As she moved around the table, she smirked at her own arrogance. Interacting with it? She had seen its weaponry and armor, she’d seen its mandibles and the sharp teeth behind them. The creature’s race apparently used the Earth—if Traeger and Church were to be believed—as their own big game preserve, and Casey had an idea what the game was. Did she really want to be face-to-face with one of these things while it was awake and aware of her presence?
Yeah. Hell, yeah, she did.
Where did they come from? What were their starships like? How had they first discovered Earth? The Predators were a spacefaring race, interstellar travelers, which meant that despite their obviously violent, apparently savage culture, they were also a people with advanced science and technology far greater than humanity had managed to create. It felt like a dream to her, so surreal that in the too-warm environment of her hazmat suit and the sterile whiteness of the lab, she grew a bit faint and had to shake it off.
It’s real, she reminded herself. Wake up, Dr. Brackett. This is not a drill.
Casey smiled as she crouched for a closer look at the Predator’s hands and the powerful fingers tipped with sharp claws. Awake, it could rip her heart out of her chest, she had no doubt of that. But what might it tell her, if she could convince it not to kill her?
She turned to Traeger. “That file they showed me. Do you have it?”
From behind him, Agent Church produced the file and handed it over. Casey took it and began to flip through reports and photographs. She came across a telephoto shot of the Predator—or a Predator, anyway—in a familiar cityscape.
“This one,” she said. “Los Angeles, 2005.”
She frowned and went back to the previous photo, which showed a tall man with white-blond hair and a strangely familiar, toothy grin. Quickly, she glanced up at Dr. Keyes, who gave her a sheepish look.
“Your father,” she said. “Sorry. Shoulda seen it. The, uh…”
Resemblance, she wanted to say. But this was more than a resemblance. The man in the photo had to be Keyes’ father. His son was a dead ringer.
“Anyway, in this photo,” she said, flipping back to the shot in LA. The helmet it wore seemed different from the war mask in the display case she’d seen earlier. “It’s wearing some kind of… atmosphere mask. A bio-helmet.” Casey pointed at the tech mounted on the alien’s wrists, wondering if they were also weaponry. “And what are these, wrist gauntlets?”
She glanced back at the dormant Predator and then at a nearby steel table, where its equipment had been laid out like a buffet of extraterrestrial bizarreness. There were other weapons and bits of armor, but not…
“Where are they? The mask and the other gauntlet?”
Traeger shot Keyes an uneasy glance. “We looked, believe me.”
Casey flipped back to another, more recent photograph—one that had been on top of the file. The man in the photo had a grown-out buzzcut, but everything about him said military.
“Is this the man who made first contact?”
Traeger shot Church a warning look, but Church either didn’t notice or ignored it.
“That’s right,” he said.
“I’d like to talk to him.”
Traeger shifted, stood a bit straighter. Those handsome features hardened. “He’s… being evaluated.”
Casey scowled. “I see. Well, if you’re going to lobotomize him, can I ask him some questions first?”
A squawk from one of the radios up front drew McKenna’s attention. He saw one of the MPs reach to his belt and grab his radio, answering the call.
“Go ahead,” the MP said, and as he listened to whatever orders were being given to him, his gaze drifted to McKenna. His eyes narrowed slightly. “Read you five-by-five. Out.”
Gears ground as the bus began to slow. McKenna stared at the MP, saw the way the man’s gaze shifted away from him. Whatever command he’d just received, it didn’t bode well. But then McKenna had never thought this was all going to end in a cheerful sing-along with his new friends. Maybe all six of them, there in the back of the bus, had been marked for “accidental” death, a way to clean up half a dozen messes the military didn’t want to deal with.
Regrets started to rise in the back of his mind, things he wished he’d done if his end had been accelerated. He pushed those thoughts out of his head. Regrets were for quitters, and McKenna was still breathing. For the moment, anyway.
One thing lingered, though. His son’s birthday had come and gone a few months back and McKenna had never gotten him a gift. He’d kept meaning to. The trouble was, he never knew what to get Rory, didn’t know what his son liked. McKenna recognized that last part was the problem, but didn’t know what to do about it.
Next year, he thought, glancing again at the MP and wondering about the orders the man had just received. Yeah, next year.
9
Rory heard his mom’s Subaru Outback pull into the driveway. Through the open window of his bedroom, he listened as the engine shut off, and then the cicadas filled the night with their usual hum. He liked the cicadas. Their music reminded him of static on the radio, a comfortable fuzz that kept things from getting too quiet.
Downstairs, the front door opened. Mom would no doubt have shopping bags. He ought to go and help her, but he’d been thinking and felt no sense of urgency. She didn’t really need him down there.
“Rory!” she called from below. “I’m home! I got you something.”
Blinking, he shook himself from his reverie and left his room.
“Rory?” she called into the quiet house, as he padded down the steps.
His mother smiled when he entered the kitchen. She gave him a kiss on the cheek as she started to unpack her shopping bags. Rory loved his mother. She could grow distracted, nearly as much as Rory himself, but his dad had always said that was an “artist thing.” His mother painted beautifully, her work hung in galleries, but she hadn’t become famous yet. People weren’t exactly clamoring for Emily McKenna paintings, but Rory knew she had sold plenty of them, and that made her a professional artist. It seemed very clear to him that this was an important thing, and he often wondered why his mother didn’t give herself more credit for her accomplishments.
He smiled at her, but his mom had already become distracted by the stack of language books he had left on the counter. French, German, Swedish, even Russian.
“You did one of these after school?” she asked.
“I did all of them after school.”
Her smile was so familiar that even Rory, who struggled with non-verbal communication, could read the meaning behind it: Why am I even surprised? He watched as she reached inside a big plastic bag from Target.
“So, look, I got you two options,” she began, as she drew out a pair of boxed Halloween costumes. “Pirate? Or Frankenstein?”
His mother held up both costumes, proffering them as if each was a remarkable treasure. Rory studied her face, mostly ignoring the costumes. It occurred to him that he ought to explain to her that Frankenstein had been the doctor rather than the monster, but he had been learning strategies of social interaction and knew that sometimes people did not like to be corrected. It was difficult for him to resist the urge, but that was why he fought hard to stay silent on the matter. The hard things were the ones most worth doing.