by Mazlow, J.
I slowed my climb and shot the male thrall. The bullet caught him in the shoulder, lifted him off his feet, and twisting him in the air deposited him face down in a pile of dried leaves. The woman thrall leapt as I fired at the male thrall covering at least ten feet with her one bound and jerked my mother off her feet by the hair dangling behind her. My mother screamed weakly as she tumbled onto her back. The thrall dropped down onto its knees over my mother, its nostrils flaring, and a gurgle of pleasure rattling around in its throat in place of its voice. Its hands shimmered with strands of her silver hair. The sight overwhelmed me, and I charged half-sliding down the slope bellowing. The gun in my hand was forgotten as the thrall bared its teeth and bent its face towards my mother’s squirming neck. She had her feet up under its stomach and pushed with all her might, but the thrall didn’t budge. It had one hand flat against her forehead pinning her head back and the other pushed her shoulder down into the dirt. I saw a thin line of blood trickle across the tautly stretched skin of my mother’s neck before I kicked the thrall. I caught it under the chin with my boot. The impact jarred my leg and almost knocked me to the ground as the thrall’s head snapped back. Suddenly my ears began to ring, and the thrall fell over with a hole in its throat spouting dark blood. I scooped my mother up and ran up the holler’s side towards my brother was holstering his gun. “The rest are coming,” he hissed and then dashed up the slope between clusters of rhododendrons. From behind us I heard a male’s voice utter a high-pitched sneering laugh. Grunts followed and then the sharp snap of a branch from where the thralls had fallen, but I did not look back as I scrambled up the hillside on all fours.
That was the worst time that I had ever been hunted. I ran up and down hillsides and splashed through cold streams in an endless succession. The thralls came on despite our attempts to hide our scent in the streams. I shot a thrall that almost caught up to me on a steep hill, slinging my mother over my shoulder like a sack so that I could draw and fire. I began to worry that I’d never get a chance to reload my clip before it emptied. Benjamin was impatient for me to hurry on and he ran farther and farther ahead. A burning sensation crept down my back and stomach from my burden, and my legs grew leaden. Each step was driven by fear alone. When my mother didn’t sleep, she muttered incoherently in little spastic groans. Her body raged as hotly as a typhoid infested jungle before falling into a glacial cool and then repeating the cycle.
A heavy downpour caught us on the morning of the third day of our flight. I wrapped my mother in a plastic parka and continued trudging slowly over muddy ground that was crisscrossed with streams of water running downhill. The water dripped off my hat, my nose and my chin and rolled down my face but I embraced it even as it soaked through my clothing. Our scent and our tracks were being washed away. After two hours of trudging through the rain it turned into drizzle and then was soon burned away by the bright sun of a clear day.
I caught up to my brother again as he lay on a muddy riverbank soaking up the last rays of the setting sun like a snake that’s just shed its skin. The swollen river’s murky waters swirled and gurgled but he still heard my approach. I carried our mother slung over one shoulder. Our breathing had merged into a mangled mix of heaves and sickly groans accentuated with the irregular pace of my stagger. He did not look up at us. I resisted the urge to let my mother drop to the ground and then collapse beside her in a heap and instead laid her down gently, cradling her head as it fell limply into the sand. Her eyes were now only narrow bloodshot slits in her leathery face and her lips were curled into a mad lopsided smile. I went down to the roiled water and knelt in the cold mud at its edge so that I could splash my face and drink the muddy waters from my hand. Benjamin’s presence taunted me like a demon demanding to be addressed, or a crow that follows you from tree to tree cawing, but I did not want to turn and speak to him.
I heard my mother gasp for breath and when I turned around, she was flailing and thrashing. As her lungs rattled with phlegm and her back arched in her fit, I ran back to her. She settled into a fit of weak coughing as I knelt beside her. Her lips and chin were completely covered in spittle. She turned her unseeing eyes to the heavens and dug into the bed of sand on which she lay. I got a small plastic cup from my pack and dipped it into the river. Small flecks of mud and plant matter drifted in the turbid water. Cradling her head on my knees, I tilted her forward and held the cup up to her. As soon as the water touched her lips she gagged and spit, her head twisting and her eyelids fluttering. I let her head fall softly to the ground where she lay quivering. She muttered, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I walk, and walk, and walk and there’s no one to comfort me.” My brother watched me sullenly not even sitting up as I crouched beside our mother.
