Vampires Overhead by Alan Hyder Page B

didn’t you call me?’
    ‘Naughty! Naughty!’ Bingen grinned, speaking with his mouth full, then as he saw I angered, spoke soothingly. ‘All right. It’s O.K. in here. Only been a bit of a fire aboard. The stairs burned away and a cupboard, but nothing else.’
    ‘Never mind about that. There’s food, isn’t there? Give me a hand up. See if you can find a rope to let down or something, and I’ll come up.’
    ‘If we can fix the opening over the cabin we might stay here the night. There’s food here.’
    ‘I can see that! Leaning over the side with your blasted mouth full, while I’m down here, starving. Stay there the night! Am I to stay here the night? Get something to give me a hand up. And something I can moor this boat with.’
    Bingen went off, his heavy boots clumping about the deck, poking around in search of rope, and eventually returned with a length of cordage which he dropped down to me. I fastened the boat by the bows and flung the end up to him. He made it fast above, and, heavily, I pulled myself up to roll over the bulwarks and lay gasping on the deck of the barge like a stranded fish. Bingen went below and, while I recovered, climbed back again with food in his hand to offer me bread and an opened tin of meat.
    The bread was hard, stale, but I munched at it greedily, like a wolf, sitting there on the warm deck; and presently, stretched satisfied, feeling, with food inside me, that I had recovered my strength.
    ‘Well? We’d better see about getting fixed up for the night,’ I suggested. ‘I’m rested now, though I’d like about three days in bed. Come on, let’s go down in the cabin. The dinghy’s fixed so that it can’t float away. Are there any smokes below?’
    ‘I don’t know. Haven’t been through the cabins properly yet. We’ll go and see. I could do with a smoke.’
    The stairs, as Bingen had remarked, were burned away, so that we had to drop down into the cabin. It looked cosy enough to me, with memory of the tunnel vividly in my mind. Two usable bunks there were, and examination assured us the place was safe to stay the night. The opening wanted securing, but a couple of the asbestos boards would quickly do that.
    ‘Bloke evidently had a family aboard.’ Bingen pointed to the litter of clothing on the cabin floor. ‘There was a lot of stuff on the floor, but I pulled some out when I was searching for food.’
    ‘Is there much food?’
    ‘Several tins of meat, bacon, biscuits, some bread that’s hard, and there’s a sack of potatoes.’
    ‘Any tea?’
    I searched about, and soon a kettle was on a fire in the stove. We lit cigarettes, waiting for it to boil.
    ‘There’s a tin stuffed full of money in the cupboard,’ Bingen said. ‘I shoved about twenty pounds of it in my pocket, but I was more pleased to find the box of cigs.’
    With a cup of tea and a cigarette, I clambered into a bunk, lounging thankfully.
    ‘Only take twenty? Might have taken it all! Hell of a lot of good it’ll do you,’ I answered from the depth of the bunk. ‘Bingen, we haven’t seen another soul alive. It looks as if we two are the only people in the world. But that’s ridiculous! There must be folks about somewhere. Everybody can’t have been destroyed. It’s unbelievable.’
    ‘Unbelievable! Those flying nightmares are unbelievable. But they’re here. All London gone up in smoke. That’s unbelievable. It’s happened. But there must be other people. They’ll have got safely out of town, away from this, and rigged up camps.’
    ‘But Bingen, haven’t you thought how numerous the things are. When we saw them from the tunnel, they covered the town like bees on a hive. People wouldn’t have had a chance to get away from them. Those things must have dropped down in millions and millions. Think of the size of the cloud that we saw.’
    ‘But we were all right in the tunnel. We two couldn’t have been the only ones in London in a safe place.’
    ‘The tunnel we were in was