Private Horst, an ashen-faced eighteen-year-old, nodded but seemed far too nervous with his assigned task.
Auerbach nodded to the other man, then started waving his hands around. “Hey, ugly boy!” he called. With a sense of relief he saw the bat’s head turn toward his diversion, but any relief evaporated immediately as the creature’s black marble eyes locked on to his own.
As planned, Private Horst moved in behind the bat, which was no longer screeching and struggling. Silently, the teenager held open a large canvas bag and took a step closer to the tangled net.
Private Auerbach had intended to continue drawing the animal’s attention but now he stood paralyzed by the creature’s stare—by its probe. Without thinking, he tried to whistle but found that his mouth had gone dry. As Auerbach blew a soundless puff of air, he never saw his partner, rushing forward and throwing the open mouth of the bag over the lower half of the entangled animal.
“Hah,” Horst cried in triumph, fumbling to pull the bag upward over the animal’s flailing wings.
The commotion pulled Auerbach away from the draculae’s stare just in time to glimpse the creature’s head rotating nearly 180 degrees. That quickly, jaws sunk into Private Horst’s left glove. Horst’s eyes registered shock, and he pulled back reflexively. “Shiest!”
The bat let out something like a growl and bit down harder.
“Let go of me!” the private screamed, pulling backward but unable to free his hand from the glove. Now the bat’s neck was stretching through a tight opening in the tangled net—and still, the beast would not let go, even as the nylon mesh tightened around its throat.
“Shoot it! Shoot it!” someone yelled, and Corporal Kessler moved closer, pistol drawn, angling for a clear shot.
“Stand back, Corporal,” Colonel Wolff said, pushing the barrel of the corporal’s gun aside and moving quickly into position.
Kessler felt a surge of relief. At least I won’t be the one killing the colonel’s prized specimen.
A single shot immediately followed, and Kessler jerked backward as a shard of flying bone bit into his cheek. Private Horst slumped to the ground, his now-empty glove still hanging from the creature’s mouth. The exit wound in the private’s skull had been aimed precisely, to assure that no speed-slung scraps of skull struck the bat.
Wolff pulled back on the Luger’s hinged toggle lock then released it, extracting the spent shell and setting another cartridge into the firing chamber. He turned to Sergeant Vogt. “Please assist Private Auerbach with the specimen, Sergeant. Then assemble the men. We are leaving.”
The mother heard the screams of the child through the blinding wall of heat and light blocking the cave exit. There was nothing she could do for him now, just as there was nothing she could do for the lead male who lay crumpled and burning in the antechamber.
The child’s calls had become muffled and difficult to distinguish and the mother turned away from the painful glare and scrabbled back into the relatively smoke-free corridor. The others were coming. She could smell their confusion and their anger. She waited for her roost-mates to arrive, waited until their bodies covered the walls and ceiling of the stone passageway, a rippling mass of energized fur and flashing teeth. They bristled and seethed and hissed, but she waited for them to go silent.
Then she communicated to them what they must do.
Deep within the cave’s subchamber, the tiny creatures that were still feeding on their unexpected food source responded with something resembling startled surprise, when their meal rose up and began to shake violently. Most of the arthropods simply fell back into the warm comfort of their guano world. But others, especially those who would not (or could not) stop eating, were killed, their smashed and broken bodies eagerly received by the hungry masses waiting below. Then, before the cave creatures could reclaim the gigantic mountain of flesh, it was gone.
CHAPTER 22
Descent
We humans have written our history in the perversion of nature.
—BOTANIST ROBERT THORNE, AS QUOTED BY R. J. MACCREADY
Colonel Wolff had broken radio silence, and even though the message was coded in an obscure native dialect, he still felt uneasy. Any radio signal out here will serve as a beacon. But now time had become the overriding factor and the colonel was beginning to doubt that they would have enough of it. Timing and logistics were everything, which made the fate of the American even more relevant.
He is definitely a survivor type—and that is bad.