Turned

by Mazlow, J.

  The closest house’s kitchen roof had collapsed inwards onto granite counter tops and stone tiles. I glanced in looking for cans sitting on the shelves of an intact cabinet, but it was empty except for a nest of frayed fabric and twigs. Nor were there any cans visible in the rubble that covered the floor. I left and walked past a red and yellow plastic car wrapped in vines and went to the next house. The weeds clutched at my pants and left their burrs as I pulled through them. The next house’s kitchen was undamaged. A useless dishwasher and stove sat rusting idly, their paint chipped by the claws of rodents and worn away by the wind that rushed in through the broken window over the sink. The refrigerator door had swung open to reveal a black-stained interior. A small plastic woman with a red apron wrapped around her plump waist and a big smile on her round white face hung on the outside of the door. Underneath her apron it read, “Nothing beats mom’s home cooking.” In the cabinet a can of rutabagas, some root beer, and two cans of spaghetti O’s were neatly stacked and the shredded remains of a bag of rice long since ripped open and eaten lay on the floor. It was a nice find. I popped open a can of the root beer and gulped it down as I pulled out the rest of the cans. The sweet, crisp liquid hissed in my mouth as I swallowed. I opened the O’s and slurped them straight out of the can, throwing my head back and letting them slide down my throat. Then suddenly I stopped with the thick sauce coating my tongue I listened quietly. I swallowed. The floor creaked as I shifted my weight slightly. The cacophony of insects and birds had died down to a dull fuzz of distant creatures. I shoved the O’s and the rutabagas into my pack, leaving the soda which wasn’t worth its weight, and then palmed my pistol. It’s cool grip and solid weight were reassuring in my sweaty palm, as I strained to listen. I had seen or heard no evidence of thralls or vamps beyond those that I had killed. If the truck that had come and gone had carried thralls, then they would be after me until they were picked up by vamps or found another human to pursue. Even if they came across other humans, they would resume their hunt as soon as they had finished with them.

  I could hear nothing in the heavy air except the dripping of moisture that had beaded up on the ceiling and slowly I relaxed. When I finished the can of Spaghetti O’s I ran my finger around the inside of the can collecting the thick red sauce in a streak down the side of my finger before sucking it clean. I carefully opened the cabinets that had remained closed. The first one’s door came off the hinges as I opened it. I caught it as it fell and set it gently onto the floor. The second crumbled in my hands with little more resistance than wet cardboard falling to the floor in little chunks of wood and leaving me with the little green and gold handle in my hand. There was nothing in the cabinets but dishes and rat turds, both of equal value to me. I slung my bag over my shoulder and headed towards the back of the house. A rat never leaves by the hole he entered, my mother had said, and I was tense, still straining to hear over my own footsteps. I crossed a soggy decaying carpet, passed a putrid heap that was the remains of a couch and stood at a narrow yellow door looking through its small window turned opaque with dust and grime. I didn’t see any danger, so I pushed, and the door opened with a loud creak. I winced and gritted my teeth at the sound. Nothing was in evidence but a gray squirrel that scrambled up a tree and stood at the fork of a branch watching with wide eyes and its tail curled up, but it didn’t chatter. I hopped down into the shell of a former porch and crouched behind a rotting support as I looked around. The forest felt uncannily still, and nothing moved under the hot rays of the hazy sun. The humid air was stifling. I was too spooked to search the other houses, so I started to move away from the houses towards the forest that squeezed them when a black spot flashed in the corner of my eye. My heart rushed and I clawed my gun out of its holster. A buzzard floated by through the clear blue sky circling lazily over the house I had just exited. I cursed under my breath and looked back at the house. There was a rustle at the front door followed by a crash, and I bolted away as the sounds of splintering ripped through the house and a screech went up from the kitchen. I leapt a tall shrub as I ran, but a tough crooked branch caught my shoe and I fell to the ground chest first knocking out my breath. I shielded my face with my hands as I fell, and a branch skinned one of my knuckles and sent my gun bouncing along the ground. As I scrabbled to my feet a briar ripped my shirt as it pulled back towards the ground. I picked up my gun. Two thrall faces glared from the doorway with dull eyes and a third, bulky and blond, already stood on the ground beneath them. He charged me, avoiding the entangling bushes with a mindless grace and I shot. The sound sent a cascade of black birds flying into the air out of the trees around us. The thrall fell to the ground flopping and clutching at his face. I turned and ran under the trees glancing over my shoulder as I fled. The other two thralls followed, not even fifty feet behind me; a wiry dark haired man in grungy shorts and a white tank top, and a lady with pale brown skin in a dress that was ripping up each of her sides so that it flew wildly around her. My breath rasped. The ground jarred my ankles with each step. Twisting in mid-stride I shot at the nearest thrall and struck him in the chest. He stumbled and fell to one knee but neither I nor the other thrall slowed. She ran past him with her mouth hanging wide open so that I could see her glistening fangs which were almost an inch long. They marked her as a fairly old thrall, and her dull brown eyes were locked on me. She was within twenty feet of me when I turned and faced her lifting my pistol with both hands and centered the sight on her forehead, ignoring my trembling arms and the racing of my heart, and fired. A hole opened in the middle of her face and erupted from the back of her head in a shower. Her arms and legs continued to pump for a couple more steps before she fell to the ground with a thud. A gasp of breath escaped me, and I contemplated going back to finish off the other two thralls but decided what was two less in a world already full. Two could scarcely make a difference.

