At least our feet’ll be dry, he thought.
Two cones of light scanned the room, one of the beams pausing momentarily at a steel table bolted to the floor. The scientific equipment it had held now lay strewn about broken. Finally, both beams converged on a row of metal cages mounted against the far wall. There were five of them, each large enough to house a medium-size dog. Four of the cages were open, their metal-barred doors thrown back revealing empty interiors.
MacCready focused his light on the only cage that remained closed. As he inched closer, he saw a flash of movement inside—a dark form, scuttling into the shadows. Mac took another step forward, his flashlight illuminating a bit more of the cage interior. He could make out a furry shape, huddled and shivering in the farthest corner.
He began to speak softly, “Hey there, little—”
Something smashed against the bars, and as Mac took an involuntary step backward, his beam illuminated glistening teeth and wild red eyes. The thing inside the cage was screaming now, high-pitched and shrill; and as the creature slammed itself back and forth against the inside of the metal enclosure, the horrible sounds were amplified by the tight confines of the lab.
“Yanni, get back!” Thorne screamed, but his wife stood her ground.
“Pipe down, Bob,” she replied, calmly.
“It’s a lab monkey,” MacCready assured him.
“Oh, I thought—”
“Mac,” Yanni said, from across the room, “come have a look.”
She was staring down at something on the floor, and as MacCready approached he could see that it was another monkey. This one was clearly dead, pasted to a thick puddle of its own blood.
Mac crouched down beside the animal, playing his own light across its body. His mind already flashed back to the stall in Chapada. “This happened recently,” he whispered.
The botanist moved in to take a look. “Like . . . when, Mac?”
“Within the past few hours, probably less.”
“But that means—”
MacCready held up his hand, silencing his friend again. Then he moved back to one of the open cages. The floor of this particular cage was thick with a coating of rust-colored matter. Guano, he thought. Must be a week’s accumulation.
“This cage held our bat,” he whispered.
Thorne motioned toward the cage door. “But this cage is opened from the outside. All of them are, except the one with Cheetah over there. So maybe Wolff’s people decided to take these so-called dra-coo-lay with them?”
“Sure, Bob, to keep as pets,” Yanni suggested, sounding remarkably earnest.
Thorne started to reply, and MacCready got ready to perform banter interruptus, when something stopped him—something that drew his attention to the darkest corner of the laboratory. But instead of aiming his flashlight there, he pointed it upward, so that the beam illuminated his own face.
“Huh?” Bob whispered, with surprise.
“It’s all right,” MacCready said softly, but not to his friend.
And with that, the face of a demon emerged slowly from the shadows, a face that held the scientist spellbound.
Holy shit, MacCready thought. It’s the—
“Mac, what are you doing?” Thorne whispered.
Mac never acknowledged his friend’s question. Instead, he decided to try an experiment he had actually been planning for some time. He began to whistle. At first he struggled to remember the simple melody, the one Yanni had used to serenade the forest behind her home.
But something about it wasn’t right, and the cat-size creature reacted by stepping backward, its face disappearing into the shadows.
Damn, Mac thought. But then, before he could wonder what had gone wrong, Yanni was standing beside him. And so he tried again. Several notes in, she joined him, correcting him, even whistling a harmony to his melody, then taking the lead.
Song of the draculae, he thought, and as they whistled, a pair of bats—each much larger than the first one—crawled down from the shadows. A fourth bat, the largest, walked down the wall of cages, quiet as a ninja. The creatures crouched with their chests close to the ground, and MacCready noticed that their bodies were tensed, like coiled springs.
The juvenile bat had been “elbowed” backward by what seemed to be an Alpha male who behaved like an older sibling, but instead of retreating into the shadows, the little one skittered between its larger companions as if looking for a way to move forward.
There’s something very different about that one, MacCready told himself, noting that its stance conveyed none of the barely contained violence displayed by its larger companions.
It shows no fear—only something like . . . curiosity.
Then, keeping the same quizzical look on its nightmare face, the draculae child cocked its head for a moment, issuing a series of high-pitched chirps, at once familiar but at the same time utterly alien.