Day tried to imagine the night hunters, stalking between the disordered rows of tents, letting themselves in stealthily or forcing their way in with violence. The end result was always the same.
He kept walking until he was approaching the centre of the settlement. One field over, a strange order of self-styled priests had made it a dreadful place to be. Here on Day’s home field, things weren’t quite so dire. There were men and maybe even women who fancied themselves as powers, but unless they had better weapons than he, Day wasn’t about to bullied. He walked between the wood-walled, iron-strutted monstrosities with as carefree a manner as he could muster. Only the sound of approaching helicopters broke his demeanour, making him hurry out from under the awnings and away from the dull, slow-moving crowds. His heart began to race in counter-point to the sluggish feeling in his belly. He felt the urge to defecate, only the second in a week.
Two choppers came whistling forward from the east, circling slowly around the camp until they bore down on the Huddle from the north. The bulk of the crowd did what they always felt compelled towards: they rushed out as a mass, arms waving and heads hollering, as if the ghouls could not only hear them, but actually cared what they had to say. Day followed unsympathetically, eyes and ears attuned to the signs.
The helicopters drifted apart and finally started off in different directions. One buzzed the Huddle. Hundreds of field-dwellers crouched low as the chopper swerved overhead. No supplies were forthcoming as it flitted across the fence-line and, keeping low, soon disappeared from view. Day found it hard to believe there were thousands of captives looking at the helicopter even now, sequestered away in a neighbouring hex he would likely never see. If Fox’s outlandish plan worked, Day wouldn’t become the farm explorer he’d imagined. Strangely, he wasn’t sure whether he was elated or disappointed at the prospect. Understandable concern cramped his belly whenever he thought about the fantasy of Fox’s scheme coming true.
The second helicopter took in a leisurely circuit of the hex before following in the general wake of the first. As it flew, the ghoul pilot skilfully tipped the machine one way and then another. As it did so, a rain of objects fell sporadically to the ground.
Day started towards the nearest cluster of people at a bolting run. Then suddenly the chopper changed angles and it was flying overhead, the hard packets falling all around. Day spun around, scooping the items up while letting discipline slip long enough to try and work out what he was collecting. The faded, torn and water-stained packets of once glossy card showed steaming pots of food, advertising snapshots taken at that time when a seemingly near-limitless utopia once blanketed most the earth, uniting the world in global commerce and the pursuit of self-satisfaction and excess.
Day collided with a man and spilled several of the armload of packets he’d scavenged. The collision reminded him to ward his find carefully. More people were approaching and the sum total was indefensible. Day scurried around grabbing back several of the parcels before retreating with his arms clutched to his furry chest, early morning steam trickling like dragon’s fire from his nostrils.
He walked until he was a fair distance. His throat was parched, but he gave it little thought. He knelt on the ground instead and concentrated on tucking the packets into his waistband. There was plenty of room. In moments he’d stashed about ten. He had half that again which fitted easily into one hand, his big fingers clutching the pile together. Starving fingers underlined the faded and sometimes partly missing labels – Swiss hotpot, pumpkin risotto, beef casserole, tuna couscous.
Feeling like he had finally accomplished something, Day started back towards shelter, wondering vaguely how the packet foods tasted raw. Uncharacteristically for him, he almost walked into Carlos before he saw him.
“I was wondering if you were going to look up,” the old survivor said.
Day brightened. However guarded his expression, a smirk was a smirk.
“You could have said something.”
“I thought our blind-fighting exercises might’ve made you a little more aware of yourself,” Carlos said, not unkindly.
Day opened and closed his mouth, unable to comment when the story of the last few weeks threatened to burst out at the mere mention of his newfound self-awareness.
“You’re in a hurry?”
“I just got this stuff in the drop,” Day said.
Carlos nodded and held up six packets of his own. “You need to add water.”
“I was kinda hoping it wouldn’t need cooking,” Day said, feeling his age suddenly next to the ornery older man.
“You that bad off?”
“Hungry, sure, but no fire,” Day said.
Carlos frowned and made a noise. “Where you sleeping at these days? It’s wet out, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He chuckled gently.
“You met Fox,” Day said. “I’m with him and his daughter.”
“You got a thing going with the old man’s girl?”
“No,” Day said.
Carlos’s eyes crinkled. “With the old Fox then?”
Day’s expression darkened and he turned half away. “No.”
“Gotta wonder what’s the attraction if they don’t even have fire.”
“We came back over the fence night before last, Carlos.” Day started to muster a rebuke, momentarily irate with the cautious half-Sioux, half-Mexican predator. Carlos wouldn’t dare risk himself on a dangerous venture yet he was quick enough to criticise. “Not a lot of room for firewood when you’re on the run.”
“Fair enough,” Carlos shrugged. “If that’s the way it is.”
Day stopped where he was and stared at the ground angrily, his stronger emotions quickly giving way to a vague discomfort.
“Something you’re not telling me, Day?”
He turned back. Once – only very recently – they had been good friends. He didn’t know if it was because of his own shifting loyalties or the pace of life and change in the camps that he now found himself distrustful of his former comrade. He just couldn’t help fearing what Carlos would do with the knowledge if he found out exactly what Fox had planned.
