Hell's Gate

by Bill Schutt

  Wolff jumped to his feet but even as he backed away, his eyes remained focused on the hole.

  click, click, CLICK, CLICK

  The Nazi officer turned and sprinted down the corridor, lantern in one hand, Luger in the other.

  Behind him, the clicking grew louder.

  The past ninety seconds had seemed longer than any hour to MacCready. He was lying facedown, trying to catch the breath he had lost diving onto the stone ledge. The landing was as soft as he had hoped for, which was a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing: His neck wasn’t broken. The bad thing: His dive had been cushioned by two feet of living bat guano, and now the plethora of cave-dwelling species—spiders, roaches, maggots—who called the place “home” were eagerly probing their unexpected but welcome new food source.

  One of the troglodytes had already scurried through a tear in the leg of his field pants, but before the intruder could head too far north, MacCready swatted at his thigh. He experienced a small measure of relief at the crunch of a chitinous arthropod body.

  Golden cave roach, he told himself. That’s gonna leave a stain.

  He felt a pinch on his uncovered wrist and another on his cheek. Pseudoscorpion? A sudden frenzy of tiny jointed legs spread across his back, and something the size of a walnut muscled its way past the ineffectual barrier of his shirt collar. Cave crab, definitely, he confirmed. MacCready had decided that the only way to keep a grip on his composure was to take a mental inventory of the creatures that were now beginning to eat him alive. Nevertheless, he hoped that the living membrane of “cave bugs” would blanket him completely enough, and fast enough.

  MacCready also concentrated on keeping his mouth and eyes closed, as a tide of grateful hunters swarmed over his shoulders, neck, and head, staking thousands of tiny claims.

  He could not see the glow of Wolff’s lantern from above, but he could hear a muffled voice.

  Can he see me? MacCready wondered, trying to concentrate on something else and coming up with a question. What could be worse than this?

  It took a second or two of thought but the best he could come up with was rabies. Foaming at the mouth, dementia, and the destruction of my central nervous system.

  Yeah, rabies would be bad. Even worse than this, he thought, until it occurred to him that simply breathing the air in an infected bat cave could transmit the very same virus he’d just conjured up as an “even worse-case scenario.”

  Keep it together. Think of something else, he told himself. And so he did—sort of.

  I wonder if there have been any studies on rabies transmission through inhalation?

  Probably not, he concluded, and he pictured himself assigning that particular project to Major Hendry. But then, as insect claws tried to pry open one of his eyelids, he realized that it was too late—the study was going on right now, and he was the lab rat.

  MacCready’s mind had just shifted focus again—how long would it take these things to reduce me to a skeleton?—when something large landed on his back.

  The creature hissed and shook itself violently, and he could feel sharp claws, even through the layer of arthropods that had gathered there to dine.

  Then the pissed-off what-ever-the-fuck-it-was hopped off.

  Yes, rabies is starting to look like a plan, MacCready thought.

  Colonel Wolff rounded a bend and slid to a halt near the end of the stone corridor. Sergeant Schrödinger had nearly made it to the cave entrance but now his body lay thrashing a few meters inside the antechamber.

  Wolff bolted toward him and got off two shots from his pistol, but not before the creatures gathered around the sergeant had scrabbled away, disappearing into cracks and crevices like shadows before the sun.

  They were feeding on him, he thought, vaulting over the dying man’s head.

  There was a flash of movement to his right and Wolff fired again. This time he heard the unmistakable impact of a bullet on flesh. There was a screech, and he glimpsed one of the beasts spinning wildly on the ground.

  Wolff ran on, inhaling the scent of gasoline. He could see the cave entrance now, fifteen meters ahead. His men were spread across the opening.

  A vibration ran through his body—strange but not unpleasant, he thought briefly.

  “Don’t shoot!” he shouted.

  Ten meters to go.

  There’s no need to run, an inner voice told him. And he had to admit that the pinging sensation was actually quite pleasant.

  He both felt and heard a leathery flutter from above and behind.

