“I don’t want to die. That choice comes first,” Carlos said. Day considered that he said so with unadmitted shame.
“And anything that risks that happening?” Day asked. After a moment he answered rhetorically: “You’re not willing to do anything at all?”
The other man’s expression broke into a scowl and he fished out the first slice of meat from under the lampshade heedless of burnt fingertips and whether the pork was cooked or not. “I think that the time I’ve been here speaks loud enough about that.”
“Why?” Day asked. “How long’s it been?”
Carlos hesitated, looked at Day and then the strip of pinkish flesh in his fingers. He promptly shovelled it into his mouth.
“Four years,” he said finally, chewing on the squelchy meat.
The revelation rocked Day, silencing him completely. He sat cross-legged and watched the smoke curling softly out from the cone of the lampshade. Carlos busied himself adding leaf and bark fragments that would increase the smoke content of the fire, and he went about the task as if intent on erecting a smokescreen to obscure their previous argument.
Day studied the proud man, and Carlos knew that he languished under Day’s stare but did nothing except somewhat over-energetically tend to his task.
In Day’s sight, Carlos was at once diminished and elevated. It was an almost unthinkable achievement that anyone could survive on the farm for so long, yet Carlos in his rugged, bloody-minded determination and resourcefulness had done so. Day knew well enough that few could survive under such conditions. The fact Carlos had almost thrived in his awful predicament ironically attested to the fact that if anyone could make it out of the camps, it was he.
It was his fear that kept him back: yet what a double-edged sword such an attribute was, Day thought, for it was fear of death that spurred the half-Mexican on to amazing feats of resilience. Yet that same fear kept him in thralldom to the terrible economy of the fields.
“I’m not staying here four years,” Day said finally.
“I know you’re not,” Carlos replied.
He answered without looking at his younger accomplice.
“I’m . . . I couldn’t do it,” Day said. “Yours is one kind of strength, mine another . . . if I have strength enough, or at all.”
Carlos laughed and looked sideways at him then, eyes narrowed and grin upturned. “After what you’ve acquired for yourself in a couple of days? You’ve got strength, boy. Might burn out on you eventually, but you’ve got it in spades. Need it in spades too, you will.”
They shared a meagre dinner of half-cooked pork shavings. Only a mouthful could be cooked at a time while the ham steaks smoked, and Carlos added more and took it in turn for them to sate their hunger. Day fantasised about the unleavened bread they made at home from the spelt cultivated in the wild spaces of the Rocky Mountains’ foothills. His mouth watered and he licked the naked grease from his fingers, grateful for something fire-warmed and sharp of taste even if that clarity came partly from being half-raw.
“If we have a deal on the knives, then I appreciate your help,” Day said as the afternoon tilted towards evening.
“We do,” Carlos assured him. “Between now and then, you’ve got to spend all your time looking for fuel. I’ll be doing the same. Understand? We’ll need a hot flame to get that silver moving.”
“You can do it, though?”
”Leave it to me,” Carlos said. “I wouldn’t make out like I could if I couldn’t. Ain’t my style.”
Day believed him and they left it at that.
The skies eventually darkened and Day could hear but not see choppers operating in the distance. Day and Carlos gradually clawed their friendship back from the edge of the precipice into which it had nearly fallen. As the hours went by they discussed strategies and means of attack, discarding nine out of every ten suggestions either of them made.
Day eventually slept and, in the morning, Carlos was waiting for him to waken almost as if he hadn’t moved since the night before. The smoking apparatus was gone, the meat with it. Carlos offered him water and half a handful of tiny orange-red things for breakfast that Day at first took to be berries, but which turned out to be edible seeds from a sort of bush he hadn’t seen before.
“I’ve thought about the problem with the eyes,” Carlos said, and waited for a sign of interest from Day. When the young man raised his face from his cupped palm and his monkey-like exploration of the unusual scarlet beads, Carlos said, “You need to do without ‘em.”
