Night of the Bat (The Zone Unknown), Page 3

  Hanuma said, “They’re drinking blood.”

  Jake yelled. He wanted to see what dead prey was beneath them. He thought it could be a large blue heron or jungle vulture, a favorite feast for vampires. A bird could have gotten sick in the tree, and the vampires overwhelmed it.

  But the clump was bigger. Larger and tangled.

  Hanuma stepped away from the light.

  They saw the oozing mass clearly now. Protruding from the top of the bloody clump were the ghastly remains of a pair of human heads, their cheeks and necks and black hair twisted and fused. Fragments of white skull glistened, and strips of light shot into holes where once there had been eyes and brains. Desiccated feet and hands and more cracked and broken bone appeared to hold the clump up, to support it like the base of a blood-soaked sculpture. The mutilated cadavers of two men, each with a shattered jaw and a mouth frozen open in a death scream.

  Jake’s eyes burned and his nostrils flared from the sickening stench. “No little bats did all this,” he said, his voice breaking. But Hanuma had already turned and was heading back on the riverwalk.

  There was another sound now: Bleep … bleep …

  It was different from the blips Gizmo generated for its searching sonar. Jake remembered turning the blip generator off. Now Gizmo was up picking the sounds of something approaching.

  Coming fast.

  “Hanuma,” he called. “Wait.”

  Hanuma kept moving. “I’ll get your father. …”

  Jake realized he’d left Gizmo’s receiver on. The bleeps were coming closer, louder. He could hear a pulsing screech. A high pitch, as from a large bird or animal—something big crashing through the canopy. Tearing through vines and jungle.

  Wings flapping.

  The lights of the river ramp went out, and there was only the glowing spill from the central platform. Jake saw the image on the screen now. Something bulky, moving fast. It was thirty to forty feet to the left, tearing through the canopy and the open pockets of its underbelly. The river was two hundred feet below.

  The imaged creature was past him now.

  “Watch out, Hanuma,” Jake called. “It’s heading toward you!”

  Hanuma heard Jake’s cries. All he could think of was getting to Dr. Lefkovitz. Dr. Lefkovitz would know what to do. He’d know what had killed the men. What kind of evil. Hanuma felt overwhelmed by a malevolence that made his skin hot and wet. The badness of the place. A profanity. He felt the cries of the men. An evil hung in the air, brushed against him like the hanging vines and creepers on the sides of the riverwalk. Branches scraped his arms, and caught in his long gray hair as he ran toward the light.

  Hanuma heard the hunting creature, too. The large thing racing, flapping its way through the canopy. It sounded as though it were a large puma or jaguar rapidly closing the distance between them. Bad thing. Dangerous thing. He believed he could hear spirits crying out: Don’t let it get you. Don’t—

  The eruption came from the canopy wall on his left. Hanuma saw a giant bat hurl itself out at him like a winged panther. He glimpsed its claws and leathery, muscled arms. Its wings opened like a cloak of skin and its abdomen was swollen and hairy like that of a ugly, colossal moth. The creature hit into him as his brain registered clearly the enormous, wide head with large green eyes set above a squashed snout.

  The impact of the giant bat knocked Hanuma down. He tried to reach for his machete, but the weapon tumbled across the walkway and over the edge. Claws locked on his shoulders like vises. Hanuma was ashamed of his scream—a scream like that of an old woman. He shrieked again, as the monstrous bat drove its two long fangs deep into his neck, the honed, pointed teeth plunging into Hanuma’s spine. He trembled as his blood burst out onto the walkway in front of him.

  Jake was stunned when the creature exploded from the canopy. He saw it seize Hanuma, biting and clawing at him viciously. The walkway shook violently, and Jake had to grab for the rope railing to stop from falling over the side and down into the river.

  Whatever the beast was, Jake saw it pulling Hanuma fast toward the central platform—Hanuma’s limp body sliding quickly away. Jake steadied himself and started after Hanuma and the monster. The creature was dragging the old man by the neck, half carrying him over the planks, using its wing tips like crutches—like the bats in Jake’s nightmare! The giant bat was trying to haul Hanuma off into the canopy. Into the air.

