Present Day Earth:

Sebastian James. He had no idea why his mother named a black kid from the boogie-down Bronx, Sebastian. It was the source of endless bullying in school. She'd told him she didn't want to name him any of those "ghetto" names a lot of black kids had. She wanted him to be better, and thought giving him a wealthy sounding name would go a long way to making that happen. She was wrong. He was about 5'8" and about 280lbs give or take. He wore very thick bifocal glasses, had a bad case of adult acne, and zero social life. On the bright side, he was employed. As a matter of fact, he was employed by one of the largest corporations in the world; the Weyland-Yutani Corp. They were the best, although Sebastian didn't know exactly what they were the best at. They seemed to be everywhere, doing everything. They were most notably in construction, but then again he'd been working for the last five years as the Head Custodian, and he'd seen some shit. Not everything was about skyscrapers and plots of land. Some of the areas in this underground structure were restricted even from him. It was these areas which had the actual word RESTRICTED painted in red, and surrounded by black and yellow striped rectangles.

Sebastian could hardly believe it sometimes. He'd started work in one of their high-rise apartment buildings, but he'd done such a great job, he'd been invited to a super-secret underground bunker. Well, he thought it was because he'd done such a great job. Really, it was because they'd done a background check and found he had no one. His mother had died of cancer a year before he was "promoted". He had no girlfriend, no children, no real friends. In short, no one would miss him should he never resurface. However, despite all this Sebastian was content with his life. It was quiet and solitary. The hall he was sweeping right now was clean and polished. It was always like that. He wielded the large push broom, but there was hardly ever any dirt. The floor was a glossy and polished as it had ever been, but he was paid to do a job, and if it was one thing Sebastian took seriously was responsibility. His mother taught him that.

He was almost done for the night. He would have been bopping his head to some music, but strict security policy prohibited any outside gidgets and gadgets from entering the facility. He was also hungry, and could hardly think of anything other than the pizza and fries he was gonna eat when he got out of here. Sebastian turned a corner down a restricted hall, pushing the broom aimlessly before him. He got to the end of that hall and found something very odd. At first he couldn't pinpoint the problem, but soon realized the door was ajar. The door was ajar. That never happened. Like, never. He stopped in front of it. Oh he was so curious, so curious indeed but he knew what that did to the cat. He'd let his curiosity get the better of him that time in school with Byron Hicks, and had paid a hefty price in the form of a bloody nose and a wedgie from hell. He took a deep breath, swallowed his curiosity, and reached for the large heavy steel lever-like handle to close it, but then he heard something. It sounded muffled or something. Sebastian shook his head, determined to ignore this anomaly, but then he heard it again. It sounded like…. a voice? His mind raced. Maybe someone was in some kind of trouble? If he ignored them they might die. If he saved them, he'd be a hero. Bravery wasn't his strong point though. Still, it couldn't be anything life threatening happening in a place like this. Maybe somebody had an accident with some machinery. Just a little help would be all that was needed. Surely he could offer a little help.

Taking a deep breath, he pushed the door open. He was still holding the broom in his hand. He was about to lean it against the wall, but a small voice inside his head warned him that that would be a very bad idea. So instead, he gripped the handle a little tighter and clutched it to his chest. This wasn't so much a room as it was a short hall which led to a staircase. The landing he was standing on was well lit, but the stairs immediately beyond was cloaked in darkness. No matter how he peered into it, he could see no lights, but then the sound came drifting up to him from it. Little beads of sweat gathered on his brow as he leaned forward. He was glad to find a banister was on his right-hand side, and he gripped it tighter than he thought was normal for someone who wasn't scared. At least he didn't think of himself as scared, not until he heard that muffled cry for a third time. His heart raced and thudded in his chest. He wiped a sweaty palm on his white shirt; the one with his name stitched neatly in cursive on the left side of his chest, and the beautiful yellow "W" printed above it. He gripped the banister again and leaned much of his weight upon it.

"H-hello?" He called out tentatively. Nothing. He took a couple of steps down, two-stepping like a toddler taking his first foray down a flight. He clutched the broomstick a little tighter, the thump-thump of the brush part hitting the steps giving him an odd reassurance. It was familiar. He dared not call again. His voice sounded strange, flat and he didn't like it. It gave him the willy-wogs. That's what he always called it; willy-wogs. He had to stifle a sudden giggle that wanted to bubble forth. It was ridiculous to even think about laughing.

