Vespers Read online

  Adrienne stood there, not moving, waiting to see what would happen.

  A moment later the square door on the top of the car exploded in, shattering the lights, throwing the car into darkness, andthunking hard on the floor. The panel ricocheted into her left leg, gashing it just above the knee. The hot pain made Adrienne superalert. She swore and pushed away from the wall.

  The car continued to descend as warm air spilled in through the opening. The young woman looked over at the lighted panel. She reached for the red emergency button.

  She never got to it.

  Something fell into the car. It was large and humid and it soaked up sound. Adrienne could no longer hear the whoosh of the air or the pings of the floor or anything but her own rapid breath. She also couldn’t see the panel. Something had blacked it out. All she saw was creeping darkness, ripples of black, then dark brown, then black again.

  Then there was red. Directly in front of her. Two fierce orbs that looked like warning lights but couldn’t be, because what would they be doing right in front of her?

  Adrienne turned to the right and reached out again, frantically trying to find the panel. She touched something that felt like satin. It was thin and soft and rippling. It was also moving closer. The woman wondered what the hell could have fallen through-

  As the elevator eased to the bottom of the shaft, Adrienne suddenly felt a terrible pressure under each armpit. She stopped moving. Shecouldn’t move. It reminded her of when she was a kid on crutches-only the crutches were reversed. The pointy end was being driven up. She seemed to rise from her feet, but only for a moment. The pressure suddenly exploded into pain that obliterated the hurt in her leg. The nuclear fire raced up her shoulders to her neck, then down her arms to each fingertip. The awful heat ran its course in an instant, waking every nerve along the way. Then it blasted back up through her shoulders again, more intensely than before. She felt bone tear from sinew along her upper back and then something ripped through the flesh there. The pain was so severe that she would have given anything-including her life-to make it go away.

  As Adrienne rose, her body quivered violently from her toes to the back of her head. Tides of heat and cold rushed over her in succession, and her heart slapped erratically against her chest. Her mouth fell open in a silent scream. The pain turned her vision swirling red-black to white and her throat filled with saliva and blood.

  And then, mercifully, she died.

  Twenty-Four

  Joyce and Gentry stopped at the small New Paltz police station to tell them about the dead sheep. Sergeant Katherine Mintz said she appreciated the visit, and after asking what the two were doing at the landfill-they told her they were trying to solve an old mystery about Dr. Lipman’s bat-Mintz informed them that a farmer, Brian Silverman, had called to report the sheep missing two hours before. Gentry asked if Silverman had heard or seen anything. Mintz said he hadn’t; no bleating, no truck racing away, no sounds of a struggle. He simply went outside to feed the animals and they were gone.

  Gentry also used the phone to call the Emergency Service Unit in Manhattan South. Joyce listened in on an extension. Lieutenant Kilar was still in the field, but Gentry learned from Sergeant Terry that the second team had been able to retrieve the bodies of the unit members as well as the vic without incident. Power remained shut down on the subway line when several small bats were spotted along the corridor. Al Doyle went in with a third ESU group and dealt with the bats according to the book: hairspray and a tennis racket. The bats were zapped with hair spray, which locked their fine-membraned wings. Then they were swatted with tennis rackets. In all, thirty-seven bats were destroyed. The MTA, the ESU, and Doyle then jointly decided that the crime scene status would remain in effect on the Number 1 track while it was searched for any additional bats. But the adjacent Number 2 track could resume operation. According to Sergeant Terry, Lieutenant Kilar was still convinced that the vic had been murdered by a person and not by a bat. The sergeant said they’d know more after the medical examiner had completed his autopsy on the man. Joyce felt a little sorry for Kilar. After the autopsy, everything he thought he knew about the case would come under serious reevaluation. Especially when, as Gentry had suggested, they compared notes with Chris Henry about the autopsy on Barbara Mathis.

