my flesh, but the sky was clear and peppered with stars. To my changed eyes the night was as bright as an overcast day. Inside the wagon something large and heavy shifted, rolled across the wagon as the vamps inside cursed and rammed into its side with a loud crack and a groan. The thralls never noticed and never paused in their pursuit of the human that was constantly just out of their reach. My brother looked back from beside the driver scowling and yelled, “Get the gun secure.” There was a muttering from inside the wagon, but the item remained secure after that even as we raced around curves. The wind whipping by, the rasping of the wheels on the pavement and the creaking of the wagons overwhelmed any other sound and no one spoke. The vampires either huddled as tightly as they could with their backs to the wind or watched the road of the head suspiciously with one hand on their rifles. I surveyed the land for as long as I could my rifle slung around my back as the cold turned my face into an icy block that felt as if it could no longer move. Deer startled by our passing darted off into the naked brush white tails flashing. Branches slapped at me where the road was overgrown, and I began to wish that I had taken a different place on the wagon. The thralls ran on through the night seemingly indefatigable whereas the humans they vainly pursued strapped themselves to their perches so that they wouldn’t fall onto the road. The landscape glowed with an eerie evanescence and the pine needles wiggled like thousands of eager young tentacles. By the time the sun began to rise my face and body were petrified with numbness from the burning of the wind. The sun was no relief though and the thralls slowed as its rays hit them. My brother called a halt and the wagons were brought to a grinding stop by their large brakes. Most of the thralls continued to struggle against their harnesses while others stood panting dully. The humans trotted up the road a little ways accompanied by the sound of their jangling packs and then disappeared to eat whatever sustenance they’d brought along. The remainder of the group brought the thralls to the shade of some pines and I paced back and forth rubbing my hands together. A pair of vamps disappeared into the woods and my brother sent another off in the opposite directions. The absence of the wind was a relief, but the day was still frosty. Several cigarettes were lit. I paced. The wind carried the scent of the men straight to me even though they were out of sight. The sun was too bright and white to make tolerating it easy and its intensity washed the definition out of the terrain. I sat down with my back to a tree the chill of the ground seeping up through my thighs and fell into a sort of trance in which I stared at the pavement tracing my eyes along the craters, pockmarks, and trail of splinters from our wooden tires. The road was like its own world with canyons, valleys, mountains and whiteness of ash or snow.
My daze was broken by a dull scream carried to us from the south by a transient breeze. Instantly two vamps sprung up and dashed towards the sound leaving their cards to flutter to the ground behind them. I also rose but didn’t follow, instead I resumed my pacing and listened to the screaming as it continued and slowly grew louder. It soon became obvious that the screams were growing closer and closer to our resting place. Though as they approached, they grew weaker, more sporadic and with greater lengths of time between them. They soon ceased to be intelligible in anyways though I had distinctly heard a cry for help when the screams had first begun. It wasn’t long before the vampires returned, two of them manhandling an emaciated man between them while the other two walked to either side salivating. I expected some sort of recognition from the man, perhaps raised eyes pleading with me to help, or just asking me why. His eyes flitted around the group like a stunned rabbit, but they did not linger on me or acknowledge me in anyway. They did not see my humanity, our shared experience. His eyes went dull and his chapped lips constantly moved in silence. The vampires shoved him forward and he fell to his knees. I looked down at myself, but I could see no changes to my body. My face had grown paler and was not reddened by the cold but that was a little thing. To him I was just another vampire no different than the rest of them. The realization almost sent me reeling to the ground. The world spun around me. I could hear the nasty laughter of the vampires and a slight whimpering from the man. Then my devastation was washed away by a flood of anger. How could he not see that I was not one of these vampires? How could he not know that human blood had never crossed my lips? One of the two vampires who had brought him back to us bent over and slashed his throat with his fangs. The man emitted a weak, gurgling scream and struggled somewhat. As the vampire rose with blood running down his chin his blood filled the air with its sweet tempting scent. I gagged, but nothing came up. The vampires surrounded him in an instance, hooting and grinning. Their eyes gleamed like a blind person’s in the brightness of the day. They opened his wrists and then his thighs as they danced around him trying to claim their piece and get their fill. They drained him in moments leaving his corpse lying on the hard ground as they turned away, their
