Watt-Evans, Lawrence - Predator 01 Read online

  But Schaefer wasn't as calm and in control as he looked, because he missed with all three shots, and while Schaefer wasn't exactly Annie Oakley, he didn't generally miss three times at that range, and it sure as hell wasn't due to any worries about wanting to hit his target, not when Carr had just tried to blow him away.

  Carr was yelling when he went through the window at the far end of the corridor, but he wasn't hit, it was pure adrenaline, a scream of challenge, not pain, and Schaefer was already running after him, and Rasche wondered as he often did, how the hell did Schaef do that? How could anyone be that strong, that fast, when he spent his time at a desk or in a car, instead of working out at the gym?

  Rasche got to his own feet and trotted heavily down the passage, to find Schaefer standing in a shattered window frame, his hands on either side of the sash and one foot on the fire escape beyond, staring up the street.

  Rasche stepped up beside him and watched as Carr dodged the four cops assigned to watch that particular alley, watched as they hesitated, conferred among themselves, and didn't leave their post to pursue.

  ". . . son of a bitch!" Schaefer said, stepping out onto the fire escape.

  "Damn! We lost him!" Rasche said as Carr vanished around a corner.

  "Not lost," Schaefer corrected him, "just misplaced. There's nowhere he can hide that we can't get him eventually." He leaned over the rail of the fire escape and called after Carr, "To be continued, punk! "

  He stood like that for a moment, then started to turn back to the building . . .

  . . . and froze.

  "What?" Rasche said, looking down, expecting to see Carr coming back.

  "Shut up," Schaefer said. "Listen."

  Rasche shut up and listened.

  "I don't hear anything," he said-which wasn't literally true, because of course he heard the wind and the distant traffic and the voices of the cops surrounding the building and all the other noises of New York by night, but he didn't hear anything that could account for Schaefer's behavior.

  "Something's out there," Schaefer said.

  "Like what?" Rasche asked:

  "I don't know," Schaefer said.

  Rasche looked around at the empty alleyways, the waiting cops, the broken glass and rotten wood of the shattered window, the dim corridor that led back to that bloody scene straight out of hell.

  He didn't see anything wrong-except the obvious, of course, the broken window and the room where the monsters had done whatever it was they did.

  But he didn't see anything that might begin to explain it, and he didn't hear anything that could mean anything, while at the same time he could almost feel whatever Schaefer was talking about.

  Something was out there. Something wrong.

  "This is starting to scare me, man," he said.

  "I've got a feeling that's the whole idea," Schaefer answered, stepping back into the building.

  And then there were footsteps pounding up the stairs, but neither Schaefer nor Rasche bothered to raise a weapon, because that was the familiar sound of police boots; no one else stomped quite like a squad of cops.

  "Seal it up!" a voice shouted, a voice that Schaefer and Rasche both recognized. They looked at each other with expressions of resignation.

  "All of it!" the voice continued. "Seal everything! Nobody gets in here!"

  "McComb," Rasche said. He grimaced. "I mean, Captain McComb."

  Then a stream of blue-clad men burst out of the stairwell, rifles at ready, fanning out through the building.

  One tugged at another's sleeve and pointed, and Captain McComb turned to see Schaefer and Rasche standing in the end of the corridor, in front of the demolished window.

  For a moment McComb just glared; then he stepped forward and growled, "You stepped in it this time, Schaefer-orders were to secure the building from outside, not cowboy around like some damn TV supercop! I heard shots-if you fired that piece of yours, you better be able to write up a convincing report of why. I want it on my desk by midnight, and I want it in triplicate."

  Schaefer pointed down the corridor. "Have you seen those bodies, McComb?"

  "So there's some dead punks? You think that justifies disobeying my orders?"

  "It's not just some dead punks, McComb. This was a slaughter. It's like a butcher shop in there."

  "So the gangs play rough-"

  Schaefer cut McComb off. "Don't give me any crap about a gang war," he said. "You go take a look in there and tell me what kind of weapon these gangs have that'll do that kind of damage. You look at those holes and tell me that was just a riot gun or an Uzi did that."

  McComb stared at Schaefer for a moment, then shook his head and said through gritted teeth, "You don't have a clue, do you? I don't give a shit what's in there-that's not the point. The point is, I told you to keep the fuck out, and you didn't. This isn't your case, and don't you worry your pretty blond head about it, Schaefer. You just stay the hell out of this one, you got it?"

  Schaefer didn't answer; Rasche patted him on the back and said, "Come on, Schaef."

  Together, the two detectives pushed past McComb and started down the stairs.

  When they were out of earshot, Rasche muttered, "If they sold stupidity on the stock exchange, we could bust McComb for illegally cornering the market."

  Schaefer grunted.

  Rasche looked at him; the grunt seemed to mean something.

  "You think he's hiding something, maybe?" Rasche asked. "You think he got paid off by someone to let this happen?"

  Schaefer shook his head. "Not his style," he said. "Someone might be hiding something, but not that."

  As they stepped out of the building, Schaefer added, "And whatever it is, I don't think it's gonna stay hid."

