Several hundred locals had gathered on the main street, had refused to obey Lt. Woloszyk’s orders to clear out, and now they were paying the full price. The bats were swarming the townspeople, citizens were down all over the place, and the bats were feasting on young and old, adult and child.
Bats now completely covered the cars of the law officers. Those inside could see nothing except the hideously fanged mouths of the bats.
“So much for the opinions of government experts,” Woloszyk muttered.
“We gotta do something to help those people out there, Lieutenant,” a deputy spoke from the back seat.
“I am certainly open to suggestions,”Woloszyk said, in a surprisingly calm voice.
“I guess that was a stupid thing to say.”
“No,” Woloszyk said. “Just being a good cop, that’s all.”
* * *
They sat in the den in shocked silence, listening to the scanner. The news was not good coming from the small town in the northern part of the parish. Johnny, Blair, and Mark could clearly hear the sounds of gunfire and the bone-chilling screaming of those citizens caught out in the open when the huge bats attacked. Holly had made certain the kids were in their room, engrossed in a movie, the volume turned up loud.
“I went through the academy with Stoker,” Mark said. “He was a good guy. Married. Two kids.”
Johnny had nothing to say about that. He had worked out in the field with a lot of good guys who had caught the Big Bullet. Usually you took a moment to strip them of any I.D. they might have been carrying and then kick a few rocks and a little dirt over them and kept on going.
The scanner fell silent for a moment, and Johnny could hear the faint sounds of the bats scratching around on the roof. The three adults all looked upward as the scratching sounds intensified, and then there was silence.
“Turn off the scanner,” Johnny said, standing up and listening intently. He then ran to the front porch and looked out through the heavy wire. The sky was dark with the shapes of bats, all of them heading away from Johnny’s house. “They’re leaving!” he called. “The bastards are heading east, toward the river.” He watched them for a moment as Mark and Blair came out to stand beside him.
“I certainly am not sorry to see them go,” Blair said. “I only wish they wouldn’t return.”
“Look, they’re turning,” Mark said. “Now they’re heading south.”
“They roost around here somewhere close,” Johnny said. “I just know they do. But I’ve gone over every map I could find of the parish. I’ve talked with people. There simply is no place that could shelter that many bats.”
“Look!” Blair said, pointing to the fading dark blot in the sky. “They’re splitting up, going in all directions. I wonder if they’re doing that so they won’t...?” Blair did not finish the question. She shook her head.
“So they won’t what?” Mark asked.
“It’s too absurd to even mention.”
“Mention it anyway” Johnny said.
“If they stayed together, in one huge ten acre dark blot in the sky, what would pick them up?”
“Radar,” Mark said. “You mean, you think...?”
“I told you it was too absurd to mention.”
Johnny remained silent. How could a bat know about modern day radar? Well, they used a form of it, didn’t they? Johnny knew that when flying, bats constantly emit a series of ultrasonic sounds, those sounds bounce off objects and are then picked up by the bats’ highly sophisticated ears. He knew that from that bounced signal, a bat could determine size, location, and movement. So then, could these bats not necessarily know, but suspect that humans might have the same capability? If so, that meant they were capable of reasoning. He sighed.
“What’s the matter?” Blair asked.
“What have your scientist friends at the lab been able to tell you about the brain of these mutant bats?”
“That it is much larger and much more complex than the brain of your average bat.”
“Capable of thinking, deducing, reasoning?”
“Possibly.”
“To what degree?”
“We don’t know.”
Johnny turned and looked past the den and dining room, into the kitchen. Skipper and June were scratching at the back door, wanting to go out. The bats were gone.
* * *
The governor insisted upon viewing the small town personally, even though it was night. His plane touched down about an hour after the bat attack. The pilot could see the dozens and dozens of flashing red and blue lights on the ground from miles away. Every ambulance within a seventy-five mile radius had been called out to deal with the mauled, maimed, dead, and dying residents of the town.
A local man gave the governor the use of his Lincoln Town Car during his stay. “I do not wish to speak with the press at this time,” the governor instructed his staff and security. “I will not speak with them until I receive a full assessment of the wounded and the dead. Keep them away from me.”
“That’s not going to be until morning, until daylight, Governor,” he was informed.
“Then find me a place to stay. I want to be here. We’ve got some hard decisions to make.”
The governor got a few hours of restless sleep and was back at the scene before dawn, speaking with Captain Alden, Colonel Jarrett, head of the Louisiana State Police, General Bancroft of the Louisiana National Guard, Sheriff Phil Young, and the sheriffs of the adjoining parishes.
“Two hundred dead from last night’s attack,” Captain Alden told him. “So far, that is.”
“How many hurt?” the governor asked.
“Just about the same number. And we’re running out of rabies vaccine for the victims.”
“Then get some in here. I don’t give a damn if you have to send armed patrolmen or guardsmen to where it can be found and take it by force. Just get it in here.”
