Chapter 1 - Why I Joined The Hunt

Ronald Carpenter's old life before he got involved with The Eclipse Co.

To regard bats as evil is silly, or so I’d always thought. However, when I came upon that dark shrieking, flapping cloud of shadows, the parts of my life that I’m most ashamed of started.

Before I ever got into business with The Eclipse, most people who saw me at work would say I was a zookeeper. I worked at The Central Park Zoo, in New York City. I might not have ever studied as a vet, but I probably do know some less ordinary bits of animal care that are slightly beyond what is needed for your everyday pets.

I suppose some would have no qualms with calling me a trainer, but I didn’t really train anything. That sounds to me more like what you would call someone who is putting together circus or theme-park shows.

I have actually heard some people say that using animals in such a way is cruel, but those performance animals are generally more loved and better cared for than many a child’s small pet in a cage (you know, that fish or hamster who can get left alone to starve if, perhaps, it’s owner might become a little distracted by something unrelated...)

Because I can usually get along well with animals myself, I was more than happy to spend my time working to provide the feeding and cleaning up that their comfort and display requires. Sure I dealt with escapes a time or two, on a need-be basis- if and when it happened, but dealing with escapes could hardly even be listed as the description of what my job was.

And while you could say that my successful escapee-recovery efforts ultimately led to the change there was in my career, you might also argue that the resourcefulness I used in my problem-solving chained me inescapably into serving as a zookeeper wherever it was that I finally ended up.

My name is Ronald Carpenter. Back at that time, I’d lived in New York for all of my life. I happened to be working, like I said, at The Central Park Zoo, at the time when I first noticed that something had changed in my working environment. On that day, I had one of those automatic split-second thoughts that I felt slightly reluctant to try explaining to someone else.

Don’t make me ask you to get your mind out of the gutter- my thought can hardly be construed as anything other than innocent. The idea that whizzed through my head as I heard the short motor run for the automatic bat-enclosure food-dispenser was: ‘That sounds too green.’

???

Yes, I realize that the majority of people don’t hear in color, but that feeling doesn’t mean I’m crazy, I don’t believe. There is even a word that someone else came up with to describe the phenomenon- synesthesia, so I know it’s not just me.

Might as well be though; I’ve never come across another synesthetic(?) person, those few times I’ve tried to explain the experience to whoever I’m around. In fact, I usually don’t bother with trying to have someone else understand because more than once I’ve had them react like I’m trying to describe being caught in a tie-dyed world of hallucinations.

I know that the colors with slight shapes are only in my mind. You can think of how someone you know looks without suddenly believing they have appeared in the same room next to you, right? The colors, how a sound looks, I ‘see’ it that way.

High and sharp sounds are the most obvious in white or pink; they come almost like sharp flashes and then they fade out into soft mist. Electrical buzzing sounds are usually green and yellow vibrations; natural ones come in a thick fog, electrical or mechanical noise is more of a substance almost pulled tight like wires. High, toneless clicks are colorless flashes like a camera makes while low clicks or thumps are dark red to black fluid looking ripples. And mammalian voices, human or animal, are are generally colored near brown, without any set solid shape.

It’s just that trying to say all of that to someone else, some person who is most likely a little skeptical about the concept to begin with, can start to make me feel a little bit self-conscious and probably uncomfortable. The only description of the odd squeaking sound that I could bring to mind was an attempt to describe a particular shade of bright green. Rather than tempt fate with the type of embarrassment that often comes from watching someone else’s face as they decide to think you could be loony-tunes, I decided that I still had plenty of other work to do; I figured that I would be safe to wait and look into what might be wrong with the bat cage later.

Had I actually gotten someone else to look at it right then, there might not be the rest of my story to tell here.

---

Handling, feeding, and cleaning wild animals was my job. I also kept track of how they were acting so we could alert a vet when something was possibly sick. I’ve just always had a certain knack when dealing with thinking, non-human creatures. I usually like them, and I often kind of hope to think that they also like me.

No, I can’t speak some secret language, or magically understand their yips and growls as words. I can just usually get them to accept me without too much effort.

How I do that? As I wasn’t taught myself, my method is a little hard to lay out in words... It’s mostly making eye contact and exhibiting a calm trust. I’m not sure I can really explain it as more than just that. If I do what feels like the right thing to do, generally the animals that we’ve kept for a time will just trustingly react accordingly.

