Turned

he stood watching.  I couldn’t see his face in the darkness, but I could hear his breath; ragged, fitful, starting and stopping, sputtering in the humid air.  I pulled my pistol from its holster and he began muttering to himself in a disarranged streak of incomprehensible syllables that he repeated quietly to himself like a chant. Only the slightest variations marred its rhythm.  My mother had grown so pale that she glowed in the light of the rising moon as if she had become spirit already.  She was beautiful. The woman we had known now so faded that she was barely present.  Her eyes opened and their faded blue was the only color visible in the dismal atmosphere of gray and black.  They were heavy with the knowledge of her fate and, beseeched me to pity her and begged me to prevent it.  Her pale, pink lips hung slightly open.  Her body was devoid of warmth and color.  She must have been frigid, yet she did not shiver.  An intense calm settled over everything.  Her eyes fluttered and closed. She lay on her back motionless. The wind stopped, the sounds of the night faded way, and all I could hear was my brother’s ramblings and the slow movement of the river.  As I stared at the only constant part of my life my hands trembled and my vision blurred as my eyes filled with tears.  I felt as if I were becoming a child again and that I would be set free to wander the earth loveless and alone.  The terrible thing that grew inside her savaged her body as it claimed it for its own, but it also gave her a latent energy, a light that no mortal could ever have.  I could not hurt her.  My attempts would be rebuffed by some unearthly power beyond my comprehension.  Behind me my brother’s chant had grown into a wail. He pulled out his hair with both hands and cast the tufts onto the ground.  The surrounding land was cowed by our sorrow; the animals were driven into hiding and the river drowned out.

As I raised my pistol her eyes opened again. She blinked them into focus and looked up at me.  Though her face remained wrinkled and tired and her hair was as silver as a frozen river, she looked younger than before. I could picture her as she must have looked in those few years before the crazy time.  Even before the crazy time life had been tough for her. She’d lost her father to war and lived with a mother who hadn’t been able to cope. Both had been unaware that society was already under attack from an unknown enemy. Now that little girl was no more than a blonde haired, blue eyed doll that only existed in humanity’s collective imagination, just as my mother herself only existed in my imagination in that moment, and not in the flesh that lay eroding before my eyes.  Her flesh was being hollowed out by a malignant force that would fill the hole in itself.  Her eyes caught mine as I leveled the trembling sight at her head.  The world undulated wildly around me.  She smiled weakly and sighed.  Closing my eyes and gritting my teeth I squeezed the cold trigger and the gun leapt in my hands.  A flash of orange swept across my vision.  My breath came in heaving gasps. I forced myself to open my eyes but unwilling to look down I looked off into the forest as I tried to steady my breathing. A trickle of smoke rose from the gun held limply in front of me.

As I stood there my brother hit me from behind and knocked me to the ground beside my mother’s warm corpse.  The gun flew from my hand and landed in the sand with its barrel pointed at me regarding me like a huge black eyeless pupil.  Benjamin fell on top of me punching me, but his fists were like socks balled up at the end of his sleeves.  He threw blows without looking where they landed. His eyes were squeezed shut and his throat was filled with a low moan.  I did not fight back but kept my arms up around my face as he jabbed at my ribs and stomach.  Eventually he collapsed half against me as if he expected me to hold him and lay there sobbing into his hands and quivering.  I pushed him off into the sand where he lay curled up gasping.  I rolled away from him but didn’t get up.  I didn’t even consider any vampires that may have been tracking us. That was insignificant to the fact that I would have to endure all of eternity contemplating what I had done.  I lay there and shivered in the night air until I fell into a dark and fitful sleep.

When I awoke, I found that my mother’s eyes had been closed.  Her hands were folded atop her book and a wildflower had been inserted beneath it. Her skin looked glazed as if frost had settled on it and her lips had turned blue.  The back of her head was a ragged mess of collapsed skull mingling with hair, dried blood and brains in a pool that had started to flow away from her before it had coagulated.  My brother and his pack were gone. I found his tracks heading north along the river and I cursed him, but with no real conviction, as I gazed at the serene body of my mother. I sighed wearily and searched along the riverbank until I found a flat stone with one jagged edge.  I scraped the sand aside on my knees for the better part of the morning until I had a trench just about the size of a person.  The sun burned away the mountains’ morning mist and I sweated freely.  My knees ached and my hands grew raw and bloodied.  When I had