Endless Night

by Warren Hately

  It was twenty feet to the water from the platform surface. The blast propelled him twice that distance from the parapet wall. Hitting the surface was like slamming into a pile of broken concrete slabs, though his body took the blows and forgave him. The icy water did not. Somehow in the last few hours his body had forgotten it was winter, yet heat exhaustion coupled with freezing water was a dangerous combination. Day almost inhaled, but drank some of the stuff instead. He drifted for long moments, wondering how and, indeed, if he would ever rise again. And beneath the water he could hear the dull thumps of the stockpile going off.

  Day bobbed to the surface and heard Kvelda gasping a short distance away. Drinking in the air, he wiped water from his eyes and saw red hair and flailing arms. She wasn’t drowning. Instead she was swimming away as fast as her untrained style would allow. Day had no idea how to swim, but after trying several different strokes in a handful of seconds he settled on an awkward overarm and tried to follow.

  They were still swimming – covering no more than about thirty metres – before the sense of a current started to gently tug. Day was practically at Kvelda’s feet and he yelled his question, unsure whether she was able to hear him.

  “Is it the river pulling us?”

  Kvelda gave a glance behind. It wasn’t her first. Day had assumed she was drawing breath. Instead she motioned with a nod and kept swimming.

  “Look behind you.”

  Day reinvented the side-stroke as he tried to follow Kvelda’s quavering instructions. To his horror and perverse delight he saw a huge section of the dam’s curtain wall had fallen away. Water was pouring violently into it through the new point of egress. As Day watched, another jagged slab of grey concrete tumbled like an almost silent glacier into the gap, its metal guardrail screeching before snapping free.

  “Swim for the rocks!” Kvelda yelled.

  Day pictured the consequences of failure with vivid clarity. The force of the new current was rapidly increasing, far out-stripping his weak ability as a swimmer. He imagined himself plummeting over the edge of the dam wall and into the shallow riverbed beyond, the fall and the weight of water around him crushing him to death.

  Floundering, he watched as Kvelda swam on a dogged angle back toward the rocks lining the man-made lake where the canyon wall descended to the river. While Kvelda was sufficiently ahead of him and she had the skill to power the last few metres to safety, Day could feel himself being yanked back by thousands of litres fleeing their captivity.

  “Kvelda!”

  He yelled it again and again. Perhaps wisely, she didn’t turn until she had secured footing in the shallows. Day had begun their swim within ten metres of the canyon wall and now that distance seemed beyond measurable to him. With each yell he slipped back several feet and, when Kvelda turned, with concern on her face as she lay half in the water and half astride the rocky shore, Day lifted an impotent hand and disappeared beneath the surface.

  Submerged, his vision seemed to pierce like headlights through the swirling, muck-clouded water. Giga-litres embraced him like an enormous hand, squeezing the air from his lungs. Wrung out, Day drifted underwater, crucified by the cruel current and the freezing cold.

  The surging river carried him towards the jagged rent in the dam wall. It went deep past the water-line, daylight streaming through the gap, highlighting every bubble and loose blade of water-grass. Day kicked his feet without effect, feeling fatigue blanketing his responses and his lungs burning like he’d inhaled hot ash. Scant yards from the damage to the wall, the water seemed to turn, pouring downwards. Day tried to kick to the surface and grab one last lungful of precious air before he was hurled over the edge and into the canyon below.

  His head broke the foamy surface and with his left hand he snatched at the broken concrete. By some miracle he caught a hold. Cold iron under his grip belonged to a length of twisted piping exhumed from within the depths of the concrete wall by the explosions. The rest of him swung past the handhold, sucking down with the gushing water. He managed to get a second hand upon the first and, with what little energy he had, Day clung to life.

