The flask passes around the fire a few times more, and their words begin to tumble freely, their faces flushed, numbed. A pitch pocket pops. Frogs chirp. The river hushes. A chittering comes from the sky — followed by the shaky nickering of a horse. Someone claps a hand and crushes a mosquito. Then York clears his throat and announces that he has to take a leak so bad that the river will rise five feet in the next five minutes.
They hear the chittering sound again, what could be mistaken for a high-pitched giggling. York is a few yards from the fire now, and he spins around to say he hopes nobody misses him when he’s gone. It is then, with his smile a white crescent and his body ghosting into the dark, that a shadow comes alive behind him. And though everyone laughs at first, thinking that this is another trick of his, thinking that his screams might be an act, this is not the case.
Something has him. Something is dragging him away. What it is, Lewis cannot see, his night vision blurred from all his time staring at the fire. Now the horses are screaming along with York. Lewis can hear their hooves kicking, as they rear back against the harnesses that bind them to the trees.
Lewis has had too much to drink. He cannot process what is happening. He studies Clark’s face to see if he ought to be scared. She already has her revolver out. A muscle ripples along her cheek. She is standing — she is running — the gun’s metal dancing with orange light thrown by the fire. Reed does the same. So does Gawea. The doctor lifts a rifle to her shoulder and swings in an unsteady circle. No one shoots. They don’t know what to shoot at.
There is a piercing scream — inhuman — and York races out of the dark. Claw marks run across his face. In his hand he carries a bloodied knife. He throws aside his packs until he finds his holster and belts it around his waist. “Move,” he tells Lewis. “Move, move, move, or you’re dead.”
Lewis is unarmed. He never keeps a weapon ready, not like the others. But he manages to force his brain into action. There is no moon. They need light. They need to shove back the night. His eyes fall to the nearby pile of wood. He tries to run and trips. He scrambles on hands and knees. The first gunshot sounds. The horses keep screaming — a sound like metal dragged across metal — though their screams seem fewer now. Lewis grabs what wood he can, feeding the fire three split logs, a branch full of dead pine needles. The flames rise with a crackling flash. The shadows retreat between the trees. And in the light cast by the fire he sees the bats.
Their skin is as white as moonlight. Some are the size of boys, some the size of men. One is splayed across the back of a rearing horse, its wings wrapped around its sides like some veined shell. It opens up the horse’s neck and nuzzles into the arterial spray. Another horse beside it has fallen and gone still, though its neck remains raised, held in place by the reins knotted around a tree branch. Two bats feed on it.
Reed fires his revolvers until they are empty. He continues to snap the triggers until a bat swoops down and he strikes it in the face and then commences tapping out the spent brass, thumbing fresh bullets into the cylinder.
A sudden wind knocks Lewis sideways. He ducks down and cannot help but scream when he sees what displaces the air. The sky above is swirling with bats, too many to count, their winged shapes like pale mouths blotting out the stars.
York takes a knee and fires a round into the sky. From the barrel comes a yellow shout of light. One of the bats screeches and wheels and drops heavily. He aims again, ready to fire, when a bat swoops down from behind, knocking away his gun and pressing him flat against the ground.
Lewis starts toward him — ready to do what, he doesn’t know. But another bat drops from the sky, landing in a crouch before him. Slowly it rises into a standing position, taller than he. Its legs are stunted and the steps it takes small. Its eyes are as large as a baby’s skull, white and broken along the edges by bright red capillaries. Its mouth is open, and its teeth, sharply pointed, are the color of bone. White downy hair runs down its chest to its belly. It opens its wings like a cloak. He dodges right and the bat follows him, stepping now in front of the fire, the red glow of it filtering through the skin of its wings and highlighting the thin bones and the filamented veins within. It starts toward him.
Lewis makes his hands into fists, ready to fight, when the bat swings a wing. A wind comes rolling off it that scatters grit and momentarily blinds him. The horses have gone quiet, but gunshots continue to thunder all around him. He swings his hands blindly. Something hooks into his mouth, a claw that reaches down his throat. He gags, but the bile doesn’t get a chance to rise before his head is yoked aside, the meat of his neck exposed. He can feel its breath as it draws closer. So hot his hair goes damp.
A gun claps beside him. His right ear goes deaf except for a shrill ring. There comes a spray of blood. Not his own. He opens his eyes in time to see the bat slump to the ground.
Gawea does not give him the chance to say thank you. She shoves a shotgun into his arms. Then she races off in the direction of the horses.
Lewis remembers York and finds him gone — and he calls for Clark and gets no answer. There is nothing left to do but chamber a round and empty it into the belly of the bat that spirals above him.
They do not kill all the bats, though they try. The air shakes with gunfire. And then either enough of them die or enough of them eat their fill, because their shapes become less frequent in the sky.
When the red light of dawn comes, they clean the camp. They drag the bats onto the fire. There is nothing to be done for the horses. Lewis crouches over Donkey and runs a hand through her clotted mane and closes his eyes and apologizes for every time he cursed her obstinacy and slowness.
Clark is gone. They have lost her. Truly lost her, her body nowhere to be found. Whether alive or dead, they don’t know for certain, but how can it be any other way than dead?
Lewis does not sit so much as collapse onto the stump of a tree. Out of habit he puts his hands to his sides as if to drag forward his chair to his desk, and for a moment he imagines himself there, in his office, happily creaking open a book to study. But only for a moment. The image begins to dissolve even as it takes form. He is surrounded not by his library but by death. He sits not in his chair but on a stump. Beneath him are hundreds of rings, like the whorls of a thumb pad, some of them fat, some thin, the last of them barely traceable. If someone should happen upon his corpse later, like a dry, gray stick half-buried in sand, he wonders if she might snap it over her knee and find inside a similar story. He has doomed himself, agreeing to this journey, and his last moments, these moments, would be his thinnest, his thirstiest.
He takes a sniff from his silver tin. And then another.
The fire is still burning. It crisps the carcasses stacked upon it. Those of the bats, twenty of them killed altogether. Their hair smokes. Their wings burn like paper. Everyone asks Lewis what they are. Bats. That’s what they are. What else is he supposed to say? “Ask her,” he says.
Gawea says nothing. The fire dances in her eyes.
“Mutants,” Lewis says. “Goblins.”
Missiles detonate, power plants melt down, radiation spills from them, the rules change. In the previous world, the bats would be considered abnormal, but who remains in this world to designate what is normal or not? This band of humans might as well be considered the unfamiliar, their so-far survival in this place unnatural. They are the mutants.
His hands shake from exhaustion. The fingernails are rimed with ink or dirt or blood; it’s difficult to tell in the half-light. He needs a bath in the river, but for the moment he cannot bring himself to do anything but sit in the shape of a ball and imagine himself away from here.