Predator heat vision

  On a flattened section of the ridge Schaefer dragged a large tangle of branches into view, adding it to a growing mound of firewood. He knelt, tending to a pile of dried grass, leaves, and other tinder. Using the last of his precious matches he set a fire cupped in his hands, gently breathing and coaxing the tiny blaze into a slowly gathering fire, flames starting to lick upward through the dry pyre.

  He stood now, staring into the rapidly growing blaze, turned and faced the canyon rim, raising his weapons high in one hand. From the depths of his blood a war cry burst, and as he threw back his head it rushed through his lungs and windpipe like a howl. It transcended time and worlds, primitive and visceral, as if from a wounded animal in a pain beyond pain.

  The wail echoed for miles through the jungle canyons and silenced all the prowlers and night birds around him. It was the commando’s beckoning invitation to the alien. His eyes flared in the yellow-orange glow of flames, and in that moment he looked unconquerable and terrifying, his mud-painted muscles tensed and ready.

  The alien had retreated to its ship and was standing in the open doorway as Schaefer’s echo came piercing through the trees within earshot. The cry was universally translatable—not just between peoples but between all worlds, wherever war had meaning. The creature craned its neck and lifted its head into the night looking like a wolf cussing the moon as it heard the cry and instantly understood its meaning. Instinctively it responded, but with a snakelike hiss that no one heard. Still, the seething noise boiling in its throat was an acceptance of Schaefer’s call to battle.

  It turned back into the ship, raising its weapon in one hand, while in the other it held a U-shaped sharpening device rather like a tuning fork. As the alien passed the tip of the weapon through the fork the spear that had slain all the other commandos flashed to life, emitting a deep harmonic hum as the blade glowed with energy, growing hotter and hotter with each stroke. The creature drew the now white-hot blade through the sharpener one last time, then lifted it to its golden eyes, studying its balance, the flashing alloy of the blade illuminating its humanoid face. The weapon meant something deeper than any mere object. To the alien it was a kind of extension of its will.

  Emerging now from its interplanetary womb, the creature swung up to the tree line, climbing to the uppermost branches. It traveled silently from crown to crown, arriving at last at the canyon rim where far below it could see Schaefer’s bonfire in the valley, the leaping, shifting, multicolored collage of heat waves and flares luring the alien onward, spellbound like a moth.

  As the bait drew the predator, Schaefer hid back from the flames, tucked in a crevasse of rock and broken tree stumps on the slope above the bonfire. His eyes shifted trancelike, moving from side to side, watching the approaches to the fire below. His senses were alert, his nerves on a wire edge.

  The alien began its descent, its shadow-form descending through the canyon, a rippling movement of grays and blacks passing across the shifting light patterns on the canyon walls cast by the growing flames below. Its golden eyes probed the cany
on, hungry to get closer to the swirling patterns of heat thrown off by the gaseous flames of the bonfire.

  Schaefer sat motionless in an Indian crouch, waiting for destiny to arrive, nearly invisible in his mud camouflage, one with the darkness of the trees and rocks. Suddenly, all around him, he noticed the buzz and click of insects and the croak of frogs had stopped. He immediately recognized this as a sign of the alien’s presence, for he’d come to understand that all creatures sensed and feared the invader.

  Schaefer drew his makeshift bow to full arch, his wounded shoulder trembling, the blood beginning to seep through the bandage again from the muscle strain. With the bow at full draw he stared intently, concentrating, searching for the alien’s iridescent form in the dancing light below.

  Then, like a giant insect, it dropped from above, rocketing down as if from the sky, its steellike spurs digging deep into a tree stump.

  Schaefer froze at the sound, his mud-rimmed eyes wide with fascination and fear. He couldn’t tell how far away the creature was in the darkness—maybe fifty, seventy-five feet. The major knew that the slightest movement on his part would bring on an instant attack, so he waited as still as a stump himself. At that moment he felt a weird comfort to know he was more at one with the jungle than his enemy.

  Enticed by the heat patterns vibrating from the fire and lacing into the canyon darkness, the alien dropped another thirty feet closer to the flaming lure. It raised its weapon, still white as steel newly tempered, like a mythic warrior’s sword. The yellow optic cells glittered like a honeycomb in the reflection from the fire as the alien looked around slowly. The quiet hissing sound escaped from its tensed mouth like a burning fuse, an instinctive signal that it was in a battle mode.

  As Schaefer squatted motionless and rigid he heard the low thump of the alien’s feet landing on a nearby table rock. Swift and silent the major turned and fired a poison arrow at the sound. It zipped through the darkness, and an instant later he heard the telling thud as the tip lodged in the trunk of a tree. “Shit!” muttered Dutch, berating himself for wasting a shot and for betraying his presence. The arrow had missed the alien’s bulbous head by inches.

  The predator was as quick to strike back. Its arm whipped so fast it was only a blur in the fire-shot night as it activated its weapon, the projectile streaking downward and exploding into a log so close to the major’s leg he could feel the wind. The impact sent up a shower of wood chips into the night.

  It was like a terminal game of chess now, and once again it was Schaefer’s move. He clutched his makeshift weapons, leaping from boulder to boulder as he fled the vulnerable spot. He jumped down into the clearing near the fire, landing hard, rolling out of the light and into the protective shadows of the rocks on the far side. Now the roaring bonfire lay between man and alien like a sacred zone of death and regeneration.

  Schaefer glanced around and saw that he was in a sort of natural amphitheater formed by the sheer walls of rock that shot up a hundred feet behind him into the black night sky. Shadows cast by the fire danced eerily across the rough stone, till Schaefer was almost certain he could see the outline of painted forms, and ancient glyphs incised into the stone.

  As the major positioned himself under the protective overhang of a jut of rock he found himself in a small space protected on three sides. He crouched with his bow and felt the pain scream across his shoulder. The wound was spilling blood freely again, and as he watched it drip on the stony ground he could see broken pieces of pottery and the carved head of a jaguar that looked like jade in the dancing firelight. But he didn’t have a minute to root around for treasure. For all he knew these fragments would mark his grave.

  Then, above on the rocky plateau, the silhouette of the alien appeared for a single moment. It looked victorious and huge against the sky, its form revealed in the play of the flames. It moved now down the rocky wall, gliding in and out of the darkness like a serpent as the rocks would now and then shelter it from the orange glow.

  As the creature crept slowly downward, nearer and nearer to the light, Schaefer distinguished a new sound over the crackle and sputter of the fire and the rushing river far below—a sound that brought fear and a savage determination to his heart. It was the rhythmic scraping of the alien’s hard, tusklike foot spurs, screeching like chalk on a blackboard. The major rose slowly to his feet, slung another arrow in his bowstring, and drew back on it as he moved out of his shelter and around a large boulder, heading toward the scraping sound.

  They were only feet from each other now. The creature paused erect in the strobing light, craning its head and slowly turning as it tried to orient itself to the diversity of sounds. The circular walls of the rocky amphitheater richocheted everything, throwing its delicate radar off. Fortunately for the major, the variable light rendered the alien’s optic nerve centers dull and dim as it moved among the inert forms of the rocks. It beheld a world of soft, ill-defined shapes in a pale magenta field of flickering heat.

   The Predator (1987 novelization), chapter 16