  Three meters.

  Slow down, son, the inner voice urged.

  Just ahead, he could see Corporal Kessler bending down—a mime lifting an invisible curtain, in reality the lower edge of a thin net that had been strung across the cave entrance.

  STOP!

  Wolff ignored the inner voice and dove past the corporal’s feet. As he did so, there came a rush of air from the place where his head had been only a split second before.

  Simultaneously, the pleasant vibration running through his body transitioned into an earsplitting shriek of anger, fear, and frustration.

  The colonel rose to his feet—others were at his side now, relieved and familiar faces. The obsequious Sergeant Vogt was even trying to dust him off but the officer waved the man away and turned back toward the cave.

  The screeching sounds were coming from a dense tangle of hair-thin mesh—a mist net, the Japanese had called it. The Asians had used these nets to capture birds for the soup pot but now theirs had ensnared something far more dangerous, and far more important.

  As if to remind Wolff of that first point, the bat’s head came into full view as it struggled to free itself from the hopeless tangle. It flashed a snub-nosed muzzle full of teeth, which quickly began to slice through the woven web. Up close, the creature appeared smaller than the four he’d seen feeding on Sergeant Schrödinger, but right now the size of the specimen was the very least of his concerns.

  The colonel nodded to two men standing on either side of the cave entrance and their response was synchronous. Each pulled back the netting just far enough to allow the lighting of the fast-burning demolition fuses they had set previously. Twin flames raced each other ten meters into the antechamber and there was a whoosh of expanding air as a wall of flame all but sealed the entrance to the plateau from the outside world.

  The Germans watched carefully, training their automatic weapons at the smoky wall and whatever might have survived behind it. But nothing came through the flames. Except for the high-pitched clicks produced by the writhing nightmare in the mist net, the only sound was the crackle of burning brush.

  Wolff pointed at the struggling draculae. “Get this animal into a bag before it harms itself.”

  A minute later, two privates clad in heavy leather gloves stepped forward and approached the net, cautiously.

  “I’ll attract his attention,” a private named Auerbach told his partner. “You sneak around from behind with the bag.”

  Private Horst, an ashen-faced eighteen-year-old, nodded but seemed far too nervous with his assigned task.

  Auerbach nodded to the other man, then started waving his hands around. “Hey, ugly boy!” he called. With a sense of relief he saw the bat’s head turn toward his diversion, but any relief evaporated immediately as the creature’s black marble eyes locked on to his own.

  As planned, Private Horst moved in behind the bat, which was no longer screeching and struggling. Silently, the teenager held open a large canvas bag and took a step closer to the tangled net.

  Private Auerbach had intended to continue drawing the animal’s attention but now he stood paralyzed by the creature’s stare—by its probe. Without thinking, he tried to whistle but found that his mouth had gone dry. As Auerbach blew a soundless puff of air, he never saw his partner, rushing forward and throwing the open mouth of the bag over the lower half of the entangled animal.

  “Hah,” Horst cried in triumph, fumbling to pull the bag upward over t
he animal’s flailing wings.

  The commotion pulled Auerbach away from the draculae’s stare just in time to glimpse the creature’s head rotating nearly 180 degrees. That quickly, jaws sunk into Private Horst’s left glove. Horst’s eyes registered shock, and he pulled back reflexively. “Shiest!”

  The bat let out something like a growl and bit down harder.

  “Let go of me!” the private screamed, pulling backward but unable to free his hand from the glove. Now the bat’s neck was stretching through a tight opening in the tangled net—and still, the beast would not let go, even as the nylon mesh tightened around its throat.

  “Shoot it! Shoot it!” someone yelled, and Corporal Kessler moved closer, pistol drawn, angling for a clear shot.

  “Stand back, Corporal,” Colonel Wolff said, pushing the barrel of the corporal’s gun aside and moving quickly into position.

  Kessler felt a surge of relief. At least I won’t be the one killing the colonel’s prized specimen.

