He remembered the briefings.
Yes, they were that fast, that silent. Doheny had discounted it when he'd heard the story, had figured that lone survivor from eight years ago had dressed up his account to make himself look good, but now, very suddenly, Doheny believed it all.
They were fast, strong, silent. They could move through the jungle as well as anything on earth.
And they had their invisibility screens, too.
And they killed people just for fun.
"Oh, God," Doheny whispered as he scrambled upward.
He'd dropped his machete-he was glad of that now He wondered if it was too late to ditch his pistol and decided not to worry about it.
If he could reach the chopper, he'd be safe; they couldn't catch that, no matter how fast or strong they were. They didn't have wings, they couldn't fly.
At the top he turned to see if he could lend Sturgill a hand Johnson and Romano were already running through the jungle, smashing through the undergrowth, making enough noise to wake the dead, sending birds and insects flying in all directions as they ran for the crater and their ride out.
Sturgill wasn't there.
Doheny had thought Sturgill was right behind him; he leaned over and peered down.
Sturgill was almost at the bottom, he saw, down by the abandoned basket-he must have slipped again. He wasn't moving-was he hurt?
Panicky, Doheny threw a glance at the dead alien. There was no sign of the live ones.
He looked back down at Sturgill and realized that that red he saw down there all around the fallen man wasn't part of the jungle, it wasn't flowers or insects or butterflies.
That was Sturgill's blood.
Sturgill was already dead.
The things had gotten him.
"Oh, shit," Doheny said as he turned and ran for the copter.
About halfway to the crater he almost tripped over Romano-or what was left of him. Doheny recognized him by his size and his gear, not by his features; Romano's head was gone.
"Oh, Jesus," Doheny cried, stumbling on.
Johnson had made it as far as the edge of the crater; he lay on his back, his chest ripped open.
Doheny hardly glanced at him-the chopper was there, waiting, hovering a few feet off the ground. The pilot must have seen Johnson die and he'd gotten moving, gotten off the ground, but he was staying low, staying in reach, waiting for the others-a brave man, Doheny thought gratefully.
And there was the copilot, Jim Wyatt, leaning out the door shouting something-Doheny couldn't make it out.
He ran down the slope, stumbling on vines, and when he was closer, he heard Wyatt call, "Where the fuck are the others? They coming?"
"Dead!" Doheny shouted back. "They're all dead! Back there!"
"Come on, then!" Wyatt called, holding out a hand, and Doheny ran, getting ready to jump, to grab Wyatt's arm and be pulled aboard.
And that was when the blades slashed through his side.
He couldn't run anymore, he wasn't dead but the pain in his side was too much, he could feel hot blood spilling down his leg and his side was suddenly icy cold despite the jungle heat, he couldn't make his legs work; he folded up and fell.
He saw Wyatt hesitating, saw him inch forward, he was obviously thinking about jumping down to help, but he wasn't sure he should, and just then the pilot's nerve finally broke, before Wyatt could move any farther.
The chopper began to rise, to pull away from the earth, and Doheny knew they were leaving him behind, leaving him to die, to become another grisly trophy for the aliens, and he began to cry, his eyes filling with tears, his breath coming in gasps.
He was bleeding to death, he knew he was bleeding to death, and they were abandoning him to save their own worthless lives, and he hated them with a sudden intensity he hadn't known possible.
For an instant he was almost glad when the blue-white fireball hit the copter's fuel tank and the craft blossomed into an orange inferno before plummeting back to earth. He could hear Wyatt's scream, saw Wyatt try to dive free of the wreckage, his uniform already burning.
And then something grabbed him by the hair and lifted him up, and a jagged blade flashed, and Doheny was dead.
Miles away a radioman reported, "General, we've lost the chopper."
"Damn." Philips glared. "What happened?"
"I don't know, sir. The pilot didn't have time to say much. The transponder's out, though; it's gone."
"Find out . . . no, forget that. I know what happened."
