by Bill Schutt
The American gave Schrödinger his best “who, me?” and continued across the river. When Mac emerged from the water, a small crowd had gathered around the agonized soldier.
As MacCready watched, two Germans forcibly held the man down while one of the guides drew an obsidian blade from a leather scabbard. Not surprisingly, the screaming man became even more terrified as the knife-wielding Indian moved toward him with a menacing grimace. Then, in one swift motion, the guide slit open the soldier’s pants, but not the soldier himself. There followed another blur of movement and this time the man’s underpants were sliced open. Immediately the group seemed to take a collective step backward, but their retreat had nothing to do with modesty or embarrassment. To everyone present it appeared as if the screaming man was wrestling with his own penis.
“Es ist in meinem penis!” the man screamed, and a moment later those standing close enough (too close, actually) got a look at exactly what the man was wrestling with.
Even MacCready got a glimpse—just long enough for him to see that the tail section of a tiny fish was protruding from the soldier’s besieged beanpole.
“Es ist in meinem penis!” he screamed again, his eyes wide, imploring someone to help—at which point, one of the man’s friends did step forward; but as he did so, the fish gave a violent wiggle. As the would-be rescuer watched, the visible portion of the creature seemed to shorten considerably and it worked its way another inch further upstream. Now only the wriggling tail fin was exposed.
Colonel Wolff stepped away from the chaotic scene and addressed the guides in Portuguese: “Qual é aquela coisa?”
“Ele é um candiru,” one of them replied.
“Oh shit,” MacCready muttered, though apparently not quietly enough.
The colonel spun toward him. “What?”
“I’m pretty sure he said it’s a candiru.”
“And what is this . . . candiru?”
“A parasitic catfish, Vandellia cirrhossa.”
“A catfish?”
“Yeah, they usually attack larger fish, latch on to their gills, then feed on the blood pumping through them. Very messy eaters.”
“But what is this fish doing inside him?”
“Candiru get excited at the scent of urine,” MacCready said. “Probably because it’s full of the same nitrogen compounds their prey excrete from their gills. Fish don’t urinate.”
As Wolff turned back toward his men, MacCready glanced over at the guides. “Walks with Empty Bladder” was now casually scanning the sky, as if searching for rain clouds or maybe butterflies. MacCready had to suppress a chuckle. “Your man must have relieved himself while he was wading across the stream,” he announced. “His new pal evidently took a wrong turn at Willy’s willy.”
“And how do we get this . . . parasite out of him?” Wolff asked.
Mac shook his head. “From what I hear, there’s only one way to remove a candiru.”
“And what is that?”
The American responded by making a scissoring motion with his index and middle fingers.
Now it was one of the guides who turned away, feigning disgust but in reality hiding a grin.
Less than five minutes later, the expedition resumed its trek toward the plateau—minus the traumatized soldier. Private Schoeppe had been sent back to Nostromo Base, limping, whimpering, and desperately clutching one end of a string that had been fastened around the base of the candiru’s tail fin. He had also been given instructions for the “necessary surgery.”
“Now, that guy’s going to have a serious story to tell if he ever gets home from the war,” MacCready said to no one in particular.
Just up ahead, Corporal Kessler turned back for a moment, “You are right, MacCready, but I think it will be a short story.”
The American smiled, suppressing the urge to keep the exchange going for fear of getting coldcocked again by his outsize SS buddy.
The Indian guides also watched as the sad-looking warazu stumbled past them. They had neglected to tell the strangers that there was indeed another remedy for a candiru attack. This one involved inserting a potion made from the unripe fruit of the jagua plant into the stricken orifice. The extract killed the candiru and dissolved its body, allowing the remains to be urinated out within a day or two.
“Such a common plant,” one of the men said, shaking his head and grinning.
“I have seen many of them this day,” said the other. Then he turned and slashed at something growing across the trail.
