"The United States will never start a war. We do not want a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough of war and hate and oppression."
- address by President Kennedy on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban, June 10th 1963: one year, one month and twenty-eight days before the start of the Vietnam War

"Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
- ibid.

For a moment, neither of them moved, then Malakov lifted himself up on his good elbow to get a better look. A thick grey smoke was settling over the train yard, drifting their way on a gentle breeze and bringing with it acrid odours of burning plastics. The wreckage was strewn over a wide area, but the larger lumps, those still recognisable as part of the freight carriage, or the alien ship, had all landed within a short distance of each other. As they listened, there were no more roars. The only sound they could hear was the crackling of the plethora of raging fires.

"It couldn't have survived that," Shelby hissed.

"Well, something did," Malakov muttered.

Shelby swallowed hard and rose to his feet, squeezing his wounded arm above the elbow like a man having a heart attack.

"Be careful, Jack."

Shelby nodded, stepping around him. He still didn't know what he was going to do. He was hoping that final roar was the creature in its death throes.

It just didn't sound like something ready to die.

Shelby approached the furthest reaches of the explosion, the light debris that had been carried a long way, still burning, or by now burnt out. A few seconds later he found himself inside the smoke haze, and it seared at his throat and pricked at his eyes. He let go of his wounded arm and covered his mouth and nose instead.

Letting out - but trying to stifle - the occasional cough, Shelby proceeded into the debris field, the chunks of metal getting larger. Some were embedded vertically in the earth where they had fallen, looking like gothic gravestones.

Fire flickered across the rubble, dying down now, so that it looked like an eerie glowing moss. But it was still choking out thick plumes of black and white smoke, which twisted and merged in the air, turning grey.

The ground beneath Shelby's feet had been baked hard and black by the heat blast. What little grass there had been was vapourised. In places the ground was burning or smoking itself, but Shelby recognised the stinging taste in the back of his throat as that of burning fuel - just no fuel he'd ever smelt.

The further he got in amongst the wreckage, the less burning, but the more smoke there was. It was quieter, like the calm in the centre of a storm, with all the crackling flames sounding distant behind him. The ground was covered in glass shards and charred wood, which crunched loudly beneath his feet.

He found himself on the train tracks, and followed them, diverting only briefly around immovably large hunks of debris. He reached the end of the tracks, where the carriage had been, and found the blast-crater. It was large enough so that the alien ship, were it still intact, could be buried in it quite capably.

The train tracks appeared to droop over the edge of the pit, like they were soft, and bending down, Shelby found little pieces of wooden shrapnel stuck in the metal; the heat blast here had been so hot it had turned the tracks momentarily molten.

Shelby stood upright. At the bottom of the pit was a large wooden section of the freight carriage - Shelby could just about make out riveted wood. It was burnt through, its surface black and flaking, and it was still smouldering.

Shelby was already skidding down the side of the crater, unable to use his hands to steady himself on the scorched earth, when he realised that piece of wood was only just big enough to conceal a man. He reached the bottom, kicked over the wood - it shattered and broke up into many pieces.

Beneath it he found an arm. The creature's arm. It had been severed just beneath the shoulder. The skin was burnt off it, and black, cooked muscle showed through from beneath, but it was so large, Shelby knew whom it belonged to. And if the size hadn't given it away, then the panel bound to it with a criss-cross of leather did. But this wasn't the one with the blades, Shelby thought.

He turned and started climbing up the side of the pit. He reached the top and looked around. There was no sign of the creature. Perhaps he and Malakov had -

Suddenly, talons seized him around the ankle.

Shelby yelled out in shock.

The hand, as strong as Shelby had ever imagined it, pulled him right off his feet; almost pulled his foot right off, Shelby thought in that moment. He scrabbled backward on his palms, the hot ash scalding the skin of his hands.

But he had to get away. Had to get away.

And he fell right back down into the crater, regaining his balance for a fraction of a second as he toppled on the edge, then landed, hard, on his back, splintering what little was left of the wood beneath him, and striking the ground hard.

Striking it with his shoulder. He winced, rolling over, the pain arcing through his body, making him feel sick. But he still opened his eyes.

Opened them in time to see the creature emerge. There was a massive lump of rubble from the alien craft at the edge of the crater. Shelby recognised it as coming from the front of the beetle-esque ship. It was so large, so heavy, part of it had buried itself in the earth as it fell. But as Shelby watched, it twitched. Then it rocked, and then with an ear-splitting screech, it was pushed over from beneath.

The creature stood up on the edge of the crater, looked down at a horrified Shelby lying in the bottom of the pit, and screamed at him.

Shelby was frozen. As the smoke swirled around the creature, Shelby saw that its severed arm wasn't the only injury it had sustained. To say that it had survived the explosion, he decided, wasn't an entirely accurate description.

