CHAPTER 3 – One Plus One is Three
"Tip it over! We'll beat it when it falls out," said Joe nervously.
Andrew went to the other side of the snowmobile, parting his face as far away from it as possible, half-shielding it with one hand, and began to kick its side. The vehicle wobbled back and forth a couple of times but it was not until he put all his strength into the last kick did it fell on its side with a loud crash.
At that moment Winnie appeared from the door.
"What the hell is going on in here?" She seriously thought the two men had gone crazy.
"Winnie get back!" Joe yelled, motioning her to stay back with his hand.
Andrew kicked the undercarriage but no egg came out. The resin was holding the egg on tightly. Neither man dared to get closer to pry it loose.
"You do something now!" said Andrew.
Joe sighed. "If only I had my gun, I'd blow the damn thing up! Keep kicking it!"
"It ain't working! Hell!" He went behind the undercarriage, grabbing a large plate and holding it out like a shield, banging the trunk out with all his strength. The force of his impact left deep dents but the egg refused to budge.
Winnie carefully made her way around the commotion to satisfy her own curiosity at what they were trying to beat the living daylights out of. She kneeled down in front of the trunk to get a better look.
Andrew gasped at the sight of Winnie so dangerously close to the trunk.
"Goddammit woman! Get out of the way!" he spat.
Winnie balked at the sight of the egg but at her low angle she lost her balance and fell on a pile of rubber hoses. The egg squirmed; Winnie covered her face, letting out a squeal as Andrew jumped protectively in front of her not sure of how he was going to protect both her and himself from the pounce of the dreaded facehugger.
Yet nothing happened.
Feeling a bit daring, Joe walked closer and poked the eggs with the crowbar, his legs coiled like a spring if he needed to run. The egg squirmed, reacting to the touch, but otherwise remained dulled.
Suddenly the egg made an odd sound – similar to that of intestinal gas – and its flaps slowly opened. From its slick cavity spewed a pathetic sight: a malformed facehugger with its spindly legs curled up over its abdomen and a tail bending at a sick angle. It looked emancipated and smelled horribly.
For a few moments it seemed that the entire world went silent. They stood frozen like statues, unable to move, their muscles refusing to collaborate until their brains registered what just happened.
Joe was the first to break the silence with a nervous chuckle. He wasn't sure whether to be amused or insulted at the face hugger's incompetence.
Andrew let out a breath of air he didn't knew he was holding in.
"Oh fuck…" His lips curled to a small smile before he broke out in laughter. The situation had been like a horror film except that instead of a wolf man to terrorize, a Chihuahua had been cast instead.
Winnie buried her face in her hands when Andrew laughed and shook her head wildly, almost trying to shake the fear of only a few moments ago.
"It's a dud!" she exclaimed. "Dear god that was insane…"
Andrew let his body fall down on the rubber hoses next to Winnie. "Insane? A fucking miracle! Oh god, I almost pissed my pants…" He let out a whooping sigh. "I have no idea what I would have done… A facehugger, I've only seen those things dead in jars. Man, facing that egg as it opened…all those bad visions from the stories about them just flooded my mind and all I could think was Oh my God I'm going to get face-fucked! Whoo…"
Joe leaned on the wall letting the crowbar fall out of his hand. He lightly kicked the lifeless facehugger.
"Thank god it's not alive…must've been a fluke of some sort. We lucked out on this one." He turned to Andrew. "Did you even bothered to check all your equipment before you left?" he asked bitterly but with an undertone of calm. "Well, I hope you-all had a damn good laugh about it 'cause this is telling me you were pretty damn careless. You didn't even bothered, did you? Just grabbed the stuff and came back not caring if you had a fucking drone in your trunk."
Joe took one last look at the fallen facehugger and spat on it as he jogged out the door, muttering insults to both the creature and Andrew under his breath.
"Asshole," Andrew muttered bitterly at Joe's back. Winnie asked if he was all right.
"Yeah, I'm fine…Grandpa gave us a worse scare than this reject. Happy Easter Johann, we found the egg…" he chuckled to himself.
