When we started, the first firecrackers looked as if they had been made by someone in the middle of an epileptic fit, but practice made perfect and we finally managed to make some very decent cartridges, with the addition of paper impregnated in gunpowder for a wick.
“And you really think that’s going to stop them?” the professor asked, sitting on the floor beside me, rolling and pressing.
“They seem to be very sensitive to light, which means some flashes at the right moment could come in very handy when things get ugly.”
“You mean if things get ugly. The smoke seems to be keeping them away.”
I bit my tongue before answering. There was no point sharing my fears. “Yeah, of course,” I said trying to sound cheerful. “They’ve probably had enough for the night and now they’ll leave us alone.”
Cassandra was watching the door just then. She turned and our eyes crossed for a brief instant. Hers said clearly: “You’re a terrible liar.”
More than an hour had gone by when we began to hear noises above us once again.
It sounded as if they were dragging something heavy once again, this time on the floor of the temple. I was trying to imagine what it could be when there came a dull bump, followed by an unmistakable murmuring sound.
“What the—” That was the only thing I could say before a small cataract of dirty water poured down the stairwell and through the threshold, putting our fire out.
They had done it again. They were much smarter than they looked.
“Get the weapons!” I shouted. “They’ll be here any minute!”
That was said and done. As soon as the fire was completely extinguished, the first Morcego’s face appeared in the threshold. His long teeth were bared in a furious grin.
We opened fire immediately with all we had. We unleashed a hell of lead that riddled the Morcego before he could set one foot inside the chamber.
But before he touched the floor, another one appeared ignoring the fate of his predecessor. He launched himself at us, only to receive the same welcome.
By then a third dark face was in his place, displaying his terrifying fangs.
“The firecrackers!” I cried turning to Cassie and calculating that at this rate our bullets would be spent long before the fury of our attackers.
She knew what I meant without any more needing to be said. While I kept firing, she grabbed one of the bigger cartridges, lit the wick, and threw it at the doorway.
As they were not made with the same pressure as commercial firecrackers, instead of an explosion we got a strong flash, like the magnesium flash of a camera from the days of the Wild West. The result was even better than expected, as the Morcegos did not seem to like it at all. The ones who were huddled in the doorway retreated amid the smoke and acrid smell of gunpowder.
“It works!” the professor exclaimed. “It scares them more than the shooting!”
“They might not fully grasp the effect of the bullets,” I said, “but it seems the flashes do affect them.”
“Well, it’s obvious we hit them hard,” Cassie observed, shining her flashlight on the three corpses that lay riddled with bullets by the threshold. “I don’t think they’re coming back.”
“They come back,” Iak asserted behind us.
He was crouched beside Valeria at the far end of the hall, leaning heavily on his bow, keeping the small fire going.
“How do you know that?” Cassie asked.
“They hate men-us,” he reminded us. “They not want us here, they fight for their land. They die if necessary.”
Unfortunately, his logic was irrefutable and none of us could think of any argument against it. We might not have meant to but we had provoked them.
But what else could we do?
We were fighting for our own skins, and whether we were right or wrong, we wanted to keep them on as long as possible. There would be time for ethical considerations once we were out of here.
If we managed to get out in the first place, of course.
I was pondering about our real chances of getting out of that cellar alive when out of the corner of my eye I saw the faintest movement. I turned instinctively to the entrance. Without the fire it was now in total darkness.
It was not until my headlight pierced the thick curtain of smoke and darkness that I made out the unmistakable silhouette of a Morcego, lurking beyond the threshold in absolute silence.
In slow motion, holding my breath in order to surprise him, I raised the gun and aimed at the shadow that was approaching us so stealthily.
When the others saw my move, they followed the beam of my light. Like me, they were hypnotized by that furtive apparition.
My finger was on the trigger, waiting so as not to miss my shot until the grotesque face of that shadow became clearer, when something unexpected happened. Even today I cannot be sure I did not imagine it.
91
With his hands in the air, as if trying to convince us of his pacific intentions, the Morcego came out from the cloud of smoke. He took a couple of cautious steps until he stood there totally exposed to us.
His lean naked body, greasy and deceptively gaunt, reflected the light of our flashlights, revealing strong muscles under the jet black skin. That tall thin creature could have passed for an Olympic high jumper, except for a couple of terrifying details.
For one thing, the long powerful arms which ended in strong sharp nails like claws—I would even say carefully smoothed so as to cause more damage—, looked perfectly capable of tearing off a limb with a single stroke. The other feature which made him different from what we call Homo Sapiens was, of course, his horribly deformed head, that absurdly elongated skull. His mouth opened and closed, showing long yellowish fangs under a flat nose flanked by great black eyes whose gaze was murderous.
Nobody moved a muscle, caught spellbound by that instant of tense quiet which must end in a way none of us could guess.
