by Mazlow, J.
As he spoke men and women in the congregation quaked visibly but silently in their pews. The pastor never acknowledged it. His steady pace of delivery never faltered though his voice rose and fell in punctuating bursts of volume. As the sermon continued, he began to talk of the Lord’s chosen people, those who would be lifted up to a land of milk and honey, a land unspoiled by the undead. The air felt electric, the congregation grew tenser and more and more men and women began to shake. I sat stiffly staring at his lips. Their movement was so restrained and seemed separate from the words that filled the church. I could see my mother’s lifeless body lying on the sandy riverbank, her face disfigured at my hands, her brains splattered behind her. I trembled though not in worship but in fear that I had prevented my mother from obtaining the Promised Land, the paradise where she would meet her parents once again. I muttered to myself a prayer whether to my mother or her God I could not say. “I had to, I had to. Vampires are excluded from the Promised Land. I had to save you.”
The sermon continued and no one paid any attention my mutterings. “There are those who do not trust the Lord, my brethren, who cannot wait with patience as He has instructed us. All things will be done in His time, but they believe themselves to be outside of his plan. These men strive to build up an earthly kingdom as corrupt and sinful as that which the Lord already struck down. These men are as haughty as Nimrod and the towers that they erect are as shaky as his tower. They are built on an unholy alliance between men and the unnatural spawn that prowl the earth in its final days, but the wise build their faith upon the solid rock of the Lord which has smashed every one of the wicked clay kingdoms that have sprouted like fungus on his precious creation.” The preacher’s eyes lingered on me as they scanned the congregation. They burned as hot as the hell that he preached was my brother’s fate. I felt small and squalid in his gaze and I flushed with discomfort. My stomach churned as if it were a separate organism struggling to free itself from my body as I wondered if I was condemned for killing my mother. Had it been the Lord’s plan for her to turn and would I face His wrath for circumventing his will. The preacher’s voice faded away until I could no longer discern his words. They became the tonal backdrop for my own feverish thoughts crashing over me in waves of increasing strength and frequency. Had I truly been acting out of mercy or had it been merely a selfish desire to maintain her purity for myself, because I feared vampirism? I thought of Abdul and his tale of the General’s turning, how the General had wondered at the strength that had been given him. Would my mother have become something even greater than she already if she were turned? My brother had obviously made peace with the vamps and used them to his own ends, but he was not a vampire. An image of my mother swirled in my mind of a time when my mother taught us to catch trout from the bottom of shallow streams with our bare hands, a time when she’d been young and vigorous, a beautiful woman with long rich brown hair down to her waist. Then she became older and slower choosing her words carefully as she tried to convey the majesty of the time before. Finally, she appeared dead at my hands, buried up to her neck in sand as I gazed on her for the final time. If she were turned would she feel as energetic as she had in her youth and devoid of the pains that beset her with age? I tried to picture her as a vampire, with pale dead skin and glassy eyes but the image shattered before it could coalesce.
I shifted in my seat sweating and uncomfortably exposed as if everyone could see my thoughts. I felt the preacher’s eyes upon me, weighing my worth, ordering me. I felt Mary’s eyes upon me wide with horror at my actions. It seemed as if every eye was upon me and they all knew that I had shot my mother and they all condemned me. My breath came in ragged ineffectual gasps, my chest heaving. The world began to spin around me. I got to my feet sending a ripple of gasps and murmurs through the congregation. The preacher momentarily lost his impeccable flow as I squeezed out of the pew avoiding eye contact with anyone and then walked briskly down the aisle though I felt the world swaying around me. Once outside I took a deep breath of the cooler air and looked around. Not seeing anyone I began walking towards a copse of trees lining the riverbank.
