The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 3

by Sandy Schofield

  Once, his family had uncovered a smuggler’s body on one of their scheduled stops, a sexless, half-buried corpse that had died from a bullet in its back, undoubtedly from a greedy shipmate’s gun. The smuggler had perhaps been dead for months and the stink had been awful, vicious and rank.

  This new smell was similar, but multiplied a thousandfold. Paul stared around dully through tear-swollen eyes but could see no corpses, no human—

  A dripping sound, overhead. Paul looked up, knowing already what he would see, trying and failing to steel himself against the sight.

  There were at least a dozen human beings hung from the ceiling, their bodies naked and bloated, mouths gaping open in silent screams. Men and women, faces and limbs strung together with the alien webbing, woven into a grotesque, living tapestry of mutilation—but only partly living. The stink was from those that had died, their corpses putrefying into malodorous liquid flesh that spattered softly to the ground.

  Incubators. This is what happens, what will happen to us…

  The drone carried him past, the dangling limbs of the human incubators brushing against his hair with cold, dead fingers; he was taken to a bare place against the back wall, pushed up against it roughly. A pool of greenish-gray liquid was nearby, the opaque slime teeming with tiny tadpole creatures, but Paul didn’t even hazard a guess as to what they were for; he could only stare at the hanging forest of flesh and try not to see it. He was beyond guessing, beyond anything but a dull numbness.

  He was attached to the wall with thick strands of the weblike secretion, his arms strung over his head, one leg up and the other half on the ground. The drone cluttered, a low clucking sound, then turned and left him there to contemplate his fate.

  Hours passed, the only sound there that of the slow dripping in front of him and the occasional unconscious moan from one of the dying incubators. Hours and hours and hours. The dim light faded, went away, came back. Paul screamed for a while, then slept, then awoke to scream again, but nothing changed.

  Sometimes from far away, he heard other screams, distant human voices begging and sobbing, but they never lasted very long. He wasn’t sure if he cared, but thought that he had at some point before—before his eyes and nose had been scoured by the hideous stench, before that girl had been ripped to pieces. Before he was shown what he was to become…

  When they finally appeared, he wasn’t sure how he felt about it. Two dark shapes loped forward, past the hanging vines, straight at him; he eyed them suspiciously, tried to think—

  They’ve come to kill you now.

  Paul smiled, then laughed, welcoming the creatures in a voice that was high and unknown to him. He was going to die! It was…

  He searched through the darkness of his mind for the symbols, the word that it was… it was—a miracle, that was it! He thanked them as best he could, nodding and babbling sounds that seemed familiar to some part of him. He would be free from this place, free to rest his aching eyes, to sleep and never have to dream…

  He was wrong.

  * * *

  “They had come to feed me,” he said quietly. “One of the drones buried its face into a hanging corpse, then came to me and covered my mouth with its own, forcing the rotten flesh down my throat. They wanted me alive, at least for a while…

  “The feeding was interrupted by a scream, the worst sound I’ve ever heard, before or since—it was human, but only because it came from a human body; whatever had made Quentin Clark a human was irretrievably gone.

  “Another drone brought him into the chamber, and he screamed on and on, blood on his lips from his shredded vocal cords; he was quite insane, you see, driven mad by whatever horrors he’d endured in that stinking hell.

  “One of his arms was half gone, a scrap of cloth tied above his elbow as a makeshift tourniquet. And there was a huge, ragged hole in the crotch of his pants, the tatters remaining stained with blood and bits of flesh.

  “He didn’t stop screaming when they pushed him into that pool of green liquid, forcing him to drink. He continued to scream as they glued his head to the wall… and then screamed after they left him, on and on, hour after hour, until he only made a horrible gobbling sound like a goose.

  “It was about then that I started trying to swallow my own tongue…”

  Church paused, smiled wryly at the pale, mute faces of his audience.

