Кристофер Голден: The Predator: The Official Movie Novelization

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.