He continued down despite his better judgement. The flight of stairs seemed to go on forever, and then suddenly he was at the bottom of it. It was pitch black, and he reached out a shaky hand in front of himself and felt the wall. He recoiled in disgust. It was slimy. He turned his head to the left and saw wall, he turned to the right and saw a short hall with another door standing ajar, a sliver of light spilling out. He gulped and turned into the light, thankful that he could see again. Once he got into the room beyond, he wouldn't be. The first issue was the smell. It was damp, and moldy, and disgusting. He could also taste the air as well as smell it, and it made his stomach do a lazy flop. Now gripping the broom handle with both sweaty palms, he inched towards the door. He stopped just outside of it and listened. Quiet, but there was no peaceful quality about it. It was the kind of quiet which preceded the breaking of a sound barrier. He inclined his head and heard the muffled cry again. It was definitely a person. It sounded like they did in the movies when somebody was gagged and trying to talk through it.

With the tip of the handle Sebastian chanced to open the door all the way, looking in before stepping in. What he saw beyond both intrigued and terrified him. At first he unconsciously had his mouth open in dumb awe, but closed it again upon tasting the foulness of the air. It was a large laboratory. The harsh florescent lights above shone down upon a room that looked as if a hurricane had hit it. It was dim despite the lights, and then he understood why. It was the walls. Most of the walls were covered in black. It wasn't paint, not by a long shot. It was some kind of substance he knew not the slightest thing about. It gleamed with a thick snot-like goop smeared all over it, but it also seemed to absorb the light in the room. It was as if there was no light except maybe natural sunlight which could illuminate this room. There were four long rows of tabletop. Workspace. It had a lot of sciencey looking equipment on it that he couldn't have named for a million dollars. They looked like scales, a few Bunsen burners which were still going, and empty bar height seats dotting the space in front of them. Some of these stools were overturned as if a great struggle had taken place. Beyond the four rows of white table top, stood four large containers. Three of them were empty, but one of them was not. Sebastian's eyes were saucers behind his bifocals as he took in a scene he didn't really comprehend. He was about to move towards this large tank, filled with a liquid and something very large and very strange floating inside, until something captured his peripheral vision. He turned his head to the right, and held out the broom in a feeble attempt at defending himself. There was something….no, someone on the wall. The thing seemed to sense Sebastian looking at it, because it wiggled what looked like fingers and made that muffled noise again. Cautiously he stepped forward, but he was numb with growing terror. Never had he felt so much like the cat whose curiosity had written its death certificate, than he did right now. As he moved closer, the thing trapped inside the black stuff on the wall, began to move more frantically. With wide eyes, Sebastian was surprised to find he recognized this thing. It wasn't a thing at all, but Dr. Hughes. Dr. Olivia Hughes. She was just about the only one who ever spoke to Sebastian, and even though she'd never said anything beyond a 'good morning' as she hurried on her way, he suddenly felt connected to this woman. She was a good looking blonde, in her late forties or perhaps early fifties, but she was still pretty. Sebastian could tell that when she was younger she had been a great deal more than just pretty. This lady used to be a knockout. Right now, something was obscuring her face.

"Dr. H-hughes?" Sebastian asked in hushed tones. "I-is that you?" He knew it was her. As he took in the sight, he could see one of her pretty gray eyes, and one of her red pumps she always wore. He had no idea where the other one had gone off too, but it was enough to identify her.

With the end of his trusty broom handle he poked at whatever was stuck to her face. To his surprise, it fell off immediately. It was stiff and he was horrified to see that it seemed to be an animal of some sort. Certainly not one he had ever laid eyes on, nor wanted to lay eyes on ever again in his life. It was shriveled up like a dead bug, but it was far from a regular old bug.

"Ruuunnnn," Dr. Hughes groaned out hoarsely. Sebastian looked up in confusion. Then moving forward to help her, he nearly tripped over something on the floor. He looked down to see yet another thing he'd never seen before. He blinked a few times, not believing his eyes. Was this an….egg? It was huge, almost to his knees. His heart skipped a beat, then galloped in his chest when it began to slowly open up.

