The Predator E-Book

Christopher Golden

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 382

Beschreibung

The official novelization of the summer blockbuster The Predator, Shane Black's new movie with a screenplay by Shane Black and Fred Dekker.For centuries Earth has been visited by warlike creatures that stalk mankind's finest warriors. Their goals unknown, these deadly hunters kill their prey and depart as invisibly as they arrived, leaving no trace other than a trail of bodies.When a young boy accidentally triggers the universe's most lethal Hunters' return to earth, only a ragtag crew of ex-soldiers and a disgruntled science teacher can prevent the end of the human race.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

The Complete PredatorTM Library From Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

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17

18

19

20

21

22

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26

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

THE COMPLETE PREDATORTM LIBRARY FROM TITAN BOOKS

THE PREDATOR: HUNTERS AND HUNTEDby James A. Moore

THE PREDATOR: THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATIONby Christopher Golden and Mark Morris

THE ART AND MAKING OF THE PREDATORby Dominic Nolan

THE COMPLETE PREDATOR OMNIBUSby Nathan Archer and Sandy Schofield

THE COMPLETE ALIENS VS. PREDATOR OMNIBUSby David Bischoff, S. D. Perry, and Steve Perry

PREDATOR: IF IT BLEEDSedited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

THE RAGE WARby Tim LebbonPredatorTM: IncursionAlien: InvasionAlien vs. PredatorTM: Armageddon

BY CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN AND MARK MORRIS

BASED ON THE SCREENPLAY WRITTEN BYFRED DEKKER & SHANE BLACK

BASED ON THE CHARACTERS CREATED BYJIM THOMAS & JOHN THOMAS

TITAN BOOKS

THE PREDATOR

Print edition ISBN: 9781785658051

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658068

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: September 2018

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

TM & © 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Did you enjoy this book?We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at [email protected] or write to us at Reader Feedback at the above address.

www.titanbooks.com

For my son, Daniel, who is going to love this film.CG

For my kids, David and Polly, who love monster movies.MM

0

Space.

Cold. Silent. A billion twinkling stars. You can’t imagine the serenity out here. The peace and quiet, the way it seems as if you might drift forever on this dark, glittering ocean. It might go on for eternity, an infinite horizon of invisible tides and unknown energies. You could surrender yourself and sail into this beautiful dream. Stars fall and comets burn in the distance, suns blink out, planets are born, and the Hubble Space Telescope watches it all with mechanical indifference.

Until there’s a ripple in the void.

Close your eyes and you can see what I mean. The heat rising off a distant highway—the way the air shimmers above the blacktop—it’s like that. Then the velvet black curls and folds and something emerges at speed that would make the air scream, if there were any air out here. The gleaming spacecraft is smoking, the hull scorched and dented, shedding scales off its hull as its pilot tries to get it under control.

The Hubble’s in the way. The ship shears through it, both spacecraft and telescope now vomiting debris. Sparking and hissing, the ship’s been through hell, and when it hits the outer limits of Earth’s atmosphere there’s a whump of resistance, like someone’s awkward dad just did a belly flop into the swimming pool.

Oxygen stokes the sparks into flames.

Far below—but closer with every second—the ice caps are melting. On board instruments show an atmosphere getting hotter and more toxic by the day, only the pilot’s not looking at those instruments.

He’s at the helm. Smoke fogs the inside of the craft. Sparks pop and lights flicker but he doesn’t flinch, focused entirely on the control panel. His talons dance across it, trying to keep control—trying to navigate this craft so it doesn’t hit the ground at the same velocity it had when it sliced through spacetime, or smashed through the invisible wall of Earth’s atmosphere. The pilot does not want to die.

Urgently, he taps a new sequence into the control panel. A slot opens on the console and even he—even this creature—hesitates a moment before he retrieves the device from within. In his language, or the crude version of his language you might be able to pronounce, it’s called the Kujhad. The pilot snaps it into the gauntlet he wears on his wrist with a loud click that echoes in the smoke-filled cockpit of the shuddering spacecraft.

He rises. The pilot is no fool. The odds of the ship making it to the surface without tearing itself apart or exploding on impact do not favor his survival. He taps one final command into his control panel, initiating the escape sequence. As locks disengage on the primary escape pod, the control panel erupts in a fresh shower of sparks. But the pilot is already gone, heading toward the pod bay, moving more swiftly than his size should allow.

Seconds pass.

Outside the ship, a hiss and pop as the escape pod is jettisoned from the main body of the careening spacecraft. The pod bursts out in a blossom of flames, far from a clean exit, striking its edges against the ship as it tumbles away, trailing smoke, spinning in a descent as uncontrolled as that of the larger vessel.

The pilot will do his best to survive. It’s one of the things his kind does best. They survive… and they hunt.

On board the ship he’s vacated, sparks continue to fly. Smoke billows. Lights flicker, the control panel glitches, and then a sudden, savage burst of electric flame erupts—a power surge.

