THEY WERE HUNTED the way all highly dangerous, man-eating animals are hunted: by many men with high-powered rifles, six of them with shotguns that could have blasted whole heads from their bodies or holes as big as heads in their chests.
A “jungle expert” had been hired by Lieutenant Shrader, who was in charge, and he had constructed immense flying nets and vast hidden pits—so large and cunning they could have captured twenty Bengal tigers. As a final precaution, Art Davis carried a pocketful of hand grenades— just in case.
Yet it was so easy to find them once they knew where to look, and so effortless to kill them, picking them off the face of the cliff with the rifles, that all the elaborate preparations were an embarrassment and a folly.
The footprints, avowed a footprint expert, led to a cliff; there they saw the little niches on the surface, leading up, serving as footholds for hands and feet. And two hundred feet above, perhaps a little more, was a break in the rock, a few branches, a cluster of leaves and hanging shrubs: obviously an entrance to a hidden cave.
A special gun was used to shoot a capsule of tear gas into the nest, and the rifleman who fired it was so expert, he hit his target at the first shot.
After the all-clear, the mayor of New York City stepped from his shiny black limousine to view, officially, what the dawn’s hunting had wrought.
What had he expected—Dracula’s children? He was amazed.
Terrified, he turned to look into all the blank faces and empty eyes that surrounded him: the police corpsmen, the detectives, the Army personnel, the reporters, and doctors in white.
“These. . .these! are the monsters?!”—for what he saw on the ground at the face of the cliff were five naked dead children lying in a careless heap, all of them bloody and riddled with holes, as worthless as Gooks, or Jews ready to be shoveled into the lime pits.