He went in through the gap crouched low, the bearded man tumbling backwards clearing a path for him. Two men, their complexions milky in the half-light, waited with bearded mouths agape, one man clutching a cloth-bound staff. Several more men stood further back, among them two or possibly three women.
Different pieces of wood had been tied together to make the tipi’s pole. Day stepped in towards it, narrowing his eyes as a hand came outstretched at his throat, the other man with the staff just beginning to move. Day crouched and twisted, moving out of the way of the hand and reversing into the darkened space, Fox following. He stabbed into the first man’s kidneys from behind and backhanded the man with the staff, silver blade slashing agony across the man’s cheek and neck.
A boot and fist found their mark in the tight space. Day ducked under a man’s swing, drove the knifepoint straight into the armpit and then the heart, ribs creaking open on the dagger’s broad hilt-less base. Screams and chaos rent the air, a woman’s voice among them all. The tent-flap lifted and a skirt-clad figure bound away into freedom.
Inevitably the pole gave out and the ceiling sagged. Someone grabbed Day around the neck from behind and started tugging and something else – a dead body, Day realised after a second – fell across his legs. He twisted and stabbed upward, but caught only air, followed by a kick to the ribs. In the darkness he saw Fox’s face flit past and then another scream tore a hole in space. Day got fingernails under the arm choking him and he pulled his strangler towards and past him and stabbed a few times, aware he had no motivation but survival of the fittest and that he no longer cared. He knew he might be able to make it a few days in the cold and the rain, but not the rest of the whole winter now the rains had arrived. Worse, he knew Kvelda, exposed, didn’t stand a chance. So he fought with all his strength, ignoring the blow of an iron pipe across his shoulder and teeth biting his wrist. He methodically snuffed out lives in the trample as if they were struggling candle flames and he was the wind.
With his hands bloodied, Day stood and lifted the most immediate section of tent material with him. His spectral eyes drank in the crepuscular light, bodies contorted and twitching across each other. A part of the inner radiance that burned within him dimmed at the murders at the same time that another raged on, fanned again by seeing Fox holding a woman in a vice grip by the arm and the jaw.
“I’ll let this one go, though she’s a viper. The other one’s already fled. One of the men got away too,” Fox said.
“Get the flap open,” Day said hastily. “Kvelda’s still out there.”
She was kneeling in the mud when they finally found the opening and lifted it up and over themselves like the neck of a giant pullover. Day’s silver-haired companion tossed the spitting woman out into the rain and she span around the moment she was on the ground and hurled abuse. Glaring at Kvelda a moment, she then broke into a dogged run across the slippery ground.
“Come in here, daughter,” Fox said.
Kvelda watched the yawning entrance like it was the gateway to hell.
“There’s dead bodies in there,” she said.
“I know that, my girl. Come in all the same, out of the wet.”
Kvelda moved forward timidly and Day did the same again, lifting the flap up.
“Day, are you hurt?”
“Nothing deep.” The bite on his arm had already stopped running.
“Hold the entrance up then.”
Fox moved around in the claustrophobic, collapsed space. One body and then two he dragged flopping over to the entrance. A minute later and he had the pole in place and Day limped over, his shoulders stinging, and started helping him. They netted a few more weapons, a bag or two of supplies.
“Bodies’ll attract notice,” Fox said when he came back from throwing out a few unneeded articles of clothing.
“Ground’s bloody too.”
“At least it’s dry,” Kvelda said.
“She has a point,” said Fox.
Day looked up at the tipi pole. It was three different rods laced together like splints. Fox was using a similar pole, the dead man’s staff, to guide himself around.
“Three people don’t need the roof that high,” Day said.
“What are you thinking?”
“Wherever we move, the ground will be wet.”
“There’s not much we can do about that, is there?” Kvelda said.
Day shrugged. “I don’t know how far we could walk, dragging it around us anyway. But if the roof wasn’t so high, we could use the sides of the tent for floor space.”
“And put the tent over wet ground,” Fox finished.
