Hell's Gate

by Bill Schutt

  One bat remained.

  The mother crouched in a forward launch position, sono-scanning the three humans.

  Go!

  Then, like the other draculae, it was gone, vanishing down the companionway like a specter, and leaving in her wake the unmistakable scent of gardenias.

  CHAPTER 29

  Profiles of the Future

  The survival value of human intelligence has never been proved, and may in fact be more a liability than an asset. Once a species reaches a certain level of intelligence, it has a survival advantage until such point that it develops sufficient power to destroy itself and everything around it. And it may be, then, that it always does. The universe may be full of planets on which high intelligence at the high-technology level has not yet developed, and also full of planets bearing the ruins of high-technology civilizations that no longer exist.

  —ISAAC ASIMOV, 1986

  Nostromo Base

  February 17, 1944

  By the time Major Patrick Hendry arrived by seaplane the next morning, with a serious contingent of special ops boys, MacCready and his two friends were waiting to guide them in. The monorail and most of the compound’s buildings (what remained of them) were still gushing plumes of black smoke that mingled with the mists and rose above them.

  As Hendry’s men spread across the base, the major pulled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of his pack. He followed up by producing a pair of shot glasses.

  “How’d you get in here so fast?” Mac asked.

  Hendry smiled. “Air recon, reported that half of Brazil seemed to be on fire. I figured it was you.”

  “Yeah, well, breaking things and killing people, setting shit on fire. That’s what we scientists are up to these days. Isn’t it?”

  Hendry replied with a humorless laugh. “Mac, you don’t know the half of it,” he said, pouring a pair of stiff shots. “And speaking of which, we just heard from our boys back north. There were numerous sightings of an unnaturally bright meteor off the Virginia coast. It was heading south to north when it tore apart.”

  “Let me guess, it was heading directly away from our position.”

  “Quite a coincidence there, huh? Unofficially, they’re calling it a Foo Fighter.”

  “And officially?” MacCready asked.

  “A meteor.”

  “What about casualties on the ground? Any word on whether this meteor dropped any bombs along its path?”

  “None whatsoever,” Hendry responded, noting his friend’s unease. “An eyewitness said, ‘It simply flamed apart into a bouquet of bright sparks and disappeared over the ocean.’”

  “A bouquet, huh? And what about the second rocket? Any more bouquets?”

  “No . . . no word on that one. Intelligence thinks it was probably lost over the Atlantic as well.”

  Mac shook his head. “That’s a stretch.”

  “So maybe we got lucky this time.”

  Hendry raised his shot glass.

  MacCready hesitated, then lightly touched it with his own. “This time,” he said. “But judging from a Japanese sketchbook and the type of lab equipment they left behind, it’s pretty clear these guys figured out how to use pathogens in the draculae saliva to make a bioweapon.”

  Hendry nodded. “Makes sense. And you know what I always say about wounded animals, right?”

  Mac waved off the rather obvious dig. “Smartest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  As if on cue, Thorne approached the men, seeming either troubled or looking for trouble.

  “Ah, the World-Famous Botanist, I presume,” Hendry said. “Would you care to join us in a toast to a job well done?”

  Thorne flashed MacCready his best who-the-fuck-is-this-guy look then addressed the major: “Excuse me, bub, but last I heard, those rockets were heading down that track in one piece.”

  “One of them went down off the coast of Virginia,” Hendry said quietly. “And that’s classified information, Mr. Thorne.”

  “And the second one?”

  Hendry paused. “Presumed lost.”

  “In any event, I will hold off on the celebrating, thank you.” Thorne turned to his friend. “Mac, have you seen Yanni?”

  Yet before Mac could scan the grounds, Yanni emerged out of the shifting mists—shadowy, as if she were a ghost.

  “Hey, Yanni,” Mac called, “I wanna introduce you to our brand-new fr—”

  Something in her expression stopped him.

  “You . . . must come,” was all she said. Then she turned and headed back into the fog.

