Bats

by William W. Johnstone

  Then, from somewhere within the brightly lit and wide-open fraternity building, came a scream, followed by another, and then another.

  “They’re in there,” Tom said, an edge to his voice. “I shouldn’t feel sorry for those silly people, but I do.”

  “Save your sympathy for those deserving of it, Captain. Those young men and women asked for it, now they’re getting it.”

  “You two have to be related,” Tom muttered.

  Young men and women who only seconds before were laughing and doing a dance that looked to Captain Alden sort of like a primitive aboriginal rite of passage were now running and screaming as the bats attacked in full force. One young man, who had been dressed in a bat mask and cape was down, his throat gone, his blood arching up in a crimson spray with each frantic beat of his heart. He was thrashing on the ground. His thrashing intensified as several bats began ripping and tearing at his exposed flesh. A young woman was on her knees, unable to scream as the bat ate her face because she had no tongue. That was lying on the ground beside her left knee.

  Inside the house, it was slaughter. The bats attached themselves to young men and women and ripped and tore and feasted on hot blood. People were jumping out of windows and running down hallways trying to get away. All they succeeded in doing was slamming into one another and knocking each other senseless. The bats dropped on them and dined.

  “You motherfucker!” a young man with blood streaming down his face called to Captain Alden. “Why don’t you pig bastards do something?”

  A huge bat landed on his back and tore his scalp off, exposing the white of skull bone. The young man screamed in pain and collapsed to the ground. The bat had a leisurely snack to the throb of heavy metal music.

  A young woman leaped screaming out of a second story window and landed on a concrete walkway leading from sidewalk to the house. She made a disgusting splatting sound when she landed. She moved only once as the circle of blood beneath her grew and thickened, and then she was still.

  People had packed into the few bars that had remained open. The smoke got so thick the managers opened doors and windows to help clear the air. The patrons were laughing and crowding the bar for service. They were going to get served, but not in the way they expected. The music in the bars ranged from rock and roll to country and soul. Something for everyones’ tastes.

  “Hey, Chubby!” one woman called from the end of the bar. “Gimmie a Bloody Mary.”

  “Keep your pants on, Mary,” Chubby said.

  “You’re asking the impossible, Chubby,” another man said.

  “Fuck you!” Mary told him.

  “I ain’t got the time now, Mary. See me later.”

  Chubby reached for the vodka bottle just as a bat settled around his head and forever darkened his world. The woman who had squalled out for the drink looked down in horror as something furry attached itself to her leg. She screamed as the fangs sank deep into her flesh. She kicked out and lost her balance and fell heavily to the floor. The barroom patrons went into a panic and began running in all directions. Mary never got her drink. She was stomped and trampled into a nearly unrecognizable blob on the barroom floor.

  Lighted cigarettes and bowl candles were knocked to the floor and within only a few minutes the interior of the barroom was blazing. Badly hurt patrons could but attempt to crawl toward the clogged exits. Most did not make it. Fire fighters arrived at the scene but they refused to leave their protective vehicles to combat the blaze because of the hundreds of bats circling overhead, hunting for human blood.

  The police, the sheriffs’ deputies, and the fire fighters had been told not to risk their lives to save people who had deliberately put themselves in harm’s way.

  That had been a hard decision to reach on the part of the community leaders, and one which certain types of lawyers would quickly challenge in court when the danger of bat attacks was past, but for now, the order stood.

  The intense heat from the raging flames forced the circling bats to move on, and they chose a honky-tonk a couple of miles away from the now out-of-control fire. They gathered en mass, squatting on the roof, on cars and pickups and vans, and waited with the patience of a buzzard.

  After only a few minutes, someone opened the front door at the same time the back door was opened and a barman walked out to toss a sack of garbage in the dumpster. That was the opportunity the bats were waiting for.

