“Woah, easy sir. I just meant he gets weepy,” Al quickly added.519Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡaX2IW9rz34
“One of these days, your sense of humour is going to get me dead,” Fred said.
“Jeez, everyone’s a critic. Well, we don’t want this to get all shooty. Let’s assume the position, guys,” Al said and then he, Steve and Fred all turned their backs to us and in almost perfect unison, dropped to their knees.
Nobody, not even Fireman Hector, moved.
“Folks,” Steve spoke up, “could someone please take our knives and guns away from us?”
There was a fair bit of murmuring and shuffling before a few brave representatives stepped forward and did as instructed, their eyes (all our eyes actually) flicking around between the three kneeling humans and the creature, expecting an attack from one species or the other. They took the weapons and Al asked permission for him and his people to stand. After our side debated for a while, it was granted and they stood, turning to face us again.
“How did you find us?” someone at the front of the crowd asked.
“Our scouts saw your scouts a few weeks back and followed them. We put your tunnel on our Must See Destinations list.”
I didn’t like the thought of our people being watched and followed and based on the murmurs rippling throughout the crowd, I wasn’t alone.
Al spoke again, clearly reading the room. “We didn’t mean to be sneaky but we’ve kinda learned that people are more willing to listen to us when we’ve got something to bring to Show and Tell. Cecil here is our character reference. Listen, we’ve only got a few hours of no-daylight left and depending on how our instructive talk goes, if say, we get booed out of town, we’ll want to get a move on, no time to spare in these almost end days. You guys willing to hear us out?”
We were.
They were unarmed, they were interesting and, as per my earlier point, what the fuck else did we have going on?
So, they told us what they had to tell us.
Sometimes people interrupted to ask questions. Sometimes people interrupted to call them crazy. But they kept talking, mostly Al with occasional contributions, corrections and hurry-the-fuck-ups from Fred and Steve.
I won’t give you a full rundown of the next couple of hours because it involves comments from like twenty or more people I haven’t even mentioned, lots of repeated questions, excessive swearing and, at one point, Al whistling what I’m pretty sure was Black Eyed Peas’ timeless plea for peace “Where Is The Love?” while waiting for another round of shouting to die down. So, instead of the whole thing, how about I just play you “The New Arrivals – Their Greatest Hits – The Story So Far”?
They had not been army, back in the day, but they were army now. It had started small, one man went out and found another survivor, those two found a third, three ran on for a fourth, four to five and so on.
That second man, Al told us, had been his father. The first man, who Al just called “A1”, had saved his father’s life when saving lives had gone completely out of fashion and between them and the others, they had brought it back.
They had moved and learned and gathered others and together they kept moving and kept learning through nights that became years and eventually they fought back. The kicker, and wasn’t everything a kicker nowadays, was that Al’s dad had died fighting the creatures far away from Al, not knowing whether his son, who had been away at college, was alive or not. It was only through second and third hand accounts that Al found out that the unnamed Death Squad he had been rescued by and then joined had been founded by a group of men and women who included his father, a computer salesman, who had survived the beginning of the end, who along with those others had tried to fight back even when nobody knew how to fight.
They decided that the first thing to do was to find out where the things went when it was dark. This was a question that we’d all had at the start but, over the years, its importance diminished in proportion to how much of a difference we figured the answer would make to our lives. On full-dark nights, out on supply runs, the fact that we didn’t trip over at least one of the millions or billions of the things that had to be out there had gone from being a curiosity to a relief. We’d guessed they must have to sleep but none of us had ever seen this. We’d barely ever seen the creatures, full-stop. If there was enough light to get a good look at them then chances were you wouldn’t get a chance to tell anyone about it.
I had caught glimpses on nights of near-misses, had once seen one’s head seeming to swivel around, looking for little old me, but that was all. Cecil was the first real look any of us had at the things that had blown up our lives almost twenty years before.
They told us the things slept in huge packs of hundreds, maybe thousands, always with some smaller outlying groups that acted like a perimeter guard. On moonlit nights, they slept uneasily, like dogs with distant noises in their ears. “Always ready to jump up and bite,” Steve added helpfully. Any light in their alarmingly long field of vision would set them off, attract them, so that one moment a match could be lit, with cupped hand, in an empty building and, if you were unlucky, it would be put out moments or even seconds later as you were engulfed by countless creatures. Al said he was sure we’d all lost people who found this out the hard way and he didn’t bother to pause for corroboration, there was no need.
“You won’t come across them,” Fred said, “unless you’re trying or get really unlucky. The packs sleep well out of the way; headlands, hilltops, that kind of thing. Real serene getaways. Never indoors, in case the greedy fuckers miss out on some light.”
Next, they hit us with a lesson they’d only learned in the past couple of years, one Al’s dad had not been alive for.519Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡocdTFrFRJY
On full-dark nights, like the night Al, Fred and Steve had just stepped out of, when there was no moon and no stars, the creatures didn’t sleep.
They died.519Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡcoyt7n5Ggj
