Vampires Overhead (10 page)

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 mouth 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.’