"Aaggh! Ruuuunnn!" She cried out again, but he couldn't move. Sebastian was frozen to the spot. Rooted like any old tree which had spent the last hundred years growing in the same place. His eyes were huge behind his lenses as he watched a living version of that creature make its way out of this impossible egg. He could barely tear his eyes away from the sight, but the distressed sounds coming from Dr. Hughes made him look up at her. Her eyes had rolled to the back of her head, and her chest was heaving mightily. He could hear the sickening crunch of bone, like something was trying to get out of her. He wouldn't have believed it had he not seen it himself. Just when he thought it was at its worst point, something did come out. The warm splatter of blood hit him in the face, obscuring his vision. At the very same time, the thing in the egg had jumped and landed on his face as well. Instantly he began choking as whatever it was wrapped around his throat, restricting his windpipe severely. Sebastian stumbled back, running right into a table. The edge of which had jammed itself roughly into the small of his back. In the moments of time between him sliding helplessly to the floor and going unconscious, several thoughts passed through his mind; none of them pleasant. First, he now understood on the most basic level of his soul that this is what it felt like to have a penis in your mouth. Sebastian had never had a penis in his mouth before, and never wanted to, but he was experiencing it just the same. Secondly, he also understood with no small amount of horror, that this was how it felt to be raped. This thing had slid something into his mouth and partially down his throat. It triggered his gag reflex and when his stomach tried to object, he was forced to swallow it back which burned and furthered the sensation of choking to death. Thirdly, it disgustingly tasted like the air in the room. It had a moldy, sour, stale quality which his stomach also protested against to no avail. He brought his hands up to pry it off, but it was no use. His hands fell limply to his side, and blackness overtook him

He blinked. Once, twice, three times. His glasses were still on his face. Remembering that something else had also been on his face, Sebastian went to pry it off, but there was nothing. He tried to focus, tried to remember even though a part of him thought it might have been better not to. He was still on the floor, but now he wasn't choking. Maybe….maybe it had been some terrible nightmare. Maybe he could just get up off the floor and things would be okay again. Yes, yes he would get up. He leaned his bulk forward, and felt a mind-numbing pain in his chest. He grabbed at his chest and drew in a ragged breath. He cast a look around, and recoiled at the sight of that bug thing, shriveled and dead right next to him. When he jerked himself backwards, that chest pain hit him again and made him cry out. He leaned himself back against the table and his eyes fell aimlessly to the wall in front of him. Dr. Hughes. She was still there, her lifeless body suspended, and her dead gray eyes pinning him down. He couldn't keep looking, so he allowed his eyes to drift upwards, but that had been the biggest mistake of his soon-to-be-over life. Above Dr. Hughes the wall moved. It seemed to uncoil itself like a snake, and as he watched it just kept uncoiling. At first his eye was trained on one spot, but soon other parts started to move. Like darkness incarnate, the uncoiling monster landed soundlessly in front of him. Sebastian felt the warmth spread beneath him as his bladder let go.

If he had known the words to describe it, Sebastian would have said he was now looking at a very young Xenomorph queen, just coming into her own. He would have known that the room he was currently about to die in, was no ordinary lab. It was a 'controlled' nesting space for the Xenos. A quaint little place where the good people at Weyland-Yutani believed they could study, and laughably, control this species' breeding habits and patterns. They had purposely allowed a queen to emerge, believing they could simply kill her if she got out of control, but that hadn't gone quite the way they'd planned. They hadn't known enough to anticipate even a young queen's influence on her drones. They thought only more mature queens commanded absolute obedience, and in a sense they were right. The more mature a queen was, the more control she could exert over a nest, but there had only been about five Xenomorphs not including the one in the tank that she couldn't awaken. With such a small number, the survival of the hive was paramount, and there would be no challenge to the queen's authority to that end.

Sebastian's mind simply could not make sense of what his eyes took in. Here in front of him was an alien which in no way resembled anything he had ever seen. It had two legs, suggesting it was bipedal, but all similarities began and ended there. It was as dark as night. Dark enough that it was difficult to discern one obsidian part of its body from the other; except the tail. That was carving a lazy "S" behind it, as it seemed to do nothing more than wait. It snarled a little, but that was about all it did. For a moment, he thought he would have some sort of reprieve. After all, he hadn't been stuck on a wall yet. Thank the lord for small favors. He was frozen in his spot until the chest pain hit again, this time without relenting. He felt and heard his sternum giving way. He cried out, blood flying out of his mouth along with the scream, and his eyes once again took a trip to the back of his head. His legs jittered on their own, and his hands clenched into loose fists as he scratched the linoleum floor beneath him. Whatever it was inside him, finally tore free. He had only seconds to register that something alive had burst forth from his chest. A chest-burster. That was Sebastian James' last thought before he left this world. The term was more appropriate than he would ever get to know.

Two days later:

She'd been gone just about two years or a little more than that, and Marcus Bledsoe had never recovered from it. There was a lot of non-recovery that went on during that time. His mother for instance. At first, the normal couple of weeks went by when Jasmine did not come around. This always bothered Marcus, and it bothered him this last time too. Then, three weeks, four, two months had gone by and no word from his sister. That was very unlike her. He started to worry, but there was no one to express his concern to. As the time ticked by, his mother became more and more volatile when she wasn't out of her mind on drugs. She'd taken to staying gone herself, getting high, turning tricks. Usually she would leave only for hours at a time, now it was days. Marcus was alone. His mother was emotionally unavailable, and when she did happen to notice his existence, she abused him physically, emotionally, and mentally. It got to the point where he would be relieved when she left for extended amounts of time. His grades began to suffer, although he managed to keep from failing freshman year. If he did a stint in summer school he would be a junior, but that was becoming less and less important.

