Predator - Big Game

by Sandy Schofield - (ebook by Undead)

  Dietl moaned again.

  “Don’t worry,” Nakai said dryly. “It’ll pass.”

  “I might be dead by then.” Dietl leaned back and struck his head against the turret. The dull clang echoed across the desert. Dietl raised a hand to his head. “I mean, I will be dead by then.”

  Nakai grinned and leaned back, carefully so that he wouldn’t hit his own head. He liked Dietl. For some reason, the two of them had hit it off right from the start, even though they came from very different backgrounds. Nakai had been raised on the reservation by his grandfather after his mother had died in childbirth and his father drank himself to death. Dietl had been raised in a large home on a country club in Southern California. He had never worried about money or food, but had simply had everything handed to him. Yet somehow Dietl had become a fairly solid kid, reliable and respectable, without an ounce of prejudice in his body.

  Dietl moaned again and Nakai’s smile grew. Many mornings in the past he had felt exactly the same, too hungover even to care if the world ended. It had been nine months since he had taken a drink, thanks to Alda. And for some reason that made him feel smug, especially the more Dietl moaned.

  “Oh,” Dietl said, rubbing his head with both hands slowly, as if stroking an overripe tomato, “why won’t this headache go away?”

  “Maybe because you hit your head on the tank?”

  Dietl glared at him. Just looking at Dietl’s bloodshot eyes was painful. Nakai remembered exactly how it felt to be that hung over. Exactly. And he didn’t ever want to feel it again.

  Dietl ran his fingers through his short-cropped hair, apparently searching for the bump. “This must be why they don’t want us grunts to have alcohol on the base.”

  “More than likely,” Nakai said. “That, and loaded guns.” He handed Dietl a canteen. “Drink. A lot of water helps.”

  Dietl groaned, but took the offered canteen and managed to get a fairly large swallow down before he choked. Then he stretched out on the top of the tank, his feet draping down over the front edge, his pack under his head as a pillow.

  Nakai took the canteen back, and hung it on his belt.

  “Mind if I nap?” Dietl asked. “I don’t think Mama Dietl’s boy is going to be any use to anyone at the moment. Wake me if the Russians attack.”

  Nakai only laughed as Dietl leaned his head against the pack and moaned again.

  A slight breeze swirled around the tank, bringing the fresh smells of the morning desert. The heat had an odor, a dry warm odor, and so did the dirt. Slight, spicy, and very faint. And very familiar. They were all familiar smells to Nakai, smells he had loved since his childhood.

  Then the wind shifted, just a little, and Nakai caught a whiff of something new. It smelled rank, like something had died out in the desert and was rotting near them.

  But not really.

  Nakai knew what death smelled like. He knew every odor. His grandfather had taught him how to tell, just from something’s smell, how long it had been roasting in the hot desert sun.

  This rank smell was familiar enough; it was wild boar, not very long dead. But beneath the odor was another one, very faint, and unfamiliar. It smelled like petroleum, old shoes, and the perfume his third cousin used to wear. It smelled like musty blankets and cinnamon. It smelled like all of that, and none of it all at the same time.

  Nakai rose so that he could catch the scent better. He moved to the front of the tank, the rifle in his hands at ready, as he tried to take in every odor, every whiff of the strangeness in the air.

  “Private,” Nakai said, his voice low and firm. “Get up.”

  Dietl moaned and sat up. “What?”

  “Do you smell anything?”

  Dietl put a hand behind himself as a brace. “Smell something? Are you kidding? My head is so full of cotton, I couldn’t smell a dead fish slapped over my nose.”

  “I’m telling you,” Nakai said, “I smell a weird odor and it’s coming from over there.” He pointed to a small group of alligator juniper trees. The trees were small, almost stunted, with scaly deep brown bark.

  Dietl slowly stood and moved over beside Nakai. “What’s it smell like?”

  Nakai let the morning air in fully, sorting the familiar from the strange odor. And the more he breathed, the more his hand tightened on the rifle.

