The Predator

by Christopher Golden

  No! she thought as Baxley reached the top of the leaning branch and launched himself, screaming, through the air. He looked just like Bruce Lee, or Charlie Chan, arms and legs pinwheeling as he hurtled toward the still-burning Upgrade.

  She cried out as he landed on its back and scrabbled for purchase, throwing an arm around its neck. In his other hand, Casey saw, he was holding a knife, which he used to stab the Upgrade savagely in the face, burying the blade deep into its right eye.

  The Upgrade howled, and thrashed from side to side, but Baxley, his own clothes and hair burning now, held on. Then the Upgrade reached round with its left arm and plucked him from its shoulder. It held him in the air for a moment, dangling and kicking, and then it hurled him away from itself as hard as it could. Baxley flew through the air, only to hit the jutting javelin of a tree branch, which went clean through his body. It entered his back and burst out through his chest, like a metal skewer through a piece of barbecued meat.

  As he hung there, pinned like a burning butterfly, twenty feet up in the air, Casey let out a gasp, too horrified even to scream. She’d known Baxley only a very short time, but due to the sheer intensity of what they’d shared, and the fact they’d put their lives on the line for each other time and again, she’d grown to think of him— as she thought of all the Loonies—as a brother. They’d been under sentence of death pretty much since they met, but it was still impossible to believe that, suddenly and violently, he was gone.

  * * *

  McKenna was far more used to death than Casey was, but even he stared up at Baxley with horror. Then he became aware of movement to his left, and turned to see Coyle stumbling forward, eyes wide, staring up at his friend in disbelief. “Help him!” Coyle screamed. “Someone help him!”

  The Upgrade took advantage of the distraction to show that, despite being consumed by fire and half-blinded, it was not yet beyond fighting back. It flicked out its wrist once again, and a split second later its lethal throwing blade was whistling across the clearing. Before McKenna, or anyone else, knew what was happening, the blade had sliced through Coyle’s left leg like a laser beam, severing it cleanly from his body. With a spray of blood, the leg toppled one way and Coyle the other. McKenna heard Casey scream, and then Rory.

  Spinning round, he saw the Upgrade turn and stumble away into the jungle. Despite its injuries, it moved fast, its burning shape flickering in and out between the blackness of the trees. Accompanied by Nebraska and Nettles, he gave chase. The thing was probably three-quarters dead already, but he wanted to finish the job if he could.

  * * *

  Lying on the ground, feeling the life drain out of him, Coyle looked up at his friend. Baxley was still burning, his body still twitching. Could he still feel pain? Coyle didn’t know, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  He groped for his gun, which lay on the ground next to his right hand. His arm felt like lead, and the gun was ridiculously heavy, but through sheer force of will he gripped it, lifted it, leveled it, pulled the trigger.

  His aim was true. He saw Baxley’s head snap back and his body slump forward, relaxed now. No more pain.

  Don’t say I never do nothing for you, he thought fuzzily. Goodbye, old friend.

  Then he died.

  * * *

  Casey might have been with Coyle at the moment of his death if she hadn’t been trying to save her own hide. As she was moving across the clearing toward him, and saw him groping for his gun, she heard a whistling sound from the far side of the clearing, faint at first but getting rapidly louder.

  She knew what it was immediately. The Upgrade’s throwing blade, having taken off Coyle’s leg and kept on going, had now reached the end of its piece of invisible elastic and was heading back home. It was only the shock of seeing Baxley and Coyle die so horrifically, one after the other, that had made her forget all about it. Now she shouted a warning and threw herself to the ground.

  She only just made it. Another second, and the blade would have gone through her without pause, smashing ribs and vertebrae and punching through her internal organs as if they weren’t even there.

  Lying on the ground, she saw it flash above her head and fly into the blackness of the jungle, following the route taken not only by the fleeing Upgrade, but also by his pursuers.

  McKenna and Nebraska.