“Not if it’s swimming in mud,” Kvelda frowned.
“Maybe not.” Day shrugged.
Fox brought the tent pole down while Day held up the roof. Weird, rain-coloured light spilled in through the re-opened flap to guide their work. Fox shortened the mast by a third and put it up again.
“They dug a hole for the post,” Kvelda said, watching the men working. “Do you think they were settled here? Were they working together too?”
Day glanced out at the five corpses turning pale in the mud as Fox answered. “We’re not in the middle of the camp. I doubt anyone would settle out here on the fringe. Vamps might get curious.”
Fox hoisted the pole, now only about eight feet in height, up onto his hip and grunted, adjusting his awkward footing as the weight of the rain-battered material dragged down on him.
“Help me gather up the front,” Day said to Kvelda.
They moved forward, no more than an arm’s length apart, and started gathering the loose tent material up that had pooled at ground level. Plastic crinkled and canvas, wool and hide hung wetly, the smell rank like the side of some waterlogged animal. They moved until their arms were piled with the stuff, the rain lashing their bared legs. Up close, Kvelda could whisper without her father hearing.
“You came for me.”
“I turned my back on you once.”
“I knew you would come. The moment I saw your face, it was like I dreamed you.”
Day felt himself blush and was glad the girl probably couldn’t see it. In amid his fluster, he was reminded of Anu.
“No one could predict this,” he said.
“Let’s go!” Fox called, no more than ten feet behind them.
As they walked awkwardly forward, the rain came down loud enough that Day almost missed Kvelda’s comment.
“We killed them, all those men.”
“They might have done as bad to us. Worse to you.”
“Am I worth them being dead?” Despite her burden Kvelda turned open, unguarded eyes on him. “Are any of us worth that?”
“I think so, or I wouldn’t be here. I’d be dead already,” Day said.
Kvelda had no reply and in moments her father’s voice struggled towards them.
“Don’t run into anyone else.”
When they had moved about a hundred metres they stopped, feeding out the bottom of the tent material and then trampling over it until the fabric between the top of the pole and the side went taut. While Kvelda used one of the dead men’s knives to dig a rest for the mast, Day went around and straightened the loose material they had dragged in their wake. There were still several rents, one of them designed to be tied or untied. He used it as a peephole to track back over their progress, the bundle of corpses no more than a blip on the wintry landscape, the heavy rains already obscuring the drag marks. When he was done, he pulled out more of the sheeting and lay it on the wet mud and then he continued all the way around until the only exposed part of the floor was the area directly around the pole. Even though much of the tent’s material was saturated, each of them privately hoped it might dry out given time.
They had nothing for a fire. Kvelda remained in Day’s fur coat, but both Day and Fox stripped down to next to nothing and hung their clothing out to air beneath the low ceiling above them. Fox had hung a bundle from his belt before and when he untied it, Day saw it was one of
the dead men’s pullovers. Fox put the dry fabric on and shrugged self-consciously at Day.
“I didn’t think this far ahead,” Fox said.
Day had his arms wrapped around himself. He squatted down on a patch of musty hide tenting and put his boots back on, glad to be quickly away from the squelching water between his toes.
“No fire,” Day said without reason. It was hard not to hope someone else had a miraculous solution. There was magic in the world, after all.
Kvelda stood from where she was kneeling and, bowing her head, scuttled across to him.
“I’m wearing your coat. You can share my warmth,” she said.
“What are you doing?” Fox said.
Day froze as the woman opened the jacket, actual steam coming from her torso. He switched his gaze to take in Fox’s scowl.
“He’s cold. He’s trying to help us, isn’t he?”
“Don’t worry about him,” Fox said. He glanced at Day, said, “He’s tougher than that.”
Day dropped his eyes and at her inquiry, her stare making him blush even deeper, shook his head. “Thank you. I’ll be fine.”
Kvelda moved and Fox said, “I don’t begrudge you anything, Day. You’ve more than earnt my faith in you. But there are some things a man doesn’t hand away easily.”
