The Predator

by Christopher Golden

  Or in this case, judging by the evidence, global security.

  The blackened vegetation crunched beneath his feet as he moved forward, his senses attuned, his eyes darting every which way, alert for anything. It took him a good five minutes of walking before he reached the thing he’d glimpsed hurtling toward him out of the sky, and when he did he allowed himself a moment— just a moment—to goggle in wonder at a craft that was definitely not of this earth.

  Damaged as it was, he could see that the angles were all wrong, and that the materials used were… weird. Swamped in plant matter, it looked more like some amphibious or insectile creature, broken-backed, hissing and spitting and steaming, than it did a vehicle capable of flight (space flight?).

  He approached cautiously, rifle up, finger on the trigger, scope trained unerringly on the open hatch, which was sticking straight up in the air like a gossamer wing, vast and dislocated. Beyond the opening, for now, he could see only darkness. He moved closer, stalking like a big cat toward its prey, the rain now pelting down around him, the sound like a million scurrying insects.

  Closer still. He noticed something glimmering on the ground near his right boot, and glanced down. Frowned.

  Liquid of some sort. Thick enough not to have been washed away by the rain. It was fluorescent, glowing bright green. Hell, what was that stuff? Rocket fuel? Radioactive waste? Alien goop?

  Before he could decide, his eye was snagged by something else, lying a little closer to the craft, half-concealed by vegetation. It appeared to be a glove of some kind, or perhaps a shackle.

  His mind rushed through possibilities. Impressive as the crashed vessel was, it was small, compact. Could it be an escape pod, perhaps something that had been attached to a larger craft? And the shackle—could its owner have been a prisoner? Or an escaping slave?

  As he took another cautious step closer, however, McKenna saw that the thing was not a shackle, but a gauntlet, vaguely resembling the kind of thing a knight of old might have worn, but far more sophisticated, far more alien. Maybe it had belonged to a warrior of some sort? But why was it lying here? Had its owner discarded it? Had it been jarred loose?

  Then he saw the face.

  It was staring up at him from the ground, close to the gauntlet. Heavy browed, eyes slanted and glaring, but otherwise featureless. McKenna’s heart jolted. For a split second he thought he’d stepped into a trap; that the craft’s occupant had dug a pit for itself and was crouched within it, ready to spring out…

  But no. Even as he swung his rifle around, McKenna realized that the face was not a face, but a mask, half-buried in ash and pulped vegetation. He glanced around, then stepped closer, probing at the gauntlet and mask with the barrel of his rifle, half-afraid they might have been booby-trapped.

  When nothing happened, he knelt down, brushed away the muck from around the mask and picked it up. It was heavy, made of some dense grayish-green metal. He stared at it for a moment, into its eye sockets, empty but somehow malevolent. Stuffing the mask into his pack, he tried his comms again.

  “Piggy One, Piggy Two. Do you copy? Over.”

  Nothing but the hiss of static. He sighed. “Fuck this.”

  He picked up the gauntlet, and was about to add that to his pack too when he paused. For a moment, he hefted it in his hand, and then, curiosity getting the better of him, slipped it onto his forearm. Immediately it attached itself with a sharp snik of meshing attachments, then, to his alarm and fascination, adjusted itself, scale-like plates sliding over one another, until it was encasing his arm snugly but not uncomfortably.

  So engrossed was he in his new toy that for a moment he forgot where he was. It was only when he heard a sound behind him—the slither of something heavy on the rain-sodden ground—that he jerked upright and spun round, water droplets flying from his hair, gun leveled, finger already squeezing the trigger.

  A figure, combat fatigues dark with rain. A white face wearing a stunned expression, staring not at him but at the smoking wreck of the craft behind him.

  “Dupree!” spat McKenna, jerking his finger from the trigger. “Jesus!”

  Dupree, on the far side of the impact crater, failed to respond, didn’t even look at him.

  “Where’s Haines?” McKenna barked. And then, when Dupree still said nothing, he instilled every ounce of authority that he could muster into his voice. “Vinnie! Where’s Haines?”