  * * *

  Crashing through the undergrowth, rifles held diagonally across their chests, McKenna and Nebraska pursued their quarry with grim determination. The Upgrade was a constant flicker of flame through the trees ahead, and although it was still moving fast, it was clearly hampered by its injuries, which meant that both men could keep up with it easily.

  McKenna wondered what would happen once the Upgrade was dead. With Traeger gone too, would the trumped-up charges against him melt away? And what about Casey and Nebraska and Nettles? Would they be free to resume whatever life they’d been living before they’d found themselves in a fight between a maverick offshoot of the US government and a couple of alien hunters? They were heroes now, after all. Heroes who may have helped save the world from—

  Then the still-burning body of the Upgrade abruptly disappeared, interrupting his thoughts.

  What had happened? Had the flames on the alien’s body finally petered out? Had it collapsed? He and Nebraska halted, a questioning look passing between them. After a moment, Nebraska gave a single nod, whose meaning McKenna understood without a word needing to be exchanged: Proceed with caution.

  They resumed their pursuit, but slowly now, McKenna thinking that if he could wish for anything at that moment it would be a pair of night goggles. He kept his senses attuned, but there was no sound, aside from the usual rustle of leaves and foliage stirred by the warm night breeze, and no sign of a flame ahead or even above them.

  They had been moving for maybe a couple of minutes when Nebraska suddenly drew in a sharp breath and grabbed McKenna’s arm. McKenna looked at him, thinking he must have spotted a movement or a flicker of flame, but instead he pointed at the ground directly ahead.

  McKenna looked at where he was pointing—and as his eyes adjusted, a vertiginous dizziness swept over him. The blackness in front of him was not the jungle floor, as he’d thought, but the edge of a steep ravine. Another couple of seconds and he’d have stepped right off it and plunged into the depths below.

  Unslinging his pack, he extracted a flashlight. He hadn’t wanted to draw attention to their position by using it before, but now he switched it on and shone the beam over the edge of the precipice.

  Some thirty or forty meters below them was a creek bed, the water glistening blackly in the torchlight. And rising from the creek bed, though dispersing before it reached the lip of the ravine on which they were standing, was a pall of thick, gray smoke—as though something large, something that had been on fire, had crashed down into the water.

  McKenna and Nebraska looked at each other again. This was it, then. The end of the road. The Upgrade had fallen over the precipice, and into the creek, and was almost certainly dead. But there was no way of checking, no way of clambering down the side of the ravine to make sure, especially in the dark.

  McKenna opened his mouth to say they might as well head back, when Nebraska suddenly reached out a hand and shoved him to one side. As he fell to his right and Nebraska dived to his left, McKenna heard a high-pitched whistling sound, and then something flashed between them and arced down into the ravine.

  What the hell, McKenna thought, then all at once he realized. It was the Upgrade’s throwing star, the one that had taken Coyle’s leg, and almost certainly his life. It was returning to its point of origin, the alien’s wrist gauntlet, which was hopefully, at this moment, being washed downstream, strapped to the charred corpse of an alien killer.

  * * *

  Reacting to a powerful electronic homing signal, the throwing star plunged over the side of the ravine and hurtled down toward the black thread of water below. Suddenly, as though in response, a huge arm, blackened a
nd steaming but intact, thrust up through the surface of the water, taloned fingers clawing at the air.

  The throwing star attached itself to the metal gauntlet encasing the wrist with a metallic snap. The hand flexed again, and then the water beside it surged and boiled as the rest of the body broke the surface.

  24

  It was dawn. They were running.

  Again.

  They had had at least a couple hours’ respite after their victory, a time to rest and recuperate, to eat a little food and bury their fallen comrades. When McKenna and Nebraska had returned to the clearing to announce that they thought the Upgrade was dead, there had been tired cheers—but only from the couple of Traeger’s mercs who had survived the encounter. For the rest of them, the price had been too high for them to feel they could celebrate their enemy’s downfall—and when Nettles had glared at the mercs for daring to express their joy and relief, they had shut up quickly, and then had slunk away soon afterward, like funeral attendees who had suddenly realized they were in the wrong church.

