Vampires Overhead (8 page)

From somewhere out of space, through the stratosphere, from the unknown, dropping through a silence with bleak eyes fixed greedily towards the inhabited earth. They might have bred here unseen, unheard of, in some darkly warm unexplored tropical fastness, but where in the world is any unexplored territory? No, from some passing planet, some other world, from which I like to think they had been exiled, outcast, for the beastly things they are, and from the space into which they had flown for safety, chanced upon earth. And the voyage had made them hungry! I tried to turn my thoughts from the impossibilities of imagination.

‘I wonder whether we’ll have much trouble forcing that gate after they’ve gone. Should manage it all right with the sword. Ten to one when we want to get out we’ll want to get out quickly.’

‘I’m not anxious about getting out now,’ Bingen answered. ‘Let me stay here until they’ve blown away.’

‘It’ll be easy enough to get out, but if we want to get out quickly? Want to make a dash for it? What then? D’you think we ought to loosen a few bricks round the gate so that it could be pushed open, but can’t be pushed in? I wonder whether those things would have enough sense to pull the gate down if we did that.’

‘No! Don’t give them a chance,’ Bingen said, stretching out a hand to stay me. ‘We daren’t risk it.’

‘It’ll be worth risking. They can’t get in while they’re pushed against the gate like that, and we’ll be able to get away if we have to. We can’t stay in here forever. Risking those things would be preferable to slow starvation.’

But saying it, I knew that, of the two, I’d choose starvation. Bingen was right. We daren’t risk letting them in.

Backing down into the tunnel we sat exhaustedly on the floor some distance apart, Bingen keeping an eye on the brewery gate, and I watching the river. We smoked thankfully of the few cigarettes we had left, and our ears tuned above the crackling roar of flames, listening for the sound of things creeping, knowing they moved silently.

And that day dragged slowly away.

The river climbed its banks to the gate, driving the Vampires away, retreated, to let them gather there again: those at the brewery end remained clamped to their bars. Every so often we inspected the tunnel entrances to reassure ourselves they were secure, and more frequently had to walk down to the river end to bathe faces in the warm water, and gulp thirstily at what, to us in the stifling heat, seemed so cool and refreshing. Without that water what should we have done? Died or gone mad? For the air heated with every gasping breath we took, fiery blasts of wind carried particles of red-hot grit and dust upon us, burning our eyes, scorching our throats, until we rinsed it away with that priceless water. Clouds of ash billowed about the hard, settling on the black bodies by the gate, tonsuring round heads, greying shawls on sloping shoulders.

Lack of food worried us not at all. I would have revolted at the thought, for sick terror contracted my stomach muscles; my nerves were taut violin strings, every little noise dissimilar to the roar of flames jerked and twitched my body. Bingen was different. At times he was cheery, defiant, and then, without warning, would get hysterical, his nerves would break, and he would curse, sob, shiver, scream.

The evening drew in without appreciable alteration to the light, and the night passed. I dozed in cat-naps, stiffening now and then to peer into the dark. Once I heard Bingen crying softly, and ashamed at hearing him, wandered back and forth between the gates.

Daylight came, bringing a difference to the colour of the glow, and so far as we could judge, the Vampires at the gates had not moved.

During that day we killed the four rats sheltering with us, for when we passed them they humped back to the wall with bared teeth. Pushing the bodies through the bars, we saw how those hateful muzzles probed and twisted to reach. One by one the rats were pulled away into the press of black bodies out of sight. It sickened me, thoughts of going the same way chilled the sweat on my back. We spent some time searching the floor for cigarette ends from the smokes of the night when we had carelessly tossed them away.

Either the air cooled, or we grew used to the heat, but still our clothes were wet with perspiration, and we had stripped to trousers and shirts. But for the thought of those muzzles on bare flesh we would have stripped to the skin. To be naked before those things!

Bingen, with eyes reddened by cinders and a stubble of beard darkening his white face, lapsed into a brooding silence from which I vainly tried to coax him. He would not survive many more days of this, I thought, as I watched him. Neither, for that matter, could I. I prayed, I think, for something to happen. For the things to move. For them to struggle to get at us, go away, return, anything but this terrible, motionless waiting. We tried to drive them from the gates with concerted attacks of the bayoneted rifle, but it was as though one attacked a pile of corpses, so that we’d give it up and go down the tunnel to suck water from the puddles on the floor if the river was in ebb, and bathe lavishly if it were high.

Four nights and three days we spent there in that hell with the Vampires clustered unmoving on the gates. Four nights when Bingen cried, swore, and fell silently brooding by turn. Three days when we stared hopelessly at the things on the gates and they stared bleakly back at us. Four nights which sapped comprehension from my brain and weakened muscles in my legs. How did we survive? How did we?

Times we grew almost contemptuous of the Vampires, kicked them, and withdrew our boots before reaching muzzles could clamp on the leather. Then we shuddered at the sight of them, hid faces in arms, crouched at the bend hidden from the gates. And the things waited silently. If only they would move, make a noise, was the ominant thought throbbing ceaselessly in my brain during the last hours of our confinement. If only they would move!

The fourth night passed uneventfully but for a hectic five minutes when Bingen woke from a nightmare in which the Vampires had reached him, to spring at me, fighting, kicking, screaming. Limpetwise he clung to my throat. I had to lift him a crack to the jaw to loosen him. God knows the reality could not be improved upon even by nightmares, but that outburst did both of us good, for afterwards we smiled at each other and cracked sheepish jokes.

