“Run, Joshua, run.”
Eli’s mother had a voice that carried. She was hollering. Joshua was up. Joshua was always up at the wrong time, in her telling, and the wrong time was every time the cooler was empty and Benjamin was in his book and Rebecca was on the bench beside her trying to eat a cheese cube with the wrong end of a plastic fork.
Behind her, the Video Enthusiast had his shoulder hunched into the camera as if it were a rifle. He had paid serious money for the unit and it deserved serious posture.
Out on the mound the pitcher kicked dirt at nothing. Right field belonged to Timmy, and Timmy belonged to no one. He stood with his mitt open the way you hold a bag for groceries. His father was on the bleachers with his face in his hands.
The parents kept score harder than the kids. Runs. Base runners. Minutes until the cooler could come out. The aluminum bleachers were hot under thighs. The metal smelled of iron and sunscreen and the inside of a hand. A man two rows up was on a phone call about a refrigerator. A woman with a clipboard kept score in the sort of careful pencil that suggested she had once been a librarian and was, in some unspoken way, doing penance.
The ball came off the bat with a clink that meant nothing, a dribbler between first and second, and Joshua’s mother went into a litany of run the way she did every Saturday, and Joshua ran, and the shortstop was waiting on second by the time the throw arrived, and Joshua had his hands on his hips at the bag before the second baseman had even turned to look.
“He got a double,” she said.
“A single and an error.” Benjamin did not look up from his book.
The pitcher’s father said something about flu season. The coach told the pitcher to get back on the mound.
Yappy Dog remembered it.
Yappy Dog had been yapping since the parking lot opened. Yappy Dog stopped yapping. The leash was tight. The stake held. The small dog’s spine had gone rigid the way small dogs go rigid when something larger has come into their air. He looked up. He whined.
Rebecca looked up too. She was two and a half and had no theory of weight or scale, only of birds.
“Birdy, Mommy.”
“That’s nice, honey.”
“Big birdy.”
The pitch came in. Eli swung. Eli’s mother shouted get some aluminum on it, which she had heard someone say once and adopted as her own. The ball went up in a slow towering pop fly toward the only place on the field where it should not have gone, which was right field, and Timmy.
Timmy wobbled under it. His glove was open. His father stood up.
The ball kept rising. It seemed in no hurry to come down. There was a moment where the entire bleachers were on their feet because the ball had gone too high — it had risen past the sense of what a child’s bat could do, past the sun, into a place where balls did not go.
A black wedge cut down through the air and took the ball.
It happened above the field at a height that was difficult, afterwards, for anyone to estimate. The wings were enormous. The bill was full of the kind of teeth a person does not associate with a thing that flies. The pterosaur banked and beat hard and rose with the baseball clean in its mouth and was gone over the trees before Timmy had thought to lower his glove.
“Big birdy,” Rebecca said, again, with confidence. Her shoes had pink lights in the heels that flashed when she stamped, and she was stamping, and the lights were flashing, and her mother was not looking at her shoes. Her mother had stood up.
Timmy was frozen. The Pitcher was frozen. The Coach had a hand half-raised toward something he could not name. Joshua’s mother turned to her bookworm son, who had finally put his finger in the page to mark his place.
“It’s some sort of pterosaur, Mother.”
“It’s coming at us.”
There were six of them. Maybe seven. Benjamin would later argue eight, though he had been pulled down behind the bleachers and was in no position to count.
The Video Enthusiast caught the formation as it banked over center field. The camera stayed on.
The first one buzzed the bleachers with a sound that was nothing like a bird, a dry crackling shriek, and the parents went down in a flutter of paper plates and beer cans. A Coleman cooler tipped off the top row and a tide of melt-water and Capri Suns went down the steps. A man’s reading glasses hit the concrete and the lens cracked across the bridge. Joshua’s mother had her arms around Rebecca, and Rebecca was still saying birdy into her mother’s collarbone, soft, certain. The Video Enthusiast stayed up. The Video Enthusiast had spent four thousand dollars and the camera was working.
Out on the picnic blankets, Barbecue Dad had a steak balanced on the long fork at chest height, halfway from grill to platter, and was looking up. He had thirty years of grilling muscle memory and not one second of grilling under aerial attack. The pterosaur came in low across the parking lot and snatched the steak clean off the fork.
“Hey,” he said.
A second one had landed on the picnic blanket and was eating someone’s potato salad with a mouth that was the wrong shape for it.
Joshua ran. Joshua had been told to run, and Joshua, unlike Timmy, was a child who ran when told. He came down the third-base line with a pterosaur five feet behind him beating its wings against its own shadow, and his mother was screaming slide, slide the way she screamed everything, and Joshua slid, and the pterosaur missed his belt by the width of a thumb and went on into the backstop and tangled there. It hung in the cut nylon screaming a noise with no name to it. The mesh swung.
