Predator: If It Bleeds: Anthology Overview And Stories
Predator: If It Bleeds is a 2017 short-story anthology edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt and published by Titan Books on 17 October 2017. Schmidt put it together for the thirtieth year of Predator, drawing on the films, Dark Horse comics, and earlier novels, and he brought back Tim Lebbon, Kevin J. Anderson, Steve Perry, S. D. Perry, and John Shirley with newer writers. The sixteen stories send Yautja through Viking keeps, feudal Japan, the American Civil War, the Punitive Expedition, Vietnam, Hurricane Katrina, and Colonial Marine space, then pick up Sloane after Alaska and Mike Harrigan twenty-five years after Los Angeles.
Short Stories
The collection prints sixteen original stories in this order, each with its own hunter and ending, from Tim Lebbon's Devil Dogs through Jonathan Maberry's Gameworld. A hunter who dies in one piece does not return in the next.
Devil Dogs
By Tim Lebbon
Captain Akoko Halley of the 39th Spaceborne, the DevilDogs, left Charon Station aboard the Sleek-class destroyer Doyle. Gerard Marshall of the Company's Thirteen sent her after comms failed at the ArmoTech research station Trechman Two, ten billion kilometers beyond Pluto. The civilian on board was Del Kalien of Section Seven, listed as a science observer, with final say on the job. Halley was addicted to phrail after a dropship crash smashed a disc in her back. The four Marines with her, Sergeant Tew, Corporal Jane Hanning, Rogers, and Shearman, plus Rosartz, were strangers drawn from her own regiment.
A drone found no hull damage and no visiting ship. The hunter had been brought in for research and had escaped. Kalien wanted the computer core more than a rescue. Halley boarded in two fireteams. They found labs of bio-mechanical samples and humans hung by the feet with spines torn out. The Yautja ambushed Tew's team, huge, helmetless, and bandaged, with sensor pads in facial wounds. Rogers was run through. Hanning was smashed into the ceiling. Tew's plasma shot ruptured the hull and sealed that zone, and Kalien later reported the hunter was still taking trophies from Tew.
Halley's team pulled an obsidian core cube, then opened fire on a bloodstained Company survivor at a locked door. The hunter dropped through the ceiling, impaled Rosartz, and threw her into Shearman hard enough to kick him open. Shearman detonated a plasma grenade. Halley reached the airlock lobby and found the burned hunter dying there. Kalien refused to let her onto the Doyle without the core and waited in the docking arm with a gun. She sent the hunter through the airlock, primed a plasma charge, and blew the arm apart, throwing Kalien and the Yautja into space locked together. Halley was the only boarding-party survivor. She meant to take a lifeboat and call Devil Dogs rescue after she set her story. Lebbon later made her a major in the Rage War novels, starting with Predator: Incursion.
Stonewall's Last Stand
By Jeremy Robinson
General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson took a five-man recon team into the woods around Chancellorsville, Virginia, on the night of 2 May 1863. His corps had already flanked Joseph Hooker's army on Robert E. Lee's plan, and battle was set for dawn. Goose, Cotton, Cracker Jack, Johnny Boy, and Gator went with him. Union talk in the trees was about a lone giant that had killed nine men without shots or bodies left behind.
They took Union captain Jason Ames and two survivors. A cloaked hunter speared Cotton through the chest and through a kneeling Union soldier's head, then reeled both into the canopy. Johnny Boy cut a running Union man's throat, then found skinned, headless, spine-torn corpses hung in the trees, Cotton among them. A shot at glowing eyes drew a roar and green blood, and a spinning disc took Johnny Boy's head. Gator slashed a cloaked midsection and had his neck twisted. Goose's rifle and revolver dented the helmet but did not go through. A shoulder cannon killed Goose, and Goose's last round damaged the hunter's wrist.
Ames planted a torch in the open field as a cannon mark. The hunter shed caster and helmet for a blades-and-disc duel. Jackson's sabre was sheared. Grapeshot split the hunter's head and wrecked the body. Ames poured kerosene and burned the remains so neither army would treat the woods as the Devil's ground, then gave Jackson a horse. Jackson rode back through the same forest and was shot by his own pickets. He died on 10 May 1863 of infection from that wound. Ames lived. Goose, Cotton, Johnny Boy, Gator, and the remaining Union men were dead. A streak of light rose from the forest into the stars after the hunter died.
