It took a second or two of thought but the best he could come up with was rabies. Foaming at the mouth, dementia, and the destruction of my central nervous system.
Yeah, rabies would be bad. Even worse than this, he thought, until it occurred to him that simply breathing the air in an infected bat cave could transmit the very same virus he’d just conjured up as an “even worse-case scenario.”
Keep it together. Think of something else, he told himself. And so he did—sort of.
I wonder if there have been any studies on rabies transmission through inhalation?
Probably not, he concluded, and he pictured himself assigning that particular project to Major Hendry. But then, as insect claws tried to pry open one of his eyelids, he realized that it was too late—the study was going on right now, and he was the lab rat.
MacCready’s mind had just shifted focus again—how long would it take these things to reduce me to a skeleton?—when something large landed on his back.
The creature hissed and shook itself violently, and he could feel sharp claws, even through the layer of arthropods that had gathered there to dine.
Then the pissed-off whatever-the-fuck-it-was hopped off.
Yes, rabies is starting to look like a plan, MacCready thought.
Colonel Wolff rounded a bend and slid to a halt near the end of the stone corridor. Sergeant Schr?dinger had nearly made it to the cave entrance but now his body lay thrashing a few meters inside the antechamber.
Wolff bolted toward him and got off two shots from his pistol, but not before the creatures gathered around the sergeant had scrabbled away, disappearing into cracks and crevices like shadows before the sun.
They were feeding on him, he thought, vaulting over the dying man’s head.
There was a flash of movement to his right and Wolff fired again. This time he heard the unmistakable impact of a bullet on flesh. There was a screech, and he glimpsed one of the beasts spinning wildly on the ground.
Wolff ran on, inhaling the scent of gasoline. He could see the cave entrance now, fifteen meters ahead. His men were spread across the opening.
A vibration ran through his body—strange but not unpleasant, he thought briefly.
“Don’t shoot!” he shouted.
Ten meters to go.
There’s no need to run, an inner voice told him. And he had to admit that the pinging sensation was actually quite pleasant.
He both felt and heard a leathery flutter from above and behind.
Three meters.
Slow down, son, the inner voice urged.
Just ahead, he could see Corporal Kessler bending down—a mime lifting an invisible curtain, in reality the lower edge of a thin net that had been strung across the cave entrance.
STOP!
Wolff ignored the inner voice and dove past the corporal’s feet. As he did so, there came a rush of air from the place where his head had been only a split second before.
Simultaneously, the pleasant vibration running through his body transitioned into an earsplitting shriek of anger, fear, and frustration.
The colonel rose to his feet—others were at his side now, relieved and familiar faces. The obsequious Sergeant Vogt was even trying to dust him off but the officer waved the man away and turned back toward the cave.
The screeching sounds were coming from a dense tangle of hair-thin mesh—a mist net, the Japanese had called it. The Asians had used these nets to capture birds for the soup pot but now theirs had ensnared something far more dangerous, and far more important.
As if to remind Wolff of that first point, the bat’s head came into full view as it struggled to free itself from the hopeless tangle. It flashed a snub-nosed muzzle full of teeth, which quickly began to slice through the woven web. Up close, the creature appeared smaller than the four he’d seen feeding on Sergeant Schr?dinger, but right now the size of the specimen was the very least of his concerns.
The colonel nodded to two men standing on either side of the cave entrance and their response was synchronous. Each pulled back the netting just far enough to allow the lighting of the fast-burning demolition fuses they had set previously. Twin flames raced each other ten meters into the antechamber and there was a whoosh of expanding air as a wall of flame all but sealed the entrance to the plateau from the outside world.
The Germans watched carefully, training their automatic weapons at the smoky wall and whatever might have survived behind it. But nothing came through the flames. Except for the high-pitched clicks produced by the writhing nightmare in the mist net, the only sound was the crackle of burning brush.
Wolff pointed at the struggling draculae. “Get this animal into a bag before it harms itself.”
A minute later, two privates clad in heavy leather gloves stepped forward and approached the net, cautiously.
“I’ll attract his attention,” a private named Auerbach told his partner. “You sneak around from behind with the bag.”