“Watch this, kids!” Mac called out.
Slowly, almost gracefully, the helicopter angled into the steel girders of a dockside crane, which in its own turn fell with the wounded Dragon I toward the methane tanks, squashing them like eggs. MacCready braced himself for “the big one” but remarkably neither the helicopter nor the methane exploded. The German pilot jumped out, and to judge from the speed at which he sprinted away, had escaped with no injuries at all. Without an ignition source, the supercooled liquid flowed across the ground like water.
“Time to go,” MacCready announced. And as Mac glanced back over his shoulder, the kimono-clad man crawled out of the tangled helicopter wreckage and blundered directly into the chemical stream.
Even from this distance, and while they fled from the spreading death tide, MacCready and his friends could hear the man screaming in startled surprise, as his feet snapped off at the ankles, frozen to the ground in a pair of wooden clogs.
Finally, the rivers of methane found an ignition source, cracking open two leftover canisters of Voorhees’s hypergolics. The blast wave rocked the Nostromo over to one side, piercing the hull with speed-slung machinery.
MacCready felt the heat of the fireball on his neck—the weight of his still bomb-laden backpack driving him forward and onto all fours. He and the Thornes were scattered like bowling pins. Quickly regaining his footing, Mac turned and saw the fog glowing ruby red under the fireball. Smaller, secondary explosions were igniting all along the shoreline.
We did it! We did it! He almost allowed himself an indulgent grin but realized there were still plenty of well-armed bad guys around. Fortunately, most of them seemed to be on fire.
And then came another rumble—this one from directly in front of him. Another rumble and another glow. His heart gave off what was becoming, these days, an all-too-familiar sinking feeling. MacCready knew this sound. He’d heard it at Chapada and again when Wolff’s team took down the recon plane. It was the sound of a rocket engine, an entire cluster of them.
“Motherfucker!” he yelled, and began running in the direction of the sound. He slid the backpack down onto one forearm, concerned now that it felt too light for the job that lay ahead.
If it’s not already too late.
Less than ten seconds after Reitsch ignited the sled, Voorhees finally saw, in the receding glare, the second pilot, Lothar, staggering toward him, his back spewing smoke. His right hand was missing; the other, still clad in a glove, was pressed against his abdomen.
“Looking for something?” Voorhees asked, wiggling the fingers of his right hand. Lothar and Hannah Reitsch were thick as thieves, cut from the same abominable block. He’d heard a too vivid description of what Lothar had done to the prisoners before Akira’s dissections began, including the woman with the bled-out child.
Voorhees pointed to a hand on the ground. “Is that yours?”
Lothar gave no response. He simply fell on his back with something ropey and pink flowing over his remaining hand. The air suddenly smelled like the bottom of a cesspool. In his last conscious moment, as the glow from Reitsch’s rocket disappeared, the pilot’s eyes met Voorhees’s pleadingly, and the dying man opened his mouth. Voorhees watched in shock-state fascination as a red bubble formed, grew large, then burst.
He continued to stare at the dead man until Colonel Wolff appeared at his side, standing calm in the turmoil. “It seems as if Reitsch’s protégé has been disemboweled,” he observed, tapping Lothar’s torso with his boot.
Voorhees wiped something thick and wet from his cheek. “No shit,” he said.
Still calm, the colonel gestured toward the Silverbird II. “So, rocketeer, do you think you can fly this thing?”
“Without a doubt, Colonel,” Voorhees said, watching as Wolff’s face widened into a grin.
The trio of draculae overflew the battered biped nest several times but there was still no sign of the child. Everywhere, even through the thick confusion of burnt-forest smells, the scent of wasted food was noticeable—to the twins, tantalizingly so.
With no thought of food, the mother dipped her right shoulder, while simultaneously flexing the elongated digits of her wing-hand. The bat’s body instantly responded by wheeling hard to the right, its wings carrying her beyond the shattered forest and out over water.