Predator

by Paul Monette

  In his macho dance he totally underestimated the girl’s fast thinking and swift reflexes. The instant his eyes were averted she sprang from the ground in a flash. Twisting her bound arms in a furious contortion Houdini would have bowed to, she cracked Ramirez squarely over the right eye with the chunk of wood.

  As his head split in two with pain, Ramirez saw-bright red lights and instinctively covered the eye with his hand. The arm with the rifle dangled useless. Again Anna took the moment’s advantage, this time kicking him brutally in the groin, ramming his testicles right up to his intestines. Stunned, Ramirez’s eyes gaped like a frog’s as he doubled over in agony. He heaved like a drowning man going under, then choked out a single hollow cough that seemed to come from the pit of his stomach. The mute reaction wasn’t a matter of stoic reserve, nor the mark of a soldier determined to salvage his pride in the face of defeat. It was rather a purely involuntary response, the kind a man makes when it hurts so much he’s beyond screaming.

  The next moment Ramirez collapsed to the ground and curled in a fetal position.

  Anna Gonsalves didn’t hang around to watch the special effects. She scrambled fast up the muddy slope beside the rock pool, parting her way through the thick border of broad-leaf ferns that followed up the ridge. Breaking out at the ridgeline, she hesitated in picking a direction. Though she knew this jungle better than all the commandos, she had never been this way, and any untracked place in the Usamacinta basin was a whole new game. She could only rely on luck and a certain instinctual sense, and she knew that no matter what she mustn’t wander over the border. It was certain death for the likes of her, as much as it would save the U.S. team.

  She started off into the jungle proper, feeling the wet heat the trees had captured. Behind her she could hear Ramirez, who had barely regained his speech. In a voice that rasped with the pain of his injured balls knifing through his body like high-voltage shocks, he managed to spit out a curse. “You motherfuckin’ cunt,” he hissed, “I’ll slit your goddam throat.”

  But though it made him feel like a man again to say it he was still too paralyzed to stand, let alone give chase. The Chicano’s wounds were a good deal worse than physical. The embarrassment and anger at being throttled by a woman—and one whose hands were tied to boot—would require a considerably longer recovery than a head gash and bruised gonads.

  From here on Ramirez would despise the dark-eyed woman rebel with an intensity beyond reason. He knelt by the rock pool, propping himself on a fallen tree trunk, and seethed with a longing to carve out her heart with a slow machete. Yet even in the thick of the pain he had the presence of mind to shout to the others for help.

  Schaefer, who was still trying to sort out Billy’s story of the temple god—trying to forget it—heard Ramirez’s cry and immediately dispatched Hawkins to check it out. “Move out, Irish. On the double.”

  Then the major turned on Dillon, who had just returned from a brisk reconnoiter of the surrounding bush in which he had encountered nothing. “Your girlfriend, no doubt,” sneered Schaefer, refering to the obvious trouble that filtered through the trees with Ramirez’s shout of alarm. “Didn’t you hear me the first time. Officer Dillon,” he growled sarcastically, pointing a threatening finger. “You babysit the bitch from now on. And don’t fuckin’ use my men again. Got it?”

  Schaefer’s patience for the boss with the desk job manner was over. Dillon glared back and said nothing, but his whole demeanor was chastened, as if he was registering a demerit.

  Hawkins raced back through the jungle along the flank of the canyon wall and arrived at the rock pool just in time to see Anna hightailing it through the ferns at the top of the ridge. He bent down to Ramirez, still half-lying on the ground, one hand protectively cupping his crotch. Hawkins looked back and forth between his buddy and the disappearing hostage, torn between the two crises.

  Ramirez looked up, his eyes still watering from the pain. He sensed the Irishman’s indecisiveness. “I’m okay,” he gasped. “Just get that bitch,” he gritted through clenched teeth, as if the outcome of an entire war depended on bringing her in.

  Hawkins tore off up the ridge after Anna, probably no more than a hundred paces behind her but with no certain knowledge of which direction she’d taken. It was her jungle, not his. Besides, Irish had less experience in the field than the rest of the commando team, usually because he was stuck in one spot trying to put together a radio out of old rusty flashlights.

