The vampire paused in the light of the campfire, turning its head slowly to look between Day and his woman. The woman was in frozen shock, laying on her side with an antelope rib in one hand, her mouth open and looking up at the foul thing with her pupils shrunk to pinpricks. Day struggled to maintain his balance, tipping slowly backwards as time slowed.
He clutched the knife in his hand like it was an anchor to reality. The vampire was in full force, leathery skin and black hair and bare hands with extended claws all vying for equal attention in the firelight. It seemed wrapped in black fabric more so than clothing, with pointed leather boots on its feet and some sort of long coat that shifted and draped its skeletal figure worn like a cloak over it.
The creature made its decision an instant later, reaching down and grabbing the woman by the front of the poncho and hoisting her forward. She only started to scream then. The sound was an inhuman cry in the otherwise vast and silent night.
Day had only ever heard that kind of screaming from further away. If the cries were terrible then, now they were unbearable. He lunged with the blade in his right hand, stabbing the long narrow point forward, but the vampire seemed to tense its legs and then suddenly it and the woman vanished upwards. Day was committed to the follow-through of the attack and managed only by desperate scrambling to avoid plowing right on into the fire.
He and William threw their gazes to the sky, but it was as good as trying to scry the unseen heart of the earth itself. Elsewhere, Day heard a yell and an answering cry that “they got one,” but over the hammering of his heart he could make little sense of what else followed. It all seemed unrelated, strangely distant.
After a little while, he had to concede that she was gone, taken in one simple, sudden and ruthless act. Defend her though he’d tried, Day had been powerless to make even the slightest mark on the harvester. Now the woman he’d lain with for the past three nights and comforted for almost two weeks was gone. What it was exactly the harvesters did with their victims no one knew, but they were never returned to the field as far as anyone said. The harvesters were vampires, and everyone knew this meant they dined on human blood. The farm was where human beings were kept like cattle in the spirit of some grand, ironic reversal. The dry pasture lands of northern New Mexico were now the killing grounds for a new industry, and Day and his fellow interred were a nation of victims.
He slumped back, never letting go of the knife. William helped his mother out of the tent and tried to calm her down, even walking her a little distance from the scene of the attack as if to give Day a moment to grieve, though it also served to lessen the woman’s distress. That it helped all of them only a little was a sad fact of reality. Day was numbed, and he only really came back to conscious awareness when William approached like a supplicant to express his sympathy.
“Thanks,” Day said robotically, “but I didn’t really know her.”
“Still. . . .” William said, and left the question hanging.
It continued to hang there all the next day. The fact that it could have been any of them attacked, and that to be so close was a little like a trial run of the inevitable night the vampires would finally come was unnerving. Day walked off his discomfort, nodding farewell to William in the morning and then turning east, unconsciously following the direction he suspected the woman was taken.
He passed several other moaning, sobbing groups, cook fires smoking chokingly for once in the absence of a breeze. Long grey faces watched him come and go, the same sense of appraisal and caution held no matter how they differed from face to face and from eye to eye.
Life was short on the farm. Day had met a man who’d been on the farm a year. He had begun thinking he’d been overlooked. Neither he nor Day had heard of anyone being confined in the field for so long. Day had seen the man’s widow with another man a week after they’d spoken.
So it was inevitable his own time would come at some point. Like the woman, Day might well be in the middle of any mundane activity, maybe even asleep. It was inconceivable to squat in readiness the whole night waiting for an attack that might be months coming. Sleeping during the days wouldn’t work either for, quite apart from the vigilance required to survive the hours of sunlight when the field’s inhabitants were all out for themselves, the daytime was when supplies and food were delivered. It took more than just luck to survive on a steady diet here. One not only had to anticipate the helicopters, but also build up an arsenal and then wheedle, threaten or cajole possessions from others, always with an eye open for an opportunity where something could be gained for little expense or risk. Worse, all this had to be done without making oneself a target for others, either by simply accumulating too much stuff, or else by blundering across interconnected groups, offending sensibilities or just generally angering the wrong people.
It was a complex world in its own way: a turgid little microcosm. It offended Day’s sense of irony that he should be stuck in a world that fitted so well with his father’s descriptions of the twentieth century and its demonic ‘consumerism’. Day’s dad helped found the HOAH commune as a response to, and an escape from, that torturous world. Now Day was caught up in a similar combine himself, all his father’s metaphors made wickedly real and macabre.
He sometimes wondered if the nascent forms of social organisation found in the camp might be turned into something greater. Yet he doubted it. There were some men or tight circles of men who moved in groups of up to a hundred followers, them and their chosen or allotted women and a few children tag-alongs. Rumours, which were the main social currency on the farm, spoke of a man on a further field who was the undisputed ruler of the three thousand people with whom he dwelt. They said he had a special agreement with the vampires to make sure he wasn’t taken so he could help keep the rest of the field’s people in line. Day wondered if it could work somehow in reverse, with the people of a field rising together in mutual defence against the night predators.