“That won’t be necessary, Governor,” a spokesperson from the CDC, the Center for Disease Control out of Atlanta, said soothingly. “We have drug companies working around the clock. I have been assured that the vaccine will be here within the hour.”
“It better be,” the governor said grimly. “It goddamn well better be.” He looked at General Bancroft. “We still have that National Guard Special Forces unit in the New Orleans area?”
“Yes, sir. I ordered them mobilized last night. They’re ready to move.”
“Get them up here. Right now.”
“Yes, sir.” General Bancroft was only too happy to put some distance between himself and a very angry Cajun governor.
“All right,” the governor said, fixing his eyes on a group of government ‘bat experts’ an aide had waved over. “Let’s talk about evacuation.”
“If you evacuate this parish, the bats will simply move to another parish in search of food.” That opinion was shared by them all.
“Do we have any idea where these mutant bats are living, roosting, whatever the hell bats do?”
“No, sir. Not a clue. But we do believe the main colony is located in another parish and fly into the parish for food.”
“Why don’t they attack people in the parish where they stay?”
“We don’t know.”
The governor walked a few yards away from the group to get his temper under control. One of his most trusted aides joined him.
“Bobby,” the governor said, “there are thousands and thousands of huge, mutant, blood-drinking, flesh-eating bats living somewhere around here, and we can’t find them. That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“When they return to their roosting place—wherever that might be—they split up into small groups. That was observed last night by three people living just south and west of here.”
“You telling me these creatures can think?”
“It appears that way, sir.”
“Who are these people who watched the bats split up?”
“A state trooper named Mark Hayden, a retired Army colonel by
the name of Johnny MacBride, and a vet who instructs at LSU name of Blair Perkins. They’re all very creditable people.”
“I know Blair. She killed that redneck rancher a few years back when she had to quarantine his herd and he pulled a gun on her. I knew her whole family. Her grandmother was a Robicheaux from around Broussard. Good people. We’ll go see them after a bit. We’ll go over there quietly, Bobby. Understand?”
“Yes, sir. Quietly.”
Forty-five minutes later, the governor, his chief aide, and his bodyguard were sitting in the den of Johnny MacBride’s home. Captain Alden had briefed the governor about Johnny, but that was really unnecessary, for the governor was a very good judge of character and it had taken him only a few moments of conversation to size Johnny up as a very competent person, a man who struck right at the core of anything, and a man who had absolutely no politician in him at all. That was refreshing. To a degree.
“So you think the bats nest close by your place, Mr. MacBride?”
“Johnny, Governor. Just Johnny. Yes, I do. Within a five to ten mile radius.”
“Interesting. Blair, you think these bats can reason?”
“To a degree, yes, I do, Governor. But I am not an expert on bat behavior.”
“Finally, someone who admits to not knowing what these damn bats might do next,” the governor said with a smile.
“What’s the death count in town?” Johnny asked.
“So far, two hundred dead and about that many hurt,” the governor replied.
“The news should be interesting this evening.”
The governor picked up on the dryness in Johnny’s voice and looked at him, a slight smile on his lips. “You can bet that certain members of the press would just love to figure out a way to blame this situation on me. They’ll never be able to blame the bats on me, but if I don’t do something damn quickly to resolve this situation, and do it right, they’ll be all over me like white on rice.”
Blair leaned forward. “Why did you come to see us, Governor?”
“Just like your daddy, Blair. Right to the point. Frankly, Blair, I came to see not you, but the man that everyone I’ve spoken with says has more brass on his ass than Superman.”
Blair laughed and Johnny grimaced.
“Oh, don’t deny it, Johnny,” the governor said. “If you were in uniform you’d be top-heavy with all the awards and decorations you earned over the years. You made full Bird Colonel at a young age. You speak a half a dozen languages and a half a dozen dialects. I know for a fact that when you announced your retirement from the army a couple of this nation’s top spy organizations nearly herniated themselves in their haste to sign you on. When these bats came in, you fortified your home and made ready to fight them.”
Johnny shrugged. “I felt I could beat them. I still feel that way.”
“Johnny, on one side, I’m under pressure to evacuate the parish. On the other side, I have people telling me that if I do that, the bats would just move to another parish in search of food. What would you do in my shoes?”
Johnny didn’t hesitate. “I think first-off I’d pray a lot, Governor. Then I would outfit teams and launch a search effort that could quickly cover every inch of this parish. These bats come in together, and they leave together. That tells me they are roosting together... somewhere. I’d declare this parish a no-flyover area and ground all fixed wing aircraft. Then I’d use helicopters and take this parish grid by grid, inch by inch, and find those bats.”
“And then...?”
“I’d destroy them.”
“How?”
“That would depend on where they’re located. But it’s probably going to end up being fire.”
“Napalm?”
“I’d think so. It would have to be very sudden, for if just one breeding pair got away, the horror would return in a few years.”
“What would we be looking for?”
“Buildings. Long deserted and out of the way.”
Bobby said, “There is nothing like that in this parish, Mr. MacBride. I’m from Catahoula. I used to hunt in this parish and I know every inch of this . . .” He stopped, his brow wrinkling.
