Hell's Gate

by Bill Schutt

  Epilogue

  Nostromo Base

  April 1946

  Only two years had passed, and the forest was already consuming the ruins of Nostromo Base. Vines were racing up the monorail supports, while bushes, some of them more than five feet tall, had sprouted from the elevated trackway itself. But the ancient stone-block road upon which the launch ramp had been anchored would survive long after the rail itself was gone.

  During the coming decades, pre-Columbian roads and the vestiges of an entire civilization, hidden between Nostromo Base and the Mato Grosso Plateau, would become archaeological sites, then tourist attractions.

  Irrigation canals dating back over a thousand years were about to be excavated and reactivated—supporting the increasingly expansive cattle ranches. Here and there, careless lumber cutting and agricultural practices were beginning to turn forested regions, through which MacCready had walked, into patches of dry savanna.

  The submarine Nostromo was being consumed as well—cut apart, hauled away, and sold as scrap. What remained of the boat stood in increasingly open daylight. The Rio Xingu was already dropping, and within two decades it would be reduced to a relative trickle—taking with it the perpetual fog layer that had shrouded the entire valley for millennia.

  Though the lack of fog made it easier to haul his heavy welding equipment from town, Hector Uieda hated being out here alone. All of the sheet metal that had covered the labs and other buildings was gone now, leaving only a framework of vine-covered ribs. To Uieda, it wasn’t the skeletal appearance of the buildings that chilled him; it was the sounds they made. Normally the occasional breezes rustling through leaves had a soothing effect, but not here, and not now. Beneath this rustling was a disquieting undertone, more felt than heard. He’d experienced the odd feeling before, but this evening it seemed stronger than ever. Uieda had to admit, however, that the heat and humidity weren’t nearly as troublesome as usual. It’s almost pleasant, he thought.

  Brooklyn, New York

  * * *

  R. J. MacCready and Major Hendry had been able to pull all the necessary strings to expedite the immigration of a war hero’s widow to America, especially as she was a war hero herself, albeit a secretly decorated one. Everything about the “Silverbird Incident” was being kept so secret that nearly a century would pass before the public learned the full story.

  At first sight, Yanni Thorne feared that the concrete wilderness of Flatbush Avenue might prove, as she joked to Mac, “tougher than the one growin’ under the plateau.”

  As always, though, she adapted quickly. Hendry had arranged living quarters for her near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on the uppermost floor of a decommissioned factory-warehouse. During the war, the building served as a kind of spare-parts storage box for the navy’s Grumman aircraft. By the time Yanni landed in New York, Hendry’s two sisters had convinced him that their “crazy” idea about buying the suddenly empty and seemingly useless warehouse at the bargain-basement price of a government auction, then repurposing it into large river-view apartments, “might be just crazy enough to be right.”

  Yanni was the first to move in, followed by several of the region’s bohemian artists, who admired the skill with which she was transforming her glass and concrete cavern into a living, breathing work of art.

  Missing Bob and the little house they had shared at the edge of the forest, she brought the forest itself into her new home. With Mac along for the ride, she had scoured every flower shop and nursery from Brooklyn to upper Manhattan for familiar plants. Yanni’s indoor replica of the Brazilian tropics thrived under huge factory skylights and windows that ran from waist height all the way up to the ceiling. The furnishings were odd, by most people’s standards: a massive rolltop work desk from the 1890s, with a hammock and a little sitting area nearby, all of it surrounded by tropical evergreens and flowering plants. Near what she called her “breathing wall” (a vertical carpet of leafy vines and bromeliads) Yanni had reproduced, as best she could, the kitchen from their home in Chapada.

  Mac was a frequent visitor; making sure the apartment was secure and checking out her neighbors with a concern that would have amused Bob. He also contributed a new refrigerator as a housewarming present, but Yanni never plugged it in. She hadn’t gotten used to the concept of frozen or prepared foods, preferring to buy fresh meat and produce daily from the local markets. As for the fridge, Yanni removed the door and used the box as additional shelf space for an array of shade-loving plants.

