Vespers (29 page)

One of the children, a young boy named Chaka, got up from one of the benches inside the van. He walked over to Joyce and said that the bat looked mean but wasn’t mean.

“That’s a pretty silly way to be, isn’t it?” Joyce asked. She took his hand.

“You’re cold,” he said.

“Very cold. I got sprinkled on.”

“How?”

“Water was putting out a fire. And I forgot my umbrella.”

Chaka smiled.

“Can you tell me a little more about the bat?” Joyce asked.

“It’s big.”

“It is. But it didn’t hurt anyone?”

Chaka shook his head.

A little girl from one of the benches said, “It reminded me of Oscar the Grouch.”

Joyce looked at the petite blonde. “Let’s see. That’s one of the Muppets fromSesame Street, isn’t it?”

She nodded.

Chaka said, “It looked mean, but it didn’t do anything bad to anyone. It just looked sad.”

Joyce thanked him, thanked everyone, then left the van. She chewed on the problem as she walked toward the town-house.

The bat hadn’t come to feed. She hadn’t come to give birth. But she had left the subway searching forsomething and wailed or wept when she didn’t get it.

What?

Joyce hoped the answer was in the playroom.

She walked inside. Dead, hurt, or unconscious bats were being swept aside with brooms. She made her way carefully down the wet corridor to the stairs in the back. On the third floor, she found herself standing under the shattered skylight. The playroom was directly ahead. She walked in.

The room smelled of wet fur. There were crushed toys and snacks, an upended TV, tattered sleeping bags, and overturned racks of videotapes and video games. Joyce stood with her hands on her hips, looking around.

Gentry walked in a minute later. “I think we got most of the bats,” he announced. “The cops’re shoveling them into Hefty bags. How were the people you talked to?”

“Pretty shaken up. Are you sure everyone is safe? No one’s missing?”

“Not a one,” Gentry said. “I talked to the police downstairs. The two ESU officers at the Twenty-third Street stop got knocked silly when she burned through the station and flew up the stairs, but she didn’t attack them.”

Joyce shook her head. “Then I just don’t understand.”

“Maybe she was conserving her strength. Maybe I hurt her when I fired those rounds back at the museum, and she came up to rest, get some fresh air.”

“She would have rested in the subway tunnel,” Joyce said. “Besides, there’s no blood.”

Gentry looked around. “So I didn’t even hit her freakin’ tail!”

“No,” Joyce said. “You didn’t. You only scared the bat off and saved my life. What was it you said to me back in the car? About asking too much of yourself?”

“I saidyou shouldn’t. I can, though.”

“Right.” Joyce knew he was joking but not. She let it go for now. She continued pacing in a circle as she looked around the room. The sleeping bags were ripped where the bat had walked across them. A few videocassettes had been crushed, and the TV was blank.

“So what do you think?” Gentry asked.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“How do I start thinking like a bat?”

“You ask yourself what sensory input could have brought you here,” she said. “All right. Let’s go back. The bat left the museum and entered the subway. She got down here fast, which meant she had to be flying. Flying and echolocating because the subway tunnels are a snug fit and she’d have to watch out for girders and posts. She probably intended to stay underground until she reached her nest.”

“Maybe she came out to eat.”

“Unlikely.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because shedidn’t eat. She didn’t attack the police at the station stop or the people here. Besides, if she were hungry she would have waited until she was closer to home. Less distance to carry her meal. No. As she neared here she either heard or smelled something that made her leave the subway. She flew straight to the roof and came down through the skylight. Then she entered the playroom. She attacked no one but encountered something here that made her cry again.”

“Wait. Again?”

Joyce nodded. “The bat also cried when she realized that her mate was dead.”

“You mean she cried like a human being?”

“I believe that’s exactly what it was, yes. Of course, that grew into rage back at the museum and caused the other bats to go berserk. But not here. She left without hurting anyone. Why?”

“What were the kids doing?” Gentry asked.