Finding ourselves face to face with that specimen from another time was like facing some creature we had nothing in common with, even though we might both belong to the same branch of evolution. In the Morcego’s case, an artificial evolution carried out by a lost civilization long ago.
The truth was—I thought fleetingly—that this nightmarish monster was the only living link between the mysterious Ancients and us.
I said we were looking at the Morcego spellbound, but he was also observing us. Although not with irrational anger, but rather with a spark of proud challenge, the way a dog that has successfully frightened off an intruder will stay haughtily on the porch with his hair on end.
I knew that if I gave him a chance, he would pounce on me and slit my throat with no regrets. But I also understood that he had been conceived for that purpose and that you cannot blame the bull for charging at a red cloth.
So I held my fire.
Our eyes crossed for a few seconds as we studied each other, both parties trying to identify the strange species in front of us, and perhaps decide how far the mercy needed to spare the life of an opponent was either possible or necessary. To decide whether the courage or the intelligence of the other was enough to make it worth the risk.
For my part I could understand that we must look as horrifying to him as he did to us, if not even more. These creatures were simply defending the only home they knew, the home they had been confined to from the moment of conception. In those enormous dark eyes, I thought I saw—or maybe I just wanted to believe I saw—a trace of humanity that might allow some kind of communication between us.
Then, unexpectedly, the Morcego opened his mouth and uttered a series of bewildering onomatopoeic sounds, very much like a child learning his first words, or a deaf and dumb person trying to make himself understood.
Needless to say, that succession of jumbled vowels and consonants was totally incomprehensible to us, but there was no doubt that he was trying to tell us something in what might have been the remains of a language forgotten for fifty centuries.
That brief moment of mutual curiosity ended when, perhaps realizing before I did that there was no way to bridge the gap, the Morcego half-closed his eyelids in frustration. With a final snort that showed as much contempt as warning, he turned around, grabbed two of his fallen companions by the arms, and disappeared from our sight.
For more than a minute we stayed as we were, in absolute silence, waiting for him to reappear. But that never happened. All we saw was the third fallen Morcego being dragged by his feet into the darkness, leaving a trace of blood behind.
“What… what just happened?” the professor asked after a while.
“We’ve been very close to connecting,” Cassie murmured in ecstasy.
“Yep,” I said. “Close to connecting his teeth to our necks.”
“It was incredible,” Cassie went on, deeply impressed. “Did you see his eyes? There was intelligence in them, no doubt about it. With enough patience and the right approach we could have a stab at communicating with him and—”
“What are you talking about?” I interrupted her. “Haven’t you understood anything? As Iak says, we’ve come into their home uninvited and killed some of them. All they want is to be left alone. They know that if they let us live, others will come. That’s why they’re killing us. It’s pure survival.”
“And they hate us,” the professor put in. “They hate us to the death.”
“But they’re humans after all,” she insisted. “A unique race, and there’s no telling what they could teach us. We could… no, we must find a way of communicating with them.”
“No, Cassandra,” the professor said. “I understand the case you’re making, but Ulysses is right. The only way we have to find is how to get out of here as soon as possible.”
“But this last one was not aggressive,” she protested, as if we were incapable of seeing the most obvious point. “There’s no question that what we just saw was a first approaching attempt.”
At that moment Iak surprised us all. He came to stand in front of Cassandra and looked at her coldly. “You see only what you want to see… Morcego born to kill humans and learn to tear out heart and eat,” he said putting his hand over her chest as if it were a claw and then taking it to his mouth. “If you believe you talk with Morcegos, you very wrong, you die. Morcegos come back.” He addressed all of us now. “They kill you. They kill all.”
As an unmistakable finale, we heard a chilling roar of hate coming from a remotely human throat at the top of the stairs. A roar that dispelled any doubts about Iak’s words.
The Morcegos would come for us, and if we did not manage to escape from that ruined city, we would die just as all the others before us had done for thousands of years.
92
That last vigil turned into an eternity.
We took turns in pairs to keep watch at the entrance to avoid anyone falling asleep. The minutes passed like hours, and the hours were like whole days. Still, I was so exhausted that I managed a little snooze on that cold stone floor, which ended up feeling like the softest mattress.
For some unknown reason, the Morcegos did not attack again that night, so that we were able to get at least a minimum of rest. Perhaps they had had enough fun.
When my watch alarm went off at six in the morning, I couldn’t believe it. I felt as if I had fallen asleep just moments before.
Although it was still dark in the cellar, there was a faint glow coming from the stairs which showed that the sun had already risen.
“Come on, children,” I said with a furry tongue as I made an effort to rise. “Time to get up.”
“Leave me alone…” Cassie complained, without opening her eyes.
“Come on,” I insisted, trying to sound on top form, though even my eyelashes hurt. “We’ve got plenty of work to do.”
