It wasn’t consideration for their wellbeing but his own that motivated him. He had heard of people killed for sneaking up on others at night. He could imagine his own reaction if anyone came too close. For a while Day walked, feeling maudlin, working over and over in his mind the events leading up to the death of Mikhail’s friend, the man he had killed. At that very moment he didn’t feel good about it, even though he also somehow managed not to regret it. He was, he thought, perhaps becoming a little like Carlos, developing a strongly realist approach to life on the farm.
The scrabbling sound drew his eyes west and Day realised he had wandered to within five hundred yards of the nearest wall. As he watched, a small figure disengaged from the top of the wall and went quickly down until it reached ground level. At the base of the wall the figure, a man, crouched and remained unmoving.
Day squinted, his nose scrunching up as he regarded the small blob of a figure. At once the man broke into a run away from the wall. Day found himself suddenly walking to the north on a path to intercept him, but as the man drew nearer he saw Day was a person who was alive and awake and, by the broad grin on his sandy face, the stranger looked relieved to see another person, so he veered towards Day, panting and bright-eyed.
“What’ve you done? Gone over the wall?” Day asked.
“Absolutely!” the other man grinned. He was only a few years older than Day, stubble-chinned and blonde.
“That’s . . . incredible,” Day admitted. “How did you manage it? Didn’t the ghouls try to stop you?”
The man indicated for Day to kneel or sit and he himself dropped to both knees and fumbled with a black satchel at his side until he freed a small water bottle and drank from it. After a long draught, the man sneezed.
“Far out!” he exclaimed. “That was one hell of a run. Who are you, man? I’m Finn.”
”Finn?”
”Yeah. Like ‘Huck Finn,’ you know?” When Day frowned, Finn asked, “Can you read, man?”
”Of course,” Day snarled. “My name’s Day.”
“Day? Great. I kinda hoped to make it over the fence and find open country on the other side, but I guess I lucked out, huh?”
”It’s just another field. I think we have other fields on all sides,” Day said.
“Really? I guess I’ll keep going east. But not tonight.” He sat down and broke his satchel open further, pulling out several apples.
“Here,” Finn said. “Have one of these before they rot. The vamps dumped a few huge crates of them three weeks back. Funny how you spend a lifetime in here wishing for something sweet or some fruit and then once you get it, it gets old really quick.”
Day’s eyes bugged out of his head and he took the proffered fruit without politely waiting to see if Finn was sure. The apple had blackened dents down one side, but that was hardly going to stop him. It made him realise how sore his gums were to be eating something harder than meat.
“Been a while since you ate, eh?” Finn smirked.
“No, just nothing but meat for a long while.”
They sat chewing for a moment, then Day asked Finn a few more specific questions about how he had managed to scale the wall. In reply, Finn glanced once behind himself to make sure his back was facing the wall and then he pulled a pair of hooks like the one Carlos had from his waistband. Finn had wound plastic twine around the base of his stainless steel hooks and then looped handles from them.
“I used these to get some purchase on the wall,” he said. “I dug one of these out of the leg of a dead pig they dropped. The other one I traded for. Took me forever.”
Day scrutinised the devices and nodded. “What was the top of the wall like?”
“There’s a drop down the middle of the wall, like a pathway the grunts patrol, and the wall’s edge’s raised, like a shield. The ground . . . the floor of the walkway . . . is noisy. I tried to tread light. Hope I managed.”
”There’s no alarm,” Day said.
“Yeah. I thought about following the wall. It gave a good view. But it’s not grunts that patrol in the night, is it? I’m not running up against a bloodsucker patrol, not with a full moon three nights away.” Finn shook his head and much of his previous humour left him.
As the adrenalin was wearing, he became cold and tired. He wore thin cloth trousers of black fabric and a heavy grey mesh jacket over several layers of improvised clothing. His shoes were the soles from old work boots lashed to his feet by strips of hardened cloth. He had worn a square of black material around his collar-length blonde hair before, but in relaxing he removed it.
“Where are you from?” Finn asked.
Day wasn’t exactly sure how to answer, so he said, “Nebraska. The mountains.”
”Nebraska?” Finn frowned as if he had never heard of it. “What city?”
”City?” It was Day’s turn to frown and he said, “I’m not from any city. Are there any left? Not in Nebraska.”
”Oh there’s cities alright,” Finn said, smiling. “I’m from Chicago. You heard of it?”
”As a place, yes.”
”A wild place. Crazy. You should visit there some time. There’s vampires there too, of course, but nothing like these greedy, power-hungry freaks.”
It was too much for Day to grasp so he simply said, “Vampires? In your homelands?”
Finn grinned back at him and nodded. After a few more puzzled questions, Day managed to tease the details from him, and Finn quickly grasped that the farm was the closest Day had ever come to a high-density population before.
