by Bill Schutt
A picture formed in Voorhees’s mind. Claws. Then another thought. They’re luring us in. He tried to speak but discovered that his mouth had quickly become too dry. “Wait . . . Corporal . . . they’re not—”
Kessler disappeared into the mist.
At the same moment Corporal Kessler was descending from the conning tower to patrol Nostromo’s aft deck, MacCready awoke to the harsh staccato of Colonel Wolff’s baton being dragged across the bars of his cell.
Rolling upright, he squinted at the switched-on overhead lights, then locked eyes with the SS colonel. MacCready even managed a sarcastic grin. “Herr Tonic, I thought I asked for a nine A.M. wake-up call. Can’t be nine o’clock already?”
Wolff’s expression was blank. “You are a very funny man,” he said, as he stepped away from the cell. “A good friend of yours could have used some of your humor, when I spoke to him recently.”
MacCready was puzzled for a moment but then he looked over into the far cell. Lieutenant Scott was gone. If he’d ever been there. “That must have required some real effort, Herr Loss, taking on a guy who was starved and half out of his mind.”
Wolff shook his head, as if he were a teacher disappointed in a student (it was a look MacCready was really starting to hate). Then the German nodded toward the same SS goon who had apparently busted him up the day before. As the giant stepped forward, MacCready saw that he was holding something—a Russian submachine gun, PPSh. Even through the veneer of mud, he could see that this particular gun had been equipped with a camouflage sling more appropriate for the Arctic Circle than central Brazil. It was unmistakably the gun that Juliano had given him.
MacCready felt as if he had just taken a blow to the gut. Bob . . . Yanni.
Only now did the colonel smile, pausing to relish the moment. “No more jokes?” he asked, finally.
MacCready sagged against the wall of the cell, remaining silent.
“Well then, perhaps you will find my offer to you amusing,” Wolff said.
Only if it involves me sticking that machine gun up your ass before I pull the trigger, Mac thought. These fucking monsters killed them. Bob. Probably Yanni, too.
The colonel continued. “If you cooperate, that is, if you tell us everything about your mission, and what your people know about us . . . I can personally guarantee that your death will be swift.” Wolff held up his right hand, extending his index and middle fingers. “Scout’s honor, as they say in your country.”
MacCready managed a smirk and shook his head, allowing his gaze to settle on a cockroach that was making a mad dash across the floor outside his cell.
The colonel gestured toward the giant SS man. “My name is Wolff. You have already met Sergeant Schrödinger, I think. Well, surprisingly he has come up with a rather imaginative laboratory procedure for cremating . . . medical waste. It concerns one of the missiles it was your misfortune to observe yesterday. The engineers tell me that it needs a bit of fine-tuning, although it performed quite well yesterday. Don’t you agree?”
MacCready continued to watch the insect, which was making a beeline for the sergeant’s boot. Bob and Yanni . . . dead.
“Now, imagine your body secured beneath a missile’s engine just before our next test.”
MacCready glanced up at the Nazi colonel. Are you even human?
Watching MacCready’s reaction carefully, Wolff leaned in closer. Then he whispered, as if to prevent Sergeant Schrödinger from overhearing. “I’ve got to tell you, just between us, the method he has designed is completely inappropriate for disposing of live subjects. I saw this same experiment, once before, at the Hermann Göring Institute. The rocket blew pieces of meat all over the launch basin.” He smiled at the memory. “It looked like red sauerkraut.”
MacCready shook his head, before gesturing for the colonel to come closer. The officer leaned in again, just a little; Mac whispered through the bars. “Does your mother know you’re involved in shit like this?”
Colonel Wolff drew back and turned away, his smile gone.
“I didn’t think so,” Mac called after him. Then he decided to keep going. “And I’ll bet you just can’t wait to tell me how much easier it’ll be if I do cooperate.”
Wolff spun around suddenly, laughing. “Do cooperate? That is if you do cooperate. If not, you’ll find that some of the locals are rather obsessed with determining how long it takes a man to die if his skin is peeled off a centimeter at a time.”
The colonel seemed to get lost in his own thought experiment. “An interesting question, no? From what I’ve seen I would estimate somewhere around—”
The sound of pistol shots stopped Wolff in midsentence. Two seconds later, Mac heard automatic weapons fire; but by then the colonel and his hulking bodyguard were already bolting toward the door.
By the time Wolff and Schrödinger raced up the Nostromo’s wooden gangplank, a crowd had already gathered near the stern of the sub.
“—like deformed children but impossibly fast.” One of the men was telling a sergeant by the name of Vogt, who was looking even more arrogant and angry than usual.
“You shot up the boat because of—” Vogt snapped to attention.
“What has happened here?” Wolff demanded.
The sergeant began to speak. “Sir, Corporal Kessler says—”
The colonel’s hand came up. “I will hear from Corporal Kessler,” he said, calmly. “Those of you not involved in the incident may leave. Sergeant Vogt, you will remain.”
The others immediately dispersed, and Wolff nodded to the corporal.
