CHAPTER 2
Sometimes sleep was dark and empty like the black void of space. Other times they came in the dreams. Often even when waking from the void of an empty dream Newt would feel like they had been hiding in the dark, watching her. She often reluctantly stepped onto the floor, anticipating the skittering sound of a face hugger, or the sinister hiss of a full grown alien warrior.
Once she had dreamed of a dark prison world where her adopted mother had been implanted with an alien embryo. Another time she had dreamed of a far flung future where Ellen Ripley had been cloned and her DNA crossed with one of the alien creatures. Most often she dreamed of the Hadley's Hope colony, of dark twisting corridors, of traversing the forbidden labyrinth of ventilation shafts and maintenance access tunnels.
In those tunnels Newt had witnessed the murder of her brother, her friends and the other colonists. She had watched as people became incubators and food, as flesh was shredded and as blood painted the walls. The slits of ventilation covers became her window to a mad world of chaos and destruction. The colonists came to build a world, not to fight off an implacable, soulless, nearly invincible foe. She might think of them as cold blooded, but their blood was acid, and even when the colonists managed to injure or kill one, often the spilled life blood of the thing still wrought even further destruction.
Vividly she remembered how the face hugger fell off dead from her father's face and everybody thought everything was going to be okay. Then a few days later as they sat around the supper table, ironically joking about the entire incident, her father had started to gasp. He had fallen to the floor, writhing in pain, screaming and clutching at his torso. Newt thought he had been choking or maybe having a heart attack. Her mother had fallen at his side desperately trying to help and Newt had kneeled beside her. Then, in horror she had watched her father's chest explode and felt the hot blood splash across her face.
The nascent alien had screeched as it breathed its first air, eyeing her then her mother. With a lightning fast leap, it had struck her mother and ripped her throat open, more blood spraying Newt's face. She had felt somebody grab her from behind, her brother dragging her from the grisly scene as the thing slithered for cover.
They had murdered Newt that day, and murdered her over and over as she watched each life pass. They had murdered her innocence, taken away her childhood. Images had been burned into her brain for all the days of her life. She could never forget the taste of her parents' blood on her lips as she had screamed hysterically.
For days then weeks she evaded the aliens. Her doll had been her constant companion, a toy her father had given her for her birthday. Then one day, in a close call in a narrow crawlspace as she barely escaped a deadly alien claw, the thing had caught the doll. She had lost so much, her mother, her father, her brother, her home. Newt had been determined not to lose the doll. She had tightly twisted her little fingers in its hair and pulled desperately on it. The alien wrenched at it and had torn the body away, leaving Newt with only the plastic head. They had destroyed her last friend in the colony, her one comfort. She had screamed. She had cried. And she had run, back to her room she had created. Once she reached it she had collapsed on the heap of junk and sobbed. Everything had seemed lost. Then, finally, after what seemed an eternity, after it had become impossible to determine the nightmares from the reality, Ripley had come, and Hicks and Hudson and Bishop and the other Marines. And despite their bravado and big guns, Newt had known it could never be enough.
Ripley had saved her though, and made her into the daughter she had lost after over 60 years drifting in hyper sleep. The money Ripley received in a settlement from Weyland-Yutani had given Newt a rich life. Ripley had never seemed too happy about it, calling it "hush money" but she used it to give Newt everything she ever wanted.
Then one day a monster had killed her mother. Not an alien, but cancer. The woman that had defeated the most vicious monster in the galaxy could not overcome a mere human disease. Ovarian cancer had killed Ellen Ripley and left Newt without even an adopted mother.
Sometimes she was angry that she had let herself die. Sometimes she understood that Ripley had fought as hard as she could. Other times, she just wanted to die herself. But just like back on Hadley's Hope, she could not quit and could not give up. It was just not who Newt, it was just not who Rebecca Ripley, was. Despite the odds, despite the tragedy, despite the nightmares, Newt would persevere, even if she must do so alone.