“Get the hell out of here,” someone shouted, “or the general will have your hide.”
The surrounding vampires murmured and let go of the truck, opening a little space between themselves and the truck. The truck rolled slowly forward. The vampires hissed as one and rushed forward. My guards opened fire, the loud cracks of their machine guns overwhelming all other sound as they sprayed the crowd. Vampires dropped to the pavement, their faces contorted with pain and rage as bullets exploded from their backs. There was a noticeable lack of blood, only a trickle of brownish liquid would drain from a gaping chest wound. Vampires crawled off clutching one hand over their cold ragged flesh, but others rushed onward even into the hail of bullets. The truck jolted forward with two thumps that threw me face down into the metal bed with one of my captors tumbling as well, his gun firing uselessly over the buildings. There was a crash underneath the truck and then we were off, the tires squealing, and two of the guards kneeling at the tailgate firing behind us. The crowd of vampires gave chase but quickly trailed off as we raced down a narrow road lined with houses seemingly untouched and turned onto another road west through a young overgrown forest that blocked out all light but our own.
“Bad luck, coming across a draining like that. There’s never enough to go around it only aggravates the thirst.”
I lay panting curled up in the center of the truck as my captors returned to their seats. If they had been human, I would have been embarrassed, but I could scarcely think at all. I just lay there with my eyes closed breathing in the rust tainted aroma of the truck bed and shivering despite the warm air rushing through the back of the truck.
After a while, the number of lit houses decreased, and we drove along in a hazy artificial dusk that emanated from both in front of us and behind us. There were no other cars on the bumpy, cracked streets that we traveled. The strange vampire city had faded away behind us as surely as if those vampires had never existed, as if they’d fallen asleep in front of their rich colorful televisions, had sated themselves with inordinate amounts of fresh blood, had passed out on corduroy couches that they’d moved to whatever house suited them, and they’d never been awakened. The gurgling of water down drains and through the sewers beneath the streets echoed back and forth between the walls of the plan squat red bricked houses shoved shoulder to shoulder behind cracked chunks of white sidewalk. At one point a leaf clogged drain had flooded the street with water that looked as black as oil in the night. The truck shuddered as it entered the water and sprayed it up behind us in a stream of broken droplets with the sound of Velcro ripping apart. We descended into a valley lined with trees and uninhabited houses hidden back amongst the growth. The roads that crossed the one we took were often overgrown or blocked by fallen trees. Several jeeps going in the opposite direction without any lights passed us in a gray blur. Then we crossed a bridge over a small stream and began to climb out of the small valley towards a swatch of bright light that lined the ridge. Crisp white electric light poured all over the clear-cut ground from spotlights at the top of wooden towers. As we crossed the ridge a large flat expanse surrounded by chain link fence topped with barbed wire came into view. The towers and the spotlights sat at regular intervals along the fence, with most of their light pointed in across the contained expanse of dark black mud and behind the fence huddling in the meager shadows was a writhing mass of naked bodies, men, women and children all moving in together in one clutch. In one corner a mound of putrid bodies sat under a glistening black swarm of flies as its base rotted away, and the fresher bodies on top were all laid on their backs so they could stare into the sky with their ragged empty eye sockets. The road ran alongside the fence towards a cluster of long low gray buildings. The humans inside the fence moved low to the ground barely walking upright, their heads jerking around continuously. They were scarcely able to support their haggard bodies, as if the mats of hair, dirt and feces that covered them weighed them down, and the muddy slop that they walked through was sucking at their feet with each step. A scream was expelled from the group and they moved away from one man, who was whooping excitedly and pointed at me. His scream seemed to bring their voices out, a sound like animals in tall grass, with words and syllables that I recognized jumbled together with others that I had never heard, so that I could not make out what they were saying or if they were even speaking English. A spotlight turned on the man, standing exposed by the group to the light, naked, nothing but a raggedy beard and thin tattered hair that ran over his shoulders, large blank eyes in hollow ringed eye sockets, ribs, a rounded protruding belly and pointy and unfleshed joints.
One of the vampires
