by Mazlow, J.
A three quarters moon shone brightly from its apex in the sky emitting white light with a tinge of green. Ahead of me an owl hooted, and the trees were filled with the continuous rhythmic croaking of tree frogs, but behind me all was silent, no animal sounds, no sounds of the vampire’s passage. I continued on slowly, as silently as I could, passing from one clump of bush to the next. I picked up a long heavy branch that had fallen to the ground and hefted it in my hands, knowing that it would not provide much defense if they found me, but it was all that I had. The underbrush was thick, briars and brambles slow to die out as the young poplars and pines fought above them for the sun’s light, and their roots competed for the water of the small creek that ran through them. I stepped cautiously into the stream not splashing, my boots sinking into the mud that lined its bottom, and then crouched down listening and watching. Every leaf hung stoically, a thick hard dark rigid green in the night as if they were statues, which belied their fragility and impermanence. I couldn’t hear anything but my own breath and the slight trickle of water moving beneath me. It felt as if the world had shut down and the earth was releasing one slow relaxing exhalation. I began moving downstream cringing as the mud squelched and the water sloshed into the holes left behind by my boots, which had sunk deeper than I’d realized into the black mud. The creek provided some respite from the underbrush, but branches still beat at my chest and face as they hung out over the water from where they crowded its banks. I moved very slowly, very cautiously, the branch held in one hand as I continuously scanned, turning around and even stepping backwards from time to time so that I could check behind me, even though I could scarcely see five feet in the brush. I moved down the stream this way for about a half an hour, half crouched over, my heart beat slowing from the torrent in my throat, the urgent drum beat in my chest that it had been to a steady thump. Mud caked on my boots and the ends of my pants’ legs, weighing them down and sweat ran down my back in a stream that had soaked through my shirt and my jacket. I didn’t think that these vamps would give up very easily, they weren’t just some vamps who had happened upon me and thought that they could get a bit of fresh blood, or a couple of vamps out for the thrill of the hunt. These vamps wore uniforms and boots, they were probably lieutenants, possibly even sirs, and they wanted to bring me back to the general because he’d had some kind of trouble with my brother. A momentary glimmer of hope entered my mind. Perhaps the general hoped to use me to bargain with my brother, for hostages or something, and then he’d need to keep me alive. And if so then my brother was more than likely still human, unless he just wanted to see me turned as he’d been turned. I had no idea how my brother could be conceivably be in such a position, but these vamps had already seemed unwilling to drain or shoot me, although that didn’t eliminate the possibility that the general just wanted his own “wild” blood treat. Even if they wanted to exchange me alive to my brother I didn’t want to stick around and be brought to their vampire city, surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of blood thirsty fiends eyeing me as they rubbed their stomachs, all the while relying on vampires to protect me from vampires.
A small gurgle from the stream behind me was all the warning I had and I spun around quickly, but all I saw was the butt of a pistol as it struck me in the cheek and the world went momentarily black. I could still feel myself falling like a tall tree, my head rapidly approaching the earth while my feet remained in the same position and then I sank into the soft dank mud. In the fuzz of my darkened mind it seemed as if I was falling into a soft bed piled with blankets. The right side of my face was buried in the mud and a wave of mud splattered the left cheek as my assailant stepped up to me, bent over and put two fingers to the pulse in my throat. His body trembled as he felt it beating there. The mud oozed into my mouth, thick and bitter but earthy. The vampire began whispering to himself in a starting, stuttering fashion. “Such warm blood. Why is this one necessary? We could just pick up another one for the General. I feel my thirst growing. He has wild blood, tasting of the past and forests, of humans who run wild and free exercising their hearts and veins, letting their blood pump through their muscles. Not like that bland blood that we have back in St. Louis. It tastes of mud and sloth.” There was a shifting in the mud and one of his knees was thrust against my shoulder as he kneeled in the mud beside me. “I’ll just leave him here and say I never saw him. They’ll think he escaped us.” He cradled my head in his hands surprisingly gently. “I won’t turn him. I’ll drain him utterly, leaving no life behind to survive.” Then a voice that sounded as if was far above me, but was actually just on the small bank behind us said, “What are you doing you fool? The general will decapitate all of us if we drain him. Do you want to spend your life chasing humans down in the wilderness and sleeping in smelly old hotel rooms on the sides of the highway?”