  McKenna had thought it was tempting fate to hang around too long, and so as soon as they were ready they were back on the move again. With Rory on his shoulders, he led the way through the jungle toward the helicopter, which they had landed on a plateau at the jungle’s edge, a couple of miles to the south. They had covered around half that distance, maybe a little more, when Casey voiced her suspicion that they were being followed.

  McKenna wanted to tell her that they were fine, that it was nothing but her imagination, but he would just have been fooling himself. Casey was smart, levelheaded, and eminently capable, and he had grown to trust her instincts implicitly. Besides which, as soon as she spoke up, both Nebraska and Nettles admitted that they had been thinking the same thing—and even McKenna himself, much as he hated to say so in front of Rory, told them that his own Spidey-senses had been tingling for a little while too.

  The question was, was their pursuer—or pursuers— human or alien? McKenna hoped they would never need to find out. They doubled their pace, and covered the last mile of jungle in less than eight minutes. It was a relief when they finally burst from the tangle of trees and undergrowth to see the ludicrous pink helicopter still standing where they had left it, like a loyal pet awaiting their return.

  As they broke cover and started running for the chopper, McKenna glanced back—and just for an instant he thought he saw movement in the jungle behind them. But it was too swift, too fleeting, for him to be sure, and the next instant his eyes were dazzled by the dawn sun rising over the distant hills. He faced front again, jogging toward the chopper, Rory bouncing on his shoulders. Nettles was already in the pilot’s seat, Nebraska and Casey climbing in beside him. The engine coughed into life and the rotors started to turn.

  “Come on!” Nettles shouted.

  Another minute, McKenna thought. Another minute and they would be up in the air, flying away from this place. Eight of them had arrived here, and five would be leaving. It wasn’t great odds, but it could have been worse.

  He was a dozen steps from the chopper when a blazing streak of energy erupted from the edge of the jungle and hit the machine like a thunderbolt. Nettles, Casey, and Nebraska were blasted clean out of the still-open door of the cockpit, which crumpled like a deflating balloon as the rotors warped out of shape and stuttered to a halt.

  The shock wave of the blast knocked McKenna off his feet, Rory tumbling from his shoulders. As he lay dazed, he saw Casey stagger upright and beckon to Rory, who ran across to her, bent low to make himself less of a target. McKenna watched as the scientist and his son took refuge behind the only cover available to them— the still-smoking ruins of the helicopter—and then, pushing himself groggily to his knees, he glanced over his shoulder.

  He was not surprised by what he saw, but it still sent a weary shudder of horror and dismay through him.

  From the trees at the edge of the jungle, its huge body shimmering as it decloaked, stepped the Upgrade. It was battered and blackened, its right eye a suppurating mass of gore, but even now it still looked more than capable of ripping them apart with its bare hands.

  It looked mightily pissed off too—but then it always did. McKenna wondered what it would be like to be born in a rage, and to stay that way your entire life.

  The Upgrade’s gaze swept over him, and then it turned its attention to Nebraska and Nettles, who were clambering to their feet, and to Casey and Rory, sheltering behind the wrecked helicopter. Remembering the declaration the creature had made back at the crash site as to who its real target was, and all the people who had died since, McKenna decided that enough was enough. If the alien wanted him, it could have him. He didn’t want to have to see anyone else die because of him today.

  Rising to his feet, he spread his arms and walked toward the alien. “Okay,” he said. “I’m over here. I’m the one you want. Leave them alone.”

  The Upgrade snapped its head back round to regard him. McKenna braced himself as the creature strode forward, wrapped one huge hand around his throat and lifted him off his feet. For a second he hung there, staring into the creature’s one good eye—and then, to his amazement, he felt himself flying through the air, having been tossed aside like yesterday’s fish.

