Endless Night

by Warren Hately

  “How did the vampires catch you?” Day asked.

  “We tried to make for the settlement. We became lost, though. The outlying city ruins were too vast to negotiate on foot. I had seen nothing of our doom by that point. Then suddenly I had a premonition and I froze. It was our undoing, since in holding still we let the Orcs catch us.”

  “Orcs?” Day furrowed his brow.

  “It was what Holland called them, out of something from a book he’d read. I never knew. Anyway, they took Frieda and used her until she died. Her screaming never seemed to end. Holland and I they saved. They even fed us. We didn’t know it then but they were slavers. They traded us to the vampires, but that was further south, well beyond Tucson.”

  “So you were sold into here?”

  “Yes,” Anu said.

  “What did these Orcs trade you for?”

  “Weapons. Particularly ammunition. I would say these vampires here in New Mexico are well established, like maybe they were strong here even before the Rising. They have the capacity for making things, as well as everything they have salvaged like the aircraft. Their ghouls are like an army, and they’re equipped as such.”

  Day meditated a moment and then said, “It’s hard to believe that anyone could ever overpower them.”

  “The people of Chicago would want to try, if they knew the problem existed. But the world is not the way it once was. Cities and settlements are cut off from each other now. It’s the only way something so large could be concealed, unless they have sorcery on a scale unimaginable.”

  “Is it possible?” Day asked.

  “I’m not the person to ask,” Anu said. “I don’t know.”

  Day’s thoughts moved slowly towards what Anu had said about unlocking his aura. He was still uncertain about it, but whereas he’d previously thought sorcery was a power that separated humankind from the creatures risen out of the night, he now saw it as an advantage one side exercised over the other. Rather than be powerless, Day understood it was almost sensible that people should seek it out. He simply understood neither its consequences nor its mechanics.

  They had lapsed into a not altogether uncomfortable silence. Day cleared his throat gently and asked Anu, “When will you be ready to do what you said you would?”

  “You have overcome your doubts, then?”

  “As much as such a thing is possible. I’m willing to take the risk. I don’t know what it is you’re promising me that I will be able to do, but I need more power on my side if I’m to get us out of here.”

  “Us?” Anu asked softly. Her expression was somewhat bemused, and equally unreadable.

  “When, then?”

  “Tonight. It doesn’t seem right to do it in the open,” Anu answered.

  “What will my aura do? See the future?” Day asked.

  “No,” Anu said, shaking her head. “Or probably not. Each person is particular. We each have hidden potential, latent gifts. Everyone is different. Every person throughout history has been the same . . . predisposed . . . to certain skills and abilities. With unlocking, the aura allows the person to develop that potential.”

  “How will I know what I can do?” asked Day.

  “Only time and self-exploration will tell. What’s most important is that unlocking your aura then allows you to grow. It is like writing in a book once the pages have been opened. Sorcerers and their kind can tattoo auras with certain spells, glyphs and signs, giving more power. In the normal world, it is both arduous and expensive. Here, it would be a different case except that all I can do is unlock you. I have nothing else to offer.”

  Day took Anu’s hand and gently smoothed his thumb across her knuckles. “You have given me a lot already.”

  “Live each day as it comes, Day,” Anu said. “None of us can know for certain when death will come.”

  He pondered her words as the afternoon lengthened, becoming gradually moody and withdrawn. Only at the onset of night could he feel the weight of his troubles lighten as the bleakness gave way to anticipation and fear.

  With their bellies growling, Day and Anu slowly made love again, healing their hearts when no other sort of nourishment was available. Afterwards, they sat across from each other holding hands and Day quickly slipped into the posture Anu had earlier shown him. After doing so, he felt her grip loosen and then her cool touch upon his forehead and temples.

  She kissed his face before they began. Soon all other feeling was gradually worn away as the intensity in his brow began to build. The pain was first, borne along by a feeling of pressure, with the softening light a long way behind.