  On an exceptionally clear spring morning, Yanni Thorne noticed, during her walk to the Manhattan Bridge, that newspapers were headlining the latest in what were being touted as the “first ever” photographs of Earth from space. They had been snapped by Wernher von Braun’s freshly upgraded, suborbital rockets.

  “Second ever,” she said to herself, recalling the ruins of the Nostromo lab and the fuzzy-looking photos she and Mac had found. “But they didn’t seem so important at the time.”

  And if Sänger’s involved, they’d be wise to keep his ass far away from me, she swore.

  As she did every morning—rain, shine, sleet, or snow—Yanni walked the Manhattan Bridge’s footpath into the city, and to her job, proudly wearing her Brooklyn Dodgers cap. The span could easily be crossed by train in only a few minutes, but she liked the long stroll across the bridge, because she loved the river. No matter what weather or lighting conditions prevailed on any given morning, the river was beauty, the river was peace.

  Upper West Side, New York City

  * * *

  Who the hell designed this torture device?” MacCready asked himself.

  He always had trouble closing the specimen cabinet doors at the Metropolitan Museum of Natural History. The problem was that they slid on tracks located several feet above his head, and would only close if a pair of metal pins on the cabinet frame were precisely aligned with a supposedly matching set of grooves on the door itself.

  “Can I help you with that, Mac?” came a voice from behind. It was Patricia Wynters, the resident artist in the Department of Vertebrate Zoology.

  “Oh, hi, Patricia,” he responded, stepping aside. “I think these pins are bent. This one’s not going to close anytime soon.”

  “Let me give it a try,” the tiny brunette responded. He’d been associated with the museum, in one capacity or another, since high school and, as always, Patricia was right there whenever he needed a helping hand. Within seconds she slid the four-foot-wide door into place and locked it. “You and prehistoric horses? That’s a new one. What’s this about?”

  “Oh, just a little something I can’t stop thinking about,” Mac said, smiling. Then he glanced down at his watch. The band, he thought. Dammit, I’m late.

  Mac and Patricia exited the specimen room together. After a “thanks” and a “see you later” Mac bolted down the fifth-floor hall toward the elevators. After a quick jog across Central Park West, then along a tree-lined trail, he stopped outside the Central Park Menagerie. A jazz band was already playing. The “experiment” was under way.

  MacCready bypassed the ticket line and headed straight for the bored-looking security guard standing just past the entrance turnstiles.

  “Hey, Carl,” MacCready said.

  “What’s cookin’, Mac?” the guard responded, waving him through. “Nice to have you back for a change. Oh, and Yanni’s a real sweetheart.”

  “Yeah, thanks. Nice to be stationed in the city,” Mac replied. He motioned in the direction of the music. “Sounds like they started without me. Gotta run.”

  “Better you than me,” Carl responded, but by then Mac had already sprinted off, accompanied by the incongruous sound of a jazzy foxtrot.

  Mac found a crowd of zoo visitors standing behind the bars of the fenced-off, outdoor portion of the Elephant House. Inside the enclosure stood two elephants, their forelimbs manacled to short sturdy chains attached to pegs that had been cemented into the ground. Standing just out of stomping distance, a mook in a three-piece sui
t was blowing his trumpet into the trunk of one of the elephants. The animal seemed to be enjoying the attention—gently touching the instrument and rocking back and forth in time with the music.

  Looking far less relaxed, the head elephant keeper, who was wearing a long blue jacket and police-style cap, stood close by—alert for any sign of trouble. Completing his ready-for-a-riot attire, the keeper held a cop’s baton—this one outfitted with a nasty-looking metal hook. Behind the trumpeteer, another musician played a stand-up snare drum, while a third wrung notes out of a saxophone. Off to one side, several lab-coat types were taking notes. Mac recognized one of them, a Professor Arthur Carrington from Atlantic Tech. At second glance, he could see that Carrington was actually posing for one of the photographers snapping away at the weirdness.

