Hell's Gate(15)

The private shivered and grabbed his machine gun, clipping the flashlight onto the barrel of the MP-43. With trembling hands he flicked off the safety and squinted upward. “Willy? Willy, get down here right now!”

Silence.

An almost imperceptible rustle from behind caused the private to swing the gun barrel toward the sound. The flashlight was of no use. If it was possible, the mist was growing even thicker—reflecting everything back at him. From only five meters away, the world was a shapeless glare.

“Who goes there?”

Dead air.

“God damn it Willy,” he called again, his voice high-pitched and cracking.

Backing up against the tree trunk, Fuchs flinched as something thorny pinched him below the left shoulder blade.

What do I do now? he thought, but before he could come up with an answer, the dead air was broken by a vibration. It penetrated his chest and rippled outward to his limbs and head. For an instant, his teeth buzzed and he felt as if someone had just peered deep inside of him. The piercing filled him with fear—a dread such as he had never known.

He was probed again, this time more strongly and from two directions at once. The thought that gripped Fuchs was instinctive, and unbreakable. You are not imagining this.

Get away from here, he thought. But what held him in place was a third piercing, this one from a new direction.

RELAX

Instantly, the private felt calmer. Something had begun vibrating through his skull, deeply like an X-ray, as if somehow that mysterious . . . something, was systematically turning on and off specific regions of his brain—which, in fact, it was.

GENTLE

“Who’s . . .

RELAX

“. . . there?”

In a brain-soaking release of endorphins so calming that it all but paralyzed him, Fuchs’s mind formed a picture of his mother. She was basting a fat Christmas goose and turned to him, smiling.

“Where . . . where are you?” he called into the mist.

GENTLE, his mother seemed to say, her reassurance vibrating through his body like a song—a lullaby.

Inhuman. The thought reached up from Fuchs’s subconscious, and his heart rate spiked. “What do you want?”

GENTLE, came the reply from within, and Fuchs felt the muscles in his left shoulder relax. The bite there had been painless enough to be mistaken for a mere thorn prick.

It’s all right now, he thought. I will see my family again. I will make it home. He tried to smile but only the right side of his upper lip moved—drawing upward, then freezing in place.

Now his mouth seemed to be filling quickly. Filling with . . .

Fuchs reclined against the tree trunk, and began to slump. Everything is all right.

Time was getting away from him.

The machine gun fell from the private’s wet hands and he reached to retrieve it, but it seemed too slippery to hold. He fumbled for the tiny silver crucifix he kept in his tunic pocket, and his fingers entwined around the chain, by accident.

His head lolled to one side and his body followed it down. The MP-43 seemed to fade out of focus.

“Mother?” he whispered—although anyone else present would have heard something very different.

GENTLE, came the reply.

Then one last time. RELAX.

Fuchs responded with a whimper that turned into a choking wet cough. From what seemed very far away, he thought he could hear a wet thump as something hit the ground. Private Becker had returned.

But that did not matter now for there were new signals. And there was nothing gentle or relaxing about them.

HUNGRY

HUNGRY

BE STILL

Fuchs tried to raise his arms, and he discovered that his limbs did not respond, could not respond.

His scream started as a gargle but rose in volume even as he felt hot breath on his face. In response, the creatures stopped feeding and stepped back to listen—cocking their heads sideways. One of them seemed momentarily distracted by the small silvery object that had fallen into the mud.

Fuchs could see their faces now—their curiosity, eyes like glistening black marbles. One of the creatures hissed at him. Then, for a moment, the private’s scream became strong and clear, spiraling up, and up, and up into the night, until it was lost in the mist.





CHAPTER 4





Someone to Watch Over Me


I know of no part of South America about which so little authentic information is available as this central plateau.

—COMMANDER GEORGE M. DYOTT

Leader of the 1928 expedition (unsuccessful) to find Colonel Percy H. Fawcett

Northern outskirts of the Pantanal, Central Brazil

Sixteen hours later, January 20, 1944

The ancient kapok tree was dead now, but its lower half was still anchored to the thin tropical soil by four giant buttress roots, radiating from its base like triangular fins. Assailed by fungi and wood-boring insects, what remained was a hollow shell. Gray and skeletal, it had resisted rain and wind to stand fifty feet above the forest floor. But no birds flew near this kapok anymore and even the insects seemed to avoid it. The sentinel stood silent against the approaching fall of night, its interior blacker than a mine shaft. Yet deep within the dead tree, the darkness had begun to shift.


Several miles away and at an altitude some five hundred feet above the hollow tree, R. J. MacCready gripped the parachute’s static-line hook in his left hand. His right hand lay across the chest pack of his reserve chute.