There was a sound as if the air had gasped and then my head was dropped suddenly back into the mud. Branches crackled and snapped, and there were several grunts and one shrill cry before I could lift my head. Squinting my eyes as if I were staring through a gray fog, I could just make out the two vampires. The rusty skinned vampire who had sat across from me in the truck had the one who had sat between me and the end of the truck hold off the ground by one hand that was wrapped tightly around his throat and squeezing. “Control yourself,” the tan one yelled spittle spraying from his mouth into the other’s face, which had developed a pink feverish tint and whose tongue was emerging limply from between his lips. The dangling vampire swung a fist that caught the vamp that held him on the cheekbone and sent him sprawling into the rush crunching through branches and the thick stems of weeds. Then unexpectedly the freed vamp came at me, moving in that quick vampiric glide that seems as if you’re blinking. He came at me more quickly than seemed possible for movements that appeared so normal and slow. I pushed myself up on wobbly arms, my hands sinking through the mud to rest on rough rocks lodged at the bottom of the stream. Then the other vampire was back up and had his pistol out, a piece of black metal that was dull in the moonlight. He fired three shots in quick succession that ripped into my attacker’s right shoulder and right side. The vamp fell forward twisting in the air as the bullets ripped through him. Cold bits of flesh and viscous blood sprayed me as he fell beside me his arms stretched out towards me. I carefully wiped the vampire blood from my face and lips and then splashed my face with the water of the stream worried that the vampire blood could turn me if I swallowed it.
The vampire who had fired leapt down into the stream and turned my assailant over onto his back. “I ought to leave you here. Maybe the coyotes are hungry.”
My attacker sat up shakily and looked around. “Don’t.” I got to my feet, my vision spinning and my head pounding with a wave of nausea and dizziness that roared through my skull. Somehow, I managed to keep my feet despite my unsteadiness and the heavy rank mud that blackened and weighed down my clothing.
My savior scoffed. “Scared of a couple little pups. You’re lucky enough as it is. You would have had all of our asses on the run for the rest of our lives, sleeping in caves, bedded down on rags, until the General found us and then he’d make you wish you’d never been turned.” He paused before saying, “You can come back if you can make it to the truck.” He turned to face me as I debated bolting. His eyes shone in the moonlight and he wore an odd unreadable facial expression. There was a slightly wolfish slant to his face, a coldness to his eyes, but there was also a real hunger buried there. “You’re brave, but obviously really stupid.” I shivered under his gaze, the realization that he had saved me from another vampire, saved me for a doom that I could not even imagine. “And you really pissed me off,” he continued as he pulled a pair of handcuffs from his belt, roughly grabbed my wrists, and chained them together. The gleaming blue metal that bit into my skinny wrists stripped me of what scarce hope I had maintained that I might find the opportunity to escape again. Almost twenty years of life without being taken was over in an instant. I was so overcome, so lost as all
the fight drained away from me that I hardly noticed as he scooped me up like a child, his shoulder digging into my stomach as he carried me back through the brush. My attacker had struggled to his feet and was unsteadily following us as we returned.
A thin mist had begun to fall as he bore me up to the truck, its lights dissolving into the fog and mixing with the light of the moon. The wetness slicked my face. AS he walked up, he yelled to the truck’s cab, but I didn’t listen to the words, all I did was stare down at the metal that bound me. A moment later the truck’s horn blared out in three quick grating bursts. Then he threw me into the truck, and I lay there panting, on the verge of hyperventilating. He got into the truck and a few minutes later another thump announced the arrival of one of the vampires, which was then followed by a sharp knocking on the glass of the truck and then the truck jerked to life, sputtered a little and then roared off down the highway. The wounded vampire had been left behind presumably to hobble down the road back to the vampire city.
Lying there drained of my will to live; I abandoned my body like an empty husk to its fate and slept some despite being surrounded by vampires who held me captive. There was nothing more I could do to protect myself and I told myself that I was going to die anyways, and that there was no need to die exhausted. If they had any mercy, they’d drain me in my sleep. I concentrated on the hum of the motor and the vibrations of the truck bed, shutting everything else out and allowing them to lull me into a series of cat naps.
