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  He stayed where he was, stock still, holding the pistol as steady as he could manage. The creature remained half out of the hole a moment, unmoving, then slowly slid the rest of the way out, gathering its limbs under itself for a quick dart forward.

  He shot it three times with the plasma pistol, the casing of its head cracking and then bursting and spattering all over the closet, the creature’s acid blood beginning to burn and pock the walls, slowly eating away at them. It spilled the rest of the way out of the hole, its limbs shivering, and then lay still.

  He prodded it with his boot. Not too big, not huge anyway; it hadn’t molted to its adult form yet. His wife, he noticed, had fainted, was lying sprawled on the bed. He sat down beside her, looked at her pale face, her tear-stained cheeks, her features suddenly and surprisingly serene. He kissed her once, then took a pillow, put it over her face, and pressed down hard.

  At first it was as if she just continued to sleep, but then he felt the muscles in her neck tense and she struggled to move her head. She tried to cry out, the sound of her voice muffled and mute through the pillow, little more than a slight vibration. He pressed down harder. Her arms were scratching at his face now, trying to gouge out his eyes, her muffled cries more and more urgent. He turned his head and squinched his eyes shut.

  And then, as suddenly as it had started, her hands and arms stilled, stopping motionless there around his face. The fingers slowly tightened, and finally, as if growing heavier, languidly slipped back down. He held the pillow tightly in place a moment longer, his own breath growing ragged, and then finally let go.

  * * *

  He felt exhausted, but there was still his daughter to find. Almost certainly, a part of his mind told him, she would have to be killed as well, but he tried to ignore it. Instead, he tried, as calmly as possible, to reload the pistol without thinking about what he had just had to do.

  He started to remove the pillow from her face and then realized he didn’t know if he could stand to see her dead, so left it there.

  He started for the hole in the closet. He had bent down and taken out his larger flashlight to look down into it when suddenly a horrible thought crossed his mind. What if his wife hadn’t been a host? What if, for whatever reason, the Aliens hadn’t used her yet?

  No, he told himself, it was ridiculous, he had had to kill her, she was obviously a host. Company policy.

  But once the thought was in his head it stayed there nagging him, getting under his skin. What if he had killed his wife for no reason? What if he had murdered his wife?

  Which was why, halfway down the hive tunnel that the hole in the closet led to, he turned himself laboriously around and made his way back up to stand beside the bed again. He tugged her shirt up, looked at her stomach. It seemed like an ordinary stomach. He palpated it with his fingers. Yes, perhaps it was tenser or fuller than normal, but it was hard to say. The creature could in any case be gathered mostly up under the ribs—wasn’t that how it usually was?

  Only one way to be sure, he told himself grimly. Better to be sure than to always wonder.

  He went into the kitchen, took out the biggest knife he could find. Holding the pillow in place over her face, he slit his wife’s belly open, forcing the knife in just below the sternum and sawing down as far as it would go. He slid his hands into the gap, working his way through the hole into her stomach until he felt something long and whiplike. He drew it out and there, in his blood-streaked hands, covered in bile and flux, was a mostly developed chestburster, dead. He felt both relieved and, as he started to realize fully what he had just done to his wife’s corpse, like he was going insane.

  * * *

  A moment later, he found himself clambering down the hole and into the tunnel beyond, flashlight beam playing in front of him. It was tight inside, and even on hands and knees, he had to hunch. It was hot, too, and the walls of the circular tunnel were moist, the floor slick as well, the legs of his trousers quickly soaking through.

  After a while, he held the flashlight in his mouth. It was easier that way and it would give him a better chance if he had his hands free when he needed them. The tunnel turned downward and he had to fight not to slip down it, and then it leveled out again. Here the air was thick, water streaming off the walls.

  And then, suddenly, the tunnel opened up into a larger chamber. He stayed at the edge of it, hesitating, waiting, then slowly stood, took the flashlight out of his mouth, beginning to flick its beam about the room.

  The walls were covered with the slick and almost baroque secretions he’d seen before, the beginnings of a hive. There, a half-dozen meters away, were two emptied eggs, their leathery flaps open. Were there other exits? None that he could see immediately, but the chamber was so shadowed and wavery that it was hard to say. Maybe there had been just one Alien.

  He took another step in, playing his light around and above the discarded eggs. Even so, it took him more than a moment to realize that here, as part of the wall, ashy and slime coated, was a human face.

  He took another step forward, then another, and only then could he begin to be certain it was his daughter.

  “Becca?” he whispered.

  She didn’t move. He moved a little closer, then crossed the remaining distance quickly and jerkily. He reached out and touched her face; it was cold, moist. He reached out to tear her down from the wall, but when he tried to pull her free he realized that the space between her shoulders and hips was gone, burst away.

  It was only then, as, filled with anguish, he started to turn away, that he became conscious of what had come up behind him.

  2

  That was maybe not exactly what had happened, but it was close enough, all the basic details right anyway. Each time Kramm dreamt it later, it got a little worse, until he felt he would sooner kill himself than have to go through the dream again.

