Ник Картер - War from the Clouds

“We have found it,” Elicia said wistfully, her shoulders slumped and her face sad, “but we can do nothing. It is too high and this cave is empty of everything but rocks and bones and ashes.” She shuddered.

We could have piled up rocks to give us more elevation, but that ceiling was thirty feet away. It would take days to pile up enough rocks to do us any good. By my calculations, we had just over three hours to do four hours of climbing, as it was.

The realization of failure was stronger because it also signalled our entrapment. We couldn’t go forward and we couldn’t go back. Our bones would be added to those in the cave, and it was no solace to us that we would not have been burned in sacrifice. Death by starvation, my boss David Hawk once said, is no damned picnic.

The four warriors also realized the hopelessness of our situation. They sat on the cold floor and began to chant in a kind of sing-song fashion that made my flesh creep. In my mind’s eye, I envisioned scenes of years ago when young maidens were brought here for ceremonial torture, ceremonial sex and then ceremonial burning. I imagined that the torturers — Don Carlos leading them — had chanted in that same creepy way.

I was about ready to join them, though, when I looked up again at that outcropping of rock that had hidden the opening from us when we had first looked up. I walked around in a circle, kicking burned bones aside, studying that piece of jutting rock.

It stuck out from the ceiling at right angles, spearing across a corner of the hole. And I could see that the hole was bigger than we had first thought. There was ample room for a man to get past that outcropping, that spear of rock, and into the chimney.

But how was a person to get up to the jutting piece of rock?

The answer was still tied around my chest. I looked down at the rope trailing away into the darkness. It was thin, but it was strong. And it was supple.

“What are you doing?” Elicia asked as I began coiling up the loose end of the rope.

“I’m going to play cowboy,” I said, grinning at her. “Just watch.”

The four warriors stopped their chanting to watch my strange activities. I tied a loop in the end of the rope and coiled about forty feet of it around my shoulder. I took a few practice throws, but the loop never rose more than twenty feet in the air. The warriors and Elicia were looking at me as though I’d lost my senses.

“All right,” I said, grinning at them as I coiled the rope for another throw. “That’s enough practice. Now I go for the real thing.”

“For what real thing?” Elicia asked.

“Just watch.”

I went for the outcropping of rock. The lariat arched up through the air and missed the rock by inches. The warriors, not understanding what I was trying to do and convinced that I’d gone daft, began their chant again. Elicia suspected the truth and began to bite her lower lip and give body English to the trajectory of the lariat.

On the fifth try, the loop snaked over the end of the rock spear and I tugged gently on the rope. The loop tightened, but it was far out near the end of the rock, at its weakest point. The chances of the rock supporting my weight were sparse, but I had no other choice.

I put more weight on the rope and the loop tightened more. Pebbles came loose somewhere up there and rained down on us. The warriors chanted louder and began to howl. Elicia bit her lip so hard that I expected to see blood spurt out.

The suspense was also killing me. I took a chance then. I lifted myself by the rope, felt a ping in my side from my wound, and began to swing back and forth across the platform of old bones. The warriors let out a cheer. They finally understood the principle of the lariat. They also were hoping that I was more powerful than the curse put on the cave. I’d try not to disappoint them.

But we were far from out of it. I climbed a few feet on the rope, my eyes on that slender point of rock that jutted out beside the chimney hole. I flopped about, testing the strength of the rock, then began a swift, hand-over-hand climb.

When I was ten feet off the ground, I heard a fluttering sound and thought perhaps the whole ceiling was starting to crack open above me. I saw nothing. The rock was holding and the ceiling had no new cracks in it. I climbed faster.

I reached the twenty foot level when the fluttering came again, louder, more menacing, closer.

“Look out, Nick,” Elicia screamed.

Her voice echoed through the chamber and seemed to come at me from a hundred different directions. I looked up and saw why she had shouted.

Something huge and black and pulsating had dropped from the chimney and was zooming straight down toward me. I thought at first that it was a great glob of soot, then I thought of a soot-blackened boulder.

But why was it pulsating?

The black glob was about to hit me when it seemed to break apart with a great fluttering sound. I nearly let go of the rope. My heart was pounding several hundred miles an hour. I let out a yip of my own and heard the cries and shouts of Elicia and the warriors below.

But I held tight to the rope and tried to duck my head away from the falling glob. The fluttering sound rose and seemed like thunder in my ears. Small black objects were zooming around my head and off to distant parts of the cave. Soft wings beat at me.

And then I knew.

Bats.

The cave had been strangely absent of life when we had entered it, but that opening that provided light should have told me that wildlife of some sort must be using this cave. That wildlife was bats and they had all been in their favorite nest in the opening of the chimney.

That black glob that had looked like a soot-covered boulder was a cluster of several hundred bats.

Elicia was screaming below me, but I knew she was in no danger. She was merely reacting to the bats that were now streaking back and forth in the cave, dive-bombing every alien object spotted by their special radar. While the bats occupied themselves with harassing Elicia and the warriors, I continued my climb to the top of the rope.

My side was on fire and every muscle in my body — especially my hands — threatened to go soft on me as I took one hand from the rope and clasped it around the rock spear. The spear, I could see in the dim light, actually was the leading edge of a small ledge just outside the hole leading up.

There were hundreds of baby bats in a nest on that ledge.

A high-pitched squeal came from the nest when my hand bumped against it. This set off the other bats in the cave. They were still streaking back and forth, dive-bombing Elicia and the four warriors. Now they began a screaching and squealing that was almost deafening, and was certainly hair-raising.

Distasteful as it was, I raised myself with both hands on the rock ledge and reached in to scoop out the nest. Bony wings flapped against my arm and face as the debris came falling down past me. Straw, twigs, dried grass and large cakes of bat shit made up most of the debris.

The screeching in the cave reached a fever pitch when the baby bats went plummeting down to the platform. The adult bats began swooping down and catching the little ones in wiry claws, then flying around and around in a circle, looking for a safe place to nest them. But I had fought hard for this place at the peak of the cave’s dome and I wasn’t about to be unseated by mama bats.

It took several minutes, however, to work my way up through the hole and onto the ledge. The hole was bigger than it had looked from below.

There was plenty of room for me to stand on the ledge, haul the others up one by one with the rope and let them get past me into the chimney.

I looked up to see if other ledges existed above me, but the walls were smooth and black. I stood on the ledge and ran my hands over the smooth walls of the almost round hole. Soot fell away, covering my body and falling down into the cave.