A termite nest would have been helpful. A single queen would keep me going.
Ultimately, though, he settled for a snake—species unknown—too slow either to strike or avoid getting clobbered. MacCready knew that beneath the skin and scales, the long ribbon of muscle was a cold and bloody petri dish if eaten uncooked, sure to make him even sicker in a day or two. But he dared not start even the smallest campfire. His subconscious seemed to be crying out that he did not have a day or two. The zigzag wasn’t working. Someone out there—the Nazi Wolff pack, no doubt—was gaining on him and so he carried the remains of the snake with him, trying his best to leave no trail. Salmonella never tasted so good, he thought, chewing on the last of the meat.
On the sixth day, Mac knew that his pursuers were closing the gap. He had to appreciate the fact that these guys never yelped from a sting or bite, or any of the other occupational hazards of a tropical wilderness pursuit. Damn, these bastards are good, he told himself, with a reluctant sense of admiration.
Seven days after his encounter with the turtles, the snake meat began to bite back. With his energy all but completely sapped, he hunkered down behind a tree fall, clutching a bundle of sharpened sticks and a makeshift atlatl to propel them. My sorry-assed arsenal.
“Remember the Alamo,” he muttered, knowing that the only thing to be decided was which of his two enemies, his pursuers or the forest, would take him down first.
When the trackers found Mac several hours later, he was mumbling to himself about giant turtles firing off Nazi missiles.
Now I’m definitely seeing things, he thought, watching as a man and a woman dropped their backpacks and rushed toward him. These guys look like Bob and Yanni.
“Mac?”
Jeez, it even sounds like Bob, he thought, and that convinced him to play along. “Sorry, Bob, no rolling papers.”
“Don’t worry, Mac. I got it covered.”
MacCready turned to the other apparition. “Hey, Yanni.”
“What’s buzzin’, cousin?” came the reply.
“Nuttin’,” MacCready said, then he dismissed the apparition with a wave of his hand, “’specially since you’re both dead.”
“How do you figure, Mac?”
“Fuckin’ Nazi showed me that Russian grease gun.”
The hallucinations exchanged brief confused looks before apparently deciphering their friend’s last comment.
The Bob mirage smiled sheepishly. “Yes, well . . . about the so-called grease gun . . .”
“Spill it,” the female ghost added, sounding disappointed.
“Hey, who has time to pack the gat when some Nazi asshole and his button men are bustin’ down the door?” the Bob mirage chimed in, defensively.
Mac stood up on wobbly legs, now acutely aware—mission-aware. These were not mirages. Bob and Yanni were alive. There was no time to waste, sick as he was. “Did you get to Queequegbah? Get a message out to Hendry?”
Yanni threw her husband a puzzled expression.
“He means Cuiabá,” Thorne explained, then turned to his friend. “No dice, Mac—as we found ourselves immediately on the lam from the Krauts. But since we also thought they’d iced you, it is no little relief that Yanni picked up your trail three days ago.”
Yanni held the empty bottle of turtle repellant up to Mac’s face.
MacCready struggled to keep his eyes focused. It was still their voices but now they were fading echoes. “Yeah, works fine on turtles,” he said. “You got something for vampire bats and Nazis?”
And with that he collapsed into Bob’s arms.
Yanni moved in quickly and together the couple gently lowered Mac’s body to the ground.
“Ingrate,” Yanni muttered.
CHAPTER 24
Marching to Valhalla
I hope these new mechanical meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and the idle, and will not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race, as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science. The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the result of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures.
—HORACE WALPOLE, 1785
Nostromo Base
February 8, 1944
By late morning, the two spacecraft lay gleaming in their wooden cradles, ready to be sled-mounted, ready for their tanks to be pumped with fuel and oxidizer, ready to roll out onto the tracks, one after another, toward their shared, central launch rail.
Colonel Wolff was looking for any excuse to get away from the rocket scientist, S?nger, who had once again fallen under the spell of his own voice while briefing the science teams and Silverbird pilots. Trimmed of excess verbiage, S?nger’s message was that “everything was proceeding as planned,” but the man had dragged out every possible speck of rocket-related minutiae until even Voorhees looked bored.