Rematch
By Steve Perry
Sloane and Mary were living at the old McGee place near Crown Pond in a remote Oregon forest, nine years after Alaska, in a sequel to Predator: Turnabout. Sloane still carried a single-shot custom MegaBeast in .610 GNR and a BFR in .500 Max. Mary had a Winchester .308. Fragments of recordings from the Alaska fight had reached a hunter ship. Vagouti and her mate Nakande came for the sniper who had killed hunters there. Nakande treated Sloane as old and unarmed, then used a meth-lab RV deeper in the woods as a warm-up.
Plasma killed Harvey, Martin, and Beau. Deputy Mac found the bodies. Sloane and Mary refused to split up, put on ghillie suits, and ambushed a cloaked hunter on a narrow trail. Both rifles hit Nakande in the lung and hip. He died after underestimating Sloane. Vagouti shut off his wrist bomb so she could finish the hunt herself. She slashed the couple's truck, three bikes, and the RV, then climbed a Douglas fir over Mac's cruiser and waited until all three were in the car.
Sloane had Mary crouch into the back and only pretended to enter. A falling cone gave her away. He fired into empty-looking space on a thick branch. She fell, her cloak failed, and her plasma trench missed him by half a meter. He finished her with the revolver at about sixty meters. Her self-destruct began to flash. They ran the cruiser out, and the blast half a mile back shoved the car sideways. Sloane, Mary, and Mac lived. Nakande, Vagouti, and the three bikers were dead.
May Blood Pave My Way Home
By Weston Ochse
Lieutenant Providence Pope of B Troop, 10th Cavalry, was in a boxed valley in central Mexico in 1916, late in Pershing's Punitive Expedition after Carrizal. Captain Sunderson had camped A and B Troops, about a hundred Buffalo Soldiers, while the army was being recalled and Woodrow Wilson wanted the 10th for Europe. Invisible movement knocked over a rifle tripod. Comanches crawled in first, and Sergeant Major Husker John's owl call and grazing fire broke that attack.
A cloaked hunter appeared at B Troop's flag. Pope shot it in the back and chest. Its net pistol missed him and contracted on Private Steve Steve, cutting him to death. Husker John smashed the hunter's head with a stone. A taller Yautja with a long spear then cut through the troop. Sunderson packed A Troop around himself as a shield. Pope held the wounded hunter with its own net pistol and threatened to kill it. The spear-carrier answered in English, named them Yautja, and placed them with the Comanches. Pope released the wounded man. Sunderson shot the retreating pair in the back, and a smart-disc punched his chest and killed him.
Of a hundred men, sixty-five lived. A half-Comanche muleskinner brought an offer the next morning: the hunters had been with the Comanches about six months, and four humans versus four Yautja would leave the rest of the command alone. Pope took the slot with Husker John, Corporal Motes, and motorcycle scout Conroy. Terms were two weapons each, no Yautja armor if the humans left guns, no disc, and a fight to the death. Motes was beheaded. Conroy pinned and stabbed his opponent, then died in a last claw embrace. Husker John cut the hulking spear-carrier's throat. Pope took a thrown claw in the left shoulder and drove the pulled claw into the last hunter's eye after a net-pistol shot to the face. The bargain held. The tall leader asked Husker John to stay and teach them, and he accepted. Pope would report him dead, take Motes and Conroy back toward New Mexico, and leave the Army when his commission ended.
Storm Blood
By Peter J. Wacks and David Boop
Sergeant Lejeune's Louisiana National Guard fireteam was driving into flooded New Orleans on 29 August 2005, with Hurricane Katrina eighty miles out over the Gulf. Inigo, Nevaeh Khanna, and Tito had an unconscious Cajun boy, Frankie, and a Hi8 tape from a wrecked Jeep. The tape was a Cryptozoid Crackdown episode. Former HairForce rockers Darren and the Maestro had come into the bayou on 28 August to film a rougarou, and Frankie's father had been hired to play the creature. Something else killed the camp. Cameraman Jason died on the airboat as Haitian Creole driver Romilly Sibian pulled away.
Ro woke under the hunter after the Jeep wreck. Katrina rain shorted its cloak. It studied her, repeated "boy," named itself Ki'Sei, tossed her a triangular tracker locked on Frankie, and vanished. A bear-sized gray wolf later slammed the Humvee windshield. Ro warned them of two killers: an intelligent giant wolf, not a werewolf, and a nine-foot cloaked hunter that had spared her. The rougarou seized Inigo by the thigh, tore his leg free, and fled after Nevaeh's shotgun tore its shoulder and neck. Lejeune found no pulse.
