Predator ship trophy room and culture

Once the dust from the blast had settled and the explosive flashes faded into the murky dusk, the alien shook its head as its vision began to return. It peered down at Hawkins’s naked corpse, its prehensile spur piercing deep into the Irishman’s thigh as if the body were a side of meat hanging from a butcher’s hook. With some difficulty the creature dragged its newest victim through the vine-webbed tangles of jungle like a sack of stones.

It had no concept of the heart loss that attended an earthling death or the rage it had stirred in the surviving commandos. Killing was simply a means to an end and had no more significance than the plowing down of the trees to make room for the spaceship. Only the lower species ever died on the alien’s home planet. The higher forms so endlessly transformed themselves that they never inhabited a body long enough to die. They sloughed themselves like snakeskins. Therefore the creature dissected these killer soldiers as dispassionately and as carefully as a clockmaker might dismantle an unusually subtle timepiece.

Obsessively it probed to locate the center of man’s identity by analyzing every millimeter of flesh and bone. Though it hadn’t succeeded yet, it had already figured that the skull and perhaps the spinal cord were crucial pieces of the puzzle. The rest of the body was patently clumsy and unimportant—discardable, like packaging.

The alien hauled the body through the night for about a half mile till it reached what looked like a dry lake bed in a thick expanse of cottonwood trees. The lake bed was like a bowl at the base of a jagged hill five miles from the Conta Mana border. An odd, surreal bluish glow filtered through the cottonwood branches, like a full moon’s bathing glow on a clear night, yet here it shone at ground level like a fallen star, and tinted with an aqua sheen like the shallows of the Caribbean.

The eerie light emanated from the alien’s spacecraft, which had set down in the middle of the lake bed. Here was the egg-shaped ship in which the creature had traveled sixteen million miles on its single-minded search for a sense of self. And for the second time. The lake bed had been hollowed out by its fiery landing a thousand years before. For this trip it had honed in on automatic pilot.

The oval-shaped craft sat ominously still, its smooth metallic shell glowing with a copper patina. The alien stood before it and with a gesture like a blessing raised a three-fingered hand. A ramp extended from the side of the ship and lowered to the ground, seemingly suspended on a dozen lasers. The intruder from another world hefted the bloody body over its shoulder, walked up into the ship, and slung down its newest prize. The silence was broken by the dull thump of the body hitting the cold tungsten floor.

With vastly concentrated strength, its spur still snagged deep in the human flesh, the alien punctured the skin at the base of Hawkins’s spine with its other clawlike hand, severing the cord like a knife through butter. Then it bore upward, ripping at the vertebrae. Stubbornly it yanked harder, pulling the entire spine free of the body, a sickly snapping and popping of cartilege echoing off the chamber walls as bone separated from tissue.

Without a trace of emotion the alien bore the head and spine into a further chamber of the ship, leaving a ghostly trail of blood and flesh on the pristine floor. It entered an oval room illumined by an intense blue light. The marauder laid the sacred remains on its autopsy table and stood back, watching as the light from above shifted to a yellowish orange. Then, with the help of laser technology centuries beyond the earth’s, the connective tissue clinging to the bones shriveled and disintegrated into tiny mounds of dust.

Then the light changed to a soft green, and the alien lifted the skull column and admired the trophy under the light. It was as smooth and white as a steer’s skeleton in the desert picked clean by scavengers and bleached for years by the sun.

The alien reached out and placed it precisely on a glowing shelf along one side of the ship, caressing it gently, proudly, as one might a prized artifact from an ancient civilization. It felt of the texture and stroked the hollows with a haunting detachment. As the green light glowed ever more triumphant it became evident that this was only one of many such trophies displayed around the room. It was some otherworldly equivalent of a big game hunter’s headroom, walls covered with elephant tusks and moose antlers. Yet it bore a kind of purity too, like a scientist’s lab or the inner sanctum of a temple.

   The Predator (1987 novelization), chapter 12