Turned

by Mazlow, J.

  “Come with me,” he said and I instinctively reached down for my pack as I stood before I realized that it wasn’t there, that it had been stripped from me by my brother’s vampiric goons. My brother’s face, stern and unmoving yet still hinting at bitter amusement in his eyes, almost sent me into a rage. The anger washed through me with the taste of bile, but I bit it down as he turned away from me. “Come or I’ll have you cuffed and brought,” he said.

  I followed him through the door and down a narrow hallway, our boots clomping on the wooden floor. I was gun less, I was pack less, anything could have happened to me and I would have had to start from square one, scavenging everything, if there was even anything to scavenge near this cluster of people. I felt naked and vulnerable and I imagined that everyone knew that my brother held me here hostage, without the supplies that a man needed. As I walked behind him, I could see that his scars ran all the way around his neck and disappeared under his shirt. At the end of the hallway a vampire who’d been sitting on a stool smoking, nodded to my brother, got to his feet, and opened a door. We stepped inside a large room that held a desk, a large bed laden with quilts and a dresser with a full candelabra perched atop it. He took a candle down, pulled a lighter from his pocket and then used the lit candle to light the remaining candles. They burnt with a sickly orange glow and spewed oily smoke into the room but were able to light up the center of the room, even though they could not reach into the corners. He picked up the candelabra and moved it to the desk trailing wax across the floor and dancing shadows along the walls before sitting on a chair behind the desk and motioning for me to sit in a straight backed chair across from him. As I sat down, he pulled off one boot and upended it, showering the floor in dirt, pebbles, and other brown bits. He eyed them curiously for a second and then turned his attention back to me.

  “The vamp told me you came from the general,” he said in a tone that I couldn’t read. I watched the light run over his chin and between his emerging stubble like water seeking the easiest path as he spoke. His eyes burnt like an animal in the light and his words were slurred together like a growl but with no evidence of hostility. He pulled off the other boot as if he were unconcerned and I sat half in shadow scowling to myself at Abdul’s loose lips. I’d wanted to reveal it in my own time after I’d accessed our situation, but perhaps the Ambassador didn’t trust me. Suddenly the realization came to me for the first time that I could use the camp to be shut of the ambassador and the General and that he’d told my brother that the General had sent me as a way to ensure that I didn’t abandon the mission. Abdul hadn’t know that the concept of long term planning was foreign to a man who lived his life off the scraps of a former civilization, but the thought stretched into a vision of me full, fat and happy, with a little hut, a field and a wife, but then it dissolved around the image of the vampire standing guard outside my brother’s door. I felt again the cold hands of the vampires as they’d captured me and brought me to this camp, and I let the image and its hope fall away. My brother stared at me like I was a rat digging into his bag of rice, not seeing me at all, seeing the ambassador, and the general and his untold legions of vamps swarming over his land in jeeps with their machine guns and their wet fangs. His arm shook on the desktop. “We didn’t even have to torture him,” he said smiling.

  “That’s it, no how are you? What have you been up to?”

  “I think I know what you’ve been up to. Slinking along like the rest of humanity, living off scraps. We can catch up on your important life later.”

  My mouth must have been hanging open I was so aghast because he smirked at me and I felt my face burning with anger. This was my little brother. He’d ranged with me, he’d scavenged with me scanning the aisles of supermarkets hoping for an untouched can, and he’d slept huddled with me in caves, hollowed out logs and rotting houses, though we’d avoided those more when we’d travelled with our mother. He’d had the same life as everyone else. He knew that it was hard.

  “How long have you been working for him?” I sat very still weighing the question and debating keeping silent because he’d shown no intention of acting like a younger brother. Was he insinuating that after I’d buried our mother along, without his help, I’d joined with the vampires and that instead of draining me and discarding me or turning me they’d decided to send me north with another vampire? At first this idea struck me as absurd, how could he think that I'd deal with vampires, but then I realized that it didn’t seem that far from the truth especially for one who must serve vampires. If he didn’t serve other vampires, then why did other vampires serve him.