Six hours earlier, in his lab, Maurice Voorhees had his second encounter with the blut kinder—then decided not to tell anyone about it. Finding Kessler gone, and with no one giving him even the vaguest reason why Wolff had taken the soldier away into the forest, it seemed to Voorhees that the better part of valor would be to keep his mouth shut. Speaking about what he knew of future propulsion systems had already gotten him into trouble. Talking about known unknowns might be even worse. What he did know was that Kessler’s unknown phantoms were not only efficient killers but skilled infiltrators as well.
Independently Wolff had come to suspect the same thing. Before he left, he issued a command that the perimeter patrols were to be pulled inward to the vital nerve centers of Nostromo Base. The most efficient use of manpower, logic dictated, was to reduce the overall surface area of the defensive lines, primarily to the three buildings where the final stages of chemical manufacture, sled and rocket testing, and—soon—payload development were racing toward completion.
As an extra precaution against intrusions by the phantoms, there were now four armed observers on the roof of each shed, keeping watch by aid of the latest copies of MI-5’s infrared binoculars. If these creatures were warm-blooded, as Kimura seemed to be convinced, any possibility of them scrabbling unseen, onto or into the buildings, could be eliminated or at least greatly diminished. The premise seemed to be that the apparent cunning and stealth of the night visitors could be counterbalanced by excessive vigilance. Wolff was evidently betting on the superiority of the human mind.
This should have been a good bet. But on the same morning Schrödinger woke the American prisoner for a trek to the night stalkers’ lair, Voorhees missed the first breakfast call, having worked through the night and even through his shift break. Then, while his machinists were released for breakfast, and as the predawn fog crept in toward high tide, something else came into the warazu compound—undetected.
For several days, virtually all of Voorhees’s thoughts had been concentrated on increasing the range of the Silverbirds. Sänger’s original designs fell short of the efficiencies necessary to overfly their targets, and the new “bottle rocket” boosters, for all their power, were not quite enough to make up the difference. Now Voorhees had the machinists stripping and scraping away every sacrificeable gram of mass from the two space-planes. By doing so he hoped to further extend their range, thus giving their pilots at least some small chance of not having to eject from their ships or letting them crash unguided into mountains, enemy territory, or even the sea.
Reducing mass meant that the pilots would carry neither food nor water; no life rafts, no survival kits—nothing weightier than whatever could be fit into the cushion at the pilot’s back and neck (which would serve double duty as a life vest). Even the backup parachutes had been eliminated, all in the hope of extending flight range, all in the hope that a skid-crash on a friendly runway, with empty fuel tanks, might save the ships. “The Leonidas Maneuver,” he would call it. Reitsch would love that one. Voorhees removed metric tons by stripping out the landing gear, along with its associated bracing and hydraulics. Still . . . each rocket would have fallen short of its safe haven by at least a thousand kilometers. Adding to the difficulties, they were now completely out of materials with which they could manufacture another batch of solid, aluminum-based propellants. Voorhees, however, discovered that he could make up for the shortfall with a newer and very carefully mixed set of chemicals, set into a cowl of tanks, or pods, paired near the tail o
f each bird. These hypergolic propellant pods were fueled by two substances that so hated the presence of each other that, when combined, their simultaneous combustion provided almost as much thrust as the bottle rocket boosters.
The real problems lay in the extreme toxicity of the two propellants, and in keeping the pilot from being anywhere near them. The fuel had a power to scorch human flesh with a ferocity that reminded him of mustard gas. And that was the milder half of the formula. The fuel oxidizer, if splashed onto a block of ice, would set the ice itself afire.
Nonetheless, Voorhees and Sänger were confident that both components could be safely contained and pumped into the appropriate thrust chambers by a simple throttle control. And so as Colonel Wolff began mapping a secret expedition to the plateau, and as the mother draculae lost her child in a cloud bank of moths, Maurice Voorhees finished testing the leakproof construction of the final propellant tank. Now Sänger’s rocket bombers would reach their destinations.
