The air was blue in the first few minutes of day. The ground was definitely cold against his back. Day could see the huddled forms of several men sleeping in a group further along to the east, but they didn’t seem like they were awake yet. Taking the risk, he sat up and unconsciously brushed dirt from his back with a bent arm while examining the pouch. In a moment, he had the tiny withered drawstring open and was tipping small pieces of metal into his palm.
It took him a moment to realise what they were. The revelation was a shock. If the silver coin left him in doubt, the eight or nine jagged pieces of pure silver one did not. They lay in his hand like shards of something somehow more real than their surroundings. Driven by the irrational fear they might simply dissolve into nothingness if he looked too long, Day shovelled the pieces back into their bag. The real likelihood was that someone would try and steal the contraband or, worse, somehow let the warders know. Day could only imagine that if everything whispered about silver was true, the vampires on top of the food chain in these parts would be dead set against the cattle getting hands on a weapon that might test their most legendary weakness.
The pouch went down the front of his pants and he spent a while in a practised posture, acting aimless and inactive. It wasn’t very hard, even though his heart was skipping.
Two days passed and Day continued his search for more clothes and a chance to acquire food. He tentatively discussed trade with half-a-dozen slightly more prosperous-looking captives. However, in the end he shied away from parting with the good work boots he had concealed in the hide shoulder-bag. With the boots he suffered from the paradox of having a trade item that was indivisible. Yet it was too good for anything he was likely to want in exchange, even though they were useless to him, carried around out of sight in the dead man’s sack. Like the thoughts about silver, he hoped for a revelation.
During that time he found a discarded plastic bottle and so he was able to get water from the communal bores north of the Huddle. The watering holes were a natural social hub in the field, but people were still always tentative around each other during daytime.
Day had a brief discussion with a man called Ogden whom he had first met not long after Ogden was first forced into the field. The man’s son had been taken three nights previously. Day wondered with surprising remoteness if it had been Ogden and his wife whom he had heard grieving not long after his woman was also taken by the night-hunters, since their losses occurred on the same evening. It was a fate that could befall any of them, and both men knew it. Day didn’t offer condolences, though he couldn’t determine if it was because they felt inappropriate or were worthless.
Ogden eventually excused himself to return to his wife, who was sitting in the shade made by a plank of wood buried into the ground with a tarpaulin suspended from it. She looked like a ghost of the woman he had seen previously at Ogden’s side. Both her rosiness and the stubborn determination in her bright blue eyes were gone. The memory of her flushing cheeks reminded Day of Kvelda. It wasn’t the first time he had found his thoughts stopping there since their meeting. With an annoyed shake, he dispelled such daydreaming conjecture and moved on.
Day had been short of water for a while, so after emptying two bottles in the course of an hour he lingered at the bores for the remainder of the day. At night, he refilled his bottle and moved north, coming to within shouting distance of the north boundary wall before bedding down in a clump of saltbush.
When he woke next the sun was up. Somehow he had managed to sleep the whole night through yet again without waking. Since he doubted a night had gone by during which more people weren’t taken – though, who knew, such a thing might be possible – Day was more inclined to be worried at how peacefully he had started sleeping. It was like the reverse of his anxious day-lit state. For someone who wanted a fighting chance when his time came, it wasn’t a good sign.
It was the heavy drone of the big double-rotor helicopter that woke him. Shielding his eyes against the dust and glare, Day continued to watch from his reclining position as the slightly battered grey, heavy-duty chopper descended towards the ground almost three hundred yards east of where he lay. The white writing on the side said US NAVY, and though Day knew that US stood for the name of the country from prior to the rising, having never seen the sea or really been taught much about it, he didn’t know anything about the rest of the message.
Against his better judgement he wandered closer to the large craft. The closer he drew, the more convinced he was it was the same vehicle he himself had been brought in on. There were bullet hole marks around the left frame. The middle of the chopper was wider than the normal single-rotor helicopters and, as it swayed and came as close as it would to setting down, the twenty or so people standing and sitting struggled to keep their balance. The ghouls piloting the helicopter were out of sight in the front cabin, but from what Day remembered there was a space for more ghouls at the back as well.
No ghouls rode in the open-air section with the new conscripts, since in the most desperate of conditions it wasn’t known what prisoners might try to do. The vampires obviously treasured their day servants enough to be off-put having to rejuvenate their numbers regularly. The same couldn’t be said for the convicts. Instead, they had devised an alternative method to make sure all the new arrivals disembarked without intervention.
As Day watched, the chopper reached the lowest position its pilots would allow. Presumably for fear of being mobbed, the vehicle never landed, ready to ascend to safety at a moment’s notice. Thus it was as much as two-and-a-half feet from the ground when the first captives jumped down, the force of the rotor blasts above their heads stripping the earth of soil and sending it in a stinging storm of concentric rings around the chopper.
