And seconds later, as the howling of maddened dogs and the shouting, screaming and gunfire from the camp sounded that much louder and clearer—seconds that seemed to pass as slowly as minutes, while the resin-laden air became pungent with cordite stench, and the ground underfoot turned to leaf-mould and pine needles—Garth went in at a run, with his heart pounding and his eyes stinging from the smoky air—went in under the outermost fringes of the colossal, now nightmarish evergreens.
But he went too fast, too carelessly; half blind with his watering eyes, and unsure of where his feet were falling; his only certainty: that he must find Layla now, before something else found her.
Garth didn’t see the humped root that tripped and sent him flying, neither that nor the black bole of the great tree that brought an even greater darkness down on him…
XIII
While it might seem like forever to Garth, to the clan folk in the camp it had been mere minutes, no more than three or four, since the first of a dozen fly-by-nights had climbed down from the higher reaches of the canopy. Up there they’d been so completely concealed, hidden in foliage so deep and so dark, that even yesterday’s sunlight had been unable to discover them. Oh, Garry Maxwell’s “sniffers” and the rest of the clan’s dogs had sensed that something was very much amiss; but biding his time, a certain changeling had planned his ambush to perfection, and on high with his undead cabal had watched and patiently waited.
It meant nothing at all to him that many dozens of the vampires—in a worst-case scenario, the entire swarm, which some twenty-four hours ago he had sent over the river to the ancient mills—would die true deaths under fire from the clan’s defenders. What were such creatures after all but a diversion, a distraction, cannon-fodder to lure clansmen out from the camp that he had hoped they would make somewhere beneath the great trees. Ah, but as slyly devious and evilly intent as he was, even Ned Singer could scarcely have foreseen how marvellously well both his plan and his hopes had come to fruition…or how at least they seemed to be coming.
Ned’s only regret: that Garth Slattery was one of them who had gone to defend against attack from the bridge. But at least Ned could taunt Garth, and with his vampire-infected once-human mind he could do it even at a distance! That was something he’d not been able to resist—something he had done already, which may have been a mistake—or perhaps not. Maybe he had done it deliberately in order to draw Garth back within reach; but with his mind gradually devolving to an unavoidable undead and vacuous condition, Ned was having difficulty assessing even his own actions with any accuracy. Be that as it may, still he intended to taunt Garth again: just as soon as he held the girl Layla in his spidery but oh-so-strong fly-by-night arms, and enjoyed the heat of her sweet strong blood coursing through his desiccated, cobwebby veins!
Ah, yes: the cold pleasure he would derive from laughing in the face of that horny Slattery pup—if the horde from across the river didn’t get him first, and if he should dare return to the camp and his beloved Layla—and how much more pleasure in killing and eating him! But not as much as he’d get from Layla, in all the endless years of having her body and her blood…
Ned would be the last of his kind down from the huge trees. He had sent the others, just one short of a dozen, ahead of him to kill or draw the fire of the men on the defensive perimeter. Some of those men had succumbed to death from above; others had heard or sensed furtive movement in the dense darkness overhead and reacted accordingly; three of Ned’s guerrillas had suffered the true death as a result.
Softly softly catchee monkey was a concept that Ned had instilled into pulpy vampire minds through a telepathic art which, paradoxically, they had taught him; but as for repressing their incessant, ravenous hunger…that was utterly beyond him! When fly-by-nights attacked it was for one reason only: to replenish themselves. Should any victim survive such a bloodletting, then he would shortly become a member of the next undead generation. However, by reason of Ned Singer’s untutored, patently susceptible mind, he and one other before him—the scav Jack Foster—had been the exceptions that proved a rule. They had been taken not only for their flesh and blood—though most of the latter had been drained off in order to facilitate the metamorphosis—but for something else that the monsters had sensed their willingness to supply: the knowledge that was locked in their human brains…while yet they remained human!
Thus the fly-by-nights had coerced Ned to their needs, who in his turn had coerced them to his. His need for vengeance: to destroy his enemies in the clan—in particular Zach and Garth Slattery, and that swaggering fool Jon Lamon—then to take the girl Layla and use her, changing her as he had been changed and bending her to his wilclass="underline" the will and ways of the vampire which he’d become, and from now on must always be.
His plan had seemed to Ned a simple one, which only now was proven less than simple in its execution. He had assumed that the fly-by-nights from across the river, while they would doubtless lose many of their members to clan defenders at the bridge, would nevertheless quickly overcome the opposition and swarm on the encampment. There they would indulge themselves in a feasting frenzy, leaving him to his own devices.
But something was amiss, for Ned was sensing—even feeling—a mass extermination! Undeath to true death: that worst case scenario he had more or less ignored because it had seemed contrary to any reasonable expectation. It was of course due to the advent of the kindred: their men, vehicles, and murderous weaponry. But all Ned sensed was an impression of searing heat, the dissolution of at best vague and tenuous fly-by-night thoughts, and a sudden yawning emptiness in what had been the eery, restless flow of enigmatic vampire mentality.
There were, however, those one or two members of the swarm whose minds were marginally clearer, more perceptive and conscious of self and being than the fly-by-night norm—“leaders,” presumably, of the less well endowed majority—and, most probably the ones who could get into the minds of men, even to the extent on rare occasions of recruiting such to their monstrous existence. As yet ignorant of what was going wrong, Ned now determined to contact one or another of the latter.
And at least one was out there, down on the river’s rim and fleeing south. But fleeing….?
Ned issued a mental query, nothing more than a thought: Why do you run? From what?
The reply registered on the screen of his mind like a badly blurred picture: From the fire and the leaden sting of relentless men. From jets of blistering heat and the collapsing cadavers of molten fellows. From death—the true death—come from the north, all unforeseen, in fire and flying metal! If I would feast some other night and sup on good sweet blood, then flee I must or…
…Ahhhhhh!!!
No sooner contact than this long-drawn-out mental sigh—of vast relief? Yes, it would seem so!—as the mind that Ned had found suddenly shrivelled away, perhaps indeed to ashes, before dispersing into the waning flow of the telepathic aether.
Then for the first time the vampire Ned Singer contemplated failure—but not of his plan in its entirety, not while eight of his remained at large in the encampment—and not until he’d enjoyed his revenge!