Then our regular trainers began our routine practice as the man strode off the field the whip clenched in one fist. As we practiced with knives, crouching and slashing at one another, my eyes were constantly drawn back to the glass box where Derrick stood staring at us through the glass, flexing his hands into fists, his chin down, and with a faint trickle of blood stopped halfway down his cheek. He was there every night until I left the compound, at first growing thinner, his skin leathery from the hot sun baking him every day. Then he began to slump against the glass, his weight leaned against his cheek, and his tongue out. Hair that had fallen from his head leaving barren patches had settled onto his shoulders. After a few months he had crumpled into one corner of the coffin, only moving his arms in slow trembling arcs that meant nothing. We never approached his torture chamber, but I could see it all clearly.
That night, when they imprisoned Derrick, was the night that I realized that we were different, that we were not humans. We were not living a life that anyone else lived. We were special no matter what our trainers said, but it was not a pleasant feeling. I didn’t lose that feeling until I drank the blood of our beloved General thinking that I would never be anyone’s tool again. Yet I am here.”
He shrugged and began to roll a cigarette his eyes glued to his work and I didn’t know if I should say anything, if anything coherent could have even coalesced from the torrent of my thoughts, or that I really wanted to say anything at all. I wanted to know more about life before the crazy times, I wanted to know if my brother had dictated this turn of events in my life, but mostly the image of those pinched faces I’d witnessed huddling outside the vampire fort rose up in my mind. It was a sad story, but it was still a vampire who told it. He didn’t look up from his rolling as I got up and walked to the bow, where I settled myself back leaned against a bench, the boat’s wind against my face and watched the black water roll by.
The engine hummed behind us like a mosquito hovering over the dark languid water. Once the great cities that lined the river’s banks had been filled with people who had dirtied it and drained it, but now these cities sat silent and the river water was safe to drink. Bart’s squat figure was outlined by the greenish light of the moon through the front glass of the cabin as he sat hunched forward guiding us through a faint mist by the light of several fog lights. The vampiric ambassador who was escorting me to my brother’s kingdom sat at the back of the boat facing towards St. Louis, staring across the black waters with his shoulders hunched up against the wind. His collar was pulled up to his chin despite the river’s fetid heat that covered everything with moisture. I paced the length of the boat as usual, my legs demanding movement, my mind craving space.
The days and nights spent on the boats moving through the heavy air were wearing on me. I ate the food that the vamps sparingly provided, not tasting it, always brooding that it had been from their supplies for their blood farms. The vampires didn’t speak more than one or two words to one another a day. Bart drove continuously only tying us up underneath drooping tree branches along the banks one day when the river was covered in such a thick cloud that he demanded we stop. I lay down in one corner of the boat curled up behind a pile of rope, seemingly isolated by the fog and slept, awakening only once when the boat swayed as someone left the boat. The next day as we resumed our journey Bart’s face seemed fuller, his cheeks a touch rosy, and he sat at the wheel of the boat in a cloud of mosquitoes and gnats, slapping at his arms and the back of his neck with annoyance.
Abdul had not shown any interest in me since he’d told me of his youth, leaving me alone to pace the length of the boat, and I did not seek him out though I thought that he must have the answers to my questions. He was preoccupied with contemplating the two foreseeable fates that might befall him at the end of our journey; being bound and drained on the orders of the General and allowed to go mad with hunger as punishment for his failure, or being slaughtered by my brother as the other vampiric ambassadors sent before him had been slaughtered.
If Abdul were any indication my brother was a man who could make vampires quake in fear. The General had said he’d set up a ‘right nice kingdom’ up north, but I had no idea what that could mean. My brother and I had never been what my mother had called ‘people persons’ like she’d been, and he enjoyed the company of other humans even less than me. Having grown up before the crazy times, before the vampires had even been revealed, my mother had always insisted that we try to meet any humans we’d spot, even though it was a decidedly dangerous concept, and visit with them for a while, even once she had grown older and the ones that could reminisce with her had grown fewer and farther between. I had always been indifferent about other humans, they rarely proved useful to us and I took no efforts to learn anything about them, but I had been
