Dust, page 9
-why no word from Richard? Al he knew, from his notepad, was that his e-mail transmission had been received somewhere on the road between Long Beach and Brookhaven, that Tam had acknowledged the signal, and that Richard's family must therefore be all right.
Bil emerged from the rain forest onto a patch of slashed-and-burned, grass-covered land.
At the edge of the clearing he smelled something, then saw something. The only living souls for miles around seemed to be a herd of cows. They watched dumbly as he knelt down in the grass and prodded a dead bat with a stick. Lasiurus borealis, Bil told himself.
Female.
Her stomach, distended with decay, was almost as large as a child's fist. It made her appear to be better fed than she must have been at the hour of her death. Bil knew the common red bat to be a solitary insect hunter that could be captured by setting up mist nets just before dusk, approximately an hour ahead of the feeding surge that most of the island's bat species undertook. In the Caribbean, Lasiurus specialized in the early evening insects that came out while the other bats were stil at rest, sleeping and digesting the previous night's meal. Bil was impressed by nature's order: The forest fed in shifts; but now something was toppling that order headlong. As he prodded, thick mats of skin and red fur sloughed off the bones, releasing wisps of stench from inside. But there were no fly larvae, Bil observed-no maggots wiggling through what had to be more than an ounce of decaying, sun-warmed meat; truly a fly banquet. In these parts, maggots alone could dispose of an entire cow carcass in less than a week. Yet this poor creature had been lying on the ground for at least two or three days, and no flies had come -where the fuck were the flies?
When he flipped the bat over with his stick, he saw that no beetles had come. No ants, either.
The cows, observing him, looked sickly and restless, an occasional belch their only comment. Bil , lost in thought, took no notice of them. His imagination crawled back again onto that same, way too speculative limb. This time he did not recoil from the question. This time, he lingered: Did the mite outbreak in New York mean that whatever was happening here had already spread across continental distances? Could that be true?
He realized that he had to get through to Richard, had to compare notes with him; absolutely had to. If his hunch was correct, a Pandora's box was being smashed open, and he began to suspect that very soon he would not be worried about strange bat migrations.
Not one damned bit.
"Bil ?" He was stil crouching in the grass when he heard Janet's call. There was a dirt road at the far end of the field. A pickup truck had just rattled by, turning Bil 's view of her shadowy, as if she were a ghost. She waved a ghost shape over her head, and as she stepped out of the dust cloud, it resolved itself into a notepad. "What've you got?" she shouted.
"A bit of a mystery," he called back. "Dead bat, no scavengers. What've you got?"
"A bigger mystery," she said. And when she knelt down beside him she flipped open her pad. More than a dozen e-mail messages scrolled by. None of them was from Richard; but each of them added a new piece to the puzzle, making the picture a little bit clearer, and a little more scary:
From Deedra and Karen, Smithsonian Institute for Tropical Studies, Costa Rica: Janet, it's confirmed. All the insectivorous bats have either died off or migrated out of Belize. Vampire bats also appear to have deserted the region. Of possible related interest, Colonel August Schmitt, a local rancher and amateur lepidopterist of some renown, notes that our butterfly populations appear to have been decimated.
From Arthur and Elizabeth in Colombia: Cannot follow up on your queries about whether or not bat populations are declining. We're much too busy here. Trying desperately to save our farm. This season's coffee harvest all but destroyed by plagues of fruit mites. Economic disaster of the worst kind.
From Darren and Sakiko in Venezuela: Confirmed. All bat populations, including vampires, missing. Ranchers here are reporting hundreds of cows dead from prion disease. A mystery: This particular prion disease is believed to be insect borne, but we are unable to identify the carrier species because our insect populations appear to be every bit as absent as our bats.
From Farouk, Marie, and Pete on Trinidad: Sorry to report that we are preoccupied with an outbreak of mad cow disease. Have identified vampire bats as probable new route of disease transmission. P.S.: We are up to our necks in vampires.