  The barman died without making a sound, a great gaping blood-squirting hole where his throat had been. The woman who had opened the front door had only a few pain-filled seconds to finally understand that when community leaders, the police department, the sheriff’s department, and the state police tell you to stay home, you had damn well better stay home.

  The attacking bats quickly tore out the woman’s eyes, reduced her face to shreds of bloody flesh, and left her jerking and grunting out what was left of her life in the beer-can littered parking lot.

  As Dr. Bajat would later put it, concerning the deaths of those who ignored warnings, “Their contribution to society was minimal, at best, so how great a loss was it?”

  A full 25 to 30 percent of those who were in the honky tonk were armed, and those men, and a few women, pulled out their .25s, .32s .380s, .38s, .44s,. 357s, and 9 mms, and began blasting away. At daylight, when the dead were counted, the bullets had killed three bats, nine men, eleven women, and wounded fifteen others. One of the bartenders was the first to go; he took a slug from a .357 in the center of his forehead and died with his eyes wide open, not even knowing what had killed him.

  “That joint just outside of town on 80 is under attack and burning out of control,” dispatch notified Captain Alden.

  “Good,” Tom said.

  The attack on campus, at the frat house, was over, and the bats were silently winging their way into the night. But the bats had pulled this little trick before, and the men and women remained in their cars until they were certain it was not a ruse. Only then did they cautiously leave their vehicles and approach the dead and dying and horribly maimed in and around the house.

  “You bastards didn’t do nothin’!” one young man gasped, his face torn and bloody. “You just sat there and watched us get attacked and didn’t do nothin’!”

  “You were warned,” Dr. Bajat told him, contempt thick in his words.

  “I wouldn’t believe nothin’ that come from the mouth of a goddamn pig. So fuck you!” the frat boy said.

  “How eloquently put,” Bajat replied. “Your major surely must be English.” He moved on to where a young woman sat with her back to the house. He looked at her. She was in shock, her skin cold and clammy to the touch. Other than that, she did not appear to be harmed. “Shock,” he told an EMT.

  “You seen enough?” Tom called.

  “Yes. More than enough.” He walked over to Tom and together they stood silently for a moment amid the carnage.

  “How the hell are we to fight these things?” Tom spoke the words very softly.

  “If we can hold out for a few more weeks, perhaps less than that, we won’t have to fight them,” Bajat said mysteriously.

  Tom cut his eyes to the South American. But Bajat would say no more on the subject.

  * * *

  “And he wouldn’t say anything else on the matter?” Johnny asked the captain the next morning. Alden had driven down to brief Phil and he and the sheriff had driven out to Johnny and Blair’s house, with Mark tagging along in his unit.

  “Not a word. He clammed up tight.”

  “Do you have a clue as to what’s going on, Johnny?” Phil asked.

  “No. I hate to admit it, but this time around, I’m completely baffled.”

  “That makes me feel better,” Tom said with a smile.

  The men sat for a time in silence, drinking coffee. The press had finally figured out the route of the bats and were drawing all kinds of conclusions. Dozens of churches who worshipped Satan had surfaced and were loudly proclaiming that the Prince of Darkness was behind
it all and soon the Devil would make his appearance and claim the world as his own. Certain TV preachers were having a field day, whipping their congregations up into a frenzy, sure that this was the end of the world and God was using the bats to destroy the earth.

  Phil Young broke the silence. “These towns east of Monroe are next, right?”

  Johnny nodded his head. “Yes. When they reach the Mississippi river they’ll turn south and head straight for us.”

  “Wonderful,” Mark said with a grimace. “What was that you said back in the spring, Johnny?”

  “And away we go.”

  “Again,” Phil added.

  Fourteen

  The northern part of the state of Louisiana now had just about as many gawkers, rubberneckers, sightseers and press types as it did residents. There was not a motel or hotel room to be found. Boarding houses were filled, and many locals were renting out rooms at enormously inflated prices. If there was a country not represented by print or broadcast Johnny couldn’t name it. The police and deputies and national guard troops finally gave up on trying to control the crowds. It just proved impossible to cover all the back roads. People who are determined to get into any area will eventually find a way, and short of shooting them there was no way to prevent entry.

