“Where’re the rest in the summer?” Carlos asked. He started fishing about in the hole again, having secreted the previous package.
“Depends. Some are trackers, working for others. A few are trappers, though that’s a dangerous trade they tell me. A few are hunters, though. They travel far and wide, taking on the big kills. The elders in my commune hired a man named Ned Grancy and his wife, Myrna I think it was, to kill something that was living higher up from us when I was about ten. I don’t know what it was. Mister Grancy said it was a Wendigo, but we don’t really know if he was being pretty or giving the real name for it. He killed it though, or maybe Myrna did. I forget.”
Day looked down at his crossed bare feet and scratched his dust-coloured hair. “Big hairy thing it was,” he added. The years since passed made the memory foggier, taking an edge off the horror the younger version of himself had felt.
“Crazy business, huh?” Carlos grinned and had both eyebrows up high in what made for a comical expression.
Day laughed too. “I suppose so.” He watched what Carlos was now doing, twisting a bark-like substance into a groove on the end of a hollow piece of wood. Calmly, the Mexican man held an eyepiece from someone’s spectacles over the soft, fuzzy bark fibres and patiently tilted the glass around.
“I should ask about where you come from,” Day said. “You’re Mexican, right? And this is New Mexico? So you must be from around here.”
“You think?” Carlos laughed. “I’m only half-Mexican. My mother was Sioux Indian.”
“A school teacher, though?”
”She taught traditional Sioux knowledge, trying to keep the old lessons alive. She could also teach maths and writing though, and had to in some of the places we lived when I was small.”
Carlos lifted the hollow piece of wood suddenly and sucked at it. Day shifted slightly backwards, watching the other man with casual alarm, but not wanting him to know it. After a minute without any luck Carlos returned to what he was doing previously with the lens.
“We lived in caves,” Carlos said, speaking slightly hoarsely. “Later. Not very far from here, about a hundred and twenty miles. We knew there was a badness up this way. Never would’ve imagined this . . . farm. It’s a big threat, you know. A big threat to everyone.”
A black helicopter buzzed past and they both went quiet, looking up tentatively, but within moments the helicopter was over the next field and then rapidly moving away.
“People in New York,” Carlos said, “They would . . . should . . . know about the vampires getting organised like this. It’s not good news. If the world’s ever gonna get back on its feet, things like this are the biggest problem.”
”I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Day agreed, sinking his chin contemplatively upon the hand atop his knee.
They sat in silence for a while. Carlos got his bark smouldering, told Day it was tobacco and that people used to do what he did now on a much wider scale. Day frowned sceptically watching the half-Mexican, half-Indian man inhale the smoke through the flared wooden flute. Carlos at least seemed to enjoy himself.
“You need more clothes,” he said eventually. “Before you can go thinking about anything else, whatever it is you were daydreaming out there at the fence line today, you need to handle the basics.”
“It’s been a long while since they dumped clothes,” Day said.
“You don’t need to wait for them to dump clothes, boy.” Carlos shifted slightly in his cross-legged posture. “It’s time you started doing what everyone else around here does: surviving.”
“It strikes me as . . . wrong to take something from someone weaker.”
“Maybe,” the other man admitted. “True men and cowards are all the same when they’re dead and buried.” He eyed Day a moment longer and said, “Or eaten,” and seemed to almost enjoy the cruelty.
Midafternoon Carlos found some excuse to wander off, but he didn’t drift far until Day himself had moved out of the immediate area of the cache.
So Day went south, coming up against the next major tower at the join of the south-eastern and southern fences. About four hundred yards out from the fence line Day started walking west, watching the movement of occasional figures on the wall until the meeting of the south-western and southern walls came more closely into view.
