Hell's Gate

by Bill Schutt

  “And speaking of careful,” Thorne said, “having to speak at your funeral would cause me no little embarrassment. So let’s avoid that scene—if you catch my drift.”

  “I catch it,” Mac said, as the friends embraced. “Just remember, Bob. Two things. One, tell Hendry about the rocket and the coordinates. And two, get the hell away from here, at least until this shit blows over.”

  “Of course, Redundzel, although I also heard you the first sixteen times.”

  Mac laughed at the reference to his old nickname. He did have a tendency to repeat what he considered to be important concepts.

  “And don’t make me and Yanni have to come in there to rescue your skinny ass.”

  “Gotcha,” Mac said, throwing his pal a salute.

  Mac never used the word goodbye. In his family, and at this kind of time, goodbye was considered bad luck.

  “See you soon, Yanni,” he said. “Maybe at Ebbets Field.”

  As the woman approached him, Mac thought he was about to be kissed on the cheek. Instead, Yanni produced a strange-looking necklace and placed it over his head.

  “Wear this, Mac,” she said.

  The thin band of leather was attached to a tiny, stoppered bottle, sealed with something rubbery. More local juju, MacCready supposed.

  Yanni spoke two or three sentences in her native tongue and Thorne translated: “She says, if you go into the swamp, be sure to rub this stuff on yourself first. It will keep you from getting bitten.”

  Mac gave her a slight bow. “You got it, sister!” he said.

  Then the friends exchanged nods and Mac turned away, setting off at a brisk pace for the tree line. He knew there was a canyon somewhere beyond those distant trees, a canyon they called Hell’s Gate.

  CHAPTER 10

  Predator

  We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

  —AESOP, GREEK SLAVE AND AUTHOR

  Chapada dos Guimarães

  10 A.M. the next day, January 24, 1944

  Jesus Raza belched as he reached for a half-empty bottle of pinga, nearly knocking it off the table—again. “You should have seen that gringo,” he slurred to his wife.

  Maria was sixteen—some forty years younger than her husband—and although she had not told Raza yet, she was two months pregnant with his child. She had been forced to marry the jefe for one reason only. It certainly wasn’t his manners (there were none) or the fact that even on his best days Raza was a drunken bully. He was simply the most powerful man in Chapada dos Guimarães. Everyone feared him.

  Maria sometimes wondered how Raza had become so important. She remembered him bragging about a youth spent in a place called Mexico where he had ridden with someone named Zapata. But Maria, who, in her entire life had not traveled more than five miles from her village, had never heard that name before.

  And he bragged about so many other things, she thought. It seemed he had made a career inventing imaginary friendships with famous people, none of whom she had ever heard of.

  What she was certain about was that Raza was a killer. His victims were strangers, mostly. Some were unlucky enough to have crossed him, while others had simply wandered into Chapada at the wrong time. She also knew that with the recent livestock killings, this was definitely one of those “wrong times.”

  “The gringo nearly wet himself when he saw me,” Raza said, between swigs of cane liquor, proudly regaling Maria with yet another rendition of his encounter in the church courtyard. He would have killed the stranger, Maria knew, but that other gringo, Thorne, had promised him two tubs of liquor if he’d go away. And if there was one thing Raza liked better than bullying, it was drinking. She also knew that he didn’t want Thorne’s witch of a wife to cast a spell on him.

  Maria smiled, trying to remember if this was the third or fourth time that he had repeated this very same story. She nodded her head and made sure to continue smiling. It was four—definitely four.

  “You should have seen his face,” Raza said, finishing the brag with another belch that reminded her of a sick cow.

  Maria nodded again. And fortunately, you had a dozen of your machete-carrying friends with you, she thought. Then she flashed her very brightest smile. I am getting good at this.

  “He’s just lucky I was feeling—”

  Someone kicked the front door into the room, landing a section of the frame beside the table where Jesus Raza sat.