  But even killing himself felt like it might not be enough. What if there was a hell, and what if his hell would be to dream the same dream over and over again, to live what he had gone through in actual life over and over again through dreams after his death? What if this was what eternity was?

  So instead he did the next best thing, something he knew would keep him from dreaming. He had himself frozen. He resigned from his position as an Alien assault investigator for Weyland-Yutani. He couldn’t help but blame them and their policies (along with himself) for the death of his wife and his child. He signed on instead with a small start-up called Omnitech. In exchange for a minimal retainer, he became a sleeper, a man frozen in cryonic storage ready to be called up at a moment’s notice whenever his special skills were needed. Until then, he would dreamlessly sleep.

  The problem was, as he found out when, finally, they did wake him up, that in cryonic storage it didn’t feel like any time was passing at all. He felt like he’d just closed his eyes when the dreams began again, and he knew then that they were pulling him out. He hadn’t been able to enjoy feeling like he didn’t exist because, well, while he was frozen, he didn’t exist, and such a nothing couldn’t be experienced. So there was the moment of closing his eyes and growing sleepy and then, directly on top of that, the moment when, slowly coming conscious again, he started to dream.

  But it was only when he turned away and saw the creature there, looming suddenly behind him in his flashlight beam, that he realized this was something he was dreaming, living once again rather than living for the first time. Which made it much worse, and filled him with despair.

  * * *

  In both dream and life he had turned, broken up inside, away from the shattered body of his daughter, turned from what was left of her corpse now incorporated into the structure of the hive, and it was there behind him, reared up on its back legs, just a half meter from his face. Hissing, it raised its front arms or forelegs or whatever they were. He watched, entranced, as its blackish lips retracted to reveal its sharp metallic teeth and then these parted too to reveal a small, squarish inner mouth. He knew, having seen it before, what
would happen next.

  It was, he had come to believe, a way the Alien had of hypnotizing its prey, the slow, careful movements followed by the almost spring-loaded action of the tinier toothed tongue—if tongue was what it was—as it punched its way through a skull as if it were made of paper. It was this that saved him, his knowledge of what was happening and his ability to fight against the paralysis. Almost instinctively, he swung the flashlight up so that when the inner mouth snapped out it broke through the flashlight’s lens and down into the flashlight’s body, the force of the blow breaking Kramm’s wrist and also leaving him, suddenly, plunged into darkness.

  * * *

  And this was the part that always made him wake up screaming. For no matter how bad it had been to be alone in a room with the Alien looming up there in his flashbeam, its shadow cast gigantic behind it, it was infinitely worse knowing the creature was there but not being able to see it, just hearing it hiss and rattle and feeling the slight ruffle of air as its tail whipped by his ear and into his body, tearing most of the meat off one of his shoulders.

  He could smell his own blood. He pushed himself back until he was against the living wall, his daughter’s corpse somewhere near him. He tried to determine by the sounds the creature was making where exactly it was. He threw himself sideways and a moment later felt the vibrations as the wall near his face was struck, a harsh hiss there just to his left, just centimeters away. He fired once and thought he caught a glimpse of the creature in the flash before the gun’s muzzle, but was immediately blind again. He got up and started to run and struck something hard and fell, nearly knocking himself out. Then the creature was on top of him, almost as if it were trampling him, and he fired once above him, the shot echoing, and the creature gave a strange clicking cry and leapt away. Maybe he had hit it? He wondered vaguely how many charges he had left in his gun but couldn’t think. He realized too that he didn’t know now where he was in the chamber, nor what direction he was facing. I’m going to die, his own voice was telling him as he managed to get to his knees. A noise somewhere, and without thinking he fired the pistol, heard the echo, and saw movement in the flash of the shot but little more than that. Keep calm, he told himself, while another part of his mind kept insistently reminding him that he was going to die.

  He stood in the darkness waiting, willing himself to see, his brain sending him brief little flashes of light that he knew he couldn’t actually be seeing. He kept the pistol out in front of him, joggling it back and forth, pushing the darkness with it, feeling around behind him with his other, throbbing hand.

  All I have to do, he told himself, is back up slowly, get the wall against my back, and then feel my way down along it, step by step, until I find the tunnel, and then move back up and into the light.

  He took a slow step back, sliding his foot. He heard a skittering to his left, like a pack of rats. Another step back, he told himself, and took it with his other foot and waited for the blow to come. Again, he told himself, and slid his first foot back again, trying not to think about the sounds around him. Wall, he told himself, then tunnel, then light.

  He heard a hissing from his left and dropped and turned and fired, and saw in the brief flash the creature’s head, its strange metallic teeth, and then heard it scuttle away. It was all he could do not to take off running. Did I hit it? he wondered and took another backward step, quicker this time, and another, almost running backward now until suddenly he struck, hard, the wall.

  It made all the difference having something against his back; suddenly he began to believe he might survive after all. Perhaps if he slid his way over into a corner of the chamber, where he could limit the directions from which the creature could come at him, he could simply wait it out. But no, another part of him was screaming, tunnel then light, tunnel then light. And how could he even be sure the chamber had corners?