Suddenly he sat up. The egg. Grandpa. He remembered Grandpa carrying those large protrusions on its back, the ones Johann thought were tumors. They looked exactly like the ones on his trunk: small, organic, bulb-like structures… A scary thought dawned on him: those weren't tumors Grandpa had, it was carrying eggs!
Breaths escaped him at the thought but did not want to say a word to alarm Winnie unnecessarily.
Winnie, still in the euphoria of the laughing streak, got up to her feet and wiped her coat clean of the garage's dirty floor then brushed her graying hair with her fingers.
"You still laughing?" He was surprised that Winnie hadn't caught on yet.
"You still scared?" she retorted. "C'mon, it's dead! It's not like it's going to jump our of our faces anytime soon…We might as well destroy it in the lab's furnace, the only thing strong enough to break up this creature." She happily mused at the thought, to think that these things were confused as spiders when they weren't even remotely similar to arachnids.
"It's not that. Winnie, who laid this egg?" His statement was direct with no question in his tone.
Her face paled as her eyes on the fallen creature turned to disgust and horror.
"Oh God no…" Her lips curved to a nervous smile. "Naw, you don't think…"
" – ing swear Joe is going to hear one from me if he drags me out like that again! If it's not Xenomorphs running about then I don't want to hear it! God! Bitching about getting my ass down here then runs off to get his gun as if a bloody Queen was here…He's turning senile faster than Winnie, I swear. Okay guys, Joe told me to see you and it better be good because I – Holy shit!"
Dora had just entered the garage so into her fuming that she didn't even notice the facehugger until she was mere feet from it. She took a jump back, clutching her mouth with one hand while pointing at it wildly with the other.
"Whoa! What the hell?" What the fuck is going on?"
Winnie extended her hand to the facehugger. Dora warned her but the older woman explained that it was dead and to prove so she picked it up by it's slimy tail, the creature's body hanging limply underneath it, and waved it around a bit.
The sight was odd yet highly amusing for Dora. She felt a bit more relaxed at the fact that all of them had dodged one nasty bullet that time but was still wary at how that thing had been brought here.
The sound of a gun being cocked indicated that Joe had returned with his favorite rifle at hand. He held the weapon at the facehugger. Winnie dropped it immediately, afraid that Joe might shoot it clean off her hand, and the creature hit the floor with a wet slap.
"Joe, put that thing away for Christ sake! It's dead Joe! It's dead…as in not alive! As in you don't need that gun to kill it because it's already dead!"
He shook his head, refusing to put the gun down. "I don't fucking care…I – " He swallowed, not sure what excuse to give to his actions. He didn't want to outright say he was scared of that thing, his pride wouldn't allow him, yet the soft quivering of his muscles and the light twitching of his sweaty face told more than words.
With a deep breath he put to gun down, looking away shamed that he held a weapon at Winnie.
The air around them seemed to have loosened its hold and a more relaxed feeling crept in. The false danger had passed and all that was left to do was to asses the situation.
Dora rubbed the back of her neck trying to ease her tense muscles.
"Ok, we're all cool now…we're cool. We just have a Xenomorph egg and a dead facehugger right in front of us. Now could someone please explain to me what the fuck is going on? Joe? Andrew? Anybody? C'mon, don't act stupid with me. If you are hiding something –"
"We're not hiding anything." Said Andrew in a stern voice. He hated to be accused of something he didn't do, even if it was indirectly. "You want to know what's going on? Well so do we. That's why Joe got you. You're the Xenobiologist, you tell us."
Dora shot him a jaded glare, not amused at his sarcasm. "Hey, I was the one that was dragged off my ass by trigger-happy over here." She pointed at Joe. "Then I come in and there's a freaking facehugger on the floor! You have to excuse me if I'm still missing the punch line but at this point I still can't put two and two together here."
Andrew sighed and looked away, his face tense. He could feel all the other's eyes on him as if he was withholding from them. Only Johann and Andrew were witness to what happened between the snowmobiles and the Xenomorph, and Johann wasn't here.
