Lying on the ground, feeling the life drain out of him, Coyle looked up at his friend. Baxley was still burning, his body still twitching. Could he still feel pain? Coyle didn’t know, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
He groped for his gun, which lay on the ground next to his right hand. His arm felt like lead, and the gun was ridiculously heavy, but through sheer force of will he gripped it, lifted it, leveled it, pulled the trigger.
His aim was true. He saw Baxley’s head snap back and his body slump forward, relaxed now. No more pain.
Don’t say I never do nothing for you, he thought fuzzily. Goodbye, old friend.
Then he died.
Casey might have been with Coyle at the moment of his death if she hadn’t been trying to save her own hide. As she was moving across the clearing toward him, and saw him groping for his gun, she heard a whistling sound from the far side of the clearing, faint at first but getting rapidly louder.
She knew what it was immediately. The Upgrade’s throwing blade, having taken off Coyle’s leg and kept on going, had now reached the end of its piece of invisible elastic and was heading back home. It was only the shock of seeing Baxley and Coyle die so horrifically, one after the other, that had made her forget all about it. Now she shouted a warning and threw herself to the ground.
She only just made it. Another second, and the blade would have gone through her without pause, smashing ribs and vertebrae and punching through her internal organs as if they weren’t even there.
Lying on the ground, she saw it flash above her head and fly into the blackness of the jungle, following the route taken not only by the fleeing Upgrade, but also by his pursuers.
McKenna and Nebraska.
Crashing through the undergrowth, rifles held diagonally across their chests, McKenna and Nebraska pursued their quarry with grim determination. The Upgrade was a constant flicker of flame through the trees ahead, and although it was still moving fast, it was clearly hampered by its injuries, which meant that both men could keep up with it easily.
McKenna wondered what would happen once the Upgrade was dead. With Traeger gone too, would the trumped-up charges against him melt away? And what about Casey and Nebraska and Nettles? Would they be free to resume whatever life they’d been living before they’d found themselves in a fight between a maverick offshoot of the US government and a couple of alien hunters? They were heroes now, after all. Heroes who may have helped save the world from—
Then the still-burning body of the Upgrade abruptly disappeared, interrupting his thoughts.
What had happened? Had the flames on the alien’s body finally petered out? Had it collapsed? He and Nebraska halted, a questioning look passing between them. After a moment, Nebraska gave a single nod, whose meaning McKenna understood without a word needing to be exchanged: Proceed with caution.
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.
24
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.