Hell's Gate(36)
As the shadows stepped closer, the image flickered like a candle in a draft.
But why are they upside d—
Jesus Raza’s consciousness blinked off like a light switch, and he toppled backward, landing on his own contorted face and rolling sideways.
The smiling shadow with the thin mustache kept close and silent vigil, counting off the seconds between dying and death, between Earth and Hell. The shadow looked at a pocket watch, noting the moment Raza’s eyes stopped searching, recording the exact instant that life had gone out of them.
“Thank you.” A voice addressed the dead man, in German. “You have been most cooperative.” Then he tucked his watch into a tunic pocket and calmly stepped over Jesus Raza’s freshly severed head. It mattered little to the shadow man that the two dead privates, Fuchs and Becker, deserved their fates. They had been fools. Even worse, they had broken S?nger’s movie camera in their deaths. The important thing, the only thing that mattered, was that they were German soldiers—his soldiers. In the process of tracking down their killer, this dirty, drunken local, as highly as he thought of himself, was utterly dispensable.
The SS officer was quite proud of his own perceived place in history, though unaware that posterity would reduce him to a stereotypical boogieman. But this too would have brought a smile to Colonel Gerhardt Wolff’s face.
At the table, Sergeant Vogt used the last of the foul-smelling alcohol the dead man had been drinking to clean his stiletto, and now he was wiping the blade on the homespun tablecloth.
The colonel appreciates the beauty of those cuts, Vogt thought, watching as Wolff opened the door to the bedroom and entered silently.
From inside the room, he caught a faint whimper and a whispered response. “Ssssshhhhhhh.”
And then . . . silence.
Like a spider, Vogt thought, and grinned. Just like a spider.
CHAPTER 11
Extinction
The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
—ARTHUR STANLEY EDDINGTON, PARAPHRASING J.B.S. HALDANE
January 25, 1944
It was midafternoon and MacCready had been trying to figure out where he’d experienced a worse combination of heat and humidity before.
Bangkok? Maybe. August in Port Arthur, Texas? He winced at the memory.
Currently, he was taking a breather beside an algae-choked watering hole rimmed by a few half-dead trees. A mud puddle with aspirations, he thought. But he needed some shade and he needed a safe place to hole up.
The forest was fragmented here—islands of clustered trees, scattered across a sea of tall grass. Right now it was the “tall-grass-in-broad-daylight” part that concerned MacCready most. He took a swig from his canteen. Hendry’d probably blacktop this place.
Though tired, and certainly ready for a nap, MacCready also knew that there were several pressing issues to consider. Finding the missing Rangers without getting skewered by the Xavante was currently in the lead, but for some reason he couldn’t shake the image of Yanni staring into the forest—and sounding just a little too much like the creatures he had encountered in the Brazil nut tree, the same creatures that had nearly killed him, twice.
They were actually stalking me, he thought. And in spite of the heat, he gave an involuntary shiver. And what? She was calling them?
As if interested suddenly in MacCready’s dilemma, a caiman surfaced nearby.
A big’un, he determined. Ten feet long from nose to tail tip.
A single sweep of the reptile’s tail sent it three feet closer to where MacCready sat. The zoologist knew that the caiman’s brain hadn’t changed much since the Age of Dinosaurs, and as a consequence its cerebrum was about as big as a gnat’s ass. Well, maybe a little bigger. But although the crocodile cousin couldn’t paint the Mona Lisa or start wars, its kind had survived unchanged through whatever had killed its brawnier, brainier cousins, the dinosaurs.
Maybe nature’s trying to tell us that brains and brawn don’t always count for much, MacCready thought.
He bounced a pebble off the caiman’s back, then glanced around for another bit of rock. Survivor or not, this guy’s getting too close.
“How does Yanni do that?” MacCready mumbled under his breath. He watched as the scaly body submerged below a layer of green, then gave it a dismissive wave. But another question, a more important one, had been forming since his departure from Chapada and had finally come to the fore. “In all this time, why haven’t the draculae killed her?”
The caiman’s eyes resurfaced, black and unblinking. MacCready held out a bigger, heftier pebble. Don’t make me bonk you with this, he thought.
With one eye on the reptile, his mind drifted back to Yanni and her formerly extinct pals. Well, whatever the answer is, it’s no wonder Thorne’s chipping in with the housework.
MacCready was about to carry out another preemptive pebble strike when he heard a slight rustle off to one side in the tall grass. Instinctively, he went as motionless as the caiman, but his right hand eased down toward the Colt. Feeling a presence as much as hearing it, he sensed something creeping by, keeping low to the ground and passing him on the left side less than ten feet away.
MacCready squinted, trying to identify the newly arrived visitor. But whatever it was, it had stopped—its sun-dappled profile all but invisible against the tall stalks of grass.