The Predator

by Christopher Golden

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  The Complete PredatorTM Library From Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  0

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  THE COMPLETE PREDATORTM LIBRARY FROM TITAN BOOKS

  THE PREDATOR: HUNTERS AND HUNTED

  by James A. Moore

  THE PREDATOR: THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION

  by Christopher Golden and Mark Morris

  THE ART AND MAKING OF THE PREDATOR

  by Dominic Nolan

  THE COMPLETE PREDATOR OMNIBUS

  by Nathan Archer and Sandy Schofield

  THE COMPLETE ALIENS VS. PREDATOR OMNIBUS

  by David Bischoff, S. D. Perry, and Steve Perry

  PREDATOR: IF IT BLEEDS

  edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  THE RAGE WAR

  by Tim Lebbon

  PredatorTM: Incursion

  Alien: Invasion

  Alien vs. PredatorTM: Armageddon

  BY CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN AND MARK MORRIS

  BASED ON THE SCREENPLAY WRITTEN BY

  FRED DEKKER & SHANE BLACK

  BASED ON THE CHARACTERS CREATED BY

  JIM THOMAS & JOHN THOMAS

  TITAN BOOKS

  THE PREDATOR

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785658051

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658068

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: September 2018

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  TM & © 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  For my son, Daniel, who is going to love this film.

  CG

  For my kids, David and Polly, who love monster movies.

  MM

  0

  Space.

  Cold. Silent. A billion twinkling stars. You can’t imagine the serenity out here. The peace and quiet, the way it seems as if you might drift forever on this dark, glittering ocean. It might go on for eternity, an infinite horizon of invisible tides and unknown energies. You could surrender yourself and sail into this beautiful dream. Stars fall and comets burn in the distance, suns blink out, planets are born, and the Hubble Space Telescope watches it all with mechanical indifference.

  Until there’s a ripple in the void.

  Close your eyes and you can see what I mean. The heat rising off a distant highway—the way the air shimmers above the blacktop—it’s like that. Then the velvet black curls and folds and something emerges at speed that would make the air scream, if there were any air out here. The gleaming spacecraft is smoking, the hull scorched and dented, shedding scales off its hull as its pilot tries to get it under control.

  The Hubble’s in the way. The ship shears through it, both spacecraft and telescope now vomiting debris. Sparking and hissing, the ship’s been through hell, and when it hits the outer limits of Earth’s atmosphere there’s a whump of resistance, like someone’s awkward dad just did a belly flop into the swimming pool.

  Oxygen stokes the sparks into flames.

  Far below—but closer with every second—the ice caps are melting. On board instruments show an atmosphere getting hotter and more toxic by the day, only the pilot’s not looking at those instruments.

  He’s at the helm. Smoke fogs the inside of the craft. Sparks pop and lights flicker but he doesn’t flinch, focused entirely on the control panel. His talons dance across it, trying to keep control—trying to navigate this craft so it doesn’t hit the ground at the same velocity it had when it sliced through spacetime, or smashed through the invisible wall of Earth’s atmosphere. The pilot does not want to die.

  Urgently, he taps a new sequence into the control panel. A slot opens on the console and even he—even this creature—hesitates a moment before he retrieves the device from within. In his language, or the crude version of his language you might be able to pronounce, it’s called the Kujhad. The pilot snaps it into the gauntlet he wears on his wrist with a loud click that echoes in the smoke-filled cockpit of the shuddering spacecraft.

  He rises. The pilot is no fool. The odds of the ship making it to the surface without tearing itself apart or exploding on impact do not favor his survival. He taps one final command into his control panel, initiating the escape sequence. As locks disengage on the primary escape pod, the control panel erupts in a fresh shower of sparks. But the pilot is already gone, heading toward the pod bay, moving more swiftly than his size should allow.

  Seconds pass.

  Outside the ship, a hiss and pop as the escape pod is jettisoned from the main body of the careening spacecraft. The pod bursts out in a blossom of flames, far from a clean exit, striking its edges against the ship as it tumbles away, trailing smoke, spinning in a descent as uncontrolled as that of the larger vessel.

  The pilot will do his best to survive. It’s one of the things his kind does best. They survive… and they hunt.

  On board the ship he’s vacated, sparks continue to fly. Smoke billows. Lights flicker, the control panel glitches, and then a sudden, savage burst of electric flame erupts—a power surge.

  The lights fail. The ship slices across the night sky, trailing smoke in the darkness, until it fades out of sight above America’s southern border.

  All is peaceful again.

  Cold. Silent.

  But not for long.

  1

  MONTERREY, MEXICO

  When a branch broke with a sharp snap beneath McKenna’s boot, he gritted his teeth and immediately froze. Then, gradually, he relaxed, letting out his breath in a long, slow exhalation.