The calm of the birds, the trees and the river soon cleared my head though it wasn’t long before I caught a glimpse of a vampire across the river furtively watching me. I didn’t see him again, but I had no doubt that he was still watching me, only more carefully. Despite the surveillance I sat for some time with my back against a tree watching the bird’s flit from branch to branch and the waters passively begin their long journey to the sea. By the time I headed back to the village it was afternoon and I felt no desire to interact with humans or vampire so I made my way quickly back towards the shack I’d been given to sleep in, pausing only to pet a yellow dog that walked beside me with its tongue hanging out. I ducked into the cabin and was shocked to find Mary pacing the small dirt floor. My cabin mate was nowhere to be found. As soon as she saw me, even before I could say anything, she threw herself into me and wrapped her arms around me.
“You worried me,” she said.
“What,” I blurted.
“You just ran out of the church, then you were nowhere to be found in the camp and you didn’t even show up for lunch.” She looked up at me with such warmth in her eyes that I immediately started sobbing. Huge warm tears rushed down my face and fell onto her shoulder. It was her turn to be flabbergasted and her face turned to a frightened tenderness.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I miss my mother,” I said. “She could have been here. We could have been together. It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault.” She guided me over to my cot and sat down beside me with one arm around me.
“I miss my mother too,” she said. “I’m sure it’s not your fault. How could it be your fault.”
Blinded by tears, the world shrank to the warmth of her body pressed against mine and her soft voice. She took my hand and held it in her lap and slowly my sobs subsided. Then I began to tell her about my mother. She sat quietly listening rubbing the back of my hand with her thumb and squeezing me gently from time to time when my sobs reemerged. I don’t remember everything I must have told her because the words spewed forth uncontrollably in a fevered remembrance and atonement which had never been voiced since I’d shot my mother but I remember that I told her one tale which seemed to embody my mother. When I told it, my voice was distorted by sobs and by my hysteria, but Mary listened and asked me to go on whenever I faltered.
“She was always there for me.” I said. “She always took care of me. When I was about five or six and my brother, Benjamin, was three I was briefly separated from my mother. A man, I don’t recall his name, had been tagging along with us, but as they all eventually did, he left my mother and us to survive on our own. It made no difference to me, but my mother often longed for men or women of her own age. We trekked through the woods quietly, scavenging from the houses that potted the landscape. We’d come upon a particularly plentiful find, a large kitchen pantry full to the brim in a house that had escaped the savages of the crazy years and the weather unscathed. My mother had been extremely tired, so we remained in the house for close to a week, eating cans of fruit and potted meat and drinking from a stream nearby while she rested from some illness that neither my brother or I had caught. It was a rare respite from the constant flight that was our life, digging in the stream, listening to the birds chirping, and watching deer creeping through the forest. The world and vampires had briefly forgotten us, but it wasn’t to last. I was out at the stream flipping over rocks and watching the orange salamanders startled by the sudden light slip away when I heard the rustle of leaves. I immediately tensed and crouched down scanning half lit shadows under the trees for the sound’s origin. Nothing moved apart from the delicate spinning of dust motes through the yellow light. The world and I stood petrified for a long moment, my eyes flitting back and forth, my ears straining to hear the slightest crackle of crushed leaves over the thumping of my heart and my neck moving slowly and smoothly as I tu
rned my head to search all around me. Finally, my fear subsided, and I stood but as I did so a tall and skinny vampire flew out of the underbrush. The bushes rattled and shook off dried leaves as I stood momentarily stunned. Then instinct took a hold of my legs and I dashed out of the stream up the other bank leaving a spray of water in my wake. The vampire practically leapt into the stream with a great splash, but I was already flying through the brush on the other side screaming. Two shots reverberated amongst the tree trunks and then a third a moment later. I stopped and looked back and my mother stood on the other side of the stream silhouetted by trees, one arm wrapped around Benjamin, who rested on her hip with his face buried against her side and his little hands clinging to her shirt. She held