Bats

by William W. Johnstone

  “I don’t blame him.”

  “Kids all right?”

  “Oh, yeah. They’re a couple of characters. Considering what they went through, they’re doing great.” He told the sheriff about having the kids make faces at the bats clinging to the wire over the windows.

  Phil chuckled. “They’ll be all right, if they can do that. Where are you heading now, Johnny?”

  “Back home to check on things. Then I might head out into the parish again.”

  “Johnny? How do you feel after shooting that man?”

  Johnny shrugged. “Fine. You’ve never shot a man have you, Phil?”

  “I never killed one.”

  “You live with it. After the first couple of times, it doesn’t bother you.”

  “Psychiatrists wouldn’t agree with that.”

  Johnny laughed. “I’ve found very few shrinks who made much sense to me, Phil, except for some hard-nosed military doctors who know what the real world is all about. Have you ever met a conservative shrink?”

  “I’ve never met a full-fledged shrink, period.”

  “Consider yourself lucky. Most of the ones I’ve come in contact with are so far out of reality and so full of liberal bullshit they’ll make you want to vomit. Phil, if you have to drop the hammer on someone, just do it and go on about your business.”

  “Sheriff?” a soldier stuck his head out of the refrigeration unit. “This guy’s got ID on him. He’s from Memphis. He also had a packet of fishhooks in his pocket and some of those colored plastic worms fishermen use.”

  Phil nodded his head. “Bag it for me, will you, Sergeant.” He turned to Johnny. “A fisherman. And I’ll bet you he didn’t come down here alone.”

  “No bet on that. I’ll see you later on today, probably. I want to check on Blair and the kids.”

  “You and Blair getting along?” Phil asked with a friendly smile, not a smirk.

  “Yeah. Really well. She’s a great lady.”

  “One of this parish’s better efforts, for sure. See you ’round.”

  As he drove off, Johnny wondered how long the morgue on wheels would be in this location before it was moved again. Phil was playing a dangerous game with the press, but Johnny knew the man had absolutely no choice in the matter. As he drove, his eyes were constantly scanning both sides of the road, for he was in thick timber now. He slowed when he saw the body, and came to a stop. It was a woman, and she was breathing. But as she lay, she jerked and convulsed. Johnny picked up the mic.

  Phil was there in a few minutes, with Chief Deputy Moody in the car behind him. Johnny pointed out the secretion leaking from the woman’s mouth.

  “You know her, Phil?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “I do,” Moody said. “She’s one of those Pearsall’s from over by the river. Left here a long time ago. Went to Houston, I think. Her name is, let me think . . . Marie, I believe.”

  “Have a patrol check out their place,” Phil instructed the chief deputy. “Carefully. Has everybody been issued a supply of body bags?”

  “Yeah. Body bags, extra rubber gloves, and about a case of shotgun shells for every unit. What are we going to do with this lady?”

  “Call it in. Get an ambulance out here.”

  “What the hell are they going to do with her?”

  “Restrain her, I guess. Goddamn, Jimmy. I don’t know.”

  The woman began moaning and jerking. She rolled over on her stomach and then rose slowly to her knees. The three men backed up as she turned a horribly swollen face to them. Her eyes were wild with madness and her throat was swollen grotesquely. A thick substance leaked from her mouth. She struggled several times to rise to her feet, finally succeeding on the third try. She grunted and ropy yellow-white saliva dripped from her lips to her blouse.

  “Ah, shit!” Phil said. “She’s gonna move on us.” He put his hand on the butt of his 9 mm.

  Then she began slowly moving toward the men just as Mark Hayden pulled up and got out, pulling a shotgun out with him.

  Johnny backed off to one side, leaving the sheriff and his chief deputy to face the woman alone. Mark stayed by his unit. But he knew what Johnny was doing. The retired colonel wanted to see if Phil would drop the hammer.

  Jimmy Moody, years older than the sheriff, and a man who had been in law enforcement all his adult life, serving under a half dozen elected sheriffs, cut his eyes to Phil. He had his hand wrapped around the butt of his pistol, a .357 magnum.