Several men and a woman in the first descent turned to help yet more down. A man passed down a little girl who couldn’t have been more than eight. Day had never seen a younger internee, apart from the newborns reared within the camp. He had heard others speculate on several occasions that since the vamps must surely capture children as well as adults, even if by accident; and that they therefore must have a different means of dealing with youngsters. The imagined ends for these equally imaginary children were many. It wasn’t a train of thought Day wanted to catch.
As was often the case, a few people remained on the metal platform set into the middle of the chopper. The ghouls obviously thought it was an amusing signal to indicate time was up by waggling the helicopter. The hovering vehicle jostled from side to side and it succeeded in pitching one person, an old man, backwards out of the chopper. He was fortunate to be able to stand once he had picked himself up from the ground.
“Here it comes,” muttered a bearded man who had walked up and stood a polite distance beside Day. The Nebraskan nodded in turn, knowing what the other veteran meant.
The means of dislodging the last few captives was both cruel and ingenious. The vamps had rigged the metal platform with electrical cables and then insulated the forward and aft cabins. When the last few passengers were clearly not jumping, either out of fear of what happened next or a genuine fear of heights, the ghouls electrified the grid upon which they stood. A few ragged screams were torn from the remaining three and the instant the charge stopped and they were able to move, two of the victims hopped down to the unforgiving soil. The third, a woman whose build suggested considerable age at the distance from which Day was watching, simply dropped to the platform floor and did not rise.
“Cooked her, I guess,” said another spectator.
“God rest her soul,” the bearded man said.
After a moment the huge helicopter began straightening up to rise again. Several of the gathered spectators were already turning away and several more, those of a different mindset, again moved purposefully towards the new arrivals. As if caught in a current Day found himself following.
“How many was that?” he asked aloud, too quietly though, curious about how often the vampires needed to set down deliveries to
top up the farm population.
The bearded man stopped and turned back to answer him. His mouth was already moving, but at the same time someone else close by gave a shout and pointed to the rear of the chopper. Down among some of the first to arrive on the scene, a man was crouched just beyond where the chopper’s rotors whipped at the sand. Day looked between the crouching man and the man yelling and pointing. The second figure was of a skinny man wearing overalls and a knitted cap and an uncomfortable looking coat of hide. His face was strangely desperate. Day followed his pointing finger and saw a third man taking off from a runner’s start fifty yards from where the helicopter hovered.
Day’s mouth dropped open as he forward-calculated the results of such an action and then watched, spellbound, as his guesswork unfolded like a premonition. Working in concert, the crouched man arched his back into a step so that when the running man reached him, the runner could vault upwards, leaping as high forward into the air as he could go. The conclusion was inevitable. His upper body met the whirling rotors just as the aircraft started to lift and the momentum of the leap drove the majority of his body into the huge spinning fan. An unsettling amount of blood and pulped remains splattered the side of the personnel carrier and the rotors whipped it sinuously about like dark red paint in vast gouts across the sandy terrain.
Of the bystanders who had been watching, almost half fell instantly into horrified keening, aided and abetted by shrieks from several men and women who clearly knew the martyr, a prior internee. The skinny sentry, pointing still, collapsed and started pulling frantically in a mad way at his hair and sparse beard.
And of the newly arrived, at least half were spattered in the gory shower of human remains. They stood where they had disembarked, strangers in a land of outcasts and not yet even given the sort of rough greeting to which such newcomers were usually due; and already they were awash in foulness and many of them had dropped to the ground gagging and vomiting and crying. At least six of them were adolescents for whom this last bastardisation must have surely been the final straw.
The closest man to Day shook his head and said aloud, “Well if that doesn’t sum it all up, I don’t know what does.”
After a little more shaking, the man added, “The stupid bastard. Good idea, though. It’s not an easy place to kill yourself, here. Easy to die, yes, but that’s by another’s hands or by the slow death of time – thirst, hunger, that sort of thing.”
“No need to tell me,” Day answered.
His mouth tasted sour with the hint of bile. He stood watching the procession of newcomers dealing with their trauma. One of the women gathered some sense of which way things would soon go and she broke off at a run in the opposite direction, on a course she probably hoped was free of other people. As if it was the very worst thing she could’ve done, two of the watching men gave whoops and took off after her.
“The mongrels,” Day’s neighbour said, moving across to restrain the skinny man on the ground from doing himself much further injury.
“And did you see?” said a woman, kneeling, where she had gone previously unnoticed a short distance behind Day. “One of them running took a load of that foul business in the face and . . . and a minute later, he’s only thinking ‘bout his groin. Life and death are a strange business,” the woman mused. She was almost fifty, Day guessed, long-haired and rangy-looking, apple-cheeked and tough despite her aged femininity. “My husband used to joke that more sex was had after funerals than after weddings. I never used to think he was right till I came to this place.”
It was a morbid thought that upset Day almost as much as the rest of the spectacle combined. He turned his back on the ongoing scene, leaving the new arrivals to their fate. As much as he was accepting the necessity of such evil, in himself and in others, he wasn’t ready to go adding to the newcomers’ misery. Bad enough to be met at the death farm with the usual robbery and abuse. A mouth full of brains whipped into a froth by helicopter blades was more than he could imagine.