“What’s to say? You know it’s the girl,” Day said, more uncomfortable with the truth than he might’ve been if telling a lie.
“What’s her name?”
“Kvelda.”
“Hmmm. What’s the father’s story? They got taken together?”
Thinking about Maya’s response, Day felt his throat go dry.
“Together?” he stammered.
“Yes, Day.” Carlos addressed him with faint condescension. “It’s been known to happen, you know?”
“I guess so,” Day said. He hoped his vagueness would satisfy Carlos.
Carlos grunted gruffly and stepped close. To Day’s heightened sense of smell it was like the unwashed masculine reek of the man was invading his every pore.
“Day, you’re being straight with me, right?”
Confused, Day looked askance before meeting Carlos’s eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“When we said our goodbyes, you were getting out of this dump. Has something changed?”
“No,” Day said. “It’s just that things are different now?”
“Why did you come back?”
“For the girl.”
“Then they weren’t taken together?” Carlos asked.
Day swallowed and bit into the lie. “They were separated. Went to different fields. The old man had a photograph.”
“So why’d you go with him?”
“I’d met the girl,” Day said. He looked down.
“What happened to survival at any cost?”
“You tell me,” Day said.
“I’m still here,” Carlos said.
“Yeah, and I’m here,” Day said.
“For how long, though?”
“Till I get a way out.”
Carlos frowned and sized him up, chin raised, eyes speculatively down-played. “I want to live, Day. I’m no fool. It doe
sn’t mean I won’t take the risk if you’ve got a good plan.”
Day looked away. “When I have a plan I’ll let you know.”
Once inside the lie it got easier. Carlos shrugged, cautious and possibly unconvinced. Where once they were brought together by mutual regard, Carlos practically taking the younger, more naïve Day under his wing, now they parted with a fertile tension between them.
Angry at almost everyone in the world including himself, Day snapped around and started back for the shelter. Several more helicopters buzzed in the distance, but they were over different fields. Closer but still far enough away not to draw notice, a crowd of people jeered in unison while someone met a gruesome public fate. Day barely gave it a thought.
Kvelda was outside when he returned. She was standing in a long grey coat with the cuffs rolled up, a vacant look in her eye. As Day came towards the opening of the tent she seized his arm.
“Are they still there?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The dead,” Kvelda said.
Day frowned. “Who do you mean?”
“The people we killed.”
“You didn’t kill anybody. You can stop talking about it that way.”
“Doesn’t it worry you? Don’t you wonder if we’re worth it?”
Day gave a hiss of annoyance and pushed past to get into the tent. “I’m tired of thinking about it,” he said as he entered. And it was true. His mind wouldn’t go there – and not out of remorse or horror. There was a dull space where his feelings had been rubbed bare. He couldn’t think about it any more.
Fox was crouched over a small pile of firewood.
“Your helicopters came.”
“I knew they would come,” Day said. “They’d been away too long.”
“And you got something?”
“Requires water,” Day said.
“You could go back to the bore,” Fox said.
Day’s brows furrowed and he looked down. He didn’t know if Fox was spelling out how things were for him in an object lesson or if the old man was just getting weak and lost within his mission, now that it was nearing completion.
“Like that, is it?” Day scowled.
“I traded for some firewood,” Fox said.
“Yeah,” Day said. “What did you trade?”
“My blade.”
“Your knife?” He stared a moment in surprise, strangely tinged with anger. “You think it was worth it?”
“In a day or so it won’t matter. I thought we could be warm at least. Your food needs cooking, right?”
Day nodded as if he hadn’t quite caught up. Kvelda entered the shelter and stood by the split awning. Daylight reflected from the tears on her cheeks and Day looked away, uncomfortably moved and yet angered by them.
“I’ll get water then,” he said.
Flakes of ice began falling as he trudged back to the Huddle. Fortunately the fur coat had pockets and as he walked along, shoulders slumped, Day thrust his hands deep into them and tried not to look around as he passed several field occupants lying in the gathering snow, seemingly content to freeze to death. In one spot a man had hacked another man to death and the dark crimson had dyed the earth, which was now turning to pink crystals with the snowfall. Day veered away as he got a sense of the scene and realised the survivor was taking off the dead man’s legs.
He continued on. Not far away a woman’s carcass had been half freeze-dried by the wind. The top of her head was open, a whitish, pinkish mash spread like a cone of dried up maggots on the crusty earth. The woman’s mouth was open in what looked suspiciously like a laugh. Day tried not to look and kept moving.
“I’m sick of being surrounded by death,” he muttered to himself.
At the bores he silently, morosely helped himself to a few small and unreliable vessels and then he pumped them full of water and started back to the tent, losing drips here and there as he stumbled. He travelled in a wide arc to get back to base.
At the entryway, Kvelda, who was looking out as usual, stepped aside without comment and Day entered. Seeing him, Fox nodded almost absent-mindedly.
“Right, we’ll begin. We’ll begin.”
