Feet pounding on the stone floor, the Predator raced through a dark passageway lined with pillars. Lex struggled to keep up. Though a phenomenal athlete in her own right, she was incapable of matching the brutal pace set by Scar. His massive strides more than doubled her own footsteps. Lex was sweating under her winter jumpsuit and heavy Alien armor, and she was also taking in great gulps of frigid air.
Thirty paces ahead, Scar paused at an intersection, as if uncertain which direction to take. Suddenly he bolted to the right.
“No! No! That way,” she pointed. “Go left.”
The Predator whirled around and spied one of the strobe lights, still flashing where Lex had left it hours before. Lex caught up with him and recognized the area—it was the corridor that led up to the sacrificial chamber where they’d left Thomas, Adele Rousseau, and several archaeologists.
“It’s this way up!” she cried, gesturing as she hurried forward.
For a moment it looked as if Scar wasn’t going to follow her. Then he took off, running past Lex, leading once more.
“Slow down a little,” Lex huffed. “Let me catch up.”
To her surprise, he did. After that, Scar paced himself to match her stride, and they ran side by side. It seemed the Predator was beginning to regard her as an equal. Lex didn’t know whether she should be flattered or appalled.
Ahead of them a black doorway yawned, two strobes blinking on either side of it.
“The sacrificial chamber,” Lex cried.
They slowed and cautiously entered the circular chamber. On the floor, Lex spied a blood-splattered handgun—Adele Rousseau’s Desert Eagle. Lex scooped the weapon up and checked the magazine. One bullet left.
From somewhere inside the chamber, Lex heard a faint, ghostly echo. Scar heard it, too. Lex strained to listen, and finally she could make out the sound of a human voice calling her name.
“Lex…”
“Sebastian!”
Eyes darting, Lex peered beyond the slabs and the mummies. In an antechamber, she saw a cluster of ghastly statues mounted on the wall—statues she did not remember seeing the last time she was in this room.
The voice called again.
“Lex… Help me…”
She looped her club to her belt and pulled a spear fashioned from the tip of an Alien’s tail off her back.
Then she slowly approached the stone sculptures, her weapon raised and ready. As her eyes strained in the half light, Lex could make out some of the repugnant details of a horrific, terra-cotta mural. It appeared to be the three-dimensional image of a mythical beast with a hard shell for a body and a tiny, humanlike head.
“Lex… Please…”
Only when the voice called again did the truth become clear. This wasn’t a mural. This grotesque tableau was actually alive. The mythical beast was really a human being—Sebastian De Rosa.
The archaeologist was encased in a monstrous Alien cocoon, his arms, legs and feet completely enmeshed in a near-impenetrable shell. On the stone floor lay a deflated egg sack and the translucent shell of a spent face hugger, belly up, its legs stiff with rigor mortis and pointed at the ceiling.
“Oh, God… Sebastian…”
The man tried to smile, but the effort died on his lips. When he spoke, the words did not come easily. Each breath was labored. He retched, and red foam flecked his pallid cheek.
“Lex… I…”
“Hold on, I’ll get you out of there.”
Lex tore at the cocoon with her hands, but it was futile. The surface was as hard as marble. Lex drew a piton and hacked at the enveloping shell, gouging out a few splinters before the steel spike blunted and bent in her hand.
“No!” Sebastian gasped. “It’s too late. You have to stop these things.”
Sebastian convulsed. The tendons in his neck bulged as his head jerked from side to side. His mouth gaped open, and blood flowed from his nose.
“Lex… They can’t reach the surface…” he moaned, struggling.
The Predator appeared behind Lex. Gazing impassively at the dying man, he rested his huge hand on Lex’s shoulder. She shrugged it off and lunged at the cocoon, beating it with her fists.
“Don’t worry, Sebastian. I’m getting you out of there!”
Scar gripped her shoulder again, far less gently now. The Predator dragged her back, away from the cocoon, as she struggled against him.
“Get off me,” Lex cried, eyes wet. “I have to help him.”
The emotion she’d buried in order to survive overwhelmed her now. She’d watched Max Stafford and Charles Weyland die, and she was not about to give up on Sebastian. Not without a fight.
But still Scar pulled her away.
“Let me go,” she screamed.
“Make it to the surface…” The Predator’s modulated voice replayed Lex’s own words to her again.
“I said get off me!”
“Kill me!” Sebastian cried out with the last of his strength. “Do it.”
He convulsed again. The pale, naked flesh under his heart began to stretch and bulge. Crimson rents appeared as his skin split open and blood gushed everywhere. Then the man threw his gaze heavenward and cried out in agony.
“I’m sorry,” Lex murmured.
She raised the handgun and fired at Sebastian’s head. His tormented screams came to an abrupt end.
Lex dropped her head. The Predator stood next to her, watching the dead man, waiting…
Suddenly a creature clawed its way out of the dead man’s abdomen and launched itself at Scar. With lightning-fast reflexes, the Predator caught it in his hand. He held it firmly in its grip and turned it from side to side, examining it. The tiny creature squirmed to free itself, its jaws snapping at Scar’s face.
Casually the Predator snapped its neck between his fingers as if it were a matchstick.
The Aliens came from every corner of the pyramid, singly, in pairs, and in clusters large and small. Like a rippling tide of black oil, the swarm flowed down sheer walls and deep shafts, and made their way through drainage tunnels and narrow air spaces between the thick walls. Tittering and hissing, they instinctively responded to the maternal cries of their Queen.
In a great living tsunami the creatures surged into the Queen’s chamber, hastening to the edge of the misty, frozen pool. Others crawled down the stone walls or scampered down the long, barbed chains that held their Queen captive.