  Only now did Dupree’s slack-jawed gaze drift toward his superior. He blinked. “Dunno. Comm’s not working.”

  McKenna hefted his pack and rifle, suddenly businesslike. “We gotta head for the extraction point.”

  Dupree nodded, then faltered again. “The fuck is that, Cap?”

  McKenna glanced at the pod, shrugged. “Above our pay grade.”

  The stunned expression on Dupree’s face was slowly fading, and he was beginning to look more like his old self. Shifting his gaze to McKenna’s arm, he cocked an eyebrow, the question unspoken.

  All at once McKenna felt embarrassed. “Evidence,” he said.

  Dupree nodded slowly. “Evidence, right. Because…?”

  The two compadres grinned at each other, then spoke in unison: “No one’s gonna believe us.”

  McKenna chuckled. Dupree grinned, but all at once something seemed to occur to him, and he looked around in puzzlement.

  “Er… Cap? I’m… uh…” He raised his hands, palms tilted toward the sky. “I’m not getting rained on.”

  McKenna stared. It was true. Rain was falling to either side of Dupree, but not on Dupree himself. He looked up into the tree that was partly sheltering his comrade, but which should still have been allowing some rain to get through—which had, in fact, been allowing rain through until a few moments ago.

  Was there something up there? Something dark and large among the leaves and branches?

  Calmly he said, “Walk away from the tree, Dupree.”

  Dupree half-turned, squinting upward, following his Captain’s gaze. “Why, is there…?”

  At which point all hell broke loose.

  With a sudden splintering crash of branches, and a shower of leaves, something fell from the tree. McKenna swung his rifle up as Dupree leaped out of the way and spun round to face it. At first the falling object was too swift to focus on, but a couple of meters from the ground it came to an abrupt halt, the vine it was suspended from snapping like a whip. It swung to and fro, arms outstretched, great red wings spread. For a dizzy, disorienting moment, McKenna thought that what he was looking at was a demon, or at least some kind of giant alien bat. Then Dupree made a kind of sobbing sound, a stifled cry of rage and horror and fear all rolled into one, and McKenna’s vision readjusted, the thing coming into sudden sharp focus.

  The reality was far, far worse than the fantasy had been.

  Dangling from a vine above their heads, swaying like a side of meat, was Haines. He had been gutted, his intestines hanging in gray-purple loops, his chest and stomach slashed open so brutally that the two sides of his mutilated flesh hung in drooling flaps on either side of him. His face was a bulging-eyed rictus of terror and agony, blood running down the sides of it and through his hair, to drip and pool on the ground beneath.

  “Jesus Christ,” McKenna muttered. Then he pointed his rifle up into the trees and unloaded, shredding leaves and branches, not stopping until the entire clip had been exhausted.

  Even then, even when the trigger clicked empty, he was not done. He switched to his handgun, firing bullets up into the trees, shooting at nothing, Dupree doing the same beside him.

  When the answering fire came, it was so unexpected, so devastating, that McKenna experienced it in little more than a series of flash images. First there was lightning, or what seemed like lightning—a bolt of blistering fire that hurtled down at an angle from the trees overhead. Then Dupree, beside him, was pierced by the light. It impaled him like a skewer, his limbs flying outward in an X, his sizzling guts flying out of the hole in his back and hitting the ground like wet
barbecue. McKenna had barely registered this when he himself was flying backward through the air, hurled ten feet or more, as if he weighed nothing. He only had time to wonder if he was dead and just didn’t know it yet when he crashed down into a pit, into darkness.

  Alice down the rabbit hole, he thought wildly.

  He came down, sprawling, on a hard surface. His body skidded backward and then he hit his head—wham!— on something solid, unyielding. For a moment he saw stars, but even when he blinked them away he realized he was still seeing them. Then he looked round, and a prickle of awe and dread passed through his body as he realized where he was.

  He was inside the crashed escape pod! He must have flown through the air and come straight down through the open hatch like a basketball into a hoop.

