“I freed this big black fellow by the name of Goodall. I can remember it still. Amazing. We fired every round we had when they came, none of this suicide, last stand hokey. There was a pile of corpses at the door. I don’t know why they kept going. When we were out, we were out. This one came in covered in fur like a . . . like a cougar or something, huge arms on the damned thing. This Goodall threw himself at him and they went at it like cats fighting, that’s for sure. Poor Goodall came good in the end. He and the thing he was dancing with, they smashed through one of the foundation walls and me and about six others managed to crawl to safety. By the time we got outside the whole station house was crawling with ‘em, so no one saw us go. I’m sure they discovered the hole later.”
“That’s some story, Creek,” Josiah said, looking into the dirt and shaking his head.
“I wouldn’t pull your leg on something as serious as that, Josiah,” Creek said, and patted the black man’s knee.
Day wasn’t sure what, but there was an air of solemnity between the two as if they shared a long history. Yet Josiah hadn’t heard Creek’s tale before and Creek didn’t seem one for keeping his stories to himself.
“Now what about you, Day? You must have some stories to tell, making it on your own in here,” Creek asked him. “How long’s it been?”
“Two months and a few days,” Day replied stiffly. Thinking about Josiah’s scrap of paper, he added, “I don’t keep count.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” Creek said reassuringly, as if thinking he might’ve offended him. “What are those markings about, there on your chest? They don’t just look like prison doodles, if you don’t mind me saying.”
Reflexively Day glanced down at his bare chest, sunken with his posture curled over his raised knees. “No, of course not. Among the people where I’m from we have totems. Our totems come from the animals of the ancient world. Those of us that have a particular animal for our totem hold that animal sacred.”
He shrugged as if it wasn’t unusual. He knew at some level that strangers’ beliefs always sounded outlandish to others. Why he felt no particular compulsion to keep quiet on the subject escaped him.
“And your animal is the . . . elk?” Creek asked.
“The antelope, but anything with horns falls under my domain.” Creek chuckled gently at Day’s word choice but passed no comment. “Each of us is responsible for the health, happiness and survival of our totem spirit.”
“It sounds like a sensible way to live,” Creek said. Jenny and Lila agreed. Day felt himself flush slightly at the compliment, yet something about his own reaction irked him.
“We will see if it has any meaning,” Day said. “Far from home, the beliefs of my people come up against the hard facts of the world.”
He thought about the meal of antelope he had passed up earlier in the week. The woman’s face flashed in his mind for a moment and he closed his eyes. Creek and the others misconstrued his reaction for emotionality and they delicately changed the subject. Creek starting prompting Jenny to remember bits and pieces about where she was from. Jenny was, it appeared, an amnesiac.
The afternoon dwindled until the fire was all but dead and the only light came from the sunset to the west, obscured by the boundary walls blocking escape that way. Marco slept early, seemingly unperturbed by the long night ahead of them. Josiah softly wished for more firewood, though nothing came of it. Day fancied he could still feel a sort of ghostly heat emanating from the dead fire and with his stomach comfortably full he was disinclined to go anywhere.
While everyone had their own theories about the safest way to spend the night, the common thread running through most farm philosophy was the fact of randomness. Not only did the vampire strikes and everything else about the place seem like a total lottery, the very randomness of events on the farm made unpredictability a facet of life. While some people thought sleeping under cover was best and others thought sleeping in the Huddle was best, most everyone still changed their routines often as well. The only way to beat the lottery seemed to be to play it, to keep changing behaviour and hope that change coincided with the attacks, the airdrops, the night abductions and everything else.
As the last light seemed to literally wink out, Creek hummed softly from his position at the fire’s edge. Lila joined him in the tune, one Day didn’t know. Like most tunes, it probably dated from before the Rising, since not many people had had the leisure to make music since. Nonetheless it seemed to warm them, and Day felt a comfortable camaraderie slip over him.
