Hell's Gate

by Bill Schutt

  Mac brought them to a halt at the remains of what had clearly been a laboratory. The roof was torn away and one of the walls was blown out, allowing them a clear view of the building’s interior. The signs of medical experimentation were immediately and horribly apparent.

  “Look, we messed up back there—big time,” MacCready whispered to Thorne and Yanni. “But we can still come out of this shit pile with something important.”

  “And what might that be, Mac?” asked Bob.

  “We’ve gotta find the bats they’ve captured.”

  “And please remind me again. What is so important about these bats?”

  “One word,” MacCready replied. “Antidote.”

  “Check.”

  “Yanni, why don’t you wait outside,” MacCready said, eyeing a stainless steel table outfitted with leather restraints.

  “Fat chance,” Yanni replied, shooting him a dirty look.

  “I will stay and cover your backs,” Thorne said.

  MacCready actually managed a smile. “Now that’s one I never thought I’d hear from you, Bob.”

  While Thorne remained outside, MacCready and Yanni explored the ripped-up, blown-apart, and strewn-about medical equipment.

  “Shit, no cages,” MacCready said.

  “Mac,” Yanni called. “Take a gander at this.” Behind a row of overturned lab benches, a canvas document pouch had spilled its contents. Leafing through a leather-bound notebook filled with drawings and foreign script, Yanni asked, “You savvy Jap?”

  “No, can’t read it. But let me see that,” he said, taking the book from her. Several photographs fell onto the floor.

  Yanni picked one up and examined it. “What’s this, Mac?”

  He squinted at the fuzzy black-and-white photo. “I don’t know, looks like pictures from space. Imagine that,” he said. Letting the photo drop to the ground, he turned to more important concerns.

  After flipping through the first hundred pages of Kimura’s notebook, MacCready stopped suddenly, his eyes widening. He held the book open. “Look, Yanni, friends of yours.”

  The pages showed a succession of beautifully rendered sketches, each displaying a different live pose and a different anatomical feature of a Desmodus draculae specimen. One series of drawings in particular sent a chill through him. The artist had expressed an inordinate interest in an oversize set of oral glands. Even more chilling, because at first it seemed so out of place, was the final sketch—a gardenia.

  MacCready tucked the notebook into the canvas pack, along with the photographs. “Come on.” He pulled Yanni by the hand, leading her back outside.

  Moving at a more determined pace, the trio quickly discovered the Nostromo, huge and incongruous in the shallow water. The deck and lower portion of the conning tower were partially obscured by mist but the boat seemed to be deserted. Mac thought this might have something to do with the fact that the sub appeared to be listing significantly to port.

  MacCready nodded toward the wounded submarine. “All aboard.”

  With Yanni beside him, MacCready pulled up at the base of the gangplank.

  “Yanni, you think Bob is square with you coming along?” he asked.

  Yanni shot her approaching husband a quick glance. She shook her head. “Fuck no.” Then they began to mount the wooden incline.

  In the Silverbird II, as another skip off the atmosphere ended, Maurice Voorhees let out a deep sigh. He had heard nothing more from his stowaway, but even the incredible sense of exhilaration he felt from the flight was tempered by the unsettling fact that something had gotten into the cockpit with him.

  Maybe it’s just a rat, he thought. Then just as quickly, he shook his head. “Who are you kidding, Maurice?”

  Filled with a renewed sense of dread, the engineer strained against the harness once more, twisting around in his seat. But it was impossible to see the floor along the rear bulkhead, and after a moment he let his body uncoil with a grunt.

  They left the canopy open. That’s how it . . . Maybe it was frightened. Maybe it was looking for a safe place to hide. And for a moment, the thought made him feel badly about what he’d done. But as unfortunate as the encounter might have been for the creature, Voorhees still prayed that the thing was either dead or too injured to be a threat.

  “All right, next crisis,” he said, checking his watch and his trajectory again. No more time to waste, he thought, reflexively reaching down for the throttle with a gloved hand.

