Nightmare Kid: The Young Predator Of Gameworld
The Nightmare Kid was a juvenile Yautja in Jonathan Maberry's short story "Gameworld," published in the 2017 anthology Predator: If It Bleeds. Salvagers found him in a crashed ship on Ceres, and the promoter Sake Chiba kept him at Gameworld, an illegal fight club in the asteroid belt, as a captive fighter. Chiba gave him his nickname and matched him against the former soldier Hogarth Fix. When the young hunter's father broke into the station, the Nightmare Kid killed Chiba with Fix's help, took his skull and spine, and left alive with his father.
Biography
Capture On Ceres
The young hunter's story with humans began on Ceres, the dwarf planet that was being terraformed for its minerals and water ice. A salvage ship found him in the wreckage of a crashed ship there. He was badly hurt and starving, but he killed seven of the eleven people in the salvage crew before he was taken. His real name never came out, and his origin remained a mystery to the humans who held him. Sake Chiba, a former sumo champion from New Osaka and one of the richest men in the solar system, then acquired him for his private club.
Owning an alien life form was illegal everywhere, even in the lawless stretch of the asteroid belt known as the rocks, where Gameworld stood. Chiba admitted that a government or a museum would have paid him about a billion dollars, but he expected far more from the creature as a fighter. Chiba's scientists had never seen anything like the alien's luminous green blood and wanted to publish their findings, which Chiba refused. His molecular biologists also planned experiments with its DNA, so he insisted that the creature stay alive.
Captivity At Gameworld
At Gameworld the captive lived at the bottom of a round containment tank thirty feet deep, with smooth walls, straw on the floor, and no bed or furniture. Bones, torn meat, and green waste lay scattered around him. When Chiba first showed him to Hogarth Fix, he stood a little over six feet, with dense muscle, pale mottled skin, long clawed fingers, and braided hair that hung to his shoulders. He wore a lensed helmet, leather trunks, and torn netting over his limbs and chest, and thin green scars crossed his body where a few cuts oozed fresh blood.
Chiba tested him first against animals, including a cougar and a mountain gorilla, and later against people, none of whom came back. Only handlers in exosuits armed with military-grade shock rods had been able to beat him. Most of his crash injuries had healed by the time Chiba showed him to Fix, though recent scrapes from the tests remained. Chiba offered Fix nine million dollars to last three minutes with the creature in the ring, on the condition that both fighters stayed alive. As the two men talked above the pit, the alien raised his head as if he followed their words.
The Bout With Hogarth Fix
Several weeks later, the alien rose into the steel fighting floor of Gameworld inside a cylinder painted with monsters from old horror stories. Heavy shackles on cables held his wrists and ankles. He wore black trunks and no helmet, and the crowd saw his spiked mandibles and sharp teeth for the first time. Chiba admitted that he did not know the creature's name and introduced him as the Nightmare Kid. Forty guards with shock rods surrounded the floor, and a ceiling turbo-cannon locked its laser sight on him while the bout went out live across the solar system.
The Nightmare Kid watched the guards warily, as if he remembered the shock rods. When the shackles came off, he faced Fix, who raised his left fist in salute. The alien answered with his own left arm after a small twitch of his right shoulder, which suggested he was right-handed. At the start signal he took a wide, ritual stance and roared before he attacked. He was very fast, and his claws drew first blood across Fix's hip, which he celebrated with a howl to the crowd. Fix answered by striking the same spot on his thigh again and again.
Over the next two minutes the Kid used his strength, speed, and reach in many different attacks and cut Fix repeatedly, once deeply across the left forearm. Fix's punches to his thigh left him limping, but he showed no sign of tiring. Fix had deliberately fought mostly with his left hand, and when the Kid built his attacks around that, Fix switched to his stronger right. The human stamped on the alien's foot, broke one of his mandibles with a headbutt, and kicked his damaged thigh until he fell. Fix was about to try to break his neck when the wall behind the fighters' benches exploded.
His Father's Attack
The blast threw the Nightmare Kid and Fix into the audience among burning debris and the dead. Red pulse blasts tore through the crowd as an armored hunter, at least a foot taller and much broader than the Kid, appeared out of a shimmer like a cloaked figure. It killed the enhanced fighter Helga with three steel wrist blades and began killing the remaining fighters. The Kid pushed himself out from under debris and bodies, bleeding green, and hissed at Fix with his three remaining mandible spikes.
