The Predator: The Official Movie Novelization

20

Five minutes later McKenna was back, looking washed-out, sweaty, but no longer in gastric distress. Clearly embarrassed by what had just happened, he looked at Casey and said without preamble, “Doc, if what you’re saying is true, my son’s headed for a spaceship, and so is a ten-foot monster.”

“Eleven,” Nebraska corrected, and shrugged. “I used to be a contractor. Got an eye for measurements.”

McKenna scowled at the irrelevancy. Sensing his agitation, Casey laid a reassuring hand on his arm. “Hey,” she murmured. “We’ll get him back.”

McKenna looked anguished. “He’s just a kid, he can’t—”

“He’s not just a kid,” she interrupted firmly. “He’s a chess prodigy with an eidetic memory who decrypted Predator language. He’ll be fine.”

McKenna nodded, though not entirely convincingly, and they went outside. Looking at the RV, McKenna knew it wasn’t going to get them anywhere—not without being picked up fast. As soon as someone bothered to check on the dead bastards back at the barn, they’d put a BOLO out on the vehicle. McKenna knew they needed new transport, and hopefully the rest of the Loonies were on to that. His main priority right now, though, was to make sure they had enough firepower to survive the mission before them.

Together, he and Nebraska went through the RV, stuffing backpacks with as much ordnance as they could carry. A dozen ways to kill people—anyone who tried to get between McKenna and his son—went into those backpacks. Thanks to the lunatic gun seller who’d stocked up the RV in the first place, they also had earwig comms units, and McKenna grabbed them so they could all be linked up, whatever happened from here on in.

They had just finished loading up when a new sound made them all freeze, a whirring from over the trees. Another damn helicopter. McKenna drew a gun and glanced at Nebraska.

“Traeger coming back?” Nebraska asked.

If it is, McKenna thought, then this time there will be a firefight. All three of them hurried out of the RV and into the soft light of daybreak. They stared into the dawn sky and McKenna’s jaw dropped.

“Is that… pink?” Nebraska asked in a strained voice.

It was. And what was more, it had the Victoria’s Secret logo emblazoned proudly on the side.

“Jesus tap-dancing Christ,” McKenna said slowly.

“That what you asked for?” Nebraska asked, as Casey laughed.

McKenna shrugged. “It’ll do.”

By now the chopper had descended enough that McKenna could make out Nettles in the pilot’s seat, and Coyle waving merrily at them from the side hatch. Despite himself, a grin spread across his face as he hurried toward the helicopter. He heard Nebraska whooping behind him as the rotors slowed. The tall grass in the field bent and waved, and the door popped open and now McKenna could see Baxley and Lynch in there with Nettles and Coyle. If he’d thought these bastards were crazy before they’d somehow managed to steal a Victoria’s Secret helicopter, he thought they were twice as crazy now, but he loved the hell out of them for it.

Yes, they needed transport. But they also needed to be inconspicuous. Flying around in this thing in broad daylight was a terrible idea, but it was still better than sitting on their asses in the middle of a grassy field without any way of going after Rory.

Carrying backpacks full of weaponry, McKenna, Casey, and Nebraska climbed into the helicopter, enduring the welcoming cheers and the cocky grins of the Loonies, and moments later they were lifting off. McKenna looked down at the RV and the field and the barn that had been the last place he’d seen Rory. He promised himself it would not be his final memory of his son.

“Very inconspicuous,” he yelled, over the roar of the chopper.

“We had to kill seven Victoria’s Secret models,” Coyle said proudly.

Casey’s face went white. “Tell me you’re joking.”

“I’m joking,” Coyle replied, horrified that she’d taken him seriously. “I’d sooner piss on the Mona Lisa.”

Nettles throttled up and the chopper took on speed, careening across the sky. The landscape rushed past below as McKenna turned to Nettles.

“Anything on board we can use?”

Nettles shrugged. “We got some low-grade pyro and about three dozen promotional tote bags.”

Nebraska held up a tube of exfoliating gel. “Yeah, Predators hate this shit.”