Kessler took a few deep breaths before recounting how he and the other sentry had been patrolling the aft deck when they saw what they thought were children. The corporal’s demeanor now turned suddenly grim. His body seemed to spasm for a moment, as if he’d received an electrical shock. Then he craned his neck, looking past the colonel to a point on the deck. “But they weren’t children,” Kessler insisted, and his eyes widened. “They were . . . they were . . .”
“They were creatures, sir,” Maurice Voorhees interjected.
“Yes,” Kessler agreed. “And they sang to me.”
Wolff studied the men’s faces, alternating between them. Have their brains capsized?
Clearly the corporal was badly shaken, but the annoying rocket scientist appeared to be holding together just fine; his eyes were not those of a panicky man.
Wolff turned toward the civilian. “What does the corporal mean, singing?”
“I’m not sure. But these . . . things . . . they made a kind of sound.”
“I felt them . . . inside,” Kessler said, to no one in particular. “Telling me that everything would be all right.”
“And did they also tell you to fire your weapons, Corporal Kessler?” Vogt interjected.
“I fired at them first, sir,” Voorhees said, addressing the colonel. “The corporal seemed to be . . . incapacitated for a moment.”
“They were singing to me,” Kessler whispered.
Wolff made a motion for Voorhees to continue.
“These creatures were moving . . . moving toward the corporal in a predatory way . . . so I fired my pistol. Then they took off . . . and the corporal seemed to snap out of it. He fired at them as well. I . . . I believe he struck one.”
Wolff knew that the scientist was protecting the soldier, but none of that mattered.
“So you’re saying that you both shot up the boat,” Vogt said.
Colonel Wolff ignored the sergeant. They all did.
“And then what happened?” Wolff’s voice was almost soothing now. “Where did they go—these creatures?”
Voorhees nodded toward a section of the deck surface that had obviously been hit by gunfire. “They ran off the side of the boat.”
Wolff looked past the damaged deck and out to where the river ran deeper. “So they swam away?”
“No, Colonel,” Voorhees said. “There was no splash—more like a flutter. I don’t think they ever hit the water.”
“No splash at all,” Corporal Kessler intoned. He too was staring out into the mist. “No splash at all.”
CHAPTER 15
Leila
But first, on Earth as vampire sent,
Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race.
—LORD BYRON, The Giaour, 1813
Outside Nostromo Base
January 27, 1944
Five minutes before midnight
The insect scuttled across a bamboo ceiling beam, tasting the air through porthole-like spiracles that ran down both sides of its abdomen. It had entered the ramshackle hut only seconds earlier, but already chemoreceptors, stimulated by elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the room, had begun relaying signals to the creature’s brain. The electrochemical messages were translated into a simple directive.
FOOD
The assassin bug began its descent.
On the dirt floor below, a young woman rose from the thin hemp mat on which she had been sitting. Crossing the short distance to the far side of the hut, she bent over a small figure sleeping there. The child shifted uneasily on a pile of rags. An old woman’s uneven breath escaped from another rag pile, heaped against a thatched reed wall.
As Leila checked for signs that the boy’s fever was subsiding, she wondered yet again how it had all come down to this. Once she had belonged to the most revered family in her village. But within a single day, her whole life was reduced to despair, loneliness, and near starvation. And now, instead of a growing sense of pride and bright thoughts of the future, her days were spent scavenging for herself, for her mother, and for her sickly child.
Leila shook her head. It wasn’t the boy’s fault. And Sereburã couldn’t be blamed, either. Both she and her husband had prayed for a child, for more than three years. It was the shrine that was to have saved their family’s lineage. It was all because of the shrine.
She still mourned the loss of Sereburã, and every night, Leila replayed in her mind the scenes that ended their life together—as if by reliving the events she might somehow change their outcome. But of course things had not changed, and these days she knew better than most that the worst death of all was the death of hope. And so Leila habitually relived the past inside her head. It always began with her childhood friendship with Sereburã, then their wedding. And though their marriage had been cut short, she smiled at the thought that they had known more love than many people knew in a lifetime. The only imperfection in the union between their two families was that, after three years, she had not yet produced a male heir—or any child at all.
The couple knew that women had begun to whisper behind Leila’s back, and at first she and her husband did their best to ignore it. But when the men began to taunt Sereburã, he responded with violence. During a particularly brutal fight, one of his opponents had lost an eye.
Sensing their plight, and concerned that the conflict might generate more violence if they did not intervene, the tribe’s spiritual leaders, including Leila’s own father, summoned Sereburã to the smoke-filled hut of the cacique. That night the medicine men’s magic sent Sereburã into the Place of Visions, and there he remained for two days.
Upon his return, Leila’s husband revealed nothing about what had taken place, but each morning thereafter, he awoke from uneasy dreams, and soon he began speaking as if possessed.
“I saw . . . a dead city,” Sereburã told her at last. Leila noticed that his voice had taken on an unfamiliar monotone. “And within the city, a shrine. We must go there.”
She asked him why.
“If we do this, if we leave an offering, the forest and the river spirits will grant us our child.”
