Turned

heaped up in front of them.  I had pushed the buttons at the bottoms of the rare preserved screen with the hopes of seeing the cartoons my mother had said she’d watched on the weekends but as I’d grown older I’d realized no television would ever work, and I’d started to doubt that the magically moving drawings my mother had spoken of had even existed, but now to my delight I saw several and could make out a pink dancing bear beckoning to some smaller animal companion.  The extremely disconcerting sense that I had left my body and had stumbled into a dream settled over me.  The air was filled with muffled voices and squeaks from the televisions in each room and everywhere was the slight hum of activity just short of being pinpointed.  The occasional streetlight was lit, often just one for a long stretch of the street as if its state was inadvertent. Everything seemed surreal, my mother’s past coming to life, the vampires curled up like vipers under a blanket completely uninterested in striking no matter who walked through their knotted masses.  I’d heard often enough that I shouldn’t disturb the slumbering beast, but the beast seemed to be in a daze as if they had sunned themselves too long.  There was no doubt that these vamps were sated with blood and were laying around like full gators on a riverbank but their slack visages defied the terror that had haunted me for the entirety of my life, that had driven my every action and dogged my every though, pursed me awake and in dreams, the terror of these silent killers who watched over every vestige of our previous civilization.  The slovenly disengaged vampires did not merit over twenty years of constant fear and flight, they did not merit a continuous vigil, the rituals, and superstitions that I’d inherited, and above all the draining wandering.  That men had lost it all to these creatures seemed unfathomable and filled me with a cold rage.  Yet floating on top of this undercurrent of emotion ran wonder at the inventions of the past, and that they could hold such allure for the undead that they would sit in slack jawed attention as I walked by, and a fear that I had kept my mother from this life of ease amongst her previous trappings.  It did not seem the unspeakable evil which she’d thought.  I shook my head.  The wind from the truck’s motion dried my tears.  She’d wanted the release of death; she’d feared undeath and being denied access to the paradise she’d been promised.

My face had grown flush, and my breathing ragged as we had driven deeper into the city, so I concentrated on taking deep breaths as I watched house after house of vampires in repose roll by.  Obviously, there were enough vampires to make life hell for mankind.  My life was proof enough of that and though the vampires we passed looked almost as frightening as a fresh batch of pudding their hunger would no doubt rouse them.

As we rode almost imperceptibly screaming grew overtop the humming of the background until the shrieks had become a din ebbing and rising like the tides, punctuated now and ten by individual high-pitched cries.  Vampires began to sprint past us down the highway or along the sidewalk moving faster than any human could run, blurred and shadowy in the broken moonlight, running towards the cries not of fear and pain, but the undulating voice of a mob.  They rushed out of their houses, leaving their doors to clatter closed behind them, or hanging open and drifting slowly closed, or just drifting in the air forgotten.  We turned at an intersection onto a four-lane road divided down the center by an overgrown median and the noise swelled so that the vampires in the truck had to yell to be heard.  I could see the crowd of vampires ahead of us, a single dark and globulous mass composed of every imaginable skin tone, body shape, and body size, undulating, not like bees or ants who move with a common purpose, a shared brain, but like a pack of dogs, hundreds of individuals squirming to achieve their own interests, but with all of their motion merged into one writhing group.  Stragglers continued to run up to the group.  Many of the vampires were naked, their privates forgotten in the rush.  When a vampire reached the group, or had been expelled back to its edge, they attempted to shoulder their way in, turning their bodies to one side and digging into the group with their elbows.  Some simply lifted the preoccupied vampires in front of them off the ground and threw them behind them as they took their place. The scrambling for position broke out into occasional pockets of violence.  The vampire’s bare backs grew scratched and oozed a desultory brown blood.  I saw an ear ripped off and thrown into the gutter.  Once the vampire had fallen to its knees mingling its howls with the cries of the group its assailant turned towards the center of the mob and other vampires quickly rushed in so that I could no longer make out the fallen vamp.  Our truck stopped short of the group that blocked the entire road.

            “Think a few shots ‘ll disperse them,” the driver yelled through the back window of the truck.  The vamps stood up and the one who’d handcuffed me smirked, “No way.  Looks like they’re getting a dried-up piece of meat from the blood farm and these vamps don’t often get that kind of,” he paused considering looking at me then continued, “Delicacy.”  I stood up trembling under the mad shrieks of the vampires, the sound threatening to have me cowering in the corner of the truck bed.  My guards had perked up as we had approached the crowd their eyes widening and their nostrils flaring.  They stiffened as I stood and avoided looking at me.