  He hit the ground, rolled, and by the time he had managed to prop himself up on one knee, the Upgrade was striding toward the helicopter. McKenna saw Nettles and Nebraska racing to retrieve their guns, which were lying some distance away, having been flung out like shrapnel when the energy bolt had hit the chopper. Then he saw Casey run out from hiding, her hands held up in front of her, as if that could halt the progress of the colossal brute bearing down on her.

  “Please…” he heard her say, but before she could utter another word the Upgrade swung an arm, swatting her aside like a troublesome fly.

  McKenna felt cold prickling terror sweep through him as the Upgrade shoved aside the ruined helicopter, exposing Rory’s cowering form. Reaching down, it swept the boy up as though he was a puppy, and then it turned and headed for a rising slope of rock, topped with trees, that fringed the far side of the natural plateau on which they had landed the helicopter. Beyond those trees, McKenna remembered from their approach, was a quarry—a vast natural bowl of pale rock and baked earth. He saw the Upgrade reach the top of the slope and disappear into the trees, still carrying his son.

  As a soldier, McKenna was used to staying calm under pressure, but now his body was sizzling with panic. “No,” he shouted, his voice raw and ragged. “No!” He tried to get to his feet, to run after the Upgrade, but he had hit the ground with such force when the Upgrade had tossed him aside that his legs were still throbbing with numbness, and no sooner was he on his feet than they crumpled beneath him again. He slapped the ground, spat blood on the dry earth—he had bitten his tongue when he landed—and started to crawl toward his gun, for all the good that would do.

  Then Casey was beside him, her elbow grazed and bleeding, dirt streaking her face.

  “He lied,” McKenna almost sobbed. “Said he wanted me…”

  Casey shook her head, grabbed his arm to support him as he made another attempt to stand. “No, he didn’t. He said he wanted McKenna.”

  Suddenly, the penny dropped. McKenna looked at her with horror.

  “He wants an upgrade,” Casey went on. “Get it? Not you, your son. The next step on the evolutionary chain.”

  He let out a roar of rage and despair, using the adrenaline of it to rise to his feet with Casey’s help, to stamp the feeling back into his numb legs. He began to run toward the trees into which the Upgrade had disappeared with Rory, Casey running alongside him, and Nebraska and Nettles, having now retrieved their weapons, bringing up the rear.

  They reached the tree line within ten seconds, and in another ten had burst through the trees to the other side. When they had passed over the quarry in the helicopter yesterday, it had looked empty, but now McKenna realized it had not been empty at all. They arrived just in time to see
a glassy shimmer, and next moment the stark, brutal lines of a Predator ship—larger and sturdier than the damaged escape pod at the crash site—materialized before their eyes.

  There was no sign of the Upgrade itself—which probably meant that he and Rory were already inside. As the rumble of engines filled their ears, McKenna once again felt panic sluice through him.

  We’re too late, he thought.

  * * *

  Rory couldn’t decide which was the worst option—dying right now, or being taken to the Predator’s planet. Like everyone else, he had thought his dad was the alien’s target, but as soon as the Upgrade had thrown his dad aside and turned its attention to him, he had realized what its true intentions were.

  It thought he was smart. Smart enough that his intelligence would enhance its own race. But how would they extract that intelligence and apply it to themselves? He thought it best not to think about that for now.

  When the Upgrade had lifted Rory up, he had curled into a ball and stayed quiet. He hadn’t struggled, hadn’t protested, hadn’t tried to communicate with the alien in any way, because he knew it would be pointless. He didn’t like looking at the Upgrade’s mangled face, because it was scary and also gruesome enough to make him feel sick, so he had kept his eyes tightly shut during the short journey to its ship. The alien smelled of overdone barbecue and its flesh was rough and hot. As it descended the rocky slope of the quarry and marched to its ship, he had heard its heart beating, a regular, rapid boom, strong and somehow ominous, like a war drum.

  He only opened his eyes once they were inside the Upgrade’s ship—because how could he not? Terrified as he was, this was an alien spacecraft, and therefore it was automatically awesome.