From Kim and Chris in Guyana: Disturbing developments. Facing possible loss of ranch due to illness affecting all our cattle. It's beginning to look like economic Armageddon down here. Regret that I cannot afford the time that will be required to set up nets and answer your questions about bats.
The only good news was that the sugar crop was said to be booming. Of course it was, Bil told himself. There were no insects around to bore into and munch on the sugar cane. A cheery thought, made all the more alarming by a vague P.S. from Kim about some sort of ritual slaughter in the outback of Guyana. It sounded in some ways every bit as gruesome as Long Beach, except that it involved far fewer people, was a lot bloodier, and on account of Guyana's long history of strange religious practices, was being attributed by the authorities to voodoo cults.
Bil wondered.
He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket, wiped the sweat away from his face, and was amazed to see that he had failed to take notice of the streamers of dried blood staining a cow's legs. What on Earth-?
Janet looked where he was looking, and she saw that all the cows had bled-most from their legs only, some from their legs and their bellies. Desmodus rotundus, she concluded.
Really vicious little beasties. They fed in packs, like miniature wolves; but they did not behave as one would have expected a winged adversary to behave. Their attack strategies were not based first and foremost upon flight. They ran on the ground, like spiders; and when they were close enough they scrabbled up your legs, and from there they could climb or claw their way to any perch they desired. Their remarkable agility on the ground was combined with stealth and cunning, and with incisors honed sharper than the finest surgical tool-so sharp, in fact, that when they slashed through your skin, individual cells would be cut in half and the nerves would register no pain. They could penetrate the arteries in your ankles and you wouldn't even know it.
"Desmodus?" Bil asked.
"That would do it," Janet replied.
They crept toward the herd for a closer look. The cows shifted uneasily but did not move away. Bil 's eyes ticked back and forth, analyzing the blood trails. He guessed that the cows had been attacked shortly before dawn, and had stood here bleeding long past sunrise. It was typical for the victim's blood to be everywhere after a vampire attack because the bats'
saliva was laced with anticoagulants, which prevented the natural clotting response. Even after a relatively minor attack, the blood simply kept flowing from the wounds, usually for several hours. Vampire bats were among the sloppiest eaters in al the animal kingdom, not only because of their grisly dietary habits and the nature of their spit, but also because their kidneys were extraordinarily efficient. With the first gush of blood over the taste buds, the kidneys shifted into maximum overdrive, began concentrating the blood solids and nutrients, squeezing out the water and dumping it instantly. As the bats clung to their prey, drinking-drinking deeply-they urinated. The urine was a watery, paler shade of scarlet, and it stank; but Bil neither saw nor smelled any sign of it in the field. The cows' legs and bellies should have been smeared from stem to stern with dried rivulets of urine and blood. To judge from the large number of puncture marks, had the bats clung on even for a few minutes, the cows should have looked as if someone had tried to butcher them where they stood. Bad as the attack was-he counted more than a dozen bites on one leg-it seemed peculiarly bloodless.
It was as if a bat pack had merely alighted, punctured the flesh, sipped the blood, and, perhaps finding it distasteful, moved on without taking enough even to kick the kidneys into action. Evolutionary biologists were often required to draw volumes of information from mere scraps of bone, causing them to develop the very modes of thinking that brought endless delight to Agatha Christie and her fans. The detective in Bil took note that the cows' noses were running thickly with mucus, and their eyes were almost rheumy enough to be pasted shut, as if they were fighting off a severe flu.
What had the reports from Venezuela, Guyana, and Trinidad said? Cows, sick and dying?
When he added this to what he knew about vampire bats, the thought sickened him. He knew that vampires would not feed on sick animals-which explained why the bat pack had not stayed long enough to leave traces of urine: Something else, perhaps the last insect alive here, perhaps even the first vampire to reach the island, had infected them. He knew that vampire bats could not store fat in their bodies-which meant they needed fresh blood every night or they died. And he knew that this herd's attackers, even if they had failed to locate healthier cows elsewhere on the island, might stil be alive and well fed, because one feature vampires shared with humans was the ability to behave altruistically. If you happened to be a vampire bat and you were unable to get a blood meal last night-not to worry, fella; your pal would vomit some of his meal into your mouth.
