by Bill Schutt
Reptilian reflexes pitted against mammalian ones had become the horses’ good fortune, and MacCready’s misfortune. The caiman landed with all the grace of a fat kid belly-flopping into a pool, a noise that was certain to be heard by whoever had fired the gun. MacCready rolled into cover, alert for any hint of someone approaching through the grass.
About a minute later, there came another gunshot, farther away this time. Definitely Mauser. Definitely Krauts, but they’re not shooting at me, he thought, his relief tinged with annoyance. Leave it to the Master Race to take pot shots at a herd of animals that’ve been extinct for fifteen million years.
By the time his adrenaline rush wore off, MacCready began to realize just what exhaustion combined with a decision to press forward in broad daylight had nearly cost him. Now he would wait for dusk before leaving cover.
Three long hours later, the zoologist skirted the waterhole in a semi-crouch, taking a moment to appreciate a perfect set of Parahippus toe prints in the mud.
I’d give a million bucks to make casts of these, he thought. Then he shot a glance into the grass where the animal had disappeared. And another million to track that herd.
But he pushed his explorer impulses aside. He had a civilization to save. His own. MacCready turned resolutely toward the stark cliffs of the Mato Grosso Plateau. Rising out of their lake of mist, and far closer now, the stony guardians of Hell’s Gate looked impossibly steep and just as inhospitable.
Jesus, MacCready thought. Don’t make me have to climb those fuckers.
CHAPTER 12
From the Mist
God is in the details.
—FREEMAN DYSON
The devil has a better press agent.
—LEWIS ABERNATHY
January 26, 1944
An hour before dawn
The vampire bats hung like ten giant black teardrops beneath the gnarled branches of the great tree. For uncounted millennia this had been an especially rich section of their hunting ground, until the strange sounds and a sudden swarm of bipeds had driven most of them away.
Now they had come back to investigate.
Just beyond their roost, it was as if a strong wind had blown through the forest in a straight line, sweeping away every tree and every sign of life. The lead male sent out a stream of ultrasonic clicks that beamed along the clearing in a clean, straight line, unimpeded.
Puzzled, he repeated the call, this time casting a wider beam of energy that painted a sonic picture of the dense foliage bordering both sides of the clearing. The return information was processed instantly. A long stretch of forest had disappeared.
From her position at the center of the cluster, the mother could already sense the combination of fear and anger in the pheromonal response of her mate. Hanging from the same branch, she felt the twins stirring uneasily in response to their father’s chemical message.
The lead male’s body vibrated for a moment, then his jaws snapped open. A pair of specialized salivary glands swelled, filling the front half of the bat’s mouth. The creature let out a long audible hiss that was accompanied by a thin, aerosolized spray, and from behind the mother, several subordinate males, including the male twin, responded immediately, mimicking his call.
Before, they had taken the new bipeds only when they encountered them by accident. Now they would hunt them.
Moments later, the branches of the great tree were empty. The creatures who had been roosting there were now returning to the cliffs, racing the coming dawn, and leaving in their wake the scent of gardenias.
MacCready peered down from a thickly vegetated ledge of rock into the valley of Hell’s Gate. Dawn was only moments away, and a hundred feet below his perch, a sea of fog stretched unbroken across the miles.
He had arrived the evening before, deciding that the high ground would reveal the best possible routes into the valley. Thankfully, he’d also been able to catch a few hours of sleep, but Mac was still feeling exhausted as he looked out across the surface of the mist.
His first impression was that if it weren’t for the treetops poking up here and there, an observer might have been fooled into thinking there was water under the fog instead of a lush forest. Indian Lake, at sunrise, he thought, smiling as he remembered the early morning view from a hilltop cabin in the Adirondack Mountains.
The squawk of parrots, moving from the high ground into the valley, brought him back to present reality. Like clockwork, the birds noisily left their nests each dawn, descending into the lowlands to feed. At twilight, the same loud commute took place in reverse. There were other sounds as well—insects mostly, and frogs.
Suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, there was only silence.
MacCready’s brain barely had time to register the change when the earth began to tremble. A second later, he felt a low rumble.
It’s coming from under the mist! MacCready thought, and with this realization, he saw a small patch of fog begin to glow, about a half mile away. Almost simultaneously, from the center of the glow, the missile appeared. From this distance it seemed to measure around twenty-five feet long and maybe three feet across, with four backward-sweeping wings located mid-body. Reddish black exhaust trailed behind the engine and MacCready watched it ascend, accelerating rapidly.
That’s not what I saw in Chapada, he realized. Then his eyes caught another object coming onto the scene, barely visible because of its great height.
MacCready strained to hear the engines. It’s Allied photo recon—gotta be. A B-24 by the sound of it. “Shit,” he whispered.
The rocket’s exhaust trail took a sudden, sharp turn, and for a moment MacCready thought that it had been thrown off course, but only for a moment. And in that moment, he knew he was watching an antiaircraft missile, one that was headed directly for the plane.
Somebody is controlling that thing, he thought, and in the same instant, missile and reconnaissance plane merged in the flash of a fireball.
The sound of the explosion reached him several seconds later and MacCready’s body jerked in response. Stunned, he allowed his gaze to drop back down into the valley, but now there was only the fog and a scattering of skeletal branches, pointing skyward like accusing fingers.
I need to contact Hendry with these exact coordinates, he thought. If only Thorne hadn’t already left. As his mind sought the fastest way to get this new information back to civilization, something bit him just below the right ear.
It’s—
MacCready neither heard nor saw anything. All sense of danger, all sense of time, all conscious and subconscious thought, all sense of self, had simply ceased to be.
Far above MacCready’s prone form, the jagged scar of a missile contrail was already fading against the blue sky of morning.
CHAPTER 13
Maruta
The legacy of cruelty, pain, and fear left behind by the Japanese Chemical Weapons Division under General Ishii Shiro still haunts the world today. There has been little effort to make restitution to the victims’ families who suffered through his barbaric experiments. Ishii Shiro is gone, but the results of his work are a threat to disrupt the free world today.
—GREGORY DEAN BYRD, “GENERAL ISHII SHIRO: HIS LEGACY IS THAT OF GENIUS AND MADMAN,” M.A. THESIS, 2005
Nostromo Base
January 26, 1944
Who killed my men?” Colonel Wolff asked in perfect but accented English.
The prisoner stood on unsteady legs, his hands bound tightly behind his back. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like that actor?” the captive asked. Then he turned to Wolff’s hulking right-hand man, SS Sergeant Schrödinger. “You know who I mean, right? Tall guy, like you—only human.”
The giant’s face betrayed no emotion.
“Who killed my men?” Wolff repeated. His voice held no malice. It was almost soothing.
The bound man turned back to face the black-clad officer. “This actor I’m thinking of—really strange excuse for a romantic lead. I’m thinking he’d be b
etter off—”
There was a flash of movement and the prisoner dropped as if he had been deboned. Like the Indian dart that had taken him down four hours earlier, the lightning-fast punch that Sergeant Schrödinger just landed to his temple went completely unseen by Captain R. J. MacCready.
Wolff stood over the crumpled man for a moment, then shot the sergeant a look that was half exasperation and half annoyance.
“An interesting way to end an interrogation,” came a voice from behind the colonel. The man was Dr. Kimura, one of the project’s latest additions.
“Can this one be responsible for the killings?” Kimura asked in passable German. He was wearing a lab coat, but beyond that his choice of attire fell apart quickly. The bespectacled scientist wore short pants, and on his feet—some sort of platform-elevated sandal. A paper surgical mask had been pulled down and now served to barely conceal several of his ample chins.
“I think not,” Wolff replied. “Clearly he was sent here to locate his missing friends.”
