Gentry took her hand. “I’m very, very sorry about Professor Lowery.”
“Me too.” Joyce looked back at Gentry. “But I’m responsible for this, you know.”
“For what?”
“For all this. The destruction, the death.”
“How?”
“By killing the male.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“No,” Joyce said, “it’s true. I should have expected it. I always believed bats were capable of feeling emotion, and I should have taken that into consideration before I started cutting the male apart. I certainly shouldn’t have left the body where the female could find it.”
“You couldn’t have known she’d do that, or that she’d find you. She was in a subway miles away.”
“You’re thinking like a human, not like a bat-”
“Yeah, well, that’s always been one of my problems.”
Joyce looked at him for a moment more. Then she pressed her lips together and looked down.
“Look, Nancy,” Gentry said, “I’m just trying to help you put this in perspective. Everyone’s been under incredible pressure. We all did what we thought was right, up and down the line. And as far as I’m concerned, you’ve done more things faster, better, and righter than anyone could have in your position.”
She continued to look down. She looked like she wanted to cry. Gentry wished she would, just let it all out. He had, a couple of hours after Bernie Michaelson had been shot. It was like a good rain, cleaning away all kinds of grime. Some of it about Bernie, some of it about losing his wife, some of it about things even Father Adams in the Chaplain Unit was still trying to figure out. But he’d obviously needed it.
As they were approaching Twenty-third Street, something came through Detective Anthony’s radio that caught Gentry’s ear. He grabbed it and turned up the volume.
“…at the Prolly House on Twenty-third and Seventh. Repeat: the giant bat is attacking the Prolly House at Twenty-third and Seventh. Request immediate assistance.”
Anthony didn’t have to be told. He turned left and raced toward the shelter for battered women.
Thirty-Five
They were too late.
Several police cars and fire trucks were pulled up in front of the three-story center for abused women. The cars were parked on the sidewalk so police and firefighters could get inside without being exposed to the bats outside for very long. A hose hooked to a fire hydrant had been used to douse the bats inside while the women and children were evacuated into ESU recovery vans. Once the bats were down, police officers with heavy-duty vests and helmets kept them down permanently using shovels. Deeper inside the building, police were using pressurized water extinguishers to knock the creatures from the air. When word came through that all the visitors and staff had been evacuated and accounted for, the officers had begun using scatterguns on the doused bats.
The giant bat had left shortly before the first police car had arrived. Around that time, the police reported, all the bats in the area had ceased their aggressive behavior, including bats that had gotten inside the shelter. They appeared frantic and disoriented but were nonviolent. Reports from other precincts indicated that the bats had calmed down all across Manhattan and were being exterminated by any and every means possible.
While Gentry headed into assist the other officers, Joyce hurried toward the vans to talk to the evacuees.
Up and down Twenty-third Street, New Yorkers were literally trying to get back on their feet. Those who could walk were helping those who could not. Many people were just sitting where they’d fallen, staring. Joyce imagined that the same scene was being repeated everywhere from Eighty-first Street to wherever the bat was nesting.
That, and the quiet. There were occasional shouts for help and moans of pain. But the fact that they could be heard only emphasized the silence that had settled on the city. There were no cars or growling buses, no air traffic, no bicyclists shouting for people to make way. There were no car radios or boom boxes, no loud conversations or kids shouting to other kids or the rattling coin cups of the homeless. There was no construction, no one selling hot watches from a briefcase or bundles of socks from a cardboard box. Save for the countless sirens and alarms, the stillness was abnormal, like during a blizzard.
New York sounded like Nancy felt. Numb. She still couldn’t believe what had happened back at the museum, that Professor Lowery was dead. She was glad she had these interviews to do, the problem of finding and destroying the bat to wrestle with.
According to the only adult eyewitness, a woman who had been in the playroom with several children, the creature had come through a skylight on the top floor and went right to that room. The woman said that while she crouched with the kids in a corner, trying to protect them but fully expecting to die, the bat ignored them all. She said that after looking around the room for several moments, the bat spread its wings, knocking over furniture and shelves. Then it wailed loudly, returned to the hallway, and flew back through the skylight. It was in the shelter for less than a minute.
One of the children, a young boy named Chaka, got up from one of the benches inside the van. He walked over to Joyce and said that the bat looked mean but wasn’t mean.
“That’s a pretty silly way to be, isn’t it?” Joyce asked. She took his hand.
“You’re cold,” he said.
“Very cold. I got sprinkled on.”
“How?”
“Water was putting out a fire. And I forgot my umbrella.”
Chaka smiled.
“Can you tell me a little more about the bat?” Joyce asked.
“It’s big.”
“It is. But it didn’t hurt anyone?”
Chaka shook his head.
A little girl from one of the benches said, “It reminded me of Oscar the Grouch.”
Joyce looked at the petite blonde. “Let’s see. That’s one of the Muppets fromSesame Street, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
Chaka said, “It looked mean, but it didn’t do anything bad to anyone. It just looked sad.”
Joyce thanked him, thanked everyone, then left the van. She chewed on the problem as she walked toward the town-house.
The bat hadn’t come to feed. She hadn’t come to give birth. But she had left the subway searching forsomething and wailed or wept when she didn’t get it.
What?
Joyce hoped the answer was in the playroom.
She walked inside. Dead, hurt, or unconscious bats were being swept aside with brooms. She made her way carefully down the wet corridor to the stairs in the back. On the third floor, she found herself standing under the shattered skylight. The playroom was directly ahead. She walked in.
The room smelled of wet fur. There were crushed toys and snacks, an upended TV, tattered sleeping bags, and overturned racks of videotapes and video games. Joyce stood with her hands on her hips, looking around.
Gentry walked in a minute later. “I think we got most of the bats,” he announced. “The cops’re shoveling them into Hefty bags. How were the people you talked to?”
“Pretty shaken up. Are you sure everyone is safe? No one’s missing?”
“Not a one,” Gentry said. “I talked to the police downstairs. The two ESU officers at the Twenty-third Street stop got knocked silly when she burned through the station and flew up the stairs, but she didn’t attack them.”
Joyce shook her head. “Then I just don’t understand.”
“Maybe she was conserving her strength. Maybe I hurt her when I fired those rounds back at the museum, and she came up to rest, get some fresh air.”