The Night of the Long Knives Read online

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  COMPLETE BOOK-LENGTH NOVEL

  THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES

  By FRITZ LEIBER

  ILLUSTRATED by FINLAY

  CHAPTER 1

  _Any man who saw you, or even heard your footsteps must be ambushed, stalked and killed, whether needed for food or not. Otherwise, so long as his strength held out, he would be on your trail._

  --The Twenty-Fifth Hour, _by Herbert Best_

  I was one hundred miles from Nowhere--and I mean that literally--when Ispotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I'd been keeping an extralookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left overfrom the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me.

  They were two desperate scavengers in a no-man's land ofradiation and death.]

  I'd been following a line of high-voltage towers all canted over at thesame gentlemanly tipsy angle by an old blast from the Last War. I judgedthe girl was going in the same general direction and was being edgedover toward my course by a drift of dust that even at my distance showeddangerous metallic gleams and dark humps that might be dead men orcattle.

  She looked slim, dark topped, and on guard. Small like me and like mewearing a scarf loosely around the lower half of her face in the styleof the old buckaroos.

  We didn't wave or turn our heads or give the slightest indication we'dseen 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 ahigh sky looks like. Three years ago I think I saw Venus. Or it may havebeen Sirius or Jupiter.

  The hot smoky light was turning from the amber of midday to the bloodybronze of evening.

  The line of towers I was following showed the faintest spread in thedirection of their canting--they must have been only a few miles fromblast center. As I passed each one I could see where the metal on theblast side had been eroded--vaporized by the original blast, mostlysmoothly, but with welts and pustules where the metal had merely meltedand run. I supposed the lines the towers carried had all been vaporizedtoo, but with the haze I couldn't be sure, though I did see three darkblobs up there that might be vultures perching.

  From the drift around the foot of the nearest tower a human skull peeredwhitely. That is rather unusual. Years later now you still see more deadbodies with the meat on them than skeletons. Intense radiation haskilled their bacteria and preserved them indefinitely from decay, justlike the packaged meat in the last advertisements. In fact such bodiesare one of the signs of a really hot drift--you avoid them. The vulturespass up such poisonously hot carrion too--they've learned their lesson.

  Ahead some big gas tanks began to loom up, like deformed battleships andflat-tops in a smoke screen, their prows being the juncture of thenatural curve of the off-blast side with the massive concavity of theon-blast side.

  None of the three other buggers and me had had too clear an idea ofwhere Nowhere had been--hence, in part, the name--but I knew in ageneral way that I was somewhere in the Deathlands between Porter Countyand Ouachita Parish, probably much nearer the former.

  * * * * *

  It's a real mixed-up America we've got these days, you know, with justthe faintest trickle of a sense of identity left, like a guy in thepaddedest cell in the most locked up ward in the whole loony bin. If atime traveler from mid Twentieth Century hopped forward to it across thefew intervening years and looked at a map of it, if anybody has a map ofit, he'd think that the map had run--that it had got some sort ofdisease that had swollen a few tiny parts beyond all bounds, papertumors, while most of the other parts, the parts he remembered carryingnames in such big print and showing such bold colors, had shrunk tonothingness.

  To the east he'd see Atlantic Highlands and Savannah Fortress. To thewest, Walla Walla Territory, Pacific Palisades, and Los Alamos--andthere he'd see an actual change in the coastline, I'm told, where threeof the biggest stockpiles of fusionables let go and opened Death Valleyto the sea--so that Los Alamos is closer to being a port. Centrally he'dfind Porter County and Manteno Asylum surprisingly close together nearthe Great Lakes, which are tilted and spilled out a bit toward thesouthwest with the big quake. South-centrally: Ouachita Parish inchingup the Mississippi from old Louisiana under the cruel urging of theFisher Sheriffs.

  Those he'd find and a few, a very few other places, including a couple Isuppose I haven't heard of. Practically all of them would surprisehim--no one can predict what scraps of a blasted nation are going tohang onto a shred of organization and ruthlessly maintain it and veryslowly and very jealously extend it.

