"Fuck you, man. It's not my fault she died! I was wrongly accused."
"Like fucking hell you were. She was what... Twelve? Maybe thirteen at most?"
"Hey, you two! Calm your fucking traps and get in the car."
Damn... I remember that car ride. Last one I ever had. I should probably forget it, but I just remember... I recall each bump in the road. Each pebble under the tires. Each turn we made. Each cuss that was shared between the ten of us in the back of that goddamn van. Yeah, there were ten of us then, before we left earth.
There was Johnny, Paul, Clement, Rodney, Cooper, two named Barry, Bradley, Kingsley, and me. I'm Harley.
My dad's the one who named me. Apparently when he was a teenager he had a little motor vehicle called a 'Harley'. He'd told me that my mother probably wouldn't have liked the name, but she died during child birth. Sometimes my father'd come home from a night of drinking and blame me for her death.
I'd tell him it wasn't my fault. It was his for having sex with her in the first place. He'd get all mad and throw his old man tantrums, and cuss at me. At one point I had just about enough, and I punched him in the jaw. He ended up in the hospital that night, woke up there the next morning wondering what happened at the bar the previous night. I'd only told him that he should quit drinking. He hadn't picked up a bottle since.
At least I did that one good thing in my life.
Now here I was with these nine assholes in the back of a van on my way to the big bad base of the big bad company. What a trip.
I felt the van lurch to a stop and the engine turned off. That's about when Cooper began to melt down. Swearing under his breath, covering his ears, tucking his legs up.
"Weyland's going to send us up, man. I... I can't go up guys, not with those fuckers. They'll send us on a death mission! Didn't you hear what happened to that Ripley chick that came back? She said her entire crew got w-"
The van door opened and Cooper shrivelled into a corner of the van, whimpering as though he was a recently abused puppy. The man who opened the door talked briefly about how we should behave, and if we refused we'd be put on 'permanent time-out'. I think we all know what he really meant by that.
We all knew this would not be a good few weeks. In fact, I think we'd all hate it.
God damn, this place looked like shit, inside and out. The outside walls looked no better than that of a homeless man's cardboard box, and the inside walls looked like the metal frame of a garbage dumpster.
We walked through at least ten different hallways on our way to the boss man's office. Somehow I imagined a Weyland building would look way better than it did. Maybe it was just this one building. The building they send the criminals to space from.
How exciting.
_LOG HGG-779-32-B_