Кристофер Голден - The Predator - The Official Movie Novelization

The ship’s underbelly.

He looked around, and a spark of hope ignited in him. Only feet away, he saw the yawning shadow of an empty port, where an escape pod had once nestled. Taking a breath, he rolled again, then crawled on elbows and knees until he reached the opening, before clambering inside. Clinging to a strut inside the opening, he glanced around and spotted a keypad.

“Rory!” he shouted over their commlink. “What’s the sequence? I watched you put it in. Tell me!”

Static, and then: “To the pod? I… I can’t remember!”

McKenna took a deep breath. “Okay, do this. Try .”

“I can’t think! It’s all mixed up in my head!”

“Damn it, son! I watched you! It was one, two, then over three, up two…”

McKenna’s words trailed off. He blinked, staring at the keypad, and realized he didn’t need Rory to remember. “Holy shit,” he murmured. “I fucking know it!” Frantically, he stabbed a finger at the pad, tapping buttons.

“Rory?” he continued. “You know how I always said be a big boy?”

“Yeah?”

“Screw it. Make yourself small, kid.” He tapped the last digits of the sequence into the keypad. “Down! Now!”

The hatch slid open. McKenna lunged inside, gun comfortable in his hand. He unloaded all the grief and fear that he had felt for his men, and for his son. Teeth bared, he targeted every blinking light he saw, blazing away with shot after shot.

Sparks flew from consoles, and the whole ship shuddered. Whatever McKenna had hit, the alien craft was taking it personally.

Shrouded in the gray gloom of the command deck, the massive Predator whipped around, faux-dreadlocks flying. It spotted McKenna, saw the open hatch where the escape pod should have been, and a trilling series of clicks issued from its mandibles as it lifted an arm and fired.

It wasn’t an energy beam that erupted from its wrist gauntlet this time, though. It was a metal cable, which spat through the air like a whirling bolo. One end of the cable embedded itself in a wall panel, while the bolo part wrapped itself around McKenna’s left leg, below the knee, and cinched tight. Jerked off his feet by the Upgrade, he yelled out in pain as the ship dipped and veered, plummeting toward the tree line. He smelled smoke and glanced at Rory, who was clinging for dear life to the walls of the pod he was crouched in. He had disabled the ship, as planned, but at what cost? Had he saved Rory from torture and death at the hands of an alien hunter, only for them both to now die in a devastating explosion when the spaceship crashed?

Alarms wailed as the tops of trees started to rush up fast in the forward view screen. Under other circumstances, the Upgrade might have moved in for the kill, but right now it clearly had other things on its mind. It detached the other end of the metal rope from its wrist gauntlet with the stab of a button and turned back toward the main control panel. As it busied itself at the controls, trying to correct the damage that McKenna had done, McKenna himself picked at the wire wrapped around his leg, trying to work himself loose. Unable to do so, he scooped up his dropped gun and fired at the wall panel that the other end of the cable was attached to. The panel buckled, part of it tearing loose from the wall. McKenna raised his gun again, thinking one more shot might do it, when the ship impacted with something—the top of a tree, maybe—and tilted vertiginously to one side.

Rory yelled out as McKenna started to slide toward the still-open hatchway. The metal cable between his leg and the wall panel went taut, held for a moment… and then the damaged wall panel tore itself loose from the wall!

Now McKenna was yelling too, and clawing at the smooth floor, but he couldn’t halt his slide toward oblivion. He thought of Nebraska sliding off the edge of the ship. Was he going to go the same way? Then he was out of the hatch and falling through space, wind buffeting him as he plunged toward certain death.

The wall panel with the clawed end of the metal cable still firmly embedded in it clattered after McKenna’s falling body—and became jammed in the narrow hatchway. McKenna slammed to a stop, the loops of cable tightening yet further, cutting into his leg, drawing blood. Now he was dangling upside down beneath the ship like the weirdest car ornament imaginable. He swung to and fro, and then to his horror saw the tree line rising to meet him. Next moment he had covered his head with his arms and was trying to protect himself as best he could, as his body was dragged through a mass of branches and leaves.

If the Upgrade’s ship had continued to increase speed, McKenna would almost certainly have been ripped to shreds before the craft reached the ground. However, to avoid crashing, the alien must have employed the forward thrusters, because almost as soon as McKenna’s body dipped beneath the tree line he felt his forward momentum slowing down. Instead of punctured flesh and broken bones, therefore, he received only superficial injuries—scratches and bruises. Now that he’d avoided being shredded, though, his main problem was how he’d avoid hitting the ground first, and then the ship landing on top of him—but at that moment Fate intervened.

The wall panel stuck in the escape pod hatchway snapped in half, and suddenly McKenna was tumbling straight down between the trees. It was still a long way to the ground, but luckily the chunk of panel, which tumbled after him, was big enough to slow his progress. He dropped in increments, oof ing and ouch ing as his body thumped against branches and was slashed by twigs. He was still four or five meters from the ground when the panel stuck in the crook of a branch and jammed tight, leaving him dangling, groaning, bleeding, bruised, and fighting desperately to stay conscious.

Although it was slowing all the while, the ship still hit the tops of the trees with a mighty WHUMPH! and ricocheted upward like a flat stone bouncing off the surface of a lake. Beyond the quarry and the trees was a huge area of swampland, and it was into this that the ship eventually crashed, skimming across an oily expanse of brackish water before hurtling headfirst into a tangle of fallen, moss-covered trees.

The impact caused the viewing port at the front of the ship to explode inward, and the Upgrade, which had been standing at the main control panel, to be ejected like a cork from a pop gun. It flew through the air, limbs pinwheeling, splashed down into the boggy water and was instantly submerged.

The crumpled, battered ship subsided, sinking a little further into the primordial ooze before coming to rest.

For several seconds the echoes of the bellowing chaos that for the last few minutes had disturbed this ancient stretch of land seemed to thrum in the twisted trees, to ripple across the water.

Then the echoes subsided, and all was silent once more.

McKenna came to, upside down, his side thudding with pain, his arms and legs scraped and bloody, and his clothing torn in too many places to count. Taking stock, he looked ahead of him, and through a thin layer of trees saw a green and brown spread of swamp below. The Upgrade’s ship sat half-submerged, canted at an angle, shattered trees downed around it. Something shifted beneath the mossy surface of the water, cutting a V-line toward him, and McKenna thought his luck had gone from astonishingly bad to astonishingly good and then to eaten-by-an-alligator.

But it wasn’t an alligator at all.

What rose from the swamp, huge and hunched over, was the Upgrade. Somehow, the gigantic Predator had been thrown from its ship. Where Rory might be, McKenna had no idea, but he knew that if this monster still lived, he needed to take every advantage he could find to try to kill it.