  But biggest of all, occupying practically all the map, reducing allthose swollen localities I've mentioned back to tiny blobs, boundingmost of America and thrusting its jetty pseudopods everywhere, he'd seethe great inkblot of the Deathlands. I don't know how else than by anarea of solid, absolutely unrelieved black you'd represent theDeathlands with its multicolored radioactive dusts and its skimpyfreightage of lonely Deathlanders, each bound on his murderous, utterlypointless, but utterly absorbing business--an area where names likeNowhere, It, Anywhere, and the Place are the most natural thing in theworld when a few of us decide to try to pad down together for a fewnervous months or weeks.

  As I say, I was somewhere in the Deathlands near Manteno Asylum.

  * * * * *

  The girl and me were getting closer now, well within pistol or dartrange though beyond any but the most expert or lucky knife throw. Shewore boots and a weathered long-sleeved shirt and jeans. The blacktopping was hair, piled high in an elaborate coiffure that was held inplace by twisted shavings of bright metal. A fine bug-trap, I toldmyself.

  In her left hand, which was closest to me, she carried a dart gun,pointed away from me, across her body. It was the kind of potent tinycrossbow you can't easily tell whether the spring is loaded. Back aroundon her left hip a small leather satchel was strapped to her belt. Alsoon the same side were two sheathed knives, one of which was anoddity--it had no handle, just the bare tang. For nothing but throwing,I guessed.

  I let my own left hand drift a little closer to my Banker's Special inits open holster--Ray Baker's great psychological weapon, though (whoknows?) the two .38 cartridges it contained might actually fire. The oneI'd put to the test at Nowhere had, and very lucky for me.

  She seemed to be hiding her right arm from me. Then I spotted the weaponit held, one you don't often see, a stevedore's hook. She _was_ hidingher right hand, all right, she had the long sleeve pulled down over itso just the hook stuck out. I asked myself if the hand were perhapscovered with radiation scars or sores or otherwise disfigured. WeDeathlanders have our vanities. I'm sensitive about my baldness.

  Then she let her right arm swing more freely and I saw how short it was.She had no right hand. The hook was attached to the wrist stump.

  I judged she was about ten years younger than me. I'm pushing forty, Ithink, though some people have judged I'm younger. No way of my knowingfor sure. In this life you forget trifles like chronology.

  Anyway, the age difference meant she would have quicker reflexes. I'dhave to keep that in mind.

  * * * * *

  The greenishly glinting dust drift that I'd judged she was avoidingswung closer ahead. The girl's left elbow gave a little kick to thesatchel on her hip and there was a sudden burst of irregular ticks thatalmost made me start. I steadied myself and concentrated on thinkingwhether I should attach any special significance to her carrying aGeiger counter. Naturally it wasn't the sort of thinking that interferedin any way with my watchfulness--you quickly lose the habit of that kindof thinking in the Deathlands or you lose something else.

  It could mean she was some sort of greenhorn. Most of us old-timers canvisually judge the heat of a dust drift or crater or rayed area morereliably than any instrument. Some buggers claim they just feel it,though I've never known any of the latter too eager to navigate inunfamiliar country at night--which you'd think they'd be willing to doif they could feel heat blind.

  But she didn't look one bit like a tenderfoot--like for instance somecitizeness newly banished from Manteno. Or like some Porter burgher'sunfaithful wife or troublesome girlfriend whom he'd personally cartedout beyond the ridges of cleaned-out hot dust that help guard suchplaces, and then abandoned in revenge or from boredom--and they callthemselves civilized, those cultural queers!

  No, she looked like she _belonged_ in the Deathlands. But then why thecounter?

  Her eyes might be bad, real bad. I didn't think so. She raised her bootan extra inch to step over a little jagged fragment of concrete. No.

  Maybe she was just a born double-checker, using science to back upknowledge based on experience as rich as my own or richer. I've met thesuper-careful type before. They mostly get along pretty well, but theytend to be a shade too slow in the clutches.

  Maybe she was _testing_ the counter, planning to use it some other wayor trade it for something.