He shot his arms in the air in mock defeat. "Look, I don't anything new. You-all know just as much as I do. I already told you what happened with Grandpa and Johann and all that crap… You put that information together! I-I don't know…"
As soon as eyes fell back on the dead facehugger his thoughts returned to his earlier judgment in the situation and Grandpa but thought that formal talk about bugs was out of his league, like a mild taboo. With Dora – a specialized Xenobiologist - in front of him he felt a bit intimidated; he was only a grunt who knew how to shoot, she had the entire Xenomorph encyclopedia in her head. What could he say that she didn't already know?
He looked at Winnie. She gave him a nervous smile and darted her eyes away. She felt the same incompetence as he. Knowing that the medic knew less about it that he did he decide to just regurgitate the information and let Dora decipher it.
"Dora, I…" He knew he was going to sound stupid. "Listen, now I don't know much about Aliens except where they hurt the most but I do know where Alien eggs come from…"
That got her attention. Before that moment she was so preoccupied with the commotion that she wasn't even thinking about the origins of the facehugger and her mind reeled in mixed fear and joy at what she was allowing him to say.
"Goddammit! There might be a Queen over there! That may be why Grandpa was acting all fucked up! Those things on its back, it was carrying eggs. It couldn't drag us to the nest so it brought the eggs to us. A walking nanny… It attacked us, no, attacked Johann, but first the snowmobiles…Oh fuck. It set us up! The snowmobiles, it put an egg in it then destroyed the other one. We had to take mine…Oh my god…"
Andrew lowered his head in shame at the realization that he had been tricked but an oversized bug. His head shot back up. "It wasn't my fault!"
"Yes it is!" retaliated Joe. "You brought the damn thing in here because you were to lazy to check your equipment!"
"I had to take Johann back! His arm! There wasn't time!"
"You had time to hook up his junk but not to check your stuff? Bullshit!"
"Fuck you! What would you have done?"
"Make sure there aren't any fucking Alien eggs in my trunk that's for sure!"
Winnie intervened. "Damn it! Will you boys quit it? It's over, ok? Andrew did a mistake –"
"That could have killed us!" Spat Joe but Winnie paid not attention to him and continued as if she had been uninterrupted.
" – but we lucked out so no harm done. I'll take the thing back to the lab and burn the bastard."
She turned to Joe. "Joe, there is no reason to hide this incident from HQ but I would appreciate for the sake for many of us to consider sugar-coating the details."
"Tell them there's a Queen!" Dora cried out. "They'll be sure to send a team then! We'll have permission to go inside the nest!"
"No. No Queen. Wait, go inside the nest? Are you mad? No. Joe, no Queen. There's little proof of a Queen so let's not jump to conclusions or anything."
Dora scoffed. "You can't deny there isn't a Queen in there. The odd behavior, the eggs, the freaking facehugger…"
"She has a point Winnie." Andre said. "We can't sweep that fact under the rug. HQ has to know about it."
"You want to get deported, do you? Ok, we don't want to raise a commotion so we'll – "
"No." uttered Joe.
Winnie looked at him. "What?"
"No. HQ will not know about this. You're right Winnie, there is no harm done so there is no reason to contact HQ about it. I'm the last person that likes the idea of withholding information such as this from HQ, after all it's our job and I'm assigned that all facts and data are taken into consideration, but I know the pen-pushers will pry their ugly noses in and eventually find out about the egg and facehugger. Even though the creature is dead the mere fact that it got in here will get us – and especially me – in an immeasurable amount of trouble. It would cause or jobs, our reputation…maybe even our lives. So I greatly urge you take into consideration about keeping this in a low profile."
"What?" Winnie asked with a slight scoff of disbelief.
"Did I stutter at any point? I said we are not reporting this to HQ. Do you want to have your memories fried? You know what happens to those that mess up and live; they either don't live for long or they mess with their brains. I don't know about you but neither choice right now seems very appealing to me. Keep your mouth shut and your heart keeps beating."
"But that's a major violation of protocol! As the director of this colony you cannot challenge the policies so you can save the skin on your ass. You serious cannot be considering such a course of action."
