By Blood We Live Part 24

He dropped the bowie. His hand closed around the stake.

One moment's courage...

He tore the wooden shaft from her heart, and waited.

Minutes pa.s.sed. He closed his eyes. Buried his face in her dark hair. His hands were scorpions, scurrying everywhere, dancing to the music of her tender thighs.

Her breast did not rise, did not fall. She did not breathe.

She would never breathe again.

But her lips parted. Her fangs gleamed. And she drank.

Together, they welcomed the night.

FOXTROT AT HIGH NOON.

by Sergei Lukyanenko.

Translated from Russian by Michael M. Naydan and Slava I. Yastremski.

Russian writer Sergei Lukyanenko is the author of the international bestselling vampire novels Night Watch and Day Watch, which were adapted to film by Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov. The third book in the series, Twilight Watch, is currently in production. The fourth and final book in the series, Last Watch, was published in January. He is among the most popular Russian science fiction/fantasy writers, and is the author of several other novels as well, but to date only the Watch books have been translated into English.

Lukyanenko's short work has appeared in English only once so far, in James and Kathryn Morrow's SFWA European Hall of Fame anthology. That story, like this one, was translated by Michael M. Naydan and Slava I. Yastremski.

This story appears here for the first time. It tells the story of a lone stranger, in a post-apocalyptic future, coming to a town overrun by lawlessness.

The town was lost between the mountains and the sea, like a man between the earth and heaven.

The train moved along the sh.o.r.e all night, and the rattle of the wheels merged with the sound of the surf in a single unending melody. In the freight car, Denis was barely able to sleep. He lay on boards that smelled of hay and horse dung, watching the infrequent flashes of stars through the holes in the slotted roof of the car. There were no horses here-the livestock pens were empty-but a little bit of hay remained, and he raked it under his head. Before going to sleep, Denis had undressed, and now wore only his undershorts. Boots stood beside his feet; jeans, a plaid s.h.i.+rt, and a velvet jacket hung off the side rail of the livestock pen. His left hand rested atop a heavy revolver in a frayed holster.

The wheels of the train knocked out their song. Denis began to stir, and whispered: "The train is rus.h.i.+ng-what a beaut, The wheels are knocking-tra ta toot toot!"

then dozed off for a short time.

Denis awoke as the car was gripped by the morning chill. He stood, grabbed his weapon, and walked from the end of the car to the caboose platform. In one of the pens, a vagrant lay still and unmoving in the shadows. Denis averted his eyes.

Daybreak. The door to the train car was open; he had entered the train through it last night. Outside, on the platform, he unhurriedly relieved himself, then sat down, hanging his legs off the side of the car, an endless ladder spreading out beneath him, the rails like twin steel bow strings and the rungs of the cross-ties dark from creosote. If you lay your head back it seemed as if the train were gliding down from the sky itself.

"The wheels are knocking tra-ta-toot," Denis repeated.

A quarter of an hour later, when the train had stopped in a small town, Denis stood in the open doors of the freight car finis.h.i.+ng a cigarette. The train pulled onto track number one; on track two, a long freight train with tanks and storage containers began to sing and toot and started off in the opposite direction. Denis jumped down without waiting for the train to come to a full stop and teetered, but kept his balance.

"It's a one-minute stop," said the stationmaster, who was standing by the tracks with a red flag in his hand. He looked suspiciously at the empty car. He was alone on the platform, his uniform-like his face-old and crumpled, his eyes dull and dead.

"I've already arrived," Denis said.

A gleam of curiosity appeared in the eyes of the stationmaster. He looked over Denis from head to toe, then asked: "Got a pistol?"

"Revolver."

"Licensed?"

"No."

The locomotive whistled and started to move. The stationmaster rolled up the signal flag and slid it into a tube. He glanced at the departing train.

"What about your traveling companion?" the stationmaster said, pointing. Denis saw that the vagrant's foot was visible through the open door of the train car.

He'd asked as if by inertia, in exactly the same way that he had stepped out to meet the train, in exactly the way he had rolled up the flag. The man had observed this kind of behavior before. Too many times.

"He's going farther," Denis answered. "Is your town a big one?"

"Two hundred thirty people," the stationmaster said. "And there's an infant, too, the daughter of a schoolteacher. But she was born sickly." He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know whether she counts."

The knocking of the wheels grew silent in the distance and only the whisper of the sea remained. "My name is Denis."

"Pyotr," the stationmaster said. He extended his hand-mechanically, lifeless. Denis pressed his palm-firmly, steadily. "Oh, you're completely frozen," Pyotr said, some emotion, at least, appearing in his voice. "Let's go inside. I'll make you some tea."

Denis nodded and followed him into the station-a small, one-story building made of red brick, the roof covered in tile.

They drank tea in the cold, dilapidated office. In the corner, old red banners with golden letters gathered dust-awards for victories in some kind of Socialist labor compet.i.tions from the previous century. On the desk was a black plastic telephone, out-of-place, incongruent-a relic of a time before everything turned to s.h.i.+t.

"Does that thing work?" Denis asked, and gulped down the hot tea.

"You've got to be joking." Pyotr didn't even smile. "But we're supposed to have one. n.o.body rescinded the rule."

"Is there electricity in the town?"

"There's a generator in the hospital. They've been bringing in a little bit of oil," the stationmaster said cautiously. "The fishermen have a wind turbine. An old one."

"How do you get by?"

