ALIEN: Isolation

Home Away From Home

Axel stepped backwards before holstering his weapon.

'Stay close to me,' he said. 'You'll have a slightly slighter chance of dying that way.' Ripley rolled her eyes at this. 'That's comforting,' she said sarcastically.

'Through here,' Axel said, crawling into a vent on the right hand side of the door that ripley was trying to unlock before. Ripley followed suit, staying close to Axel.

This vent was far simpler than the network of vents Ripley had to navigate not long earlier. It was straight, and very short. After barely twenty seconds of crawling, Axel and Ripley were out the other side, at one end of a T-junction corridor. 

Axel and Ripley were at the bottom of the 't', and couldn't progress down the corridor because of what appeared to be a makeshift barricade, right where all three sections of the junction should have met.

All of a sudden, Axel crouched. 'Get down, and stay quiet,' he said, instructing Ripley to do the same. Ripley followed Axel's order and hid behind a crate, before seeing why he'd warned her.

Two men on the other side of the barricade strolled in from the left side of the T-junction. Both of them, Ripley noticed, were brandishing shotguns.

'Have you heard what's going on?' one of them said. 'I'd rather not,' said the other. 'There's something on the station,' said the first one. 'A killer or something, haven't you heard?'

'Piss off, man.' said the second one, 'You're making me paranoid.'

'What happens if we run into it then?' asked the first one. 'Then we shoot the crap out of it.' said the second, before both left Axel and Ripley's view, down the right hand side of the junction.

Axel remained crouched, and kept whispering. 'Through here,' he said, pointing to another air vent on the right hand side of the corridor, first making sure that the shotgun toting men were out of earshot. They climbed in, and began to crawl through the vents again.

This one, much like the other they had crawled through, was straight, and short as well. Ripley crawled out the other end with Axel, and found herself in what appeared to be a gap in the vents. It was kind of like a service hatch, only accesible via the vents. It would have only had a floorspace of about four metres squared, and about a two metre high ceiling.

There was something about this hatch though. Instead of being empty, and devoid of all relative civilization, it looked as though it had been converted into a crude little home.

There was a clean mattress lying on the floor, beside which lay an electric lamp. There were magazines strewn over the matress, and shelves and drawers lined the walls.

'Have you...' Ripley paused, '...Been living here?'

'Yeah,' Axel said, looking arounf the place. 'After the station went to the dogs, I had to find somewhere safer to live. Somewhere...' he tried to think of the right word. 'Isolated, or inconspicuous.'

Axel walked up to one of the shelves, and opened it up. He stuck his hand in, and it shortly came back up grasping a torch.

'Here, take this,' Axel said, throwing the torch to Ripley. 'Try not to use it too much,' he advised. 'It runs out of battery fast, and there aren't many others around the station.'

Ripley thanked him, but quickly tried to change the subject.

'What did you mean by killer?' she asked Axel, as he began to climb up a ladder that lead into another vent.

'A killer,' he simply said. 'What more is there to know?'

'Well what kind of killer?' Ripley asked, getting impatient. 'A psycho, or a person, what?'

'No sweetheart,' Axel said shaking his head. 'No, it's much worse than that. Much, much worse.'

'What kind of worse?' Ripley said. 'Do they have weapons, or what?'

'You don't get it, do you?' Axel taunted, getting impatient himself. Ripley could tell why, after all, he'd been through a helluva lot in the past...however long it was... since the station had gone overboard.

'Lady, the killer clasps no weapons. He doesn't use guns or knives, he doesn't have a motive, or a purpose of anything more or less than to kill.' Axel said, shaking his head, looking down whilst frowning.

'This killer's been picking us off one at a time, ever since we figured out what it was.'

Axel turned his head and looked back up at Ripley.

'Ripley, the killer is no human.' he said, his voice trembling slightly.

'There is a monster on this station.'