Night of the Bat (The Zone Unknown) Read online

  Books by Pulitzer Prize-winner

  PAUL ZINDEL

  THE ZONE UNKNOWN

  Book One: Loch

  Book Two: The Doom Stone

  Book Three: Raptor

  Book Four: Rats

  Book Five: Reef of Death

  Book Six: Night of the Bat

  The Gadget

  YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

  The Pigman

  The Pigman’s Legacy

  My Darling, My Hamburger

  A Begonia for Miss Applebaum

  Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on My Eyeball!

  I Never Loved Your Mind

  The Undertaker’s Gone Bananas

  Confessions of a Teenage Baboon

  The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman

  David and Della

  The Girl Who Wanted a Boy

  A Star for the Latecomer (with Bonnie Zindel)

  To Take a Dare (with Crescent Dragonwagon)

  P.C. HAWKE MYSTERIES

  Book One: The Scream Museum

  Book Two: The Surfing Corpse

  Book Three: The E-mail Murders

  Book Four: The Lethal Gorilla

  Book Five: The Square Root of Murder

  Book Six: Death on the Amazon

  Book Seven: The Gourmet Zombie

  Book Eight: The Phantom of 86th Street

  THE WACKY FACTS LUNCH BUNCH

  Book One: Attack of the Killer Fishsticks

  Book Two: Fifth Grade Safari

  Book Three: Fright Party

  Book Four: The 100% Laugh Riot

  SHORT STORIES

  Love & Centipedes

  Rachel’s Vampire

  PLAYS

  The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds

  (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

  The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild

  Ladies at the Alamo

  Let Me Hear You Whisper

  And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little

  Every Seventeen Minutes the Crowd Goes Crazy

  The Ladies Should Be in Bed

  Amulets Against the Dragon Forces

  Published by Graymalkin Media

  www.graymalkinmedia.com

  Night of the Bat

  Copyright © 2001 by Paul Zindel

  All rights reserved.

  eISBN: 978-1-935169-68-0

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS:

  Zindel, Paul.

  Night of the bat / Paul Zindel.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Teenage Jake joins his father on an expedition to study bats in the Brazilian rain forest and finds the project menaced by a giant brain-eating bat.

  [1. Bats—Fiction. 2. Monsters—Fiction. 3. Brazil—Fiction.

  4. Amazon River Region—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.Z647Ni 2001

  [Fic]—dc21

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, recording, photocopying or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electric piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://www.graymalkinmedia.com/

  Dedicated to Dorothy Ames and

  our Milford dinners, over which we discuss

  the labyrinths and flights of Family.

  1

  EMERGENCE

  Jake heard the small mammal sounds erupting from the end of the high ramp where the vines swirled to form a cave. There came the flutter of wings, and the nightly emergence had begun: a blanket of glistening bats—hundreds of bats!—with bulldoglike ears and tiny, punched-in faces.

  Bats flying right at Jake.

  Jake called down from the canopy to his dad, on the jungle floor. “Send the sling up for me. Now, Dad, now.”

  He tried to escape, but it was too late. The wave of bats swelled and began to wash up over his legs. They bit at his ankles, small razor cuts from short, feeding jaws.

  “Help me! Dad!” he shrieked.

  Jake drew in air to scream. A living, furry scarf scampered up to cover his mouth. One of the bats tore at his lips, then shimmied its small hairy head and legs and wing tips inside of his mouth. He tried to yell as it crawled violently, deep into his throat.

  A small head.

  Biting inside him.

  Jake screaming. Screaming and praying and …

  “Wake up, young man. Excuse me. Wake up.”

  Jake Lefkovitz’s eyes snapped open. He realized that the flight attendant was shaking him by the shoulder.

  “Oh … sorry,” Jake said, bolting upright in his window seat on the M-80 jetliner.

  “Please put your seat back forward and make certain your safety belt is secure,” the flight attendant said. She smiled. “We’ll be landing in Manaus in twenty minutes.”

  Jake noticed that several of the passengers were staring at him. He knew he must have cried out. The remnants of the nightmare were like snakes turning in the back of his mind. “I dreamed my allowance got cut,” he announced, laughing and rapping his knuckles on his head like a clown.

  He knew he had stayed up too long the night before. For weeks, he’d spent hours at the New York Public Library reading like a demon everything he could get his hands on about bats and the Amazon. He’d read books and magazines from the Smithsonian. A colleague of his father’s had lent him videos and audiotapes from the Museum of Natural History. One was about batologists like his father, working high in the rain forest canopy of Brazil. The other was about the wildlife—capybaras, deadly anacondas. Army ants cutting a ten-foot swath through the jungle.

  On this trip, Jake was determined to prove himself to his dad, who thought Jake couldn’t take anything seriously. It was true that he had a reputation as a joker, that he liked a good laugh. Now he wanted to show he had grown up and changed—that he could be part of his father’s research team and act responsibly.

  Jake looked out the plane window as it circled low over Manaus, the capital of the Amazonas state. From the air it appeared to be an oasis of broad streets and plazas in the middle of a belt of greedy jungle—part of a lush wilderness territory as big as the United States. When the plane landed, the flight attendant kept her eye on him.

