The Predator

by Christopher Golden

  “Fuera,” he said to the room, as he made a beeline to the bar.

  The bartender came out from behind the bar, his gaze shifting past McKenna. Although his face stayed impassive, it was a studied sort of impassive, and McKenna didn’t have to ask why. He heard the creak of a floorboard and knew at least one of the customers— probably more than one, since courage usually came in groups—had taken exception to his presence.

  The corner of his mouth lifted in something like a smirk. He stared at the bartender.

  “Want to know my favorite cereal?” he asked.

  The bartender frowned. “Que?”

  McKenna spun, spotted the two assholes coming for him. He moved with intuition that had been trained into him, smashed into him, burned into him. It felt good, after what he’d seen, to fall back into the rhythm of a simple bar fight, to glide into the motion of fists and kicks, to strike hard, to break bone.

  “Snap,” he said.

  A thrust. “Crackle.”

  A kick. “Pop.”

  He knew the line was lost on the bartender and didn’t care. “That’s a hint,” he said.

  On the floor, the two men who’d attacked him groaned, but they were done. McKenna slammed his backpack down on top of the bar, then unzipped a pouch and pulled out a greasy wad of Mexican currency. The bartender arched an eyebrow as McKenna held out the cash.

  “I need you to mail this from the embassy. El consulado, sí? Muy importante. Go!”

  The bartender stared into McKenna’s eyes, then gave an abrupt nod, grabbed the backpack and turned to go. As he did so, McKenna said, “Buddy?”

  The bartender looked back.

  “If you don’t do what I ask, I’ll find you. You don’t want me to do that.”

  Without another word, the bartender vanished through the door behind the bar. McKenna tried not to think about the odds on whether he’d scared the guy too much, not enough, or just the right amount. Fear could be a weapon and a great motivator, but like any weapon, you had to know precisely how to use it.

  Alone in the bar now (the guys he’d vanquished had crawled away at some point during his exchange with the bartender), McKenna leaned forward, grabbed himself a glass and a bottle of tequila, and poured himself a shot. Neither the glass nor the bottle was particularly clean, but what the hell? He raised his glass to the flies buzzing lazily around the ceiling fan, and was about to knock it back when he heard sirens, approaching fast.

  He sighed. He wasn’t surprised they’d found him, but he wondered how they’d done it so quickly.

  As the sirens reached a crescendo and were accompanied by the sounds of several vehicles screeching to a halt outside, he reached into the right-hand pocket of his grimy combats and extracted a tiny, silvery sphere— the alien cloaking device. He held it between his thumb and forefinger as he rolled his head back on his shoulders, hearing his neck muscles crackle, then dropped it almost absently into his tequila.

  He picked up the glass and upended it over his mouth, swallowing its entire contents in one gulp, as the door to the bar crashed open behind him.

  3

  Lawrence A. Gordon Middle School might have been the Home of the Warriors, like the sign out front said (a new, albeit temporary sign beneath bore the legend HALLOWEEN HAUNT 10/25—WELCOME PARENTS & STDS), but Rory didn’t care much for the school’s sports teams. At twelve years old, he was a scholastic warrior. A classroom warrior.

  Not at lunchtime, though.

  At lunchtime, Rory was a warrior of the chessboard.

  Mr. Moore, his science teacher, ate lunch at his desk. The room stayed quiet, because Chess Club was in session. There were five games going on simultaneously, all of them taking place on the lab tables. Rory could have played— could have beaten any of the kids in the club—but instead he threaded through the room with his crust-free peanut butter sandwich in one hand while he studied each of the ongoing games in turn. In his mind, he worked both ends of all five games, had a strategy for each of the ten players that would have guaranteed them victory.

  Only nobody ever asked.

  Mr. Moore glanced up at him and sighed. A lot of times, the science teacher seemed like he wanted to talk to Rory, as if some great, weighty question burned at the tip of his tongue—or maybe some piece of wisdom that would reveal Mr. Moore as a more thoughtful, more intelligent, more sympathetic teacher than Rory’s experience had thus far led him to believe. The man studied him sometimes, not in a creepy way, but more like one of the Chess Club kids on the losing side of a game, as if Mr. Moore looked at Rory and saw a puzzle that he thought he could solve if he could just find that one missing piece.

