Garth remembered Singer’s wife. He hadn’t seen much of her, but recalled that as his father had remarked she’d never seemed too well. A small, sad, dark-eyed creature really, and not that much older than Layla when she’d died…
Death: it had come along all too frequently in the Southern Refuge. It seemed that men hadn’t evolved to live down in holes in the ground; nor yet in vast, man-made caverns.
Death: it came for men and monsters alike…
Now, as the memory of Garth’s kill flashed once more across his mind’s eye, he shivered; in fact it was more a shudder. His father felt the tremor and asked: “Cold are you? That’s strange because it’s summer and a fairly mild night, not that the seasons have ever meant much to us refuge folk.”
“Not cold,” Garth shook his head, “but I keep thinking back on my kill.”
“Again with the memories, eh? But this one far more recent. Well, that happens, but the more you kill—and you will—the less your conscience will trouble you. We’ve been lucky so far: no large groups of the awful things to contend with. Just small parties, and mindless as always. Lord, I only wish I could come out with you…but this damned leg.”
“According to Big Jon Lamon,” Garth answered, “when you and he were scavs together, you did more than your fair share. Anyway, working in the sorting bays with scav salvage, that hasn’t been easy work. I saw you come limping home after many a shift, with the pain screwing up your face. Hounding the fly-by-nights that time has cost you dear, Father.”
“Fly-by-nights!” Zach twisted in his seat, turning his head and spitting his disgust over the side of the lead-roofed, six-wheeled trailer—the so-called trundle—where it bumped and swayed across rough country. And wiping his mouth he continued: “Aye, you’re right, Garth, it cost me dear. But, by God, I’d do it all again, and gladly! But as for now—
“Well, what the hell! For what it’s worth, the Earth is all theirs now—or will be when we’re all done for…” A statement he at once regretted, following it up with a sidelong glance at Garth. And biting his lip, shuffling uncomfortably in his seat, he quickly made amends: “But that’s to look on the downside, of course.”
Forcing a grin, Garth attempted a joke, tried to divert his father’s dark mood. “Oh? So there’s an upside, is there?”
But no. Again nodding to himself, in a way that had become a habit, Zach once more turned in his seat to gaze out into the gloom, across a plain that was little more than a desert dotted with the crumbling stumps of ruins, beyond which a near-distant horizon of low hills glowed with an eerie luminosity. And glancing again at his son, and pausing to think whatever he thought—though nothing too profound, Garth felt sure—finally, with a grunt of sour amusement, Zach spoke again:
“Huh! No fool you, eh, son?”
Son. Garth smiled to himself, but genuinely this time. Son: and here he sat, sixteen going on seventeen, and a killer of fly-by-nights at that! But to the Old Man, his father, he was still a young boy, his only son.
And meanwhile Zach had continued: “No, there’s no upside—not recently, anyway—or if there was I’ve somehow missed it! But listen: just because I’m sometimes a bit down, that doesn’t mean that you—”
“It’s okay,” Garth cut in. “I know, I really do! It’s just that things never seem to get any better, right? “
Zach nodded and turned yet again, his eyes focusing, narrowing, trying to penetrate the night. “Something like that,” he said. “It’s like life doesn’t hold much meaning for me, not any longer. I sometimes feel…oh, I don’t know…but it’s like that old saw you mentioned—‘hope springs eternal’—except I know it doesn’t. I suppose I’m just a bit weary of it all. Perhaps it’s simply that I wish I was doing more—wish I could do more—like I used to.”
With which Garth knew where the conversation would be turning now…
They were seated in a rear corner of the trundle, a rusting old bus long since stripped of a worthless engine, whose wheels and chassis were still in decent order. With its sides cut away except at the corners, and a roof layered with patches of hammered lead, the wagon now “trundled” along behind a tractor. Reconverted from a scav salvage skip, and refurnished with inward-facing bucket seats, it accommodated twenty-eight persons: men, women, and children alike. Some dozen or so trundles of similar design were in tow, while an equal number of vehicles proceeded under their own power; and all of them patrolled, watched over, shielded by outriders on mountain bikes, flanking the column at all times.
More or less separate from most of their fellow passengers, Garth and Zach knew that if they talked quietly they would not be overheard; that Zach’s frequently bitter, even disheartening-seeming remarks wouldn’t offend the men or frighten the women. For Big Jon Lamon had been known to come down hard on that sort of thing; though it was unlikely that the clan’s leader, Zach’s old friend, would find much fault with him.
Anyway Garth was sure that his father had long since earned the right to speak his mind, to think and comment out loud upon whatever was concerning him; but still he hoped Zach would keep it down when finally his frustration got the better of him. And sure enough, after another short spell of uneasy silence and just as Garth had anticipated—so it began:
“I’m reminded of my Old Man,” Zach said, “meaning my father, your grandfather, telling me things he’d heard from his father, including lots of immemorial slogans—or ‘home truths,’ as he called them—words that sometimes made good sense but all too often didn’t. I got that ‘hope springs eternal’ thing from him, just as you got it from me. Huh! Him and those old hand-me-down bywords that rarely rang true and never seemed to work in practice. In fact mostly they were dead wrong! Words from moldy old books is what they were. Words like—oh, let me think a minute—ah, yes, a favourite: ‘the meek shall inherit the Earth!’
“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!