Turned

by Mazlow, J.

  “Well, let’s not sit here then, Bart” the ambassador said and began cutting the ropes that tied the boat to the dock. Bart dashed to the front of the boat and slashed the ropes from the other end. As the last rope was cut, he pushed us away from the dock with a paddle and as he entered the cabin we began to drift slowly way from the bank and down river. The engine started and then deepened as he shifted into gear and as the boat started forward a small flag unfurled from a short metal pole at one back corner of the boat. The red, white, and blue had faded and it was tattered and worn but it was unmistakably the American flag. Abdul cursed and yelled into the cabin. “Bart, take down this flag immediately.”

  Bart came out of the cabin, the boat still gliding northward down the center of the wide expanse of dark water, his grin broadening. “General’s orders, sir.”

  “I’m well aware of the General’s standing order but as I am the ranking officer of this mission you will follow my orders and I want this relic put away. Unless you care to be swimming with the fishes.”

  Bart looked uncertainly at the water flowing by and then said, “Yes, sir.” He pulled the flag down from its staff, balled it up, lifted one of the benches and threw it into a basin beneath the seats. Then he returned to the cabin and the ambassador sat down with his rifle across his knees at the end of the boat the both of us looking backwards at the city we’d left as he calmly pulled a pouch full of tobacco from his pocket and began rolling a cigarette. He pulled his collar up around his neck as he lit it and the city shined the same orange as his cigarette’s tip as the sun set behind it as we sped northwards down the center of the empty river.

  My compatriot unexpectedly spoke to me our third night out from the sordid vampire city where the General dwelled. He had kept to himself mostly standing or sitting in the rear of the boat, smoking, and looking back the way we come, not speaking once to Bart or myself as I paced the length of the boat back and forth contemplating a jump into the river. No doubt they would have simply fished me back out or shot me in the back as I swam and finally be shut of our insane mission. As my measured paces approached him on the sternward portion of my circuit he said in a low soft voice, “I cannot remember my conversion. I am a Made. Most doubt it but the General has confirmed it to be true.” I stopped a few paces away from him. There was no moon and I could see nothing of him except for the shadowy outline of his body against the starlight glowing off the river. Mades were a myth, but a myth that my mother claimed to be true, she claimed they had arisen when she was a little girl. “Why should the General have the power to authenticate my identity, he was turned 77 years ago, and I was made 98 years ago. I myself turned him. He says I was made for him.” He waved for me to come a bit closer and I took a seat on a bench near him. “Come, stop your infuriating pacing and I will tell you of my youth.”

  He pulled some tobacco from his pouch and began rolling it in thin crisp paper. After deftly licking and tucking in the ends he handed the cigarette to me. “It is good tobacco, try it.” He held out a lit match and I leaned over pulling hard on the cigarette as it met the flame. The taste was harsh and acrid, and I spat, coughing hard as he laughed softly and puffed on his own smoke. Once my coughing had settled down to a faint itch in my throat, I took another drag, the smoke still harsh, but also herblike and slightly fruity. It was good; it distracted me from the vampire’s pale lips only visible when his cigarette’s tip glowed orange as he inhaled. He continued to speak, pausing as he took a drag and let out the smoke in slow exhalations.

  “My first memory is of a small gray room on a hallway filled with small gray rooms, all containing boys who looked like myself.” He pointed at his dusty orange skin as a means of explanation. “The doors were locked, and I was reading. I read anything they gave me in those days, even though most of it was propaganda.” I must have looked quizzical because he asked, “Do you know what I mean?” and when I shook my head he thought for a moment he said, “It is just a convincing argument. I was reading about men who though they looked like me, were killing people like me with hidden bombs.”

  “At night we were trained; how to navigate, use guns and knives, hand to hand combat and how not to be seen, but when we were not being trained we were separated, left alone in our rooms with our reading material and videos. Once a day they fed me blood from a hospital bag.

