Child of the Xenomorph

11

My eyes shuddered open. I was nearly blinded by a blazing bright light. I squinted, trying to adjust to the sudden change. When the fuzz at last ceased from my eyes, I took a look at my surroundings.

I was in a brilliant white lab, the walls so bright they looked as if they could burn you. Fluorescent lights beamed down on me, illuminating the stark whiteness of the room even more.

Panic shot through me as I took it all in. Labs meant humans. Humans meant captivity. I tried to sit up, but cried out as pain sparked down my spine and exploded in my abdominal region.

Memory flooded my mind. Calvis. Pain. Tsalken. What had happened? How did I get here?

There was only one logical conclusion. The enemy had won. My friends were dead. J'Khati, my sister, and Ember. Tsalken . . .

Tears streamed down my cheeks as I slumped back down onto my back. There was no reason to live anymore. No reason to go on. I hoped that one of their experiments included dissecting me.

That's when the door to the lab swung open. I turned my head to the side, not daring to try and sit up again.

It was a man I had never seen before. He looked as if age was just starting to affect him, as his beard was dusted in hairs of grey. His head was bald and shining like the rest of the laboratory, and he wore a stern expression on his face. But when our eyes met, I could see kindness twinkling in his soft brown eyes.

He wore nothing but white, nearly blending into the lab's walls. His boots made no sound on the shimmering floor as he quietly walked over to where my head was on the bed.

"I'm glad to see you're awake." His voice was rough and deep, but not frightening. "You were out for quite some time."

Questions rose inside of me, spinning around my mind like a tornado. "How did I get here? What was wrong with me? How am I alive right now?"

He chuckled softly. I had forgotten how nice it felt to be in the company of a gentle human being.

"I wish I could answer all of your questions at once, as I am sure you must be bursting to know all the answers immediately. But I must answer them one at a time. Let's start with the first, how you got here. Now that is a peculiar story indeed."

He paused, and then continued. "I am not sure how hard it would be for you to believe this, as I don't know what kind of life you have lived before you arrived on our doorstep, but a creature none other than a Xenomorph carried you here."

He stopped, gauging my reaction, but when I didn't faint or scream or cry he kept going. "It gave the soldiers quite a scare, and they were ready to shoot it dead, but when it bowed its odd head and raised you into the sky like an offering, they knew something was very different about this particular Xenomorph. So they let it in, and the moment I saw your nearly dead body and took you from its clutches, it bounded into the woods. We haven't seen it since, but let me tell you, I have seen many strange things in my life. That was by far the strangest occurrence I have ever seen."

Despite my best efforts, I started laughing. The doctor gave me a very weirded out look, and I couldn't blame him, but I wasn't able to stop. Laughter exploded out of me, the joy and happiness inside swelling out. Tsalken, my dear Tsalken, had saved me.

One thing did confuse me, however. How was 'humans not shooting at Xenomorph', even a real sentence? It was simply too good to be true. There was hope after all.

"Well, onto the next question," the doctor said after my fit of laughing was over. "What was wrong with you. Where do I start with that? I guess the simplest explanation was that your immune system was attacking itself. I didn't get to see it, but I'm guessing at some point in your life right before you nearly died you had a substance in your body that didn't belong there, almost like some sort of transplant. Your white blood cells didn't recognize the other white blood cells of whatever was in you, and essentially a war was started within you. Also, you had a bullet in your intestines, which certainly doesn't help the situation. That was removed first, and your gut should be working again as well as it used to."