Vampires Overhead

by Alan Hyder

  ‘Let the girl tell her story and don’t interrupt,’ I said. ‘Go on, Janet.’

  ‘I asked Dad what the things were, on the boats over there, and heard him say something which made me turn round, and on the barge with us were some of them! Ugh!’ Janet shivered. ‘They were terrible. What are they, mister? You’ve seen them, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes. We’ve seen them,’ I said soberly. ‘We’ve seen them, but we haven’t the faintest idea what they are.’

  ‘Seen them,’ Bingen growled. ‘Seen them! Why, one of them was on me in the tunnel and it . . .’

  ‘We don’t want to hear about that now. Go on, kid.’

  ‘well, those horrible black birds were on the barge. Like bats I’ve seen pictures of, except that they were larger. And then they dropped all over us. Our barge was the same as the others. They were on Dad’s legs, and he was trying to kick them off. I ought to have helped him, but I was too frightened to move. I ought to have helped him.’

  ‘You couldn’t have done anything to help. We were frightened when we saw them, weren’t we, Bingen?’

  ‘Dad threw some off the barge, but as lots of them were coming he caught hold of me, pulled the cargo apart and pushed me in. Covered me over with the boards.’

  ‘Could your dad do anything with then? Hurt them?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I saw him throw quite a lot of them overboard. They kept on dropping. When he was pulling me into the cargo there were two on his legs. Hanging on while he carried me. I was terrified, and didn’t do anything to help.’

  ‘Of course you couldn’t have done anything,’ I assured her. ‘And then . . .?’

  ‘Then, I think I must have fainted. I’ve never fainted before in my life. But one of those things clambered on to me! It was horrible. Look.’ She extended her hand, and on the wrist was a tiny red puncture encircled by a ring of pinkily flushed skin. ‘That’s where it bit me, I think.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. I’ve got two marks on my cheek just like that,’ said Bingen. ‘Look here.’

  ‘Will you keep quiet! We don’t want to be reminded about it now,’ I told him curtly. ‘Forget it! Go on, Janet.’

  ‘Dad pushed me under the boards and piled them all over me. He pulled some out too. I could hear him calling that it was all right,’ the girl said. ‘Then I must have kept on fainting, lying there in the dark. I was so frightened. I was covered right up, you see, and couldn’t move. There was just a tiny crack I found later on, but the first time I peeped through I couldn’t see anything. Then it started to get hot. It grew hotter and hotter until I thought I was going to get burned. I could smell smoke and hear fire crackling, and I tried to throw off the boards, but I couldn’t. Then, when the light came, I peeped through the crack again and saw those things sitting on the deck, and close to the crack I could see something black, as if one of them was sitting on the piles of boards over me. So I lay still.’

  ‘There was probably a lot of them sitting there on top of you,’ said Bingen. ‘Waiting for you to come out.’

  ‘Shut up! Anyway, it was a good job you couldn’t get out, wasn’t it!’

  ‘Yes. I believe there were a lot of them, because I could feel the boards moving. So I wouldn’t have come out, if I could have. I lay there crying, until I seemed to have been in there for weeks. I started screaming every now and then. I screamed for help at first, and then, just because I was frightened. I cried because I couldn’t understand what had become of Dad. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t come and let me out.’

  ‘We couldn’t understand why the watchman didn’t come and let us out either, could we, Garry?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear us call out?’ I asked her. ‘Didn’t you hear us come aboard?’

  ‘Yes. I heard you hail us,’ Janet answered. ‘I was too frightened to answer at first, and then when I heard someone clambering up the side and go wandering all over the boat, throwing things about and swearing, that made me more frightened.’

  I looked grimly at Bingen.

  ‘He was searching for food,’ I told Janet. ‘We hadn’t had any for three days.’

  ‘I thought you were robbers.’

  Bingen’s hand went sheepishly to his pocket, in which reposed the twenty pounds he had taken from the cupboard.

  ‘You didn’t . . .’ the girl’s voice was anxious as she asked, ‘You didn’t see anything of Dad when you came aboard?’

  ‘No,’ I answered, and kicked Bingen’s ankle when I saw he was about to speak.

  I felt ashamed I hadn’t been gentler throwing her father overboard, but I was glad I had done so. If she had seen him . . .!

