by Alan Hyder
I stood erect, searching the bank to see who had thrown it until I understood. Then I went on rowing.
‘It’s all right, Bingen. It must have been shot out of that exploding building. Push it overboard—quick, you fool.’
The timber slid overboard and we went on.
‘You look as if you could do with a wash and brush up, Bingen.’
‘Aw! This is no time to joke.’
Bingen certainly looked to be in a sorry plight. He was black from smoke, with great stripes of grey running down his body where he had smeared the running sweat. Both of us were now stripped to the waist, and I suppose that I resembled him. I know that I was dry. The roof of my mouth was so parched my tongue stuck to it. I had to stop every while to scoop water up in handfuls, until Bingen discovered a baling tin under the seat. He flung water over us in turn, to find that he was filling the boat and had to bale until he perspired again.
But, overshadowing everything was one actuality. One awe-inspiring fact which neither of us dared voice until we had travelled some distance.
‘Bingen, have you realized! We’re going right through London without seeing another living soul!’
‘Yes. But I think I understand that. We’ll find the crowds when we get past the buildings, out in the country. They couldn’t stay here in this fire. They got away.’
‘They couldn’t all have got away as quickly as this. There must be some people about here, if there are any anywhere.’
‘For God’s sake what do you mean? You don’t think . . .?’
He read the answer in my eyes.
That made us forget the heat. There was no one else upon the river, and it was impossible for anything to have lived ashore. Ashore, the fires; on the river, nothing but our dinghy and clumps of drifting, smouldering timber, floating debris; and over all, a covering of white ashes. I watched a long baulk float by, hissing, steaming, turning from red to black as water percolated into it.
‘There are others on the river besides us,’ I whispered suddenly. ‘There!’
We shuddered, and I pulled the dinghy quickly aside.
Partly submerged, a collection of bodies, tangled together into a raft, floated slowly along to the left of the boat. We watched until the ghastly procession drew astern.
‘They’re exactly like the two in the brewery,’ Bingen said. ‘Those things have been on them before or after they were drowned. How did they get in the river? There’s nearly a hundred of them.’
‘Stampeded into the water, and a cloud of Vampires dropped on them. Hope to God they were drowned before . . .’
‘Garry, d’you remember seeing those mummies in the museum by the barracks in Cairo? All those people had the same shrivelled, shrunken appearance. They look just like mummies that have been dead a thousand years.’
‘There’s Tower Bridge in front. Half of it’s down. We’ll have to be nippy getting under there.’
One of the great towers had fallen, half the roadway jutted over the river, and on the broken bridge stood a lorry laden with some material which blazed, and yet did not burn away. It looked as if it had been burning for days and would go on burning for ever.
The river widened, and the heat abated visibly. Hereabouts, fires on the banks seemed to have nearly burned out. Maybe they started here earlier; the Vampires, perhaps, dropped here first. But there could not have been much difference in the time of their arrival. They must have descended to earth simultaneously in one vast cloud. The one tremendous conflagration razing London could not have started from small isolated fires.
‘Even here, there’s not another soul but us. Just the two of us on a grey river edged with fire.’
Several times Bingen, whose eyes continually searched the sky, yelled for us to drop to the bottom of the boat and endeavour to hide beneath our coats, when, in the distance, high in the sky, some of the Vampires flew effortlessly by, until, reassured they had not seen us, or seeing us, did not intend to descend, we rose and went on. Once, hunched on the remaining piles of a tumbled wharf, we saw one of them, and even across the river I could feel the cold bleakness of its unwinking eyes. We wondered what kept it there. Perhaps it was hurt. A bend in the river hid it from sight.
‘With the fires nearly cold, I’ll pull nearer the bank so that we can shout anyone we might see,’ I said, and rested on the oars awhile to let the dinghy drift closer ashore. ‘We seem to be getting away from the worst of it now.’
Rounding blackened stanchions protruding from the water, we almost barged into another fire reaching into the river, but by now Bingen and I had discovered the art of rowing and steering in harmony, and we got safely out of danger, and sweeping into the stream again we caught sight of the barge!
