The Predator: The Official Movie Novelization

21

Armed with a long rifle, Lynch was crouching close to where McKenna had crouched before him, looking down on the crash site below. His vantage point, though, wasn’t quite as good as McKenna’s had been. He had only a partial view of the site from here. He couldn’t see what was going on over by the alien ship, mostly obscured as it was by an overhang of rock and a drooping sprawl of decimated trees. Propped against a bush in front of his face, his radio hissed and crackled, but remained annoyingly silent for now.

Never a patient man, Lynch twitched and fidgeted, glaring at the radio as though it was a toddler that stubbornly refused to eat its greens.

Come the fuck on, he thought. Just give the fuckin’ word.

From the corner of his eye he caught a flicker of light. Fireflies?

He glanced to his right—and saw a trio of red dots dancing on his trigger arm. Red fireflies?

Then realization crashed in on him. Shit! He was being targeted! The sniper was being sniped! He scrambled upright, spun round, raising his gun.

Before he could take offensive or defensive action of any kind, a lightning bolt shot down from the heavens and hit him dead center. He was lifted into the air, as if by a giant hand made of sizzling light and excruciating pain, and smashed back down again. His ears hissing, his thoughts screaming, his body full of fire, he looked wildly around, and noticed something very odd indeed—his own arm, lying on the ground, fingers still twitching at one end, smoke rising from the other. Wondering if he was dreaming, or hallucinating, he turned to look at the place where his arm should be, and saw nothing but a charred stump, drooling blood.

I’m dead, he thought, and felt a kind of wonder. I’m actually dead. Aww, shit. Now I’ll never get to find out how this ends.

Above him, in front of him, he heard the crashing of undergrowth, the sound of something big heading his way.

Scrabbling in his pack, he pulled out a flare gun and fired it blindly into the air… illuminating a huge, dreadlocked shape, which pushed its way out of the trees and loomed over him like the Angel of Death.

Still calm, still counting down, Traeger said, “Three… two…”

McKenna wondered whether to shoot him in the head before he reached one, just for the hell of it.

Then a flare lit the sky above the jungle somewhere to the east, and was followed almost instantly by the hideous, drawn-out scream of someone or something dying a horrible death.

McKenna thought instantly of the Loonies, and Casey. They were out there. He hoped to God—

The momentary distraction was all that Traeger needed.

Spinning round, he made his hand flat and rigid as a blade, and stabbed it toward McKenna’s throat, intending to jab him right in the Adam’s apple. McKenna flinched away just in time, and Traeger’s hand scraped painfully against the side of his neck. It was still enough, though, to enable the CIA agent to break free of McKenna’s grip when the Army Ranger stumbled backward. As Traeger leaped from the ramp of the ship, hit the ground and rolled, the world suddenly erupted with gunfire.

We’re dead, McKenna thought, assuming that without Traeger there as a shield, the mercs had opened up on them. He threw himself backward, his only instinct being to protect Rory—with his own dead and twitching body, if need be.

It took him maybe a second to realize that the bullets weren’t coming their way. No, they were coming from the jungle, from the Loonies, God bless ’em, raining in on all sides, with the mercs as their target. And the mercs—those that weren’t cut down in the first volley—were scattering, running for cover, returning fire when they could. McKenna had been in firefights before, and knew he had to think and act fast, that he’d have only a few seconds before someone once again identified him and Rory as targets.

Rory was lying on the ramp, curled into a ball, his hands pressed over his ears. Crouching beside him, veiled by smoke, McKenna scooped him up, carried him to the edge of the ramp—Rory’s body rigid, as if made of wood—and dropped to the ground. Blanketed by the haze, the two of them then rolled beneath the ramp and lay there a moment, recovering. McKenna could hear his son’s heart hammering in his chest, and he held him close, murmuring words of comfort and encouragement. Eventually, he felt Rory’s body relax, saw him crack open an eyelid. The ground was littered with the corpses of Traeger’s mercenaries, and McKenna told his son not to look.

“Are you okay?” he said quietly.

Rory was clearly petrified, but he nodded. From his pocket, McKenna produced the invisibility ball, polished it briefly on his thigh, and offered it to Rory.

“Take this. You need to vanish, you really vanish. Understand?”

Rory nodded again.

Diego Galarza did not consider himself a bad guy. Yes, he’d been prepared to shoot the crazy soldier, and maybe even his kid, but what he did, he did purely so he could send money home to his ailing mama and two sisters in East Harlem. Without his monthly contributions, he feared they’d slip below the poverty line, especially once his mama’s medical bills began to mount up. It was imperative, therefore, that he stay alive. And although it wasn’t looking too good for him right now, he felt sure things would turn out okay in the end. After all, he was a lucky guy, always had been. He’d even been known as Lucky Galarza in the neighborhood where he’d grown up. He’d had scrapes in the past—many scrapes, and some bad ones, ones where other people had got killed—but somehow or other, he had always come out on top.

Right now, he was crouched behind the generator, close to the perimeter fence, cut off from the rest of his unit. Bullets had spattered the ground and spanged off metal all around him for what seemed like minutes. They had stopped now, but Diego knew it was a temporary lull, and that if he moved, if he showed himself, he would be shot down like a dog.