  Eventually his closed eyes began to burn with a terminal incandescence. He started to murmur with the pain nestled into the groove of his brows. It worsened, and soon he became blind to the coruscating white hot vista that filled his inner gaze. Shapes, patterns and sigils seemed to form and yet go unformed before him, appearing as suggestions, absences, illusions. The pain continued to grow, accompanied soon by an ear-splitting shriek like metal under an enormous pressure.

  Like a woman birthing, several moments past the point where Day was convinced he couldn’t endure any more, he tried to open his eyes only to see he couldn’t differentiate between them open or shut. He felt something break, a psychic membrane, and the luminescence seemed to melt away into his body. He gave a gasp and wrenched forward, falling stunned across Anu’s lap with his gaze still unseeing even though the whiteness had disappeared. Instead he saw nothing, allowing the woman’s hand to smooth across his forehead in great waves seemingly tied to the rotation of the Earth.

  Unconsciousness claimed him and, when he awoke, he thought at first the darkness was his prior blindness returned. Heart throbbing in his chest, he realised the crystalline stars overhead were standing out like points of silvery flame against the blackness and he relaxed, forcing himself to soothe his breathing and rest back, his head in the crook of Anu’s arm.

  He turned slightly on his side and away from her and opened his eyes again.

  The skeletal shape of the vampire exuded menace. As if seen through new eyes, Day felt that he could discern every long-closed pore, every follicle of hair spearing out through the blood-drinker’s clay white skin. Black eyes, clouded over in almond-shaped sockets, flicked robotically from spot to spot as it scanned the area in which it stood. No more than five yards from where Day and Anu had slumbered, the vampire carried itself with the ease of one secure in the belief of its own invincibility.

  When Day started to move, he did so slowly. He almost couldn’t believe his own audacity, moving his hand slowly down towards where Carlos’s daggers were sheathed at the sides and small of his back. By the sound gently whispering against his ear, Day could tell that his lover slumbered on. His ears felt like a blind man’s fingertips reading Braille, with every complication of air and the pressure past his skull as rich as a whispered description. He somehow knew exactly what way Anu lay and how far into the sleeping realms she was, even though he was lying with his back to her. It was this realisation of his own sudden ability that waylaid any rising panic or fear about the killer standing resolute within a long jump of his own seemingly sleeping form.

  Like an insect, the vampire didn’t do anything fluidly, snapping instead from one pose to the next, head pointing one way and then another instants later. With his eyes hooded, Day could still see the creature’s every move. And not only that: it seemed to him he knew where the monster would be a split-second before it went there. Each passing moment was a confirmation.

  There was something else, too. Day was careful lest his eyes be snared by the creature’s gaze, for he knew now the blood-drinkers hypnotised their victims moments before death, thus giving them the appearance of a speed many times greater than they actually possessed. But there was also something about the vampire, an inner radiance that leaked out, tingling like an aura that could not be seen but only felt, which told Day the murderer was using magic to disguise itself from ordinary eyes. That Day could see it – a
long with a thousand other clues cataloguing themselves for the first time since Day had woken – meant his own once-latent psychic talents had now been revealed. Anu had spoken about untapped potential and Day had clearly found it in the most direct way possible. The stakes were not only of the greatest kind, but they were immediate, too.

  Anu continued to sleep and the vampire moved suddenly from one hump of earth to another, circling around the apparent sleepers. For a moment Day wondered if Anu had foreseen this moment, though common sense told him she could not prophesy something through which she slept. That being the case, Day didn’t have to fear his current predicament was preordained. Instead, he just had to survive.

  He rose, fearless like the vampire, the first of his silver fangs singing quietly as it withdrew from its sheath. At the moment at which Day needed every scrap of awareness his arsenal of senses could give him, he closed his eyes. As his lids flickered down, lashes covering and then lids obscuring his night-time view, he registered the vampire snapping about like a serpent towards him.