A fleet of them lay moored together, burned, like other shipping on the river, to the water’s edge, and but for swerving to avoid the heat from that jutting warehouse, we should have noticed nothing extraordinary about them. Moored closer to the north bank, they were yet some distance from the shore, and amongst them one seemed strangely whole.
‘See that barge over there, Bingen?’ I cried. ‘It hardly looks as if it has been burned at all. There might be someone aboard her. And there might be something to eat. Can you shout? My mouth’s too dry.’
‘Ahoy there!’ Bingen’s cupped hands sent the hail booming across the water. ‘Hi! Anyone there?’
The cry, reverberating over the dead river, sounded weird in the silence, for, despite the dull roar of the flames, it was silent, with a silence which could be felt. The silence of a total lack of humanity. So strange did that cry sound that Bingen shrank back to his seat and we pulled towards the barges in quiet. Almost, I wanted to pull on down the river, but that barge attracted me. Perhaps it was the thought there might be food aboard, perhaps the working of Providence. The dinghy heaved through the cross currents and soon we were alongside. I pulled the oars inboard.
‘Will you go up, Bingen? I’ll give you a back. There’ll be grub of some sort there. Come on, man. There’s nothing there to hurt you,’ I said angrily as he hesitated. ‘None of your friends there. Go up and see what’s on her.’
‘I’m not so sure.’ Bingen demurred. ‘Why so anxious for me to go? What about you having the climb?’
‘Ah! Get on, you swab. After this row I’d never pull myself up there in a month of Sundays,’ I growled, glancing at the steep side of the barge. ‘I’m just about beat now, but I’ll try to give you a lift up. Lift me up, damn you, and I’ll go.’
Bingen toyed with the idea of lifting me the seven or eight feet up to the barge, and then stood sulkily upright.
‘All right then. Give me a hand. But remember, I want this boat kept here so’s I can jump for it if there is anything there.’
‘If there is anything there, you fool, bring it down and we’ll eat it. Come on.’
Steadying the dinghy, I gave him a thrust which helped him on his way, and sat back in the stern exhausted, tired out, hungry. Examining the barge, I saw why it had not burned with the others. It was built of concrete. One of those, I imagine, built during the war as an experiment—unless they built boats of concrete afterwards—and her load was, I understood even more why she had not burned, asbestos boards. Piled above her sides, they were untouched but for blackened spaces where, I suppose, tarpaulins had burned away. The whole of the barge was littered deeply with ash blown from the adjoining boats.
‘Bingen! Bingen!’ He seemed a long time gone, and did not answer my call. ‘Bingen, are you all right?’
I scanned the sky for Vampires and, far away, could see a faint cloud moving at rapid speed.
‘Bingen!’
‘Righto! Be with you in a minute,’ came his reply, and I heard him climbing from below.
‘Come now, damn you.’ His face appeared over the barge side, and I swore at him angrily. ‘You . . . You’ve found food and stopped to eat it. Why the devil didn’t you call me?’
‘Naughty! Naughty!’ Bingen grinned, speaking with his mou
th full, then as he saw I angered, spoke soothingly. ‘All right. It’s O.K. in here. Only been a bit of a fire aboard. The stairs burned away and a cupboard, but nothing else.’
‘Never mind about that. There’s food, isn’t there? Give me a hand up. See if you can find a rope to let down or something, and I’ll come up.’
‘If we can fix the opening over the cabin we might stay here the night. There’s food here.’
‘I can see that! Leaning over the side with your blasted mouth full, while I’m down here, starving. Stay there the night! Am I to stay here the night? Get something to give me a hand up. And something I can moor this boat with.’
Bingen went off, his heavy boots clumping about the deck, poking around in search of rope, and eventually returned with a length of cordage which he dropped down to me. I fastened the boat by the bows and flung the end up to him. He made it fast above, and, heavily, I pulled myself up to roll over the bulwarks and lay gasping on the deck of the barge like a stranded fish. Bingen went below and, while I recovered, climbed back again with food in his hand to offer me bread and an opened tin of meat.
