And it was a dreadful sight. The groans, shuffles, moans, whimpers and shallow breaths had already told their own tale of many hundreds of men and women suffering. When Day’s eyes contracted, they seemed to do as much out of sympathy and fear as in reaction to the poor light.
The people were suspended along the damp walls much further than he could see, chains nailed into the rough rocks acting in lieu of manacles. People filled the walls on either sides of the natural chamber. Day knew they were far underground. Water, shallow but not unclean, covered the uneven ground. The great cave angled slightly so that its walls turned out of view before an end to the masses of people could be discerned. There had to be thousands in captivity.
“Gods, what’s happened here?” he sobbed aloud in a broken voice.
Someone shuffled slightly above him and to one side. Sensing the movement, Day turned and looked at emaciated feet pressed back at the heels for purchase on the rock face. Chains tinkled above and, further on across from the feet, a woman stripped to the waist, her dangling breasts crusty with dried blood, hung slumped and unmoving half-robed by hair. She’d been dead several hours at least.
“Caves . . . beneath the fields,” the man next to Day said softly.
“Beneath?” He knew it was a fact yet his reasonable mind still questioned it.
“Underground river . . . dammed up, I reckon . . . by the creeps.”
“You were taken tonight?” Day quietly asked him.
The man gave a rasping and equally quiet laugh. “No. Plenty of you . . . came in . . . but this is stage . . . three.”
“Three?”
The man was a while before next he spoke. Day fathomed it came at considerable effort.
“One . . . the processing . . . two . . . the fields . . . three . . . we’re dinner,” the man said at last.
“Dinner?”
“This is the larder.”
Day digested the statement for a few moments.
“How long have you been here?”
“You’re . . . asking me?” The man choked back a sob. “No idea.”
Day stopped trying to strain upwards, recognising it for the futile task it was. He cast his eyes around instead, desperate for some trace of Kvelda. Eventually, as the silence from the other man lengthened, and ignoring the general quiet amongst the rest of the fettered population, Day took in a massive lungful of breath and called Kvelda’s name.
The reply was faint. Day craned his neck around, insanely hoping he could see, but the light source further up the left of the tunnel and around the curve threw the hundreds of figures between it and Day into writhing silhouette. The walls looked alive as the occasional head or limb moved, despite all too many of them not moving at all.
Day was also aware of the hissing of the captives around him. He twisted, feeling someone to the right jabbing at his shoulder with their elevated knee.
“Shut up,” a hoarse voice whispered.
“You’ll bring the . . . keepers,” the man who’d spoken earlier said.
Sure enough, in the distance he heard a soft noise quickly escalating in sound. The motor launch came around the bend, illustrated briefly as it moved through the light before collapsing into shadows and weird angles of black and grey. Only as it came down the shallow waterway within a hundred and fifty yards could Day make out a renewed sense of the image: three ghouls squatting or standing in the low-bottomed boat.
No more than twenty yards past Day they stopped. Two of the ghouls put their boots onto the rocks running beneath and between the patches of water. In the gloom they had once more forsaken helmets. Overlarge black eyes stared out of shrivelled chimpanzee faces, one of them with a strange and wispy beard barely clinging to his emaciated chin. They carried metre-long truncheons of black plastic and, as if after a moment to deliberate, they strode up amongst the nearest cluster of limbs hung like human ivy on the wall. Adjusting the clubs slightly, sparks flickering from the ends, the two ghouls went to work terrorising a handful of the captives.
“See?” someone else hissed close by to Day.
He forced himself to watch, surprised at how little the men and women screamed. Clearly the batons hurt. The ghouls seemed methodical rather than sadistic and, after several minutes, Day could see why. Having stunned two of the dangling figures into a stupor, the ghouls loosened the catches holding the man and the woman fast.
The unconscious bodies dropped to the hard ground without any strength to ease their fall. It took both of the ghouls to pit their puny strength against the meagre bulk of the woman, dragging her by the arms to the launch. They then returned for the man, labouring even harder as they went about their business.
