The corporal drew a knife and motioned for MacCready to turn around, then he cut the leather band that had bound his hands together. “Because you are going in there with Colonel Wolff.” He lowered his voice. “And your friend, Sergeant Frankenstein.”
His hands now free, MacCready led the way, carrying one of the three Indian lanterns. He was followed by his SS shadow, while the colonel brought up the rear.
Twenty yards into the cave’s spacious antechamber the natural rock walls funneled into a narrow corridor of hand-hewn stone. MacCready paused, but an immediate increase in pressure from the sergeant’s gun muzzle was all the prompting he needed to keep going.
At four feet wide and extending not much higher than the top of his head, the claustrophobic passageway was covered with eroded pictographs and paintings—the remnants of a lost plateau culture. Although unable to examine the walls except in passing, MacCready was still fascinated by the strange markings, animated as they were by a flickering, crimson-tinted light that would have made Dante feel right at home. He wondered if Fawcett, the lost English explorer, had made it this far—or perhaps had died here.
Deeper into the corridor, a grunt from behind caused the American to smile briefly. “Watch your head, Sergeant,” he whispered, before a “shhhh” from Colonel Wolff silenced him.
Besides the inscriptions, MacCready found something else about the cave that seemed odd. A flow of air blew past them as they moved, sometimes barely perceptible, at other times a humid breeze that carried the scent of something distinctly organic.
It’s as if the plateau itself were breathing, MacCready thought.
Several minutes later, the unlikely trio located the source of the “breath.” The hot air was wafting up through a circular, manhole-size opening in the rock floor, rimmed by carefully cut-and-placed stones. The smell was strongest here as well—acrid and almost painful to inhale, and now MacCready knew exactly what it was.
He knelt down to peer over the rim and felt Wolff move in beside him. It might have been a perfect time to flip the Nazi into the abyss if not for that fact that Sergeant Schr?dinger had remained standing, with his back pressed firmly against the far wall, and with his machine gun barrel aimed directly at MacCready’s head.
“What is that smell?” Wolff whispered.
“Guano,” MacCready whispered back. “Bat shit, with a chaser of bat piss. That’s the ammonia.”
“The creatures, the ones who killed my people, they are down there?”
MacCready shrugged his shoulders. “Not sure yet,” he replied, hoping that his acting ability was holding up. “I need you to hold on to my legs,” he said, very quietly. Then, as carefully and stealthily as possible, he slid down on his belly and extended a lantern into the chasm.
As the American stretched his upper body deeper into the hole, he felt Wolff’s iron grip around his ankles. What he could not see was the look exchanged between the colonel and Sergeant Schr?dinger.
Five wingspans from the point at which MacCready’s lantern sent forth a rusty red circle of light, the mother slept. The child was also asleep, though fitfully so. His position, well away from his mother and the others, was a new and serious development. There was a raspy sound coming from deep inside his chest, and a sick smell from one of his wings. He was beginning to suffer from the blast of gas directed at him in the biped nest.
The child would either heal or he would die, but until then he would be isolated from the others in the roost.
Nearby, the lead male awoke with a cramp in his right shoulder. He had been dreaming about the bipeds.
The strange sounds they made before they died.
The taste of their blood.
The thought made him shiver with something like anticipation, and he began to unfold his wings.
The entire top half of MacCready’s body was now hanging into the subchamber, and with the lantern extended downward, he squinted to see beyond the blood-red glow. For a moment, there was nothing but glare, but then his eyes became acclimated. He saw a ledge along one side of the hole, perhaps five feet wide, but then it fell away, dropping thirty feet to the floor of the cave, a floor that was littered with ancient bones.
It’s a tomb . . . or a sacrificial chamber, his darker side added, even as the shadows began to play tricks on his mind. It had to be the shadows, he thought, because for a moment it almost seemed as if the bones were—
MacCready nearly dropped the lantern.
—moving.
And in the next moment he knew that it was not his imagination.
The floor of the subchamber was slowly roiling like warm, convecting tar. Disarticulated skeletons, darkly stained, writhed in a sea of semisolid matter that seemed to be alive itself. Even worse, there were the sounds: the bones clicking and scraping against each other as the mass tumbled slowly over itself. A skull surfaced like the head of a drowning man in a bottomless pool. But what poured out of the eye sockets wasn’t water. It was—
Something registered in MacCready’s brain. Something familiar.