When Fox released the corpse, Day and Anu closed the distance. Fox drew a curved knife from the dead man’s belt and held it out to Day handle-first.
“Do I need to tell you this is what I’m trading?” Fox asked in a gruff whisper.
“Not at all,” Day said.
“Let’s go then.”
Day hissed for Fox to wait and peered through the gap between the posts and saw another figure bounding towards them along the fence-line, no thought of coordinating the Temples’ security in mind.
“Let’s go, Day,” Anu said.
“We must retrieve my things. We’ll need rope too.”
“Explain yourself,” Fox hissed.
Day put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “We’re leaving this field tonight. Your daughter isn’t in this hex.”
Fox’s expression refused to change. A decision made, the silver-haired man drew the combat dagger from his belt and turned as a woman in hides and carrying a spear charged towards them.
“Defilers in the Temples!” she yelled.
Day threw the knife as hard as he could. Running straight for them, the woman saw the dagger at the last moment and veered to one side. Fox moved into her path with the carbon steel knife clanging against the spear-shaft, turning it aside and reversing in an instant. The woman kept running, but gargled and fell down just to their right. Both her heels continued to dig at the soil, turning her body slightly around as the life escaped her in a hissing fury. Day looked on with mixed feelings. If Anu wasn’t returned to him, his anger would’ve been worse.
“There’ll be more with that,” Fox said. “Do you know the way?”
“There’s a priest. Maledictus.”
“So he calls himself,” Fox scowled.
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“There’s more than one priest,” Anu said.
Day shook his head, words failing him. So instead he ran, leaving Fox and Anu to follow. He had a good idea of the path, down the passage from the altar and into the clearing between the different huts. As they ran, they passed where Fox and Anu cut their way in, quiet enough that even Day hadn’t heard.
The space between the different makeshift buildings was trampled flat, disturbed only by the earlier marks from Day’s dragging heels. Why they had left him his valuable boots, Day had no idea. Perhaps they really did think they were appeasing the vampires. That, and why the vampires hadn’t come for him already – this night and every night before then – didn’t really feature in his thoughts. Instead, his residual senses ensuring him to his decision, he shoulder-barged the rickety door of the shelter.
A man was coming straight for the door as Day charged in. It wasn’t the priest, but Day was no less satisfied as the sound of the man’s breaking jaw filled the warehouse-temple. His victim wasn’t dressed as either a priest or a guard. He collapsed holding his face and lay on the floor writhing silently as Fox and then Anu filed in behind.
“What’s this one?” Fox asked.
“Storehouse,” Day said. “The things should be here.”
Yet as he scoured the shelves, his precious silver knives and Finn’s hooks failed to reveal themselves.
Fox, impressively calm, unscrewed the lid from a glass jar and drank the contents. He exclaimed softly as he ran his bare, wiry forearm across his mouth.
“Damn. Pineapple juice.”
Anu quickly snatched a few items down as Fox moved to cover the door and Day completed his fruitless search. A swatch of dusty blanket concealed a wooden doorway and he went on through, unsurprised to find a bedchamber and the naked form of Maledictus, almost glowing in the darkness, standing against the far wall like he was nailed to it.
Perhaps the priest had hoped they wouldn’t enter. On seeing Day hulking in the doorway with the curved knife and an unfriendly expression, the priest’s resolve fled and he started shrieking for more guards. Day heard scuffling behind him but ignored it, flitting forward with hardly a pause.
Maledictus scurried to the side as Day ran up and over the bed. Planking snapped and gave way beneath him, but he didn’t slow. He only changed his course, zigzagging, finally colliding with the skinny man and throwing him against the wall, which in turn promptly gave way and sent them spilling out into the late moonlight.
Day’s knife had already cut halfway through the priest’s stomach. He reversed the blade and ran it across Maledictus’s throat, holding him down by the chest, his screams bubbling along with the rich dark blood running like nourishing rain upon the grim soil. It was a moment in time that seemed stretched to infinity. When Day was sure he was done, he stood and cast around. Anu stood spot-lit in the broken-edged frame of the hole. Fox was behind her, moving forward with a terse expression.
“More coming. Find your stuff quick.”
Day wiped black hands across his chest and then moved to the next of the crude huts. A small voice in the back of his mind kept whispering that he still hadn’t been revenged on the woman. He kicked in the shuttered door and tried not to think, only to act and react and let his senses guide him.
Before entering, Day hadn’t realised how small the structure was. Once inside he was fighting for space. Fabric and actual clothes hung from hooks in the low ceiling. Poor shelving contained all sorts of gear – equipment and tools and scrap metal rather than foodstuffs and consumables like in the other hut. Straight away Day found Finn’s leather pack with the hooks inside and the belt with the holsters and his knives in them. He actually closed his eyes a moment and squeezed his hands closed over the items in relief. He opened them when he heard the gunshot.
His name on Fox’s voice echoed from outside.
Day pulled a row of jackets, vests and cloaks with him as he withdrew, nearly pulling the flimsy structure down as well. He got a shaky look at the shooter – another self-styled priest perhaps, a long black beard and marks on his face. The vampire’s black automatic handgun was held confidently in his doubled grip.
