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 them 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.