The Bat

Huarez followed the red bat with his eyes. It was looping, dogfighting, diving, sailing.

It was infected.

Shooting bats was a tricky game; your shot either hit the bat or scared it off. Huarez had never missed.

The trick was to catch it in a “long dive”, when it dives down for about a second without swooping back up or veering to either side. The window that afforded was infinitesimally small. If you aimed for a long dive and misjudged the bat’s course, it would jerk away as you pulled the trigger.

That golden combination of reflexes and accuracy required of marksmen was rare and valuable. Huarez had it. Before the plague, he hadn’t had much else.

Now, men like him were the only thing standing between epidemic and extinction.

He fluidly tracked the bat with the barrel of his gun, a white plastic revolver manufactured by the State. Custom-built with lightness as a priority, allowing precise aiming at close ranges.

Huarez was at mid-range himself, belly down under a shrub overlooking a miniature valley over which the bat frolicked. His gun was drawn up close to his face with the butt of the handle resting on the ground, providing stability as he aimed by rotating it like it was a stationary gun turret. The slatted shadow of the rickety wooden outhouse behind him kept the worst of the Texas sun off his back. The farmer who called in this bat had taken a fear shit in the latrine, where he hid from the animal for a while. Huarez tuned out the smell. Eventually.

Now the farmer was long gone, deep into quarantine, and Huarez was alone out here with the bat. Huarez’s trained eye clocked the bat’s yellowed eyes, final confirmation of its infection. Even before then he knew it had to be marked. Citizens were obliged by law to report all sightings of bats flying in daylight hours, and he had never yet been called out for a false alarm.

Every hour or so, he had to writhe into a different position to hush his screaming joints. Age was hitting him hard. He imagined his muscles looking like beef jerky and his bones like white cacti under the skin, which he knew looked like old leather. He had been under this bush, he reckoned, for about three hours. Aching, tired, losing focus. He had let a few long dives go by that he knew damn sure he would have hit a few years ago. Not that anyone was lying under bushes shooting at bats a few years ago.

Even with his eyes on the bat, he saw the shadow before him was getting shorter. The heat was already burning him into the ground and boiling his sweat, but it was going to get a whole lot worse when the sun hit him.

Finally, the creature dived. Huarez took the shot. You never get used to the recoil from a bat revolver; it just seems too light to kick as much as you know it will. But it does. Huarez’s whipped straight up and the tip of the barrel slapped him awkwardly in the forehead. He flinched and jerked his head back like a bug had landed on him but didn’t feel too much pain. He shook his head to dismiss this distraction and made to recover the bat.

No time to look around for the bat from here, he had to move in and confirm the kill. His gun slapping him obscured and stole his attention from what he should have seen, which was hopefully a dead bat sinking through the air and landing with a dusty thud in the sand. He crawled backwards out of the shrub, through the way he had come in, over the stems he thought he had flattened but caught in his clothes like road spikes.

Huarez pushed himself up to his feet and leaned backwards onto the outhouse, holding his gun out in front of him and scanning the sky, then the ground. He only stayed there for a second before moving to the little valley the bat was flying over. He walked to the precipice and aimed his gun down into the valley, whose ground level was about four feet lower than where he stood. He took the quickest of glances down. He had only to descend a small slope, not too steep and with only pebbles as obstacles, to enter the valley. He took the slope in a few steps then cancelled his momentum by lunging forward into a crouch, keeping his gun trained ahead throughout.

Now he was down here with it, he had to be, for the skies were clear. And then he saw it. Alive, flapping around lamely on one wing. He had all but severed its left wing, which remained tethered to the bat like a twitching weight. He sighed, and felt a cruel impulse to let it bleed out; he knew two bullet holes would be an embarrassment and a stain on his record. But it was already an obvious ruined kill, and he wasn’t going to let it suffer further. He got up, strode over to it, and waited for a break in its twitchings. It hissed and rasped in pain, feebly spitting disease across the sand. It looked up at him with its thoughtless eyes, distracting itself from the pain for a second. He looked at it straight back and pulled the trigger.