“Reception was poor; we couldn’t be certain of the precise contents of the message, which seemed to be a request—even an entreaty—for people! By which I mean human reinforcements for a refuge decimated by fly-by-night depredation! Though the message was weak and fragmented, we learned this much at least: that the folk of this distant community had been attacked, suffering enormous losses before finally destroying the local swarm; also that they now offered safe harbour to anyone who could find his way to their co-ordinates. Moreover, head tech Fielding believes these co-ordinates are known to us, from marks made by our forebears on what few pre-war maps have been preserved!”
Here pausing to let all of that sink in, Big Jon Lamon had relaxed just a little, relieved to note that the various family and craft groups had now begun to talk excitedly among themselves. For finally they had recognized at least something of how certain of his previous statements now made sense. And so for a quarter-minute Big Jon had stayed silent, letting the buzz gain momentum as it rippled through the crowd…
II
Garth Slattery’s thoughts, memories from a comparatively recent life which now seemed a thousand years in the past, were abruptly interrupted when the trundle swayed, lurching over an uneven mound of stony debris. Garth’s father, Zach, grasped his shoulder to hold him steady.
“Asleep, were you?” Zach inquired.
The trundle had steadied up and Garth shook his head. “Day-dreaming,” he answered. “Thinking back in time, to the Southern Refuge. Compared to this journey, it no longer seems such a bad place!”
His father nodded. “Then I’d advise you to think of what we might have at journey’s end. It’s no good dwelling in the past, Garth. Especially one that’s burning in a cold, invisible fire, or perhaps beginning to shine a little, back in that great dead hole in the ground!”
“As you say,” Garth had to agree. “But I know you too well, Father, and that your occasional talk of a future Eden is meant only to buoy me up. And really there’s no need; I’m only young, but as I’ve often heard you say, hope springs eternal. Well, it does in me anyway; and I want you to know I neither despair nor fear for whatever lies ahead—though I suspect that you do, if only for my sake…” He paused to offer a frustrated shrug, and then went on: “I think what I’m trying to say is that I’m hopeful, and that I do have plans for the future.”
With which he almost unconsciously glanced across the weapons rack in the trundle’s central aisle, to the row of seats on the far side where Layla Morgan sat beside Ned Singer, just out of earshot by reason of the trundle’s banging and rattling.
Garth’s father noticed, smiling as he correctly interpreted his son’s glance and something of his “plans for the future.”
“Perhaps you’d be more comfortable over on that side, eh?”
It was no good pretending; Garth had given himself away on too many occasions recently; and as he knew his father, so Zach knew him just as well, if not better. And sighing, he answered, “Layla can’t seem to decide who she likes best, me or Ned Singer. Older and more experienced—the important leader of a scav team, at least as was—Ned may be more to her taste.”
“Maybe so,” said Zach, “but I noticed it was Ned who seated himself beside Layla—not the other way around. As to who she likes best: you’ll never know unless you ask her. And remember, we mate young in the clan, for children are our future—assuming we’re to have one! As for Ned Singer: you should watch out for him. Ned’s too excitable and has a bad temper; doesn’t like to be beaten, not at anything. He had a wife, taken by disease. She was a frail thing and I didn’t know her well. There were no children, and…I don’t know, perhaps I shouldn’t mention it, but from what I saw of her she seemed to bruise too easily…”
With that said, and as he looked here and there around the swaying trundle, Zach’s thoughts and his mood turned dark once more. Garth was right: it was only for him that Zach lightened up from time to time. But inside he had felt empty—angry and frustrated, sad and despondent—ever since his wife, Garth’s mother, had died in childbirth. While no blame attached to the boy, still the father had never stopped grieving.
Now like Garth he let his memories drift back in time, but a great deal farther back…
One night all those years ago, not long after Angela died, Zach had taken his team out into the dark; not so much to scavenge as to hunt fly-by-nights! For in his embittered mind they were to blame that the refuge’s so-called “hospital,” like all of its facilities, was so poorly equipped. And oh, they’d done some cleansing, some killing, that night! Zach, like a cursing, berserk warrior out of olden times, riding the devils down and blowing them to hell one after the other—at least until he’d lost control of his machine, his powerful motorized mountain bike, crashing it and breaking his right leg sideways at the knee, resulting in the painful, awkward limp that he’d suffered ever since. It had put an end to Zach’s scavenging, but never his grieving or his anger…
And now his mind returned to the present.
Several of the men in the trundle were cleaning and oiling their personal weapons: antique rifles and shotguns from as far back as the 21st century—museum pieces scavenged from a shattered city close to the Southern Refuge—as well as many and various sidearms, and a few far heavier pieces; even a grenade-launcher, and a vicious-looking short-barreled machine gun.
Watching the men at work and nodding, if mainly to himself, Zach told Garth, “Aye, look at them. All of them hardened warriors now, though more properly survivors. Oh, we fight when we must and with all we’ve got, just to survive, to avoid extinction! For our hideous enemy rarely takes captives, and when he does…well, they don’t keep too long! Ever hungry, he fights recklessly, even insanely; puts himself in harm’s way in order to gorge; that and only that! And never a thought—if indeed he’s capable of thought—for his own survival, not that we’ve ever been able to tell. And definitely not for ours!”
As a former apprentice scavenger Garth had been very fortunate; he’d experienced only a few rare fly-by-night encounters. By contrast, here with the convoy he had already made his first kill. And he still felt strange, even a little sick about that: that he’d destroyed a creature once human, or which should have been, and that he’d shot the weird wafting thing in the eye…and seen its spongy head explode like a rotten puffball!
That had come about because the convoy had no use for scavengers in the old sense. No longer a stable, settled community, the two-hundred-odd folk of the once-clan had been allowed only a minimum of personal belongings, and then only items of absolute necessity. There was simply no room in the powered vehicles and battered trundles for materials scavenged en route, and so no need for scavs. Thus Garth Slattery was no longer a scav but a pointsman—an outrider on his father’s rebuilt machine—yet still an apprentice of sorts: the junior member of Ned Singer’s six-man team, sharing its nightly duties with two similar teams as tasked on Big Jon Lamon’s work rosters.
For when a fortnight ago Singer had lost an outrider to fly-by-nights—the rider, by pure coincidence, of Zach Slattery’s old bike: a machine Ned’s crew had recovered, but alas, without its rider—he had requested Garth as a replacement; which had left Zach feeling uneasy. It was why he now and then saw fit to warn his son against Singer: a man who had very little time for rivals. For it didn’t seem unreasonable that where Layla Morgan was concerned, Singer might see Garth as just such a rival. And out there in the velvet darkness—the badlands surrounding the near-blind, often painfully slow convoy…well, surely it were best to be cautious. For who could say what cruel fate might or might not be lying in wait for another young outrider during an encounter with fly-by-nights? Or even as the result of a simple accident, for that matter?