Vespers (33 page)

“Where west?”

“I’ll explain in a second. What’s the status of your SWAT teams?”

“Their launch is pinned down,” Weeks informed him. “The bats are in an uproar again. What the hell is going on out there?”

Gentry said, “The big bat was nearly through the floor of the ventilation tower.”

“Jesus! What’s that fucking animalmade of?”

“Muscle, mostly,” Gentry replied. “And she’s after Nancy. Instead of coming back into the city we decided to head to Liberty Island. Nancy feels that even if the bat can make the trip, a mile-long flight in strong air currents will exhaust her. What kind of personnel are on the island?”

“Hold on. I’ll-”

“Robert!”Joyce cried.

“Comin’ atcha!”added T-Bone, who had hoisted his camera onto his shoulder.

The detective spun around. T-Bone hadn’t turned on the floodlight so Gentry squinted into the dark.

There was an emergency lamp over the front entrance to the tower. In the small, sharp cone of light Gentry saw the giant bat literally push down the door. A cloud of ethyl chloride followed the animal out, dusting its back with a frigid coat. The bat took two hops toward the sea and vaulted skyward. She flew close to the water, followed by a train of small bats. Occasionally, the bat would rise, glide for a moment, then drop and resume flapping.

“She’s got to be within minutes of giving birth,” Joyce said. “She’s having trouble staying aloft.”

“Not trouble enough! She’s closing the gap,” Gentry said. He turned and looked at the control panel. “Fifty-three miles an hour. Is that the best we can do, Kath?”

“That’s top speed!” Kathy shouted apologetically.

Gentry ducked back down behind the windscreen. “Gordon? Are you still there?”

“Here!”

“The bat’s out and she’s following us.”

“Do you have a weapon?”

“Yeah. An empty one. Listen, we’ll be at the Statue of Liberty dock in less than a minute. What’ve you got for me?”

“Wait,” Weeks said. “Marius is talking to the park police.”

Gentry waited. He glanced ahead. The statue was brightly lit, an ethereal, washed-out green against the starless sky. They were less than a half mile from the low wall that surrounded the island.

Hope,he thought as he looked out at the statue. Wasn’t that what Lady Liberty was all about?

Weeks came back on. “Okay, here it is. Sergeant Julie Gilheany is opening the main door, back of the monument. She and another officer will lay down cover fire for as long as they can. Listen. I’m assuming the bats are going to follow you out there. When they do, we’re going to get our SWAT teams onto the water. If they can get close enough to pick off the giant-”

“I understand,” Gentry said. “We’ll lay low.”

Weeks wished him luck. Gentry thanked him, then put the radio in his jacket pocket. Holding on to the windscreen, he stood, half turned, and told the others the game plan. As he did he could see the giant bat illuminated by the reflected glow of the statue. The thing was roughly a quarter of a mile away and coming after them slowly but doggedly. Her dark army was spread behind her, their numbers growing.

“This is unfuckingreal,” T-Bone said as he videotaped the swarm. “I feel like I’m inThe Outer Limits.”

Nancy was also watching the bats. She was hunched over and seemed beaten. Gentry leaned toward her and lightly squeezed her left shoulder. Without turning, she reached across and touched his hand. Her fingers were cold. He wished he could think of something hopeful to say that wasn’t naive or a lie.

He looked back toward the island.

Roughly two hundred feet separated the dock from the entrance to Fort Wood, the starshaped structure that serves as the foundation for the statue. Kathy swung around to the east side of the island and came to a hard, jolting stop alongside the dock.

Kathy jumped out and Gentry followed. He told her to run ahead while he helped Nancy out. Instead, she stayed to give T-Bone a hand with his camera and equipment case. Together, the foursome ran along the asphalt walk toward the large doors. Gentry stayed close to Joyce. She was tired and not moving as fast as the others. They swung around the left side of the statue. The tall double bronze doors were open. Inside the statue’s lobby entranceway stood two United States park police officers. One held a 9-mm pistol, the other a pump-action shotgun.

The park police sergeant had stepped outside with her shotgun. She aimed skyward.

“You’d better move!” she shouted to the group without taking her eyes from the bat.