  “I can’t say, exactly,” Nakai said. “And that’s what worries me. It’s sort of like a rotting sweat, but sweeter.”

  “Well, it’s certainly hot enough for that already,” Dietl said. “And it’s not even seven in the morning.”

  “Shhh,” Nakai said, holding up his hand. “Listen.”

  A faint sound had come from those stunted, twisted trees. A rustle, combined with a clicking, like beads striking one another.

  Nakai squinted. There was no place to hide in those branches. No real foliage to cover a person, yet he could swear that the sound he heard came from those trees. Not from beside them, but from up in them. And the more he focused, the more the normal sounds of the desert disappeared, leaving only the sound from the trees.

  Breathing sounds.

  Faint. Heavy.

  The slight crack of a brittle branch.

  More breathing.

  Something very large was in those trees, yet Nakai’s eyes told him nothing was there. The words of his grandfather came back strong.

  Boy, never trust just one sense. Use them all. You will need them all.

  Right now Nakai’s nose and his ears said something was there, in the tree, watching them. Possibly waiting to attack.

  “Someone’s in those trees,” Nakai whispered. “I can hear him.”

  Dietl scrambled to his feet, the scraping of his boots on the metal tank extraordinarily loud in the morning air. He came up beside Nakai and grinned.

  “Let’s see if we can send a scare into whatever’s up there.”

  Dietl brought up his rifle and swung it in the direction of the trees, aiming as he did so.

  “No!” Nakai shouted, but he was too late.

  As Dietl brought up his rifle, a thin beam of flickering red light lanced from the tree and found Dietl, three bright red dots crawling over his torso. In the tree, about halfway up, the air shimmered and turned a faint blue.

  “Get down!” Nakai shouted as he dove off the side of the tank.

  His warning came too late.

  A bolt of blue energy shot from the air in the tree, slicing Dietl directly though the chest before he even had a chance to pull the trigger. The private was dead before he hit the top of the tank.

  Nakai rolled against the tread of the tank as more bolts of blue energy cut the ground near him. With each blast the air crackled and sparked, and the red dirt was burned black. A dry electric smell, like lightning in a powerful storm, seared the air.

  Whatever was in that tree was invisible and firing a weapon like nothing Nakai had ever heard or seen.

  Nakai rolled to the far side of the tank, then opened up on the area in the center of the tree where the shots had come from. His own rifle jerked in his hands as he fired. He steadied it, and shot again. The blue bolts kept zinging the air. He crouched, still firing, and ran low to the ground. He no longer aimed. He just shot randomly, hoping that he would hit whatever was firing at him.

  His feet sank in the soft dirt, and yet he was running faster than he ever had in his life, faster than he had run when he was a teenage track star years before.

  Another blast of energy cut the ground under his feet and he stumbled, diving over a rock ledge as more bolts cut the air where he had been.

  The guy in the tree was a good shot, but not perfect. Nakai was lucky.

  He rolled through some scrub and rose in one quick motion, never stopping. No more surges of blue energy exploded around him as he sped off downhill, twisting and leaping, never slowing.

  And as he ran, more of his grandfather’s words came back to him, as clear as if the old man were speaking them now.

  The monster will arrive firin
g death from no more than a shimmer in the air.

  Nakai just wished he knew what the hell his grandfather had meant.

  4

  My brother is a brave man. But even the brave must know when to run away from danger. My brother is also smart. So the first time he fought the monster, he ran. It was the right thing to do. He is not stupid. Stupid men are not brave, they are simply dead.

  Corporal David Winford bounced the army humvee through a shallow wash and up a rock slope, spinning the wheels in the dirt and sand. He was following what would laughingly be called a road, but in New Mexico anything less than four-wheel drive wouldn’t have made it the first half mile.

  The sun beat down on his freckled skin. He had forgotten his hat back at the base, possibly a serious mistake. He was a redhead, with a redhead’s fair coloring, and just this brief exposure to the sun would turn him into a lobster. It had happened before.