  Phil cut his eyes toward Johnny. “You could have called someone else.”

  “But I didn’t,” Johnny replied.

  The dying but dangerous woman stopped her slow advance and held out her arms like some really terrible actor in a B horror movie. She grunted and coughed and the infected saliva sprayed and dripped.

  “With that pissy 9 mm you carry the best advice I can give you is to shoot her right between the eyes,” Johnny said calmly. “Twice,” he added. “And you’d better haul it out, right now.”

  Phil gave Johnny a very disgusted look. He kept his gun in his holster.

  Moody was getting antsy as to what Phil was going to do. He pulled his .357 and started to assume a shooting stance. Phil’s voice stopped him.

  “It’s my show, Jimmy,” Phil said, slowly pulling his 9 mm as the woman began stumbling toward him, straight toward him. Phil had been briefed by the doctors and the scientists. He knew there was no cure for this disease. Only a slow, painful, and horrible death for those infected. He lifted the 9 mm and pulled the trigger, twice, both slugs taking the woman in the forehead. She stumbled backward and sat down in the grass. She remained that way for a few seconds, then slowly toppled over, dead.

  Phil eased the hammer down and holstered the pistol. He cut his eyes and stared at Johnny for a moment. Then he shook his head, sighed, and walked over to his car and leaned against it. The other three men looked at one another and left him alone with his thoughts. They rummaged around in their vehicles and found and pulled on rubber gloves. Mark took no pictures of the body. Orders. He did not know where those orders originated and he sure as hell wasn’t going to ask. Moody opened the trunk and got a body bag, and the men carefully bagged the body and carried it to Johnny’s truck, placing it in the bed.

  “The problem is,” Mark said, “there are no bad guys in this situation. The picture is more gray than black and white. I mean, the people we’ve shot and will be forced to shoot didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Other than behave in an incredibly stupid manner,” Johnny said. “But that isn’t against the law.”

  Moody got a little hot at that remark. “Not everybody is as worldly as you, Mr. MacBride.”

  “Worldly hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it,” Johnny replied. “You don’t have to have traveled around the world to have some common sense. Most of the people who have been and will be infected took no precautions against the bats. I can’t work up a lot of sympathy for them.

  “How in the hell does a person get to be as hard as you?” Phil yelled.

  “Practice,” Johnny replied, then got in his truck and drove back to the portable morgue.

  Book Two

  It made our hair stand up in panic fear.

  —Sophocles

  “Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—

  Prophet still, if bird or devil!”

  —Poe

  One

  Mark stopped by Johnny’s late that afternoon, just about an hour before sunset, and had a cup of coffee... and two sandwiches.

  Johnny had dropped off the body of the woman and returned home. He had spent the entire afternoon reworking all the windows. He left the original wire up, attached insulators to more wire he had precut to fit, and nailed them in place. Then he took PVC and ran his insulated wire through that, to the outside wire on each window. Finally he hooked it up and tested it. It was hot all the way around.

  Blair had worked right beside him while Holly and Rich kept an eye out for bats.

 
“It’s personal to you now, isn’t it?” Blair asked.

  “I’m in a war, and I’m going to win it.”

  “You and the bats, huh?”

  “Me and the bats.”

  Mark had looked at the handiwork and grinned. “You taking this personal now?”

  “Damn right.”

  “I wish I could stay and see you fry some of those bats but I have to roam until midnight.”

  “Alone?” Johnny looked at him.

  “’Fraid so. And no, you can’t come along. I’d love the company, but I’d have a guilty conscience about leaving Blair here with the kids.”

  She laughed. “I’ll be perfectly all right if Johnny wants to tag along.”

  He shook his head. “No. I want to see those damn bats hit that wire. Mark? How angry is Phil with me?”

  “Oh, he’s not upset at you. It’s more himself. Phil is taking shooting that woman pretty hard.”

  “He shouldn’t,” Blair said. “He saved her from a terrible, horrible death. I ...”