  Eyes closed, Day didn’t slow. Upright now, his left hand was free to wrench the second dagger from its scabbard and he did so. At the same time he took a large step to the right, some inner compulsion guiding him away from the sensation of a near-miss blow.

  No doubt the creature would be lazy, accustomed to hunting useless man-things. Day drove his left fist forward and felt the point pierce brittle fibre. He kept turning, blade extracting at the same moment that his right hand arced around in a deadly blow, the ensilvered blade stabbing the vampire in the throat. The hunter gave a strangled gulp, its atrophied windpipe severed, and Day slashed down its front with his left-hand blade.

  Thereupon he immediately rolled. As his shoulders tumbled across the ground, the desert sand seemed to thrum with another story, the thrashing demise of the blood-monster told in a language of vibrations and subtle pitches.

  Coming to his feet just a few feet further away, Day felt it safe to open his eyes, doing no more than assuring himself to his foe’s position before leaping forward with the twin daggers held overhand. He fell upon the sprawled and kicking monster and stabbed down eight or nine times in quick profusion, a meagre black ichor leaving thin whip-like strands inky in the dust.

  Anu was at his shoulder the very next moment. “Day, what have you done?”

  He turned slowly, feeling a little dumb, and looked down at her fingers clawed into his bare shoulders.

  “I’ve slain one of the murderers,” he simply said.

  She nodded wordlessly, though his assessment needed no correction. The wrecked thing didn’t even give a last gasp. It just lay there punctured at their feet, still as a corpse dug up from a hundred year-old grave.

  “How could you do such a thing?” she softly asked.

  “You’ve given me the power to do it,” Day said. “It’s your spell, or whatever you call it.”

  Anu breathed out, clearly overwhelmed. “So soon? Truly, great forces must guide my dreams. I was right to honour you, Day. Now you are a weapon for us all.”

  Drawn into the moment, Day tried not to listen to the undertones in the woman’s voice, but he hardly could not. His mouth screwed up slightly amidst his bleached whiskers.

  “If there are forces that guide our actions, they’ll make themselves known to me. If you had special hopes, you should have spoken of them before.”

  Anu’s moonlight-darkened eyes turned to him and she bowed her head. “You will do as you will. It was always so.”

  He softened, one hand reaching to take her jaw and lift her gaze. He was disturbed to see the blackness staining his fingertips then on her face and they broke apart so Anu could wipe herself clean.

  “It burns like a spice,” she said.

  “Does it?” He looked down at his now-empty hands dappled with gore. “I cannot feel it.”

  Past his muddied hands he looked at the chalk-coloured cadaver. Elsewhere another scream rent the night.

  “This isn’t the only hunter on the field this evening,” Anu said.

  “You’re right, and we should get away from this one,” Day answered her.

  “Even I can’t foretell what response this death will bring.”

  “First you secreted yourself and your magic away in here,” Day said. “And now you have made a weapon of me. These foul things are jealous of their power. They would incinerate this whole field if they thought someone or something had risen to challenge their rule. We’ll have to be careful.”

  “The first step is to get away from this one here,” she told him. “We’ll worry thereafter about what else it brings.”

  Day stared down at the body and nodded a sigh. “We’ll leave this one, but not before seeing what death brings with it when hunting.”

  He crouched over the vampire’s corpse as alien as a stick insect. Like the last vampires he had seen, this one was clad in segmented clothing made of leather and reinforced plastics. The creature’s frame was too frail for any of it to be any use to him. However the hunter had a utility belt with a holstered weapon and pouches for replacement magazines. Day unclipped the belt and found a way to widen it enough that he could wear it diagonally across his chest. Then he put his bearskin coat over it, covering the holster completely.

  “Are the bullets silver?” Anu asked.

  Day shook his head. “Sadly not.” He grinned and added, “They need no silver to kill us.”

  “Just luck, now, it seems,” Anu said, posting a feral grin and smiling back at Day in the darkness.

  By morning they were across the other side of the field. Dawn light found the couple holding hands, kneeling in the dirt as usual, with Day struggling to do his best to render in words the ways in which his world had changed.

