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.
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.