With one final cold menacing glance, the remaining ghoul gave a curt nod and the engine rose in pitch again. Rather than turning, the launch continued on until it vanished into the blackness consuming the tunnel to Day’s right.
Realising how tensely he’d been holding himself, Day slowly relaxed, suspended a foot or so in height above the ground, but with sufficient irregularities in the rock to provide rest for his heels. Effectively crucified along with everyone else, Day took stock of his exhausted muscles and hung limp.
An hour or so later, word drifted down that a teenage boy among the group had died as a result of the ghouls’ assault. Day’s eyes closed reflexively, but he forced them wide a moment later, denying himself the illusory luxury of a guilt and grief he knew he could never really feel to the depth it deserved. He was too long gone in his own adaptation to the hard realities of survival.
After the grim confirmation of the tunnels’ latest casualties, time began to imperceptibly stretch until the only assurance it was passing at all – rather than freezing to a stop – was the light gradually diminishing at the bend to Day’s left. As long and slow as the last hours had been, Day’s mental processes were even more retarded. It took him yet more hours into the pitch black before he realised the timing of the fading light matched the reign of night over day. It was sunlight streaming so close to him and yet out of direct sight around the tunnel’s arm.
As soon as he understood his own proximity to possible freedom, his brain began to whirl again with all the fresh permutations and combinations of escape.
Some hours on, his night-vision able to pick out only a little in what would be impenetrable dark to a normal person, scuffles and muted cries began to filter down the tunnel from the right. Like the movement of a vast army of bats, the vampires had entered the tunnels to feed.
The screams and moans from the procession soon grew worse. Nearby, a man started nervously cursing under breath. Beside that person, a woman began praying. Day closed his eyes because he could not close his ears. He wet himself as if it were an entirely practical thing to do, and like the fear had nothing over him.
He had no idea how the vamps organised it. For all Day knew, Kvelda or even Carlos was under attack right at that very minute. Yet the vampires didn’t come within a distance at which Day could perceive them. There was plenty of sport for them further up the tunnel. As the hours rolled by, seemingly as slow and monolithic as the orbits of the moon, Day’s fear grew dull even while the sounds carried on. It was against human capacity to stay at full shock for so long and, shamefully, long before the last whimper had ceased, Day fell asleep.
Waking was an awful shock. His whole body was so stiff, bruised and sore, he felt like he’d been stabbed a dozen times during the night. His hands were numb from the chains circling his wrists and from his own body weight hanging suspended for so many hours.
A fragment of daylight was winking to the left, but it was the sound of motor boats that woke him. With the veil somewhat lifted, he could see in the direction of the previous night’s disturbances. Ghoul boats with lights attached were moored on the shallow shore. Leathery figures moved among the living, cutting free the dead.
The tinkling of chains above and beside him presaged the unseen stranger’s speech.
“Makes you think . . . eh?”
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Day wasn’t so sure. When fear really had him, Day often found useful thought fled. Unable to articulate this distinction, Day said nothing, wishing instead for a drink to ease his thirst. His mouth felt like a thousand cats had backed themselves up into it. Since he doubted the ghouls went around administering beverages, Day figured he’d already had his last drink before death unless he somehow escaped. In the cold light of dawn, such as it was, the prior night’s frenzied escape fantasies seemed like a hollow fiction. Again he closed his eyes, not so dehydrated that he couldn’t cry. Above him, the unidentified narrator said nothing, though he seemed to resonate Day’s unease.
When his tears had dried, Day reclaimed his resolve. Perched once more on his treasured rocky cleft, his arms aching less for their brief reprieve, Day filled his lungs with air once and shouted.
“Kvelda!”
After three cries, he had to admit to himself that no reply came. He was unfortunately sure of it.
“What are you . . . doing . . . fool?”
Day said nothing. Around him, several captives rattled their chains. For good measure Day yelled again, but in the spilling echoes that followed he could discern no confirmation from Kvelda that she was alive.
