It was a boy. Terror raised his voice into a screech, but Mark never doubted the screamer was male. His instant, worried guess: one of the big jocks standing guard out at the edge.
“Gaaaaaaaah!”
He sounded hurt. Also brave, because the cry twisted into words before cutting off.
“Bats! Bats! RUN! Bats! They’re —”
The clarity that Mark had felt, absorbing the new sky, stayed with him as he turned — not to escape, but to help. That would have been a mistake. Two things saved him.
There were people everywhere in the shadowy space between the gym and the main wing of the school, milling around bike racks and raised planters as they tried to fit into one line or another. One column stretched from the nurse’s office inside the main wing out to the flag pole. Another, leading back into the locker rooms was another zigzag mess.
These formations shattered as the guard screamed, as a maelstrom of bodies barred Mark’s path. Worse, the gym doors rattled open again as several dozen girls came out to investigate. Some instinct told him to look up.
The night rippled, as if the surrounding forest horizon lifted and then fell on a sudden wind. A cloud rushed over them, and darkness became a solid, biting thing, filled with screams.
Bats? Mark had a brief impression of spasming black worm-like things — small, no bigger than his thumb, with wings about the size of his hand and long, thin, cutting tongues that stabbed and darted in the moonlight. Their only noise was a staccato rustling of frenzied motion, soon lost in a rising roar of human cries. The wave of dark fliers rushed past him like ten thousand needles stitching through paper as the savage little creatures formed swells and bunches, almost like deliberate knives, dividing the crowd. And he realized —
They’re isolating some of the smaller kids.
Even as he moved, Mark recognized the pattern, like a school of piranha, or a pack of wolves, culling out and then taking down cornered animals. The crowd surged again as everyone ran, hundreds of voices echoing from the tall cinderblock walls.
Mark bumped uselessly against the panicked mob, one step, two, trying to reach a freshman girl lost in a jittering cyclone of wings, but he was struck in the hip and then in his ribs. Arms and elbows, everywhere. He staggered as the human stampede turned him toward the gym.
The change of direction, giving in to the group impulse, went through Mark with much deeper force than the impacts against his body. Heart pounding, his body and mind trembled with adrenaline. His first thought was loud and wild, full of anger at himself. If you’d run out there you might have died.
Then he looked for Alex.
Where is she?
Searching for his friends in the gloom, Mark slammed into several mountain bikes chained to a rack, scraping his ankle and stomach.
Something whispered against his hair. He ducked and threw an awkward swat, maybe hurting one or two of the swarming creatures. A stiff little body smacked into his knuckles, feeling a lot like a hackeysack, and further down his arm a dry mass of wings crumpled against the bones of his wrist.
That was when pain began.
Mark choked and twisted away from his own left arm. He banged his shoulders and lower back against the hard protrusions of two bikes and was hardly aware of it. His world had closed down to one bright jagged spike of horror and he threw his arm from side to side into tires and metal struts and gears, frantic to get the bat off.
The palsied monster was humping and squirming. Somewhere under a tent of wings were tiny claws, four or six or more, scratching at him like fine needles, but it was the whipcord tongue that made him yell. It unfurled like an oily pink wire and cinched completely around his wrist, breaking the skin, squeezing his tendons and muscle.
The bat-thing’s eyes were yellow beads.
It was hot and stank of musk and droppings.
Mere seconds passed before the agony in Mark’s arm changed, perhaps from a natural anesthetic in the creature’s saliva. It left him more aware of the severe bruises he was inflicting on himself but he didn’t stop, bashing his arm down on the bike’s ridged gears again and again.
Mark had no way of knowing if the toxin would paralyze or kill him if it reached his heart or brain. Yet fear was overwhelmed by greater emotions. Duty to his friends. And revenge. The bat clung to him even in death and he ripped at its broken wings, feeling one claw let go. His fingers were slick with its thin, dark blood and his left hand wasn’t working well, but he finally peeled the ugly thing away as he turned.