“What are you talking about? What work?” the professor asked as he stretched with difficulty.
“You’ll soon see.”
“Why do you always have to be so mysterious?” Cassandra asked.
I looked at her out of the corner of my eye as she yawned and rubbed her eyes. “I guess,” I said crossing my arms, “you might be interested to know how I plan to get out of here.”
“I’m afraid to ask.” The professor sighed, passing his hand across his forehead.
“Me too,” Cassie said. “But you piqued my curiosity. What have you come up with?”
“It’s pretty simple,” I replied with a confident smile. “Has any of you seen the movie Night Crossing?”
We went up the stairs warily in case the Morcegos might have left something to surprise us, and we reached the great hall where we had felt so safe until the night before.
The first thing I did on reaching the hall, after putting Valeria in her stretcher, was to look outside the entrance. I was relieved to find out that Claudio’s remains had vanished and that only a few smoking logs remained of the bonfire at the top of the stairway.
Better this way, I thought with a twisted smile. Then I turned to look inside. I was glad to see that although everything we had left the night before had been turned upside down and spread all over the place, the Morcegos had not vented their fury on our few belongings, which were pretty much intact.
With the morning light coming in through the entrance, we felt a lot calmer, even hopeful, when we fully realized we had made it through the night alive. Which was no small achievement.
“Well,” Cassie said. “We’re up here now. Are you going to tell us about this great movie idea of yours?”
“Sure,” I said. “For some reason, yesterday I remembered this movie, which is based on a true story. Two families from what was then East Germany managed to cross the Iron Curtain in a homemade hot air balloon. It occurred to me that… well, we could try the same using the hydrogen we found in the Nazi storeroom.”
It would have been worth selling tickets to see their faces. Without giving them time to react I knelt down on the floor, then with the tip of a knife on the stone made a sketch of what I wanted to achieve with their help. The bewilderment on their faces deepened.
Ungracious allegations about my mental health, continued jokes about the few cells that made up my brain, or my childish naivety in imagining that what works in a Disney movie would work in real life were some of the most favorable comments I had to put up with as I gave them my simplified explanation.
When I had finished, the historian and the archeologist had more serious arguments against what even I had to admit was the crazy scheme I was proposing.
“It won’t work.” That was Cassie’s trenchant conclusion.
“Yes it will,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because… it has to,” I said. It was the best argument I could manage.
“Are you listening to yourself?” the professor asked shaking his head. “You talk about it as if it were simple, but it’s nothing of the kind. Have you given any thought to how much hydrogen we’re going to need to lift the four of us? The weight/lift ratio? The volume the balloon would need in order to get off the ground?”
I shrugged my shoulders before saying: “No idea. I’m better at letters than numbers.”
“Well then? Without doing the calculations beforehand, how do you intend to—”
I raised my hand to interrupt him before he had finished. “I know all that, Doc,” I said. I breathed out, exhausted, and passed my hand over my face. “It sounds absurd and it probably is. But believe me, we have no other alternative. We’ll just have to make it and hope that it works.”
“Ulysses…” the professor muttered, far from agreeing. “Do you realize it sounds like the plan of a ten-year-old?”
“I know it sounds pretty wild,” I said, fully aware of his objections, “but it’s the only possibility I can think of for getting out of here alive. I’m open to any other suggestion, but if nobody has a better idea, I propose we try it. We have the means, plus the ingenuity and the need. What else do you want?”
“A taxi?”
; “Come on,” I insisted. “We have to start right now. There’s no time to lose.”
“But this plan of yours, even if it’s feasible, will take time to work out,” the professor said distrustfully. “How many days do you think it’ll take us?”
I turned to look at Valeria, who was lying there in silence, deadly pale, like a wax figure. The professor’s daughter had lost a lot of blood during the night, and the color had drained from her cheeks and lips.
“Not days,” I said firmly. “We have to make it and get out of here today, before night comes again. Otherwise, she’ll die. And so will we.”
93
“Where shall we start?” Cassie asked once I had managed to convince her that my plan was not totally insane. “Personally, I have no idea about what to do.”
I nodded toward the entrance. “At the mercenary camp, along with the supplies, I saw the seven parachutes packs they used. If we add the seven emergency ones, which must still be in their backpacks, we have a total of fourteen parachutes. At about two hundred and seventy square feet of cloth each one, we get approximately…”
Math has never been my thing, so while my brow furrowed in concentration, the professor hastened to say: “Three thousand seven hundred and eighty square feet.”
“Yeah, thanks, Doc… so we just have to join them together the way I showed you.”
“But, how?” Cassie asked. “Sorry, I left my sewing machine at home.”
“I haven’t thought of that yet,” I said with a wink. “You’ll have to go to the camp and pick them up, then come back and find some way of sewing them. That’s going to be your job, guys. Since between the two of you, you hold various university degrees, I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2) Page 41