Night of the Bat (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

  The rustle. The animal breathing. It was still there.

  Magyar prided himself on being able to stalk closer to any prey than all of the hunters of his tribe. He wouldn’t be a fool. He didn’t want to get too far from the light of the fires and the protecting effigies. The rustlings he heard were different from others he’d known. It seemed to be something large. Something crawling. He began to pray for a very large and fat iguana or gecko. He stopped when he saw a dark shape just ahead of him.

  A boar, he thought.

  He would roast another boar. …

  Suddenly, the dark shape was moving fast toward him. He was shocked by it swiftness, something reaching him and whisking up from the blackness at his feet. A thought—What is it?—shot through Magyar’s mind. Whatever the thing was, it rushed up his body, knocking the blowpipe from his lips. It had the weight of a large animal. He opened his mouth to cry out.

  To shout …

  But there was no sound.

  No terrible pain.

  Only a great pressure at his throat and a cracking of bone and cartilage. A moment later and he could feel a vise of needle teeth that rendered his jaw frozen. He was on the ground now—on his back—and whatever it was held him down with the force and precision of a puma. Like a jungle cat, it had him by the neck, this thing, this black thing that now began to flap its wings on either side of him.

  It took Magyar a moment to realize that the creature that held him was convulsing, the whole of its body shaking, vomiting fluids directly into his throat and mouth and …

  By now he knew everything Dr. Lefkovitz and Jake and the other workers had said was true. A patch of the night fog had broken straight up to the canopy. Moonlight crashed down through the hammock, and he could see a part of the bats head. Grotesquely shaped, with wet membranes that unfurled from its nostrils and ears. Dr. Lefkovitz had taught him the anatomy of bats. Magyar stared into the large, intense black eyes.

  A moment more, and he knew that whatever the fluids were that the creature was pumping into his throat were drugging him—clouding his mind. They were numbing, dulling all pain now. He was paralyzed.

  The bat relaxed and disengaged its teeth from his neck. It crawled off of him and circled him for a moment. When its full face hovered over him once more, it was staring at him sideways. A long, narrow tongue slid out from between its needle teeth and began to lick Magyars eyelids.

  Magyar felt the moist touch of the tongue.

  It was gentle. Cooling.

  Absurdly, Magyar felt hope flowing back into his thoughts. He knew that if the saliva was like that of the small vampires, it would slowly dissolve the skin from his face. It would make his cheeks bleed, and the bat would take its time savoring the blood.

  It would lick carefully.

  With delight.

  Slowly.

  As he’d seen the smaller bats do with their prey in the canopy.

  There would be time, Magyar believed. Time for someone to awaken and realize he was missing from his watch. Dr. Lefkovitz, or one of the men, would look out to the fire and effigies, and realize something was wrong. They’d track him the short distance he’d traveled into the jungle. They would find him. The bat would hear them coming, and it would fly off and away from him.

  Suddenly, he saw the bat’s mouth open like a constrictor’s. The full spectrum of its horrible teeth and crimson-coated gums floated over him now, dripping with what he knew now was his own blood.

  No, he thought. Oh, God …

  With a quick burst of saliva, two small openings in the creature’s upper gums undulated, and a pair of hollow, sharp fangs began to emerge. They slid downward—seven, eight inches!—and locked into place with the precision of dental drills. Convulsing again, the bat lowered the fangs until they entered Magyar’s eyes. Moments later, still conscious—even in blindness—Magyar knew the bat was drinking his mind.

  Dr. Lefkovitz awakened as the first light of dawn touched the camp. He went outside expecting to see Magyar cooking breakfast meats and stirring a steaming pot of boiling roots mixed with the dried mushrooms and fish that had been brought up from Manaus. The effigies stood in the morning mist.

  “Magyar,” Dr. Lefkovitz called softly, near the central fire. All the fires had burned low, but he thought it was just Magyar conserving the logs as dawn had approached. When there was no answer, Dr. Lefkovitz became concerned.