The largest group of Aliens was led by the alpha-Alien with the net-ravaged hide. They poured in, filling the chamber, hissing and squabbling. Then all movement ceased as the brutes bowed their eyeless heads to their matriarch. For a long time the Aliens remained still, quiet, respectful—a jet-black sea of shining, chitinous hides and slavering jaws, their cylindrical heads bowed and swaying from side to side in supplication.
The Queen rattled her chains and cried out in a sustained, sibilant hiss that inflamed her spawn and spurred them into action.
In a flurry of gnashing teeth and ripping jaws, the creatures attacked their matriarch. Leaping from the edge of the frozen pool, most caught hold of the great harnessing machine that rendered the hive mistress immobile during her reproductive labor—though a few plunged screeching to their death through the rising mist into the vapor pool.
Crawling over one another in a maniacal press to rip their mother’s flesh, the monsters moved as a single, sweeping entity, descending the walls and clinging to the chains, while others swooped down from the high ceiling like raptors.
The things caught hold of the Alien Queen in a thousand places and tore at her hide incessantly with tooth and claw. When the tittering mass reached the Queen’s head, slobbering jaws gnawed at her great horned crown, cracking the bony crest and tearing the barbed hooks loose from their moorings. Fountains of acid blood flowed in rivulets down the Queen’s ravaged frame, splattering her offspring and inflaming them to further savagery.
At last the final hook was torn from her crest in a shower of splintered bone. Although the Queen’s head was free and her jaws were more than capable of destroying any of the gnawing, rending creatures within her reach, she still did not fight back. Instead she hung there—manacled arms outstretched, head erect—as if inviting her children to feast on her flesh and drink her blood in a blasphemous orgy of matricide.
The Queen bled from a score of wounds, her boiling blood splattering everywhere. Suddenly there was a shower of sparks as the big machine that held her lower extremities began to melt. Ravaged by the Queen’s acid blood, chain metal began to twist, wires snapped and cables buckled.
Triumphantly, the Queen yanked the chain restraining her right arm, casting several of her children into the frozen mist. Fearing for their own lives, the rest of her panicked offspring reversed their course, leaping onto the floor far below, hopping onto the walls, or dangling from the remaining chains like rats escaping a sinking ship.
When both arms were free, the Queen used her claws to shred the semi-molten machine that had enslaved her for so long. Freeing her gangly legs, she still struggled against the great clamp that imprisoned her tail and reproductive organs.
Tension rippled her massive form, jaws locked and teeth clenched as the Queen ripped her trembling tail free. Then, with a snap of cartilage and a flood of bubbling, caustic slime, the Hive Queen tore her own birth canal from her body.
Free at last, the Queen leaped from the shattered platform. Chains dangled from her limbs, clattering as she moved.
Quivering with both rage and triumph, she threw up her ravaged arms and let loose a shriek that vowed vengeance and retaliatory pain….
The Alien Queen’s bloodcurdling scream echoed through the pyramid.
“What was that?” Lex cried.
She turned to Scar and witnessed a first—a frightened Predator.
“It’s that bad?”
Scar touched her arm, echoing her recorded words once more like a mantra. “Keep it together…. Make it to the surface.”
But Lex shook her head. “We can’t let these things get out of here.”
Acting as if he understood her words, Scar removed a complicated and bulky device from his wrist. On its crystalline face, Alien characters glowed. Scar tapped several keys, and a cluster of symbols appeared. He thrust the device under Lex’s nose and tilted his head—his “Get it?” pose.
“I don’t understand.”
The Predator pointed to the wrist computer. Then he held out a tight fist and turned it upside down. Watching Lex, the Predator slowly unfurled his fist.
“An explosion. That thing is a bomb?”
Then she recalled the mural in the hieroglyphics chamber, which depicted a Predator with its arms raised, then a mushroom cloud.
“It is a bomb!” Lex cried. Like the one that went off on this island in 1979.
Lex took the device from Scar’s hand. It was heavy, and she could feel it vibrate as mechanisms turned within.
“Well,” she said, “I hope it kills every fucking one of them.”
Lex tossed the bomb through the stone grate, where it plunged deeper into the heart of the pyramid.
“Keep it together. Make it to the surface,” Scar’s computer-generated voice repeated.
They started to run.
The path to the entrance appeared to be clear, and Lex could see a dull glow in the distance—halogen lights still burning in the grotto outside the pyramid. But as they reached a wide staircase lined with square columns, another Predator stumbled out of the darkness and lunged at Lex.
Recoiling, she beat the creature with her fist, then kicked out with her booted foot.
Amazingly, the Predator staggered backwards under her weak assault. Lex noticed that the creature seemed injured—its face mask was gone, and its mandibles writhed convulsively. The fanged mouth was flecked with green foam.
Reeling, the stricken Predator stumbled back. Then its knees gave out and it folded to the floor. Head thrown back and twisting from side to side, slime spraying on the statues, walls, and flagstone floor, the Predator howled—and Lex saw its chest cavity begin to bulge.
The helpless creature gagged as the skin stretched around its heart, then blossomed into a phosphorescent burst of green, gushing gore. Lex stumbled into a column and fell to the ground, watching in horrified fascination as the head of a newborn Alien poked out swathed in pus and ooze, its jaws snapping air, desperate to be free of the Predator’s dying flesh.
Only then did Scar step forward and activate the plasma gun on his shoulder. For a split second Lex saw three scarlet dots illuminate the chattering jaws of the nascent obscenity, then Scar fired.
The searing plasma struck the fallen Predator, incinerating its carcass, along with the squirming horror that twitched inside of its gaping chest. Red fire and black smoke filled the chamber, and the awful, permeating stench of burned flesh choked Lex. Turning her back to the conflagration, she watched the flickering shadows play on the walls as both aliens were completely consumed.