  A single shot immediately followed, and Kessler jerked backward as a shard of flying bone bit into his cheek. Private Horst slumped to the ground, his now-empty glove still hanging from the creature’s mouth. The exit wound in the private’s skull had been aimed precisely, to assure that no speed-slung scraps of skull struck the bat.

  Wolff pulled back on the Luger’s hinged toggle lock then released it, extracting the spent shell and setting another cartridge into the firing chamber. He turned to Sergeant Vogt. “Please assist Private Auerbach with the specimen, Sergeant. Then assemble the men. We are leaving.”

  The mother heard the screams of the child through the blinding wall of heat and light blocking the cave exit. There was nothing she could do for him now, just as there was nothing she could do for the lead male who lay crumpled and burning in the antechamber.

  The child’s calls had become muffled and difficult to distinguish and the mother turned away from the painful glare and scrabbled back into the relatively smoke-free corridor. The others were coming. She could smell their confusion and their anger. She waited for her roost-mates to arrive, waited until their bodies covered the walls and ceiling of the stone passageway, a rippling mass of energized fur and flashing teeth. They bristled and seethed and hissed, but she waited for them to go silent.

  Then she communicated to them what they must do.

  Deep within the cave’s subchamber, the tiny creatures that were still feeding on their unexpected food source responded with something resembling startled surprise, when their meal rose up and began to shake violently. Most of the arthropods simply fell back into the warm comfort of their guano world. But others, especially those who would not (or could not) stop eating, were killed, their smashed and broken bodies eagerly received by the hungry masses waiting below. Then, before the cave creatures could reclaim the gigantic mountain of flesh, it was gone.

  CHAPTER 22

  Descent

  We humans have written our history in the perversion of nature.

  —BOTANIST ROBERT THORNE, AS QUOTED BY R. J. MACCREADY

  Colonel Wolff had broken radio silence, and even though the message was coded in an obscure native dialect, he still felt uneasy. Any radio signal out here will serve as a beacon. But now time had become the overriding factor and the colonel was beginning to doubt that they would have enough of it. Timing and logistics were everything, which made the fate of the American even more relevant.

  He is definitely a survivor type—and that is bad.

  Wolff hated the thought of leaving the plateau without proof that the man was dead, yet there was no alternative.

  Standing before his men, the colonel noted that the group had grown smaller by three since their last briefing. They were gathered near the cave entrance just outside a newly hung mist net, which he hoped would prevent the surviving bats from getting out. The shredded, scorched, and bloody remains of the first two nets had been cut down and tossed off the cliff. According to plan, they had set additional charges along a fissure that ran along the antechamber threshold and elsewhere. Wolff was taking no chances; the floor was rigged with trip wires.

  If MacCready emerges from this entrance he’ll get quite a surprise.

  The colonel spoke, keeping his voice low, as if afraid of being overheard. “While it appears that our American prisoner is dead, for the sake of our mission, we must be certain. For that reason, Private Auerbach and Private Schmidt will remain here, halfway down the trail.”

  Wolff moved in closer, his gaze alternating between the two men. “Our little camp here will be abandoned soon; at least it will appear that way. You two will keep yourselves hidden and kill anyone or anything that comes down that trail. When you are quite certain that the American’s body is beyond all possibility of resurrection, you will proceed to the base of the trail and wait there, where our indigenous friends will find you.”

  The colonel paused while they saluted, then he continued. “Sergeant Vogt and Corporal Kessler, you will descend the trail with our guides. Scour the forest for any sign of the American. If by some chance he has escaped, the Indians will pick up his trail. Should they capture Captain MacCready, please give him my personal regards, then allow our local colleagues to satisfy any curiosity they may have about him. Once they have separated the American from his burdensome life, rendezvous with Auerbach and Schmidt and return to base.”

  Sergeant Vogt raised his hand, looking like a schoolboy asking his teacher for permission to pee.

  Wolff acknowledged him with a nod.

  “Excuse me, Colonel, but what about you? What about the . . . specimen?”

