The Fly-By-Nights (17 page)

Moving closer to Garth and leaning his bad leg against the trundle for support, Zach nodded and said: “Tired? Yes, so I’ve noticed. But
only
tired? I think not. Worn out with worrying is more like it—you and Layla both—but worrying about what?”

“What?” Now Garth frowned. “You’ve been speaking to Layla?”

“Oh?” the other shot back sharply, as if affronted. “Isn’t that allowed, then?” Then he lied, saying: “I saw her, yes, but I didn’t stop to speak; didn’t much need to. She was teaching a handful of kids, but I thought she looked out of sorts, down in the mouth—though not nearly as far down as you!”

Then, suddenly scowling—hobbling closer still and shaking his crutch in Garth’s face—he snapped: “Hey, you! This is me, your Old Man, remember? And Garth, I
know
you! I know you almost as well as I know myself! So I’m asking you one more time: what the hell is up!? Because I’m pretty damn sure that something is
way
up!”

Garth opened his mouth, looked about to deny it again, then sighed and said, “It’s probably just me… except
no
!” he shook his head frustratedly. “It really isn’t! I mean, I’ve asked the other squad bosses about it, talked to Don Myers and Bert Jordan, and they’re both uneasy about it, too. They don’t much like it, but on the other hand it has to be better than the alternative!”

“What?” Zach frowned. “Garth, you’re rambling! What is this ‘it’ you’re on about, eh? And what’s this alternative that ‘it’ has to be better than? For goodness sake make sense!”

At which Garth laid his rifle aside, stood up, and finally blurted it out. “Did you ever get the feeling someone was following you, watching you? Did you ever glimpse something out the corner of your eye, except when you blinked and looked again it was gone? Have you ever felt…
felt you’re being hunted
?”

Zach believed he knew what Garth was getting at but wasn’t about to define the problem for him; he wanted to hear it from the youth himself. So rather than prompt him further, he simply said: “Son, when you’re out there in the darkness with a ground mist lapping your feet and shadows that shift when clouds block out the moonbeams…why a man might imagine almost anything!” (But even as he said these things Zach was thinking to himself:
Except—God forbid—this could be a hell of a lot more than any man’s mere imagination!
)

It was Garth’s turn to frown. Staring hard at the other he said: “So then, it appears you’ve guessed at least something of what I’m talking about, this thing that’s so much on my mind?”

“Eh? Well damn right I have!” his father then exploded. “Do you think I’m completely stupid? What the hell else do you have in common with Myers and Jordan, if not your work out there in the dead of night? Maybe I should go and ask
them
what’s going on, what’s been getting to you this last fortnight or so, ever since—oh, I don’t know—ever since that great bully Ned Singer got taken!”

That last was a deliberate ploy on Zach’s part, and he was watching his son closely, noting his reaction. Nor was he disappointed at Garth’s response: his narrowing eyes, and the way his broad shoulders twitched however slightly, almost unnoticeably. Until at last:

“Yes, you’re right,” said Garth, nodding and taking a deep breath before adding: “That’s when it began, or maybe a day or two later. As for what it is…you might as well ask what it
isn’t,
or what it hasn’t been!”

“Oh?”

Garth nodded again and said, “I can’t believe you haven’t noticed anything yourself! Maybe it’s because you’re okay with the situation—turning a blind eye to it—satisfied to let it rest, like Don and Bert. But let me remind you, Father, how there hasn’t been a single fly-by-night attack—no, not even a chance encounter or skirmish—since we lost Ned Singer! And yet they’re out there, plenty of them. I
know
that the fly-by-nights are out there every night! And gangling Garry Maxwell’s dogs: they know it, too! As soon as it’s dark they’re a bundle of nerves. Sometimes when I’m out on the perimeter, I can hear them sniffing around, whining and yipping; and Garry grumbling, calling them names, telling them to either bark and get it out of their system, or calm down and shut the hell up! But really he should know better than that, because those dogs of his…well, they
definitely
know better!”

Having heard Garth out this far, still Zach wasn’t ready to suggest or attempt to identify the source of the youth’s actual problem. Simply mentioning Ned Singer had opened the floodgates and got Garth talking, but Zach didn’t want to unsettle him any further by communicating his own worst fears in respect of that…that man? Anyway, there were still things he wanted to know before deciding what to do about all this. And so:

“You’re concerned that the fly-by-nights
aren’t
attacking?” he kept up the subterfuge. “Well, I must say that’s a new one on me!”