Marcus had resisted the allure of gangs and petty crime, but he was still sort of in the streets. With no guidance except anger and hurt, he began to skip school. He wasn't aimlessly hanging out though. Off and on, Marcus had been on Jasmine's trail because no one else cared to be. He had been the one to report Jasmine missing, and that was when the full reality of the life she'd been living smacked him in the face. She was a whore. He'd suspected it because she just didn't seem the criminal type, but he was unprepared for the depth of that, and the drug use. Her rap sheet wasn't all that short. It consisted mostly of possession charges, and solicitation. The detective who shared all this with him, only did so after it became obvious that Marcus was relentless, and that whoever was the parent of this missing young lady was nowhere to be found.

His name was Det. Jimenez. A rather tall Puerto Rican guy, built like a freight train, but quite soft spoken. He had soft brown eyes, which were kind but they could see much. They saw a young man, lost and twisting in the wind. Det. Jimenez took a sort of pity on young Marcus, and did his best to guide him from a distance. It was he who showed Marcus the MMA gym not too far from Marcus' high school. Marcus wasn't the gang bang type, but he was angry and frustrated, and sooner or later, if he wasn't reigned in, Det. Jimenez knew he'd be processing him through the revolving door system. If he could save just one, he would. Marcus took to the gym like a moth to a flame. He was now only sixteen, just about 6'0", and very wide for his age. Not a bit of fat anywhere. He was built like a linebacker, and wasn't done growing. Det. Jimenez didn't know that Marcus had become a spitting image of his father Terrell.

Marcus was at the gym. He'd spent his lunch break and the next two periods there. He had taken up a corner by himself. He was on top of a heavy bag practicing his ground and pound, and imagining it was Jasmine. He knew it wasn't right, knew it wasn't her fault, but she'd left him. She'd left him all alone with their monster of a mother after she promised she wouldn't do that. Jasmine promised him that she would rescue him, and now she was gone. Just up and left. No word, no goodbye, no sign, not even a body to give him closure. All his teachers, the cops, the principal, and even Det. Jimenez told him to just remember her in his heart, but move on. It wasn't healthy to constantly brood over her disappearance, but that was easier said than done. It worried him in the back of his mind and his heart. Jasmine's body would never be found, because she wasn't dead. More importantly, someone knew where she was. Someone knew where she was, and he was going to find her. He didn't know how he was going to do it, but he was.

Marcus punched the bag until his knuckles were swollen, and he could barely lift his arms. He decided he was done for the day, went to take a quick shower, and made his way out. He'd stayed until school was out, again. Jimenez wouldn't like it, but Marcus just shrugged, hefted his bag on his shoulder and headed to the burger joint on the corner. As he walked and ate his double cheeseburger, he went over all the old facts he'd gathered. He'd narrowed her favorite haunts down to a specific area, which was known for prostitutes and druggies. Most didn't want to talk to some kid they didn't know, but there were a few who did. One in particular, a girl known around the hood as Tweety because she was so light-skinned, had been very talkative. She wanted to screw him, but he was fifteen at the time and terrified of the thought of sex. He was a little older now and a bit less terrified, but still didn't want his first time to be with a whore. All in all, Tweety had been the most helpful. She talked to him, she said, because he was cute like a lost little puppy dog. She was sure that the last time she'd seen Jasmine, she had gone to a shelter of some kind. The Love Outreach or something. For reasons unknown, Marcus had never actually gone to pay that place a visit. Every time he thought about it, warning bells and whistles went off in his head, and he always found something else to do. He'd told Jimenez about it, but the cop dismissed it as an invalid lead. Plenty of transients passed through places like that. They have a moment of clarity, wanna get clean, start a program, just to leave when the urge gets too bad. That was probably what happened to her, Jimenez assured Marcus, but it didn't work.

He found himself finishing his burger while sitting on a bench on the street. He got up and tossed the greasy wrapper in the nearby trashcan and wiped his hands on his pants. He hefted his gym bag again and walked towards the subway. Today was the day, and he'd better do it before the sun went down. Marcus wasn't a coward, but that part of town was even more sketchy than the one he semi-lived in. He took a deep breath, checked his fare, and descended the subway stairs.