Endless Night

by Warren Hately

  Instead Anu whispered, “I have seen this moment before in my dreams. Be careful.”

  Day scowled unhappily, but having resolved already not to move on, he was committed to the meeting whichever way it went. As the silver-haired man came forward, his dark brows knit in a serious frown, Day gave a jutting nod of acknowledgement.

  “I remember you from when you arrived.”

  The man stopped about five yards short and put his hands on his hips. He was wearing the same padded vest of synthetic fabric and black pants and military boots. No one had robbed him. The handle of what looked like a proper combat knife protruded from his belt.

  “Have I questioned you already or not?” he asked.

  “Questioned us?” Day looked at Anu, who shook her head tightly.

  “You haven’t,” she said.

  “Good,” the other man said. “Cuts my time down if I ask that at the beginning. I can’t remember everyone’s faces. There’s more people getting kept here than I expected.” He grunted and added, “More fields too.”

  “What’s your question?” Day asked.

  He could tell the man was speaking like he had a secret – as if there was more he could reveal and even might, given time. But Day had met enough people driven crazy or psychopathic in the two fields he’d visited. Asking questions might yet be a preamble to starting trouble. The silver-haired man was dangerous. He’d proven that already. Day kept his hand ready to pull the gun in case things turned ugly. It was worth the risk, Day figured, because he could already tell he hadn’t faced anyone as dangerous as the cantankerous figure standing across from them.

  “My name’s Fox,” the man said. He reached into his back pocket and withdrew a square of card that he started to offer over. “I’ve come here looking for my daughter. Vamps got her last month from our stockade just outside of Abeline.”

  Anu took the card. Day merely frowned.

  “You came here on purpose?”

  “We knew the vamps were massing in Abeline. Had their boys working on the train tracks there. We’ve been running sabotage ops on them for the last year or so. We’ve got a bunker, plenty of old US military ordinance. Suckers tracked us down, though.”

  “But you came here on purpose?” Day asked again.

  Anu handed him the photograph as the old man started speaking again.

  “It’s my daughter. I’m not letting no damned bloodsucking things from Hell take her. I kitted myself up for this. We pretty much had their operation figured out. We just got the size wrong.”

  Day’s eyes were still on the photograph. The thick white border framed Kvelda’s innocent beauty well. He hadn’t thought of her again since crossing the fence. Now the memory welled up like a bloody wound. Perhaps by dint of his new senses, the image in Day’s mind seemed caught in acute relief. He fancied he could remember still her fragrance.

  Day shook his head. “You’re in the wrong field.”

  Fox grunted and shrugged. “How do you know that? There’s too damned many of them. Problem I haven’t solved yet.”

  Day lifted his eyes. While Day appeared virtually unmoved, the old man could tell there was a something lingering in his expression.

  “If you know something about my daughter, I’d appreciate you telling me,” Fox said with all the stern manners of a gentleman farmer.

  “Your daughter’s name . . . Kvelda?”

  “That’s right.” Fox kept his own face tight, his voice in rein.

  “You’re in the wrong field.”

  “How do you know? Where is she?” He took a step forward.

  Anu squeezed Day’s arm again and instantly he was reminded of her words. If she had foreseen this development, obviously it augured importance for the future. The coincidence alone told Day it was a critical moment.

  “I came over the wall a few days back. I met your daughter in the previous hex.”

  “She was alive then?”

  “Yes. She was well. In good company, even,” Day said and shrugged.

  Fox visibly put aside his more immediate questions to ask, “How did you get over the wall?”

  “I’ve got my ways.”

  Fox looked to Anu. “He telling the truth, ma’am?”

  Anu nodded like a priestess. “Yes.”

  Fox snorted and readjusted his stance. He started folding his arms together and then halted, putting his hands on his hips, his belt slung low, the knife handle only inches from his palm.

  “Where is she?”

  Day said nothing, looking down at the spare trousers bunched in his hand. Then he lifted his gaze and tried to make it hard.

  “We need food,” Day said. “You can’t do anything with the information anyway. You’ve got no way over the wall.”

  “If you can get over, God knows I can do it,” Fox growled.

  “Maybe. But you won’t know which way to go without my help.”

  “You could just tell me.”

  Anu’s hand pressure tightened so much that Day had to shake her off. He said to Fox, “I mightn’t like doing it, but this is a trade we’re talking about.”

  “You’re making it that way.”

  “Maybe you haven’t been here long enough to realise,” Day shrugged. “Everything’s got a value on the farm.”

  “That’s funny,” Fox sneered. “I didn’t think any of us had a value.”

  Day shrugged again to show Fox he wasn’t going to enter a debate. There might be a low value on human life around the farm, but they had to have some kind of value to the vampires for it to be worth doing at all.

  “So what are you telling me?”

  “I’m telling you this is a trade,” Day said. “If you haven’t got something worthwhile, you’d better go find some.”

  Fox suddenly snapped. In quasi-perceptual terms Day had seen it coming. He had the automatic pistol out from under his coat before Fox had moved more than halfway to his goal, which seemed to be putting his hands around Day’s throat. The silver-haired man, his weather-beaten skin flushing the colour of eggplant, pulled up short and gave a choked exclamation.