"You mean lack thereof. We are going to pretend this never happened; Andrew checked his equipment and it was all clear. There is no egg in his trunk. The face hugger never appeared. Understood?"
"I don't think this is wise and – "
"Winnie, shut up."
Winnie tensed her eyebrows but said no other words.
Andrew interjected. "Personally, I like the skin on my ass Winnie. I've heard things about those brain-drain operations and that's something I pray never to experience."
Winnie looked at Dora for some sort of support from her side but the woman simply looked away from her.
The medic walked out of the garage, her footsteps echoing lightly in the large room.
It was a few moments before Joe spoke again.
"Dora, check the video feeds, if there is any footage with a hint if this I want you to erase it completely from the hard drive. No trace of it whatsoever."
Dora nodded almost hesitantly. "What if the higher-ups ask about the missing timelines?" She avoided looking at him as she asked, there was a tang of guilt for agreeing to do this but she had to if she wanted to continue with this scientific undertaking.
"Let me take care of them. You just do as you're told. Andrew" – the young man perked his head at the sound of his name – "Don't think that this is over. You may not be formally punished but I'm going to make damn sure you never forget to check your equipment again. Take the thing to the lab's burner then come back here and clean this shit up. There's some battery acid in some canisters in the crate over there along with some protective coverings, use it to burn the egg; outside though, and downwind from here, don't want the stench to come in. Same with Dora, no trace of it; Andrew, you made this mess, you clean it up"
Andrew nodded, relieved that he avoided being at the mercy of HQ even thought the thought of cleaning didn't brighten his mood either, yet he wasn't the kind to look a gift horse in the mouth and complain.
Joe picked up the lifeless facehugger by its tail with the end of his fingers. It was slimy and the stench it produced was overwhelming. Just having the creature touching his skin sent shivers down his spine. He knew how active these creatures could be when alive. They could move with uncanny speed and for a creature with no visible visual organs it could leap with scary precision to their target. Anyone with one of these attached to their face spelt doom, the embryo would develop in a matter of hours – almost always less than a day – then the newborn would chew its way out of its live host and terrorize as one of nature's perfect killing machines. There were those who called it an honor to become part of perfection but Joe thought they were insane for finding honor in being a live nursery to a parasite. Every bug that fell by his hands was a personal victory for him.
The doors of the medical center hissed silently as Andrew walked into the seemingly impossible sterile room reminiscent of a bio-weapons lab than a medical center. Johann was located in this exact same room, recuperating from his surgery under the care of a large plastic dome that monitored his every heartbeat and bodily functions.
The burner was a large box-like contraption protruding halfway through from the wall. The control panel was right adjacent to the burner door and from far away it looked like an oversized microwave except this wasn't used for cooking, it's main purpose was to break down any organic material to its simplest anatomical form then the particles were collected and automatically disposed of.
The burner's door opened with a loud screeching sound. The interior was thick and deep, no light came out of it. It was as welcoming as a crocodile's mouth. Andrew threw the lifeless facehugger in, smacking against the wall of the container with a wet slap. He smelt his slimy hand, gagging at the stench, and wiped the foul goo on his shirt.
He slammed the door but it bounced against the rim and opened. He slammed it again. It simply bounced back open one more time.
"Lousy piece of junk…"
Grabbing the edge of the door he slammed the door shut as hard as he could. The banging sound echoed in the large room…before it swung open.
Andrew let out a frustrated grunt then grabbed the door by the handle and slowly closed it. The door stayed put this time. A sigh of victory escaped his mouth. The burner's figures were sent through the keypad. A loud beep confirmed his order, then he began to exit the room not even giving Johann a glance in his direction for fear that he might feel guilty, he was mad – with a hint of satisfaction – , he didn't want to feel guilty.
The parting doors hissed shut as Andrew stepped out into the hall, unaware that something else grew an interest in Johann.
The burner beeped once angrily as its door slowly swung open. It had not been shut properly.
Inside the darkened cube of the burner, a spindly leg twitched lively…