The Predator

by Christopher Golden

  His words almost felt like a confession, and for a few seconds he studied the beer label on the bottle, embarrassed and ashamed. When he finally glanced up, he was surprised to see Casey was looking at him with an almost tender expression.

  “Can I be honest with you?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  Gently, she said, “That’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

  He started to chuckle, but didn’t reply. In the conversational lull, Casey cocked her head at a distant, growing burr. It took her a moment to realize the sound was the approach of a helicopter, chopping at the air.

  McKenna, however, recognized the sound instantly. By the time Casey had figured it out, he had already jerked upright and then slammed out the door of the RV, into the darkness. Casey took a deep breath and followed him out. Whatever came next, they were all in it together, for better or for worse.

  She had a terrible feeling it was going to be worse.

  18

  Bursting from the RV, McKenna nearly ran headlong into Nettles, who stood frozen in the field, listening to the sound of the incoming chopper. All the amusement that had been on the man’s face just minutes earlier had vanished, leaving just the soldier behind. The warrior.

  “Sounds like a Pave Hawk,” Nettles said, glancing at McKenna. “Sikorsky. Not civilian.”

  This was all McKenna needed to hear. He whirled around, scanning the team. Baxley, Coyle, Lynch, Nebraska, Nettles himself, Casey… and Rory. Jesus, he wished he could have taken the kid home, but nowhere was safe for Rory right now. Nowhere. He consoled himself with the thought that as long as he was with his son, he could at least try his best to keep the kid alive.

  How the hell had it come to this?

  “Lights out! Move!” he barked, even as he darted back to the RV, reached inside, and killed the lights.

  When he turned, he saw that the Loonies were all looking to him, waiting on orders. He’d become their ersatz CO, which meant it was on him to formulate a plan. Right now, his only plan was to keep as many of them alive—and out of the clutches of their various enemies—as possible. Whatever happened in the next few minutes, if some of them kept to the shadows, there was always hope for the others. If they were all captured, the government could tell any story they wanted about the violence and fear unfolding tonight.

  Yet, in their faces, he could see that they thought of themselves as a team—that they wouldn’t like the idea of splitting apart. They needed something to cling to. The Loonies needed a mission.

  “We’re gonna need air transport,” McKenna said. He glanced at Nettles. “And maybe some incendiaries. Nebraska, you’re with me. The rest of you, go. Get moving!”

  They all stood a little straighter. Even Rory. One by one, the Loonies saluted McKenna, sealing the deal—making it official. He was their commanding officer. He snapped a salute in return, trying to hide how absurdly moved he suddenly felt, and the Loonies took that as their cue. They bolted, grabbing weapons on the way, and disappeared into the woods at the edge of the field.

  McKenna grabbed Rory’s hand, nodded to Casey and Nebraska, and the four of them ran across the field. Tall grass waved around them, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough to hide them. They’d only run five yards when they nearly tripped over the Predator dog, a thick stick clenched in its mandibles.

  Casey rushed at it, making silent shooing motions with her hands. “Go,” she urged, but the bolt through its head hadn’t just tamed the monstrosity. Dumb as a stump, it capered back and forth with every shooing motion, thinking Casey was playing with it.

  While they’d been in the area, the men had spread out to clean their weapons and take inventory. Casey spotted something on the ground and bent to retrieve it. Only when she stood up did McKenna see that it was an errant grenade, sloppily left behind by one of the Loonies. He’d have ripped them a new asshole if they were still standing there. Instead, he felt relief as Casey tossed the grenade—pin still safely in—toward an irrigation ditch. The Predator dog raced after it, snatched it up, and then tumbled into the ditch.

  “Dad, we’re never gonna make it,” Rory said.

  McKenna gave him a tug and they started running again. Casey and Nebraska fell in behind them, racing toward an old barn a hundred yards across the field.

  The helicopter roared in from over the tree line. The chop of its rotors went from loud to deafening as it swept overhead, circled back, and then hovered above them, its spotlight stabbing down onto McKenna and the others like God had decided it was time for them to have a conversation. They were caught dead to rights, nowhere to run.