  “One night we were taken out to one of our training areas as usual, except one boy was not there. The skinny white girl who always wore her hair in messy ponytail and wrote notes onto a clipboard as we trained was there, the three bulky men in khakis who trained us, and the shadowy perimeter guards I never saw up close were there, but not Derrick. The sharp search lights cast everything within the shiny aluminum fences in sharp relief. No one spoke. A cool night breeze blew through the compound and all the boys shivered while the young woman stood fidgeting and fingering her collar, and the three men were as stoic as Grecian statues. Finally, there was a wail as if a boy had just gotten a shot and Derrick was dragged out by a short muscular man I’d never seen before. He shoved Derrick to the ground in front of our group and adjusted his thin rimmed glasses. Curled up at his hip in his other hand he held a small whip. As he uncurled it Derrick lay twisted on the ground his hands holding him halfway up him, trembling and wide eyed, but not crying. We never cry we can’t spare the moisture.” He chuckled and looked at me with a glint in his dark eyes from his cigarette, but I just nodded noncommittally.

  “‘This one,’ the short man had said squeezing the end of the whip tightly in his hand, ‘thought that he was special. He thought that he could do what he wanted and attack our staff. Well let me be the first to tell all of you,’ his gaze slid briefly from us to our trainers, ‘You’re not special. You can be broken.’ He lashed out with his whip striking Derrick in the back driving him to his stomach with the blow and before the boy could even whimper, it fell on him again. Three strokes pounded him in rapid succession. Derrick moaned and blood oozed from underneath his shirt when the whipping stopped. ‘You can be hurt. You can die.’ He thrust the whip at us. ‘Now this one can serve as an ever-living example to you of the fate that awaits you should you attack your superior.’ He waved and two more men pushed a handcart out onto the field bearing a glass coffin glittering as the search lights hit it and sat it down behind him and then wheeled the handcart away. Derrick hung limply, not resisting as the short man lifted him and opening the coffin like a phone booth thrust him inside.

  Then our regular trainers began our routine practice as the man strode off the field the whip clenched in one fist. As we practiced with knives, crouching and slashing at one another, my eyes were constantly drawn back to the glass box where Derrick stood staring at us through the glass, flexing his hands into fists, his chin down, and with a faint trickle of blood stopped halfway down his cheek. He was there every night until I left the compound, at first growing thinner, his skin leathery from the hot sun baking him every day. Then he began to slump against the glass, his weight leaned against his cheek, and his tongue out. Hair that had fallen from his head leaving barren patches had settled onto his shoulders. After a few months he had crumpled into one corner of the coffin, only moving his arms in slow trembling arcs that meant nothing. We never approached his torture chamber, but I could see it all clearly.

  That night, when they imprisoned Derrick, was the night that I realized that we were different, that we were not humans. We were not living a life that anyone else lived. We were special no matter what our trainers said, but it was not a pleasant feeling. I didn’t lose that feeling until I drank the blood of our beloved General thinking that I would never be anyone’s tool again. Yet I am here.”

  He shrugged and began to roll a cigarette his eyes glued to his work and I didn’t know if I should say anything, if anything coherent could have even coalesced from the torrent of my thoughts, or that I really wanted to say anything at all. I wanted to know more about life before the crazy times, I wanted to know if my brother had dictated this tu
rn of events in my life, but mostly the image of those pinched faces I’d witnessed huddling outside the vampire fort rose up in my mind. It was a sad story, but it was still a vampire who told it. He didn’t look up from his rolling as I got up and walked to the bow, where I settled myself back leaned against a bench, the boat’s wind against my face and watched the black water roll by.

  The engine hummed behind us like a mosquito hovering over the dark languid water. Once the great cities that lined the river’s banks had been filled with people who had dirtied it and drained it, but now these cities sat silent and the river water was safe to drink. Bart’s squat figure was outlined by the greenish light of the moon through the front glass of the cabin as he sat hunched forward guiding us through a faint mist by the light of several fog lights. The vampiric ambassador who was escorting me to my brother’s kingdom sat at the back of the boat facing towards St. Louis, staring across the black waters with his shoulders hunched up against the wind. His collar was pulled up to his chin despite the river’s fetid heat that covered everything with moisture. I paced the length of the boat as usual, my legs demanding movement, my mind craving space.

