Invasive Species

By Tyson Hanks

Something has come to Florida. . .but they don't want you to know about it. It’s cutting a trail across the state and leaving nothing but mutilated bodies and carnage in its wake. Meanwhile, a veterinarian and a county sheriff battle against powerful political and corporate entities who will stop at nothing to keep the invasive species a secret.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tyson Hanks
• Release date: Oct 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463326640

Tyson Hanks

Tyson Hanks is a fan of horror—both literature and film. He wrote quite a bit when he was younger but was struck with a tragic case of adulthood. He has recently taken up the hobby again and is thrilled that some folks have deemed his work worthy enough to show the public. He has yet to receive a literary award, but he did get a gold star on a middle school English paper once. His work has been published in Sanitarium Magazine, as well as the World War I horror anthology “Kneeling in the Silver Light.” His short story, "Tethered," is available on Amazon Kindle, and his first book, “Greetings from Barker Marsh,” will be released in the summer of 2016. He lives in Florida with his beautiful wife and daughter.

Book preview

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She opened her eyes and realized the vibrations had stopped.

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Hector Alameda was quietly reading a Ray Bradbury paperback in his bunk. It had been hours since the pilot had come aboard and ushered the big transport to the dock in the Port Of Tampa.

The Rio Del Tiempo was a class II transport that made a run between Vera Cruz, Mexico and Tampa, Florida once a week. Once in port, a customs officer went over the bills of lading with the captain. Hector found it interesting that they hadn’t asked to inspect the cargo in years. On this trip, the ship had no containers on deck; just forward and aft holds where the palletised cargo was stored. Mostly they carried auto parts and electronic circuit boards from Mexican factories to American assemblers.

The crew’s quarters were buzzing with activity. Hector’s younger shipmates were preparing to go ashore for a night in the bars and strip palaces of Ybor City, the oldest part of Tampa. The young men laughed and baited each other as they washed and dressed. Hector was content to simply lie in his bunk and read. While the rest of the crew was spending their money on beer and women, he would stay aboard and vent the cargo holds. It was a good trade. His shipmates would be nursing hangovers and unloading the cargo tomorrow in the day’s heat while Hector would be ashore buying Tampa Bay Lightning jerseys for his sons.

Alberto was 12 and Francisco was 14. Both boys had become rabid hockey fans once Hector could afford satellite TV. Hector, his wife, his mother, and the two boys all lived in a modest home in the suburbs of Vera Cruz. It made twenty years of these voyages worth it. He wasn’t rich, but he was better off than many people in his country.

His shipmates begged him to come along and few slapped his stomach playfully or pulled at the gold cross on the chain around his neck as they filed out of the crew’s quarters. Eventually, they’d all left.

The silence was deafening.

There was always noise aboard a ship at sea. If it wasn’t the crew making a racket, it was the ship’s engines. Here, in the port, there was the possibility of a little peace and quiet.

Hector drank in the silence. A few minutes later, his quiet was interrupted by Carmen, the ship’s giant, but soft-spoken, First Mate. The big man was wearing a white starched shirt, black slacks, boots, and a white cowboy hat that Hector thought could have doubled as a life raft if the ship ever went down. The scent of Aqua Velva that Carmen had bathed in filled the enclosed space.

Hector! the big man exclaimed. Don’t fall asleep until you vent the holds. The Captain wants to be unloaded and back in the gulf by twenty hundred tomorrow.

Consider it done, chief, Hector replied cheerfully. You know you can count on me, he finished off with a theatrical salute.

Carmen laughed as he squeezed his giant frame through the bulkhead hatch.

Hector reached over and set his small alarm clock to 1 a.m. That should give me enough time to read the next story, he thought to himself.

Sometime later, Hector was still trying to fathom how killing one small butterfly could affect the election of the President of the United States when the nerve-grating alarm went off. He reached over, shut off the offending sound, and swung his legs out of his bunk. He stretched as he stood up, dog-eared the page, and threw the book on his mattress.

Hector reached over with one hand and rubbed a sore shoulder muscle. It seemed his body complained more frequently about the hard, physical work of a merchant seaman’s life these days. He slipped on his deck shoes and a gray t-shirt. Hector figured it would take him about an hour to vent the hatches and walk the ship. After that, he’d try to get a few hours’ sleep before the relative quiet of the ship was broken by the return of his drunken shipmates. Dressed for his tasks, Hector walked down the passage to the stairs that led up to the main deck.

As he eased himself off the top step and onto the deck, a wall of humid air hit him. Even though it was the middle of May and one in the morning, the temperature was still a sweltering ninety-five degrees. There were daily reports on the news about this being the hottest spring on record. It filled the TV talk shows with pundits trying to find someone responsible for the extreme weather. As a sailor, Hector worried about the warmer than usual water in the gulf causing an early hurricane season. He didn’t enjoy being at sea in a hurricane, but he enjoyed losing money from canceled trips even less.