The lights fail. The ship slices across the night sky, trailing smoke in the darkness, until it fades out of sight above America’s southern border.

All is peaceful again.

Cold. Silent.

But not for long.

1

MONTERREY, MEXICO

When a branch broke with a sharp snap beneath McKenna’s boot, he gritted his teeth and immediately froze. Then, gradually, he relaxed, letting out his breath in a long, slow exhalation.

What was he worried about? Did he truly think such an inconsequential sound would betray his presence? Here in the depths of the jungle? Because what surrounded him could pretty much be termed a cacophony. Insects clicked and chirruped at ground level, exotic birds and monkeys chattered and screeched in the thick green canopy of trees overhead, and even the undergrowth in which he was crouched rustled all around him as unseen creatures went about their business.

No, short of standing up and belting out a rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at the top of his lungs, he thought he was pretty much okay as far as concealing the sounds of his own, mostly stealthy movements were concerned.

Not that that made his mission all that much easier.

Far from it.

Ignoring the sun beating down on the shoulders of his thick camouflage jacket, and the trickles of sweat that ran out of his hair and down the sides of his grease-blackened face, he adjusted his rifle on his shoulder, settling it into a slightly more comfortable position. Through its scope his gaze remained fixed on the incongruous sight of the gleaming black SUV parked at the side of the thin dirt highway that cut a groove through the teeming vegetation. He watched the men inside the SUV. Hunched, dark shapes. Just sitting there, as still as mannequins.

He’d been here for close on thirty minutes now, but he was prepared to wait a lot longer if need be. Quinn McKenna was a captain in the US Army Rangers. A professional sniper. Thirty-six years old, at the peak of physical fitness, he could shoot a man dead without his pulse rate showing even the slightest blip of reaction. He was as cool as a snake. As patient as a sphinx. Here, in the heat of the jungle, with the enemy in range, he was very much in his element.

The slight hissing in his Bluetooth headset was abruptly silenced and the clipped voice of Haines came through, tinny but clear.

“Piggy One, copy. You got eyes on the hostages?”

McKenna’s reply was a murmur. “Negative.”

The third member of his unit, Dupree, his Louisiana tang prominent, said, “Twenty bucks says they don’t show.”

McKenna smiled. “You yardbirds actually want to bet money on whether a drug cartel has executed the hostages?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” said Dupree with conviction.

“I believe that was implied,” murmured Haines.

McKenna’s smile stretched into a grin. Sometimes the only way to cope with this job was to maintain a sense of humor—albeit of the graveyard variety. “Okay, just checking. I’m in for twenty.”

He heard the rumble of an engine off to his left and swiveled the rifle to track the approach of a new vehicle. At first, he saw nothing but a swirling cloud of dust, then within it the glint of reflected sunlight on glass and chrome. Seconds later another SUV, as black and highly polished as the first, shimmered from the heat haze, as if beamed down from the USS Enterprise. Aware of movement to his right, McKenna swiveled again, and saw three men emerge from the parked vehicle armed with rifles, their movements languid, their weapons held casually, pointing at the ground. One of them—plump face, dark moustache, white, short-sleeved Guayabera shirt—was instantly recognizable. This was Gutierrez. Murderer. Drug lord. McKenna’s target.

The second SUV jolted to a halt a meter or so behind Gutierrez’s vehicle and two big, sweaty guys got out the back, one on each side. The guy closest to McKenna turned and reached into the vehicle and hauled out a young woman. A sack had been pulled over her head and cinched at the neck. The woman, her hands tied in front of her, stumbled as the hired goon pushed her toward Gutierrez and his men, but she made no sound. Not so the second hostage, a kid this time, similarly hooded and tied, who was yanked from the vehicle like a sack of potatoes and tossed onto the dusty ground. He landed in a sprawl of limbs, skinning his bony knees, yelping in pain. One of Gutierrez’s men laughed.

McKenna watched without emotion—or at least, he kept his emotions tightly coiled inside him. The instant Gutierrez had stepped from the vehicle, McKenna had tilted his rifle a fraction so that the drug lord’s head was positioned precisely in the center of his crosshairs. Aware as he was of the plight of the hostages, he remained utterly still, his heartbeat slow and steady in his chest, his breathing shallow, his finger poised on the trigger of his weapon.

Barely moving his lips, he spoke quietly into his headset. “I got a woman and a kid, target in the reticle, no crosswind. I’m not waiting, 10-50 out.”

All in all, it was a pretty shitty time for an earthquake.

At least, that was what McKenna assumed it was at first. The instant he had finished speaking he became aware of a deep bass rumble, as if the world was about to split in two, and the ground beneath his feet started to shake. Then several things happened in very quick succession.