“Good, then I can use him for—”
“Before you do anything, Doctor, I will spend some time with our guest.” Then, without further explanation, and before Kimura could respond, the colonel turned and strode off in the direction of the Nostromo, Schrödinger at his heels.
“You probably weren’t so haughty when you hung up our other submarine,” Kimura muttered to Colonel Wolff in Japanese, and under his breath.
Satisfied that the colonel and his goon were not around to observe, he prodded the prisoner’s body with a geta clog. Further satisfied that the prisoner was at best only semiconscious, he nodded to a pair of Japanese soldiers who were standing by at attention. The men gave no hint that a minute earlier they had been snickering at Kimura’s eccentric attire.
The doctor’s order consisted of a single word: Maruta. But it was all the pair needed to hear. They watched their superior hobble off, trying hard to mask his limp. They’d all spent their childhoods in the shadow of polio.
The two soldiers hauled the prisoner’s body up by the arms and began dragging him away—his boots digging a pair of shallow troughs that ended as the men approached a hangar-shaped building, roughly the size of a truck garage. The rounded roof of the corrugated structure was streaked with reddish brown rivulets—the metal panels corroding after nearly four months in the hothouse climate. One of the men kicked open the door and they disappeared inside Dr. Kimura’s “woodshed.”
Akira Kimura wished he were still in Manchuria, or anywhere else for that matter. Anywhere but here, where savages fly their colors on our prized submarines—and have the impudence to rename them. What is a Nostromo, anyway?
My work there was far from finished, the doctor thought, as he peered into a microscope. “Maruta,” he said to himself. It was a word that caused him to chuckle, in spite of the heat, humidity, bad food, and worse company. Back in Harbin, even Dr. Ishii had gotten a laugh out of that one. Maruta.
Kimura was a trained microbiologist, with a doctoral degree from Kyoto Imperial University. He’d stayed on after graduation, working at the army’s medical hospital and winning the favor of the senior officers there. The young researcher had identified himself with the National Socialists, adopting their goals and aspirations, as well as their hatred for all things capitalistic, bourgeois, or liberal.
Kimura’s life changed by accident in 1928, after he read a document from the Geneva Disarmament Convention. It was a report that banned chemical and biological warfare. But the young scientist was not dissuaded.
“If they took the trouble to outlaw it,” Kimura reasoned, “it must have great potential as a weapon.”
Using his connections with several ultranationalists in the War Ministry, Kimura began to lobby for the creation of a program to develop pathogenic weapons. Knowing that their military was greatly outnumbered by the Bolsheviks, Kimura’s superiors were all too eager to promote the development of weapons that could be used to counter the Soviet advantage in any upcoming conflict. Kimura savored the memory of how his stature rose during construction of a massive research complex in occupied Manchuria. By the time of its completion in 1939, and under the supervision of Lieutenant Colonel Ishii Shiro, the Ping Fan facility consisted of more than seventy structures. In addition to the state-of-the-art labs and dissection-autopsy facilities, there were twenty-two dormitories, a large Shinto temple, eight restaurant-bars, and brothels serviced by young Chinese and Korean “comfort girls.” Kimura always found it amusing that the fifteen thousand Ping Fan construction workers, illiterate Chinese mostly, died from the work-to-death directive, without ever knowing what they were building.
Even less fortunate were those housed in buildings 7 and 8, who were surprised at being given ample food and warm cells in which to sleep.
“My patients,” Dr. Kimura had called them, but he knew that the comforts lavished upon these men were akin to those lavished by Kobe cattlemen on their well-fattened herds. In hushed tones, the program was referred to as “Unit 731.”
Most of Unit 731’s “patients” were Chinese but there were Russians and Koreans as well. There were even a few dozen English and American prisoners of war. Although all would eventually meet horrible deaths, the method of their murder varied greatly. Some were staked to the ground in gridlike patterns, then “bombed” with a broad spectrum of disease agents, ranging from plague-infected fleas to anthrax. Kimura and his crew would then calculate the effective killing distance of the pathogens from the epicenter of the blast.