”Eyes?” Day raised an eyebrow.
“Yep. You’ll need to learn to fight blind. At night.” Unnecessarily, Carlos added, “Blind-fighting.”
“Gods,” Day muttered. “If it wasn’t hard enough.”
Nevertheless, the young Nebraskan could clearly see the point. If the vampires could mesmerise him before his precious silver daggers were in play, he’d lose everything, including his life, without ever striking a blow.
They resolved to explore the issue some more that evening and, for the daytime, went their separate ways. As the least sort of repatriation he could offer, Day took Carlos’ water bottles north to the bores and refilled them. He glimpsed Lila and Jenny sitting together at a distance, but didn’t make any effort to communicate. They sat huddled, for all the world like mother and daughter, normalised except for the wound that glistened untreated on Lila’s neck.
On the way back to Carlos’ hideout, Day came across a blue plastic tarpaulin abandoned against the edge of a scrub bush. Day not only folded the sheeting down into a transportable size, but he gathered up the dry fodder that grew from the tips of the water-starved plant’s stems. He compacted the bundle into a tight wand of fibres and bound them with a piece of plastic twine fluttering on the ground nearby.
When he stood, he saw Mikhail standing about two hundred and fifty yards away, still as a statue and watching him. While thanks to Day Mikhail could no longer keep the company of his European offsider, he had another, slightly smaller man with him. The newcomer was Asiatic, though he had gingery hair that bespoke a mixed heritage. Once Day met Mikhail’s glare, the black-haired man made a hand gesture towards him and commented to his companion, who screwed up his mouth in a contemplative way and shrugged.
Not wanting to fuel Mikhail’s sense of revenge any further, Day walked south-west, no longer heading straight for and thus betraying Carlos’ spot. When he glanced back five seconds later, the two men were trudging off across the plains to the east.
Carlos and Day ate smoked pork and chewed on a few stalks of a lemon-flavoured herb that sprouted sometimes spontaneously on the field. Day was surprised by how well the meat had been cured, but the green grass-like herb was a cruel reminder of the vegetables missing from his diet. When the few stems Carlos had scrounged were gone, Day absently chewed on one of the dry reeds he’d plucked earlier.
The daylight took a while to fade even though the year was turning slowly towards the nights being longer than before. For the first time in a while Day felt well refreshed, not just because of the food Carlos had provided, but also from having enjoyed an uninterrupted warm night’s sleep, kept cosy by his latest acquisition. He had yet to take it off. He was well on his way towards drowning out the previous owner’s scent.
Carlos produced the two smaller knives he’d proposed to coat with silver and handed them to Day.
“Turn around and kneel,” he commanded.
After Day complied, Carlos fixed a strip of cloth around Day’s head, covering his eyes.
“Okay.”
When he stood, Day felt strangely uneven, almost a little shaky. The vivid part of his mind wordlessly reminded him how the exact same circumstances would reign if he ever drew the blades against one of the night hunters. The thought shivered him and he almost gave in to the temptation to remove the blindfold then and there. Thankfully Carlos’s voice interrupted.
“When I don’t speak, try and follow where I am,” he said, and instantly disappeared from Day’
s radar. Day suspected he was meant to be able to track the half-Mexican from sound alone or possibly smell, but the moment Carlos went quiet Day had no idea where to find him.
However he didn’t want to display his ignorance. Holding the knife in his right hand tightly, he struck out in a random direction.
Carlos made a hissing sound and slapped him hard across the cheek.
“God damn it, Day!” Carlos screeched, and when Day yanked down the cloth he saw Carlos was clutching his upper arm where blood ran freely.
“You cut me!” Carlos gasped. “Damned vamps’ll come for me if they smell I’m cut.”
“I cut you?” Day asked, astounded. “For real? Gods, Carlos, I had no idea. I’m sorry. It was a lucky shot. A shot in the dark.”
”Yeah, no pun intended,” Carlos scowled. “Good thing I moved in time, boy. That knife was coming straight for me.”