They drove to St. Louis Cathedral. The Yautja came through a stained-glass window onto the altar, put three targeting lasers on the rougarou, and dropped a plasma bolt that collapsed the rear doorway. Tito opened fire, then died on wrist blades through the chest after stabbing the hunter's shoulder. The rougarou ripped off the hunter's mask. Lejeune clipped a winch hook to her vest, jumped on the beast's back, and noosed the cable around its neck. The hunter's blades went through her leg and pinned her to the hide. Ro rammed the Humvee into the pile and drove them into the storm. Ki'Sei jerked the cable free, drove its blades through the rougarou's eyes, and tore skull and spine out as a trophy, then left into the hurricane. A Coast Guard Dolphin lifted Ro, Lejeune, Frankie, and Nevaeh off the cathedral on 30 August. Ro broke the Hi8 tape and dropped it into the flood. In the helicopter Frankie opened his backpack on a battered rougarou cub his father had tranquilized before the killing started.
Last Report From The KSS Psychopomp
By Jennifer Brozek
Captain Tariq Ahmed took the Kosana Scout Ship Psychopomp into a year-old battle wreck in Sector Kilo-Mike-Kilo, Quadrant 7429. On the far side sat the scavenger torpedo-cruiser Oxenham, its emergency beacon about six days old. Ahmed went dark, then decided to board, kill scavengers, free prisoners if any, and claim the field for the Kosana Salvage Company. Engineer Trina Gannon, security chief Emery Mazur, medic Vito Cocci, and Zuri Becker crossed an umbilical in EVA suits. Paying passenger Gunnar Larson, a first-contact specialist, came aboard with Ahmed. Navigator Kaida Asari stayed on the Psychopomp.
Inside they found a man days dead, pinned to a corridor with scrap metal, plus scorch marks, dried viscera, and traps. Zuri and Vito reached a conference room turned trophy hall: human bones, skulls, spines on sinew, one headless flensed body hung upside down, and two living men in stripped gray uniforms. The younger woke, shouted "ghost," and looked past Zuri. She fired into a cloak. A large blade went through her. A net of cutting wire pinned Vito to a bulkhead. Gunnar holstered his blaster, drew a knife, and shouted a greeting. The cloak dropped on a two-meter armored hunter. It cut Gunnar from groin to sternum, then stabbed Vito. Ahmed's blasts bounced off a shield, and he ran.
Trina copied Shaw Doty's engineering overrides and tied Oxenham to her wrist pad. Ahmed triggered a corpse-trap and his comms died. At the airlock a limping hunter met them. Trina cut Oxenham's gravity. Emery launched himself at it and told her to go. She sealed the locks, uncoupled the umbilical, ordered Kaida to evac, and set Oxenham to self-destruct. Zuri, Gunnar, Vito, Ahmed, and Emery were dead. Trina and Kaida lived. The hunter was last seen as a possible blur in the umbilical. Whether the blast killed it is not shown. They filed a false last report of scavengers, a wild animal, and booby traps, split the claim reward, and listed death benefits for the crew except Gunnar. Trina called it her last scouting run.
Skeld's Keep
By S. D. Perry
Jarl the Sword's Son sailed north in 820 with sixteen fighters after three messages reached Jormungand the Skull's hall. The first message was that warlord Asger the Spear had killed Skeld the Boarstooth and taken the Keep. The second was that Asger had gone mad and was burning farms. The latest was that Asger had been dead since the taking, and Skeld's people were walking as draugar. Four Yautja watched the knorr from a hidden ship: retired elite Tli'uukop, called One Eye, and three recently Blooded students, Shriek, Ta'roga, and Kata'nu, son of Esch'ande. Tech was forbidden against primitives except a pulse-beam failsafe each carried.
The fishing village and farms were empty. At a pig farm they found animals beaten with rocks and a family killed a day or two earlier. Jarl refused draugar and called it madmen. Cloaked Ta'roga sat a hundred paces out, planning to take Jarl at dawn. Bowman Helta heard him, put an arrow into Ta'roga's inner thigh, and died when Shriek split his head. Shriek cut Thrain's throat. Ta'roga gutted Sten. Both hunters fled. One Eye treated them, then offered redemption: no armor, no cloak, no weapons, bare claws, and stay out of Kata'nu's hunt. He decided he would not bring more students to hunt men.