  What was he worried about? Did he truly think such an inconsequential sound would betray his presence? Here in the depths of the jungle? Because what surrounded him could pretty much be termed a cacophony. Insects clicked and chirruped at ground level, exotic birds and monkeys chattered and screeched in the thick green canopy of trees overhead, and even the undergrowth in which he was crouched rustled all around him as unseen creatures went about their business.

  No, short of standing up and belting out a rendition of ‘The Star-Sp
angled Banner’ at the top of his lungs, he thought he was pretty much okay as far as concealing the sounds of his own, mostly stealthy movements were concerned.

  Not that that made his mission all that much easier.

  Far from it.

  Ignoring the sun beating down on the shoulders of his thick camouflage jacket, and the trickles of sweat that ran out of his hair and down the sides of his grease-blackened face, he adjusted his rifle on his shoulder, settling it into a slightly more comfortable position. Through its scope his gaze remained fixed on the incongruous sight of the gleaming black SUV parked at the side of the thin dirt highway that cut a groove through the teeming vegetation. He watched the men inside the SUV. Hunched, dark shapes. Just sitting there, as still as mannequins.

  He’d been here for close on thirty minutes now, but he was prepared to wait a lot longer if need be. Quinn McKenna was a captain in the US Army Rangers. A professional sniper. Thirty-six years old, at the peak of physical fitness, he could shoot a man dead without his pulse rate showing even the slightest blip of reaction. He was as cool as a snake. As patient as a sphinx. Here, in the heat of the jungle, with the enemy in range, he was very much in his element.

  The slight hissing in his Bluetooth headset was abruptly silenced and the clipped voice of Haines came through, tinny but clear.

  “Piggy One, copy. You got eyes on the hostages?”

  McKenna’s reply was a murmur. “Negative.”

  The third member of his unit, Dupree, his Louisiana tang prominent, said, “Twenty bucks says they don’t show.”

  McKenna smiled. “You yardbirds actually want to bet money on whether a drug cartel has executed the hostages?”

  “Abso-fucking-lutely,” said Dupree with conviction.

  “I believe that was implied,” murmured Haines.

  McKenna’s smile stretched into a grin. Sometimes the only way to cope with this job was to maintain a sense of humor—albeit of the graveyard variety. “Okay, just checking. I’m in for twenty.”

  He heard the rumble of an engine off to his left and swiveled the rifle to track the approach of a new vehicle. At first, he saw nothing but a swirling cloud of dust, then within it the glint of reflected sunlight on glass and chrome. Seconds later another SUV, as black and highly polished as the first, shimmered from the heat haze, as if beamed down from the USS Enterprise. Aware of movement to his right, McKenna swiveled again, and saw three men emerge from the parked vehicle armed with rifles, their movements languid, their weapons held casually, pointing at the ground. One of them—plump face, dark moustache, white, short-sleeved Guayabera shirt—was instantly recognizable. This was Gutierrez. Murderer. Drug lord. McKenna’s target.

  The second SUV jolted to a halt a meter or so behind Gutierrez’s vehicle and two big, sweaty guys got out the back, one on each side. The guy closest to McKenna turned and reached into the vehicle and hauled out a young woman. A sack had been pulled over her head and cinched at the neck. The woman, her hands tied in front of her, stumbled as the hired goon pushed her toward Gutierrez and his men, but she made no sound. Not so the second hostage, a kid this time, similarly hooded and tied, who was yanked from the vehicle like a sack of potatoes and tossed onto the dusty ground. He landed in a sprawl of limbs, skinning his bony knees, yelping in pain. One of Gutierrez’s men laughed.

  McKenna watched without emotion—or at least, he kept his emotions tightly coiled inside him. The instant Gutierrez had stepped from the vehicle, McKenna had tilted his rifle a fraction so that the drug lord’s head was positioned precisely in the center of his crosshairs. Aware as he was of the plight of the hostages, he remained utterly still, his heartbeat slow and steady in his chest, his breathing shallow, his finger poised on the trigger of his weapon.

  Barely moving his lips, he spoke quietly into his headset. “I got a woman and a kid, target in the reticle, no crosswind. I’m not waiting, 10-50 out.”

  All in all, it was a pretty shitty time for an earthquake.

  At least, that was what McKenna assumed it was at first. The instant he had finished speaking he became aware of a deep bass rumble, as if the world was about to split in two, and the ground beneath his feet started to shake. Then several things happened in very quick succession.

  First, a flock of birds exploded from the canopy of trees overhead, screeching in fright. Something huge and dark appeared in the sky to McKenna’s right (in his peripheral vision it looked like a boulder the size of an entire neighborhood) and sheared the top off a radio tower jutting above the trees in the middle distance, causing a mass of debris to fly off in all directions. On the ground, Gutierrez, his men, and the hired goons shouted and pointed their weapons, raising their faces to the approaching projectile as its vast black shadow rushed across the ground toward them.