  I started to walk away, holstering my warm pistol, and allowing my trembling heart to settle as I caught my breath when I heard a low rumbling to the west. I froze. I had never heard a sound like it before, a throbbing that shook the earth in a regular pulsation like a group of giants galloping in the distance. It seemed to come from all directions at once. I crouched beside a tree trunk shaking and watching for the source of the sound which grew louder and crisper. As it neared it was topped with the hiss of wind. I thought perhaps it was the beginning rumblings of an earthquake and did not know if I should leave the tree or not before an olive-green machine low over the treetops floated into view. It had the face and body of a locust but with two stunted wings. Its whirring black blades were blurred in the pale blue sky and the sun glared off its windshield as it twisted slowly back and forth. I squatted beside the tree hugging it with my cheek pressed hard against its rough bark. I was unable to move as the fabled flying machine from before the crazy times flew closer and closer until it hung almost directly overhead. Its roar blocked out all other sound and it whipped the dried leaves into a frenzy around me. They stung as they pelted my face. Through squinted eyes I could make out vampiric faces peering down from a door slid back along the machine’s rounded metal body. They pointed at the cul-de-sac and the machine twisted slowly and then flew ungainly towards the houses I’d just left. As soon as the door had turned away and been replaced by its tail I bolted briefly wondering if this was somehow my brother’s doing. A shout popped in the air just audible over the machine’s wind and the hum of its engines. I drove my legs as hard as I could as I ran.

  It turned ponderously and followed as I ran madly splashing through the waters of a small creek as if I could throw it off my scent. It circled overhead if it briefly lost sight of me under the trees until I reemerged and then it raced across the sky until it was over me again. Every second that passed I expected them to shoot and leave me bleeding on the ground until they came to drain me or to hurl themselves from its belly and drag me to the ground in one leap. The sun was on the final leg of its decent and is orange and red light was crosshatched by the tree’s s
hadows. I cast my mind back and forth desperately trying to think of any way to elude the vamps before nightfall descended. My throat burned with each breath and my lungs felt squeezed. My heart palpitated. I knew of no nearby caves and certainly none that were anything more than dead end traps. There was a river nearby, but they would have followed me even me more easily along its course. I could see no option, so I just ran on.

