Bats

by William W. Johnstone

  Johnny passed that information along to Blair and she grimaced. “So now what?”

  Johnny shrugged. “I’d go ahead and plan to destroy the bat colony. But it’s not up to me.”

  She smiled at him. “Like the governor said, Johnny: you are no politician.”

  “Something to be thankful for.”

  They stood for a moment looking at one another. Holly and Rich were in a bedroom, watching TV. Both Johnny and Blair felt something was wrong, but they couldn’t pin it down. It was Blair who pinpointed the strange feeling.

  “No bats, Johnny. It’s full dark and no bats have gathered around the house.”

  Johnny glanced over at his dogs. Skipper was zonked out on his back and June was sound asleep on the front porch, something she would never do if bats were around.

  “They may have given up on us for the time being,” Johnny said. “But you can be sure they’ve gathered somewhere.” He frowned as a strange sound reached his ears. June and Skipper were awake instantly. The sound grew louder; a snorting, grunting noise.

  “What the hell is that?” Blair asked. “The bats don’t make sounds like that . . . at least they never have.”

  Johnny suddenly spun around and ran for a gun cabinet, jerking down two high-powered rifles. He quickly loaded them and handed Blair a Remington. 308. He levered a round into a Winchester .375.

  “I know what that sound is, Blair. Pigs. Wild boars. A hundred pound plus boar coming at full speed would tear that fence all to pieces. And then we’d really be in trouble. Take the back and stay inside the wire. Shoot every pig you see.”

  Johnny made the front porch with only seconds to spare. Two big tuskers were running all out for the fence, slobber leaking from their mouths and their eyes wild with madness. He leveled the rifle and stopped the first one cold, the big slug knocking the tusker sideways. He broke the shoulder of the second big hog and finished it with another round. At the rear of the house, Blair’s .308 boomed twice.

  “Those damn bats were counting on the hogs to break through,” Johnny muttered. “What kind of mutants are these things?”

  He heard a slamming sound as a big hog rammed into a utility shed outside the protected area. In its fury, the wild hog hit the shed time after time in an attempt to gain entry. Johnny heard the splintering of boards and knew the hog had broken through. The boar went on a rampage once inside the shed, charging at anything and everything. The shed was a catch-all for odds and ends and everything Johnny knew he should throw away but wouldn’t.

  The big hog finally tired of the shed and wandered out into the light. Johnny dropped it with a heart shot that almost stood the tusker up on its hind legs. The hog hit the ground, dead.

  “They’re leaving, Johnny!” Blair called from the rear of the house. “At least these back here are.”

  Johnny caught a glimpse of several big hogs running into the woods, heading away from the pocket of light. He punched rounds into the .375 and looked into the house. The kids were standing together in the den.

  “It’s all right, kids,” he called. “No danger. Why don’t you two take Skipper and June into the bedroom with you? You can even have them up on the bed if you like.”

  “All right!” Rich said, and the brother and sister vanished into the bedroom, the dogs right behind them.

  Blair reloaded the clip of the .308 and met Johnny in the dining room. “One of us will have to be on guard all night,” she said softly.

  “Yeah. We’ll stand watches. Keep a fresh pot of coffee on at all times. This is going to be a long night.”

  It was a horrible night for a carload of teenagers who had driven down to sightsee and rubberneck and gawk, hoping to catch a glimpse of the giant bats. They blew a tire about a mile from Johnny’s house. The two boys and two girls sat in the car and looked at each other as the silence of the deadly night closed in around them. And they began to realize what an extremely dumb thing they had done.

  “We just sit right here and wait,” the driver said. “Pretty soon a cop or one of those national guard patrols will come by and get us out of here.”

  “And if they don’t come by?” his girlfriend Linda asked.

  “Somebody will come by,” Mack told her. “Just relax.”

  “The man says relax,” Jane spoke from the back seat. “Yeah. Right.”

  “The bats can’t get in,” Mack said.

  “But those crazies wandering around can,” Paul said. “And the TV said there were lots of them infected with rabies in this parish.”