  Then, without tapping or clicking, and with no warning at all, something sharp pricked his right index finger through the leather glove.

  The engineer-turned-pilot yanked his hand away.

  “Shit!” he cried, fumbling to remove the glove.

  He stared at his finger.

  No pain—maybe the skin’s not broken, he thought. But just as quickly, he noticed a centimeter-long divot of missing flesh. And as he watched, the wound filled with blood, overflowed, and the overflow began to drift into the air.

  “No! NO!” Voorhees cried, willing the blood to stop—but it didn’t. He pulled the glove back on. His hand looked normal now but almost immediately, he could feel the glove filling with something slippery and warm.

  Maurice Voorhees began to hyperventilate.

  As the seconds passed, another “stone-skip” began; the Silverbird and its wounded passengers were hurled toward the top of another parabola.

  Had he been watching, Voorhees would have seen the Virginia coastline coming into view—but from the port-side window, rather than the starboard. His encounter with the stowaway had thrown off his timing and he had neglected to release the bio-bombs on their “useless” mid-Atlantic trajectory. Nor had he made a required course correction toward the west. Instead the pilot was fixated on his own hand. The glove had swollen rapidly and now began to deflate, as spherules of bright red—some pea-size, others breaking up into a scarlet mist—poured from the slice in the leather. Through the horror, he was reminded of a magician’s wand, but it was not magic dust that his index finger was spewing into the cockpit.

  “Jesus,” he said, moments before experiencing a sudden and painful buildup of pressure in his guts. This was followed by the equally unexpected relief of something letting go, and his pants were suddenly streaming blood as the g-force returned.

  The course correction, he thought, finally and too late. But instead of checking the gauges arrayed before him, something made him look down again. There, beside him, was the injured bat. His scientist’s brain worked frantically as if recording its last notes: Much larger than the one I dosed with rocket fuel.

  As he stared in fascination and horror, the creature looked up at him, teeth glistening red. Then it turned back to feed at the pool that was forming around his feet.

  The Silverbird II stone-skipped into yet another arc, and this time the air in the cockpit became so filled with blood that Maurice Voorhees could no longer see through the windows.

  He struggled to maintain his concentration. No landing now. He was beginning to lose consciousness but just as quickly his thoughts became clear—one last time. The bombs. The bombs.

  “LLLSSSLLL,” he called, through lips that were losing all sensation. “Lisl.”

  And as he began weeping tears of blood, he realized that he was losing control of his hands.

  “I will do this!” he screamed (or perhaps the words were just in his mind).

  With the g-forces beginning to build again, he flailed at the controls, deliberately swinging the Silverbird broadside into what he knew would be a hypersonic, superheated wind.

  On a beach far below, a ten-year-old boy who had awakened early to chase sandpipers stopped to watch a comet blaze suddenly to life, cleaving before his eyes into a cluster of five dazzling diamonds. As they flew northeast toward the deep Atlantic, the diamonds—embers from Hell’s Gate—broke apart, trailing smoke and sparks until they extinguished themselves in a sterilizing glare.

  Three figures entered the Nostromo through a forw
ard hatch, not far from the spot where something huge had torn a hole in the submarine’s foredeck and hull. The boat was sitting dead in the water, having settled to the river bottom with a ten-degree list to port.

  At the bottom of a steep metal ladder, cramped passageways extended away from a small circle of light like the arms of a spider.

  Somehow Yanni had managed to scrounge up a trio of flashlights.

  MacCready tried to dredge up anything he could remember about the deck plan of the Demeter, Nostromo’s grounded sister ship. “This way,” he whispered, gesturing down one of the dark corridors. I think.

  They moved slowly, supporting themselves against the walls to compensate for the odd angle of the floor, before pausing beside an open hatch in the “B” deck. MacCready aimed his flashlight beam down into “C” deck, revealing yet another open hatch in the deck below. “D” deck? Shit. How far down does this thing go?

  He shook his head. “I think it’s this way,” he whispered. “I’ll go first.”

