Vampires Overhead by Alan Hyder

been shot out of that exploding building. Push it overboard—quick, you fool.’
    The timber slid overboard and we went on.
    ‘You look as if you could do with a wash and brush up, Bingen.’
    ‘Aw! This is no time to joke.’
    Bingen certainly looked to be in a sorry plight. He was black from smoke, with great stripes of grey running down his body where he had smeared the running sweat. Both of us were now stripped to the waist, and I suppose that I resembled him. I know that I was dry. The roof of my mouth was so parched my tongue stuck to it. I had to stop every while to scoop water up in handfuls, until Bingen discovered a baling tin under the seat. He flung water over us in turn, to find that he was filling the boat and had to bale until he perspired again.
    But, overshadowing everything was one actuality. One awe-inspiring fact which neither of us dared voice until we had travelled some distance.
    ‘Bingen, have you realized! We’re going right through London without seeing another living soul!’
    ‘Yes. But I think I understand that. We’ll find the crowds when we get past the buildings, out in the country. They couldn’t stay here in this fire. They got away.’
    ‘They couldn’t all have got away as quickly as this. There must be some people about here, if there are any anywhere.’
    ‘For God’s sake what do you mean? You don’t think . . .?’
    He read the answer in my eyes.
    That made us forget the heat. There was no one else upon the river, and it was impossible for anything to have lived ashore. Ashore, the fires; on the river, nothing but our dinghy and clumps of drifting, smouldering timber, floating debris; and over all, a covering of white ashes. I watched a long baulk float by, hissing, steaming, turning from red to black as water percolated into it.
    ‘There are others on the river besides us,’ I whispered suddenly. ‘There!’
    We shuddered, and I pulled the dinghy quickly aside.
    Partly submerged, a collection of bodies, tangled together into a raft, floated slowly along to the left of the boat. We watched until the ghastly procession drew astern.
    ‘They’re exactly like the two in the brewery,’ Bingen said. ‘Those things have been on them before or after they were drowned. How did they get in the river? There’s nearly a hundred of them.’
    ‘Stampeded into the water, and a cloud of Vampires dropped on them. Hope to God they were drowned before . . .’
    ‘Garry, d’you remember seeing those mummies in the museum by the barracks in Cairo? All those people had the same shrivelled, shrunken appearance. They look just like mummies that have been dead a thousand years.’
    ‘There’s Tower Bridge in front. Half of it’s down. We’ll have to be nippy getting under there.’
    One of the great towers had fallen, half the roadway jutted over the river, and on the broken bridge stood a lorry laden with some material which blazed, and yet did not burn away. It looked as if it had been burning for days and would go on burning for ever.
    The river widened, and the heat abated visibly. Hereabouts, fires on the banks seemed to have nearly burned out. Maybe they started here earlier; the Vampires, perhaps, dropped here first. But there could not have been much difference in the time of their arrival. They must have descended to earth simultaneously in one vast cloud. The one tremendous conflagration razing London could not have started from small isolated fires.
    ‘Even here, there’s not another soul but us. Just the two of us on a grey river edged with fire.’
    Several times Bingen, whose eyes continually searched the sky, yelled for us to drop to the bottom of the boat and endeavour to hide beneath our coats, when, in the distance, high in the sky, some of the Vampires flew effortlessly by, until, reassured they had not seen us, or seeing us, did not intend to descend, we rose and went on. Once, hunched on the remaining piles of a tumbled wharf, we saw one of them, and even