The Keep gate stood open over siege dead and burned bone-heaps. Mass screaming came from inside. Jarl's band charged. Kata'nu followed in cloak and read a high airborne fungal alkaloid spore in the crop. Skeld's and Asger's people were mixed in, fevered, unarmed, and trampling their own. Snow outlined Kata'nu. A sword cut his shoulder, and an axe went into his guts. One Eye released Shriek and Ta'roga unmasked and unarmed. Ult ran Shriek through the side and lost his head. Bjarke opened Ta'roga's back. Therin put an arrow in Ta'roga's chest. Jarl hamstrung a path, cut deep into Shriek's neck, and died when Shriek's fist shattered his sternum. Ta'roga was chopped apart. Stelgar, Thoralf, Rangvald, Therin, and about a dozen unarmed Keep people by the stables lived. Kata'nu would not shoot the survivors. He unmasked, held his mask out to Stelgar, and left through the gate. Stelgar put the mask on Jarl's chest, and they burned Skeld's Keep.
Indigenous Species
By Kevin J. Anderson
Young colonist Jerrick drove a solar combine on the settlement world Hardscrabble. One hundred fifty settlers had believed the colonization brochures, then learned there was no resupply ship coming. Native predators they called gruzzlies had already killed seven colonists in the first year, plus livestock, without eating Earth flesh. The beasts had black spiky fur, a flattened croc face, a plated belly, a spined tail, and rake claws.
Jerrick found the last of ten cattle being torn apart and left his plasma rifle in the cab. A gruzzly pinned him against a carcass. A cloak-shimmer put three red dots on the beast's chest. A plasma bolt opened a crater. The hunter decloaked, threw a javelin with a blue discharge, then finished the kill with blades and a shoulder cannon through the heart. He cut the head off with a humming blue saber, looked at unarmed Jerrick, dismissed him, and recloaked. That night the hills burned. Dawn showed energy-furrows through the grain and three headless gruzzly carcasses in the fields.
Later a singed gruzzly crushed a cloaked hunter in the wheat. The hunter stuck a charge to its back and blew out spine and heart. Jerrick's father Davin, the colony leader, went out alone with a plasma rifle. One shot wrecked the shoulder gun. The hunter threw the javelin through Davin's abdomen, cut the neck, and tore off the head with vertebrae as a poor trophy, then took the gruzzly head and limped into the smoke. That night Jerrick took the combine into a storm and found a much larger mother gruzzly over a decapitated cub. Clearing saws wrecked her arms. A cloaked hunter put a shoulder-bolt into her ribs. Jerrick left the cab, claimed the kill, put five plasma hits into her chest, then a point-blank throat shot, and severed the head. The hunter bowed, recloaked, and left him the carcass. Jerrick dumped the mother head outside the gate as a warning and shut the stockade. No hunter is shown killed.
Blood And Sand
By Mira Grant
Eleven-year-old Thomas "Tommy" Warrington and his twin sister Annie lived with Aunt Mary and Uncle Jack on a failing desert farm at Last Bridge Township, Montana, in 1933. Their mother had died of illness near San Francisco, and their father had died earlier of sickness. Mary treated Tommy as unpaid labor and was preparing Annie as a bride for a neighboring farm. Jack was violent. Two nights earlier a bright object had fallen in the desert.
Mary sent Tommy to fetch Jack from the cow pasture. Annie followed. They found a cougar split open with its head gone, then rattlesnakes cut open with fangs and rattles missing. At the boundary fence the barbed wire was torn, and Jack lay dead with his head gone. Behind a rock sat a small cracked machine and a pale, heatless light. A bipedal hunter with a pulsing, petal-like face stood behind them, holding a red segmented trophy of heads and spine. Tommy stepped between it and Annie. The hunter did not kill them. It gestured them back toward the farm.
Tommy decided the hunter killed only threats: the cougar, the snakes, and Jack. He told Annie to run, grabbed the cracked machine, and led the hunter to the house. He threw the device at Mary's feet and hid under the table. Mary grabbed the fireplace shotgun and fired. The hunter killed her, then nudged the shotgun toward Tommy. Tommy refused it. The hunter answered Gahn'tha-cte in an approving tone and left with its machine. Jack and Mary were dead. Tommy and Annie were free of the farm. Tommy believed that if the hunter came back, he would be fair game.
Tin Warrior
By John Shirley
The U.S. Army held a living Yautja at a high-desert blackout base called Area 57 after a scout ship was shot down in the same desert. The ship sat in Special Hangar Fourteen under a defense protocol that had already burned two technicians with plasma. Engineers reverse-engineered Yautja gear into the Mark III suit: HUD, nanotech composites, copied bio-mask circuits, wrist-gauntlet electronics, and a cable-fed plasma caster with one stored shot. General Ervin Dault stripped the hunter's self-destruct and returned only chest armor, camouflage, and wrist spikes. Sergeant Nialls, a Ranger with a Silver Cross, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts, was overdue for leave after three and a half months at the base.
