Marc Cerasini: AVP: Alien vs. Predator

Mount Everest, though tamer now than at any time in her grim history, was still an unpredictable killer and always would be. Hundreds of corpses were scattered across the rocky pinnacles of the higher elevations, or buried under tons of ice and snow, where they would never be found. Most of those corpses belonged to Sherpas.

For Lex, her own death now held little terror. She had watched others perish, including those she’d loved, and on several occasions she’d almost died herself. Facing death so often had somehow blunted its power and diminished its dread. Personal extinction was something Lex could face and accept. What she could not abide, however, and what she would never accept was the death of another human being in her charge.

A blast of unexpected wind and a rain of dusty snow set Lex’s adrenaline flowing. She cocked her head and listened for the telltale rumbling that would herald an avalanche. When it didn’t come, she took a deep breath and prepared to resume her climb.

That was the moment the GSM phone rang on her belt, bursting into the epic landscape of this natural world like some kind of mechanized explosion.

Silently, Lex cursed a string of obscenities. Then she hung her axe over her wrist and reached down to check the device’s digital screen. Lex didn’t recognize the number blinking there and was tempted to ignore the call. But the phone continued to ring, so she tore off her mask and placed the hands-free receiver over her head and into her ear.

“Who is this?” she demanded.

The voice on the other end was liquid velvet, cut with a precise English accent.

“Miss Woods? A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Lex tucked her mask into a pocket and resumed her climb without a reply.

“My name is Maxwell Stafford,” the man purred. “I represent Weyland Industries.”

“Let me guess,” spat Lex as her axe bit into the ice. “You’re suing us again?”

“You misunderstand. I speak for Mr. Weyland himself.”

“What’s one of the world’s biggest polluters want with us?”

“Mr. Weyland is interested in you personally, Ms. Woods.”

Lex kicked her crampon into the ice and grabbed the safety line with both hands.

“He’s offering to fund the foundation with which you are associated for a full year,” said Maxwell Stafford. “If you’ll meet with him.”

Lex hesitated a moment. As a professional guide and explorer, she had long ago committed herself to the Foundation of Environmental Scientists, an international group that actively advocated the preservation of all life on Earth—human and nonhuman. Species were disappearing from this world at an alarming rate. Lex agreed with the foundation’s members who strongly believed that the loss of even one species put those that remained at greater risk.

Like the rope from which Lex dangled, the foundation was a lifeline for many—the deciding factor between the certainty of life and the finality of death. And though this offer sounded like a deal with the devil, she couldn’t help but ponder what a deal it was. With Weyland’s money, the foundation she loved, in danger of extinction itself, would be in a position to do some truly remarkable work.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I presume you know how bad we need the money,” Lex replied. “But tomorrow is going to be a problem. It will take me a week to get back to the world.”

As she spoke, Lex continued to climb. Just a few feet above her was the Khumbu summit, the icefall’s highest point—a frozen river that formed a flat, icy shelf the size of a tennis court.

“I told Mr. Weyland that,” said Stafford.

Lex swung the axe, kicked in the crampon, and hauled herself up on the rope.

“What did he say?” she said between pulls.

“He said we didn’t have a week.”

Throwing her arm over the edge of the icefall, Lex pulled herself up to the summit—and found herself staring at a perfect pair of brown Oxford Brouges. Still dangling, Lex looked up into the face of a handsome black man wearing light-cold-weather gear. Behind him, a Bell 212 helicopter sat waiting, its door open.

Lex unhooked her safety line and took the man’s proffered hand. With surprisingly little effort he lifted her off the ledge and placed her onto the ice.

“Right this way, Ms. Woods,” Maxwell Stafford said, gesturing toward the chopper, which immediately began revving up.

Speaking loud enough to be heard over the engine roar, Stafford took Lex’s arm and led her to the aircraft.

“Mr. Weyland is quite eager to get started.”

Thirty miles from Mexico City, at the base of the towering Temple of the Sun, under the chiseled stone gaze of the Aztec sun god Uitzilopochtli, hundreds of men and women toiled in the sweltering heat.

Perspiring day laborers gouged the ground with picks and shovels, tossing clots of earth into sifters—large barrels with wire mesh bottoms used to separate out rocks and pebbles, bits of metal or pottery, and anything else larger than a Mexican peso. Archaeologists and graduate assistants scrabbled on their hands and knees, picking at the ground with garden shovels to unearth shards of broken pottery and blobs of lead fired from the guns of conquistadors 400 years before.

The founder of this excavation project, Professor Sebastian De Rosa, observed the controlled chaos from the fringes of the site. De Rosa was an athletically built man with a face that reflected both the olive-skinned warmth of his Sicilian mother and the chiseled, patrician angles of his Florentine father. It was to his father, a steely pilot who’d flown for Mussolini in World War II before becoming a successful businessman, that Sebastian owed his tenacity and nerve. From his mother came his remarkable composure, patience and charm—attributes admired by most of his students and many of his peers.

As the professor walked the perimeter of the site, however, an approaching limousine with a Republic of Mexico seal set Sebastian’s characteristic cool on edge. Waving off a bandana-clad site manager, the professor changed the direction of his stroll to coincide with the arrival of the vehicle.

The black limousine, grimy from the road, was heading for an area beside the main site that had been established as a staff camp. Tents were pitched, and a bank of portable plastic outhouses had been erected downwind. There was a mess hall with a kitchen and a makeshift shower made from a barrel suspended over a square of water-stained plywood planks.

Beyond the camp, a dusty clearing was overrun with battered pickup trucks, grimy Land Rovers, dented Jeeps, and three faded yellow school buses used to transport the day workers to and from the surrounding Mexican towns. Those laborers—carpenters, electricians, diggers—ranged in age from energetic teenagers to weather-beaten old men. All spoke Spanish, smoked American cigarettes, wore dusty jeans, and drank cervezas from the early afternoon until late at night.

As Sebastian passed the tents to meet the limo, he waved to a group of graduate students taking a cerveza break themselves. All were young, enthusiastic and American. They wore fashionable, name-brand gear—Banana Republic shorts, L.L. Bean boots, J. Crew vests and jackets—and as “associates” and “archaeological assistants,” they were handed the worst jobs on the site, which was, of course, the academic order of things. As one grad student had put it on a sign over his tent, in that typically blunt American fashion: “Grunt Work Is Our Fate.”

It wasn’t easy being a neophyte, and Sebastian well remembered the arduous, eternal centuries of paying his dues. But before basking in the glories of published papers, private grants, and Good Morning America appearances, this uber-educated breed had to earn its chops through painstaking study and tedious labor at archaeological digs.