“I can’t see a thing with this thing on!”
Carlos eyed him suspiciously and then the wound, unclamping for a moment. He gave a look of disgust and said, “Lucky break? We’ll see. Put the knives away. Looking back, I think it’s a bit premature.”
They continued the exercise once Day had made himself a new blindfold, the old one adorning Carlos’s arm. Thereafter the pair found that about every second time Day had a good general idea of Carlos’s position. The results astonished Day, but Carlos was more guarded with his praise even though the achievement seemed remarkable.
They kept on in such a fashion for several weeks, never knowing when death would drop from the sky or appear in their midst to separate them. In the mornings and late afternoons they practised the blind-fighting or some of the other tactics Carlos thought up. Several times they ran through the blind-fighting exercises after sunset and Day seemed to improve very slightly. The harder it was to see, the more he came to rely on his ears and his feet. Eventually Day got into the habit of going through the training barefoot because he began to feel like he could sense Carlos’s proximity to him better through the soil.
The main parts of the days were still dedicated to the business of survival. When the helicopters went overhead, the men dropped whatever they were doing to join the pursuit even though on two occasions the airdrops were for plastic sheeting or for piles of soiled clothing deposited in the farm to help the captives ward themselves better against the increasing autumnal chill. On a third occasion, the supplies consisted of bundles of firewood and Day waded in with half-a-dozen other men to make sure he claimed his share. Carlos also acquired a share and so they had between them a good store for cooking and for whatever obscure alchemical method Carlos had planned for coating the twin daggers with silver.
After the first night Day got into the habit of pitching his blue tarpaulin a short distance from Carlos’s hole. If Carlos cared for Day’s proximity or the way it drew attention to his lair he didn’t say. During the days, the attention-drawing blue plastic was carefully folded inside the ripe hide shoulder-bag and left sitting in a cleft in the ground a short distance from the hideout.
Eighteen days into his training, Day lifted his head at the sound of the heavy helicopter approaching from the east. Carlos heard the sound as well and, spitting out the piece of gristle he had been chewing, stood and stretched.
“Personnel carrier,” Carlos said. “I might go see who they bring in. Coming?”
Day’s mind flitted instantly back to the gory scene that occurred last time he attended a landing. He shook his head, passing on the opportunity.
“Suit yourself,” Carlos said, setting off north-west.
Day gently stretched to remain limber; and after a few minutes he pulled out the daggers and started to gently turn them over in his hands, running through a few of the low sweeping stabs Carlos had taught him. The sun was a remote but fiercely-burning globe in the sky overhead, and at such a time of day he often felt hesitant exercising in full though distant view of the watchtowers. Although the presence of weapons and certain items that, in a regular prison, would certainly be contraband were probably well known to the ghoulish warders, Day wondered if they would be quite so nonchalant if they knew captives were practising martial manoeuvres designed solely to combat them and their deadly night-coming masters.
Briefly, such thoughts rekindled Day’s earlier fantasies about somehow getting large numbers of inmates to train in preparation for running against the defences of the walls. Day had spoken to Carlos about it and was certain that if it wasn’t for Carlos’s self-preservationist streak, he might be exactly the man to lead such a motley army. Yet Carlos was unlikely to extend himself in that way. It was a daydream the young man knew he would have to abandon for good. All the counter-arguments had already been critiqued by his own mind and he knew the conditions in the fields were kept as they were exactly to maximise the aggression of inmate against inmate and thereby keep them enslaved and comparatively passive, at the mercy of the blood-drinking fiends who had engineered their fates.
When Carlos returned, he promptly demanded the knives and handed Day back his slim weapon.
“Okay, we’re on. You can go wander for a couple of days,” Carlos told him abruptly. “I’m going to be spending a lot of time out of sight and I don’t want any attention drawn.”
“Well, if you put it like that,” Day shrugged. He put his hands on his hips and breathed out, looking off the way Carlos had been. “What were the new recruits like?” he asked.
