Hell's Gate(86)

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.

One bat remained.

The mother crouched in a forward launch position, sono-scanning the three humans.

Go!

Then, like the other draculae, it was gone, vanishing down the companionway like a specter, and leaving in her wake the unmistakable scent of gardenias.





CHAPTER 29





Profiles of the Future


The survival value of human intelligence has never been proved, and may in fact be more a liability than an asset. Once a species reaches a certain level of intelligence, it has a survival advantage until such point that it develops sufficient power to destroy itself and everything around it. And it may be, then, that it always does. The universe may be full of planets on which high intelligence at the high-technology level has not yet developed, and also full of planets bearing the ruins of high-technology civilizations that no longer exist.