Кристофер Голден - The Predator - The Official Movie Novelization

They resumed their pursuit, but slowly now, McKenna thinking that if he could wish for anything at that moment it would be a pair of night goggles. He kept his senses attuned, but there was no sound, aside from the usual rustle of leaves and foliage stirred by the warm night breeze, and no sign of a flame ahead or even above them.

They had been moving for maybe a couple of minutes when Nebraska suddenly drew in a sharp breath and grabbed McKenna’s arm. McKenna looked at him, thinking he must have spotted a movement or a flicker of flame, but instead he pointed at the ground directly ahead.

McKenna looked at where he was pointing—and as his eyes adjusted, a vertiginous dizziness swept over him. The blackness in front of him was not the jungle floor, as he’d thought, but the edge of a steep ravine. Another couple of seconds and he’d have stepped right off it and plunged into the depths below.

Unslinging his pack, he extracted a flashlight. He hadn’t wanted to draw attention to their position by using it before, but now he switched it on and shone the beam over the edge of the precipice.

Some thirty or forty meters below them was a creek bed, the water glistening blackly in the torchlight. And rising from the creek bed, though dispersing before it reached the lip of the ravine on which they were standing, was a pall of thick, gray smoke—as though something large, something that had been on fire, had crashed down into the water.

McKenna and Nebraska looked at each other again. This was it, then. The end of the road. The Upgrade had fallen over the precipice, and into the creek, and was almost certainly dead. But there was no way of checking, no way of clambering down the side of the ravine to make sure, especially in the dark.

McKenna opened his mouth to say they might as well head back, when Nebraska suddenly reached out a hand and shoved him to one side. As he fell to his right and Nebraska dived to his left, McKenna heard a high-pitched whistling sound, and then something flashed between them and arced down into the ravine.

What the hell , McKenna thought, then all at once he realized. It was the Upgrade’s throwing star, the one that had taken Coyle’s leg, and almost certainly his life. It was returning to its point of origin, the alien’s wrist gauntlet, which was hopefully, at this moment, being washed downstream, strapped to the charred corpse of an alien killer.

Reacting to a powerful electronic homing signal, the throwing star plunged over the side of the ravine and hurtled down toward the black thread of water below. Suddenly, as though in response, a huge arm, blackened and steaming but intact, thrust up through the surface of the water, taloned fingers clawing at the air.

The throwing star attached itself to the metal gauntlet encasing the wrist with a metallic snap. The hand flexed again, and then the water beside it surged and boiled as the rest of the body broke the surface.

It was dawn. They were running.

Again.

They had had at least a couple hours’ respite after their victory, a time to rest and recuperate, to eat a little food and bury their fallen comrades. When McKenna and Nebraska had returned to the clearing to announce that they thought the Upgrade was dead, there had been tired cheers—but only from the couple of Traeger’s mercs who had survived the encounter. For the rest of them, the price had been too high for them to feel they could celebrate their enemy’s downfall—and when Nettles had glared at the mercs for daring to express their joy and relief, they had shut up quickly, and then had slunk away soon afterward, like funeral attendees who had suddenly realized they were in the wrong church.

McKenna had thought it was tempting fate to hang around too long, and so as soon as they were ready they were back on the move again. With Rory on his shoulders, he led the way through the jungle toward the helicopter, which they had landed on a plateau at the jungle’s edge, a couple of miles to the south. They had covered around half that distance, maybe a little more, when Casey voiced her suspicion that they were being followed.

McKenna wanted to tell her that they were fine, that it was nothing but her imagination, but he would just have been fooling himself. Casey was smart, levelheaded, and eminently capable, and he had grown to trust her instincts implicitly. Besides which, as soon as she spoke up, both Nebraska and Nettles admitted that they had been thinking the same thing—and even McKenna himself, much as he hated to say so in front of Rory, told them that his own Spidey-senses had been tingling for a little while too.

The question was, was their pursuer—or pursuers—human or alien? McKenna hoped they would never need to find out. They doubled their pace, and covered the last mile of jungle in less than eight minutes. It was a relief when they finally burst from the tangle of trees and undergrowth to see the ludicrous pink helicopter still standing where they had left it, like a loyal pet awaiting their return.

As they broke cover and started running for the chopper, McKenna glanced back—and just for an instant he thought he saw movement in the jungle behind them. But it was too swift, too fleeting, for him to be sure, and the next instant his eyes were dazzled by the dawn sun rising over the distant hills. He faced front again, jogging toward the chopper, Rory bouncing on his shoulders. Nettles was already in the pilot’s seat, Nebraska and Casey climbing in beside him. The engine coughed into life and the rotors started to turn.

“Come on!” Nettles shouted.

Another minute , McKenna thought. Another minute and they would be up in the air, flying away from this place. Eight of them had arrived here, and five would be leaving. It wasn’t great odds, but it could have been worse.

He was a dozen steps from the chopper when a blazing streak of energy erupted from the edge of the jungle and hit the machine like a thunderbolt. Nettles, Casey, and Nebraska were blasted clean out of the still-open door of the cockpit, which crumpled like a deflating balloon as the rotors warped out of shape and stuttered to a halt.

The shock wave of the blast knocked McKenna off his feet, Rory tumbling from his shoulders. As he lay dazed, he saw Casey stagger upright and beckon to Rory, who ran across to her, bent low to make himself less of a target. McKenna watched as the scientist and his son took refuge behind the only cover available to them—the still-smoking ruins of the helicopter—and then, pushing himself groggily to his knees, he glanced over his shoulder.

He was not surprised by what he saw, but it still sent a weary shudder of horror and dismay through him.

From the trees at the edge of the jungle, its huge body shimmering as it decloaked, stepped the Upgrade. It was battered and blackened, its right eye a suppurating mass of gore, but even now it still looked more than capable of ripping them apart with its bare hands.

It looked mightily pissed off too—but then it always did. McKenna wondered what it would be like to be born in a rage, and to stay that way your entire life.

The Upgrade’s gaze swept over him, and then it turned its attention to Nebraska and Nettles, who were clambering to their feet, and to Casey and Rory, sheltering behind the wrecked helicopter. Remembering the declaration the creature had made back at the crash site as to who its real target was, and all the people who had died since, McKenna decided that enough was enough. If the alien wanted him, it could have him. He didn’t want to have to see anyone else die because of him today.

Rising to his feet, he spread his arms and walked toward the alien. “Okay,” he said. “I’m over here. I’m the one you want. Leave them alone.”