Such simplicity, he thought, with a distinctly prideful feeling. I could fly this craft my—
Voorhees realized that he was no longer alone.
At first, there had been an inexplicable sense of calm, but immediately, a part of his mind screamed out to him, that the sudden intensity of a deep, penetrating peace was thoroughly unnatural in a place like this.
GENTLE
His gloved hand relaxed, and slipped down a notch against a helium nozzle that supplied pressure to the test equipment.
Voorhees turned his head; despite what his other senses were detecting, among them the out-of-place scent of gardenias, his eyes were showing him that he still appeared to be alone.
“Is that you again?” he asked, already knowing the answer. “Where are you?”
In that instant, a sonic search beam probed Voorhees to depths he failed to understand. He felt naked, and alone, and revealed. The unnatural sense of peace was suddenly in conflict with the new vibrations that were reaching through him, as if both sensations were born of a subtle clumsiness—and which in one awkward moment produced a sense of alarm. His eyes ticked back and forth, up and down, looking from walls to ceiling and down to the floor. No one and nothing was there.
The refreshing feeling of a soft, inner touch washed over him again, as if in sudden response to the aberrant wave of uneasiness.
GENTLE
Voorhees could not resist. Though he heard voices he knew could not exist, the overmastering calm refused to leave him. And finally, it became the voice of his mother, creeping into his skull.
He was suddenly more tired than he thought possible, and more nauseous than he had been since his dressing down from Wolff two days earlier. He put a gloved hand to his stomach, and started to relent.
The voice in his head was changing, now—not his mother any longer, but Lisl.
GENTLE
“Dear God,” he whispered. The beast tried to push deeper, tried to keep him under control, but all Voorhees could visualize now was Lisl as he had last seen her: naked white ribs and scraps of spine that were never meant to be seen by a loved one.
“No!” he shouted, and moved his hand toward the helium pressure valve. He glanced down. The . . . thing had been barely more than a meter away the whole time. Four slender limbs, two of them bound in black membranes, anchored the creature to the underside of Voorhees’s workbench.
Then he looked into the blut kinder’s eyes. They were not expressionless, like the eyes of a snake, or a shark. Quite the opposite: This was the face of a sentient being, one who was simultaneously gazing into him with curiosity, as if asking questions of its own. It craned its little head upward and nearer.
You’re smaller than I thought you would be, Voorhees told himself, and he began to believe it looked far too thin and tame to be dangerous.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice—
His hand hit the valve, jetting a microburst of helium laced with a red misting of propellant across his glove and across the table, and near the creature’s face. It managed to shield itself with a wing before the burst could brush over its eyes.
Initially, Voorhees had cursed his carelessness for somehow letting the beast creep literally under his nose without notice. But now he could understand how he had failed to detect its approach. It was impossibly fast, and just as impossibly silent. Only during a panicked pivot and a dash to the far side of the shed did its claws make any scratching sounds at all.
Voorhees coughed and bolted toward the front door, which he kicked open.
The creature managed to cover the same distance at least three times faster than the scientist and flitted through the same door. The beast ran with such astonishing fluidity that Voorhees’s eyes and mind were unable to truly follow it.
The guards outside, unfortunately, had the same problem. In that moment, they could never have aimed and fired at the intruder with any hope of clipping it. In the end, the men never saw the creature, taking aim at Voorhees instead. And it would have ended there for him, as he burst through the door into open air, if one of the more observant and agile sentries had not slapped his partner’s gun away from the engineer’s direction, causing it to fire harmlessly into the sky.
Only moth dust fluttered down. Silent.
CHAPTER 21
And You Shall Fight Legends
No use wasting your bullets, Martin. They cannot harm that bat.
—Dracula (THE MOTION PICTURE), 1931
R. J. MacCready had long suspected that the Europeans’ first encounters with vampire bats in the New World must have contributed to vampire lore in general, and to the vampire’s mythical association with bats in particular.