  The water was surging down and battering him. After some moments suspended above the white tumult, his grip weakening by the second, Day realised the waterfall wasn’t pouring past the fissure and down into the desert vale below. The helicopter rockets and the exploded stockpile had collapsed the wall at one end. Pieces of wood and a few floating items bobbed past only to disappear into the black interior of the massive wall cavity itself. Day stared in horror, transfixed by the primal terror of the black void gaping to swallow him up like a pestilent womb working in reverse.

  The blast had cracked open the thirty yard-wide curtain wall, exposing the tunnels and stairwells by which the ghouls and possibly the vampires too made to and fro in the subterranean dark. The lake was slowly but forcibly emptying itself into the hollows before it could ever clear through to the canyon on the other side.

  Day gave a tortured howl, able to hear his name being called in Kvelda’s sweet but desperate voice. There was nothing he could do. In that moment before the sucking downpour took him, he had the irrational fear the ghoul helicopter might return. He tried to crane his head around, as much to get a final look at Kvelda as to shout a warning; but his hands slipped free of the pipe and he plunged into the fast-rushing darkness instead.

  At first he went completely under the water again. Carried along, he tumbled helplessly, thrown about by the torrent as it smashed down into the unearthed halls and stairwells of the ghoul caverns. Several times he struck his head, yet he remained almost stubbornly conscious. The number of times his limbs nearly broke didn’t warrant counting, they were of such little concern compared to simply drawing breath.

  At some point, his eyes focused to pinpricks in the near total darkness, the watercourse threw him up against a bend in a descending stairway. Day struggled upright, legs feeling broken, his back flattened to the wet concrete wall as a solid rain of water crashed down around him, flowing off into several different channels.

  Across the landing was the dark bulge of a pressurised door. Day slogged across the blanketing wetness to force it open. Once through, he sealed it again and managed to admit only a few hundred litres from the downpour. Then he slumped to the ground and let his head bang back against the closed portal. His body was eighty per cent bruises and not much else as far as consciousness went. He had summoned his reserves too many times. Finally he had given his all. The fight went out of him and he slumped down further, eyes rolled up into his head.

  There came a time when he was able to do more than flop over on his side and collapse again. The awareness that he was immersed in two inches of water triggered the most primal instincts he possessed. Day woke groggily and wiped his face, gingerly levering himself into an upright position using both hands. His fingers were black with bruises, the knuckles scraped and half-scabbed.

  Exhausted, quasi-blind and aching all over, Day could scarce believe it when he saw a figure lurching slowly towards him. In his fatigue, Day almost lay down again, but he knew it would be a fatal error, and he honestly believed he deserved better after so many tribulations.

  The ghoul was dragging a broken leg. Yet despite its fallibility, its weakness, its pathetic carriage and the disdain with which Day regarded the creature, he knew as long as the ghoul was moving it remained a threat. Letting gravity prop him against the concrete wall, Day felt along his side until he had loosened the soaked leather holster of the first 9mm pistol. Then he drew the weapon, lifted it with difficulty and fired.

  The ghoul collapsed in a heap and Day wheezed before breaking into a hacking series of coughs. After more than a full minute, he blinked back into consciousness and ordered himself to stand. He walked unsteadily towards the ghoul and gave it a kick.

  Past the body, an unlit corridor beckoned. Twenty yards on revealed an open stairwell. Water sloshed over the submerged steps and into the hallway, which continued on into darkness. Day looke
d at the stairs that continued up and considered taking them. He had no real idea how far down he had come in the deluge. He knew he’d fallen a number of flights. He couldn’t say whether he was still above the height of the canyon floor or if his fall had taken him beneath it.

  He shook his head weakly and walked past the welling step. Despite his aches and exhaustion he carried the pistol at his side, his arm as heavy as if he had splinted it. Gradually his vision cleared, accommodating the low light as he passed several more waterlogged bodies. One was of a man without arms, the torn sockets long-since drained of blood. The others were ghouls, a thousand times more pathetic as corpses with their bodies frail as the corpses of children.

