Vespers (14 page)

Rhodes glanced down the tracks. She moved the flashlight around even slower than before. “I don’t see any bats,” she said, “and we have an injured man somewhere down here.”

“Bats don’t store their food,” Joyce said. “They eat on the run. The man is probably dead already.”

“Dr. Joyce, are you saying they ate him?”

“Officer, I don’t know.Please come out.”

Rhodes stood there a moment longer. Then she walked a few more yards into the tunnel. The blood on the ground had thinned. Then it stopped. She kept walking, her boots crunching on the black dirt beside the track. She shined the light ahead, then up. She still didn’t see the victim, but he had to be near.

“Sergeant?” Joyce asked.

Rhodes hesitated. If it were just her life at risk, she’d stay and search for the missing man. But it wasn’t. Reluctantly, the officer turned and walked back toward the team.

She never reached them. A pair of bats slammed into Rhodes’s legs, directly behind the knees. It took only a second for them to bite through the trousers to her flesh.

“Son of a bitch!” she yelled.

She put the radio and the light on the ground and turned to smack at the animals. As she did, she was pelted by a dozen more bats. They hit in quick, stinging succession, like pellets from a BB gun. They pinched the back of her vest, arms, and legs.

The two officers closest to her, Brophy and Hotchkiss, ran over. The bats were too small, and Rhodes was squirming too much for them to use their tasers. This close, it would be easier and safer to attempt to pull them off. The officers began slapping and clawing at the bats, only to have the animals turn on them. More struck. Within seconds there were more than twenty of them.

“Are you coming out?” Joyce asked.

Rhodes didn’t answer.

“Can you hear me?” Joyce yelled.

Rhodes picked up the radio. “Lieutenant!”

There was a click as Lieutenant Kilar cut Dr. Joyce off. “Rhodes, what’s happening down there?”

She tried to answer, but she dropped the radio as she twitched and slapped at the bats.

“Sergeant, what’s the nature of your problem?”

“She was right!” Rhodes screamed. “It’s goddamn bats! They’re all over the place!”

One of them crawled down her forearm and slipped into the flared bottom of her glove. The bat chewed at the heel of her palm.

“Fuck you, rodent!” Rhodes cried.

She slammed her hand onto the ground; the bat was crushed by the blow. The officer yanked off her glove and shook the creature out. The bloody bat plopped on the gravel. It was still alive, its wings broken, and it tried to crawl away. She drove her boot down in it.

“Heel!”

“Rhodes!”Kilar barked.

“Wait!” she cried.

Before Rhodes could pull her glove back on, two more bats flew from the darkness. They attached themselves to the sides of her hand. Their teeth pinched like staples. Their breath came fast and hot. Rhodes screamed and tried to shake them off. They held on, their wings folded tight. Pain flashed down her wrist and blood dribbled along her sleeve.

“God, these bastards don’t give up!”

“I’m sending another unit down immediately,” Kilar told her.

“Give them heavy armor!” Rhodes shouted. “I’m going to try to evacuate my own unit!”

Allowing the pain to fuel her anger, Rhodes tore into the bats and then tried to help the other two officers. Officer Brophy was on his knees; Officer Hotchkiss had thrown his back against a wall, mashing two bats under his heavy vest. Rhodes was forced to stop as four more bats swooped in low. They swung behind her, crawled under her helmet, and bit behind her ears.

Officers Lord and Nicco started forward.

“Don’t!” Rhodes cried. “Get out! We’ll follow.”

The two officers stopped as Rhodes shrieked with pain. A bat had crawled into her boot and bit her ankle. She fell to one knee and pressed on the high Kevlar fabric with both hands. The bat dropped down to her heel to avoid being crushed. Her eyes wide, Rhodes wriggled her foot around as the bat bit it repeatedly. The others continued to pick at her arms, legs, and ears. Another attacked the nape of her neck. Her other knee hit the ground.

“I said go!”she yelled at the officers up ahead.

Just then Rhodes saw something move in the blackness. It was directly behind the two officers. As a bat crept under her neck and gnawed at her chin, the sergeant yelled for the officers to turn around.