“You’re slow,” he said
“And you’re a bastard,” I retorted. He sat up and pulled his toothpick, a long double-edged knife from his belt and a whetstone from his pack, glared at me, and began sharpening. He drew the blade slowly and evenly across the stone, adding a tiny flourish each stroke at the blade’s tip. He took his time with each side. The blade made an awful hiss, like a snake in the grass. Seething I faced the river, resisting the urge to slap him for trying to pull the same tricks on me that he pulled on any old scrounger or frightened patsy. Someone who’d follow whatever strong man they could tag along behind. I was his brother and even if we were unrelated, I’d killed a few vampires in my day, maybe even more than he had.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” I said. “You should have just kept on running.” A thin sliver of the sun setting behind the squat trees that grew along the opposite bank was all that remained of the day. Its rays transformed the brown river into burnished copper intricately laced with the shadows of leaves and branches. His knife continued its steady scraping.
“Papa never came back, but I did.” He answered. I scowled but didn’t look at him.
Our mother cried out, “I’m so cold. My blood is cold,” before rolling over onto her side and dry heaving.
When she’d stopped, I said, “Papa never came back, and neither should have you.” We didn't speak again as the sun disappeared below the horizon and the first stars appeared. Crickets and tree frogs began their incessant nightly chirping. My paranoia shaped their choruses into the sounds of pursuit, and I heard vampires’ light steps in the light breeze.
My brother stood and stretched. He was just a featureless shape of a man in the dim light.
“She’s going to turn,” I said quietly.
“No, she’s not,” he yelled and knelt beside her, laying one hand on her pale forehead. Sweat had soaked through her clothing as the fever had ravaged her body, but in its wake, she was left shivering as if blanketed in snow. Her skin wore the pallor of cold blood. A state that she would soon have to endure at all times, except when she had just enjoyed drained someone. I shivered.
“She’ll turn or she’ll die of the thrall sickness,” I said.
“What do you know about it?” He stood slowly and stared at me with cold hard eyes. “Besides, we wouldn’t be in this predicament if it wasn’t for you.”
“As if you’ve been a great help, running ahead and then complaining that it took me so long to carry her.” We both looked at her. She lay on her side with one cheek comfortably resting against the sand. Her chest barely rose with each breath. “They will find our scent again and they will catch up to us.”
“Let them,” he grunted and then shoved his knife back into the sheathe that hung from his belt. He walked to the river’s edge and stared into waters too murky to reflect even the moon. An owl hooted and several dogs barked in the distance as a chill wind blew down the river and tussled at my shirt. My brother wore nothing but short sleeves and shivered. He’d always been a fool.
“And by then she’ll be one of them,” I said, “and we’ll have to fight her as well.”
