Marc Cerasini: AVP: Alien vs. Predator

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.

In the labyrinth, hundreds of Aliens raced through the darkness, flowing over walls and rippling along the ground, hissing and tittering, aware that their prey was close—close enough to hear, to smell, and soon to taste.

Behind the ocean of black, blood-mad monsters loomed a massive shape that dwarfed the others—something huge and monstrous and very, very angry. The Alien Queen.

Standing over the smoldering corpse of his fellow Predator, Scar heard the Alien swarm. He paused in midstride to listen, head cocked in an almost human gesture.

After a moment, Lex heard them too. Though she could not see her pursuers, it was obvious that the monsters were gaining on them.

Scar took off, heading for the exit. Lex was on his heels. They emerged from the pyramid in a dead run and took the stairs two at a time. Through a red mist of exhaustion, Lex spied the bright white lights of the underground camp in the distance. It seemed to be deserted.

Sucking in frigid air, she risked a glance over her shoulder; there was still no sign of the horde that had been chasing them.