Day couldn’t meet the older man’s eyes and so he didn’t try. He went down on his knees, resigning them to the squalid cold, and sat back with his arms crossed, his fingertips tickling his naked sides. Within moments he was shivering and thinking about a fire and sizzling wet slices of meat. Eyes clouding over at the smoky vision, he realised he was imagining eating elk and felt faintly ashamed even though he struggled to remember why it mattered. His childhood felt like another life, something someone had read aloud to him once from a book. He closed his eyes and leaned back until the sticky cloth of the tent was against him, the drum of rain on the other side faintly persistent.
It was still dark when he opened his eyes next – dark enough for it to be night. He waited a moment until his new senses sprang into life and then he crossed the foetid space, circling where Kvelda and her father lay curled together like just another pair of close-sleeping corpses. Day then checked the slit in the tent and peered out at the ice-sprinkled night.
The rain had ceased and now a shimmery cool spread across the wet ground, turning puddles to ice and mud to cold crust. Inside the tent their temperatures had heated the air despite the oppressive drips of the permeable skins and the water frozen fast to the ever-cold plastics.
He went and checked his cloth pants. They were still damp. He pulled on his leather pants and refastened his boots. Bare-chested, he then slipped from the tent and started walking resolutely back the way they had come. His muscles seemed to tighten of their own accord in the cold, like the temperature attached electrical cables to his skin to prickle the flesh. He concentrated on tightening his jaw so his teeth wouldn’t clack together and he tried not to worry about whether exposure might kill him before anything else.
The bodies lay where they’d been left. Day had a new knife thanks to the killings, a long leaf of metal honed sharp down one side and to its point, a cloth and tape-bound handle secure against his palm. He used the bayonet quickly, cutting the bodies free of their clothing, trying not to notice the dry ice reek of blood and congestion.
Half the fabric was frozen stiff. The rest was soaked in the mud. He carried the whole lot with him back the way he had come. As he walked he craned his neck to look at the stars. Even in his captivity it was hard to ignore the sidereal magnificence of the scene, thousands of bright white dots standing out against the impenetrable black majesty of space. Day barely had a concept of what he was seeing. He knew in childhood some had whispered that into the heavens was where the dead went when their bodies were put away. Day couldn’t credit the daydreams of children.
At the entrance to the awkward tent Day stopped and wrung out the materials he’d collected. Then he moved inside and spent a while hanging them up, each oriented to avoid touching the tent’s skin as much as possible.
He then moved across, searching the possessions left behind. He found a glass jar with some seeds in it and quickly ate them. He found a bottle with water and drank it, several more containers like it already ejected during the move. He found a small parcel of twigs and dried leaves, a tinderbox ready for a blaze but useless without any fuel to feed it. Nor did Day have a way to make fire. He sighed and tucked the objects away and kept searching.
In the second bag he found several pieces of cloth wrapped around cuts of meat, a bone with some scaled flesh attached, a couple of tins and a cooking pot with dried-out cooked rice in it. Mindful of the others, Day took the bone back to his corner, draping the moist track pants over his shoulders as he squatted and gnawed. To avoid problems later on he left the rest of the food until Fox awakened. They had come too far to have a falling-out over that.
He slept for a little while, but quickly woke once Kvelda and her father started digging through the food. They ate a cold breakfast as the sun came up, then there was a little more rain as the day dawned cloudless and cold.
Day redressed in his double-layer of pants and he went around checking his scrounged fabric only to be disappointed.
“Going out?” Fox asked.
“We’ll need more food,” Day said. “There should be choppers today.”
“You think?” Day shrugged and the older man said, “I don’t want you to get yourself killed just for a warm shirt. Kvelda, give Day his jacket back.”
The girl obediently eased the heavy coat off and handed it over. Day hesitated, desperate to have it back, but not wanting to let Kvelda know it was so. Without the jacket she only had a single layer of ordinary clothes, a cuirass made of hide and black denim. She thrust the coat forward into Day’s hesitation and Day, vaguely ashamed, took it.