  Surrounding him were all kinds of weird alien instrument panels, that even now were flashing to life, as though aware of his presence among them. He saw jagged symbols scrolling across screens, multiple readings for who knew what. It was fascinating and terrifying in equal measure, but he didn’t have the time or knowhow to make sense of any of it. He had a more pressing matter to attend to—the enemy. The thing that had opened up Haines like he was a can of beans and eviscerated Dupree with an alien lightning bolt.

  Looking out through the open hatch, McKenna at first thought his eyes were deceiving him. Beyond the edge of the impact crater the jungle seemed to be moving, shifting, as though it were alive. Then he realized there was something moving across the jungle, a vaguely man-shaped blur, but tall— seven feet, at least. It seemed to be made of liquid glass; through it, McKenna could see trees, leaves, shafts of light. But it was jerky, coalescing then breaking up, constantly resetting.

  Elusive though this strange new enemy was, at least McKenna had something to aim at. He reached instinctively for a weapon, but neither his rifle nor his handgun was any longer in his possession. He must have lost them when he was blasted through the air.

  All he had to defend himself with was the wrist gauntlet, with its two curved and jagged-toothed blades curving up and outwards over the back of his hand like claws. As the glassy thing moved again in the jungle, he jerked his arm up instinctively, ready to engage in hand-to-hand combat if necessary, and as he did so the gauntlet inadvertently clunked against the side of the pod opening.

  The result was spectacular.

  With a missile-like whoooosh! the gauntlet discharged a bolt of light, of energy, which shot up and over the edge of the impact crater and into the jungle beyond. Although McKenna hadn’t exactly aimed the gauntlet, he’d been pointing it in the general direction of the glassy figure, and now he saw the shifting, liquid-like collage collapse downward as the bolt of energy—nothing but a wild shot—hit it and deflected away, striking the still-swinging body of Haines and not only pulping him like a melon, but also blowing apart the tree he was dangling from.

  The figure, which McKenna now realized must look as it did because it was encased in a cloaking device, let out a hideous cry of rage and pain, and dropped to the ground, writhing in apparent agony. It was still close enough to the tree from which Haines had been hanging for the contents of the soldier’s exploding corpse to spatter over it, drenching it in blood and viscera. As McKenna watched, the figure stopped writhing and slowly straightened up, raising its head to glare in his direction.

  For the first time he saw its face, and his mouth dropped open.

  Masked in blood, the thing was a living nightmare.

  Trying to make sense of something so alien was almost impossible, but what McKenna’s brain was telling him was that the creature was part shark, part crab, and part warthog all rolled into one. It was all tusks and spines and glaring eyes, and as it opened its mouth and bellowed at him a second time, mandibles stretched out on both sides of its face, it revealed teeth as long and sharp as steak knives.

  McKenna was afraid of no man, but this was something different. His fight or flight instinct kicking in, and coming down heavily on the side of flight, he scrambled up and out of the pod and began running, legs pumping, arms swinging. Turning his back on the creature, he ran across the churned, blackened ground of the impact crater and all but dived into the jungle beyond, hoping to lose himself in the luxuriant foliage. He thrashed through bushes and leaves and veered around the trunks of trees, like a charging quarterback evading tackles, oblivious to whether the thing was behind him, giving chase. He had no weapons aside from the gauntlet, but at least he hadn’t lost his pack, which bounced against his body as he ran with the weight of the alien mask inside it. All he could hear were his own panting breaths and the slap of wet leaves as he raced through them. But suddenly, overriding that, he became aware of another sound, somewhere overhead, a low, bass thumping, a steadily increasing whup-whup-whup.

  The creature? Tracking him through the treetops? But no. It was something more mundane. Something he recognized.

  He looked up, already knowing what he would see.

  A helicopter, like a giant black dragonfly, vectoring in overhead. Salvation perhaps, but McKenna trusted his instincts, and on this occasion his instincts told him that the helicopter was not good news.

  Focused on the chopper, his foot turned on a patch of uneven ground and he staggered, dropping to his knees. All at once he felt jittery, exhausted, his adrenaline almost spent—it had been a trying day. He glanced behind him. No sign of the creature. But what if it had got its cloaking device working again? What if it was creeping up on him even now? Desperately he examined the wrist gauntlet, his only potential weapon. There were various blocky little buttons all over it. Maybe it would be a good idea to familiarize himself with a few of them, see how they worked. Tentatively, he stabbed at one, and to his astonishment a tiny metal ball popped into being as if from nowhere, and glowed for a moment.