Had the fire been aglow, it wouldn’t be unlike circling the Great Hearth at home. Everyone was free to gather at the hearth, alone or in groups, playing games, singing and telling stories. After the cooking was done the fire was the only one his people kept lit at night, so as to preserve fuel. In the winter it was a pleasant place to be, days on end without work and nothing to do but rest and talk and ration out the food stores.
Such times seemed far away, Day conceded, arms curled tightly about himself to ward off the cold.
A lunatic cry in the middle distance silenced Creek and Lila’s song instantly. Lila looked about guiltily, as if the tune might be responsible. Though no further sound threatened, the lone call throttled their enthusiasm. Creek produced a ragged shawl and rolled himself in it. In record time he seemed to be asleep. Lila let Jenny crawl into her lap and eventually she fell asleep herself, sitting up watching where the flames would have normally danced. Day kept his eyes away, not wanting to initiate conversation now that it was dark. His senses were attuned to the night in readiness for anything, or so he thought.
He snapped awake at the sensation of movement brushing his leg. He was in much the same position he had been before falling asleep, head resting on the smelly hide bag. It took very little for him to crane forward at the waist to see the cause of his wakefulness.
With a sense of fast-mounting horror, Day saw the dark figure of the vampire standing in the middle of their encampment holding Creek by the neck with a single hand. The old man looked dead, limp in the creature’s grasp, though his twisting limbs suggested he was held against his will, alive but unable to move.
In the vampire’s other hand was Lila. While with sleep, Day’s eyes were already accustomed to the gloom, his mind struggled to drink in everything the dark moving shapes suggested. The figure of the vampire bent low over the half-collapsed, silently squealing Lila and bit into her throat. In the stillness of the otherwise quiet plain, the sound of the trespasser guzzling warm blood sounded like a waterfall.
Day was not the only one to wake, though as far as vampire abductions went it wasn’t a loud one. Day saw Marco struggling to crawl backwards, away from the scene with an aghast, mouth-open face and the terror of what he saw reflecting off the thick lenses of his glasses. As Day watched, the teenage girl Jenny woke blurry-eyed and looked up, practically at the feet of the vampire looming over her.
Then the girl screamed.
The sudden noise seemed to break Day out of his reverie and his first instinct was to hurl himself backwards from where he had been sleeping to ensure he was out of the monster’s immediate reach. The vampire dropped Lila like a heavy sack and she didn’t rise again. Almost as if volunteering to take her place, Jenny leaped at the creature, wrapping her legs around its narrow waist and scratching at its face.
“Jenny! No. . . .” Creek groaned weakly.
The vampire drove its head forward into Jenny’s face so that the girl immediately slumped. With its free hand it pulled the girl from itself and threw her backwards. She flew all of twenty-five feet through the air and landed with a pained thump beyond the immediate crisis.
The scream and following commotion woke Josiah, sleeping beneath a sheet of blue plastic. The plastic crinkled as the black man curled into a ball beneath it, too horrified to do anything including look to his own defence. Seeing Josiah’s eyes literally close over rather than watch the gruesome business unfold, Day resolved to act.
With quick f
ingers uncinated, Day tore open the knot that secured his belongings, searching desperately for the silver dollar. The sound of Jenny’s whimper and Creek’s moans drifted across the camp as he dug.
The vampire turned slowly at the hips as if methodically casting around for the next threat. The wan moonlight revealed the figure as female, the long black hair matted into ropes that hung to the bottom of her shoulder-blades. The dusty clothing she wore (Day found it hard not to continue thinking of the vampire as an it) was of a matte black material, the leggings not unlike rubber hose, the boots clearly military issue. The form and curvature of her muscular, whip-thin body still betrayed her sex, yet the high-cheeked face and blazing eyes seemed inhuman, the mouth hanging open to reveal glinting teeth like rows of surgical needles. Likewise her fingertips seemed sharp as iron nails. Her chin was black with Lila Bengtsson’s blood.
The cool disc trickled into Day’s hand. A-twirl, he held the coin up at the vampire with the etched cross-face showing. His own face snarled to match the creature’s fierceness, though in a quiet corner of his brain he found it odd to throw such passion into an act that was otherwise so vague and futile. He didn’t even draw his knife, though possibly that is what saved him.