The aliens, of course. The monsters from outer space had been displeased that humans had been poking around their dead comrade.
Any chance of giving them the body as a goodwill gesture was gone. Any chance of getting a look at the technology on that body was gone.
And six good men were gone, too.
"Should I send a rescue mission to look for survivors, sir?" Perkins asked.
Philips turned, startled.
"Hell, no," he said. "There aren't any survivors."
"According to the radio reports, the pickup crew wasn't onboard when the chopper went down, sir ...."
"They were probably already dead," Philips said.
"But . . ."
"All right, look," Philips said, "if they're on the ground, they'll be okay for a while-we'll go in and look after those things have had time to finish up and leave. But I'm not sending more men in to be slaughtered."
"Yes, sir," Perkins reluctantly agreed.
The general saw his face, knew that Perkins thought they should at least try to rescue the pickup crew
Philips knew better. Maybe Schaefer had managed to kill one of the aliens, maybe Dutch had managed to kill one, but the men of the pickup crew had been ordinary mortals. And they'd been armed. Philips wished he had ordered them to go in unarmed, maybe then the aliens would have let them go-but maybe they wouldn't have. This wasn't a hunt, this was defending the dead; the rules might be different.
And besides, he'd wanted volunteers, and if he'd insisted on no weapons, he might not have got any.
That might have been better all around, of course. Because despite what Perkins might think, Philips knew those men were dead.
Well, there was still Schaefer and his "guide," and Philips intended at least to get to him before the aliens could.
* * *
24
It seemed to Rasche that he'd been staring out the window for over an hour.
Maybe he had been, and he still couldn't believe it.
Those ships cruising over New York, visible only through the helmet-mask . . .
They showed up golden-red; Rasche wondered what color they were really. The mask twisted colors, changed them, and the resolution was weak, shapes became soft-edged and indistinct; details vanished -- or appeared, set in sharp relief by the shifted colors.
For a long time Rasche couldn't really accept what he was seeing. He knew it had to be true, nothing else made sense, but this stuff happened on My Favorite Martian, not in the real world.
Not on My Favorite Martian, either, he corrected himself. They never had the budget. Maybe Star Trek or one of those other sci-fi shows-he never watched them. Or the blockbuster movies with Schwarzenegger.
It all fit together, though. Schaefer had said the killer wasn't human, and Schaefer had been right.
The killer had been a goddamn Martian.
And the feds must have known all along. That explained everything. They knew that those things were out there-Rasche didn't know how, but they knew
Schaefer's brother-Dutch must have found out about the Martians.
Had the aliens killed him?
Or worse, had the feds killed him, to keep those things secret?
Or was he still out there somewhere? Was he helping the feds?
That was one thing Rasche couldn't figure out, but it didn't matter-he saw the rest of it. Those ships out there had brought some kind of superhunter to earth, something that hunted human beings just for fun. The feds knew about it, bu
t they were keeping it hushed up.
Why?
That one wasn't too difficult to figure-all those UFO nuts, who maybe weren't quite so nutty after all, had an answer for that. Hell, they had half a dozen answers. The feds didn't want anyone to panic. Maybe they wanted to capture the alien technology for themselves. Maybe they were dealing with the aliens. Maybe they'd all sold out to invaders from another galaxy. Maybe they were aliens, Martian shape-shifters who'd replaced the real humans.
Rasche had always thought that was all a bunch of crazy paranoid fantasy-but those ships were out there.
Ships, plural. Schaefer had thought there was just one killer, one of these hunters from outer space-but Rasche could see four ships just from this one window, and they looked big, not like anything that would carry a single passenger.
Jesus, Rasche thought, if one of them took out Dutch's squad, if one of them slaughtered the gang-bangers at Beekman and Water . . .
He put the mask down, and the ships vanished; picked it up and looked through it, and they were back.
At last he put it down and went for a cup of the sludge that served as coffee.