Aw, isn't nature wonderful? Bil thought ruefully. He knew that the displacement of forests by cattle ranches in Venezuela, Guyana, and Trinidad had made fresh cow blood as accessible to vampire bats as milk cartons and prime ribs were to people. As the ranchers increased the population of cows, they unwittingly lured the vampires out of the woods, and their population exploded as wel . No one had asked what would happen if the bats' primary food source became sick; but Bil was certain that sickness had forced the vampire migration he was witnessing on Tobago; and he knew that here, too, cow blood was becoming tainted. Now he began to see what was to come.
Janet saw it, too; and the thought frightened her. "They'l just keep migrating, won't they?"
she said hopefully. "Rather than feed on sick cows?"
"Or they'l stick around and look for healthier blood," Bil said. "Switch to a different flavor."
"People?"
He looked at the bite marks on the sick cows and grimaced. There were a lot of the little monsters out there these days. By everything he knew, more than the world had ever seen before. And they were roosting somewhere, roosting by the tens of thousands, sleeping in little clusters under eaves or in caves-but now, Bil guessed, they were hungrier than usual, and
"It'l be dusk in a couple of hours," Janet warned.
Bil glanced up toward the sun. "Better tell our neighbors to hang double layers of mosquito netting over their beds tonight, and to button up their doors and windows real tight. Just in case."
"And tell them to tell their friends."
"Maybe," Bil said, trying to shake off the grade Z horror movie that was playing in his head.
"And maybe we're exaggerating," Janet said, trying to sound hopeful again. "Probably we're overreacting. I think what's gonna happen is that a lot of people are going to think we're pretty sil y when they wake up in the morning." But Bil looked over his shoulder at the insect-eater whose starved, decaying body had attracted no maggots. And he began wondering what sort of ecologic train wreck could account for plagues of hungry bats and mites, and he wished more than ever, as the horror movie in his head began to gain momentum, that he would hear from Richard.
"You can't fool yourself," Bil said. "So don't try fooling me. This could get really ugly, really fast. You know it. I know it. In a month or even a week, this part of the Caribbean could become a place no sane person wants to be caught sleeping in, or around."
"Al these islands? Half the Caribbean?" Janet shook her head. "No, it just can't be that bad. Can't be."
"It might be a lot worse than half the Caribbean," Bil said. "We could get on a plane for New York tomorrow; but I doubt we'd be leaving the problem behind us. I think Long Beach makes that clear enough."
Janet stood stunned for a moment, as if her husband were a crazy man; then the wall of denial crumbled and she began to see that the problem really could be spreading halfway across the Caribbean, or worse. "What's causing it?" she said at last.
"Such a little thing," he said, a slightly manic grin breaking across his face. "Almost the littlest things in the world-insects. You'd hardly even think to look for them on a normal day.
But they're dead, Janet. Dead, or dying, or hibernating somewhere. And it's not just here, in the Caribbean. It's happening in New York, I think. It could be all over the world."
"No," Janet said. "That doesn't make any sense."
"I'm afraid it's the only thing that does."
Four hours later, and two thousand miles northwest of Tobago, dusk was descending upon Newbern, North Carolina. The beekeeper left the dirt road and ducked into the woods to his left when he heard a soft rustle. Human or animal? He had to be careful. If he was caught poaching from the quarry again, they'd probably confiscate his entire collection. Old Mr. Ames, in charge of mine security, had caught him red-handed last time and hauled him into court. The beekeeper stil did not understand why Ames or anyone else would get so hot under the collar about a few fossil seashells and shark's teeth. This was a phosphate mine, for crying out loud! With their trucks and cranes and high-pressure water hoses, the miners were flushing ocean sediments out of a mile-wide pit, then hauling the phosphates away to make fertilizer, or to give magazine pages and book covers their glossy finish. The shells, teeth, and occasional whale vertebrae were mere refuse washed out with the til .
They were valueless to the mine owners, unwanted, and bound to be buried in rubble and floodwaters as the cranes and hoses moved on.
