The Fly-By-Nights (26 page)

“Just like old times, eh?” Zach gasped, wincing his pain as the leader grasped his outstretched hand and hauled him up onto his feet. “Times when we scavenged together, and sometimes went hunting bloody vampires!” But:

“No, Zach,” Big Jon breathlessly replied, shaking his head, “not quite. For this time we’re the ones being hunted, and it’s one of them who’s directing the hunt! But what the hell—let’s go find and kill some fly-by-nights, shall we?”

“Damn right!” Zach grunted. “By all means. But Garth is out there somewhere, thinking he’s protecting us, while his wife is here and alone. Before doing anything else we should find young Layla and make sure she’s safe. What say you?”

Nodding curtly, the other answered, “I saw the pair of them earlier, setting up nearby. I think she’s this way. Let’s go.”

And without another word these old friends—these two “old men” of the clan—stepped forth into smoky, shifting shadows, cordite stench, and the menacing velvet gloom.

While close by, greatly reduced in number but monstrous and merciless still, the surviving members of Ned’s ambushers—his vampire cohorts from the canopy—carried on with their murderous business… 

Only three men left…Ned still thought of these creatures who had climbed up into the dusty canopy with him as “men,” because he knew they had been. It was one of the few remaining vestiges of his own once-humanity, and he had chosen the original eleven because of the weird rapport he had with them; not as strong as with the ones he thought of as swarm leaders, but strong enough that their presence—knowledge of their existence—was ever there in his mind, like faces he would recognize in a crowd. By way of explaining this sense of familiarity, Ned had “reasoned” it likely that they had been taken recently and, much like himself, had temporarily retained certain traces of their previous human mentalities and so were connected on similar wavelengths.

By now, if things had gone to plan, enough of Ned’s kind to constitute a swarm should have completely destroyed the defenders at the bridge and come up to ravage in the forest camp. His fly-by-night ambush party from the high canopy might have suffered some few losses, but the surviving majority would even now be converging on a certain area defined by Ned’s presence. That was how it
should
have gone and how things
should
be, but where was the swarm and where his eleven “men” now?

There had been eleven of them, yes, but following immediately on their descent, only eight. Then, as the camp had started awake to the near-distant tumult from the river crossing—and more surely awake to sounds of gunfire and cries of terror from the perimeter—their numbers had quickly reduced to seven, six, five and four. Until a moment ago, even as he searched them out in the telepathic aether, yet another mental connection, like a dully glinting thread in Ned’s mind, had been broken and blinked out, and he was left with three.

Only three survivors of his fly-by-nights, the creatures he had chosen to guard him, watching his back while he avenged himself on those hated men of the clan: Garth Slattery and his old cripple of a father; and Big Jon Lamon, their so-called leader. Well, the latter could die at once and be eaten, but as for the Slatterys: Ned would keep both of them alive long enough to witness the start of what he’d planned for Layla, the many different ways he would use her in bringing those plans to fruition!

Oh
yesss
! That was how he’d planned it, how it was
supposed
to have been…but now?

Now things were working out very differently and Ned’s revenge was as yet unrealized, his lust unsated. Ah, but there was time yet and plans can be changed! The girl Layla for instance:

Most of the gunfire within the camp—which had been sporadic at best—had ceased now, for a majority of the armed men had gone down to the river crossing; which meant that Ned might well find Layla all unprotected and incapable of resistance.

He would carry her away into the forest and there have both her body and her blood! Then, if that Slattery pup had survived the fighting at the river crossing, and if his father had likewise survived, they would surely seek Ned out. Indeed, he would even leave a trail that they could follow! For Ned knew that in the dark heart of the forest he and his men—further assuming that by then any of
them
were left—would have the advantage.

Thus he continued to plan ahead, his ability to do so fuelled by hatred, his once-human lust, and fly-by-night blood-lust. For while the future seemed uncertain now, and despite that his capacity for reasoned thought was gradually failing, all was not lost. No, for with vengeance so close he could almost taste it, Ned knew that he
must
pursue it to whatever end!

It was dusty, smoky and eerily gloomy under the huge trees, but to Ned’s eyes it was as bright as the daylight he no longer could bear. And while only three of his original cabal remained to guard his back during the next phase of his continually evolving plan, still they were possessed of fly-by-night strength and insensate ferocity, and that must needs suffice.

Moving more purposefully now—his eyes blazing yellow, and his fretted nostrils sniffing at the reeking air—Ned left the perimeter and went ghosting in towards the encampment’s central area. As he went so he “called” on his three to leave what they were doing and join him at the source of a certain unmistakable scent. Almost a perfume in its own right, this was the smell of sweet young female flesh, and to Ned it was unique as a fingerprint. With his vampire senses to guide him unfailingly through the night and his lust fully inflamed, he would know that scent anywhere…

XIV

At that exact moment, as the surviving members of Ned’s ambush party received his message, the creature closest to Layla where she stood confused and uncertain near the entrance to her makeshift shelter, was one of the oldest and most hideously mutated monsters of its kind; but it was also one of the most mentally and physically capable.

