by Mazlow, J.
The men and women who surrounded me seemed so much more ragged than they had when I’d first walked into the village. Their clothing was tattered, torn and dirty. Their hands were covered in scabs and calluses and their faces were dirty and wrinkled from the sun. They glared at me with a mad hatred in their eyes as they ran into me with their shoulders or blocked my path daring me to try to force my way through them. My refusal to provoke them both amused and irritated them. One ran up behind me and shoved me to the ground. Mud ground into the knees of my pants and the crowd around laughed. The man stood stroking a trimmed mustache as he dared me to bother him. I went on. The sun was burning brightly warming me in an unpleasant way as if I had a fever. I felt dizzy and my vision swam. A man shoved me hard with one hand, but I didn’t fall though my legs were weak. I could smell his sweat, a sickly-sweet odor, and another scent not unlike raw meat beneath his usual stench of smoke and filth. My mouth watered in response. A pulsing of pressure grew in my ears quickening. I ignored the urge to grab his arm and jerk him closer so that I could huff his scent. He must have seen in it in my eyes because he jumped back and disappeared into the crowd. I barreled through the rest of the crowd sweeping the people to the side with my arms. They felt as light as cord wood. They shouted at me from the ground as I fled them, running as soon as I escaped the crowd. I dashed down the narrow alleys of the village finding my way back to the cabin I’d left that morning by some instinct. I disappeared into the semidarkness of the cabin and fell across the cot and lay unmoving though my body moved as if possessed of a powerful alien energy. I could not get the scent of the crowd out of my nostrils, whether it permeated the entire atmosphere of the camp or simply my memory I could not say. I closed my eyes but when I did an image of a throbbing neck sprang unbidden to my mind and would not be banished. My stomach started to clench and quickly the pain grew so intense that I rolled up into a little ball and dug my hands in the thin blanket I lay on. It felt as if I’d been shot in the stomach but that the hot lead had not left my body. I attempted to count the dust mites as they glided through the dusty yellow air but lost count when the cramps shot through my abdomen. Saliva ran down the side of my face and pooled up on the bed, but the pain scarcely allowed me to care, let alone wipe it. My body began to convulse, and red veins stabbed through my vision with the bursts of pain.
I lay cursing my brother and wishing for a pistol to end the spine twisting pain that wracked my body. Relief from the pain seemed as if it would never come. An icy cold burning ripped through my extremities, up through my bowels and deep into my skull. My stomach cramped tighter and tighter and my throat grew painfully parched as I faded into a darkness that only contained the pain, and the pulsing veins of people’s neck. I could see them pounding in frightened rhythm and I could smell the fear that coursed through the blood that they pumped. A bright new pain as if my gums were being seared ran along my jaw and shot through the centers of my teeth as they grinded against one another.
Suddenly a warm liquid splashed onto my lips and ran across my swollen tongue. I licked the thick coppery liquid without even open my eyes then immediately rolled to the side and vomited. The cot shook with my spasms. When I opened my eyes, I was staring at the puddle of black bile that was rapidly being absorbed by the dusty dirt floor and three pair of leather moccasins. My brother chuckled as I looked up at him wiping my lip with my sleeve. “What did you get me,” I asked in a voice little removed from a whimper.
“Better than you deserve.” He swirled the wooden mug he held. “Cow’s blood. I thought rat’s blood would suffice but I was told by my vampires that this would scarcely suffice. Seems that they were right.” He held the mug out to me, and I gagged. “You’re going to have to get used to it,” he said but I refused to take it. I lay back down and rolled away from him. “Petulant child,” he swore and doused me with the sticky blood. It ran down the back of my neck and around my chest in rivulets soaking into my shirt. “You’ll be begging for it soon enough. I guess that you and I aren’t as alike as I’d hoped. Maybe we didn’t even have the same father.”
I turned back over just to stare at him in disbelief. “Mother said.” He cut me off.
