Alien 3 – what should have happened

-Rise and Shine-

The first thing that hit him was the smell. The metallic tang of bleach and disinfectants tingled in his nose. Hospital. He had to be in a hospital. That meant…

Corporal Dwayne Hicks bolted upright in his bed, expecting to see the pristine interior of a Colonial Marine infirmary. The sight that greeted him was less than pristine. He was lying in a cold, dingy room whose formerly white tiles had assumed a waxy yellow color, despite the cleansing power of the disinfectants. His bed was in a corner, cut off from the rest of the room by a translucent plastic tarp hanging from the ceiling. Ominous stains were splattered across. Some had gone wrong; this was not where he was supposed to be.

How did he get here?

Hicks shut his eyes and brought up the last thing he remembered before going out.

"Hicks, don't let Bishop leave without us."

"We're not going anywhere."

Ripley. His eyes snapped open as his goal switched from trying to figure out where he was to try and find out what had happened to her and Newt. The last he had seen, she was preparing to run into the alien nest to find the girl before she was impregnated by a face-hugger or the entire atmosphere processor turned into a cloud of vapor the size of…well, a big cloud.

Had they made it?

He leapt out of bed only to discover that not only was he completely naked but an unnervingly large wound on his side that he didn't remember getting had just ripped its stitches.

"Oh shit." He thought as he stumbled into the plastic curtain, yanking it from its track in a futile attempt to stop his headlong descent to the cold, tiled floor.

A bald man was lounging on a bed across from where Hicks lay with blood oozing from his reopened wound. The man glanced up from his comic book.

"Mate, you look like how I feel."

"Yeah, I get that a lot." Hicks replied through clenched teeth.

The man snickered and shouted; "Clemens! The Corporal is up and he's bust his stitches!" Then he returned to reading his comic book.