All across its body, the creature's flesh hung off it in burnt, bloody strips. But it didn't have red blood, it had thick luminous green blood, and this was oozing out of wounds and trickling down its body, running in and out of deep, gritty holes that had been gouged out of the thing's bodily tissues by flying shrapnel.

Both its legs were intact, but raw. As with the creature's severed arm, Shelby could see the muscles in one exposed calf. The leather loincloth was gone; only a smouldering waistband remained. Its genitals - if those were its genitals - were black, indescribable, source of the constant stream of blood running down its legs.

The stump of the creature's left shoulder flinched spasmodically. Occasionally it spurted green blood. The other arm was in better condition, though even in a quick glance Shelby spotted several fingers missing. But then the creature turned its hand, extended its wrist-blades, and Shelby saw those fingers were still there, just broken backward, hanging from loose, meaty shreds of tendon.

The creature stumbled awkwardly around the edge of the crater as Shelby squirmed in the bottom. Its chest-plates were torn open, one side hanging off the creature's back, the other bent inwards, bent into its chest.

When the creature reached the other side of the crater's rim, it was no longer in silhouette, and Shelby saw its face clearly for the first time. Its mask was gone, but Shelby barely recognised the ugly motherfucker from Hanlon's drawing.

Its distinctive black dreadlocks were gone, burnt off completely. One half of its twin-set of mandibles was gone, broken off, and green blood dribbled from the wounds into its flappy mouth, making it splutter and spit. Shelby couldn't help but wince when he saw the long, twisted scrap of metal sticking in the creature's left eye. Green blood welled around it. The other eye, yellow, reptilian, stared at Shelby.

You did this, didn't you? It seemed to say.

Shelby picked himself up, staggered back away from the creature. A moment later, it thundered down into the crater. Shelby yelped, turned and scrambled up the edge. He didn't stop. He ran. It was only when he tripped that he looked back.

He was at a safe distance - if there were such a thing. Breathing hard, the smoke no longer making his clogged lungs reject the poisoned air, he put his hands on his knees and looked back into the pit, back at the creature.

It hadn't been coming for him after all.

It was standing in the bottom of the crater, crouching over its severed arm. For a brief second, Shelby had an at-any-other-time-amusing flash of the creature in a hospital having it surgically reattached. Were these aliens that advanced?

As Shelby craned his neck to see what it was doing, he heard the creature making a bizarre clicking sound to itself. It sounded like the chattering of a magpie, at the back of its mouth; or the rev of a quiet engine, a muffled machine gun.

What was it doing? Shelby kept asking himself.

It had flipped open a panel on the severed arm. Even from this distance Shelby could see several small panels. The creature was pressing buttons.

Behind him, Malakov began calling out.

"The spear!" he cried. "The spear!"

Shelby turned only his head. He saw Malakov, who had now perched himself up against the ladder at the bottom of the sentry tower. He was gesturing with a thrusting motion, using his good arm; gesturing desperately.

Shelby's focus fell on what lay between Malakov and himself, what was still sticking out of the ground, but now at an oblique angle, dislodged as it had been - but not completely - by the explosion of the alien craft.

It was the alien's spear.

And it was only yards from Shelby, blackened and smouldering, its ornate decorations burnt off in the blast. Shelby ran for it, grabbed it.

Then he turned back toward the pit.

The creature was still crouching down, crouching over its arm, pressing buttons with its few remaining fingers. Shelby charged down into the crater, his feet flailing beneath him, the spear held aloft in both hands.

Just as the bastard had come for him.

In the fraction of a second before Shelby drove the spear-point into its owner's belly, the creature looked up, saw, swung a backhand at the spear.

Shelby didn't - wouldn't - let go of his only weapon. He fell with it, flying back against the far side of the crater - but out of the creature's reach.

But it was coming for him. It dropped the severed arm again, the panels on its screen, Shelby noticed, alight with strange green symbols.

The creature howled and swung its wrist-blades at Shelby. Shelby thrust the spear up, not at an angle to impale the beast, but hard enough to catch the twin blades on either side of his weapon - wedge them there, in fact.

The creature wrenched backward, but the spear stuck fast, and Shelby still did not let go. He went with it, up, at the end of the creature's grasp, and only when the creature swung him around did his weight pull the spear free.

He flew against the edge of the crater, and slid back down to the bottom. The creature was on him again in a second. This time it was too fast. The spear was still lying across Shelby's sprawled ankles. He tried sliding further down into the crater, but that way there was only the creature's legs. The creature's blades caught Shelby in the shoulder, his bad shoulder. He felt a tendon tear just as easily as the fabric of his trousers had beneath the freight carriage and he screamed.

