in the firelight and then a piercing scream filled the room, before abruptly dissolving into gurgling. The ambassador turned to face the outland vampires now standing together between us and the door. They came at him from opposite sides, their steps in sync as if they could read one another’s thoughts and their arms held open wide as if they intended to grapple. Bart rose to his knees behind Abdul and then fell again his hands slipping as they clasped around his neck as a thin trickle of rusty blood oozed down the jut of his Adam’s apple. The ambassador’s hand struck like a viper as the two approached him snatching up an outstretched wrist and bringing it down to meet his rising knee with a crack. Tim belted out a throaty howl and was spun away into a corner as Abdul shoved him away by his broken wrist and sidestepped Ricky’s charge. He grabbed Ricky by the hair, broke his momentum with a sharp jerk, and pulled him upright by the thin blond strands of hair that were wrapped around his fingers. Pushing up on Ricky’s chin with his other hand he held the vamp’s head at eyelevel, inches from his own face, and then he snapped it to one side with a laugh and as it lolled he leaned forward and slit the throat with his fangs. A brown line of blood flowed from the wound and then Abdul flung the vamp to the floor. He walked over to Tim who was still lying on the floor, bent over him, and slit his throat with his knife. Then he disappeared through the doorway wiping his hands on his pants and with a confirming glance backwards as he left. He returned moments later and dragged off first Tim and then Ricky. They squirmed but their broken limps flopped uselessly, and their heads rolled different directions with each tug on their bodies. When he stepped back into the doorway the hollows of his eyes seemed darker and deeper. I rose as he drugs Bart away and followed the ambassador out to a wood pile. The steps sent jolts of resurgent pain that set a sharp ache resonating through my skull. Ricky and Tim were pile atop one another beside the wood pile, Ricky’s limbs limply embracing Tim. Their disembodied heads lay on the sides of their faces beside them. Their eyes were wide open, and their skin was like snow in the moonlight, a rigid, plastic snow. An axe stuck out of a cylindrical log that was stood up on one smooth end. Abdul lay Bart down on his back with his neck stretched out across a long flat piece of wood, the slit opening up on his throat like a plastic bag. He pulled the axe free, stepped to one side of Bart and raised it. It fell in a long arc, propelled by the downward pull of his outstretched arms, and then connected with a clunk and the head fell away. Abdul chucked Bart’s body on top of the other two, and then tossed the head onto the pile. It rolled into the other heads, jostling them before they all settled with their wide eyes staring into the ground, sky, and trees. Abdul wiped his hands on his pants again.
Suddenly, his voice returned, “You have to cut them off,” he motioned towards the heads, “Or else they might recover.” I nodded; a vampire was never dead enough. “It’s cold,” he said, and I followed him into the house, our arms loaded with wood. He set the door back up against the door frame and built the fire up, until it was tall and crackling, and as he pulled a chair up close to it, I stripped my shirt off against the heat. I crawled up on to the table and lying down with my feet at a dark blood stain and my head resting on my arm, tried to sleep, but though I felt still, I felt as if the ambassador was standing over me and I could feel his cold grip grasping my throat again and again.
The next evening Abdul shook me awake. My neck was stiff, and my face was lying in a puddle of my own drool. The fire had died down, the sheen of sweat that had covered my skin as I’d fallen asleep had dried, and I was shivering as I slept in the coolness of the morning. I got up and quickly replaced my shirt. The ambassador was upending every container in the shack, every drawer was pulled out, every tub turned over, and he had a growing pile of knives, firearms, and ammunition in the middle of room. I found the jerky on the floor of the shack next door and filled my pack with it, wrapping it in a shirt, and hoping that it was truly deer meat. Abdul took a couple of knives and tucked them into his belt, shoved the ammunition into a bag, and hauled it along with an armful of guns out to the boat. Then we left the last vampire outpost behind, just another empty building along the river, and headed north, the ambassador now wearing a sweater over his uniform that diminished his forbidding appearance.
The ambassador pushed northward quickly, rushing the boat up the center of the river with a scowl on his face and muttering often to himself. I sat in the front of the boat watching the trees rush by and the animals startled from their drinking flee our passage. The world had emptied out. I felt no urgency. Abdul could have drained me at any moment, but to what end had he then saved me. I slept when I wanted, ate what I had in my pack, scooped up murky cups of water from the river to drink and pissed from the back of the boat as we raced away.
As I made my way back to the