First, a flock of birds exploded from the canopy of trees overhead, screeching in fright. Something huge and dark appeared in the sky to McKenna’s right (in his peripheral vision it looked like a boulder the size of an entire neighborhood) and sheared the top off a radio tower jutting above the trees in the middle distance, causing a mass of debris to fly off in all directions. On the ground, Gutierrez, his men, and the hired goons shouted and pointed their weapons, raising their faces to the approaching projectile as its vast black shadow rushed across the ground toward them.

Through all of this, McKenna, after a quick glance to his right, remained motionless, cool, focused on his job. Readjusting his aim, which had wavered only slightly, he calmly shot Gutierrez through the head, taking him out of the equation. Even before the drug lord hit the ground like a dead weight, McKenna was swiveling, re-sighting, and finally taking in the details of the projectile heading toward him.

He was expecting to see a comet, or a meteor, or whatever such things were called—a lump of rock, at any rate, trailing a tail of fire.

Instead, he experienced a split second of awe, wonder, astonishment, as he realized the thing hurtling toward him was not a piece of space debris at all, but something… manufactured. A craft of some kind.

A spaceship.

He had time only to register that it looked like nothing he had ever seen before—hell, that it looked utterly and completely alien— and then he was up and running for his life. Thanks to his job, McKenna knew a little about course vectors and velocity, but he didn’t need to be an expert to calculate that the craft—the spaceship— was going to pass right over the heads of the group gathered around the two SUVs (and even now, the goons were piling into the vehicles and hauling ass, leaving their bewildered hostages and the corpse of their leader behind) and crash down pretty much right where he had established his vantage point.

His only hope was the fact that to reach his vantage point he had had to scale the hillside of a steep jungle valley, hauling himself up via tree trunks and vines and the sinewy stalks of fleshy green plants. With luck, if he could reach the valley, the thing behind him, which even now was screaming like all the souls in Hell, would hit the ground, bounce right up over the top of the valley, and slide to a halt somewhere on the far side.

There were a lot of ifs and buts to cover for that to happen, but ifs and buts were pretty much all McKenna could rely on right now. That, and his ability to keep running, as the jungle did its best to hold him back, leaves and branches lashing at his body as he hurtled through them, vines snagging at his ankles, eager to trip him up.

Then, just when it seemed the screaming of the engines behind him would blot out his senses and the world with it, the ground disappeared beneath McKenna’s feet. One second it was there, and the next he was pedaling air, like Wile E. Coyote in those old Road Runner cartoons.

Still holding his rifle in a death-like grip, he plunged downward, toward an array of branches and leaves and stalks and vines and rocks—oh shit, rocks. He tried to gauge his fall, to keep his body compact, but there wasn’t a whole lot he could do to influence gravity, and within seconds he was tumbling end over end, only vaguely aware of the pummeling he was taking as he bounced and rolled and cartwheeled down the slope.

He had been knocked cold only twice before—once when boxing during his army training, and once in a bar fight when a redneck had got in on his blind side and hit him upside the head with a pool cue. Whatever it was that bashed him in the side of the skull now felt a little like that pool cue—a sudden, hard flash of impact, and then…

Nothing.

It was impossible to gauge how long he was out for, but when he came to he did so suddenly, his eyes snapping open. His survival training, drummed into him so intrinsically it was as natural to him as breathing, kicked in, his senses instantly assimilating information.

He was covered in dirt, most likely from the avalanche of jungle debris created by the impact of the alien craft, which he could see had reduced the tree line way above his head to so much splintered matchwood. At some point it had started raining, heavy droplets splashing into his face and pattering on his fatigues like searching fingers.

His head was throbbing, and when he touched it his fingertips came away thinly smeared with blood, but aside from a few bumps and bruises he seemed to be okay.

His hands were empty. Where was his gun? Then, sitting up, he saw it lying in a clump of vegetation only a few meters away. He scrambled across to it, and snatched it up, and immediately felt better.

Were his comms still working? He touched his headset, which was miraculously still in position and apparently undamaged.

“Piggy One,” he said. “Do you read? Over.”

Nothing but static—so maybe it wasn’t undamaged, after all.

He clambered tentatively to his feet—and gasped.

As he had calculated (hoped), the alien craft, the UFO, had hit the tree line at the top of the valley, bounced like one of those Dambuster bombs from World War Two, and come down on the far side of the valley, trailing a slipstream of debris behind it. But it hadn’t just come down. It had effectively punched a tunnel through the jungle, pulverizing trees as it went and leaving a smoking, blackened trail behind it.

Shouldering his rifle, McKenna headed up the far side of the valley, and a few minutes later he was standing on the edge of the charred trail. Investigating UFOs was not exactly part of his mission remit, but how could he ignore something like this? Besides, he had to find his men. Haines and Dupree were out there somewhere, and chances were they’d have followed their instincts and, like him, converged on the UFO crash site. And okay, so this wasn’t strictly US soil, but as an Army Ranger, not to mention a citizen of the world, he still felt a responsibility to maintain national security if such an opportunity should present itself.

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.

“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.