  Meanwhile, even with her hands still bound, Anna—fit as a gymnast—darted rabbitlike around trees and ducked like a jackal through the underbrush. She was so single-minded about escaping she forgot her never-quite-mastered fear of prowling pumas and the deadly vipers slithering underfoot that she could easily, in her rush, disturb. She’d been brought up in the capital city, and her great guerrilla triumphs had involved the planting of bombs in government buildings and embassies. She had proudly, tenaciously, marched with her unit to the jungle hideout to prepare for the great offensive, but something in her had never lost the childhood fear of the wild. Her youth in the city had been pampered by nuns and European governesses. The jungle, though only miles away, was the other side of the world.

  If she had known what was tracking her, the thoughts of snakes and wildcats would have seemed innocent as a child’s dreams.

  For when Anna overcame Ramirez only minutes before, the alien had been crouching in the upper branches of a mahogany tree towering above the rock pool. It had sensed, and in its way relished, every detail of the skirmish between the two. Curious and obsessed, it watched Ramirez clutch his groin, instinctively understanding who was the loser, who the winner. It watched the rebel woman clamber away up the ridge with a sense of triumph spilling over from its own soul. It suddenly longed for a victory of its own, so it could fly with the winner and kill the winner and have it all.

  Exultantly transforming itself from observer mode to predator mode, it quickly searched the surrounding sky till it settled on a hawk sailing gracefully by, its wings held perfectly still while the heat-soaked air currents wafted it like a billowing schooner. The unearthly intruder followed the bird’s flight with its neat vision. Then, with its sixth-sense power of capture, it zeroed in on the hawk’s essence, its mind steering the bird toward it like some remote-controlled toy. The hawk’s soul was lost to the alien, possessed like a zombie.

  For this was the effortless power the alien found it had over every creature it encountered on the host planet—every one, that is, but man. It could kill a man but not take him over—could dissect him down to the cell structure, but not inhabit him body and soul. Perhaps it was the elusive matter of the soul that made man impenetrable to the alien—man the justice-giver, man the idea-maker. Something in any case that the alien lacked, and all the more reason to destroy the species utterly if there was no other way of possessing it.

  Wings frozen, the hawk dropped helplessly from the air, and the alien snatched it out of the sky with an outstretched hand. It pulled the bird close and held it gently in both three-fingered hands, fanning the white neck feathers where the quivering bird lay paralyzed. Then the alien bent its head down and almost seemed to nuzzle the bird, purring as if to calm it—till the stunning transformation occurred. First the alien’s skin swirled with all the mottled autumn shades, hues blending and churning like a kaleidoscope till it settled on the exact slate gray of the bird’s feathers. Then its lizardlike skin swirled down and its form melted and compressed and took the hawk’s shape. When it was an exact clone of the animal it dropped the limp hawk from its talons, letting it fall to be consumed by predators of its own.

  An instant later the reincarnated hawk flapped its wings as if it had just awakened to a new day. Its razor talons released their viselike grip on the topmost branch. Soaring into the air it set off up the ridge after Anna and Hawkins. Unlike the true hawk, which drifted in wide dreamlike circles, the alien slapped the air with a surge of power as it sped over the trees, drinking in the species at the
peak of force, in a wild drunken thirst for prey. With the easy edge of a bird in a race with the earthbound it sailed above its prey, catching the girl’s pace but then outdistancing her by a hundred yards and lazily combing back in a hawk’s pure circle.

  As Anna struggled to stay ahead of Hawkins she glanced back anxiously every few seconds. The sounds of snapping twigs and the rush of leaves grew louder as he closed in on her. Though he was encumbered by the radio strapped to his back and the M-202 slung over his shoulder, Irish was in superb condition and steamrollered after the rebel woman with relentless stamina. Because she was so panicked her trail was a snap to follow. Even if he’d had to move slower there was never any question about laying aside the radio. It went where Hawkins went—period.

