The Predator: The Official Movie Novelization

9

Rory heard his mom’s Subaru Outback pull into the driveway. Through the open window of his bedroom, he listened as the engine shut off, and then the cicadas filled the night with their usual hum. He liked the cicadas. Their music reminded him of static on the radio, a comfortable fuzz that kept things from getting too quiet.

Downstairs, the front door opened. Mom would no doubt have shopping bags. He ought to go and help her, but he’d been thinking and felt no sense of urgency. She didn’t really need him down there.

“Rory!” she called from below. “I’m home! I got you something.”

Blinking, he shook himself from his reverie and left his room.

“Rory?” she called into the quiet house, as he padded down the steps.

His mother smiled when he entered the kitchen. She gave him a kiss on the cheek as she started to unpack her shopping bags. Rory loved his mother. She could grow distracted, nearly as much as Rory himself, but his dad had always said that was an “artist thing.” His mother painted beautifully, her work hung in galleries, but she hadn’t become famous yet. People weren’t exactly clamoring for Emily McKenna paintings, but Rory knew she had sold plenty of them, and that made her a professional artist. It seemed very clear to him that this was an important thing, and he often wondered why his mother didn’t give herself more credit for her accomplishments.

He smiled at her, but his mom had already become distracted by the stack of language books he had left on the counter. French, German, Swedish, even Russian.

“You did one of these after school?” she asked.

“I did all of them after school.”

Her smile was so familiar that even Rory, who struggled with non-verbal communication, could read the meaning behind it: Why am I even surprised? He watched as she reached inside a big plastic bag from Target.

“So, look, I got you two options,” she began, as she drew out a pair of boxed Halloween costumes. “Pirate? Or Frankenstein?”

His mother held up both costumes, proffering them as if each was a remarkable treasure. Rory studied her face, mostly ignoring the costumes. It occurred to him that he ought to explain to her that Frankenstein had been the doctor rather than the monster, but he had been learning strategies of social interaction and knew that sometimes people did not like to be corrected. It was difficult for him to resist the urge, but that was why he fought hard to stay silent on the matter. The hard things were the ones most worth doing.

“Frankenstein,” she prompted, mistaking his silence for incomprehension. “You know, green skin? Met the Wolfman?”

Rory took a breath. The doctor, not the monster. The words were on the tip of his tongue, but he kept his expression blank. Michael Rosenn, his therapist, would be proud when Rory told him later on. For now, though, his mother gave an exasperated sigh and held up the other box, acting as if it had been the prize she intended to give him all along.

“Let’s go with pirate!”

Rory took the boxed pirate costume and reached inside, pulling out the mask. “This is dumb,” he said, no punches pulled. “Dad’s always telling me to grow up. Be a big boy.”

Still, no matter what his father said, he knew the idea of trick-or-treating ought to appeal to him. His classmates seemed thrilled at the prospect. Reluctantly, he donned the mask. He breathed evenly, but it sounded very loud with the plastic covering his face, and he didn’t like peering through the eyeholes. He turned his head to experiment, wondering how much it would restrict his vision, and he noticed the water spot on the wall—the one he had tried not to notice ever since he had heard his parents fighting in the kitchen, heard his mother remind his dad that he’d once driven his fist through that wall and the spot was not water at all, but the place where it had been plastered over and the paint didn’t match.

His dad had a temper.

Rory took off the mask and set it on the counter. “It’s too small. The guys’ll… you know, still be able to tell.”

Emily frowned. “Tell what?”

“That’s it’s me,” he replied. He caught sight of the sad look on her face, the sudden wetness in her eyes, as he turned to leave the room, but he didn’t understand the source of her sadness. He was only being practical, after all.

“I love you, peanut,” she said, her voice breaking a little.

“Jag alskar dig,” he said automatically as he left the kitchen. Swedish for I love you.

Rory didn’t announce that he was going into the basement. He never did, but somehow his mom always knew when to look for him there. Now he descended into his lair and glanced around at the many recycled computers, screens glowing with online games awaiting his attention. A sign hung on the wall—CONTROL AREA.