  The jefe’s pinga-soaked brain registered Maria’s scream and a flash of movement; but before he could rise from his chair, there was a gun muzzle pressing against the back of his head and another jammed into his right cheek.

  Raza froze, keeping his hands on the table. Only his eyes moved.

  Someone was dragging Maria into the back room. “Nooooo—” she cried, until her voice was cut off by the closing of the bedroom door.

  Now the room was silent—so silent that Raza was able to hear the quickening thump of his heart, inside his own chest.

  “Who killed my men?”

  The voice had come from behind him. It was calm and measured, almost gentle in tone. The speaker was definitely a foreigner but his Portuguese was fluent.

  Raza tried to turn toward the voice but a painful increase in pressure from the twin gun muzzles prevented any movement at all.

  “I . . . I don’t know what you mean,” Raza replied. “What men?”

  More silence, but five seconds later a bone-chilling scream sounded through the walls of his bedroom. I have heard her scream before, Raza thought, but not like this.

  Her cries stopped as abruptly as they had begun.

  “Who killed my men?” The voice had come again, still calm, still measured.

  “This is a mistake,” Raza blurted out. “But you know . . . mistakes happen. So take the woman. I . . . I give her to you.”

  There was another pause, then a sudden ease in pressure from the gun barrel that had been pressing into the back of his head.

  That’s better, Raza thought. Now—

  Something smashed into the side of his jaw. Raza felt an enormous bolt of pain shoot down his neck and arm. It felt like electricity dipped in fire, and his right arm straightened in something that resembled a salute. Pieces of hard and sharp matter were clattering in the bottom of his mouth, and when he slid his tongue along the place where four teeth had been only a moment before, he felt cold air behind warm blood.

  Unbeknownst to Raza, the man with the calm voice had instantly recognized the involuntary arm movement as a muscle spasm resulting from a damaged nerve. He also recognized the expression of startled surprise in a man who had just pushed his tongue through his own cheek and into open air.

  Raza slumped to the floor and one of the guns followed him down, the muzzle resting uncomfortably close to his right eye.

  “Who killed my men?” The tone of the man’s voice had not changed at all.

  “I . . . thon’t—” Raza’s mouth was full of hornets. He spat them out, hard and wet, and waited for another blow—which did not come. For some reason, this scared him more than anything else the last few minutes had wrought.

  Ask me again, Raza thought. Ask me the question! But there was no question—only excruciating pain and even more excruciating silence. His mind was racing. Maybe a bullet this time. And Raza flinched at the image of his head, mostly gone above the eyes.

  But the room remained silent.

  Then Raza’s mind fixed on something else. Something important. Yes. Something that can save me. The gringo. He willed his mind to clear.

  “Stran-ger . . . choo days . . . ag . . . o . . . Amer . . . Amer . . . can.” The hinge of his jaw was not working right. Still, his only concern was getting the words out.

  “Witch . . . esss . . . housh . . .” Raza spat again. “Witch anner cra-zzee hush-ban. Liv . . .” He paused. The clicking of the hinge and the dribble of fresh blood was making him dizzy, so he pointed: “. . . ne . . . rrrr . . . edge . . . town.”

  Instantly
, the gun muzzle was withdrawn.

  The pain was coming in dull waves now, but with great effort, Raza raised his head. A tall figure had materialized in front of him. He had a narrow face, with a thin mustache.

  Something familiar, Raza thought, squinting as if trying to remember the name of an old acquaintance.

  Was he a movie actor? His mind flashed to a film he’d seen in Cuiabá.

  Raza could see that the thin-faced man was smiling. But the smile wasn’t making him feel any better at all. In fact, Jesus Raza suddenly felt his bowels churning.

  The smiling man nodded slightly.

  Suddenly he knew. It was—

  Raza’s head was jerked back by a powerful hand and in that same sweeping motion he was thrown forward onto his knees. He kicked backward with one foot and tried to stand but his hands slid on something hot and wet. His whole world tilted into dizziness and irrational calm, tilted like the deck of a sinking ship, leaving him puzzled that his fingers seemed to be resting under a warm spray.

