Read I Travel by Night for Free Online

his breath. A second slug hit him squarely in the left shoulder and knocked him back. He fell into the thicket of vines and thorns, and there he lay as the battle raged around him, his lungs hitching and his vision fading in and out. He told himself to get up, to rejoin the fight, and as he tried a body fell across him and pinned him down. Horses without riders thundered past. The cannons spoke again from a distance, and once more the earth exploded.
    In this maelstrom of death and destruction Trevor Lawson sank down into what felt like a hole lined with velvet black. His eyes closed, and his body shivered as he slept.
    He awakened in the dark, with the sounds of pain around him. He smelled blood and sulphur. The murmurs of wounded and dying men rose up from the forest like whispered hymns. Occasionally someone cried out or sobbed. Lawson could no longer hear the noises of battle. The cannons were silent. Frogs croaked from bloodied ponds and crickets chirped in the gore-smeared weeds. Lawson felt the throbbing pain of his bullet wounds. He thought his left shoulder might be broken, for he couldn’t move that arm. He was aware that he yet gripped hard to the Colt. Was it still loaded? He didn’t know. The body that lay across him twitched. Lawson could smell whiskey on the man’s mouth. Confederate or Yank, he knew not, but the man was still breathing. Also the wounded soldier had a beard like the pride of a hog’s bristle-brush. Lawson needed to push the man off, to roll him over, anything to get free. With one working arm it was going to be difficult. The man muttered something that sounded like Lemons, Rolly in his delirium, and Lawson wanted to say Get off me, you damned fool .
    He was aware, then, that there was movement among the fallen soldiers.
    There was no light. No candle-lit lanterns searching for those who might survive the night, to be loaded onto wagons and taken to the field hospital. There was no light, but there was movement.
    Lawson turned his head to the left as much as he could. He could barely breathe with this bearded ox lying across him. He narrowed his eyes, scanning the dark. Yes…someone was moving among the bodies. More than one, it appeared. The figures were nearly blurred, moving like ghosts yet they were not spirits of the dead, for Lawson saw them crouch down and they became solid enough in their stillness. He counted five, and possibly there were more he could not see. He thought they might be camp followers looking for their lovers, for indeed three were women in long and dirtied gowns. He started to call out for help, to proclaim I am alive , but before he could summon the breath to speak…
    …someone reached down and wrenched the bearded ox’s head backward. Lawson saw long clawlike fingernails caked with dirt. The bearded man’s throat was exposed; his eyelids fluttered, as if he were awakening from his wounded slumber. Then suddenly there were two figures crouching down on either side, a man and a woman both thin and wild-haired. The man wore a mud-stained dark suit, the woman a dirty light-colored gown with what appeared to be fabric roses at the bosom.
    Lawson saw the woman open her mouth wide, and wider still. Something unhinged in the jaw and the lower teeth thrust forward. Two curved fangs descended from the upper teeth, and in a blurred rush of desperation of need or hunger she bit into the bearded man’s throat on one side while the man’s descended fangs plunged into the other side. Their eyes burned red at the centers, as if embers glowed there from the hearth of Hell.
    Their bodies shuddered. The bearded man’s eyes opened and rolled backward in his head to show the whites. His face contorted in silent agony. The two creatures continued to feed from his throat, making slurping and sucking noises. Tendrils of blood ran. The male creature’s hand drifted out and stroked the woman’s tangled hair, as if this moment was the essence of the greatest love between