He sat and launched back into several games at once, but something in the room kept drawing his attention. In his peripheral vision, he could see his worktable, and when he finally glanced over, he saw the parcel that had been delivered by the postal worker with all of his father’s mail. Rory had compartmentalized its presence, intending to open it just as soon as he’d made his way through the language books upstairs, but he’d forgotten.

Now he sucked in a sharp breath, went to the table, and tore open the package. He reached in, pulling back the dirty newspapers that the contents had been packed with. He reached inside, felt a smooth metallic surface, and pulled out an enormous scarred helmet that reminded him immediately of something out of one of his video games.

For a moment he stood frozen, his mind stunned into immobility, and then abruptly it began to race as he tried to determine precisely what he held. This was not a Halloween mask or a replica. Whoever this helmet might belong to—this thing his father had shipped to himself from Mexico, and which had only been delivered here because he’d forgotten to pay for his post office box—it didn’t belong to Quinn McKenna. The thing didn’t look like US Army gear. It had various markings on its surface, but not in any language Rory had ever seen. It looked like it might have some in-board technology, and he started mentally comparing it to games he’d played and movies he’d seen.

One thing was for sure. Whoever this belonged to, the guy had a massive frickin’ head.

Rory set the helmet aside and reached into the box again. What he pulled out this time made him grin. The wrist gauntlet clearly had the same origin, the same tech. He started fiddling with it, pressing nearly hidden buttons. With a click, a small door opened and a long, trapezoidal object popped out of a compartment in the gauntlet. It reminded him of a fat, old-fashioned remote control, but there was nothing old-fashioned about the sleek surface or the strange texture of the metal. It felt unusual and heavy and strangely warm, almost alien.

He studied the gleaming device—Rory was certain this thing had a purpose. It didn’t appear to be a weapon, but there were switches and buttons. Warily, he punched a button. When nothing happened, he frowned and turned the sleek device over again, cocked his head to study it, then thumbed another button.

A display blinked on. Rory frowned deeper, locked in fascination as he watched glowing red symbols scroll across the device. His eyes widened as he studied their cryptic patterns, trying to make sense of it all…

Far from Rory… far from Earth… a stealth ship, smaller and sleeker than the one that had recently crash-landed in the Mexican jungle, glides swiftly toward the Earth. Within it, a Predator quite unlike the one in Project: Stargazer’s custody taps a button and a display appears on its viewscreen. The same glowing symbols scroll, but to these eyes, its patterns are far from cryptic. Instead, they reveal very much indeed. The hunter makes several satisfied clicking noises, and flies onward.

In his basement, Rory worked studiously, scribbling a transcription of the symbols from the alien device onto the outside of one of his school folders. He knew his heart ought to be racing, but he felt calmer than he’d ever been. Excited, yes… enthusiastic… but intent upon his task. Here was a real puzzle, a real mystery that he could sink his teeth into. He couldn’t ever seem to unravel the mysteries that other people presented, and school had never presented him with a challenge, but here was something different—a true challenge. Languages, after all, had always been his specialty.

With a blip, the readout on the device changed. He scrunched up his face and furiously scribbled this new sequence, translating in his head. His eyes narrowed, and he stared at the device. He had begun to understand it, and now he tapped several buttons, causing the display to revert to the first sequence he’d awoken.

Aboard the pursuit ship, the strange Predator grimaces and glares with great displeasure at his viewscreen. The readout has changed as if it has a mind of its own. A malfunction? He taps the controls, correcting the sequence…

Rory could have laughed when the sequence altered again. It seemed to him that the device had reacted to him. For a moment he wondered if it had been programmed this way, or if it contained some kind of alien artificial intelligence that he could not hope to understand.

On second thought, he decided the odds of there being a language or technology he could not understand were very slim. Dismissively, he overrode the device again.

On the pursuit ship, the strange Predator—enormous even by the standards of its race—punches in a new code. The interior of the ship spasms. The seat beneath him trembles, but it is the outside of the ship that truly trembles. It shimmers and enters stealth mode. To the naked eye, or even to any instruments, it is now invisible…

Rory grinned, awash with sudden understanding. He would have preferred the AI solution, but this was fun, too. It’s a game, he thought. He had seen enough of these cryptic symbols, scribbled enough of them down and gotten a basic translation worked out, so that he now understood how to revise the sequence of the code to reverse a command, which was precisely what he did.

