Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [6]
“Of course it’ll work.” I was getting frantic now.
The Trinidadian said nothing.
“Why won’t it work?”
Muradali put his hand on my shoulder and smiled. “Because Diaemus youngi doesn’t jump.”
“Oh,” I replied, sheepishly. “Right.”
The light from Janet’s headlamp swept upward from the bottom of the empty elevator shaft (now below us) to the ceiling. “So where are all the—” Her beam had stopped tracking abruptly.
Illuminated at the top of the chamber were three circular clusters, each composed of a dozen or so black silhouettes, arranged concentrically. They hung silently, reminding me of giant Christmas tree ornaments. Suddenly, one of the fusiform shapes unfurled, revealing wings nearly two feet across.
“Phyllostomus hastatus,” Farouk whispered. “The second-largest bat in Trinidad.”
“Crawling mother of Waldo,” I muttered, and Muradali threw me a confused look.
“Don’t mind him,” Janet explained, keeping her light trained on the bats. “He gets all scientific when he’s excited.”
Muradali nodded politely, then began assembling an object that looked suspiciously like a drawstring-equipped butterfly net at the end of a four-foot pole.
I shot him a quizzical look. “A butterfly net?”
“Swoop net,” Muradali corrected, handing it to Janet.
Farouk nodded toward the net, then shined his light up at a cluster of bats. “To catch the ones closest to the elevator door, you lean out over the edge while someone holds your belt or backpack.”
Janet glanced up at the bats, then quickly shoved the net into my hands. Possibly she’d had the same vision that I’d just had, of tumbling down a concrete-lined abyss with nothing except years of rainwater, bat guano, and asbestos to soften the fall.
As I moved into the doorway, it was impossible to chase away the image of that poor woman, stepping off the solid concrete floor and into a bottomless pit of bat-shit soup. “Thanks, hon,” I said.
Janet only smiled.
“We’ll leave these bats alone,” Muradali said, moving away from the shaft.
As we quickly followed him, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Can we catch vampires like this?” I asked, suddenly feeling a bit braver and taking a few swings at some phantom air bats.
“No,” he replied, picking his way through the debris. “Too smart.”
Later, the scientist explained that early efforts to eradicate vampire bats had resulted in the deaths of thousands of non-blood-feeding species. In 1941, Captain Lloyd Gates was placed in charge of protecting the American forces stationed at Wallerfield from the twin threat of mosquitoes and vampire bats. Gates’s less-than-subtle response to the bat problem was to have his men use dynamite and poison gas in caves known to contain bat roosts. Flamethrowers became a popular alternative, but still the vampires persisted, as did their attacks upon the encroaching military men. Also hard hit was the increasing population of locals who had been drawn to the region for the income the base provided. As a result, thousands upon thousands of non-blood-feeding bats were blown up, poisoned, or incinerated. Even worse, these bat eradication techniques were apparently so appealing that over eight thousand caves in post–World War II Brazil were similarly destroyed.*5
Farouk recounted how he and vampire bat expert Rexford Lord had been sent to Brazil to pick up some tips on eradicating Desmodus from the antirabies groups working there.
“These guys took us to a cave. Then they rolled out a big tank of propane and wired it up with an old-fashioned camera flash, running the wires out the cave entrance.”
He described how everyone waited outside the cave entrance while one of the Brazilians opened up the gas-tank valve.
“Must have been the new guy,” I added.
“They used a triggering box to set off the flashbulb and the explosion ripped through the cave like a bomb,” Farouk said. Then he shook his head and continued. “After the smoke cleared, they asked us to go in and identify the dead bats that we found. And there were thousands. All sorts of species—but not one vampire.”
Farouk said that later