  “I got a gun,” Mack replied, holding up a .22 revolver. “And plenty of ammo for it.”

  “Sure is dark out there,” Linda said.

  “It usually is at night,” her boyfriend said with a nervous smile.

  Before she could come back at him, they all heard the grunting, shorting, shuffling sounds in the brush beside the road. The kids froze.

  “It’s them!” Jane hissed.

  “Oh, God!” Linda cried.

  “Relax,” Mack told them all, looking out the window. “Settle down. It’s a bunch of hogs. See them right there. They busted out of the pen, is all.”

  The hogs were not wild in the true sense of the word. Their ancestors were domesticated pigs who had broken loose and survived in the woods. But that was generations ago, and these hogs were just as dangerous as the true wild hog, maybe even more so, because of their bigger size. And now, disease eating at them, maddening their brains, they were truly dangerous.

  “Oh,” Jane said. “I feel sorry for them. They could get out in the road and get run over.”

  “Do you pray over your bacon every morning?” Paul asked her. “So what if they get run over? Gimmie the gun, Mack, let’s shoot one.”

  “I get first shot.” He started to roll down the window.

  “No!” the girls yelled in unison.

  Mack ignored them and rolled down the window. He took aim and shot one of the larger hogs, the bullet striking the animal high on the neck. The animal squealed in pain, but it was not badly hurt. It was mad.

  “You ... bastard!” Linda yelled at him. “Now why did you do that?”

  “It’s just a damn hog!” her boyfriend protested, just as the shot hog charged the car.

  The hog hit the side of the car at full speed and put a huge dent in the door. Mack had cocked the pistol and when the hog struck the car, the impact tossed him over against Linda. She screamed and the pistol discharged, blowing a small hole in the windshield.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Paul hollered. “That damn hog is attacking us.”

  “And why not, you son of a bitch?” his girlfriend shouted at him. “We attacked it first!”

  The angry hog backed up and charged, slamming into the car again. Now the door was really warped. Mack recovered and put a bullet into the hog’s head. The hog backed up a few yards, shook its head, sat down, and died. The others had run back into the woods at the sound of the first shot.

  With nervous fingers, Mack tried to reload the pistol, dropping cartridges all over the floorboards. But he forgot to do one very important thing: roll up the window all the way.

  He caught a glimpse of a dark shape out of the corner of his left eye and looked up just in time to see a huge bat glide soundlessly into the car and wrap its wings around his head and start eating his face, starting with the eyes. In less than ten seconds, blood was pouring down Mack’s neck and his screaming had ceased because he no longer had a tongue.

  Linda grabbed up the pistol, aimed, and pulled the trigger. She killed the bat, and she also blew a hole in Mack’s jaw. During the struggling, Mack had grabbed hold of the door handle and had fallen against the door, now he and the bat toppled out, to lie on the shoulder of the road.

  “You goddamn stupid cunt!” Paul yelled at Linda. “You killed Mack!”

  Linda’s eyes narrowed; she put the muzzle of the pistol on Paul’s nose and jacked the hammer back. The sound was enormous in the night. Paul peed his underwear shorts. “Don�
��t you ever call me a stupid cunt, you dipshit prick! You think I meant to shoot Mack? Now get your hotshot ass over the seat and see about Mack. Move, damn you!”

  Paul moved. Very quickly. He knelt down beside his friend and peeled the dead bat from his face. The moon was bright and so was the blood that covered Mark’s face. Paul puked up his supper at the sight. Mack had no eyes, no tongue, no lips, no nose, and not much flesh left on his face. What flesh remained was mostly hanging in strips.

  Paul recovered, jumped up, and ran a few yards from the car. “You crazy bitches can stay in that damned car. I’m not staying with you. You’re both crazy. Fuck you both!” He took off running down the road.

  “What about Mack?” Linda screamed.

  “He’s dead!” Paul yelled over his shoulder. “And you killed him, you bitch!” He started running down the center of the blacktop.