Baxley edged over to McKenna. Almost matter-of-factly, as if he was asking where they were going to stop for lunch, he said, “Cap, we gonna die, you think? Just curious.”

Hearing him, Nettles chipped in from the pilot’s seat. “Yeah, we’re dealing with a hybrid…”

“That thing,” Coyle called. “It’s a fucking survival machine.”

Despite their casual bravado, McKenna could tell that the men were jittery, nervous, that they needed a pep talk. Looking at Baxley, but addressing them all, he said, “You. Yesterday you were on a prison bus, barking to yourself. Now you got a gun in your hand. Who’s the fucking survivor? Huh?”

Baxley nodded enthusiastically: Hell, yeah.

Glancing at Nebraska, McKenna continued, “We put bullets in our head and walk to the fucking hospital. That’s who we are.”

Nebraska grinned.

“So, when it comes to standing on the right side of the dirt?” Now McKenna looked at each of them in turn. “That motherfucker ain’t got shit on us.”

The Loonies whooped, punched the air. When the sound had died down, McKenna turned back to Baxley.

“And yes,” he said decisively. “We may die.”

The men laughed and cheered all over again. Baxley grinned. “Thanks. Just checking.”

“Nettles,” McKenna said. “We got a twenty?”

“I can follow their chopper,” Nettles replied. “I just need to lock in on its frequency.”

Casey’s brow furrowed. McKenna followed her gaze as she leaned over to look out the window.

“Or,” she said, “we can just follow that thing.”

Far below the chopper, they could all see the Predator dog hauling ass across country roads and farmland.

The forest pressed in on all sides. The only light came from the headlamps of the military jeep, which seemed to give the looming vegetation a jolting, shadowy life as the vehicle lurched in and out of ruts in the makeshift road.

Rory had been dozing, but now he was awake. Sitting in the back of the jeep, he alternated his gaze between the back of Traeger’s head, poking above the seat in front, and the chiaroscuro of white, pitted tree trunks and flat, pale, spade-shaped leaves embedded within a blackness so profound it was like a vacuum.

Beside Rory sat Sapir, Traeger’s aide, who hadn’t acknowledged him once throughout the entire day-long journey. Rory wondered where they were, and where they were going, but he didn’t ask—he wasn’t that sort of kid. He shifted his position slightly when the jeep slowed, so he could peer between the two front seats.

He saw temporary floodlights on metal tripods illuminating a row of sawhorses, beyond which a couple of lowboy tractor trailers were parked nose to tail at the side of the road. The temporary barricade was guarded by soldiers in black, like the ones at the barn. Rory counted four of them, their weapons leveled. A fifth approached them. Traeger wound down his window and brandished his ID.

“You mind telling the Wild Bunch to chill out?” he barked.

Rory’s mom had once referred to his dad as an alpha male, and so Rory had read up about them. He had learned enough to know that Traeger was one too—or at least, that he tried to be. Rory wasn’t sure, though, whether it was the CIA man himself or just his job that made the soldier cower a little, and nod, and scurry away to obey his superior’s orders.

After a moment, the sawhorses were pulled aside and the jeep drove through, and at a command from Traeger pulled into the side of the dirt road, just in front of the tractor trailers.

Traeger got out and motioned that Rory should do so too. The vegetation was pressing so close to the door on Rory’s side, though, that he had to wait until Sapir had vacated the jeep before he could scramble across the seat and exit on the same side.

The air smelled green and hot and damp. Rory saw Sapir wipe sweat from his brow with a handkerchief that he produced from his pocket. Traeger, on the other hand, looked as cool as ever. He marched off, indicating that they should follow him.

Rory was surprised when they left the road and plunged into the jungle. A route had been marked with arc lamps, but it was still a little tricky picking their way down the side of a ravine thick with undergrowth and dotted with dark rocks that pushed up out of the carpet of verdant green like the humped backs of whales.