He stepped toward Fix and then stopped. His anger turned to Chiba, who was trying to escape in his private elevator with six guards while panicked customers clawed at the doors. The Kid charged across the floor, cut down people in his way, and forced himself into the elevator before the doors closed. He fought the guards inside as the car rose, and three of them were left broken on the floor. Watching the larger hunter, Fix realized that the alien he had fought was a younger, less skilled version of the same kind, and that its parent had come to take it back.
The Death Of Sake Chiba
In Chiba's office, the injured Kid could barely stand, and the former sumo champion was beating him, though the young alien never stopped fighting. A guard's shock rod drove him to his hands and knees while Chiba took a heavy navy pistol from his gun safe. The larger hunter then smashed through the elevator door and leapt into the office, and Chiba grabbed the Kid by the throat and pressed the gun to his head as a shield. The Kid hissed but did not struggle, and Fix, on the floor nearby, threw him Helga's commando knife.
The Nightmare Kid caught the knife, bit into Chiba's gun arm, and gutted the promoter. His father slapped him twice across the mouth, hugged him once, pushed him away, and slapped him again. The Kid held up the bloody knife, and the adult nodded at it. He then cut open Chiba's back and tore out the skull and spine as his trophy. The father looked at Fix, the body, the knife, and the trophy, and gave Fix a small nod. Then both hunters jumped down the elevator shaft toward the screaming below.
Personality And Abilities
The Nightmare Kid fought like a trained warrior even as a juvenile. He was much stronger than a man, extremely fast, and able to leap great distances for his size, and his long claws cut like scalpels. He took a great deal of pain without slowing down, and he kept fighting after the guards, Chiba, and Fix had all hurt him badly. In captivity he killed most of a salvage crew while starving and injured, and he beat every animal and human fighter that Chiba sent against him.
Chiba believed the Kid enjoyed extreme combat, and the alien openly celebrated small successes, such as first blood against Fix. He showed hatred for his captors but learned caution around the shock rods. His opening roar and wide stance looked tribal and ritualistic to Fix, and Chiba judged that he moved like a warrior with real training in a fighting style. He was also naive, and in the ring he trusted the left-handed fighting pattern Fix fed him until it cost him a mandible. He held up the knife for his father's approval and took a hunter's trophy from the man who had imprisoned him.
Behind The Scenes
Jonathan Maberry created the Nightmare Kid for "Gameworld," the last story in Predator: If It Bleeds, which Bryan Thomas Schmidt edited and Titan Books published in 2017. The story was told from Hogarth Fix's point of view and never gave the young hunter a real name. It switched between calling him it and he, and Fix guessed only that the adult was a mother or father. The larger hunter was never named either, and the story did not say how the Kid's ship crashed on Ceres. "Gameworld" is his only appearance.
Maberry returned to Fix in "The Fix Is In," published in Predator: Eyes of the Demon by Titan Books in 2022. In that story Fix recalled the Nightmare Kid as a juvenile of roughly preteen or young teen age and called the adult hunter the Kid's father. The recap set Chiba's offer at a million and a half rather than the nine million of the original story, and Fix noted that he never saw the ship that took the Kid away. The Gameworld fights are also discussed among other tournament hunts.
Conclusion
The Nightmare Kid was a young Yautja taken from a wreck on Ceres and held as a captive fighter at Gameworld. He killed most of the crew that found him, won every test match Sake Chiba arranged, and nearly lost his bout with Hogarth Fix after Fix broke one of his mandibles. When his father attacked the station, the Kid went after Chiba, survived the fight in the private office, and killed the promoter with the knife Fix threw him. He took Chiba's skull and spine as a trophy and left alive with his father.
Appearances
- Predator: If It Bleeds, "Gameworld" by Jonathan Maberry (2017)
- Predator: Eyes of the Demon, "The Fix Is In" by Jonathan Maberry (2022), mentioned only
Tag Categories: Individual Predators | Predators From The Novels | Predators Who Survived | Predator Lore
