In another hour it would be most of the way to dark but he didn’t say anything. They were four fully grown and armed men and they could look after themselves. He nodded. “Another hour then.”
The sun seemed to visibly move across the sky and his shadow became longer every few minutes. He could still hear the water running to his left but the river was now hidden behind a bank of trees and overgrown bushels. It was tiring and their water had run out. He was tempted to suggest calling it off before the hour mark. But he had already missed the twins’s bedtime so a few hours more out wouldn’t make much difference.
Ahead of him Aaron stopped. Ben stopped beside him. “Did you see something?” he said.
“When did you last come this way?” he said.
The two brothers stopped beside him, yawned and stretched. “What’s going on?”
Ben ignored them. “By river? Couple of years I guess. Before the twins anyway. Why?”
Aaron nodded. “Come here,” he said.
He looked back at the two brothers who showed little concern about the setting sun or that their question had been ignored. Then he walked away from them and followed Aaron through a rough path that had formed between two bushes.
On the other side was the river. About two metres below them where the land had risen imperceptibly as they walked. The greenish water rushed past below and he followed it to the wooden structure that looked something like a bridge spanning the banks.
“What do you make of that?” said Aaron.
Ben wondered if Aaron had already known about the structure. It wasn’t clear to him what it was. Perhaps he’d had an ulterior motive for the ‘one more hour’. “What is it?” he said.
“So you didn’t see it last time you came out?”
Ben shook his head and felt as dumb as the brothers.
“I thought not. Looks like they’ve done some more work on it recently.”
“Do you know what it is?”
Aaron sighed. “Best guess: a dam.”
“A dam?”
He nodded. “It’s right up the flow of the river from Sanctuary, block the water here and we’ll soon dry up.”
“Who would…” But he didn’t need to finish. The answer was obvious; if the vamps dried out the river they could walk right into the village and take whoever they wanted. But vamps didn’t build, they weren’t organised. They were just mindless beasts. Unfortunately the available evidence did not support this theory. “We have to do something.”
Aaron nodded. “London.”
“London? What for?” said Ben.
“Weapons,” said Aaron. “They’re coming for us Ben and we need to be able to defend ourselves.”
“We’ve got weapons, haven’t we?”
Aaron held up his crossbow. It had been made in the village based on a design from a textbook Ben himself had salvaged. It was rough, inelegant, it took about a minute to reload and it wasn’t accurate over long distances. “These things? Ben, how many vamps do you think it took to build this?”
He shrugged.
“Dozens, maybe as many as a hundred and that’s just the workers. What about the ones behind it?”
Ben didn’t like feeling dumb, it felt too close to the truth to be funny. He was a worker, not a thinker, but he didn’t need to have that pointed out to him. “What do you mean?” he said.
“Someone had to plan that, they had to find somewhere to get the material and the tools. That isn’t the product of a bunch of worker ants.”
That made a cruel kind of sense. The few vamps that he had encountered had been primal, instinctive creatures, certainly not capable of the kind of reasoned thinking it would require to build something like a dam. So maybe there was another set of vamps, smarter than the grunts that attacked people in fields.
“There’s a place in London,” continued Aaron. He looked around as if someone might be watching them. Maybe the brothers could have been but they were no where to be seen. “When everything happened,” he said, apparently happy that they were safe, “we holed up in The Tower. It was on the river, we only had to defend one side.”
Ben listened, fascinated despite the dreadful nature of the situation. Aaron’s past was, until that moment, a mystery to him. He had never wanted to talk about it before. Ben had assumed it was for the same reason no one else wanted to talk about the past; it hurt too much to remember the world that used to be. But now it turned out that there was more to it than that.
“The PM, the King, everyone considered valuable was moved in so they could be defended. There were plans for what we would do after the threat was eliminated…” he shook his head. “…we were going to start again and build a new world.”
“They over ran the castle?” Ben guessed.
Aaron nodded. “We had a few weeks but it was never going to last. If we’d had a few more days we might have been able to get more people out. In the end it was just me and Anthony.”
Ben had been too young when it happened to really consider what happened to the leaders of the country and now that he was old enough they seemed distant and unimportant. He doubted he would have been too concerned about it at the time. He knew that at some point in the past there had been a king but what did that matter now?
“There were weapons there?” he said.
Aaron nodded. “We took what we could but it’s only enough for a few people.” He nodded towards the dam. “If this works we’ll need to arm the whole village.”
“Maybe it would be easier to just move on,” he said. “We live on boats after all.”
“Yeah, right. Half of them are so built up it would be easier to move a block of flats. Besides, if the vamps are smart enough to build something like this they’ll just catch up with us again. We need a way to defend ourselves.”
Ben nodded. It made sense and he couldn’t see a way around it. “Why didn’t you say that before? Why all that rubbish about getting supplies?”
Aaron lowered his voice. “Do you trust him?”
“Who?”
“Nicholas. Do you trust him?”
Ben thought about it. He didn’t like Nicholas, that was for sure, but he trusted him, didn’t he? He had the best interest of Sanctuary in mind. “Don’t you?”
Aaron rubbed the back of his neck and when he was done, said simply, “no.”
How long had they been there now? The darkness was creeping over them like a blanket. He wanted to know more, wanted to find out why Aaron didn’t trust Nicholas but this was not the time. “We have to tell him,” he said.
“I think you’re right. I wanted you to see it first.”
The dark crossed over the watery valley between the two banks. Ben thought he began to sense, rather than see, movement. The bank opposite had been stripped of vegetation and looked a lot like the parts of Back Field that had been ploughed. Now the ground seemed to pulse and undulate as though something were pushing from below.
“We need to move,” said Aaron.
Ben nodded his head in agreement and started to turn until he felt Aaron’s hand on his arm.
“Ben, I don’t think we should tell people about this.”
“It’s between you and me,” he said. “But we tell Nicholas in the morning.”
Aaron nodded. “Agreed.”
He wanted to get into why Aaron didn’t trust Nicholas but now wasn’t the time. They walked back through the path of broken trees and arrived to find the brothers with their crossbows aimed at their hearts.
When they saw that it was them they relaxed and lowered their weapons. “We thought you was … one of them.”
There was no time to discuss that either. Ben led the way back along the river. Despite being thirsty and exhausted they moved quickly. Ben, at the front, motivated by the image of the dam and the thought of how many vamps were now behind them. How, he wondered, could they have been so close for so long? Shouldn’t they have known?There were so many questions and he knew he wouldn’t get answers to them all.