  A wind came up from the mountains, and cleared the view to the river. Dr. Lefkovitz decided he’d look for Magyar on the bank. He was always catching fresh river bass and frogs to blend into his soups and pastes. The sun hadn’t dried the mud bank, and it was easy to spot the fresh footprints. Dr. Lefkovitz knew about the riches of the mangrove hammock.

  “Hey,” he called out again. “Magyar.”

  The mangrove roots rose high above the jungle floor. Several crawling sucker-fish had left the water and climbed into the roots to feed on moths and stick bugs. Dr. Lefkovitz found his sandals sinking into a squishing mud. He was several feet from the bank now, and was afraid the river had begun to rise and swell the watershed and pockets of quicksand—the first sign that the annual flood was imminent.

  There was an odor of decay in the air, and it began to sting Dr. Lefkovitz’s nostrils. He tried to shake off his sleep, and as he pried his foot loose from the mud, he looked down and noticed the mud had an unusual red tint to it. He stepped back away from it, and felt something cracking beneath his feet. It looked like a white branch. But there were other sprigs of white and—

  He realized he was looking at pieces of a skull.

  At first he thought they were from some animal, but then he saw a rib cage. It looked human—but barely—and it was only the shape of the jawbone that gave it away. Dr. Lefkovitz began to call out, to shout, as he realized he was standing in the middle of something very bad. The flecks of bone and flesh were sprayed across the mud like confetti. He saw now that the whole jungle floor was moving, alive with beetles carrying tiny pieces of human flesh to their lairs in the earth and roots and beneath fallen trees.

  Even as he shouted to awaken the whole camp, he knew what had happened to Magyar. He understood that—and what would have to be done.

  11

  THE TRAP

  A half dozen workers were stringing garlands of

  leaves  and shredded bamboo over the netting, pulleys, and support ropes, camouflaging the reality that the new addition to the riverwalk was, in truth, a trap.

  “Tighter,” Dr. Lefkovitz was shouting to Rasdyr, the smallest of the workers, who could climb to the very top of the canopy’s thinnest branches. “Pull the ropes tighter.”

  Rasdyr, his body already dripping in the hot morning sun, smiled broadly and signaled that he understood.

  “How does it work?” Jake asked his father when he came up in the sling. “It looks like some kind of jerryrigged batting cage.”

  “It’s basically a room made of very strong rope and jungle vines,” his father said. “When that monster returns, it will have to land at the end of the riverwalk and crawl forward.” Jake followed his father inside the rope chamber. “One end of the trap will be left open.”

  “How do you know it’ll come in?” Jake asked.

  “There will be something it wants inside.”

  “What?”

  “Bait.”

  “What kind?”

  “Human.”

  Jake glared at his father. “Dad, didn’t that thing kill enough people? Who’s going to be nuts enough to be in here?”

  “I’ll be in the trap,” his father said. “Rasdyr and I.” He pointed to the opening. “When the bat crawls in, it’ll trip a rope trigger that’ll fly two additional nets into place, sealing the trap and dividing the chamber. We’ll be safe in this half. The bat will be trapped in the other half. We can fire darts into it until it falls unconscious.”

  “Unconscious?”

  “Yes,” his father said, stripping his voice of any emotion. “I want to capture it ali
ve.”

  Jake knew his father was fighting to contain a swell of fear and hate and vengeance. “Why alive?” he asked.

  “Jake, you’ve got to realize what all this might mean for the expedition,” his father said. “For the museum. We could study the creature. Use it. Learn from it. We have no idea what its biology and behavior can tell us. How does its brain work? What is its chemistry?”

  “It ate the brains out of a few of your men,” Jake said. “Didn’t that tell you enough? At least it’s a hint!”

  “We could know more. …”

  “Dad, you’re not a trapper or hunter!”

  “I used net traps in Indonesia long before you were born, son,” his father said. “I developed them for a British zoological project to save the orangutans in the Javanese jungles. An adult male orangutan has the strength of two or three men—they are ferociously strong. You corner a primate like that and it’s capable of ripping the arms off you. These net traps worked just fine. We saved over forty—fifty!—orangutans by catching them and relocating them deeper into the jungle and out of the reach of poachers.”

