Vespers (19 page)

“It has to do with the levels of exposure different cells receive,” Joyce said. “Back in grad school I took a course on the radiogenic effects of artificial and natural toxins on living tissue.”

“Smarty-pants,” he teased.

“I took it pass-fail,” she grinned. “A lot of the physics and chemistry was over my head. But basically there are four ways radiation affects living things. Acute somatic or bodily effects, serious somatic effects, developmental effects, and genetic effects. They depend pretty much on the intensity of the irradiation and the ability of the irradiated tissue to replace damaged cells. For example, skin or the lining of the intestine recovers relatively quickly from lowlevel exposure, while the hair, eyes, and brain don’t recover at all. Rapidly developing fetal tissue-in which the damaged cells can cause a cascade effect that creates damaged cells-are particularly susceptible to radioactivity.”

“Okay, I think I’ve got that. So let’s talk about our big bat. What’s a bat’s gestation period?”

“From three to six months.”

“And how many babies do they have in a litter?”

“Normal bats don’t have litters. They have one or two pups per birth. This particular vespertilionid, I don’t know. Irradiated cells can divide in strange ways.”

“So a high level of exposure could harm a mother and cause mutations in a fetus, but she still might live long enough to carry the pup to term. And the pup might survive.”

“Yes.”

“But then why wouldn’t the pup be radioactive?”

“The radiation isn’t passed along to the child,” Joyce said. “Only the damage.”

“So the mother acts like a filter.”

“In a way. But the changes can be geometric. A mutated child can pass even greater changes on to its offspring.”

Gentry glanced at her. “So a big bat like the Russian one could conceivably give birth to-”

“An even bigger bat,” Joyce said.

“Shit,” Gentry said.

“Yeah. Slow down,” she said as they neared a dark stretch of road. “Up there.”

The route narrowed and ended at a wooded region. Gentry’s shoulders heaved and he sighed.

“Y’know, I can accept most of what you said. But I’m not sure I can make the leap of faith to the next part.”

“Which part?”

“About one or more large predators living out here, in a small town, without being seen.”

“Why not? How often do people see bears up here?”

“That’s different.”

“You’re right,” Joyce said. “A bat can fly. It feeds at night. It has a more diverse diet than a bear or a cougar or a deer. It apparently has a much wider range of predation, which would blunt its impact on the local fauna. And it has the Catskills to the west to prowl around in.”

“Okay,” he said. “It goes unnoticed. Flies too low even to be picked up on airport radar. Then answer one more question.”

“I’ll try.”

“Can you fire a forty-four Magnum?”

She smiled. “Do bats fly?”

“Good. I’ve got two Ruger Super Blackhawks in the trunk,” Gentry said, “and I’m not going mutant bat hunting without them.”

They drove for another five minutes before reaching a clearing. There were no other vehicles in the area. Gentry parked and they got out. He removed the two handguns from the well where he stored the tire jack and grabbed a flashlight from the tool chest. When he closed the trunk, the slam of the door sounded disturbingly final.

It had gotten chilly since they left the doctor’s house. An insistent breeze stirred the treetops, carrying an early hint of fall and a sense of isolation. Branches groaned softly. Gentry heard a train whistle far off. The detective had gone into crackhouses feeling less anxious than he did now. He knew that kind of enemy. The zoned-out junkie or the quick-on-the-trigger pusher. This was something-primalwas the word that came to mind.

Stones and dirt crunched underfoot as they hiked up the sloping path. They proceeded slowly at Joyce’s insistence. She didn’t want to stumble into an “off-limits bat habitat,” as she described it, the kind of area the Little Leaguer and his father had entered the evening before. If they did, the plan was that she’d back out immediately and Gentry would help her.

Twigs snapped as animals fled into the underbrush. Gentry kept his eyes ahead. He had the flashlight; Joyce had the lead. He liked the way she looked with the Magnum swinging comfortably alongside her thigh. He liked the way she looked period.