  That was one of the oddest things about being on the autism spectrum. Rory didn’t feel like he was missing a piece of anything, didn’t feel like his puzzle hadn’t been solved. He felt whole. He just felt like Rory.

  Neuro-diverse, Rory thought, glancing again at Mr. Moore, catching him looking again. It was a pleasant tag doctors liked to put on kids and adults like him. The opposite of neuro-typical. But what was typical? Rory was what a lot of people still called an Asperger’s kid, even though technically Asperger’s had been erased as a specific diagnosis and was now just one slice in the larger pie of Autism Spectrum Disorder.

  Once his mom had said she thought neuro-typical people were like cavemen, and kids like Rory were the future of humanity. He liked that idea, but he had a feeling someone like Mr. Moore would frown in even deeper puzzlement—and maybe a little uneasiness—if he said it in class. Sometimes he had a hard time imagining how Typicals thought, but he’d pondered this subject a lot.

  He took a bite of his sandwich as he stepped up beside the board where Helen Jemisin and Ethan Hill were playing. Helen had been kicking Ethan’s ass, but now she reached for her queen.

  “I wouldn’t—” Rory started to say.

  Ethan scowled at him, but Helen arched a curious eyebrow and glanced up.

  Which was when the world started to scream.

  * * *

  A minute before Helen Jemisin picked up her queen, two kids, Derek and E.J., the former wearing the mean and cunning look that would most likely carry him through life, the latter so slack-jawed and sleepy-eyed he might as well have had the word “Goon” tattooed on his forehead, had been standing in a deserted school corridor beside a fire alarm.

  Glancing left and right, Derek had said, “Go on, I dare you.”

  E.J. had blinked. “Why don’t you?”

  “Because I dared you first.”

  E.J. considered the irrefutable logic of this. Then he shrugged and curled his meaty right hand into a fist.

  * * *

  Rory clapped his hands over his ears as the other kids stood up from their desks. The alarm blared over and over, a rhythmic shrieking assault on his brain. Mr. Moore went to the door, forgetting Rory as he ushered the other kids into the corridor. Maybe he looked back and maybe he didn’t, but by then Rory had slid to the floor behind one of the lab tables and curled into a fetal ball with his fingers in his ears. He squeezed his eyes shut, all thoughts leaving him. Only the sound remained, tearing into his head, an intimate assault of pure noise.

  He forced himself to open his eyes.

  E.J. and Derek passed by, out in the corridor. The instant he spotted them, Rory stopped breathing, thinking maybe he could make himself invisible. For half a second he thought he had succeeded, but then Derek came to a halt, grabbing E.J.’s arm. Wolfish smiles split their faces as they stepped into the room.

  Rory flinched. He knew, then, who had set off the fire alarm. He couldn’t prove it, of course, but he knew it as surely as he knew his own name, and that Helen Jemisin had been three moves from beating Ethan Hill in that chess match.

  “Hey, E.J.,” Derek crowed. “You hungry?”

  They strode across the science lab as if they hardly even knew Rory was there, ignoring him while at the same time completely focused on his presence. Their performance was bad theater and he wanted no part of it,
but they’d never given him a choice before and they weren’t going to start now.

  “Hell, yeah!” E.J. replied. “You know what I’m hungry for?”

  Rory tensed, knowing what was coming. He could have said the next three words with them, they’d said it so many times, these shitty kids who thought they were so clever. An Ass Burger.

  “An Ass Burger!” E.J. exclaimed.

  Rory was half convinced the jerks thought Asperger’s was really spelled that way.

  E.J. kicked him. Rory tucked into a tighter ball, trying to defend himself. He’d been kicked before, been bruised but never bloodied. These guys were dumb as a box of rocks, but smart enough not to do visible damage. Stupid to the bone, but they had a bully’s wisdom.

  “Mmm,” Derek echoed. “That sounds delicious. A big, juicy Ass Burger!”