  “Dad, there’s still time for us to leave. Don’t you really think that’s what we should do?” Jake asked. “We could load the pirogues and be out of here before the night. …”

  His father didn’t answer him. He took Jake down in the sling to the jungle floor. Two of the workers were loading a single pirogue with fresh supplies. “I want you to leave,” his father said.

  “I’m not going with them,” Jake said.

  His father took him into the main hut. He pointed to Jake’s belongings on the floor next to his cot. “You’ve got to pack. You’re coming here was a mistake, son. I knew there was danger. …”

  “Is all of this your ego, Dad?” Jake said. “Just so every-one back at the museum might say, ‘Oh, boy, Lefkovitz caught a big bat.’ It’s like you’re trying to be a control freak with nature. You want to be bigger than God.”

  “No, I’m not trying to play God,” his father objected.

  “Well, a lot of you scientists are,” Jake said. “You can just imagine what they’d do with this bat.”

  “No …”

  “I think you do.”

  “Son, when I decided to become a scientist—that meant I had to follow the research frontier wherever it took me. I and millions of people might be dead. We’ve always lived on one cutting edge or another. That’s what a scientist does. That’s what I do. Just because I’m here in the Amazon, it’s no different. There will be things we’ll learn from this bat. From it’s behavior and chemistry and genes. We have a chance here, Jake. …”

  “A chance for what?”

  “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “You can’t go around doing whatever you want, Dad. It’s all gone too far. What will you or some experimenting whacko do with this monster’s genes? Clone big bats as food supply? Splice its genetic material into farm animals so we can have bigger chickens and goats? Maybe thirty-pound tomatoes!”

  “That’s absurd. …”

  “Dad, you’re a scientist! You’re not supposed to be messing up the environment like everybody else. Walk away from this one. You have to stop them from ruining the Amazon. From killing the rain forests. You can’t open a can of worms like this giant bat. Leave it. You’ll wreck this whole place! God, Pops, don’t mess with this bat. Let’s get out of here!”

  Exhausted, Jake’s father sat on the edge of his cot. For a few moments he stared at Jake, then moved his gaze to the stack of specimen jars, a ray of sunlight cutting through them so the faces of the creatures appeared cruel and macabre. For the first time in his life, Jake’s father had no quick dismissal for him. “I think you’d better show me your Gizmo,” his father said, quietly. “I’d like to see what it is.”

  A small smile crept onto Jake’s face. “Sure, Dad,” he said. “Sure.”

  “I know it translates sound reflections into images,” his father said.

  Jake moved quickly and turned Gizmo on. “It does a lot more than that. I had wanted to show you all it could do, but you wouldn’t listen.” Its narrow rectangular screen glowed. Jake fumbled through his box of equipment, grabbed a wide elastic headband, and attached it to the thin ends of the screen. He placed the lit viewing screen against his forehead.

  “This is the fantastic part, Dad. The images that appear on the screen can be sensed on my brow,” Jake said. “On anyone’s forehead. I can tell the rough shape of objects in total darkness, even with my eyes closed. With training, a human being can use this device to see like a bat!”

  “Is that possible?”

  “This isn’t science fiction,” Jake said. “It’s fact. They’re using devices like Gizmo with blind people. I got the idea from Scientific American. There are lots of articles about it all over the place now. You’ve just been too busy down here to keep up with the new stuff.”

  “Jake, I still want you to leave. …”

  “But I’m the only one here that’s trained to be able to ‘see’ with this thing. It takes practice. Weeks—months!—like I had preparing for the science fair. Dad, that bat is very, very smart. You need me and Gizmo with you.”

  Suddenly, there were cries and shouts from outside the hut. Jake and his father rushed outside. Several of the workers had hurried to meet a man staggering out of the jungle toward them. It was a moment before Jake and his father realized it was Muras, covered with mud and blood.

  “It followed us. …” Muras was screaming. He saw Dr. Lefkovitz and started toward him. The men put their arms around Muras and helped him over the final distance. “It killed Hanuma. The thing, the big bat killed him and Dangari. It followed us!”

  Muras collapsed in Dr. Lefkovitz’s arms.