  ‘You’d better try and eat something. After all this time you’ll want something to get your strength back.’

  Bingen cut meat, placed it on biscuits, and, after a while trying vainly to swallow, Janet managed to eat. We sat there a long time, and she told us of her life on the barge, of her travels, mostly between The Pool and Gravesend, while Bingen and I made a fuss of her. She was such a plucky kid. That is what I thought.

  Eventually she dropped off to sleep, even whilst speaking, and we laid her in the bunk, covered her with blankets after I had removed her shoes. I watched her soberly, worriedly.

  ‘God, Bingen! What are we going to do with her?’

  ‘Oh, what d’you always do with girls? Train ’em up in the way they should go,’ he grinned. ‘I’ll look after her all right myself if you’re nervous.’

  ‘You’ll want looking after yourself,’ I told him menacingly, ‘if you don’t watch your step with her.’

  ‘Going to save her up for yourself?’

  ‘Don’t be a bigger fool than you can help, Bingen. And for the love of Mike, forget things like that about this kid. We’ll just take care of her until down the river we find someone to hand her over to.’

  Round about noon the girl woke with a tiny scream which brought both of us jumping to her side to soothe and reassure her until she wakened thoroughly. I wiped tears from her cheeks. Tears were never far from her eyes during the next few weeks, but all through she behaved so bravely that at times I was ashamed of my fears, and her courage made Bingen scowl and sulk occasionally.

  ‘We’ll make a good meal, and then we’ll be off along the river out of this,’ I said at last. ‘Come along, Janet, give us a hand to get dinner.’

  We dined satisfactorily from fried bacon, stale bread, and tea. We all gulped thirstily at our tea, for the cabin was hot, and a thin layer of fine grey ash covered everything. With the meal finished, we set about preparing for our departure.

  ‘If there’s anything you want to take along, Janet, we’ll pack it for you.’

  ‘I should like to take a few things.’

  She packed some little treasures into a bag, and foolishly I carried them instead of the parcel of food I wanted to take.

  ‘Aw, we’ll be able to get plenty of food,’ Bingen averred. ‘There’s no need to load ourselves up with parcels.’

  Against my intuition, I gave in to him, and when we clambered up the hatchway we were free of all encumbrances but for Janet’s parcel. The sword and rifle lay in the dinghy.

  The sky was blue, unmarked by any moving thing but a few fat, lazy white clouds, and we turned from our inspection of it to the water and the close-by barges. Nothing moved on their burned decks. We lifted the girl from below, and then, one by one, clambered down into the dinghy.

  ‘Now we’re off,’ I called cheerily, for Janet was on the point of tears at leaving her wrecked home. ‘Soon we’ll be out of all this and among people again.’

  ‘Will we?’

  ‘Of course we will,’ and somehow as I said it I knew that I was wrong.

  The dinghy swung into the stream while I fitted oars into rowlocks.

  ‘Oh! Look! Both the Wanderer and the Daisy Bell are burned out,’ the girl cried as we swept from under the bows of the barge into midstream. ‘And the others as well. The shore! Everything’s burned!’

  ‘Yo
u don’t want to trouble too much about that. Don’t want to look about too much as we go along.’ I tried to make my voice comforting. ‘The whole of London we’ve passed until now has been burned. When we get lower down we’ll find things better.’

  Hastily, I pulled away from some corpses surrounded by debris floating past, and hoped fervently she had not seen. From their appearance they seemed to me as if they had been caught by Vampires on some vessel, and, when the boat burned to the water’s edge, floated free. Stealthily I tried to see if she had noticed them. From the whiteness of her face and the quick beating of her bosom under her jersey I gathered she had, but she smiled at me bravely, and I dug oars in the river and pulled on.

  Janet was game. She must have had a worse time under those piled boards than Bingen and I, but she behaved splendidly throughout the whole trip. Alone on the barge! What must she have gone through? Perhaps it was because she did not comprehend sufficiently. Perhaps now, her confidence in Bingen and I was implicit. At all events, it was only when she got into direct contact with the Vampires she actually lost control of herself. Even when I could see her thoughts turning anguishingly about her mother and father, she did not break down.