  Nobody argued with him.

  MacCready was halfway down the second set of ladders when a loud metallic groan filled the passageway. The sound was accompanied by a coarse, rattling vibration, as if a giant had decided to sandpaper the Nostromo’s hull. Just to show its gratitude, the sub shifted another five degrees to port.

  Great, MacCready thought, this thing’s going to capsi—

  A sudden jolt caused him to lose his footing and he slid down the final four steps shins-first before landing on his rump with a splash. Completing his descent, MacCready was hit by a sloshing wave of water and fuel, as the knee-high surge on “D” deck made the adjustments required by physics.

  Mac sat in complete darkness, groping in vain for his now-extinguished flashlight, when a spotlight illuminated him from above.

  “Well, this descent of yours is somewhat less than smooth,” Thorne whispered from behind the light.

  After the Thornes took a more deliberate, and certainly less spectacular, climb down the ladder, they stood in a central companionway. It ran fore and aft, into the dark, and through eighteen inches of debris-cluttered water.

  “Which way?” Thorne asked, trying hard to mask his nervousness.

  MacCready took a flashlight from his friend, shrugged, then set off in the same direction he had been heading before.

  “I have a question,” Thorne whispered. They were wading single file through a claustrophobic passageway lined with gauges, pipes, and a maze of wires.

  “Ask away,” MacCready whispered back.

  “What do you propose we do should we find these dra-coo-lay?”

  “That’s a good one, Bob; I’m not quite sure.”

  The botanist let out a deep breath. “This plan is sounding more than somewhat familiar. May I suggest we head topside and talk this out?”

  “Over a smoke, of course?”

  “Now there you go. And I have got some—”

  MacCready’s signal for silence halted his friend’s quest for herbage.

  The companionway led to an abrupt end. They now stood in ankle-deep water, outside a door-shaped hatch that was several inches ajar. A skull and crossbones had been stenciled on either side of the portal, and someone had scrawled something in German on the hatch itself.

  The botanist gestured toward the sign. “I don’t suppose this says ‘Welcome’?”

  “Eintritt Verboten,” Mac replied. “It means stay the hell out.”

  “I agree, Mac. Especially since what makes you think your bats are down here, anyway?”

  “We found the Bio Lab back there. And there were no bats. Where else could they be?”

  “The plateau,” Yanni replied.

  “Nailed it, wifey,” Thorne added, with no little measure of pride.

  “Could be,” Mac responded with a nod. “Do you two want to head back up there with me?”

  The couple shook their heads simultaneously.

  Mac smiled. “So?”

  “Onward,” Thorne whispered.

  MacCready moved forward, directing a flashlight through the narrow opening. The shaft of light revealed a lab that appeared quite spacious—for a sub. Fallen boxes and toppled equipment blocked most of his view, but not the unmistakable scent of guano and urine.

  MacCready turned to his friends. “It’s definitely in there,” he whispered. “Or was.”

  Yanni nodded in agreement, even as Thorne took a step backward.

  “All right, let’s go,” Mac said, pushing the hatch open another six inches.

  They entered the lab cautiously, stepping over the high lip of the hatchway. MacCready noticed that the threshold acted like a dam, holding back the water from the adjoining companionway.

  At least our feet’ll be dry, he thought.

  Two cones of light scanned the room, one of the beams pausing momentarily at a steel table bolted to the floor. The scientific equipment it had held now lay strewn about broken. Finally, both beams converged on a row of metal cages mounted against the far wall. There were five of them, each large enough to house a medium-size dog. Four of the cages were open, their metal-barred doors thrown back revealing empty interiors.

  MacCready focused his light on the only cage that remained closed. As he inched closer, he saw a flash of movement inside—a dark form, scuttling into the shadows. Mac took another step forward, his flashlight illuminating a bit more of the cage interior. He could make out a furry shape, huddled and shivering in the farthest corner.

