Vespers

Thirty-Three

The door of Professor Lowery’s laboratory shuddered violently, and the room grew dark as more and more black shapes covered the frosted glass. The back wall of the lab was coming apart, and Nancy Joyce looked up while she screamed at God to give her a break. She continued to look up when she saw something. Then she took a quick look at the lab table and ran toward it.

“Yes,” she said.

“Nannie, come back!” Lowery yelled.

“In a minute!”

“What are you going to do?” Ramirez yelled.

She snatched the burner from the lab table. “I’m going to set the coat on fire!”

“The coat?” Ramirez said.

“Don’t!” Lowery said. “The smoke will-”

“Start the sprinklers on the ceiling,” she interrupted. “The spray will put the fire out before we choke. The cold and the wet should also ground the little vespers if they get in.”

“You totally rule,” Ramirez said.

Joyce fired up the etna and crouched by the door. The rattling on the frosted glass pane and the mousy squealing of the bats were maddening, but at least they drowned out the sound of the crumbling plaster. She touched the flame to the lab coat.

It didn’t burn.

“You fire-resistant son of a bitch!” she yelled.

Bats began to poke through and around the fabric. Muzzles, claws, wings. Joyce pulled over the swivel chair, stood under the sprinkler sensor, and held the flame to it.

“Comeon!”

The first three bats made it under the door. They flew at Ramirez and he jumped under the desk, startling Heidi; he nearly impaled himself on her scalpel before she was able to pull it back. Snuggling toward her, Ramirez reached up around the front of the desk, slipped off the mouse pad, and held it almost like a Ping-Pong paddle. He used it to swat at the bats as they attacked. Heidi was bravely trying to slash at the bats as they darted in.

In the back of the lab the hole was big enough for the bat to fit her head through. She was using both claws now to hack at the wall. Bats began to fly through there just as the laboratory’s two sprinklers came on. They sprayed the room with a cool, sturdy shower that caused the small bats to break off their attack and flutter around in confusion.

“Even better,” Joyce muttered.

The water droplets were interfering with the bats’ echolocation. Joyce stepped down from the chair and sidled up to Lowery. She kept the burner in case she needed it. The room was quiet for a moment. In that moment of calm Joyce wished the professor would say something about what she’d just done. Nothing effusive. A “well done” would do it.

A moment later a door-sized section of the rear wall fell with a horrible crack. It sent dust billowing up into the water; it fell as pasty rain that covered the giant bat as she eased into the opening.

She came in with her folded left wing first, followed by her tawny body and then her right wing. She turned to face the room and spread her wings wide. As she did, Joyce moved into the room to get a better look at her lower belly.

It was extremely distended. The bat was pregnant.

The giant’s head moved slowly toward the table, her nose wrinkling as she sniffed the air. After a moment she saw the male. Folding her wings, she crawled over to him. Joyce stepped toward the door to give her room. A chair and a stainless steel surgical table were knocked over as the bat approached. Lowery remained by the locker, trembling in the cold spray. Nearly a dozen small bats were hiding from the water and a few were flying above the spray. No more bats had entered the laboratory. In the distance a fire siren sounded.

The giant bat reached the table. She spread her wings and hopped up beside the other giant. She folded her wings again and dipped toward the face of the still, silent creature.

Joyce rubbed water from her eyes and watched the bat closely. There was no consensus among zoologists as to whether monogamous bats “felt” anything for their mates. They cared for their young but not for elderly bats; any sense of family, of community, seemed to revolve around the survival of the species. Professor Lowery had always been a student of the “survival-only” school. Joyce didn’t share his sense of human superiority or bat inferiority, whichever it was.

She wished there were some way other than this to settle the debate.

Bats continued to slap against the outside of the frosted glass. Once in a while a bat in the laboratory would fly at one of the occupants, only to be driven away by the water. Now there were screams coming from other rooms. Joyce didn’t want to think about what was happening there. The thick, thick swarms. The bloodletting. The death.

The head of the giant female was facing down. Her ears were turned toward the male. Joyce watched intently; she was strangely detached from the danger she was in.

How many days and nights had they been together?Joyce asked herself.

The dead bat was more than just the female’s partner, her brother, and the father of her unborn pup. To the female, the sound of his heart and his breathing would be as familiar as her own. The closeness of his body would be the only warmth she’d ever known. He would have led her to food supplies and water and shelter and protected their nest from intruders. To the female, the dead bat might have been the greatest part of life itself.

