The other man followed suit, kicking hard into the leather jacketed midriff of the emaciated creature. As men, they were far stronger. It was the vampires who had the secret powers. The ghouls were just servants.
One of the men reached down and grabbed the ghoul by the arm, but the long motorcycle glove came off in his hand and he fell backwards. The hand thus revealed was fine-boned, no real suggestion of flesh to the wrist and hand, only dry parchment-like skin surrounding long-nailed fingers.
At the same moment the higher helicopter door swung open, defying the tug of gravity as another figure moved within the chopper seeking egress. More shouts sounded from observers standing to the north of the crash site, but Day kept his eyes on the first ghoul for the moment, flicking his gaze to the cockpit only in a feverish desperation. If there was anything worth taking other than meat from the helicopter, the competition would be violently fierce. It was much too risky.
As he watched, the fallen man recovered, lurching towards the ghoul as the bigger man pulled it upright. The second man’s hand went to the ghoul’s side and only then did Day see the holstered sidearm. From within the helmet the ghoul emitted a thin, reedy wail and then a louder, more desperate cry – brother to that shout Day had heard earlier – as the smaller of the two men pulled the gun free and pointed it at the ghoul’s chest.
All around them, harsh-faced men and women gave raucous cries, many of them encouraging the pair on. Day heard Finn’s voice and glanced to his right, seeing the sandy-haired man red in the face and bawling instructions, “Kill the grunt,” as he called them, his mouth split in a grin of demonic character.
The gun went off once and then again a second time. The ghoul slumped and the man with the pistol stupidly whipped it against the helmeted head. The ghoul’s arm cracked in the grip of the bigger man who immediately released the captive, backing away from the gunfire’s path.
Though it had been slumping, the ghoul stood up again and frantically staggered back for the helicopter bubble. Once more the gun flared, the impact of the bullet punching the ghoul into the helicopter’s doorway. The bigger man then wrestled with his companion for control of the weapon and they fell down, struggling amid the rib bones of diseased-looking animal cadavers.
Day was horrified. A few more spectators crossed the line and rushed at the ghoul, plucking its hands from the frame of the helicopter and dragging it back. Observantly someone shouted that the ghoul couldn’t be harmed by normal bullets. Immediately thereafter the gun went off a fourth time and the smaller of the two men stood, the other man’s blood reddening his palm.
The captured ghoul disappeared from sight among the first members of the crowd to seize him. Day dismissed the terrible shrieks, finding it hard to sympathise with the keeper’s fate. It was the rabid behaviour of the crowd – and he caught himself thinking of them as ‘his people’ for the first time – that scared him. However, as the unfortunate creature had its limbs, and then finally its head torn from its body by main strength (the only thing that would silence it under the circumstances), Day stealthily approached the helicopter cockpit with the others.
People flooded from nowhere. An elbow struck him in the ribs and he clutched himself, veering wildly as another out-rushing of captives swept over and through the chopper. Whatever was there would be gone in an instant.
Day lashed out, striking a man in the temple with his fist. The man rebounded into another man and then fell over. He disappeared under the feet of the people surging around them. In turn, Day elbowed wildly to get free of the crush of the crowd. Fortunately being two or three inches taller than average, he was able to make past a pair of women and three wrestling men and get around to the front of the chopper where the crowd was less concentrated.
There was a yell behind him as the first ghoul’s black helmed head was held aloft. Day glanced at the trophy, but he concentrated on what was ahead of him, around the other side of the downed flyer.
Another mob of about eighty people had convened around the second ghoul escaping from the helicopter. His helmet gone, the blinking, saucer-eyed figure scurried left and right in a hunchbacked posture, sweeping feeble-looking splayed hands at anyone who dared come near. Surprisingly, the creature’s show of fortitude had succeeded thus far, with several members of the crowd only beginning to respond. The ghoul didn’t have long before it too would go under like its co-pilot, and the thing obviously knew it.
The ghoul rasped something aloud and drew the automatic pistol from its hip. Day flinched, drawing back even though he was only an observer to the scene and not an immediate target. Why none of the more emboldened men didn’t rush the thing then and there, Day couldn’t understand. In an instant the gun’s recoil clacked twice and the closest two men went down with spouts of blood issuing from their chests.
The renewed gunfire sent the confrontational crowd into a spin, with the less-able members fleeing in all directions, even right past the gun-toting ghoul. The gun went off again and a woman fell down clutching her leg. A fourth shot hit a red-bearded man in the shoulder, spinning him around.
Mikhail appeared out of the crowd with a suddenness that shocked Day almost more than the mad undead helicopter pilot shooting into a crowd of innocents. The gingery-haired Asian was with him again, and this time Day could see he had discs in his ears where in Day’s experience piercings normally went. The discs stretched the skin in an obscene manner. The metal studs under the Asian man’s nose only heightened his feral appearance.
The pair rushed the ghoul and Day started moving away. If Mikhail laid his hands on a gun, the last place Day wanted to be was standing dumbstruck watching him.
A vaguely familiar old man wearing an improvised toga of blue plastic sheeting hurried past at a fast walk and grabbed Day by the shoulder.