  As if to answer the sergeant, there came a sound from below and across the valley, a rhythmic beat that sliced through the late afternoon air, growing steadily louder.

  The colonel said nothing but turned instead, focusing his gaze at the double-bladed flying machine that had risen from distant Nostromo’s sea of fog.

  Now the men outside the cave entrance could see that there were long black threads extending from the bottom of Dragon I. And as the cargo helicopter gained altitude and moved nearer, they saw that the threads were cables attached to a large steel basket. They all recognized the pilot, identifiable by her unmistakable blond hair.

  The Führer’s gifted pet, Wolff thought. Flugkapitän Hanna Reitsch gave a single wave, and through a swirling cloud of dust Colonel Wolff returned it. His men struggled to secure the front half of the metal cage—which Reitsch deftly placed on the narrow ledge. Kessler and Vogt ran forward carrying the canvas-and-net bag. Animated from within, the bag hung by leather cords beneath a pair of bamboo mist net poles.

  “Don’t lay it down!” Wolff shouted, pointing into the enclosure. “Suspend the ends of the poles onto the crossbeams.”

  The men did as they were told, but their minds were busy with other issues: dead comrades; the horrible creature struggling within the bag; the very real possibility that more of the monsters would soon come pouring out of the cave entrance; and the certainty that when the giant vampire bats did emerge, there would be hell to pay.

  Corporal Kessler tried hard to stow away these thoughts, especially since a more immediate threat to his survival was to secure the pole suspending Colonel Wolff’s specimen to the back half of a cage, which dangled and pitched high above the valley floor. The arrangement presented him with numerous ways to die, none of which involved “a bed, a bottle, and advanced old age.”

  R. J. MacCready ran a hand down his right forearm, noting that it had already swollen to one and a half times its normal size. He tried to think positively. If my arms were still tied, this one would’ve burst like an overstuffed sausage.

  No, that visual didn’t help.

  After hoisting himself to the top of the labyrinth’s subchamber just long enough to snatch one of the lamps, MacCready had ducked down again onto the ledge of guano and little “biters” and followed the first corridor he could find that led away from the smoke-disoriented mass of bats on the antechamber level above
. With any luck at all, the scientist hoped, many of them were preoccupied up there, with Sergeant Frankenstein and his friends.

  The plateau seemed to be literally honeycombed with damp underground passages. The one he chose led deeper into the weathered rock and, initially, uphill into thicker, choking smoke. He knew that fresher, smoke-free air was blowing upward through a passage beneath the roost chamber. He also knew that the fresh-air “low roads” were the paths the bats would most likely choose, and which he therefore needed to avoid. Using his filthy shirt as a smoke filter, Mac decided to follow the fumes along the higher corridor, far uphill and far beyond the “manhole” through which he had entered—away from Wolff’s Nazis and away from the determined procession of draculae he hoped would have killed them all by now.

  “Somehow, I doubt it,” he mumbled, finding a sharp downward bend in the “high road” that allowed him to crawl along a narrow passageway into more breathable air. He descended another two hundred yards deeper into the plateau before encountering a fork in the passageway. Mac decided to take the wider of his two choices, until a steady gust from a crack in the ceiling nearly extinguished the lantern, forcing him to consider doubling back. Coaxing the flame slowly and more fully to life, and shambling forward in the dark, he was lulled into a false sense of security. He had, after all, entered a region in which the ground was level and he could stand easily. When at last the lantern completely illuminated the path ahead he was reminded of his last discussion with Major Hendry: This is no time for complacency.

  The drop-off was only about twelve feet, but the floor of the dead-end chamber was covered with stalagmites—pointing up at him like a field of swords.

  MacCready shook his head. Why worry about Wolff and the draculae when your own stupidity can kill you?

  Some thirty minutes after doubling back to the fork, MacCready extruded himself through a rib-compressing crevice and into late afternoon daylight. He took a small measure of satisfaction from the fact that this exit had deposited him far beyond the sight of the cave entrance he and his captors had used earlier.