  MacCready and Thorne exchanged puzzled looks, before jogging off after Yanni.

  They quickly caught up with her and she led them through the smog and dripping foliage until they came to a clearing in the woods. The remains of a small campfire were still smoldering.

  MacCready stepped into the circle, realizing at once that there were two bodies near the center of the clearing. One was lying on the ground at the foot of the other—which had been lashed upright to a wooden post.

  MacCready crept nearer. Something’s wrong.

  “What is going—?” Bob Thorne froze.

  Both of the “bodies” were Colonel Wolff. MacCready could see that, a centimeter at a time, the Xavante had put the Nazi to the same fate he once condemned him to by “choice.”

  Somehow, they had removed his skin in a single piece. Mac estimated that it must have taken many hours to complete the task. He was also fairly certain that Wolff had survived their artwork and been left to die.

  Morbid curiosity led him to take a step closer, and a cloud of flies rose noisily into the air, angry at having been interrupted in their meal and their egg-laying on the staked-out man and his twin. The colonel appeared to have died staring down at the wet pile, which was already black with ants.

  Scarcely breathing, MacCready began to examine the upright corpse. He placed a hand under its chin and lifted the head up. The musculature is still quite warm, he thought, looking at his watch. “Six hours,” he said.

  “Six what?” said Thorne, his voice subdued by shock. “I don’t understand.”

  “After they’ve finished the job, it takes at least six hours for a man to die like that.”

  An instant later, Wolff rolled his lidless eyes and spat at him.

  “Jesus Christ!” Thorne cried.

  Incredibly, Wolff began to chuckle and his head stayed up, straining against visible tendons, as MacCready backed away, nearly toppling over Wolff’s “other body.”

  “Jesusss? Where is heee?” The German looked at MacCready through air-dried and bug-bitten corneas, his voice damp air escaping from a tomb. “Youuu . . . I knew you weren’t deadddd.”

  Uncharacteristically, MacCready could not think of a reply.

  Sensing this, Wolff attempted what might have been a smile, several cordlike facial muscles drawing upward but with no lips to complete the expression. A moment later, the muscles relaxed and the Nazi concentrated on what he knew would be his final words: “The Silverbirds . . . I did thisss . . . Kimura’s bomb . . . You did thisssssss.”

  And with those words, Wolff’s head slumped forward.

  Thorne approached cautiously, half-afraid the Nazi would reanimate himself a second time. He was also unnerved by the strange expression MacCready wore.

  “What does he mean by this, Mac?”

  “I’m not sure, Bob,” MacCready lied, looking rather unsteady and knowing that Wolff had called it correctly. He had done this. Looking back now, at each fork in the road, every decision seemed like the right one. Yet still, in the end, he wound up leading his enemies directly to the biological weapons they craved. How, he wondered, might events have unfurled had his plane’s collision with a scarlet ibis killed him at Waller Field? How much better would things have turned out?

  “I’m not sure,” Mac repeated. He went silent, not knowing whose question he had just answered.

  Yanni’s voice broke the silence. “Mac, you need to see this.”

 
She was holding open a notebook that she’d pulled from a small pile of Wolff’s belongings. Mac took the book from her without losing the page she’d been staring at.

  Colonel Wolff’s lab notes were written in a clear and easily readable German script, but what immediately caught Mac’s attention were his drawings of the plateau. They showed the cave entrance, the passageway leading to the draculae roost, and the subchamber itself. But it was a drawing of the cave’s antechamber that caused MacCready’s eyes to widen. Four small squares spread across the floor, each with a line stretching to a point several feet away. They booby-trapped that cave, he thought, recognizing what, to his mind, could only be trip wires.

  MacCready scanned additional figures on the adjacent pages. One of them showed similar boxes arranged across the top of the plateau.

  And what are these? he wondered, noting that the squares were arrayed along what seemed to be a series of fissures in the earth. Mac remembered the strong breeze that nearly blew out his lantern—a breeze that could only have come down through one of these faults. While two of Wolff’s men were being slaughtered by turtles, he must have been sending others back to survey weaknesses in the plateau roof.