“Come along lad. You don’t want to be around for what’s coming,” he said, the trimmed white beard on his jaw streaked with what appeared to be bile.
Because the man was familiar, Day fell into step with him, but not before wildly casting his eyes around for a glimpse of Finn.
“Why?” Day asked. “What’s going to happen?”
“Can’t you hear the helicopters?” the man asked.
They didn’t slow. In a few more seconds Day and the older man had fled west and covered about two hundred metres of ground from the crash site. Day’s buzzing ears gradually separated out the sounds of blood blasting through his veins and his pulse hammering in his ear from the thick background sound of helicopter engines.
There were three of them. Two went with their doors open, and ghouls with automatic rifles and black plastic goggles hung from the sides. The middle aircraft flew with only a rear hatch open and, as their shadows crossed Day and the old man, Day’s companion gave a grunting order.
“Run!”
Day did as he was told. He covered another hundred feet of unbroken terrain before the cracking noise sounded behind him and a wave of force knocked him and his saviour flat. A wall of roaring chaos crossed over them a moment later and Day abandoned any poise he’d retained, covering his head and ears with both hands, trying to mould his forearms to the sides of his face to protect himself.
A few seconds went by before he realised his companion was talking.
“I could feel the heat from here!” the stunned old sixty-something said.
Day sat up and turned because the other man had done the same.
It was hard to believe even the vamps would prosecute such an extreme punishment on the farm, especially with a situation started by their own malfunction. Yet the smoking, charnel evidence lay behind them.
The explosive had been thermal, designed to reduce an area to superheated slag rather than shred it with fragments. The downed helicopter was ground zero, but the devastation extended in a circle about a hundred yards in radius from the blast centre. Within that area the plain was dotted with at least seventy or eighty bodies, reduced to charcoalised lumps on the landscape. The helicopter itself – and w
hatever threatening, vital paraphernalia it contained – was barely recognisable. The struts of the chopper’s chassis could be discerned, but everything, particularly the industrial plastics and the glass of its outer carapace, were boiled away.
“Gods. . . .”
Day was without breath.
The old man only muttered something tearfully about “those bastards,” rustling nervously in his plastic coat.
“Is this their revenge?” Day asked. He momentarily hoped Mikhail and his liberated weapon were caught within the blast. It seemed likely he and his new companion would be dead.
“Revenge? No,” the other man said. “I think not. They would’ve done this to stop us having access to tech.”
“Tech?” Day figured what the man meant, but was puzzled by the inventive use of the noun.
“Sure,” the older man wheezed, mucus staining his white moustache, red eyes blearily focused on Day. “Imagine if one of us could’ve got that chopper running, had they left it there? They couldn’t just bring in a truck to haul it out.”
Day nodded. He could see how such-and-such was the case, it and all the different scenarios the other man imagined; but it struck him as almost unbelievable that the vampires and their minions could wield such destruction and not even have the lives taken be the primary concern. The roasted bodies were collateral damage. Inconsequential.
He clutched his head in his hands, looking between his knees for a while until the world focused.
“A little generosity will go a long way,” the old man said after a while. Something in his voice and his accent made Day look up.
“Colin McNab,” Day said after a moment.
“Hey? What’s that, lad?”
“Your accent,” Day prodded.
“Scottish, yes. Or, och aye, I should say?” The old man tried to grin, but the reference was lost. He was old, almost Creek’s age, but somewhat more spry, as their flight from the bombsite had proven.
“You saved me.”
“And you let me cut some meat to eat, just when I didn’t think I could carry on,” the old man said, serious and hushed again.
“I remember now,” Day replied.
“Where’s your lady friend?” He wasn’t such a fool as to ask without a tone of hesitation. Bad things happened all the time.
“She’s gone. Taken.”
“Ach, sorry, friend.” The other man hummed a moment. “You’re Nebraskan, right? Almost didn’t recognise you without your tattoos.”
”I remember you asking.”
”My name’s Stewart,” the man said, rolling the R.
“Stewart? I’m Day.”
“That’s a good name. I’m not fond of the night any more,” he said.
Day nodded, glanced past him looking for a sign of Finn. A few stragglers were approaching the devastation. At the fringes of the blast radius, people languished with wounds that weren’t immediately fatal. Only a couple of the new arrivals approached these figures.
Stewart watched the same scene, clucking his tongue. “Scavenging already! What have we become, here?”
“Cattle,” Day answered simply, not really thinking.
Stewart made a contemplative noise, the answer being too obvious to refute.
“I’m glad neither of us went like that,” the Scotsman said a moment later.
“Agreed.”
After a moment’s more contemplation the other man slapped his plastic-clad thighs and stood.
“Well my lad. People to do, places to see.” He coughed. “Are you alright?”
Day’s smile was weak, more at the rich accent that reminded him of his father’s friend, a default uncle, than Stewart’s sentiment.
“I’m great,” he said.
“Alright, I’m glad to hear it. Stay safe,” Stewart said and strolled off in the opposite direction to the charnel scene east.
Day exhaled slowly and clutched his head again. His ears were sore, whether from the noise of the explosion or his rough covering of them at the end of his and Stewart’s flight he didn’t know.
