Free Brood by Chase Novak

downward swing, making a sound between a grunt and a screech, like one of those Russian women tennis players striking a backhand.
    But the swing is stopped midarc. The sudden stop wrenches Cynthia’s shoulder and wrist. Startled, confused, she turns around.
    â€œDo not,” Adam says, holding on to the end of the handle. “Please.” Still holding on to the plunger, he guides her to one side.
    He crouches down next to the bat. Adam is so beautiful, Cynthia must avert her eyes. He is murmuring something to the creature, but she cannot make out what he is saying.
    â€œDon’t touch it, Adam,” she says.
    â€œAdam?” It’s Alice, who’s standing in the doorway of the bathroom, rubbing her right eye. She has sweated through her little-girl pajamas. The teddy bears, born blue, are now black.
    â€œIt’s okay, Alice,” he says, looking up at her. Crouched there, his eyes on his sister, he would not be out of place in a Museum of Natural History diorama illustrating the earliest cave dwellers. He covers the bat with a towel, carefully scoops it up—clearly more mindful of the bat’s safety than his own—and gently shakes the towel until the bat slides into the wastebasket.
    â€œI’ll be right back,” he says.
    When he is gone, Cynthia and Alice stand in silence until Alice says, “He loves them and they love him.”
    â€œBats?” Cynthia says. “Really? Bats?”
    â€œEverything,” Alice says. “Everything that’s alive.”

Chapter 6
    T hey are coming from all directions—uptown, downtown, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Westchester, even Staten Island—and they are coming on foot, on skateboards, on bicycles, by subway. A few of them, though young and with no legal right to do so, even drive cars, and now, like any other New Yorker hoping to avoid astronomical garage fees, they are circling the blocks around Central Park, trying to find places to park. They are traveling in ones, twos, and threes, though, like teenagers everywhere, they like to be with a crew, a pack mentality that applies to these teens in particular. But they do not wish to draw attention to themselves, and a convoy of youngsters converging on Central Park in the middle of the night—it’s actually morning, three o’clock, and hot and humid, the full moon appearing and disappearing and appearing again in a clotted black sky—would most assuredly attract unwelcome attention.
    Later in the day, in another part of the park, Mayor Morris is going to appear at an event that has been weeks in the planning. David Chilowich, one of the few New York hedge-fund managers whose difficulties with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the attorney general of New York have never resulted in legal action and who has been compiling a spectacular public record of civic engagement, has donated three hundred million dollars to the Central Park Conservation Guild, and he will be handing the mayor the check in a ceremony that, if all goes well, ought to boost Morris’s sagging poll numbers (he’s been fading for months) and increase Chilowich’s odds of walking out of court a free man should his ability to evade prosecution ever falter. A stage has been set up overlooking one of the park’s many lagoons, and seating for five hundred so-called dignitaries has also been set up. Microphones, speakers, closed-circuit TV, all are at the ready, and several cops from the Central Park Precinct, as well as Central Park Conservation Guild employees and volunteers, are on hand, even now, in the middle of the night, to make certain none of the careful preparations are disturbed.
    The upcoming ceremony means that park security has been increased, but the security is concentrated near the north end of the park, around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, and tonight’s pack meeting is twenty blocks away and on the park’s west side, at the