  The roof is leaking, he thought.

  Raza called out to his wife. The bitch can clean it up. But his bisected trachea only let out a long, bubbling gurgle. Calm and a descending dreamscape were gaining dominion over his thoughts—a dreamscape in which shadowy figures stepped out of the corners, their hands lengthening toward him, as if seeking to drag him into the earth itself. The shadows and his own wet croak snapped the toughest man in Chapada to hyperconsciousness. And in that moment he saw two men in black uniforms.

  As the shadows stepped closer, the image flickered like a candle in a draft.

  But why are they upside d—

  Jesus Raza’s consciousness blinked off like a light switch, and he toppled backward, landing on his own contorted face and rolling sideways.

  The smiling shadow with the thin mustache kept close and silent vigil, counting off the seconds between dying and death, between Earth and Hell. The shadow looked at a pocket watch, noting the moment Raza’s eyes stopped searching, recording the exact instant that life had gone out of them.

  “Thank you.” A voice addressed the dead man, in German. “You have been most cooperative.” Then he tucked his watch into a tunic pocket and calmly stepped over Jesus Raza’s freshly severed head. It mattered little to the shadow man that the two dead privates, Fuchs and Becker, deserved their fates. They had been fools. Even worse, they had broken Sänger’s movie camera in their deaths. The important thing, the only thing that mattered, was that they were German soldiers—his soldiers. In the process of tracking down their killer, this dirty, drunken local, as highly as he thought of himself, was utterly dispensable.

  The SS officer was quite proud of his own perceived place in history, though unaware that posterity would reduce him to a stereotypical boogieman. But this too would have brought a smile to Colonel Gerhardt Wolff’s face.

  At the table, Sergeant Vogt used the last of the foul-smelling alcohol the dead man had been drinking to clean his stiletto, and now he was wiping the blade on the homespun tablecloth.

  The colonel appreciates the beauty of those cuts, Vogt thought, watching as Wolff opened the door to the bedroom and entered silently.

  From inside the room, he caught a faint whimper and a whispered response. “Ssssshhhhhhh.”

  And then . . . silence.

  Like a spider, Vogt thought, and grinned. Just like a spider.

  CHAPTER 11

  Extinction

  The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

  —ARTHUR STANLEY EDDINGTON, PARAPHRASING J.B.S. HALDANE

  January 25, 1944

  It was midafternoon and MacCready had been trying to figure out where he’d experienced a worse combination of heat and humidity before.

  Bangkok? Maybe. August in Port Arthur, Texas? He winced at the memory.

  Currently, he was taking a breather beside an algae-choked watering hole rimmed by a few half-dead trees. A mud puddle with aspirations, he thought. But he needed some shade and he needed a safe place to hole up.

  The forest was fragmented here—islands of clustered trees, scattered across a sea of tall grass. Right now it was the “tall-grass-in-broad-daylight” part that concerned MacCready most. He took a swig from his canteen. Hendry’d probably blacktop this place.

  Though tired, and certainly ready for a nap, MacCready also knew that there were several pressing issues to consider. Finding the missing Rangers without getting skewered by the Xavante was currently in the lead, but for some reason he couldn’t shake the image of Yanni staring into the forest—and sounding just a little too much like the creatures he had encountered in the Brazil nut tree, the same creatures that had nearly killed him, twice.

  They were actually stalking me, he thought. And in spite of the heat, he gave an involuntary shiver. And what? She was calling them?

  As if interested suddenly in MacCready’s dilemma, a caiman surfaced nearby.

  A big’un, he determined. Ten feet long from nose to tail tip.

  A single sweep of the reptile’s tail sent it three feet closer to where MacCready sat. The zoologist knew that the caiman’s brain hadn’t changed much since the Age of Dinosaurs, and as a consequence its cerebrum was about as big as a gnat’s ass. Well, maybe a little bigger. But although the crocodile cousin couldn’t paint the Mona Lisa or start wars, its kind had survived unchanged through whatever had killed its brawnier, brainier cousins, the dinosaurs.

