained in the half light, Lex could make out some of the repugnant details of a horrific, terra-cotta mural. It appeared to be the three-dimensional image of a mythical beast with a hard shell for a body and a tiny, humanlike head.

  “Lex… Please…”

  Only when the voice called again did the truth become clear. This wasn’t a mural. This grotesque tableau was actually alive. The mythical beast was really a human being—Sebastian De Rosa.

  The archaeologist was encased in a monstrous Alien cocoon, his arms, legs and feet completely enmeshed in a near-impenetrable shell. On the stone floor lay a deflated egg sack and the translucent shell of a spent face hugger, belly up, its legs stiff with rigor mortis and pointed at the ceiling.

  “Oh, God… Sebastian…”

  The man tried to smile, but the effort died on his lips. When he spoke, the words did not come easily. Each breath was labored. He retched, and red foam flecked his pallid cheek.

  “Lex… I…”

  “Hold on, I’ll get you out of there.”

  Lex tore at the cocoon with her hands, but it was futile. The surface was as hard as marble. Lex drew a piton and hacked at the enveloping shell, gouging out a few splinters before the steel spike blunted and bent in her hand.

  “No!” Sebastian gasped. “It’s too late. You have to stop these things.”

  Sebastian convulsed. The tendons in his neck bulged as his head jerked from side to side. His mouth gaped open, and blood flowed from his nose.

  “Lex… They can’t reach the surface…” he moaned, struggling.

  The Predator appeared behind Lex. Gazing impassively at the dying man, he rested his huge hand on Lex’s shoulder. She shrugged it off and lunged at the cocoon, beating it with her fists.

  “Don’t worry, Sebastian. I’m getting you out of there!”

  Scar gripped her shoulder again, far less gently now. The Predator dragged her back, away from the cocoon, as she struggled against him.

  “Get off me,” Lex cried, eyes wet. “I have to help him.”

  The emotion she’d buried in order to survive overwhelmed her now. She’d watched Max Stafford and Charles Weyland die, and she was not about to give up on Sebastian. Not without a fight.

  But still Scar pulled her away.

  “Let me go,” she screamed.

  “Make it to the surface…” The Predator’s modulated voice replayed Lex’s own words to her again.

  “I said get off me!”

 
“Kill me!” Sebastian cried out with the last of his strength. “Do it.”

  He convulsed again. The pale, naked flesh under his heart began to stretch and bulge. Crimson rents appeared as his skin split open and blood gushed everywhere. Then the man threw his gaze heavenward and cried out in agony.

  “I’m sorry,” Lex murmured.

  She raised the handgun and fired at Sebastian’s head. His tormented screams came to an abrupt end.

  Lex dropped her head. The Predator stood next to her, watching the dead man, waiting…

  Suddenly a creature clawed its way out of the dead man’s abdomen and launched itself at Scar. With lightning-fast reflexes, the Predator caught it in his hand. He held it firmly in its grip and turned it from side to side, examining it. The tiny creature squirmed to free itself, its jaws snapping at Scar’s face.

  Casually the Predator snapped its neck between his fingers as if it were a matchstick.

  In the Queen’s Chamber

  The Aliens came from every corner of the pyramid, singly, in pairs, and in clusters large and small. Like a rippling tide of black oil, the swarm flowed down sheer walls and deep shafts, and made their way through drainage tunnels and narrow air spaces between the thick walls. Tittering and hissing, they instinctively responded to the maternal cries of their Queen.

  In a great living tsunami the creatures surged into the Queen’s chamber, hastening to the edge of the misty, frozen pool. Others crawled down the stone walls or scampered down the long, barbed chains that held their Queen captive.

  The largest group of Aliens was led by the alpha-Alien with the net-ravaged hide. They poured in, filling the chamber, hissing and squabbling. Then all movement ceased as the brutes bowed their eyeless heads to their matriarch. For a long time the Aliens remained still, quiet, respectful—a jet-black sea of shining, chitinous hides and slavering jaws, their cylindrical heads bowed and swaying from side to side in supplication.

  The Queen rattled her chains and cried out in a sustained, sibilant hiss that inflamed her spawn and spurred them into action.

  In a flurry of gnashing teeth and ripping jaws, the creatures attacked their matriarch. Leaping from the edge of the frozen pool, most caught hold of the great harnessing machine that rendered the hive mistress immobile during her reproductive labor—though a few plunged screeching to their death through the rising mist into the vapor pool.

  Crawling over one another in a maniacal press to rip their mother’s flesh, the monsters moved as a single, sweeping entity, descending the walls and clinging to the chains, while others swooped down from the high ceiling like raptors.

  The things caught hold of the Alien Queen in a thousand places and tore at her hide incessantly with tooth and claw. When the tittering mass reached the Queen’s head, slobbering jaws gnawed at her great horned crown, cracking the bony crest and tearing the barbed hooks loose from their moorings. Fountains of acid blood flowed in rivulets down the Queen’s ravaged frame, splattering her offspring and inflaming them to further savagery.

  At last the final hook was torn from her crest in a shower of splintered bone. Although the Queen’s head was free and her jaws were more than capable of destroying any of the gnawing, rending creatures within her reach, she still did not fight back. Instead she hung there—manacled arms outstretched, head erect—as if inviting her children to feast on her flesh and drink her blood in a blasphemous orgy of matricide.

  The Queen bled from a score of wounds, her boiling blood splattering everywhere. Suddenly there was a shower of sparks as the big machine that held her lower extremities began to melt. Ravaged by the Queen’s acid blood, chain metal began to twist, wires snapped and cables buckled.