  McKenna let go of his son’s hand and spread his arms, to make sure the shooters up in the chopper knew he didn’t have a gun. Nebraska and Casey did the same.

  Moments later the Sikorsky was on the ground, tall grass bent by the blowback of the rotors. The door slid open, and a figure jumped down into the field. McKenna recognized Agent Traeger immediately, and reluctantly had to admire the man’s courage. Though his men followed him out of the chopper, all of them armed and with their weapons trained on McKenna, Nebraska, Casey, and Rory, Traeger had exited first and unarmed. Whatever he wanted from them, it wasn’t a firefight.

  Even so, McKenna shifted to put himself between the mercenaries’ guns and his son.

  Traeger stopped a dozen feet away and regarded them impassively. “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?” McKenna replied.

  “The device,” Traeger said. He mimed placing something on his arm, as if he was wearing the same type of wrist gauntlet the Predators wore. “It goes right in here.”

  McKenna knew instantly what he meant, remembered the thing in Rory’s hand—what the original Predator had come for, and what the Upgrade had killed him for.

  “That… thing has it.”

  One of Traeger’s men—not a soldier, but an aide of some kind—gave them a look of disdain.

  “I see,” the aide said. “Well, if that’s your position, I think it’s time for some robust discussion.”

  As the helicopter’s rotors finally stopped spinning, throwing an eerie silence over the farmland, armed mercenaries hustled forward and grabbed McKenna and Nebraska. Rory started to argue, but McKenna quieted him with a look. The mercs started marching McKenna and Nebraska toward the barn across the field. In the dark, Casey and Rory were accompanied by Traeger and his aide. No guns were aimed at the scientist and the boy, but they were no less prisoners, and in no less danger.

  * * *

  McKenna had his face in the dirt. He didn’t like the taste. His thoughts were all static fuzz, like a TV screen when the cable connection went out. His face throbbed where boots had kicked him, and his ribs ached. He tried to get his knees under him and another boot kicked him. He grunted and went down on his face again. Thoughts of Rory filled his head. He pictured the kid drawing in the dirt… then sliding in the dirt to get to first base… and somehow that led his mind to an image of the Loonies saluting him.

  An image flickered in his head—the men he’d lost in the jungle, the smell of their blood, the Predator uncloaking, soaked in gore. He should have killed the bastard at the time, but it was dead now, wasn’t it? Muddy as his thoughts were, he knew that. The giant one, the Upgrade, had hung that son of a bitch like a side of meat. He wondered how many more there were, how many on their home planet. How many on his home planet?

  “You hid it once,” a voice said.

  McKenna glanced up at the two mercs who loomed over him. They had him in some kind of holding pen beside the barn. One of them kicked him again.

  “In the mail,” the mercenary reminded him. “Where’d you hide it this time?”

  With the next kick, McKenna coughed up blood.

  Fuzzy as his mind might be, he knew that was a bad sign.

  * * *

  The mercs had taken Casey up into the barn’s loft, and secured her to one of a stack of rickety wooden chairs that had no doubt been left over from a hoedown or so
mething. The barn’s interior was not nearly as romantically antique as she’d expected, given the general condition of the structure from the outside. The place was big and sprawling, with wooden crates stacked next to the rows of chairs at one end and a string of lights along the beams overhead. Not the sort of place teenagers would come for a roll in the hay in the torrid novels she’d read in secret in middle school.

  She tugged against the handcuffs, but it was a futile gesture. Traeger, who had been leaning against the wall, observing her as if she was an interesting specimen in an aquarium, now wandered casually across and stood in front of her—loomed over her, in fact.

  “You’re pretty handy with a gun,” he said. “Where’d you learn?”

  She wasn’t about to discuss her family history with a creep like Traeger. He wasn’t worth it. “America,” she said.

  Traeger snorted. “Funny. Know what my job description is?”

  Casey thought back to the moment when the Predator had first burst to life in the examination room back at the Project: Stargazer complex, and how Traeger had suddenly been conspicuously absent.

  “Guy-who-flees-when-monster-appears?” she snapped, and winked at him. “You’re good.”