In the occupied villages nearby, children were spared the bacterial bombs; instead Kimura’s men handed out chocolates that had been filled with anthrax and cookies smeared with plague.
The scale of experimentation had grown so large that bodies could not be buried fast enough, or deep enough. Indeed, the decay of so much accumulated flesh had produced emissions of methane gas in such quantity that in some places the ground ballooned upward almost a full story. Kimura and Ishii had noted, with more annoyance than concern, how attempts to disguise the burial ground as ordinary farmland were doomed to failure. “The farmers said that the ground was poisoned. All the plants died and not even pigs would go there.”
But the toxic earth wasn’t the only horror-show detail for the locals to ponder and Kimura to smile about. The Ping Fan facility itself was foreboding—140 acres—surrounded by a five-meter-deep moat and a series of high brick walls, either electrified or bristling with barbed wire, and, in each of the camp’s four corners, a machine-gun-equipped watchtower. He’d ordered commuter train crews to draw the curtains on all passenger car windows as their trains neared the Ping Fan station: “Those foolhardy enough to risk a peek will see the complex from a far less comfortable vantage point.”
A continual source of pride for Kimura was the realization that, by comparison to the German death camps, the efficiency of Unit 731’s commanders was absolute. Not even rumors escape.
Locals knew better than to take an interest in the “special transport vehicles” that roared into the facility at all hours. They had learned that whenever the blare of police sirens preceded these large trucks, they must never be caught within viewing distance.
The situation had reached a point at which even regional administrators in the puppet Manchukuo government were concerned about maintaining the cover-up.
“What should we tell the people?”
Kimura would always remember Lieutenant Colonel Ishii’s contemptuous reply. “Tell them we have constructed a lumber mill,” he told his subordinates, and they in turn had informed the Manchu ministers.
From that day forward, the “patients” at Ping Fan would have a new name—maruta.
From that day forward, they would become “logs.”
Inside the “woodshed,” which had no visible windows and only a single vent near the ceiling, the heat of the day had made the conditions even more oppressive. Beyond the temperature and humidity, there was the unmistakable smell of human excrement, and something else�
��something indescribable. One of the Japanese soldiers began gagging even before they had dumped R. J. MacCready’s unconscious body into the first of a line of steel-barred cells. The sickened man gestured toward the cell door, then fled quickly, without uttering a word.
The soldier who remained, a private named Yamane, locked the cell as quickly as he could. He wanted to follow his sickened friend’s hasty retreat and was surprised, therefore, to find his dash for the exit thwarted by hesitation.
Strangely, suddenly, there was something about this place that brought back a memory of Yamane’s youth and the butcher shop where his father worked.
It certainly isn’t the horrible smell, he thought. But just then, and only for a moment, he could almost hear his beloved father’s voice.
JENTORU
Yamane shook his head. Not something my father would have said, he thought.
There was a hiss of air, and the private’s hand moved instinctively toward the sidearm he carried. But it was only the stirrings of the new prisoner, beginning to regain consciousness. Yamane relaxed a bit, watching as the American groaned and half-rolled onto his back.
The newest permanent resident was quiet again, but just as Yamane turned to leave, there was a rustling sound from the far corner of the room. Like two pieces of old rice paper sliding past each other.
The private squinted into the darkness. Something was there—something odd and barely visible—a black shape suspended near the ceiling. Did it move?
It did move, he thought. The strange object seemed to expand for a moment.
Then he heard his father’s voice again. JENTORU.
“Uh-oh!” came a singsong voice from the farthest cell.
Yamane spun around and stumbled toward the exit, nearly tripping over his own feet as he went. Why am I running? he thought, realizing that a part of him actually wanted to remain.
For a moment, the “woodshed” was flooded with light as the outer door swung open, but the sound of a bolt slamming home brought back the darkness, concealing the room and its secrets.