“I know what mother said. Neither of us saw the guy. She could have been making the whole thing up, along with a ton of other bullshit that she fed us.” They turned and filed out of the one room shack, my brother lingering in the doorway after the rest of them had exited, staring at me in the dusky light. “It could be a lot worse brother. At least now you’re not fodder.” With that he let the curtain drop behind him and I could hear him tramping away into the distance. The day was cold so I lay back down, huddled under the blanket, and tried to ignore the scent of the blood that was drying all over my body so that I could sleep. Sleep came eventually but only fitfully then. The drying blood filled my mouth with saliva and made me restless. I dreamt in gray of forests filled with swirling gray leaves, gray decaying houses and gray vampires marching back and forth as if they were automatons. Now and then a spark of bright red would pop in my peripheral vision and in the dream, I would jerk my head towards it as if to try to catch sight of it. Inevitably it would have disappeared, and I would be left wandering through a landscape devoid of color or warmth continuing a search whose object I’d long since forgotten.
I lay forgotten, like a corpse in state, but the corpse of a man with no family and no friends. The first few days after I’d been drained, after I’d surely been turned, though I did not allow my mind to linger upon that reality I lay slipping in and out of dreams. I remember awaking from Mary’s warm lips and her luscious neck pulsating beneath my lips, to my body trembling as a cold wind cut through the ragged blanket, I’d almost screamed but the sound had stifled in my dry throat. I licked my cracked lips and lay back down. I could hear men, women, children, chickens, cows, and dogs all moving outside. I could smell the humans as they walked outside my cabin. Their scent would wake me with a subtle acceleration of my slowing heartbeat, and I knew that they were approaching even before I heard their footfalls or saw their shadows. Each time I lay clenching the blanket until they passed. I imagined if I tried to stand my legs would collapse beneath me and I wondered if I would lie on the bed until I was nothing more than a shriveled raisin of a man, or a vampire, gumming the air like a machine that has lost its purpose. A vampire guard stood at the doorway, pacing or smoking, often leaving me completely unguarded. On the second day he entered with a wooden mug and set it down on the floor beside my bed. I could smell the blood. It filled the air with a sweet metallic scent. Instantly my stomach growled, my mouth watered and everything I looked at seemed stained red. My body threatened me with convulsions and my hand moved of its own will. It picked up the cup. The blood inside was still warm but cooling and congealing rapidly. It was rich dark red. I stared into the mug, then closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. It smelled right. I needed it. My body threatened more pain and my mind threatened to rebel, but I simply sat with it cradled in both hands just below my chin as I tempted myself with its odor. Again, I heard the gunshot that had taken my mother’s life and I saw the smoke slipping from the end of the barrel at the end of my arm’s reach. I imagined her sitting on a field of green grass underneath a round tree munching on an apple with the juice running down her chin as a warm sun shone down. Her paradise. Was she loitering there now, looking down on me? Now I would never join her. Even if I didn’t drink the blood I was already condemned to dangling over the fires of hell. If she were watching over me then I had no doubt that she would disown me if I drank the blood. But if my fate was already decided what did it matter, why did I have to continue to endure the agony of my body destroying itself as the vampirism burnt through it. If my mother was truly in paradise, then she must not have been watching over me for surely my condemnation would ruin her paradise and my further abomination of drinking the blood would rip her heart out. Therefore, I determined that she must not have been watching over me. I took a tiny sip. The blood was salty, coppery
, sweet, and so sticky and thick that it threatened to gag me. It tasted of ambrosia. It tasted better than the stew that Mary had fed me on my first night in the camp. It tasted of life and a life’s purpose. It tasted of fulfillment and honey. After the first sip went down, I chugged the entire contents of the mug with only one raise of it to my parched lips. It slid down my throat as if were alive and then settled on my stomach uneasily. I sat down on the bed my vision swimming as if I were drunk.