Dault ordered an arena test: Nialls in Mark III versus the unarmed prisoner. Lieutenant Olivia Curson treated it as payback. Nialls had testified after Captain Speevis attacked her behind the mess, and Speevis had been sent to an Arctic radar post. Dault told Nialls to engage, not kill. The hunter feinted, cloaked, used the hidden spikes, redirected a caster blast into the wall, took the caster, and killed sniper Earl Smithson. It then killed sentries Cooper, Morris, and Lapsky, stuffing three heads in a duffel. Dault blamed Nialls and sent him out without the caster. He separately ordered sniper Cliff Javitz to wound the hunter for recapture, kill Nialls with a Stryker 30mm cannon, and make Curson's death look like the hunter's work.
The hunter turned away from town toward rancher Gage Binch's place and Hangar Fourteen. It killed Gage with a knife, then his own chainsaw, beheaded a Brahman bull, spiked the head on a post, and felled an oak onto the razor fence. Javitz's cannon wrecked the Humvee and killed Corporal Ramirez. The hunter boarded the unlocked Stryker, killed Javitz, drove through hangar riflemen, and rammed the doors. Copied Mark III circuits locked Nialls in place on the ship's control wavelength. The lander launched and contacted a cloaked mothership. From above the hunter destroyed the administrative building with Dault inside, then the exo-team building. It hovered over Nialls and Curson, then left without firing. Curson read that as respect for a close fight. Both had planned to testify against Dault. An MP roadblock turned them toward town.
Three Sparks
By Larry Correia
Nasu Hiroto returned to Kamakura after the Genpei War, when about twenty of Minamoto Yoritomo's warriors had been killed one by one, skinned, and hung from trees in Aokigahara, the forest north of Mount Fuji. Hiroto was a Minamoto captain, archer, and swordsman, a veteran of Dan-no-ura and Kurikara, later a ronin hunter of tigers in Tenjiku and white bears north of Joseon. Witnesses described an invisible demon that killed with spear, claw, or lightning and marked prey with three glowing points on the forehead or armor. Locals called it the Oni of Aokigahara, or Three Sparks. No villager had been harmed. Yoritomo sent Ashikaga Motokane and five bodyguards with Hiroto.
Hiroto entered the forest stripped to the waist, unarmed in appearance, carrying a bamboo pole as a conscripted porter. Earlier porters had come back alive. They found Hōjō Murashige headless in a stream, spine torn out. Tracks showed a long duel: great height, twin blades, green blood, and a severed clawed finger. After losing the finger, the hunter stopped accepting sword duels. It killed Kaneto with a plasma blast after the three-spark aim-points appeared. At sundown it attacked from the trees, blew another warrior's arm off, and killed the rest of the unnamed guard. Hiroto, ignored as a peasant, shot the cloaked hunter with jellyfish-venom arrows and wounded it. Motokane survived by running.
They followed glowing green blood. A land-bridge trap erupted like a mine, hurling Nobuo and setting the canopy on fire. The hunter locked three sparks on Hiroto. Zensuke charged and was cut in half by wristblades. An arrow broke the cloak by striking the wrist device. Hiroto saw a giant in a mesh net with a metal-looking head and sadhu-like hair. A boulder blast threw him. He rose with Nobuo's tetsubo, broke the hunter's shoulder and leg, and lost his left eye when the blades split his face. Nobuo threw him a sheathed katana. Hiroto drew and cut through the hunter's chest. Nobuo later beheaded Motokane in a hollow tree so the report would list no other survivors. Hiroto presented the hunter's mask to Yoritomo. The shogun tasked him to build a secret corps of irregular killers, shinobi-no-mono, modeled on the oni's methods.
The Pilot
By Andrew Mayne
Captain Billy Moore flew an SR-71 over a speck in the East Siberian Sea after a satellite infrared flash and a seismic signal. An electromagnetic pulse killed his instruments and the electronics at a Soviet site mapped as an Agricultural Resource Institute. He ejected onto rock and woke in a cold cell with gas lanterns. Commander Ratface and bald interrogator Jennings wanted SR-71 radar range. Moore answered with childhood stories and refused to talk. They cut his painkillers. Guard Vostov ran the beatings.
Hours later they brought in another robbed airman. Moore assumed a Chinese JZ-8 had suffered the same pulse. The two tapped a clang-code through a pipe: men, doors, guns, a prison map. Over about two days Moore learned the site was not a real prison, the staff were not trained interrogators, and the pulse plus a regional storm had cut them off from command. He killed Vostov with a sharpened spoon handle, took keys, and offered the other prisoner a joint breakout. The other man signaled yes, and that friends would come if freed.