He pressed his lips together and shook his head, then ran his hands through his hair as he stamped one foot in the san
d. She moaned and writhed in the sand behind us, making a fallen sand angel with the twisted turns of her limbs. Her chest heaved and she pressed her hands and feet into the earth, arching her back and lifting her head from the ground. It twisted back and forth frantically. “Let’s put her to rest peacefully,” I said. “Let’s not let her become one of them.” I carefully pulled her book from her backpack. Its tattered pages and worn cover comforted me and I caressed it gently as I carried it over to her and laid it on her chest. She quieted as I did so. Her arms stopped flailing and her breath came easier as the book’s heavy weight settled onto her. I crossed her arms over its cover. My brother shook his head and wrung his hands as he stood watching. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness, but I could hear his breath; ragged, fitful, starting and stopping, sputtering in the humid air. I pulled my pistol from its holster and he began muttering to himself in a disarranged streak of incomprehensible syllables that he repeated quietly to himself like a chant. Only the slightest variations marred its rhythm. My mother had grown so pale that she glowed in the light of the rising moon as if she had become spirit already. She was beautiful. The woman we had known now so faded that she was barely present. Her eyes opened and their faded blue was the only color visible in the dismal atmosphere of gray and black. They were heavy with the knowledge of her fate and, beseeched me to pity her and begged me to prevent it. Her pale, pink lips hung slightly open. Her body was devoid of warmth and color. She must have been frigid, yet she did not shiver. An intense calm settled over everything. Her eyes fluttered and closed. She lay on her back motionless. The wind stopped, the sounds of the night faded way, and all I could hear was my brother’s ramblings and the slow movement of the river. As I stared at the only constant part of my life my hands trembled and my vision blurred as my eyes filled with tears. I felt as if I were becoming a child again and that I would be set free to wander the earth loveless and alone. The terrible thing that grew inside her savaged her body as it claimed it for its own, but it also gave her a latent energy, a light that no mortal could ever have. I could not hurt her. My attempts would be rebuffed by some unearthly power beyond my comprehension. Behind me my brother’s chant had grown into a wail. He pulled out his hair with both hands and cast the tufts onto the ground. The surrounding land was cowed by our sorrow; the animals were driven into hiding and the river drowned out.
As I raised my pistol her eyes opened again. She blinked them into focus and looked up at me. Though her face remained wrinkled and tired and her hair was as silver as a frozen river, she looked younger than before. I could picture her as she must have looked in those few years before the crazy time. Even before the crazy time life had been tough for her. She’d lost her father to war and lived with a mother who hadn’t been able to cope. Both had been unaware that society was already under attack from an unknown enemy. Now that little girl was no more than a blonde haired, blue eyed doll that only existed in humanity’s collective imagination, just as my mother herself only existed in my imagination in that moment, and not in the flesh that lay eroding before my eyes. Her flesh was being hollowed out by a malignant force that would fill the hole in itself. Her eyes caught mine as I leveled the trembling sight at her head. The world undulated wildly around me. She smiled weakly and sighed. Closing my eyes and gritting my teeth I squeezed the cold trigger and the gun leapt in my hands. A flash of orange swept across my vision. My breath came in heaving gasps. I forced myself to open my eyes but unwilling to look down I looked off into the forest as I tried to steady my breathing. A trickle of smoke rose from the gun held limply in front of me.
As I stood there my brother hit me from behind and knocked me to the ground beside my mother’s warm corpse. The gun flew from my hand and landed in the sand with its barrel pointed at me regarding me like a huge black eyeless pupil. Benjamin fell on top of me punching me, but his fists were like socks balled up at the end of his sleeves. He threw blows without looking where they landed. His eyes were squeezed shut and his throat was filled with a low moan. I did not fight back but kept my arms up around my face as he jabbed at my ribs and stomach. Eventually he collapsed half against me as if he expected me to hold him and lay there sobbing into his hands and quivering. I pushed him off into the sand where he lay curled up gasping. I rolled away from him but didn’t get up. I didn’t even consider any vampires that may have been tracking us. That was insignificant to the fact that I would have to endure all of eternity contemplating what I had done. I lay there and shivered in the night air until I fell into a dark and fitful sleep.
When I awoke, I found that my mother’s eyes had been closed. Her hands were folded atop her book and a wildflower had been inserted beneath it. Her skin looked glazed as if frost had settled on it and her lips had turned blue. The back of her head was a ragged mess of collapsed skull mingling with hair, dried blood and brains in a pool that had started to flow away from her before it had coagulated. My brother and his pack were gone. I found his tracks heading north along the river and I cursed him, but with no real conviction, as I gazed at the serene body of my mother. I sighed wearily and searched along the riverbank until I found a flat stone with one jagged edge. I scraped the sand aside on my knees for the better part of the morning until I had a trench just about the size of a person. The sun burned away the mountains’ morning mist and I sweated freely. My knees ached and my hands grew raw and bloodied. When I had finished, I wiped my forehead with my sleeve and then with one arm wrapped around her neck and the other under her thighs I lay her stiff body in the trench. The book slid off her chest and fell to the ground as I carried her, its pages fluttering crisply before it landed with a thud. I retrieved it and laid it on her stomach beneath the flower my brother had left her. I tried to bite back the bitter tears that flowed freely down my cheeks as I mounded the sand over her body. Before I covered her face, I got down on my knees and kissed each cheek delicately. They had grown as cold and stiff as dried leather. Then I silently said goodbye and desperately tried to imagine her in a garden paradise filled with fruit. I knew that she would have wanted my brother to see her burial but I pushed the sand over her face and she disappeared from the face of the earth with only one of her sons to bear witness.