  He slid his way down along the wall, feeling his way along, always listening. He slid a little further, then a little more. He would have gone a little further still, but then the wall beneath his hand moved.

  * * *

  At the time he didn’t know what had happened: suddenly he was pounding his way shrieking into the darkness, no longer aware of where he was, and then his face struck something hard enough that the darkness flared white and he stumbled down and everything was lost to him. Maybe a wall, he thought later, amazed that he’d managed to live through this part of it, though it crossed his mind that perhaps he hadn’t run into something at all, but that something had deliberately struck him, knocking him unconscious.

  When he came conscious again it was to a sense of movement, the back of his head jouncing along the floor, a dull, itchy scraping noise inside of it. He didn’t know where he was. There was pressure on one leg, on his boot, and it took him a long confused moment to realize he was being dragged, and then a moment more to realize from the sound of the movement before him, the strange, loping gait, that it wasn’t human.

  He willed himself to keep his leg loose, let the creature drag him, tried to think. The pistol was still in his hand, trailing from it, his index finger caught in the trigger guard and broken. He managed to work his middle finger in beside it, against the trigger, then, as silently as possible, drew the hand and the gun it was holding onto his chest.

  One chance, he was thinking, just one.

  And then the dragging stopped, his leg thumping back to the floor. Now? he wondered. Something grabbed him roughly by the arms and spun him into the air, slamming him against the wall and holding him pinned there. Now? he wondered. There was something wet and slick about the wall and it was being molded around him, one of his arms mostly motionless now. He cocked his wrist hard and pointed the gun and waited until he felt the creature’s breath against his neck. Now, he thought, and pulled the trigger over and over again.

  3

  He could see the light through his eyelids, through the pale, mottled orange-red of his own flesh. He could feel the warmth on his face, but couldn’t will himself to open his eyes, worried that it was a hallucination, that he would see only the dark after all. His body, he suddenly realized, was shivering, despite the warmth. He could only feel parts of it, as if other parts of it were dead. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to open his eyes even if he wanted to.

  “Is he going to be all right?” a voice somewhere above him asked. A high voice, probably a woman’s.

  “Sure,” said another voice, this one bass and smooth, but oddly slowed. “He’s just been out a long time.”

  Out? he wondered.

  The light seemed to intensify, then suddenly seemed to be burning its way through his lids.

  “Not too quickly,” said the deep voice. “We still need to be careful.”

  Someone somewhere gave a grunt. The lights dimmed slightly. Then Kramm felt something run down the inside of his arm, cutting and intense, searing a line straight across his brain.

  “What’s this?” asked the woman’s voice.

  “Please don’t touch him,” said the deep voice. Touch me? Kramm thought. But she cut me.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It looks like an acid burn.”

  “Yes,” the man said. “It is an acid burn. It’s in the file.” And then the strange reddish surface of the inside of his eyelids slipped away and instead he saw himself staring at a man stumbling out of the entry of a settler’s unit, bloodspattered, one leg being mostly dragged, something wrong with both hands, acid burns down one blackened arm. The muscle of one shoulder had been torn open, tufts of hair had been ripped from one side of his head. A strip of skin from his temple had come undone to hang unfurled over his ear. But worse still than all this were the man’s eyes, the pupils narrowed to minuscule dots, the gaze itself hardly sane and very far from human.

  And then, in an instant, he realized the man was him. Suddenly he was no longer outside the body but instead deep within it, pain throbbing along the side of his head and all through his body, and suddenly everything went black, and he was screaming, a
nd he was gone.

  * * *

  “—all true then?” somebody was saying.

  “How do we know?” said a smooth, deep voice that seemed somehow familiar to him. “We only know what he told them and what of that they chose to release to us. He wasn’t telling much, or maybe couldn’t tell much, maybe just didn’t know exactly what happened to him.”

  He smiled grimly inside his head, feeling the skin of his face tighten.

  “He’s awake,” said a woman’s voice.

  “Not yet,” said the deep voice. “Involuntary reflex.”

  “I heard,” said another voice, one he didn’t recognize, “that he was in the dark alone with one of them for days, stalking it, being stalked by it.”

  “Could be,” said the deep voice. “All we know is that he touched down and then wasn’t heard from for eight days.”

  He could feel the images trying to come to the surface but he pressed them down, back deep into the folds of his brain. He didn’t want to live through that again, or even think about it. But they came anyway. There was his wife again, sitting on the bed, dazed, and then there he was pawing through her body cavity looking for the larval Alien that he knew must be there. Did he find it, or had he simply imagined finding it, not being able to face having killed his wife for no reason? And then the eight days that followed, that he could remember only bits and pieces of, when he had been inhabiting a state well beyond madness.

  “Rumor is he killed the thing as it glued him to the wall, and that he spent the next few days trying to get free,” said a voice.

  “Rumor from where?” asked the low voice.

  “I read about it somewhere,” said the voice, guardedly.

  “The digipulps, I’d guess,” said the low voice. “You shouldn’t believe everything you read.”

  He tried to open his eyes again, felt his lids flutter.