Vespers (28 page)

Gentry opened the car door and helped Nancy in. A bat flew at him, and he whipped his coat around, smacking it to the ground. He stepped on the coat, then pulled it under his arm. The bat was crushed on the asphalt. Gentry took another look back.

The air was full of bats. It was like watching thousands of dark Ping-Pong balls blowing in a huge lotto tank. The creatures were moving everywhere and every way. The detective watched as some rooftop partygoers stumbled against the low brick wall. There was a horrified shriek as one man went over. He managed to grab a cement planter that ran along the edge of the roof; he dangled there while other guests attempted to pull him up. But the growing swarm of bats drove the rescuers back, and the man fell eleven stories to the sidewalk. He didn’t scream, but he hit the concrete with an audible crack.

Gentry slid into the back, behind the passenger’s seat. He slammed the door, catching an incoming bat as he did. The detective opened the door, let the bat drop out, and reshut it firmly.

“What in God’s name is going on?” Anthony cried.

“We’ve been demoted to insects,” Gentry said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Never mind,” Gentry replied. He told Detective Anthony to head downtown to OEM headquarters at 7 World Trade Center. The detective hoped the place was still operational.

Anthony activated the flasher and siren, turned the car around, and sped back down Central Park West. He wove around a zigzag of fire engines that had responded to their call. The firefighters were backed against their trucks using the water to beat back bats. Obviously, the giant female was still close enough for her cries to affect these vespers.

“I’m going to keep off the highway,” Anthony said. “The radio says it’s jammed with abandoned cars and wrecks and people who are still trying to get out of town.”

“Fine,” Gentry replied. “Just don’t stop. It’ll give these bastards a chance to swarm.”

“Understood.”

The driver cut west at Sixty-fourth Street, then turned onto Columbus Avenue at Lincoln Center. The bat attack was not limited to the Central Park region. Well-dressed patrons who had come to hear the 125th anniversary production ofDie Fledermaus-a perverse coincidence-at the Metropolitan Opera were running through the lobby or hiding under tables in the vast courtyard. Several bodies were bobbing under a sea of bats in the large, lighted circular fountain.

Gentry turned to Joyce. She was staring ahead, her expression flat. He took her hand and squeezed it. She turned toward him, and as they passed a streetlight he could see the sadness in her eyes.

The driver slowed to avoid a body that had crawled onto the street. A moment later, Anthony screamed, jammed hard on the brakes, and started slapping at his lap. Gentry looked over the seat.

A bat was chewing on the inside of the driver’s thigh, and two more were crawling into the car from under the dashboard.

“Get the helloff! ” Anthony cried.

He grabbed the bat and tried to pull it away as the other two flew at his hands.Two more bats came in behind them.

“Where’s your radio?” Gentry demanded.

“In the passenger door!”

Gentry reached over to get it as four more bats squirmed in from under the dashboard. The animals flew for his face, and Gentry dropped back into his seat.

A bat flew at Joyce’s chin; she snatched it from the air with her right hand and slammed it against the window to her left. There was a mushysplat and a short squeal.

As the dead bat slid from the window, Joyce leaned over the seat toward the dashboard. She turned the air conditioner on and cranked it tohigh.

“Turn the vents on the bats!” she said to Anthony as she turned to help get the bats off Gentry.

With bloody fingers, Anthony adjusted the vents so they blew on his lap and face. The bats immediately slowed down, and the young officer was able to pull them away. They flew at him again, this time less vigorously. He snatched them off and crushed them like tissues and discarded them on the floor. No other bats entered the car.

When Gentry’s bats had been crushed, he looked at Nancy. “They hate cold,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“You never fail to amaze me. Neither do the bats.”

“I can’t decide whether they’re trying to get away from the female’s cry or whether they’re controlled by it,” she said. “But whatever it is, if there’s a way into a place, they’ll find it.”

Gentry turned to the officer. “Can you drive?”

“Yes,” he said. “And thank you, ma’am.”

“It was my pleasure,” she said.