There he stopped, rubbing his face and loathing the taste of dust in his mouth. A head-sized rock, two yards in front of him, suddenly cracked open seemingly of its own volition. Day stared at it dumbly. Somehow it seemed completely unrelated when the distant quiet crack of the ghoul’s rifle echoed from the south. Only then did Day realise he’d been shot at, probably to relieve some lonely ghoul’s boredom or to fulfil a wager. Day took an immediate step backwards and froze.
If he kept walking the bullet would’ve struck him. If he went backwards now, it would be what the gunman expected – or so his flailing mind reasoned. The situation required thinking, but he felt sure he wasn’t able to do the necessary calculations and guesswork fast enough to save his life. Before doing anything else he realised he just had to move or risk being a still target. Without really thinking about it, he jumped forward, taking a long step until he was standing on top of the broken rock.
The echo came a moment later, but he wasn’t sure where the bullet had gone. So much of the ground was just featureless tan dirt, sometimes hard-packed, sometimes brittle and windblown, that no immediate sign of the rifle shot stood out.
He couldn’t go back to where he was because they would expect it. He turned and went forward again, but he also went closer to the fences. At their angle he wasn’t sure how long it took before the sniper would have to adjust for height as well as left or right. To be contrary, he suddenly went the other way and he felt the sand at his heel leap up and the rifle’s retort sound an instant later.
It took all his effort to resist breaking into a run. It was what they’d expect. He took one or two more steps and threw himself down on the ground. In his head the possible combinations of moves whirled like chimes on a tree-branch, but the reality was that every five yards he moved was only a slight adjustment at this range.
Another crack rang out, instantly followed by another. Day gave a nervous cry as dirt flicked in his face. There was another crack and then something hit the dirt in front of him like a shovel had been rammed into the soil. The shot’s echo sounded a second after. Day lay there unable to keep from trembling, not only his bladder but his bowels weak and watery. Though it afforded only the illusion of protection, he wrapped both arms about his head and barked a curse into his smothering flesh. Two more shots rang out with no effect.
A few minutes passed with the sniper gone quiet. It might only mean the ghoul was playing with him, Day reasoned to himself. Maybe laying down, he was too hard to hit.
He poked his head up enough so he could see. Then he very slowly scanned around. A few people were on the periphery of his vision and with a shock he realised that three of them were lying down, being seen to by other people. A fourth man was on his own, rolled onto his back, arching and relaxing with the pain in turns.
The sniper hadn’t been targeting him alone, but everyone near him.
The closest victims were a hundred yards away. For whatever reason, they forewent hiding from the sniper to tend to the woman gasping and trembling in the arms of her primary caregiver, a crying, heavily bearded young man. Day leapt up instantly and jogged towards them and then around behind, using the unwitting people for cover. As he stood on the outside of their grief, the whispered words between the man and the dying woman were absorbed by his consciousness almost unwillingly, even as he scouted the terrain for the next corpse.
The true horror and awfulness of the farm would never be known, Day thought, since each day brought a new cruelty. Today he was as guilty as the sniper though, since he had at last resolved, perhaps due to Carlos’ words, or the woman’s abduction, or maybe otherwise, to be as bad as he needed to be – as bad as the worst of them who, in their
plight, abandoned their own people and the values of their upbringing simply to survive. He wondered if the continuation of one organism’s basic lifespan was really worth the cruelty. Carlos obviously thought so, though he had shown Day kindness when he need not have done so. To Day, he could think of only one way that, by living, he could redeem himself for all the terrible things he might have to do. Escaping the farm was his goal.
Silence descended. Day’s prayer for a ceasefire seemed appropriate since the distant, deadly assault was as mysterious and unquestionable as a thunderbolt from the heavens.
He hurried towards the next mourners, a man and an older woman holding hands looking down at the unmoving form of another man shot once through the heart. Day paused behind them and then once more saw the man he had glimpsed previously.
He was lying still now. One hand was draped over his chest, not really clutching himself, but perhaps that had been the intention. Day broke free of the last group and it only took twenty paces in a low sprint to reach the victim’s side.