They were about thirty feet from the doors. Gentry glanced behind him. The giant bat had just crossed the shoreline and was bearing down. The advance guard of vespers had slipped around the female and were slicing toward them.

Nancy screamed as two of the bats bit her shin. She stumbled, but Gentry wouldn’t let her fall. He caught her around the waist and pulled her up even as a flurry of bats dug into the back of his neck and chewed on his left leg.

Gentry heard Kathy shriek as bats descended. The reporter kept running. She dropped the lights she was holding and pushed both hands through her hair, trying to dislodge the bats. Her cries were followed by the distinctivepup-pup-pup of the 9-mm as the second officer raced from the fort.

“Berk, get back!” the sergeant cried.

“I’ll be okay!” the young man said. Still firing, he ran past Gentry.

“No!”Gentry barked. But he was tired from the run and his voice was a raw wheeze. He wished he could turn and pull the officer back, but he didn’t want to let go of Nancy.

Suddenly, Gentry felt a sharp shooting pain run up his left leg from his ankle. Several bats were attacking his shin and one of them had taken a bite from his Achilles tendon. But the detective refused to go down. The bats were growing more numerous every second. If Gentry dropped he wouldn’t be getting back up. He swallowed a cry and dragged the leg behind him.

Kathy reached the entrance, followed by T-Bone. She was still struggling with bats. T-Bone pulled two from his own head, crushed them in his giant hands, then did the same with the vespers that were in Kathy’s hair.

“Berk!”the sergeant cried again.

Gentry heard a scream. He turned and saw bats attacking the officer’s hands. A moment later hundreds of small bats slammed into his torso. The force of the impact lifted him several inches off the stone walkway and dropped him on his back. Then the giant bat crashed down on his chest. The officer’s arms flew out and he vomited a plume of blood.

“Berk!God -” The sergeant wailed and raised her shotgun.

The giant bat’s eyes and ears were not on her victim. They were on Joyce. Shaking her head angrily and closing her wings, the creature crawled from the body and lumbered through a cloud of thousands of small bats. Her eyes were narrow, her mouth fierce. Bent low and moving slowly, she clawed across the twenty yards to the door.

Gentry and Joyce ran past the sergeant. A fist of bats flew in with them, knocking the sergeant down before she could fire. T-Bone rushed over and pulled the second door shut. It closed with a heavy slam just as the giant bat hopped toward it. There were six smaller doors behind the ornamental front doors.

Gentry wrestled the bats from his neck, then helped Nancy with the vespers that were viciously biting her hands and forearms. When she was finally free of bats, Joyce ran to help T-Bone and Kathy, who had gone to assist the sergeant. Apart from being vocally angry at herself for having lost the camera lights, Gentry was pleased to see that Kathy had it pretty well together.

The enormous bat hit the outer door hard. The lobby resounded with a thick, echoingthud.

While the others were still struggling, Gentry tied a handkerchief around his ankle to try and stanch the bleeding. Then he rose. The pain had abated somewhat and he put his weight on the foot. It wobbled as if it were asleep and his ankle flared hotly. Favoring his right leg, Gentry looked around for the shotgun. He spotted it lying near the display of the statue’s original torch, which had been replaced during the centenary restoration. The bat continued to hit the door. Gentry limped toward it, stopping several feet away, off to the side. He slipped his arm securely through the strap. He cradled the heavy rifle in his left hand and raised it to his shoulder.

“Come on, you misery,” he said through his teeth. “Come on.”

Behind Gentry, obviously frustrated with the tenacity of the remaining vespers, T-Bone had reached into his vest and retrieved the seltzer bottle. After shaking it vigorously, he shouted for the women to back away from the sergeant. Placing his thumb over the mouth of the bottle he turned the spray on the bats, concentrating on the ones clustered around Sergeant Gilheany’s head. The vespers hopped off; when they did, he stomped them as though they were spiders. Then, with the help of Kathy and Joyce, the sergeant was able to crush the rest of the bats.

Suddenly, the pounding at the front door stopped. After standing frozen for several seconds, Gentry lowered the shotgun.

T-Bone absently wiped his wet thumb on his trousers. “What coulda happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” Joyce said.