  Compelled by a stern inner voice, Day replenished his ammunition. When he moved on, the corridor turned to the right and descended slowly another level. There were no lights and no daylight. However far down he had come, it was sufficient to make the blackness impenetrable. While he knew his eyes were no longer truly seeing, Day’s own exhaustion mixed with the super-heightened state of his remaining senses so he sought neither to question nor explain how he still navigated his surroundings. It was only quasi-perceptual, almost instinctual and thus a super-sense previously unknown to him as he negotiated the black psychedelia. He passed several more ghoul carcasses and knew there was no light at all to see them by, yet by other unknown means their fluorescent skulls looked up at him, parchment skins saturated, bodies broken and twisted like the discarded playthings of some giant child.

  The stairs descended to an inner atrium. The ceiling remained vaulted overhead so that it became a massive chamber into which he trod. The concrete floor was grooved with several single-wheel rail lines. A collection of flat tray trolleys, their handles twisted or torn off in many instances, were scattered around the room as debris. The electricity had died, but it seemed some kind of light was promised at the track’s end.

  The floor was wet and in places the uneven concrete housed shallow puddles. The moisture only seemed to make Day’s senses more acute. He wearily followed the metal lines sunk into the concrete tunnel for almost a quarter mile, wondering when he would ever see the surface again and if it would be in his present lifetime. Then the ambient glow began steadily to strengthen and he forced himself to look up as he shambled along.

  The ground became steadily dirtier and dirtier until the concrete and the tracks disappeared before sandbars of black dirt dotted with rubbish. Clearly a huge amount of water had washed through, scouring the tunnels of inhabitants and their possessions. Bones and the occasional torn body of a ghoul appeared amid the wreckage. Day grasped a length of iron pipe with a black knob at each end. Irrationally, despite the pistol in his hand, the club made him feel safer. Tiredness anaesthetised him to his fear so that he carried on through the midden, all but ignoring the signs of the end of vampire civilisation as he had known it. Ahead there were more stairs – massive curving concrete stairs that seemed full of importance. He had descended hundreds of metres.

  Day turned his head, nostrils flaring as the vampire dropped from the high ceiling. He started moving but the wet, bedraggled thing slapped hands on his shoulders and wrenched him backwards. Day lost his footing and went the way he’d been pulled, twisting at the waist as much as he could and laying down blows with the pipe.

  Once they were both on the dirty concrete ground it was a matter of moments for the gruesome creature to entangle itself around him. Day slammed the metal pipe twice across the vampire’s face before the bar was ripped from his hand and thrown clatteringly away.

  “Lay down, puny human,” the monster hissed.

  Day continued to struggle as the vampire coiled legs as strong as steel springs around him. Day pulled the pistol towards his face and, for the briefest moment, considered shooting himself instead. Then he dutifully turned the waving muzzle around and squeezed the trigger three times before searing pain transfixed his grip and the gun disappeared.

  “Never again!” the vampire roared, its voice like the high-pitched whine of an engine.

  “Damn you . . . monster,” Day grunted, his words sounding weak to his own ears. He growled and struggled for air, yelling, “Your kind are finished! Drowned!”

  “Yes!” the vampire answered back with a harsh cry. It lifted Day by the shoulders and then slammed him down hard on the concrete. “You’re in our graveyard!”

  Day’s hand slipped from his attacker’s grip and by instinct alone he managed to get it around the vampire’s wizened throat. He averted his face as much to resist eye contact as to stop the mad creature’s poisonous drool splattering his face. It growled almost like it was being pleasured as Day attempted to crush the thing’s throat with all the strength he could summon to his hand.

  Slowly the vampire forced itself down over him. Long strands of spiderweb-coloured hair thick with the reek of putrefaction swept around him. He tried to resist, forearm bulging like an iron bar under duress, but the creature was too powerful and it settled down over him slowly and irresistibly, like night on a small town.