But now, as Garth’s frustration mounted, he was shaking his head again. “You still don’t get it, do you?” (Which was more a statement of fact than a question.)

“So explain,” said Zach, shrugging.

“They aren’t attacking because they’re following, watching, and
waiting
! And it could be we’ve been wrong all this time not to credit them with more than a little intelligence. Oh, I know that they’re usually completely insane, and mindlessly reckless even where their own miserable lives are concerned. But now…well I’m beginning to think that they’re capable of learning! I think they
are
learning. And…and I also think—”

“Yes?” (Now it was coming.)

“—I think they have a leader!”

“Go on,” said Zach, his voice husky, and his hand squeezing Garth’s shoulder as if to squeeze the problem right out of him.

Rock steady now Garth faced his father, looked him straight in the eye and said, “I’ve seen him out there in the night, and more than once, I thought maybe I had nodded off—and perhaps I had, maybe I do—for even now I can’t be absolutely,
definitely,
one hundred percent sure of what I think I’ve seen! But Father, if a swirl of mist in the dark of night can take on the shape and ghastly face of a man, then there’s a lot of mist out there that looks an awful lot like Ned Singer!”

“
Ahhh!
” said Zach, and his voice contained a shiver despite that what he had heard merely confirmed what he’d suspected all along.

“He never comes too close to me,” Garth went on, “but stays out there on the edge of my night vision and melts away, disappears, before I can focus on him. Or, if he’s only a figment of my imagination—my night fears—then the image vanishes the moment I try to fix it in my mind’s eye…”

Zach waited, let the pause last another moment, then said: “All right, Garth, so what’s your conclusion, your best guess?
Have
you seen Ned Singer out there—and if it really is him, then what the hell do you think he’s doing—or is this all in your mind after all?”

Garth shrugged irritably. “If it’s my imagination—and believe me, I really do hope it is—then Ned’s not there at all and all he’s doing is driving me insane! But if,
just if
, it is him, then the fly-by-nights are doing what he wants, working to his plan and following
him
following
us
! And as I said, there’s plenty of them. In fact I think they’re a horde, a swarm that’s been gathering force, increasing its numbers as it moves parallel with the convoy!”

“A swarm!” Zach softly repeated him. “Moving parallel.”

“Father—” Garth gripped the other’s arm hard, “—I saw Ned again last night, except now…he’s different.”

Feeling the steely coiled-spring tension in his son’s fingers, Zach hobbled back a wary pace, asking, “How ‘different?’”

Releasing his father’s arm, Garth slumped down again on the rock with his back to the wheel. And after a moment’s thought:

“I think,” he began, “that when I first saw him clearly—or at least clearly enough to identify him—it was on my first night as a boss where we camped in the woods in the lee of those cliffs. Ned was as grey and as still as a stalactite, standing there in the mist with his ragged clothing hanging off him. But it was him all right, even though his normally bulging red face and piggy eyes were…well,
different.
As long as I had known him he had always been too sure of himself, ignorant and arrogant. But out there on the perimeter—or perhaps in my dream—he looked vacant and oddly puzzled, as if he was trying to remember who he was and what he was doing there, or as if he stood in some weird dream of his own. And his eyes were burning cold, leaden in his deathly face.

“Well, that was the first time. But since then…

“His vacant look has gradually changed, until now it’s got that old arrogance back. But it’s also sly, evil, full of purpose, because Ned’s no longer puzzled; he
knows
why he’s there and what he’s doing! And as for his eyes:
they burn on
me!”

“On you!” Zach whispered, and he nodded. “Yes, they would!”

“But Father—” it was as if Garth hadn’t heard him, “—how can any of this he possible? Ned Singer is a dead man, taken by the fly-by-nights! And yet I see him, and it makes my mind spin in circles!”

Zach got down on his good knee beside Garth and hugged him. “Son, you’re not crazy, not even nearly crazy. And as for Singer—”

“—A dead man!” Garth muttered it again. But:

“No,” said Zach. “There’s another word, or description, for what Ned Singer might be now. Not dead but—”

“Undead!” said Garth. “Like…like that scav you told me about? Oh…what was his name? Jack Foster, yes?”

“Ah!” Zach released the other. “So you remember our conversation about that old business, do you? About Jack Foster, and how he was taken—and how he came back?”

