He fell and rolled, ankles smarting but unbroken, as he came up in the new field on one knee. At first glance there was nothing to distinguish it from the other, but he was still alive and had to presume there would be further chances. He started off at a sprint, intent just on making distance from the wall, uncertain whether retribution would be forthcoming or not.
After about five hundred yards, Day collapsed in a heap. His breathing was shattered and he lay in a depression in the earth like another dried creek bed and simply spasmed with adrenalin and panic and overflowing fear. A good part of this mixture was also relief, and eventually he seized upon that good feeling and used it like a rope to haul himself back into order. Within ten minutes he was still again, his sweat chilled upon his body. He lay, half-concealed by the play of the land, watching the wall and the complete lack of movement upon it.
Daybreak came and he allowed himself a nap at least, but it wasn’t for long. The movement of people soon disturbed his rest. It was as if that sense he had slowly begun to master with the blind fighting was now intruding as he felt the movement of others through the vibrations in the ground. Yet he was grateful for it despite the tiredness. He knew that in a strange new hex, despite the appearance of normality, he couldn’t allow himself to become vulnerable. As he had known ever since arriving on the farm and keeping largely to himself, a sleeping man carrying anything even slightly of interest was vulnerable to swift and sudden murder.
Thus he rose, ill-humoured and tense, and watched shanty-towners drifting one way and then another. There were no helicopters in the air, no sound of gunshots. Things appeared sedate, like a rest day back home. Day’s stomach growled and he sighed heavily.
After a while he thought he began to discern a sense to the locals’ movements. He suspected any hex would have its gathering point at the centre, just out of a desire to be as far as possible from the prying eyes of the watchtowers. The movement of those surrounding him supported such a theory.
Day stood and fell into step behind a pair of men, one slightly younger than himself, the other about ten years older, greying already in the hair and walking with a limp. The older man carried a self-made machete by his side, the blade home to the sort of notches that only came from use. Day made sure his distance was a respectable one as he followed them towards the centre of the camp.
His first impression was that the new Huddle was somehow more extensive. The area was twice as large and twice as many people roamed around it. Several of the structures were more wood than tarpaulin or junk, with hide awnings snapping in the early morning breeze. Healthy-looking men and women stood at the entryway to these various abodes with the bearing of sentries, and several more were positioned along points of key advance. Day passed an auburn-haired woman strapped into a hide harness and a skirt made of cardboard and cloth laced with twine. Good quality sandals were on her feet and she carried a quarterstaff made from an old broom, but fire-hardened and capped with a nasty-looking steel point.
Day’s eyes met those of the woman for the merest moment and then suddenly another figure intervened – a woman completely wrapped in a dirty earth-coloured shawl. Her hand clasped Day’s bicep tightly and of her face, all he could see was a pair of warm brown eyes.
“Come this way immediately,” the woman hissed, dragging him along.
For some reason he complied. In moments, he and she were hurrying away from the centre of the hex. Out of caution he only glanced once behind.
“What is it?” he asked after several hundred yards, pulling his arm free.
“You were approaching the temple. The guards would recognise you,” the woman said.
“Recognise me? Impossible. I’m newly-arrived.”
“Exactly,” the woman nodded. She adjusted her shawl, revealing ropes of bronze-coloured hair under the protection she wore. Her skin was deeply tanned, burnished by the sun even though she seemed clad against it.
“The sentries would notice that your arrival can’t be explained.”
“What is the Temple?” Day asked.
“Some people have given themselves over to the priests, and the priests demand tribute. The best of everything, as you might imagine.”
“Priests of what?”
“The Vampire God,” she answered.
“Is there such a thing?”
“Who knows? I think it started out of cruelty and now it has a life . . . a ghastly life . . . of its own. The vampires take the priests and their guards as readily as the rest of us. Not much loyalty, for such good followers.”
“And why did you halt me?”
“Your name is Day?” the woman asked.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“My name is Anu,” she said. “I saw you in my future.”
“You tell the future?”
“My own future,” Anu replied. “That is all.”
Day pondered what the woman had said for a moment. They had moved a good range from the settlement. If there was to be trouble, he had avoided it for the moment.
As he looked at Anu, she shifted the mantle to cover her hair and face as if she was uncomfortable with Day’s gaze. She was a fine-looking woman, strong in the body and slightly over-proportioned compared to the women he had known. Her feet were bare and cracked. Accustomed to the hard open plain, they had become like it.
“I had a friend. He’s dead now. He said that as newcomers we are all tested for any . . . talent . . . that might go against our keepers. Magick, and the like.” Day watched her closely, focusing on her cautious brown eyes.
“I know,” Anu said after a moment. “I’m a fluke, I figure. A statistical anomaly, my father would’ve said. He was a mathematician in the time before.”
“Then it was just luck?”
“Not good luck,” she said. “Not good enough for me to avoid internment, but no, they did not detect my gift. I don’t know why.” She shrugged, her husky-voiced speech coming to an end. In her eyes and manner Day saw a woman who had resigned herself to the fact and had since ceased questioning it.