As Finn explained it, Chicago was a city from before the Rising. When the supernatural creatures of the world came forth, the city descended into the sort of chaos paralleled around the country. However what saved Chicago – when other cities were left smouldering, haunted ruins – were pre-existing racial tensions. Not only were the police and the city’s gangs more alert than elsewhere, but when law and order collapsed, it flung the gates wide for a reckoning on a grand scale. The distinct boroughs and gang turfs were fortified quickly and the police took control of the administrative hubs and main buildings with the help of the National Guard. Although there were several years of all-out turf warfare – not just between whites and blacks and Latinos, but with vampires and other beasts and what Finn called manticores running berserk all throughout – the result was the city was locked-in and therefore never completely overthrown. While for many years Chicago was split between a number of boroughs, each of which looked to their defence against night creatures independently, the antagonisms between the rival social classes meant even if it was chaotic, Chicago survived.
In recent years, measures were taken to reinstitute a central authority to the city, with a council made up of turf leaders from all sides ruling over the reintegration of the boroughs. The most progress to date was to re-open the city’s central hub to all groups and have that area policed once again by an organised force. It was a far cry from the civil politics of the city’s founding fathers. The men and women who ruled the city now were all battle-hardened veterans of street wars, not idle bureaucrats intent on a comfortable living. Finn even went so far as to suggest that the vampires of the Chicago environs liaised with the city council so as to keep their animosity as low as possible. At the same time, the blood-borne disease that turned humans into lycanthropes was in plague-like proportions in certain quarters, with the result that lycanthropic citizens that wanted access to the city centre were tagged and their details recorded in a central register.
Finn eventually fell silent and Day was in no rush to fill the space he vacated. The newcomer extracted another apple and started eating it with an unhappy expression.
“How many fences have you crossed?” Day finally asked. He tensed, afraid what the answer was going to be.
“Three,” Finn smiled. “I keep hoping I’m gonna strike out. Then again, maybe they have a really big wall around this whole place?”
“Three,” Day repeated. “And you always go east?”
&n
bsp; ”Yup.”
”This place must be huge.”
“I came to the camps seven weeks ago,” Finn said. “I was driving in the desert on my way to do some business with a Wilderness Spirit with a friend of mine, Lacey, who’s got some wicked mojo, or at least she did back home.”
”Mojo?”
“Magick,” Finn said abruptly. “She’s a mage. A sorceress. You know?”
The blood drained again from Day’s face. “There are humans who know magick?”
Finn only laughed. “You need to come to Chicago some time, boy. We’ve got everything there now. Twenty years ago, the closest you got to magick was someone’s aunt reckoning she could talk to yer dead grandma. But with the Accord – that’s the city council, what they call themselves – a few of the monsters started coming out of the woodwork. They’ve been outsiders so long, now people know about them I guess the lure of a normal life’s pretty strong.
“Funny, you know. I think about this old film I watched, the monster, whatever it is, is lookin’ in on people in a house having a celebration and its sad. Cryin’ even. I imagine some of them’re like that.
“Being monsters, though, they don’t have much to contribute to the cash economy. We’ve got the dollar again in Chicago. The Accord runs a treasury out of the old newspaper building.
“So soon enough, the first of these are offering to teach what they know in exchange. First ones got pretty rich, I’d say.”
”They . . . taught people . . . like students . . . in a school?” Day looked numbly at the other man’s face. It didn’t help that school was an abstract concept already.
“You can think of it like that if it helps you,” Finn shrugged.
Day chewed it over a moment and followed the thread of the tale back to where Finn had left it. He asked, “What’s a Wilderness Spirit, then?”
“Most areas have them, they reckon. Like a small god, a local god. Something. Lacey said we could deal with this one, but now I guess I’ll never know.” Finn’s animated expression deserted him.
“What happened?”
”The vamps jumped us at night. We both had heaters, but they didn’t do us any good. Needed silver bullets I suppose. They overwhelmed us almost straightaway. I thought we were food, then, but they took us instead, stuck us in the back of an old postal van and some ghouls drove us about a hundred miles.
“There was a town, then. An old one, you know? Deserted. They’d fenced in the school and there was about sixty of us in the basketball courts, wire fences too hard to climb. Lacey got hit up pretty bad and they were taking people away one at a time. No one ever came back. I didn’t know what it meant until they took me.
“It was testing. Testing for magick,” Finn said. “I didn’t know it when they did it to me, but I’ve had it explained since.”
He paused for a moment, apple forgotten, drew in a lungful of air and ploughed on, snapping a chunk from the apple as he spoke.
”Well, that’s why Lacey . . . why I haven’t seen her since. Once they processed me, I was put back in a van with the last nine or ten people I’d seen dragged out of there. They drove us to a train which we had to wait half the night for. Man, those vamps’ve got a real operation going.”
“Hard to believe you share the streets with them, where you’re from,” Day said.
“Makes a man rethink that sort of thing.”
They exchanged knowing glances.
“What now?”
“Tomorrow night I’ll keep going east,” Finn answered him.
“Why not keep going now?”
”Well, I’m tired.” They chuckled, and then Finn added, “I figure that I might get pegged if I walk all the way across this camp and then try for the wall. Someone’s on the wall at night, though I don’t know if they’re vamps or grunts or what. The night’s bright because of the moon.”
“You sound like you have a plan,” Day said.
“I’ve done three camps in three nights. I’m happy with that. There can’t be too many more before I come up against . . . well, the end of the line, one way or another.”
