Turned

the south and I hadn’t noticed having been so intent on the lights of the living city until the car had left us behind.  Here boxy neighborhoods lay just off either side of the highway, sometimes hidden by trees and overgrowth, or tall gritty walls that had often fallen onto the shoulder and far right lane of the highway but often visible as dim sagging structures that occasionally glinted as the our lights struck their remaining windows.  Lines upon lines of houses, each five feet from its neighbor formed a grid of dilapidated husks.  The number of cars pushed to the side of the highway and sitting on their tireless wheels had grown to a constant line parked along the shoulder and the right-hand lane.  Some were neatly parked on the shoulder, but others had been shoved into the line of cars at an angle their bumpers crushed into crumpled door panels and their rears jutting out into the highway.  The gray walls that lined the highway had crumbled in many places crumpling the roofs of cars with chunks of stone and trees had fallen onto other cars, lying in troughs of metal slivers and glass shards.  I saw a skeleton behind the jagged remains of a door window, leaned up against a silver BMW’s steering wheel, its bones picked clean and washed out until they were as white as snow from the sunlight that burnt it each day.  Its skull was turned towards the highway and its jaw hung open beneath its wide black eye sockets.  One hand was still curled around the cracking leather of the steering wheel.  We’d passed it in an instant, its eerie presence illuminated in a flash of our lights before it disappeared back into the darkness but as I saw it I felt as if it had been awaiting me, the only fellow human being for miles, but whether it had been waiting to mourn or to mock I did not know.  Soon we veered off the multilane highway, down a ramp, and made a left onto another four-lane highway but divided down the middle by a faint yellow double line. At the left a single stoplight swung in the misty night air hanging from a fraying black wire.  Buildings lined this street, their facades sagging and their long horizontal windows long since broken.  Every bit of ground not paved was covered with a thick layer of weeds and tall saplings.  We crossed an intersection covered in a layer of mud that was cut with two pairs of tire tracks and on the other side the street narrowed to only two rough lanes fronted on both sides by small two story houses laid out on almost perfectly parallel lines.  After a couple of blocks one of the houses was lit from the inside, bright light diffused through drawn curtains that leaked around their edges.  Its yard was populated with only a couple inches of growth of rough leafed weeds and thick stalks scarred by a recent trimming.  Then another house appeared on the same side of the street lit up on both stories.  The air grew filled with a vague and origin less humming like the buzzing of a gnat that can’t be swatted away from an ear.  We crossed onto another block and suddenly all the houses were lit up.  The humming grew more pronounced but was overshadowed by music blaring from house, a harsh screaming music accompanied by shrieking instruments and rapid drumming. Soon the houses had their curtains drawn and their doors and windows thrown open to the night air.   The truck had slowed to a steady speed and the rumble of its vibration felt as if it were quivering under restraint as it rocked along the bumpy road. No discarded cars littered the roads; the yards had been trimmed or consisted of packed beds of lightly orange earth wet from the mist that didn’t seem to fall so much as to hang in the air.  These houses were in decent repair, except for the occasional unoccupied house which had collapsed in on itself.  Their roofs were whole, and they had glass in the windows although their exteriors were still the washed-out grey of colors long since lost to the wind and rain.  As we rode along, I peered through the smudged greasy windows and inside the houses I saw sitting or lying on couches and recliners upholstered in bright colors and dark leathers vampires with blandly engrossed faces.  There were lady vampires in flowery dresses, male vampires in rumpled suits, vampires with puffy cheeks, vampires with skin as dark as the night, vampires caught in perpetual childhood lying with their chins on their hands and even vampires of both sexes lying on their backs completely naked oblivious to our passage.  The darker skinned vamps lacked the gray paleness of their lighter counterparts, but their skin still had the sheen of stretched plastic.  Most of them sat alone in their rooms, though occasionally there was a pair or a small group of them sitting together not really speaking to one another, just staring enthralled, their faces impassive, their eyes dull, their fangs tucked away in their mouths with a slackness to their expressions as if they were half asleep.  I doubted they would have noticed if I had walked down the street with blood gushing from my wrists, they were so intent on the colorful dancing screens that sat in front of their couches.  Each house had a television on one side of each occupied room, lit, alive, unshattered, and on their screens the images of men and women moved back and forth amongst vivid greens and blues, cars rolling and fires burning, and all of the vampires watched with expressionless faces.  I had never seen a functioning TV before, though scarcely any structure that I had ever holed up in had been without the plastic black boxes, but most had had their screens smashed into piles of glass granules