“Check the trees, not just the ground,” Joyce said. “In case there are any animal remains up there.”

“I am,” Gentry said. “Have you seen any bats?”

“Not a one,” she said. “Last night there wereonly bats in the woods. Tonight there’s everything but.”

“So we’re wasting our time.”

“To the contrary. What I’m saying is that thereshould be bats. I understand how massive bat predation like I found last night could eat up a lot of local animal life and force the remaining bugs or lizards to leave or hide. But I don’t understand what could scare awayjust bats and leave everything else-”

She stopped. So did Gentry. She turned around.

“Holy shit.”

“What?”

“Robert, what if the bats weren’tfrightened away?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Think about that path down the Hudson River you were talking about before.”

“Yeah?”

“There are no bats here. There were relatively few bats by the time I went into the woods last night. There’s a very high bat count in the city subways. What if they’re all moving?”

“You mean migrating?”

“No. Moving. In a highly organized fashion.”

“Is that possible?”

“Bats communicate,” she said, thinking aloud. “We don’t know how or to what extent, but we think they’re a lot like dolphins in that sense. They send out short, pulselike sounds-‘clicks’-that come so fast they sound like high-pitched duck quacks. Bats use those sounds mostly to hunt.”

“Echolocation.”

“Yes. But deeper in the throat, in the larynx, they generate a very high whistle that can change pitch very quickly. We think those sounds are used to communicate everything from the location of food sources to sexual interest to organizational commands.”

“That’s very nice,” Gentry said. “But why would bats be moving to New York?”

“I don’t know. Why do bats move anywhere? Shelter or food.”

“Subways and cockroaches.”

“There’s also other wildlife,” Joyce said. “Baby pigeons, mice, rats, fish-New York is a big, rich smorgasbord for bats.”

“But so are the Catskills and Westchester and Connecticut. Right?”

Joyce started walking again. “For a normal colony, yes. But what if this one isn’t normal?”

She stopped beside a sign that pointed out the various roads and scenic sites in the area. But she wasn’t looking at the sign. She was looking at what was behind it. Gentry turned the flashlight in that direction.

There was a red and white iron bar waist-high across another dirt road. In the center was a sign with hours posted on it.

“Landfill,” Joyce said.

Gentry shined his light beyond the pole.

“It’s perfect,” she said. “It’s deserted at night. The remains of any animals would be bulldozed under, and the smell of the trash would cover the smell of guano.”

“Are we going in there?”

Joyce ducked under the pole.

“I guess so,” Gentry said as he followed her in.

They walked for roughly an eighth of a mile down the rutted dirt road. The full moon had risen above the mountains, casting the hills and thickly bunched trees in pale light. The only sounds were the crunch of their shoes on the stones, the leaves stirred by the night air, and now and then an animal fleeing through the underbrush.They moved slowly, Joyce reminding Gentry that the first time a bat came after either of them they were to back away immediately. Gentry understood and said he’d been less anxious raiding apartments when he was a narc. He knew and understood that kind of danger. Plus it was over in a few moments of intense activity. Now, he had no idea what to expect, or when.

When they reached the landfill, the vision was surreal. Crags of refuse, like blue-white lunar mountains, towered over the flat plains of dirt. The jagged peaks threw long, sharp shadows over their own lumpy foothills and across the occasional clumps of trash. Off to the right, near a shed, a bulldozer sat like a sleeping monster.

“Where do you want to look?” Gentry asked.

“I’m not sure.” Joyce took the flashlight from him. “I’ll just pick a spot.”

She walked toward the hills that surrounded the landfill. The nearest slope was about three hundred yards away. When she reached it, she walked slowly along the base, shining the light up through the surrounding trees and then down along the ground.

Gentry stood alone at the entrance to the landfill. Despite the gun, he felt naked.

After several minutes, Joyce stopped in front of a steep section of hill. She looked up and then down. Then she got down on her hands and knees. “Robert?” Her voice seemed very far away.

“Yes?”

