“Oh really? Indeed? Bah! Because in all my days, after some thirty-three long years of a life of which I’m growing heartily sick and tired, I have yet to see, touch, smell or even hear of a single ‘meek’ fly-by-night! What, these nightmarish creatures that we run from—scurrying like cockroaches from a dead or dying refuge to the safety, hopefully, of another—meek? No, never! Not one of ’em! Show me a scorpion without a stinger, or a dog without fleas, and I’ll show you a meek fly-by-night! But except for some kind of miracle, or an act of God, in whom I no longer believe, you can be sure they will inherit the Earth! And then, when there’s none of us left—I mean if that time should ever come, because I’m sure you understand that this is just me in one of my moods—what will they eat then, eh?”
While Garth had heard all this before, frequently, still he listened. Because his father knew things; because he remembered things he’d been told, immemorial things about the old times—the good times, allegedly—before the war. That was one reason why Garth sat still, hearing the Old Man out, but mainly it was because Zach was his Old Man: his father, and one of the oldest of men! What, all of thirty-three years? Truly amazing when the average was four or five years less!
And as so often before Garth would have gone on listening—but at that very moment he had glimpsed, or perhaps more surely sensed, a telltale flash of red on the periphery of his vision: a crimson beam that came lancing in from somewhere out there in the night, flickering up and down, back and forth along the column’s length…a beam that the left-flank-forward outrider was flashing from his vantage point in the darkness, through one of his torch’s three tinted lenses: the red lens! Red for danger!
Garth jerked his head round in that direction, towards the source of the beam; and here it came again, sweeping along the tracked raupers, trucks and trundles. By then everyone had seen it, and the column had come to a halt. Zach had stopped muttering; he’d already taken his pump-action shotgun from its sheath on the rack, his reflexes still faster than Garth’s own, which perhaps explained something of the Old Man’s longevity. And as Garth loaded his weapon, so they sat there, anxiously awaiting orders from up front, from Big Jon’s command rauper, where the convoy’s leader stood upright in the turret, scanning the darkness through ancient night-light binoculars.
They waited, Garth and Zach and all the others in the trundle—their nerves jumping and hearts pumping—waited for Big Jon’s response which, if it sounded as a long single blast on a whistle, would signal a false alarm when all would be well. But if it came as three sort blasts, then everyone would know that they were coming!
Them! Like wispy locusts floating out of the dark, sighing wraiths with their glowing eyes and ragged, fluttering shrouds: the fly-by-nights! And by then every man and woman, and most of the young ones too, they would all be assuming defensive positions—and just as fast as they could move!
Already the men in the trundle had done loading their guns, the harsh ch-ching of steel cocking mechanisms ringing loud in the sudden silence. On the far side of the trundle Ned Singer’s hands were hovering close over the quick-release straps securing his bike to the exterior of the vehicle. Shooting a glance at Garth, he saw the youth following suit; likewise four other men, two on Garth’s side, two more on Singer’s. And as for the women, many of them with side arms of their own: they were now huddling protectively over the youngest children.
Everyone was ready…
Garth looked across at Layla, who was looking right back at him. Her face wore a strange expression, which like his own was worth a hundred words, or perhaps just three? So Garth dared to hope. But sometimes—times like this—the future he desired seemed way beyond his present reach, if not entirely unattainable…
There came a shout from up front: Big Jon’s query, directed at the unseen outrider, perhaps a hundred yards or more off the port side…
A moment’s pause that seemed to last a full minute or more, until at last the lancing beam sliced the night again. But this time it flashed green! A false alarm—thank God!—followed up at once by a single long blast on the leader’s whistle; then a massed and clearly audible sigh of relief as everyone began to breathe again…
III
With the dawn came more terror, more fear; not of fly-by-nights but of the dawn itself, the fatal light that painted a crack of gold on the eastern horizon.