  Its breath was foetid. Under the vampire’s assault Day’s strength gave out completely. After so many hours and ordeals even his will to survive couldn’t summon any last reserves. The grinning vampire gave a greedy chuckle as its sharp teeth brushed across Day’s twisting neck and then, with one final retching cough, the monster suddenly slumped.

  Day came back to life the moment he realised the thing’s insane strength was no longer pinning him down. He shook off its hard grip and slid backwards, one hand lifting the vampire by the hair to keep it away. As he pulled his legs free and struggled upright, Day noticed the blood oozing from the vampire’s mouth and then the wooden spoke driven down through its back.

  Carlos stood in the weak light almost as pathetic and beaten as Day felt. As soon as Day was free, his legs gave out and he went down in a heap, only barely managing to keep kneeling and looking at his friend seemingly returned from the dead.

  The other survivor was standing naked except for a pair of black leather pants with a chunky utility belt attached. His feet were bare along with the rest of him. Despite Carlos’s stocky frame, his mulatto flesh seemed jaundiced and the skin loose. A number of scabs on his chest and the wounds from where he had been shot in the arm while entering the vampire tunnels were reduced to crusted black welts. He looked at Day with a mixture of horror and disbelief, his eyes bulging out luminous and dark beyond his control where the flesh itself had sunk in. His black hair, even where it grew on his face, was moulting at a rapid rate.

  “What happened to you, Carlos?” Day stammered.

  Carlos stared for long moments with his suddenly alien, owlish expression.

  “I died, Day,” he said in a hollow voice.

  “Died?”

  “Vamps wouldn’t let me go.”

  Day switched his gaze to the silent vampire, a length of wood rammed through its heart. Where the face and hands connected with the moist soil, the body was quickly dissolving down to the bone. Day shook his head slowly instead of making a speech, too tired and lost for words to have any hope of making sense.

  “You killed it,” he said eventually. The sound of his own voice was a surprise.

  “Stake through the heart, a-yup.”

  Day forced himself to stand. As he rose, he took in further details of Carlos’s devastated condition. Though he had a belt like the ghouls wore, there was no pistol in sight. The gun by Day’s feet felt like a lodestone and, exhausted as he was, Day was shocked to realise his instincts told him to destroy his friend like he had slaughtered so many other ghouls. He’d answered that call to instinctual survival in the past, but now he faltered.

  “You came from the other way?”

  “I was going outside,” Carlos said, and he gestured to the massive stairs.

  “But you’ve . . . seen?”

  “The vampires . . . the colony’s gone,” Carlos said weakly. “Washed away. Running water kills them.” He shrugged to show it was a recen
t discovery and just as surprising to him as it was to Day, who looked around himself anew with a stricken face that was half-surprise and half-delight.

  He thought of Kvelda abandoned to the rocks above them and made a slight motion towards the stairway. Carlos flinched and dabbed paper-dry lips with a pale tongue. With his seemingly-enlarged black eyes he settled a questioning look at Day who, though he understood what had gone unphrased, couldn’t help but glance at the ground once more and the gun lying there. Carlos flinched, almost literally a shadow of his former self, and Day took one step, scooping the pistol up and levelling it.

  “Shit,” Carlos gasped. “Christ, man?”

  “You were thinking about it,” Day chided.

  “Christ, Day! They ghouled me, man!”

  Day looked nervously between Carlos, one hand plaintively outstretched, and the stairs, freedom’s promise beckoning just as plain. He lowered the gun.

  “It’s a habit,” Day said.

  “Killing people?”

  “Survival.”

  Carlos nodded in such a bereft, earnest way Day knew the other man understood completely. Day merely thought about moving again and suddenly Carlos was in tears. He stood rooted to the spot in his pathos, a one-man tragedy with nowhere to go and no physical way to relieve his misery. Discoloured tears fell down his rapidly blinking face and Day stared back with an expression of mixed fear and uncertainty.

  “You never said a truer thing,” Carlos said, sniffing violently between tiny gasps. “Damned vamps gave me a choice. Didn’t they offer you?”