  The days and nights spent on the boats moving through the heavy air were wearing on me. I ate the food that the vamps sparingly provided, not tasting it, always brooding that it had been from their supplies for their blood farms. The vampires didn’t speak more than one or two words to one another a day. Bart drove continuously only tying us up underneath drooping tree branches along the banks one day when the river was covered in such a thick cloud that he demanded we stop. I lay down in one corner of the boat curled up behind a pile of rope, seemingly isolated by the fog and slept, awakening only once when the boat swayed as someone left the boat. The next day as we resumed our journey Bart’s face seemed fuller, his cheeks a touch rosy, and he sat at the wheel of the boat in a cloud of mosquitoes and gnats, slapping at his arms and the back of his neck with annoyance.

  Abdul had not shown any interest in me since he’d told me of his youth, leaving me alone to pace the length of the boat, and I did not seek him out though I thought that he must have the answers to my questions. He was preoccupied with contemplating the two foreseeable fates that might befall him at the end of our journey; being bound and drained on the orders of the General and allowed to go mad with hunger as punishment for his failure, or being slaughtered by my brother as the other vampiric ambassadors sent before him had been slaughtered.

  If Abdul were any indication my brother was a man who could make vampires quake in fear. The General had said he’d set up a ‘right nice kingdom’ up north, but I had no idea what that could mean. My brother and I had never been what my mother had called ‘people persons’ like she’d been, and he enjoyed the company of other humans even less than me. Having grown up before the crazy times, before the vampires had even been revealed, my mother had always insisted that we try to meet any humans we’d spot, even though it was a decidedly dangerous concept, and visit with them for a while, even once she had grown older and the ones that could reminisce with her had grown fewer and farther between. I had always been indifferent about other humans, they rarely proved useful to us and I took no efforts to learn anything about them, but I had been content to go where my mother had wanted to go.

  Our mother had always told us that the hardest time of her life had been when we were growing up, when we were young and helpless, and that she’d aged five years for every one that had passed during that time. Still she laughed about it later and often quipped, “what do I care what I look like. There aren’t any magazine models to compare myself to. I could be the hottest woman in the world for all I know. And it’s not like I’m trying to date.” That always made her laugh uncontrollably, snorting and doubling over, while we sat staring at her grinning, amused but unable to fathom her joke. Even though she laughed she still claimed those years were worse than losing her father as a little girl to the Iraq war, and worse than losing her mother during the long years of hunts when the vampires had first come back from across the sea and began to purge the world of humans. Food was even harder to come by during those years then it was now, there had been riots, fires burning unchecked, and no one able to bury the dead, but she’d survived the roving patrols of vamps that killed or turned all that fell into their hands, and yet that had been easier than the desperate hiding, and fleeing, that she’d done with my brother strapped to her back and me running alongside. It had been worse because she’d had to care for us, protect us, and her greatest fear had been that we’d be turned. “If my boys were turned,” she’d say and then just trail off into a solemn silence. She never wanted another child. She couldn’t see the point of bringing them into an undead world. She’d sworn off men for as long as I could remember, although she had enjoyed flirting with them, even though it raised my brother’s hackles.

  Benjamin had always pouted whenever we shared a camp with anyone else. When he was young he would always point to each man in the camp in turn and ask our mother if he was our father as she shook her head soberly, but he quickly grew out of that habit, replacing it with a quick disgusted glance at their features. He sat by their fires sharpening his knife and watching with scorn as our mother laughed with them, or treated their wounds, bristling if any man flirted with her. He’d sulk by the fire, or he’d stalk away into the forest muttering to himself, then he’d silently join us again once we’d left the others. He couldn’t even be bothered to make any kind of chit chat with anyone; male or female, he had only ever spoken to me and our mother for as far back as I could remember. He’d often scout ahead and then convince us to change routes with lies of vamps or richer scavenging simply to avoid a group of humans, shrugging off my mother’s anger whenever she found out that she’d been deceived. To him, humans were dirty, slow, and loud, all dangerous traits. When we parted ways after my mother’s death, I figured he’d get as far from men as possible and I’d never see him again, and yet now the vampires claimed he was leading an entire town.