  “What – how – how in Hell?” He looked at the pistol and then at Day with obvious reappraisal. “Where in the Hell’d that come from?”

  “Like I said,” Day waved the pistol a fraction. “You don’t know everything.”

  Fox grunted. For a moment it looked like he was about to do something stupid. He began to say something and thought better of it, looking down at the ground and shaking his head as if at his own thoughts. A fresh calm seemed to steal over him then and he raised his eyes and looked at Day for a long moment.

  “So what is it you want from me?”

  “You can come and find me when you think you’ve got something worth bargaining for.” Day swallowed hard, the tension coiled like a snake at the bottom of his throat – and the tail around his heart.

  Fox gave another glance at the gun and then sideways. While Day didn’t follow his stare, too afraid it might be a ruse, somehow he was still able to glean the sense of a small crowd gathering to watch the spectacle. It wasn’t every day inmates saw fellow prisoners toting guns nor holding them against each other. Day’s pupils refocused and he settled his eyes on Fox.

  “Do you understand? I don’t want to shoot you, but I’m not arguing when I’m the one with the gun.”

  “You’ve got the gun alright, boy,” Fox said. He motioned with a spiderweb-hairy forearm. “Plenty of these people have noticed. How long do you think you can hold that thing on me and not have the whole hex know?”

  Day baulked, but his features didn’t show it. “I’ll shoot you first.”

  “I got me a sense of how things work in this place. I don’t imagine it’s the same from hex to hex, but I know which way the wind’s blowing here,” Fox said. He looked off to the side again and licked his lips out of nervous habit.

  Day raised the pistol a fraction and inhaled sharply. Although Fox didn’t flinch, Day had the sense the other man was stilled. Day ris
ked a look around and saw maybe sixty people were gathered in clumps to either side to watch the exchange. He wasn’t sure why his eyes were drawn to it, whether for reasons of intuition, luck or the power of his enhanced senses, but striding across the plain towards the nearest bunch of onlookers was a muscular-looking man in a short kirtle and vest made of animal hides, black boots on his feet and a spear-like weapon slung over his shoulder. Day could only presume it was one of the self-styled priests’ sentries. Day looked back at Fox and spoke tightly.

  “I can put a bullet between your eyes before you get the jump on me, so don’t go thinking otherwise. You come see me when you’re ready.” He whipped the gun back into its holster and turned away. Anu followed and within moments they were bustling past a knot of people and towards anonymity again, or so Day hoped.

  She kept close to his arm as they moved. Her concerned voice, pitched low, cut through his own nervous thoughts.

  “Did you see them? Do you think they have us marked?”

  “Was it one of the priests’ men? I don’t know,” Day said. “Since you’ve kept me out of their way, I barely understand them.”

  “They are guards to the priests and they are their spies as well.”

  “For spies, they draw a lot of notice,” Day said, stepping through a recently abandoned midden, bones and coals scattered everywhere.

  Anu took his hand, her fingers slippery with concern. “They have informants too. I don’t know why, but there are plenty who take the Vampire God seriously. I guess it’s all a shock to them, the camps, so they latch on to what they’re told. But the sentinels don’t need to go in secret. The moment a crowd gathers, they step in on the priests’ behalf.”

  “One man alone among sixty,” Day tutted. “We’re broken the moment we arrive, aren’t we? Otherwise so few could never terrify so many.”

  “The sentinels?”

  “That’s who I mean. That’s right,” Day said.

  “You underestimate their powers.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “They have their spears and people truly fear the vampires will be called down on them if they oppose.”

  Day shook his head, not angry at Anu’s defence, but refusing to dignify such statements with a reply. He kept pulling her along with him, chancing glances backwards that were fearful however much he scorned others’ paranoia. Only when they had curled around to the east again and were looking back upon the Huddle (what the locals called instead the Temples) did Day allow their pace to flag and his likewise sweat-oily hand to drop by his side.

  “We’ll be eating dust and water at this rate.”

  Anu sighed and, folding her hands in her lap, sunk slowly to the ground. “Food will find us, I hope.”

  Day scowled behind the woman’s back, the sentiments ones he couldn’t accept. It seemed foolish to hope when luck was only made through hard effort.

  He scanned around as if there was something that could be done about his aching hunger then and there. Within a hundred yards there were about six people, yet none of them looked like they harboured a secret hoard of supplies.

  He sighed brusquely and wondered whether it was hunger making him so agitated or if it was knowing he had an instrument capable of meting out instant death and the therefore inevitable temptation to use it. His shoulders seemed to sag as he shuddered out a mighty breath and then sat as well.

  The helicopters came about an hour later. Day and Anu were sitting in the same position, all but wordless, and rather than leap up at the sound of the distant whir, Day glanced sidelong at his partner while she looked elsewhere, and he wondered if she had already seen the helicopters’ arrival in her dreams. More cruelly, he wondered if Anu kept that knowledge to herself to support the cosmic attitudes she expressed, as if trusting to the universe to provide when she knew full well what would be.

