THE NIGHT OF THE
LONG KNIVES
I was one hundred miles from Nowhere—and I
mean that literally—when I spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I'd
been keeping an extra lookout because I still expected the other undead bugger
left over from the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me.
I'd been following a line of high-voltage towers all canted over at the same
gentlemanly tipsy angle by an old blast from the Last War. I judged the girl was
going in the same general direction and was being edged over toward my course by
a drift of dust that even at my distance showed dangerous metallic gleams and
dark humps that might be dead men or cattle.
She looked slim, dark topped, and on guard. Small like me and like me wearing
a scarf loosely around the lower half of her face in the style of the old
buckaroos.
We didn't wave or turn our heads or give the slightest indication we'd seen
each other as our paths slowly converged. But we were intensely, minutely
watchful—I knew I was and she had better be.
Overhead the sky was a low dust haze, as always. I don't remember what a high
sky looks like. Three years ago I think I saw Venus. Or it may have been Sirius
or Jupiter.
The hot smoky light was turning from the amber of midday to the bloody bronze
of evening.
The line of towers I was following showed the faintest spread in the
direction of their canting—they must have been only a few miles from blast
center. As I passed each one I could see where the metal on the blast side had
been eroded—vaporized by the original blast, mostly smoothly, but with welts and
pustules where the metal had merely melted and run. I supposed the lines the
towers carried had all been vaporized too, but with the haze I couldn't be sure,
though I did see three dark blobs up there that might be vultures perching.
