Кристофер Голден - The Predator - The Official Movie Novelization

She breathed out slowly, glancing around at the motley crew. She couldn’t help thinking she knew the handsome guy from somewhere, but she couldn’t think where. “Expendables?” she said wryly. “More like the Seven fucking Dwarfs.”

The guy with the baseball cap grinned bashfully. Casey sighed in surrender to the insanity, grabbed her pack, which was leaning against the closet door, moved across to a plastic chair, and flopped down into it.

“Don’t you guys have… someplace to be?” she asked.

One of the men—goatee beard, bare arms covered in tattoos—shrugged and said, “VA Psych Ward? Military prison?”

Casey almost laughed. For some reason, his response—or the way he had delivered it—relaxed rather than alarmed her.

“Can I borrow a phone at least? I need someone to feed my dogs.” When all she got in response was shrugs and grimaces of apology, she fished a tiny bottle out of her pack and took a swig, then focused on the handsome man, as it suddenly came to her where she had seen his face before. “I read the file. Those men it killed… Yours?”

The guy nodded.

McKenna , Casey thought, remembering. His name is McKenna.

“They’re gonna need a patsy for that,” she said.

“You’re looking at him.”

“Yeah. I figured. Textbook fall guy. Psycho ex-sniper, PTSD, divorced… has even got a flaky kid who curls up in a ball. It’s perfect—”

McKenna’s eyes blazed with fury. He felt himself flush, felt the desire to lash out. Instead, he glared at her, silently warning her.

Casey shrugged apologetically. “I’m just telling you what’s in the file.”

The guy with the tattooed arms put a hand on McKenna’s shoulder and fixed Casey with his own imposing glare. “How about you tell us what you were doing at a secret base full of private soldiers? Mercs,” he said accusingly.

“It was a CIA cover,” said Casey.

Speaking for the first time since she had revealed to him what was in his file, McKenna said in a strangled voice, “It said ‘flaky’?”

Casey glanced at him, but continued with her explanation. “I’m an evolutionary biologist. I was on call in a case of… contact.”

McKenna paced up and down to release the tension inside him while the guys all took turns staring at each other, weighing the meaning of her words. Finally, McKenna halted, exhaling raggedly. They were all dancing around the truth, her unsure what they knew, them treating her the same way. But out there was an alien psychopath who’d murdered McKenna’s men and a whole shit-ton of Traeger’s people as well. There were people who’d known this secret for what seemed to be a long time, and who were clearly prepared to kill all of them to make sure it stayed a secret.

If Casey was in this with them now, there was no more room for secrecy. She could see that McKenna felt the same way. He was studying her face, assessing her. She wondered whether she ought to say it out loud—that she was prepared to go out on a limb and trust them. That if they wanted to stay alive they had to trust one another.

Before she could, McKenna spoke the words that were in her mind. “Look. If we want to keep breathing, we’ve gotta find this thing. Expose it. We all agreed?”

A look went around the motel room, a bonding moment. They were all exiles, the perfect scapegoats for whatever the government and their black box UFO research group decided to pin on them. Everyone nodded. They were all in.

“Good,” McKenna said, turning to Casey. “First things first. What is it?”

“The Predator? Well… it has human DNA, for one thing.”

“What the fuck?” said a guy with a brooding expression, who so far hadn’t spoken. “Human—”

“That’s not all,” Casey went on. “I was there when it escaped. I think it was looking for something.”

She saw the blood drain from McKenna’s face.

“Its equipment,” he muttered.

Suddenly, all eyes were on him. “I took it so I’d have evidence. Oh, shit…” All at once he looked antsy, as though his skin was crawling with the need to move. “I think I know where it’s going.”

He glanced at the tattooed guy, who nodded and went to the door. By the time he had opened it, McKenna had fallen in behind him. Casey could see that right outside the room, a small, tough-looking guy had set up a poker game with a bunch of bikers.

“How good’s your hand?” tattooed guy asked.

The small guy glanced around at his buddies. “It’s poker. I don’t think I’m supposed to say… but good, yeah.”

“We got Indian Scout bikes,” tattooed guy said, then pointed to the Winnebago. “We want that RV.”

“And some guns,” McKenna prompted.

“Hmm? Oh…” Tattooed guy raised his voice. “And some guns,” he echoed.

Rory liked candy, of course—mostly things made of chocolate. People who gave candy corn or jawbreakers simply didn’t understand the allure of trick or treat, but they weren’t the worst offenders. Folks who took it upon themselves to issue a silent condemnation of everything good about Halloween—the Stillsons, for instance, who gave out toothbrushes last year and Halloween-themed pencils the year before—were the enemy of all that was good and joyful about childhood. Rory’s neuro-diversity might make it hard for him to pick up social cues, but wandering around in spooky costumes and getting free candy had never been something he had to struggle to understand.

There were some real assholes in the neighborhood, shitheads like Tom Kelly and Dom Cortez, who would vandalize an old woman’s electric scooter if she’d just sit still long enough. Why those pricks hadn’t ever hit the Stillsons’ house with a hundred dozen eggs some Halloween night was a mystery Rory didn’t think anyone would ever solve.

Not that he supported vandalism. But still… toothbrushes? For trick or treat?

He’d gone upstairs to use the bathroom, had a bowl of spaghetti his mother had foisted on him, and then retreated to the basement again. Now he sat staring at the shoddy Frankenstein mask his mom had brought home and tried to decide what to do. He loved her so much and he knew that she loved him and just wanted what was best for him, but the truth was that she didn’t always know what was best—and neither did Rory. They were both learning, and that always made the decisions and the conversations difficult.

Trick or treat meant chocolate, yes. But what he loved about it most was the anonymity. He could go from house to house and mostly manage to avoid being recognized. The social encounters of the evening were so deeply ritualized that nobody expected any further interaction beyond the ringing of the doorbell, the chorusing of “trick or treat,” and the grateful acceptance of proffered candy. Rory understood this exchange. It didn’t require him to parse words, to search for hidden meanings, to gauge someone’s tone of voice—all strategies his therapist had taught him that took enormous effort and focus.

Halloween meant he could be anything or anyone, that people would see only the mask. As much as he struggled with the word normal , and knew that being on the spectrum was not at all unusual, every year he went out trick-or-treating and felt like he’d been suffocating all year and he’d finally learned how to breathe properly.

And yet… Halloween also made him sad. That was the awful part, the double-edged sword of it all. While he was out collecting candy, out among the people who had no diversity in their neuro and didn’t embrace it in others, he felt good. Happy. But at some point, either when he’d arrive back home or shortly before, he would begin to think about the mask and be forced to acknowledge that people were treating him normally because they didn’t know it was Rory McKenna behind that mask. They hadn’t had a conversation with him, only engaged in the ritual. The mask made them more comfortable than Rory himself would have, because they didn’t have to make an effort with the mask.