MacCready nodded toward the wounded submarine. “All aboard.”
With Yanni beside him, MacCready pulled up at the base of the gangplank.
“Yanni, you think Bob is square with you coming along?” he asked.
Yanni shot her approaching husband a quick glance. She shook her head. “Fuck no.” Then they began to mount the wooden incline.
In the Silverbird II, as another skip off the atmosphere ended, Maurice Voorhees let out a deep sigh. He had heard nothing more from his stowaway, but even the incredible sense of exhilaration he felt from the flight was tempered by the unsettling fact that something had gotten into the cockpit with him.
Maybe it’s just a rat, he thought. Then just as quickly, he shook his head. “Who are you kidding, Maurice?”
Filled with a renewed sense of dread, the engineer strained against the harness once more, twisting around in his seat. But it was impossible to see the floor along the rear bulkhead, and after a moment he let his body uncoil with a grunt.
They left the canopy open. That’s how it . . . Maybe it was frightened. Maybe it was looking for a safe place to hide. And for a moment, the thought made him feel badly about what he’d done. But as unfortunate as the encounter might have been for the creature, Voorhees still prayed that the thing was either dead or too injured to be a threat.
“All right, next crisis,” he said, checking his watch and his trajectory again. No more time to waste, he thought, reflexively reaching down for the throttle with a gloved hand.
Then, without tapping or clicking, and with no warning at all, something sharp pricked his right index finger through the leather glove.
The engineer-turned-pilot yanked his hand away.
“Shit!” he cried, fumbling to remove the glove.
He stared at his finger.
No pain—maybe the skin’s not broken, he thought. But just as quickly, he noticed a centimeter-long divot of missing flesh. And as he watched, the wound filled with blood, overflowed, and the overflow began to drift into the air.
“No! NO!” Voorhees cried, willing the blood to stop—but it didn’t. He pulled the glove back on. His hand looked normal now but almost immediately, he could feel the glove filling with something slippery and warm.
Maurice Voorhees began to hyperventilate.
As the seconds passed, another “stone-skip” began; the Silverbird and its wounded passengers were hurled toward the top of another parabola.
Had he been watching, Voorhees would have seen the Virginia coastline coming into view—but from the port-side window, rather than the starboard. His encounter with the stowaway had thrown off his timing and he had neglected to release the bio-bombs on their “useless” mid-Atlantic trajectory. Nor had he made a required course correction toward the west. Instead the pilot was fixated on his own hand. The glove had swollen rapidly and now began to deflate, as spherules of bright red—some pea-size, others breaking up into a scarlet mist—poured from the slice in the leather. Through the horror, he was reminded of a magician’s wand, but it was not magic dust that his index finger was spewing into the cockpit.
“Jesus,” he said, moments before experiencing a sudden and painful buildup of pressure in his guts. This was followed by the equally unexpected relief of something letting go, and his pants were suddenly streaming blood as the g-force returned.
The course correction, he thought, finally and too late. But instead of checking the gauges arrayed before him, something made him look down again. There, beside him, was the injured bat. His scientist’s brain worked frantically as if recording its last notes: Much larger than the one I dosed with rocket fuel.
As he stared in fascination and horror, the creature looked up at him, teeth glistening red. Then it turned back to feed at the pool that was forming around his feet.
The Silverbird II stone-skipped into yet another arc, and this time the air in the cockpit became so filled with blood that Maurice Voorhees could no longer see through the windows.
He struggled to maintain his concentration. No landing now. He was beginning to lose consciousness but just as quickly his thoughts became clear—one last time. The bombs. The bombs.
“LLLSSSLLL,” he called, through lips that were losing all sensation. “Lisl.”
And as he began weeping tears of blood, he realized that he was losing control of his hands.
“I will do this!” he screamed (or perhaps the words were just in his mind).
With the g-forces beginning to build again, he flailed at the controls, deliberately swinging the Silverbird broadside into what he knew would be a hypersonic, superheated wind.
On a beach far below, a ten-year-old boy who had awakened early to chase sandpipers stopped to watch a comet blaze suddenly to life, cleaving before his eyes into a cluster of five dazzling diamonds. As they flew northeast toward the deep Atlantic, the diamonds—embers from Hell’s Gate—broke apart, trailing smoke and sparks until they extinguished themselves in a sterilizing glare.