a pistol with a faint wisp of smoke trailing from its barrel in her other hand half fallen to her side. She waved to me and I turned back towards her but as I did two thralls and a vampire burst from the woods near the creek. The thralls turned towards me and began their elegant shuffling charges while the vampire turned towards my mother hissing as she raised her pistol again. I turned and ran and didn’t look back as gunfire erupted behind me. Ten shots fired in a continuous even interval and my little brother ‘s voice rose in a foreboding wail that diminished as more forest fell between us. I ran back and forth like a deer trying to escape a cougar, zigging this way and that just as my mother had always said. I could hear the grunts and groans of the thralls behind me as they changed their direction to follow my course. I expected any moment to feel the cold grasp of undead hands closing around my neck and I shrieked and almost fell when a cold drop of water fell from the trees and ran down the back of my neck. As I stumbled leaves slipping out from underneath my feet I glanced backwards and caught a glimpse of the ashen faces pursuing me. Their faces clenched in snarls. At that moment I thought they would have me and the only thought that went through my brain was that I didn’t want to drain my mother. Just then there was a shot and my mother’s voice screaming for me to run and I regained my feet and sprinted as hard as I could towards a copse of gnarly brushy trees crouching underneath them as I ran. I kept running and even crawled when the brush grew too thick and hung low over the ground. I heard nothing behind me, but I didn’t trust my own ears. Thralls can run as silently as a panther through the forest if they want.
I ran until I could no longer run and then I walked and finally I fell panting beside a tree, my body given out, unable to propel myself further even a single inch even if a vampire was right behind me. I collapsed on the ground, chest heaving as I panted drinking in the air. The world faded away too little more than a blur and when I finally came out of my stupor a warm humid southern night was upon me. The forest was alive with the sounds of the night; crickets, owls, tree frogs and unidentified rustlings which I assumed were not vampires. I got to my feet, my stomach growling. Even at that age my mother had insisted I carry a small pack and I pulled from it a can of spaghetti o’s and a can opener. I drained the can as I started to walk aimlessly unsure of which direction I should go. Once I’d finished and tossed the can to the ground with a clatter I felt more hollow than when before I’d eaten and tears streamed down my face as I stood there alone in the dark world for the first time. I had no idea where to go, no idea even which direction I’d come from. The stars appeared only in disjointed bursts between the branches giving my child’s brain no direction. I worried that I would wander alone forever, and I wished that I had been taken by the vamps if only to avoid that fate. I must have wandered in circles then only partially aware of what I was doing through my sobs. The day came hot and heavy and still I walked until my clothes were drenched with sweat. I didn’t know where I was walking, and I had no idea where I should walk. I thought perhaps I could find my mother and my brother’s body, but then I thought what if they’d been turned. My feet kept walking even when my mind didn’t command it. Finally, I came upon an immense fallen oak with green leaves still hanging from its branches. A huge hole had been ripped from the ground where its roots now hung exposed to the sunlight, so I climbed down into the hole and hid myself in its shadows under the roots and an overhang of earth. I curled up into a little ball in the deepest recesses of the little pit that the tree’s roots had left behind as if I were a fox in the depths of winter and fell asleep.
I slept throughout the day and the next night, my only movement was to pull my canteen from my pack and drink the remainder of the water it held and then freshly roll up. A warm rain settled over everything and little red streams of clay and rainwater ran down the sides of my pit and pooled up against me but still I didn’t move. The outside world became little more than dull shapes, pools of color and incessant dripping. Faces appeared in the mists around me, silent snarling faces that remained even when I closed my eyes. I must have been hallucinating because I didn’t realize that my mother had found me. When I came to, she was cradling me against her chest, her face pressed against mine whispering softly to me as my brother played in the mud that my shelter had become. Her pistol lay discarded in a puddle with her pack beside it. “I’ve got you,” she said over and over again. I leaned back from her and she smiled at me. Her face was haggard, her eyes red orbs deeply sunken in dark concentric rings. She shook as she held me.