In space, the pursuit ship decloaks. What issues from the strange Predator’s mouth then, in clicks and spittle, is what passes for profanity on its home world.

“You okay down there, kiddo?”

Rory froze. He stared at the device, at the helmet and the gauntlet, and then at the steps that led up from the basement. This would be a bad time for his mom to come down to check on him.

“Just playing games, Mom!” he yelled, trying to make everything sound normal.

For a few tense seconds he waited, wondering if she would reply—or even whether he’d hear the clump of her descending footsteps. But there was silence from up above. She must have gone away.

His hunched shoulders lowered slowly as he relaxed.

The only thing Anya Martin didn’t like about her job was that she could never tell the truth about what she did. Not that she worked for the CIA or anything—she wasn’t going to have some Russian spy shoot her in the back of the head on a street corner, or poison her food in a London restaurant. Although eating in London restaurants did seem wonderfully exotic to her. It depressed her when her train of thought chugged down these particular tracks, because then she got thinking about traveling the world, and though the job of Tracking Analyst sounded fancy, her salary was anything but.

Whine, whine, whine, she thought to herself, sitting in front of a whole bank of radar and tracking arrays. Truth was, Anya made more than a decent living. If she hadn’t been a single mother, saving for her daughter’s college, she probably would have done plenty of traveling by now. She fantasized about various European river cruises, got all the catalogs and emails, and didn’t even care that she’d probably be the youngest person on board by thirty years or more.

Someday, she’d do all that traveling.

For now, though, at least she loved her job. Many of the programmers she had gone to college with would surely be making more money than she did by this point in their lives. Others would be managers by now. Maybe executives.

The good news was that the US Air Force had paid for Sergeant Anya Martin’s education. She had no college loans.

Also, she spent her days watching the skies for signs of alien invasion, or any other unidentified flying objects—anything that might indicate that alien enemies were approaching or traveling through Earth orbit. The military wanted forewarning of any possible threats. But here in her very comfortable chair in the 6th Space Warning Squadron’s headquarters in Sandwich, Massachusetts, Anya just loved the idea of aliens. She pretended to be quite serious about the work—as serious as the title Tracking Analyst implied—but in the end, really, it was all about Dana Scully and Fox Mulder and late nights watching The X-Files when her parents had told her to go to bed.

It didn’t hurt that she got to live half a mile from the ocean on the coast of Cape Cod.

Blip.

Anya’s heart jumped. She stared at the radar screen and then glanced at the PAVE PAWS tracking monitor. The blip vanished, and then reappeared. It repeated the pattern again. Quickly, she went through her protocol, including identifying its location and trying to make radio contact with the object, to no avail.

“Sir?” she said, gesturing toward the Lieutenant General.

He came across, a man so wiry she wouldn’t have been surprised to find that his gray hair was made of steel. “What you got, Sergeant?”

“Weird-ass bogey, sir.”

They watched together as the blip vanished and reappeared sporadically.

“One second they’re on the grid, the next they’re ghosting,” Anya said, trying to hide her excitement. She’d caught plenty of weird shit during her time in this job, but this was odd as hell.

“Radio contact?” the Lieutenant General asked.

“Negative, sir.” She narrowed her eyes, skin prickling with ice as her thoughts filled with wonder. “But it seems to have an ion trail.”

The Lieutenant General had a pen in his hand. He started to chew on the back of it while he stared at the monitor. Then he turned and scouted the room for Anya’s supervisor, Lieutenant Crain.

“Where’s the 325th?” he asked.

“Tyndall, sir,” Crain replied.

The Lieutenant General’s gray eyebrows crinkled in a deep frown. “Let’s scramble some jets. I don’t want to take any chances.”

Sergeant Anya Martin couldn’t hide her smile. This was getting good. It was even more exciting than being poisoned to death in a London restaurant.