He was torn between staying here to finish the job he’d been hired to do, or opting out, crawling off into the jungle and making his way to safety. If he took the second option, he knew he wouldn’t get paid, and there might well be other consequences if it was discovered he’d cut and run, but at least he’d still be alive. The perimeter fence was maybe three meters away, and the first clumps of blackened foliage at the edge of the jungle maybe another three meters beyond that. Six meters in all. It was nothing. If he crawled on his belly, if he kept to the shadows, he could make it.

He was still plucking up the courage, still wondering what to do, when he heard a sound coming from the jungle. It started off as a rustling, but quickly escalated into a crunching, and then a crashing, as something headed toward him. The something sounded big, maybe an animal, or even a vehicle of some kind. Maybe the guys who had fired on them had a tank, and were attempting to drive it through the jungle, right onto the crash site. He peeked around the edge of the generator, and saw trees and bushes whipping back and forth, as if a twister was working its way through them. He thought he could see something moving back there in the shadows too, something that walked upright like a man. But how could it be a man? Whatever that thing was, it had to be ten, twelve feet tall.

Slowly, he raised his gun as the figure moved closer.

Then the thing stepped out of the darkness of the jungle, into the light.

He had heard some of the other guys talk about the space alien they kept at Project: Stargazer, had heard them say the thing had escaped, but he hadn’t known whether they were bullshitting him. Then he had seen the spaceship and he had thought that maybe there was something to their story, after all. Even so, he had never really expected to see a space alien, and certainly not this close. And even if he did see one, he’d half-expected it to look like the ones on TV: small and gray, with big black eyes. But this bastard was bigger and more terrifying than anything he could ever have imagined—hell, it was almost twice as tall as he was. And it was built like a Roman gladiator on steroids, its muscles huge and powerful, its massive hands tipped with claws that looked as though they could tear a man’s head off with one swipe. But worse than any of that was its face. Oh man, its face…

As the creature turned in his direction, its mean little eyes fixing on him, and its mandibles stretching open, Diego felt his bladder let go. Hot liquid squirted down his leg as a judder of fear started up like a motor in his guts and turned his limbs to trembling Jell-O. Whimpering, but not even aware he was doing it, he raised his gun and took aim at that hideous face. But the creature reacted with lightning speed, and even before his finger could twitch on the trigger, it had ripped aside the perimeter fence as though it was a lace curtain, and was reaching out for him. Within a split second, it had knocked his gun aside, and ripped him open as though he was a wet paper bag. Diego heard a tearing sound and a crack of bone, and realized it was coming from himself. Then, as his steaming innards slid out of the gash in his belly, he felt himself lifted off his feet like a doll. His last sensation, as his life and all he had been swirled away into a black drain, was of the creature using him like a puppet, squeezing his hand so that his finger pulled the trigger on his weapon, spraying the crash site with bullets.

Perched in a tree on the opposite side of the crater, Casey saw the Upgrade stride into the clearing, tear a man apart, and strafe the area with bullets to discourage retaliation. What she didn’t see were several of the mercs making it across to a parked jeep, but she knew they must have done so when the vehicle’s headlights suddenly blazed, and its engine roared, like a wild animal issuing an attack cry.

She saw the Upgrade straighten up, tossing aside the merc’s eviscerated body like discarded packaging, as the jeep tore across the clearing toward it. At first, she thought the jeep was going to ram the Upgrade, and wondered who’d come off worse. But then the vehicle screeched to a halt and a trio of black-clad mercs spilled from it, each of them loaded with heavy artillery.

Casey had to admire their bravery. They must have concluded either that the previous attack had originated from the Upgrade itself, or that their attackers would see the Upgrade as a common enemy, and would either join forces with them or hold fire. On that last assumption—if that was their assumption—they were kind of correct. The Loonies were holding fire for now—but not out of any sense of commonality or fair play. If things were going as discussed, they’d be moving into position, their single aim being to retrieve McKenna and Rory, and get them out of the kill zone. As for Casey, for now she had a grandstand seat. Up in her tree, she watched events unfold with a horrified fascination.

Even as the mercs were spilling out of the jeep, the Upgrade was on the move. It was frighteningly fast, its movements almost a blur even without its cloaking technology. Although Casey had little sympathy for Traeger’s black-clad soldiers, their massacre was still painful to watch. It was like seeing a tiger pitted against tortoises in a gladiatorial arena. Armed as they were, they appeared cripplingly slow next to the swiftness of their enemy. The Upgrade was on them before they could get their guns up and aimed, though not without the alien first reducing the odds by throwing some sort of whirling blade, which took one of the mercs’ arms clean off at the elbows. As he lay in the grass, screaming, the Upgrade ploughed through the remaining two men, slashing one open with its claws, before picking the other up with both hands and simply ripping him in two.

Now, as the Upgrade strode purposefully toward the original Predator’s craft, more mercs started to emerge from hiding—though whether to avenge their fallen comrades or simply because their orders were to protect the ship at all costs, Casey wasn’t sure.

Even in greater numbers, though, they were no match for the eleven-foot-tall Predator. It simply cut through them like a barracuda through a pool of minnows, dodging their clumsy attempts to take it down, and dispatching them in a variety of ways—ripping some apart with its bare hands, beheading others with its throwing blades. It shot one man who tried to sneak up behind it with his own weapon, and it snapped a wrist cuff onto one merc’s arm as it passed him by, then pressed a detonator on its gauntlet and reduced him to an explosion of chunky red confetti.

Leaving a battleground of dead and dying men behind it, it continued its remorseless progress toward the alien craft.

And toward McKenna and Rory, who were still crouched beneath the ship’s ramp.