At least a hundred students and adults jammed entrances to the gym and main building, shrieking, flailing blindly at the haze of bats. Four sets of doors just weren’t enough. He saw an adult trip over one boy’s feet. Both of them went down and the boy dragged someone else with him.
Yet, the tumult at the doors had benefits. The bat-things whirled and slashed over the mob, yet curled away from the howling turbulence of heads and arms. In well-defined, arrow-like swirls, they retreated from the heart of the crowd. The tiny monsters were feeling out the shape of the stampede, cutting people away from the back end in ones and twos, like a hideous, lashing tide. Teens screamed and flailed with jackets and backpacks, and some of the predators fell.
They always from come above, he noted, squirming out of his own jacket and waving it like a helicopter blade, over his head. Never from the side.
We need shields. Armor. Clubs. Lacrosse sticks, football helmets, shoulder pads, even blankets might work. If I could only get to the equipment room. Heck, umbrellas would be great! As if there were many of those, in good old Twenty-Nine Palms, Mojave Desert, California.
The darkness added to the chaos. Peeling away from the door jam, in their terror students careened into each other, channeled by the raised planters and bike racks— A blond girl, with a lick of blood across her temple—
An adult man, hunched over to make himself smaller than the children—
We have to get out of here, Mark thought. Head for other doors.
Unable to keep whirling the jacket, he wrestled it overhead, kept his elbows bent and let the fabric stretch against his scalp and shoulders, like a sail. Doing this exposed his torso, but it also gave him extra protection where it counted most. Bat-things swooped, but only hit his left hand and the empty decoy of the jacket.
“This way!” he shouted into the white face of a junior he recognized — Cammie Rosa — she had wisps of blood-wet hair stuck to her ear and cheek. “Tell everyone! This way! We’ll go around the main wing!”
Incomprehension flashed through Cammie’s eyes, swiftly replaced by a glint of steel — and he saw she was attached to another girl, one hand clenching her friend’s wrist. They made a daisy-chain of three, with the last girl sobbing back over her shoulder for someone else they’d lost in the screaming dark.
Mark turned to holler at two more kids. “Your jackets! Over your head! Like this!”
Cammie started yelling, too, luring more students to form into her chain. Groups glommed together. In less than a minute, twenty-five or more were shuffling past the flagpole, most of them with a shirt, a jacket, a purse, a backpack over their heads. The knot of teenagers became large enough that a spearhead swarm veered away, seeking stragglers.
Mark shouted at two seniors who’d burrowed to the center of the group. “Smaller kids in the middle! You two keep everyone moving. Around the cafeteria. I’m going after others.”
Even as he yelled, Mark looked back at the gym, thinking the doors must have cleared.
But what he saw made his heart plummet.
One set of doors was closed! The double-doors on the far right had been shut, despite the horde of people clamoring to get in. Students and adults trampled each other to move left, toward the remaining set. For an instant, Mark thought he saw Alex, her wiry frame struggling to hold a door open against much larger bodies. The sight froze him. But he knew hesitation was death.
“That way!” he yelled at Cammie and a skinny kid with glasses who seemed to have it together. While they cajoled the growing convoy forward, Mark dashed over to three hunched forms huddled by a planter. Mark used his jacket to disperse a swarm, then to whack feeding bat-things off their victims. It took strength to yank the kids out of their fetal balls and then send them stumbling toward Cammie. The skinny guy had guts, running forth to retrieve the trio, screaming like a banshee as he whirled his own jacket, using it also to drive the wounded ones along.
Another pair of stragglers hurried over when Mark called. But a third group wasn’t so lucky. Mark had to carry a wounded boy while others clutched his belt. That left Mark’s jacket hanging from his head like a hoodie, with bat-oid things crawling across, seeking an opening. They departed only when Mark’s rescues reached the comparative safety of the herd.