  Jane scrambled over into the front seat and quickly rolled up the window. She looked down at Mack and fought to keep her pizza down. “You didn’t kill him, Linda,” she said. “That bat tore his whole face off. I can see skull bone shining. No! Don’t look.” She pushed her friend back. “One of us sick is enough. The bleeding has stopped and that means his heart has stopped; remember those classes from last year?”

  The bleeding had not stopped, but in the dark it was difficult to tell.

  Jane started the car, dropped the gear shift lever into drive, and lurched off, up the road.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” Jane said, fighting the wobbling wheel. “But we’re damn sure getting gone from here.”

  A few moments later, Linda pointed. “Look at all the lights to your left. Turn here, the driveway is clear. What have we got to lose?”

  “Only our lives,” Jane said grimly, turning into the hard-packed drive.

  “And if we stay out here all night?”

  “I do get your point.”

  “Jesus, it’s a fort!” Jane said, as she pulled up to the fence around the acreage.

  “There’s a man on the porch,” Linda said, rolling down her window just a bit. “Help us, mister! Please?” She hesitated. This was really going to sound stupid.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Jane asked. “Tell him what happened.”

  “That we were attacked by pigs?” The shock of what had taken place had not yet sunk in. “That’s almost as bad as Jimmy Carter being attacked by a rabbit.”

  “Pull around by the side,” Johnny called. “As close as you can to the garage door. Get ready to jump out when I open the door.”

  “You got it, mister,” Linda called, just as the car backed up and then lurched forward.

  The girls were strong and stable until they got into the house. Inside, safe, they fell apart. Blair finally got them calmed down enough to tell their story. They were from Monroe. Had driven down to sightsee. It was awful. Just awful. The hogs, then the bat.

  Blair gave them a mild sedative and stashed them in the only remaining bedroom.

  “Getting crowded around here,” Johnny said, as he went to his truck to call in. The phone was still out.

  Paul had stopped to rest. He’d been sure he would find a lighted house somewhere along the way. But what few houses he’d seen had been dark, and you can tell when nobody is home. It’s a feeling you get. Besides, he felt safer on the blacktop. He walked on. He could not believe the stupidity of Linda, shooting Mack like she did. Stupid cunt. That’s all girls were good for. If they didn’t have a cunt somebody would declare a hunting season on them, like deer or ducks.

  Then he saw the lights of the sheriff’s substation. “All right!” He felt better when he talked aloud. Made a guy feel like he wasn’t all alone out here.

  “I see someone walking toward us,” Cal radioed to Johnny. “He’s about a quarter of a mile away. I can just make him out. But he’s not going to make it. The bats are all around the trailer.”

  Paul almost made it. He came close. He started to run when he got about two hundred yards from the substation.

  Then the bats hit him.

  The first bat swooped silently in and took out one eye. Paul screamed and stumbled, but stayed on his feet, wobbling and staggering up the blacktop with his head filled with pain, blood pouring down his cheek.

  “Come on, boy,” Cal urged. “Run, boy, run!”

  But the deputies could do nothing except stand by a window and watch from the safety of the fortified trailer.

  The second bat glided in and settled around Paul’s head, blinding him. The young man sank to his knees on the blacktop as other bats winged in and covered him, ripping and tearing at his flesh. He finally fell over and was still as the moving mound of bats thickened and they dined.

  “They got him,” Cal said. “Jesus, but he came awful close to making it.”

  “Ten-four,” Johnny acknowledged, and tossed the mic onto the seat.

  Back where Mack lay, mercifully unconscious, the hogs had returned to have an evening snack. They grunted and snorted and tore at human flesh. It did not take them long to reduce the young man to scattered bones. Then they wandered on down the blacktop, following the scent that Paul had left.

  When the hogs reached the substation, they left the blacktop and circled around behind the trailer. What was left of Paul was lying in the road, the bones shining in the moonlight. The bats hung from limbs on both sides of the blacktop and watched the hogs circle the small trailer.

  Cal had just made a fresh pot of coffee. Dale Gray walked to the counter and looked out the window. “I think we’re in trouble, Cal,” he said softly. “I think we’re in big trouble.”