  * * *

  4

  It was two o'clock in the goddamn morning, but the streets outside were still sweltering hot.

  McComb wasn't on the streets, but he was still sweating. The air-conditioning in his office was working just fine, but he was sweating all the same as he dialed the number he'd been given.

  "Yes?" said the voice on the other end. No name, no greeting---just "Yes?"

  "This is Captain McComb," McComb said. "Let me talk to General Philips."

  "Just a moment," the voice said.

  After a pause a new voice, one McComb recognized, barked, "Philips."

  "McComb here, General," the police captain said.

  "Go on."

  "You were right, General," McComb said. "There was an attack." He swallowed.

  Philips heard the swallow, noted the pause. "Bad?" he asked.

  "Yessir," McComb replied. "Real bad. Eleven men dead. Eight of them were skinned alive and hung upside down inside the building, one was thrown out a window, and the other two were on the roof. The two on the roof had been decapitated and badly mangled-we haven't found the heads."

  "You won't," Philips said.

  McComb was silent for a moment, taking that in.

  "Who are they?" Philips asked. "Your men?"

  "No," McComb said. "A bunch of hoodlums. Gang members, worked in drugs."

  "No great loss, then," Philips said. "They were heavily armed?"

  "We found enough weapons lying around . . . Yes, heavily armed."

  "That fits."

  For a moment McComb sat silently in his office, staring at the closed door, trying unsuccessfully to think; then he asked, "General, what the hell is going on? What happened to those men?"

  "I told you before, Captain," Philips replied; "I can't tell you that. It's a federal matter, and out of your hands-all you do is keep us posted and keep everyone else out, and we'll take care of it."

  "So . . ." McComb hesitated. "So there are going to be more attacks?"

  "Maybe," Philips said. "We don't know, not for sure-but there could be, yes."

  "You don't know?"

  "No, Captain, we don't. This isn't something we're responsible for, it's just something that we saw might be coming."

  "But if you saw it
coming, couldn't you . . . can't you see whether it's going to happen again?"

  Philips sighed. "Look, Captain, I can't explain why, but it's damn near a miracle we know as much as we do about this, and it's just dumb luck that we spotted . . . that we got a hint something like this might happen in New York. We have no idea whether it'll happen again, or how often, or for how long-and it's not your job to worry about it. It's your job to keep everyone away from the scene, and to keep everything quiet, and that's all. We don't want any of your men involved, and we sure as hell don't want the press to get even the slightest whiff of this."

  "Just keep it quiet," McComb said.

  "That's right," Philips agreed. "Other than that, we'll handle it ourselves. I'll be coming up there tonight with my people, and we'll be conducting the investigation. You just keep your men clear."

  "Yessir," McComb said.

  He hung up and sat back, the sweat starting to run down his back.

  He didn't like being ordered out,- he didn't like being told what to do by the feds-but this was a special case. It wasn't the FBI or some of the other Treasury boys this time-Philips was army, some kind of special unit, and McComb's instructions to listen to him had come from the mayor, who'd said that his instructions came from the White House.

  And this wasn't just some drug bust. At first McComb had thought that was it, that the feds had decided to turn the whole goddamn army loose on the drug traffic; but then he'd seen what was in that tenement on Beekman.

  The army hadn't done that. Not the U.S. Army, anyway. Some third-world terrorists might do something like that, if they had the time and were mad enough, but McComb sure hoped that American soldiers wouldn't.

  And it hadn't been a gang war, either. Drug traffickers killed each other, sure, and they'd mutilate each other sometimes, whack off an ear for a souvenir, maybe even cut off some poor guys' balls to make a point; but they didn't skin people and hang them up to dry.

  And even if some lunatic had decided to skin his competition, gang-bangers didn't kill eleven heavily armed people without putting any bullet holes in them.

  Oh, there might have been bullet holes in the two on the roof-they were so chewed up no one could tell without a microscope. The eight inside the building, though, had been killed with blades.

  They'd all been armed, they'd fired off thousands of rounds, and they'd been killed with blades.

  And the forensics boys who had gotten a look before the feds chased everyone out said that it looked as if one of those eight had still been alive when he was skinned.

  Even drug dealers didn't do that. Not even the crazy new bunch out of Jamaica.

  Who the hell did?

  Philips had contacted him the day before and told him there might be some kind of unusually vicious massacre about to happen, one that didn't seem to make any sense. He'd said it would probably be somewhere that wasn't air-conditioned, that the victims would probably be armed, that it would probably be well above street level.

  And that's all he would say.

  How had Philips known? What the hell was going on?

  McComb didn't have any idea, but the more he thought about it, the more relieved he was that it was out of his hands.

  Let Philips and his feds have this one-God knew that McComb didn't want it!

  About 240 miles to the south, Philips stared at the phone.

  Maybe he should have told McComb what was going on-but the reports on McComb, and Philips's own impression of the man, weren't encouraging about how he'd take it.

  It wasn't as if it was easy to believe. Hell, Philips hadn't wanted to believe it himself when Dutch Schaefer had told him what had happened out there in the jungle eight years ago, even though Philips knew and trusted Dutch.