  And still the bats held off attacking on the final leg of their assault.

  “The bastards counted on this,” Johnny blurted one morning.

  “What?” Blair asked, looking up from her omelet. Holly and Rich had already had their cereal and were playing with the dogs in the protected runaround area.

  “The bats. They knew, or sensed, or planned, whatever, that this area would fill up with the curious. That’s why they’re holding off.”

  She stared at him for a moment before shrugging her shoulders. “I won’t argue it. Nothing these winged monsters do surprises me any longer.”

  Blair had been working closely with Dr. Bajat at the newly reopened lab nor far from the house. Several of the big bats had been taken alive shortly after the attack in Monroe and she had been astonished at their intellect. They were performing tasks that would baffle some adults. With each passing day they seemed to grow in intelligence. The bats, of course, could not be handled by Bajat or any of his colleagues, so the scientists could only observe them and try to draw visual conclusions from their behavior. Of them all, only Bajat seemed unimpressed by the ability of the bats.

  “Dr. Bajat locked us all out yesterday afternoon,” Blair said. “Right after he received a crate of something. He wouldn’t let us see what it contained. You remember I drove back to the lab late yesterday?” Johnny nodded. “The doors were still locked, but I could hear Bajat laughing inside.”

  “Laughing? About what?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t the foggiest idea. I knocked on the door and he called for me to wait just a moment. When he let me in, the crate was nowhere in sight. But here’s what is strange. The giant bats seemed to be in terror of something. They were cowering in fright. Huddled in one corner of the observation room.”

  “And Bajat said . . .?”

  “ ‘Now I know. Now the mystery is solved.’ When I asked him what he was talking about, he would only shake his head and say, ‘It won’t be long now. By the end of this month, I’m sure.’ ”

  “What the hell is he talking about?”

  “I have no idea.”

  * * *

  In the lab, Bajat looked at the captive giant bats safely behind thick glass in the observation room and smiled. “My father was right,” he spoke into the microphone of a tape recorder. “Disease doesn’t stop you. Humankind can’t stop you. But he knew. He knew. Why you came up this far north is something I do not know and probably will never know. But here you are and soon you will die. At least ninety-nine point nine percent of you will. Nature controls her own—if humankind will allow it, that is.”

  Bajat turned off the recorder and stood up, stretching. He walked to a sheet covered cage and drew back the covering. He looked inside and murmured, “But how you accomplish this remarkable feat is going to be a marvelous sight to behold.”

  Bajat stepped back so the giant bats could see into the cage. The huge bats howled and hissed and chirped and slobbered in fright and huddled together in the furthest corner of the room. One of them even unfolded its wings and covered its eyes.

  “Amazing,” Bajat said, shaking his head. “And so simple. It was right before our eyes and no one picked it up.”

  He recovered the cage and took it into another room. When he exited that room, he carefully locked the door behind him and pocketed the key. He had changed the lock, and he alone possessed the key that would fit the lock. Bajat was not acting in a selfish manner by not sharing his recently acquired knowledge with the others. He just wanted to be sure he was right before divulging the information. He knew that scientists were notoriously loose-mouthed, and he did not want to be the one to spread false hope. He was ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredth percent sure of this find, but there was always that tiny lingering doubt that had to be considered.

  He looked up as several scientists from the U.S. tapped on the door. He let them in, and moments later, the lab was busy with scientists doing testing and comparative work. Bajat left them to their work and went to his quarters to rest. He was humming as he turned back the sheet. It was almost time. The season was changing, the nights getting cooler. It would not be long now. As he laid down, he made up his mind to tell Blair and Johnny. He could trust them not to talk to the press. He would go to their home that afternoon. Noon. Yes. In time for lunch. They always fixed plenty in case Trooper Mark Hayden stopped by.