  “I’m not working for him. He picked me up outside of St. Louis.”

  “He just picks you up. Doesn’t drain you or turn you and sends you trotting north with a lieutenant, a made, just to have a little chat with your brother.” He stood still wearing his thick socks and strode over to me, bending over so his face was even with mine and then sneered at me. “You know what Mades were before, right?” he said a bit frantically, rattling the desk with a pounding of his fist. I nodded but he went on as if he hadn’t even asked me. “They were assassins working for humans who turned against their masters. They brought all of this about, they’re the reason that we live in such shit.” As he spoke, spittle spraying from between his lips with the force of his words, an image came unbidden to my mind; a young boy version of the ambassador tucked away in a small clean cell sitting on the edge of a tightly made bed swinging his legs in the air. In my imagination his face was unnaturally pale and impassive as if he were a statue come to life. “I wonder how many Mades the General has under his command,” my brother said quietly to himself. Then he turned back to me. “How many?”

  “How should I know?” I leaned back in the chair, folded my arms across my chest and avoided looking at him. He paced in front of me his socked feet swishing across the floor.

  “Well how many vamps then? How many tanks, helicopters, planes?” He spat the words out, one on top of another without waiting for me to answer while I sat in a stiff silence. “Men?” he asked.

  “None that I know of,” I responded, and he looked at me incredulously as if I were inappropriately joking.

  He sat down again, setting his elbows down on the desk and folding his fingers together and stared at me. Then he exhaled loudly and began again more calmly. “Look, you waltz in here with a Made. All the vamps are bristling. They all want him dead. They don’t trust him, there’s no way they’ll ever trust him. They told me he’s been with the General from the beginning. Longer than you or I have been alive.” A small grin crossed his lips and his eyes lit up. “I am flattered by the General’s attentions though. I thought he would just continue to send half-rate vamps until he lost interest.”

  “They want you dead too,” I said.

  He stared at me his eyes narrowed as the candles flickered and danced around their impurities. “I thought I could always trust men. They may not respect you and they may hold out on you come harvest time, but I would never have thought that a man could work for the General. Now I don’t know. Any man could walk into this camp just like you did and be accepted. He could fool us all. How many of them are already here spying? Do you know?” He stared at the wall his hands trembling slightly against the desktop. I felt disgusted with him. My own brother walking with vampires but unwilling to trust men. He sat muttering to himself for a moment until a sharp rapping at the door disturbed him.

  “Come,” he commanded, and Peter stepped in through the creaking door as it swung open. “What is it?” my brother asked leaning back in his chair.

  “A couple of vampires have been spotted around the camp.”

  “Strays?”

  “I don’t know. They seem to be skirting our perimeter for now.”

  My brother glared at me. “You know anything about this?” I shook my head. “Kind of fishy them showing up right after you. Perhaps they’re here to rescue you and the Made?”

  “We came alone,” I said.
/>   My brother pulled his boots on and as he sat lacing them up, he said to the vampire, “Winter is drawing near, and we need as large a force as we can muster. Get a couple of others and meet me at the barn.” The vampire nodded and left without a word. As my brother stood to follow him, he looked down at me still sitting with derision. “You can move about our camp for now, but if you try to leave,” he paused. “You put me in a tight place brother. Just don’t leave the camp.” He left the door opened and I could hear his boots receding down the hall and then his voice yelling something. I stood and looked over at his desk wondering what was inside, wondering what I should do. There was a flurry of footsteps in the hallway and a young man burst into the room and then looked at me disappointedly.

  “Come on,” he said gruffly. “I can show you where you can sleep.” To my surprise he led me out of the house and into the cool night where the moon cast ample light for us to navigate. The village was quiet except for some shouting at one of the barns. I could make out two vampires running up a hill scattering sheep and then a man on horseback shot out from behind the barn following them at a gallop. The boy watched wistfully and sighed as he led me down a narrow lane of hard packed dirt between the buildings. Some dogs trotted up to us sniffing and he idly scratched them behind their ears as we walked up to a small hut. He pushed back a flap of hides that was covering the doorway and pointed to a cot in one dark corner of the small room. “You can sleep there.” Then he turned and left me looking into the musty cabin. A slight whistling noise emanated from the other corner indicating that the mound there was in fact another cot and its occupant. I lay down on the hard cot shivering wishing for the man’s blanket as I listened to his breathing and the sighing of the camp at night.