But now he was free again. And his arm, in more agony than ever before, was not yet beyond use. He hefted the spear and drove it right into his attacker's thigh. It reared back, hollering madly, blood and spittle flying from its mouth.

The raw calf muscle split as Shelby retracted the spear. A jet of green blood squelched all over him as the creature staggered back.

Shelby scrambled to his feet, swung the spear, caught the creature in the shoulder, drove the bastard away. But really, he was just making it even madder.

When he struck again, the creature screeched, swung his blades, intercepted the attack - and shored the end of the spear clean off.

Shelby gasped. The creature took a few back-steps, trying hard to keep its balance when it was unable to use a free hand to steady itself whenever it lunged for Shelby. Shelby took the chance to escape around it, back into the open centre of the blast-pit. He backed off, turning the spear around to the other point.

And then he trod on the creature's severed arm.

The creature howled when he did that, almost as if it still felt the pain. With its one eye, now larger, wider, more ravenous than ever, it glared at Shelby. Snorting like a bull, it lifted up its wrist-blades for another attack, started forward.

Shelby - and he didn't know why he did it - suddenly stooped down, picked up the alien's severed limb and cast it out of the crater.

The creature had never made so much noise as it made then. Its sole set of surviving mandibles flexed maniacally. It opened its mouth to scream so loudly that Shelby could see it had a long, pointed tongue inside its vaginal jaws.

It charged at Shelby, who was lying on his back. Shelby brought up the spear and the creature ran into it. Its battered chest-plate took most of the damage, but more green blood poured from the wound. Close to its heart, Shelby thought.

Though only if it had a heart in the same place as a human.

And now the creature had its one good arm around the spear, and that one arm, with its hand of three fingers, was stronger than Shelby's grip. He was going to lose the spear, one way or the other. He went up with it again.

The creature sent him careering up, up.

He came down again at the edge of the crater. He had a choice. Keep the spear, stay in the crater. Let it have the spear, and run.

Shelby let go of the broken end of the spear. He scrabbled over the edge of the pit, his fingers throbbing with the pain of grabbing burning rubble to pull himself out and clear. The creature thrust the spear into the ground behind him.

And just like before, it missed him.

Shelby ran. He was on the wrong side of the crater. The pit was between him and Malakov. The creature was between him and Malakov.

But he was between the creature and its arm.

Shelby guessed that's what it was after. He was just a bug to this thing now, a fly bothering him when he was trying to concentrate. He wondered, in fact, if he'd ever been more than a fly to this thing. He ran toward the arm.

As he ran, he heard the whoosh behind him.

He only really realised what it was when he found himself face down in the hot ash, a sharp, squeezing pain in his chest, feeling pinned down.

Looking beneath him, he saw the end of the spear.

The rest of it was sticking out the back of him. Shelby could feel it wobbling as he moved. As he tried to move. His lung, punctured, he coughed, but it wasn't the smoke choking him now. It was the blood.

And he could hear it, hear the creature coming. It was no longer screaming, no longer howling, no longer rasping feverishly. It was making that clicking sound again; it sounded content. It was getting closer, and closer.

Using the last of his strength, Shelby pushed himself up, over, then slowly pulled the spear out of his chest from behind. Tears streamed from his eyes, the unstoppable tears of such pain - but maybe, perhaps, also defeat.

He got the spear out and turned over in time to see the creature loom over him, and for a moment, it just stood there. Then it reclaimed its spear from the ground, where Shelby had thrown it, and lifted it above its head.

Shelby stared up into its face; calm, acceptant, just waiting. In the final few seconds, as the creature brought the spear down toward his chest, Shelby thought he saw the alien's outline suddenly silhouetted against a white holylight.

Was this death? Shelby thought to himself.

No, it the fucking spotlight! Li's voice said inside his head.

And in that instant, Shelby was back. Back in time to hear the monstrous peal of the machine gun from the sentry tower. Back in time to see the creature's single eye flare with shock and realisation - as the bullets ploughed into the back of its skull and burst through its face in an explosion of blood and bone.

Shelby rolled once more to the side, but this time when the creature fell upon him with its spear, it went all the way. It collapsed to the ground, breaking the spear beneath it. It fell with such weight that it sent up a cloud of ash.

Shelby staggered erect, took a few steps back, just in case. But the noise the creature made, the only noise it made, was the sound of the last of the air in its alien lungs whistling out through the bullet-holes Malakov had put in its head.

Shelby waved at the spotlight, already feeling giddy.

Then he collapsed.

The next thing he knew, he was stirring, lying on the ground, with the alien dead next to him, and Malakov on his knees, tending to him.

"Here, have a souvenir," Malakov said.

He hefted up the creature's mask. It was undamaged.