As Day scurried to a halt, the dying man took an enormous double lungful of air as if startled back into life. He was about fifty, with dark hair greying and spread out around him like a fan. His face was dry and it had been kept hairless with some difficulty. On his body he wore a pair of dusty dark denim work pants, a matching rugged short-sleeve top with a pocket on it and above the pocket a faded red-and-white oval logo. Under the short-sleeve shirt he wore a muddy green long-sleeve top. A hide sack was at his hip, tied shut so nothing could fall out.
Day didn’t know how the older man had kept onto them, but he wore a pair of cow-coloured work-boots on his feet that buckled up rather than laced. In his two months Day had seen several men killed for footwear only half as good.
The bullet had taken him through the side of the neck and the blood was emptying from the wound at a steady rate. It was making a mess of the clothes, Day noted dryly. He tried to look on without expression, but found the corners of his mouth turning down, his eyes smarting; and he found it hard to meet the man’s blue-eyed gaze and maintain the hard-edged stare it felt necessary to expend to do what his instincts said was needed.
“Lucky day . . . for you,” the man said in a rasp.
Day started to respond before he realised the man had gone completely still. He was dead. The posture remained exactly the same, the eyes still open. An unpleasant noise issued from the man’s lungs and then he was completely silent as well.
Day had to kick himself into action. He crouched and stripped the boots and immediately put them on his own sandblasted feet. He had no way of carrying them and wearing them made defending his ownership easier than anything else. When this was done, he returned to a one-knee crouch and scanned around, pulling the hide bag over to himself. Then he undid the man’s work pants and pulled them down. The smell was very bad, but he consoled himself by thinking the shirt would likely be worse. For the present, he rolled the stained trousers up and put them beside the bag.
He then forcibly turned the corpse onto its side, but as he moved he saw a group of people moving towards him, starting to take an interest in the unclaimed body and whatever Day had found. Day had seen many terrible things on the farm, few as demented as the zombie-like ravaging of the dead in which groups of people could engage. Corpses were usually dragged to the fence-line, but in particularly bad instances, not all the corpses managed to make it that far – or at least not completely intact.
The decision was instant. Day kicked back from the body, snatching up the hide bag by its shoulder strap and, with it, the roll of murky denim work trousers. He walked backwards several more steps before bumping into a woman coming from the other direction. Clumsily she made a pass at Day’s loot and he responded mercilessly, brushing her arm away and then pushing her on towards the corpse. He drew his blade then and turned to the way he had been going, facing south once more, and a few more people quickly parted before him. He wasn’t happy to be going back into the viewfinder of a possible sniper, so he elbowed past a skinny man wearing a torn yellow rain jacket and began to trek west again, veering to the north with every stride.
He only allowed himself to stop when going any further meant coming back to the fence-line. The tower at the join of the south-west and north-west fences seemed to bristle with unseen weaponry and disgruntled ghouls to use them. Day vowed not to be any ghoul’s sport ever again.
With a weary sigh he dropped to a sitting posture, one knee raised beneath his chin. No one mired his immediate view of the area, though it was impossible to go far enough on the farm that people would never be in the frame completely. The best he could hope for was a moment’s privacy, especially as he started to untie the salvaged bag.
His hands were dancing with nerves as he fussed with the knot. Consciously, he tried not to think about his recent experiences and the close brush with death. He wanted to empty his mind, so he concentrated on the knot, a conundrum for his fingers alone to solve.
Making whatever anyone could from animal hide was the number one industry on the farm, and some people were better at it than others. From what Day had seen, Carlos was particularly skilled in curing hides as well as smoking meat. On the other hand, the dead man’s bag smelled quite bad and was moist in places where no accessory had any right or reason to be wet. It was pretty fresh hide. Day finally got the knot undone and upturned the contents as much for their sake as his own.