I am not a vegetarian, and I usually tire of over-pampered companion creatures that seem to lack enough brain-power to take care of their own selves. Part of what I enjoy about zoo-creatures is how many of them are not tame and so seem to be something more than just a pet.

That with the zoo is exactly where I belonged, I can’t deny, but am I the only person to have thrown out what is right and good when I discovered a way to have a little ego-boosting power-trip?

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For now, let’s not worry about why some might call me a little bit too proud, because that definitely wasn’t the case when I saw what I did on my way out of the zoo that night.

The little nagging worry that had been planted in my mind with the strange noise had gotten me to swing back by the bat cave/cage on my way out for the day just to be sure that I couldn’t see anything that might have been visibly wrong with the enclosure.

When I walked over to where we put the food that those bats are getting, I came upon a gigantic-billowing, black cloud of bats who right then had found a route of working their way out through the food dispenser and escaping free from the machine’s back end. I might have had a chance at catching one or two, had I a butterfly net or something similar on hand, but I was really too stunned to do much more than just watch.

As I stood there looking helplessly upon the swarm of fleeing beasts with a growing contingent of dismayed animal caretakers, I couldn’t stop myself from noticing how the bat-screeches almost look/sounded like bright-green/yellow cloud made from bolts of lightning.

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I don’t think I have to point out to you about the massive size of New York City. When considering how similar bats are to your common pigeons (the so-called ‘rats with wings’), their ability to survive until an instinct to move on to somewhere less populated kicked in wasn’t all that much of a worry, in my thinking. We really just needed a way to narrow down exactly where our 64 escapees had gotten to before that urge to leave the big city gripped them.

Change that- as I began wondering how long it might be before sightings of our escaped swarm were reported; I discovered that only 63 had escaped because one of the bats was in a cage in the veterinary office.

It seemed to me that there had to be a way for us to use this remaining winged mammal in some sort of plot to recapture its brethren.

I don’t know what this bat (who I started calling ‘Fred’) was with the vet for. (I’ve named many an animal ‘Fred’ when I need to care for it yet want to distance myself, so I don’t become too attached.) It was perfectly healthy again before I ever came to it. (I’m sure that this bit of naming roots out of trying to turn whichever lucky animal I name into something almost as make believe as say, The Flintstones.) If my plan worked right, this little chiropteran(bat) would happily seek out and rejoin the others were we to set him loose, and we could simply follow where he went.

I ran the idea by those who now made up the recapture crew and in no time they asked me to join them because my plan was good; before long we were looking up the best small-sized tracking equipment that could be harmlessly yet securely affixed to a bat.

Now, this escape/hunt is important in my history because without it, I’m not sure that I’d ever have come into contact with The Eclipse. I say that because of how my somewhat odd method of tracking our escaped bats was soon discovered and then highlighted by the local media. I hadn’t yet even located our runaways, but I already had optimists who were hailing me as some sort of city-wide hero.

Emails poured in to the zoo servers. Our computer kid then separated these out by their titles and the letters that seemed to be aimed directly at me were passed along for me to do with as I would. You might say Emilio was lazily trying to pass his work off onto me, but you can also argue that my silly idea had unexpectedly just about tripled his work-load.

I can’t say that I really minded, it kind of gave me a kick to see how many of the ‘uncaring public’ gave a minute’s import to what I was doing. And while there was a fair load of it that seemed to be no more than criticism and name-calling, a refreshingly healthy amount of the letters were compliments of ‘good idea’ and even a few offers of outside, unasked-for help.

That life-changing letter was one of the last among these, and though it just seemed almost perfectly innocent at the time, the email was odd enough to stick out in my mind. It came from the personal account of a man named Perry Striker who claimed connections with some sort of vaguely undescribed defense firm based in Chicago, called The Eclipse.

Apparently they had an animal testing facility or two, and were having their own problems with the containment of batlike-creatures. He was inviting me to come ‘join’ him and others on a company newsgroup. Perhaps our different ideas for solving our supposedly similar problems would help out everyone.

Of course, I didn’t realize it at the time, but now I’m pretty sure  he was looking more to get a feel of me through my response than he was actually trying to offer any type of real help.

Author's Note

I left off the short prelude that is in the official book.