As he moved toward the front hold of the ship, he looked up at the sky. A good sailor uses the sky like a farmer uses an almanac. Some high clouds were drifting across the crescent moon. The harsh mercury vapor lights of the harbor washed out all the stars, but Hector knew they were there. Out in the middle of the gulf, away from man-made lights, he would stand by the rail with his pipe and look at the millions of stars for hours on end.

The hatch for the forward hold was about four feet square. When Hector reached it, he knelt and threw the locking latch, releasing the air pressure in the hold with a hiss. The stale air smelled of oil, grease, and chemicals from the stored circuit boards. He bent his knees and lifted the heavy hatch lid with a pressing motion, using his strong legs like pistons.

That’s one down and one to go, he said aloud as he rubbed his lower back. Hector walked along the deck’s railing, looking out at the bay’s calm, dark water. He stopped and coiled a rope that had been left undone by one of the younger men on board. He shook his head—they were more interested in the women ashore than doing a good job.

When Hector reached the rear hold, he bent down and unlocked the hatch. Before the air could escape, he went into his crouch and lifted the lid.

A wave of nausea instantly hit him.

Hector’s eyes started to tear and his sinuses and lungs were suddenly on fire. The smell of ammonia and rotting flesh saturated the surrounding air. He put his hand over his nose and mouth and staggered backward, gasping for breath. Through the watery mist filling his eyes, he thought he saw two brown leaves float out of the hatch and land on the deck.

The offensive cloud was quickly dissipating into the night air. He repeatedly rubbed his eyes until they were almost clear. He looked back at the hatch with blurred vision. There, on the deck, were two brown shapes. He shook his head again and his vision focused a bit more. Three feet in front of him, two bats propped themselves upon their wings and were staring back at him with black, glistening eyes. The ears were small and they had noses that were pushed flat like a bulldog. Both of the bats’ mouths gaped open. That’s when Hector saw the large, sharp front teeth in their upper jaws.

Dios mio, he whispered. Vampiro!

A flashing shape hit him in the face and knocked him back. Hector recovered his footing and used his hand to delicately explore his nose.

It didn’t feel broken.

Hector crossed his eyes, trying to focus on a single bead of blood gathering at the tip. He touched it again, and this time the tip slipped off and hung by a thin piece of skin. A torrent of blood filled his hand and splattered onto the front of his shirt and pants.

As he covered his nose with both his hands in a futile attempt to stop the blood flow, Hector realized the air was filling with bats. They were coming out of the open hatch in a steady stream.

He was wide-eyed with shock.

Hector felt a stabbing pain in his left forearm and looked down as the tiny animal hooked its long third claw into his skin so it could reach over and lap up the blood on his shirt with its long, pink tongue. It looked up at him with a blood-soaked snout and seemed to smile. More bats had scaled his legs to get at the warm, red food. Hector’s panic rose and a high-pitched whine started to form in his throat.

He shuffled backward, trying to dislodge the bats that had landed on him. Hundreds of them were now wheeling in the air around him, beating him with their leathery wings. As Hector moved, a dozen bats followed him, hopping and running along the deck. Hector was focused on how fast they moved and was only partially aware that he had run out of deck. His back struck the ship’s railing.

Hector had just brushed a feeding bat from his chest when one of the largest animals in the cloud flew straight into his face, trying to hook its wings behind his ears. The impact threw him off balance, and for a moment, he was weightless.

He somersaulted head over heels forty feet down to the surface of Tampa Bay. Just before impact, the bat dislodged itself from his face and flew off. The attack from the bats and the fall had disoriented him, so when he hit the water, the shock caused him to inhale deeply. There was an oily, salty aftertaste in his mouth as he plunged some fifteen feet into the dark bay waters.

Hector realized he had no air in his lungs and his arms felt like lead. One of his deck shoes must have fallen off during his fall, and he watched as it drifted down past him. He tried to make his arms move, but the electric jolt down his right arm told him it was broken.

The water in his lungs was dragging him deeper. His bubbles rose slowly toward a surface that seemed miles away now.

What vision he had left grew dim, and his last conscious thought was of his wife and sons. As Hector lost consciousness, his autonomic reflexes took over and filled his lungs with water.

His body wasn’t on the bottom very long. The blood that still oozed from his nose and a dozen other shallow wounds attracted the sharks from several miles away.

After an hour, the only part of Hector Alameda left in Tampa Bay was a deck shoe.

***

The colony assembled above the ship and followed her inland. They flew away from the bright lights of the port and eastward into the darkness.

Hector Alameda was the only one who knew that vampire bats had come to Central Florida, but he couldn't tell anyone.

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As she flew high above the swamps and marshland below, her ears tipped forward. Her right ear had a jagged tear in it—a souvenir from her recent, narrow escape. It still worked like a miniature satellite dish, receiving the sound information bouncing back from the objects below and in front of her.

Her mouth was open and her high-pitched voice pierced the black sky. She was navigating more effectively than the most sophisticated RADAR man had built. The sounds coming out of her throat would hit an object and bounce back toward her. She collected the sound waves in her ears and her brain processed the data creating a perfect image of what was in front of her.

