Gentry walked ahead. He stopped short of the crisscrossing bats and peered into the dark. With awful, kick-in-the-groin suddenness, the detective wished he had thought about what he’d seen in the subway. A moment later he saw the monster’s gaping mouth and serrated teeth inside the dark opening. He saw the ruby eyes beneath them.
The head was inverted.
The goddamn thing had been hanging upside down. Gentry had probably shot the bat in its fucking tail.
The detective raised his gun to fire again, but by then the giant bat had vanished. He holstered his weapon and ran into the laboratory. He had to duck bats as they wove to and fro.
“ Nancy!” he yelled. “ Nancy, are you all right?”
There was no answer. He half skidded, half splashed to a stop and knelt by the locker. The door was facing him. It fell open.
Joyce was bundled inside. She looked up at him, trembling, and he slipped his arms around her.
“It’s okay,” he said, hugging her. “It’s okay.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” she said, shivering. “Did you get her?”
“No,” he said, “but she’s gone.”
“Probably got tired. She’s very pregnant.”
“We can talk about this later,” Gentry said softly as he helped her out. “Let’s get you out of here.”
He had to work her from the tight spot in pieces-head, right shoulder, left shoulder, lower right leg, lower left leg, torso, hips. He held her close to him, warming her as they stood.
Gentry pulled Ramirez’s leather coat from the locker. It was soaked and he threw it aside. There was nothing to wrap her in.
Joyce turned toward the opening in the wall. “I thought I heard a shot and a cry,” she said.
“You did,” Gentry told her, “but I fucked up. She was hanging from something inside there. I only hit her foot or her tail.”
Joyce turned and touched his wet, unshaven cheek. “You didn’t fuck up. You saved my life.” Then she looked past him at Lowery. Her expression had told Gentry that she knew exactly what she’d see.
Gentry slid between them. “Let the medical people take care of the professor. I want to get you out of-”
A bat dove at him. Then another.
“What the hell?” he said.
“It’s the female,” Joyce said as she swatted at the bats. “She stopped wailing, but that doesn’t mean she’s quiet. She’s probably making her way back toward the subway.”
“Come on!” Gentry said as he hustled her toward the door.
As more and more bats resumed their attack, the detective was not optimistic about making it back down the stairs. Just getting into the hallway with Nancy was a nightmare of slipping on water and swatting at bats. He was trying to shield the woman. But the bats that had been streaming above when he arrived were attacking now. They had scattered before when he fired his gun, and he tried to frighten them again.
This time they weren’t buying.
Gentry had his left arm over Nancy. He pulled her close and used his body and coat to shield her as best as he could. She had her arms wrapped tightly around his waist, her damp head bent against his chest. He could feel her heart drumming. His own was getting up there too: they’d gone only a few yards down the corridor when Gentry realized they weren’t going to get much farther.The bats were really starting to pile on. He couldn’t see or hear, wasn’t even sure in which direction they were headed. And he felt like he was being hit from ankle to scalp with snapping rubber bands. Each bite made some part of him jump.
Finally, Gentry stopped, took off his coat, and started to wrap it around Nancy ’s head.
“You go!” he yelled. “Make a run for it!”
Joyce refused and pushed blindly at his coat to make him take it back; she stopped suddenly and desperately patted the coat. The top, on the left.
“What’s in here?” she asked.
“My radio-”
Joyce tore frantically at the coat to get it out. She fell to her knees, pulling at the coat with one hand while swatting at the bats with the other. Gentry dropped and helped her get it out.
He handed it to her then pulled the coat over them both.
“Turn it on!” she yelled.
“It’s on.”
“Louder!I want static, as much as you can get!”
Gentry took the slender radio. He held it close to his face, curling his arm around them both for protection, and turned it to talk. Then he pushed up the volume in order to generate feedback. After a moment he got a thunderous, seashore-breaker drone.
He gave the radio back to Nancy. “Now what?”
“We jam them!” she shouted as she took the radio and held it outside the garment.
The bats broke off their attack at once. They fluttered around aimlessly. When Nancy was sure the retreat would hold, she removed the coat.
“Okay,”she said. “Let’s get up and walk out of here.”
Gentry rose and helped her up. They started toward the stairs.It was astonishing.The bats would approach and then fly off, as though they were bouncing into a force field.
“It’s like you said about the tiger moth, isn’t it?” Gentry said. “High-frequency sounds interrupting the normal flow of information.”
“Not exactly,” Joyce said. “This isn’t blocking whatever the she-bat’s sending.It’s hiding it-confusing them.”
They hobbled ahead, bleeding from numerous puncture wounds. Gentry’s mind leaped from being proud of Nancy yet again, to thinking about the rabies shots they’d certainly have to undergo after being attacked, to focusing on the larger problem: how to stop the giant bat. If they didn’t do that soon, New York City would be destroyed in a matter of days.
The bats in the rotunda had gone back on the offensive, flying, clinging, and ripping at everyone who moved. The radio afforded Gentry and Joyce protection as they made their way to the exit; she left it behind with a museum official who was trying to get workers into a windowless office. She and Gentry ducked back under his coat.
Detective Anthony was still waiting across from the museum, his windows shut as bats poured from Central Park. Dogs were howling everywhere, and many were running free in the streets, no doubt driven wild by the ultrasonic cry of the she-bat. There were screams coming from people lying on the sidewalks, from windows of the apartments that lined Central Park West, from cars and buses. They had stopped or plowed into one another, into trees or hydrants, or had rolled up onto sidewalks. Bats had come in through open windows. Passengers were struggling to get them off.
There were loud cries to the right. As Joyce and Gentry crossed the street, the detective pulled the coat off his head and looked back. The skies high and low were full of bats. They were like layers of clouds, moving at different speeds, in different directions. Just north of Seventy-sixth Street, where the loud screams had come from, a cloud of bats had descended on a rooftop bat party. “Guano shelter” tents were ripped, and ghostly shapes flitted through the night as bats became tangled in the torn fabric.
Gentry opened the car door and helped Nancy in. A bat flew at him, and he whipped his coat around, smacking it to the ground. He stepped on the coat, then pulled it under his arm. The bat was crushed on the asphalt. Gentry took another look back.
The air was full of bats. It was like watching thousands of dark Ping-Pong balls blowing in a huge lotto tank. The creatures were moving everywhere and every way. The detective watched as some rooftop partygoers stumbled against the low brick wall. There was a horrified shriek as one man went over. He managed to grab a cement planter that ran along the edge of the roof; he dangled there while other guests attempted to pull him up. But the growing swarm of bats drove the rescuers back, and the man fell eleven stories to the sidewalk. He didn’t scream, but he hit the concrete with an audible crack.
Gentry slid into the back, behind the passenger’s seat. He slammed the door, catching an incoming bat as he did. The detective opened the door, let the bat drop out, and reshut it firmly.