  After picking up drive-through fast food, Joyce and Gentry got back on the road. Joyce wanted to go back to Manhattan instead of the Bronx. She was tired, but she wanted to be in the city if anything happened with the giant bat. If it was okay with Gentry, she said she didn’t have a problem crashing on the floor; it couldn’t be any less comfortable than some of the cold fields and rock ledges she’d camped on. Gentry said he had no problem with that.

  They were silent for most of the ride back. Gentry had opened the windows and turned on the news, and they listened to reports about “the subway serial killer.” Police Commissioner Veltre speculated that it was a homeless “tunnel person” who had massacred other tunnel people deep under Grand Central Station, attacked the man at Christopher Street, and was still on the loose. Extra buses were being put on for people who didn’t want to ride the subways. Teams of police officers were being assigned to all the Manhattan subway stops for people who did. Gentry remarked that the police were making all the right moves for what they thought the problem was. Unfortunately, Joyce pointed out, if the bats behaved as they had elsewhere, those moves would be utterly ineffective.

  They also listened to distressingly lighthearted reports about the “batfestation” in the West Village. Reporters had apparently bought the idea that they were stirred up by the serial killer who was prowling the subways.

  Joyce wondered what they would say if she told them it was a giant bat. How many of them would believe her? Probably none. She still had trouble believing it herself. And as anxious as Joyce actually was to see the thing, to study a new breed of bat, the power of this creature-or creatures-terrified her. It wasn’t just the physical strength she feared. The mere presence of a large bat would not have made the smaller bats go wild. Most bats were cowards; a large creature of any kind would have driven them away. What worried her was if a giant bat could communicate with the smaller bats, actuallyinstruct them to attack people who strayed into their territory, then the situation could be catastrophic.

  There were no other bat-related incidents in the news. Obviously, the vespers were resting. But she knew that wouldn’t be the case for long. There was a reason the bat had come out of hiding after eight years. Perhaps it had finally grown too large for its roost or for the local food supply. If there were more than one bat, there might be another reason. One she didn’t want to think about until she knew for certain the gender of the bats.

  Joyce offered to drive part of the way and was glad when Gentry told her to relax. It was good to sit and semiveg out. She shut her eyes and slumped in the seat. Her arms, shoulders, and legs were shot. The feeling of heaviness in her limbs reminded her how they used to feel years ago when she went off with Professor Lowery on his expeditions. When she climbed cliffs and bellied along the ground and scaled barn roofs to take pictures for his books about bats. Proving herself had always been hard work.

  When they reached Manhattan, Gentry returned the car to the lot and they cabbed back to his apartment. They turned on the ten o’clock news. Doyle was on, congratulating himself and the NYPD on a successful pest-control operation. Gentry turned the TV off.

  “You did good, Al,” he said, “but it was only round one. Nancy, you ever play video games?”

  “JustMs. Pac-Man when I was a kid.”

  “This whole thing reminds me ofSpace Invaders orAsteroids. You clear one level and you feel pretty good about yourself. Then you get hit with the second level where everything’s twice as fast and three times as nasty. And you’re history in about two seconds.”

  “There’s just one big difference,” Joyce pointed out.

  “I know,” Gentry said. “The games have a reset button.”

  Twenty-Fiv
e

  Dori slowed as the traffic getting onto the George Washington Bridge began to thicken.

  When she first started driving a bus six years before, thirty-nine-year-old Dori Dryfoos had the morning shift. The single mother thought she’d like shuttling businessmen between New York and northern New Jersey. They’d be neat, articulate, and reliable, everything her alcoholic, screwing-around, former jock of a husband wasn’t. Maybe she’d even get to know some of the men, meet a single one, and get asked to coffee or dinner or a movie. It could happen. But it never did.

  The reality was that at least half the businessmen were networking, lost in newspapers or cell-phone-using bores. The other half were busy hitting on the young, highpowered, up-and-coming women who rode the bus. Some of the men gave Dori a “good morning” with their tickets. But most didn’t. And the women seemed condescending.