  Maybe she made a practice of traveling by night! Then the counter madegood sense. But then why use it by day? Why reveal it to me in any case?

  Was she trying to convince me that she was a greenhorn? Or had she hopedthat the sudden noise would throw me off guard? But who would g
o to thetrouble of carrying a Geiger counter for such devious purposes? Andwouldn't she have waited until we got closer before trying the noisegambit?

  Think-shmink--it gets you nowhere!

  She kicked off the counter with another bump of her elbow and started toedge in toward me faster. I turned the thinking all off and gave mywhole mind to watchfulness.

  Soon we were barely more than eight feet apart, almost within lungingrange without even the preliminary one-two step, and still we hadn'tspoken or looked straight at each other, though being that close we'dhad to cant our heads around a bit to keep each other in peripheralvision. Our eyes would be on each other steadily for five or sixseconds, then dart forward an instant to check for rocks and holes inthe trail we were following in parallel. A cultural queer from one ofthe "civilized" places would have found it funny, I suppose, if he'dbeen able to watch us perform in an arena or from behind armor glass forhis exclusive pleasure.

  * * * * *

  The girl had eyebrows as black as her hair, which in its piled-up andmetal-knotted savagery called to mind African queens despite her typicalpale complexion--very little ultraviolet gets through the dust. From theinside corner of her right eye socket a narrow radiation scar ran upbetween her eyebrows and across her forehead at a rakish angle until itdisappeared under a sweep of hair at the upper left corner of herforehead.

  I'd been smelling her, of course, for some time.

  I could even tell the color of her eyes now. They were blue. It's acolor you never see. Almost no dusts have a bluish cast, there are fewblue objects except certain dark steels, the sky never gets very faraway from the orange range, though it is green from time to time, andwater reflects the sky.

  Yes, she had blue eyes, blue eyes and that jaunty scar, blue eyes andthat jaunty scar and a dart gun and a steel hook for a right hand, andwe were walking side by side, eight feet apart, not an inch closer,still not looking straight at each other, still not saying a word, and Irealized that the initial period of unadulterated watchfulness was over,that I'd had adequate opportunity to inspect this girl and size her up,and that night was coming on fast, and that here I was, once again, backwith _the problem of the two urges_.

  I could try either to kill her or go to bed with her.

  * * * * *

  I know that at this point the cultural queers (and certainly ourimaginary time traveler from mid Twentieth Century) would make a greatnoise about not understanding and not believing in the genuineness ofthe simple urge to murder that governs the lives of us Deathlanders.Like detective-story pundits, they would say that a man or woman murdersfor gain, or concealment of crime, or from thwarted sexual desire oroutraged sexual possessiveness--and maybe they would list a few other"rational" motives--but not, they would say, just for the simple sake ofmurder, for the sure release and relief it gives, for the sake of wipingout one recognizable bit more (the closest bit we can, since those of uswith the courage or lazy rationality to wipe out ourselves have longsince done so)--wiping out one recognizable bit more of the wholemiserable, unutterably disgusting human mess. Unless, they would say, aperson is completely insane, which is actually how all outsiders view usDeathlanders. They can think of us in no other way.

  I guess cultural queers and time travelers simply _don't_ understand,though to be so blind it seems to me that they have to overlook much ofthe history of the Last War and of the subsequent years, especially themushrooming of crackpot cults with a murder tinge: the werewolf gangs,the Berserkers and Amuckers, the revival of Shiva worship and the BlackMass, the machine wreckers, the kill-the-killers movements, the newwitchcraft, the Unholy Creepers, the Unconsciousers, the radioactiveblue gods and rocket devils of the Atomites, and a dozen other groupingsclearly prefiguring Deathlander psychology. Those cults had all been asunpredictable as Thuggee or the Dancing Madness of the Middle Ages orthe Children's Crusade, yet they had happened just the same.

