Turned

I rested my bound arms on the roof of the cab with a flat clank and looked across the crowd of vampires.  At their center stood an empty space and at its center stood a man; old, with red skin deeply tanned and dirty in its many creases, mottled from the sun, his eyes large white orbs eggshell cracked by red lines, and his mouth a black void broken with a few rotting teeth.  He stood petrified in the face of the vampires that had been aroused by his presence.  His beard hung over the skin stretched tautly across his rough ribcage, wiry, oily, and drenched in mud.  His naked body was nothing more than wrinkled skin over oversized bones and joints.   I quaked, my knees bending forward and rattling, tottering on my own weight, but I managed to stay upright leaned against the cab of the truck.  Everything dropped away but the mob of vampires and the man at its eye.  A sound barrier dropped over everything, I could still hear, but I no longer processed the sounds.  The vampires’ hellish animalistic cries felt more like physical blows of coalesced terror than sounds.  I had the sensation of orbiting around the ring of bloodthirsty fiends, as their tepid graying flesh and the white points of their fangs seemed to rotate counter to my direction, but all revolving around the stationary center, the man.  Everything was lit with a ghastly pallor.  On one side stood a couple of storefronts washed out and in disrepair, ragged glass teeth at the edges of their windows, all their color washed out.  On the other side sat three small houses, the middle one sagging inward as it began to collapse in on itself while the other two stood strong around it.  I had never been so frightened; so frightened that my mind felt icy and heavy, shrunken into a lead ball at the back of my skull.  My heart beat loud enough for the entire party of vamps to hear.  All thought had been evacuated, leaving me frozen and without recourse, no possibility of escape running through my head, no momentary hopes of discovering weakness, I stood absolutely paralyzed with fear, quivering helplessly.  The sluggish vamps had been awakened from their stupor and now moved like a swarm of locusts compelled by an innate desire, the power of this slovenly group had manifested itself, a force of nature willing to beat itself against stone walls in order to attain its desires.  Sweat rolled down my back and across my forehead as I watched.

            Then abruptly the circle closed.  The man was swallowed up with only a muffled cry to mark his passage, barely audible over the swelling of the vamp’s chant like screams. The sounds of ripping flesh and the sharp cracks of bones pierced the circle before a chilling shriek of anger went up from the mob.  Their formation roiled, turning over like the water under a fall, as vampires were flung out of the center.  Fangs were bared with loud hisses.  The sounds snapped me out of daze, and I looked around quickly.  One of my captors jerked my ankle, the chill of his iron grip was apparent even through my pants, and I sat down hard.  The truck started to roll forward slowly, the truck bed shaking choppily.  Vampires began to flow around both sides of the truck back towards their homes.

A vampiress with long blonde hair that had gone thin and scraggly stared hard into the back of the truck as she walked past a welt raised along an oozing scratch mark on one cheek.  First, she stared up at my guards her angular face hard and her eyes burning.  Then she looked at me, the nostrils in her long thin nose rippling.  She cast another glance towards my guards, less cold, more curious, her eyebrows curled up towards them, and then she looked back at me, her nostrils now flaring in and out rapidly as she kept pace with the truck and suddenly her eyes glazed over and she leapt into the back of the truck with one bound her pale hands outstretched towards my throat.  A rusty brown substance had been pushed beneath her nails.  Her face was contorted with her cheeks sucked in and her fangs thrust forward.  As she landed in front of me her body radiated a wave of coldness as if she were an open door in the winter.  Her hair fell around her face dangling over me  as I scrabbled backwards pushing against the side of the truck bed, but the guard who had saved me earlier, who seemed to be the unofficial leader of the group, had sprang between us instantaneously and caught her by the upper arm as she reached for me.  “He’s for the general,” he said and then flung her from the truck.  She skidded across the pavement howling but walked away without looking back once she’d gotten to her feet.  However, her interest had brought the group of vampires rolling up to the bed of the truck like a wave threatening to crest over its sides.  Pale, grayish faces whose skin was often stretched tautly over their cheekbones even when their hair had gone fully gray and was falling out in ragged patches.  The whites of their eyes were as smooth and as unbroken as cue balls, utterly devoid of the thin red blood vessels of human eyes, and when combined with their unblinking stares were disturbing.  Even those with black skin looked untouched by the sun, their skin having lost any rich depth of color that it had previously contained.  They grabbed the edge of the truck on both sides, their bony knuckles popping up like the earth raising new mountains, and then began to rock the truck, pulling it back and forth.  All of my guards were at the truck bed’s edges and I had slunk in between them, seeking shelter from vampires behind