She pulled a key from her belt and unlocked the gate pushing it open with a creak. Up close she and her companions were even more perfect than I had thought their faces unblemished, their lips with just a hint of color and plumpness. They had recently fed.
“The general has been notified of your arrival,” she said in a silky voice. Her body exuded coldness, as if I’d stepped into a pocket of cold air. As we stepped past she inhaled deeply through her nostrils and said, “You smell good,” with a biting snap to her jaws almost driving me to the floor quaking, but my captor kept moving at a quick march down the concrete between the two buildings and I dashed to catch up to him. We left the trio behind as they locked the gate and when I looked back as we turned to enter a door set halfway along the walls they were gone.
We’d entered a long narrow hallway set at intervals with fluorescent lights that hummed and flickered as we walked underneath them. Their bright squares reflected from the tile floor moving as I moved. A thrall shuffled far down the hallway ahead of us but other than her the hallway was as desolate and quiet as a tomb except for our footfalls echoing off the gray concrete block walls. Grimly my guide marched past nondescript doors set in the walls, his eyes faced front, his jaw set, not speaking, as if he were alone. I followed, lagging as far behind my captor as I could with no doubt in my mind that I could not stop, or turn without his knowledge. A cold sweat ran down my back and my body trembled as it battled continuous dread and exhaustion. My brother had offended these vampires in some way and I wondered if our shared blood would spare me from the life led by the penned humans we’d passed on our way into the compound, or would they simply torture me in lieu of Benjamin. The vampire stopped at a door no different than any others we’d passed except its wired glass window was lit and painted on the door in silver letters was the name, General Marcus. He rapped twice and a barked, “Come in,” came almost instantaneously. My guide opened the door, motioned me through, and I stepped in ahead of him, my legs wobbling and my heart pounding. The room was shadowy, lit by several floor lamps that could not illuminate every corner. The walls behind the lamps were covered with maps of North America before the fall, when it had been a shining net of cities stretched out across the land. Plush couches hugged the walls on three sides and an ash tray smoked on a low faux wooden table in front of the boots of a squat, grizzled vampire reclined on one couch and pulling at a cigar that he held between two fingers. He had gray streaks the color of the cigar ash running down the sides of his head and peppering the rest of his hair. He greeted us with a disturbing big toothed smile. The cigar alternately lit up and obscured his square face. His torso looked as if it had been modeled after a tank, especially in the rumpled desert camouflage uniform he wore. On the couch across from him a young woman lay in a soft robe with a chain trailing loosely to an eye set in the floor from a metal collar at her neck. Her breath caught as I came in, her eyes darted away from me. She was unlike any woman I’d ever seen with soft pale skin scarcely touched by the sun, clean shining hair, a round stomach that sagged slightly, and a butt that jiggled as she rolled over and faced the back of the couch. There were bite marks on her throat, her wrists, and her thighs. Silence only broken by the General’s inhalations hung over everything alongside the smoke. My captor approached slowly his head tilted forward. I stood behind him, not wishing to venture far from the door that had shut behind us, rubbing my arms as if to ward off a chill. I began to feel as if we were trapped in time, that we would always be standing in front of this smoking general bulging out of his khaki uniform, with his squnched up bulldog face, pocked nose, and a grin at our expense. A grin that was almost like an old-fashioned country boy. The general continued to sit there puffing, his eyes burning almost as brightly as the tip of his cigar. The smoke smelled so delicious that I was salivating, sweet, spicy, and clove like.
Finally, the general pulled his feet off the table, letting them fall to the floor with two distinct thumps and sat up. “Well sit-down boys,” he said in a low gravelly voice rattling with phlegm and pointed at another couch. My captor sat down quickly and crisply, and I followed lethargically. I felt drained, overwhelmed, and hopeless as I stood deep within the belly of the
