A heavily overweight man, obviously new to the field, ran up behind Day and, not seeing that he held a knife, roughly barrelled him out of the way in his eagerness to see what lay on the ground. Day whirled like a snake. He took in the man’s sunken eyes and cracked lips, the sweat across his brow and the desperation on his bloated features, but he was without pity.
It was like Day’s own thoughts were racing at a thousand miles per hour, heightened so as to seize every survival opportunity available to him. In that moment he saw the fat man wore what might once have been a woman’s fur coat. It had to be large to fit him, though it didn’t meet up over his belly. Whatever femininity had once graced the jacket was now gone. On the man, the jacket resembled a bear’s skin. His hollow eyes and protruding snout reinforced the image.
Despite soaking up all the information, Day did not noticeably hesitate. He dropped one of the two pots in his right hand and swung the other hard into the man’s face. The man was so intent on the plunder that he never saw the blow coming. With a dull gong he staggered backwards with his nose flattened and gushing blood. He clutched his face to no avail. After four steps back he tripped and fell.
Although he should not have been surprised that such a big man did not black out with one blow, Day was still quietly astounded. He stalked around the fur-covered figure, trying to ascertain whether he was going to get up again, not really wanting to carry out any further cruelties even though he felt seized by outrage and an unspent frustration that bordered on bloodlust. However, like a Grizzly, the man started floundering to right himself. Day stepped in again, swooping efficiently, and gave the man two more dints with the pot on the side of the head. On the second strike the pot broke free of the handle. But the man slumped, yielding to the barrage.
Day tossed the remains away. He looked around and saw three people watching him. None of them made a move towards the pile of pots that he appeared to be guarding.
Despite himself, Day gave a grudging laugh. “Help yourselves,” he said, then crouched over his other target.
His victim was breathing awkwardly through collapsed nostrils. It made Day tense to see the effects of the injuries up so close, but as with everything else, he steeled himself to the performance and with difficulty tilted the man onto his side. In a moment he had the man face down, liberating the coat. Thankfully the fat man wore a cloth shirt between his corpulent skin and the tattered lining of the fur, but an unpleasant funk still emanated from the coat as if from a living beast. Despite the growing briskness of the wind, Day decided to leave putting it on for a while.
“Do you skin all your kills?” a bass voice called out.
When Day turned around he had the knife in his hand again, but he was pleasantly surprised to see Carlos standing holding onto a haunch of what looked like a pig.
“You got the pig, and I got the pots,” Day laughed after a moment’s hesitation.
Carlos laughed too and pointed at the pile now depleted by four or five units. “Grab yourself a replacement and me a new one and I’ll trade you for it.”
“That’s good,” Day said, quickly grabbing a few pans in one hand, but without knocking them too loudly together.
“Seems I’ve been fighting again. I missed out on a delivery, it looks like . . . a delivery of meat, that is.”
“Not your luck, maybe, but it’s better luck than he’s got,” Carlos said, pointing to the man on the ground.
For a moment Day felt ashamed, even though he knew the half-Mexican approved. As sure as he shared Sioux blood, Carlos was a survivor. Day had been half-naked the whole time since seeing him last, and it was only now he’d solved the problem. As much as it saddened Day to admit it, it would be worth any unknown man’s death if he didn’t have to shiver through another night with a pair of urine-stained trousers wrapped around his neck for warmth.
He and Carlos drifted south for a few hundred yards without saying a word. Compared to the general post-airdrop frenzy they were sedate, two figures at least in temporary truce with each other, on their way to share a meal and talk like the normal men they’d once been. Day couldn’t make any particular claims to being civilised, but as much as the term stood in for the opposite to living like a pig in a pasture being fattened for slaughter it would do.
As they walked they kept their heads down. It would do no good to get themselves involved in any of the scenes that sprang naturally from the aftermath of an airdrop. Several cries rent the air as they went forward.
To continue the metaphor he’d been thinking, Day believed it contradictory to the idea of fattening the cattle for slaughter to let them run around like crazed animals, killing and maiming or abusing each other over the bare rudiments of survival. He and Carlos had to almost literally step over two men strangling each other next to the corpse of a woman. A short distance on, a man stood mutely looking down at the body of another woman, driven into the ground when she had been struck by a side of slightly festering beef hurled from a helicopter. So far the half-a-dozen folks ringing the unfortunate had had the good taste to back off and leave him to his grief. It wouldn’t last long.
“This way,” Carlos said, and veered due south.
“I’m surprised you can find your way back,” Day said.
“I’ve become used to it,” Carlos answered over his shoulder.
After a few more minutes they stopped and, because he knew what he was looking for, Day could see the artificial covering that hid Carlos’ safe.
The other man sat down heavily and grinned up at him, motioning with a single hand for Day to do the same.
“You look like you’ve been living rough,” Carlos said.
“I know. Here you are, feeding me again,” Day said and smiled tensely.
“Don’t worry about it.” While they talked he retrieved a yellowish water bottle from his cache and sipped from it. As he drank, his eyes never left Day, so much so that the younger man dropped his eyes.