Within the next hour I felt strong, giddy with strength even, but the power was not evenly distributed. I was like a leaf that had been given veins of iron or a car that has had its engine replaced with one bigger than the frame can handle. If it were not for the dizzying effects of the blood, then I would have feared hurting myself unknowingly. As it was, I felt like running, flying across the fields like a deer wild with fear. I imagined myself running straight out of the camp, hurtling past any guards through the woods to the river, but then I wondered where I could go. What would I do? Would I drink the blood of those who had too recently been my own species? My stomach pain seemed to have subsided though it was constantly gurgling and the pain in my jaw had eased somewhat thought it still fell unsettled. My entire body felt as if it had been ripped and rended and now the still tender pieces were rearranging and reconstructing themselves. My fever had broken and now a deep cold settled into every recess of my body. I draped the thin blanket over my body and jogged in place in one corner of the room, but I could not escape the chill that felt as if my bones had been replaced with steel no matter how vigorously I exercised and I stopped when the guard peeked his head in suspiciously. He wore a ski mask, scarf, and a heavy coat though I didn’t think that the day was intensely cold. I longed for the sun on my face but even the thin lines of light that snuck their way in through the walls dizzied me.
On the third day someone walked up to the guard and though I strained I could not make out the words of their conversation as they smoked. Once they’d tossed the butts, they both walked off and I was left unguarded. Apparently after my brother had had me drained and left in the frigid cabin to recover either felt that he had no further reason to distrust me or that I was so powerless that he had no cause to worry. I stepped out into the lane. A cold light mist was falling from a thick gray blanket of dismal clouds that covered the sky from end to end. The mist had settled over the camp covering everything, yet I could make out the hut at the end of the land with a crispness that defied the environment, yet their color had been subdued. Whereas before a shack had had a wall made of faded red boards, now it appeared as little more than tinted wood. Despite the fog I could hear men on the hillsides, women in the camp and children playing along the riverbank. The scent of humanity welled up from all sides, almost knocking me back against the wall with its strength. I licked my lips and felt my stomach growl. A growing sensation sat in the back of my mind gnawing at my sensibility and I felt as if it were somehow an extension of my stomach, as if my stomach had invaded part of my brain and were threatening to conquer it entirely. Beyond the human smell I could smell all the other aspects of the camp and even the decomposition that took place in the shady parts of the forest, under the pines sagging with moisture or under the bare branches of the hardwoods. There were other scents and sounds that I could not make out or understand. Everything felt very clear like pristine pencil marks on white paper, yet muted and any movement appeared slow and sounds elongated. The smell of a human dampened from the rain appeared and I inhaled deeply before I could stop myself with a choking gasp. Then I could hear the heartbeat of a child, fluttering as it came to me, followed by its splashes through the muddy morning and I dashed back into the cabin. The child ran happily by unaware of my existence as I lay on the bed, my face contorted into a gruesome parody of someone about to cry but who can’t produce a tear. I’d momentarily warmed but soon my body was just as cold as I’d been before. The slow breaths that returning to my nostrils from the bed reeked of musty decay.
I sat up and looked at my hands. They had grown wan and cold, bloodless therefore lifeless and when prodded sprung back slowly like foam. Death seemed necessary yet unattainable. A gunshot through the head would have done it but I didn’t know if I’d be able to pull the trigger. I wondered how I’d get through the hundreds of years of undead existence I would have to suffer. Then I passed into a sort of joyless reverie where I pursued question after question. Would I age? I had no idea. Vampires had only existed for a couple of hundred years at best, so perhaps they simply had not had time to age and would all die of old age in a few millenniums. What did the bottom of the ocean look like and could I now walk along it for days admiring the fish, the crabs, and the lobsters? How long could I go without blood and could I survive off animal blood? Would I always have my human memories, or would they fade leaving me permanently and irrevocably vampire?
I was in this disassociated state floating in a whirl of the metaphysical when the preacher entered my shack alone. I didn’t notice him. He stood in front of me for a while eyeing me and fingering a pistol at his waist. Eventually he cleared his throat and I snapped out of my thoughts. As I saw his fat face and unsightly jowls, I realized who stood in front of me and anger surged up my throat. I felt a tingle in my fingers as if they were signaling their desire to strangle his throat. Instead I controlled my anger and remained completely still which meant to him that after my eyes had flicked to him, I remained as still as a statue. Being alone in the same room as a vampire didn’t unnerve him as much as I would have liked but he had lost his air of cool superiority and his right hand remained near the butt of his pistol. I was not surprised to see him. I had had many visitors as I’d lain on the cot writhing and spewing, my burning up with the thrall sickness and I could not say with any certainty which ones had been real and which ones had been the product of the searing of my mind. The preacher had appeared with his two sons, all wearing pistols and he had laid a bible on my chest and said a prayer over me and that was all I remembered. Perhaps I owed him that intervention against the thrall sickness, but I also certainly owed him Mary’s life.
