Turned

by Mazlow, J.

  We had slunk into the city from the south and I hadn’t noticed having been so intent on the lights of the living city until the car had left us behind. Here boxy neighborhoods lay just off either side of the highway, sometimes hidden by trees and overgrowth, or tall gritty walls that had often fallen onto the shoulder and far right lane of the highway but often visible as dim sagging structures that occasionally glinted as the our lights struck their remaining windows. Lines upon lines of houses, each five feet from its neighbor formed a grid of dilapidated husks. The number of cars pushed to the side of the highway and sitting on their tireless wheels had grown to a constant line parked along the shoulder and the right-hand lane. Some were neatly parked on the shoulder, but others had been shoved into the line of cars at an angle their bumpers crushed into crumpled door panels and their rears jutting out into the highway. The gray walls that lined the highway had crumbled in many places crumpling the roofs of cars with chunks of stone and trees had fallen onto other cars, lying in troughs of metal slivers and glass shards. I saw a skeleton behind the jagged remains of a door window, leaned up against a silver BMW’s steering wheel, its bones picked clean and washed out until they were as white as snow from the sunlight that burnt it each day. Its skull was turned towards the highway and its jaw hung open beneath its wide black eye sockets. One hand was still curled around the cracking leather of the steering wheel. We’d passed it in an instant, its eerie presence illuminated in a flash of our lights before it disappeared back into the darkness but as I saw it I felt as if it had been awaiting me, the only fellow human being for miles, but whether it had been waiting to mourn or to mock I did not know. Soon we veered off the multilane highway, down a ramp, and made a left onto another four-lane highway but divided down the middle by a faint yellow double line. At the left a single stoplight swung in the misty night air hanging from a fraying black wire. Buildings lined this street, their facades sagging and their long horizontal windows long since broken. Every bit of ground not paved was covered with a thick layer of weeds and tall saplings. We crossed an intersection covered in a layer of mud that was cut with two pairs of tire tracks and on the other side the street narrowed to only two rough lanes fronted on both sides by small two story houses laid out on almost perfectly parallel lines. After a couple of blocks one of the houses was lit from the inside, bright light diffused through drawn curtains that leaked around their edges. Its yard was populated with only a couple inches of growth of rough leafed weeds and thick stalks scarred by a recent trimming. Then another house appeared on the same side of the street lit up on both stories. The air grew filled with a vague and origin less humming like the buzzing of a gnat that can’t be swatted away from an ear. We crossed onto another block and suddenly all the houses were lit up. The humming grew more pronounced but was overshadowed by music blaring from house, a harsh screaming music accompanied by shrieking instruments and rapid drumming. Soon the houses had their curtains drawn and their doors and windows thrown open to the night air. The truck had slowed to a steady speed and the rumble of its vibration felt as if it were quivering under restraint as it rocked along the bumpy road. No discarded cars littered the roads; the yards had been trimmed or consisted of packed beds of lightly orange earth wet from the mist that didn’t seem to fall so much as to hang in the air. These houses were in decent repair, except for the occasional unoccupied house which had collapsed in on itself. Their roofs were whole, and they had glass in the windows although their exteriors were still the washed-out grey of colors long since lost to the wind and rain. As we rode along, I peered through the smudged greasy windows and inside the houses I saw sitting or lying on couches and recliners upholstered in bright colors and dark leathers vampires with blandly engrossed faces. There were lady vampires in flowery dresses, male vampires in rumpled suits, vampires with puffy cheeks, vampires with skin as dark as the night, vampires caught in perpetual childhood lying with their chins on their hands and even vampires of both sexes lying on their backs completely naked oblivious to our passage. The darker skinned vamps lacked the gray paleness of their lighter counterparts, but their skin still had the sheen of stretched plastic. Most of them sat alone in their rooms, though occasionally there was a pair or a small group of them sitting together not really speaking to one another, just staring enthralled, their faces impassive, their eyes dull, their fangs tucked away in their mouths with a slackness to their expressions as if they were half asleep. I doubted they would have noticed if I had walked down the street with blood gushing from my wrists, they were so intent on the colorful dancing screens that sat in front of their couches. Each house had a television on one side of each occupied room, lit, alive, unshattered, and on their screens the images of men and women moved back and forth amongst vivid greens and blues, cars rolling and fires burning, and all of the vampires watched with expressionless faces. I had never seen a functioning TV before, though scarcely any structure that I had ever holed up in had been without the plastic black boxes, but most had had their screens smashed into piles of glass granules heaped up in front of them. I had pushed the buttons at the bottoms of the rare preserved screen with the hopes of seeing the cartoons my mother had said she’d watched on the weekends but as I’d grown older I’d realized no television would ever work, and I’d started to doubt that the magically moving drawings my mother had spoken of had even existed, but now to my delight I saw several and could make out a pink dancing bear beckoning to some smaller animal companion. The extremely disconcerting sense that I had left my body and had stumbled into a dream settled over me. The air was filled with muffled voices and squeaks from the televisions in each room and everywhere was the slight hum of activity just short of being pinpointed. The occasional streetlight was lit, often just one for a long stretch of the street as if its state was inadvertent. Everything seemed surreal, my mother’s past coming to life, the vampires curled up like vipers under a blanket completely uninterested in striking no matter who walked through their knotted masses. I’d heard often enough that I shouldn’t disturb the slumbering beast, but the beast seemed to be in a daze as if they had sunned themselves too long. There was no doubt that these vamps were sated with blood and were laying around like full gators on a riverbank but their slack visages defied the terror that had haunted me for the entirety of my life, that had driven my every action and dogged my every though, pursed me awake and in dreams, the terror of these silent killers who watched over every vestige of our previous civilization. The slovenly disengaged vampires did not merit over twenty years of constant fear and flight, they did not merit a continuous vigil, the rituals, and superstitions that I’d inherited, and above all the draining wandering. That men had lost it all to these creatures seemed unfathomable and filled me with a cold rage. Yet floating on top of this undercurrent of emotion ran wonder at the inventions of the past, and that they could hold such allure for the undead that they would sit in slack jawed attention as I walked by, and a fear that I had kept my mother from this life of ease amongst her previous trappings. It did not seem the unspeakable evil which she’d thought. I shook my head. The wind from the truck’s motion dried my tears. She’d wanted the release of death; she’d feared undeath and being denied access to the paradise she’d been promised.