  Several hundred monster bats hit the house simultaneously and the sound startled them all. Mark spilled his iced tea all down the front of his shirt, Blair jumped about a foot in the air, Holly and Rich ran out from the bedroom, hollering, June and Skipper headed under a table, and Johnny dropped a just lighted cigarette into his lap.

  When they had settled down—as much as they could over the shrieking, yowling, snarling sounds of the bats—Mark asked, “Aren’t you running the risk of shorting out your equipment with that many bats hanging on?”

  “No,” Johnny said on his hands and knees, looking for the lost cigarette. He finally found it and snubbed it out. “I hooked all that up to my big generator out back. You folks watch this.”

  He walked to the rear of the house, electrically started his big butane run power plant, and hit a switch. The sound of frying bats was horrible and the smell was even worse. But two seconds after Johnny turned on the juice, the windows were clear and the ground around the house was littered with dead bats.

  “All right!” Mark said.

  “Not so fast. We have troubles,” Johnny said, standing by a window and looking out.

  “What?” Blair asked.

  “We’re surrounded by bats. Look.”

  They were hanging from the trees all around the house, glaring balefully and unblinking at the house.

  “Jesus!” Mark said. “There must be thousands of them.”

  Blair went immediately to Holly and Rich and walked them into a bedroom, staying with them, talking with them, comforting the brother and sister.

  “You’d better call in, Mark,” Johnny said to the trooper. “There is no way you can get to your car now.”

  “I am going to have one pissed captain.”

  “I doubt it. Ask him if he’d like to drive out here and see for himself.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Mark,” Captain Alden said, pleasantly enough.

  “You will?” Mark asked, surprised.

  “Yes. The bats have congregated at the sheriff’s substation, the highway department buildings, one national guard trailer, and now out at Johnny’s. It’s almost as if they planned it.”

  “Maybe they did,” Mark said soberly.

  “The bat experts say that’s not possible.” Captain Alden laughed, a grim bark of dark humor. “But they don’t say it very convincingly. Stay where you are and eat MacBride out of house and home. I’m tired of buying you cheeseburgers. Stay in touch.” He hung up.

  “Buy me cheeseburgers!” Mark said, hanging up the phone and looking at Johnny. “One time, just one time he bought me lunch and that was two or three years ago, and he’s still complaining about it.”

  “How many cheeseburgers did he end up buying you?”

  “Well . . . four.”

  “Four? You ate four cheeseburgers?”

  “I was hungry.”

  “We used to have pie eating contests here at the fair,” Blair said, coming out of the bedroom. “But Mark always won so they finally canceled it.”

  “I like pie!” He looked outside. The bats were still there. “I left my shotgun in the car,” he said glumly.

  “I have plenty of weapons,” Johnny told him.

  Mark told him about the other places surrounded by bats.

  “That’s not possible!” Blair said, then shrugged her shoulders and held out her hands in defeat. “OK, OK. With these bats, who knows?”

  “But why?” Johnny asked. “Why those places?”

  “I can tell you one of the reasons,” Blair said. “You’re the enemy and they know it. That flies in the face of logic, I know. But I firmly believe that.”

  “Mark? What national guard post?”

  “The one close to here, I guess. I’ll call them.”

  While Mark called in, Johnny did a walk-through of the house, pausing in every room to gaze out a window. The bats were hanging motionless, watching the house. Waiting. About half of them were dripping slime from their fanged mouths. “You won’t beat me,” Johnny muttered. “And you won’t make me run.”

  “The bats are concentrated in this area, Johnny,” Mark told him as he entered the den. He paused, a curious expression on his face. “Could this a ruse? A diversion on their part?”

  “I’m staying out of this,” Blair said. “Expert opinion—even if mine was—is useless with these mutants. This is a brand new book, with every page blank.”

  Johnny answered the phone and handed it to Blair. “Your teacher friends up the road.”

  He heard her say, “Yes. That’s right. We’re completely surrounded by bats. Maggie, I don’t know. I think we’d just better throw the book away and start over. That’s right. OK. Be careful. See you.”