He stood in front of me for a long time. I could smell his sweat through his thick old coat. I could hear his heart beating and see it pulsating in his throat. The rate quickened somewhat as he stood there but I felt no urgency, I felt no need to move, no need to relieve the pressure in the room. I could see the pores on his nose contracting and expanding as he breathed, and I watched a bead of sweat roll down the side of his neck.
“It would have been better for you if you had died,” he said. He spoke quietly but still with the sanctimonious tone he always used, though it was somewhat spoiled but his newfound need to carry a sidearm. “But that is not for mortal men and women to decide only the Lord above.” Here he paused almost imperceptibly. “The Lord determines all things; He has brought you down this path for the glory of Himself and the aid of his flock, though the path is mysterious.”
“The Lord has condemned me to an eternity of suffering and agonizing loneliness both here on earth and afterwards when I’m cast out into the lake of fire, but he has done it for some greater purpose? What? To turn those that he has also condemned?”
He shifted his weight. “Perhaps. But perhaps that Lord has a greater purpose in mind for you. Already you have worked good though I do not know how. Your brother has decided to proceed with his assault upon the General’s forces this winter.”
“He’s dumber than I thought then.”
The preacher grinned. “Oh, ye of little faith. He will not assault St. Louis. Oh no, but why not pick up some ripe new lands south of here where the growing season is longer and the winter’s not so harsh. You and that vampire of yours have convinced him that the north has been abandoned, that it is his for the taking and so he will. That is our opportunity and even more of an opportunity for you.”
“Why should I?”
“Are you already grown so cold towards your fellow man that you do not wish to seem them escape the clutches
of the undead fiends or perhaps you’ve already changed your allegiances. If so you’re a paragon of self-interest, or a sadomasochist. You’ll have plenty of long years wandering the earth remembering your human life and the undead life that follows. You could ease your guilt and ease your suffering by helping them.”
“Would you be any better than my brother?” I asked.
“I think the evidence is undeniable?”
“What do you want me to do?” He smiled and leaned in close almost whispering in my ears as he laid out his plans.
When he’d left, I lay back down on the hard cot and stared at the dusty ceiling as I wondered what loyalties I had left and what considerations I should make before embarking upon the Preacher’s request. A cobweb hung in one corner abandoned in the face of the rising cold. It seemed likely that I may die in failure. That did not bother me as much as other implications. The skin across my entire body writhed as if it were a separate entity and wanted to escape me.
Eventually I got up and went to the door. There was no guard, so I stepped outside into a cloudy morning with a constant cold breeze blowing that froze me to the core. The ground was muddy and crisscrossed with all kinds of tracks. Large boot tracks were speckled with the imprints of birds, little bare feet tracks overlapped one another in a beautiful chaotic friendly. Dog tracks came and went as if the mutt had leapt from one place to the other. My stomach growled and I shivered. I was very hungry. The hunger manifested itself as a continual nagging in the back of my mind, like a very mild headache or a song one can’t get rid of as well as a deep-rooted pain in my stomach. I looked carefully up and down the lane but didn’t see anyone who looked like they were watching my hut. I looked longingly and carefully down the path towards the river but then I thought of my previous escape attempts and I began to walk up the path towards the center of the village. I walked as aimlessly and casually as I could, but the vampire body is not made for such strolls especially one as young as mine. It jerked quickly when commanded so that I must have looked like a machine to other vampires, herking and jerking up the lane, my head ticking around like an owl. The men and women who passed me along the path stared at me silently and I kept my eyes averted from their suspicious faces. When turning a corner into another lane I clipped the edge of a hut with a shoulder rattling the tin roof and nearly falling backwards. A child laughed but then dashed away as soon as my head turned towards him.