Hell's Gate(66)
And then, without warning, all four of the gargoyles disappeared down the corridor, toward the prey that was currently making the most noise.
If Schr?dinger hates centipedes, wait till he sees what’s coming.
MacCready eyed the colonel, who was still pressed into the depression.
Just as he began to ease away from the wall, MacCready noticed something that caused him to freeze. There was a flutter of movement, and another dark shape emerged from the subchamber. This one was smaller than the others, and it hauled itself out of the hole with considerable effort. Then the creature stood on the floor, breathing hard, listening.
MacCready fought the urge to close his eyes. It’s a young one.
The bat sniffed at the air and then did something completely unexpected: It sneezed.
MacCready held his breath and the little vampire drew nearer, its face moving into a lantern beam and casting its features in deep red, horror-movie shadows. Mac could not escape the feeling that the bat smelled something familiar, not just a human scent, but his scent. And his subconscious sent up an image. The tree . . . the staked-out goat.
In the distance, Schr?dinger was now making thrashing sounds against the corridor walls.
The littlest vampire pivoted toward the sound. The creature appeared to hesitate for an instant. Swiveling its head slowly from side to side, it cast out high-frequency bursts, barely discernible to the humans.
As MacCready watched, the young draculae pressed its chest to the ground, as if it were a human about to perform a push-up. Then, all in one small part of a second, the bat’s oversize pectoral muscles catapulted it into a hop that carried it down the darkened corridor in a blur of motion.
The men remained motionless, their bodies still pressed as deeply into the cave wall as physics would allow. Only their eyes moved, and then only for an instant, as each man’s gaze was drawn back to the hole in the floor.
Are there more of them coming? MacCready wondered. Should I—
A strobe of automatic gunfire came from Schr?dinger’s direction. The staccato roar was painful in the enclosed space and MacCready resisted the impulse to fling up his hands to cover his ears. Particles from the cave ceiling shook free and fell around him. There was another burst of machine-gun fire, shorter this time. They turned reflexively toward the source and the last few flashes revealed the giant sliding down onto his knees, firing his weapon. He let out a series of increasingly unintelligible curses, which deteriorated into a new and surprising sound. This was the end of SS Sergeant Schr?dinger. The legend, who once grinned at his captors when punched in a freshly bored bullet wound, was crawling on all fours toward the cave entrance, bat-bitten and whimpering like a little girl.
MacCready glanced at Wolff, whose attention had been drawn to the disquieting whimper. His next move will be to execute me.
As if reading his mind, the German slowly turned to face his prisoner. Wolff’s movements were deliberate and unhurried. His face bore no emotion. And as the colonel’s right arm began to rise, MacCready knew that there would be a Luger attached to the end of it.
This is it!
MacCready gestured in the direction that Schr?dinger and the bats had gone, and for a split second he saw puzzlement in the German’s expression. As the colonel’s gaze broke away, MacCready hurled himself off the wall, going completely and perplexingly airborne in the confined space. Wolff turned back just in time to see him execute a perfect dive—directly into the hole in the floor.
The dive left the colonel momentarily stunned. He had fully anticipated a feeble attempt to run deeper into the corridor. But this? This?
Wolff remained motionless. His gun arm had been late in tracking the movement of the American but he left the pistol pointed toward the opening in the floor.
Will there be more of these creatures emerging? he wondered. How many of them can there be? Five? Five hundred?
The colonel decided to wait another minute and, while acknowledging that there was little time to ponder the prisoner’s suicide leap, he had to admit that it had been completely unexpected, and in its own way, admirably spectacular.
Evidently the man preferred dashing his brains out at the bottom of a filthy cave to the efficiency of a single, finely crafted bullet.
On second thought, though, Wolff knew that a head shot wasn’t exactly what he had planned for the smart-assed American. It would have been more like a bullet in each knee. All the better to keep any more of his little bat friends occupied if—
The colonel anchored his mind to more immediate matters . . . survival . . . and the mission.
Yes, above all else—the mission.
Wolff moved away from the wall, bending to retrieve a lantern, all the while keeping his pistol trained on the hole from which the bats had emerged. He approached the opening tentatively, holding the lantern out. A breeze rose up out of the dark, setting the red and yellow flame into motion. The German officer went down on one knee.
There was a stone ledge just below the rim but his eyes moved quickly past it, drawn to the floor of the chamber. Something moving. The colonel shifted the light, struggling to obtain a clearer view, hoping it was only the American twitching and dying on the floor, before realizing that the floor itself was moving.
Rice, Wolff thought, incongruously. But rice was indeed exactly what it looked like—a deep pool of live, unusually fat rice grains, set in motion around once-towering stalagmites, now half-sunk in a lake of black matter.
There were bones in the rice. But no body. And no more bats.