Kathy helped Sergeant Gilheany to her feet. “As soon as I can I want to go out and get Officer Berk’s remains.”

With the pounding stopped, they could hear the clawing of all the other bats. They were scratching on the stone walls, on the door, on the roof. It was claustrophobic and unnerving.

Gentry jumped when he heard a voice in his pocket. The radio. He slipped it out. “Gentry here.”

“Are you all okay?” It was Weeks.

“We lost one of the park officers,” Gentry said. “The rest of us are inside the fort. Can you see what’s happening?”

“We’re watching the statue from our window,” Weeks said. “And it looks like you’ve got two problems. The first is that every bat in New York seems to be nesting on the statue.”

“We know. What’s the second problem?”

Weeks said, “It looks like the giant bat found a way inside.”

When the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in October of 1886 it was the tallest structure built since the Pyramids of ancient Egypt.

A gift from France celebrating the hundredth anniversary of American independence, the152-foot-tall statue was designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. It portrays a woman stepping from broken chains and raising a torch of freedom. In her arm is a tablet representing law; on her head is a crown whose seven spikes represent the seven continents and seven seas over which it was hoped the light of liberty would shine. She looks toward one of those seas, the Atlantic, from atop a 152-foot-high pedestal.

Three hundred thousand rivets hold the statue’s beaten-copper skin to a metal framework designed by Gustave Eiffel. These supports function like springs, designed to give in winds reaching up to 125 miles an hour. This crisscrossing skeleton is attached to a central metal core that runs up the center of the statue. The core also supports a 168-step spiral staircase that enables visitors to walk from the foot to the crown. Only the upraised arm that holds the torch is off-limits to tourists. When the statue was first constructed, a design miscalculation caused the spikes of the crown to pierce the arm. The framework of the arm had to be reconfigured on the spot, weakening it.

The statue’s stone pedestal rests in the center of the starshaped Fort Wood that once guarded the entrance to New York Harbor. More than a century after being decommissioned, the fort was once again guarding the lives of those inside.

According to Gordy Weeks, the giant bat was using her hooks to make her way up and around the statue’s pedestal, and she appeared to be holding a human body in her claws. Weeks told Gentry he’d update him in a moment.

Sergeant Gilheany moaned when she heard about Officer Berk. She started for the door.

“Where are you going?” Gentry asked.

“No way am I letting that thing take him.”

T-Bone got in front of her. “You can’t do anything about it now.”

“Like hell. I can kill that monster.”

“No,” T-Bone said, “you can’t. You can get your own ass seriously killed though, and I ain’t gonna let you.”

“Sergeant, the man’s right,” Joyce said. “If you step outside, those little bats will be all over you.”

The sergeant looked from T-Bone to Joyce. Then she looked ahead as she wiped blood from a gash across her nose.

“You dumb rookie,” she said to the door. “I ordered you to come back. Why the hell didn’t you listen?”

“Because he knew what every cop knows,” Gentry said. “If we don’t block the shot, the bad guys score.”

“Save the pep talk for the cadets, Detective. If the four of you hadn’t come in like a bunch of-”

“What? Scared people who just got our butts kicked?”

“Yeah, something like that…”

The sergeant stopped speaking as a new sound came from above. It was high, muffled, and continuous. It sounded like a dumpster lid slowly being opened and shut.

“What the hell?” T-Bone said.

Weeks came back on. “Detective, it looks like the bat’s gone into the pedestal.”

“We’re hearing that,” Gentry said.

Just then the creaking stopped. A moment later so did the scratching outside the lobby.

“Now what?” Kathy asked.

“Maybe it’s naptime,” T-Bone said.

“No,” Joyce said. She turned quickly to Gentry. “It’s birth time. The statue’s right on the water. It’s cold down here, warmer up there. By how much, Sergeant?”

“About thirty degrees.”

“Which would make it well over eighty inside,” Joyce said. “That’s perfect for a new nest.”

“Detective, is that Dr. Joyce?” Weeks asked.

“It is.” Gentry held the radio closer to her.

“Tell her the small bats are starting to leave the statue. Some are heading back, some to Jersey, some to the other islands. Ask her if she has any idea why.”