The priest said something – another burst of religious garble appropriate to the moment, but drowned beneath Anu’s frantic screaming and another of the weapon’s retorts. Day saw Fox dodge left and vanish from view around the side of Maledictus’s lodgings and Day moved to follow, half-guiding forward, half-dragging Anu behind him.
Fox had encountered another sentinel as he sought to flee. She’d hardly slowed him. Day took little satisfaction – the third bullet whizzing past them like a suicidal hornet – at seeing the woman prostrate on the ground, her arm hanging half-off, the curved sword in Fox’s grip stabbing down and then flicking up as the older man passed on still leading the way.
They were in another sheltered alleyway, the sides walled in by pickets and a mishmash of plastic, drapes and timbers. Day elbowed to his right, testing whether its solidity was truth or illusion. Something like a metal pole reassured his elbow with a painful jolt. Instead Fox forged the path, kicking forward and collapsing yet more pickets.
Their trip around the building took no more than two or three seconds. Day glanced behind as they approached the end of the confined passageway and, as he did, the gun-toting priest rounded the far corner. Day only registered Anu’s warm hand in his cool grip as the priest fired and the shock of the impact went through her.
Anu fell against him and when he looked, one side of her precious face was all but gone. As her weight continued to press down, Day flinched and pushed back, anguished yet relieved when Anu fell and twisted away, one eye open, but the brown orb was cold and unstaring.
Day’s thoughts were aflame as he threw himself to the ground. When the priest foolishly ran out the alley’s mouth, Day was all over him, the short-handled dagger nearly disappearing inside the man’s armpit as he gargled, kicked and spasmed and the gun went off one last time harmlessly into the cold night air.
Day tore the weapon from the priest’s bloody grasp. Only for a moment was he allowed the pause, then Fox lifted him up and along.
“I’m sorry friend. Let’s go.”
Instin
ct told him what was best. Otherwise, his heart was cold.
As they ran forward, a large gap between wood-and-trash partitioning suggesting the end, Day wondered whether the vamps would come to the sound of gunfire. Like the rumour-mill, they would know one of their flyers had gone down. Yet it became quickly moot as another sentry charged up through the path towards them and Day squeezed the trigger as the others had done and watched blood explode like sparks from the man’s neck.
Fox gave him a concerned look as they ran, but Day had no idea about his meaning. He fired once more at shadows and then they were out and through. A few startled-looking field-dwellers began backing away and in some instances were openly running from them. Day resisted the urge to shoot the innocents down. Instead he followed Fox’s lead, forging a path through the expanding knots of human cattle. One got too close or was otherwise too slow and he went rebounding from Fox’s elbow as surely as if he’d been hit by a truck. Day fell into the older man’s wake as comfortably as an old man into his wife’s bed. He was carried along in that one admittedly fake security that was left to him.
Anu’s dead body had hardly lain still a moment before it seemed they were suddenly out of danger. Day looked around, adrenalin and cold and his emptiness making him stumble while Fox marched resolutely ahead. There were wayward glances a-plenty, but nothing else to indicate they’d just fought their way free of the field’s stronghold, bodies in their wake. Although there were surely more guards, none came after them. When Day glanced back a minute later the crowd of news gatherers had grown yet again considerably.
Fox caught him looking and said, “Any bet they’ll be storming inside within five minutes.”
Day looked a moment longer and then tried to focus on the path ahead.
“I don’t know,” he said simply.
“I don’t know how many priests they had, but their religion’s as good as dead. Within five minutes all those people who were oppressed’ll start wondering where the priests kept their offerings. All the good things they’ve kept for themselves.”
Day was neither willing nor able to talk about it. In his peripheral memory Anu was still snatching precious tins of canned vegetables from Maledictus’s larder.
She knew, Day thought simply. She knew and she came anyway.
“I know things feel bad for you right now,” Fox said, drawing up alongside Day as they marched.
“I could be dining with vampires this night,” Day said in a numb voice.
“That’s right,” the older man said and clasped his shoulder. “And I have a way out for us.”
Day looked askance and he could barely muster a frown.
“You do?”
“If you mean what you said about my girl.”
“Kvelda,” Day said.
“That’s right. You knew her name without asking. Tell me you know where she is.” The sincerity was the only weakness Fox had shown.
Day looked down and shook his head is if to negate the older man’s concerns. “No, I know where she is. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Then we’ll need to get moving.”
Day was stiff with cold and grief, but he knew immediately what Fox was saying. With awkward hands he belted his things in place.
“Still need a rope,” he mumbled without looking up.
Fox nudged him to show the three or four blankets he was carrying over one arm. In the first trickle of light the brightness of the blood splashed across them was muted.
“I can make something with these.”
While seemingly insensate to the consequences, Day felt he was being piloted towards his destiny as if by remote control. If survival was instinctual, he was now operating on instinct alone. Anu’s death was sadly only part of it. His mind could only handle so much before reeling back in shock.
Fox nudged him, still awaiting a response.
“We’ll need to keep moving. It’s the wall this way.” He finished buckling the satchel in place and added, “Need to get over while it’s still dark.”
“We’d better be quick then.”