“I found something.”

Gentry had had a feeling she would. She was like that, this lady. Had a sixth sense like a cop.

He walked quickly to where Joyce was standing. His pace wasn’t dictated by fear but sickness; the smell down here was a curious mixture of pine and rot. The sooner he got past the trash, the happier he’d be. He reached the scientist’s side and crouched beside her.

“What’ve you got?” he asked.

She pointed to a deep, damp rut cut by water. There was something dark lining the rut.

“Looks like diluted guano,” she said, rubbing some of the muddy black substance between her fingers and smelling it. She shined the light up the hill. “And up there is where it could have come from.”

Gentry looked.

Above them, maybe sixty feet, was a very large drain.

Gentry insisted on leading the way up the hillside.

Joyce didn’t argue. She wanted him to feel like he was contributing something other than the guns and the car. And she still felt bad about the Jupiter thing. She wasn’t a show-off and she hated coming off like one. Especially to someone who was every bit as professional in his way as she was in hers. Even when he’d kept her from going into the sublevels of Grand Central Station, he hadn’t insulted her intelligence or skill.

And Gentrywas contributing to this, though he probably didn’t realize it. He was making her feel like a member of a team, a partner in this search instead of an acolyte. Whenever she went on fieldtrips with Professor Lowery, he pushed her physically and intellectually. His prodding forced her to do things that established new high-water marks for where she could go and what she could accomplish. But they were always lonely experiences because he was looking down from his peak. He never pushed himself, made her feel like she was doing anything for him. That was why she’d allowed the professor to seduce her. It was an effort to bring him closer in a place and at a time of her life when she really needed it: her first year of grad school, her first time overseas. She did it to make him more accessible. Unfortunately, all it did was make her more “his.”

Gentry did not seem like that kind of man at all. Even with a gun in his hand, even when he’d been ordering her out of the subway tunnel, there was something gentle about him.

“So let’s work this forward from day one,” Gentry said as they climbed.

“All right,” she said.

“Mama bat gets away from Dr. Lipman. She makes her way to the river. She follows it and gives birth somewhere along the way.”

“Not in the open,” Joyce said.

“Why not?”

“Because hawks prowl the river. They’d have picked her pup off.”

“So the mother finds a quiet, enclosed place to give birth,” Gentry said.

“A place close to food and drink,” Joyce said.

“What would she have done next?”

“The routine would have been for the mother to look after her pup, then go out to feed. Then one day during the month she didn’t come back, probably succumbing to radiation poisoning. She’s found relatively soon thereafter, or else scavengers would have picked at her remains.”

“Could the baby bat have continued on its own after that?”

“Conceivably, as long as there was water and either insects or vegetation, depending on what kind of bat it was. Bats are pretty self-sufficient pretty early.”

“Would it have continued to live alone?”

“Probably not. When male or female bats are in heat they can be very aggressive.”

“How often does that happen?”

“In temperate regions that usually happens in the fall. That way they can give birth in the spring or summer when food is relatively populous. My guess is the bat would have tried to join an existing colony. If it was as big as we think, it could very well have taken over a colony.”

Gentry reached the drain and stopped. It was difficult to stand there because of the slope, and he was forced to hold on to a tree. He shined the light around the opening.

The drain was about four feet in diameter, and the concrete was nearly green from the minerals in the water.

“This is an old one,” Gentry said. “There’s a faded WPA logo here.”

“WPA?”

“Works Progress Administration. Government projects from the Depression. This was put in to give people work. They probably laid a whole lot of interconnected pipes through the town.”

“I see,” Joyce said. “So a bat that was born in one of the drains could get around quite a bit. It could listen at other openings, make sure that no one was near, then slip out unseen.”

“I suppose so,” Gentry said. “But would a bat be smart enough to do that?”

“Not an ordinary bat, no,” Joyce said.

“This isn’t an ordinary bat,” Gentry said. “So in addition to being bigger and stronger than other bats, it might also be smarter.”