The others immediately dispersed, and Wolff nodded to the corporal.
Kessler took a few deep breaths before recounting how he and the other sentry had been patrolling the aft deck when they saw what they thought were children. The corporal’s demeanor now turned suddenly grim. His body seemed to spasm for a moment, as if he’d received an electrical shock. Then he craned his neck, looking past the colonel to a point on the deck. “But they weren’t children,” Kessler insisted, and his eyes widened. “They were . . . they were . . .”
“They were creatures, sir,” Maurice Voorhees interjected.
“Yes,” Kessler agreed. “And they sang to me.”
Wolff studied the men’s faces, alternating between them. Have their brains capsized?
Clearly the corporal was badly shaken, but the annoying rocket scientist appeared to be holding together just fine; his eyes were not those of a panicky man.
Wolff turned toward the civilian. “What does the corporal mean, singing?”
“I’m not sure. But these . . . things . . . they made a kind of sound.”
“I felt them . . . inside,” Kessler said, to no one in particular. “Telling me that everything would be all right.”
“And did they also tell you to fire your weapons, Corporal Kessler?” Vogt interjected.
“I fired at them first, sir,” Voorhees said, addressing the colonel. “The corporal seemed to be . . . incapacitated for a moment.”
“They were singing to me,” Kessler whispered.
Wolff made a motion for Voorhees to continue.
“These creatures were moving . . . moving toward the corporal in a predatory way . . . so I fired my pistol. Then they took off . . . and the corporal seemed to snap out of it. He fired at them as well. I . . . I believe he struck one.”
Wolff knew that the scientist was protecting the soldier, but none of that mattered.
“So you’re saying that you both shot up the boat,” Vogt said.
Colonel Wolff ignored the sergeant. They all did.
“And then what happened?” Wolff’s voice was almost soothing now. “Where did they go—these creatures?”
Voorhees nodded toward a section of the deck surface that had obviously been hit by gunfire. “They ran off the side of the boat.”
Wolff looked past the damaged deck and out to where the river ran deeper. “So they swam away?”
“No, Colonel,” Voorhees said. “There was no splash—more like a flutter. I don’t think they ever hit the water.”
“No splash at all,” Corporal Kessler intoned. He too was staring out into the mist. “No splash at all.”
CHAPTER 15
Leila
But first, on Earth as vampire sent,
Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race.
—LORD BYRON, The Giaour, 1813
Outside Nostromo Base
January 27, 1944
Five minutes before midnight
The insect scuttled across a bamboo ceiling beam, tasting the air through porthole-like spiracles that ran down both sides of its abdomen. It had entered the ramshackle hut only seconds earlier, but already chemoreceptors, stimulated by elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the room, had begun relaying signals to the creature’s brain. The electrochemical messages were translated into a simple directive.
FOOD
The assassin bug began its descent.
On the dirt floor below, a young woman rose from the thin hemp mat on which she had been sitting. Crossing the short distance to the far side of the hut, she bent over a small figure sleeping there. The child shifted uneasily on a pile of rags. An old woman’s uneven breath escaped from another rag pile, heaped against a thatched reed wall.
As Leila checked for signs that the boy’s fever was subsiding, she wondered yet again how it had all come down to this. Once she had belonged to the most revered family in her village. But within a single day, her whole life was reduced to despair, loneliness, and near starvation. And now, instead of a growing sense of pride and bright thoughts of the future, her days were spent scavenging for herself, for her mother, and for her sickly child.