  He gave a kick of his own. Rory grunted and promised himself he wouldn’t cry. He didn’t understand why bullies behaved like this, didn’t understand hardly anything about why people chose to do the things they did, but he knew enough to realize that crying would only make them happy and make them kick him even harder. His therapist said it was difficult for him to translate and learn typical behavior, but he’d learned that much.

  Both boys moved in to kick him again, but the alarm cut off abruptly and the lab fell into silence. They knew it was over. Students would be coming back, and so would teachers. They would get caught. They seemed displeased at being interrupted so soon and looked around. Sneering, the boys went from chess game to chess game and knocked over every piece on every board, as if Rory had been playing in all of them. In a way he had, but they couldn’t know that, and he wouldn’t tell them.

  The assholes traded a laughing high-five and marched proudly from the room.

  Rory rose, taking stock of his body. He stretched a little. There would be some bruising, but those kicks hadn’t broken anything. Compared to other assaults, this one had been mercifully short.

  He exhaled and let himself glance across the room, taking in each of the chessboards in turn, quickly making a mental inventory. Then he nodded—it could be done.

  One by one, as fast as he could—hoping to avoid discovery by Mr. Moore—Rory McKenna put every chess piece back on every board, exactly the way they’d been before the fire alarm. It was simple, and deeply satisfying. Chaos and disorder troubled him deeply and the only thing that alleviated those feelings was to restore order.

  To set things right.

  * * *

  On the walk home, the Ortegas’ dog, Bugsy, tried to murder Rory again. Growling and snapping, the dog raced through its yard and would have torn Rory’s throat out if not for the picket fence. At least, that was how Rory saw it. He didn’t like dogs, and he especially didn’t like ugly dogs that looked like storybook monsters. Mom said pit bulls were just like other dogs, that they’d gotten a bad reputation, but Rory still gave Bugsy a wide berth as he made his way home.

  When he entered the house, the first thing he noticed was the silence. He could always feel it when his mother wasn’t there—her absence was tangible, and he sometimes wondered if that was what it might be like if he ever met a ghost. Did ghosts give off the feeling of their absence, like a hole in the world? Of course, Rory knew ghosts weren’t real, but sometimes he thought about them and it freaked him out anyway.

  The front door slammed behind him. One of his mom’s paintings jumped a bit on the wall and he hesitated, wanting to make sure it didn’t fall. He supposed it was a good painting—he liked it, anyway.

  In the kitchen, he dumped his backpack on the floor and then paused when he noticed a damp spot on the wall. Snatching a paper towel off the roll, he blotted the spot, erasing the bit of disorder that had irritated him. Then he went to the refrigerator, upon which hung a note from his mother. Spent 1.5 hours cleaning house, she’d written. If you mess it up, I will cut you. XOXO Mom.

  Rory opened the fridge and surveyed its contents, debating what he wanted for a snack.

  The doorbell interrupted his pondering, so he shut the fridge and went out into the foyer. When he opened the door, a postal worker smiled at him. The man had a handcart with the United States Postal Service logo on the side. Rory wondered how many letters it could carry, if there were only letters and not packages or catalogues or magazines. He wondered if someone could hide inside the handcart, or if a dog might hide inside, if the dog was particularly determined to kill and eat a middle school kid in his neighborhood. For half a second, he studied the handcart for any sign that Bugsy might be hiding inside.

  “Quinn McKenna live here?” the postal worker asked.

  Rory blinked.

  The postal worker gave a lopsided smile. “Didn’t mean to stump you. How’s this: is Quinn McKenna your mom or your dad?”

  “Dad,” Rory replied.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  The guy upended the handcart and an avalanche of letters and bills and boxes poured out onto the floor of the foyer. Rory jumped back, staring at the pile of stuff spreading out across the floor. He glanced at the postal worker, wondering if the man had lost his marbles. Lost his marbles was a phrase his mother sometimes used to describe people who behaved in a way that seemed illogical or somehow outrageous to her. She’d often said she worried that Rory’s dad had lost his marbles. She had never said it about Rory.

  This postal worker, though—Rory felt sure his mother would have an opinion about this guy.