  Dori hadn’t asked for the night shift just to get away from the morning commuters. That was just a side benefit. She did it so that she’d be home during the day with her three-year-old son, Larry. Day care just hadn’t worked out; poor Larry would sit in a corner and cry the entire time. Working the night shift, at least Dori could tuck the boy into bed while the baby-sitter looked on. Larry seemed much happier about that. And why not? No one liked to feel abandoned.

  To Dori’s surprise, she loved the night shift. It was relaxing and invigorating. One of the afternoon-to-evening drivers would park in the New Jersey terminal lot at eight o’clock, where the bus would get gas and a cleaning. Dori would collect it at nine. Her shift ended at five in the morning, right before the hellish rush-hour commute began over the George Washington Bridge. It was perfect.

  The nighttime crowd was always delightfully eclectic and slightly wacky. There were aunts and uncles and grandparents who had spent the day with family. There were teenagers going to Manhattan for God knew what, workers heading in for late shifts as security guards or street cleaners or disc jockeys or whatever else people did at night, and even the occasional nun or lap dancer or hustler. Dori knew a few of the regulars by name. It was too bad: some of the male hustlers had better manners than the businessmen.

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  Dori took a quick glance behind her. A thin, white-haired lady was standing in the aisle to her right.

  “Yes ma’am?” Dori said.

  “Is there something wrong with the lavatory?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. Why?”

  “I think it’s locked.”

  “Maybe someone’s in there.”

  “No. I’m sitting right in front of it. No one’s gone in.”

  “Well, maybe it’s stuck,” Dori said. “This is a pretty old bus. Maybe one of the gentlemen back there will give it a tug for you.”

  “Thank you,” the woman said. “I’ll ask.”

  Slowed in the moderate late-evening traffic at the entrance to the bridge, Dori watched in the rearview mirror as the woman made her way back down the aisle. She held the backs of the seats as she walked, then stopped beside a young man. He was probably a college student. He had that look. Muscular, blond, clean-cut. The youth smiled up at the woman, listened to what she had to say, then went back to help her. The restroom was a small compartment on the left side of the bus. He pushed down hard on the handle.

  The traffic started to move as she got on the bridge. Dori took her eyes from the mirror and looked ahead. You didn’t see very many things like that in the morning, she thought. Simple courtesies. People who didn’t mind getting off their butts and helping people.

  Suddenly, a terrible cry tore through the bus. Dori touched the brake, and her eyes snapped back to the mirror.

  The young man was stumbling backward. As Dori watched, he fell across the lap of a young woman who was sitting opposite the restroom. He was waving his hands wildly as things flew from the opened door.The old woman fell backward, landing hard on the rubber flooring. She didn’t get up.

  At first, in the subdued light of the bus, the things looked like campfire ash or fall leaves blown by a strong wind. They were swirling forward rapidly, an expanding spiral moving this way and that. Their approach caused most of the seventeen passengers to flail their arms, scream, and duck down. As the things continued toward her, Dori saw what they really were.

  Bats.

  Shrieks filled the bus as Dori crushed the brake. The vehicle stopped; the bats kept going. Four of the small, tawny creatures were on her a moment later. Their wings were dry and soft as they fluttered against her. She snarled at the bats as they tore at her face and scalp.

  “Get off me!”

  Dori leaned forward and tried to reach the lever that opened the door. But she retreated an instant later, forced to cover her eyes. She shook her head violently, but the bats wouldn’t leave. They clung to her bobbed black hair and ears, to her slender fingers and knuckles. Every move, every moment brought new pain. She felt like she’d run deep into a thorn bush and couldn’t get out.

  Screams bounced through the bus. Burying her eyes in the crook of her right elbow, Dori wrapped the arm tightly around her face. Then she turned herself back toward the dashboard and felt blindly with her left hand for the lever. When she found it, she pulled hard.

  The door folded open. The cool, brisk air rushed in off the Hudson River. The bats continued to attack.