The fact was he and everyone else knew the vampires were numerous and, even worse, they had a literal army of servants. As Day approached the eastern boundary, he had to shield his eyes against the morning light as he picked out the head-and-shoulder forms of the ghouls up on the barricades.
The fences themselves were slatted horizontal sheets of metal and timber, riveted to sturdy poles every fifteen feet, reinforced every fifty yards by a thick concrete pylon. Every few hundred yards the pylons formed the foundation for a concrete-and-metal watchtower, well shielded from attack.
The figures in the watchtowers were hidden from view so one never knew when it was the vampires or instead their servants who were looking. People said it was dark enough in the towers for the vampires to remain on guard even in daylight. Looking up at them it seemed implausible, but the towers were accessed from underneath by the pylons, which themselves must be hollow; and since only the vaguest sense of the structures outside the field were granted by the slatted fences, the vampires might well never have to be exposed to sunlight at all, should they so choose. The fields were hex-shaped, each connecting on one face to another field, or so the popular theory ran. It was possible the vampires and ghouls travelled underground, again shunning the light, but it need not be that way, he reasoned.
A hundred yards from where Day stood, a ghoul watched from an elevated position on the wall. Walkways ran along the top of the wall and sometimes the ghouls watched over into Day’s field and sometimes into the adjoining ones. They rarely stayed in one place very long. They seemed to have no trouble in the sunlight, which was precisely the reason they were designed to serve their vampiric masters. Day had heard half-a-dozen theories about how the ghouls came about, but none of the explanations seemed particularly credible, especially when Day was as sheltered as he had always been and didn’t know the first thing about how the world had been derailed. It was possible that vampires and ghouls had always worked together, the ghouls subservient to the vampires for whatever reason, for all the centuries they had hidden themselves away from
the prying eyes of humanity.
Most people agreed the vamps made the ghouls, but Day didn’t know enough about sorcery to be able to tell whether such a thing was actually possible. All the magick seemed to be in the possession of the secret people who had thrown the twentieth century off course. Day, coming as he did from one of the most insular pockets of humanity still surviving in the world, was not in a good position to know whether humans had made any inroads to harnessing the same powers the creatures of the night (and of the day, Day thought, watching the ghoul move along) had used for centuries to conceal themselves and exert mastery over the sun-loving humans.
It was a mixed fortune for Day’s people that they were already in exile from the world when the great calamity struck in 1972. When Day was a boy, too young to really understand adult words, his father used to tell how he had lived a full life already before throwing off the shackles of the twentieth century and travelling with Day’s mother to help found the Hoah. It explained why he was grey-haired and older than the fathers of the other boys Day’s age – a fact that had often unnerved Day whenever he thought about it late at night when trying to sleep. He’d grown up dreadfully afraid his father would leave him, especially after his mother died when monsters tried to settle in the same area as the commune. It was only by a concerted effort and the effective use of fire, plus learning how the creatures were vulnerable when they slept in the daytime, that the commune had managed to survive at all; and in the tough years during which that struggle reigned, Day grew to an immature form of manhood and ceased to worry about his father’s mortality. Much like the woman last night, just when Day wasn’t thinking about it, his father had keeled over while hiking back up into the foothills after a foraging mission; and the next man in line, Dan Croft, who had a tricky knee, hadn’t been able to move fast enough. So Day’s father died of a heart attack while falling down a three hundred foot rock-face.
“Hey!” a voice yelled from a fair distance further back from the fence. “Hey stupid! Come here!”
Day turned to see a large, dark-featured man gesturing from about a hundred and fifty yards back. Though he didn’t want to dignify the insult with a response, the man was smiling and Day couldn’t help being curious about what the stranger wanted. Slowly he started walking, his thumb hooked into the rawhide belt keeping his track pants close to his body.
“What is it?” Day asked when he was closer.
“It’s you, you damned fool,” the man said, still grinning. “Don’t you know the fence line is the worst place you can stand?”
“That’s what people say. I’ve heard bad reports about the huddle, too,” Day answered, using the slang name for the rough settlement built in the middle space equidistant from all the fences.
The man – Day thought of him as Mexican – only laughed and extended his large dusty hand. He was several inches taller than Day who was already a fair size. “You were taking a big risk, man. My name’s Carlos.”
”Carlos? I’m Day,” he replied.
“Day? Like ‘night and day’?” Carlos asked. Day merely nodded. “Okay Day. Are you crazy then? Are you hoping they pick you up?”
“No,” Day answered. “No I haven’t lost my mind yet, though I might soon if I don’t get away from here. I wanted a closer look at the ghouls and the fences . . . I wondered . . . I was wondering if I could kill them.” Day patted the timeworn handle of his wooden knife.
“Kill which? The ghouls or the fences?”
“Both,” Day said, keeping his tone neutral despite the temptation to smile. Carlos might yet pull a larger knife on him, so it was no use lowering his defences just yet.
“Show me your knife,” the other man said after a moment of stillness, his mood growing more serious.