I tried not to think as I grabbed my pack and headed north. I’d found that it was best not to think when confronted with troubles which were beyond my reach to solve. All I could do was to press on. There would be no one to spare me if I caught and turned by vampires. Even still I couldn’t help but to worry that a flood would wash my mother’s body out to sea or a dog would dig her up, and then all of nature would feast upon her but I was powerless to stop them.
That terrible hunt was in my thoughts as I fled from the cul-de-sac where I’d overheard my brother mentioned by vampires. I slept a couple of hours huddled against the crumbling side of a rotten log and dreamed of my mother’s last moments. I snapped awake when her pleading face was replaced with snarling fangs and burning eyes and heard the low growl of an engine returning to the area, I’d just left so I resumed my steady pace. The vampire’s threat to send a party after me rung in my ears and I was certain that thralls were already trailing me, sniffing at the wind and the earth like dogs. Two to three thralls did not concern me entirely too much, although bad luck could kill you if you slipped on a branch and broke your leg at any time, but three thralls were unlikely to kill me on their own especially with my head start on them. However, if I could not throw them off my trail before the rest of the party joined them, then I would have to contend with vampires. I walked steadily, sleeping in fifteen-minute catnaps in thickets and the crooks of tree branches when I tired, knowing that to sleep longer would mean my death. The thralls that pursued me would not need to sleep, and would follow me day and night unceasingly, with only the absence of a guiding vampire slowing them somewhat. I walked in streams when I could and smeared the soles of my shoes in some foul dog droppings that I came across. I slurped food straight from cans as I walked and stowed the empty cans back in
to my pack. After fleeing for two days without them catching up to me I began to relax and allow myself to sleep for longer chunks of time and slow my pace as my food supplies dwindled.
I cut west across a flat landscape of young trees and tall weeds broken by occasional fields of rolling waist-high grasses, until I came across a small road that had almost been completely overgrown by the trees and briars. They even grew in the cracks that ran along bulges in the pavement. Though tempting I couldn’t risk using it, so I crossed and moved away until the undergrowth thinned under mature trees and then paralleled the road swatting at the mosquitoes that hovered in the shade. Occasionally I stopped and turned around in place listening carefully and scanning the forest for anything that moved, but all was still except for some black birds that danced across the treetops.
Soon I came across a small cluster of abandoned houses set just off the road. These were the gravestones of civilization as my mother had called them. Their neat yards had been overtaken by tall weeds and trees growing around rusting swing sets and smothered bicycles. Their seeds had blown in through busted windows and fallen walls and taken root in shallow piles of dirt and decomposing leaves. They had burst through windows and spread their foliage over the sagging roofs. Most of the houses had partially collapsed, either struck down by falling trees or their beams had snapped under the weight of their waterlogged roofs. Nature had worn them all into a bland gray that was inharmonious with the forest except where they were covered with mildew or lichens. Cars sitting idle on crumbling pavement rusted on flat tires amongst glittering piles of their own broken windows. I crouched behind a screen of tall ferns that grew in the moist shade and studied the houses for a few moments. The nearest’s dull blue siding had begun peeling and hung slack like an open jaw from which sparrows flew, chirping and harassing one another as they wobbled in the air fitfully. Nothing moved but the mosquitoes that landed on the back of my neck in endless succession of itching bumps. My stomach growled and my mouth filled with saliva as I counted in my head my few remaining cans and anticipated the houses’ kitchens. I pushed the ferns aside and stepped into the thick weeds.