  My face had grown flush, and my breathing ragged as we had driven deeper into the city, so I concentrated on taking deep breaths as I watched house after house of vampires in repose roll by. Obviously, there were enough vampires to make life hell for mankind. My life was proof enough of that and though the vampires we passed looked almost as frightening as a fresh batch of pudding their hunger would no doubt rouse them.

  As we rode almost imperceptibly screaming grew overtop the humming of the background until the shrieks had become a din ebbing and rising like the tides, punctuated now and ten by individual high-pitched cries. Vampires began to sprint past us down the highway or along the sidewalk moving faster than any human could run, blurred and shadowy in the broken moonlight, running tow
ards the cries not of fear and pain, but the undulating voice of a mob. They rushed out of their houses, leaving their doors to clatter closed behind them, or hanging open and drifting slowly closed, or just drifting in the air forgotten. We turned at an intersection onto a four-lane road divided down the center by an overgrown median and the noise swelled so that the vampires in the truck had to yell to be heard. I could see the crowd of vampires ahead of us, a single dark and globulous mass composed of every imaginable skin tone, body shape, and body size, undulating, not like bees or ants who move with a common purpose, a shared brain, but like a pack of dogs, hundreds of individuals squirming to achieve their own interests, but with all of their motion merged into one writhing group. Stragglers continued to run up to the group. Many of the vampires were naked, their privates forgotten in the rush. When a vampire reached the group, or had been expelled back to its edge, they attempted to shoulder their way in, turning their bodies to one side and digging into the group with their elbows. Some simply lifted the preoccupied vampires in front of them off the ground and threw them behind them as they took their place. The scrambling for position broke out into occasional pockets of violence. The vampire’s bare backs grew scratched and oozed a desultory brown blood. I saw an ear ripped off and thrown into the gutter. Once the vampire had fallen to its knees mingling its howls with the cries of the group its assailant turned towards the center of the mob and other vampires quickly rushed in so that I could no longer make out the fallen vamp. Our truck stopped short of the group that blocked the entire road.