After a couple of hours, I sat up, pushing myself up awkwardly with my joined hands under the watchful eyes of the vampires sitting in the bed of the truck and froze. I was paralyzed like a deer caught in headlights by the light rising from the bluff, oblivious to the truck’s frequent swerves, as I stared past the vampire who’d never left St. Louis, sitting across from me wearing an amused and slightly proud smile on his face before he turned and gave the city a glance. I was as spell bound as a man witnessing the works of gods, like a man approaching the altar of his god. More lights then I’d seen cumulatively, all burnt together in one location, huddled together turning the bottoms of the clouds that drifted over them orange and pink. I sat staring in the face of what the old woman, my mother, and even random passersby to avoid, that which men had been forced to forsake, the lost habitat of men, the giant steel buildings, dark and gray, stark against the night sky, glittering in the lights that shined underneath them, dark hulking masses of the past, their bases crowded with thousands of electric lights burning white and hot, the headlights of cars and trucks moving in front of them, mingling with the stationary light of dwellings, and then crossing the darkness. From our position several miles away it appeared as I had always envisioned it, as it had awoken me with terrors sweating in the night, a giant swarming hive with vampires walking briskly in and out of buildings, rushing down streets and upstairs, speeding into the night in their automobiles and bringing back their human victims to share with one another in their vampiric city. I trembled. They were going to eat me alive. Yet beneath the fear, there lay a layer of wonder and away and jealousy of the profligate electricity and machinery that these vampires had leeched away from human civilization just as they leeched their very lives from men. As I absorbed it all one of the flying machines must have taken off because I could make out a flashing light rising from the city that circled around the tall buildings and then headed east.
I swallowed trying to lubricate my dry throat and wondering at my audacity. “How many?” I paused a moment sorting through the words in my head and recalling the word people before it spouted fragrantly from my lips. “Vampires live in that city?” I didn’t know why but the question had become imperative. My entire life had been spent wandering through a desolate, rotting countryside, going months without seeing man or vampire, avoiding both when at all possible and taking great pains to not become either’s prey, and yet while that life had been hard it had been manageable, but the sight of just one city containing thousands of vamps towered over that control like a wave. Even if there had been a way to escape in that moment it would have been impossible to go back to my life of foraging in the shadows of this shining monstrosity. Unless one fled to the frigid corners of the north there was no escape from their sheer numbers, no choice but to turn a blind eye to the inevitability of the extinction of the human race, when all of the world would be cold vampires crawling along its surface desperate for blood, growing weaker and weaker.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry your tasty little head about that,” said the one who’d married his high school sweetheart, “but I’d say a hundred thousand at least. I’m sure the whole city will want to introduce themselves to you personally. Wild blood is rare around here. Got a bit more kick to it than the farmed variety. A little bit of spice from the varied diet.” The city’s lights had brightened as we drew nearer and washed out his pale speckled face and caused the tips of his fangs to glint like stars. As we descended the bluff towards the city that sat astride the black Mississippi winding through its center and dividing the lit side from the empty dark side across the water I spied an arch, white like a sun-bleached bone against the dark water, rising in such a graceful curve that I gasped and everything else fell away. I could understand my mother’s sense of loss, her eagerness to point out the useless relics of society like speakers, fish tanks, ATMs and countless other hunks of rusting metal and sagging plastic that littered the houses and streets that we’d wandered, each one spurring her into a wistful and enthusiastic descriptions of their forgotten uses. Even though she’d only been a little girl at the advent of the crazy years this world with its buildings that rose like giant legs disappearing into the sky had always maintained its hold on her. I could scarcely breathe from the weight of loss settled over me as I examined thousands of lights clustered at the bases of those monoliths of previous glory.
The roar of another engine came up behind us as a low car approached us, its engine growling in the night. A wave of panic swept over me at its approach as the combination of the might of the vampire city that I was descending into and the mystery of my brother’s involvement settled into my mind and left only the sickening question of my role and the surety that if I did not meet the vamps’ expectations I would be drained to death or worse. Even squinting I couldn’t make anything out inside the red car until it pulled up beside us and a vampire woman with an angular face leaned out of the window and shouted something at our driver. Then the car burst ahead of us, gunning its engine, and wound its way down to the city ahead of us leading with one red taillight.