The giant bat crept back a step and threw her wings out grandly. The right wing hit the wall behind the table, crushing the second fire extinguisher and shattering the emergency light above. Joyce turned up the burner. The long flame sizzled as water fell through it. In the hissing orange glow she saw the giant bat turn toward her. Spray from the sprinklers washed over the bat’s face and wings and dark fur. The bat’s gem-red eyes fell on her and on Lowery. Then the animal’s mouth pulled wide and turned upward and Joyce heard a sound she’d never heard from a bat or any other creature. It started low, like a moan, then grew louder and higher until Joyce had to put the burner down and cover her ears. Lowery dropped the fire extinguisher and it rolled away. Even with her palms pressed tightly against them, the shriek knifed through her ears, shattering the glass in the cabinets, until it finally passed from the audible to the inaudible.

The bat remained on the table, her mouth drawn open, the silent scream stirring the other bats from their hiding places.

The cry caused the frosted glass of the door to explode. The bats raced in, the crush causing some of them to become impaled on broken fragments that were still in the frame. They filled the room, flying in every direction, distracted by the water falling from above. A few, flying under the others and protected from the spray, started biting at Joyce. She dropped the burner, which rolled away and died in a puddle. A moment later she lost her footing on the wet tile floor and landed hard on her back. She managed to flop onto her belly to protect her face. Bats bit her back, neck, and legs.

“Nannie-”

She looked ahead.

Lowery was lying several feet away at the foot of the locker. The scientist was curled on his left side in a fetal position, his arms wrapped around his head. Bats covered his side and hands.

“Nannie!”

He was reaching blindly for something.

The fire extinguisher. It had fallen over and rolled several feel away.

The woman scrambled across the slippery floor. As she did, bats gathered on her, biting and scratching. She’d been nipped by bats before, though not by as many or so often. She did what she’d learned long ago to do on cold nights: relax. It didn’t lessen the prickling pain, but it kept her from jerking this way and that each time a bat nipped or clawed.

As Joyce neared the fire extinguisher, the giant bat suddenly leaped down. The floor wobbled as she landed. In almost the same movement she slammed her right hook into Lowery’s back, dragging him across the wet floor as she turned toward Joyce. The ivory white claw penetrated the professor’s right shoulder amid a fountain of blood; he writhed and pulled at it but the she-bat didn’t seem to notice. After a moment he went limp.

The bat raised her other hook.

There wasn’t time to think. Joyce was moments from being impaled. Rolling toward the bat, she grabbed the fire extinguisher. The enormous bat hopped toward her as Joyce lay on her back and turned the nozzle up and sprayed the contents into the bat’s face.

The giant staggered back, still holding Professor Lowery. Joyce fired again, this time into her mouth. The other bats instantly broke off their attack, flying back to shelter out of the rain.

Joyce looked at Lowery. Blood was pouring from his body. His arms and legs were limp.

“Marc!” she cried.

“Yeah!”

“Get outnow! ”

The young man slid from under the desk, pulling the reluctant Heidi with him. He continued to hold her hand as he helped her to her feet. He pushed her ahead of him and looked back at Joyce.

“Go!I’ll hold her back!”

“I’ll get help!” he said.

He ran out, and Joyce turned back to the giant bat. The bat had pulled her claw from Professor Lowery and was shaking her head violently. The water was washing the foam away. Joyce hit her again.

The bat stumbled back against the sink, her great wings stiffening, her body deflating as she exhaled.

Joyce knew that wasn’t going to hold the bat much longer. She also didn’t want to run. The thing would chase her through the museum where other people might be injured. Firing one more blast of foam, Joyce slung her arm behind her and threw the fire extinguisher at the bat. It hit the creature in the left forearm. Then, turning to her left, Joyce reached for the handle of the locker door. She yanked it open, stood, and squeezed in sideways. She took a wire hanger from a hook, slipped it through one of the vents in the door, and pulled it shut.

It was dry in here, though water dripped from her hair into her ears and mouth. She began to tremble from the cold and ended up crying with fear and the horror of what had happened to Professor Lowery.

Joyce listened. As she did, her mind beat up on her.

Lowery is dead.

She breathed rapidly and the locker warmed.

I should have done what he told me.

The dark made everything seem louder, closer. She heard the flap of the bat’s wings, like someone shaking out a rug. She couldn’t tell whether or not it was coming closer.

No. That wouldn’t have made any difference. Two fireextinguishers wouldn’t have helped.

She heard shouts from downstairs.

You did the right thing.

Then there was silence, but only for a moment. Suddenly the world turned sideways as the locker was wrenched away from the wall and dragged loudly across the laboratory floor. A moment later the top and bottom of the metal cabinet slammed hard against something. There was a brief respite, the locker tilted farther, and then it was slammed again-

The hole in the wall. The locker was being pulled against it.

Joyce’s breath came faster as panic gripped her. She thought of the deer in the tree, the bicyclist carried into the tunnel, the man swept from the train platform at Christopher Street.

The bat was trying to take her away.