“Why stop me, then? You saw me in your future?”
“Yes.”
“Do I continue to appear in your future?” he asked slowly.
He sensed the woman was uncomfortable, though he could not see her skin flush under the sari.
“To the very end,” she said. “We become lovers. I unlock your aura.”
The two statements side-by-side vied for shock. Day found himself smiling and the woman allowed her veil to slip enough to show that, however hesitantly, she smiled too.
“It must be hard to learn of things in such a way,” he said softly after a few moments.
Anu’s eyes crinkled and she nodded. “That was a kind response, Day. I have always planned to thank you for it.”
He sensed that she smiled before she asked, “Are you hungry?”
“I am,” Day nodded.
Anu offered her hand and, taking it, Day walked with her further from the centre of the hex. After some minutes Anu halted at a patch of brown scrub grass and knelt, drawing a hook from within her robe to dig at the earth.
He sat cross-legged across from her and watched, his loin stirring with the memory of her words, eyes close on the strange woman’s form. After a few moments she abruptly folded back her mantle to the waist, revealing her bare, muscular arms, solid brown waist and her chest clothed in a hide halter. From the earth she withdrew a plastic-wrapped bundle, dirt trickling from its creases.
“We had meat yesterday, and I was fortunate. I think its horse, if that is no problem for you?” she asked.
Day shook his head. Anu withdrew a bundle of sticks and chips of wood from a second package.
“Maybe you would start a fire,” she said, and tossed him a circle of glass.
Day understood the principle of the lens. He began arranging unwrapped sticks with some of the brown grass torn off to act as fodder for the infant flames. It took some time, but eventually he had a small fuming blaze going on the s
oil.
Anu had several thin metal skewers tied with a parcel of other things slung low around her wide hips. She pierced several of the strips of meat and offered him one to cook.
“How long have you been here?” Day asked.
“Almost four weeks,” she told him.
“And where do you come from?”
“I lived near the sea, once, far to the east. There are many settlements among the ruins out that way. When my father died I travelled, going with caravans inland to Old Chicago.”
“I’ve heard of it. Is that where you learned your magick?”
“If that is what you would like to call it, then yes. There is an ancient Wyrm who takes a new student only every handful of years. I was fortunate. The others, he ate.” She smiled for the first time at Day’s reaction, instantly quelling his response. Day found himself smiling yet again in turn.
“He taught you?”
“He unlocked my aura, as I shall do for you,” she said.
“Have you done it before? Since coming here?”
“For no one,” Anu replied.
Day hummed and sat back, the meat starting to sizzle. Although he understood the sense of her words, no concept leapt from them to his mind. Talk of auras bordered upon the fanciful, despite the other things he already believed.
“How is it done?” Day asked eventually, chewing meat.
“The unlocking? I cannot tell you, only show.” Anu then gestured, lifting both her hands up towards him.
Day finished the piece on the skewer and shuffled forward. Anu set another piece of skewered meat across the rapidly diminishing flames and then sat cross-legged before him, the majority of her cloak pooled in her lap.
She gently touched her fingertips to his temples, facing him and gently turning his head so that he was looking down into her lap.
“Close your eyes. It helps with the disorientation.”
Day did so. He ceased to be able to see how the woman acted, though he had no sense of her moving. Instead he concentrated on the rising sense of pressure building in the forward part of his head, like a headache hurrying on its way. He felt his eyes, closed as they were, begin to fill with light. As soon as he noticed the phenomenon it was gone and the pressure of Anu’s gentle hold disappeared.
“That is a taste. What you experienced grows until the natural ties limiting the aura to your body are shattered.”
“Is it harmful?”
“It will hurt. Some do not survive, but I can tell already this won’t be a problem for you,” Anu said.
“I don’t want to risk my life. I plan to escape from here.” Day was more surprised at the statement than Anu, it seemed. Their implied intimacy had relaxed his guard.
“I know,” she said. “That is why you must be unlocked. Then you will have more than just silver knives in your arsenal.”
“You know about the knives, too?” Day asked.
“Yes, you show them to me after dark this evening, before we make love for the first time.”
Day felt his face heat up and Anu, perhaps likewise flustered despite her bold comments, gave a tight laugh as if only by humour could their mutual embarrassment be relieved.
They talked more during the day, and then they went together to the bores, avoiding a nasty argument that led to a stabbing in the line for water. Things thereafter went as Anu had predicted and they slept curled against each other on the ground, clinging to their intangible warmth. As Day went to sleep he silently prayed that death would not descend on them, at least not that night, leaving them to their strange yet not so strange happiness.
In the morning, the large helicopters came, two of them together to a spot on the far side of the Temple. Anu was interested in seeing the newcomers, claiming she always went to see them on their arrival in case she could recognise anyone else who had slipped past the vampires’ wards. Thus they made the journey, going the long way around the central dwellings in case Anu’s fears were well-grounded. Day was unswervingly sure they were. Several of the sentries from the Temple went to the impromptu gathering as well, no doubt to scan and identify the newcomers for religious purposes.