Moore knocked out a guard, took an AK-47, and opened a large dark chamber. The prisoner he had nicknamed Ping was a tall, greenish-white biped with yellow-silver eyes, webbed wrong hands, and acid-smelling wounds leaking green-yellow fluid. Scalpels and carts showed Soviet examination. Moore unlocked him anyway. Ping field-stripped the AK, rejected it, and hammered a light fixture into a crude machete. He slaughtered the barracks, about twenty men in under two minutes. Outside, tarps hid a smashed craft in a crater. Moore, in a stolen Soviet uniform, shot the generator. In the blackout Ping cloaked, killed the remaining troops, and rolled the heads of Jennings and Ratface to Moore. Ping dragged the wounded Moore to a small bay that looked like an old meteor crater. Moore heard a splash, then a huge explosion. He woke later half in water at the Alabama reservoir where he had once swum with Julie Conner, still in a Russian uniform, wedding ring on his hand. How he reached Alabama is not shown. The hunter was gone after they left the Soviet site together, and the crashed ship had been destroyed so the Soviets could not keep it.
Buffalo Jump
By Wendy N. Wagner
Sheriff John Anderson had been the law in Coyote Creek, southern Oregon near the California border, for six years when Wallace McBurnie arrived in September. McBurnie had found Anderson on the streets of San Francisco at twenty-two and trained him as a safecracker for ten years. Anderson had left that life for his daughter Mina, who lived at Big Bess Sandford's boarding house. McBurnie wanted him for a Malheur County job. Anderson refused. The gang kidnapped Mina and beat Bess.
Anderson and deputy Lars Nielssen tracked the camp to a sandy peninsula with water on three sides. A cloaked hunter hit the camp with silent blue-white plasma. Fat Malone died with a horse hoof driven through his chest. A bolt burned through a fringed-jacket dandy and through Lars. A net snatched McBurnie and Mina across the creek. Piss-Bucket Johnson later died of burns after claiming an invisible ghost had waded the creek. Anderson hired tracker Billy Novak, about eighteen, with a Shasta grandmother and a Sioux grandfather from the 1849 rush. They followed oversized clawed prints into Lars's widow Eva's canyon field, where an invisible ship sat. Eva walked into it and vanished, then reappeared after Anderson cracked his head on the hull.
Novak's plan was a buffalo jump: stampede Eva's three hundred cattle into the cloaked ship. Fire and revolver shots started the run. The ship decloaked, about twice a Conestoga, arched back, roof hatch open. The hunter came out firing plasma and bursting cattle skulls. Anderson shot it in the head, and it dropped among the herd. Inside the red-lit hold they found a man's skull and spine in a clear box, McBurnie locked in a crate, and Mina hiding in a cabinet. A hunter then stood in the hatch, copied Anderson's voice saying "Mina," and did not stop them leaving. Anderson, Mina, Novak, and Eva survived. Lars, Fat Malone, Piss-Bucket, and most of the gang were dead. McBurnie was left in the crate when the ship lifted off. Anderson offered Novak the empty deputy job and gave Mina back her corn dolly.
Drug War
By Bryan Thomas Schmidt and Holly Roberds
Retired LAPD captain Mike Harrigan was speaking at an urban police conference in the Rio de Janeiro Convention Center, twenty-five years after the Los Angeles hunt in Predator 2. Former federal agent Garber, last seen with the OWLF in Los Angeles, was there selling for Legends, Inc., demonstrating the LI547-B1, a laser-scoped rifle with a grenade launcher. Explosions hit the Cortado Centro favela. Through the scope they saw a body hung and skinned. Metro homicide detectives Ana Rios and Rodrigo Villaca ran in with Harrigan. Favela resident Fernando guided Harrigan through the honeycomb alleys in exchange for a promise of Los Angeles.
They found a disc-decapitated corpse and a spear-killed body, plus plasma burns. Four drug-militia men with AK-47s and Brazilian IMBEL IA2s died to a cloaked hunter. It uncloaked, green-spotted, scalped a victim, and turned on Harrigan and Fernando. Garber hit it with a grenade. Fernando led Harrigan to a drug-lord bathtub cache of rifles, shotguns, and Uzis, with a corpse under the guns. Garber used a flamethrower and grenades, then lost his legs and had his head blown off. From a balcony Harrigan scoped the uncloaked hunter, which looked at him and said "Ooman… Cetanu." Fernando pelted it with fruit. Harrigan shot the left shoulder. Green blood marked rooftops.
