Then he became aware of Casey beside him, holding on but still staggering against him as the RV swung around a corner and the school fell out of sight.
She caught his eye, and he could see that she had been shaken to the core by what she had witnessed tonight.
“Holy shit,” she muttered. “They’re hunting each other now?”
On the baseball field, the Upgrade stands in the moonlight and examines his prize. The black box gleams in the dark. The Kujhad, it is called, in the language of his people. He feels a certain satisfaction at the death of his prey, but there is more to be done. The massive Predator raises his wrist gauntlet and a hologram display blossoms into light and life.
It depicts the young human, the one previously in possession of the Kujhad. The boy appears to be staring at the Upgrade, examining him, assessing him, though the Upgrade knows that what the young human is really assessing is the Kujhad itself, and that this footage was recorded by the device earlier that day.
The Upgrade is intrigued by the boy. There is intelligence in his eyes. More than intelligence. For a human—and, more particularly, one as unformed as this—to work out the intricacies of the Kujhad so quickly takes something very special indeed.
In some ways, he could consider this boy his nemesis. He had the intelligence to adversely affect the workings of the Upgrade’s ship, after all, and that alone makes him far more dangerous than all those bigger humans with their primitive weapons.
The Upgrade tweaks a control and suddenly there is sound to accompany the holographic image. The voice is scratchy, high-pitched, and to the Upgrade his words are meaningless.
“Just playing games, Mom!” the boy says.
17
The grounds of the school had been cordoned off, and the basement hurriedly converted into an autopsy room/ pathology lab. It wasn’t an ideal room for such purposes, as the school boiler, old and in need of an overhaul (if not outright condemnation) chugged and burbled away in an alcove on the far wall, filling the damp space with a stuffy warmth that encouraged mold and fungi to sprout in shadowy corners.
Dominating the center of the room was a large table—in truth, four tables requisitioned from the school dining hall and clamped together—on which lay the now deboned, headless corpse of the Predator that had broken free from the Project: Stargazer complex. The white sheet laid over the corpse was stained with patches of alien blood, which glowed a luminescent green whenever the flashing lights of cop cars, strobing through the bank of high windows on the outside wall, passed over it.
Traeger strode into the room, wrinkling his nose at the heat and the raw, fetid stench of dismembered alien, and marched up to the table. His aide, Sapir, scuttled behind him like an obedient pet rat.
“So this time they’re hunting their own,” Traeger said, and huffed out a sound that translated as: Go figure. He favored Sapir with a glance. “Now tell me again.”
“Eleven feet,” Sapir said.
Traeger whistled. “That’s really fuckin’ tall.” He whipped the white sheet back from the corpse. Sapir recoiled at the sight of the Predator’s head perched on its neck stump at the end of the table, above the body, its piercing, fish-like eyes glazed now in death. Traeger, though, leaned in closer, baring his teeth in a spiteful grin. “Shoulda stuck with us, buddy.” He turned to Sapir again. “You said they had a kid with them?”
The aide nodded. “Yes, sir. Captain McKenna’s son. Wife confirms—he has the operating system to the missing ship. Thinks it’s a video game.”
Traeger rubbed his chin. He paced around the sheeted corpse, looking thoughtful, while Sapir waited patiently.
At last he said, “I’m thinking this guy was a rogue. A runner. The big one was damage control. Sent to take him out.”
“Retrieve the ship?”
“Or destroy it.” Traeger came to a halt. His eyes narrowed. “We need to find that ship. Before he does.”
Sapir licked his lips. Tentatively, he said, “Sir… we’ve been looking for forty-eight hours solid—”
Traeger raised a finger, cutting him off. So pompously that you could almost see the speech marks around his quote, he said, “‘The difficult is done at once. The impossible takes a bit more time.’” He gave Sapir a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “The kid. He has the device.”
Sapir spoke the words eagerly, to show that he was in tune with his boss’s wishes. “Find the kid.”
It was late enough that all good girls and boys should have been asleep. The RV sat, cooling and dark, beneath a bridge at the far edge of a patch of rural farmland so vast it was impossible to tell where it ended and the next property began. Despite technological advances, there were still places in America where a squad of military deserters/mental patients and a startlingly fearless and physically capable scientist could vanish for a few hours.
Despite the late hour, Rory was still awake. He had a stick in his hand and was drawing in the dirt. The stick made an imperfect artistic implement, but he thought he had the basic design and measurements of the alien ship correct. He drew it from memory, recalling the holographic image he’d summoned up from the gizmo that had popped out of the Predator’s wrist gauntlet. The gizmo was gone now, so he wanted to solidify the memory in his head, just in case it was important. At the same time, he kept running through the symbols that had appeared on the readout, trying to understand what it all meant.
Nebraska Williams kept looking over his shoulder. He seemed like a nice man, but Rory grew antsy. He didn’t like being the focus of anyone’s attention.
“I heard you got a hole in your head,” he said.
Nebraska smiled. “People been tellin’ me that since I was five.”
Rory frowned, but stayed on topic. “What happened?”
“Well… you get to be my age, your brain’s like an attic,” Nebraska replied. “All musty and cobwebby. Sometimes you need to air it out.”
The soldier resumed the task of placing grenades gingerly into a box. Rory frowned. He wondered if Nebraska realized he was recommending a middle-school kid solve his problems with a bullet to the head and decided that, no, the man had no idea. Apparently, that was one of the side effects of shooting oneself in the head.
Casey had lost track of time. Ever since childhood that had been her MO. She’d find a thread that intrigued her, some bit of information or a word she didn’t understand or a scientific idea, and she’d follow it down the rabbit hole, learning as much as she could until she fell asleep or her mother forced her to go to bed or come to dinner or go to school. It was warm inside the RV, the air heavy and close now that the engine had been turned off for a while, but she had her microscope—and more importantly, she had the Predator’s gauntlet that had been in Rory’s possession.
When McKenna entered, Casey had the gauntlet on her arm, studying it. She knew it was important to learn as much as possible about the Predator and its tech, but she also relished this time. The rest of the world, and the danger she was in—both from the gigantic Predator 2.0 they’d encountered and from her own government—all fell away while she focused on unraveling the mysteries before her.
McKenna grabbed a beer from the cooler, then paused to glance at her, as if uncertain whether to interrupt her or not. But Casey was ready to talk, ready to demonstrate what she’d found. McKenna wasn’t a scientist, but he was smart, and besides, it was sometimes good to share information, get your findings out into the open, rather than just letting them stew in your head.