Hinged panels of lead shielding were lowered from the roofs of the convoy’s vehicles into positions on the right, the side facing the rising sun: that great fireball whose lethal, seething rays would soon be pouring down upon the earth and all that moved naked over it. But in the distance and not too far ahead, extensive ruins were beginning to rear their shattered skeletal shells; while winding in from nowhere apparently, a once-metalled, potholed, bramble- and weed-strewn road led directly into the derelict town or city.
“In the old days,” Garth’s father told him, peering ahead, “this place would have had a name. But the few maps I’ve seen date back to a time years before the war, and as far as I know it isn’t marked on any of them. It was probably new in its day, before the bombs rained down. Anyway, it seems likely that Big Jon discovered at least some indication of it, because he sure as hell led us right to it! And his timing couldn’t be better; in the next hour or so we’ll be needing all the shelter we can get!”
Garth looked at the dull sheen of the leaden shielding, and said: “The lead shuts out the light. I quite like the light. It…it’s different! I’m not yet used to it, after the generated light in the Southern Refuge. But I do like it.”
“So do we all,” Zach answered. “The heat, too…but there are different kinds of heat. Up there in the atmosphere—which I’m told was thicker before the war—there was something they called an ozone layer. That’s mostly gone now. Anyway, I’m sure you learned about it in school in the refuge and probably understand the science at least as well as I do: how apart from ordinary heat, radiation from the sun gets through much easier now. And if you add to that the lingering nuclear radiation from the bombs…the overall effect is deadly! Yes, the lead shuts out the light some, but at the same time its great weight shuts out the radiation, too—well, a little of it, thank goodness!”
Garth nodded. “And during the war? It was nuclear radiation made the fly-by-nights, right?”
“After the war,” Zach corrected him, and nodded. “But there are several different theories. I go for the one that says they were here from the beginning, evolving along with the first men. You see, every creature has its parasites: the dogs have fleas, even our guard dogs. The birds, what few are left—like those scabby crows we saw when we sheltered up yesterday—they have mites. Even the bees in the flowers under those trees where we camped. And since time began these creatures have been learning to hide themselves, surviving, evolving. It’s instinct, that’s all; but it makes them hard to seek out, hard to get rid of. Likewise the fly-by-nights.
“The theory has it that they too learned to stay out of the light, hiding themselves from men. In the beginning there might have been just a few of them; they’d keep their numbers down in order to stay hidden. In the times I’m talking about, all those hundreds or thousands of years ago, whenever they fed on people they would probably kill their prey, devouring all so as not to make more like themselves. And so they were always there, these parasites, living on the blood and flesh of men and beasts.
“However, for all their evil intelligence they would sometimes make mistakes; accidentally leaving clues that caused the folk of those times to suspect their existence, their presence. Why, they might even be caught red-handed! And it was like that—slowly but surely—that these monsters became part of humanity’s myths and legends…”
“When I was just a child,” Garth said, frowning at an elusive memory from the past, “back there in the refuge, I remember seeing—what was it called, a film, a ‘movie’?—that showed a very different kind of fly-by-night. They weren’t the same as our fly-by-nights and men didn’t call the
m by that name.”
“Vampires!” Zach nodded again. “You have a good memory, for you were only three or four years old! That was a training film in the days before our viewscreens and discs gave up the ghost. And despite that it was a fiction—a so-called ‘entertainment’ from the old world—still the folk of the clan, even the young ones and others who might never be required to venture outside, they were obliged to see it in order to instill in them at least a measure of dread: some knowledge however false, misshapen, or exaggerated, of the evil lurking out there in the dark. And you remember that, eh?”
“I remember it frightened me!” Garth replied. “I was a just a child, after all. All that blood and screaming…of course I was afraid!”
“That’s right,” said Zach. “It was supposed to frighten you. That was its purpose. But what you saw up there on that screen: all that blood…that’s not how it is.” He shook his head.