  The dinghy lurched on, unsteady under my amateur oarsmanship, a tiny interloping spot in a fantastic grey, red, and blue world.

  It was incredible how the fire spread, desolating the countryside, for nowhere, that we could see, had escaped. Stretched to the horizon, grey ash and dull red, smouldering, smoke-topped debris. No longer, except at intervals, was the hissing roar of flame in our ears, but the river was far from silent, for intermittently came crashes and explosions as some tottering shell of a building fell. Here, with the river opening out, it was cooler. The ash did not trouble us so much, but the bigger ships were here, and it was dangerous work passing them. Spars and timbers smouldered and made our eyes smart. Flotsam and jetsam drifted past.

  ‘God! Stop pulling.’ Bingen’s voice held terror. ‘We can’t go any further. Garry, look!’

  Turning a sweeping bend, we rounded the river to run into a very inferno!

  Ahead, on the northern bank, were clustered the squat tanks of an oil company, and burning oil, running from gaping cylinders, spread in a solid mass of flaming petroleum across the river. From bank to bank was a wall of smoke-topped flame. Black and scarlet. Underneath the river raced, boiling and tumbling.

  ‘There isn’t any way we can get through?’ I stared from side to side. ‘We’ll have to land. We can’t go by there.’

  ‘Pull a little closer, so that we can see.’

  ‘If you haven’t got eyes to see from here, going closer to that isn’t any good, Bingen.’

  ‘What’re we going to do?’

  ‘We can choose between the two banks,’ I answered, scanning each side of the river. ‘The south side looks best to me.’

  To the north was an open space hemmed by burned buildings, where grass had once been green, and trees once dressed a park. Now it was ash-grey, with tree-stumps protruding grimly. The south was more promising. Swampy marshland lay flatly, unbroken along the shore, and buildings were scattered, so that there had been nothing to burn, though grey ash covered the country.

  ‘Garry!’ Bingen whispered to me, and his thumb jerked significantly towards the sky over his shoulder. ‘Look at the back of us.’

  In the distance I saw a cloud moving slowly towards the horizon.

  ‘No need to worry about them. Too far away. Besides, they’re moving away from us.’

  ‘No matter how far away they are, they’re to be worried about,’ Bingen growled, and followed the cloud with anxious eyes. ‘We’ve got to get somewhere to be safe, and the sooner we do it the better I’ll like it.’

  ‘All we had in mind was just getting away down the river,’ I mused. ‘Now we’ve gone as far as we can, what next? It seems to me, the only thing we can do is settle on some definite place to go, and make for it. We might go rambling all over the country and then be caught napping. You got any suggestions, Bingen?’

  ‘No. I only want to get away.’

  ‘What about you, Janet? Can you suggest where we ought to make for?’

  ‘No. I only know the river and the riversides between here and Gravesend.’

  ‘Seems then, it’s up to me.’ I thought rapidly, pulling meditatively on the oars when we threatened to drift closer to the burning oil. ‘Let’s weigh things up. We want a refuge from those things if they should come back. We want food, water, and to find other survivors. To try to pick on a direction that would bring us to other people would be striking off blindly anywhere. What we want is some definite objective with sanctuary at the end of the trail. That means we want somewhere with something like our tunnel or a cave.’

  ‘We can’t go back to the tunnel,’ Bingen said foolishly.

  ‘A cave. Let me think. Once I took a bus out to the country past Croydon. What was the name of the place? Churley. That was it! Churley Hills. I remember, in the middle of the hills about half a dozen cottages in a valley.’

  ‘What good will they be to us?’ Bingen scoffed. ‘We want some dug-out, or pit, or something.’

  ‘Oh, don’t I know it! Wait a minute. The gardens of those cottages ran right back into a cliff, and in the cliff they had got caves cut. Served as stores or coal-houses, or something. If the whole of the country is like this,’ I waved a hand round the boat, ‘we might be able to live in the cottages, they were stone, unless my memory fails me, and dive for the caves if necessary. If neither of you can suggest anything better, I’ll pull in to the bank and we’ll make a start.’

  ‘Let’s go away from here,’ Bingen urged. ‘You want to get away from here too, don’t you, Janet?’