  “Help! Help!” Jake called out, hoping his father would hear.

  He gained ground. A hundred thoughts shot through Jake’s mind at once. He thought of the power pack around his waist. He thought of Gizmo, and of just throwing himself on the creature. He’d try to stamp on its wings and make it break its grip on Hanuma.

  Jake was shouting at the thing now, shouting at it as if it were a bad dog: “Drop him! You drop him! You let him loose!”

  6

  SCREAMS

  Dr. Lefkovitz and the men heard Hanuma and the cries for help. The old shaman’s screams were heart-stopping, Jake’s shouts chilling. Several of the men were harvesting bat specimens from traps along a rope bridge. There was no way they could make it back quickly onto the slatted stretch of the north walkway.

  Along with Dangari and Muras, Dr. Lefkovitz reacted as if he’d heard a bomb go off. The frightened men turned back, moving as fast as they dared on the aerial walkway.

  Jake—his father thought. What if he’s fallen! What if he or Hanuma has fallen!

  Near the central platform, the north walkway angled and ran parallel to the riverwalk. Dr. Lefkovitz first saw Hanuma across the gulf between the catwalks. His body was sliding as if by magic, a limp doll nearly airborne, grasped in the jaws of darkness.

  Dr. Lefkovitz gasped. “Oh, my God.”

  Closer, he saw the shape of the shadowy thing, retreating with its spoils. The lights on the riverwalk were out. Hanuma’s body was being carried headfirst now, his face raised so that his eyes stared up into the snarling mouth of the beast.

  Dangari and Muras slowed, trembled. Dr. Lefkovitz saw them holding back.

  “Come on!” he ordered.

  Suddenly, Jake burst from the shadows of the riverwalk, racing to save Hanuma. Jake was acting on instinct now. He had turned up the volume on Gizmo. Its speakers were blaring. Earsplitting. Blip … Blipblipblipblip …

  The pitch from the device was painful, excruciating, and the bat creature was outraged by it. It halted and shrieked on the approach to the center platform. The massive bat looked around, saw the other, stronger men stampeding toward it, the shouting men on the north walkway crossing over.

  Jake tore off the power belt and grasped one end of it as if it were a length of heavy chain. The creature had dragged Hanuma into deeper shadows. It was a murky shape now, with a single splash of light bouncing off its glistening, snouted head.

  The bat thrust its wings violently forward as Jake swung the power belt in a high arc. Its weight of lead casings and batteries hit the creature on the skull. The bat let out a shriek, and its clawed legs flew out toward Jake. It snorted wildly, a stinking, vile mucous flying from its nostrils. Jake swung the belt again. And again.

  His father, Dangari, and Muras were racing across the central platform. The bat had withdrawn its blood-covered fangs from Hanuma’s neck and dropped him. The old man was still conscious, moaning on the walkway, as the bat turned. Suddenly, with a final shriek, the bat propelled itself over the side and plummeted toward the jungle floor.

  Jake sunk to his knees and cradled Hanuma until the others reached him. Dangari and Muras helped tend to the wounded shaman. Dr. Lefkovitz was riveted at the railing. He saw the falling monster spread its wings and go into a glide. It circled quickly, terrifyingly, then headed out toward the river and the jungle night.

  It was a while before Jake and his father descended in the sling. They waited below as Dangari and Muras brought Hanuma down. Dr. Lefkovitz made the old man as comfortable as possible on a cot of woven hemp in the main hut.

  “You’re go
ing downstream to the missionary village,” Dr. Lefkovitz told the barely conscious Hanuma. “Jake told me what happened. We saw the creature.”

  “I’m sorry … very sorry,” Hanuma said, gasping. He struggled to hold up his head.

  Jake got a pair of his jeans and a T-shirt. He rolled them up and placed them under Hanuma’s head for a pillow. Dr. Lefkovitz carefully injected an anti-rabies vaccine into the folds of Hanuma’s stomach, and a local anesthetic into the periphery of the wounds at the back of his neck. He cleaned and cauterized the punctures and lacerations from the bite and attack. “You’ll need an intravenous drip to prevent you from going into shock. You save your energy—rest. Everything will be okay,” Dr. Lefkovitz said gently.

