Кристофер Голден - The Predator - The Official Movie Novelization

McKenna fixed his gaze on hers. “A hybrid,” he said softly.

After speaking to Casey, McKenna did what he maybe should have done as soon as they arrived here. Using one of the burner phones they’d acquired, he keyed in the most familiar phone number of his lifetime.

It only rang once. When Emily answered, her voice was frantic.

“It’s me,” McKenna said.

“Tell me he’s okay.”

McKenna turned to look at his son, sitting apparently contentedly with Nebraska, who was smoking a cigarette, and taking care to blow the smoke in the opposite direction. “He’s fine. He’s with me. I’ll bring him home when it’s—”

“It’s okay,” she interrupted. “Don’t say anything. Be safe.”

She hung up. No explanation.

McKenna frowned. Emily’s message had been loud and clear. She wasn’t alone.

Emily ended the call, trying to hide the vengeful sneer on her face. Her boy was okay—that was all she had needed to know. She turned her back on the cadre of black ops agents who’d filled her kitchen, and dropped the phone into the sink’s garbage disposal. One of them shouted and another reached for her, but they were too late to stop her from flicking on both the water and the disposal. The sound of the sharp blades chopping up the phone while the water ruined anything they might salvage gave her a thrill of pleasure, deep in her chest.

She turned toward them, letting them see her fury.

“You guys fucked with the wrong family.”

Still blazing, she pushed through the agents filling her kitchen, crossed to the open door leading to Rory’s basement sanctuary, and clumped down the wooden steps. Just before the call from Quinn, a couple of guys, surveillance techs, had gone down there without her permission, and she wanted to know what they were up to.

Entering the basement, she was incensed to see one of them pick up a remote-control T-rex that was standing atop one of Rory’s notebooks in what he called his ‘Control Area’ and toss it disdainfully over his shoulder. The T-rex hit the floor with a clatter. Emily hurtled across the room like a tornado, snatching up the dinosaur as she went, and shoved her way between the two men. Waving the T-rex in the startled tech’s face, she barked, “Hey! Don’t throw the toys!”

The tech looked at her with an expression that was half-sneer, half-apology, as if he was uncertain how to respond. Before he could decide, there was an almighty crash from the kitchen above, and it wasn’t merely the sound of something being dropped or falling over, but the sound of major damage—the kind of sound you might hear if the kitchen ceiling collapsed, and the entire contents of the room above smashed through onto the floor below.

Emily and the two techs froze, looking up at the basement ceiling, as if they expected that to collapse in on them too. Then the two guys reacted, drawing guns almost in unison, one of them dashing past a bewildered Emily and up the stairs, while the other—the one that had thrown the T-rex—looked at her and held up a hand, suddenly solicitous: For your own safety, stay here.

They waited. Heard running footsteps. And then—suddenly, shockingly—the sound of gunfire. Three, four, five shots.

Emily went rigid, raising herself up on her toes, her fingers spasming out like the defensive spines on a puffer fish.

Holy shit, what was happening up there? She couldn’t believe she was hearing this. Gunshots! In her house?

She was terrified, yes, but she was also angry. How dare they? Whoever this was, how fucking dare they? Almost unconsciously, she began to walk toward the basement stairs, her steps slow, cautious, her eyes fixed on the now closed door at the top.

Maybe she should hide? Arm herself? Who would be next through that door? Friend or foe?

And then, a hard, bright, furious thought: What the fuck have you got us into here, Quinn?

After the crash and the running footsteps and the gunshots came silence. Three seconds of silence… four… She took another tentative step forward.

And then the world fell in on her.

Or rather, it fell in behind her. Another crash at her back, like a small bomb had gone off, and suddenly she was throwing herself forward as her head and shoulders were showered with splinters of wood and flecks of plaster.

Rubbing her streaming eyes, choking on dust, she clambered to her feet and turned—and in an instant, it was as though everything she had believed, everything she had relied on her entire life, was ripped unceremoniously away. Because standing in her basement, beneath a hole which even now was raining swirls of white dust down onto its shoulders, was what appeared to be a demon from Hell. Ten feet tall, maybe more, it had a face like all her worst nightmares rolled into one, and in its fearsomely taloned right fist it was clutching the still twitching body of a dead mercenary.

No, scratch that. It was holding the top half of a body. Because its poor victim, whoever he had been, had been severed, or pulled apart, or twisted off, at the waist. Blood and other weightier things were now sliding and pouring out of the massive rent and splatting on the basement floor. But if the sight of this alone wasn’t bad enough, Emily now saw the demon take hold of the corpse’s dangling, exposed spine in its left hand, and with one practiced tug, rip it from the body as casually as a child might rip a Band-Aid from a wound.

She almost passed out. She almost threw up. It was only a fierce sense of self-preservation that prevented her from doing either. Her entire focus since turning around had been on the demon and its victim, but now she realized that the second tech, the one who had thrown aside the T-rex she was still clutching in her hand, was still standing over by Rory’s now dust-shrouded Control Area, much closer to the demon than she was.

His face was ghost-white—though whether through fear or simply plaster dust it was impossible to tell—and he was whimpering, cowering, like a beaten dog that didn’t want to be beaten anymore. Not that the demon was prepared to show even a shred of pity. With a lightning-quick spin, it flicked out its wrist, and the spinal column lashed toward the man, like a striking cobra made of bones, and wound tightly around his neck, garroting him.

Emily had seen enough— more than enough. This latest atrocity galvanized her to spin round and race toward the basement stairs. With every step she took, she expected to hear the clattering crack of the demon’s bone-whip, expected to feel herself lifted off her feet. As she scrambled up the stairs, she had only one thought in her mind: If I’m going to die, please God, let it be quick .

The Upgrade watches the human creature scuttling to safety with dispassion, even disgust, and considers crushing the life from it—it is a worthless thing, after all. But in the end, it is the sheer insignificance of the creature’s life that saves it; the Upgrade has more important concerns.

Looking around, it focuses on a bank of screens and other devices. Lights are blinking and flickering, and images swirl on the screens themselves. To the Upgrade this technology seems primitive, basic, and yet there is such a wide range of equipment here, all of it operative, and all of it contained within a small, domestic space, that it is suggestive of an acute intelligence, of a mind that is both enquiring and forever striving to better itself—and that the Upgrade can admire.

Turning in a slow circle, the alien scans a series of framed photographic images on the walls. Here is one of a young male human and a mature male human, both wearing identical garments, the older human with his arm around the younger one’s shoulders. Here is another image of the older human, and this time he is wearing garments and carrying a weapon, which the Upgrade knows identifies him as a warrior, a soldier.