The Fritz Leiber by Fritz Leiber
Author:Fritz Leiber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: time travel, war, science fiction, fantasy, horror
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2015-12-27T16:00:00+00:00
THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES
Originally published in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, January 1960.
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.
âThe Twenty-Fifth Hour,
by Herbert Best
I was one hundred miles from Nowhereâand I mean that literallyâwhen I spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. Iâd 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.
Iâd 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 didnât wave or turn our heads or give the slightest indication weâd seen each other as our paths slowly converged. But we were intensely, minutely watchfulâI knew I was and she had better be.
Overhead the sky was a low dust haze, as always. I donât 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 cantingâthey 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 erodedâvaporized 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 couldnât be sure, though I did see three dark blobs up there that might be vultures perching.
From the drift around the foot of the nearest tower a human skull peered whitely. That is rather unusual. Years later now you still see more dead bodies with the meat on them than skeletons. Intense radiation has killed their bacteria and preserved them indefinitely from decay, just like the packaged meat in the last advertisements. In fact such bodies are one of the signs of a really hot driftâyou avoid them. The vultures pass up such poisonously hot carrion tooâtheyâve learned their lesson.
Ahead some big gas tanks began to loom up, like deformed battleships and flat-tops in a smoke screen, their prows being the juncture of the natural curve of the off-blast side with the massive concavity of the on-blast side.
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