First time ever doing anything fanficish. But I've had this idea for a while and wanted to write it, so I figure why the hell not.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Darkness.
Darkness is all she has ever known.
Then, vibrations.
Impact.
Suddenly, the darkness recedes. She senses an opening in the protective shell beyond her egg. The air here is dry, and nothing moves. She waits, like she always has.
Movement.
Something is coming. A large object trundles near, massive, but not alive. It stops and things crawl forth from its bowels. These are alive. She coils, ready, and the petals unfurl atop her egg.
They draw near, cautious. She waits.
After they circle the landing site, they begin to draw closer to the wreckage. One of them finds her. She finds him, in return.
They drag his limp body back to the vehicle.
She already has begun growing, feeding, inside him. His unconscious form is quarantined. Scans are run. The doctors fail to notice the dark spot growing near his lungs.
She bides her time. Her host awakens. He is discharged from the medical facility.
Still she waits.
He feels discomfort, but shrugs it off as psychological. Perhaps he doesn't want to consider the possibility that the creature might have done something to him.
She waits.
Three days have passed. On the night of the third day, she bursts forth through his rib cage. His dying screams draw startled neighbors to his dormitory, but it is too late, and she is gone.
They search, but they find nothing. They don't even know what to look for.
She makes her way deeper into the seldom traveled maintenance ways of the colony. She scavenges vermin for food. She grows until her skin pulls tight around her serpentine body, then she molts.
A week passes. In all the time she has traveled the maintenance ways, growing, she has seen no sign of others of her kind. She is alone.
She leaves the maintenance tunnels.
She hunts.
She finds a human, alone. He is a suitable host for the start of her eventual brood. He makes a looping path past the same buildings over and over. He holds a cold metal object. She does not understand.
She charges him. He brings up the thing in his hands. She feels cold metal tear through her shoulder, blossoming into pain. This does nothing to stop her charge. She impacts the man. Enraged, she grabs the man's head and twists it until it she hears cracks and pops and the man stops moving.
She abandons the colony under cover of darkness, fleeing into the sparse vegetation around the settlement. She must find easier hosts. She cannot risk her death. But she finds no other large creatures. After only a short while, the vegetation ends at a lifeless salt flat as far as she can sense. This is a dead world.
The following evening, she returns to the interior of the colony, on the coast of the lifeless sea. She knows soon she will be reproductively mature. She must secure hosts for her hive. The humans are her only option.
This time she doesn't underestimate them. She hides amongst the pipes sprouting from the side of a building, and waits for one of the humans to pass. Silently, she drops down behind him. She recognizes the metal in his hands. She takes it from him, tosses it aside. She grabs him in her embrace.
Noise.
The human makes to much noise. Others will come. The noise comes from the thing at the top of his body. She covers it with her hand. He struggles harder.
He stops struggling.
She is confused. She removes her hand, and he doesn't make noise. She lets him go and he falls to the ground.
He is dead.
She doesn't know why. She didn't injure him. Perhaps it is something about the noise.
She watches the next one closely. She notices the rise and fall of the human's chest. The dead one stopped doing that when she grabbed his face. She understands.
She is careful this time to only cover the thing that makes noise. This one continues to struggle.
The human struggles all the way back down to the maintenance level, but she makes it there safely. She begins to secrete resin, and secures the human female to the wall of her chosen chamber. She makes sure to cover the human's mouth with resin.
She does the same thing six more times that night.
Soon she will be ready. These seven will be her first brood, and they shall take up the task of finding new hosts. She feels the primal urge, the need, to begin her final molting. Then she hears a sound.
Their footsteps echo through the maintenance tunnels. Was she followed? She must protect her nest.
She climbs up into a vent above the passage. She can hear four distinct sets of footfalls echoing closer. This is the only way into her nest. She waits.
They pass below her in the corridor, one by one. She is right. Four total. She grabs the last one as he passes, smothering his face in her hand and stabbing through his chest with her tail. She yanks his body up into the shadows of the vent. It is over before they have a chance to turn around.
Bullets smash into the vent, but she has already moved on. She pauses over another vent opening, closer to her nest, the body still gripped in her claws.
The humans are checking the vents as they pass below them now. They snap their guns up quickly as the pass under the vents, but she is faster. She flings the carcass of their comrade down the shaft at them, and drops down after it. One of them is knocked down by the body, and she lands on his chests, crushing his rib cage. She lashes out with her tail, slicing through the second man's thigh. He falls and his gun is knocked away.
The third man fires.
Bullets gouge through her body again. Lances of white hot pain. Her blood sprays onto the colonist with the wounded leg. She sees his skin melt as she scurries back up the vent shaft. The remaining colonist is horrified by his friend's fate and is slow to fire as she retreats. She hears the dying gurgle of the man that was doused with her blood as she makes it to safety.
Her wounds are not lethal. She will recover, given time. However, the surviving man is now retreating from her lair. She cannot let her nest's position be given away. So she chases him.
She cannot risk another direct confrontation. She has been lucky so far.
She thinks about her blood, how it killed the human. She notices the steaming holes in the vent behind her where her blood has dripped onto and ate through the metal.
She gets ahead of him.
She sits, coiled once again at the top of a vent. The human is running in blind panic now. She drives her claws into one of the bullet wounds in her chest, ripping it wider. Her blood flows faster. She collects it in her open hand. As she hears the human's footsteps approach, she flings the acid downward at him.
She very nearly misses.
The acid splashes onto the back of his ankles. He takes a few more steps before falling to the ground.
Noise. So much noise. She must finish him off. But he might have the weapon trained on the vent. Or he might be writhing in pain on the floor. She does not know.
She rips metal from the side of the vent, a shard as long as her arm. She slowly crawls down the vent, acid from her opened wound steadily dripping into a growing crater on the ground below. As she approaches the lip of the vent, she extends the metal out into the open corridor.
Nothing happens. She risks a look at the hallway below.
The human has dropped his weapon. He is dragging himself by the hands away from the vent, screaming in pain and horror. Two bloody streaks from his dissolved feet mark his slow progress down the corridor.
She drops. She doesn't even try to be stealthy. She is enjoying this.
She approaches him slowly, careful not to drip acid from her wound onto him. She grabs his shattered body, holding him in her embrace. She is gentle, in her way.
She takes him back to the nest, and binds him to the wall with her resin.
She molts for the final time.
The process takes two days. When she regains consciousness following the molting process, she is disappointed to see that her eighth victim has died from his injuries.
An hour later the first egg emerges.
Several hours later her first seven larvae feed on their host's corpses. She already has a dozen eggs ready for additional hosts.
During the next nightfall, the seven, now adults, leave for the surface. They return with hosts, and secure them, then return to the surface. By the end of the night, twenty-six human colonists ring the walls of her breeding chamber. Only six of her warriors have survived their first day, but her brood is now even stronger.
Within a week, the last holdouts of the colony, barricaded in the town hall, fall to her hordes. The entire maintenance level of the settlement is now her hive. What was once a human colony is now her colony.