  Jake ran and got his father’s medicine kit. Rasdyr brought water from the trough. As Dr. Lefkovitz cleaned the scrapes and cuts on Muras’s body, the workers began to panic and weep. Several shouted angrily at the sky and the jungle and the failed effigies. They cried out with rage and grief.

  “Now I’ve got to stay,” Jake told his father. “The bat isn’t going to let anyone leave. You know that now, don’t you, Dad? Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” his father said. “I know it.”

  12

  WAITING …

  By nightfall Rasdyr, Jake, and his father had settled in at the back of the trap. The three of them remained silent for a long while. Jake knew that each of them was thinking of Magyar and Hanuma and Dangari in their graves.

  Rasdyr was barely five feet tall and, at twenty-eight, still looked more like a boy than a man. His slight build reminded Jake of the jockeys he’d seen on the occasions when his father had taken him along with a few of his colleagues for a day at Yonkers trotter racetrack.

  The Indian sat in the middle of the riverwalk platform, which formed the floor of the bat trap. He had separated his darts into two separate small piles. One set of darts had been dipped in a drug mixture distilled from the sap of wildflowers and eucalyptus trees. The others were coated with a mixture concentrated from oleander roots, a poison capable of slaying the largest of tapirs and wild boar.

  “Check and recheck everything,” Dr. Lefkovitz said. “When the bat comes, we won’t have much time.”

  Jake held back tears as he checked and rechecked the battery belt and wire connections that powered Gizmo. He was remembering gentle, little Hanuma, with his long gray hair and the gold tooth, waiting for him at the airport in Manaus. Jake had respected the no-nonsense approach Hanuma had taken with him. Throughout all their bantering in the taxi and while traveling upriver, there had always been a wisdom and great sweetness in Hanuma’s eyes and words.

  “Why did the bat have to stalk Hanuma?” Jake asked his father.

  “There are many predators—lions and tigers, some of the sharks, humans for that matter—who can sense a pecking order in another species. It has to have been watching us. We’ll never know for certain. It can hear our voices. The tones we use. It pro
bably knew Hanuma was high in the pecking order around here.”

  Jake felt a mixture of fear and vengeance. “It will come back tonight, won’t it, Dad?”

  “I think so,” his father said softly

  “Now I want us to settle the score,” Jake said slowly “I want us to get even.”

  Rasdyr and his father nodded. One look into Jakes eyes and they knew what anguish he was feeling.

  Dr. Lefkovitz, had given strict instructions for the men at the camp to keep the fires burning high and to cluster together until the night was over. He believed the effigies and noise and light would drive the bat to the bait on the riverwalk.

  “It’s like we’re in a trap within a trap,” Jake said. “That bat isn’t going to be happy until it kills us all. We’re already trapped at the camp.”

  For a while, Dr. Lefkovitz kept a Coleman lamp lit at the center of the trap. He and Rasdyr checked all the knots and pulleys. Jake kept Gizmo trained toward the opening and riverwalk where the bat could enter.

  “What if the trip rope doesn’t work?” Jake asked.

  “That thing wouldn’t think twice about charging all three of us.”

  “It’ll work,” Dr. Lefkovitz said.

  There were the sounds of something moving in the blackness of the riverwalk where the platform stretched out above the river and the light from the Coleman paled.

  “Monkeys,” Rasdyr said.

  Jake nodded. He could see the shapes clearly on Gizmo. They were small ones—several of them. Marmosets, perhaps, or a family of woollys.

  Dr. Lefkovitz held a machete ready. For the first time, Jake saw that his father was frightened. Rasdyr slid one of the drug-tipped darts into a blowpipe. He had already loaded several of the reserve pipes and had laid them out neatly in front of him, like a surgeon’s tools. Faint vapors from the sap had risen and mixed with the sweat on his face. He scratched with his long fingernails at the irritated skin on his cheeks and forehead.

  By three in the morning, Rasdyr appeared tired and in need of a nap. He had worked hard all day preparing the darts and carving the blowpipes. Occasionally a strong wind would blow off the river, and the jungle mist and fog would clear. Then the fires and lean-tos of the camp could be glimpsed far beneath them.