Vespers (27 page)

No. That wouldn’t have made any difference. Two fireextinguishers wouldn’t have helped.

She heard shouts from downstairs.

You did the right thing.

Then there was silence, but only for a moment. Suddenly the world turned sideways as the locker was wrenched away from the wall and dragged loudly across the laboratory floor. A moment later the top and bottom of the metal cabinet slammed hard against something. There was a brief respite, the locker tilted farther, and then it was slammed again-

The hole in the wall. The locker was being pulled against it.

Joyce’s breath came faster as panic gripped her. She thought of the deer in the tree, the bicyclist carried into the tunnel, the man swept from the train platform at Christopher Street.

The bat was trying to take her away.

Detective Anthony raced along Eighth Avenue to Columbus Circle. En route, Gentry used the car phone to try to raise Professor Lowery’s office.

The phones were not working in the laboratory. The detective also wasn’t able to reach museum security and was furious with himself for not having accompanied Nancy.

The car rounded Columbus Circle. Anthony cut through the traffic coming the other way and sped alongside the park. As they headed north, Gentry was overwhelmed by the panic he saw. Anthony had to swerve, stop, and start as people ran and stumbled into the street, trying to get away from the bats. It reminded him of the cockroaches that had been flushed from the walls of his apartment building. People didn’t seem to be runningto anything, just away. And there weren’t many people helping other people. They were looking after themselves. Not out of selfishness but out of necessity. The bats turned each person, each part of the body, into a battle zone.

And the people were losing.

“Isn’t there anything we can do to help?” Anthony asked.

“If we get out, the bats will bring us down,” he said. “And if we stop to let anyone into the car, we may be overrun.”

Overrun by bats and by people. Overrun by panic and fear.

The detective looked up as they drove past the rows of stately and exclusive apartment buildings that lined the broad street. Small fires were burning in the windows of several apartments. They could have been caused by struggles around candlelit dinners, by bats that had flown too close to gas burners, by people who tried to chase away the creatures using makeshift torches. Gentry could also hear the high-pitched whine of the smoke detectors, which seemed to make the bats even more agitated.

Midtown South and Midtown North used the same radio frequency and Gentry called in the locations of the 10-59s to be relayed to the engine and ladder company on West Eighty-third Street. He didn’t know how the firefighters would deal with the bats-hoses, perhaps-but they’d have to try. That was all the city needed now, to burn.

The car pulled up across the street from the museum. The old gothic towers were alive with bats. Gentry told Anthony to wait; he didn’t want an officer who was inexperienced with the bats either getting hurt or getting in his way. Pulling his coat over his head, Gentry ran across the wide street and raced up the stairs into the rotunda.

He was not surprised to find bats everywhere. In the bright glare of the emergency lights he could see them circling in the high ceiling, knitting in and out of the skeleton of the giant, rearing barosaurus, flying through the dark halls beyond. What did surprise him was that they weren’t attacking, though it was obvious they had been: wounded museum personnel and visitors were everywhere. People were just beginning to stir after the assault.

Gentry took his coat from around his head. The subdued state of the bats meant that the giant had left or had been killed. As he sped toward the stairway, he prayed it was the latter.

Gentry reached the fourth floor, the last of the public floors. There, he had to ask a wounded guard how to get to the fifth floor. Bleeding on the cheeks and hands, the man told him. Out of breath, Gentry ran to the door and put three bullets through the security scanner. The door clicked open. He took the stairs two at a time and hurried to Professor Lowery’s laboratory. He heard awful banging coming from that direction.

The spotlit halls were deserted save for several confused, slipstream flows of bats and two people who were limping toward him. As they neared, Gentry recognized Heidi Daniels. The detective stopped her.

“Heidi, where’s Nancy?”

“She’s still in the lab!” Marc Ramirez said urgently.

“What happened?”

“The female bat broke through-”

Gentry didn’t hear the rest. He ran on, damning himself with every other step. He should have been here. Heshould have.

Though the main lights were down, the emergency lights had come on in the hallway. The laboratory was just ahead. Gentry approached boldly; it didn’t pay to tiptoe, not with bats.

