After that tipping point had been crossed the land descended into bands of roving naturals draining humans and accidentally turning thousands. Some of the Night Asps abandoned us and led them. Humans fled the cities and filled the countryside with the putrid stench of their rotting bodies as they starved and died of exposure by droves, far more dying by natural causes than at the fangs of the vampires. As society crumpled the General Left DC and headed to his hometown, St. Louis, and those left of the Night Asps remaining with him travelled across the country with him in a caravan of black SUVs. Any vampires who desired could join our ranks, any who did not where beheaded. Most humans we met along the way believed that we worked for the government and approached us, so that soon after leaving we pulled trailers full of them behind us.
Many naturals went mad at the sight of their world, their lives disintegrating before their eyes and fled into the night or blew their heads off. Others clung to our group and their vampirism even more tightly as we passed through cities afire, growing stoic at the sight of the ornate trails of black smoke visible against the blue sky from miles away. I felt little. I had not known their world. I had never seen a movie or had a cookout. I had never been to a mall. I drank when I wanted, and I could feel the breeze on my skin as we rolled across the deserted land. I did not feel happiness so much as satisfaction.”
I was walking none too quickly north, through a rapidly warming morning, whistling a tune my mother had often sung softly to myself. A flock of geese flew low overhead in a crispy V following the highway south and songbirds flitted in and out of the trees their songs filling in the voids that lay between the bursts of goose honks. I stuffed my jacket and flannel shirt into the top of my latest pack, a sad thing that would probably not last to the end of our journey though that drew close. The sun and the exercise were enough to keep me warm despite the nip that lingered from the night. The black highway top glittering in the morning light rolled out before me through a stretch of straight pines that prevented the sun from reaching the ground at their roots but warmed the strip at the center of the road down which I strode. The sky burnt a clear pale blue, the trees stood a silent dark green and the ambassador had taken his typical scouting trot. The world felt pleasantly empty and time trundled on slowly. A buzzard appeared circling lazily over the horizon ahead of me.
Suddenly Abdul burst from the trees as if a shadow had sprung to life startling a rabbit into darting away. Though he sprinted up to me the dull thuds of his boots on the pavement were the only sound of his passage and when he fell in beside me his chest rose and fell with its interminably languid rhythm. His eyes darted back and forth checking and rechecking the shadows under the trees and his hand lingered near the pistol he wore holstered at his hip but when he spoke his voice was even and steady.
“There are vampires ahead,” he said.
“Thralls?” I asked. He shook his head. His nostrils flared and I could hear him inhaling deeply.
“How many?”
“I saw two, but there may be more. They were waiting beside the road up on that ridge,” he pointed at a rise far ahead. “But a glint on their rifles revealed them. I tried to get closer, but they saw me and disappeared into the forest.”
I shivered a low sustained tingling that ran up my spine, my neck and pulled my scalp taut.
“If they tried to follow me then I led them on a merry chase, but we should still get off this road. They will return to watch it.”
I followed him as he slipped off under the trees where the bed of pine needles underfoot dampened the world to a low buzz that didn’t obscure the beating of my heart.
“Did the General send them?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but I doubt it.”
“Unless he’s decided to go ahead and wipe out my brother’s camp.”
“A possibility,” he conceded.
“Why else would there be vampires so close to my brother’s camp?” I asked but he didn’t answer only walked along silently beside me in the gray underbelly of the pines.
The air under their branches was cool and still like a cave’s and filled with the fragrance of the tree’s sap. The needles crunched gently underfoot.
“Why can’t you,” I began but a glance from Abdul quieted me to a whisper. “Why can’t you just tell the vampires what we’re about so that they’ll leave us alone?”
“If they were from the General, they’re likely not pleased with me and any vampires this far north who aren’t from the General aren’t going to respond well to any sorts of threats of the General’s authority. Besides there are probably more than just the two.”
“What are we going to do then?”
He shrugged. “Head north, keep watch and hope we’re lucky.” He smiled and immediately fell back into silence.
All of the tenseness of my former life rushed back into our travels and I spent the next three days starting at nothing, sleeping fitfully and randomly palming the pistol Abdul had given me just for the comfort I received in its weight.
Abdul no longer left me to scout, but instead always remained within eyesight, pressing me on or hissing through his teeth at