Having come the long way, Day and Anu arrived as the first helicopter was rising up into the air. Several figures lay unmoving among the newcomers, dead or unconscious thanks to the electrics of the ghouls. Taking its cue from the ascent of the first chopper, the second lowered to the ground behind the milling first round of a dozen-or-so new internees.
Day’s eyes were drawn to one among the men and women staring out from the hollow chamber in the middle of the carrier. The man was silver-haired and bearded, gaunt-faced, his tanned skin sallow against the black of the vest he wore. Whereas the other passengers looked out with expressions ranging from abject fear to lunacy, the silver-haired man’s stare was hard, almost impatient. Others gasped when the man did so, but Day was somehow unsurprised to see the older fellow leap from the helicopter before it had even properly settled. He immediately began walking hard away from the landing zone.
“Does that one have an aura?” Day asked his companion.
She smiled. “We all have auras, Day, but his is not unlocked, if that is what you mean?” She chuckled softly and said, “Determined, isn’t he?”
“A hard man, I’d say.”
By the time the rest of the newcomers were exiting the second vehicle, certain elements of the gathered crowd had converged upon the arrivals from the first. A young man clinging to the leather coat he wore took a bad beating from three other men and a woman, while a slightly older man ran in a blind panic away from the crowd and took various blows at random from other members of the mob. Day noticed the three Temple sentries watching on impassively, their spears held upright.
“Watch the man,” Anu whispered.
Day turned his attention back to the silver-haired man as he all but pushed his way through one ruckus after another. It was inevitable that he drew attention even though his gaze was set a mile beyond the crowd.
Two men stepped into his path. The older man’s hands lifted up from where they had been, holding the bottom edge of the vest, and Day saw the faint glimmer of a metal cord in the man’s grip. The taller of the two interlopers barely made the first gesture of restraint before he was suddenly spinning about, the cord around his throat. Bulging eyes and a reddening face heralded his death as the older man strangled him without expression in front of shocked onlookers. When the second man tried to intervene, the older man merely transferred both ends of the cord to one hand and used the other to block the attack with a knife. He lashed out with a booted foot, catching the second attacker on the knee and doing grievous damage. As the man gasped and his footing gave out, the silver-haired man moved the attacker’s knife-holding wrist about. After several fluid movements the whole forearm moved back and to the side and then the knife it held sank into its wielder’s chest. The newcomer stood back from the falling body and then also released the other corpse from his garrotte. The bodies lay down practically side-by-side.
The efficient killer gave a withering look all around, noting without pleasure how the most immediate onlookers reared back. Then he set off again, passing out of the closest area. Those who might’ve been inclined to challenge him, even after the cold-blooded deaths he had just meted out, were drawn towards the other newcomers presenting a much easier mark. Within moments, the first of the rapes began and, sickened, Day encouraged Anu to come away.
“You see? It was worth the visit,” she said.
Day only shook his head, repulsed. He momentarily forgot about the tenacious silver-haired newcomer as Anu and he wandered back to their previous encampment.
One of the many ‘worst things’ about the farm was that apart from the daily business of survival, internees had nothing with which to occupy themselves apart from the dramas they produced or indulged. Day and Anu spent the morning watching the skies for supply drops, but the smaller helicopters failed to materialise. Small-talk kept the couple going, and event
ually the subject came around to how Anu herself had been captured.
“With my gift, I often supported myself working with the security on overland caravans,” she told Day. “Unfortunately I have very little control over what elements from the future I foresee and what ones I do not. My training, which I have devised myself, has picked away at this problem only a little over the years.
“We were approaching the ruins of the large settlement of Tucson, a fortified town that survived the Rising. Some years back a plague of sorts decimated the population. The fort itself was abandoned, but recently it’s become a meeting point for long-distance cargo trains. A small population of permanent residents provide basic services. They even have a hotel, somewhat like the old days.
“Tucson was a city once. Quite a large one. The outskirts of the ruins remain dangerous. They’re infested with wyverns and manticores, and griffins from the desert.” Anu’s eyes briefly closed as she re-imagined the scene she had come to describe.
“Unlike the names given to them in ancient times, these are not beasts. Wyverns, manticores and their ilk are merely names given to the various monstrous humanoids that no longer disguise their presence in the world since the Rising made their existence open. However some of them do command creatures that are truly beasts. Around Tucson, there are great two-legged lizards which the traders call Basilisks after the monsters of myth. One of these came from the ruins and fell on our cargo train just as we entered the fringe of the city. It had lain sleeping in one of those places that bear the signs for Gas. Have you heard of them?”
Day was forced to admit he had not.
“The basilisk was as long as the bus I was in, though the tail made up a good part of that length. They are deadly fast. It came out like a flash, hitting the bus in the side and tipping it.
“The gunners started up on the turrets, but on a creature that size, they were too slow to harm. I escaped, running into some more abandoned buildings. Another woman called Frieda and a male psychic called Holland went with me. Holland’s wife was the bus driver and she was devoured by the beast.”
Endless Night Page 13