When he reached the lab, he saw bats drinking from a puddle just outside the doorway. He heard the gentle spray of water inside under the steady beat ofwham…silence…wham. The bats didn’t bother him, even though he was just a few feet away.

He saw the shattered glass lying just inside the door. His heart punching hard, he raised his gun and held his breath and swung through the wooden frame.

Years of entering drug dens and hideouts had taught Gentry to see everything as a snapshot when he went into a room: front vision, peripheral vision, top and bottom, it was all processed at once. The emergency lights in the hall barely lit the laboratory, but it was enough. Virtually every inch of the walls, cabinets, and ceiling was covered with a rippling black carpet of bats.Everything except for the dead giant, which was lying on the table to the left. A fine spray was raining down in the midst of the bats, and Professor Lowery lay soaked with water and blood near the desk. He wasn’t moving. Behind the spray was what the narcotics squad used to call “the big story,” the head of the gang.

The giant bat.

The creature was mostly in shadow, its giant off-white hooks trying to pull the laboratory clothes locker through an opening in the wall. The animal was hidden inside the opening. The banging came from the monster’s awkward attempts to maneuver the tall locker through the wide hole.

The creature stopped moving. Gentry stood with his right arm extended, his left hand supporting his wrist, his index finger on the trigger. The locker was resting in the creature’s hooks, lying diagonally across its body. Gentry couldn’t see the bat’s head, wings, or legs.

Suddenly, the creature wailed. The echoing cry reminded Gentry of a street musician he used to hear on his beat, a man who dragged a violin bow across the mouth of glass bottles. It was a high, sustained, hollow sound, almost like weeping. The other bats didn’t move. Obviously, that wasn’t the sound that sent them into their frenzy.

Gentry raised the gun slightly and fired twice, once to the left and once to the right. The giant bat’s wail became a shriek of pain. The locker clattered loudly to the floor.

The twin reports of the 9-mm stirred the small bats from their perches. Hundreds of them dashed through the spray, weaving up and down and from side to side. The droplets seemed to confuse them. Gentry lowered his weapon and walked into the spray. Behind the thick swarm he could see the locker lying on its side. The giant hooks were gone.

Gentry walked ahead. He stopped short of the crisscrossing bats and peered into the dark. With awful, kick-in-the-groin suddenness, the detective wished he had thought about what he’d seen in the subway. A moment later he saw the monster’s gaping mouth and serrated teeth inside the dark opening. He saw the ruby eyes beneath them.

The head was inverted.

The goddamn thing had been hanging upside down. Gentry had probably shot the bat in its fucking tail.

The detective raised his gun to fire again, but by then the giant bat had vanished. He holstered his weapon and ran into the laboratory. He had to duck bats as they wove to and fro.

“ Nancy!” he yelled. “ Nancy, are you all right?”

There was no answer. He half skidded, half splashed to a stop and knelt by the locker. The door was facing him. It fell open.

Joyce was bundled inside. She looked up at him, trembling, and he slipped his arms around her.

“It’s okay,” he said, hugging her. “It’s okay.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” she said, shivering. “Did you get her?”

“No,” he said, “but she’s gone.”

“Probably got tired. She’s very pregnant.”

“We can talk about this later,” Gentry said softly as he helped her out. “Let’s get you out of here.”

He had to work her from the tight spot in pieces-head, right shoulder, left shoulder, lower right leg, lower left leg, torso, hips. He held her close to him, warming her as they stood.

Gentry pulled Ramirez’s leather coat from the locker. It was soaked and he threw it aside. There was nothing to wrap her in.

Joyce turned toward the opening in the wall. “I thought I heard a shot and a cry,” she said.

“You did,” Gentry told her, “but I fucked up. She was hanging from something inside there. I only hit her foot or her tail.”

Joyce turned and touched his wet, unshaven cheek. “You didn’t fuck up. You saved my life.” Then she looked past him at Lowery. Her expression had told Gentry that she knew exactly what she’d see.

Gentry slid between them. “Let the medical people take care of the professor. I want to get you out of-”

A bat dove at him. Then another.