Joyce was still walking around the room. “Coloring, reading, resting, snacking.” She looked down at a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich, an overturned container of milk, a banana. The bat hadn’t touched any of the food.

Was it a scent? Someone who smelled like Joyce? The bat could have detected that from the subway, but she didn’t come here to kill. She was looking for something.

“Maybe some of the kids were watching TV,” Gentry suggested.

“Possibly.” Joyce walked toward the overturned set.

“Maybe the bat heard her mate’s voice on the news.”

“A lot of people would have been watching TV along her route,” Joyce said. “Why would she stop here? Anyway, even if a tape of the male bat was on the news, she’d hear the sounds differently from the way we do. They would register as a series of strobing pulses, not as a continuous sound. It would be like you mistaking a black-and-white newspaper photograph for reality.” She stopped at the TV and looked down. “On the other hand-”

“What?” Gentry asked.

“She could have heard something that we recognize as one thing but that she heard as something else.”

“Such as?”

Joyce righted the stand and the TV. She reconnected a loose cable in back. The static vanished and a solid blue screen appeared. Joyce looked at the VCR that was on a bookcase behind the TV. The unit was off. “They weren’t watching a videotape,” she said.

Gentry moved one of the sleeping bags. There was a small plastic console beneath it. The red “on” light was glowing. “No,” he said. “They were playing video games.”

Joyce stepped over and crouched beside it. The game cartridge had popped partway out. She pushed it back in and then looked at the TV. The title screen of the game came on. “Feather Jackson,” she read. She pushed “start.” The legend scrolled down the screen, recounting the history of the girl who could fly. As it did, the theme music came on.

Gentry said, “Maybe we ought to ask one of the kids what part they were up to.”

Joyce nodded absently. She was listening to the game.

Gentry turned to go.

“Wait!” Joyce said suddenly.

Gentry came over and squatted beside her. “What’ve you got?”

She punched up the volume on the TV. “Do you hear that?”

“The music?”

“No.” She raised the volume. “The drum underneath it.”

Gentry listened again then nodded with the beat. “Drums of doom,” he said, then read from the screen. “ ‘The approaching armies of the Pillow People want to conquer Featherland and turn its inhabitants into-’ ”

“Robert, don’t you get it?”

He shook his head. She turned the volume higher. The music itself became a broken, crackling noise, but she could still hear the drum.

“This is just a hint of how the bat heard it. Loud and thumping.”

“Okay. But there had to be thousands of radios on along the way, a lot of beats. Why would she respond to this particular drum?”

“The drumbeats in music change, don’t they?”

“Most do, I suppose.”

“This doesn’t. It’s constant.”

He listened.

“Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Hear it?” Joyce asked.

“Yeah.”

The legend finished, and the game began. The drums continued.

“The beat keeps going when the introduction ends,” she said with growing excitement. “The sound probably continues through the entire game. Don’t yousee?”

“No.”

“Robert, that sound is in the audible range. When would the bat have been exposed to a regular drumbeat like it?”

“I have no idea.”

Joyce rose. She shut off the video game and started toward the door. “In the womb, Robert. The bat came here looking for her mother.”

Gentry and Joyce went back to the car and continued downtown. Joyce was revved up again. Gentry was not. He had some major problems with what Joyce had come up with.

“You really believe that a bat flying through a subway tunnel heard a video game that sounded like her mother-”

“Her mother’s heart.”

“Like her mother’s heart,” he said. “She heard that and she flew over to check it out?”

“Yes. It’s very possible.”

“One sound in a city of millions upon millions of sounds.”

“That’s right. Again, think like a bat. Its hearing is extraordinarily sensitive and multidirectional. A bat can pick up and follow a distinctive sound the same way a shark sniffs blood in the water.”

“But even if that’s true, her mother died eight years ago,” Gentry said. “How could the bat remember that?”

“It’s not in the conscious mind, but it’sthere, ” Joyce said. “The sound triggered some kind of memory. Think about it. She left at peace, without hurting anyone, without stirring up the small bats again. She was obviously calmed by whatever happened here.”