  Dori cried out in desperation. She half stood and threw herself against the window to her left. The bus began to roll forward. She hit the window again and again, banging her hands and forehead against the pane until bat blood mingled with her own blood and bat cries joined hers.

  The bus angled toward the road divider, then rammed against it and stopped. Tires squealed as cars braked. A van smashed into the rear of the bus, jolting it forward. Horns blared angrily. Behind her, passengers screamed and shouted. But Dori wasn’t aware of any of them. Her world was bounded by bats and defined by pain.

  There were no longer any bats in the air. Two or three of them had latched onto each of the passengers. Most of the riders had folded themselves in the narrow space between their seats and the backs of seats in front of them. They were trying to duck in a face-down position. A few had fallen into the aisles and were pulling at stubborn bats or kicking the air in pain. No one was able to get free of the small, fast-flapping attackers. Not for more than a moment.

  Suddenly, the cars went silent.

  Then, as one, the bats stopped attacking the passengers and flew in a mad, cat’s cradle pattern toward the door.

  A motorist ran to the door to see what was wrong; the middle-aged woman ducked as the bats zigzagged past her. When they were gone, the woman hurried up the steps and knelt beside Dori. The driver was curled in a ball on the floor and crying softly.

  “Are you all right?” the woman asked.

  “It hurts,” she said. Her face and the backs of her hands were a meshwork of fine, red stripes.

  Several men arrived. They ran around the women and checked on the other passengers.

  “I called nine-one-one,” she said. “The police are on the way. You’re going to be all right.”

  Dori attempted to get up. She was trembling. The woman gently pushed her back.

  “Don’t move.”

  “My passengers-”

  “You stay still, Ms. Dryfoos,” the woman said, reading her name tag. “They’re being looked after.”

  “The bats?” Dori said.

  “They’re gone. They flew off.”

  Dori used the side of her hand to wipe blood from her eyes. Still shaking, she said, “Emergency brake,” and pointed to a spot under the steering wheel. “Push it.”

  “Of course.” As the woman went over to engage it, she looked out the windshield. She froze.

  “Ms. Dryfoos, how do you close the door?” she asked urgently.

  “The lever-there,” Dori replied. “Why? What is it?”

  The woman quickly pushed the bar. “Because the bats are coming back,” she said. “A lot of them.”

  T
wenty-Six

  Gentry was sitting back on the couch, enjoying the late summer breeze coming through the window and watching the end of some police show on TV. His eyes were half shut and his mood was one of dreamy satisfaction. He liked knowing that Nancy had fallen asleep in his bedroom, in his bed. Nancy Joyce was not a woman who needed looking after. But she did need sleep, badly, and it made him happy to know that she was comfortable enough to take it here.

  His contentment evaporated when the show was interrupted by a news bulletin. Gentry was alert immediately.

  “Good evening, I’m Patrick McDermot,” said the local New York anchor. “There is a developing situation in upper Manhattan. For more information, we’re going live to reporter Kathy Leung. Kathy?”

  If Kathy was in New York, it had to be bats.

  “ Nancy!” Gentry shouted as Kathy came on. He grabbed the remote and punched up the volume. “ Nancy, come here!”

  He heard her stumble from the bed.

  Kathy said, “Pat, just over an hour ago, a commuter bus starting across the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey was attacked by bats. According to passengers of the bus, the batspoured from the lavatory in the back and attacked every one of the seventeen people onboard, including the driver. Though there were no fatalities, that was only the start of what’s shaping up to be amajor problem for the city of New York.”

  Nancy shuffled into the living room. She was round-shouldered and bleary-eyed. “What’s wrong?”

  “A bat attack on the George Washington Bridge,” Gentry said.

  Joyce was instantly alert. She remained standing as she watched.

  “What you’re looking at now,” Kathy continued, “is a view of the skies over the Hudson River. Immediately after the attack on the bus,thousands of bats began gathering over the river. What’s astonishing is that they’ve remained in the skies as their numbers swell.”