  The shrill sound of a woman’s screams ripping through the camp awoke me. I rolled into the wooden wall in my confusion cursing and as I sat up her cries descended into hysterical sobbing. All around the small building the camp which had been as still and as silent as a grave when the woman’s screams had awakened me now rustled and boiled as shadows darted by in the dawn light towards the source. My unknown cabin mate was gone his blanket tossed in a careless bundle at one of his cots. I’d never learned anything about him other than his whistling breath. I rushed out of the house joining in the hustle of mostly women and children who rushed down the alleyway, a mass of skirts rustling and small figures darting forward broken here and there by the men who strode along with their tools. I could make out people standing in the edges of fields and pastures shouting in both directions as others descended the hill towards the village, sometimes at a stuttering run, others at the more stolid pace of the aged. As we walked a bell tolled three times from the courtyard that fronted the farmhouse. The woman’s sobbing was now curled around a continuous stream of indecipherable words as we approached the square and mingled with the growing hum of the crowd and grew louder. Every face older than that of a child’s walking alongside me was tense, jaws set, eyes hard and piercing every shadow of the early morning light. Women clutched their skirts and men looped their hands into their belts and belt loops. Several squeezed each other’s hands. A blustery man’s voice rose above the crowd. “He brought him in last night. He allowed this.”

  I moved into the quickly filling square and pushed my way to the front of the crowd, many of the people eager to allow me to the front where a small clearing had formed around the weeping woman and three men where grappling with a struggling vampire. The rising sun glared off his waxy skin so that it seemed translucent, like parchment paper stretched across his rippling ribcage. The woman was down on her knees with a child’s body in her arms, one arm clutching the darkly tousled head and pressing its face into her shoulder. Tears streamed down her face as she hugged the boy’s body to her chest and rocked it back and forth. Another woman was at her side rubbing her shoulder and whispering but she cried on oblivious to the other’s kindness. The vampire hissed and flung his body forward but two men pinned his arms behind his back and his body to the ground while another pulled his neck taut with the rod attached to the metal and leather muzzle he wore. His eyes blazed against the pallor of his face as he glared and snarled at the crowd around him and snapped his neck as he attempted to pull the muzzle loose. His limbs jerked here and there as if they were being snapped with invisible wire. That motion combined with the tautness of his skin marked him as a young vampire, probably less than a month converted.

  The blustery voice arose again, quite loudly and deeply from a man standing nearly straight across from me who projected his voice with ease. “He said this wouldn’t happen again. He promised us that he had them under control, but how can he control their appetites. It would be easier to control the devil that has created these abominations, but only Jesus who told the Devil to get behind him has such power.” The woman cried on oblivious to the man’s speech, her tears running down the back of the child’s neck, but several in the crowd nodded and murmured in agreement. Perhaps in another time he would have passed for nondescript, a man of average height, with a pudgy face that descended into jowls and a round protruding belly on an otherwise normal body, but his threadbare pinstripe suit set him apart from everyone else. He gestured with one hand as he spoke as if he were pulling the words out of the air and shaping them as he wished while his other handheld a pair of clean black dress shoes discreetly at his side. Two burly men with the same small square forehead and pumpkin shaped head stood behind him.

  “How long can we tolerate these fiends within our midst? Ben cannot protect us. No matter how many times he lies down with the abomination.” When he spoke, his throat bobbed up and down like a frog’s and his jowls jiggled. I felt a flush of irritation at his criticism of my brother, but I said nothing. The crowd behind him jostled as if everyone were trying to gain a better view of the preacher and they begin to hum with agreement. I didn’t see the preacher moved but it seemed as if he and the crowd had swelled towards the vampire and its prisoners and I could feel their excitement. Those in the front row stared at it with blood thirsty eyes. The crying woman still knelt with her child now forgotten by those who’d rushed to her earlier, even the woman now idly rubbing her shoulder.

