Predator gunfire

He stopped for a second and listened, bewildered, then pushed aside a red fern leaf and saw the retreat of the mighty, two-legged creature—not ape, not man, but warrior without a doubt—as it raced off into the trees. Laying on the ground just inches away was the shell of Blain’s body. Mac looked down and saw his partner’s deflated corpse emptied of its organs, a kidney and a few feet of intestines strewn nearby, dropped accidentally by the monster as it flashed away.

The commando choked and could feel the banana he’d eaten before the rebel attack erupt into his mouth. He turned his head aside and blew out the sticky, half-digested yellow mass, then shook his head and sobbed out loud, wiping his stinging eyes in disbelief.

Yet he quelled his grief quickly in favor of a passion for revenge. He pulled his wits together, drew his rifle to his chest and aimed nakedly in the direction in which the alien had fled. As he blasted into the trees he shouted a wild and primitive war call—not a cry he’d learned in basic training, but one that came directly from the soul, the unconsolable wail of agony when a man loses a brother.

He emptied the entire magazine at his waist before thinking to call out to the others. But it didn’t matter. Every living thing within a radius of two miles heard Mac’s raw scream and the explosion of gunfire. Immediately the commandos were on their way, tearing through the brush in a kind of frenzy, as if they barely had a second now to tie a tourniquet on this nightmare.

When Mac’s ammunition was exhausted he reached down and grabbed up his buddy’s rifle, which had snagged on a bramble during the havoc. Once more he poured the ammunition into the black-green vegetation, riddling the trunks of trees and scattering nests and bursting seed pods, as if the jungle itself must die for this one. His glazed saucer eyes were possessed as he swept the gun back and forth across the path. Whatever reserves a man can muster, Mac burned now with a white fire, then summoned more to burn again. In his crazed state now he would happily level the entire country and all the rotten dictatorships bordering it if necessary, anything to wipe out the wrongness responsible for his best buddy’s murder.

The other commandos were zeroing in on the site one by one, erupting out of the choking brush.

“What the hell’s goin’ on,” Ramirez bawled to Mac, shouting to compete with the deafening crack of bullets ripping from Blain’s rifle.

Mac screamed back without a second’s holding fire. “It got Blain!” he cried. “Ran that way!” And he let off another stream of bullets into the splintered grove of bamboo to point the way.

“Lemme give you a little light,” Ramirez hissed with an edge of black humor as he released his grenade launcher and whumped two volleys into the jungle. Seconds later a pair of deafening explosions sent fragments of dirt and leaves and sticks everywhere, knocking birds from the air as the canyon roared with a phosphorous light. Then the blinding chaos was followed by the stunned silence of aftershock, as if the whole world had paused for a breath of grief.

The alien, racing among the trees, stopped in its tracks as the white flash from the grenade explosion short-circuited its heat-seeking vision, momentarily paralyzing it. As it froze in a crouch, a shard of shrapnel zinged through the air and managed to lodge in its thick-hided shoulder. It barely felt the merest twinge of pain, but the gash was deep enough to cause a glob of blood—a thick, translucent, amber jelly—to splash on the leaves of a kingfire bush.

The group of men, now including Schaefer and finally Dillon dragging Anna along behind, stood wide-eyed in the clearing, ears ringing painfully as they waited for the jungle to settle. For a moment the only movement was the pale blue smoke wafting from the end of Mac’s rifle. And every one of them looked as if he hadn’t a clue where to go from here. Their dozen wars suddenly amounted to nothing, and their massive kills and their awesome bravery and luck were as meaningless as the random swarms of bees that floated like liquid gunfire in the deep of the woods.

Anna suddenly broke free from Dillon’s clench on her arm and wobbled over to Blain’s body as if she were drawn by a kind of spell. As she looked down at the mangled flesh her eyes glazed over in renewed terror. But this time she didn’t go rigid with shock as she did at Hawkins’s run-in with fate. Schaefer watched her carefully, knowing the girl’s recollections and Mac’s report might shed some light on the workings of the enemy’s mind. As Anna stared transfixed in horror the major glanced between the two witnesses, impatient for some answers.

Mac spoke first. “I . . . I saw it,” he stammered.

    The Predator (1987 novelization), chapter 11

“Don’t know, only saw one of ’em,” Mac answered vacantly “Camouflaged, kinda like Spiderman. He was over there . . .” he said, pointing into the rugged chaparral, recalling the chase. His words trailed off with his terrible memories. “Those fucking eyes,” he muttered, numb and awestruck. Then he shivered in the steamy night, though the temperature still hovered just under a hundred.

Dillon interrupted impatiently. “What, Sergeant?”

“Those eyes!” Mac turned, shaken, glaring at Dillon and shouting angrily. “It was like lookin’ straight into hell! But I know one thing,” he swore with huge conviction. “I drew down and fired right into its heart. Capped off two hundred rounds and then my pistol—the full pack.” His hands were shaking with murderous rage. “Nothin’ . . . nothin on this earth coulda’ lived, not at that range!” At the end his voice was a roar of defiance, as if he would throttle Dillon if the black man dared to contradict him.

   The Predator (1987 novelization), chapter 12