  But cultural queers are good at overlooking things. They have to be, Isuppose. They think they're humanity growing again. Yes, despite theirlaughable warpedness and hysterical crippledness, they actuallybelieve--each howlingly different community of them--that they're thenew Adams and Eves. They're all excited about themselves and whether ornot they wear fig leaves. They don't carry with them, twenty-four hoursa day, like us Deathlanders do, the burden of all that was forever lost.

  * * * * *

  Since I've gone this far I'll go a bit further and make the paradoxicaladmission that even us Deathlanders don't really understand our urge tomurder. Oh, we have our rationalizations of it, just like everyone hasof his ruling passion--we call ourselves junkmen, scavengers, gangrenesurgeons; we sometimes believe we're doing the person we kill theultimate kindness, yes and get slobbery tearful about it afterwards; wesometimes tell ourselves we've finally found and are rubbing out the oneman or woman who was responsible for everything; we talk, mostly toourselves, about the aesthetics of homicide; we occasionally admit, butonly each to himself alone, that we're just plain nuts.

  But we don't really understand our urge to murder, we only _feel_ it.

  At the hateful sight of another human being, we feel it begins to growin us until it becomes an overpowering impulse that jerks us, like apuppet is jerked by its strings, into the act itself or its attemptedcommission.

  Like I was feeling it grow in me now as we did this parallel deathmarchthrough the reddening haze, me and this girl and our problem. This girlwith the blue eyes and the jaunty scar.

  The problem of the _two_ urges, I said. The other urge, the sexual, isone that I know all cultural queers (and certainly our time traveler)would claim to know all about. Maybe they do. But I wonder if theyunderstand how intense it can be with us Deathlanders when it's the onlyrelease (except maybe liquor and drugs, which we seldom can get and evenmore rarely dare use)--the only complete release, even though a briefone, from the overpowering loneliness and from the tyranny of the urgeto kill.

  To embrace, to possess, to glut lust on, yes even briefly to love,briefly to shelter in--that was good, that was a relief and release tobe treasured.

  But it couldn't last. You could draw it out, prop it up perhaps for afew days, for a month even (though sometimes not for a singlenight)--you might even start to talk to each other a little, after awhile--but it could never last. The glands always tire, if nothing else.

  Murder was the only _final_ solution, the only _permanent_ release.Only us Deathlanders know how good it feels. But then after the kill theloneliness would come back, redoubled, and after a while I'd meetanother hateful human ...

  _Our_ problem of the two urges. As I watched this girl slogging alongparallel to me, as I kept constant watch on her of course, I wonderedhow _she_ was feeling the two urges. Was she attracted to the ridgyscars on my cheeks half revealed by my scarf?--to me they have apleasing symmetry. Was she wondering how my head and face looked withoutthe black felt skullcap low-visored over my eyes? Or was she thinkingmostly of that hook swinging into my throat under the chin and draggingme down?

  I couldn't tell. She looked as poker-faced as I was trying to.

  * * * * *

  For that matter, I asked myself, how was _I_ feeling the two urges?--howwas I feeling them as I watched this girl with the blue eyes and thejaunty scar and the arrogantly thinned lips that asked to be smashed,and the slender throat?--and I realized that there was no way todescribe that, not even to myself. I could only feel the two urges growin me, side by side, like monstrous twins, until they would simply betoo big for my taut body and one of them would have to get out fast.

  I don't know which one of us started to slow down first, it happened sogradually, but the dust puffs that rise from the ground of theDeathlands under even the lightest treading became smaller and smalleraround our steps and finally vanished altogether, and we were standingstill. Only then did I notice the obvious physical trigger for ourstopping. An old freeway ran at right angles across our path. Theshoulder by which we'd approached it was sharply eroded, so that thepavement, which even had a shallow cave eroded under it, was a goodthree feet above the level of our path, forming a low wall. From whereI'd stopped I could almost reach out and touch the rough-edgedsmooth-topped concrete. So could she.

