They were two desperatescavengers in a no-man's land of radiation and death.COMPLETE
BOOK-LENGTH NOVEL
THE NIGHT
OF THE
LONG KNIVES
By FRITZ LEIBER
ILLUSTRATED by FINLAY
CHAPTER 1
Any man who saw you, oreven heard your footstepsmust be ambushed, stalkedand killed, whether neededfor food or not. Otherwise,so long as his strength heldout, he would be on yourtrail.
—The Twenty-Fifth Hour,
by Herbert Best
I was one hundred miles fromNowhere—and I mean thatliterally—when I spotted thisgirl out of the corner of my eye.I'd been keeping an extra lookoutbecause I still expected theother undead bugger left overfrom the murder party at Nowhereto be stalking me.
I'd been following a line ofhigh-voltage towers all cantedover at the same gentlemanly tipsyangle by an old blast from theLast War. I judged the girl wasgoing in the same general directionand was being edged overtoward my course by a drift ofdust that even at my distanceshowed dangerous metallicgleams and dark humps thatmight be dead men or cattle.
She looked slim, dark topped,and on guard. Small like me andlike me wearing a scarf looselyaround the lower half of her facein the style of the old buckaroos.
We didn't wave or turn ourheads or give the slightest indicationwe'd seen each other asour paths slowly converged. Butwe were intensely, minutelywatchful—I knew I was and shehad better be.
Overhead the sky was a lowdust haze, as always. I don't rememberwhat a high sky lookslike. Three years ago I think Isaw Venus. Or it may have beenSirius or Jupiter.
The hot smoky light was turningfrom the amber of middayto the bloody bronze of evening.
The line of towers I was followingshowed the faintestspread in the direction of theircanting—they must have beenonly a few miles from blast center.As I passed each one I couldsee where the metal on the blastside had been eroded—vaporizedby the original blast, mostlysmoothly, but with welts andpustules where the metal hadmerely melted and run. I supposedthe lines the towers carriedhad all been vaporized too,but with the haze I couldn't besure, though I did see three darkblobs up there that might be vulturesperching.
From the drift around thefoot of the nearest tower a humanskull peered whitely. Thatis rather unusual. Years laternow you still see more deadbodies with the meat on themthan skeletons. Intense radiationhas killed their bacteria and preservedthem indefinitely fromdecay, just like the packagedmeat in the last advertisements.In fact such bodies are one ofthe signs of a really hot drift—youavoid them. The vulturespass up such poisonously hotcarrion too—they've learnedtheir lesson.
Ahead some big gas tanks beganto loom up, like deformedbattleships and flat-tops in asmoke screen, their prows beingthe juncture of the natural curveof the off-blast side with the massiveconcavity of the on-blastside.
None of the three other buggersand me had had too clearan idea of where Nowhere hadbeen—hence, in part, the name—butI knew in a general way thatI was somewhere in the Deathlandsbetween Porter Countyand Ouachita Parish, probablymuch nearer the former.
It's a real mixed-up Americawe've got these days, you know,with just the faintest trickle ofa sense of identity left, like a guyin the paddedest cell in the mostlocked up ward in the wholeloony bin. If