Ames, the beekeeper heard, liked to boast in the local bars about the day he "busted and burned" the poacher. Ames joked about how, when asked to explain what he had been looking for in the phosphate pits, this "weird old beekeeper" opened up trays of fossil shark's teeth in the courtroom and began a crazy lecture about how this whole county had been under the ocean mil ions of years ago. A self-taught paleontologist, the beekeeper knew now that he must have been mad to show the teeth, or to speak so lovingly of his hobby. He realized, too late, that his enthusiasm could be contagious. One of the mine owners had been present in the courtroom, and his eyes opened wide when he saw a shark tooth wider than the span of his own hand. During recess, the owner had lunch with the judge, and an offer was made to drop all charges if the beekeeper allowed the phosphate miner and three company executives to have their pick from his collection.
And so it went: "I'l take that one ... that ... that one . . . and that . . ." Years of careful searching, and his finest specimens were snatched away in a single afternoon.
"I wasn't there to see it," Ames was often heard to brag, "but they tell me the old beekeeper sobbed like a little girl when they took his fossils away."
Wel , Ames would never catch him again. Last time it had happened only because he allowed himself to become too distracted by the Miocene whale jaw he'd dragged out of the pit. The old guard must have spotted him from the road, then hid in the woods and crept up on him as he passed by.
"Well, Ames, you won't get me again," the beekeeper repeated to himself. "What right have you, anyway? God put the seabed here fifteen mil ion years before the likes of you came along with your cranes and hoses and threw a fence around it. Nice tooth I've got here-better than any of the ones your friends stole from meso I guess the score is just about even, now. But I'l get myself a bunch more before I'm through with you bastards.
What else is there at a time like this? I'm broke. No more bees. Al my hives are dead."
His footsteps came to an abrupt stop. The rustling noises had started again. Ames? And the beekeeper made what he knew to be a stupid attempt to blend motionlessly with some tall bushes.
The rustling rose and ebbed, but the sound that froze him like a statue was what he thought to be- swore to have been- a low moan. Ames?
He closed his fingers tighter around the tooth, welcoming the weight of time in the heft of a fossil, welcoming most of all its power of distraction. Eight inches long-at the very least, he told himself. Even "Jaws," the great white, possessed teeth no bigger than a shot glass.
Whoever owned this must have been a real monster.
His thumb ran over a crescent etched into the flattest part of the tooth-a sucker mark about the size of a half dollar. It was a clue to what the shark had bitten, and formed part of a picture in which the tooth had actually been torn from the monster's mouth. The beekeeper recalled seeing photos of these same sucker marks on the hides of sperm whales. This sperm whale-sized shark, and the great sperm whale itself, shared an appetite for giant squid.... The woods remained silent, but something stil prickled the hairs on the back of his neck, so he continued to stand motionless, watching and waiting. He listened for the snap of a twig under work boots, :or thorns scratching against blue jeans, or any other signs that Ames-or, God forbid, Ames and one or two of his drinking buddies-was on the prowl. But the rustling noise, and all other noises, it seemed, had stopped. The beekeeper crept forward again, half wishing he could throw Ames to the great sharks, deciding to stay as far as possible from the dirt road, and peering into the woods ahead. They were dark and deep, darker than they had any right to be and
He froze.
Yes, there had been something rustling here; but it was not a man. And, yes, Ames had been here, too; but he no longer looked like a man. During what must have been a brief but terrifying struggle, Ames had stumbled out of his shoes. His right eye was covered with mites. The left was gone. His left cheek had been eaten, and from where he stood the beekeeper could look inside and see a carpet of mites in the shape of a human jawbone and teeth.
Something under Ames's shirt gave with a wet blatting sound, and the beekeeper watched in silent disbelief as the guard's diaphragm suddenly caved in and most of his innards flowed out his back.
The beekeeper decided it was time to leave. Screw the tooth- He tossed it away, finding it suddenly too weighty a liability-then wheeled and ran whence he came, his shoes barely touching the forest floor.