  “Jesus,” MacCready said, “they’re going to blow that cave.”

  Absolutely not, Mac,” Major Hendry barked, dismissing the request with a wave of his hand. The two men were standing outside the ruins of Wolff’s and Kimura’s lab.

  “But Pat—”

  “And that’s an order. I’m sending you back with the first convoy to Cuiabá,” Hendry announced. “You need a break.”

  “Pat, you don’t understand. I’ve got to go up there.”

  “No, you don’t understand. If any of these assholes survived, and if they’ve gotten back to that cave—let ’em blow it and God bless ’em. You are not going up there alone.”

  “But what about an antidote, and what if they’re trying to capture another one?”

  Hendry held up his hand. “Hold the bullshit, Mac. I can read German just as well as you. Wolff’s entire plan was to get those rockets away and to make sure nobody on this side of the Pond ever got access to those microbes again. Ever!”

  MacCready knew his friend’s argument made perfect sense, and yet he had to go back.

  Everything was turning upside down in MacCready’s head. It seemed that the voices of his mother and little sister had already decided his course. Last time, he hadn’t been around to prevent the deaths of an innocent mother and child. There was no choice in the matter. This time, without taking pause to question the sanity of his decision, Mac would do everything in his power to prevent the extinction of the innocent. In his mind, Amelia, Brigitte, and the draculae were becoming hopelessly entangled.

  And why do I want to go back there?

  The elders who drove Yanni into the forest years before could have answered him. “Once the chupacabra have been allowed to live inside your skull, you are never the same again.”

  Bob and Yanni Thorne watched a commotion begin near one of the spare rocket engines, while nearby a group of Hendry’s men had mounted what was left of the monorail track and were taking measurements.

  “Ants,” Thorne said. “Just like ants.” And in his scientist’s mind there was no doubt now, that a new day, a new era had begun. “I am seeing the world to come, Yanni. And it ain’t pretty.”

  “And speaking of ain’t pretty.” Yanni gestured toward MacCready, who was striding toward them at a brisk clip.

  “So on a scale of one to ten, how much shit is he bringing this time?”

  “Thirteen?” Yanni said.

  Once Mac laid out the plan, Thorne realized that Yanni had underestimated. “You want to go where?” he said. “Well, this time you’ve gone too far. And we are not going with you. In fact, I may rat out your plan to Hendry, just to keep your ass off that plateau.”

  “No, Bob, you will not tell Hendry,” Yanni countered quickly. “And you are not going. I am.”

  Thorne looked like someone who had been punched in the stomach. “But—”

  “We belong to the chupacabra, Mac. And we will save them,” Yanni said.

  Bob was suddenly agitated. “What’s with this ‘we belong’ shit? Who belongs to what chupacabra?”

  MacCready, who was no less dumbfounded than Thorne, paused for a moment. Although her statement seemed as distant from all prior reality as space-planes and sentient vampire bats, he knew she was right. Deeply intrusive and frightful, there was an intensely personal quality about the song of the draculae. Once received, one was apt to obsess.

  “Then I am going, too,” Thorne announced. “It’s settled.”

  “Well,” Mac said, “Hendry did order me not to go up there alone.”

  His friend managed a laugh. “So it seems that now you are only following orders.”

  MacCready knew that if any of Wolff’s men had survived to tie up loose ends, now that the rockets were away, they had at least a full day’s lead. So, to shave off several hours, Mac led Bob and Yanni up the same path he had taken during his escape from the draculae lair.

  The first thing MacCready discovered as they stood atop the forest-capped Mato Grosso Plateau was that he’d been correct about the source of the winds in the caverns below. It’s as if the plateau itself is breathing.

  He encountered the first fissure by accident. A downward gust nearly sucked a map from his hands, even before he saw the deep slash in the ground. The fig trees around its edge had been deformed by the downdraft; trunks leaning into the crevice, while roots clawed in the opposite direction, seeking to anchor the plants against the tug from below.

