Scrabbling in his pack, he pulled out a flare gun and fired it blindly into the air… illuminating a huge, dreadlocked shape, which pushed its way out of the trees and loomed over him like the Angel of Death.
Still calm, still counting down, Traeger said, “Three… two…”
McKenna wondered whether to shoot him in the head before he reached one, just for the hell of it.
Then a flare lit the sky above the jungle somewhere to the east, and was followed almost instantly by the hideous, drawn-out scream of someone or something dying a horrible death.
McKenna thought instantly of the Loonies, and Casey. They were out there. He hoped to God—
The momentary distraction was all that Traeger needed.
Spinning round, he made his hand flat and rigid as a blade, and stabbed it toward McKenna’s throat, intending to jab him right in the Adam’s apple. McKenna flinched away just in time, and Traeger’s hand scraped painfully against the side of his neck. It was still enough, though, to enable the CIA agent to break free of McKenna’s grip when the Army Ranger stumbled backward. As Traeger leaped from the ramp of the ship, hit the ground and rolled, the world suddenly erupted with gunfire.
We’re dead, McKenna thought, assuming that without Traeger there as a shield, the mercs had opened up on them. He threw himself backward, his only instinct being to protect Rory—with his own dead and twitching body, if need be.
It took him maybe a second to realize that the bullets weren’t coming their way. No, they were coming from the jungle, from the Loonies, God bless ’em, raining in on all sides, with the mercs as their target. And the mercs—those that weren’t cut down in the first volley—were scattering, running for cover, returning fire when they could. McKenna had been in firefights before, and knew he had to think and act fast, that he’d have only a few seconds before someone once again identified him and Rory as targets.
Rory was lying on the ramp, curled into a ball, his hands pressed over his ears. Crouching beside him, veiled by smoke, McKenna scooped him up, carried him to the edge of the ramp—Rory’s body rigid, as if made of wood—and dropped to the ground. Blanketed by the haze, the two of them then rolled beneath the ramp and lay there a moment, recovering. McKenna could hear his son’s heart hammering in his chest, and he held him close, murmuring words of comfort and encouragement. Eventually, he felt Rory’s body relax, saw him crack open an eyelid. The ground was littered with the corpses of Traeger’s mercenaries, and McKenna told his son not to look.
“Are you okay?” he said quietly.
Rory was clearly petrified, but he nodded. From his pocket, McKenna produced the invisibility ball, polished it briefly on his thigh, and offered it to Rory.
“Take this. You need to vanish, you really vanish. Understand?”
Rory nodded again.
Diego Galarza did not consider himself a bad guy. Yes, he’d been prepared to shoot the crazy soldier, and maybe even his kid, but what he did, he did purely so he could send money home to his ailing mama and two sisters in East Harlem. Without his monthly contributions, he feared they’d slip below the poverty line, especially once his mama’s medical bills began to mount up. It was imperative, therefore, that he stay alive. And although it wasn’t looking too good for him right now, he felt sure things would turn out okay in the end. After all, he was a lucky guy, always had been. He’d even been known as Lucky Galarza in the neighborhood where he’d grown up. He’d had scrapes in the past—many scrapes, and some bad ones, ones where other people had got killed—but somehow or other, he had always come out on top.
Right now, he was crouched behind the generator, close to the perimeter fence, cut off from the rest of his unit. Bullets had spattered the ground and spanged off metal all around him for what seemed like minutes. They had stopped now, but Diego knew it was a temporary lull, and that if he moved, if he showed himself, he would be shot down like a dog.
He was torn between staying here to finish the job he’d been hired to do, or opting out, crawling off into the jungle and making his way to safety. If he took the second option, he knew he wouldn’t get paid, and there might well be other consequences if it was discovered he’d cut and run, but at least he’d still be alive. The perimeter fence was maybe three meters away, and the first clumps of blackened foliage at the edge of the jungle maybe another three meters beyond that. Six meters in all. It was nothing. If he crawled on his belly, if he kept to the shadows, he could make it.
He was still plucking up the courage, still wondering what to do, when he heard a sound coming from the jungle. It started off as a rustling, but quickly escalated into a crunching, and then a crashing, as something headed toward him. The something sounded big, maybe an animal, or even a vehicle of some kind. Maybe the guys who had fired on them had a tank, and were attempting to drive it through the jungle, right onto the crash site. He peeked around the edge of the generator, and saw trees and bushes whipping back and forth, as if a twister was working its way through them. He thought he could see something moving back there in the shadows too, something that walked upright like a man. But how could it be a man? Whatever that thing was, it had to be ten, twelve feet tall.
Slowly, he raised his gun as the figure moved closer.
Then the thing stepped out of the darkness of the jungle, into the light.
He had heard some of the other guys talk about the space alien they kept at Project: Stargazer, had heard them say the thing had escaped, but he hadn’t known whether they were bullshitting him. Then he had seen the spaceship and he had thought that maybe there was something to their story, after all. Even so, he had never really expected to see a space alien, and certainly not this close. And even if he did see one, he’d half-expected it to look like the ones on TV: small and gray, with big black eyes. But this bastard was bigger and more terrifying than anything he could ever have imagined—hell, it was almost twice as tall as he was. And it was built like a Roman gladiator on steroids, its muscles huge and powerful, its massive hands tipped with claws that looked as though they could tear a man’s head off with one swipe. But worse than any of that was its face. Oh man, its face…
As the creature turned in his direction, its mean little eyes fixing on him, and its mandibles stretching open, Diego felt his bladder let go. Hot liquid squirted down his leg as a judder of fear started up like a motor in his guts and turned his limbs to trembling Jell-O. Whimpering, but not even aware he was doing it, he raised his gun and took aim at that hideous face. But the creature reacted with lightning speed, and even before his finger could twitch on the trigger, it had ripped aside the perimeter fence as though it was a lace curtain, and was reaching out for him. Within a split second, it had knocked his gun aside, and ripped him open as though he was a wet paper bag. Diego heard a tearing sound and a crack of bone, and realized it was coming from himself. Then, as his steaming innards slid out of the gash in his belly, he felt himself lifted off his feet like a doll. His last sensation, as his life and all he had been swirled away into a black drain, was of the creature using him like a puppet, squeezing his hand so that his finger pulled the trigger on his weapon, spraying the crash site with bullets.
Perched in a tree on the opposite side of the crater, Casey saw the Upgrade stride into the clearing, tear a man apart, and strafe the area with bullets to discourage retaliation. What she didn’t see were several of the mercs making it across to a parked jeep, but she knew they must have done so when the vehicle’s headlights suddenly blazed, and its engine roared, like a wild animal issuing an attack cry.