Soon they came to an area where the ground was a sea of black mud, which formed a track as wide as a highway through the surrounding vegetation. There was a strange smell, like the ghost of an oil drum fire, and although it was hard to tell in the dark, Rory thought the vegetation on either side of them looked scorched, blackened. He imagined men coming through here armed with flamethrowers, using fire to blast a route through the jungle. But when, after another five minutes of walking, they came to a clearing, surrounded by temporary stadium lights, he saw that what had burned its way through the jungle was nothing so mundane as a few flamethrowers.

Immediately he thought of the map he had drawn in the warmth and safety of his basement den at home, and knew exactly where he was. He was at the crash site of the ship that the Predator—the one that had been killed by the Upgrade—had used to reach Earth.

Even though the ship was broken and spattered with charred, pulped jungle debris, it was still a thing of beauty. Rory gazed up at it in awe, admiring its sleek lines, its economical, streamlined shape.

They had arrived here just in time. A squad of soldiers was unrolling a huge tarpaulin, and even as Rory watched they began to haul it over the ship, presumably to conceal it from potential rubberneckers who might be peering down from passing aircraft.

Rory couldn’t understand why the crash site hadn’t been discovered before now—he could only suppose that the blackened ground was less visible from the air, and that the original Predator had cloaked the ship, then led Traeger’s men well away from it, before allowing itself to be captured—but now that it had, it was a hive of activity. Over on the far side of the clearing, a group of techs were rolling in a giant screen, while others followed behind like an honor guard, holding armfuls of cable attachments to stop them trailing in the mud.

And on the periphery, more soldiers were variously hammering in posts, unrolling lengths of wire fencing, or engaged in the setting up of a generator, so that—Rory assumed—the site could be enclosed within an electrified barrier.

So engrossed was he in all this activity, and in the ship itself, that he had almost forgotten about Traeger. It was only when the man crouched beside him that he recalled who had brought him here.

“So, what do you say?” Trager said. “Think you can get us in there? Because I’m not sure that you can.”

Rory was not so out of touch with human emotions that he couldn’t recognize Traeger’s intentions. “Good reverse psychology, fuckface,” he said, deliberately using a word he thought his dad might have used.

Traeger chuckled, but his next words were anything but kind. “Put it this way, then. You love your dad, don’t you? You want to see him alive again, right? Then do me a favor…”

He put one hand on his sidearm and gestured with the other toward the hatch of the newly revealed ship. Then he leaned toward the kid and whispered, “Let your love open the door.”

Rory might have been on the autism spectrum, but he got the message loud and clear.

If Rory had known where his dad was at that precise moment, he wouldn’t have been all that surprised. Despite their differences, he had absolute faith in his dad’s prowess as a soldier, and was sure, even though his dad hadn’t been around all that much in the last couple years, that if he, Rory, was ever in danger—as he possibly was now—his dad would move Heaven and Hell to help him.

It would almost certainly have given Rory some comfort to know that his dad was looking at him right now. Quinn McKenna, who knew this terrain far better than Traeger and his bozos did, was currently perched on the highest spit of land overlooking the crash site. He was shrouded in foliage, completely camouflaged, his rifle leveled and his eye glued to the sniper scope, which allowed him to see what was happening with crystal clarity.

The pink helicopter was parked in a clearing just over a mile away, and the Loonies and Casey were out and about, doing their stuff. The Loonies might be a maverick bunch, but McKenna had faith not only in their loyalty, but also in their abilities. He didn’t know where any of this was ultimately leading, but right now he felt like the leader of The A-Team. Just him and his rag-tag bunch of oddballs against the world.

Through his sniper scope he saw Rory approach the crashed Predator ship, flanked by Traeger on his left and his smarmy sidekick, Sapir, on his right. Last time McKenna had been here, the hatch of the pod had been open, sticking straight up in the air like the damaged wing of a crumpled dragonfly. Now, though, it was closed—presumably by the Predator, which had sealed up its ship before allowing itself to be “captured” by Traeger’s men and transported to the Stargazer facility. McKenna watched as Rory halted in front of the hatch and examined a panel beside it, Traeger and Sapir looking on. Then his son reached out and began to tap a code sequence into the keypad.