  Hanuma closed his eyes. He began to breathe deeply. His body was still trembling. Dangari draped Hanuma’s old and frayed shaman’s robe about him to comfort him, to wrap him in the spirit and power and tribal dreams it still held for Hanuma.

  “What will happen at the missionary camp?” Jake asked.

  “Their radio is powerful enough to reach the Brazilian Army installation at Jacaranda,” his father said. “They’ll send a medic in a helicopter and airlift him to Manaus.”

  Jake took a bottle of alcohol from the supply stock next to the jars of formaldehyde filled with the bat specimens. He dabbed at his own scrapes and bruises. His father hesitated, then took over helping to clean the cuts for him. For a moment, Jake felt his father was going to praise him for saving Hanuma on the riverwalk.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” his father said instead. His voice was cold, covering any real emotion, as usual. “You don’t understand the jungle. You don’t know what you’re dealing with here.”

  “Dad, I …”

  His father didn’t let him speak. “You were way out of line bringing your little electronic game up to the canopy. …”

  “It’s not a game.”

  “Now you know why I never want you with

  me. …

  Jake let his father go on. Why can’t you see me, Dad? Jake felt like shouting. Why can’t you really see me?

  7

  METAMORPHOSIS

  Magyar and three of the other men brought down the remains of the two dead workers. Dr. Lefkovitz left the hut to examine what was left of the twisted and hollowed bodies. Jake stayed with Hanuma to make certain the drip needle didn’t slip out of the wrist vein and bloat the arm. He himself was still shaken from the confrontation with the huge bat. He needed to talk alone with his father. It seemed to him there were a lot of questions that needed to be asked, and decisions to be made.

  Sorgno, one of the younger workers, came in to check on Hanuma. Jake asked Sorgno to stay with the old man while he went out by the campfire and waited until he could get his father aside. Several of the other workers had already placed thick logs and chunks of peat on the campfires so they blazed to help ward off the chill and the terror.

  “Will Hanuma be all right?” Jake whispered to his father. “The bite was deep. That thing’s fangs were like knives. What kind of creature was it?”

  “I’ve never seen nor heard of any species of bat that large or ferocious,” his father said. “Even in Indonesia the Megachiroptera don’t get half that big. The biggest bat known is a fruit bat.” His father’s voice became strangely hollow, a tone Jake knew from long experience meant that his father was filtering his words, too carefully choosing what he wanted to say.

  “You’re not telling me something,” Jake said.

  His father dropped his gaze to the ground. Jake new that look, too—another familiar, evasive maneuver. “Son, the Amazon is as big and unexplored as the depths of the ocean. There could be anything down here. …”

  “Dad, what don’t you want me to know?”

  Dr. Lefkovitz turned to look at the roaring fires. “We had a warning, I suppose. About the bat, perhaps. The first month the expedition had settled here, Hanuma and I took a pirogue and went upriver about a dozen miles to a small village—a malorca of Kano Indians—true primitives and known in past times to be headhunters. As we approached the village’s mud beach, there were thirty or forty of the Kanos who had come down to the bank. Naked men with straw woven into their hair. Women with moonstone necklaces holding children. Children playing tag in the mud.”

  “What happened?” Jake asked.

  His father turned back to look Jake in the eye. “Closer, I noticed several of the villagers throwing what looked like large chunks of meat and bone into the water. All around the ‘meat,’ the river boiled with the flash of silver fish. I insisted we stop. I asked Hanuma why the Kanos were feeding the piranha. Hanuma said we should keep going—that it would be dangerous to stop—but I wanted to know what was going on.

  “Hanuma and I let the boat drift into the shallows, but we held our paddles ready. We had to circle around the massive school of feeding piranha. Some of the fish were a foot—a foot and a half!—long. Larger than any piranha I’d ever seen. The fish hurled themselves at the food, sinking their teeth deep, then shaking their bodies ferociously until a shred of the meat tore loose. I saw what they were being fed: pieces of human bodies.”