  Maybe nature’s trying to tell us that brains and brawn don’t always count for much, MacCready thought.

  He bounced a pebble off the caiman’s back, then glanced around for another bit of rock. Survivor or not, this guy’s getting too close.

  “How does Yanni do that?” MacCready mumbled under his breath. He watched as the scaly body submerged below a layer of green, then gave it a dismissive wave. But another question, a more important one, had been forming since his departure from Chapada and had finally come to the fore. “In all this time, why haven’t the draculae killed her?”

  The caiman’s eyes resurfaced, black and unblinking. MacCready held out a bigger, heftier pebble. Don’t make me bonk you with this, he thought.

  With one eye on the reptile, his mind drifted back to Yanni and her formerly extinct pals. Well, whatever the answer is, it’s no wonder Thorne’s chipping in with the housework.

  MacCready was about to carry out another preemptive pebble strike when he heard a slight rustle off to one side in the tall grass. Instinctively, he went as motionless as the caiman, but his right hand eased down toward the Colt. Feeling a presence as much as hearing it, he sensed something creeping by, keeping low to the ground and passing him on the left side less than ten feet away.

  MacCready squinted, trying to identify the newly arrived visitor. But whatever it was, it had stopped—its sun-dappled profile all but invisible against the tall stalks of grass.

  Then, without any warning or shyness, it stepped into a narrow clearing at the water’s edge.

  The zoologist’s eyes widened. You are not there.

  He resisted the urge to blink—half-fearing that if he did the tiny creature would dissolve like a mirage.

  You are definitely not there, MacCready’s mind repeated, leaving him feeling uneasy this time. He was, until now, just getting used to the idea that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t following his mother into the perpetual, uncontrollable dreamscape of insanity. Time to reevaluate.

  The animal standing at the edge of the watering hole looked something like a horse. And as the animal dipped its long snout to drink, MacCready could see that it behaved something like a horse as well—gold-colored eyes scanning the surface of the water, alert for any sign of movement.

  Beyond appearance and mannerisms, though, calling this species a horse was a stretch. For starters (and just for starters) it stood no more than three feet tall at the shoulder and, incredibly, instead of a single hoof, it had toes—three of them by the look of it.

  MacCready
concentrated on keeping his jaw from dropping open, while another part of his brain slipped easily into paleontology mode—working through everything it could dredge up about the evolution of prehistoric equids.

  He knew that the granddaddy of all horses had been a short-snouted forest browser, with four toes on the front legs and three on the hind legs. As North American climates changed around twenty million years ago, humid forests gave way to grasslands, and new horse lineages developed longer legs, fewer toes, and, on one surviving offshoot—single hooves.

  MacCready watched the animal paw at something near the waterline.

  Mesohippus?

  No, this guy’s a little larger. Parahippus.

  But that was a North American species—supposedly a long-extinct intermediate between woodland and grassland horses.

  Well, this little fella is going to throw a real monkey wrench into what we thought we knew about the ancestry of horses.

  As if overhearing MacCready’s thoughts, Parahippus raised his head, cocking an ear. MacCready held his breath.

  Suddenly there was a horselike cry from the sea of grass bordering the far side of the watering hole.

  Unknowingly, the scientist’s body reacted with the slightest twitch. There are more of them, he thought, maybe a whole—

  The tiny creature turned its head and looked directly into MacCready’s eyes.

  —herd.

  MacCready never bothered to stifle the smile that had begun to spread across his face. But even before he could complete the grin, the crack of a gunshot sent him sprawling into the mud.

  Mauser, MacCready thought, reaching for his sidearm and catching a glimpse of the tiny horse as it flew across the muddy pool in a single leap. A split second later, there came an explosion of green-streaked water. Even before MacCready’s gun arm could spin toward the new commotion, a toothy reptilian snout stabbed upward and closed only on open air. With a measure of relief, MacCready saw that the frightened Parahippus had already vanished into the grass.