Retroville had never looked better.
The stolen Yolkian spaceship streaked toward Earth, carrying Jimmy Neutron and the rest of Retroville home after their victory over King Goobot and the Yolkians. Jimmy stood near the controls while Cindy argued about his flying, Sheen reenacted the battle, Carl tried not to throw up, Libby told everybody to shut up, and Nick pretended he hadn’t been terrified.
Goddard sat beside Jimmy, tail wagging.
None of them noticed the other ship.
High above, a dark vessel followed without lights. Its pilot had watched the children defeat an alien species and escape certain death. They had proven dangerous enough to be interesting.
The Predator selected a weapon.
A blue-white blast struck the Yolkian ship from behind.
The cabin exploded into alarms. Jimmy grabbed the controls as the ship rolled violently toward Earth.
“Everybody hold on!”
The damaged spacecraft ripped through the clouds and came down somewhere Jimmy definitely had not intended. Trees snapped beneath the hull before it slammed into the mud.
For several seconds, nothing moved.
Then a black drone rose from behind a tree, silently hovering over the wreckage with a tiny red light blinking beneath it.
Nearby, Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler suddenly appeared beside a commentary table.
JR looked at the smoking spaceship. “Bah gawd, King! Where the hell are we now?”
Lawler slapped at a mosquito. “Somewhere with bugs, JR. I already hate it.”
Movement inside the wreck drew their attention.
Jimmy crawled through a broken hatch first, followed by Cindy, Sheen, Carl, Libby, Nick, and Goddard. No one else came out.
Jimmy stared back at the ship for several seconds before lowering his head.
Cindy placed a hand on his shoulder. “Jimmy…”
“I know.”
Nick broke the silence by kicking a piece of twisted metal. “Well, standing around crying isn’t getting us home.”
Cindy glared at him. “Seriously?”
“What? We survived killer egg aliens. I think we can handle a jungle.”
Something clicked in the trees.
Nick looked toward the sound and smirked. “See? Probably a monkey.”
He walked ahead before Jimmy could stop him.
“Nick, wait!”
Nick pushed through a wall of broad leaves and disappeared from sight. A few seconds passed.
Then came a wet impact, followed by a scream.
The others froze.
JR shot out of his chair as the drone swung toward the trees. “GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY! SOMETHING JUST GOT NICK!”
Lawler squinted into the jungle. “I didn’t even see what did it!”
Neither did the kids.
They found Nick hanging several feet above the ground, his intestines forming a crude, grisly noose. Blood pooled beneath his dangling corpse.
Carl immediately vomited into a bush.
Sheen stared upward, pale for perhaps the first time in his life. “Okay. I officially vote that monkeys are evil.”
Jimmy studied the ground beneath Nick. There were footprints, but only for a few steps. Then they simply stopped.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Cindy said.
“No,” Jimmy answered. “It doesn’t.”
A clicking sound echoed from somewhere above them.
They ran.
For the next hour, the jungle seemed to move around them. Branches shifted when there was no wind. Strange noises followed from tree to tree. Every time Jimmy stopped to listen, the sounds stopped too.
The commentators kept pace, following the children on their dangerous trek through the jungle. One moment they were beside the wreck. The next they were deeper in the jungle with their table between two trees.
Lawler looked around nervously. “JR, I don’t like this. Whatever killed Nick is playing with them.”
“You’re damn right, King. This ain’t a fight yet. It’s a hunt.”
Sheen was the next to break.
He spun around, grabbed a thick branch, and waved it at the jungle. “Come out and face Ultra Lord’s greatest disciple!”
A red dot appeared on his chest.
Jimmy’s eyes widened. “Sheen, move!”
The blast hit before Sheen could react. A sharp bolt of light cracked from a nearby tree, striking him and exploding his chest in a mess of blood, bone, and tissue.
“BAH GAWD!” JR shouted. “SHEEN’S DOWN! THEY NEVER EVEN SAW IT COMING!”
Lawler ducked behind the table. “That came from the trees!”
Cindy grabbed Jimmy by the shirt. “What is happening?”
“I don’t know yet!”
Carl began crying. “I want to go home.”
A shimmer passed through the air behind him.
Libby saw it first. “Carl, RUN!”
Carl turned just as something invisible grabbed him and yanked him backward.
His scream vanished into the trees.
The group chased after him, but by the time they reached the spot, Carl was already dead.
His lifeless body was slumped against a tree, his right hand clutching his inhaler. A slash mark was visible across his throat. Quick, efficient, and brutal.
Lawler stared upward as the drone tracked a faint distortion moving through the branches. “How are we seeing this when they can’t?”
JR shook his head. “King, I stopped asking questions about this job three fights ago!”
Jimmy, Cindy, Libby, and Goddard kept moving.
Nobody talked unless they had to. Jimmy stopped occasionally to examine broken branches and scorched bark. Cindy stayed close. Libby carried a sharpened piece of wreckage.
They reached a shallow stream near sunset.
Jimmy knelt beside Goddard and opened a panel in his side. “I need your environmental sensors.”
Goddard barked.
A metallic whistle came from the opposite bank.
Libby looked up.
Three red dots formed across her torso.
“DOWN!” Jimmy shouted.
Cindy tackled Jimmy into the water. Libby tried to dive behind a fallen tree.