Even though Rory was proud of his dad—and more so than ever after today—he had never wanted to be a soldier like him. He had little desire to shoot anyone, or to be shot at, no matter how noble the cause. But as he stood in front of the Predator’s ship, he wished he still had the helmet and gauntlet that had helped him accidentally vaporize the stoner while he was out trick-or-treating. He felt bad about that guy—figured he always would—but if he could have vaporized Agent Traeger, he wouldn’t have hesitated for a second.

For most of his life, Rory had never had to consider whether he had courage. He would never have said he was brave in the way his father was brave, but he stood up for himself. Now that he had to think about it, he supposed he had some courage in him. Cornered by bullies, he’d speak up, even fight back if he had to. But he wasn’t stupid. Agent Traeger struck him as the sort of person who had no sense of honor or nobility. If this guy needed to murder his father, maybe even his mother, to get Rory to do what he wanted, he did not doubt for a second that Traeger would do it.

So, he unlocked the ship.

Once he’d punched in the code, the hatch opened with a whisper. A cavernous darkness yawned within as the hatch rose. Tentatively, Traeger went first. Rory stood with Sapir, hanging back a moment. If he hadn’t stepped inside on his own, he figured Sapir would have nudged him. Traeger had recognized that Rory’s brain was an asset, and he had announced his decision to his aide the way a king might. The soldiers around them might think it was crazy for him to bring only Sapir and Rory into the ship, but they took their orders from Traeger and no one would dare challenge him.

Rory didn’t have to wonder about the decision, either. Traeger kept the others out because whatever might be inside the alien craft, it was top secret. Which meant that whatever happened after this, Rory would be forced to keep that secret. He imagined that meant Traeger intended him to be dead, but he was alive so far, and he planned to keep it that way.

So, he opened the door and he followed Traeger into the ship, and he didn’t even protest when Sapir gripped his arm to keep him from wandering. And he sure as hell didn’t try to run. Because where would he go, aboard an alien ship that might have homicidal monsters hiding away somewhere?

Once inside, the three of them gazed around in wonderment. There were symbols everywhere, but it looked precisely as Rory had imagined it. Once they had gotten past the entryway, they spotted several storage units set into the walls. Rory had seen enough movies to know this didn’t bode well, that these things might be hibernation chambers, and he shouldn’t want to know what they contained.

Except he did want to know. He couldn’t help himself, and he knew Traeger and Sapir and their whole gang of assholes at Project: Stargazer would also not be able to help themselves, given enough time.

Sure enough, Traeger grinned and rubbed his hands together, like a fat and greedy king who has just had a banquet laid out for him.

“Hook the translator into the mainframe, download everything,” he said. Turning to Rory—though only, Rory suspected, because there was no one else there for him to boast to—he added, “Been trying to figure out what these bird-chirping motherfuckers are saying since ’87. Gave the Harvard School of Linguistics a billion-dollar grant. Voilà!”

Gazing uneasily around at the tubes, Sapir said, “What’s inside these things?”

“It’s the property of Project: Stargazer, that’s what the fuck it is,” Traeger replied.

As he spoke, Rory noticed a control panel, like a podium that jutted from the floor between two of the cylinders. The panel was covered in symbols, the components of the Predator language, or at least some form of iconography that their species understood. Rory could see that each of the stasis cylinders was highlighted in red on the display, with a time-code beside them. The numbers were blinking, as if something had stopped them from continuing to count forward.

Or count down, he thought.

A countdown. It had stopped mid-sequence, the blinking an impatient signal, suggesting that all it would take was someone with the right code to get it moving again.

Rory shook himself from his reverie, abruptly aware that Sapir and Traeger were reacting to a commotion outside the ship. He turned to listen, and heard running footsteps, shouting. Then Traeger’s radio squawked. He snatched it angrily from his belt and held it to his ear. Rory heard the urgent voice of one of Traeger’s mercenaries.

“Code Three, Code Three, we have motion at the south fence line.”