“Yes,” said Garth, frowning as at last he began to see the light, or thought he did. “That’s been on my mind quite a bit. But…do you think perhaps that’s what my problem is? That I can’t get that story out of my head: how Foster came back with a swarm and tried to break into the refuge, and now I’m obsessed with the idea that something similar is happening with Ned Singer?”

“You think you may have dwelled upon it for too long?” his father replied, without truly accepting that was all there was to it. “Well it’s possible, I suppose.” And then—remembering what Layla had told him about Garth’s nightmares: how he would suddenly start awake with Singer’s name on his lips—he said: “But Garth, there’s something more to what happened that time; something I never mentioned before because I thought it wasn’t important—until now.”

“Then tell me!” said Garth.

“Well—” Zach scratched his chin, and cast his mind back to when Garth had been a mere infant “—Jack Foster was a very odd sort of fellow: too quiet, not at all pleasant, something of a loner. He had no close friends that I remember, not even among the rest of the scavs. His father had suffered for a long time from radiation poisoning, and Jack’s face and head had come out badly misshapen; which probably accounts for his being a loner. On the other hand perhaps he was too…I don’t know, too
much
an outsider to ever have been a scav! For as you’ll appreciate, it took a certain type of man—a team player—to venture out from the refuge after sunset, searching for useful materials in the ruins while risking his life in lethal confrontations with fly-by-nights! But in addition, Jack didn’t seem quite as hard as the rest of us. I mean, he was something of a daydreamer—no, not someone who would fall asleep on the job, which is
not
intended as any kind of reflection on you and what you’ve told me, you understand—but someone who dwelled in his own world and mind: a very ‘introspective’ type of fellow. Now, that’s a hell of a big word, which I might have misused because I never took to schooling and reading the way you did. But it means—”

“That Jack Foster was a deep thinker,” said Garth. “Someone who was maybe too interested in what went on in his own head?”

“Yes!” said Zach. “Put simply he did too much thinking, had too much of an imagination. And sometimes, in fact quite often, he would tell us that when he was on his own—which he actually preferred to be—picking over some supposedly ‘safe’ place deep in the rubble, he’d often seen fly-by-nights just standing off and watching him, and for some reason they’d never tried to attack him!

“Now, while Jack had been a scav with me and Big Jon Lamon for, oh, maybe four years, he had only ever been seen to shoot and kill fly-by-nights on occasions when we were together as a team, and when
we
—the rest of the crew, that is—were under attack. And he would say some pretty weird things from time to time; for instance: ‘Oh, they’re not so bad not once you get to know them…’ Which would make us laugh, of course, because it had to be his idea of some kind of joke…didn’t it?

“Well, we used to say that Jack Foster led a charmed life; and indeed he seemed to…at least until the night they took him! But charmed or not Jack’s life was never a very happy one. That was because of his bad dreams about the fly-by-nights, or so we assumed. Himself, he never said too much about it, but it
was
said by folk who bunked close to him, that he rarely got more than an hour or two’s sleep before waking in a sweat, shaking head to toe, and making a hell of a fuss about something in his head!”

At that Garth’s jaw had dropped; but now, since it appeared Zach had finished speaking, he said: “Maybe they’d been getting into his dreams! And maybe—I mean just
maybe—
they’ve been getting into mine, too!”

“Oh?” said his father, remembered his promise to Layla, and reacting as if all this was news to him. “Have you been suffering in the same fashion, then?”

“Oh yes!” Garth shivered. “I’ve been nightmaring, and it’s Singer who’s in my mind. Always telling me…telling me…”

“Yes?

“That he’s coming!”

And once again: “
Ahhh!
” said Zach, struggling to get to his feet, then backing off a pace. And with his expression changing, becoming stern, and his tone of voice hardening: “So then, with all that you’ve experienced and all you think is happening, you never saw fit to report or even mention any of this to anyone?”

“Of course I wanted to! You must know I did!” Garth shot to his feet and faced the other. “But how could I? What, I should frighten the life out of Layla? Or talk to Big Jon and explain how I, er, perhaps
nod off
out there on the perimeter every so often? Or get myself laughed at, ridiculed, by raving on about ghosts in the mist, not to mention that really nasty one in my dreams? I mean, who would take me seriously? And tell me something if you will: is there anyone among us who
hasn’t
had bad dreams about fly-by-nights from time to time? God, surely it’s enough that I’ve doubted my own sanity without inviting anyone else in to judge me?”