  MacCready could also see Yanni Thorne, standing apart from the freak show. She was comforting the second elephant, which looked like a mountain of wrinkles compared to the svelte young lass being serenaded by the band. Still, the tired-looking creature watched the bizarre proceedings with seeming amusement. Yanni, on the other hand, who was stroking the ancient elephant’s ear, seemed to be sharing Mac’s growing feelings of disgust.

  The song ended and one of the scientists hurried over to address the crowd, which was already beginning to wander off. “Ladies and gentlemen, what you have seen here today was a scientific experiment to determine the effect of music on the beasts of the jungle.”

  “You call that music?” someone heckled, eliciting a burst of laughter from the crowd.

  The man in the lab coat, who was not laughing, cleared his throat and continued, explaining how the response they had just witnessed was proof that these brutes could remember their days performing with circus band accompaniment.

  Mac turned away. “Science experiment, my ass,” he muttered to himself. “Definitely a publicity stunt.”

  Moving along the fence, he could see Yanni and another keeper leading their enormous wards through the barn-size doors of the indoor enclosure. He checked his watch, grateful that she’d be getting out of work soon.

  The jazz band had packed up and left, and Mac and Yanni were sitting on a park bench. She was dressed in street clothes now, tight-waisted slacks and a collared cotton top. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail. “If you think that was a horror show, Mac, be thankful you missed the Monkey House concert.”

  He flipped a peanut toward a gray squirrel, who was watching their conversation with apparent interest. “So music doesn’t soothe the savage beast?”

  “The monkeys threw their shit at those guys. Pelted them.”

  Mac laughed. “Well, there’s a breakthrough: ‘Science discovers a new species of music critic.’”

  “Nobel Prize,” Yanni replied, “wit outta doubt.”

  Mac shook his head. “Well, your elephant friend seemed entertained, although Professor Blather had his own ideas about why that was.”

  Yanni gestured, as if shooing away a fly. “That schmuck? Elephants aren’t brutes, Mac. They’re as intelligent as you and me. Only different . . . sorta like—”

  MacCready suddenly felt uncomfortable—a tightness in his throat. “So, you still like Brooklyn, right?” he blurted. “Your apartment and all.”

  “What?” Yanni responded, seemingly confused by the abrupt change of topic.

  Yanni paused. “Yeah, Mac. Of course, I love it.” Now he could see that she knew exactly where his thoughts had gone.

  “That’s . . . good,” he said, awkwardly.

  “Speakin’ of which, I gotta get home,” Yanni said, standing. “And you got work to do, I suppose.”

  MacCready hesitated. “You’re right,” he said. “I do want to check out those Parahippus specimens before I quit for the day.”

  “I could walk you to the museum, Mac, and then just take the B downtown?”

  “No, I’m fine, thanks,” he said, with a hint of a smile.

  Once again, Yanni managed to impress him with her adaptability, this time leaving him to wonder how a woman from the rainforest had so quickly become an expert on the intricacies of the New York City subway system.

  Yanni gave Mac a quick peck on the cheek, then strode off toward Fifth Avenue.

  He watched her walking away, let out a long sigh, and headed back for the West Side and the fossils of the extinct horses that he hoped were romping through central Brazil. I’ve got an expedition to finalize.

  Major Patrick Hendry had become a frequent visitor to Mac’s office at the museum. They’d both been transferred to Fort Hamilton after the war, which actually made it easier for Mac to keep another set of trusted eyes on Yanni and her artsy-fartsy neighbors.

  Harder to tolerate was the fact that Hendry was often careless about the way he handled museum specimens, a habit which placed him in what Bob would have called “a somewhat less than positive light” with the curators. Now the major was eyeballing a set of ancient horse fossils that Mac had arranged on a lab bench.

  “Here, hold this for a minute,” Mac said, intercepting his friend by placing a Civil War–era cannon ball into his hand. “This you can’t break.”

  “What, you don’t trust me?” Hendry said, feigning shock. “You’re not still busting my balls about Triceratops?”

  “You mean Bi-ceratops?”

  “Yeah, well. Accidents happen,” Hendry responded, with an embarrassed grin.

  Unfortunately, though, Mac also saw something behind the grin that told him this was not one of Hendry’s friendly, bull-in-a-China-shop visits.