“What’s happened to you?” Carlos asked finally, taking one of the pots and starting to rinse it out with water from the bottle.
“Nothing,” Day assured him, eyes elsewhere. “The fight for the coat? It’s nothing, he jumped me.”
”I’m sure he did,” Carlos said.
He grunted, squatting, moving around with the pots and more supplies he was pulling from concealment. He started laying down some loose twigs and pieces of bark. A green disposable lighter, ancient-looking, was held half-obscured in his hand.
“That’s not what I see though,” he said without looking up.
“What do you see?”
”I don’t know,” Carlos said. “Something. You didn’t sleep well?” It was in some senses a rhetorical question, since sleep evaded many given the circumstances under which it was available. But having asked, Carlos was implying something about the previous night.
“No.” Day shrugged and there it was, out in the sunlit open. Like vampires, the truth often didn’t last long in such conditions.
There was no harm done to him, Day thought, numb to the shadow that had ridden him all day. “A vamp took one of the people I shared a fire with last night. She bit another camper, too. Right in front of me.”
Carlos nodded, but he didn’t say anything for a moment. “Reason I sleep in a hole in the ground,” he said softly. Then he asked, “She?”
“Yes,” Day said. “Hard to tell in some ways, but yeah, it was a female. Strong, though.”
“What did you do?” Carlos asked, his emphasis on the pronoun.
“It’s a weird thing,” Day said. Despite the awfulness of what had happened, a slow grin spread across his face as he looked down, shaking his head because Carlos began to grin along with him.
“What?”
”Man,” Day tried to order his thoughts. “Did you know that vampires could use their eyes on you?”
”Eyes? Like, how?”
“I mean . . . hold you, with their gazes.”
”Hypnotism?” Carlos asked, frowning as if
doubting that this was anything like what Day could possibly mean. Yet Day nodded.
“Yes, she hypnotised me. I went for a . . . coin . . . this thing,” he said, and dug the coin out, tossing it to the half-Mexican. Carlos frowned at it for a moment while Day resumed his explanation. “Obviously it didn’t work. She froze me. Stopped me dead in my tracks. She had Creek, the old guy she took, and she had drunk too. Blood on her . . . her face.”
Carlos hummed deep in his throat so that it sounded like a growl.
“Go on.”
“She took the coin and tried to make me eat it,” Day said, then added, “While I was . . . mesmerised. Then apparently she licked my face, put her bloody mouth up against mine.”
”Made you taste the blood? Human blood?”
”Lila’s. Yes.”
Day swallowed hard and looked down. Carlos remained holding the coin, turning it over slowly. Day leaned forward and distracted himself by drawing a line in the hard-packed dirt with his finger. He made the sign of a musical bass clef, but he couldn’t remember what the icon symbolised or where he’d seen it before.
“That’s sick,” Carlos observed.
“I don’t think she was kissing me, like a sex thing,” Day said.
“No,” Carlos said. “I doubt they do that, though what would I know? I didn’t know they could fix a man like you described.”
”They can,” Day said. “Or she could, certainly.”
Silence reigned for a moment. Carlos shook his head and started scooping up the earth around his collection of frail kindling as a shield against the wind. He licked his finger and held it up, nodded, and then retrieved a few smoothed rocks from where they were resting as part of the disguise for his hidey-hole. He arranged the stones to enhance the shielding and then he slowly used the dying lighter to start a fire.
“I’m out of food,” Carlos explained. “I’ll try and smoke most of this leg, but cook some now too. Hope you don’t mind your meat pretty pink.”
“Pink’s fine,” Day assured him. For emphasis, his stomach agreed with a loud groan.
“Damn,” Carlos laughed, “I do believe your stomach’s gonna start busking if I don’t feed it soon.”
Day smiled, even though he didn’t know what the other man meant. No one in his community had ever needed to perform for food and they had no such thing as money.
The silence returned as the smile slowly expired. Day’s thoughts never really left off thinking about the latest vampire attack, now that Carlos had brought him back to it. Brief flashes of the face of the woman that he had only recently lost to the cursed creatures lit up in his mind and he sighed deeply.
Eventually his train of thought turned to the silver in his shoulder-bag. Glancing at the smelly hide thing, he saw the coat and decided it was safe enough now to put it on.
Carlos grinned in appreciation. “You’ll be warm now.”
He continued to feed up the fire, adding more twigs to the nascent blaze.
“You know,” Day began, “I had been thinking before about ways to fight them.”
Carlos kept smiling just as if the conversation hadn’t turned ninety degrees. “You think so, yeah? How?”
“Until last night, I thought I had a secret weapon,” Day said. Carlos’ eyebrows lifted, his attention well and truly caught. Day smiled to himself as his secret evaporated and curiously without any misgiving, he pulled out the black bag.
“I got this from a dying man,” he said.
Carlos accepted the bag reverently, the soft cloth like something from another world beyond the hide and plastic existence of the farm.
One look inside was all he needed. “Day!” he said, hissing the name as if trying not to make it too loud. There was always someone within line of sight and the same was often true for earshot.
