The Fall

Bat Out Of Hell

XAVIER POV

A billboard with happy geriatrics playing bingo beamed down at me as I frowned at the scene below their frozen revelry. Rusty brown stains patterned the leaves on the verdant bushes. Another care facility nightmare.

The President of this country's most densely populated cloud of bats called me personally for this job, he wanted discretion. Professional courtesy and all that. This was not the first messy death taking place across a few affluent suburbs had been called to his attention after the local normie constabulary ruled there was a serial killer on the loose.

I carefully made my way over to the foliage decorated with human remains. A white car rolled past slowly, the local residents accustomed to errant grandparents strolling across the road without a care for incoming motor vehicles.

Two hours ago the tape around this crime scene had been taken down, allowing a personal investigator such as myself to tamper without question. Personal investigation - the family business. The Firm had offices spanning the entire country, with highly ranked representatives of the Avian Court heading each office. Keeping a pulse on the secrets of all creatures, and deriving humor from the petty squabbles of normies and their gangs.

In the regular course of events I would have had to employ creature cover to examine the crime scene. In some cities the police departments welcomed The Firm as consultants, but the current chief was not inclined to share here. The normie had something to prove, and a deficiency of cunning with which to achieve the feat. The reason that I was able to tamper with such a fresh scene was that the evidence had already been tampered with. 

By the bats.

I sighed with the weight of the world coming down on my shoulders. The miscreants were so far gone to their own lunacy that they didn't notice my net descending over their feast. Even trapped, the white bats simply kept lapping at the blood with slow ineffectual tongues.

The behaviour was not synonyms with the rest of the were bat community, especially this particular cloud of mainstream suburban creatures.

The majority of the were bat population resembled fruit bats or flying fox sized vampire bats. Globally these creatures were at the forefront of scientific advancements for agricultural husbandry, specifically pertaining to fruit trees. Their clouds usually claimed territory in the suburban areas around major cities, and were a low key chattering, gossiping addition to any community.

The normie mythology of vampires came from a radical faction that insisted normie blood carried more of a nutritional and spiritually nourishing profile to the bovine vintages.

The reality was that over time the consumption of genetic material so similar to their own caused the were gene to mutate. The creatures were no longer human or bat, but some twisted amalgamation of the two states and unable to shift completely from one to the other. 

A leathery, winglike membrane webbed between fingers, hair sprouted in fur like tufts in random places, fingers elongated into talons. Not pretty. To top it all off; there was an internally ticking time bomb. At some point an errant carrier cell inevitably crossed the blood brain barrier and they rapidly spiraled into dementia with raging hallucinations.

If deformity and insanity is the ideal state, they were absolutely correct. I focused back on the wrinkled bats in front of me, wondering if these creatures had formed a nursing home cult.

But the information I had on creature cannibals did not fit with this case. Specifically, the lack of physical symptoms exhibited by the deranged old bats. They were demonstrably into the whole consumption of human blood shtick, but madness follows deformities, and these were all fully in a shifted state.