  “I’m okay,” Jake said. “I always yell in my sleep.”

  “How strange,” the flight attendant said.

  His face reddened. He covered his embarrassment with a wink as he got his overstuffed duffel bag, a heavy cardboard box bound with rope, and a big aluminum boom box down from a storage compartment. He put a small bag of peanut-butter cookies saved from the in-flight dinner into the duffel bag. Peanut-butter cookies had always been his favorite, and they had been, by far, the best thing about the meal. He lugged his carry-ons to the open doorway, where the heat socked him like a hammer.

  As he came down the stair ramp, it was easy for him to spot the guide his father had sent to meet him. A tiny, wrinkled man with waist-length gray hair waited alone on the tarmac.

  “Welcome to Manaus, Master Jake,” the man said as he extended his hand. “I’m Hanuma, your father’s foreman.”

  “Ciao,” Jake said, taking Hanuma’s thin, stiff hand and shaking it. “‘Ciao’ is Italian for hello and goodbye.”

  “I see.” Hanuma stared at him and took his
hand back. “I have a taxi waiting to take us to the river dock,” he said, leading the way through the small, stifling, terminal and out an exit to the pickup area.

  Jake felt the tropic heat deep in his lungs now, and he remembered he was heading into a jungle where men perish. “Did you ever find the missing men from the expedition?” Jake asked.

  “No …”

  “It’s a little scary, isn’t it? When Dad called last week, he sounded really worried about them. Is it possible they just got bored and took off?”

  Hanuma grunted. “My workers do not take off,” he said. “The missing men are the main reason Dr. Lefkovitz didn’t want you to come out to the camp. He said you should stay in Manaus, and he can join you down here at the end of the month. See the Theatro. The museums. There will be time for a safe tour of the river before the rains come.”

  “No way,” Jake said. “I’m going back upriver with you guys. Dad’s been gone too long. If something weird is going on out at his camp, I don’t want him doing a disappearing act, too. Guys don’t just disappear from my dad’s expeditions. Even my mom’s worried and wants him to pack it in.”

  “Then why didn’t she come?”

  “Well, she’s with a law firm and is still busy clawing her way to the top. She lay around the house for a couple of decades, and now you can’t stop her. Last week her firm sent her to Tonga. I don’t even know where that is.”

  “That explains it,” Hanuma said.

  “What?”

  “Why you are in Manaus despite your father’s warning. You just do whatever you want.” Hanuma smiled, flashing a gold front tooth.

  “That was the old me,” Jake said. “Dad never let me get away with too much. You know how he wants things done his way. I think one of the reasons I’ve come down here is to let him know I found out he was usually right.”

  Hanuma glanced up toward the equatorial sun. “Ah, I understand you now. You want your father to see that you have learned to be wise and have courage. My seventeen sons and daughters were like you when they were young. Full of themselves. Maybe you will learn—as your father should have—that sometimes, in the Amazon,” he said seriously, “it is a fine thing if one can admit they are wrong. Or it can be ‘Ciao, baby’ forever.”

  2

  THE RIVER

  The taxi driver, a young Indian wearing a grime-stained baseball cap and a T-shirt, left the side of his beat-up Ford station wagon, and helped Jake put his luggage into the trunk. Jake kept his CD player with him.

  “What is in the big cardboard box?” Hanuma asked Jake.

  “Some electrical thingamajig. I did my science project on echolocation—bat radar. Some pretty interesting stuff. I figured Dad would want to see it.”

  “Perhaps,” Hanuma said, as he and Jake slid into the backseat. “Do you mind if I ask why you didn’t stay home in New York City and eat ice cream and pizzas? Maybe make an appointment to see your mother and let her buy you more Gap jeans and Tommy shirts?”

  “Thanks,” Jake said. “You sound like you’ve been to the States a lot.”

  “Enough to know that an air-conditioned mall is more fun than the jungles of Jurua Lace. And safer.”

  “Safer I don’t know about,” Jake said. “We’ve got our share of savages running around Manhattan, too, you know. How long’s the trip to Dad’s camp?”

  “A small moon and fourteen waterfalls.”

  “Is that like half past a jaguar’s a—?”

  Hanuma cut him off. “Dr. Lefkovitz warned me that you would be a very silly boy.”

  “Thank you. I am the only one in our family that still has a sense of humor.”

  “If that’s what you want to call it,” Hanuma said. “Dr. Lefkovitz says you can be a real teenage pain in the butt.”

  “How’s that for PR?”

  Hanuma sighed.

  As the taxi left the center of Manaus, the elaborate fountains and statues of the plazas gave way to narrow streets of makeshift Indian stores and checkerboard gardens. Several tourist cafes with striped awnings and neon signs lined the riverbank near the main deep-water dock. Gaudy tour boats were moored side by side small fishing skiffs and beached narrow dugouts called pirogues.

  The driver pulled the taxi to a halt at one of the small Indian docks. Two well-built men in loincloths left their freshly stocked pirogue and helped Jake with his duffel bag and box of rattling electronics.

