Hell's Gate

by Bill Schutt

  He sidled awkwardly up to Corporal Kessler, who was sitting with his back against the cliff. “What’s going on here?”

  “The guides will go no farther,” Kessler replied. “They said that the people of the Forbidden City were exterminated by the gods; but that if we enter this place there would be no gods—only demons. Only chupacabra.”

  “And?”

  “And so most of us will remain outside for now.”

  Now that’s a relief, MacCready thought. As dangerous as the draculae were, they were also a fascinating zoological phenomenon; as such, he did not exactly relish the idea of watching as Wolff firebombed or machine-gunned the bat roost into oblivion, before he, himself, was put to death.

  Another of Wolff’s men barked out an order in their direction and Corporal Kessler responded with a halfhearted salute.

  “Seems as if you, MacCready, will get to see the blut kinder again.”

  “How’s that?” the American asked, and for the first time, he saw something that passed for satisfaction on Kessler’s face.

  The corporal drew a knife and motioned for MacCready to turn around, then he cut the leather band that had bound his hands together. “Because you are going in there with Colonel Wolff.” He lowered his voice. “And your friend, Sergeant Frankenstein.”

  His hands now free, MacCready led the way, carrying one of the three Indian lanterns. He was followed by his SS shadow, while the colonel brought up the rear.

  Twenty yards into the cave’s spacious antechamber the natural rock walls funneled into a narrow corridor of hand-hewn stone. MacCready paused, but an immediate increase in pressure from the sergeant’s gun muzzle was all the prompting he needed to keep going.

  At four feet wide and extending not much higher than the top of his head, the claustrophobic passageway was covered with eroded pictographs and paintings—the remnants of a lost plateau culture. Although unable to examine the walls except in passing, MacCready was still fascinated by the strange markings, animated as they were by a flickering, crimson-tinted light that would have made Dante feel right at home. He wondered if Fawcett, the lost English explorer, had made it this far—or perhaps had died here.

  Deeper into the corridor, a grunt from behind caused the American to smile briefly. “Watch your head, Sergeant,” he whispered, before a “shhhh” from Colonel Wolff silenced him.

  Besides the inscriptions, MacCready found something else about the cave that seemed odd. A flow of air blew past them as they moved, sometimes barely perceptible, at other times a humid breeze that carried the scent of something distinctly organic.

  It’s as if the plateau itself were breathing, MacCready thought.

  Several minutes later, the unlikely trio located the source of the “breath.” The hot air was wafting up through a circular, manhole-size opening in the rock floor, rimmed by carefully cut-and-placed stones. The smell was strongest here as well—acrid and almost painful to inhale, and now MacCready knew exactly what it was.

  He knelt down to peer over the rim and felt Wolff move in beside him. It might have been a perfect time to flip the Nazi into the abyss if not for that fact that Sergeant Schrödinger had remained standing, with his back pressed firmly against the far wall, and with his machine gun barrel aimed directly at MacCready’s head.

  “What is that smell?” Wolff whispered.

  “Guano,” MacCready whispered back. “Bat shit, with a chaser of bat piss. That’s the ammonia.”

  “The creatures, the ones who killed my people, they are down there?”

  MacCready shrugged his shoulders. “Not sure yet,” he replied, hoping that his acting ability was holding up. “I need you to hold on to my legs,” he said, very quietly. Then, as carefully and stealthily as possible, he slid down on his belly and extended a lantern into the chasm.

  As the American stretched his upper body deeper into the hole, he felt Wolff’s iron grip around his ankles. What he could not see was the look exchanged between the colonel and Sergeant Schrödinger.

  Five wingspans from the point at which MacCready’s lantern sent forth a rusty red circle of light, the mother slept. The child was also asleep, though fitfully so. His position, well away from his mother and the others, was a new and serious development. There was a raspy sound coming from deep inside his chest, and a sick smell from one of his wings. He was beginning to suffer from the blast of gas directed at him in the biped nest.