Their eyes locked and then all went still. Day knew time had passed, perhaps only moments, though possibly it was longer. A sharp taste filled his mouth, a mix of copper and something else metallic. With a shock he realised the night monster was gone and Creek along with her.
Jenny was up and moving, crying to herself and kneeling beside the hump of Lila’s body. Day had not seen the girl get up from where she’d been thrown. Judging by the soft but sharp breathing coming from those shadows, Lila wasn’t dead, or at least was not dead yet.
Marco and Josiah were unmoving, frozen as if posed. Jenny shook Lila roughly and Day tried to tell her to stop. Something occluded his throat and his body jerked, coughing. Only then did he realise his hand was empty and, in the same instant, the silver coin he’d been holding shot from his mouth when he convulsed in coughing. He retched some more and then suddenly he was leaning over and vomiting.
The taste in his mouth wasn’t that of the coin alone but of Lila’s blood. The vampire, for whatever sick demented reasons of her own, had kissed him deeply rather than take his life.
Worse, the creature had mesmerised him, freezing him in his tracks. The evidence was irrefutable, and it was this reasoning as much as the taste of human blood on his lips and tongue that made him ill to the very core of his being.
Now the threat had diminished, Marco broke free of his torpor and went to Lila’s side. Between him and the girl, they managed to move the woman into a sitting position. Tears bedecked her face and she clutched the side of her throat where the neck met the shoulder and, while she was racked with sobs, her expression was brave and defiant despite the violation visited upon her.
“Those bastards,” Lila managed to stammer after a minute. “They must have a . . . coagulating agent . . . in their bite.”
Lila’s analytic manner reminded Day of his friend at the commune, Storm Wilson, who was dead now, but who had once managed to overcome the pain of a broken leg by going on and on in immense detail, hypothesising how it had come to pass that the rock ledge gave way under him and at what angle the various forces must’ve conspired in order to break the twin bones of the lower leg in the manner they had. By the time Day had half-carried his friend home, after four hours, Storm was delirious with the pain, but it didn’t stop his rambling, increasingly incoherent analysis.
Watching Lila’s face, it was clear she felt an odd mixture of emotions, embarrassment curiously at the forefront of them all. Day thought it wouldn’t do her any favours to point out that the vampire had been a woman, but Jenny did it anyway.
“She kissed him!” Jenny hissed, pointing at Day and leaving no doubt about the perpetrator. Unconsciously her own face became a mask of the vampire’s fierce and penetrating expression.
“She – what?” Lila frowned, her hand still fused to the blood encrusted wound at her neck.
“The monster was a woman,” Marco said unhelpfully. “Or was once.”
Josiah still hadn’t moved and Lila glanced at him as if to get further corroboration. Seeing the man frozen still, her face softened a little more, even though her own natural lines were etched with the marks of pain and grief.
“Oh God, poor Creek,” Lila said after a moment. Then she looked at Day.
“Kissed you?” Her eyebrow rose as if requiring him to prove he hadn’t been a willing party.
“If the girl says so,” Day answered quietly. “I don’t know. I couldn’t move. Her eyes. . . .”
He wanted a way to explain what had happened in a few words, letting that brief testimony stand alone against any accusations that might follow. He knew that speaking too long and too elaborately upon the subject would just make him seem a conspirator, somehow as guilty as the vampire for its visit.
“He was frozen,” Marco said, a hint of disgust in his voice as if he himself had not sat unmoving throughout the whole ordeal, and with less reason.
“She froze me,” Day emphasised. He looked at Marco and scowled, but the Italian man did not have the decency to look away.
“I’ve heard that,” Lila said softly. “Not on the farm, but before. In books. Old movies. They have movie houses in Chicago still. They have everything in Chicago,” she emphasised with a chuckle. “Folks aren’t making films any more of course. But I saw a film years ago about vampires. Two films, in fact.”