"Man, you look awful," a voice said as Rasche tried to pour without spilling; his hands were shaking enough to make it very tricky. He looked up.
"I've seen mimes with a better tan, Rasche," the other detective said. "You all right?"
"Beat it, Richie," Rasche answered, picking up his cup-it wasn't full, but it was good enough.
Richie shrugged. "Just trying to help," he said.
"You can't," Rasche answered, shuffling back toward his office, walking as if he were afraid the floor might tip and throw him off at any moment, holding the coffee as if it might explode at any second.
And how did he know it wouldn't? The whole world had gone mad on him. He picked up the mask.
Maybe it wasn't the world that was mad; maybe it was him. Maybe he was losing his mind.
He needed to talk to someone.
Shari was still in Elmira, and besides, how could he talk to her about this? She already worried about him so much-she'd think he'd finally cracked. Something like this on top of his behavior at Niagara Falls-she'd assume he'd gone nuts, become a complete paranoid loon.
He didn't think he'd gone nuts-the mask was solid enough. And those men had been looking for him at the motel.
They couldn't have been the killers, though, not if the killers were alien monsters. They must have been feds, after him for some reason.
Or maybe the aliens really were shape-shifters.
He had to talk to someone about it. And not by phone; he needed someone who could see the mask, touch it, know that it was real.
The feds?
But they already knew. They would just take the mask away and go on hushing it all up, and that wasn't enough.
He tucked the mask under one arm, the coffee in his other hand, and headed downstairs to see McComb. He smiled uncomfortably-he must be losing his mind, he thought, if he was going to talk to McComb about something like this.
McComb didn't answer the first knock, but Rasche knew he was still in there, that he hadn't gone home. He kept pounding, and eventually the captain opened the door.
"What the hell is it?" he demanded.
"Captain, I need to talk to you," Rasche said. "Now Inside."
McComb stared at him for a moment, then said, "All right, you have one minute. And lose the coffee-I don't want any oil spills on the new carpet.
Rasche tossed the cup in a nearby trash can-he didn't really want to drink it, anyway. He stepped into McComb's office with the alien mask held out before him in both hands, like an offering.
"If you've come to apologize on behalf of your partner, Rasche, you can save it," McComb said as he closed the door. "You're days too late. I filed for disciplinary action against Schaefer and requested dismissal just as soon as he walked out of here, and where the hell did he go, anyway? Will you look what he did to my phone?" He gestured, but Rasche didn't bother to look. "Don't touch it, it's evidence against that son of a bitch . . . ."
"I know we've had our problems, Captain," Rasche said, "but this is big."
McComb stopped talking and glared at Rasche.
"There . . . there's something out there," Rasche stammered. He couldn't quite bring himself to say right out that there were spaceships-if he thought he might be going crazy, what would McComb think? McComb already suspected Rasche was nuts, just for putting up with Schaefer.
He held out the mask. "Schaefer snagged this from the thing he met at the scene of the first massacre, on Beekman," he said. "We . . . "
"Hold it!" McComb held up a hand. "Are you saying you've been withholding evidence?"
Rasche stared at McComb for a moment, then lost it. He was talking about entire worlds, and McComb was worrying about legal details?
He slammed the mask down on the captain's desk. "Would you listen to me?" he shouted. "There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of those things out there, just waiting-all you have to do is look-"
"I'm not looking at anything," McComb bellowed, "except your ass in a holding cell pending a full departmental review! Goddammit, you're going down for this, Rasche, same as Schaefer did! Trespassing on a sealed crime scene, withholding evidence, lying in your signed statement . . ."
"Fine!" Rasche shouted back, snatching up the helmet. "Fine, I'll have my little chat with the chief!"
He stormed out of McComb's office.
"Hey, Rasche, you're not going anywhere." McComb called after him.
Rasche paid no attention-except to change his intended route, taking the back stairs to avoid any attempts to interfere. He was going to take this to the chief, to the mayor, to anyone who would listen. It was obvious that McComb had all the good sense of a possum crossing an interstate-New York was under siege by alien monsters, and McComb was worrying about stains on his carpet.