The motor launch came soon thereafter, approaching from the depths of the tunnel and appearing first as the sharp prow on the ghouls’ tin-coloured boat. As before there were three ghouls in it, one carrying a weapon of some sort and the others their batons. Day narrowed his eyes as they alighted and, around him, the nearest prisoners cried and shivered. The man alongside him was curiously silent as the ghouls surveyed a twenty yard stretch of prisoners and tested the current on their black clubs.
Day inhaled again and yelled Kvelda’s name.
Their decision made for them, two ghouls strode up to where Day was hung and, pausing for one inhuman fraction of a second, they started jabbing him with the clubs. Wherever the batons touched, unbelievable pain flared. When they had done one spot they moved to another, sparing no part of him, doing a clinical job of reducing him to a state of spastic collapse.
Day had been hardened immeasurably by his time on the farm. The pain was bad but, in one remote corner of his mind, while he knew people might choose death over suffering, he also believed the dead in their graves would swap a moment’s pain for no life at all. He let himself slump before he’d truly succumbed to the ghouls’ assault and, perhaps because they were two working against one, the spindly creatures stepped back.
“Move him. Hurry,” the figure on the launch said. His voice sounded distant and hollow.
One of the ghouls fussed with the chains, removing a free-standing screw of some sort keeping the manacle closed. First one and then another, and suddenly Day had fallen to the moist stones. Ever cautious, the second ghoul stuck him with the prod, but Day sensed the electrical current mere moments before it was applied and he quelled any reaction that might imply his wakefulness. Pain was clouding his mind, but the sharp rocks they dragged him over were an antidote to unconsciousness.
He felt the sharp edge of the metal boat against his ribs and then he was over the edge and inside. Rolled by momentum onto his back like a landed fish, he gazed up through glassy eyes at the third ghoul standing over him with the rifle pointed up into the cavern roof.
Day’s heel broke the creature’s knee, the whole leg buckling inwards and back. He had no idea if such beings felt pain like ordinary men, but it seemed stunned at the assault and barely moved, despite its imbalance, as Day forced himself up from the bottom of the boat.
A moment later he was trying to wrench the gun away from the injured ghoul. It went off, a single bullet hitting the next ghoul in the upper arm, spinning it about. Day then felt an electric baton zap the small of his back and the injury gave him the strength to wrench the weapon free and swing the dense plastic stock across the next ghoul’s jaw.
Its neck broke. His frail gaoler fell from the boat with a dull splash. Several of the captives lining the walls gave rabid yells, but Day kept his focus. He drove the gun behind him and pushed the first ghoul into the water and then the launch tilted to one side and Day went over.
When he pulled himself upright, he looked across the overturned hull of the metal boat and saw the remaining ghoul hopping across the opposite shore with its pistol in one hand. It fired twice at him, sparks flaring from the boat. Day returned fire, knowing how much further his loud response damned him.
His aim was erratic. Day was no marksman. He and Carlos and Kvelda had established a headshot would kill the vampires’ servants, but hitting such a difficult target one shot at a time seemed beyond Day’s ability. The living human hostages draped over the scenery gave howls as bullets missing the moving ghoul struck home in their vulnerable and fast-bleeding flesh. Day could only grit his teeth and fire on. He struck the fleeing ghoul twice and ducked each time as pistol bullets rattled close. With his eighth bullet Day hit the thing in the chin and the whole head lifted off one side and it tripped over and fell.
The chamber was still reverberating with gunshots when the massed captives started howling for their release. Under the onslaught, Day felt woozy and sick.
He started running towards the light.
“Kvelda!”
He yelled it again and again. As the massive passageway turned, Day moved forward like some kind of messiah, more and more captives lifting up their tired heads to call on him for release. His eyes swarmed over the crucified crowds, greedily taking only what information he needed. Time and time again he saw faces that were not-Kvelda, and he looked away.
Yet she screamed his name shrilly. On the opposite side of the cavern, Kvelda hung suspended five feet from the ground, blood dried in rivulets down her arms from wrists hacked to pieces by the restraining gyres.
“Day! Here!”
He ran across to her, water splashing. After clumsy, awful moments she was down and slumped into his arms.
“Oh God,” Kvelda cried. “I didn’t think . . . you can’t . . . oh, Day!”