"Like everybody else," Pyotr said, with no trace of resentment. "We do whatever we need to. We poke around in the soil, but there's very little good soil around here. We catch fish. During the day the freight train will come by; we will send ten barrels of fish to the city."

"Salted?"

"Fresh. We interlay them with wet gra.s.s-seaweed. They'll last a day."

"What else?"

The stationmaster hemmed and hawed. "Well, in general, nothing. There's no work. There was no point for you to get off the train here."

"I always find work," Denis said. He poured himself more tea from a fat nickel teapot. It was the only clean and well-conditioned object in the office. And the tea brew was the real thing, as though from a past life.

"Unfortunately, there's no sugar left," Pyotr said. "There's never enough sugar."

"I don't drink it sweet."

The stationmaster raised his tired and pleading eyes: "You should go. The freight train will set off in the afternoon-I'll put you on it. I can talk to the engineer, he'll let you in the cabin, you can go as-"

He failed to explain the word "as"-as right then there was a knock at the door, and someone entered the office.

"Well, now," Pyotr whispered as he stood.

Denis finished drinking his tea, then turned around.

A young man was standing at the door-thin, black-haired, with brash, lively eyes, and bright-red lips, as though they had been painted with lipstick. He was wearing a black leather coat with s.h.i.+ning silver braid-studs and black leather pants that fit tightly over wiry legs. In his left hand, he held an automatic pistol by his side-carelessly, with boyish defiance.

"Who's he?" the young man asked.

"He's just pa.s.sing through," the stationmaster said. "He got off the morning train. He was riding in the freight car; he was completely frozen. He's leaving in mid-afternoon."

The young man remained silent and bit his lip.

"Who's this?" Denis asked the stationmaster. "Some kind of pretty boy?"

Pyotr choked on his tea and shook his head.

The young man's eyes became big and round from the insult. He didn't say a thing-for which Denis mentally complimented him-but he immediately began to raise his weapon. The stationmaster dove under the desk.

The revolver in Denis's hand shot just once. A hole appeared in the young man's black leather jacket, and the air smelled tartly of gunpowder. The youth glanced at Denis-hurt, like a child forbidden to play a game-and fell heavily to the floor.

"You go," Denis said to Pyotr. "I'll clean up here."

"What have you done?" the stationmaster began, as he crawled out from under the desk. "What have you done? You should have just peacefully left in the afternoon..."

"You're not sick of living this way?"

"Everybody's living this way, it's bad for everyone now."

"No, not everyone's living this way," Denis said resolutely. "Go."

The stationmaster set off for the door in an arc, but the young man's boots-heavy, laced-up army boots-were lying right on the doorstep, and he was forced to step over the body.

"Is this one a newcomer, or one of yours?" Denis asked.

The stationmaster stopped, awkwardly leaning over the body. He licked his lips, took off his service cap with raspberry-colored piping and crumpled it in his hand.

"One of ours. The doctor's son."

"Where can I find him?"

"The doctor? Take this street," the stationmaster said, and flicked his hand so that it was clear right away there was only one street in the town and it goes from the station to the sea. "There's a little hospital, halfway down the street. A clinic, of course, not a hospital. We just call it that."

"You go home," Denis suggested. "Go, go. I'll clean up everything."

The hospital was very small, but even so, it was a little bigger than the train station. It was two stories tall, but on the second story, parts of broken window panes were awkwardly patched with clear plastic. Denis walked back and forth on the porch, finis.h.i.+ng his cigarette. Finally he made up his mind, gave a short knock on the door and, without waiting for an answer, entered.

The doctor must have lived in the hospital-otherwise why would he be in his office so early? Fairly old and heavy, he was sitting at his desk. A stethoscope, the symbol of his profession, was in the corner. He was eating a watermelon.

"Have a seat," the doctor said, pus.h.i.+ng a plate at Denis. "Eat. We have sandy soil, the watermelons are really good. They help your kidneys."

"I'm not worried about my kidneys," Denis said. "Your son-"

"I know," the doctor didn't raise his eyes to look at him. "Pyotr stopped by earlier."

Denis remained silent.

"What do you expect?" The doctor asked. "I can't say 'thank you' to you. But I'm not going to begin to accuse you of anything. Yes, certainly, it's good that this torment has ended. To watch your son being turned into a monster-it... burns up the soul."

"I can imagine," Denis said.

The doctor set aside the green rind and started on the next piece of melon. "Just what have you achieved?" he mumbled. "Now they'll kill you. And punish us for the fact that we didn't kill you ourselves."

"How many of them are there?" Denis asked.

"Twenty or so."

"Can you be more precise?"

"Eighteen," he said, red juice trickling from his lips. "Not counting my son."

"We don't have to count him," Denis confirmed. "There are about a hundred men in the city, couldn't you handle this yourself?"

"It's not a hundred," the doctor shook his head. "If we count just the adults, it's about seventy."

"Well? There are only eighteen of them."

"That's easy for you to say," the doctor shrugged his shoulders. "Eighteen. Fifteen of them are our children."

"Initially there was just three?"

"Yes. They settled in. Everything began little by little. They promised to protect us and for a while they really did protect us. Then one our boys went over to them, then another, then a third..."

"You should've done something about it before the first went over to them," Denis said firmly. "How many men, how many women?"

"They have about two women," the doctor winced. "But that's not a problem for them. If they get bored, they come take our women."

"What is the name of this gang?" Denis asked.

"They call themselves the 'High Noon Vampires.' They come to hara.s.s us every day at noon, like clockwork."