  “Think a few shots ‘ll disperse them,” the driver yelled through the back window of the truck. The vamps stood up and the one who’d handcuffed me smirked, “No way. Looks like they’re getting a dried-up piece of meat from the blood farm and these vamps don’t often get that kind of,” he paused considering looking at me then continued, “Delicacy.” I stood up trembling under the mad shrieks of the vampires, the sound threatening to have me cowering in the corner of the truck bed. My guards had perked up as we had approached the crowd their eyes widening and their nostrils flaring. They stiffened as I stood and avoided looking at me. I rested my bound arms on the roof of the cab with a flat clank and looked across the crowd of vampires. At their center stood an empty space and at its center stood a man; old, with red skin deeply tanned and dirty in its many creases, mottled from the sun, his eyes large white orbs eggshell cracked by red lines, and his mouth a black void broken with a few rotting teeth. He stood petrified in the face of the vampires that had been aroused by his presence. His beard hung over the skin stretched tautly across his rough ribcage, wiry, oily, and drenched in mud. His naked body was nothing more than wrinkled skin over oversized bones and joints. I quaked, my knees bending forward and rattling, tottering on my own weight, but I managed to stay upright leaned against the cab of the truck. Everything dropped away but the mob of vampires and the man at its eye. A sound barrier dropped over everything, I could still hear, but I no longer processed the sounds. The vampires’ hellish animalistic cries felt more like physical blows of coalesced terror than sounds. I had the sensation of orbiting around the ring of bloodthirsty fiends, as their tepid graying flesh and the white points of their fangs seemed to rotate counter to my direction, but all revolving around the stationary center, the man. Everything was lit with a ghastly pallor. On one side stood a couple of storefronts washed out and in disrepair, ragged glass teeth at the edges of their windows, all their color washed out. On the other side sat three small houses, the middle one sagging inward as it began to collapse in on itself while the other two stood strong around it. I had never been so frightened; so frightened that my mind felt icy and heavy, shrunken into a lead ball at the back of my skull. My heart beat loud enough for the entire party of vamps to hear. All thought had been evacuated, leaving me frozen and without recourse, no possibility of escape running through my head, no momentary hopes of discovering weakness, I stood absolutely paralyzed with fear, quivering helplessly. The sluggish vamps had been awakened from their stupor and now moved like a swarm of locusts compelled by an innate desire, the power of this slovenly group had manifested itself, a force of nature willing to beat itself against stone walls in order to attain its desires. Sweat rolled down my back and across my forehead as I watched.

  Then abruptly the circle closed. The man was swallowed up with only a muffled cry to mark his passage, barely audible over the swelling of the vamp’s chant like screams. The sounds of ripping flesh and the sharp cracks of bones pierced the circle before a chilling shriek of anger went up from the mob. Their formation roiled, turning over like the water under a fall, as vampires were flung out of the center. Fangs were bared with loud hisses. The sounds snapped me out of daze, and I looked around quickly. One of my captors jerked my ankle, the chill of his iron grip was apparent even through my pants, and I sat down hard. The truck started to roll forward slowly, the truck bed shaking choppily. Vampires began to flow around both sides of the truck back towards their homes.

  A vampiress with long blonde hair that had gone thin and scraggly stared hard into the back of the truck as she walked past a welt raised along an oozing scratch mark on one cheek. First, she stared up at my guards her angular face hard and her eyes burning. Then she looked at me, the nostrils in her long thin nose rippling. She cast another glance towards my guards, less cold, more curious, her eyebrows curled up towards them, and then she looked back at me, her nostrils now flaring in and out rapidly as she kept pace with the truck and suddenly her eyes glazed over and she leapt into the back of the truck with one bound her pale hands outstretched towards my throat. A rusty brown substance had been pushed beneath her nails. Her face was contorted with her cheeks sucked in and her fangs thrust forward. As she landed in front of me her body radiated a wave of coldness as if she were an open door in the winter. Her hair fell around her face dangling over me as I scrabbled backwards pushing against the side of the truck bed, but the guard who had saved me earlier, who seemed to be the unofficial leader of the group, had sprang between us instantaneously and caught her by the upper arm as she reached for me. “He’s for the general,” he said and then flung her from the truck. She skidded across the pavement howling but walked away without looking back once she’d gotten to her feet. However, her interest had brought the group of vampires rolling up to the bed of the truck like a wave threatening to crest over its sides. Pale, grayish faces whose skin was often stretched tautly over their cheekbones even when their hair had gone fully gray and was falling out in ragged patches. The whites of their eyes were as smooth and as unbroken as cue balls, utterly devoid of the thin red blood vessels of human eyes, and when combined with their unblinking stares were disturbing. Even those with black skin looked untouched by the sun, their skin having lost any rich depth of color that it had previously contained. They grabbed the edge of the truck on both sides, their bony knuckles popping up like the earth raising new mountains, and then began to rock the truck, pulling it back and forth. All of my guards were at the truck bed’s edges and I had slunk in between them, seeking shelter from vampires behind vampires, despite a growing urge to laugh, and the thought that I should give in now because sooner or later I was going to be drained, or killed, and the journey to that end had grown agonizing. The vamps around the truck moaned in a continuous push of low sound. One of my guards shot a quick burst of machine gun fire into the crowd. A couple of the other guards had begun kicking the vampires clinging to the truck in the face sending them flying into the crowd of three deep vampires.