  As I paced the length of the ship, listening to the frogs on the banks, and watching the bats flit overhead as they feasted on the plentiful mosquitoes and gnats and other pests that hovered over the slow water, Abdul rolled cigarette after cigarette, deftly twisting them one after another with scarcely a glance at the task, and then smoked them furiously. He exhaled in angry gusts, not blowing the delicate rings that would fade away from us quickly as the boat rushed northward or savoring the smoke by letting it slowly trickle from his mouth as he normally did. He cursed and flicked a butt into the river and the smoke died off. I approached him hoping to learn more of my brother. He did not turn towards me, though the boat thudded hollowly under my steps, but instead continued staring downriver, his body as motionless as a moss-draped statue in some desolate town square. I tapped his shoulder and he spun around so quickly that I jumped back. “What is it?” he hissed, his narrowed eyes yellow in the morning light and glaring at me. He kept his trembling hands interwoven in front of him. A pulse throbbed visibly in his neck. Saliva ran down his chin unnoticed from his bared fangs. He stood with a snap and pushed me down in one quick motion. I fell onto my hands, jarring my wrists against the deck. Standing over me he wrung his hands together; his skin all but drained of its color and pulled taut like a corpse’s. The wind blew back his greasy black hair. “I’m hungry,” he said quietly, his clear eyes focused on me. I pushed myself backwards with my feet and hands, scuttling away like a crab, but he followed. “I haven’t fed in days.” All I could watch was his tongue running along his lips slowly as I lay petrified, my world shrunk down to his pale visage against a background of gray clouds. His eyes were locked on my throat and my heart beating there like a wounded animal thrashing on the ground. “So empty. I am collapsing inward,” he gasped, though he never wavered as the boat rocked in the water. He laid his hands on his stomach as if he were a pregnant woman and stared at me, shaking for a brief moment, his jaw tautening, and then commanded, “Get out of my sight.�
� I scrambled to my feet, slipping, and banging one knee as I got up, and then ran to the front of the boat, crying with fear, afraid he was following as he stormed up to Bart. The boat turned and then the motor eased as we drifted towards a bank where the water had no apparent motion and dragon flies were dancing on the river’s surface. Abdul spoke sharply to Bart and then leapt from the boat, splashing in the water and mud at the river’s edge. He trotted up the bank and disappeared into the trees. I lay down as the boat turned back towards the river’s center, alone with a subordinate vampire. If the ambassador didn’t return, I’d surely be drained. My brother’s face floated through the dim glow of my closed eyes, grimacing, and sneering at me. He’d escaped the vampires. He must have found a life that wasn’t all fear. I cracked my eyelids and looked down the length of the boat. The driver drove on stoically.

  A blurry light hung in the darkness on the east side of the river, dripping with humidity and flickering with the spastic longings of the mosquitoes and beetles that courted its rays. The beams slid down the river creating a shining path through the twisted shadows of the trees that hung along the bank. The river was as smooth as a highway and the air was heavy. I sat in the front of the boat watching the sickly green moon float across the sky and cast its reflection onto the river. The ambassador paced with his hands behind his back, his boots clapping against the deck in loud rhythmic patterns. Birds cried out and darted into the night at our passing and snakes tumbled from branches into the river adding their splashes to the lapping of the water against the banks. All the ceaseless movements of nature coalesced into the creaking of the earth as it rolled through time, but over it all burst the ambassador’s footfalls in military precision, as if he comprised an invading army.

  When the ambassador saw the light, he stopped and then peered at it cursing softly under his breath. It was the final outpost, the edge of the General’s regime, though far within the borders of what the General claimed as the territory of New America. As far as I knew there wasn’t anyone to stop the General from laying claim to the entire world. No one to challenge him.