“Stay together!” Cammie shouted. “It’s not far! We’re going for the offices around to the left!” Kids banged against each other, cursing, stumbling, yet they reached the immense flat shape of the main building and got some respite. The batties were incredibly nimble, but the building should offer some cover.
Fifty meters, he thought. It can’t be more than a fifty, can it?
It was a perfect nightmare. A dart of bats across his face. A wailing kid who ran past the convoy without seeing or realizing its partial safety. Mark tried to find the energy to chase after the poor fellow, and found that he had no reserves. Across the quad, he saw a body unmoving on the concrete.
Someone – he never knew who – took the wounded kid from his arms. Maybe he could walk now.
They were forced to waddle, knees bent but chests up to make their raised arms their highest points. Too many of them had naked backs or nothing more to protect them than a bra strap. One boy screamed when a bat lashed at his spine, and others cried out in fear. But having recovered from their panic, now two of the larger guys took turns patrolling the group, swatting predators, crushing them with bare hands. Of course that would only work until —
The thin guy pointed and shouted. “A big swarm… I think it’s the main one. They look like… they’ve spotted us!”
We’ll never make it to the doors. If only there was a window. Mark looked around desperately. He spotted more stragglers, six teenagers and an adult kneeling beside a Coke machine and another bike rack—
And a fire extinguisher.
Summoning some strength, Mark ran for it, breaking ranks. “Stay close to the wall! Keep moving!”
Wings skittered overhead. He ducked and yanked his shirt off entirely, making a rough wad of it in his left hand. His bad hand. He punched into the glass. On the third try, it shattered.
Somewhere an alarm went off, clanging above the din of voices. Battery-powered. Awesome. Mark hoped everyone on this hellish little island would realize what he’d done and make the connection themselves.
Barry and Alex and Froggi, he thought. They’ll know.
If they’re alive.
Two of the stragglers argued with each other, a girl pulling at a boy. “Please, let’s join them! Please!” she cried, on her feet, but the boy stayed against the Coke machine with his rigid fingers clamped onto its red plastic, yelling, “We’re safer here!”
The girl was exposed. The bats recognized it. An open black claw of spasming wings and tongues shot out of the night. It covered her head first, spiraling around her long hair and bangle earrings, tugging her off-balance away from the boy. Her delicate hands came up helplessly even as the bats began to twist her off her feet.
Mark swung the canister around and blasted the swarm with a loud shock of fire retardant. The girl fell hard on the concrete, bleeding but alive. She screamed as bats landed all around her and convulsed and twitched. Most of them leapt back into the sky. Mark crushed one with his shoe and felt another strike at his pantleg. The girl shoved herself onto her knees even before her boyfriend reached her.
“Oh, Shawn, oh my God—”
“Move it! Run!” Mark hollered as he hurried along the convoy of refugees, shooting brief bursts wherever the attackers seemed to be clustering on prey, breaking up concentrations, desperately hoping the ammo would hold. Night vision had kicked in. But other senses seemed more reliable — every hair on his body stood up as stiff as a pin, as if each one was a quivering nerve reaching away from him. The premonition of another attack was as real and sickening as his icy hot pulse.
It didn’t come. He did dash over to blast a clump that almost covered two desperately flailing teens. A large student and one of the town citizens gathered the victims in their arms as Mark scanned about, ignoring bats that swept by in twos or threes.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” The skinny kid with the glasses cried, urging everyone forward tight against the wall.
The bats only flittered into them once, trying to get to the girl. Her blood.
His mind raced.
The one that bit me, it was so hot. And that might be what drove them off — not just the blast itself or the noise, but because I coated them in powder.
They eat meat and blood. All protein. The powder might blind them. Hide us. It definitely hurts ’em.
“Oh—!” The boyfriend hesitated when he saw the door to the admin office, nearly tripping the girl and Mark.