  The back of the humvee spun sideways before the tires dug down to rock and lurched him forward. He gunned the engine just a little, giving the machine enough power to top a slight ridge. David was sweating as much from fighting the humvee over the road as he was from the early-morning sun. Even the wind rushing through his short hair didn’t help cool him. And worst of all, he knew it was all going to be for nothing. The colonel and the sarge were investigating a supposed bogey landing. They had taken a half-dozen trucks and humvees this morning when they left. They certainly didn’t need another. It was just another stupid make-work job. And he hated it. And he hated the army.

  He spun the humvee through another wash and had just started up the other side of the ravine when a figure burst over the top of the ridge, running at full speed.

  “Now what the hell?” Winford said. He slammed on the brake and watched the guy barrel down the slope, leaping over rocks and brush like a hunted deer. The guy was wearing fatigues, and looked familiar.

  The guy glanced over his shoulder once before skidding to a stop beside the vehicle.

  “Nakai?” Winford said, startled at the look on the man’s sweat-covered face. “Aren’t you supposed to be on tank duty today?”

  The question came out of surprise as much as anything else. No one ran away from his post, especially not Nakai. Nakai was always being hounded by the sarge, and made up for it by following the rules to the letter. Winford respected Nakai for that; most men would have given up entirely—including Winford. After all, if he were going to be yelled at for performing his job, he might as well be a screw-off, right? At least, that’s how the others would have thought. Nakai was another matter.

  Nakai took a deep shuddering breath—Winford had never heard anyone’s breathing sound so ragged before—and then managed to speak. “I am on duty. But I won’t go back up there.”

  Winford’s shoulders stiffened. Something was very wrong. “Why not, Corporal?”

  “You don’t know what I saw.” Nakai never really looked at Winford, but instead kept scanning the hillside above them, watching for something he obviously thought might be chasing him.

  Winford had seen that haunted look on green boys in boot camp when they realized they were in the service for the duration, but he had never seen it on a man who’d been in the army as long as Nakai. Winford had seen a pale version of that look on the faces of some of the COs, though, when they were reminiscing about Desert Storm.

  Winford unlatched the safety strap on his pistol, and scanned the hillside where Nakai was staring. Nakai was making him nervous. There was nothing moving up there at all. Just sand and scrub and rock. Just exactly the same as everywhere else around the base.

  “So what did you see?” Winford asked.

  Nakai stared into Winford’s eyes for a moment, then looked back up the hill. “It’s something I should report directly to the sarge, or the colonel.”

  Something serious then. Winford inclined his head toward the empty seat beside him. “Well, then, hop aboard. I’m heading out to see ’em now.”

  Nakai nodded and slowly climbed into the humvee all the time staying alert and focused on the hill he had come down. Winford looked again. He couldn’t see anything.

  “Seems like you lost whatever it was.”

  Nakai shook his head once, almost in dismissal. “It’s not as simple as that.”

  “Seems straightforward to me,” Winford said.

  “Just drive,” Nakai snapped.

  Winford glanced at him. Nakai’s reaction had nothing to do with army protocol or the chain of command. It was cold and harsh, and beneath it, Winford thought he could hear a faint tone of fear.

  He ground the vehicle into motion, lurching up along the dirt road. Over the noise of the engine he said, “I’m sure the sarge is going to want to know why you’re not at your post.”

  Corporal Nakai just stared out at the desert, looking for his unseen pursuer, not saying a word. If Nakai didn’t care about the sarge’s reaction, then things had to be very bad.

  For the next few minutes they bounced down through an arroyo, then up the side, over more rock and dirt. Winford fought the humvee forward over the rough ground, using the directions he’d been given at the base. Nakai sat quietly, holding on through the bumps, not even seeming to notice the roughness of the ride. Instead his gaze darted from one rock to the next, one bush to the next, looking for God only knew what. Winford sure didn’t. And Nakai clearly wasn’t saying.