“What’s wrong, Bobby?” the governor asked.
“The government land.”
“What government land?”
“The government land over past Buffalo Bayou . . .”
“That’s the area you told me about,” Johnny said to Blair.
“But there is nothing in there.”
“Yes, there is,” Bobby said. “But it’s been abandoned so long people have forgotten about it.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Bobby?” the governor asked.
“It was a big logging operation at the turn of the century, Governor. Then in the early twenties, gas and oil was discovered. But the wells played out in about ten years. A town was built in there. Maybe a dozen or so buildings. I doubt if it would be visible from the air due to the trees and brush. Trees can grow a lot in seventy years.”
“And it’s government land?” Johnny asked.
“Yeah. All of it. Thousands of acres.”
“The Buffalo Bayou Refuge,” the governor said. “I know what you’re talking about now.” He shook his head. “Now we really have problems if that’s where the bats are roosting.” He looked over at Johnny, who was smiling.
“The area has probably been declared wetlands or some other sort of protected federal land,” Johnny said. “And if there are oil and gas wells in there, capped, of course, that lets out the use of napalm ... or fire altogether. This has been a pretty dry spring. We’d have fires burning out of control.”
“It would take an act of congress, literally,” the governor said, “to get permission to burn that area. And that’s just not going to happen.”
“I just thought of something,” Bobby said. “I had someone telling me, I can’t remember who it was, that they knew poachers who used to really hunt that area. But they haven’t seen a deer or a bear in there in a couple of years. As a matter of fact, people have been bitching and griping for a couple of years about the lack of deer in this entire area.”
“Bingo,” Johnny said. “The bats have been feeding off of wildlife. When they exhausted that, that’s when they turned to humans for food.”
“These are mutant bats, for sure,” Blair said, “but they’re still vampire bats. The smell would give their roosting grounds away.”
“The smell?” the governor asked.
“An ammonialike odor. They drink blood and their urine has an ammonialike smell. And the floors of those buildings would be knee-deep in guano.”
“Knee deep in shit?” the governor blurted.
“Yes,” Blair told him. “And quite possibly that guano will be filled with a form of maggot-type worm that seem to thrive in it. They’re dangerous, in that they can bite and burrow under the skin and cause terrible skin lesions that are difficult and sometimes impossible to heal. The flesh around the sore literally rots away. But of more importance is this: rabies can be contracted not only from a bat bite, but also by an airborne virus. As to the number of bats that might be present in this colony, well, I’ve seen bats emerge from bat caves at the rate of five thousand to ten thousand per minute, lasting for as long as half an hour.”
The governor shook his head at just the thought of hundreds of thousands of mutant bats.
“I thought you said you weren’t a bat expert?” the governor’s bodyguard said.
“I’m not. But I have studied them.”
“All right, people, let’s get moving. We have things to do. You won’t say anything about this suspected location to anyone?” the governor asked.
“Not a word,” Johnny said. “The last thing we need is a bunch of amateurs stomping around in here and getting themselves killed, or stirring up the bats and making them move. Just when we might have them located.”
“The latter was my primary concern,” the governor admitted. “The well-being of fools has never been very
high on my list of priorities.”
After the governor and party had left, Blair said, “I think the governor was hoping you’d volunteer to aid in this bat hunt, Johnny.”
He grinned at her. “First thing you learn in the army, Blair: Never volunteer for anything.”
Four
The story of the bat attack on the residents of the small delta town was page one in every major newspaper in the country and the lead-off story on the evening national news on every network. Both Johnny and Blair thought the reporter they listened to was going to break down and weep openly when he spoke of the brutality of the police in handling those infected with rabies (no mention was made about Carrington’s practically begging the cops to shoot those infected people—naturally). On another network, the commentator spoke glowingly of the reporter who had gotten killed but said nothing about the trooper who had died or of the city patrolman with half his face eaten off. The third network handled the story fairly and the anchor did his best to present the tragedy in an unbiased manner. The all-news network presented the story without histrionics, frills or innuendo.
Johnny clicked off the set just as the phone rang. Bobby from the governor’s office. “That land we spoke of earlier today, Mr. MacBride?”
“Yes.”
“It was sold several weeks ago to a foreign investment company. And it’s all smooth and legal. Looks like it’s going to take several days, at least, to track down just who owns it and probably several more days, or longer, we’re afraid, to secure permission to even set foot on the property. It does not look good at this time. By the way, a person representing the investment company was sent in several weeks ago to post new signs all around the property. He has not been seen or heard from since that time.”
“The bats got him.”
“That’s what we think.”
“The governor has contacted several persons in Washington, rather highly placed in government. They say to stay off the property. We have no legal right to set foot on any of it, much less destroy it.”
“That’s just great.”
“Yes, isn’t it?”
“Well, thank you, Bobby.”
“You’re welcome. The governor thought you should be informed. Good night, Mr. MacBride.”
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