Кристофер Голден - The Predator - The Official Movie Novelization

He went up the steps and rang the bell. A buzz echoed deep inside the house.

“Trick or treat?” he called hopefully.

To his surprise and consternation, a voice replied immediately, a slightly slurred voice, which came from right behind the door, as if its owner had been crouched or slumped against it. “Fuck off.”

On the sidewalk, just close enough to hear the homeowner’s response, E.J. and Derek laughed, holding onto each other as they bent over with mirth.

Rory turned stiffly away from the door, gaze shifting as he tried to figure out the best path of escape—searching to see if there was a path of escape. Behind him, the door creaked open. Before he could turn, he heard the raspy voice speak up again.

“Here’s a treat, you little shit.”

Then he felt the smack of something hard and wet against the back of his helmet. It rocked him forward slightly and, inside the helmet, Rory blinked in shock and frustration. He wiped the back of his helmet and looked at his hand, fearful that the guy in the house had thrown dog crap at him or something. Instead, his hand came away with a smear of what he thought must be rotten apple, and a glance at the ground proved the theory.

E.J. and Derek were howling with laughter.

Without warning the interior of the helmet lit up. Red lights flashed. Rory’s heart jumped in alarm and he panicked, twisting around for help, for some solution. Symbols scrolled across his internal viewscreen. Targeting information popped up and he stared at the guy on the front steps—the apple-throwing stoner who still stood there, sneering.

“What?” the stoner asked, throwing out his hands in a challenge.

A click came from the side of the helmet. Rory heard a whine. Then hellfire erupted from the helmet and disintegrated the stoner where he stood, blowing out the entire doorway of the house, leaving it a flaming, charred wreckage.

McKenna and Casey had taken Emily’s Subaru and started cruising up and down the streets, moving carefully. With all the kids in the street and on the sidewalks, all the parents holding hands, munchkins with their Jack-o’-lantern buckets, and swaggering teenagers prowling for candy with the laziest costumes imaginable—if any—looking for Rory was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

“Busy night,” Casey said. “What a great place to trick or treat. Rory’s lucky to have grown up here.”

“Yeah,” McKenna agreed. He didn’t bother to make excuses for how much of Rory’s growing-up he had missed. He had a feeling Casey wouldn’t be surprised, but he didn’t know her well enough to share, even if he’d had the inclination.

“You really think he’s wearing the Predator helmet?”

McKenna turned up Sycamore Street. “Yeah. He found it, that’s for sure. That and the wrist gauntlet. Knowing my kid, and seeing that empty box, I figure there’s almost a hundred percent chance he’s got them both on.”

“At least it’s Halloween,” she said. “So, he won’t stand out.”

“From our point of view, that’s not a good thing.”

McKenna’s gaze continued to shift, tracking each kid, mentally dismissing each costume as he searched for the Predator helmet, and the boy wearing it. He tapped the accelerator again, cruising slowly along Sycamore, watching the shadows and the front steps and the sidewalks.

“I’ve seen every alien encounter movie,” Casey went on. “Sure, I hoped for gently inquisitive or frighteningly ambitious, but I was totally ready for hostile. I mean, let’s face it, if the nature of off-world races is anything like that of humans, they’re bound to be assholes, right? Farming our minerals or harvesting our people—something unpleasant…”

She let the words trail off as she, too, searched the sea of trick-or-treaters.

“Ignore the small groups with parents,” McKenna said. “He wouldn’t fall in with them. He might join a large group of kids, stick to the back where he might not be noticed, but chances are he’ll be on his own. Shouldn’t be hard to spot him.”

“Sounds like a sad kid.”

McKenna frowned. “You’d be surprised. There are things that bum him out or make him frustrated, but he’s got a much better attitude than you’d think, considering how much crap he has to deal with because he sees the world a little differently.”

“You don’t talk much about him.”

“I’ve been doing nothing but talk about him.”

“About keeping him safe, yeah,” Casey said. “But not about what kind of kid he is.”

McKenna went quiet as he braked to let a family cross the street, then turned left on Briarwood Road.

“He’s a good kid, Casey. A really good kid.” McKenna hesitated a moment, then went on. “A hell of a lot better than his old man.”

Whatever she might have said in reply was interrupted by an explosion on the next block. Over the roofs of houses, a pillar of flame flashed toward the night sky and then vanished, but the smoke rising from it remained visible.

Casey and McKenna exchanged a stunned glance, and then he stomped on the gas pedal. He wasn’t a man who prayed—wasn’t a man who believed in things he couldn’t hold in his two hands—but McKenna now found himself praying with all his heart that Rory hadn’t been at the center of that explosion.

Rory froze, mouth gaping inside the helmet. He blinked, telling himself that couldn’t have just happened.

A pile of ashes sat on the top step.

The front lawn, on either side of the steps, was smoking from the heat.

Oh shit. Oh God. Oh shit , Rory thought, even as the more analytical part of his mind examined the event and tried to make sense of what had happened. A weapon had whirred out from the side of the helmet. Its sensors had reacted to the attack, thinking the stoner was a threat because of the impact of the apple.

Now he turned, in utter shock, and stared at E.J. and Derek, who seemed just as stunned. As soon as the bullies realized the mask was now pointing in their direction, however, they screamed and fled, moving faster than he had ever seen them move before.

He raised the helmet and turned to glance again at the ruin of the front door and the ashes on the steps, too shaken to appreciate the terror of his tormentors. At some point, he had dropped his trick or treat bag. Now he lowered the helmet and bent to retrieve it, numbly picking up items of candy that had spilled from it as he attempted to restore a semblance of order to his mind.

Once he had done, he looked again at the smoking ruin of the house, and suddenly the shell of shock that had formed around him cracked and fell away. Tearing off the Predator mask, he tossed it into the bushes surrounding the house.

Then he ran.

The two-way radio squawked. Nettles was back in the RV, monitoring local police chatter. Now his voice burst in from the static.

“McKenna, you hearing this?” he barked.

He must’ve put his two-way up to the police scanner, because McKenna and Casey heard the crackling voice come through, but it sounded like it was coming from deep inside a well.

“…got a male juvenile, ten to twelve years old,” the officer was saying. “Ran right in front of my car, now moving east on Woodruff.”

McKenna swore, spun the wheel, and turned the car into a squealing, smoking one-eighty. Emily wouldn’t thank him later for the rubber he’d left back on the road, but the officer had spotted what could well have been Rory, and she wasn’t going to give a shit about her tires if he could get their boy back in one piece.

“Repeat,” the voice on the police scanner said. “Moving east on Woodruff.”