The hunter plasma-burned Fernando's left shoulder, stabbed a captive carioca, and could no longer cloak. Harrigan hit it with Garber's grenades. It began arming a self-destruct. Four hunters appeared with spears and a cube showing a wanted image of the wounded hunter. The search party stripped its weapons, bound it, and took it. The leader nodded to Harrigan and spoke a phrase Harrigan tried to repeat. Harrigan, Rios, Villaca, and Fernando lived. Garber and many dealers and civilians were dead. The rogue hunter was taken alive by its own kind, not killed on the hill.
Recon
By Dayton Ward
Sergeant Daniel Roland's five-man Force Recon team was inserted near dawn in Quang Tri Province, Vietnam, in January 1968. The job was forty-eight hours, no radio, to check rumors of a POW camp after an Air Force pilot, a U.S. senator's son, had been shot down nearby. Lance Corporal Scott Pearson carried an M79. John Coffren carried a Remington shotgun. Corporal Bill Leisner was the rifleman and Vietnamese translator. Lieutenant Matthew Byrne wore a brass bracelet made from shell casings by a Montagnard. Blooded hunter Nk'mecci watched from the canopy on his first solo hunt. Years earlier he had hunted Earth with his father and older sibling during a larger human war with less advanced weapons.
Nk'mecci could have killed everyone and did not. He took both sides' leaders and studied the rest. A bullet hit his cloak power cell, and he shut the cloak off. He already had wounds in torso and leg. A yellow-green bolt went through Pearson's chest. Byrne was found later with skull and spine taken, his magazine still full. A VC leader died the same way. Leisner read maps in a dead soldier's satchel as a coded plan for attacks everywhere, bigger than the recent rockets on Quang Tri Base. The three survivors headed for the primary landing zone, about twelve hours out.
Twelve defenders set an ambush near a grassy extraction glade. A branch broke under Nk'mecci. He had to fight in the open and killed most of the ambush. Roland's M79 high-explosive round killed two behind a log. Plasma killed Leisner. Roland hit Nk'mecci in the chest with M79 buckshot and knocked him out of the tree. Hueys came in on yellow smoke. Coffren died on the run to the bird. A bolt grazed Roland's left shoulder and cracked a rib. Nk'mecci put three plasma hits into the descending Huey, including the engine, and it exploded in the trees. He then killed the remaining Huey's gunner, wrecked the canopy, and killed the co-pilot. He stood over Roland and studied him. The whole recon team died. Roland's skull, cleaned and polished, sat on Nk'mecci's console. Nk'mecci reached his ship dying. Honor kept him from using the medical bay: the recon report would go home, but he judged the hunt a failure, so his life was forfeit. From orbit he watched the multi-pronged offensive start and concluded Earth was still worth hunting.
Gameworld
By Jonathan Maberry
Hogarth Fix sat on the competitor benches at Gameworld, an illegal fight venue in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Owner Sake Chiba, a retired New Osaka sumo and a 6.6-trillionaire, broadcast the bouts live from Neptune to Earth. Fix had grown up in Gary, Indiana, served twelve years in Special Forces, and was in his late thirties. His daughter Daisy needed cancer treatment in Stockholm. He signed on to earn enough for that treatment, or to die so the off-world life-insurance clause would pay. Chiba watched him hold back against sparring partner Owl, then offered nine million to last three minutes with a captive pulled from a crashed ship on terraformed Ceres.
The juvenile stood a little over six feet, pale mottled skin, mesh, claws, helmet, green blood, billed as the Nightmare Kid. It had killed seven of eleven on the salvage crew, then a cougar, a gorilla, and later human test fighters. The bout was bare-knuckle in the steel pentangle. The Kid lunged with claws and drew first blood on Fix's hip, then his back. Fix fought as a left-handed counterpuncher and kept hitting the same thigh, then switched to his real right hand: wrist, foot stamp, a headbutt that broke a mandible, throat and body shots, and a heel kick to the damaged thigh. He was a moment from snapping the Kid's neck when the arena wall blew in.