Garth stared at his father and said: “I know. That’s what I asked myself after I destroyed that thing: ‘Where’s the blood?’ I saw spongy pulp and pink froth, but—”
“—But no blood, or very little? And then dry as dust? Yes, that’s how it is.” And yet again Zach’s nod. “The fly-by-nights are mutations, Garth. And you’re right, for in the aftermath of the war the radiation did indeed change them. They couldn’t inhabit the refuges—shelters as they were called then—because men would surely discover and do away with them. And out there, under the open sky, perhaps because they were changeling creatures in the first place, the new change was a whole lot faster. The ones the sun didn’t destroy, it turned them into the monsters that have preyed on us—mainly on our scavs—ever since. You should count yourself lucky, Garth, that working as a scav on Ned Singer’s team those few nights, you haven’t come across any of them before now!”
Garth was still frowning. “So, radiation either killed them off or turned them into what they are now,” he began. “But they seem to me like mad things! What of their intellig—?”
“—Waned, and failed them.” His father pre-empted him. “For as well as altering their flesh and bones, that weird heat also ate at their minds…or at least, so we believe. On the other hand—” and now he frowned, “—well, there have been one or two cases of intelligence lingering over a while…”
“Lingering over? From what?”
“From folk who have been taken, bitten and changed, but not killed. When I was a scav along with Big Jon Lamon, we actually saw it happen. We lost one of ours—Jack Foster, he was called—who…who…” But there Zach paused.
“Go on,” said Garth. “Jack Foster, who…what?”
“Who came back! Came back as a fly-by-night. Came back with a swarm, maybe twenty or thirty of them, that tried to get into the refuge! Because Jack knew, you see? Because he remembered!”
Garth nodded. “Maybe there were some among them who knew he was important, that Jack Foster could lead them to…to their next meal, in the refuge! And so he was spared to become one of them. Something like that, anyway.”
“That’s what we figured,” said. Zach. “That until the change took him in full, and his mind, too, Jack would have remembered us—and about the refuge! In which case he should have remembered how the entrance was a gauntlet! But whether he did or not it made no difference, didn’t stop him. When they came swarming out of the darkness the watchmen wiped them out half-a-dozen at a time! It was…oh, a glorious slaughter! God, how I wish it was like that every time, but without someone being taken!”
Garth thought things through a while, considered everything the Old Man had told him, and finally said: “So actually you’re saying that perhaps there’s a spark of intelligence in the fly-by-nights after all? But we already knew that, didn’t we? That while they no longer need to hide from men—because they are the masters of the surface world now, where there simply aren’t any men—well, not until us—still they have sense enough to take cover from the sun. However mindless and deranged they may be, it appears they’re not that crazy!”
“Instinct,” Zach replied. “Not true intelligence, but instinct pure and simple.”
And, believing him to be correct: “Survival!” said Garth.
“That’s how the theory goes, yes,” said Zach. “Except maybe you shouldn’t be so quick in taking it for granted that there’s no men above ground any more. I mean, it’s possible that you’re right, but…well, in the old times during and after the war, there couldn’t have been enough room for everyone in the shelters, and people are very adaptable. I’m sure you won’t remember this Garth, but again when you were just a child the occasional outsider—sometimes a family, even a small group, but as wild as animals through generations of cowering, existing, surviving outside—would come to us in their search for sanctuary. Then, if we’d lost folk and had room to spare, we would sometimes let them in. But the last lot…well, it must have been thirteen, maybe fourteen years ago, and since then: nothing. Still I suppose there could be others out in the open even now, though how they get by I just don’t know.”
“Survival,” Garth said again. “But if so, then it’s against all the odds…”
By then the convoy was into the city’s outskirts, negotiating a rubble-strewn road with the gaunt shells of burnt-out or shattered buildings growing up on both sides.
The leader, Big Jon Lamon, grotesque in a nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare suit, stood tall in the turret of his rauper (or his “kettenrauper,” according to a hand-painted sign flaking away on its rusty iron flank, though no one could remember the designation’s origin: actually that of an armoured half-track, a museum piece in miraculously working order) where Big Jon had brought it to a temporary halt, and from which he hastened the convoy’s vehicles on as they passed him by.
