The Fly-By-Nights (3 page)

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?

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!

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…