The door was closed, and even in the night Mark could see a bulk of human shapes standing against it on the inside, pulling it shut. The top part of the door was glass. But the glass had been broken in one corner where they’d reached in to get the lock, and the skinny kid shouted, “Open up, open up!”
Mark let himself drop out of the group, staying low. He turned and squeezed off the last of the fire extinguisher, one blast at random, the second at a swirl in the dark. Then the extinguisher hissed and died.
People were yelling. He threw himself toward the sound.
They must have gotten the door open because hands clutched at his hair and his bad arm, yanking him inside where he fell. Then the door slammed. Glass danced on the tile floor close to his face and a girl shrieked, “You idiots! Cover the window with something!”
Mark scrambled out of the way as a dozen pairs of feet shuffled around him from different directions. Binders, keyboards, a big desk calendar were passed forward to plug the hole. Two guys upended an entire table in a deafening crash of computers and printers and shouted, “Watch out! Move!”
There was no time to rest. While some hunted down any bat-things that had come in, other voices echoed in the hallway behind the office, other survivors, sobbing and shouting. Mark pulled himself to his feet and against a wall. He tried to peer through the black-on-black shadows.
He needed help. He found the skinny kid easily. Each lens of the kid’s square glasses held a smudge of moonlight that winked and went out when his face turned toward Mark.
“Holy shit, dude,” the kid said, making a shaky noise that might have been a laugh.
“We need as many fire extinguishers as we can get,” Mark told him. “There’s still people out there.”
* * *
The batoids (as some called them) were gone twenty minutes later. Someone marshaled a small gang of boys, girls, and two adults back into the darkness. They went through the main entrance in a tightly packed circle, armed with fire extinguishers, mops, brooms, and wearing wastebaskets for helmets or jackets wrapped like turbans around their heads. They were a big shuffling beast that gained more size as bleeding kids crawled out of hiding — from under benches, inside dumpsters or under huddles of clothes.
In the moonlight, the pavement seemed to squirm with wounded bats, like crumpled hunks of leather. In one spot they found fifty of the ugly things on the concrete, wheezing, barely moving. Mark didn’t know what to make of it, but he didn’t want to find out. He led the group in a wide detour around the patch of sluggish creatures.
A few human sounds dotted the darkness and small groups detached to reclaim wounded kids, guarded by sentries with fire extinguishers.
Leonard Kelly, the skinny kid, croaked, “Somebody oughta knock on the gym and tell them the party’s over.”
“Go for it, Leo,” Mark whispered. The poor guy had probably been picked on for years for looking like a geek. Here was a well-earned chance for him to get limelight. “Tell ’em to grab all the extinguishers they have and come help.”
They moved on, pulled a dazed boy to his feet and supported him between them as they continued.
The next fellow was less lucky, his throat open. Hundreds of little prints marked the edges of the bloody puddle. Wings. Claws. The swarms had intensified here. Drawing attention away from others, Mark thought, wondering if that made him cold-blooded.
Above them, the sky was so beautiful, clear and cool, with a million new stars and the giant moon.
“Anybody know who this is?”
Voices rose behind him as the gym doors clanked open. He felt glad – angry, exhausted, and glad. Two powerful flashlight beams stabbed out from a cluster of human shapes.
“Okay, let’s keep moving this way,” he said. He wanted to rest. He wanted to find Alex and Barry and Mr. Castro and Froggi and the twins … and Helene … and Dave and Charlie … but if anyone else was still out here, they might be in desperate need of timely first aid.
The bats might come back, he thought. We have to be ready. There’s no telling what their normal patterns are, and we might have confused them as badly as they did us.
The notion stayed with him as he crept forward, wishing he had one of those flashlights.
Then he stepped on another bat-thing and jumped. “Aah!”
This one was alive. A sophomore girl stepped out of the group to stomp it with her designer-heeled sandals.
He waved his group forward, hoping he might recognize his friends among the thin crowds filing out of the gym. Flashlights. Voices calling.