“That big building up front there,” Big Jon pointed, shouting orders at the driver in the shielded cab of the tow-tractor that pulled Garth and Zach’s trundle. “Get parked up alongside, deep in its shade, until we can sort out the accommodation. Mind you: no one goes inside, not yet!” Then as the vehicle trundled by and Big Jon spied a familiar face:
“Ho there, Zach! How goes it with you?”
“Battered and bruised, and aching in my back, my belly, and my two sides!” Garth’s father replied with a shout and a little dry humour. “Other than which I reckon I’m probably okay! Sorry for the women and kids, that’s all.”
Big Jon, having begun to laugh, stopped at once and nodded. “Well, with luck,” he yelled, his voice almost lost in the thunder of the tow-tractor’s motor as the convoy rumbled on, “today they’ll get to rest up all they want—God bless ’em all!” Following which, Big Jon and his rauper both were lost in billowing clouds of dust.
“Aye, but before anyone rests up there may be more work for some of you,” Zach muttered, as he fixed his son with a worried look. “Dangerous work at that.” He might have said more but instead, shifting his gaze beyond Garth, he nodded his acknowledgement of Ned Singer who was coming round from behind the weapons rack, swaying toward them in their corner seats.
Zach’s meaning had been perfectly clear, however, and when Garth said, “Fly-by-nights?” it was more than just a question.
“I hope not,” Zach replied, under his breath, “but it’s not unlikely. Some of these buildings still have roofs and could be occupied. In respect of which—well here comes your boss right now, doubtless to issue his instructions.”
Answering Zach’s nod with one of his own, however perfunctory, Singer took hold of a dangling strap to steady himself and leaned over Garth. “’Prentice Slattery,” he growled, “I suppose you know what comes next, and what I expect of you? But are you ready for it?”
Garth accepted that he was still an apprentice of sorts, at best a novice where fly-by-nights were concerned, and answered: “I’ll be ready when you call for me, Mr. Singer. But may I ask, what’s your reckoning? Is it likely we’ll be facing danger this time?”
“Danger, for you? Not if you watch and learn,”
Singer grunted. “Not if you stick close, do as you’re told and quick about it. The reason I bother myself with you: you’re my youngest, my weakest, my least experienced. If you’d gone scavenging with me sooner—if you had a bit more of that behind you, back at the Southern Refuge—I wouldn’t be so concerned. I would know you better, how you’d think and react in a crisis or difficult situation. But you’re a Slattery, and—”
“—And what Ned?” Zach’s voice was dangerously quiet where he leaned forward, coming half out of his seat.
Singer scowled but drew back a little. “Well, you know what they say,” he said. “Like father, like son…eh, Zach? I mean, there’s four other men at risk in the squad, and I can’t afford to sit still for any wild stuff. That first kill your boy made: fine; all well and good; another fly-by-night gone to whichever hell! But I was there and witnessed it. He was in a panic, your boy, and shooting wild; for which no great need since I had his back! As for that kill: it was a lucky shot, that’s all; a very fortunate shot for everyone concerned.”
“Like father, like son, eh?” Zach’s voice was quieter still, an almost inaudible growl, and yet more dangerous for that.
Garth put his hand on his father’s tense, slightly shaking, thinly-fleshed thigh and told Singer, “You needn’t be concerned about any wild stuff from me, Ned—er, Mr. Singer. I’ll stick close, do as I’m told—and I’ll be very quick about it!”
Singer nodded. “Good! And that’s all I’m asking. But listen now: I won’t be making any exceptions. Next time you let loose, start blasting away left, right, and centre, you won’t find Ned Singer ducking your stray rounds. No, for I’ll he looking after Number One, meaning me! It’s fly-by-nights we aim to kill, not each other! So then, ’prentice Slattery, is all understood?”