  We were right in the midst of the gas tanks now, six or seven of themtowered around us, squeezed like beer cans by the decade-old blast buttheir metal looking sound enough until you became aware of the red lightshowing through in odd patterns of dots and dashes where vaporization orlater erosion had been complete. Almost but not quite lace-work. Justahead of us, right across the freeway, was the six-storey skeletalstructure of an old cracking plant, sagged like the power towers awayfrom the blast and the lower storeys drifted with piles and ridges andsmooth gobbets of dust.

  * * * * *

  The light was getting redder and smokier every minute.

  With the cessation of the physical movement of walking, which is alwayssome sort of release for emotions, I could feel the twin urges growingfaster in me. But that was all right, I told myself--this was thecrisis, as she must realize too, and that should key us up to bear theurges a little longer without explosion.

  I was the first to start to turn my head. For the first time I lookedstraight into her eyes and she into mine. And as always happens at suchtimes, a third urge appeared abruptly, an urge momentarily as strong asthe other two--the urge to speak, to tell and ask all about it. But evenas I started to phrase the first crazily happy greeting, my throatlumped, as I'd known it would, with the awful melancholy of all that wasforever lost, with the uselessness of any communication, with theimpossibility of recreating the past, our individual pasts, any pasts.And as it
always does, the third urge died.

  I could tell she was feeling that ultimate pain just like me. I couldsee her eyelids squeeze down on her eyes and her face lift and hershoulders go back as she swallowed hard.

  She was the first to start to lay aside a weapon. She took two sidewisesteps toward the freeway and reached her whole left arm further acrossher body and laid the dart gun on the concrete and drew back her handfrom it about six inches. At the same time looking at me hard--fiercelyangrily, you'd say--across her left shoulder. She had the experiencedduelist's trick of seeming to look into my eyes but actually focussingon my mouth. I was using the same gimmick myself--it's tiring to lookstraight into another person's eyes and it can put you off guard.

  My left side was nearest the wall so I didn't for the moment have theproblem of reaching across my body. I took the same sidewise steps shehad and using just two fingers, very gingerly--_disarmingly_, I hoped--Ilifted my antique firearm from its holster and laid it on the concreteand drew back my hand from it all the way. Now it was up to her again,or should be. Her hook was going to be quite a problem, I realized, butwe needn't come to it right away.

  She temporized by successively unsheathing the two knives at her leftside and laying them beside the dart gun. Then she stopped and her looktold me plainly that it was up to me.

  * * * * *

  Now I am a bugger who believes in carrying _one perfectknife_--otherwise, I know for a fact, you'll go knife-happy and end upby weighing yourself down with dozens, literally. So I am naturally veryreluctant to get out of touch in any way with Mother, who is a littlerusty along the sides but made of the toughest and most sharpenablealloy steel I've ever run across.

  Still, I was most curious to find out what she'd do about that hook, soI finally laid Mother on the concrete beside the .38 and rested myhands lightly on my hips, all ready to enjoy myself--at least I hoped Igave that impression.

  She smiled, it was almost a nice smile--by now we'd let our scarves dropsince we weren't raising any more dust--and then she took hold of thehook with her left hand and started to unscrew it from theleather-and-metal base fitting over her stump.

  Of course, I told myself. And her second knife, the one without a grip,must be that way so she could screw its tang into the base when shewanted a knife on her right hand instead of a hook. I ought to haveguessed.

  I grinned my admiration of her mechanical ingenuity and immediatelyunhitched my knapsack and laid it beside my weapons. Then a thoughtoccurred to me. I opened the knapsack and moving my hand slowly and veryopenly so she'd have no reason to suspect a ruse, I drew out a blanketand, trying to show her both sides of it in the process, as if I wereperforming some damned conjuring trick, dropped it gently on the groundbetween us.

  She unsnapped the straps on her satchel that fastened it to her belt andlaid it aside and then she took off her belt too, slowly drawing itthrough the wide loops of weathered denim. Then she looked meaningfullyat my belt.

  I had to agree with her. Belts, especially heavy-buckled ones like ours,can be nasty weapons. I removed mine. Simultaneously each belt joinedits corresponding pile of weapons and other belongings.