  * * *

  “You have got to be kidding!” Blair said, finding her voice after Dr. Bajat let them in on his findings.

  Johnny just sat at the table and stared at the man.

  The South American shook his head. “No. I’m almost entirely certain of it. It was right there in my father’s journal and I missed it all these years. I just wasn’t looking for that. But a word of caution: It’s going to be a week to ten days. Maybe two weeks. It depends on the weather.”

  “But is there nothing we can do to hasten the arrival?” Blair asked.

  Again, Bajat shook his head. “No. Absolutely nothing. It is all in the hands of mother nature now.” He smiled. “I was sure the young trooper would be here for lunch.”

  Johnny chuckled. “Captain Alden’s got him working north of here. He called to tell us. I was going to fix cheeseburgers for lunch.”

  “A lot of people could die in two weeks,” Blair said.

  “Not if they take precautions,” Bajat said. “Whether they will or won’t is up to them.” He shrugged that off. “Have any of you noticed a change in the bat attacks?”

  “They seem to be less interested in homes,” Johnny said.

  “That’s right. And that ancient I spoke with, years ago? He said the bats started out attacking anything and everything they could find, but their final assault, before they were driven out, before they were killed, always took place during a celebration of some sort, when entire villages gathered to celebrate something.”

  “So it’s coming down to the wire now,” Johnny said.

  “It’s close. Very close.”

  * * *

  In a rare display of unanimity, the majority of the people of Northeast Louisiana began working together. At night, the small towns along the last fifty miles or so of I-20 east resembled ghost towns. The sheriffs of the two parishes involved ordered all bars and other nonessential businesses to close at dusk. A few of the bar owners—white and black— immediately went to court, and a judge ruled that the sheriffs had no right to deprive the club owners of their livelihood when they were not breaking any laws.

  “Well, that’s just dandy,” one sheriff said.

  “Fuck ’em!” the other sheriff said. “The bats sure got rid of a bunch of worthless troublemakers in Monroe.”

  “You reckon they’ll do the same
here?”

  “We can always hope.”

  Except for a few of the bar owners—most closed voluntarily—the people obeyed the warnings. Milk and bread and butter and beer and bacon and eggs had better be purchased before dark, for the stores were closed up tight about a half hour before dusk, to give the employees time to get home while there was some daylight remaining.

  And still the bats held off.

  While Blair was at work one day, Johnny and Dr. Bajat suited up and with shotguns in hands, walked the woods surrounding his cleared acreage. The men could spot no signs of bats, and could detect no odor that was a dead giveaway when they were present.

  “They aren’t here and haven’t been in some time,” Bajat concluded, back in the house and out of the heavy and hot reinforced suits, gloves, and helmets. “Their odor lingers for some time. But those bones we found at the edge of your property ... ?”

  “I’ll call Phil about that right now. I’m sure that was one of those infected with rabies. Those bones have been there since spring. There are still about thirty or so people unaccounted for.”

  “It was a female. Probably Caucasian. There was an old break in her left forearm, just above the wrist.”

  “That’ll help in IDing.” He called the sheriff’s office.

  “That’d be Nora Howell’s daughter, Tina,” Moody said. “I remember when she fell off that horse and busted her arm. I’ll send Cal out with the coroner.”

  “Wasn’t the Howell family one of those that . . .” Johnny paused, remembering he’d been told that Moody was somehow related to them.

  “Yeah, it was. Bats got the whole family. Tina completes the circle now. We can close the file on that one.”

  “I’m sorry, Jimmy.”

  “They were warned, Johnny. They chose to ignore the warning. It’s nobody’s fault ‘ceptin’ their own. See you ’round.”

  “I read the death count,” Bajat said, returning from the kitchen where he had washed his face and hands. “The people were very, very lucky. It could have been a lot worse than it was. If, ah, lightning,” he smiled, “had not ignited those old wells and destroyed the bats’ nesting area, there might not be a living human being in this area as we speak.”