  Five

  Cal had just lifted his cup to his mouth when the first hog smashed into the rear of the metal building, which was actually a trailer without wheels. The impact was so hard that Cal dropped the cup and stumbled against the small refrigerator. Another hog charged the small portable building and hit the building with enough force to knock Mister Coffee off the counter, send hot coffee flying all over the place, and have the deputies grab onto anything they could in order to stay on their boots.

  “We’ve got to open the windows and shoot them, Dale!” Cal said. “Come on. Quick. Those damn hogs will eventually punch right through this big Prince Albert can.”

  Another charge punctured the metal and Cal shoved the small refrigerator over the enlarging hole and braced it with a shotgun. Dale dropped two of the hogs and the rest backed up to reconsider the situation.

  “We stopped ’em!” Dale said, wiping sweat from his face.

  “For the time being.” Cal walked to the radio and called in. “We gotta get out of here, Chief. This building won’t withstand many more charges.”

  “Can you make it to your unit without getting nailed by the bats?”

  “I ... don’t think so,” Cal said.

  Johnny was monitoring the conversation and broke in. “Moody, I can take my truck and back it up to the door. The deputies can jump into the back; the camper shell will protect them.”

  “Ten-fifty, Johnny,” Phil broke in. “You’ve got a houseful of people to protect. I’ll send a pickup out with a camper shell on it.”

  “No good,” Johnny nixed that. “You’re miles away. It would take you twenty or thirty minutes to get there. I’m only a mile away. I’m on my way.”

  Cal keyed the mic and they could all hear the crashing sounds as the hogs once more began attacking the small portable building, this time in force.

  “Jesus Christ!” Cal shouted. “Somebody hurry. Please. They’re hitting us from all sides.”

  “On my way,” Johnny said, and ran for his truck.

  “We’ll be all right,” Blair told him, then kissed him. “Take off, Hero.”

  “Hero,” Johnny muttered, shaking his head and heading for the garage. Blair would open and close the garage door from inside the house.

  “Give ’em hell, Johnny!” Holly yelled from the hallway, and that brought Johnny up short.

  He
looked at her, then smiled. “I’ll do that, Holly.”

  “All right!”

  Johnny passed the bones of Mack, picked clean and scattered by the hogs, then swerved to miss the remains of Paul, lying in the middle of the blacktop. He braked at the substation, and backed up. The hogs had really done a number on the portable building and were only seconds away from smashing through the windowless and therefore blind side of the building.

  “Here we go,” Johnny muttered, the huge bats soaring everywhere around him.

  The instant Johnny braked, the bumper touching the concrete steps leading to the building, bats were all over the cab of his truck. The two deputies made the covered bed of the truck and Johnny heard the camper door close.

  “We’re in!” Cal hollered.

  “Yeah, but I can’t see jack-crap!” Johnny shouted. “The damn bats are all over the cab.”

  “Tell us about it,” Dale yelled. “They’re hangin’ all over the camper, too.”

  “Hang on, boys. I’m going to pull away from the building before those hogs decide to attack the truck.”

  The bats were clinging to the wiper blades, the window, the hood, the mirrors, shrieking and howling and dripping slime all over everything as Johnny pulled out.

  “Blind as a bat,” he muttered, then smiled grimly. “But you bastards aren’t, are you?”

  On the blacktop, Johnny turned his emergency flashers on. His headlights were already on.

  “I called in on walkie-talkie!” Cal hollered from the back. “They know we’re blind and they’re sending help.”

  “What the hell do they expect to do when they get here?” Johnny shouted, struggling to see through the piled-on mass of winged fury.

  Cal and Dale exchanged glances, Dale muttering, “Damn good question.”

  Johnny turned on the windshield wipers. “What do I have to lose?” he said.

  The wipers struggled to rise and Johnny hit the washer button. The combination of the two either startled the bats or they just decided to give up. The windshield was suddenly clear and Johnny stepped on the gas.

  “We’re clear, boys!” he yelled.