  When Anna broke through the dense trees onto the canyon rim and into a more navigable grove of ferns, she still had a thirty-meter lead but was heaving from exhaustion. Moments later she came to a natural clearing, a long unbroken alley between rows of tall bamboo trees that grew in such perfect rank they looked planted. Taking advantage of the opening she sprinted down the alley as fast as she could, surging forward with a last throb of energy as if she were crossing a finish line.

  Hawkins drove down hard on her now and closed the gap. He bore down like a madman along the bamboo alley, the great weight on his back roaring him forward on the slight downhill slope. Anna was only ten feet in front of him. Five feet. Then she slipped a half inch as she trod over a rotting melon, and the instant’s hesitation gave Irish his chance. He lunged out as he overtook her, knocking her to the ground. Immediately he had his rifle cocked and pinned her neck to the ground. Then he roughly rolled her over with his foot and placed the barrel tight between her eyes.

  Anna’s eyes darted back and forth in panic, staring into the threatening black hole of the rifle and combing the pitiless jungle as she frantically weighed her alternatives. Out of the corner of one eye she caught a glimpse of furious upheaval farther down the alley. Hawkins’s back was turned so he couldn’t see it. Anna assumed with a bitter sinking of the heart that it was another of the commandos catching up with them. So flight was out of the question. Anna stared up the barrel at the cold-eyed Irishman, wondering what sort of tack she ought to take—pleading, seduction, screaming, sobbing. Once again she darted a glance down the alley to see which of the others had joined them, hoping it might be the weak-hearted black man—

  And suddenly, there in the low grass about twenty yards away, was the alien, standing clear, for the first time making no attempt to disguise itself from view. It had discarded its hawk disguise and returned to its normal humanoid form—a creature who seemed from Anna’s vantage to be nearly as tall as the trees. Its cobra skin swirled with color. Its masklike face appeared to be peeling away from its great golden honeycomb eyes. It waved its weapon above its head in silent communion with the warrior stars of deep space. Its Darwinian battle with an equal was engaged at last.

  The sight of it was so horrifying that Anna nearly blacked out. Her brute survivor’s instinct was the only thing that kept her sane, and the impact of the monster was such as to temporarily erase her blood rivalry with the soldiers. In an instant man against man had turned to man against devil. Her eyes went wide with shock, and her mouth fell slack. She tried to whimper a warning to the Irishman. Hawkins figured she was scared he’d shoot her.

  “Listen, sweetass,” he said, “don’t give us any more shit, okay? You’re not dead yet, and neither are we. Let’s keep it that way, huh?”

  She didn’t hear a word of it as she limply held out a hand, pointing down the bamboo alley at the alien as it flared its weapon to life. “Look . . . look out . . . behind you,” she gasped in breathless Spanish.

  Hawkins assumed she was pulling a stunt to divert his attention, yet he saw the real terror in her eyes and heard the shiver in her halting tone. He turned slightly to glance over his shoulder while still covering the girl. As he did so he saw a weird blur, the mottled outline of the creature looming toward them, its saber wheeling in the air above its head.

  It seemed as if the entire wall of the jungle were caving in as the alien covered the distance like a bolt of lightning. Anna and Hawkins froze at the sight and instinctively shrank toward each other. But there was no real time to react in thought, let alone in action, though Hawkins managed to fire one lonely misguided bullet which whizzed off uselessly into the seething sky. It was to be his final defense.

  In a second the alien’s weapon ripped through Hawkins’s throat and shot out the other side. The impact sent the Irishman hurling backward till he landed with a sickening crash in the undergrowth thirty feet away. Anna was left prostrate on the ground, covered with the commando’s blood.

  Shaking uncontrollably, she crawled on her hands and knees to the side of the alley and crouched in a heap against a bamboo trunk, sobbing like a lost child. She started biting the ends of her fingers like a psychotic, her face ghost white as she stared at the shredded track of turf where Hawkin’s body had shot across the ground.

  She began to pray, after a fashion. The words drooled out of her and made no sense, but the sound was the sound she’d made in the convent, murmuring among the nuns twenty years ago. Her white-dress first communion god seemed very far away, but it was the only god she knew.