  The child would either heal or he would die, but until then he would be isolated from the others in the roost.

  Nearby, the lead male awoke with a cramp in his right shoulder. He had been dreaming about the bipeds.

  The strange sounds they made before they died.

  The taste of their blood.

  The thought made him shiver with something like anticipation, and he began to unfold his wings.

  The entire top half of MacCready’s body was now hanging into the subchamber, and with the lantern extended downward, he squinted to see beyond the blood-red glow. For a moment, there was nothing but glare, but then his eyes became acclimated. He saw a ledge along one side of the hole, perhaps five feet wide, but then it fell away, dropping thirty feet to the floor of the cave, a floor that was littered with ancient bones.

  It’s a tomb . . . or a sacrificial chamber, his darker side added, even as the shadows began to play tricks on his mind. It had to be the shadows, he thought, because for a moment it almost seemed as if the bones were—

  MacCready nearly dropped the lantern.

  —moving.

  And in the next moment he knew that it was not his imagination.

  The floor of the subchamber was slowly roiling like warm, convecting tar. Disarticulated skeletons, darkly stained, writhed in a sea of semisolid matter that seemed to be alive itself. Even worse, there were the sounds: the bones clicking and scraping against each other as the mass tumbled slowly over itself. A skull surfaced like the head of a drowning man in a bottomless pool. But what poured out of the eye sockets wasn’t water. It was—

  Something registered in MacCready’s brain. Something familiar.

  The smell above; the movement below.

  He remembered a similar scene, minus the telltale evidence of a lost civilization, deep inside a cave in upstate New York.

  MacCready let out the breath he forgot he’d been holding, realizing that ancient human remains were being animated by millions upon millions of insect larvae, larvae that were thriving in a dark layer of organic tar and bodily fluids that was constantly being renewed from—

  —above.

  But that means . . .

  MacCready swung the beam slowly higher, and peered across the ceiling of the tomb. Hanging in utter silence was the source of the beetles’ feast: a hundred dark silhouettes.

  Like giant Christmas tree ornaments.

  In the dim red light, one of the fusiform shapes unfurled, revealing wings ten feet across.

  Catching a glimpse of the creature’s head in profile, MacCready was reminded of something the half-mad Lieutenant Scott had said: “No more doggie on the ceiling.” But only now did the real meaning of that statement become clear.

  A hell of a time to figure this out, he thought, his mind quickly transitioning to more immediate concerns. MacCready slowly moved his free arm up through the opening, waving his hand in a circular motion that he hoped would translate to “Pull me the hell up—now!”

  It did.

  “Time to get out of here,” he whispered to Wolff, keeping his eyes on the opening in the floor even as he crab-walked away from it. “Very quietly out,” he added.

  “What did you see? What are they?” Wolff whispered back, but he did not move.

  “They’re bats, Colonel. Big, fucking vampire bats.”

  “Fascinating. They are mating?”

  “No. Surviving,” MacCready replied. “And doing a better job of it than we’re gonna do, if they figure out we’re up here.”

  “And this is what killed my men?”

&
nbsp; MacCready nodded and planned his bid for more time. “You got it. But there’s too many of them and too few of us. Unless you want all of your men killed, there is no way to exterminate them right now.”

  “Can we capture one?” Wolff asked, unable to mask his excitement—and at that very moment MacCready realized that he’d been had.

  This little expedition has nothing to do with dead Germans and eliminating their stalkers. But why do they—

  Before he could finish the thought, a loud grunt echoed off the stone corridor. Both men flinched at the sound and turned toward Sergeant Schrödinger. The giant was leaning against a wall and staring at the eight-inch cave centipede that hung from his right hand.

  MacCready threw a glance at the hole in the floor, then brought his forefinger reflexively to his lips, as if to shush the stricken man. If the bats heard them, this play’s final act would come quickly, Lady Macbeth style. The sergeant, however, was definitely preoccupied. The arthropod’s pincers were powerful enough to pierce boot leather, and now they were efficiently slicing beyond the fleshy pad below Schrödinger’s thumb, digging into bone and locking like the jaws of a poisonous, hydraulically driven vise.