  Eventually, though, he'd been convinced, and he'd convinced his superiors. The evidence had been there.

  He wasn't sure McComb was the sort who'd believe the evidence.

  And if he was, Philips wasn't sure he wanted McComb to know. This had to be kept quiet. If the news ever leaked out to the general public . . .

  Nobody paid any attention to the tabloids when they raved about space aliens, but if the U.S. government was to announce that monsters from outer space were hunting humans in the streets of New York-well, Philips wasn't sure how it would go over, but he knew he didn't want to find out. He imagined panicking crowds, crazed cultists, conspiracy theorists-half the people wouldn't believe the official story and would assume it was covering up something illicit, while the other half would probably see it as the end of the world.

  And it wouldn't do any good. Unless Dutch had lied, the things, whatever they were, had technology that made good old U.S. know-how look like kids playing with sticks and pebbles. The aliens had invisibility screens, energy cannon, pocket nukes. They could do whatever they wanted to Earth, to the whole human race, and the best thing humanity could do was ignore it, bear up under it, and wait for the bastards to get bored and go away again.

  They sure didn't. want to get the aliens angry. People were no match for those things.

  Sure, Dutch had fought one and killed it and lived to tell about it-but Dutch was about the toughest specimen the human race had ever produced, and he'd been damn lucky, as well. Philips had listened to the whole story several times and knew how much to adjust for Dutch's downplaying of his own talents-and even so, he knew Dutch had been lucky.

  If the scientists could get their hands on some of those gadgets the creature had had, maybe things would be different, but so far that hadn't happened, and it didn't look as if it was going to anytime soon.

  After they'd picked up Dutch and heard his report, Philips and his group had started studying anything and everything that had seemed as if it might be related. They had traced the legends in the area, had looked at everything from Star charts to missing-pet reports, had gone looking for anything they could find.

  They'd found plenty of evidence of the things, all right, had learned a little more about their habits and patterns-but nothing of their technology. The bastards were apparently very, very careful with their gadgetry-they didn't leave any cosmic equivalent of tossed beer cans lying around, let alone anything really important.

  But there hadn't been any real urgency to the studies. The creatures had been coming to Earth to hunt people for centuries, and they always hunted in hot, harsh climates, in the back country, never in any place important.

  Until now.

  Now the things were loose in New York. The Air Force had picked up unfamiliar radar interference and had put word out to Philips's group in hopes of finding an explanation; he'd theorized it might be the radar equivalent of the shimmer effect the creatures' invisibility gadgets caused, and had asked where it had been found.

  And the Air Force had told him.

  New York.

  Philips had had a whole platoon of radar analysts and stealth specialists put on it, and they'd confirmed the Air Force report.

  If the radar was picking up what it appeared to be picking up, the things were in New York.

  What the hell were they doing that far north? If they wanted a city to play in, why not someplace like Rio, or Mexico City?

  Maybe there was something special about New York, something in particular they wanted there, but what?

  It hadn't seemed likely that they wanted something specific, something that could be found only in New York. And it hadn't seemed reasonable that after centuries of confining their hunts to hot places they'd suddenly go north.

  Philips had considered all that, and he'd thought maybe it wasn't. the intruders after all, maybe the radar signal was a false alarm, but he'd talked to McComb yesterday morning, just in case-and sure enough, the attack had happened, the hunt had come.

  The hunters of men, the predators on human prey, were loose on the streets of New York.

  And Philips didn't know why.

  He still had some time before his flight; he pulled out the faxed report he'd gotten an hour before and began reading
through it again, looking for some clue, some hint of what the things wanted in New York.

  * * *

  5

  For the next few days the heat wave continued; the thick, hot blanket of tropical air that smothered the city showed no sign of going anywhere.

  The investigation of the massacre at Beekman and Water showed no sign of going anywhere, either, as far as Schaefer and Rasche could tell, but they weren't on the inside. They were banned from the scene, and no one they spoke to knew who was handling the case. There were rumors that some special federal task force was involved.

  Schaefer made it plain that he didn't like the sound of that.

  "Hey, it isn't necessarily a cover-up," Rasche reminded him. "For all we know, the whole thing could be taped and ready to go. The feds do the job sometimes."

  "Since when is this their job?"

  "Since they said it is," Rasche answered. "Come on, Schaef, let it go."

  "It's not their city," Schaefer said.

  "It's not just yours, either."

  "When some asshole comes in and massacres the punks I've been trying to nail for the past three years . . ."

  "Schaef, you're not in narco anymore."

  "You think that means it's over?"

  "I think that means it's not our problem."

  Schaefer was clearly not convinced of that, but he stopped arguing.

  It wasn't their problem. The feds had taken over, and plain old NYPD homicide detectives were not welcome.

  Rasche wasn't very happy about that either; for one thing, he knew that whenever something this weird and violent went down once and the cops weren't all over it, it was likely to happen again..

  The idea of looking at another scene of carnage like the fifth floor of that tenement made Rasche sick to his stomach, and he had to admit that he didn't see much sign that the feds were doing anything. No G-men were combing the NYPD files, or questioning the cops who patrolled that beat, or talking to any of the guys in either homicide or narco.