Marc Cerasini: AVP: Alien vs. Predator

Working with speed and precision, Scar stood the head and torso up and sliced the edge of the rubbery, translucent flap that covered the Alien’s head. Peeling the thick membrane back, the Predator exposed the Alien’s brain, which was—amazingly—still throbbing with life. Finally, the Predator lifted the armored external skull away from the Alien body and placed it aside. The bony shell was completely hollow. The elongated brain remained connected to the torso and still twitched and pulsed.

Both intrigued and repulsed, Lex moved closer, carefully avoiding the acid blood that stained the cell floor. As she watched, Scar removed one arm and began stripping away the muscles from the Alien’s shell. While he let the gore slide to the floor, he set the bony armor down next to the hollow skull.

“What are you doing?” Lex repeated.

Once again Scar stood the gory torso up and began to probe the creature’s brain with his knife. Even without its skull and its missing left arm, the Alien looked menacing.

Lex watched the brain flop about and wondered, How do you really know when one of these things is really dead?

At that instant the Alien’s right arm shot out and raked the air just inches from her face. Lex literally jumped backwards with a yelp.

But the Alien made no further movement, and Scar sat passively behind it, prodding and picking at a lobe of its brain. The Predator looked up at Lex, then plunged the knife into a cluster of nerves. The Alien hand lashed out again. She realized that Scar had frightened her deliberately—and now Lex could swear that the Predator was laughing.

“Ha, ha, very funny.”

So Predators do have a sense of humor. Gallows humor, sure, but any kind of humor is better than none at all.

Fun time over, Scar went back to work, stripping away the organs and muscles and keeping only the shell, which he stacked in a pile near the empty Alien skull.

“What are you doing?” Lex asked again. This time she laid her hand on Scar’s arm, firmly enough to get his attention.

With an impatient snarl, the Predator threw down the half-mangled arm he’d been working on and held up his knife, as if displaying it. Lex leaned closer and examined the blade. Only then did she realize that it was not forged of metal but carved from some bony substance like ivory, and honed to a sharp edge.

“Okay,” Lex said. “It’s a special blade…. So what?”

Very deliberately, Scar dipped the tip of the sacrificial blade into the Alien’s seeping brain pan and covered it with the acid blood. Then he shook the blade over a segment of battered Predator armor. As soon as the drops splashed the surface, the acid went to work, melting the armor.

Then the Predator shook more acid blood off the blade—and onto a segmented piece of the Alien’s shell. Nothing happened; the acid just rolled off.

The Predator gave her a look that clearly meant, Get it?

“Of course!” Lex cried. “The Aliens are immune to their own bodily defenses. A porcupine can’t stab itself.”

And obviously the sacrificial blade the Predator carried was made of the same substance—Alien exoskeleton, carved and shaped and honed to a razor-sharp edge, like the whalebone blades nineteenth-century whalers used to fashion out of the bones of their prey.

Lex nodded vigorously. “I get it, I get it. We’ll keep it together and make it to the surface.”

Scar reached out and touched her arm, then lifted his hand and touched the mark on his mask.

“Keep it together… Make it to the surface…” Lex was startled to hear the Predator speak to her using an electronic recording of her own words.

Lex smiled, then she slapped the top of his giant fist with the palm of her tiny hand. “Deal,” she said.

Suddenly, an unearthly cry unlike any other they’d heard before literally shook the walls. The cry was more than loud enough to penetrate their chamber, so surely it could be heard all over the pyramid.

Lex and Scar exchanged anxious glances, then Scar snatched a chunk of Alien armor from the pile and slapped it against Lex’s chest hard enough to knock the wind out of her. Holding it in place, Scar sized the piece, then tossed it aside in favor of a smaller segment.

Lex understood his plan immediately, and to show him she got it Lex lifted a heavy piece of armor and placed it on his forearm.

The Predator tensed at her touch but allowed Lex to fit the piece of chitin to its arm without protest. As Scar picked through the Alien shells for other usable components, Lex drew her survival knife and started cutting the straps off her ruined backpack.

As they worked side by side for the common purpose of mutual survival, Lex and Scar—human and Predator—began to function like a team.

For endless hours, the Alien Queen, powerless to act due to the wicked barbed chains that held her captive, had been compelled to watch helplessly as one after the other of her precious eggs were tipped into the roaring furnace. Only a few of the eggs had been given a chance to yield life, and they had all been spirited away to another part of the pyramid where she could no longer watch over them.

Even now the Queen sensed that some of her offspring were alive and well.

Foam flecked the Queen’s long, eyeless muzzle, and her abdomen convulsed as another pulpy egg dropped onto the slide and was automatically carried away by the vast machines that pumped and churned behind the walls.

The female thrashed and bared her teeth in rage when her egg failed robotic inspection and was consigned to the furnace. But before the conveyor reached the fiery chamber, the skin of the egg peeled back, and a pale white face hugger emerged, eager to escape its leathery cocoon. But the machine was pitching the rejected egg into the fire. Extending a robotic arm, it shoved the struggling infant into the conflagration, along with its leathery pouch.

Mewing piteously, the newborn face hugger was instantly consumed.

Witnessing this atrocity, the Queen went berserk. She thrashed and strained at the metal chains, testing their tensile strength to the limit. Even though chunks of masonry and the dust of millennia had been dislodged from the walls and vaulted ceiling by her furious convulsions, the indestructible chains would not give.

Tilting its crested head back as far as the restraints allowed, the Queen opened its slavering mouth and unleashed an awesome, ear-shattering shriek of rage, frustration and utter despair, which reverberated throughout the pyramid.

The alpha-Alien with the net-ravaged hide was pounding its fists against the stone door in a futile effort to reach Scar and Lex when it heard the keening distress call. Pausing, the Alien lifted its misshapen head to listen.

When the Queen’s cry came again, the alpha-Alien hissed and bared its teeth, alert for danger. His entourage folded into the shadows, where they swayed like coiled pythons, watching and waiting for its lead.

Tail-stump thrashing, the alpha-Alien turned and hurled itself down the passageway in the direction of the Queen’s chamber. The swarm followed, their ebony claws scouring the stone as they scurried into the gloom.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the slab, Scar continued to sheathe Lex in a crudely fashioned battle suit. Using the rib cage of the dead Alien, the Predator created a chest plate, holding it in place with the Velcro straps from Lex’s backpack.

Scar had retained his own face mask and the metal powerpack he wore on his broad back. He also kept his shoulder armor with gun mount. These seemed to be the most vital components of his original battle armor, the ones that contained his life-support and internal power systems, and the sensory equipment the Predator relied upon to hunt down its prey. The mesh heat-netting was in place under the Predator’s makeshift suit, and Scar also gripped his long, barbed spear in one fist. The other fist was encased in armor, studded with the shattered blades from the Predator’s ruined throwing disk.