“You know,” Carlos said. “It could be any of us getting off there for the first time. No one died at least, you’ll be glad to know.”
Day got his things together and after a few wistful glances backwards he struck out south. It was only about a hundred yards before he changed his mind and turned west.
Eventually he tired of walking and sat down in the dust. Carlos was a remote but, like almost anyone, still visible figure in the distance.
It seemed like ages since it had rained, though it was the right time of year for a real deluge, at least in the Rockies. Day was tired of trekking from one end of the hex to the other. Quite apart from everything else, it was the boredom of the farm that was difficult to manage. Balancing gut-wrenching fear for one’s life with sheer mind-numbing boredom wasn’t easy. He thought back to the man who had hurled himself into the big helicopter’s rotors and considered something like that could only come out of such a deadly combination.
It was one of the things Day had benefited for in the past three weeks working with Carlos. He had even somehow ceased to think that every night might be his last since his head was too filled with his own fevered imaginings and vague, unarticulated promises about the future. He had expected to sleep consistently more peacefully at night ever since securing the fur jacket, but instead he found he went to sleep with his mind at such a pace that it made for an oft-interrupted rest.
Day sat in the dirt and willed the hours to pass. Until he had the means of his own liberation in his hands, any time he spent was wasted. He was eager to be about the business of getting off the farm, even though, if the knives were pressed into his hands at that very moment, he knew he was far from ready. It was not just a matter of being ready for the violence. Much of what was required for freedom would come down to chance. He and Carlos had discussed numerous strategies and agreed there was no one way likely to lead to success. Blind luck would probably account for whether he lived and died, and his own strength and the degree to which he was able to prepare himself ahead of time would only load the scales in his favour by the tiniest amount.
People came and went as he sat looking west, waiting as the sun slowly descended out of the sky like a shy woman taking her time about dipping into cold water. A man strolled past, hands cupping his mouth as he called out a dog’s name. The frantic look on his face indicated madness. A woman with an equally red expression carried a teenage boy over her shoulder, but the bright blood staining her undyed skirt and the dark splotches on the boy’s clothes showed that while the woman was also living through a nightmare, h
ers was no delusion. Elsewhere a man dragged a woman along by her wrists and, further on from that, a woman berated a man in a loud, angry voice, dashing her fists upon his chest while he completely failed to react. The sound of crying filtered across the camp followed by men’s voices raised in anger so guttural it sounded like dogs fighting.
Humanity, here, is reduced to the levels of animals, Day thought, and not for the first time. He shook his head, not wanting any part of it. With the sun still in full force he turned his back and drew his spare pants from the shoulder bag crammed full of plastic sheeting. Then he set the bag down as a smelly pillow and draped his head with the trousers, shading himself from the sun. It was not his usual habit to sleep in the day, neither here on the farm nor at home. Now, though, after several strenuous weeks, he took his leave of absence from Carlos as a sign for rest and gave into it. Before very long he was gently snoring and letting the nomad carnival play on without him.
Although he came close to rousing several times, he didn’t wake until much later. It was dark. The stars overhead glittered like a sheen of ice stuck fast to black cloth. Day was pleasantly warm in his hairy coat and he lay on his side for many more minutes after he was awake, admiring the stars and trying hard not to think about what things other than beauty the night often brought.
Eventually he sat up and drank a little water. He had no sense of the hour, though by the general level of stillness and quiet he guessed it was late. He was surprised he’d slept with such depth. Yet the farm was never entirely silent, even at midnight. Weird, distorted sounds rolled across the plains. He knew there was a practical explanation for the noises, though not one he would necessarily like. For all Day knew, the vampires had come already to a neighbouring field and were about their dark business.
It made him impatient to be sitting still, contemplating such thoughts. When he was sure sleep had been driven far away, he stood and gathered his things and started walking further west. He went quietly, which meant going slowly, since he didn’t want to wake anyone he might come across.
Endless Night Page 9