  Through all of this, McKenna, after a quick glance to his right, remained motionless, cool, focused on his job. Readjusting his aim, which had wavered only slightly, he calmly shot Gutierrez through the head, taking him out of the equation. Even before the drug lord hit the ground like a dead weight, McKenna was swiveling, re-sighting, and finally taking in the details of the projectile heading toward him.

  He was expecting to see a comet, or a meteor, or whatever such things were called—a lump of rock, at any rate, trailing a tail of fire.

  Instead, he experienced a split second of awe, wonder, astonishment, as he realized the thing hurtling toward him was not a piece of space debris at all, but something… manufactured. A craft of some kind.

  A spaceship.

  He had time only to register that it looked like nothing he had ever seen before—hell, that it looked utterly and completely alien— and then he was up and running for his life. Thanks to his job, McKenna knew a little about course vectors and velocity, but he didn’t need to be an expert to calculate that the craft—the spaceship— was going to pass right over the heads of the group gathered around the two SUVs (and even now, the goons were piling into the vehicles and hauling ass, leaving their bewildered hostages and the corpse of their leader behind) and crash down pretty much right where he had established his vantage point.

  His only hope was the fact that to reach his vantage point he had had to scale the hillside of a steep jungle valley, hauling himself up via tree trunks and vines and the sinewy stalks of fleshy green plants. With luck, if he could reach the valley, the thing behind him, which even now was screaming like all the souls in Hell, would hit the ground, bounce right up over the top of the valley, and slide to a halt somewhere on the far side.

  There were a lot of ifs and buts to cover for that to happen, but ifs and buts were pretty much all McKenna could rely on right now. That, and his ability to keep running, as the jungle did its best to hold him back, leaves and branches lashing at his body as he hurtled through them, vines snagging at his ankles, eager to trip him up.

  Then, just when it seemed the screaming of the engines behind him would blot out his senses and the world with it, the ground disappeared beneath McKenna’s feet. One second it was there, and the next he was pedaling air, like Wile E. Coyote in those old Road Runner cartoons.

  Still holding his rifle in a death-like grip, he plunged downward, toward an array of branches and leaves and stalks and vines and rocks—oh shit, rocks. He tried to gauge his fall, to keep his body compact, but there wasn’t a whole lot he could do to influence gravity, and within seconds he was tumbling end over end, only vaguely aware of the pummeling he was taking as he bounced and rolled and cartwheeled down the slope.

  He had been knocked cold only twice before—once when boxing during his army training, and once in a bar fight when a redneck had got in on his blind side and hit him upside the head with a pool cue. Whatever it was that bashed him in the side of the skull now felt a little like that pool cue—a sudden, hard flash of impact, and then…

  Nothing.

  It was impossible to gauge how long he was out for, but when he came to he did so suddenly, his eyes snapping open. His survival training, d
rummed into him so intrinsically it was as natural to him as breathing, kicked in, his senses instantly assimilating information.

  He was covered in dirt, most likely from the avalanche of jungle debris created by the impact of the alien craft, which he could see had reduced the tree line way above his head to so much splintered matchwood. At some point it had started raining, heavy droplets splashing into his face and pattering on his fatigues like searching fingers.

  His head was throbbing, and when he touched it his fingertips came away thinly smeared with blood, but aside from a few bumps and bruises he seemed to be okay.

  His hands were empty. Where was his gun? Then, sitting up, he saw it lying in a clump of vegetation only a few meters away. He scrambled across to it, and snatched it up, and immediately felt better.

  Were his comms still working? He touched his headset, which was miraculously still in position and apparently undamaged.

  “Piggy One,” he said. “Do you read? Over.”

  Nothing but static—so maybe it wasn’t undamaged, after all.

  He clambered tentatively to his feet—and gasped.

  As he had calculated (hoped), the alien craft, the UFO, had hit the tree line at the top of the valley, bounced like one of those Dambuster bombs from World War Two, and come down on the far side of the valley, trailing a slipstream of debris behind it. But it hadn’t just come down. It had effectively punched a tunnel through the jungle, pulverizing trees as it went and leaving a smoking, blackened trail behind it.

  Shouldering his rifle, McKenna headed up the far side of the valley, and a few minutes later he was standing on the edge of the charred trail. Investigating UFOs was not exactly part of his mission remit, but how could he ignore something like this? Besides, he had to find his men. Haines and Dupree were out there somewhere, and chances were they’d have followed their instincts and, like him, converged on the UFO crash site. And okay, so this wasn’t strictly US soil, but as an Army Ranger, not to mention a citizen of the world, he still felt a responsibility to maintain national security if such an opportunity should present itself.