  “Get the hell out of here,” someone shouted, “or the general will have your hide.”

  The surrounding vampires murmured and let go of the truck, opening a little space between themselves and the truck. The truck rolled slowly forward. The vampires hissed as one and rushed forward. My guards opened fire, the loud cracks of their machine guns overwhelming all other sound as they sprayed the crowd. Vampires dropped to the pavement, their faces contorted with pain and rage as bullets
exploded from their backs. There was a noticeable lack of blood, only a trickle of brownish liquid would drain from a gaping chest wound. Vampires crawled off clutching one hand over their cold ragged flesh, but others rushed onward even into the hail of bullets. The truck jolted forward with two thumps that threw me face down into the metal bed with one of my captors tumbling as well, his gun firing uselessly over the buildings. There was a crash underneath the truck and then we were off, the tires squealing, and two of the guards kneeling at the tailgate firing behind us. The crowd of vampires gave chase but quickly trailed off as we raced down a narrow road lined with houses seemingly untouched and turned onto another road west through a young overgrown forest that blocked out all light but our own.

  “Bad luck, coming across a draining like that. There’s never enough to go around it only aggravates the thirst.”

  I lay panting curled up in the center of the truck as my captors returned to their seats. If they had been human, I would have been embarrassed, but I could scarcely think at all. I just lay there with my eyes closed breathing in the rust tainted aroma of the truck bed and shivering despite the warm air rushing through the back of the truck.

  After a while, the number of lit houses decreased, and we drove along in a hazy artificial dusk that emanated from both in front of us and behind us. There were no other cars on the bumpy, cracked streets that we traveled. The strange vampire city had faded away behind us as surely as if those vampires had never existed, as if they’d fallen asleep in front of their rich colorful televisions, had sated themselves with inordinate amounts of fresh blood, had passed out on corduroy couches that they’d moved to whatever house suited them, and they’d never been awakened. The gurgling of water down drains and through the sewers beneath the streets echoed back and forth between the walls of the plan squat red bricked houses shoved shoulder to shoulder behind cracked chunks of white sidewalk. At one point a leaf clogged drain had flooded the street with water that looked as black as oil in the night. The truck shuddered as it entered the water and sprayed it up behind us in a stream of broken droplets with the sound of Velcro ripping apart. We descended into a valley lined with trees and uninhabited houses hidden back amongst the growth. The roads that crossed the one we took were often overgrown or blocked by fallen trees. Several jeeps going in the opposite direction without any lights passed us in a gray blur. Then we crossed a bridge over a small stream and began to climb out of the small valley towards a swatch of bright light that lined the ridge. Crisp white electric light poured all over the clear-cut ground from spotlights at the top of wooden towers. As we crossed the ridge a large flat expanse surrounded by chain link fence topped with barbed wire came into view. The towers and the spotlights sat at regular intervals along the fence, with most of their light pointed in across the contained expanse of dark black mud and behind the fence huddling in the meager shadows was a writhing mass of naked bodies, men, women and children all moving in together in one clutch. In one corner a mound of putrid bodies sat under a glistening black swarm of flies as its base rotted away, and the fresher bodies on top were all laid on their backs so they could stare into the sky with their ragged empty eye sockets. The road ran alongside the fence towards a cluster of long low gray buildings. The humans inside the fence moved low to the ground barely walking upright, their heads jerking around continuously. They were scarcely able to support their haggard bodies, as if the mats of hair, dirt and feces that covered them weighed them down, and the muddy slop that they walked through was sucking at their feet with each step. A scream was expelled from the group and they moved away from one man, who was whooping excitedly and pointed at me. His scream seemed to bring their voices out, a sound like animals in tall grass, with words and syllables that I recognized jumbled together with others that I had never heard, so that I could not make out what they were saying or if they were even speaking English. A spotlight turned on the man, standing exposed by the group to the light, naked, nothing but a raggedy beard and thin tattered hair that ran over his shoulders, large blank eyes in hollow ringed eye sockets, ribs, a rounded protruding belly and pointy and unfleshed joints.