  A slight movement in the branches ahead of me was my only warning and I flung myself to the ground as a vampire hurled himself out of the trees and flew right over me. I got up and ran off tangentially, but a second vampire, a tall male with long scraggly hair and a face like old leather, stepped into my path. He held a rifle with an extremely long barrel. I turned but the other was now behind me and a third grinning broadly emerged from the trees to my right. Hot tears streamed down my cheeks as I jerked my pistol free. Over twenty years I had managed to escape the vampires and now I was to be turned or drained to the death. I started to lift the pistol, whether to fight or to escape my fate I didn’t consider and then his rifle cracked in the air. The sound was weaker than a gunshot and of a sharper pitch. I felt a prick in my calf and then an icy pain began to spread rapidly up my leg. When I looked, I saw a dart quivering there and I said, “What” aloud. The vampires laughed as my muscle’s strength abandoned me and I tumbled to the ground feeling as if I were floating. Darkness crashed across my eyes in strengthening waves and then I lost consciousness.

  A jarring vibration that had numbed my mouth shook me slowly awake, but I remained still even as I opened my eyes. My cheek was flattened against the rough bed of a truck and slid back and forth across the rusty trenches that ran down it lengthwise. The bed’s grit had gotten between my teeth and filled my mouth with the taste and feel of metal as if I were biting down on tinfoil. The warm humid air rushed overhead whipping across the truck with a moan that was broken here and there by the whooshing of branches that hung out over the road. From ahead of me the engine of a truck roared but was punctuated with sudden misses that jerked the entire truck. Through vision blurred by the wind and the vibration I could make out two vampires leaning casually against the back of the truck. One sat on the wheel well and smirked at me once he noticed that my eyes were opened. He had dark eyes that seemed to collect the light, straight dark hair gathered into a ponytail and smooth skin the color of a river filled with silt and churned by a heavy downpour. He sat so still that he scarcely seemed alive or undead. I shivered under his gaze. Behind him tree trunks appeared momentarily like gray ghosts before disappearing back into the darkness of night as we sped past. A third vampire sat at my feet just in front of a tailgate which popped up and down picking at his nails with a pocketknife. The tan-skinned vamp across from me wore camouflage fatigues that were the same sandy camouflage as the vampire who’d first mentioned my brother’s name had worn. They billowed and wrinkled in the wind along his leg until they were tucked into heavy black boots that narrowed above the ankle and laced up to the bottom of the calf. The boots were so exceptional that I briefly forgot their occupier and I started to sit up to ask where they’d been found. The truck dipped just as I did and threw me face first into the truck bed. I bit my lip hard and the vampires laughed. I shivered as an intense wave of helplessness washed over me. Each of the vampires wore pistols strapped to their waists which they’d hitched over onto to the front of their thighs so that they wouldn’t bang against the truck. I sat up again using my hands to steady myself as I did. The effects of the dart still lingered causing my stomach to churn and my vision to spin slowly as if I’d drank beer. One side of my face was numb, but I didn’t know whether it was caused by the dart or if it had simply fallen asleep from being pressed against the truck bed.

  “Throw yourself out,” the vamp across from me shouted, tilting his head back in a narrow angle to indicate the environment rushing by behind us, and then he chuckled. “You won’t get far.” When he laughed, he bared longer fangs then I’d ever seen. He could have been a vamp for fifty years with fangs that size. They extended past his lower lip and curved back towards his mouth, ending in sharp tips that glistened with a coating of saliva. His dark eyes parsed me and dealt me out onto a platter with an intense hunger that quickly disappeared behind a cold veil. The other two vampires assiduously ignored him. The truck rolled down the center of a wide black highway occasionally swerving suddenly. Trees grew thickly along the road’s sides and their branches reached out over a third of the roadway, but down the center a strip of star speckled night sky was visible. We were headed northwest towards the vampire city that of St. Louis.