  Ignoring the jibe, he said, “Close. I’m in acquisitions.”

  Casey glared at him. In truth, she wanted to know more, but the handcuffs and the armed guards in the barn and whatever Traeger’s men were doing to McKenna didn’t make her feel like developing any sort of rapport with him right now, however false and temporary, so she remained silent.

  Undeterred, he went on, “I look up, I wait—and catch what falls out of the sky.”

  “Alien tech?” she said, interested despite herself.

  “Yup. Seems Predators, they don’t just polish pelvic bones twenty-four seven. They conquered space. I wager there’s a whole faction… like you.”

  “Acerbic?” She weighed her options, mind racing. “Listen, I can help you. I’ve been studying the biolog—”

  “Shut the fuck up!” he screamed at her suddenly, shocking her, causing her to dig her heels into the dirt floor, rock back in her chair. For a moment, the wooden walls boomed with the echo of his fury, and then abruptly he was calm again, smiling at her. Only this time his smile didn’t seem as charming as it once had. This time, it seemed cruel and bottomless. “You stole our secrets, Dr. Brackett. That’s not one ‘no,’ that’s two ‘nos.’ That’s a no-no. Now, I need to locate that ship, so… one more time. Where is the device?”

  Casey felt her throat go dry. She licked her lips. “What’s on that ship?” she asked.

  Traeger’s smile slipped again, but this time he didn’t scream at her. He simply let out an exasperated sigh and rubbed a hand over his closely cropped hair. He was clearly frazzled, stressed out. Which may not have been good news for Casey and McKenna, but she felt a certain satisfaction at seeing it nonetheless.

  “You wanna know what’s on that ship?” he snapped. “Okay, for starters—a ship. A fucking interstellar spacecraft. We don’t got one of those.”

  “That’s a really good point,” she conceded.

  “So.” He leaned closer to her. “ You tell me— what’s on that ship?”

  She looked into his eyes. Brown as roasted chestnuts, but cold all the same. “Gravy,” she said.

  He nodded, straightened up. “Exactly. Gravy.”

  * * *

  Rory sat in the RV, drawing in a notebook one of the soldiers had given him. He preferred it to drawing in the dirt. The helicopter sat dark and silent about twenty meters away—the pilot had moved it closer to the barn. One bored-looking guard had been posted to keep an eye on Rory, and he didn’t mind so much. He was just waiting to find out what the soldiers were going to do with him and his dad and Casey and Nebraska. He liked Casey and Nebraska, he had decided.

  His dad and Nebraska were soldiers too, so he thought it wouldn’t be so bad. The alien monster, the huge one, was clearly the bad guy. Rory had seen enough monster movies to know what happened when the military went up against a giant monster, so he figured they would work all of this out together, eventually.

  For now, he just wanted to draw.

  Agent Traeger’s aide, whose name—Rory had learned—was Sapir, sat inside the helicopter with his laptop open. Rory wasn’t sure if Sapir thought he was deaf or that his Asperger’s made him stupid, but the man wasn’t making any attempt to keep him from overhearing the conversation he was having over Skype on his laptop.

  The man on the other end of the Skype call was a cryptographer. Sapir had said as much, but Rory would have figured it out anyway. He wasn’t stupid, no matter what Sapir thought. The cryptographer sounded tense, but Rory wouldn’t have been able to identify what sort of tension the man’s voice betrayed if Sapir hadn’t kept telling him not to get so irritated.

  That’s what irritation sounds like, he told himself. His mom had told him he needed to focus on strategies of socialization, and trying to identify emotion by tone of voice was one of those. Rory had been trying, but didn’t feel like he was getting any better at it.

  “You haven’t found the spacecraft,” the apparently irritated cryptographer snapped at Sapir. “Why are we trying to crack the entry code?”

  “Because when we do find it, it would be great if we could get into the fucking thing!” Sapir barked.

  Now that sounded like irritation. Rory felt pleased with himself for recognizing it, but he supposed shouting and swearing were big clues, so maybe he shouldn’t pat himself on the back too much.