Day wished him all success. Whatever the outcome, it would be interesting to see him in action the following night and Day intended to be there, even if it was a case of living vicariously through the other man’s adventures. Day knew his own time would come. Finn was the first person he’d met who was doing anything anywhere close to what Day himself wanted. He might not be striking back, but he wasn’t standing around like cattle waiting to die.
With renewed enthusiasm Day asked Finn more and more specific questions about life in the other fields he had visited. Finn dismissively acknowledged that in breezing through, he hadn’t really developed much of a feel for how each field (or ‘camp’ as he called them) was distinct.
“The one I was in yesterday, though,” Finn said. “It seemed to me like the men were slightly better organised and moved in bigger groups. At a distance I saw a big ruckus, maybe ten or twelve men going for it at once. It’s like they had developed into factions . . . clans.”
Day pondered those words, wondering what sort of alternate social forms he would likely meet if he followed Finn’s path. In unusual circumstances and with all the normal, natural functions of social life distorted, it wasn’t surprising that aberrations would develop and the unusual might become usual, skewing everything accordingly.
It was still dark, the sun a few hours off rising before their heads began to nod. Day, through sheer idle contemplation, gave into the sleep urge. Finn was clearly weary from his travails. They each drifted off to sleep without further word and it wasn’t until the sun cleared the fenced horizon that they awoke, practically at the same moment.
They woke up together for a reason. Close by, loud shouts sounded, and when Day stood up he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. One of the small supply-delivering helicopters sagged against the backdrop of the cold, grey-blue sky. Oily smoke churned from a gap in its side, diffusing through the whirling rotors. Finn stood up beside Day and as they watched, the suspended aircraft seemed to inch down some more, fighting the tug of gravity and the abandonment of its powers.
All at once the smoke seemed to cease and the chopper fell completely out of the sky. The forward ground was obscured by throngs of people, but the booming crash was loud enough to merit Day’s heart jumping a beat from fear of an explosion. From all around, figures streaked towards the commotion and without much thought to the consequences, Day and Finn followed suit.
At about four hundred yards Day came up against the first few spectators, whose ranks became progressively more tightly-packed the further he went. The smell of fuel and traces of dissipating smoke perfumed the crowd blackly and, oblivious to the trouble it might cause, Day manhandled a few figures from his path and patted the shoulders of others to be allowed through.
A weird cry emanated from ahead. Day moved past several more people, and the way that they yielded, hesitant themselves about pressing forward, gave him subliminal pause. He slowed, passing a man in a faded orange robe who shared a stark look with him. The ring of onlookers was not as dense as he had expected and, when he looked behind him, Day saw that more and more were arriving every moment, pressing in anxiously behind him and the men and women immediately around him. Day was now at the new forefront of the circle, with the members of the previous crowd shrinking back from what they’d seen.
For a moment Day thought the ground had become suddenly uneven until he glanced at his footing and saw his boot was propped upon a severed arm. Blood continued to weakly pump from the stump just beneath the shoulder. Several more chunks of unrecognisable matter were strewn around near him and the pale soil was wet, pink even, with blood. The helicopter suicide Day had seen flashed through his mind and he rebuked himself back from the edge of vomiting. The fruit he’d eaten in the night was too precious to be wasted even though it wasn’t easy to stop himself.
A few paces closer to the wreck, a jagged piece of rotor jutted from the groun
d. A few smaller shards of metal were strewn haphazardly elsewhere and a woman was crouched on the ground crying and clutching a slightly younger woman against herself. The second woman was limp as a rag doll, her face half missing, the redness smearing against her comforter’s hidebound shoulder.
Day put his fist to his mouth and let his eyes roam on, planting his feet firmly and letting the ones behind him butt up against his back without getting their way. As other eyes sought out the wreckage, the desire to press forward wilted. Day wondered if Finn had managed to remain near, but he didn’t turn back and look. The main part of the scene before him was too captivating.
The helicopter had crashed nose-first into the ground, even though its cockpit was basically a round, black marble and it couldn’t be said to possess a nose. After crashing, the chopper had tilted one way, the overhead rotor tipping into the ground and exploding in fragments. The shower of metal shards mostly went in a shotgun-like spread away from the helicopter and into the direction from which Day had approached.
The front upper half of the dome of the cockpit bubble was cracked in several places. The door on its side was leaning open. Behind the door was a sliding hatch, also half-open, and animal carcasses in various portions were spilled out from when the chopper tipped to its side.
Staggering for footing among the mouldering tide of beef and mutton was a skinny figure clad entirely in black, a black motorcycle helmet on its head, gloves on its hands. The visor of the helm was open. It was enough that Day could see the small, confused eyes and the withered and pale lime-brown skin surrounding them.
Two men also struggled on the uneven ground. One of the inmates was a large but starved-looking fellow. His soft blue coat hung on him like a sail. Patched canvas pants could have surrounded his scrawny long legs twice. Yet like his companion, the tall man was seized by a desperate rage; and he waded towards the unsteady ghoul with a lion’s roar, slapping a huge palm down on the side of the ghoul’s helmet and driving it sideways to the ground, away from the helicopter.
Endless Night Page 10