  After a moment his partner merely dusted off her canvas skirts and stood, an eyebrow raised at him as she wrapped the long loop of veil back in place, masking everything about her face except for her soulful brown eyes. Day shook his head in a gesture that was equal parts frustration, resentment and surrender. His stomach had begun to go beyond its pain and into numbness, as it often did with hunger. He frowned and checked that his knives were in place before gauging a strategy for which way to run.

  As it turned out the helicopters started dropping their supplies further across the camp. Anu and Day hurried towards a group of about thirty men and women frantically pulling at a pile of sacking, ropes binding the supplies foolishly cut in the haste to reach what lay underneath. Day only caught a glimpse of hessian bags, some of which were stamped with a purple logo. As the first scuffles started, it didn’t take the bags being torn for Day to know they contained grain.

  He stilled Anu with his palm, keeping her behind him. He wasn’t trying to ward her. Things were too desperate for that. Yet he needed her in reserve to help him the moment he had taken a share. Day knew Anu’s strength and that he could rely on her when the moment came to make off with what was theirs.

  He stepped forward, trying to reach between some of the men clustered around the dwindling cargo drop. A man with a grey complexion, his face torn in a dozen places and none of the wounds recent, turned about and tried to wrest Day backwards. Another man with greasy hair tied in a knot joined his efforts and Day let himself be rebuffed without starting a fight. A moment later he had moved around slightly in the group and, orbiting them and sticking close to Day like a wayward molecule, Anu held her place in the unspoken strategy.

  Day started to move forward again and suddenly the man and woman now in front of him erupted into blows. A sack burst open, rice spilling onto the ground. A third figure, a dusty-skinned man in an old red jacket and hide pants, drew a curved knife and stabbed the woman in the side. He turned on the man, slashing with the dagger and scoring nicks to the hands and chest. His target retreated, yielding. The man with the knife dropped down and started scooping up the precious grains, trying to salvage the torn bag to carry more.

  Day kicked him hard in the face. There would be no arguments. Not worrying too much about the grain outside the bag, Day dropped to his knee long enough to twist the torn sacking tight and then he passed the bag back to Anu. She had to use both hands to take it from him.

  “Keep close,” he said.

  Day drew Finn’s belt knife and moved back towards the throng. Another woman peeled away from the mass and instantly fell over clutching her jaw. A woman with a twist of wood for a club dealt two more blows to other people before a man got her in a headlock and started choking her into silence. Someone then jumped the woman’s attacker and they all went down in a tangle. Day stepped into the gap and almost butted heads with a grinning teenager, a pair of battered spectacles propped up in his sandy hair.

  “Easy, friend,” the young man said.

  Day grunted, looked down. The ropes binding the package were cut in several places, salvageable but useless for now. About twenty large bags were left from the parcel drop. Half were split and broken. Day grabbed a bag and started pulling it, discovering only moments later it was haemorrhaging rice. The bag beside it was lifted by the teenager who gave a frantic laugh and a smile and loped away. A bigger man, probably slower, started off after him even though the defence of the grain bags had lessened. Day shook his head and pushed away a woman’s hands and liberated another sack, hefting it over his shoulder before twisting around to guard his back.

  “Come!” Anu said.

  Day nodded and broke free of the group, a pair of legs trying to trip him, another hand clutching at his furry shoulder. He elbowed away cruelly and felt sour breath explode against his cheek. He ignored everything else, just concentrating on making his partner’s side unhindered. Moments later they had gone about fifty metres and turned all but invisible to the ongoing ruckus.

  “Well done,” Anu said.

  Day grunted. “Did you see it happening otherwise?”

  Just below the top of the veil, An
u’s brows crinkled with uncertainty. Day scowled, as much at himself as the woman, lost for the source of his anger. Almost wishing someone desperate would throw themselves at him for the sake of his unappeased violence, Day resettled the bag over his shoulder and set off away from the site. As if experiencing her first reluctance, Anu followed.

  The voice halted them after no more than a dozen paces. Swivelling at the hips, the heavy sack a counterweight, Day scowled to see a pair of Temple guards standing fifty metres away. A man and a woman, they both carried makeshift spears. The woman held a curved sword, the handle with a guard over the knuckles. If anything, she looked the more poised and deadly of the two. They were better fed and less weathered than ordinary inmates. The bare skin of their arms and shoulders glowed with the tans gained from long hours standing in the sun through the summer. That they had been in the field that long, the seasons’ dial now turned towards winter, attested to their threat as much as their demeanour.

  “What?” Day called back.

  The man took several paces forward, his expression almost reasonable. “You weren’t given leave to raid from that drop. The priests must have a tithe.”

  “A tithe?” Day wasn’t familiar with the term, though its meaning was strangely unambiguous.

  Anu slipped close to him again, their animosity forgotten as the sentry answered. “That’s right.”

  “And how much do you claim?”

  “The full sack,” the female sentinel answered. “Your woman can keep the rest.”

  Day lowered his burden, but only to rest it on the ground, propped lengthways against his leg. He raised his hand, possibly meaning to point, when the rope cord fell around his shoulders from behind.

  “Anu!” Day gasped stupidly.