They had stopped at Fifty-sixth Street, near the Symphony House. He flipped on a loudspeaker and turned back onto the road.

“Turn on your air conditioners!” he shouted as he went around other stopped cars.

Gentry reached over and got the radio. There were different channels broken into divisions, with three precincts in each division. Anthony’s radio was still set to Midtown South. On the other end, dispatcher Caroline Andoscia was trying to listen to several people at once. Each of them was shouting, probably because they were under attack. Gentry turned down the volume and put the radio on the seat. They heard a dispatcher call for backup at Grace Church on Broadway and Tenth Street. The 10-66 “unusual incident” call reported that the building was jammed with people and under attack. Bats had come up through the pipe organ. When people tried to escape, the bats swarmed in through the doors.

“Should we go there?” Detective Anthony asked. “We don’t know how many units are operational.”

“There isn’t time,” Gentry said. “We’ve got to get Dr. Joyce downtown.”

“Say your prayers,” she said quietly to the radio.

Gentry looked out the window. It was like a scene from an old science-fiction movie where a monster or alien invaders had gone through a city reducing lively streets to acres of bodies, idling vehicles, smashed windows, and windblown litter. And all of it in just under an hour. People who had ignored the mayor’s suggestion to stay inside had dropped where they were walking or jogging or waiting to cross the street. In the road and on the sidewalk, bicycle delivery men were lying where they fell. Dogs that hadn’t been brought down in attacks were fighting each other or jumping into the air trying to bite the bats. The car had to swerve even more than before to avoid hitting injured people. Dead pigeons were everywhere. Occasionally, Gentry saw a bird streak through the air, pursued by bats. At least the furry bastards weren’t playing favorites.

The handful of people who were still mobile were attempting to ignore the bats clustered around their heads and arms and were trying to crawl to the nearest doorway. Those who had managed to get to shelter-small bodegas or newsstands that could be closed up in a hurry-were looking through windows or shouting for help. But help was nowhere near.

“What would happen if we pumped the radio feedback through the loudspeaker?” Gentry asked Joyce. “Would that drive the bats away?”

Joyce shook her head once. “The interference was the equivalent of a weak magnetic force. Beyond a very local perimeter it wouldn’t affect the stronger cry of the female.”

Gentry started as bats slammed at his window in succession and bounced away. The bats were thicker downtown, flying in every direction like black confetti caught in a fan. Just below Forty-second Street, the Port Authority Bus Terminal was a disaster, with evening commuters and police looking as if they’d been cut down by poison gas. They were lying side by side or one atop the other under the wide overhang.

To the east, the top floors of the Empire State Building were dark-not because the lights were off, but because the top of the building was crawling with bats. There must be trapped prey on the observation deck and inside the spire. Occasionally, light would poke through the shroud of bats as they shifted or as a window broke and a body fell through.

Car sirens and bank alarms screamed on all sides. Occasionally, police cars and ambulances sped by. Gentry couldn’t imagine how they were deciding who got help. Probably doctors or surgeons or city officials, he guessed. People who would be needed to fight the bats. Gentry had never seen a system crash so fast or so completely.

He turned back to Nancy. “Assuming the OEM is still functioning, Weeks is definitely going to want to talk to you. Al Doyle spent the last of his credibility coin at the mayor’s press conference this morning. He told everyone there was nothing to worry about, it was the male bat that was controlling the others. Will you be up for meeting with Weeks?”

She nodded. “That she-bat is still out there. And it’s a lot more dangerous than these people realize. She’s definitely pregnant; I could see that when she was in the lab. She’s probably within a week or so of giving birth, which is why she’s come to New York. Her offspring will be very vocal within a few days, and they’ll probably have the same effect on bats that she has. If there are two or three giants running loose in the subways, protected by other bats, it’ll be damn near impossible to get near them.” Her voice snagged and she looked away. “The one time I could really use his help and he’s not here.”

Gentry took her hand. “I’m very, very sorry about Professor Lowery.”

“Me too.” Joyce looked back at Gentry. “But I’m responsible for this, you know.”