Bingen was asleep when, with the dawn, there came to me an eerie sensation, a feeling that something was different, something missing. Trying to analyze that premonition I fail. It might be my nostrils noticed the change. There was no perception of relief, safety, danger past; rather was there a tense nursing unconsciously of muscles ready for some new peril. Whatever it was, that impulse was sufficient to make me waken Bingen.

What had I wakened him for?

Gradually, green and red reflections from the river faded, and the tunnel was lighter than it had been with the things humped about the gates. They had gone! We sat silently watching the light, the empty gates, and I believe both of us doubted our eyes. And the river crept out of the tunnel. I nudged Bingen.

‘Let’s go to the gate.’

Up the tunnel we walked warily, expecting some fearsome development, but, with the gate clear to our gaze, Bingen jumped ahead of me to the bars. They were red-hot, and his hands fell from them as he peered into the brewery yard. Nothing could be seen but burned buildings, cobbles littered with fallen brickwork, and having stared we turned with one accord, raced down the slope for the river. Raced, I said, but it was a feeble run, for all our excitement. I felt almost too weak to run. We looked out to the river, our faces pulled back a few inches from the hot iron of the gate.

‘They’ve gone! God! They’ve gone!’ Bingen cried, and punched me so that I swore at him, for I wanted to do something foolish, cry. He shouted into the morning. ‘There’s not a damned horror in sight. Nothing. We’re going to get out of here.’

‘You fool,’ I answered thickly. ‘Not a horror in sight! What the hell do you call that?’

I gestured over the water.

On the north bank, the river lapped a grey embankment; the trees had gone, and, behind, rose a solid wall of white-heat. Above, rose the steel framework of burned buildings; below, drifted lifting clouds of grey ashes. As we watched, some half-burned houses fell, bursting into red flames. Fire shot skywards. Smoke intensified, billowing into the blue sky. To the east and the west, so far as we could see, peering first from one side of the gate and then the other, it was the same. A fiery desolation. London had gone in flame and smoke. There was nothing but glowing ash, broken here and there, where long scarlet fingers quivered upwards from the gutted framework of a building which burned slowly, with less combustion than its surroundings.

To our left, the girders of Hungerford Bridge twisted and dropped to the water about the caissons. Red and black, the burned-out carriages fell downwards, tethered together—empty, I thought as I looked up at them, but they were full of people. Corpses drained dry by the muzzling of Vampires and cindered by leaping flames. Barges on the flats, burned to the water’s edge, lay broken, gaping, and about those close at hand I could see little saucer-like depressions in the mud where melted rivets and bolts had fallen.

It was a dead world we two survivors stared into from our rat-hole.

A crashing tearing roar pulled our eyes to the east, and we saw a wall of dust and smoke rise slowly about the looming bulk of St Paul’s Cathedral. The huge dome tilted, swayed in the climbing flames, rose, flattened. A crackling of innumerable explosions, a great spurt of fire, and the dome was gone. But my thoughts were not on the destruction of London’s great buildings. My eyes were searching . . . searching for those terrible scavengers, the grey clustering Vampires. And as I looked for them, Bingen called vibrantly.

‘There they are! Look! There’s some of them.’

They had gone from the flats, the bridge, the embankment opposite, and in the flames we could find none. The blue sky was free of them, I thought; but Bingen saw them.

Away to the east, a cloud of Vampires rose slowly from a towering plume of smoke. At first I thought the cloud was smoke, for straight into the air they rose, flying like nothing I have seen fly before.

Later, at close quarters, I have examined their flight, and it is strange, for instead of lying parallel to the earth, they are upright, and twisting wings spiral into the air, cork-screw fashion. Those we stared at now did not seem to be moving very quickly, but they must have been travelling at an immense speed, for even as we watched they were disappearing into the west. We spotted others then. Far away over Westminster Bridge beyond the tower of Big Ben, standing like a blind man with an eyeless black cavity whence the clock had fallen, we saw a great grey cloud rise into the air. A tremendous cloud, spreading many a mile across country, and about that cloud there could be no mistake. They were Vampires. So far as I could judge, this edge of the flying millions must have risen from somewhere near Highgate, and they stretched away past the horizon! We saw isolated smaller groups coming faintly out of the sky, merging into the main body, and the vast cloud flew up, up to the blue of heaven, grey faded to blue, merged totally. But for hurrying little overtaking groups the sky was clear of them.

‘What now?’ I asked Bingen, and tried to move the stiffness from my neck. ‘Shall we risk making a dash for it? If those things drop on us out in the open . . . we’re done. Perhaps we ought to stay here a bit longer. Make sure they don’t come back. But we must get out soon. I’m hungry.’

‘We’d better wait,’ Bingen said after a while, his eyes still in the air. He shivered. ‘I daren’t get tangled with one of them again. I daren’t! Ugh! I can feel it on me now.’

‘What about seeing the brewery again? We ought to see to that.’

‘If we could get some beer out of it. I want something to buck me up.
b
ut we must wait and make sure.’

‘You stay here a minute, and I’ll have a look at the top end. Keep your eyes open for anything. I’ll see what I can, up there, and be back.’

My feet stumbled on the slope as I started to run, and by the brewery gates faintness swayed me, so that I had to squat on the floor to recover. Hunger and terror had told on me more than I realized, I was weak. Soon, I knew, I must get something to eat, to get strength for the coming effort of escape. We must take a chance, leave the tunnel while we had the opportunity. Who knew when those things might be back?

The yard was unchanged, except for a great piece of guttering fallen athwart the gate to drip molten lead from a steel angle. One end of the angle lay close, nearly under the bars, and I reached for it. I should be able to lever the gate open if I pulled one end of it into the tunnel.