Officers Lord and Nicco spun. Driving her chin into her chest to stop the pain, Rhodes grabbed her high-intensity light and swung it around. The bloody arm of a man had slipped from an overhead girder. She watched as the rest of his body followed slowly. The bloody corpse fell head-first and landed heavily on the track bed, face down. Black dust clouded around the body and puffed up through a massive hole in the center.

With a growl, Rhodes snatched the tenacious bat from her raw chin. She wadded it like waste paper, squeezed hard, and threw it down just as something else appeared behind the officers.

Rhodes squinted ahead and stared. The apparition was just outside the glow of the light, and she tried to make it out. Drops of blood were spattered across it like stars. Its eyes were dull crimson, and its teeth were like red ice. There was the hint of what looked like a nose, two damp, oblong gashes sloping upward and outward from the mouth.

The shape was there for only a moment. Two objects, like great hooks, glistened and shot forward. They impaled Officers Lord and Nicco and lifted them off their feet. The two men hung several feet up for a moment, trembling, then were thrown down. The hooks and wings flashed up into the blackness, and then the teeth and eyes vanished.

Sergeant Rhodes managed to draw her service revolver. But the bats wouldn’t let up, and the pain of countless bites had weakened her. She fell to one hand. Blood and perspiration blurred her vision. She tried to marshal her energies. But more bats came at her, attacking her wrists and forehead. The biting was constant now and much deeper behind her knees and elbows and neck. Each one felt like a staple fired nearly to the bone. Still kneeling, Rhodes dropped onto her chin.

And then she felt herself being hoisted up.

“Come on!”Officer Hotchkiss yelled.“We’re gettingout!”

Rhodes was startled, as though waking from a too-brief nap.

“Help me!” Hotchkiss said. “I can’t do this myself!”

The policeman had slid his arm around the sergeant’s waist. He pulled her halfway to her feet.

Rhodes collected her feet beneath her. “Brophy,” she muttered. “What about Brophy?”

“He’s coming!”

Rhodes turned weakly. She saw him running, then stumbling after them. Bats were clustered in the air around his head, like monstrous gnats.

“Help him,” she said.

“He told me to help you. He was-fuckthese things!” He slapped at a bat on his hip. “He was on his feet. You two can”-he pawed his leg-“fight this out”-he hammered the side of his thigh-“later!Fuck! ”

They started running down the tracks. Hotchkiss was half-pulling, half-carrying Rhodes. As they ran past the fallen officers, Rhodes reached for her radio. She wanted to make sure emergency medical assistance came in with the backup. But the loop in her belt was empty. Then she remembered she’d dropped the radio.

Then she heard a scream behind her. She looked back, squinting through crimson sweat. She saw Brophy do a surreal forward somersault. Then the blackness filled in behind him, like ink, swallowing the faint lights along the tunnel wall.

“Oh my God, Rhodes said.

“Don’t talk, run!” Hotchkiss screamed.

Rhodes looked ahead as she heard a scream. Then another and another. They degenerated into awful squeals of pain.

“Keep running,” Hotchkiss said again. He was breathing hard and looking ahead hard. “Don’t look back. Run.”

Rhodes managed to find some strength and get her footing. After a moment she was able to carry more of her weight. The bats continued to nip at her, and a few of them flew at the other officer. They swarmed around his face and fought their way into her helmet. But the man ducked his head like a bull, shook them off, and kept going.

Soon the dimming light of the flashlight gave way to the distant glow of the station. The bats seemed to peel off the closer they came to the platform.

Hotchkiss screamed, “Help-anyone!”

He fell suddenly and Rhodes went with him. But they didn’t lie there. Using everything she had to fight the few remaining bats as well as pain and exhaustion, Rhodes staggered back to her feet. Hotchkiss was struggling, wheezing. Rhodes helped him up and they continued running.

This time Rhodes called for help.

Moments later, three Sixth Precinct officers who had heard the screams met them coming the other way. They helped the injured officers out of the tunnel and laid them on benches along the platform wall. One of the officers called for an ambulance. Another of them said something about going in to help the other members of the ESU team.

He was startled when Rhodes grabbed his sleeve. She held tight with raw, bloody fingers.

“Don’t go back!” she warned.

