I tried not to think as I grabbed my pack and headed north. I’d found that it was best not to think when confronted with troubles which were beyond my reach to solve. All I could do was to press on. There would be no one to spare me if I caught and turned by vampires. Even still I couldn’t help but to worry that a flood would wash my mother’s body out to sea or a dog would dig her up, and then all of nature would feast upon her but I was powerless to stop them.
That terrible hunt was in my thoughts as I fled from the cul-de-sac where I’d overheard my brother mentioned by vampires. I slept a couple of hours huddled against the crumbling side of a rotten log and dreamed of my mother’s last moments. I snapped awake when her pleading face was replaced with snarling fangs and burning eyes and heard the low growl of an engine returning to the area, I’d just left so I resumed my steady pace. The vampire’s threat to send a party after me rung in my ears and I was certain that thralls were already trailing me, sniffing at the wind and the earth like dogs. Two to three thralls did not concern me entirely too much, although bad luck could kill you if you slipped on a branch and broke your leg at any time, but three thralls were unlikely to kill me on their own especially with my head start on them. However, if I could not throw them off my trail before the rest of the party joined them, then I would have to contend with vampires. I walked steadily, sleeping in fifteen-minute catnaps in thickets and the crooks of tree branches when I tired, knowing that to sleep longer would mean my death. The thralls that pursued me would not need to sleep, and would follow me day and night unceasingly, with only the absence of a guiding vampire slowing them somewhat. I walked in streams when I could and smeared the soles of my shoes in some foul dog droppings that I came across. I slurped food straight from cans as I walked and stowed the empty cans back into my pack. After fleeing for two days without them catching up to me I began to relax and allow myself to sleep for longer chunks of time and slow my pace as my food supplies dwindled.
I cut west across a flat landscape of young trees and tall weeds broken by occasional fields of rolling waist-high grasses, until I came across a small road that had almost been completely overgrown by the trees and briars. They even grew in the cracks that ran along bulges in the pavement. Though tempting I couldn’t risk using it, so I crossed and moved away until the undergrowth thinned under mature trees and then paralleled the road swatting at the mosquitoes that hovered in the shade. Occasionally I stopped and turned around in place listening carefully and scanning the forest for anything that moved, but all was still except for some black birds that danced across the treetops.
Soon I came across a small cluster of abandoned houses set just off the road. These were the gravestones of civilization as my mother had called them. Their neat yards had been overtaken by tall weeds and trees growing around rusting swing sets and smothered bicycles. Their seeds had blown in through busted windows and fallen walls and taken root in shallow piles of dirt and decomposing leaves. They had burst through windows and spread their foliage over the sagging roofs. Most of the houses had partially collapsed, either struck down by falling trees or their beams had snapped under the weight of their waterlogged roofs. Nature had worn them all into a bland gray that was inharmonious with the forest except where they were covered with mildew or lichens. Cars sitting idle on crumbling pavement rusted on flat tires amongst glittering piles of their own broken windows. I crouched behind a screen of tall ferns that grew in the moist shade and studied the houses for a few moments. The nearest’s dull blue siding had begun peeling and hung slack like an open jaw from which sparrows flew, chirping and harassing one another as they wobbled in the air fitfully. Nothing moved but the mosquitoes that landed on the back of my neck in endless succession of itching bumps. My stomach growled and my mouth filled with saliva as I counted in my head my few remaining cans and anticipated the houses’ kitchens. I pushed the ferns aside and stepped into the thick weeds.
The closest house’s kitchen roof had collapsed inwards onto granite counter tops and stone tiles. I glanced in looking for cans sitting on the shelves of an intact cabinet, but it was empty except for