  By the time Hanuma had finished haggling with the driver over the fare, the men were ready to launch the pirogue onto the river.

  Jake knew his father had sent his best men to bring him upriver: Hanuma and two Indians who had made the journey many times. They ordered Jake to sit between Muras, the bowman with the supplies, and Hanuma’s main man, Dangari. Hanuma squatted at the back of the pirogue where he could help steer. Jake knew from his father’s letters that Hanuma was able to troubleshoot most of his expedition’s problems. He’d once been a shaman in the Murdaruci tribe, and was said to have special gifts, like clairvoyance.

  He knows across great distances, without phone or walkie-talkie, when one of his men or children has been bit by a snake or fallen from a tree, Dr. Lefkovitz had written. That is why the workers missing from the camp are of great concern to us. Hanuma believes something bad has happened to them. He can no longer feel their spirits.

  Muras and Dangari were like most of the men from the Murdaruci tribe, olive-skinned, short, but with powerful builds and lustrous straight black hair like that of cliff divers. Under Hanuma’s orders, they cut their paddles with the sharpness of knives into the dark river water, and used them to steer in the rapids. The whole first day there was always the distant sound of screeching chain saws and roaring earthmovers. Swaths of mahogany rain forest were being cleared as far as the eye could see. Lumber trucks with poisonous fumes coughing from their cab pipes tore along dirt roads like ruthless juggernauts.

  As dusk set in, the sky reddened and the banks along a tributary of the river were unspoiled jungle again.

  Hanuma picked their camping spot for the night and supervised the raising of the tents and the making of a fire. Dinner was slicings from a slab of salted tapir.

  The next morning, Jake helped shove off into rapids that threatened to capsize the pirogue. At each waterfall, he pitched in with the Indians to carry the long dugout and supplies carefully up to the next stretch of flat, slower river. When it was calm, Jake played rock CDs on his boom box—and once, some loud rap just to see the look on Hanuma’s face.

  “I see you are trying to drive me and the jungle crazy,” Hanuma said.

  “Oh, you mean the music?” Jake asked.

  “Yes. The racket.”

  A constant mist drifted down through the towering trees and walls of vines. The main waters of the entire Amazon basin were born in the Andes. Soon, when the high mountain snows melted, they would violently flood the area as they did every year.

  “How much time before the flooding starts at the camp?” Jake asked.

  “Soon,” Hanuma said. “Maybe a couple of weeks. The waters will rise quickly and fish will swim in the forest,” Hanuma said, his voice gentle with a mix of Portuguese and Indian accents. “Within a month, giant water ferns will arise where your father’s camp now stands. There will be too many piranha to keep away with the sound of his old truck motor. River dolphins have begun to play near the camp falls, and the spider monkeys are already chattering nervously. Yes, the high water is coming.”

  “Has Dad collected a lot of nifty bats?” Jake asked.

  “Plenty, if you ask me. He always wants to find more. He makes Muras draw them. Muras can draw very well.”

  “Dad told me he’s after vampires on this trip,” Jake said. “They’re really nasty little suckers, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” Hanuma said.

  “I’ve seen them in the nocturnal room at the Bronx Zoological Gardens,” Jake said. “The staff puts out petri dishes of cow’s blood for them to lap up.”

  “The north
jungle has many of the ‘little suckers,’ as you say, that your father wants to study,” Hanuma said. “They sleep in the vines and hollowed tree trunks during the day. At night, they fly to feast on the backs of monkeys and wild boars. My men wake up sometimes to see bats drinking blood from their own legs and faces.”

  “In that case, I guess there won’t be much sack time for me.” Jake remembered his dream on the plane, and his stomach tightened. Perhaps he’d read too much about bats. The gentle way they bite. How they can give someone a fatal disease without their even knowing. “Isn’t anyone afraid of getting rabies?”

  “That is a danger, too,” Hanuma said. “You go crazy. It is a terrible death. But my men are more afraid of a puma attack or cayman alligators grabbing them in the river and eating them. Here the alligators kill and hide their prey beneath mounds of underwater peat.”

  The idea was disturbing to Jake, but he had no intention of showing fear. “Great marinade,” he said.

  “My tribesmen are also afraid of evil tree spirits and mountain lightning—and tiny barbed catfish that can swim up into their body cavities.”

  Jake decided not even to think about that.

  It was afternoon by the time they reached Dark Angel Falls. Jake helped carry the pirogue and supplies up the towering, steep rocky bank to a cove above the falls. In the last hours of the journey, the river narrowed to less than a hundred feet wide and its water became clear. Electric eels and iridescent neon fish flashed in the eddies. A jaguar watched them from high in a tree as they passed. Tapirs and capybaras drank at the riverbank.

  Jake noticed spiderwebs with strands as thick as cord. Once, when the pirogue had to pass under an overhang of tropical willows, ticks the size of acorns and large clawed beetles rained down and had to be brushed into the river.

  As the sun began to set, Hanuma called out. “There’s your father.”

  3

  STRANGERS