  “As you’ve surely guessed, I didn’t succeed. I don’t know why I was kept alive, or why I was separated from the others; perhaps they were also isolated and I was just the last in line for whatever they wanted us for, I honestly never understood why and probably never will…

  “I survived because I had no alternative, although for a while after that, I lost my grip on reality. I’m not sure for how long; days, I suppose. Ultimately, my mind simply retreated into itself…”

  * * *

  …movement, and a sudden sharp pain, joined by another, then too many to count. He moaned, felt his body jostled roughly by bony fingers, his numb limbs abruptly alive and screaming with needles of agony.

  Eyes opened from the pain. Before him, a man in a scummy pond of fluid, swollen and dead. He frowned, knew something about the man—

  —he stopped screaming, he finally stopped screaming—

  “Clark,” he rasped, but wasn’t sure what that meant. The thing that held him didn’t answer, but dragged him away and through an indefinite darkness.

  Time and movement, and an opening of space. He was put down, landed and crumpled to a sticky floor. New place, new sounds—sucking, slurking noises. Soft wet meat noises.

  Something clicked inside.

  Paul raised his head wearily, blinking. He’d been dreaming for a long time, something about a ship and Quentin Clark, shouting—

  Screaming, and he wouldn’t stop; that wasn’t a dream…

  Consciousness, and Paul didn’t like it, didn’t want it, but he remembered everything now. He must have blacked out for a time, but the drones had come back, taken him down from the wall, taken him—

  Paul looked around, saw the strange, egglike orbs all around him in the high-walled room. He crawled, stumbled to his feet, saw the lithe black figures crouching nearby, watching a struggling human figure—the person, woman impossibly bloated, her hands secured to the floor, her movements weak and her form wracked with pain.

  He was in their breeding pen. And Louise Clark was about to give birth.

  21

  The drones ignored him, surrounded the moaning woman, cluttered and hissed. Paul was transfixed by the sight, unable to move in his terror, and he watched helplessly as one of the drones moved closer, laid one claw gently against her monstrous, naked belly. Stroked it, pushing away the few remaining rags of her clothing to expose the stretched flesh.

  I have to do something, help her—

  He started to tremble all over, his mind screaming to turn back into its earlier void. There was nothing he could do, nothing.

  A ripple of movement beneath her skin, a sliding finger beneath a flesh blanket. Louise convulsed, her back arching, her mouth screaming with no sound, nothing but the faintest gasp for air.

  Her eyes opened and fixed on Paul’s for one long second, the most tortured expression he’d ever seen.

  She knows, Holy Mother, she knows what’s happening!

  Louise rolled her head against the ground, back and forth, the movements becoming wilder as another ripple stretched at her swollen womb. Her mouth opened again, and this time she did scream, one long, piercing cry of agony and awareness.

  Her belly ruptured, burst outward in a spray of gore, and still she screamed, alive and knowing, screamed as the drone nearest reached into her throbbing gut and pulled free a tiny parasite…

  She died with her eyes open, her purpose served for the capering monsters. They snatched up two more of the horrid things, dripping with Louise’s ruptured tissues. Hissing excitedly, they held up their small, weakly squirming children, the newborn drones different than the spider creature
s he’d seen before, longer, eelish—

  Those dead fingered things were first stage, and then the thought that sent him over: she had triplets…

  Paul vomited, not knowing that there was anything left for his body to expel. Chunks of bloody flesh spewed from his mouth, the sight and smell of it causing him to heave again.

  The drones didn’t seem to notice; they had begun to shriek, the sounds angry and terrible. Paul looked up, nauseous and sick and so afraid for his sanity, for his soul, that it took him a moment to realize what had happened.

  Their babies were dying. Two of them had stopped moving already, and in less than a minute, the third squealed faintly and joined its bloody siblings.

  Dead.

  The drones screeched on, the echoes in the giant chamber still furious and awful—but suddenly Paul thought that maybe their cries were more, they sounded—

  Frustrated.

  Afraid.

