I fell to my knees so hard that the impact jarred my neck. The cold ground numbed my kneecaps through my jeans as I kneeled with my hands clasped before me as if I was praying, wishing for tears to run down my face, unable to believe my grief without that human exhibition. I grabbed a handful of dirt and ground it into my face trying to cover the scent of the men. Even then I ached for their blood. The humans watched me puzzled, returning to their calmer state as I did nothing but collapse onto the ground in convulsions of dry sobs and stare into the blue sky. They were just children. They were born with the possibility of becoming men, but I didn’t know what they had become. Unmen. I shrieked into the air my body shaking with the effort and the humans howled and quivered, huddled together. My breath grew ragged and the ground leached my meager body heat until I was numb from head to toe, and my eyes were so dry that the world appeared to me in splintered gray fragments of hazy vision. After a time, my lamentations petered out and I stood wearily pushing myself up with the butt of my rifle. I stared at the greasy haired blue-eyed men, women and children lolling at me through terrified eyes and burnt with a mixture of loathing, hatred, and pity. I charged at them again roaring and firing my rifle into the air. They started at the shots and I reached out as if I was trying to grab one of the taller boys. He shoved a small girl to the ground as he pushed himself through the group away from me, but the group moved with him as if they were all connected. I pursued him and the whole conglomeration moved, pulling, and jerking in starts and stops. Eventually I herded them out of the fence and then I stopped.
They stood there together, chests pumping in and out with their exertion and fear, looking around them at the buildings and at the glowing embers of the house fire muttering to themselves incomprehensibly. Some of them were looking back at the muddy pit that I’d just forced them from but I stood in the way of their return, others, especially the children were looking around curiously though the view wasn’t much different from where they’d been held.
I tried to shrug them off, push them from my mind as I turned my back to them and walked away with my shoulders hunched up around my neck against the wind. I’d done what I could for them. I’d given them freedom and told them of the village, now it was up to them to save themselves of death by exposure. As I moved away from them the alluring scent of their hot blood fell away and my mind cleared. I doubted I was the first vampire to set a group of men free. I wondered if all vampires felt as human as I did for their entire lives. It seemed implausible. I felt no less human that I ever had beyond the change in the abilities of my body except for my growing need for blood, but perhaps the transformation had been so slow that the slow slippage had transpired unnoticed. Perhaps I was delusional.
My thoughts fell away as I wound my way down streets upon which the buildings had collapsed in neglect and the General’s vampires had instead erected small metal sheds for storage. They appeared untouched. Several fires burned across the block, reaching into the sky with their greedy fingers and through the shells of rusted out cars across the streets. They filled the air with an acrid odor and an eerie orange and green glow. I licked my cold dry lips. I turned a corner and walked down a street lined with brick buildings standing shoulder to shoulder with one another. At the end of it my brother, Peter, Robert, a middle-aged vamp, and the twins stood leaned up against a mildew covered car. They stood watching a large white building fronted with columns as it burnt. The flames danced up the walls blackening them, raced through the roof, and sent black oily clouds of smoke rolling over and over itself in a column that blocked the sun. My brother stood apart from the rest of the group who were piddling with their weapons and grinning at one another. My brother had his back to the flames and his face was down with a hood around it against the wind. His rifle leaned against the car and both of his hands were shoved deep into his pockets. He bore a grimace inappropriate for a man who had just won the first major battle in a war of his own making as he stared at the trash littered pavement. Black specks of ash settled on patches of brittle snow that lay coiled in the shadows and flitted through the air like moths. My brother said something without moving his body, only his lips showed it. The rest of the group jerked around to stare at me.
I gritted my teeth keeping my face stony though a surge of anger climbed through me. He was sitting and pouting like a little child in the face of a victory he had claimed to have wanted so badly and claimed would benefit the men, women and children of the village who’d suffered to provide the food, weaponry and supplies for this mission. Wives and children of the particularly gullible, or a cynical side of me noted, savvy survivors were back at the village wondering if their husbands and fathers would return. He knew what each and every man at that village