  The sergeant held out his hand to Colonel Wolff, his eyes trying to conceal pain as the centipede threw its body into a series of exaggerated S shapes. Schrödinger flailed his arm out, slamming the back of his hand into the wall with bone-cracking force. He let out a slight grunt, turned, and disappeared into the darkness.

  They could hear him crashing blindly down the stone corridor, trying to make his way back again toward the imagined safety of the cave entrance.

  For a moment, the American captain and the German colonel exchanged equally surprised looks, but just as quickly they both turned toward the opening in the floor. There were new sounds rising through the hole in the tomb, stirred by Schrödinger’s commotion.

  click, click, click, click, click, click, CLICK, CLICK

  “Flatten yourself against the wall,” MacCready whispered, hoping that Wolff was not about to follow the sergeant’s noisy lead—and knowing that if the colonel did run, all three of them would be slashed open and pumped full of anticoagulant saliva. MacCready also knew that, like the goat under the Brazil nut tree, he would still be alive while the draculae drank him.

  In the lair of the vampire bats, the colony was awake.

  The reaction to the sounds from above was immediate and synchronized.

  BIPEDS, the draculae signaled to each other.

  Then, with the relentless precision of wasps sent to protect their endangered hive, four dark shapes scuttled across the ceiling toward the circular opening. The bats skillfully maneuvered an obstacle course of stalactites, moving as easily through the rooftop forest of columns as if it made no difference to them that their world was suspended upside down.

  MacCready placed his lantern on the floor and in one rapid motion pressed his body into a depression in the cave wall. Colonel Wolff quickly mimicked him. As much as he wanted to flee, now that he was free of the gun that had been continuously trained on him, MacCready’s life depended on remaining still—absolutely still.

  Four large shadows erupted through the hole in the floor. At first they were formless and abstract—wild shapes pouring out of the ground—gliding effortlessly up the walls. But shadows did not make sounds, and these hissed at each other, filling the chamber with a musky aerosol that reminded MacCready of skunk oil.

  One of the creatures scrabbled past MacCready’s face, claws clicking against the ceiling. And in the glow of the Indian lanterns, he finally got a clear picture of the vampires. Like animated gargoyles, he thought, and the part of his brain that could never turn off zoologist mode noted that they moved as gracefully on vertical walls, or even across the ceiling, as jaguars moved across the ground. He was familiar with similar gravity-defying moves in smaller creatures like roaches and chameleons, but never had he seen the like in an animal of this size.

  And then, without warning, all four of the gargoyles disappeared down the corridor, toward the prey that was currently making the most noise.

  If Schrödinger hates centipedes, wait till he sees what’s coming.

  MacCready eyed the colonel, who was still pressed into the depression.

  Just as he began to ease away from the wall, MacCready noticed something that caused him to freeze. There was a flutter of movement, and another dark shape emerged from the subchamber. This one was smaller than the others, and it hauled itself out of the hole with considerable effort. Then the creature stood on the floor, breathing hard, listening.

  MacCready fought the urge to close his eyes. It’s a young one.

  The bat sniffed at the air and then did something completely unexpected: It sneezed.

  MacCready held his breath and the little vampire drew nearer, its face moving into a lantern beam and casting its features in deep red, horror-movie shadows. Mac could not escape the feeling that the bat smelled something familiar, not just a human scent, but his scent. And his subconscious sent up an image. The tree . . . the staked-out goat.

  In the distance, Schrödinger was now making thrashing sounds against the corridor walls.

  The littlest vampire pivoted toward the sound. The creature appeared to hesitate for an instant. Swiveling its head slowly from side to side, it cast out high-frequency bursts, barely discernible to the humans.

  As MacCready watched, the young draculae pressed its chest to the ground, as if it were a human about to perform a push-up. Then, all in one small part of a second, the bat’s oversize pectoral muscles catapulted it into a hop that carried it down the darkened corridor in a blur of motion.

