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.
He hears a voice beside him, York’s. “Why didn’t you do something?” He stands ten yards away with a shotgun in his hands and tears in his eyes. “Both of you.” He gestures the gun at Lewis and Gawea.
“We did what we could.”
“Bullshit.” The tears track trails through the dirt and blood on his face. “I was there, in the basement, when you hurled my sister against that pillar. I was there, in the stadium, when she called down the vultures.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Oh, how does it work, then? Tell me.”
Lewis looks to Gawea and she gives him nothing back. “I wish I knew.”
The horses lie in ruined mounds, with the flies already making a meal of them. Reed stands by the fire with the doctor, both of them slump shouldered and staring at the flames that lick the spaces between the bats heaped there.
“We are fucked, you realize that?” York says, his voice cracking, his tone that of a furious boy. “We are absolutely fucked. What are we going to do without our horses? We can’t exactly turn around, go home, say we’re sorry, can we? So what do we do? What the hell are we supposed to do?”