The weapon fired. Another high-energy bolt crackled through the air as it streaked towards its mark.
The tree exploded, impaling Libby with wooden shrapnel. Her body hit the jungle floor with a lifeless thump.
JR removed his hat. “My God. That thing is dismantling them one at a time.”
Lawler swallowed. “And Jimmy still doesn’t know what he’s fighting.”
Cindy pulled Jimmy out of the stream. “We can’t keep running!”
“I know.”
“So think!”
Jimmy ran the clues through his head. His breathing slowed.
Then his expression changed.
“Cindy, every attack has come from an elevated position. The footprints stopped because it climbed. The plasma discharge came from a weapon we couldn’t see. Carl was grabbed by something we couldn’t see.”
Cindy stared at him. “So?”
Jimmy looked toward a shimmer between two trees.
“So maybe we’re not supposed to see it.”
The Predator moved.
Cindy barely had time to turn before a blade flashed from empty air.
Jimmy shoved her aside.
The strike missed him, but the second didn’t miss Cindy.
The razor-sharp blade skated across the side of her neck, severing her carotid artery.
Cindy sputtered and attempted to flee, but collapsed near the stream.
Jimmy stopped moving.
The jungle went silent except for Goddard growling beside him.
JR lowered his voice. “King, that boy just watched every one of his friends die.”
Lawler stared at Jimmy. “Something just changed.”
Jimmy slowly stood.
“Goddard. Infrared scan.”
Goddard’s eyes glowed red.
His head rotated across the tree line, projecting a faint grid over the jungle. For a second there was nothing.
Then Goddard barked and locked onto a shape twenty feet above them.
A humanoid figure burned bright in infrared.
Jimmy pointed. “There!”
Goddard fired his eye lasers.
The beams ripped through the branch beneath the Predator. The creature dropped hard into the mud, its cloak flickering wildly before shutting down.
For the first time, Jimmy saw it.
Seven feet of muscle, armor, and blades stood before him.
Lawler’s eyes went wide. “Oh my God, JR! Look at the size of that thing!”
“Jimmy Neutron has finally exposed the hunter!”
The Predator roared and charged.
Jimmy dove aside as wrist blades carved through the tree behind him. Goddard fired again, but the Predator rolled away, launched a metal disc, and sliced through one of Goddard’s rear legs.
Goddard crashed into the mud.
“Goddard!”
The Predator backhanded Jimmy across the clearing. He hit the ground hard, rolled twice, and barely managed to crawl away as the Predator raised its blades.
JR slammed both hands on the table. “COME ON, KID! THINK OF SOMETHING!”
Jimmy’s hand landed on a piece of polished metal from the crashed ship.
He looked at it.
Then at Goddard.
Then at the Predator’s shoulder cannon.
“Brain blast.”
Lawler pointed. “He said the thing!”
Jimmy grabbed the metal plate and ran directly at the Predator.
The shoulder cannon fired.
Jimmy dropped flat and angled the plate.
The blast struck the metal, ricocheted upward, and smashed into the Predator’s shoulder assembly. The cannon exploded in a shower of sparks.
The Predator staggered.
Goddard dragged himself upright on three legs.
“Now, boy!”
Goddard fired both eye lasers into the Predator’s chest.
The creature stumbled but stayed standing.
“BAH GAWD, IT’S STILL UP!” JR roared.
The Predator charged through the beams.
Jimmy braced the reflective plate against a fallen log while Goddard shifted his aim. The lasers struck the metal, split across its curved surface, and converged from two angles directly onto the Predator’s exposed mask.
The mask cracked.
Jimmy screamed, “Full power!”
Goddard’s eyes flared white.
The lasers punched through.
When Goddard finally stopped, the massive alien hunter’s head was completely gone, vaporized by the intense laser. Neon-green blood trickled weakly from its neck, its flow stemmed by the laser’s cauterization.
The Predator dropped to one knee and collapsed face-first into the mud. Or rather, would have, if it still had a face.
For several seconds, nobody moved.
Then JR stood and threw both arms into the air. “BAH GAWD! JIMMY NEUTRON DID IT! THE BOY GENIUS JUST OUTSMARTED THE DEADLIEST HUNTER IN THE GALAXY!”
Lawler stared at the body. “Remind me never to make fun of science fair kids again.”
Jimmy dropped beside Goddard and immediately began inspecting his damaged leg.
“You okay, boy?”
Goddard barked and licked his face with a metal tongue.
Jimmy looked toward Cindy’s body, and the victory disappeared from his expression.
Above them, the black drone silently pulled away into the darkening sky.
Somewhere between worlds, a man in a baseball cap and glasses stared at the holographic screen in front of him while a half-empty mug of Yuengling rested in his hand.
He leaned back on the barstool.
“Ha, you were WRONG!”
The bartender slid another beer toward him.
The man grabbed it. “My friend wrote this whole thing years ago saying Predator would absolutely destroy Jimmy and turn his skull into a trophy. Shows what the hell HE knows!”
He took a long drink and stared at another portal flickering beside the screen.
A small red-haired boy in a white lab coat appeared on it, hunched over some kind of machine.
The man narrowed his eyes.
“Dexter versus Jimmy…”
He took another drink and considered it for a few seconds.
“Nah, I don’t think anyone wants to see that!”
He grabbed the beer and changed the channel.
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