Bowing low, they offered their respects to the lifeless Predator, then they lifted his corpse and carried him toward a long ramp that lowered silently out of the belly of the spaceship.
Lex fumbled at her belt for a weapon but came up empty—her club was gone, lost in the fight. She crouched in a martial arts fighting stance, fists raised and ready to lash out. Lex was willing to take them all on if she had to. For a long moment there was a tense standoff.
Stepping in front of her, a tall Predator with long, drooping dreadlocks and ornate, jewel-studded armor considered her through blank eye slits. Slowly, the creature lifted its hand and traced the scar on Lex’s forehead, then pointed to the same symbol burned into its own mask.
Lex’s eyes darted to the others. All of them bore the same distinctive mark.
The Predator elder nodded once, then presented Lex with his heavy spear. As she grasped the object in her hands, the inhuman hunters bowed their heads in a gesture of respect.
Then the elder turned his back on the woman and winked to invisibility. Lex traced his retreating footsteps, along with the prints of the others, as they marched through the snow to the starship.
The ramp silently closed and the craft’s main thrusters roared. Saint Elmo’s fire danced across its metallic surface and the ship vanished, though Lex could still hear its roar and feel the hum of its engines rumbling in her chest. Finally, in a blast of snow and ice, the spacecraft was gone.
Drenched in blood—human, Alien and Predator—and wreathed by bruises, Lex watched it go. In her own gesture of respect, she touched the tribal scar that branded her forehead. Finally, she lowered the spear and reached into her pocket.
Lex gazed at Sebastian’s rusty Pepsi cap for a long moment. Then she turned her eyes skyward once more, where a break in the clouds revealed a brilliant full moon hanging low in the Antarctic sky. Watching the clouds drift across the lunar surface, Lex recalled Sebastian’s words, and she spoke them in a voice tinged with awe and sadness.
“Hunter’s Moon.”
EPILOGUE
His kin had laid him in a place of honor, at the base of the statue of their savage thunder god. His faceplate was off, the scar on his forehead a dark stain on his pallid flesh.
The funeral ceremony was over and the other clan members had filed out to enter their individual cryostasis tubes, where they would hibernate during the long voyage back to their home world.
Alone now, in a chamber heavy with incense, Scar’s corpse twitched.
Suddenly the gray flesh below his dead heart bulged and stretched as if some creature was trapped inside his body, fighting to break free….
