Dear Readers: I'm sorry it's taken this long to update, I've been really busy lately and am having a little bit of writers block. I'm also sorry that this chapter is shorter than the others, I just thought it's been too long since I updated. Please Review!
Alyssa was glad to see it was just Lian as the door opened. Lian jumped in surprise as she saw all the guns aimed at her.
"Where the hell have you all been?" Lian asked.
"Finding her," Kevin said and pointed at Alyssa. Lian nodded. It was now that Alyssa saw the huge slash going across Lian's right cheek, which was bleeding pretty badly.
"What happened to you?" Alyssa asked. Lian gave all of them a stern look.
"You guys should come to the med room, now."
Katie couldn't believe what she was seeing. Their were two examination in the med room. On one lay a large form covered in a grey blanket from head to toe. On the other, was Kiersten. But whatever had made her Kiersten was gone now. She had a large tube, which was connected to a breathing machine, going down her throat, and two more in her nose. All the skin on her body that wasn't protected by armor was scarred with third-degree burns, the flesh still bleeding and melting. He armor was partly melted, and the clothing was burned into her flesh. Her silky black hair was gone, with just a few tufts of hair left on her head. Katie winced as she noticed that the eyelids on Kiersten's right eye had been melted together, closing her eye forever. The other eye was closed, since Kiersten was most definitely in a coma.
"Oh God," Nate muttered. Katie looked away as he put his arm around her.
"What happened?" she asked. She looked back to Lian.
"This happened," Lian said, and pulled the blanket off of the thing on the other table.
"Oh fuck," Kevin said, and Katie heard Alyssa scream. It was one of them, on of the aliens, except part of its banana-shaped head had been blown off, revealing a semi-hollow dome filled with yellow-green muck that might have been its brains. Katie took a deep breath. She didn't want to look at it, but at the same time couldn't take her eyes off of it.
"Wha… what happened?" Alyssa cried. Lian began to speak, but couldn't. Katie could see she was trying not to cry.
"It… it was in the vents, and, and, and…" she started and burst into tears. Katie couldn't believe it. Everything was just getting so fucked up. Andrew and were Rigby dead and Kiersten in a coma. What next? She listened as Lian continued. "It pushed Jerry out of the vents, and it jumped at us. We tried to dodge it, but the fucking thing was fast. It… it grabbed me, and it lifted me up. Kiersten shot it, though, and it dropped me and went after her. While it was running I… I didn't know what else to do. I shot it, and its blood got all over her, and its tail whipped around and cut my face," she told, and pointed to the deep gash on her cheek. She wiped away the tears coming from her eyes, and continued. "As soon as the blood it her she started screaming and I tried to help her but she kept…wiggling and screaming. She ran out of the armory and into the main hall, and when I got to her she just collapsed. I brought her in here as soon as I could, and I've been waiting for you guys ever since," she finished.
"We need to get her out of here, she needs help," Nate said. Lian smiled.
"Wait, where's Andrew and Rig?" Lian asked. Kate looked at everybody, but she suspected nobody had the heart to tell her.
"They, umm, they're dead…" Katie explained. Lian took a deep breath, trying to keep the tears back.
"Wait, did u see them die, or did the aliens take them away?" she asked.
"Taken away," Kevin told her. Lian nodded.
"Then they aren't dead," she said. Katie noticed the confused looks on everyone's face, and she herself didn't understand. Lian noticed the confused look on their faces, and spoke up. "Come on, I need to show you guys something."
Nate followed Lian as they walked towards the main hall. He didn't know how Lian knew Rigby and Andrew weren't dead, but he hoped to God she was right. All he knew was that he wanted to get out of here; he wanted all of them to get out of here. Lian stopped by a computer, and clicked on a file called A-R.
"What does A-R mean?" he asked. Lian looked back at him.
"Alien Research," she said, and a new page opened, and he began reading.
Alien Research
In the few days it's been since these things have attacked us, and we don't know how long we can last. We've tried hard to learn about these things, find a way to kill them all or something, so I guess I'll record them here.
We know that they die easily, they have a hard exoskeleton for protection, but it can be penetrated by the average bullet, even a knife if thrust with the right amount of force. We also know that the creatures have a lifecycle that develops in stages, which I will explain now.
1.We know that the things start out in an egg form, and I think that they have a sort of heat sensor, or a movement detector, because the ones that have been infected and remember say it didn't open until they came close.
2. Living in the eggs are creatures we have named facehuggers. They're like ugly little spiders, eight legs and all. When I saw one attack Clint, it jumped, nearly ten feet at him, and grabbed his head. At the same time it wrapped its tail tight around his neck. After it came off of him, we dissected it, and found out that it shoves a tube down your throat that puts a baby in your chest.
3. We don't know how long the things take to grow in you. For one person it burst after twenty minutes, another it took nearly five days. Now, we shoot all the infected on sight. The company won't be coming anytime soon, and we really don't need any more of these things running around, and none of our friends deserve the pain.
4. We don't know how long it takes for the aliens to mature, but we do know that the little bastards form cocoons and grow in them. After seeing it happen to so many of our marines, we know the aliens don't flat out kill usually unless they are outnumbered. Instead they try to impregnate us, the bastards. A few though have killed our marines without impregnation, Lord knows why. Maybe they were just hungry.
Those are all the stages that we know of, but one thing still confuses us: If there are so many eggs, what the hell is making them? I'm not sure I want to know. Two days ago Kerckhoff and Jay Posteraro took a group of marines down into the tunnels to try and kill whatever was producing the eggs. None of them have come back…
And now we're getting messages from Weyland-Yutani saying they want us to capture an alien and bring it back, I don't know why; probably for some bio-weapon, the crazy shits. I don't think there are enough of us left to even attempt to capture one…
Corporal Jared Hennen
Nate finished reading, and suddenly everything seemed to make sense.
"There is no oil," he said out loud. Everybody looked up at him, and he noticed all the confused looks.
"What do you mean?" Alyssa asked. He sat down in a chair, overwhelmed at what the bastards had pulled. The company had screwed over their friends, and now was sending them in to clean up the mess.
"They knew, the goddamn sons a bitches knew about the nest," he said, and he saw the looks on all their faces, they were realizing it too. "Who's to say the company hasn't known about these things? They knew that these things were, and they told us there was oil to get us to dig," he explained. He heard Kevin curse; Alyssa too.
"If they knew about these things before; like how dangerous they are, then why did they send them down there?" Alyssa asked.
"Because, Alyssa, we're grunts. We're just junk to them, exposable junk. They don't care about us, they just want whatever they can get to make money," he told her. There was a long moment of silence before Katie spoke.
"Fuck! What are we gonna do, our radios aren't strong enough to reach the Aphrodite, right?" she asked. Nate nodded.
"Only Andrew's was, and he's dead," he said. Lian shook her head.
"No, he's not. He's probably being impregnated right now, if we go down we can grab the radio and save him, maybe Rigby too," she said. Kevin shook his head.
"Fuck you Lian, we already went down there once today, I don't plan on doing it again," he said loudly.
"Yeah Lian, last time we went down two of us didn't make it back," Katie said. Lian shrugged her shoulders.
"That may be, but if we don't we're going to be stuck down here until they break in and kill us. Like Nate said, the company doesn't care about us, they just want their precious alien. We need Andrew's radio to call the Aphrodite, and I think I know a way to get into the nest without being swarmed by the bugs," she said. Nate couldn't think of any way.
"How?" he asked, and everyone else said the same.
"The A.P.C."