Shelby nearly laughed, winced. "Don't make me laugh, Anton."

"I still got one of these left." Malakov held up a small vial.

"What is it?"

"A tincture of morphine. You want it?"

Shelby smiled. "Sure." Then: "You took some too?"

"Oh, yeah! I'm flying, Jack. I'm flying."

"So that's how you did it."

"Did what?"

"Climb up that tower and use that gun."

Malakov shook his head, grinned. "Nice theory, but the drugs were up in the tower all along. I had to climb up there just to get them."

"Then I'm impressed."

Malakov smiled. "Yeah. About your theory, about how you learn to cope after you've been shot." He paused. "Maybe it isn't bullshit after all."

Shelby laughed; it hurt; he didn't care.

Khrushchev was already awake when Ana the serving girl knocked gently at his bedroom door and came in without awaiting so much as a grunt.

"There's someone here to see you, sir."

"Who is it?" he grumbled. "Gharkov?"

"No, sir. It's Leonid Brezhnev. He says it's important."

Khrushchev groaned distastefully and turned over. But he heard the door open, heard a heavier pair of feet than Ana's come across the room.

"Leave us," Brezhnev's voice told Ana.

Khrushchev sat up grumpily as she closed the door.

"What do you want, Brezhnev?" he said.

"Nikita, there's some things you need to know."

"I'll make my report to Marshal Gharkov, and when there aren't any more attacks, that'll corroborate my findings. I'll leave your name out of it. You can be one of the dozens of unidentified victims of this thing. They'll never doubt it."

Malakov was helping Shelby through the airbase, but Shelby thought he was helping Malakov. They had found the base commander's abandoned office, and a map of the base on the wall pointed the way to the infirmary.

"What about Cuba?" Shelby asked.

"Khrushchev will stand down our nukes when he's convinced the threat has passed. Kennedy will follow suit. Might take a few days, though."

"But they'll still be there."

Malakov nodded. "Yeah, but your CIA friend was right. We now have so many nuclear weapons each they are their own deterrent. There's no way to win a nuclear war. There's enough nuclear bombs to kill us all."

"I didn't mean the bombs. I meant Kennedy and Khrushchev. They'll still be there. They'll still be sitting in their palaces this time tomorrow, and if another one of these alien bastards comes looking for its pal, this could all happen again."

Malakov chuckled. "Oh, I wouldn't worry too much about that, if I were you, Jack. I'll give Kennedy a year, Khrushchev less - that's one of the benefits of being a dictatorship, Jack: you don't need an election to get rid of a bad egg."

"You really think that will happen?"

"Of course. The future's far too important to be left to chance, Jack. Or, even worse, chancers, like Khrushchev and Kennedy."

Shelby smiled. "Gonna become an assassin, are we?"

"Oh, no." Malakov snorted. "I'm through being a player in this game."

Shelby rasped a chuckle. "So what next for Anton Malakov?"

"I really don't know." Malakov sighed.

They walked a little further, both limping, both breathless.

"Ever thought about becoming a fisherman?"

"A fisherman?" Malakov cried.

Shelby grinned.

NOTES:
And thus, at 1.44pm on August 24th 2004, I typed the final word: "grinned" - how inappropriate for a story about killin' and slaughterin'. I envisaged this and the last chapter only being one chapter, but they ended up taking 7500 words, which I wrote in the space of just over twenty-four hours. If I'd written the entire story that fast, I would have managed it in a week (as it is, it took just over two months, having been started properly on June 15th). 7500 words is under an eighth of the story, which ran to a total of almost 57,000 words, making it my third longest story by only a chapter's breadth (I wrote another fan-fic in 1997/8 that was just over 60,000 words).

I am overall happier with this story than I am "The Rabbits Of Roadkill Turnpike". Apart from two awkward, exposition-heavy chapters in the last third, this story was generally more fun to write, and the end result is less waffly and portentous. I had a more triumphant feeling of achievement with this grand finale, which felt suitably grand, and exciting to write, seeing as I'd held off such a full-on fight with the Predator until the ending, whilst in "RORT" the final battle between the rabbits was just another skirmish in a war that had lasted for 40,000-odd words beforehand.

Where I preferred writing "RORT" was with the characters, because I never felt inhibited to cut loose with them, instead of sticking to the plot. At numerous times in this story I felt the urge to go somewhere else with the characters that would have got me into a pickle with the envisaged ending (even though the particulars changed therein - originally Malakov was going to blow up the alien ship, and save Shelby, and the Predator wouldn't survive at all). As it is, I don't think such plot-based thrillers are my bag after all. Great to watch Kiefer Sutherland running around saving Los Angeles (again), but not as much fun to write. I think I got the thriller bug out of my system now.