“All right. Assuming that’s true, why didn’t she get angry when she saw that her mother wasn’t here? She was in a rage when she left the museum.”

“You just said why.”

“I did?”

“All the giant bat knows is that her mother wasn’t in the playroom,” Joyce said. “As far as the bat knows, she might still be alive somewhere. But when the bat came to the museum laboratory, shesaw that her mate was dead. She didn’t see or smell anything to suggest death here in the shelter. Maybe one of the kids accidentally pulled out the cable when the bat came in. Maybe the bat did. So the video sound stopped suddenly, and the bat-”

“-thinks that mommy may still be alive?” Gentry said.

“We’ve got a name for that at the zoo,” she said. “It’s called the Dumbo effect. We use smells and sounds to wean animals from their parents.”

“ Nancy, I just don’t know.”

“Robert, it’spossible. As far as our bat knows, this is the same thing that happened once before, a month or so after she was born.”

“Abandonment.” Gentry rose. “How did our lady bat find the dead male bat?”

“She probably traced it by smell.”

“By smell. So wouldn’t the big bat also have smelled that her motherwasn’t here?”

“Olfactory memory doesn’t work that way. Bats, people, most animals recognize a smell if they encounter it again. But they can’t summon it up like they can sounds or images. If she heard something that sounded like her mother, she would believe it was her mother, smell or no smell.”

“And you’re saying this is theonly sound that ever reminded her of her mother’s heartbeat?”

“Why not? Until yesterday this bat lived her entire life in the wild. And she was with her sibling. They were brother and sister, mother and father to each other, mates.”

“Death, incest, and Oedipus,” Gentry said. “This is a goddamn Greek tragedy.”

“That’s the way some mammals are. And now, for the first time, the bat’s alone. When better to listen for her mother?”

Gentry still had problems with it, problems with all of it. Big mutant bats. Little bats driven mad by echolocation. But it didn’t change the fact that New York was under siege, and that the bats had to be dealt with.

“So how does this help us?” Gentry asked.

“I’m not sure,” Joyce said.

Once they crossed West Houston Street, the city was deserted except for police officers patrolling in cars and riot gear-and bats. They were hanging from streetlamps and awnings, from walk signs and traffic lights.

A tired-looking Marius Pace met Joyce and Gentry in the lobby of the new Office of Emergency Management headquarters. Pace took the pair directly to the elevator; on the way to the eighteenth floor, he reported where things stood as of one hour before. That was when Gordy Weeks had come out from his meeting and briefed his deputies during a short recess.

“The impact assessment is obviously pretty grim.” Pace consulted a legal notepad that was spotted with round coffee mug stains. “The subway patrols obviously weren’t able to deal with the bat, so all of New York ’s roadways, rails, and bridges have been shut down. Nothing leaves or enters the borough. All businesses here and in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx are closed except for food-service and health-care providers, but the roads are still open. The area airports have also been closed from Westchester down to New Jersey, and all incoming traffic is being diverted to Hartford, Philadelphia, and Buffalo. Only emergency aircraft can come or go locally.”

“Have there been any incidents?” Joyce asked.

“Yes. Not attacks per se, but two aircraft had to be evacuated just before takeoff, after they sucked groups of bats into the engines. The towers at all the fields are reporting radar problems due to the bats. If we haven’t cleared this up by tomorrow night, the National Guard will be mobilized to get food and medical supplies into the city. An immediate curfew will be in effect from six-thirtyP.M. until six-thirtyA.M. We’ve got a good group of people working with the media to keep the public informed, and each of the officials you’ll meet upstairs has teams dealing with problems involving health, fire, looting, sanitation, and other issues. As it happens, your timing is very good. When I Emailed Director Weeks to tell him you were here, he informed me that they’d just started discussing what kind of offensive the city is going to mount.”

“Who’s in charge of going after the big bat?” Joyce asked.

“That information,” said Pace, “I do not have.”