Moments later the Sikorsky was on the ground, tall grass bent by the blowback of the rotors. The door slid open, and a figure jumped down into the field. McKenna recognized Agent Traeger immediately, and reluctantly had to admire the man’s courage. Though his men followed him out of the chopper, all of them armed and with their weapons trained on McKenna, Nebraska, Casey, and Rory, Traeger had exited first and unarmed. Whatever he wanted from them, it wasn’t a firefight.
Even so, McKenna shifted to put himself between the mercenaries’ guns and his son.
Traeger stopped a dozen feet away and regarded them impassively. “Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” McKenna replied.
“The device,” Traeger said. He mimed placing something on his arm, as if he was wearing the same type of wrist gauntlet the Predators wore. “It goes right in here.”
McKenna knew instantly what he meant, remembered the thing in Rory’s hand—what the original Predator had come for, and what the Upgrade had killed him for.
“That… thing has it.”
One of Traeger’s men—not a soldier, but an aide of some kind—gave them a look of disdain.
“I see,” the aide said. “Well, if that’s your position, I think it’s time for some robust discussion.”
As the helicopter’s rotors finally stopped spinning, throwing an eerie silence over the farmland, armed mercenaries hustled forward and grabbed McKenna and Nebraska. Rory started to argue, but McKenna quieted him with a look. The mercs started marching McKenna and Nebraska toward the barn across the field. In the dark, Casey and Rory were accompanied by Traeger and his aide. No guns were aimed at the scientist and the boy, but they were no less prisoners, and in no less danger.
McKenna had his face in the dirt. He didn’t like the taste. His thoughts were all static fuzz, like a TV screen when the cable connection went out. His face throbbed where boots had kicked him, and his ribs ached. He tried to get his knees under him and another boot kicked him. He grunted and went down on his face again. Thoughts of Rory filled his head. He pictured the kid drawing in the dirt… then sliding in the dirt to get to first base… and somehow that led his mind to an image of the Loonies saluting him.
An image flickered in his head—the men he’d lost in the jungle, the smell of their blood, the Predator uncloaking, soaked in gore. He should have killed the bastard at the time, but it was dead now, wasn’t it? Muddy as his thoughts were, he knew that. The giant one, the Upgrade, had hung that son of a bitch like a side of meat. He wondered how many more there were, how many on their home planet. How many on his home planet?
“You hid it once,” a voice said.
McKenna glanced up at the two mercs who loomed over him. They had him in some kind of holding pen beside the barn. One of them kicked him again.
“In the mail,” the mercenary reminded him. “Where’d you hide it this time?”
With the next kick, McKenna coughed up blood.
Fuzzy as his mind might be, he knew that was a bad sign.
The mercs had taken Casey up into the barn’s loft, and secured her to one of a stack of rickety wooden chairs that had no doubt been left over from a hoedown or something. The barn’s interior was not nearly as romantically antique as she’d expected, given the general condition of the structure from the outside. The place was big and sprawling, with wooden crates stacked next to the rows of chairs at one end and a string of lights along the beams overhead. Not the sort of place teenagers would come for a roll in the hay in the torrid novels she’d read in secret in middle school.
She tugged against the handcuffs, but it was a futile gesture. Traeger, who had been leaning against the wall, observing her as if she was an interesting specimen in an aquarium, now wandered casually across and stood in front of her—loomed over her, in fact.
“You’re pretty handy with a gun,” he said. “Where’d you learn?”
She wasn’t about to discuss her family history with a creep like Traeger. He wasn’t worth it. “America,” she said.
Traeger snorted. “Funny. Know what my job description is?”
Casey thought back to the moment when the Predator had first burst to life in the examination room back at the Project: Stargazer complex, and how Traeger had suddenly been conspicuously absent.
“Guy-who-flees-when-monster-appears?” she snapped, and winked at him. “You’re good.”
Ignoring the jibe, he said, “Close. I’m in acquisitions.”
Casey glared at him. In truth, she wanted to know more, but the handcuffs and the armed guards in the barn and whatever Traeger’s men were doing to McKenna didn’t make her feel like developing any sort of rapport with him right now, however false and temporary, so she remained silent.
Undeterred, he went on, “I look up, I wait—and catch what falls out of the sky.”
“Alien tech?” she said, interested despite herself.
“Yup. Seems Predators, they don’t just polish pelvic bones twenty-four seven. They conquered space. I wager there’s a whole faction… like you.”
“Acerbic?” She weighed her options, mind racing. “Listen, I can help you. I’ve been studying the biolog—”
“Shut the fuck up!” he screamed at her suddenly, shocking her, causing her to dig her heels into the dirt floor, rock back in her chair. For a moment, the wooden walls boomed with the echo of his fury, and then abruptly he was calm again, smiling at her. Only this time his smile didn’t seem as charming as it once had. This time, it seemed cruel and bottomless. “You stole our secrets, Dr. Brackett. That’s not one ‘no,’ that’s two ‘nos.’ That’s a no-no. Now, I need to locate that ship, so… one more time. Where is the device?”
Casey felt her throat go dry. She licked her lips. “What’s on that ship?” she asked.
Traeger’s smile slipped again, but this time he didn’t scream at her. He simply let out an exasperated sigh and rubbed a hand over his closely cropped hair. He was clearly frazzled, stressed out. Which may not have been good news for Casey and McKenna, but she felt a certain satisfaction at seeing it nonetheless.
“You wanna know what’s on that ship?” he snapped. “Okay, for starters—a ship. A fucking interstellar spacecraft. We don’t got one of those.”
“That’s a really good point,” she conceded.
“So.” He leaned closer to her. “ You tell me—what’s on that ship?”
She looked into his eyes. Brown as roasted chestnuts, but cold all the same. “Gravy,” she said.
He nodded, straightened up. “Exactly. Gravy.”
Rory sat in the RV, drawing in a notebook one of the soldiers had given him. He preferred it to drawing in the dirt. The helicopter sat dark and silent about twenty meters away—the pilot had moved it closer to the barn. One bored-looking guard had been posted to keep an eye on Rory, and he didn’t mind so much. He was just waiting to find out what the soldiers were going to do with him and his dad and Casey and Nebraska. He liked Casey and Nebraska, he had decided.
His dad and Nebraska were soldiers too, so he thought it wouldn’t be so bad. The alien monster, the huge one, was clearly the bad guy. Rory had seen enough monster movies to know what happened when the military went up against a giant monster, so he figured they would work all of this out together, eventually.
For now, he just wanted to draw.
Agent Traeger’s aide, whose name—Rory had learned—was Sapir, sat inside the helicopter with his laptop open. Rory wasn’t sure if Sapir thought he was deaf or that his Asperger’s made him stupid, but the man wasn’t making any attempt to keep him from overhearing the conversation he was having over Skype on his laptop.