Mary and I sat in silence her warm body pressed to my side as she pulled me close to her with her other arm. A thousand stories of my childhood sprang to mind, of our time wandering the desolate deserted neighborhoods and empty countryside to the south but there was only one story that I felt that I had to tell Mary, my mother’s death. The words came easily even quickly when I told her of how my mother had been infected but as we drew closer to the end I sputtered and spat the words through tears and quivering lips. I was surprised and grateful that my brother had told no one himself, but if he had perhaps Mary would have never spoken with me. I expected her to push me away when I told her of the shooting, to get up and to leave me alone in the cabin, but she simply squeezed me tighter and said nothing. When I told her of how my brother left me alone on that sandy bank to bury our mother she muttered, “What a bastard,” and looked disgusted. When I told that tale to her, letting it out of my head for the first time I felt as if I’d just taken a long hot bath and scrubbed myself from head to toe. “I’m sorry,” she said when I was finished, and I could hear the concern in her voice. For a moment my doubts and worries that I had made the wrong choice, that there had been some hope left and I’d just overlooked it were swept away and I felt lighter and younger than I had since that day. In some ways I felt as if I’d actually disgraced my mother’s memory by avoiding the human interaction that she’d loved. My long penance in the wilderness was at an end and had been a waste to begin with.
When I had finished speaking Mary squeezed me closer, whispered, “It’s not your fault,” and kissed me on the cheek. My face grew hot and I stared at my ragged sneakers as a grin rose to my face. We sat like that for a moment and then I turned and well aware of the roughness of my beard I kissed her. My hand slipped to the small of her back and pulled her closer. It was a tentative kiss, gentle and unsure. Her lips were soft and hot. My own lips felt as if they were melting into hers though my arms were ungainly and useless. When we pulled apart, I was out of breath and lightheaded. She took my hand and held it on her lap smiling at me. Mary’s face had taken on a lovely pink flush. My eyes soaked up her moist lips, her small pyramidal nose, and her dark hair falling around her shoulder. Neither of us spoke and she leaned forward and kissed me again, her hands around pulled my lips harder against hers and I couldn’t feel my body except where it joined hers; her breast pressed against my side, her hands on my back and shoulders, her thigh against mine and her lips.
I think we would have kissed all afternoon and all evening if we’d been allowed to, but despite Mary’s allure the sudden silence of a group of crunching boots just outside my shack and the shadows they cast across the doorway pulled my attention away from her. I got to my feet as the hide was pulled back and the preacher and his two sons stepp
ed inside crowding up the small area. He took in the room in one quick glance.
“I see that you are in good hands brother. I was worried that my sermon had left you overwrought. I will not apologize for the strength of the words though, I am only the messenger and if sometimes the message is not easy to digest, well the words even soured in John’s stomach once he’d gotten them down.” One of his sons stood at the door as he spoke and the one who’d previously relayed his father’s message stood at his shoulder. His voice quieted a bit and took on an edge as he went on. “You’ve managed to fit in here well,” and looked hard at Mary. “I must confess that myself and others did not have high hopes that you would last. Many that wander into our community do not. Of course, whether or not you remain here doesn’t rest on your ability to fit in alone. There are only two paths that men take here: the straight and narrow path to eternal righteousness or the dark path to eternal damnation. The dark path will bring much suffering to you and those around you.”
I just nodded as he spoke wondering if he’d come down here just to continue the sermon that I’d run out on. Had he gone around to everyone who’d left the services early and made sure that they got the full message. His eyes had contracted into small hateful nickels that glinted as he glared at Mary who simply smiled as she sat on my cot blushing and looking at her feet. My confusion must have shown on my face because the preacher’s face began to redden as well, and he raised his voice a hair and spoke as if through gritted teeth.
“This village needs to be purged of the undead scourge which has fastened us like a great tick sunk into ear of a grinning dog, a parasite that your brother has allowed to fester.”