  Then McKenna vanished, abruptly and completely. He was still physically aware of himself—of his weight, his aching muscles, his pumping heart—but he could no longer see himself. For a moment, he was alarmed—and then he realized that the benefits of being invisible right now far outweighed the negatives.

  Gathering himself, taking a deep breath, he slipped as quietly as he could into the surrounding jungle.

  * * *

  The team of black-clad mercenaries who emerged from the helicopter looked to have all been cut from the same mold. Buzz cuts, faces carved from granite, muscles upon muscles, armed to the teeth.

  By contrast, the man who stepped out behind them looked like the nicest guy in the world. Around forty, slim, wide smile, skin like dark velvet, expensive haircut, CIA agent Will Traeger made his black hoodie and nylon jacket look like an Armani suit. Perhaps the only flaw in his personal picture was that he was popping tabs of Nicorette gum as though they were Tic Tacs. As his feet touched down on the dusty ground of the jungle dirt road, he removed his aviator sunglasses, exposing soft brown eyes that only further enhanced his handsome face.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, his voice a soothing burr, “heads up. Our enemies are large, they have ray guns, and fucking up your day is their vacation. Hit fast and hit hard.” He held up a finger. “And remember… they’re invisible standing still. When they move, look for the shimmer. Now, roll out.”

  As the mercs dispersed into the jungle, their guns like toys in their huge hands, a piercing shriek, like a war cry, ululated out of the jungle, seeming to come from everywhere.

  The man who had emerged from the helicopter behind Traeger, handsome in his own way, but with the ability to blend into the background when needed, quailed at the sound. Traeger, however, merely raised his head as if sniffing the air, then replaced his aviator sunglasses, apparently unperturbed. Beckoning his aide toward him, he said, “I want the passenger. I want the pod. If it ain’t from here—”

  Traeger’s aide, whose name was Sapir, finished his sentence for him. “You want it.”

  Traeger nodded, the jungle reflected in the lenses over his eyes. “I want it.”

  2

  When he
saw the battered, bullet-pocked sign, McKenna thought he might actually get home alive. Or whatever passed for home these days. He didn’t live with Emily anymore, didn’t see his boy Rory nearly as much as he ought to. Part of that had to do with serving in the field, but part had to do with him never having a goddamn clue how to be the husband Emily needed or the father Rory deserved.

  McKenna knew his own faults. He just didn’t whine about them.

  He staggered, breath rasping, legs shaking. He felt like he’d run twenty miles, and maybe he had, but he damn well didn’t have two hundred more in him. He shifted the pack on his back and stared at the run-down Mexican town splayed out ahead of him. Calling it a town was being charitable—the place looked more like a row of horse stables in the middle of nowhere—but he spotted one structure with a faded Coca-Cola sign and the words Cantina Rojo.

  Bingo.

  With a nervous glance over his shoulder, he dry-washed as much of the camo paint off his face as he could manage. He didn’t have time to make himself pretty. Truth was, he didn’t know how much time he had. There were going to be a lot of questions waiting for him, a lot of people who wanted to know what he’d seen—and maybe didn’t want him to have seen it in the first place—people who would want to assign blame. When soldiers died—

  Damn it. My brothers.

  When soldiers died, everyone wanted to assign blame, to make sure the fingers were pointing at anyone but themselves.

  But this? This was a whole different brand of FUBAR.

  Still catching his breath, McKenna ran across what passed for a street and entered the cantina. Overhead, a ceiling fan rotated so lazily it might have been nothing more than the breeze making it turn. If it accomplished anything other than redistributing the heat, he couldn’t tell. Sweat trickled down the small of his back. Fucking Mexico, he thought. McKenna had always known he’d die dirty and sweaty.

  He reconned the room. A handful of customers, moving slow with the heat, happy to be in the shade. No one in the cantina set off his interior alarm bells, no cops, no military.