“What the hell?” he said.

“It’s the female,” Joyce said as she swatted at the bats. “She stopped wailing, but that doesn’t mean she’s quiet. She’s probably making her way back toward the subway.”

“Come on!” Gentry said as he hustled her toward the door.

As more and more bats resumed their attack, the detective was not optimistic about making it back down the stairs. Just getting into the hallway with Nancy was a nightmare of slipping on water and swatting at bats. He was trying to shield the woman. But the bats that had been streaming above when he arrived were attacking now. They had scattered before when he fired his gun, and he tried to frighten them again.

This time they weren’t buying.

Gentry had his left arm over Nancy. He pulled her close and used his body and coat to shield her as best as he could. She had her arms wrapped tightly around his waist, her damp head bent against his chest. He could feel her heart drumming. His own was getting up there too: they’d gone only a few yards down the corridor when Gentry realized they weren’t going to get much farther.The bats were really starting to pile on. He couldn’t see or hear, wasn’t even sure in which direction they were headed. And he felt like he was being hit from ankle to scalp with snapping rubber bands. Each bite made some part of him jump.

Finally, Gentry stopped, took off his coat, and started to wrap it around Nancy ’s head.

“You go!” he yelled. “Make a run for it!”

Joyce refused and pushed blindly at his coat to make him take it back; she stopped suddenly and desperately patted the coat. The top, on the left.

“What’s in here?” she asked.

“My radio-”

Joyce tore frantically at the coat to get it out. She fell to her knees, pulling at the coat with one hand while swatting at the bats with the other. Gentry dropped and helped her get it out.

He handed it to her then pulled the coat over them both.

“Turn it on!” she yelled.

“It’s on.”

“Louder!I want static, as much as you can get!”

Gentry took the slender radio. He held it close to his face, curling his arm around them both for protection, and turned it to talk. Then he pushed up the volume in order to generate feedback. After a moment he got a thunderous, seashore-breaker drone.

He gave the radio back to Nancy. “Now what?”

“We jam them!” she shouted as she took the radio and held it outside the garment.

The bats broke off their attack at once. They fluttered around aimlessly. When Nancy was sure the retreat would hold, she removed the coat.

“Okay,”she said. “Let’s get up and walk out of here.”

Gentry rose and helped her up. They started toward the stairs.It was astonishing.The bats would approach and then fly off, as though they were bouncing into a force field.

“It’s like you said about the tiger moth, isn’t it?” Gentry said. “High-frequency sounds interrupting the normal flow of information.”

“Not exactly,” Joyce said. “This isn’t blocking whatever the she-bat’s sending.It’s hiding it-confusing them.”

They hobbled ahead, bleeding from numerous puncture wounds. Gentry’s mind leaped from being proud of Nancy yet again, to thinking about the rabies shots they’d certainly have to undergo after being attacked, to focusing on the larger problem: how to stop the giant bat. If they didn’t do that soon, New York City would be destroyed in a matter of days.

The bats in the rotunda had gone back on the offensive, flying, clinging, and ripping at everyone who moved. The radio afforded Gentry and Joyce protection as they made their way to the exit; she left it behind with a museum official who was trying to get workers into a windowless office. She and Gentry ducked back under his coat.

Detective Anthony was still waiting across from the museum, his windows shut as bats poured from Central Park. Dogs were howling everywhere, and many were running free in the streets, no doubt driven wild by the ultrasonic cry of the she-bat. There were screams coming from people lying on the sidewalks, from windows of the apartments that lined Central Park West, from cars and buses. They had stopped or plowed into one another, into trees or hydrants, or had rolled up onto sidewalks. Bats had come in through open windows. Passengers were struggling to get them off.

There were loud cries to the right. As Joyce and Gentry crossed the street, the detective pulled the coat off his head and looked back. The skies high and low were full of bats. They were like layers of clouds, moving at different speeds, in different directions. Just north of Seventy-sixth Street, where the loud screams had come from, a cloud of bats had descended on a rooftop bat party. “Guano shelter” tents were ripped, and ghostly shapes flitted through the night as bats became tangled in the torn fabric.