  Behind the cover of the bushes where Hawkins had disappeared, arms and legs flailing like a broken puppet, head barely hanging from his body by shreds of torn cartilege, the alien dispassionately hooked its third spurred finger into the Irishman’s leg like a meat hook. Then it dragged the body off through the jungle, limp as a fallen deer.

  Anna had retreated even further now into a sort of catatonia and didn’t notice anything. If only she could have recovered her hunger for freedom she would’ve been able to run away scot-free. Now was her chance. The alien appeared to be content with a single trophy at a time, as if it needed to focus its whole mind on a microscopic examination of one pure specimen. Anna could have fled it all like a fevered tropical nightmare, emerging once again to the rational bombs and espionage of the disintegrating capital. Yet she’d been pitched too far off balance by the horror she’d witnessed. It wouldn’t go away and wouldn’t behave like a dream, and she lay in a heap against the tree trunk, trembling as if she would never wake.

  T E N

  In the crook of the sunset canyon below, the rest of the men had gathered at Schaefer’s signal. They waited for Ramirez and Hawkins, skittish as corraled horses getting wind of a stalking mountain lion. They smoked black Panama cigarettes to the knuckle and scrutinized the shadowing jungle with trigger-happy reflexes. Each was anxious and worried for the two men still out there, especially after hearing the lone gunshot. As the silence deepened after the echo died, the one shot seemed like an awful omen, like a bad game of Russian roulette.

  Blain cradled his grenade launcher as affectionately as a first-born son. “One o’ them monkeys shows his face and I’ll send him back to his dead grandmother,” he cracked gruffly out of the side of his mouth to Mac. It seemed like such an empty threat in a place where nothing human moved and nothing so simple as a war played out. But the bluff cliché was not what mattered here. It was as if the mere words—any words—would break up the heavy cloud hanging over the men.

  Mac chuckled briefly. “Can I kill the other grandmother?” It was good to lighten the intensity even for a second.

  Schaefer, huddled with Billy, was trying to make sense of the psychic whirlwind from which the Sioux had just emerged. The major, a hard-core Baptist-raised nonbeliever in Santa Claus and a three-dimensional fan from head to toe, was wary of Billy’s dream state. Yet from the ditches of Da Nang to the smithereens of Cambodia he had never encountered the kind of barbaric cruelty he’d uncovered in the wake of the downed chopper. Billy might be talking like a nut case, Schaefer thought, but he also knew well that the kid had never steered him off-target—not once. So the major tried his best to pry open his mind to the far-out possibilities Billy was intim
ating.

  “Lemme get this straight,” Dutch said slowly, his brow furrowed with skepticism. “You say you saw God, only he looked like some kinda space monster?”

  Billy stood his ground, absolutely centered by his vision. “That’s one way to put it, sir.”

  “What the hell is this, The Twilight Zone? I got enough trouble just gettin’ through this fuckin’ jungle alive.”

  But Billy’s insight had been so crystal clear, his conviction so solid, he realized there wasn’t a minute to waste on an introductory course in psychic awareness. One of the reasons he’d been able to tune in so acutely to the intruder’s thoughts was that the alien had begun to focus more individually on the men as it systematically took and dissected them. Right away it had sought to share something with the Indian, recognizing in him a kindred spirit. So Billy had the most highly developed vision of the alien’s mission, and he knew he simply had to convince the major to trust him.

  “Sir, you gotta believe me,” he almost pleaded. “We’re in terrible danger. There’s a force out there . . . we’ll call it a creature. It’s already killed the three guys back at the chopper. I don’t even know if we can stop it. But it’s after us now, I’m sure of it. There’s no time to explain how I know. But I swear. Major, trust me on this one. I wish I was wrong but I’m not. If I’m wrong I’ll turn in my stripes and sell Injun rugs on Route Eighty—that is, if we ever get outa here alive.” He looked expectantly at Schaefer, but with the utter calm of a man touched by divine vastness.

  “Christ, Billy,” Schaefer groaned, shaking his head in bewilderment. But he knew a decision had to be made that instant. “All right, we got no other choice but to keep movin’ double time. Whatever it is out there, I’m not gonna sit and wait for the autopsy—especially mine. You lead the way, same as always. But don’t tell none of the others about this monster business.”