Hell's Gate(79)
“Time to go,” MacCready announced. And as Mac glanced back over his shoulder, the kimono-clad man crawled out of the tangled helicopter wreckage and blundered directly into the chemical stream.
Even from this distance, and while they fled from the spreading death tide, MacCready and his friends could hear the man screaming in startled surprise, as his feet snapped off at the ankles, frozen to the ground in a pair of wooden clogs.
Finally, the rivers of methane found an ignition source, cracking open two leftover canisters of Voorhees’s hypergolics. The blast wave rocked the Nostromo over to one side, piercing the hull with speed-slung machinery.
MacCready felt the heat of the fireball on his neck—the weight of his still bomb-laden backpack driving him forward and onto all fours. He and the Thornes were scattered like bowling pins. Quickly regaining his footing, Mac turned and saw the fog glowing ruby red under the fireball. Smaller, secondary explosions were igniting all along the shoreline.
We did it! We did it! He almost allowed himself an indulgent grin but realized there were still plenty of well-armed bad guys around. Fortunately, most of them seemed to be on fire.
And then came another rumble—this one from directly in front of him. Another rumble and another glow. His heart gave off what was becoming, these days, an all-too-familiar sinking feeling. MacCready knew this sound. He’d heard it at Chapada and again when Wolff’s team took down the recon plane. It was the sound of a rocket engine, an entire cluster of them.
“Motherf*cker!” he yelled, and began running in the direction of the sound. He slid the backpack down onto one forearm, concerned now that it felt too light for the job that lay ahead.
If it’s not already too late.
Less than ten seconds after Reitsch ignited the sled, Voorhees finally saw, in the receding glare, the second pilot, Lothar, staggering toward him, his back spewing smoke. His right hand was missing; the other, still clad in a glove, was pressed against his abdomen.
“Looking for something?” Voorhees asked, wiggling the fingers of his right hand. Lothar and Hannah Reitsch were thick as thieves, cut from the same abominable block. He’d heard a too vivid description of what Lothar had done to the prisoners before Akira’s dissections began, including the woman with the bled-out child.
Voorhees pointed to a hand on the ground. “Is that yours?”
Lothar gave no response. He simply fell on his back with something ropey and pink flowing over his remaining hand. The air suddenly smelled like the bottom of a cesspool. In his last conscious moment, as the glow from Reitsch’s rocket disappeared, the pilot’s eyes met Voorhees’s pleadingly, and the dying man opened his mouth. Voorhees watched in shock-state fascination as a red bubble formed, grew large, then burst.
He continued to stare at the dead man until Colonel Wolff appeared at his side, standing calm in the turmoil. “It seems as if Reitsch’s protégé has been disemboweled,” he observed, tapping Lothar’s torso with his boot.
Voorhees wiped something thick and wet from his cheek. “No shit,” he said.
Still calm, the colonel gestured toward the Silverbird II. “So, rocketeer, do you think you can fly this thing?”
“Without a doubt, Colonel,” Voorhees said, watching as Wolff’s face widened into a grin.
The trio of draculae overflew the battered biped nest several times but there was still no sign of the child. Everywhere, even through the thick confusion of burnt-forest smells, the scent of wasted food was noticeable—to the twins, tantalizingly so.
With no thought of food, the mother dipped her right shoulder, while simultaneously flexing the elongated digits of her wing-hand. The bat’s body instantly responded by wheeling hard to the right, its wings carrying her beyond the shattered forest and out over water.
The twins followed closely behind, deftly mimicking their mother’s movements, and they remained silent as she emitted a series of calls that probed the area just offshore. Instantaneously, the altered high-frequency signals returned, painting, in her brain, a three-dimensional picture of the enormous log that had brought the bipeds into their territory. But something about the structure had changed since their last, aborted hunt there. Now there were no bipeds, and the flattened surface where they had waited in ambush days earlier was tilted oddly to one side.
After overflying the structure, the mother angled away, gaining altitude with a flick of her thumbs that changed the flow of air over her wings. The child was gone and now they would return to the stone roost, before any more of her children disappeared.
The mother began casting long-range signals toward the faraway cliffs, when suddenly the female twin screeched an alarm call behind her and fell out of formation.
NO! the mother called; but by then the twins had already completed a tight loop and were speeding back in the opposite direction.
Furious, she followed them, but even before completing her own loop, she heard it.
The calls were coming from inside the giant, floating log.
The mother caught up with the twins just before they peeled out of their side-by-side formation and sped past a jagged hole in the log. She flew straight over the gaping tear, simultaneously gathering information and sending the child a message of her own.
The draculae wheeled around again, as if preparing for another reconnaissance pass, but this time they drew the leading edges of their wings upward. The braking maneuver caused them to lose both altitude and speed, and the finely controlled stall brought the trio to a synchronous and silent landing on the Nostromo’s broken deck. Seconds later they disappeared down an open hatch.