His eyes swept past the woman kicking her chained legs scant inches from his face, past the old man arching forward, begging to be freed, and then the body of an even older man, corrupt from days left uncollected by the ghouls. Day put a supporting arm around Kvelda’s shoulders and moved her forward.
“You need to be strong,” he said. “This is no time to fall.”
They moved towards the light. If there were more motor boats on their way, Day couldn’t hear them. He knew releasing at least a few other inmates could bring worthy dividends, especially if they multiplied by freeing others; but as it had been on so many other occasions, time was so short he wasn’t willing to risk his life or Kvelda’s and regret later a single second so unwisely spent.
Thus they came at last far enough down the tunnel that the massive yawning entrance was clear. The numbers of chained people fell away dramatically. Yet Day and Kvelda hardly noticed, struck dumb instead by the new sight that rose to confound their eyes.
The wall was immense. Grey and completely smooth except for features, tiny in size and unguessable at such a distance, worked mechanically across its surface, the wall rose to such a height that while it didn’t block the sun, there was no trace of the sky until Day had fully craned back his head. Then the curtain wall gave way to crystalline blue.
In the canyon there was no wind and, while the day was cold as winter, to the eyes it looked like spring could be in bloom. Far up and away, inferring scale by dint of the wall over which it flew, a hawk or kestrel of some kind swooped, little more than a speck to ordinary sight even though Day could make out the fluttering gaps between its tail feathers.
The chittering of the crowd hadn’t diminished much behind them; but through it, Day discerned the buzz of another engine and, grasping Kvelda’s grimy hand, he ran across the pool-dotted rocks and out into the canyon itself.
The walls sloping up to either side were weathered rock riven by time and the elements into steep crags compounded with
loose pebbles and sketchy growth. As if a shower had just fallen, the ground at the bottom of the apocalyptic vale was a collection of shallow pools and puddles all the way to the enormous dam half-a-mile distant.
Like leaping sparks, bullets spat amid the rubble. Running up the slope was all but impossible and climbing made slow progress. Day and Kvelda were hardly more than ten metres off the ground before he turned and, half-aiming, half-hoping, returned fire. The ghouls’ motor launch was pulled up across the waterway. The occupants were wisely in cover behind it.
“What about Carlos?” Kvelda cried.
Day shook his head like a dog with a doll.
“It’s a funny time to be worrying about him,” he said.
Kvelda answered with a mute sob and rolling eyes. A bullet split a rock not a half-yard from where she had put down a hand to haul herself along and she yelped. Day lifted the rifle again and, twisting at the waist, fired off a shot. The bullet went through the gap between one ghoul’s shoulder and chest and the pallid-looking thing, like all of them, strangely unbelievable in the reality of day, tumbled backwards with a little cry.
“This isn’t working,” Day said.
Pushing Kvelda ahead of him, Day turned and ran sideways, scrabbling for purchase amongst the rocks, loose stones pouring down at the merest approach. After a dozen paces Day slipped, taking Kvelda down with him. Righting themselves only by coincidence, suddenly they were at ground level again and running haphazardly, zigzagging as much through panic as instinct across the wet earth.
Although there were a few rounds left, the rifle in Day’s hold suddenly seemed useless and restrictive. Before he had really followed the thought through, he shook it free and abandoned it to the ground behind them. Momentarily the gunshots following them ceased, replaced soon after by the sound of the motor once more.
“I can’t run, Day!” Kvelda shouted.
Still moving, Day turned sideways and looked back. A helpless expression morphed across his face. He didn’t want his survival to come at the price of having abandoned Kvelda. Without reasoning it through, Day knew he had sacrificed too many benchmarks of normalcy to now give up his love for the sake of a continued life. He had callously murdered in cold blood as well as fever-pitch rage. He had lied, bullied, cheated and looted, and very nearly stooped to cannibalism as well. While some might argue, with all those moral thresholds sundered, life itself had no worth or meaning, Day had descended to a pragmatic level beyond any defensible rational position. Though he knew he didn’t want to die, he also didn’t want to make any more sacrifices to whichever gods now ruled over his fate.
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