  The crowd quieted suddenly, and we turned to see my brother surveying the assembly from the farmhouse’s porch. The preacher stood with a clenched jaw and his eyes dark and furrowed. As soon as the crowd’s attention had shifted my brother briskly descended and crossed through the parting people, trailed by the two human brothers who’d been with my brother when we’d first been captured and Peter. Except for my brother they all were wearing dingy camo. As he drew close Benjamin gestured at the men who held the vamp with a sharp snap of his wrist, they leapt away from the vamp, even dropping the muzzle and my brother quickly drew a pistol from his belt. The vampire took one dazed step towards the sobbing woman though he snarled at my brother as he moved and then a sharp crack split the air. A faint cloud of smoke wafted from the pistol’s thick barrel and the vampire fell to his knees howling. A mixture of tattered gray flesh and fabric steamed around a rent in his chest that oozed slightly. My brother spoke rapidly to one of his entourage and I was unable to make out the words over the ringing in my ears, but the vampire disappeared into the big farmhouse. The others pulled the vampire up from his writhing on the ground and jerked his hands away from his wound and held them at his back. The position pulled the wound open so ragged red ends of flesh were exposed to the air. An incredibly red ooze like concentrated blood soaked into his shirt. His face was contorted with pain, but his burning eyes were now locked on my brother. A trail of spittle ran from the corner of his lips which were pulled back to expose his fangs and down his chin and hung twisting in the air before it finally dropped onto his chest. A resounding knell burst forth from the farmhouse behind me and I jumped as it sounded. It rang three times and though the square was crowded with the villagers, the crowd’s outer edges jostled as more men, women and children joined us. In the meantime, a large wooden block had be
en carried over by two large vampires and sat down on the muddy ground near my brother. A shallow rounded trench that was stained a rusty brown and crisscrossed with notches and lines that left splinters lifting from the wooden surface.

  “If you try to flee you will make it even worse on yourself,” my brother said and then ordered the vampire’s muzzle removed. He had been a skinny boy, maybe fifteen with a full shaggy mop of hair that had not yet begun to wither and crack, but his face was pulled taut in a skeletal expression of rage. His chest heaved the gunshot opening and closing with each breath.

  No sooner than the muzzle hit the ground with a thud he spat on it and shouted looking directly at the vampire at my brother’s side. “He’s a tyrant. A petty little tool. We have already conquered this world once. Why should we allow him to have any part of it? Why should we not take back what is ours?” My brother didn’t speak, just stood stone still until the words ended and then he made one sharp motion. The large vampire grabbed the offender by his hair and forced him down onto his knees shoving his head onto the block. He sputtered curses as they pulled his head down so that his neck stretched tautly across the wood. Someone handed my brother a braided leather whip. Its snap, as loud as a pistol’s shot transformed the stream of curses into a blood curdling howl, which was soon lifted up by the roar of the crowd around me. Every human around me seemed to be cheering except for the preacher who still scowled and a small group around him. The whip fell again tearing through the vampire’s shirt and biting into the flesh beneath leaving behind oozing red tracks. He heaved and writhed with each stroke his back curling upwards as he pressed his palms into the ground trying to free himself, but my brother’s comrades kept him pinned to the ground and the whip descended again and again driving him back onto the block. His eyes went from smoldering to dull wet holes in his face that only lit up as the leather bit into his skin. The whipping continued until the vampire lay limply across the block, all tension and struggle driven from him. His back was crisscrossed with raised tracks that oozed a thick red liquid and his shirt draped over the block only kept on by the neckline. The entire back of his shirt had been shredded by the whip’s blows. His fangs had dug into his lower lip whether driven in by one of the blows or by biting his lower lip I didn’t know. When my brother had finished the whipping, he threw the whip and then took an axe that was handed to him and leaned against the handle. The crowd fell silent and my brother looked out over them with a face full of disgust. I almost expected him to start spitting in their faces but instead he spoke at a loud but easy volume.