“Before you go, there’s something I need to show you,” Fox said. “It’ll help you understand why I don’t want you gone long.”
“It’s about our way out of here?”
“That’s right,” Fox grinned. A couple of his teeth were gone, unmentioned somehow during the latest fracas. He used the staff like a crutch to move over to his gear. He’d also taken the fake leg off at some point in the night.
“If you’re telling me, I guess I can stop waiting for you to leave me behind or put a bullet in my back,” Day said.
Fox snorted. “Got the bullets. No gun, though.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Sure I do,” Fox said and shrugged, crouching over the leg and pulling the foot off. “There was a time early on I might not’ve worried about it. You earned your stripes boy, as they say. You’re too dangerous not to have around.”
Day smiled crookedly at the ill compliment and simply watched. Fox extracted a device shaped like a thick pen from the heel of the plastic prosthesis. With his thumb he flicked the cap off the end, the piece of plastic attached by a plastic hinge. Fox depressed a button like a plunger and down the side of the tube a red light came on.
“I’ll go out in a little while and plant this for Mother Sky.”
“I don’t know what it is,” Day said.
“It’s a radio beacon,” Kvelda answered.
“That’s right,” Fox said. A wry smile appeared and disappeared on his stubbled face. “It’s a homing device. I don’t know if the vamps’ll find it or if they’ll even know it’s there. It works on radio frequencies. Don’t know if they’ve got much use for them here. I guess they communicate somehow.”
“Mother Sky?”
“She’ll be coming for us. We’re gonna fly out of here, Day, just you wait and see.” Fox grinned and crossed his arms. He stuck the emitter in his vest pocket.
“Fly? Out of here?” Day stared off into his imagination, trying to work out whether it was even feasible. But he had no idea.
“A helicopter?”
“Light plane,” Fox said. “There’s some F-14s down in the ha
ngar, but Mother’s too old to know how to fly ‘em. Shame. They’d really give the vamps something to think about.”
Day gave a curt smile to cover his ignorance. He tried to imagine a plane landing in the confined space of the hex, but everything he knew about planes came from stories growing up and a handful of pre-Rising books he once read that mentioned them. That Fox was suggesting now a plane was going to swoop down and usher them to safety seemed preposterous.
“What’s the matter son?”
Day shook his head. “Just thinking.” He cleared his throat and headed out through the flap.
In raw daylight it seemed strange to see all the other shelters dotted about the place. He was accustomed to habitation only at the centre, what everyone in the home hex referred to as the Huddle. Only a few of the shelters were as good or better than the one Day, Fox and Kvelda had forcibly inherited. A great many more were rag-tag, architecturally incoherent messes fluttering on the cold desert landscape.
Here and there a few people were wandering, like Day, resembling cloth-swathed zombies with no idea of home. A few more lay in their individual shelters, some not much more than wrapped in plastic and sitting astride puddles, their gormless faces shattered by the turn in the weather if by nothing else. And of course, not mentioning those already disinterred by the actions of last night, the plain was marked here and there by bodies who had succumbed to either cold or violence, their frostbitten flesh too exposed for decomposition abandoned, snap-frozen memorials to the nameless souls who had once inhabited them.
Day had never fared a winter on the farm and the experience left him wondering. The icy rage he had channelled to stake a claim on the life-saving shelter was a bitter and distant memory. All that remained was a sort of curiosity about how life worked on the farm in the colder season. He had assumed he had it all figured out only to realise what he knew pertained to only part of the year. Truly winter was its own realm.
He walked across the hard-packed earth trying to figure out what the vampires did in the face of their livestock settling down for the winter behind flimsy screens of plastic, hide and cloth. He wondered as well what made the humans shed their shelters once the weather cleared. Perhaps it required the freezing temperatures for the cattle to cooperate at all. With the motivation gone, their pacts and alliances fell apart. It was easy to believe.
Endless Night Page 20