"Jesus, Schaefer," Rasche muttered to himself as he trudged down the concrete steps, "where are you when I need you? Central fucking America, for Christ's sake!"
His only chance of getting anything done without Schaefer there to make things happen was taking his case to McComb's superiors-but as the steel fire door at the bottom of the stairs slammed open with a crash like thunder, Rasche realized that Philips and his people would know that.
And McComb would call them. He still had the phone Schaefer had broken on his desk, but he had a replacement, too.
The three men in suits and sunglasses who had burst in at the foot of the stairs had the jump on him; Rasche didn't reach for his pistol.
"Federal agents," the one with the 9mm automatic announced. "That's far enough, Detective Rasche." He flipped open a credentials case in his left hand, but Rasche was too far away to read the badge.
One of the others lifted a walkie-talkie and told it, "It's okay-we've got him."
The third man had a pistol and an outstretched empty hand; the first waved at him and said, "Hand my friend the helmet, Rasche."
Rasche grimaced and hauled back to fling the helmet.
Three pistols pointed at his gut.
"Easy, easy," the first fed told him. "Just hand it over easy, you won't be needing it."
Reluctantly, Rasche lowered his hand and handed the mask over.
"Good," the fed said. "Come on, then; you're coming with us."
"Where?" Rasche asked. "Can I call my wife first, or at least tell someone upstairs?"
The agent shook his head. "Uh-uh, Rasche. No calls, no one sees you leave. Car's waiting."
Rasche frowned. "That's not standard procedure. That's more like kidnapping."
He also realized that even if McComb had phoned the instant the door closed behind him, these bozos couldn't have gotten here and set up so fast.
They must have been waiting for him all along.
"Never mind what you call it," the fed said. "Just come on."
One of the others took Rasche by the arm and gave him a shove in the right direction.
; Rasche came, but as they left the building, he protested, "You have to be shitting me-you can't kidnap a police officer from the middle of Police Plaza!"
"The hell we can't," one of the feds muttered.
"You're not regular feds," Rasche said: "Even those pricks from the FBI wouldn't pull this. Who the hell are you?"
"You don't need to know," the spokesman told him as he shoved Rasche roughly into the backseat of an unmarked black sedan.
* * *
25
A pan of dirty water flung in his face brought Schaefer around; as the cool wetness shocked him back to consciousness, he heard a voice saying, "Time to wake up, puppy dog."
Schaefer blinked and looked around.
He was sitting in a low wooden chair, feet on the floor and his knees sticking up, his wrists tied behind him with something stiff-it felt like coat hanger wire.
Whatever it was holding his hands, it was strong and tied tight; he couldn't even come close to snapping it, couldn't slip it off. Eschevera, if that was who was responsible, wasn't taking any chances.
His arms were bound to the chair's back with plain rope.
The chair stood near the center of a fair-sized, dimly lit room, one with plank walls and a plank floor; it wasn't anyplace Schaefer recognized. Daylight was coming in under the eaves; there were no windows or lamps.
He guessed he'd been out for hours, maybe days-long enough for Eschevera's men to drag him back to whatever they were using for a base, anyway. Whoever had clouted him had known what he was doing; Schaefer had a headache, but his thoughts were clear enough, he didn't think there was any concussion.
He wondered where the hell he actually was-and how hard it would be to get out. If they'd hauled him all the way down the full length of Panama and this was the Cali camp just across the Colombian border, and if the DEA reports were right, the place was a goddamn fortress, and his chances of escape were right up there with the odds of St. Peter giving Hitler the benefit of the doubt. If this was just some little cabin somewhere along the smuggling routes, though, he might be okay.
He'd beaten a monster from outer space; he had no interest in dying at the hands of a bunch of drug-dealing punks who claimed to be members of his own species.
Watt-Evans, Lawrence - Predator 01 Page 15