  The guard had taken an interest in Rory’s drawing. The guy came a bit closer, peering over his shoulder.

  “What’s that?” the guard asked.

  “Map,” Rory said.

  “Map to what?”

  Rory shrugged without looking up. “The alien’s ship.”

  The guard went quiet for a few seconds before bending over and reaching toward the drawing pad. His hand paused a few inches from it. The smile on the man’s face did not reach his eyes. Even Rory could see that.

  “Do you mind if I…?”

  Rory shrugged. The guard took the pad and Rory started tapping his pencil on the toe of his sneaker. He didn’t want to give up the pad—drawing was the only thing he could do to occupy himself here, and it helped keep him calm. His mother was an artist, and though he didn’t aspire to follow her in that vocation, he understood the way she lost herself in her art. He found himself able to do the same thing and he always enjoyed the places that drawing took him, even just doodling. Sometimes he drew things to help himself envision them, or to make sure he wouldn’t forget.

  The guard walked the pad over to the helicopter, trying to get Sapir’s attention, but Sapir waved him away.

  “I’m busy.”

  On the Skype connection, the cryptographer continued to plead his case. “Sir, we’re trying. I’m telling you, the access sequence… it could be a hundred digits, for all we know.”

  “Fifteen,” Rory said aloud.

  Sapir and the guard both froze. Even the cryptographer on the laptop had gone silent.

  Rory glanced across at Sapir through the open door of the RV. “I’m pretty sure it’s fifteen.”

  Less than ninety seconds passed while Sapir rushed inside and emerged with Agent Traeger in tow. Rory knew he was the guy responsible for people pointing guns at them tonight, and for all the trouble his dad was in. Traeger had the drawing pad in his hand as he walked over to him and smiled like they were best friends.

  “Hi, Rory,” Agent Traeger said. “I’m Will. I understand you know where the spaceship is.”

  Rory bit his lip, shoulders tense.

  Suddenly, Traeger was no longer friendly. He tapped the drawing Rory had made. “You want to play grown-up? Man to man? We’re not going to let your dad go. Not until you give us what we want.”

  “What if I won’t tell you?” Rory said.

  Traeger shook his head and looked just like Mr. Cushing, his math teacher, sometimes
did when one of Rory’s classmates disappointed him. “Oh, now, Rory… I thought we were playing grown-up.”

  For the first time, Rory felt a little afraid.

  19

  The world tilted beneath McKenna. He still had a mouthful of dirt and he was certain there was cowshit mixed in there, too. Groggy, he had just enough of his wits about him to hope this wasn’t a concussion. The two mercs still loomed above him, but they’d held off on the kicking for a minute.

  He spat a wad of blood and soil onto the ground. His face was swollen, his jaw stiff. He breathed through his nose with a reedy whistle and the copper stink of his own blood. They’d worked him over good. Internal darkness kept washing over his thoughts, as if unconsciousness was an ocean trying to drown him.

  Taking a breath, he glanced up, eyes narrowed as he peered through the slats in the fence around the holding pen. The helicopter sat there, and its rotors had started to turn. The familiar whine of the chopper gearing up forced him to pay attention. He saw several figures climbing aboard and wondered where they were off to. Had they found the Upgrade Predator? Had they found the gizmo Rory had gotten his hands on?

  The mercs were talking among themselves. As far as they were concerned, he was done. As good as dead. The only thing remaining would be the bullet that punctuated the end of his personal sentence.

  McKenna squeezed his eyes shut. One of the people getting on board the chopper seemed so much smaller than the others. If he hadn’t been kicked in the head, it might have gained him a second, but then he blinked his vision clear and realized the little guy was Rory and that he was being dragged on board. These fuckers working for Traeger weren’t content to question them—these assholes were about to take his son on a chopper ride, take him away from his old man, use him somehow.

  The chopper started to lift off. It whorled skyward.

  That moment or two had cost McKenna a chance to reach Rory. Rage boiled behind his eyes.

  “Golf tomorrow?” one of the mercs asked the other, ever so casual, as he drew his gun to finish Quinn McKenna. Whatever they had needed him for, they clearly didn’t need him anymore.