A larger hunter decloaked, taller by a foot, armored, wrist blades, pulse weapons. It impaled enhanced fighter Helga and threw her down. The Kid broke for Chiba's private elevator. Fix took the newcomer as the Nightmare Kid's father, come into the station to get its child back. Fix followed with Helga's commando knife, killed guards, and found Chiba beating the injured juvenile and pulling a navy automatic from a gun safe. Chiba used the Kid as a shield and put the pistol to its head. Fix threw the knife to the Kid. The juvenile bit Chiba's gun arm and gutted him. The father slapped the Kid, hugged him, then slapped him again. The Kid cut Chiba from crown to anus and tore out skull and spine. Both hunters left down the shaft while the arena was still being slaughtered. The father gave Fix a single nod. Fix opened Chiba's biometric safe with Chiba's intact palm and stood at the money. Maberry later sent Fix into another hunt in The Fix Is In, collected in Predator: Eyes of the Demon. The asteroid club is an earlier human death tournament than the near-future fights in Predator: Bloodshed.
Notable Hunters
- Vagouti was a female hunter who came to Oregon with her mate Nakande to hunt Sloane after recordings from the Alaska fight reached a hunter ship. After Nakande died in an ambush, she kept the hunt going until Sloane killed her with a rifle shot and a revolver, and her wrist bomb exploded.
- Nakande was Vagouti's mate. He treated Sloane as old and unarmed, used a meth-lab RV as a warm-up, then walked into an ambush on a narrow trail and died after rifle hits to the lung and hip.
- Ki'Sei hunted in flooded New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. He spared Ro after the Jeep wreck, named himself, then killed the rougarou at St. Louis Cathedral and left into the storm with the skull and spine.
- Tli'uukop, called One Eye, was a retired elite who took three recently Blooded students to Skeld's Keep in 820. After Shriek and Ta'roga fled the first fight, he sent them back unmasked and unarmed, then decided he would not bring more students to hunt men.
- Shriek was one of those students, tall and quick to charge. He fled the village fight with a broken arm, then died at the Keep with Jarl's sword in his throat.
- Ta'roga was another of One Eye's students, sure of himself with a fixed blade. Helta put an arrow into his thigh at the camp, and at the Keep he was chopped apart.
- Kata'nu, son of Esch'ande, was the third student and the one One Eye thought most promising. An axe opened his guts in the Keep, he refused to shoot the last humans, and he left his mask with Stelgar before he walked out the gate.
- Nk'mecci was on his first solo hunt in Quang Tri Province in January 1968. He killed Roland's recon team, reached his ship dying, refused the medical bay because he judged the hunt a failure, and left Roland's skull on his console.
- The Nightmare Kid was a juvenile pulled from a wreck on Ceres and billed at Gameworld. Its father broke into the arena, slapped the Kid, hugged him, then slapped him again. The Kid gutted Sake Chiba and took the skull and spine, and both hunters left down the shaft.
Behind The Scenes
Schmidt dated the introduction January 2017 from Ottawa, Kansas. The brief was fun hunts with human ingenuity against hunter tech, stretching from future colonies to Vikings, samurai, and the American Civil War, with historical figures and returning franchise characters in the mix. The title comes from Dutch Schaefer's line in the 1987 film, the same quote tradition as Aliens: Bug Hunt that same year. Lebbon's Devil Dogs sits earlier in Halley's Corps career than the Rage War, before she is a major on Alien vs. Predator: Armageddon. Perry's Rematch is a direct sequel to his 2008 Dark Horse novel Predator: Turnabout. S. D. Perry's Skeld's Keep and Correia's Three Sparks are the Viking and samurai pieces that later lore pages still cite. Schmidt and Roberds's Drug War is the Harrigan and Garber follow-up from Predator 2.
Anderson, Lebbon, both Perrys, and Shirley had already written Predator novels or comics before this book. Weston Ochse, Larry Correia, and Jonathan Maberry had just written for Bug Hunt. Blackstone Audio released an ensemble-cast audiobook on 27 February 2018, running 12 hours and 34 minutes, with a separate narrator on each story. Titan followed the collection in 2022 with Predator: Eyes of the Demon, which includes Maberry's Gameworld sequel.
Conclusion
Predator: If It Bleeds is Titan's 2017 short-story anthology, sixteen separate hunts instead of one novel plot, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. Eight stories are set in Earth's past, from Skeld's Keep in 820 and feudal Japan through the Civil War, a southern Oregon cattle town, Mexico in 1916, Montana in 1933, a Cold War Soviet site, and Vietnam in 1968. Four take place on modern Earth: Hurricane Katrina, Oregon after Alaska, a U.S. Army black site, and Rio twenty-five years after Los Angeles. The last four are far-future hunts, with Colonial Marines beyond Pluto, a scavenger wreck, the colony world Hardscrabble, and the asteroid club Gameworld. Most of the book's hunters end up dead, taken, or gone back to their ships.
External Sources
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