Over seven feet tall but spindly as a spider, with its hair drifting three feet behind it when it moved, and hanging almost to its waist when stationary, the creature was
in its way
anthropomorphic, but so far removed from any human origins as to be utterly alien. Its arms—even longer than its hair and thin as twigs, with hands and taloned fingers fifteen inches in length, the latter barbed at the knuckles—reached out graspingly before it in typical fly-by-night fashion, while its incandescent eyes burned an intense white, like blobs of molten metal. Worse than all of these anomalies together, however, were its yawning jaws that dripped fresh blood, and needle teeth still hung with strips of human skin and raw flesh torn from a recent victim!

Layla failed to see the thing at first…what she did see was a pair of ghostly, long-shadowed, smoke-wreathed silhouettes that came groping directly toward her out of the gloom! They too seemed to be reaching their arms out before them; but while Layla couldn’t know it their hands bore weapons, not talons!

Just a split second after Layla turned away from them, even as she made as if to flee into the night, she realized her mistake, that in fact she knew the pair: Zach Slattery and Big Jon Lamon! But in the same moment she saw the
third
figure where it came eagerly, purposefully wafting toward her from the opposite direction; a very tall, very thin figure…and one with flaring pits for eyes!

No less than Zach and Big Jon the ancient vampire was likewise silhouetted, against the nimbus cast by a small, guttering oil lamp which Layla had hung from the projecting ridge-pole of her shelter; but no matter the circumstances—gloom or glimmer—there could be no mistaking this thing for what it was. Again Layla spun on her heel; only to trip and literally fly into her father-in-law’s arms.

Thrown off balance by reason of Layla’s sudden, unanticipated weight, and with his game leg giving way beneath him, still Zach managed to cushion the girl’s fall; even though that meant losing his grip on his shotgun, however temporarily.

And meanwhile, Big Jon had seen the cause of Layla’s abrupt and terrified flight.

“God help us!” The leader muttered his prayer as the fly-by-night wafted toward him, suddenly accelerating into what seemed like a frenzied all-out attack, its wispy white hair and rotten rags floating behind it. Unable to avoid its rush, Big Jon made a stand. Taking aim with a hand that trembled however slightly, he let the nightmarish creature get even closer—only two or three paces away—before squeezing the trigger…and nothing happened!

Bad ammunition—again!

“
Jesus
Christ!”
This time, realizing there was no avenue of escape, Big Jon’s words were little more than a groan; and feeling his knees turning to rubber he sank to the leaf-mould floor. Even sprawling, however, he went on repeatedly, uselessly, yanking on his antique revolver’s trigger in the hope that at least one of the remaining rounds had retained its sting. No use, all such hopes were in vain; and having come down on his right side between tree roots, now Big Jon was having difficulty in recovering his back-up side-arm from his belt!

Meanwhile:

Incredibly, and for all its swooping rush, the fly-by-night elder ignored Big Jon’s slumped figure; it wasn’t here for him. And while the leader gave up trying to reach the spare side-arm trapped under his heavy body, and began fumbling instead in his jacket pockets for bullets to replace the faulty rounds that he was shaking from his revolver’s chambers, the hurtling creature came to an abrupt, astonishingly smooth halt. And with barely a glance at Big Jon, it simply turned away from him! And stepping very carefully, calculatingly over Zach and Layla’s tangled figures—straddling them with its spindly legs—the monster bent forward and down from a wasp-like waist and caged them between all four stick-insect limbs!

Trying to free herself from Zach, who was groping blindly, desperately in the leaf-mould and pine needles for his shotgun, Layla had turned onto her back. Now, as she looked up directly into the fly-by-night’s hideous skull-like face, she wanted to scream but couldn’t. She had stopped breathing; she had no air and her throat was dry as dust; there was nothing she could do but gaze helplessly into those flaring, incandescent orbs that seemed with every passing moment on the point of spilling over and pouring their liquid metal contents down on her! Oh, Layla knew that last was an illusion, but it was an horrific concept nevertheless!

Looking at her through those nightmarish eyes, the monster cocked its head first one way, then the other. It was following unusual instructions—not so much orders as directions—that were very foreign to its nature. But the normally disfunctional group organism that was the swarm had recently taken possession of a man, a human being who, on this very rare occasion, it had endowed with the trappings of authority…all of which, supposedly, for the good of the swarm as a whole.

Well, perhaps, but where was the bulk of the swarm now? For no less than Ned, this old one had sensed the great extermination of so many of its parts—its species?—down at the river crossing, and it was now obvious that this adopted human’s ill-conceived plan had failed utterly. There would be no mass feeding frenzy tonight, nor any creation of fresh new vampires, not for this decimated swarm!