Leila had never heard of this particular shrine, but like others in her tribe, she was familiar with stories that told of a Lost City, a city built deep within the stone cliffs that soared above their valley. But Leila recalled other stories as well, stories that explained why the city was never to be visited. There were demons inhabiting the lost world behind the cliffs and it was said that they would kill any intruder. These were the tales parents told their children at night, stories meant to keep them from wandering too far from their mothers or behaving badly. And like the other monsters of her childhood, the Night Demons too had faded to a dim memory by the time Leila reached adulthood. Leila was torn between knowing that the shrine might not exist and a belief that the most important truths were sometimes hidden in dreams. In the end, she decided to make the two-day journey with her husband, in spite of her forebodings.
Leila remembered Sereburã uncovering a steep trail that clung to the rock wall. The wall itself had irregularly shaped sections that frequently jutted out into the path. Some of the protrusions had been carved to resemble strange animals—a stone jaguar straining its petrified muscles as if about to hurl itself into the void . . . a half-formed caiman struggling to be born out of solid rock.
On several occasions, Leila was convinced that she saw movement out of the corner of an eye, a shifting of shadows among the moss-shrouded crags and crevices. But whenever she looked more closely, the shadows were still.
The couple made their way upward until at last they stood beside a vertical scar that seemed to have been torn into the side of the cliff face. It was twice the height of a man and nearly as wide as it was tall.
As Sereburã prepared the red-glow lantern he had been instructed to bring, Leila peered into the cave and gave an involuntary shudder. Although it was midday, the light barely penetrated into a darkness that knew no end. Even more unsettling was a wind coming from inside the earth. It moaned as it passed them, carrying with it a rich earthy scent.
Cautiously, they moved into a spacious antechamber and, crossing it, they came to a steadily narrowing passageway. Here the scent was stronger, much stronger.
Like mushrooms and black soil, Leila thought, but just as she identified the scent with something safe and commonplace, she noticed that the current of air bore something else as well—something heard—yet unheard.
Singing, Leila thought, as the couple descended into the throat of the plateau.
Sereburã tried to quicken their pace toward the sound, holding the lantern-torch in one hand and gripping Leila’s hand in the other.
For a reason she could not explain, Leila stood her ground. In fact, she leaned forward, straining to hear the strange song below the cave wind.
I will conceive a child, she thought.
And it was then that she nearly followed Sereburã, nearly pushed her hand deeper into his. But something stopped her. Something about the-voice-that-was-not-a-voice sent a chill down her spine. And it was a chill that paralyzed her legs.
Neither of them said a word but Leila could feel her husband’s fingers slipping through her own, his thumbnail sliding across her palm.
And then he was gone.
When at last Leila staggered back into the village, she could provide no explanation for the disappearance of Sereburã. Summoned to the cacique’s hut that night, she told the elders about the wind coming from deep within the earth, and about the voices it carried. She finished her story with the very last thing she could remember, her hand slipping from Sereburã’s hand.
“What did these voices sound like?” the cacique had asked, leaning toward her.
At first there was only silence in the medicine man’s smoky hut, but then there came a sound. It started as a soft hiss of air, then rose in pitch until it had transformed into a series of short notes, a melody lasting several seconds.
Leila realized that the sounds were coming from her. She closed her eyes and drew another long breath.
She was standing inside the antechamber.
Sereburã was walking away from her.
The dim passageway.
The light from her husband’s torch throwing wild shadows onto the rock walls.
The clicking of claws on stone.
A flash of mo
vement up ahead.
Something crawling along the ceiling.
Moving toward Sereburã, horrifyingly fast.
More than one. There were—
Leila gasped, interrupting her own strange melody.
Her eyes shot open. The elders were sitting motionless; even the cacique appeared to have been paralyzed. What have I done?
The tribal leader spoke a single sentence.
“She belongs to the Demons.”
These were the last words Leila was ever to hear from him, or from anyone else among her people.
After the exile, Leila and her mother struggled to build and maintain a tiny thatched dwelling. It clung precariously close to a terrace on a steep hill overlooking the Valley of Mists. But even before the hut was completed, Leila knew that she was pregnant.
As the days passed, she took on duties usually reserved for men, becoming adept with the blowgun and bringing down peccary and capybara with curare-tipped darts. Her mother gathered nuts, fruit, and edible roots. Against all odds, their lives began to find a rhythm.
When the time came for Leila to give birth, the older woman helped with the delivery. And although Leila took a measure of pride from the fact that Sereburã finally had his son, it soon became apparent that the child had not escaped his parents’ curse. As an infant he barely cried, and four years later he had yet to utter a single word. Physically, the boy had always been undersized, but lately he had begun to lose weight, his eyes sinking deeper and deeper into his skull.
Leila’s mother, too, seemed weaker. Her once-beautiful face was now drawn and creased like an old mango, and she looked much beyond her forty-five years.
We will die soon . . . all of us, Leila thought, and as if to drive the point home, one day the old woman returned from another backbreaking trip to fetch water with a fantastic tale.
“Many warazu have come,” she said. “They climbed from the belly of a giant fish.”
Leila reacted to her mother’s words with fear, though the fear had not been brought on by the magical arrival of strangers. Leila had heard similar confused talk from some of the old people whom she had loved and respected as a child. Their minds seemed to have gone suddenly soft.