“Send a fire team to take a look,” Traeger barked. “Extreme prejudice.”

“Local wildlife?” Sapir ventured, but Rory was smiling.

“It’s my dad. He’s gonna save me now.”

Traeger knelt beside him. His voice was silky, but he had a look on his face like the bullies at school—mean and spiteful. “Well, if it is your daddy—and I truly hope it is—he has to be just about the dumbest motherfucker I’ve ever met. I mean, a Ranger sniper tripping motion sensors? He’d have to be…”

Then his voice tailed off and his face went slack, his eyes opening in horrified realization. Once again grabbing his radio, he looked wildly at Sapir and said, “He’s creating a diversion! It’s a fucking divers—”

Before he could bring the radio up to his mouth, it flew from his hand. As though attacked by an invisible force, he was knocked off his feet, his body smashing against a control panel.

Sapir whirled this way and that, eyes and mouth stretched wide with fear, looking for his boss’s assailant.

“Howdy,” said a voice.

Rory saw the air behind Sapir shimmer and coalesce, and next moment his dad was standing there, face blackened with dirt, a tranquilizer gun locked and loaded, and pointing at Sapir’s face.

Sapir looked nervous, but he did his best to sneer. “What, you’re gonna kill us with a tranq gun?”

McKenna’s voice was low, his hand steady. “You took my boy, so yeah.”

He pulled the trigger. The tranq dart passed through Sapir’s eye and into his brain.

For an instant, Sapir looked outraged. His remaining eye glared at McKenna. Then the life went out of him and his body dropped in an ungainly sprawl of limbs, so much dead meat.

Even before Traeger’s aide hit the floor, McKenna was moving. In one smooth motion he dropped the tranq gun and drew a pistol, which he pressed to Traeger’s temple as he hauled the CIA man to his feet by the collar of his jacket.

Rory smiled at Traeger. “Told you,” he said brightly.

Traeger looked as if he would have cheerfully strangled the life out of the boy there and then. Instead, he gawked at McKenna, as if unable to believe the sheer insolence of the man.

“You out of your mind?” he exclaimed, spittle flying from his lips. “We literally have you surrounded.”

“That’s why you’re coming with me,” said McKenna mildly. “I just want the kid, nobody has to die.”

“Umm, Dad?” said Rory, ever the pragmatist, and pointed at Sapir’s corpse.

McKenna shrugged. “I mean… y’know… from here forward. Now let’s go out there and tell your men to put their guns down.”

He shifted his grip from the front of Traeger’s collar to the back, and shoved the agent toward the hatch. They exited the ship and started down the ramp. The area directly in front of them was populated by armed mercs, all on high alert. Traeger cleared his throat and the majority of the mercs turned. It took a moment, but suddenly guns were coming up, all pointing in their direction.

Pressing close in against Traeger’s back, McKenna hissed in his ear, “Tell ’em.”

Traeger raised his voice. “If Captain McKenna doesn’t lower his weapon in the next ten seconds, shoot the kid’s knees out.” He twisted his head back to regard McKenna, curling his lip. “That work for you?”

McKenna jerked his head at Rory, who moved to stand behind his father, pressing himself against McKenna’s back as tightly as McKenna was pressed against Traeger. To McKenna’s dismay, however, he saw the mercs fanning out around them, and he knew that if he wanted to absolutely guarantee his boy’s safety, their only option was to withdraw to the dubious sanctuary of the Predator’s ship.

In truth, he’d misjudged Traeger’s reaction, and that irked him. He’d potentially bet his life—and worse, Rory’s—on the fact that Traeger, with a gun at his head, would turn out to be a coward. But the CIA agent had displayed a reckless bravery that had surprised McKenna.

“Fuck you!” he snarled into Traeger’s ear, trying to reestablish the upper hand. “My guys have this place covered from every angle.”

But even now, Traeger refused to be cowed.

“Funny story,” he said dismissively, “I don’t care. Ten… nine… eight…”

McKenna took another look at the mercs surrounding them, and thought: Shit.