People were talking about it later when he went again to the bores to refill his bottle. As best as he was able, Day closed his ears to their accounts, concentrating on drawing up the brackish water. He took out the rolled-up work pants he’d been carrying around and started methodically washing them with water from the bottle. He was glad for the chore since he’d neglected trying to get rid of the foul odour so far. Now it offered the perfect distraction. He worked at the pants with his thumbs, scouring the material and then seizing it firmly and rubbing handfuls of fabric against each other. In the absence of soap, hard labour sufficed.
He refilled the bottle. He had just started on the pants again when he lifted his gaze for a moment, casual but alert, casting an eye over the lie of the land. Then his eyes met those of the girl Kvelda, walking past the bores at a distance of about a hundred paces in the company of three other women. The others were all slightly older and more rugged than she, clearly veterans accustomed to the hardships of the farm.
He recognised the tall older woman at the lead of the party as Maya. Day wasn’t certain, but it seemed he recognised only one of the other women as companions from when Day and Maya had met the first time. The third woman was a new addition to the collective, as was Kvelda. Maya carried the weapon she had improvised before, which was a length of hessian stuffed with rocks. The second woman, looking every bit the ogress, carried a long lump of fire-hardened wood. The built-up look of her shoulders spoke volumes about her ability to wield it.
Maya’s women’s collective was one of the first identifiable groups Day had met upon arriving at the field. It was reassuring to know they lived on in some form. Day had supposed the collective would be victim to attrition and he was obviously right. Yet the group itself had survived.
While Maya led them on past the rock-strewn area around the second bore, sap in one hand, a plastic waterbag in the other, Kvelda looked at Day with an unreadable expression. She continued to look bereft, lost in the strange place, but she had clearly made some kind of choice to be keeping the company she was in. As well, Day discerned a quiet defiance that had crept into the young woman’s features; and she unleashed on him as hostile a stare as any woman had given since he’d arrived. Day was momentarily taken aback, and he had to remind himself that it was his choice not to allow himself to be drawn into the woman and her world and her vulnerability. He couldn’t blame her for feeling rejected and turning that emotion into the fuel for her survival.
After a moment’s surprise, he muted his expression, watching the women pick through the wasteland in single file. Kvelda was the last of the four. After about twenty paces the third woman paused and looked behind her, giving an uncomfortable but reassuring smile that Kvelda returned, instantly looking away from Day and abandoning her show of force. Day watched for a while longer as the little party drifted off to the north-east.
One problem with the flat New Mexico terrain was that it took almost forever for someone to disappear from sight. Consequently Day was still thoughtfully watching Kvelda and her party when two men who had been sitting down in lazy postures around a smoking hearth stood up and began to throw rocks at them. Their masculine jeers carried with the wood-smoke to where Day stood at the bore, the wet but halfway clean trousers in his hands.
He didn’t think too much about it. He just started forward to where the men were yelling. If he had paused long enough to ask himself why he was interceding when he had avoided so many other affairs, he wouldn’t have had an answer. Likewise, why Day wanted to stop Kvelda coming to harm when he had literally walked away from her before beggared any explanation.
He was still fifty yards from the two men when Maya’s voice rung out, her hand raised and bare forearm jutting out of her dusty blue smock like a female Moses.
“Stop!” she commanded. Her eyes went past the two men and settled on Day.
The men, who previously had their backs to him, stopped and turned at the call. Immediately one crouched to grab a stick from beside the fire. A
few rusty nails were pushed through the fire-hardened end of the club, but otherwise it was a very fragile-looking thing. The other man glanced at his mate and frowned, his reddish beard rustling, and he took several paces away from the club wielder as if to dissociate the pairing.
Day paused as well, his own features feral and frowning as he realised Maya was addressing him. Kvelda stood at Maya’s elbow and her arm was freshly lowered from pointing out his intentions. A second shock ran through him when he realised he had drawn his knife without thinking. The weapon was decidedly more deadly than the club and, used from behind, could only prove fatal to at least one of the hecklers.
“Leave us to our troubles,” Maya shouted out again.
Day came to a complete stop. “We’ve met before,” he tried to remind her, though what his actual purpose was in telling her so he couldn’t say.
“Yes,” Maya said. Her stony gaze turned to the man with the club. “If you take this any further, what happens will be your own fault.” She said it so as to be made explicitly clear it was the club-man’s own injury or possible death to which she was referring.
The man looked back once at Day and then swivelled himself around to answer Maya. “You’ll set your boy on me, will you?”
If anything else could have angered the woman more it was hard to tell. She drew herself up to her full height. While not as impressively tall as the six foot-tall woman also in her group, her manner was sternly authoritarian, matriarchal. “I kid you not, man. He’s no boy of mine. It’s to me or Hilda you’ll answer, not him.”
Hilda, the woman with the club, took a single step forward and refastened her double-handed grip on her weapon. She was a hard-faced woman and her time on the farm had taught her how to mask fear. She looked as cold-blooded as anyone could hope to be, and completely unafraid.
Endless Night Page 5