“If that’s what it was,” Day said, “then so it was. I tried to use this on her,” and he lifted up the moist coin and wiped dirt from it onto his pants’ leg.
Lila looked at the coin and its marking for a long moment, reaching out and holding Day’s hand at the correct angle for the moonlight to hit it and reveal the cross. Her gaze lingered a beat and then she closed her eyes and drew back without a word.
Marco then shuffled forward, still sitting, and he looked up at Day with a rabbit-nosed, squint-eyed expression from under the glasses. “How did you get this?”
“I found it,” Day said simply.
“Damn lot of good it did,” Lila sighed. Jenny nestled into her. Testing the wound, Lila withdrew her hand from her neck and found she was no longer bleeding.
“I feel fine. Weak but fine,” she said in response to a look from Day.
For his part, Day returned the scratched silver dollar to his bag and then closed it up again, thinking about the small purse-load of silver inside. He might have a weapon against the vamps, but it seemed like they had no end of weapons against humankind.
It felt strange, but after their immediate conversation had concluded, Day felt Lila and her group close in on themselves, shutting him out as Lila and Jenny cared for Josiah, obviously struggling with demons of his own and Marco, as unsuited as he seemed for the job, standing poised over them like a miniature defender. They had shared their resources and suffered pain together and now they were done. In vomiting, Day had squandered the majority of the meal he’d eaten and straightaway his belly was growling for more. The fire was long since dead and as he had nothing else to offer them, even with their apparent leader gone, Day was out of the group.
In a sense it suited him. Had he wished to saddle himself with others, Maya and her women or even a madman like Mikhail seemed to be better bets than Creek’s band of misfits. Day rested, deflated, until dawn, and then he stood at once and walked away from the campsite without so much as a final word.
His small store of silver somehow now seemed less precious. He had fancied making a crucifix or a blade with it, even though there wasn’t really enough. In the face of the vampire woman’s powers Day felt dispirited and useless. To face the vampires with anything less than a suitable weapon meant throwing his life away in vain.
The sun had been up several hours by the time he drifted back towards the bores. He had drunk the remainder of his bottle hoping to fill the sick empti
ness in his gut while trekking the northern perimeter and watching the ghouls at work. It was a warmer day than others recently and he welcomed it, striding around bare-chested with the trousers spread over his shoulders like an invisible man in work pants riding his back.
He heard gunfire further north. It sounded like nothing more than a faint series of pops. It made Day wonder how many fields there were, and how faraway they must be. Not for the first time – and he was far from the first in the field to do so – he wondered if life in other fields was much different to where he was imprisoned. He could imagine all sorts of social arrangements might spring up, even without the keepers’ cooperation. He could imagine them, but not believe them. The likely thing was that life continued to be as dreary and fraught with peril as his life at present seemed to be.
As midday came he heard the buzzing of the smaller helicopters going over and Day almost fainted from relief since the hunger was so strong upon him. He resolved to take as much as he could defend, if he was lucky enough to get in on a drop.
Thinking such thoughts, Day re-tied his hide bag so none of his existing goods would get lost in the run. A helicopter flew almost directly over him, the ghouls at the controls having some fun by buzzing low over the running humans beneath. Although Day ducked instinctively, the metal rails that projected from the bottom of the aircraft were still a dozen feet above his head when they went zooming over. A hundred yards further on, two separate packages tumbled from the open door and Day started a sprint towards them.
He arrived at the second of the two bundles and ruthlessly pulled his knife, his expression blank but severe. A woman who wore strips of cloth shrouding her face drew back as if she had been cut, leaving the package to him. Adrenalin roared through his veins, so it was with immense disappointment that he saw the bundle was made from about twenty battered metal cooking pots tied together by lengths of twine. For the moment it was only him and the woman scavenging, so with distaste he knelt and cut free a few of the objects. He tossed one to the woman, who caught it with ease and promptly vanished. Then he liberated two pots for himself, figuring he might be able to trade one or both of them at a later stage. He sighed tiredly, reduced by his disappointment.
Endless Night Page 7