  Once a few years earlier, an old woman has surprised me as I’d bathed in the curve of a stream on a hot summer day. I’d seen no signs of vamps in days; no engines rumbling, no thralls, and no scared humans fleeing. I hadn’t seen anyone as I walked the riverbank hoping to catch fish so I’d decided that I might as well bathe since I had the chance. One set of clothing had been washed and laid on the banks in the sun to dry with my pack beside them, my pistol atop it. I swam and scrubbed myself in the warm water as my mother had had us do sometimes as children. As I splashed, just shy of frolicking, the old woman shuffled silently up to the edge of the river and stood there sniffing the air as if she were a wary mutt. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t notice her. When I saw her, I jerked upright, and my hand went to my empty hip. She didn’t make any move but just stood there looking at me with her head cocked to one side. Her long-crimped hair defied gravity as it hung out at crazy angles, neither bending under its own weight or around her shoulders. I waded slowly towards my possessions as she squatted there watching me.

  “Boy,” she said, “I ain’t seen legs like those in a while,” then she smiled widely allowing me to see all her remaining teeth. “I ain’t seen no one swimming like that either. Not a bad way to escape a vampire if you can get enough water between you and them.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted, shading my eyes from the sun, and studying her as I stood in the shallow edge of the water. She didn’t appear to be armed in any way. She was just an old woman in a dirty gray dress tightened at her waist by a wide brown belt, carrying a handful of plastic bags twisted around each of her wrists. I went on to cut into the silence. “They don’t like water much, but there could always be vamps on the other side waiting for you.”

  She laughed, a brittle but joyful cackle, and then said, “Or they may have a boat.”

  I came out of the water dripping, with her eyes on me, and gathered my clothing.

  “I don’t have any food,” I said as I checked my pack and my pistol.

  She jostled her bags at me with a crackle. “I can take care of myself boy; it’s you that I’m worried about. It was mighty easy sneaking up on you.” I ignored her as I took my dry clothing from my pack and replaced it with my wet set.

  “Which way you headed? She asked.

  “Don’t know. Just thought I’d head that way,” I’d pointed to the north east. “Trying to find somewhere that hasn’t been looted yet.”

  She’d squinted hard at me as I’d pointed. Her face was creased and wrinkled, ridged and valleyed, her skin was as dark as the night, and her lips looked as if they’d deflated over the years. Her eyes almost disappeared amongst all the bags, flaps and wrinkles that were squished together when she squinted. Her voice was quieter when she spoke again, and she wove her enormous hands together in front of her face with a crinkling of their attached bags, as if to steady them. “There’s nothing that way but vamps.”

  “Vamps? Really. I haven’t seen any in weeks.”

  She shrugged, but her eyes widened, the whites intense in the sunlight and her pupils almost disappeared. “There’s vamps up there, mark my words, an entire city of them.” I began pulling on my clothes even though she seemed harmless and she went on her eyes losing their intense focus.

  “I was up that way a few years ago near St. Louis. It used to be a big city before the crazy times. I was near out of my mind with hunger and I i
gnored advice. ‘Stay away from cities, they’re always searched’ that’s what everyone had always told me, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even make it to the city though before I had some sense scared back into me. At night I could see lights that burning all evening. Car lights ran back and forth along the roads and lights flashed on the bottoms of planes. The place was crawling with vamps like ants crawling in and out of their nest. I lay along the roadside and watched them roll out of the city in jeeps. Each jeep carried standing on the bumpers and hanging off the backs. Their pale skin was ghastly in the moonlight. When the wind blew up from the city, I thought I could make out a dim wailing like a thousand children quietly sobbing. That sent a chill down my spine that has never been matched and I’ve faced a made.” I scoffed at the concept of a made even more than her boast of facing one, but she didn’t seem to care. “When I got the opportunity, I slipped away from the city and I ain’t never going back.” She looked at me expectantly and said, “and I’m still alive ain’t I?” balling up a fist and holding it over her chest as if preparing to beat on it, but she didn’t, she just let it slowly drift back down to her waist under the weight of the bags. Her face reddened and a brief tremble rippled down her body but I all I could see was my mother burning with the thrall sickness superimposed over her image. I shook my head and picked up my bag.

  “Even my elders can make mistakes,” I’d said quietly, and she burst into a guffaw so loud that I looked around worriedly as birds flew to more distant perches and screeched into the air.