  Within ten minutes they cleared the top of a high ridge near the base of a large mesa. The sight of the valley below damn near made Winford stomp on the brakes.

  The trucks that had left the base that morning before sunrise were in a circle surrounding something red and brown. The thing was round, and large, but not so large that it couldn’t be held by chains and lowered, with a crane, onto the back of a flatbed truck. Winford couldn’t tell what the thing was, but it almost matched the New Mexico desert rock.

  “What the—?” Nakai said as he stood in the moving humvee and started at the sight ahead, holding on to the top of the windshield to keep from getting tossed to the sand.

  At first Winford couldn’t figure out what he was looking at. Then, as he stopped the humvee just above the circle of other vehicles, he understood. The red-and-brown “something” was an aircraft. A very strange-looking circular craft, not much bigger than a pickup truck. It had race-car-like fins on one side, and a cockpit area in the center. It was clearly a one-person machine, but there was no sign of the person who had flown it.

  Suddenly, from out of the group standing near the craft, the sarge’s voice boomed. “Corporal Nakai. Just what the hell are you doing out here?”

  Beside the sarge, Colonel Athelry turned, frowning. Athelry was a slight, wiry man, with graying hair and a graying mustache. His skin was like leather, tanned by years of exposure to the elements. The thought made Winford touch his own face. It was hot. He was going to be badly burned.

  As if that mattered. The world had suddenly turned weird. Thank heaven for the sarge’s predictable behavior. He was glaring at Nakai as he waited for an answer.

  Nakai, still standing in the humvee, forced himself to look away from the strange craft. Then he snapped to attention and saluted.

  Both the sarge and colonel stepped toward the humvee.

  “Well, soldier?” the colonel said, somehow almost managing not to shout. “You were asked a question.”

  “Sir,” Corporal Nakai said. “I must speak to you about a matter of extreme urgency.”

  “I’ll say we have a matter of extreme urgency,” the sarge shouted at him as he stopped in front of the humvee.

  Winford managed to keep his hands on the steering wheel and his eyes straight ahead, trying to be as invisible as he could be as the sarge yelled at Nakai over him.

  The sarge didn’t give Nakai any time to answer. “There’s a foreign covert aircraft in our backyard and you’ve abandoned your post!”

  Winford had seen the sarge angry before, but never like this.

  Nakai snapped off his salute,
then climbed from the humvee and stood at attention in front of the sarge and the colonel. “Begging the sergeant’s pardon,” he said, “but I believe I may have encountered the occupant of that aircraft, and he’s no spy, sir.”

  “What?” the colonel said, stepping forward and into the corporal’s face.

  Nakai didn’t even flinch. “I said, sir, that he’s no spy.”

  Winford froze. Nakai was running scared from the person who came in that craft? Winford almost turned toward Nakai. But to do that would be to call attention to himself which, at this moment, was probably not a good thing to do.

  The colonel stared at Nakai for a long minute, never moving his gaze from Nakai’s face. Then the colonel glanced at the sarge and nodded.

  “Winford,” the sarge said, “leave the humvee here and see what you can do to help load that craft on the trucks.”

  Winford climbed quickly out of the vehicle.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, hoping he kept the disappointment out of his voice. Winford had been a small part of this drama, but no one felt he deserved to know what happened. That was one of his greatest frustrations of army life: he never got to know the full details about anything—and it seemed like this was something to know about.

  Winford turned and headed down the hill. It was clear to him that the sarge and colonel had ideas as to what the pilot of this craft might be. And it sounded as if Nakai’s information contradicted theirs.

  A spy craft?

  A space craft?

  Could it be both?

  Winford shivered despite the growing heat. He glanced over his shoulder. No one was watching him. He lingered, hoping to hear what was going on.

  “Okay, son,” the colonel said to Nakai. “Tell us what you saw.”

  Nakai nodded once, and spoke. But Winford was too far away to hear his answer.