Fox started fussing with the small stockpile of wood. Day stood looking down at him feeling fed up and oddly contemptuous.
“When is it going to work, this thing of yours?”
Fox looked up, but his hands kept moving. “The beacon? Who knows. A day or so.”
“How will they know exactly where we are?”
“The beacon,” Fox said.
“Yes, but how will they find us out of all that?” He gestured outside. The bass drone of a helicopter sounded and, still speaking, Day moved back to the exit to check it out. “There’s several thousand people in this field alone.”
“It’s only one person who’s coming. Mother Sky.”
“Whoever it is, I’m still asking the question,” Day said.
“Now now, son. You’re getting jumpy. Help will be here soon enough.”
Day looked out. In the hazy distance he saw the distinctly odd shape of the transport chopper settling down. Hanging suspended in the air like some kid’s cut-out, another identical double-rotor chopper was poised ready to follow once the first had given the all-clear.
“What’s the matter, Day? Feel like your luck’s run out?”
Day whipped around. “Be careful with what you say.”
“Hmmm,” the old man said. “Superstitious.”
“Just tell me the old woman’s coming,” Day said.
“She’s coming,” Fox said. “I feel it in my bones as sure as winter.”
Day stared hard at the silver-haired man as he resumed his work. He was suddenly looking his age, a lot less harmless than Day knew him to be, as if he was content with his work and his achievements thus far. Day only hoped whatever inner resources the older man had used to get him this far weren’t totally squandered. That he’d given up his knife in trade was a worrying sign, though Day also conceded he might not know the full story. The crafty old fellow might have other weapons quite literally up his sleeve. Yet his trade had also brought them a prospect of fire and as Fox continued to work with the wood and the first flames sprang into life and the scene just lingered on and on, Day dropped his impatient guise and crouched a discreet distance from the fire with his eyes half closed.
The nights seemed endless while they waited for their sign in the skies. Day found it increasingly harder to sleep and by the third night, he was half-convinced Fox really had cursed him with ill luck and that here, on the cusp of their supposed departure, death would come creeping silently in the darkness while he slept.
By the fourth night Day was sitting up near the ashes of the long-since exhausted wood supply, dark-dilated eyes attuned to the slit in the tent and the sub-shadows his extended vision could sometimes discern flitting against the tent walls. Day had come to think of them as ghosts, as if his spectral vision had pierced the veil separating life and death and now even the spirit world was laid bare to his senses. Yet nothing ever manifested except hazy phantasmal half-signs and that part of his mind that had become more rational – and yet dangerously irrational – by his time in the camps knew his visions were nothing more than a flight of fantasy fuelled by the terrors of his unconscious. Several times he afterwards realised he had slept for short patches anyway and, as if making up for the deprivation, his dreams came on twice as hectic and lurid. More than once he dreamt the very thing he feared, in one form or another, and at his death or gross danger he would snap awake, the silver daggers in his hands glinting like shards of twilight, poised and ready to do the work for which they were created.
“She’s not coming,” Day said once the acerbic sun dawned once more.
Fox looked up from where he was lying, arms tangled as if incestuously with his daughter – Day as jealous of the intimacy as the warmth it conveyed – and the old man’s sleep-rheumy eyes found him across the dark space of the shelter.
“Have so
me faith. It’s not going to be easy.”
Day shook his head at the older man, sure they were beaten. He’d clung to a false hope and now it was obvious even to him.
An hour later, the astringent winds tugging at him as he trekked aimlessly but with purpose across the hex, Day’s hopes did a back-flip. He wondered if this was how it felt for all animals caged without any means for self-determination. When he was acting out a plan before, however vague it was, it had given him hope. Now he felt bereft of the power to discern likelihood from illusion. It seemed as plausible to him that they might some day soon wing their way out of the vampires’ prison than if the ground itself might suddenly rouse from its winter sleep and yield trees blooming with fruit.
On the fifth morning the food supply was gone and Day went walking again as more transport choppers rose like levitating chunks of architecture in the distance. Howls and screams were muted by the crosswinds, carrying the newcomers’ misery perhaps to another field.
Huddling into himself, the light rain falling like gunfire from a bleak and crackling sky, Day watched the helicopters about their work surprised they’d fly in such weather. Not for the first time he wondered how much the winter depleted the vampires’ stores. There was plenty of death – too much of it, he predictably thought, vulnerable creature that he was – and with the encampment settled down behind screens and shelters no one could guess just how much more misery was going on unobserved.
At midday the winds changed as if seduced and the grey pall overhead started to shift. Miraculously blue skies began to appear like an optical effect, exposed by the dirty clouds slowly sliding sideways.
Day stopped at a fire-pit. Almost twenty-five men and women, a few older, a few younger, were gathered around the sloping hole. Heat emanated from the pit almost in defiance of the wind. Day sensed things out before approaching, nodding hesitantly to the nearest drab ghosts, their eyes quickly turning back to the fire. They were entranced like only the starving could be. Looking closer among the coals, Day saw the meat had fingers and toes. Metal skewers kept them upright amid the fuel.
Endless Night Page 21