Turned

to only a jagged frame sitting in an overgrown driveway.  She’d sat in the cab for a long time with her head against the steering wheel and the keys dangling from the ignition, as my brother and I had jumped up and down on its gleaming plastic bed. We’d made the shocks squeak terribly but remained completely silent ourselves.  Eventually she’d stopped staring at the floorboards and cranked the truck.  The engine had turned and turned with a dull groaning and shook us with its chug chug motion before it had finally caught with a sputtering gleeful sound that rattled everything.  It belched smoke as we leapt in its bed and shouted for joy at the ragged sound of the engine firing.  It threatened now and again to quit but was growing smoother with every revolution until it backfired emitting a piercing bang that rang through the trees and my mother had almost broken the key as she turned it off.  She hurried us out of the truck and didn’t halt our quick march until she felt sure no one was hunting us, ten hours later.

“So, you’re his brother then?” the blond vamp on the other side of the truck asked while the others regarded me with a bland curiosity as they fiddled with their knives, cleaning their nails.  I didn’t answer, my throat felt constricted as if it had swollen shut.  “So, you’re Benjamin Elderitch’s brother?” he asked again.

 “I guess he’s scared shitless,” the one who had been at my feet put in.  “Or he’s too stupid to know how to talk.”

I didn’t know what to do.  I’d never heard of anyone talking with vampires.  What had my brother done, and were they going to take it out on me?  How had they found me?  Despite the warm, damp air rushing by I shivered, and my teeth chattered.  I tried to keep it together, tried to think of the vampires that surrounded me; the one that had questioned me watching me with a mixture of irritation, disgust and a growing anticipation, the darker one beside him looking bored, the one between me and the rattling tailgate, and two more in the cab nothing more than floating heads behind the glass, as nothing more than wild dogs, who won’t attack unless you run.  But with every glimpse of their fangs and every flash of moonlight off their pistols and knives, my terror grew until it was a writhing mass barely contained.  Their pale faces multiplied in my mind so that I saw them no matter where I looked, and even when I closed my eyes.  I tried to stare past the m at the brush that grew along the road’s edges sending its roots probing into the cracks in the pavement and wondered if I could leap, if I would survive, or if would break my neck as I hit the ground.  My questioner kicked me in the thigh, the toe of his boot digging into the meat of my thigh.

“He’s a wild, he ain’t like farm fodder.  They gotta have a bit more brains to stay alive.  Answer me boy, are you his brother?  The one who’s stirring up all that trouble up north?  You ain’t gonna talk?”

He snarled at me and got up seemingly immune to the constant bumps and jerks, stepped over to me still in a crouching position and slapped me across the cheek and the side of my nose.  The blow threw my head back, only for it to recoil as it reached the length of my neck.  Starbursts flared in my vision, bright yellow against the night that they momentarily masked.  The vampires laughed a distant sound woven in with the roaring of the wind, but all outside of a foggy insulation barrier that seemed to surround my head.

“He’s feeling bloody again,” one of them said amongst their laughter.  A deep painful pulsing started behind my watering eyes and thumped throughout my skull.  I felt myself letting go, but control slipped through my grasp and I could not stop myself as warm liquid seeped down my legs, soaking into my jeans.  The vampires’ laughter redoubled.  I could smell the rank liquid despite the wind, and it smelled like fear made physical. Where the vamp had struck had risen above the surrounding skin in a ridge of swollen flesh that was tender and hot like sunburn and my neck felt as if it had been permanently twisted to one side.  I heard one of them say, “Little baby,” but I missed the context.  I closed my eyes expecting to be drained at any moment, to feel their cold fangs at my throat, slashing open my jugular, my own warm blood soaking the front of my shirt and their cold lips closing around the wound.  I wondered if I would remember my human life if I awoke as a vampire.  Would I remember my mother and my brother?  Would I remember sitting at a wobbly table in a sleek silver trailer abandoned on some lonely back road while my mother taught us to play monopoly, wondering why anyone would pay for one of the thousands of worn out, moldy, decrepit houses that we’d slept in?  Would I drink the blood of humans and would I comprehend what I was doing, or would I be like a dog that gnaws at a corpse with no sense of right and wrong?  Would I drain people even if I did not comprehend my actions, compelled by instinct despite a lingering sense of shame and guilt?

“I guess,” I croaked, hoping they would not hit me again, my throat dry, despite the snot that ran from my nostrils and the tears leaking from between my squeezed shut eyes.

“He can speak,” the one that had struck me said.  “You’ve just got to loosen their tongues a bit.  Although nothing is more effective then flame if you’ve gone it.”

The truck shifted and I