  Something was wrong with the hive.

  * * *

  “From that moment forward, I kept my eyes and mind open for any information that would help me with my new resolve; I would find a way to kill them all. Some sickness had invaded their nest, they were vulnerable to it, and if I could discover the cause, could utilize it somehow…

  “I swore then that I would survive, would make myself into the deadliest enemy the aliens had ever known. Why they had taken me to that birthing chamber, I don’t know, and at the time, didn’t care; all I knew was that I was still alive and that I would find a way to stay alive. And a way to make them sorry for not killing me first.

  “When they led me away from that place, I observed. I saw things that had been there before, but in my panic had failed to notice—drones, dead and decaying. More of the tiny, spidery parasites littering the ground, stacked in piles at every corner, along with some of those eelish children like those that had come from Louise. And some of the adult creatures were slower than others, sick with whatever disease was there, their exoskeletons dull, their movements shaky.

  “I was taken to a chamber where I saw what was left of Hewett and Johanson—they were beyond being able to recognize me.”

  Church faltered, remembered the wide, blasted eyes of the crewmen, the grasping, empty faces. He shook it off and continued.

  “I was led to another of those stinking pools—but I didn’t wait for the aliens to force me. With a supreme effort of will, I put my face into the murky liquid and made a show of drinking eagerly. I hoped that if I complied, I’d be spared the treatment that had made inhuman things of my crewmates.

  “From the start, this plan met with success. The aliens did not molest me as long as I anticipated their actions. I—my friends were past being able to fend for themselves…”

  Church trailed off. His audience didn’t need to know how he’d fed the two dying men, carried the squirming, nameless parasites in his mouth to theirs, watched their grinning, idiot faces as they swallowed—

  “… so when I saw them doing a task I thought I could emulate, I took it upon myself; I’d do anything to prove I wasn’t a troublemaker.

  “Soon, the aliens stopped guarding me so closely and I was able to investigate my surroundings. I gathered as many samples of organic substances around me as I could, and kept them hidden in a small recess—I began to conduct crude experiments, testing the reactions of the samples on one another. The leechlike things in those pools, all throughout the nest—they secreted a solventlike colloid, which the aliens were evidently cultivating as a sort of medicine. And after much trial and error, I discovered that that secretion destroyed a certain ubiquitous black mold that was toxic to the drones. The drones had been trying to immunize us against whatever was making them sick, to experiment on us, I suppose, to discover a cure for their disease.

  “Days, perhaps weeks, had passed, but I finally had something, something that the drones were incapable of understanding; I had the key to their survival in my hand.

  “I immediately put my findings to use, using large quantities of the toxic mold to destroy those living medicine factories. It was amazing how well it worked; in a matter of days, drones were dying from their polluted serum. I made use of every chance I had to conduct this—biological sabotage, still searching for more, my experiments growing in range and complexity with each day.

  “Thoughts of escape became secondary to the results of my work; I used my crewmates’ skulls for dishes, their skin for forming vessels, arteries for tubing—any and everything I could find that would assist me in my search…”

  Church remembered watching them, recalled the heady sense of power that had come to him with each drone falling, dying. He had been reared to believe that they were all but indomitable, almost impossible to kill—and yet there he had been, surviving among them. Poisoning them, fooling them. Learning their secrets.

  And so obsessed with his experiments that he’d long stopped wondering how it would all end…

  * * *

  Paul shambled down the passage toward his secret cache, giggling to himself. Four more today, four! The last had died at his feet, its spiny, dusky arms wasted and reaching, its dying rattle slow, suffering…

  Movement behind him. Paul stopped, head down, waiting for the drone to pass; they didn’t see him anymore, he was just another shadow, harmless and—

  A talon, cold and mute against his bony shoulder. The creature hissed dully, sickly, turned him around, and shoved him in the opposite direction, following close behind.