  Jake’s tongue thickened. His shirt was damp, too tight about his chest.

  His father went on. “The villagers were tossing into the river parts of what seemed to have once been a man and a woman—perhaps a couple of children, too,” his father continued. “Hands and feet that had been hacked off—the remains of a savage slaughtering.”

  Jake fought the sickening feeling that was swelling in his stomach. “Who killed them?”

  “That’s what I wanted to know. Hanuma called to the villagers. A shaman came forward and spoke in a language Hanuma understood. ‘The slaughtered men and women were a family,’ Hanuma translated for me. ‘The village had to kill them because the family was about to turn into beasts.’”

  “What was the shaman talking about?” Jake asked.

  “Hanuma had another exchange, then tried to explain to me that the shaman believed that, in this village, every few years, some people change into terrible winged creatures. Monsters that begin to kill and devour the other villagers. They hang their victims high in the jungle. Demons. Phantoms. The slaughtered family had begun its metamorphosis.”

  “You and Hanuma didn’t believe that, did you?” Jake asked.

  “No,” his father said. “‘Get us out of here,’ I told Hanuma. Together, we paddled back out, straight through the water boiling with the feeding piranha. Hanuma kept talking to the tribe’s shaman. Smiling. Laughing. I knew Hanuma was calming the tribe. Assuring the shaman and the villagers that we were leaving in peace. …”

  “Do you think the winged monster could have been this big bat?” Jake asked. “That this bat has been feeding on the village and they explained it with this metamorphosis—this crazy belief that people in the village could turn into monsters? I mean, that’s nuts.”

  “Yes,” his father said. “But I should have listened more carefully. Asked more questions. I think they have seen this bat.”

  “Maybe it’s a creature that has lived here all along—since time began—and it doesn’t happen to like a lot of people invading its territory. You—the expedition—you’re the real invaders around here, aren’t you? I read a lot before deciding to come down here, Dad. The Indians have been here for twenty thousand years and everything went just fine. They took care of the jungle and the jungle took care of them.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with that bat. …”

  “It could,” Jake said. “I mean, you couldn’t blame the jungle if it started fighting back.” He remembered Hanuma. “Hey, that bat could have given Hanuma rabies, right?”

  “If it was infected, the virus would be in its spittle. In its bite.”

  “Its saliva was in Hanuma’s wounds,” Jake said. “It was in his neck.”

  “And upper spine,” his father added. “If the bite were on Hanuma’s hands or legs, he might have as much as three to six weeks
before the symptoms of rabies—the madness—could begin. Once the virus reaches the brain, there’s no cure. The rabies virus feeds on the brain cells and drives its victim insane. Hydrophobia. Fear of water. A horror of everything—in its final stages. It is the most terrifying death imaginable—but, even if Hanuma is infected, he’s got a good chance of getting through this if we get him downstream tonight. I started his rabies shots, but he’s going to require a series of them over several days. The Fathers at the village will continue the injections until the helicopter can get him to the hospital in Manaus.”

  Dangari and Muras interrupted. They took Dr. Lefkovitz aside, whispering for his ears only. When he came back to Jake, his father said, “They’re ready to put Hanuma in the pirogue.”

  “Dad, you’ve been here for months. You’ve got enough dead bats to choke a hippo. Besides, the whole place is going to flood any week now. How many more flying rats do you have to knock off?”

  The sound of men chanting drifted to them from the edge of the camp. The workers were standing around the open grave they’d dug for the dead men. Dangari came over and asked Dr. Lefkovitz to say a few words. Together they walked to the grave.

  Muras made room for Jake to stand next to him as his father spoke in a prayerful tone: “They were two loyal and fine friends—members of our research team. They were good family men and spoke often about their children. I will see that the monies they earned will reach their families. The museum sponsoring the expedition will provide extra funds. We will do as much as we can. …”

  The grave was deep, moist, with sides that glistened in the moonlight. Jake lifted his eyes from the shadowy, twisted cadavers lying at the bottom of the grave, and glanced around the circle of the men. He saw the worker he’d left with Hanuma.