My ears rang. Coyote scream, a cry for help. It almost had gone wrong, in the worst possible way. I nodded. Yeah, I knew Murphy’s Law.
Walter looked, suddenly, older than his years. “We take your point, Hap.”
Hap turned to Scotty. “Scotty me boy? Any miscalculations on your watch?”
“Yeah, lost track of a guy’s dose rate once. He went over the limit. Anybody doses over again, on my watch, I go back to surfing and the sharks.” Scotty glared. “That answer your question, Miller?”
“Honorably.” Hap turned to Soliano. “Hector? Miscalculations?”
“On occasion. I am human.”
“Me too! That’s why I live in utter mortal dread of screwing the pooch, so to speak.” Hap patted his T-shirt. “Homer and I know you don’t wanna screw the pooch when you’re in charge of the gents.”
“Who are the gents?” Soliano asked.
“Mr. Alpha, Mr. Beta, Mr. Gamma. The gentlemen like to play real rough.” Hap smiled. “Let me get philosophical on y’all for a minute. Ionizing radiation is by nature unstable, and people are like radionuclides. Unstable. It’s like you said, Hector, we’re human. So we jess cain’t help it — we gotta eff up, now and again. And when you put your unstable people in charge of your unstable atoms…” He rolled his eyes. “Ooops.”
It struck me that Hap had not asked about any screwups on Ballinger’s watch. Then again, I guessed we were living one right now.
21
Walter and I were making space in his suite to set up our lab when someone pounded on the door.
I opened it to the sound of shrieking. The girl was inches from me. My height. Weedy. Eyes wild. I took a step back. Shrieks came again, somewhere outside.
Walter came over. The girl grabbed his hand. “Hurry, Grandfather. Trouble.”
I followed them outside and down the walkway that led from our annex.
Again, the shrieking.
I broke into a run, passing them both.
There were paths leading in four different directions, and steps going up a level and down a level. I glanced down at the pool. Nobody there. A woman in a peach uniform rushed past and I stopped her but before I could ask she said “aqui aqui” and took off. I followed.
The path rounded the hip of a building and dropped down into cascading palm gardens on a grassy hillside. I stared in some wonder at the stream bubbling down to the pond, which was carpeted in water lilies. I thought I heard a frog croak.
I hurried down.
There was a good-sized crowd under the palms — in bathing suits, shorts, sundresses, housekeeping uniforms — guests and staff shoulder-to-shoulder all pressing in on something and then, as one, heaving backward in a renewed hail of shrieks. I picked out Milt Ballinger’s bald head, twisting to have a look at the bare thonged behind of a blond woman tanned to mahogany.
I tightened my robe and wormed into the crowd.
I saw bits of green between sunburnt shoulders and Hawaiian shirts, as if these people had gathered in mass heat-stroke delusion to stare at the lawn. The hot air smelled of sweat and coconut oil. I tried to work my way through the throng but a mahogany-chested blond man — the match to Milt’s thonged woman — blocked my way. He suddenly noticed me. “Kleine fledermaus,” he said, and popped me up to the front of the crowd.
I thought I was the one with heat stroke. It followed me, I thought.
No question of mirage, this time.
The bat canted in the grass, one leathery wing dug into the thatch, the other wing half-folded. The little body was raw with sores. One translucent ear was bent and cemented to the head by a yellowish crust. The creature had left a mark of its progress, a thin black trail of feces that culminated, where it now crouched, in a red-tinged seep. Suddenly the mouth opened to reveal a bloodied tooth hanging from its gums. The bat emitted a shrill cry.
The crowd cried back.
I saw, at the far end of the crowd, Walter and the girl. He had a hand on her shoulder. I wanted to go over and ask if he thought it was the same bat we’d seen on the saltpan, if it gave him a shiver like it gave me, but at that moment Scotty pushed through the crowd.
“Get back, get back, raus everybody, vaya vaya, merci people, get yourselves the heck outta the way!” Scotty ran one hand through his blond hair, spiking it, and with his other hand raised his cell phone. “Jasper, get yourself into a suit now and bring a Geiger and a collection box…” He looked around. “Some kinda gardens. Next to the pool.”
The bat opened its mouth and the dangling tooth dropped like a tiny spear into the grass. A Japanese woman began taking pictures. Scotty tried to block her view and a Japanese man complained.
Soliano brushed past me, whispering to a white-haired ranger.
Passing along the cover story, I guessed. We are, officially, an EPA team monitoring the health of the local ecosystem.
“Show’s over, folks,” the ranger shouted, flapping his hands, and the gawkers reluctantly fell back.
Scotty was on the phone again, standing sentinel between the bat and the departing crowd, sparing more than a few glances for the retreating behinds.
I moved to Soliano, whose attention was fixed on the bat. “We saw a bat last night.”
He flinched.
“Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“It is just…” He touched his forehead. “I am reminded.”
“Of what?”
“A dying dog. And the heat.”
I asked, anxious to figure out Soliano, “What happened?”
He angled toward me, although his eyes never left the bat. “I was a boy in a family of wealth. Our estate was in the mountains, for the coolness. I was driven to school by a chauffeur. A small sedan, so as not to draw attention. The windows were tinted, so that no one might see inside. My family wished to avoid trouble. Once, unfortunately, trouble found us on the drive to school. A man and a dog lay in the road, blocking our way. They had been shot. Bandits. My chauffeur was fearful. He was fearful to turn around and take me home because his job was to deliver me to school. He was fearful to bring the wounded man into the car…all the blood. He was fearful to get out and move the man out of the way…bandits, he feared. He was fearful of the dog, which showed its teeth. My chauffeur could not drive around the man and the dog. The road was narrow, ditches on each side. He was fearful to drive over the man, afraid for his own mortal soul. The consequence was that we waited in the car. It grew stifling.” Sweat bloomed, now, on Soliano’s face. “At last the man appeared to have died. My chauffeur drove onward. I felt a bump. That was all.” Soliano made his gesture, hand to brow. “I looked out the back window. The man was crushed. But the dog, remarkably, lifted its head. I saw the teeth. I knew I was going to have dreams of those teeth. The sun must have lighted the teeth but I feared it was God’s doing. I thought the dog had been resurrected to exact revenge because we did not act.”
After an excruciating half-minute in the stifling vacuum, I had to say something. “You were just a kid.”
Soliano gave a curt nod.
“The chauffeur was in charge.”
Another nod.
The bat opened its eyes. They were a solid milk of cataracts.
Soliano flicked aside his khaki shirttail, reached into his waistband holster, and brought out a small pistol. He fired and the bat somersaulted backward, leaving a new trail of blood. It did not move again.
This time, I said nothing. He’d done the right thing — people had to be protected, and the creature surely needed to be put out of its misery — but I felt I was intruding on Soliano’s peculiar path to action.
“Hector.” Scotty was suddenly with us. “You got a lab in Vegas can do a necropsy?” He eyed the carcass. “Looks a whole lot like ARS.”