“For what?”

“For all this. The destruction, the death.”

“How?”

“By killing the male.”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“No,” Joyce said, “it’s true. I should have expected it. I always believed bats were capable of feeling emotion, and I should have taken that into consideration before I started cutting the male apart. I certainly shouldn’t have left the body where the female could find it.”

“You couldn’t have known she’d do that, or that she’d find you. She was in a subway miles away.”

“You’re thinking like a human, not like a bat-”

“Yeah, well, that’s always been one of my problems.”

Joyce looked at him for a moment more. Then she pressed her lips together and looked down.

“Look, Nancy,” Gentry said, “I’m just trying to help you put this in perspective. Everyone’s been under incredible pressure. We all did what we thought was right, up and down the line. And as far as I’m concerned, you’ve done more things faster, better, and righter than anyone could have in your position.”

She continued to look down. She looked like she wanted to cry. Gentry wished she would, just let it all out. He had, a couple of hours after Bernie Michaelson had been shot. It was like a good rain, cleaning away all kinds of grime. Some of it about Bernie, some of it about losing his wife, some of it about things even Father Adams in the Chaplain Unit was still trying to figure out. But he’d obviously needed it.

As they were approaching Twenty-third Street, something came through Detective Anthony’s radio that caught Gentry’s ear. He grabbed it and turned up the volume.

“…at the Prolly House on Twenty-third and Seventh. Repeat: the giant bat is attacking the Prolly House at Twenty-third and Seventh. Request immediate assistance.”

Anthony didn’t have to be told. He turned left and raced toward the shelter for battered women.

They were too late.

Several police cars and fire trucks were pulled up in front of the three-story center for abused women. The cars were parked on the sidewalk so police and firefighters could get inside without being exposed to the bats outside for very long. A hose hooked to a fire hydrant had been used to douse the bats inside while the women and children were evacuated into ESU recovery vans. Once the bats were down, police officers with heavy-duty vests and helmets kept them down permanently using shovels. Deeper inside the building, police were using pressurized water extinguishers to knock the creatures from the air. When word came through that all the visitors and staff had been evacuated and accounted for, the officers had begun using scatterguns on the doused bats.

The giant bat had left shortly before the first police car had arrived. Around that time, the police reported, all the bats in the area had ceased their aggressive behavior, including bats that had gotten inside the shelter. They appeared frantic and disoriented but were nonviolent. Reports from other precincts indicated that the bats had calmed down all across Manhattan and were being exterminated by any and every means possible.

While Gentry headed into assist the other officers, Joyce hurried toward the vans to talk to the evacuees.

Up and down Twenty-third Street, New Yorkers were literally trying to get back on their feet. Those who could walk were helping those who could not. Many people were just sitting where they’d fallen, staring. Joyce imagined that the same scene was being repeated everywhere from Eighty-first Street to wherever the bat was nesting.

That, and the quiet. There were occasional shouts for help and moans of pain. But the fact that they could be heard only emphasized the silence that had settled on the city. There were no cars or growling buses, no air traffic, no bicyclists shouting for people to make way. There were no car radios or boom boxes, no loud conversations or kids shouting to other kids or the rattling coin cups of the homeless. There was no construction, no one selling hot watches from a briefcase or bundles of socks from a cardboard box. Save for the countless sirens and alarms, the stillness was abnormal, like during a blizzard.

New York sounded like Nancy felt. Numb. She still couldn’t believe what had happened back at the museum, that Professor Lowery was dead. She was glad she had these interviews to do, the problem of finding and destroying the bat to wrestle with.

According to the only adult eyewitness, a woman who had been in the playroom with several children, the creature had come through a skylight on the top floor and went right to that room. The woman said that while she crouched with the kids in a corner, trying to protect them but fully expecting to die, the bat ignored them all. She said that after looking around the room for several moments, the bat spread its wings, knocking over furniture and shelves. Then it wailed loudly, returned to the hallway, and flew back through the skylight. It was in the shelter for less than a minute.