  She shook her head, not in any sort of negation, and ran her fingersinto the black hair at several points, to show me it hid no weapon, thenlooked at me questioningly. I nodded that I was satisfied--I hadn't seenanything run out of it, by the way. Then she looked up at my blackskullcap and she raised her eyebrows and smiled again, this time with aspice of mocking anticipation.

  In some ways I hate to part with that headpiece more than I do withMother. Not really because of its sandwiched lead-mesh inner lining--ifthe rays haven't baked my brain yet they never will and I'm sure thatthe patches of lead mesh sewed into my pants over my loins give a lotmore practical protection. But I was getting real attracted to this girlby now and there are times when a person must make a sacrifice of hisvanity. I whipped off my stylish black felt and tossed it on my pile anddared her to laugh at my shiny egg top.

  Strangely she didn't even smile. She parted her lips and ran her tonguealong the upper one. I gave an eager grin in reply, an incautiously wideone, and she saw my plates flash.

  * * * * *

  My plates are something rather special though they are by no meansunique. Back toward the end of the Last War, when it was obvious to anyrealist how bad things were going to be, though not how strangelyterrible, a number of people, like myself, had all their teeth jerkedand replaced with durable plates. I went some of them one better. Myplates were stainless steel biting and chewing ridges, smooth continuousones that didn't attempt to copy individual teeth. A person who looksclosely at a slab of chewing tobacco, say, I offer him will be puzzledby the smoothly curved incision, made as if by a razor blade mounted onthe arm of a compass. Magnetic powder buried in my gums makes for a realnice fit.

  This sacrifice was worse than my hat and Mother combined, but I couldsee the girl expected me to make it and would take no substitutes, andin this attitude I had to admit that she showed very sound judgment,because I keep the incisor parts of those plates filed to razorsharpness. I have to be careful about my tongue and lips but I figureit's worth it. With my dental scimitars I can in a wink bite out a chunkof throat and windpipe or jugular, though I've never had occasion to doso yet.

  For the first minute it made me feel like an old man, a real dodderer,but by now the attraction this girl had for me was getting irrational. Icarefully laid the two plates on top of my knapsack.

  In return, as a sort of reward you might say, she opened her mouth wideand showed me what was left of her own teeth--about two-thirds of them,a patchwork of tartar and gold.

  We took off our boots, pants and shirts, she watching verysuspiciously--I knew she'd been skeptical of my carrying only one knife.

  Oddly perhaps, considering how touchy I am about my baldness, I felt nosensitivity about revealing the lack of hair on my chest and in fact asort of pride in displaying the slanting radiation scars that havereplaced it, though they are crawling keloids of the ugliest, bumpiestsort. I guess to me such scars are tribal insignia--one-man andone-woman tribes of course. No question but that the scar on the girl'sforehead had been the first focus of my desire for her and it stilladded to my interest.

  By now we weren't staying as perfectly on guard or watching each other'sclothing for concealed weapons as carefully as we should--I know Iwasn't. It was getting dark fast, there wasn't much time left, and theother interest was simply becoming too great.

  * * * * *

  We were still automatically careful about how we did things. Forinstance the way we took off our pants was like ballet, simultaneouslycrouching a little on the left foot and whipping the right leg out ofits sheath in one movement, all ready to jump without trippingourselves if the other person did anything funny, and then skinning downthe left pants-leg with a movement almost as swift.

  But as I say it was getting too late for perfect watchfulness, in factfor any kind of effective watchfulness at all. The complexion of thewhole situation was changing in a rush. The possibilities of dealing orreceiving death--along with the chance of the minor indignity ofcannibalism, which some of us practice--were suddenly gone, all gone. Itwas going to be all right this time, I was telling myself. This was thetime it would be different, this was the time love would last, this wasthe time lust would be the firm foundation for understanding and trust,this time there would be really safe sleeping. This girl's body would behome for me, a beautiful tender inexhaustibly exciting home, and minefor her, for always.

  As she threw off her shirt, the last darkly red light showed me anothersmooth slantwise scar, this one around her hips, like a narrow girdlethat has slipped down a little on one side.