  “His PO box payments are past due. Sorry,” the man said. He didn’t shrug, but Rory could hear the shrug in his voice. “Guess he’s… not around much, huh?”

  Rory gave a small nod. The postal worker’s attention had already turned to one parcel, a big box that had been stamped and rubber-stamped and scraped and taped. Rory spotted the words consulate and Monterrey, Mexico, and thought: Mexico?

  “That’s my dad’s handwriting,” he said, mostly to himself.

  “Embassy stamps,” the postal worker said, studying the box like it was a cadaver and he was a TV detective. “He do some kind of government work?”

  “MOS 11B3VW3,” Rory replied, pronouncing each letter and number with emphasis.

  The postal worker stared at him the way so many people stared at him. Rory had come to recognize the dumbfounded expression of the eternally confused.

  “Military designation,” the boy said. He paused a moment, but saw that the man still didn’t understand. “He kills people.”

  The postal worker cocked his head and gave Rory an odd look. “You have a nice day, okay?”

  Rory watched as the man went down the front walk, and then he closed the door. Frowning, he turned to regard the parcel from Mexico. After a moment, he picked up the box. It wasn’t very heavy—not like it had been packed full of books—but it wasn’t light, either. Why would his father have mailed this box to himself, and what was he doing in Mexico? More importantly, what was in it?

  He wondered if it might be a present. His father always said he was going to bring Rory a surprise the next time he went out of town, but he always forgot. Maybe this time he had decided to mail something home, so he wouldn’t forget.

  Rory shook the box, his curiosity growing.

  He told himself he wouldn’t open it. Not without asking his father first.

  But, of course, if it was a present, then it had been meant for him in the first place, hadn’t it?

  4

  Casey Brackett sometimes wondered why she did this to herself. On a beautiful day when she had no classes to teach, she could have done anything with her time. Her mother would have told her to find a boyfriend, because her mother had grown up as part of a generation that believed a woman needed a man in her life for security or a solid foundation or something. Casey didn’t mind the occasional man, but her mother’s attitude drove her nuts. She didn’t need a boyfriend… although she wouldn’t have minded an outing now and then with a circle of friends.

  She didn’t have a circle. Laid out on a graph, her
friends would have been more of a connect-the-dots. There were days this felt unfortunate, but when she was being honest with herself, Casey had to admit it was her own doing. After all, she didn’t really like people very much. Which was why, on this beautiful day, she was sat on a bench in a dog park just outside Johns Hopkins, Maryland, red-penciling papers from college students who were never as smart as she wanted them to be. She went through a lot of red pencils.

  The papers were on her lap, the red pencil in her right hand. In her left, she held a braid of leashes belonging to her stupid, beautiful, goofy dogs. They were ordinarily very well behaved, which often lulled her into thinking that she could bring them down to the dog park and get some correcting done. Then one or more of them would start acting like a lunatic or begging for her attention, and she’d remember how she’d promised herself the last time that she wouldn’t fool herself like this again.

  But it was a gorgeous day—and she did need to get her correcting done.

  The eruption of urgent barking sounded like Casey herself, the day she’d reamed out the sacker at the grocery store for putting a jug of orange juice into a bag on top of a fresh loaf of bread. She knew that bark the same way a mother knew her baby’s cry, and her head snapped up in irritation.

  “Summer! Stop it!” she snapped. “That’s not yours. Does it look like it’s yours?”

  The dog barked twice at the toy she’d been trying to steal, and then darted away, but not without casting a rueful glance at Casey. She could be trouble, that one. Sometimes she would gather up the unattended toys at the dog park and piss on them, to claim them for herself. Marking her stolen territory like a furry conqueror with a fetish. Then there was the time she’d bitten the handsome firefighter who’d been working up his nerve to ask for Casey’s number. She’d given the guy her number for all the wrong reasons, thinking he’d call to make her pay for whatever shots or stitches he might need, but he’d never called. She’d been both relieved and disappointed.

  As her red pencil hovered over the paper on top of the stack on her lap, a jogger ran by with his own dog on a leash. The guy slowed down. Even in her peripheral vision, Casey saw the way he craned his neck to get a better look at her.