Turned

even as I opened my eyes.  My cheek was flattened against the rough bed of a truck and slid back and forth across the rusty trenches that ran down it lengthwise.  The bed’s grit had gotten between my teeth and filled my mouth with the taste and feel of metal as if I were biting down on tinfoil.  The warm humid air rushed overhead whipping across the truck with a moan that was broken here and there by the whooshing of branches that hung out over the road.  From ahead of me the engine of a truck roared but was punctuated with sudden misses that jerked the entire truck.  Through vision blurred by the wind and the vibration I could make out two vampires leaning casually against the back of the truck.  One sat on the wheel well and smirked at me once he noticed that my eyes were opened.  He had dark eyes that seemed to collect the light, straight dark hair gathered into a ponytail and smooth skin the color of a river filled with silt and churned by a heavy downpour.  He sat so still that he scarcely seemed alive or undead. I shivered under his gaze. Behind him tree trunks appeared momentarily like gray ghosts before disappearing back into the darkness of night as we sped past.  A third vampire sat at my feet just in front of a tailgate which popped up and down picking at his nails with a pocketknife.  The tan-skinned vamp across from me wore camouflage fatigues that were the same sandy camouflage as the vampire who’d first mentioned my brother’s name had worn. They billowed and wrinkled in the wind along his leg until they were tucked into heavy black boots that narrowed above the ankle and laced up to the bottom of the calf. The boots were so exceptional that I briefly forgot their occupier and I started to sit up to ask where they’d been found.  The truck dipped just as I did and threw me face first into the truck bed. I bit my lip hard and the vampires laughed.  I shivered as an intense wave of helplessness washed over me.  Each of the vampires wore pistols strapped to their waists which they’d hitched over onto to the front of their thighs so that they wouldn’t bang against the truck.  I sat up again using my hands to steady myself as I did.  The effects of the dart still lingered causing my stomach to churn and my vision to spin slowly as if I’d drank beer.  One side of my face was numb, but I didn’t know whether it was caused by the dart or if it had simply fallen asleep from being pressed against the truck bed.

“Throw yourself out,” the vamp across from me shouted, tilting his head back in a narrow angle to indicate the environment rushing by behind us, and then he chuckled.  “You won’t get far.”  When he laughed, he bared longer fangs then I’d ever seen. He could have been a vamp for fifty years with fangs that size.  They extended past his lower lip and curved back towards his mouth, ending in sharp tips that glistened with a coating of saliva.  His dark eyes parsed me and dealt me out onto a platter with an intense hunger that quickly disappeared behind a cold veil.  The other two vampires assiduously ignored him.  The truck rolled down the center of a wide black highway occasionally swerving suddenly.  Trees grew thickly along the road’s sides and their branches reached out over a third of the roadway, but down the center a strip of star speckled night sky was visible.  We were headed northwest towards the vampire city that of St.  Louis.

Once a few years earlier, an old woman has surprised me as I’d bathed in the curve of a stream on a hot summer day.  I’d seen no signs of vamps in days; no engines rumbling, no thralls, and no scared humans fleeing.  I hadn’t seen anyone as I walked the riverbank hoping to catch fish so I’d decided that I might as well bathe since I had the chance.  One set of clothing had been washed and laid on the banks in the sun to dry with my pack beside them, my pistol atop it.  I swam and scrubbed myself in the warm water as my mother had had us do sometimes as children.  As I splashed, just shy of frolicking, the old woman shuffled silently up to the edge of the river and stood there sniffing the air as if she were a wary mutt. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t notice her. When I saw her, I jerked upright, and my hand went to my empty hip. She didn’t make any move but just stood there looking at me with her head cocked to one side.  Her long-crimped hair defied gravity as it hung out at crazy angles, neither bending under its own weight or around her shoulders.  I waded slowly towards my possessions as she squatted there watching me.

“Boy,” she said, “I ain’t seen legs like those in a while,” then she smiled widely allowing me to see all her remaining teeth.  “I ain’t seen no one swimming like that either.  Not a bad way to escape a vampire if you can get enough water between you and them.”

“Yeah,” I admitted, shading my eyes from the sun, and studying her as I stood in the shallow edge of the water.  She didn’t appear to be armed in any way.  She was just an old woman in a dirty gray dress tightened at her waist by a wide brown belt, carrying a handful of plastic bags twisted around each of her wrists.  I went on to cut into the silence.  “They don’t like water much, but there could always be vamps on the other side waiting for you.”

She laughed, a brittle but joyful cackle, and then