  Everything was more vibrant. Of that he was certain. His senses were alive, drunk with life in a way that filled him with an inner euphoria he’d never before experienced. A trill of fear that his new way of being in the world might desert him underscored everything he did. As such, life remained as poignant as ever, the same dreadful formula running true, though perhaps at a higher level than ever.

  On top of his heightened perceptions, Day wasn’t able to completely explain how he could discern the intentions of others as accurately as if he could read the future himself. However he knew it wasn’t prophecy he was experiencing. Instead his senses were sharpened to the point he could read and instantly translate sensual data to predict the actions of those around him mere instants before they acted. It had been this kinaesthetic power that allowed him to best the vampire. His blind-fighting prowess, unquestioned at the time by Carlos and himself, prefigured that secret potential Anu’s sorcery had unlocked.

  When his eyes fell upon her, and his hands in hers seemed to sing with the story of what they found, Day was filled with overwhelming affection for the otherwise strange woman. Her round burnished face with its warm brown eyes that seemed always moist enough to suggest tears yielded to his senses as easily as if he was able to glide beneath the surface of her skin.

  As they talked and the day marched on, Day became almost mesmerised with the sensate whisperings of new feelings that tickled like electricity, like the fingers of ghosts, through his mind. As his hand swept Anu’s long, sun-bleached hair back from her broad forehead, he began to feel as if new sensations, hitherto unknown to humankind, were opening up within him. He wondered – and voiced his wonderings – whether all manner of things previously thought of as intellect or rationality or intuition were in fact residual senses either diminished in people from bygone days or else the first inklings of the new sensual order into which mankind was one day destined to evolve. Whether it was the wash of moods within him or sheer flights of fancy that took hold of him in the aftermath of the vampire’s death, Day felt poised on the brink of a new way of understanding and absorbing the world; and his link to Anu now made sense only in that new empathic medium that as yet lacked a language to describe it.

  As was inevitable, night ca
me again; and as the sunlight fled the world at the behest of unseen gods, helicopters buzzed across the field. Day and Anu sheltered into each other and voiced their fears and theories about the ghouls’ flight. Whatever purpose the vampires’ servants had, no tangible sign of it was revealed. At such a distance even Day’s new sensitivity could glean no sense in what their actions foretold.

  The following morning hunger began to gnaw its way through Day’s enthusiasm. It was like the pangs were rendered more acute now given the dilation of his senses. He and Anu rose from their nook and started wandering. The gun under his armpit was a terrible temptation, knowing as Day did that it gave him close to ultimate power over the others in the field. Whether or not a few shots would bring the ghouls running, he couldn’t guess. Very little so far seemed to have made the ghouls break their pattern. Even the vampire’s death had not yet brought any obvious retribution. Anu mused that perhaps the other vampires would just consider it a glitch – just one more of the inevitable factors that, while rare, were bound to happen as a statistical anomaly given the size of the system they controlled. Reminded of Anu’s mathematician father and her view of her own presence on the farm as a system error, Day couldn’t help wondering what other inevitable probabilities lurked unguessed at and ready to play out in the near future.

  At midday the pair were haggling a food trade with a group of three men who seemed relatively uninterested in using superior numbers to threaten. One of the men was a new arrival, half-naked and with his rear end still bleeding from the greeting he’d been given. Day figured the spare pants he’d carried with him from the previous field might have some value to him and his new minders, a whip-thin, jet black man called Nero and a man with one eye who went by the nickname Wednesday.

  Day recognised the silver-haired man as he strode across the flat ground towards them. The other traders saw the determined set in the older man’s gait and decided to move on, their agreement unsettled, the trade unconcluded. As Wednesday, Nero and their new find moved off, Anu grasped Day’s upper arm with a firm hand. Day thought she was concerned, for it was true the rugged-looking newcomer radiated a preparedness bordering on hostility, and Day was already bracing himself for the confrontation.