“What about-”

“Don’t!”she snarled. “Not without infrared…armor…heavy weapons. Promise me.”

The officer hesitated.

“Promise!”

He promised.

Sergeant Rhodes lay back on the bench. She shut her burning eyes. “It’ll kill you,” she muttered. “It’ll kill you.”

“What will?”

“It will,” Rhodes said.

And then she passed out.

Detective Gentry and Dr. Joyce arrived by squad car at St. Vincent ’s Hospital on Seventh Avenue and Eleventh Street. That was where Field Sergeant Rhodes and Officer Hotchkiss had been taken.

Rhodes had been hurried from the emergency room to surgery. She’d suffered two badly broken ribs, a punctured lung-it had been penetrated from the outside, not by one of the ribs-and dozens of severe bite wounds up and down her body. The back of the top of her right thigh and one of her heels were practically gone. The bottoms of both ears had been chewed away. She had lost a great deal of blood.

Hotchkiss had suffered severe lacerations of the face, scalp, back, and legs. He was pale and bruised, and it hurt to move. But when Gentry and Joyce asked to see him, he agreed. His physician and a burly, balding ESU lieutenant were standing beside the bed when they arrived.

Gentry always felt honored to be with someone who had put it on the line like the ESU squad had. They’d known there was danger and they walked right the hell into it. Gentry felt miserable about the deaths but it was partially offset by the pride he felt in this man.

Gentry smiled as he walked toward the bed. The men moved away. “Officer, I’m Detective Gentry, Midtown South. I want you to know you’ve got a lot of people proud and pulling for you, Officer Hotchkiss.”

“They cut us to pieces,” young Hotchkiss replied thickly from between slashed lips.

“You went in knowing there was bad news down there,” Gentry said. “That didn’t stop you.”

Lieutenant Kilar touched the officer’s shoulder. “You also saved the life of Sergeant Rhodes.That’s what happened down there.”

Dr. Joyce walked toward the bed. The men moved away.

“Officer, I’m Dr. Nancy Joyce. I’m with the Bronx Zoo. How are you?”

“Do I need…a vet?”

“No,” she smiled.

She knelt beside him and touched his left cheek with the back of her fingers. It was the only part of his round face that appeared unhurt. The injured police officer smiled up at her with his eyes.

“I want to ask you a few questions. You okay with that?”

He nodded once.

She smiled back. “What can you tell me about the little bats?”

“Not much. It was dark.”

“Do you know what size they were?”

He thought for a moment. “About mouse size. Mice with wings.”

“Their color?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. You’re doing fine. What did the bats do first?”

“They attacked Sergeant Rhodes.”

“Where was she relative to you?”

“South of us, maybe two yards.”

“Did the bats come at you in a wave?”

“There were several waves, I think. It was difficult to see.”

“And they all flew at Sergeant Rhodes?”

He nodded. “Until we tried to help her.”

“Then what happened?”

“Some of them peeled off,” Hotchkiss said. “It felt like they were trying to push Brophy and me to the side while they also bit us.”

“And when you were leaving the tunnel? Did they follow?”

“Some of them did for a while. Then they stopped. Very suddenly.”

“One more question,” Joyce said. “The other two officers who were down there with you-”

“Lord and Nicco.”

“Lord and Nicco,” Joyce repeated. “What happened to them?”

The remnants of Hotchkiss’s smile vanished. The pain of the memory was evident in the slow downturn of his mouth, in his distant eyes. “The vic fell off a girder-”

“The who?”

Lieutenant Kilar explained, “The victim. The man they went in to find.”

“He fell,” Joyce repeated. “Then what happened? What did you see?”

Officer Hotchkiss continued slowly, “A shape. All I saw was a big, black, moving shape.”

“Could that have been a bat too?”

“What?” Kilar said.

Hotchkiss’s eyes grew red. “I don’t know. It was like Lord and Nicco just rose off the ground and dropped. They didn’t move after that. Brophy was fighting more of the bats than me, so he yelled that I should go get Sergeant Rhodes out of there. I did. Then we heard Brophy. He, uh…he wasn’t having a real easy time, screaming…” Hotchkiss began to sob.

The doctor moved behind Joyce and said, “Let him rest.”