‘YOU’RE A FUCKING LIAR!’ Duke Rhinemann shrieked in a voice breaking with hurt betrayal and furious understanding. He leaped at the man who had saved his sanity and perhaps his life on a Red Line train . . . and then everything swooped down at once.
Pearson could not have seen it all, yet it seemed that somehow he did. He saw Robbie Delray hesitate, then turn his weapon sideways, as if he intended to club Duke with the barrel instead of shooting him. He saw Lester Olson, who had shot the batman in the Newburyport barn pop-pop-pop before losing his guts and deciding to try and cut a deal, lodge the wire stock of his own gun against the buckle of his belt and pull the trigger. He saw momentary blue licks of fire appear in the ventilation holes in the barrel, and heard a hoarse hack!hack!hack!hack! that Pearson supposed was the way automatic weapons sounded in the real world. He heard something invisible slice the air an inch in front of his face; it was like hearing a ghost gasp. And he saw Duke flung backward with blood spraying up from his white shirt and splattering on his cream-colored suit. He saw the man who had been standing directly behind Duke stumble to his knees, hands clapped over his eyes, bright blood oozing out from between the knuckles.
Someone — maybe Janet Brightwood — had shut the door between the staircase and this downstairs room before the meeting started; now it banged open and two batmen wearing the uniforms of the Boston Police squeezed in. Their small, pushed-together faces stared savagely out of their oversized, strangely restless heads.
‘Amnesty!’ Robbie Delray was screaming. The freckles on his face now stood out like brands; the skin upon which they had been printed was ashy-white. ‘Amnesty! I’ve been promised amnesty if you’ll just stand where you are and put up your hands!’
Several people — those who had been clustered around the coffeemaker, for the most part —
did raise their hands, although they continued to back away from the uniformed batmen as they did it. One of the bats reached forward with a low grunt, seized a man by the front of his shirt, and yanked him toward it. Almost before Pearson realized it had happened, the thing had torn out the man’s eyes. The thing looked at the jellied remains resting on its strange, misshapen palm for a moment, then popped them into its mouth.
As two more bats lunged in through the door, looking around with their blackly gleaming little eyes, the other police-bat drew its service revolver and fired three times, seemingly at random, into the crowd.
‘ No!’ Pearson heard Delray scream. ‘ No, you promised!”
Janet Brightwood grabbed the Bunn, lifted it over her head, and threw it at one of the newcomers. It struck with a muted metallic bonging and spewed hot coffee all over the thing.
This time there was no mistaking the pain in that shriek. One of the police-bats reached for her.
Brightwood ducked, tried to run, was tripped . . . and suddenly she was gone, lost in a stampede toward the front of the room.
Now all the windows were breaking, and somewhere close by Pearson could hear approaching sirens. He saw the bats breaking into two groups and running down the sides of the room, clearly bent on driving the panic-stricken Ten O’CIock People into the storage area behind the easel, which had now been knocked over.
Olson threw down his weapon, grabbed Kendra’s hand, and bolted in that direction. A bat-arm snaked down through one of the cellar windows, grabbed a handful of his theatrical white hair,
and hauled him upward, choking and gargling. Another hand appeared through the window, and a thumbnail three inches long opened his throat and let out a scarlet flood.
Your days of popping off batmen in barns on the coast are all over, my friend, Pearson thought sickly. He turned toward the front of the room again. Delray stood between the open trunk and the fallen easel, his gun now dangling from one hand, his eyes shocked nearly to vacancy. When Pearson pulled the wire stock from his fingers, the man made no attempt to resist.
‘They promised us amnesty,’ he told Pearson. ‘They promised.’
‘Did you really think you could trust things that looked like that?’ Pearson asked, and then drove the wire stock into the center of Delray’s face with all the force he could muster. He heard something break — probably Delray’s nose — and the thoughtless barbarian which had awakened within his banker’s soul cheered with rude savagery.
He started toward a passage zig-zagging between the stacked cartons — one that had been widened by the people who had already bolted their way through — then paused as gunfire erupted behind the building. Gunfire . . . screams . . . roars of triumph.
Pearson whirled and saw Cam Stevens and Moira Richardson standing at the head of the aisle between the folding chairs. They wore identical shocked expressions and were holding hands.
Pearson had time to think, That’s how Hansel and Gretel must have looked after they finally got out of the candy-house. Then he bent down, picked up Kendra’s and Olson’s weapons, and handed one to each.
Two more bats had come in through the rear door. They moved casually, as if all were going according to plan . . . which, Pearson supposed, it was. The action had moved to the rear of the house now — that was where the pen really was, not in here, and the bats were doing a lot more than just shearing.
‘Come on,’ he said to Cam and Moira. ‘Let’s get these fucks.’
The batmen at the rear of the room were late in realizing that a few of the refugees had decided to turn and fight. One of them spun around, possibly to run, struck a new arrival, and slipped in the spilled coffee. They both went down. Pearson opened fire on the one remaining on its feet. The machine-pistol made its somehow unsatisfying hack!hack!hack! sound and the bat was driven backward, its alien face breaking open and letting out a cloud of stinking fog . . . it was as if, Pearson thought, they really were just illusions.
Cam and Moira got the idea and opened fire on the remaining bats, catching them in a withering field of fire that knocked them back against the wall and then sent them to the floor, already oozing out of their clothes in an insubstantial mist that to Pearson smelled quite a lot like the asters in the marble flower-islands outside The First Mercantile.
‘Come on,’ Pearson said. ‘If we go now, we might have a chance.’
‘But — ‘ Cameron began. He looked around, starting to come out of his daze. That was good; Pearson had an idea they’d all have to be wide-awake if they were going to have a chance of getting out of this.
‘Never mind, Cam,’ Moira said. She had also looked around, and noted the fact that they were the only ones, human or bat, left in here. Everyone else had gone out the back. ‘Let’s just go. I think maybe the door we came in through would be our best bet.’
‘Yes,’ Pearson said, ‘but not for long.’
He spared one last look at Duke, who lay on the floor with his face frozen in an expression of pained disbelief. He wished there were time to close Duke’s eyes, but there wasn’t.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, and they went.
By the time they reached the door which gave on the porch — and Cambridge Avenue beyond it
— the gunfire coming from the rear of the house had begun to taper off. How many dead?
Pearson wondered, and the answer which first occurred — all of them — was horrible but too plausible to deny. He supposed one or two others might have slipped through, but surely no more. It had been a good trap, set quietly and neatly around them while Robbie Delray ran his gums, stalling for time and checking his watch . . . probably waiting to give some signal which Pearson had preempted.
If I’d woken up a little earlier, Duke might still be alive, he thought bitterly. Perhaps true, but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. This wasn’t the time for recriminations.
One police-bat had been left to stand sentry on the porch, but it was turned in the direction of the street, possibly watching for unwanted interference. Pearson leaned through the open door toward it and said, ‘Hey, you ugly ringmeat asshole — got a cigarette?’
The bat turned.
Pearson blew its face off.
Shortly after one the next morning, three people — two men and a woman, wearing torn nylons and a dirty red skirt — ran beside a freight-train pulling out of the South Station shipping yards.