“What about the gun?”
Fox growled and spat. “What about it?”
“We should leave it here.”
“God, why would you say that?”
Day wasn’t certain he was right, but he said blankly, “Now they’ll do whatever they have to do to find it. I killed one of them several nights ago.” He shook his head at how strange the words sounded, untroubled by the weirdness of their truth.
“Too many random elements have broken loose,” he began again, his mind going to Anu’s father the mathematician until the thoughts began to burn.
“They’ll want to control the chaos. Maybe by any means. They’ve done it before,” he said, imagining the white-hot flash of the explosives. “Best to let them turn up the gun somehow eventually. Otherwise they’ll . . . they’ll have to suspect, eventually, we got over the wall.”
Fox sniffed, answering Day’s long-winded explanation tersely. “Just make sure it can’t turn up again and bite our ass.” He looked meaningfully and perhaps a little cruelly at Day, who in turn only nodded his head again and hurried along.
They approached the west-facing wall and Fox showed him how to shuck the remaining few bullets from the weapon. Then they left it lying in the dust. A very slight rain began to fall as Fox tucked the bullets away inside his vest and starting tying together blankets. When the makeshift rope didn’t look long enough he pulled his knife and started hacking them into separate pieces.
Day watched sombrely. “It’s a good knife.”
“Brought it with me.”
Day wondered for a moment if the older man was already sorting through ways to get rid of him. He’d said he had a way off the farm. Day couldn’t imagine. More questions couldn’t hurt.
“Weren’t you searched?”
Fox looked up, tugging a knot until it was a tight little ball. “You could say that,” he said.
“So . . . is it true?”
Fox laughed. “No.”
Day continued to watch without showing any sign of comprehension. The silver-haired man paused to scoop up more blanket and then he said, “They didn’t get my radio beacon or my knife or my garrotte either. They didn’t get the two grenades I’ve still got in there too.”
At Fox’s mirthless laugh, Day half-got the reference and nodded. “You fit that . . . all . . . up there?”
“The garrotte and the explosives I sewed into the vest.”
“You prepared yourself to come in here?”
“That’s not really a question, is it? You knew that before.”
Day shook his head, experiencing a murky blend of quiet admiration and confusion, and then he said, “You must’ve had a good idea of what you were up against.”
“Like I said, we’ve been fighting back against these vamps for years.”
“How’d this all get built then?” Day asked.
“Beats me. We never knew any of this existed. Never understood what they needed a railroad for either till Kvelda was gone.”
“She’s not like the rest,” Day said suddenly.
Fox only cocked his eyebrow. Day didn’t know what else to say and so he remained silent. Finally Fox finished with the rope and filled the silence.
“She’s special to me. You can’t imagine. My life’s nothing next to hers. You’d have to be her father to know.”
“Or her husband,” Day said.
Fox stared at him hard and said, “Don’t even think about it.”
Again Day said nothing. He imagined Fox must be aware the sorts of foulness that could’ve easily befallen his daughter since she was captured. Oddly, it oddly stung to be considered one of the vermin, especially after the risks Fox had taken on his behalf. But as Fox said, maybe only her father could understand how the emotions worked in this instance. Or perhaps the older man was simply beholden to forces he could neither fathom nor control. Situation normal, then.
“It’s getting
light,” Fox said eventually.
Day started tinkering with the hooks.
“It’s false dawn. What is your plan for an escape?”
Fox looked at him, curiously threatening again, and said, “We’ll talk about that when we’re over.”
Day wrapped the plastic twine around his wrists before taking a hook in each hand. Gruffly Fox moved forward and looped the end of one blanket through Day’s belt.
“I’m relying on you. So’s she,” he said.
Day had already removed his boots and tied them to his belt. Now feeling heavily burdened, but not completely compromised, he scurried towards the base of the wall at an awkward run. Breathing heavily, Fox was close behind.
At the wall, Day crouched a moment. Fox closed in and slammed into the wall loud enough to make it shudder. Day could only close his eyes, resigned to the moment. His weak bladder wasn’t the only thing making him feel transfixed in some unseen sniper’s sights. Yet when no death came he counted his luck one more time and started up the wooden planks.
It was still much too dark to get a sense of the overall topography. As he hauled himself up onto the lip of the wall he caught the impressions of light sources in the far distance. While his immediate surroundings were crystal clear, his darkness vision seemed much the same as before Anu’s awakening when it came to greater distances.
He dropped down onto the meshwork grille with toes spread to minimise the shock. Unsure whether Fox needed the signal, he tugged the blanket only to have it go immediately taught. Day relaxed his hold on the steel hooks, dangling them from his wrists as he caught up the improvised rope and concentrated all his attention on resisting the counterweight pull. At that moment vampires could’ve stalked up behind him and had him for good, yet no such violence came.
Grunting and cursing under his breath, Fox came to the under-hang and thrust one hand up. He tapped the barrier, sheet metal resonating slightly, and Day laid himself across the edge and hauled the older man up. His bare feet kicked in the cooling darkness as he tried to resist being pulled back over the edge. Fox half-climbed over Day and went down into the narrow passageway between walls with a reverberous clang.
Endless Night Page 17