She sat on the rickety cot beside her brother. The cargo bay was full of families like theirs, huddled together in the colony�s last hope for safety while they awaited the marines they were promised. Their mother�s face was stern and preoccupied as she gestured for them to stay. �Newt, Tim, sit here. I�ll be right back.�
The small woman strode her way to the armed staff at the cargo bay�s doorway, catching the gangly one�s eye and holding her ground firmly. �I want a gun.�
The thin man scowled with some concern, �Don�t you think we�re all better off leaving the weapons with those who know how to use them?�
Unblinking, the blonde tensed her jaw. �I saw what happened to my husband. If things go bad,� she pointed shakily back toward her children, �I need something to make sure they don�t end up the same way.�
�Move out of the way! I�m telling you, I heard gunfire out there!�
�And I�m telling you that there ain�t no one out there! You�re hearing things!�
The men�s shouting rang through from the end of the cargo bay and stirred the girl awake. �Mom,� she intoned groggily, �What�s wrong?�
�I don�t know, honey.� The woman�s face was hauntingly distant. She stroked her daughter�s hair comfortingly, but would not meet her eyes. �Just stay put. It�ll be fine. I promise.�
At the doorway, the argument continued, �Listen, it has to be Draper�s group! If we still have men out there, they need shelter! We�ve got to let them in!�
�We can�t compromise our own security, they�ll have to make it on their own��
�Go to hell. You aren�t giving the orders here anymore. We aren�t about to leave any man to those creatures. We�re opening the door.�
�Fuck you! We�ve got women and children in here, stop and think about them!�
�I�m thinking about the men in that corridor! If you think that we��
The massive cargo bay door shuddered and groaned its way open, revealing a single solitary figure staggering in the dark, all tattered clothes and pale skin. The haggard man was oozing blood from his gaping mouth, with terror in his eyes. Trying to stumble toward the doorway, he lurched forward and fell face-first to the steel floor, inviting the light to play across the grotesque open back of his hollowed-out skull.
�Fuck! Get it closed, get it��
A swarm of lithe black limbs and tails flooded through the doorway, and the bay was filled with a horror of hisses and gunfire, blood and acid, screams and prayers.
The last thing Rebecca saw in that cargo bay was her mother raising the small pistol to the back of Timmy�s head.
The rest was a blur of her terrified scrambling through the air ducts, her mind a careening wheel of panic.
Got to get away�
I can go places they can�t fit�
Mom, you promised�
PART 1
Four days without food. Less than an hour of sleep. Lying flat on her back, deep within a ventilation duct that even her slight form could barely crawl through, Newt's wide blue eyes fought back to waking. Heavy eyelids grudgingly parted for pupils dilated by darkness and adrenaline. Each warm breath condensed on galvanized steel just long enough to see before dispersing as if it had never been. She was safe in the small spaces like these, it seemed, but it would soon be the coffin it felt like, if she couldn't make it to the cafeteria just once.
She would sometimes hear them at night, tasting the air just meters away, a shadow crossing her only light, and so she would assume that one would be waiting for her to emerge. She would wait, and wait, and hope and pray that she'd waited long enough before wriggling out from the vent to quickly find another. So far, she had been lucky.
Worming up to the grate, she lay there for some time, staring out the slits at the mocking sunlight slowly reaching through the corridor, waiting an hour or more for any sign, any hint of a single monster. Her technique wasn't terrible: Go in the exhausts, and out the intakes, keeping her scent blowing out the place she'd already been, and off the place she would emerge. Cross through the fans at dawn and dusk while they're stopped to conserve energy during stable temperatures. It had taken some experimentation and terrifying close calls, but this precocious girl, nearly as sharp as her father, worked out the pattern soon enough.
Dropping slowly from the loosened vent, the small blonde eased onto pale hands before pulling her shaking legs along, crouching on all fours with furtive glances down both ends of the hall. To spend as much time out of hiding as she would need to rummage through the cafeteria was a dangerous proposition, but it was time to start taking risks. To eat or be eaten.
Hunger. Craving. Need. It rose each day, driving him in search of something he couldn't even imagine. He watched the others scurry about their instinctive tasks for the hive, for Her, and he wondered at the feeling of difference from them. Their slightly different forms, their more reckless acts, their seeming lack of interest in the things about which he was curious. They passed by the objects he puzzled over and blithely ripped into the creatures whose bodies later fascinated his senses.
Indeed, he was different. He had developed more like their hosts than had his many siblings. More inquisitive thoughts lurked in his mind, and from his body hung an appendage difficult to ignore. An organ that had reacted curiously during the final feeding of days before. Some of those shapes... Some of those sounds... Their flesh in his hands...
He could feel the organ begin to twitch and swell, and averted his attention with a frustrated hiss. He watched a sibling pass as it returned to the hive from the sunlight, crawling along the rippling resin wall yet again empty-handed.
There had been no more catches since then, but there was one more to be had. He sensed it. They all did. The traces across the floor from wall to wall. The wafting from a new place each night. The small sounds in the dark.
It was juvenile, insignificant, yet its elusivness was maddening to him. There was some trick at work, a game being played, and every hint uncovered fueled his interest more. The prey was clever, it was young, and it was female.
And it was hungry.
The cafeteria was right there. Newt's heart was hammering at her small chest. She had never been out of hiding so long, moving so far in one stretch. While the creatures were most active at night, there were always some during the day, and she kept expecting that dreaded hiss to spell her doom at any moment. It wasn't helping that in her desperately sleepless state, shadows at the corner of her eye took on lives of their own.
Swallowing the lump in her throat, she padded on bare feet across the final meters to the double doors and slid inside.
Peering around the scene of the dim and cavernous space, she felt sick. One of the earliest attacks had left its haunting marks�bloodstains and clothing tatters abound�but all the bodies, living and dead, had been taken away to wherever the monsters go, and where they kept coming from. It looked like a massacre of ghosts.