Кристофер Голден - The Predator - The Official Movie Novelization

He and Rory clattered down the stairs, McKenna all but carrying his son, taking the steps two at a time. Through the still-drifting murk of debris he saw dark shapes moving up the stairs toward them, and for a moment he faltered, before realizing it was the Loonies, Nebraska at their head.

“Go! Go!” he yelled, waving them back. There followed a Keystone Kops moment, everyone trying to turn at once and head back the way they had come, which would have been comical if it hadn’t been for the dire circumstances. After a few seconds, however, they were all heading in the same direction, Lynch and Coyle leading the way, with McKenna and Rory bringing up the rear, just behind Nebraska and Casey.

They made it into the lobby, and were a few feet from the splintered gap that had once housed a pair of double doors when McKenna became aware of something at his back—a sixth sense kind of feeling, maybe a displacement of air—and turned to see the original Predator (it felt like too much of a sick joke to think of him as the small one) leaping straight down the center of the stairwell.

The creature landed with barely a jolt—indeed, without even bending its knees to absorb the impact of its fall. The Loonies froze, and for what felt like a long moment McKenna and his team stared at the Predator, and the Predator stared back at them.

What is this? McKenna thought. An impasse? Or is it just waiting for us to run, so it can enjoy the thrill of the chase?

So focused was he on the creature that he didn’t notice Rory sidle away from his side. Now, though, he heard him gasp, and turned. His son was a couple of meters away, almost against the right-hand wall, looking at the Predator side-on. Curious, McKenna took a tentative step to his right, and suddenly he saw what Rory was seeing—the whip-like cord, which was wound around the smaller Predator’s neck, stretching up into the dusty shadows.

The Predator hadn’t jumped down the center of the stairwell. He had been pushed or thrown. And he wasn’t standing there staring at them. He was dead.

The Upgrade had hanged him.

Now that McKenna looked more closely, he saw that the Predator’s feet weren’t quite touching the floor. As if the Upgrade was somehow aware that the humans in the lobby below had finally realized the truth, it gave several sharp tugs on the cord around its fellow alien’s neck, making the Predator’s limbs jerk and twitch in a ghoulish dance.

Then it gave a sudden sharp yank rather than a tug, and the cord, which was made of some type of metal, sliced straight through the meat and bone of the smaller Predator’s neck. The creature’s head flew off and hit the floor with a thud, right in front of the Loonies, the neck stump spattering them with green blood as the body dropped to the ground.

That was precisely what was needed to break the spell. As one, the Loonies, McKenna, Rory, and Casey turned and bolted out of the wrecked entranceway.

McKenna yelled, signaling toward the RV, and they all ran in that direction.

All except Rory, that is, who paused to regard the pit bull, which, despite everything, was still hunched down beneath the bleachers, too terrified to move. A thoughtful look crossed Rory’s face, and for a moment it seemed he might even veer off to rescue the frightened dog.

Then McKenna grabbed him roughly enough to make Rory yelp out in pain. “Goddammit,” he said, unable to rein in his exasperation at his son’s lack of urgency, “we have to go!”

He leaped into the RV, all but dragging Rory after him, as Nettles threw himself into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine. McKenna hated to retreat without finishing a job—which, now that he had found Rory, he saw as both ridding the Earth of the alien threat, and gathering enough evidence to expose Traeger and his goons, and clear all their names. Thing was, the Upgrade was more than he had bargained for. If they were going to fight it, they needed a plan, and standing here dying wasn’t anyone’s idea of good strategy.

He didn’t let go of Rory’s arm until the RV’s door was shut behind them and they were heading away from the kill zone, but as soon as he did, the boy crawled under the table of the dinette and curled into a fetal ball. McKenna felt a twinge of guilt and shame at how roughly he had handled his son, but he told himself it was necessary—in this case, rough love might have proved the difference between life and death.

Around him the Loonies were whooping and hollering—more a release of tension than anything else—but they quieted down fast when the Upgrade suddenly appeared behind them, stooping through the shattered doorway and rising to its full height, its massive form spattered in the glowing green blood of its enemy. The Upgrade was clutching the weird remote control doohickey in its taloned paw, and as it watched them go it had a look on its face that McKenna couldn’t help interpreting as a kind of calm contemplation. Perhaps it was something in the creature’s eyes. From this distance, they looked almost human.

He glanced again at Rory, cowering under the table, and couldn’t help but feel a pang of dismay as the boy winced—almost as if he was more terrified of the violence inflicted by his own father than he was of an eleven-foot-tall alien killer with the face of an angry crab.

Then he became aware of Casey beside him, holding on but still staggering against him as the RV swung around a corner and the school fell out of sight.

She caught his eye, and he could see that she had been shaken to the core by what she had witnessed tonight.

“Holy shit,” she muttered. “They’re hunting each other now?”

On the baseball field, the Upgrade stands in the moonlight and examines his prize. The black box gleams in the dark. The Kujhad , it is called, in the language of his people. He feels a certain satisfaction at the death of his prey, but there is more to be done. The massive Predator raises his wrist gauntlet and a hologram display blossoms into light and life.

It depicts the young human, the one previously in possession of the Kujhad. The boy appears to be staring at the Upgrade, examining him, assessing him, though the Upgrade knows that what the young human is really assessing is the Kujhad itself, and that this footage was recorded by the device earlier that day.

The Upgrade is intrigued by the boy. There is intelligence in his eyes. More than intelligence. For a human—and, more particularly, one as unformed as this—to work out the intricacies of the Kujhad so quickly takes something very special indeed.

In some ways, he could consider this boy his nemesis. He had the intelligence to adversely affect the workings of the Upgrade’s ship, after all, and that alone makes him far more dangerous than all those bigger humans with their primitive weapons.

The Upgrade tweaks a control and suddenly there is sound to accompany the holographic image. The voice is scratchy, high-pitched, and to the Upgrade his words are meaningless.

“Just playing games, Mom!” the boy says.

The grounds of the school had been cordoned off, and the basement hurriedly converted into an autopsy room/ pathology lab. It wasn’t an ideal room for such purposes, as the school boiler, old and in need of an overhaul (if not outright condemnation) chugged and burbled away in an alcove on the far wall, filling the damp space with a stuffy warmth that encouraged mold and fungi to sprout in shadowy corners.

Dominating the center of the room was a large table—in truth, four tables requisitioned from the school dining hall and clamped together—on which lay the now deboned, headless corpse of the Predator that had broken free from the Project: Stargazer complex. The white sheet laid over the corpse was stained with patches of alien blood, which glowed a luminescent green whenever the flashing lights of cop cars, strobing through the bank of high windows on the outside wall, passed over it.