  He began to speak softly, “Hey there, little—”

  Something smashed against the bars, and as Mac took an involuntary step backward, his beam illuminated glistening teeth and wild red eyes. The thing inside the cage was screaming now, high-pitched and shrill; and as the creature slammed itself back and forth against the inside of the metal enclosure, the horrible sounds were amplified by the tight confines of the lab.

  “Yanni, get back!” Thorne screamed, but his wife stood her ground.

  “Pipe down, Bob,” she replied, calmly.

  “It’s a lab monkey,” MacCready assured him.

  “Oh, I thought—”

  “Mac,” Yanni said, from across the room, “come have a look.”

  She was staring down at something on the floor, and as MacCready approached he could see that it was another monkey. This one was clearly dead, pasted to a thick puddle of its own blood.

  Mac crouched down beside the animal, playing his own light across its body. His mind already flashed back to the stall in Chapada. “This happened recently,” he whispered.

  The botanist moved in to take a look. “Like . . . when, Mac?”

  “Within the past few hours, probably less.”

  “But that means—”

  MacCready held up his hand, silencing his friend again. Then he moved back to one of the open cages. The floor of this particular cage was thick with a coating of rust-colored matter. Guano, he thought. Must be a week’s accumulation.

  “This cage held our bat,” he whispered.

  Thorne motioned toward the cage door. “But this cage is opened from the outside. All of them are, except the one with Cheetah over there. So maybe Wolff’s people decided to take these so-called dra-coo-lay with them?”

  “Sure, Bob, to keep as pets,” Yanni suggested, sounding remarkably earnest.

  Thorne started to reply, and MacCready got ready to perform banter interruptus, when something stopped him—something that drew his attention to the darkest corner of the laboratory. But instead of aiming his flashlight there, he pointed it upward, so that the beam illuminated his own face.

  “Huh?” Bob whispered, with surprise.

  “It’s all right,” MacCready said softly, but not to his friend.

  And with that, the face of a demon emerged slowly from the shadows, a face that held the scientist spellbound.

  Holy shit, MacCready thought. It’s the—

  “Mac, what are you doing?” Thorne whispered.

  Mac never acknowledged his friend’s
question. Instead, he decided to try an experiment he had actually been planning for some time. He began to whistle. At first he struggled to remember the simple melody, the one Yanni had used to serenade the forest behind her home.

  But something about it wasn’t right, and the cat-size creature reacted by stepping backward, its face disappearing into the shadows.

  Damn, Mac thought. But then, before he could wonder what had gone wrong, Yanni was standing beside him. And so he tried again. Several notes in, she joined him, correcting him, even whistling a harmony to his melody, then taking the lead.

  Song of the draculae, he thought, and as they whistled, a pair of bats—each much larger than the first one—crawled down from the shadows. A fourth bat, the largest, walked down the wall of cages, quiet as a ninja. The creatures crouched with their chests close to the ground, and MacCready noticed that their bodies were tensed, like coiled springs.

  The juvenile bat had been “elbowed” backward by what seemed to be an Alpha male who behaved like an older sibling, but instead of retreating into the shadows, the little one skittered between its larger companions as if looking for a way to move forward.

  There’s something very different about that one, MacCready told himself, noting that its stance conveyed none of the barely contained violence displayed by its larger companions.

  It shows no fear—only something like . . . curiosity.

  Then, keeping the same quizzical look on its nightmare face, the draculae child cocked its head for a moment, issuing a series of high-pitched chirps, at once familiar but at the same time utterly alien.

  Jesus, MacCready told himself. It’s trying to communicate with us.

  Yanni repeated the song again, and in Mac’s mind, at that moment, nothing else existed. He felt Yanni’s hand on his shoulder, motioning him to step aside with her, leaving a clear pathway to the door.

  Without turning away from the bats, MacCready whispered, “Yanni, why—”

  “There is no other way, Mac. If we want to live.”

  MacCready nodded. I’m not crazy. It’s not just senseless animal song: It’s an understanding.

  A moment later, there was a flutter of movement and a whisper of parchment, then the clatter of claws receded down the steel-walled companionway.