  She turned to Johnny and Mark. “The scientists, all of them, are just as dumbfounded as we are by the bats’ behavior. And we all share something else: we’re scared.”

  “Well, what do we do now?” Johnny asked.

  “Let’s eat,” Mark suggested.

  * * *

  Frank Wirth could not push the words out of his mouth. But that really made no difference, for none of his family would have understood him. The fast-acting rabies had destroyed their minds. Frankie and his sister Becky had left the house in the middle of the afternoon. Frank’s wife sat in a chair, slobber dripping from her mouth. Frank left her sitting there and walked outside. He stood for a moment and then started walking down the middle of the road. No particular reason; it just seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

  Frankie and Becky had started out across country and were nearing a small town, stumbling and staggering along. Neither of them knew who they were or even what they were. They did not remember that behind him, they had left a trail of terror as they rampaged through farmhouses. Frankie had been shot in the shoulder, but he felt no pain from that bullet; nothing could have been more hideously painful than the agony that tormented him every second from the disease he carried.

  The bats hung from tree limbs all over the parish and watched the now several dozen human rabies carriers stumble along. They did not attack them. The eyes of the bats shone with not only fury, but with more intelligence than even the most liberal-thinking scientist would give them credit for possessing. Up to this point. The thinking of the many scientists gathered in the parish was about to change, dramatically. Those that lived through the onslaught, that is. Reporters were also going to change their way of thinking and reporting about the bats. Those that lived through it, that is.

  Just at dark, Becky and Frankie were joined by Clyde Dingle, Royal Crown, and several others from Dingle’s coven. They looked at each other, grunted a few times, then squatted down in the weeds near the edge of the small town. They were filthy and bloody and stinking. Their faces were swollen grotesquely and their eyes were wild.

  The sun was going down. The huge ball of fire was a strange color. A dark red, almost crimson. The color of blood.

  * * *

  “They’re gone!�
� Holly said, running from the bedroom to the den. “The bats are gone!”

  The adults looked out the windows. Not a bat in sight. “I’ll call it in,” Mark said, moving to the phone. He picked up the phone and stood for a moment, then slowly set the receiver back into the cradle.

  “Phone’s dead, isn’t it?” Johnny asked, sitting down on the couch.

  “Yeah. It is. But you fixed your outside box and lines so they couldn’t get at them.”

  “They didn’t tear them out here. The bats have managed to destroy the main switcher, terminal, whatever you call it, or the satellites, the microwave tower systems. The next thing they’ll do is attack the power lines.”

  “But they’ll fry themselves doing that,” Mark said.

  “Some will. But we’re dealing with thousands and thousands of mutants. So they lose a couple of thousand. Big deal.”

  “Johnny,” Blair said, “you’re suggesting they have leaders, right?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m implying they might. They’re certainly working like an army, don’t you agree?”

  Mark looked at Blair and opened his mouth and Blair cut him off before he could speak the words. “Don’t ask me if that’s possible, Mark. I’d have to say that with these mutants, from what I’ve seen thus far, anything is possible.” She turned to Johnny. “How about your walkie-talkie?”

  “It’s in the dining room. We still have the radio in the truck we can use. We’re not cut off. You want to call in, Mark?”

  “Yeah. I better find out what’s going on.”

  “Keys are in the ignition.”

  “I’m going to fix dinner,” Blair said. “Anything to get my mind off this.”

  “You want a drink, Mark?” Johnny called.

  “I’d like one, but I better not. With the bats gone, I’m going to try for my car.”

  Johnny’s voice stopped him in the hallway leading to the garage. “I wouldn’t do that, Mark. Those damn bats are waiting out there. You can bet on that and you’ll be betting your life. Call in. See what Tom has to say about it.”

  Johnny looked in on Holly and Rich. They were watching TV on the small set he’d placed in their room. Holly looked up at him, her eyes serious. “We’re cut off out here, aren’t we, Mr. MacBride?”