  The second thing MacCready discovered was that Wolff and his mapmakers had done their homework. Underfoot, the tabletop formation was cobwebbed with vertical fissures. The map led him to a second crevice, and in what appeared to be just the right place, someone had planted an explosive device.

  “Shit, I knew it. It’s a fucking shaped charge.”

  “Which is?” Thorne asked.

  “It’s designed to channel explosive energy in one direction. So that even a small blast can have a big effect.”

  “And what direction is this so-called shaped charge pointing?”

  MacCready pointed downward. “We’re standing on a diamond.”

  “A what?”

  “No time to explain. I need you and Yanni to look for more of these things.” He handed them his own hand-drawn version of Wolff’s charge placements and pointed to the forest on the opposite side of the fissure. “And if you find anything—do not touch it. Just let me know.”

  “No worries, Mac. What do I know from disarming bombs?”

  “And keep your eyes peeled. Whoever planted this thing could still be up here.”

  Thorne responded with a reluctant nod. Yanni holstered her sidearm and unslung her blowgun. “Shhhhhhhh,” she whispered.

  Twenty minutes later, MacCready shimmied out of the crevice, placing the dissected bomb on the ground beside him. And while it was no longer dangerous, he knew it had taken far too long to disarm the device.

  Mac thought back to Wolff’s notebook and the multiple detonation points he would now have to deal with (too many of them and maybe not enough time), when Yanni’s voice called out.

  “Lookee what we found!”

  She was walking behind a blond-haired man in his early forties, hands raised over his head.

  “My name is Eugen Sänger,” he said in accented English. “And under the articles of the Geneva Convention, I am officially requesting that you protect me from this savage.”

  MacCready ignored the comment. “Where are the rest of these things, asshole?” he said, pointing to the bomb at his feet.

  “I have been stranded. Have you seen my guides?”

  MacCready winced, reminded of Corporal Kessler’s pursuit of him across the swamp. “Where do you guys come up with this shit?”

  Yanni responded by poking Sänger hard, in the back of the head, with the business en
d of her blowgun. The man staggered forward a few steps.

  “Pally,” MacCready said, “if you don’t start talking right now, you are going off the side of this fucking plateau.”

  “My name is Eugen Sänger and under the articles of—”

  MacCready unleashed a savage right cross that not only broke the rocket designer’s jaw but a bone in his own hand as well. Sänger fell to his knees and looked up with a blood-smeared grimace that turned into a grin.

  Mac felt a flutter in the pit of his stomach. Something about the man’s expression conveyed a single fact: It was already so clearly too late.

  He turned to Yanni. “Where’s Bob?” And the blood drained from his face when she pointed to the forest on the cliff side of the fissure.

  The explosions felt like an insignificant series of muffled pops, compared to their ultimate effect. Wolff and Sänger had indeed done their homework, knowing exactly where, with just a few little taps, they could crack a diamond into a thousand pieces.

  “Bob!”

  Mac and Yanni sprinted along the plateau side of an ever-widening chain of cracks in the ground. It seemed that new crevices were yawning open every second and in every direction—except one.

  “Yanni!” It was Bob’s voice and she changed direction, heading into the disintegrating earth.

  “Bob!” she screamed, and as she did, Mac grabbed her wrist, yanking it with such force that for a moment he feared he’d dislocated her shoulder.

  As if by magic the rumbling stopped and there, in front of them stood Bob Thorne. He was wearing a curious look on his face.

  He waved. “Hey, Yanni. Mac.”

  MacCready looked across the thirty-foot chasm that separated them, and what he saw was heartbreak.

  “Hey, Bob.” I’ll watch after Yanni, he thought of saying.

  “I know you will,” Bob replied.

  And then, beginning with a disorienting lurch, a section of the plateau, more than a thousand feet tall, cast off like a ship from a pier. Carrying Bob with it, the ship sank slowly into the smoke and dust of Hell’s Gate.