She could see everything, no matter the size. As the Florida landscape rushed by below her, the Matriarch saw every power line, barbed wire fence, and cypress tree that could act as a potential hazard to her colony’s flight.

She was looking for a roost. They had been flying for over an hour and the weakest members of her colony would not last much longer. They needed to rest and feed.

The food they found outside their unnatural cave had provided a small meal for a few members, but the food source had plunged into the water before the rest of the colony could feed. The Matriarch’s primitive senses told her that the biggest portion of her colony was on the verge of starving, and so was she. She needed to find a food source for them, and soon.

As she continued to fly and scan for food and shelter, her sophisticated mind began to fire a series of electrons and impulses that resulted in what humans would call memories. She thought about how she’d become the leader of this colony and how they’d ended up in this very unfamiliar place.

Her kind had lived in the same cave system for a very long time. Millions of them were born, lived, and died in the roost for many generations. Her ancestors were smaller in number and they had fed on the native animals found in the roost’s surrounding savannah. Then the two-legged animals showed up, and suddenly her species was presented with a larger and more varied food supply. This new food source was sweet and full of nutrients, and with their abundance and time, the colony grew.

They crammed the roost with their bodies. This helped keep them warm in the dark, wet cave. Their waste was tar-like, and over the years it grew to nearly ten feet deep along the floor of the roost. Flesh-eating beetles found their way into the cave and after evolving and developing a resistance to the powerful ammonia present in the bats’ urine, the beetles could feed on the partially digested proteins found in the thick guano on the cave floor.

The beetles indulged in special treats whenever members of her species would grow too sick to hang from their perches or would die from illness or wounds. The larger animals would fall into the ever-moving mass below and the beetles would devour them down to bones within hours. For five hundred years, these life and death rhythms were acted out, until a fateful, final day 48 hours ago.

The colony’s nocturnal feeding habits had been discovered.

The cattlemen in the area had a hard enough time trying to make a living with livestock without having to destroy their cattle or horses because they’d fallen victim to the bats. Once bitten, the bigger animals risked contracting rabies, and the vaqueros could not risk having a disease like that spread among the herd. As a result, all those animals that had been fed upon were killed and burned immediately.

The roost hadn’t been hard to find. The cattlemen went into the nearby hills at dusk and waited for the colony to gather in the air above the cave’s opening before going out to feed. Having discovered the location of the roost, the men returned to the cave the following day when the sun was at its highest and the bats were inside. Each vaquero carried a can of gasoline up to the mouth of the cave and dumped gallons of the fuel into the opening. It took most of the day to drench the cave floor to their satisfaction. Just before dusk, they lit it.

She heard the fire before she felt it. As the gasoline fumes ignited, a dull whuff awakened her and she knew that the colony was in danger. She felt the heat as it rolled over the colony like a wave and raised the cave’s temperature almost instantly. Next came the black air, rising up into their roost. It choked them and burned their eyes and lungs.

The Matriarch and older females of the colony sounded the alarm as thousands of bats took flight. Many of them instinctively started down the path they took every night, and as a result, they flew directly into the flames. Their death cries echoed off the stone walls as panic gripped the colony.

She called to all that could hear her and demanded they follow. She knew there was a narrow fissure—a chimney— near the back of the cave. It was their only chance of escape. She flew, singing in her loudest voice, past others who were trying to escape the hot fiery death.

A large group of bats heard her cries and followed headlong in blind obedience. Some fell out of the air as they attempted their escape, the black, acrid smoke taking its toll.

At the back of the roost, a small opening, slightly wider than her own body, shot vertically up through the rock. She entered the opening and sped on, dodging overhanging ledges. The chute started to narrow and she became frightened that she’d led them all to a choking death.

It didn’t matter now; there could be no hesitation. Stopping would surely mean death for her and the colony. She continued soaring upward and by the time her RADAR picked up on the jagged piece of rock, it was too late. She could maneuver enough to keep the outcropping from crushing her body, but a piece of her right ear brushed the sharp the rock, severing it cleanly.

She ignored the pain and pressed on. Just when it looked like the channel would close completely, her lungs were suddenly filled with fresh air. In the next instant, she and several thousand members of her colony were in the sky, breathing deeply and singing their names to each other. The Matriarch led them east, away from the black air and the horrific cries of the dying colony.

She kept them low so the two-legged animals who had destroyed their home would not see them in the sky and follow. They flew for what seemed like hours until a yellow light and the scents of more two-legged animals filled the air.

They needed a roost—and food.

Below, a large, black space appeared. She sang and when her voice returned to her, determined that there were indeed places to roost among the strange cave’s roof. She also picked up on food sources scurrying along the cave’s floor.

The Matriarch directed the colony down and into the dark opening. Many of the others were agitated by their strange new roost, but as they detected the scurrying rodents below, they began to feed and quickly calmed down.

They were all so tired that they didn’t notice when the crew secured the hatch to make ready for their voyage to Tampa.

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