Although stories about bloodsucking bats began to circulate in Europe soon after Columbus’s third voyage, in 1498, it was Hernán Cortés and his Conquistadores who were likely the first Europeans to come into direct contact with them. The creature known to MacCready as Desmodus rotundus, the common vampire bat, was not much larger than a hamster, but Portuguese Jesuits, returning to Europe from the New World tropics, spoke of them as if they were as large and fierce as spawn of the devil. Historians dismissed the accounts. Now, with Desmodus draculae, the common vampire’s outsize cousin, evidently still very much alive, Mac wondered if the legends of shape-shifting, man-bat vampires—which had spread through Europe by 1725—might actually have been helped along by sightings of a South American version, the chupacabra. By the end of the nineteenth century, a London theater manager by the name of Abraham Stoker had taken the swift and cunning titular creature from John Polidori’s tale “The Vampyre” and transformed it into his masterpiece: Dracula.
And so, as MacCready saw it, a story begun by frightened sailors and priests had spread to Europe and come back to the New World in the early twentieth century, ably aided by Bela Lugosi on the silver screen. It seemed only natural to Mac, if also delightfully ironic, that when bone fragments from an Ice Age cave in nearby Venezuela were identified as belonging to an unusually large vampire bat of the genus Desmodus, science would come full circle—christening the species draculae.
Lost City of the Mato Grosso
JANUARY 29, 1944
* * *
On the second day of their trek, by the time the sun began climbing down the sky, Wolff’s party was already following the narrow, weathered trail that led up the cliff face. During their infrequent rest periods, MacCready tried to admire the view, especially the strange stone carvings. They were everywhere, but with his hands still bound, and a gun muzzle pressed against his back, he figured that this particular trek was no place for sightseeing. In fact, he found that climbing the steep trail was an even bigger pain in the ass than stream crossings had been.
The two Indian guides led them halfway up the plateau, finally stopping outside a vertical slash in the stone. MacCready noticed that nobody, least of all the guides, seemed very excited at the prospect of entering. And to judge by the reaction of these local “pranksters,” this was the entryway they had been searching
for—a portal into the lair of the draculae.
One of the soldiers opened the backpack he had been carrying and produced a trio of odd-looking lanterns. To MacCready, they resembled a homemade version of something one might find at a campsite, except that these candle-based lamps cast their beams through translucent shells that had been dyed red.
MacCready nodded in recognition. It was similar to a lighting method used by researchers to study nocturnal mammals. They were wisely counting on the draculae’s visual system being similar to other creatures of the night—insensitive to red light. Heat was another issue altogether, and the locals who had advised the soldiers in their choice of supplies must have learned this, long ago. The interior of each lantern was cleverly insulated, in such manner that the candle’s heat was blocked from warming the lantern’s outer surfaces, letting out only the red light, and a narrow streamer of warm air that could be detected only directly overhead.
We’ll see the bats but they won’t see us. Hopefully.
He glanced over at the guides who were currently in discussion with Wolff, evidently assuring him that the lantern lights could not be seen by the blut kinder.
Now, how the hell did these guys know that?
MacCready also noticed that the powwow had gotten rather animated, and that whatever Wolff was selling, the pair apparently wanted no part of it.
He watched the German stalk away from the guides, who had definitely held their ground. Even if they do wear their hair like Moe Howard, Mac told himself, they are fucking far from stooges. In fact, they seemed to be the only ones who knew exactly what they were all up against.
The colonel spent several minutes quietly briefing his men, and in response, most of them whipped off their packs and began to hunker down along a ten-foot-wide lip of stone, cut into the cliff—an entranceway into the plateau. Although he could not see very far inside, MacCready could tell that the portal had been modified, centuries ago, into a wide antechamber that narrowed dramatically, beyond which the far walls transitioned from shadow to impenetrable black.