Even litter had a status on the farm, and the dead man had collected his fair share: a few old pens, an empty tin can with the ragged edge blunted, a spoon, a needle and thread, some empty rifle casings – things like that. It was what was in the small black velvet bag that intrigued Day the most. He glanced up to make sure no one was watching him. Instead he saw two men walking hard across the barren plain straight for him.
Day stood, smoothly stuffing the black bag under the hide kilt he wore around his waist. He was still bare-chested, the muscles clinging to his bones, not an ounce of fat to soften him. It was cold, too. Freezing. It made his muscles bunch more tightly. A few degrees lower and no adrenalin and he would be shivering again.
“We saw you playin’ round with them bodies,” the first of the two men said, starting his speech while still ten yards off and walking like he had no intention of stopping. His partner, slightly taller, wore a wide-brimmed hat that threw his rugged, big-nosed face into shadow.
“Good for you,” Day said without yielding any ground.
The speaker halted abruptly. “What’d you get?”
Day motioned at the trash on the ground, the hide bag by his foot obviously worthless. “You can see for yourself. Nothing worth getting killed over.”
“Him or you?” the man sneered.
He made fists of his hands and Day tensed, but the newcomer just continued to flex and relax his hands like it was some kind of psychopathic mannerism. Designed to intimidate, it was less effective when the rationale was so see-through.
He had lank, greasy black hair that was cut short around the front with a blunt knife and total disregard for how it made him look. His large teeth were ringed with yellow-grey deposits except for one that was completely black.
Day turned slightly so his left shoulder was facing the pair. While he didn’t move his right hand, it was out level and only a span from the wooden handle of the knife in his belt.
“Seems like everyone’s always picking fights for the wrong reason,” he said.
“Tell it to your momma, boy. Gimme those pants. You wrapped ‘em up like that? What’s inside?”
Day glanced down at the bunched clothing to try to understand whether they really looked that suspicious and, the moment he averted his eyes, the man’s fist snaked out incredibly fast and took him in the jaw. As he crashed to the soil, Day couldn’t believe he’d been caught off guard so easily. Yet the man was fast. Once Day hit the ground he rolled backwards and stood again, awkwardly righting himself. He drew the knife in one take, doing so cleanly, not at all clumsy.
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br /> “Keep back,” he hissed.
The black-haired man took a step forward again, agile like a boxer, and made as if to grab open-handed for the dead man’s work pants. Day flinched and that was all that was needed to make his opponent withdraw. The second man, however, stepped up to the same mark, intimidatingly big compared to Day, which meant he was very large indeed. In a calm motion the second man drew a wooden club about eighteen inches long from the small of his back.
“There’s nothing to them,” Day said again. He kicked the trousers a yard forward, trying to show that when partly unrolled they revealed nothing. He stepped back close to the pants though, as if keeping guard.
“You want to die for these pants?” the second man asked. His accent was unusual, deformed-sounding. “Mikhail take your shoes if you die.”
Day got the sense that Mikhail was the boxer. The second man was too big for the work boots, which were a fraction too small even on Day’s feet.
Day waved the knife and the blade glimmered in the light. Though he wanted them, he wasn’t prepared to suffer much on account of the trousers. He had already done well from the man’s execution and neither Mikhail nor the European knew anything about it. All the same he was loath to simply let them intimidate him or go away thinking he’d backed down. Day had made a lot of practical decisions like walking away since entering the farm, and with his newfound sense of self-assertion, he wasn’t keen on now letting a name develop for cowardice.
“No,” he said after a moment. “Not dying for the pants. You can have them if you ask.”
Behind the European, Mikhail grunted a laugh. But the European man flexed his hands and for him, it was no show. He took one step forward and swung a haymaker for Day’s head. Although he saw it coming, Day only just crouched out of the way in time and he never even managed to bring his weapon into play. It was like the swing started out slowly and then suddenly accelerated through the mid-point and on. Day literally felt the dense clump of matted hair at the back of his head lift on the breeze of the passing swing.
Endless Night Page 3