After a little while he also decided to stand. As it turned out he wasn’t dead. As the lottery of the farms would seemingly never end, Day resigned himself as many did to continue on, trying to milk from every hour what value there was to be had. In the end it was a decision not much different to what many people in ordinary lives made for themselves, despite the lethal context of the farm. Life itself, viewed from an extreme angle, had no inherent purpose beyond its own continuation anyway, so while he was unconsciously perpetuating himself and nobody else was trying to do otherwise, Day figured he might as well enjoy the breath he took, the strength in his limbs, the gentle sighing wind on his lightly bearded face.
Consequently it began raining. Day sighed, trudging somewhat closer back in the direction of the abominable slaughter. While the rain fell and he cloaked himself with his own plastic sheeting, he felt comfortable to let tears fall for once. He stayed short of blubbering, not letting his face contort erratically with his emotions. Even with the rain, most of the people remained since there was nowhere to go for shelter; and the show of weakness over which Day was so concerned drew less attention as long as he kept his face bland.
Doing so, he almost masochistically forced himself to absorb the images of the pathetically fragile blackened bodies, those closer to the point of impact reduced to featureless husks breaking down under even the gentle rain’s drumming. There was no purpose to making himself suffer further, yet to be alive when so many others had perished without direct reason was such a luxury that his own guilt was assuaged only by not fooling himself as to the reasons why.
A human mind can impose suffering upon itself for only so long, the duration and each person’s limits being dependent on their own natures. For Day, grieving thoughts eventually turned to ones of practicality. There was nothing to be had, nothing to be gained at the crash site. When another helicopter returned in his direction – for all Day knew it could’ve been the one that dropped the bomb – Day and many others hobbled away from the death-attracting scene. A few people carted corpses, but it figured that the rest would remain abandoned at the scene, they along with the fallen chopper that had summoned them to their doom lying untouched, shunned by the field’s residents. The black spot would become an unholy ground, a resting place of sorts, maybe even a place no one went. Day wondered how long it would take people to feel they could approach it, even if it was to treat it like a shrine rather than a scavenging spot, without fearing a rocket attack just for treading on the scorched earth.
Day and the others streamed away from the site, unconsciously impelled in the direction of the Huddle. Once he realised where he was going Day faltered, but it seemed as good a place to venture as any. After all, Finn was likely to be drawn there and Day wanted to renew his acquaintance with the sandy-haired traveller before Finn went over the wall that night. If he did dare to challenge the vampires again so soon, Day wanted to watch.
More than it being fuel to his own ambitions, Day found Finn’s personality and recklessness struck a chord within him. He admired the other man for his temerity and, more than just having the spirit and nerve for the deed, Finn had the pragmatism to make it actually happen. He was no daydreamer. Day himself, in daydreaming, found himself thinking about going along with Finn and the sorts of challenges they might meet and the adventures they might have. In all his time on the farm, he hadn’t met anyone equal to his appreciation in that way. Even Carlos, whom Day held in deep respect, was also deeply flawed, unable to act out of fear of the double-bind of death.
The people milling about looked even more stark and horror-stricken than usual. The nightly city was already beginning the early stages of construction. The majority of the huddle disassembled every morning to avoid looting and fights and the usual consequences of territorialism. Only a core of about thirty people held regular dwellings, such as the dirty-looking tarpaulin, wooden stake and hide tents could be called. The majority who eschewed
the daily deconstruction were either beyond caring about their fate or else deluded about their own power within the field. Half-a-dozen men with a handful of hangers-on and female subjects each held court there, fancying themselves feudal lords, dukes or warlords ruling over a cowering nomadic population. It was an elaborate fantasy. Even though each of the men predicated their demesnes upon their physical power and intimidation, none of them were so terrifying that Day himself was given serious pause.
The Huddle was busier than Day had ever seen it. The air crackled with talk. The helicopter’s crash was the event of the century. Everyone had something to say about it. Presumably the mourners, if there were many, were elsewhere. He saw a man in a turban go past carrying a side of beef over his shoulder, followed by ten or twelve weaker-looking men and women begging for scraps. Someone had made away with a profit from the morning after all.
Day passed a few hours amid the chaos, not really talking and not really eavesdropping, but soaking up the gossip by a strange social osmosis. The talk turned his stomach in the end. It was pathetic to hear human beings reduced to such a dreary level. They sounded like the lowest-paid staff in a company, as his father had described them, too weak to live without the subsistence wage, too subjugated to seek a better life. All they could do was whisper their condemnations and outrage, too impotent to have any effect.
It further depressed Day to realise he had lost his water bottle at some time in the confusion. The rain had ended not long before, so he couldn’t even tip back his head and catch water to ease his thirst. Rather than scout around the bores for a discarded container he started out to the south, eyes flitting left and right in search of Finn.
Though it wasn’t exactly with shock, he was disturbed to think Finn might have been among the unlucky ones killed by the morning’s bomb blast. When two hours of his scouring the field had passed, with trepidation Day returned to the blackened shell of the helicopter, alone now, a memorial in a field of lesser dolmens.
Endless Night Page 11