Day drew the weapon and held it up in a position from which he could still use it. The blade was very narrow, actually worn back from years of being sharpened. He knew already he would have to be careful in the ways he used it.
“It’s a little thin,” Carlos said. “Might break. Pointy though.”
He laughed again and lifted the dusty poncho he was wearing to pull a sharp, curve-shaped piece of metal from his belt. It was a large stainless steel hook. The airdropped carcasses sometimes had them broken off in their hind legs or sometimes in their heads. Carlos had made a handle for his out of bone and the end looked vicious.
“Pointy is good,” Day observed.
“Yeah,” Carlos agreed. “Tell me, how were you going to get up there to kill yourself a ghoul? Those fences are twenty-five feet high.”
“I was thinking about climbing,” Day said, and he shrugged.
“They have guns. Rifles. They’d blow you away before you got up there.”
The fences were also built with a lip at the top to make simply swinging a leg over the edge quite difficult, even if anyone could climb that far.
“I know,” Day answered and shrugged again to show he didn’t have any particular favourites as far as plans went.
Carlos chuckled and rubbed his hand across his hairy mouth. He put away the hook and turned slightly. “Do you want something to eat, Day?”
“As long as it’s not antelope or elk,” Day answered softly, rationing out a tight smile.
After about three hundred paces, Carlos stopped at a slight rut in the ground. He bent over with an audible grunt and started rolling up the earth in his hands. Day watched in amazement until he began to understand the Mexican’s trick. A second blanket was laid down over a hole in the ground that had been widened from what was once originally just a random crack. The blanket was somehow dyed or stained pretty much the same colour as the earth and into the blanket had been woven small rocks and pieces of bark and twig and a few small clumps of the fawn grass that seemed to prosper all over the plains without actually being alive. Day couldn’t tell how big the covering was since it melded perfectly with the natural surface. Carlos rolled back just enough to expose a gap and then he thrust his arm into it.
“What’s this?” Day asked in surprise. His blank features with their hoary coverage of frost-coloured beard folded in around his crinkled brow.
“What do you think? It’s my hidey-hole,” Carlos said.
He pulled out a small parcel of dried and cured skin and, nodding in satisfaction perhaps at the accuracy of his blind gropings, he sat down heavily in the dirt at the front of the hole. As he deftly unpacked the parcel it revealed thick wedges of meat.
“What animal is it?” Day asked.
“I don’t know,” Carlos said slowly. “But it isn’t antelope. The damned thing had scales on it, but it was an arm as big as a horse’s leg . . . though maybe a little shorter.”
”I don’t know anything like that.” Day squatted and absently rubbed his bare shoulder, hand covering the first in the procession of ink animals crossing his skin.
“It must be one of the new things,” Carlos said. The comment required no elaboration.
Neither of them showed much hesitation towards the meat. Carlos offered Day the package first and the younger man took a middle piece in three blunt-ended fingers and immediately started to chew.
“You’ve smoked it,” Day said, removing the meat from his mouth suddenly and staring at it.
Carlos took a moment to swallow his first bite and then said, “You bet. I’m not starving in here if something goes wrong. We get cut off from our food supply just because the freaking vamps screw something up, I’m not going without. I’ll eat anything. I’m not picky.”
Day was already finishing the piece of meat and a relieved expression passed across his face. He didn’t demur when the Mexican offered the choice of a second sliver.
“That it’s smoked isn’t against my taste,” Day slowly said. “I’m just surprised to see someone as organised as that in this place. We smoke all our kills, where I’m from.”
”Which is?”
“Nebraska. Foothills.”
Carlos nodded and raised one thick black eyebrow. “Boy, you’r
e a long way from home.”
”I’ve met further,” Day said. “Man from New York, five days ago. It’s hard to believe places like that really exist.”
”Or still exist,” Carlos said. “My mother was a school teacher,” he went on. “I guess I’ve got a better sense than some folks about how things used to be. New York was one vast city, motorways, ports, skyscraper buildings . . . the whole lot. From what I’ve heard since I came here, they’ve trimmed their borders a little since back then.”
“The man was from Manhattan,” Day said, offering the name in case it meant something, which it evidently did since Carlos nodded knowingly.
His host took a third piece of meat out of the wrapper and passed it to Day, then he put the end of a piece for himself in his mouth and went back to covering up the remains. As he folded the skin he talked around the meat like it was a cigar.
“Manhattan’s a fortified island. Nothing goes in or out without supervision and big security. Half the folk on the island work for the defence forces. People say right in the middle of Manhattan they live just the same as they did before the Rising.
“Central Park,” Carlos went on. “Have you ever heard of that? It’s like a man-made forest in the middle of the city. People used to go to the park two days a week and swim and hunt for sport and play games.”
“I have a hard time imagining what a city must be like,” Day admitted, gratefully finishing the meal. “The biggest place I’ve been to is a settlement called Yeehaw, down the water table from us. We trade there a couple of times a year. There’s about two hundred people in Yeehaw, plus about another two hundred in the winter time.”
Endless Night Page 2