  ‘I want to, but I should like to try and find out where Dad and Mother are,’ she said. ‘But I’ll go where you say.’

  ‘There isn’t a chance in a thousand of finding your people right away,’ I told her. ‘Later on, when the things have gone, and folks start appearing from wherever they’ve got to, then we can have a look round for them.’

  Bingen, in the bows with a length of timber ready to fend off burning driftwood, nudged me and nodded towards the sky. Again I saw a cloud of Vampires. We did not drop to the bottom of the boat for fear of alarming Janet, but we watched anxiously, until we saw they moved away from us, and then I pulled once again on the oars, and Bingen turned back to his task of watching the water ahead. We neared the bank.

  ‘Wait a minute, Garry,’ Bingen called. ‘There’s something in the water. Looks like a cash-box. Pull a bit to the left while I see what’s in it.’

  ‘Don’t be foolish. What’s the use of money to us?’ I demurred, but bent over the side of the boat, and as it seemed interesting, pulled the dinghy closer. ‘Fish it out then, and be quick.’

  Among some broken ships’ timbers littered with sodden clothing, supported upon the wood, there floated a black box, with corners strongly reinforced by iron bands. Bingen brought it aboard with a heave.

  ‘Shan’t be a minute, it’s nearly open now. May be some worthwhile stuff in it.’

  The lid wrenched open, and he pulled out handfuls of wet papers—books, what I think was a ship’s log, a handful of coins, and several charts. Bingen was disappointed, but when I saw what lay at the bottom I leant forward excitedly. Two Colt revolvers and a small waterproof package of what looked like ammunition.

  ‘Give me those guns. Open the packet to see if they are cartridges, and find out if they’re dry.’

  Taking the guns, I spun cylinders and broke them. They were wet, but otherwise in good condition. I dried them carefully upon my trousers.

  ‘The ammo’ seems all right,’ Bingen told me, and handed over some cartridges.

  ‘I think maybe these’ll be of more use to us than a dozen boxes of gold. They may be useless against the Vampires, but if nearly all the people have been wiped out, there’ll probably be gangs about, and it’ll be every man for himself.’ I loaded the guns and gave
one to Bingen, sticking the other in the waistband of my trousers. ‘Ah! That gives me a comforting feeling of security, jammed against my side.’

  The dinghy ran ashore upon a mud flat, and making sure the ground would bear me, I waded past the mud, tethered the boat to a clump of marsh grass, and returned to carry the girl ashore. Bingen, I saw, had made ready to do that, and I grinned at him when later he clambered from the boat and, taking another course, stumbled deep in the water to his armpits.

  ‘Trouble is, with you your behind’s too close to the ground,’ I called to him. And while he struggled in the mud and water, whispered quickly to the girl. ‘Bingen is quite all right, but he’s a bit of a . . . Oh, I dunno, he’s a bit of a ladykiller. You don’t want to be too chummy with him. Understand?’

  ‘I think so, mister,’ Janet answered. ‘But I think he is all right, really.’

  ‘Of course he is, but, well, I suppose you’re not old enough to understand. But anyway, don’t flirt with him. You understand that?’

  ‘Old enough? . . . Why . . .’ and then she glanced from me and called to Bingen when he landed floundering and swearing softly, ‘Are you all right, mister?’

  ‘Mister?’ Bingen raised eyebrows at her and grinned at me. ‘Mister! You aren’t on a boat now. There’s no misters here. Call me Bingen, the same as this long-legged camel does.’

  ‘We’ll all have time to make friends properly and call each other pet names later on,’ I cut in. ‘Now we are ashore, the best thing we can do is to get moving towards Churley, and move quickly. As it is, I doubt whether we’ll get there tonight. And we want to get some sort of a caboose to settle in before it’s dark. Come on.’

  We went winding among the tufted clumps of tall grass and hummocks of the swampy marshlands, towards where a cluster of buildings indicated a road. The damp grass over which we passed was hardly burned, but everywhere ash had fallen, so that we were almost deceived into walking upon the hidden stagnant water. Somehow, the fact that we had a definite objective cheered us, and, reaching the road, we set off briskly.

  ‘If we see anything better on the road than the caves I remember at Churley, we’ll stay there, but anyway, it seems we’ll have to find some place for tonight.’