My curled body slammed into the hard pavement, hot white light shattering my vision and then I was rolling along the asphalt stones and branches digging into my skin. My teeth cut into my lips and my ears started ringing in a deep ominous tone as my head hit the pavement. Just down the road tires screeched. Bullets whined as they ricocheted off the pavement behind me. The gunshots sounded distant through the crashing of my body against the road and the ringing in my ears. The ground pounded me on all sides as I rolled, as if I were being punched repeatedly by a circle of men. I rolled off the pavement, my ankles slamming into the side of an abandoned car twisting my body’s path, and then I rolled through a patch of jagged gravel, down a short incline through some tall sticky weeds and slammed into a small tree, my body curling around it with the impact. I sat up coughing and wiping the blood that was flowing from my nose and down across my swollen tender lips. Gray flecks of grit stung in the abrasions that ran across both of my elbows and down one side of my stomach. A mixture of clear liquid and blood oozed slowly from the raw flesh. Boots rang on the pavement and I got up shakily bending the little tree as I pulled myself up. One of my eyes was beginning to swell closed and I could only keep it open enough to squint. I ran hobbling as best I could crashing through the brush and weeds, down a bank that sloped gently away from the highway. Behind me shouts rang out and I imagined the vampires following my bloodstains to the crushed weeds where I’d rolled off the highway. An acute pain flared in my knee with every step and my breath came in harsh, ragged gasps that sounded like rocks being drug across sheet metal. I held my hand across my mouth hoping to dull the sound. I could hear the vampires leaving the highway and crashing through the brush almost as loudly as a human being moving fairly quickly would have, the vamps must have been rushing. I slowed down taking deep breaths and stepped easily choosing my path more carefully. My pants had ripped at the knees and hung in shreds allowing branches to prod and painfully drag across the road rash beneath them. The sound of the vampires’ movements disappeared, and panic welled up from my chest as I tried to look in every direction at once as I walked. My heart beat harder than ever before and the intense urge to flee, to sprint as hard as I could away from the highway and the truck that sat upon it almost swept away my reason with its strength but the racket would have certainly brought them back down upon me. If I let my fear get the best of me then they would capture me again, take me to their vampire city and drain me, or give me to their leader, this general who would drain me himself as a special treat. I could see them gathered around me in the darkness, pale faces with a slight waxy sheen, fangs gleaming in the moonlight as they leaned in and I struggled futilely against their cold wiry grips restraining my limbs. Then I imagined myself crouched over my own victim, the limp body of an emaciated man hanging from my arms in an ungraceful arc as I sucked blood from his neck and my mother watched from the shadows, red faced with the thrall sickness and muttering to herself. I wiped blood from my nose and lips onto my sleeve. I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t become one of them, I had to escape. I prayed for my pistol so that I could shoot myself, so that I could spare myself, but the vampires must have taken it while I was under the effects of their sedative. How could my brother be involved in this, had he already been turned and requested to feed upon me as part of some cruel initiation rite, or was it all a ruse? It didn’t make any sense. He had to have turned, else how could he be associating with vampires. The image of my brother as a vampire loomed overwhelmingly in my mind. A wan man, very thin, lazing about by day, hunting by night. It scared me. My brother had been a cruel and unfeeling human, as a vampire he was sure to