  Another feeding. Paul frowned unhappily, hurrying ahead of the drone. It must be taking him to eat something; all of the humans were certainly dead, had been for many days. His stomach rumbled at the thought of food, accompanied closely by a roiling queasiness; the matter they fed him was too decayed to provide much nourishment anymore.

  They reached an opening in the dim passage and Paul started down the left fork, where the last of the—

  Amys! His name was Amys!

  —food was kept. The drone screeched at him and he turned, surprised. It still stood in the open passage, waiting. He turned back, confused. There was no other way to go.

  The creature snatched at his arm, pulled him toward a towering heap of drone corpses. It yanked him roughly around the pile, pushing at the decayed mass—

  —and behind it, another passage, small and dark.

  Paul smiled in spite of his uncertainty. He was being taken somewhere new, a place he hadn’t yet visited with his poisons. Perhaps there was another pool there…

  Or it’s finally my turn to die.

  He pushed the thought aside, focused on what he could control. The drone hissed again, and he started down the passage eagerly. It was empty, very dark, but after a moment or two he could make out a dimness ahead, another chamber.

  He could hear more of the dying drones there, had come to know the sound of the disease in their cries, the reedy whistle of their breathing. There were five of them in the entry; they parted so that he could step into the small chamber.

  He looked around quickly, grinning, then frowning; no pool, but a large, sloping cradlelike thing built up out of alien secretions that dominated the room, the only thing there. And inside the cradle, a human figure.

  It was his mother.

  Paul felt something deep inside of him shrivel and die. He had thought that there was nothing else for him to endure, no other terror that could get through to him, no atrocity left.

  She must have fought them all along the way; her arms and legs were but rotting stumps, bitten or torn off. Her skin was covered with dozens, hundreds of lacerations, claw marks—

  Impossibly, horribly, she lived. He could hear her unconscious breathing, shallow and slow, each intake of foul air stabbing at the remnants of his soul…

  A drone shoved him rudely forward; he barely stopped before he would have fallen in, landed on top of her—

  “Nooo—” he moaned, felt his sanity curdle, prepared to depart forever as he realized why he’d been brought to this place
.

  The creatures wanted them to mate. To make healthy, new incubators.

  Paul felt the chamber spinning, darkness clouding his vision, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep his awareness for much longer, couldn’t stop himself from falling into the void. He bent over her, the drones leaning in, hissing gleefully—

  Paul remembered her smile, her laugh, the way she’d had of touching her hair when she was nervous—all of that gone, ripped away…

  He gently, tenderly wrapped his trembling hands around his mother’s fevered throat and did the only thing he could to ease her suffering.

  One of the drones shrieked, grabbed for him, but it was weak from the sickness—and too late. Lucian’s eyes bulged open in the last seconds of her life, strangled by her only son, and he saw the pain there, the insanity—

  And the final, small flicker of gratitude. He wept, calling her name as the room spun faster, as the drones snatched him away from her mutilated corpse.

  …a

  …everything went to black.

  * * *

  “When I awoke again, I was secured to one wall of their breeding pen. The aliens gave their best shot; their last chance, really.

  “They brought an egg, opened it in my face. The sickness had affected even those; they had to help the weak face-hugger out of its shell. Still, it was stronger than I.

  “It forced my lips and jaws apart… shoved its probe down my trachea. And into my chest.”

  Church stopped for a moment, found that he couldn’t go on, not yet. He could almost feel it, as he sometimes did in his dreams—the prehensile coiled tail, closing around his throat, tightening.

  He looked up, saw Crespi and McGuinness there, waiting, their expressions unreadable. Finally, Crespi broke the silence, his voice soft and somehow bland.

  “But… how? How did you survive?”

  Church smiled faintly. “Who says I did?”

  22

  Church studied their faces, read the mute shock there, and decided to finish his little tale; there was still much to do, and the emotions he had stirred within himself weren’t what he had expected, not at all. He’d hoped for a catharsis, an understanding—and what he felt was unclear.