Day grinned like a drunk fool and nodded. “He knew, I think,” Day said. “He’d been carrying it around for . . . I don’t know how long.”
”Silver,” Carlos said softly, eyes shining like they never had in Day’s presence before.
Day watched him a moment, smiling.
“This is more than a fortune,” Carlos said after almost a full minute. “It’s worth more than any corner of this camp.”
“But not as . . . money.” The Old World word sounded strange to him.
“No,” Carlos agreed. He weighed the closed bag in his hand and then gave it and the silver dollar back to Day. “How had you thought to use it?”
”Before,” Day asked, “as a knife. Now though, I don’t know. None of us can combat mind tricks.”
“I suppose there’s enough there to edge a blade,” Carlos said grudgingly. He held his hand out and said, “Show me your knife?”
Day pulled the long blade and offered it hilt-first, but straight away Carlos sighed and shook his head. “This silver’s precious,” he said. “You could probably coat this blade, it’s so thin despite the length. But you don’t need that much blade. Something shorter would be better.”
“This is the only knife I’ve got,” Day said. “You’ll understand me when I say it’s served me well.”
“Okay. Hold on.” Carlos slithered on his belly into the hole, disappearing from the waist up. Day hadn’t seen him go into the pit before and it was an unusual sight.
Carlos took a few minutes rummaging around by touch alone. The trust between the men had grown. Day had no idea how much Carlos had stashed in his cache, but in the search for whatever it was the half-Mexican was neglecting the fire. Day was still hungry despite the hypothesising, so he slid forward and cupped the tiny blaze to make sure it kept going. He added a thicker piece of wood after breaking the stick into halves.
Carlos pulled his black head from the hole and spat long hairs loose from his mouth. He lifted up both hands and in each he held short, almost triangular knives with blocky black handles. “This is what you need.”
“You have more knives?”
”I prefer the hook,” Carlos said, offering over the knives for inspection.
Day held them in such a way as to suggest he didn’t have the first idea how to go about testing their efficiency short of stabbing something. Since nothing thankfully required such treatment, they felt inert and strange in his hands.
Still, the way that his fists perfectly surrounded the short handles and the width of the blades, narrowing from a two-and-a-half inch base to a point about five inches out, meant the whole length would be utilised in a stabbing attack. They would be less useful for slashing, upon which Day based his entire knife-fighting strategy. But he understood what Carlos was implying, because with the smaller knives they could both be mostly surfaced with silver if someone had the tools. A two-fisted attack with silver against a vampire promised much more effectiveness than a single long blade that might snap under pressure.
“They’re good,” Day conceded.
“What have you got to trade?” Carlos asked, taking over the fire business once more. As mysterious as it seemed, he sorted through the few items he’d pulled out previously and then stuffed two short metal stakes into the ground.
“Trade? For what? The knives?”
”The two knives and me putting a silver finish on them and then re-edging the blades.”
Carlos was too intent watching his hands to see Day’s eyes flare in both surprise and doubt. The older man reached a hand back into the hole and pulled out what looked like a large foldable lampshade, except that it was made from scavenged hide and bound to a frame made of thin metal rods and crooked sticks.
Carlos glanced up and caught the tail end of Day’s expression and promptly misinterpreted it. “It’s for smoking the meat,” he explained, gesturing to the frame for clarity. He then used Day’s knife to shave the outer layer from the truncated pig’s leg.
The sliced meat was carefully laid down amid the ashes of the tiny fire Carlos had begun, placed so as not to waste a moment of the flames, but also to avoid exhausting and extinguishing them. Day started digging in his shoulder-
bag and by the time Carlos was done arranging the meat, Day was able to put down the work boots he’d taken from the silver’s owner.
Carlos whistled appreciatively and then his attention went back to the pork. He used Day’s sharp knife to cut long slabs of meat from the leg, doing it economically. Neither of them thought about the blade’s last use.
“The boots are yours,” Day said, adjusting the worn collar of his fur coat. “You look like you could use them.”
Carlos glanced distractedly down at the self-made hide moccasins he was wearing and shrugged. “I’ve got a pair of tennis shoes in the hole as well, but you’re right. Whether I wear ‘em or not, they’re a good trade.”
”Enough?” Day asked. When Carlos’ expression didn’t change he added, “The knife too, of course.”
Carlos immediately handed the greasy blade back to him. “It’ll take a couple of days or more. You don’t want to be without in the meantime.”
“It’s a deal then?”
”To be honest, not great for me, but any silver’s left I’ll keep if you agree and, well, it’d be nice to know someone other than me was gonna go up against the vamps.”
Day let that sink in a moment. “Have you ever thought about it?”
”Thought?” The other man laughed. “Thought? Yes. Planned, however . . . that’s another thing altogether. I’m not throwing my life away, no offence.” When Carlos saw the comment caused dismay, he added, “Young guy like you though, pair of silver stabbing daggers? You might just do it.”
“You hope so,” Day said bluntly, recovered.
His companion hummed with caution. He placed the first few raw narrow steaks inside the lampshade, adding a few more twigs as a distraction while he thought.
Endless Night Page 8