The bread was hard, stale, but I munched at it greedily, like a wolf, sitting there on the warm deck; and presently, stretched satisfied, feeling, with food inside me, that I had recovered my strength.
‘Well? We’d better see about getting fixed up for the night,’ I suggested. ‘I’m rested now, though I’d like about three days in bed. Come on, let’s go down in the cabin. The dinghy’s fixed so that it can’t float away. Are there any smokes below?’
‘I don’t know. Haven’t been through the cabins properly yet. We’ll go and see. I could do with a smoke.’
The stairs, as Bingen had remarked, were burned away, so that we had to drop down into the cabin. It looked cosy enough to me, with memory of the tunnel vividly in my mind. Two usable bunks there were, and examination assured us the place was safe to stay the night. The opening wanted securing, but a couple of the asbestos boards would quickly do that.
‘Bloke evidently had a family aboard.’ Bingen pointed to the litter of clothing on the cabin floor. ‘There was a lot of stuff on the floor, but I pulled some out when I was searching for food.’
‘Is there much food?’
‘Several tins of meat, bacon, biscuits, some bread that’s hard, and there’s a sack of potatoes.’
‘Any tea?’
I searched about, and soon a kettle was on a fire in the stove. We lit cigarettes, waiting for it to boil.
‘There’s a tin stuffed full of money in the cupboard,’ Bingen said. ‘I shoved about twenty pounds of it in my pocket, but I was more pleased to find the box of cigs.’
With a cup of tea and a cigarette, I clambered into a bunk, lounging thankfully.
‘Only take twenty? Might have taken it all! Hell of a lot of good it’ll do you,’ I answered from the depth of the bunk. ‘Bingen, we haven’t seen another soul alive. It looks as if we two are the only people in the world. But that’s ridiculous! There must be folks about somewhere. Everybody can’t have been destroyed. It’s unbelievable.’
‘Unbelievable! Those flying nightmares are unbelievable. But they’re here. All London gone up in smoke. That’s unbelievable. It’s happened. But there must be other people. They’ll have got safely out of town, away from this, and rigged up camps.’
‘But Bingen, haven’t you thought how numerous the things are. When we saw them from the tunnel, they covered the town like bees on a hive. People wouldn’t have had a chance to get away from them. Those things must have dropped down in millions and millions. Think of the size of the cloud that we saw.’
‘But we were all right in the tunnel. We two couldn’t have been the only ones in London in a safe place.’
‘The tunnel we were in was exceptional. In cellars and places like that people must have been smothered when the things dropped. They couldn’t have breathed. Then the fire! Others in the open wouldn’t have stood a chance. What chance would we have stood out in the yard! In the tunnel, we were secure from both fire and Vampires. While the gates kept them from us, they let in enough air to keep us alive. The depth and dampness kept the heat from us. How many other people were sleeping in the depths of a tunnel?’
‘Oh! There must have been similar cases?’ Bingen thought awhile, worriedly. ‘What about the tubes for instance?’
‘Hum! The tubes were open to the things.’
‘Basements?’
‘People might have lived in such places, but that’s problematical. Anyway, they would have died when the houses burned above them.’
‘But it is incredible that every soul in the country has gone west.’
‘Of course it is. In the country. But, Bingen, honestly I feel that we are the only two living in London.’
‘It’s true we came all the way down the river from Hungerford to here, without seeing a living thing except Vampires.’
‘It’s incredible we could have done that. Isn’t it?’
We smoked in silence.
The softness of the bunk, and the food I had gorged after my fast, was an inducement to sleepiness, even though it was only somewhere round three in the afternoon. Gradually my eyes closed, until remembering the opening overhead, I sat upright.
‘I’m going to get in a real sleep,’ I said to Bingen. ‘Let’s go up and see that the opening over the cabin is secure. Then we’ll turn in, get a good long rest, out of it early in the morning, and make our way right out of the town to see what’s in the country. I’m just about dead beat. Standing on the steps of a cinema for four years doesn’t leave you with enough stamina to go on “jags” with drivers of the Royal ’Orse, fight Vampires, row boats down rivers. Let’s get the place safe. Come on.’
We climbed to the hatchway.
