Nightwing - Observation of Flea Behavior Under Microscope
Phillip Payne:
Doctor, I'd like to show you something. You too, Chee. Now there are four species of flea on this slide: carnivore, dog, X-Cheopis, and bat. I'm going to put a blood spot on the slide. Now what do you see?
Doctor:
Well, the bat flea is ingesting the blood.
Phillip Payne:
Keep looking. Now what do you see?
Doctor:
It's a bacilli. And virulent.
Walker Chee:
You mind if I take a look at that?
Phillip Payne:
Go ahead.
Doctor:
Where did you get that blood specimen?
Phillip Payne:
Same place as the fleas: the dead sheep.
Walker Chee:
What kind of bacilli is that?
Phillip Payne:
Bubonic plague.
Walker Chee:
Now how the hell do you know that?
Phillip Payne:
It's my business to know.
Walker Chee:
What do you think, Doc?
Doctor:
Well, it certainly could be plague. What mystifies me is the loss of blood and the stench of ammonia and the bites. I've never seen bites like that.
Phillip Payne:
The bite marks come from the incisor teeth of vampire bats. The blood loss and the ammonia are one and the same.
Walker Chee:
Meaning what?
Phillip Payne:
Vampires consume one and half times their weight in blood. They piss the excess out so they can get airborne again. That excess blood turns into ammonia.
Phillip Payne:
Make no mistake. There's a highly intelligent colony of vampire bats roosting in a great cave somewhere in these canyons. Their attacks, inevitably, will be drawn closer to mass human dwellings. And with these attacks come the bubonic plague. That's what you've got to face, Chee.
Walker Chee:
What about placing the reservations under quarantine?
Phillip Payne:
No, that won't help. You can't protect people from nocturnal sweeps of thirty or forty thousand vampire bats.
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