  Triumphantly, the Queen yanked the chain restraining her right arm, casting several of her children into the frozen mist. Fearing for their own lives, the rest of her panicked offspring reversed their course, leaping onto the floor far below, hopping onto the walls, or dangling from the remaining chains like rats escaping a sinking ship.

  When both arms were free, the Queen used her claws to shred the semi-molten machine that had enslaved her for so long. Freeing her gangly legs, she still struggled against the great clamp that imprisoned her tail and reproductive organs.

  Tension rippled her massive form, jaws locked and teeth clenched as the Queen ripped her trembling tail free. Then, with a snap of cartilage and a flood of bubbling, caustic slime, the Hive Queen tore her own birth canal from her body.

  Free at last, the Queen leaped from the shattered platform. Chains dangled from her limbs, clattering as she moved.

  Quivering with both rage and triumph, she threw up her ravaged arms and let loose a shriek that vowed vengeance and retaliatory pain….

  In the Sacrificial Chamber

  The Alien Queen’s bloodcurdling scream echoed through the pyramid.

  “What was that?” Lex cried.

  She turned to Scar and witnessed a first—a frightened Predator.

  “It’s that bad?”

  Scar touched her arm, echoing her recorded words once more like a mantra. “Keep it together…. Make it to the surface.”

  But Lex shook her head. “We can’t let these things get out of here.”

  Acting as if he understood her words, Scar removed a complicated and bulky device from his wrist. On its crystalline face, Alien characters glowed. Scar tapped several keys, and a cluster of symbols appeared. He thrust the device under Lex’s nose and tilted his head—his “Get it?” pose.

  “I don’t understand.”

  The Predator pointed to the wrist computer. Then he held out a tight fist and turned it upside down. Watching Lex, the Predator slowly unfurled his fist.

  “An explosion. That thing is a bomb?”

  Then she recalled the mural in the hieroglyphics chamber, which depicted a Predator with its arms raised, then a mushroom cloud.

  “It is a bomb!” Lex cried. Like the one that went off on this island in 1979.

  Lex took the device from Scar’s hand. It was heavy, and she could feel it vibrate as mechanisms turned within.

  “Well,” she said, “I hope it kills every fucking one of them.”

  Lex tossed the bomb through the stone grate, where it plunged deeper into the heart of the pyramid.

  “Keep it together. Make it to the surface,” Scar’s computer-generated voice repeated.

  They started to run.

  The path to the entrance appeared to be clear, and Lex could see a dull glow in the distance—halogen lights still burning in the grotto outside the pyramid. But as they reached a wide staircase lined with square columns, another Predator stumbled out of the darkness and lunged at Lex.

  Recoiling, she beat the creature with her fist, then kicked out with her booted foot.

  Amazingly, the Predator staggered backwards under her weak assault. Lex noticed that the creature seemed injured—its face mask was gone, and its mandibles writhed convulsively. The fanged mouth was flecked with green foam.

  Reeling, the stricken Predator stumbled back. Then its knees gave out and it folded to the floor. Head thrown back and twisting from side to side, slime spraying on the statues, walls, and flagstone floor, the Predator howled—and Lex saw its chest cavity begin to bulge.

  The helpless creature gagged as the skin stretched around its heart, then blossomed into a phosphorescent burst of green, gushing gore. Lex stumbled into a column and fell to the ground, watching in horrified fascination as the head of a newborn Alien poked out swathed in pus and ooze, its jaws snapping air, desperate to be free of the Predator’s dying flesh.

  Only then did Scar step forward and activate the plasma gun on his shoulder. For a split second Lex saw three scarlet dots illuminate the chattering jaws of the nascent obscenity, then Scar fired.

  The searing plasma struck the fallen Predator, incinerating its carcass, along with the squirming horror that twitched inside of its gaping chest. Red fire and black smoke filled the chamber, and the awful, permeating stench of burned
flesh choked Lex. Turning her back to the conflagration, she watched the flickering shadows play on the walls as both aliens were completely consumed.

  CHAPTER 29

  In the labyrinth, hundreds of Aliens raced through the darkness, flowing over walls and rippling along the ground, hissing and tittering, aware that their prey was close—close enough to hear, to smell, and soon to taste.

  Behind the ocean of black, blood-mad monsters loomed a massive shape that dwarfed the others—something huge and monstrous and very, very angry. The Alien Queen.

  Standing over the smoldering corpse of his fellow Predator, Scar heard the Alien swarm. He paused in midstride to listen, head cocked in an almost human gesture.

  After a moment, Lex heard them too. Though she could not see her pursuers, it was obvious that the monsters were gaining on them.

  Scar took off, heading for the exit. Lex was on his heels. They emerged from the pyramid in a dead run and took the stairs two at a time. Through a red mist of exhaustion, Lex spied the bright white lights of the underground camp in the distance. It seemed to be deserted.

  Sucking in frigid air, she risked a glance over her shoulder; there was still no sign of the horde that had been chasing them.

  In the Ice Grotto

  When they finally reached the grotto, they found the expedition’s equipment broken and scattered, as if by mad vandals.

  It was then that Lex discovered the frozen corpse of the roughneck Quinn at the foot of the ice tunnel. By the look of him, he’d fought hard for his life. While Scar stood guard, Lex quickly searched the camp for others, but everyone was either gone or dead.

  At the mouth of the shaft that led to the surface, the roughnecks had set up a winch-and-pulley system to lower supplies underground and haul samples back up. For Lex and the Predator, the device was the only way out of this hell. Looking around, Lex spied a large wooden packing crate. She tore the lid off. Except for a loaded piton gun, there was nothing inside. Lex threw the lid aside and hooked the crate to the pulley cable.