“Turn me,” he whispered bloody spittle running down his lip.
I shuddered when I realized he was one of the twins. He had been a man, a man who had clamored to become a vampire, but a man still and he had died at my hands.
“Men should not kill men for that is an abomination.” My mother had said. “Vampires kill enough, and paradise will not come to those with blood on their hands.” You must help your fellow man.” Most men did not live by my mother’s axioms, instead robbing and killing each other as they struggled for survival though we had not. Now I had killed again.
I’d killed my mother but that had been mercy. It had been what she’d wanted. She would never have suffered more than if she’d been undead. I could not look away as his body calmed, and his life faded away. He sat with his back against the dumpster and his legs splayed out in front of him as if resting. His face maintained a pleading look even in death. His eyes were vacant and going glassy. I didn’t close them. I didn’t touch him. I’d had to kill him. My brother had sent him to kill me and I had come to kill me brother. Weakness washed over me, running up through my knees in a dizzying rush to my head and I leaned against the cold rough side of the dumpster, my rifle butt planted against the ground. Would it have been better if I had died instead of being turned? This man hadn’t had the choice even though he’d so desired to become a vampire. I had stripped him of that choice. I searched myself but I still felt no different than I had as a human beyond barely restraining myself from licking the spilled blood from the pavement. Had my mother really wanted to die, really wanted me to kill her? I saw again her eyes and her gasping breath, and I was filled with doubt and self-loathing. I was suddenly very afraid of the death that could take a vampire. I shivered, my cold thick blood pumping slowly through my deflated veins.
The black hole of my rifle’s barrel staring at me jolted me back to the matters at hand. Two vamps and my brother were waiting for me and their brethren were on the way. I stood trying to force the rushing of indistinguishable thoughts into something useful. I wouldn’t get lucky again, they’d keep me pinned down. I briefly wondered if I could bear my vengeance through the process like a pack that catches on every branch and bramble. I reloaded my rifle’s clip with its shiny bitter bullets and chambered a round in my pistol.
The night seemed to settle as items in a pack do on a long jog. Suddenly an unwilling prayer dripped from my lips like wax rolling down a candlestick. I beseeched my mother’s spirit and my mother’s god, “Forgive me, protect me, never forget me as I can never forget you.”
Then I bolted from behind the dumpster as if I were breaking for the nearby car, moving like a gust of wind. My speed surprised even me, and I exalted in the feel of the cold wind rushing past my face. I caught the group of them off guard, smoking cigarettes and watching my position as if they expected me just to crouch down while they waited for their reinforcements. Before any of them could raise their rifles, I cut back towards them. They grinned wildly as if my charge amused them and loosed a spray of bullets that scattered across the pavement around me. I ran with smooth long glides, my feet barely touching the pavement as if I were running across water though my wound burnt with each step. I fired as I ran and took Robert in the knee. He fell howling, his rifle firing wildly into the air as he dropped it. His compatriots rushed for cover leaving him to struggle to one knee grasping for his rifle as I fired a burst of bullets that caught him in the chest and knocked him onto his back. I stopped and fired at my brother as he ran towards a nearby building. The shots flew wide, but he immediately dropped to the ground and rolled around.