The pitcher’s father had crossed half the infield by then. He was a heavy man and not built for sprinting. He ran with one hand pressed against his side because of an old shingles flare he had been ignoring for two weeks, and the running was making it sing, and he was running anyway. He had loved his son, on and off, for ten years, and he had said it three times. Saturday was for fixing that. Saturday had a beer in it for after, and the apology he had been working out in the truck on the way over was about a fishing trip that had not happened in 2009. He was going to say it on the drive home. He was going to say it now.
The pitcher had not moved. The pitcher had locked his knees and was looking up the way Yappy Dog had looked up, with the same understanding and the same usefulness.
A pterosaur came down on the boy from straight overhead. It was the dive that they had seen on the History Channel and not understood until they saw it here. It hit him in the shoulders and lifted, beating, getting nowhere, the boy’s feet grazing the mound, and then it had altitude and was hauling him low across the field toward right field where Timmy stood with his bat.
Timmy’s father was there too with a bat. Two men with bats and a boy in the air.
“Grab him, Timmy,” his father shouted. “Grab him.”
Timmy set his glove on the ground. He waited until the pterosaur passed low overhead. He jumped and got both arms around the pitcher’s legs and his weight pulled the beast down to where the bats could reach it.
The first swing was high and hit nothing. The second swing connected with the pterosaur’s wing and broke something in it that made a sound like a folding chair. The third swing took the side of its head. It dropped both boys and tumbled and got up with one wing low and went off across the grass croaking a wet broken croak and lifted again from foul territory and was gone over the parking lot.
Yappy Dog had, by then, pulled his stake clean out of the lawn. He was running with the stake bouncing behind him, very fast, the leash an arc of tension, and a pterosaur came down and took the dog in a single clean arc and lifted him off the ground with the stake trailing behind like the tail of a kite. Yappy Dog made one small noise. The leash-and-stake hung from the pterosaur’s bill as it climbed, swinging, and was gone over the trees.
The Video Enthusiast was still filming.
Then they were gone. The flock lifted as if on a signal and wheeled and went away over the trees in a phalanx that was, to anyone who knew anything about geese, all wrong. The shape was wrong. The wing-beat was wrong.
“I think they’re leaving,” the Video Enthusiast said, and the panning of his camera was a slow professional pan across the sky he had no business knowing how to make. Behind him, a teenage girl in a green dress was vomiting into a metal trash can with the team’s logo on it, and a man in a Mets cap was kneeling beside her with his hand flat on her back. Nobody was laughing. There was a small smell of burning meat from the abandoned grill and a small smell of something else from the picnic blankets and the air, after the noise, was very quiet.
Joshua’s mother was on her knees with Joshua against her chest. Rebecca had not stopped saying birdy. The pitcher was sitting up in the grass with his father’s hand on the back of his neck and a long red welt across his shoulder from where the talons had not gone deeper than they had. Timmy was looking at his glove on the ground as if it were a thing he had borrowed and was not certain he could return.
“Oh, Joshua,” his mother said, “you were so brave.”
“He didn’t touch third,” Benjamin said.
She gave him a long look. Behind her in the cut-up nylon mesh, the tangled pterosaur was screaming again, that high dry frustrated noise, and the Video Enthusiast had the camera trained on it in close-up because he knew, even then, which footage was the footage that was going to pay.
Up the highway, on a television in the back of a beach bar two states down, the news was on it inside the hour. The clip was the clip that everyone was going to see. The pterosaur in the mesh. The mother on her knees. The empty leash hanging from a pterosaur’s mouth in the long blue. A bartender in a wet apron stood with the remote in his hand watching it twice through. He turned the sound up the second time. A man in a suit with a slight accent saying we believe that these current depredations can be attributed to animals that escaped the island before we at Grendel took possession of it. Beachgoers walked past, drinks in their hands, and did not look up.
The wreckage of the pterosaur in the backstop was, by then, on a flatbed under a tarp, going somewhere that no one was supposed to know about. The men loading it wore black, and the men in black did not introduce themselves. They had a piece of paper they did not show. They had a Swiss flag patch on the upper arm of one jacket, very small, very deliberate. They worked fast and clean. One of them had a wedding ring he kept turning on his finger as he worked, a small slow rotation, over and over. The flatbed pulled out of the lot and turned not toward the highway but onto a service road that led, eventually, to a private airstrip that did not appear on any map a parent would ever own.
Timmy stared at his glove like it belonged to somebody else. The tangled pterosaur in the backstop kept screaming. The men in black had a tarp ready before the parents had got the children to the cars. Yappy Dog did not come home.