My compatriot unexpectedly spoke to me our third night out from the sordid vampire city where the General dwelled. He had kept to himself mostly standing or sitting in the rear of the boat, smoking, and looking back the way we come, not speaking once to Bart or myself as I paced the length of the boat back and forth contemplating a jump into the river. No doubt they would have simply fished me back out or shot me in the back as I swam and finally be shut of our insane mission. As my measured paces approached him on the sternward portion of my circuit he said in a low soft voice, “I cannot remember my conversion. I am a Made. Most doubt it but the General has confirmed it to be true.” I stopped a few paces away from him. There was no moon and I could see nothing of him except for the shadowy outline of his body against the starlight glowing off the river. Mades were a myth, but a myth that my mother claimed to be true, she claimed they had arisen when she was a little girl. “Why should the General have the power to authenticate my identity, he was turned 77 years ago, and I was made 98 years ago. I myself turned him. He says I was made for him.” He waved for me to come a bit closer and I took a seat on a bench near him. “Come, stop your infuriating pacing and I will tell you of my youth.”
He pulled some tobacco from his pouch and began rolling it in thin crisp paper. After deftly licking and tucking in the ends he handed the cigarette to me. “It is good tobacco, try it.” He held out a lit match and I leaned over pulling hard on the cigarette as it met the flame. The taste was harsh and acrid, and I spat, coughing hard as he laughed softly and puffed on his own smoke. Once my coughing had settled down to a faint itch in my throat, I took another drag, the smoke still harsh, but also herblike and slightly fruity. It was good; it distracted me from the vampire’s pale lips only visible when his cigarette’s tip glowed orange as he inhaled. He continued to speak, pausing as he took a drag and let out the smoke in slow exhalations.
“My first memory is of a small gray room on a hallway filled with small gray rooms, all containing boys who looked like myself.” He pointed at his dusty orange skin as a means of explanation. “The doors were locked, and I was reading. I read anything they gave me in those days, even though most of it was propaganda.” I must have looked quizzical because he asked, “Do you know what I mean?” and when I shook my head he thought for a moment he said, “It is just a convincing argument. I was reading about men who though they looked like me, were killing people like me with hidden bombs.”
“At night we were trained; how to navigate, use guns and knives, hand to hand combat and how not to be seen, but when we were not being trained we were separated, left alone in our rooms with our reading material and videos. Once a day they fed me blood from a hospital bag.
“One night we were taken out to one of our training areas as usual, except one boy was not there. The skinny white girl who always wore her hair in messy ponytail and wrote notes onto a clipboard as we trained was there, the three bulky men in khakis who trained us, and the shadowy perimeter guards I never saw up close were there, but not Derrick. The sharp search lights cast everything within the shiny aluminum fences in sharp relief. No one spoke. A cool night breeze blew through the compound and all the boys shivered while the young woman stood fidgeting and fingering her collar, and the three men were as stoic as Grecian statues. Finally, there was a wail as if a boy had just gotten a shot and Derrick was dragged out by a short muscular man I’d never seen before. He shoved Derrick to the ground in front of our group and adjusted his thin rimmed glasses. Curled up at his hip in his other hand he held a small whip. As he uncurled it Derrick lay twisted on the ground his hands holding him halfway up him, trembling and wide eyed, but not crying. We never cry we can’t spare the moisture.” He chuckled and looked at me with a glint in his dark eyes from his cigarette, but I just nodded noncommittally.
“‘This one,’ the short man had said squeezing the end of the whip tightly in his hand, ‘thought that he was special. He thought that he could do what he wanted and attack our staff. Well let me be the first to tell all of you,’ his gaze slid briefly from us to our trainers, ‘You’re not special. You can be broken.’ He lashed out with his whip striking Derrick in the back driving him to his stomach with the blow and before the boy could even whimper, it fell on him again. Three strokes pounded him in rapid succession. Derrick moaned and blood oozed from underneath his shirt when the whipping stopped. ‘You can be hurt. You can die.’ He thrust the whip at us. ‘Now this one can serve as an ever-living example to you of the fate that awaits you should you attack your superior.’ He waved and two more men pushed a handcart out onto the field bearing a glass coffin glittering as the search lights hit it and sat it down
