Кристофер Голден - The Predator - The Official Movie Novelization

“Hey! Traeger!” she yelled, gesturing at his burning pants.

Distracted, he jerked his head around, saw the flames, and panicked.

Big mistake.

As his head swiveled round, so did the shoulder cannon, in sync with his movements. Only now it was pointing at the back of his skull, and the sudden surge of adrenaline in his brain was enough to trigger it. There was a whoosh! as the cannon fired, and suddenly Traeger’s head was nothing but flying offal. As the merc standing closest to him was splattered with blood and shards of bone and porridgey lumps of brain matter, Traeger’s headless body staggered sideways a couple of paces, and then tumbled forward, hitting the ground with a graceless thump.

“Fuck me!” Casey blurted, and clapped a hand to her mouth. Traeger had been a ruthless fucker with a rotten black soul, but she still felt guiltily responsible for his death. If she hadn’t pointed out that his pants were on fire…

If she hadn’t pointed it out, he’d have burned to death anyway, she told herself firmly.

She still felt bad—though it was perhaps a good thing that she didn’t have the luxury of wallowing in remorse for long. With a bellow of rage, the Upgrade, still burning, rallied again, surging to its feet like a boxer on the ropes who refuses to go down, and swinging one vast, burning arm in the direction of a merc who had ventured too close to it. The merc leaped back with a yell, the Upgrade’s clawed hand missing his face by mere inches and smashing into a tree. Sturdy as it was, the tree splintered in a shower of sparks, several of its branches shaking loose and crashing to the ground. One of them embedded itself into the soft earth and toppled sideways, its torn end coming to rest against the thicker branch of another tree that jutted out from the trunk at an almost perfect right angle. Now the fallen branch, canted sideways, resembled a ladder leaning against the side of a house. And suddenly Casey saw Baxley leaping onto that ladder and scaling it like a monkey, his face twisted demonically, nothing in his eyes but the raging desire to bring their enemy down.

No! she thought as Baxley reached the top of the leaning branch and launched himself, screaming, through the air. He looked just like Bruce Lee, or Charlie Chan, arms and legs pinwheeling as he hurtled toward the still-burning Upgrade.

She cried out as he landed on its back and scrabbled for purchase, throwing an arm around its neck. In his other hand, Casey saw, he was holding a knife, which he used to stab the Upgrade savagely in the face, burying the blade deep into its right eye.

The Upgrade howled, and thrashed from side to side, but Baxley, his own clothes and hair burning now, held on. Then the Upgrade reached round with its left arm and plucked him from its shoulder. It held him in the air for a moment, dangling and kicking, and then it hurled him away from itself as hard as it could. Baxley flew through the air, only to hit the jutting javelin of a tree branch, which went clean through his body. It entered his back and burst out through his chest, like a metal skewer through a piece of barbecued meat.

As he hung there, pinned like a burning butterfly, twenty feet up in the air, Casey let out a gasp, too horrified even to scream. She’d known Baxley only a very short time, but due to the sheer intensity of what they’d shared, and the fact they’d put their lives on the line for each other time and again, she’d grown to think of him—as she thought of all the Loonies—as a brother. They’d been under sentence of death pretty much since they met, but it was still impossible to believe that, suddenly and violently, he was gone.

McKenna was far more used to death than Casey was, but even he stared up at Baxley with horror. Then he became aware of movement to his left, and turned to see Coyle stumbling forward, eyes wide, staring up at his friend in disbelief. “ Help him! ” Coyle screamed. “ Someone help him! ”

The Upgrade took advantage of the distraction to show that, despite being consumed by fire and half-blinded, it was not yet beyond fighting back. It flicked out its wrist once again, and a split second later its lethal throwing blade was whistling across the clearing. Before McKenna, or anyone else, knew what was happening, the blade had sliced through Coyle’s left leg like a laser beam, severing it cleanly from his body. With a spray of blood, the leg toppled one way and Coyle the other. McKenna heard Casey scream, and then Rory.

Spinning round, he saw the Upgrade turn and stumble away into the jungle. Despite its injuries, it moved fast, its burning shape flickering in and out between the blackness of the trees. Accompanied by Nebraska and Nettles, he gave chase. The thing was probably three-quarters dead already, but he wanted to finish the job if he could.

Lying on the ground, feeling the life drain out of him, Coyle looked up at his friend. Baxley was still burning, his body still twitching. Could he still feel pain? Coyle didn’t know, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

He groped for his gun, which lay on the ground next to his right hand. His arm felt like lead, and the gun was ridiculously heavy, but through sheer force of will he gripped it, lifted it, leveled it, pulled the trigger.

His aim was true. He saw Baxley’s head snap back and his body slump forward, relaxed now. No more pain.

Don’t say I never do nothing for you , he thought fuzzily. Goodbye, old friend .

Then he died.

Casey might have been with Coyle at the moment of his death if she hadn’t been trying to save her own hide. As she was moving across the clearing toward him, and saw him groping for his gun, she heard a whistling sound from the far side of the clearing, faint at first but getting rapidly louder.

She knew what it was immediately. The Upgrade’s throwing blade, having taken off Coyle’s leg and kept on going, had now reached the end of its piece of invisible elastic and was heading back home. It was only the shock of seeing Baxley and Coyle die so horrifically, one after the other, that had made her forget all about it. Now she shouted a warning and threw herself to the ground.

She only just made it. Another second, and the blade would have gone through her without pause, smashing ribs and vertebrae and punching through her internal organs as if they weren’t even there.

Lying on the ground, she saw it flash above her head and fly into the blackness of the jungle, following the route taken not only by the fleeing Upgrade, but also by his pursuers.

McKenna and Nebraska.

Crashing through the undergrowth, rifles held diagonally across their chests, McKenna and Nebraska pursued their quarry with grim determination. The Upgrade was a constant flicker of flame through the trees ahead, and although it was still moving fast, it was clearly hampered by its injuries, which meant that both men could keep up with it easily.

McKenna wondered what would happen once the Upgrade was dead. With Traeger gone too, would the trumped-up charges against him melt away? And what about Casey and Nebraska and Nettles? Would they be free to resume whatever life they’d been living before they’d found themselves in a fight between a maverick offshoot of the US government and a couple of alien hunters? They were heroes now, after all. Heroes who may have helped save the world from—

Then the still-burning body of the Upgrade abruptly disappeared, interrupting his thoughts.

What had happened? Had the flames on the alien’s body finally petered out? Had it collapsed? He and Nebraska halted, a questioning look passing between them. After a moment, Nebraska gave a single nod, whose meaning McKenna understood without a word needing to be exchanged: Proceed with caution .