  “So, Mac,” the major began, when the phone rang.

  “Excuse me, Pat,” Mac said, picking up the receiver. “Oh, hi, Yanni. What’s going on?”

  He noticed with some alarm that Hendry had put down the cannonball and was headed straight for the fossils. “What? You want me to get you a what? Wait a second. Don’t touch those, sir!”

  Hendry picked up a grapefruit-size skull.

  “No, Yanni, I wasn’t calling you ‘sir.’ Major Catastrophe just stopped by. Yeah, Hendry.” Now MacCready pointed frantically toward the lab bench, flashing his commander the universal sign for Put That Down.

  “You bought a what? Yeah, that’s what I thought you said. Sure. Right. See you soon, Yanni.” MacCready hung up the receiver. Wearing an incredulous look, he turned back toward the major.

  “What’s the matter?” Hendry asked. “They run out of bananas in the Monkey House?”

  “No. Yanni just bought a baritone saxophone.”

  Hendry laughed. “Why’d she do that?”

  “There was this jazz band at the zoo yesterday. I guess the sax guy made a bigger impression on her than I thought.”

  “You know those musician types. Gotta be careful there, Mac.”

  “Yeah, don’t remind me,” Mac said, gesturing toward the horse skull. “You wanna put that down now?”

  “Horses, huh? Is this the little filly you ran into in Brazil?”

  “That specimen you’re holding happens to be about thirty million years old . . . so, unless you want to be offed by curators and have your body consumed by dermestid beetles, I suggest you don’t drop it. And the specimen I saw was considerably livelier. But I can tell you didn’t come up here to talk about fossil horses.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Hendry said, carefully placing the skull back on the lab bench. “There’s something in the air, Mac, and it just might have your name on it.”

  “So spill it.”

  “Like I said, nothing solid yet.” Hendry gestured down at the fossils. “Just don’t plan any field trips.”

  “Wonderful,” Mac said, rolling his eyes. Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  As spring became early summer, Yanni’s indoor forest became filled with what were at first the discordant sounds of a novice saxophone player. But as the weeks passed, her proto-beatnik neighbors, some of whom had become her teachers, were pleasantly surprised at her progress.

  Meanwhile, MacCready was working with the renowned na
tural history artist Charles Knight, to perfect Knight’s sketches comparing the anatomy of a trio of prehistoric horses. Knight was intrigued at MacCready’s insistence that the artist’s prior reconstructions were “a bit off.”

  “Anatomically, your little hunch makes sense,” Knight said. “But what I’d love to know is how you’re so certain about it?”

  And I’d love to show you, one day, Mac thought, just as the phone rang.

  “Seven fifteen A.M., this can’t be good, Charles. Would you excuse me?”

  “Army business, I suppose?”

  “’fraid so,” Mac replied, watching as the older man exited, grumbling.

  “MacCready here.”

  “Mac, it’s Jerry.” His friend from the mayor’s office sounded edgy.

  “Hey, Jerry, everything all right?”

  “Not really, Mac. It’s Yanni.”

  Mac felt his heart jump. “Is she . . . hurt?”

  “No,” Jerry replied, quickly. “It’s nothing like that.”

  MacCready let out the breath he’d been holding. “So what’s going on?”

  “I’m catching major shit, Mac. The brass at the zoo think Yanni’s slipped off the track.”

  “Look, I told you from the start, Yanni’s a little . . . different. And that was before I asked you for a favor.”

  “Yeah, I know you did. But there’s still a problem.”

  Several years earlier, MacCready had mentored the young polymath. Nowadays he was as comfortable cutting diamonds as he was designing lenses for spy plane cameras and flight-testing helicopters. Mac’s favorite of Jerry’s traits was his talent in the kitchen and the fact that he seemed to know every top chef in New York City. Unlike MacCready, though, Jerry was also quite adept at politics, and had become, at a very young age, a “higher-up” in the mayor’s office. Shortly after Yanni’s arrival, he’d asked Jerry for a favor—his first, and within hours, the Central Park Menagerie had a new (and exotic) assistant animal keeper.