‘Nip outside and get half a dozen boards of that asbestos,’ I told Bingen. ‘I’ll get the rope, and if we lash them down over the opening, we’ll be snug for the night. Leave spaces between so that we can breathe.’
With the opening covered, we dropped down again, and I followed Bingen’s example, pulled off all my clothes, for it was hot in the tiny cabin. We could have done with the opening wide to the night air but . . . we were taking no risks. That both of us dispensed with all our clothes was proof of our confidence in the security of the concrete barge.
‘Good night, Bingen. See you in the morning, I suppose.’
‘You will Garry. I’m not getting out of here until after you’ve poked your head out to see that everything’s all right. Good night.’
I snuggled down in the bunk.
Shafts of light slanted down from between the cracks in the asbestos boards, and for a while I could not sleep. I watched the dust dancing in the paths of sunlight, with horrors from preceding days and nights flashing back and forth in my brain and, as though I had not my full share, thoughts of others must needs trouble me. The Luxurides; the programme girls; how had that wonderful little blonde fared; often had I admired her when she had come to the doors under some pretext to breathe deeply of air free from perfume and warmth; the hook-nosed manager; the haughty marcelled damsel of the box-office; how had they fared; the old lady who looked after me so well in my ‘digs’ in Pimlico. . . .
With these people revolving madly in a fluttering cloud of Vampires, I fell asleep. Nature had let me put up with a lot, but now must have put her foot down, for I stopped dreaming and shivering in my bunk, lapsed into total unconsiousness.
Before I slept, I heard Bingen snoring noisily.
Early in the dark of dawn, I was roused to find myself listening intently for some sound which unwittingly had awakened me. The cracks of sunlight had gone, the cabin was in inky darkness, I saw a star twinkle through a crack in the boarded opening, but as I watched it was gone. Then my muscles tensed gradually.
I could not hear Bingen. He breathed noisily, and now in the silence I could not hear him! Suddenly, as I listened, his bunk creaked softly as though he jerked nervously.
; ‘You all right, Bingen?’
‘Yes,’ his answer came whispering from the blackness.
‘I wish to heaven I’d had the foresight to leave a light ready to hand,’ I grumbled. ‘There’s a box of matches on the table, but where the devil is the table? I think I’ll get . . .’
I stopped talking, for as I spoke I heard Bingen’s breath catch and sob.
‘Bingen. For God’s sake what’s the matter? I thought I heard something. It woke me up. did you hear anything, or have you just got the wind up? Bingen! What’re you up to?’
The words rapped out sharply, for his bunk strained as though he pushed at it, bare feet pattered across the cabin, and he was searching in the dark for me. I reached for the floor with dangling feet, caught his arm, and it was shaking. He held on to me closely.
‘The matter. What’s the matter. Speak, you fool. Is there something in the cabin with us?’
‘Out there. Out there. Something screaming. God!’ Bingen’s voice shook hysterically. ‘God! A terrible noise.’
‘What noise?’ I asked and, asking, held my breath, shuddering, for I heard now the noise which had wakened me. It stabbed into the quiet of the cabin like a flash of light.
‘AAAAAAAH!’
And again it came.
‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!’
Out there in the night, someone screamed.
High pitched, shrill, monotonous cries, sounding as though they were wrenched from some tortured child or woman. Screams of sheer terrified hysteria.
‘What is it? Bingen, is that what you heard before?’
‘Yes.’
The screams rang through my ears.
‘AAAAAAH!’
As though the cries were strangled by sheer inability of the screamer to cry any more, they gurgled softly to a stop, and with the silence, sanity and reason came back to me.
‘Get away from me. Get out of the way.’
Struggling against Bingen’s clutching hands, I freed myself, and was on the floor, stubbing my toes in a maddened effort to discover my bearings. If only I could see that star twinkling through the crack in the covered opening! My outstretched fingers caught the remnants of the stairs, a broken newell post, and, swinging myself up, I pushed, heaved with my shoulders at the asbestos boards, prising at the ropes which held them down, until finger-nails broke, and in the darkness Bingen rushed forward, tried to hinder me.