  The men remained motionless, their bodies still pressed as deeply into the cave wall as physics would allow. Only their eyes moved, and then only for an instant, as each man’s gaze was drawn back to the hole in the floor.

  Are there more of them coming? MacCready wondered. Should I—

  A strobe of automatic gunfire came from Schrödinger’s direction. The staccato roar was painful in the enclosed space and MacCready resisted the impulse to fling up his hands to cover his ears. Particles from the cave ceiling shook free and fell around him. There was another burst of machine-gun fire, shorter this time. They turned reflexively toward the source and the last few flashes revealed the giant sliding down onto his knees, firing his weapon. He let out a series of increasingly unintelligible curses, which deteriorated into a new and surprising sound. This was the end of SS Sergeant Schrödinger. The legend, who once grinned at his captors when punched in a freshly bored bullet wound, was crawling on all fours toward the cave entrance, bat-bitten and whimpering like a little girl.

  MacCready glanced at Wolff, whose attention had been drawn to the disquieting whimper. His next move will be to execute me.

  As if reading his mind, the German slowly turned to face his prisoner. Wolff’s movements were deliberate and unhurried. His face bore no emotion. And as the colonel’s right arm began to rise, MacCready knew that there would be a Luger attached to the end of it.

  This is it!

  MacCready gestured in the direction that Schrödinger and the bats had gone, and for a split second he saw puzzlement in the German’s expression. As the colonel’s gaze broke away, MacCready hurled himself off the wall, going completely and perplexingly airborne in the confined space. Wolff turned back just in time to see him execute a perfect dive—directly into the hole in the floor.

  The dive left the colonel momentarily stunned. He had fully anticipated a feeble attempt to run deeper into the corridor. But this? This?

  Wolff remained motionless. His gun arm had been late in tracking the movement of the American but he left the pistol pointed toward the opening in the floor.

  Will there be more of these creatures emerging? he wondered. How many of them can there be? Five? Five hundred?

  The colonel decided to wait another minute and, while acknowledging that there was little time to ponder the prisoner’s suicide le
ap, he had to admit that it had been completely unexpected, and in its own way, admirably spectacular.

  Evidently the man preferred dashing his brains out at the bottom of a filthy cave to the efficiency of a single, finely crafted bullet.

  On second thought, though, Wolff knew that a head shot wasn’t exactly what he had planned for the smart-assed American. It would have been more like a bullet in each knee. All the better to keep any more of his little bat friends occupied if—

  The colonel anchored his mind to more immediate matters . . . survival . . . and the mission.

  Yes, above all else—the mission.

  Wolff moved away from the wall, bending to retrieve a lantern, all the while keeping his pistol trained on the hole from which the bats had emerged. He approached the opening tentatively, holding the lantern out. A breeze rose up out of the dark, setting the red and yellow flame into motion. The German officer went down on one knee.

  There was a stone ledge just below the rim but his eyes moved quickly past it, drawn to the floor of the chamber. Something moving. The colonel shifted the light, struggling to obtain a clearer view, hoping it was only the American twitching and dying on the floor, before realizing that the floor itself was moving.

  Rice, Wolff thought, incongruously. But rice was indeed exactly what it looked like—a deep pool of live, unusually fat rice grains, set in motion around once-towering stalagmites, now half-sunk in a lake of black matter.

  There were bones in the rice. But no body. And no more bats.

  The officer lay down on his belly. “Where are you?” he whispered, as much to himself as to MacCready. Now he could see the entire floor of the subchamber clearly, but there was still no sign of the American.

  Could he be—

  The colonel’s brain registered a new source of movement, this time out of the corner of one eye. Now he swung the lantern back to the level of his head, illuminating the roof of the subchamber. Without the hulking sergeant anchoring his feet, Wolff was unable to attain MacCready’s panoramic view, but what he saw was clear enough. Something resembling a wave was rippling across the ceiling—a wave of teeth and reflecting eyes, advancing toward him.