Great. Now you bring out the sports equipment, Mark mused, as a couple of dozen burly guys emerged all suited up in football pads, helmets, and gloves with towels packed in the joints. In an eclectic touch, they wielded baseball bats and proceeded to go after bat things that were flopping on the ground, while Grace Donner and a few of her bio gals dashed ahead of the vengeance squad, grabbing still-living ones to stuff into plastic jars. Two townies and a carnival man brandished shotguns.
Together, they took back the school grounds.
* * *
Alex found him sharing the remnants of one small bottle of water with Leo and two other kids on a far corner of the gymnasium grandstand. She had a bruise rising on her left cheek, where a right-handed punch would have landed. Some panicking fool who tried slamming the gym door against refugees, Mark figured. Whoever it was, probably came out worse for the struggle. I pity the fool.
Alex also had a raw stripe on her neck where a bat licked her. He recalled the boy they’d seen whipped across the throat … Another inch and Alex might have shared that fate.
She hugged him while he was still trying to make sense of his feelings. Good. She couldn’t see his face with their arms around each other, and she started crying and Mark realized he couldn’t breathe. Fortunately, Barry was there too and he punched Mark’s shoulder in a very unBarry-like way.
They settled down together after Leo volunteered to get more water in the teeming chaos.
“Do you think they’ll be back?” Alex asked.
“We’re probably safe for the night, but I’m just guessing. The swarm probably pounced because … well, they probably seldom see so many warm bodies, after dark.”
“Yeah,” Barry agreed. “There’s no way any other native life would stay exposed at nightfall like we did. The natives must go to ground and wait out the bats, but there were so many of us … I’ll bet the bats usually gorge on their prey and then go home to digest and sleep.”
“Then why … the ones lying on the ground. So many of them looked just lethargic. Not injured, but they seemed more tired than the humans.”
“Could be they were driven wild by how defenseless we seemed,” Mark commented. “That kept them attacking and gorging, when normally they would’ve burned out after just a few minutes.”
“And so they died.” Barry nodded. “Ironic.”
“We don’t know what fraction died. A lot. But … They must live near here. That’s a problem.” He shrugged. “Anyway, this disaster won’t happen again. Now we know better.”
Alex nodded. “One lesson learned. But at what cost?”
Mark could see Principal Jeffers, his face stricken as Ms. Takka, the younger biology teacher held out a clipboard, no doubt tallying the dead. Mark had only seen three, and heard of two more, including the guard who shouted the first warning. But he suspected darkly there’d be more.
Flexing his still half-numb left arm, Mark refrained from speaking aloud his other worry. He didn’t have to. Everyone must be thinking the same thing.
What if the bites and tongue-licks are poisonous to humans?
The gym was overpacked again, with half the basketball court set aside as a makeshift hospital and frightened kids and adults stacked up through the bleachers. At least the lights were on again, no matter if they were burning up irreplaceable gas. Darkness would have been terrifying.
Mark spotted Mr. Castro helping with the wounded, but nobody had seen Dave McCarthy’s black jacket or Charlie Escobar’s big chin, or a lot of other people. Froggi and the twins were gone, too, but Mark didn’t worry much about them. The X Kids had probably taken cover away from the rest of the population.
Out on the basketball court, some were being treated for neck wounds. Several wore bandages over an eye. One girl – both eyes. There were broken bones from falls … and no lack of volunteer nurses.
I should help, he thought. And Mark knew that he was too spent to do anyone else the slightest good.
Nothing remained of the confident, almost cocky TNPHS spooky spirit, when the Grand Meeting had broken up. No one would soon forget how students, townies and carnies battled each other at the doors, some fighting to close them and others – like Alex – to keep open a way for refugees.
There were fractures throughout their community — mistrust and doubt — to say nothing of the bruises and bloody lips inflicted by each other.
Some “colony.” We failed our first crisis, Mark thought.
We have to be able to rely on each other. It’s all we’ve got.
No one slept well through the long, alien night.
