Turned

every crackle of leaves beneath my boots.  I ate as we walked biting into chunks of cooked venison as we left the hilly riverside and passed into a land flat but for long shallow valleys and rocky mounds.  We crouched at the edges of roads for minutes as Abdul listened, sniffed and studied them before we dashed across, my pack rattling as it bumped into my back and then threw ourselves under the pines on the other side.  I could almost imagine that we were kids and that we were making a game out of it, but then the sound of a shot would puncture my vision and the danger came rushing back in. The weather turned colder the first night of our furtive flight and I awoke to a dreary drizzle on my face after a brief sleep.  Abdul ransacked my pack for all the remaining clothing, wrapping a thick scarf around his neck, pulling a woolen cap down around his ears and struggling with two sweaters under his coat.  As he led us through the night his silhouette bulged and receded like a lumpy sausage.  The rain and the cold had dampened the forest so that the pine branches hung over like arches and we moved through the stillness almost humbly.

The morning of the third day Abdul awoke me with a boot to the shoulder and a finger to his lips.  He stood with his rifle held in both hands angled across his chest inhaling deeply through his nostrils for a moment, then turned a quarter turn and smelled again and again until he’d completed the circle. His face was cut with a scowl.  He gestured to the southeast and we made our way, my limbs stiff and aching from the cold.  We moved more slowly than usual stopping often as Abdul smelled.  After a while, the turned us to the northeast and we continued our northward journey.  A creek burbled not too far from us.  The sun lit the undersides of the trees and their fallen needles with a musty yellow light.  Suddenly Abdul spun around pulling his rifle to his shoulder, a shot cracked, and I flung myself to the ground as Abdul’s gun fell away.  A shadow flew over me and barreled into Abdul and they both fell to the ground.  Abdul got to his feet under the vampire and flung him off. I ran as hard as I could towards the sound of the stream, my boots slipping on the thick bed of pine needles as I ran.  There was another shot as Abdul faced a towering black vamp who grinned at the sight of Abdul falling to one knee and clutching his side and then they fell away behind branches.  I hopped a bush and fell on the other side, scrambled to my feet again and ran, pulling my pistol out.  I heard loud talking back where Abdul had been taken, but otherwise the forest was quiet except for my ragged breath, the jostling of my pack and the snaps and cracks under my feet.  I ‘d almost reached the stream, a scant two feet wide slice of clear water running slowly along what looked like an overgrown ditch, when I was struck from behind and I fell, skidding through the pine needles.  I rolled over, pine needles strewn across my face, and without even trying to get up freed my arm raising my gun.  The vamp that’d shoved me sneered and dashed forward.  The gun sparkled in a ray of sunlight falling between the branches and I squeezed off two quick shots.  The bullets caught him in the chest punching him backwards a step and he paused there like a rearing bear, his face snarling with pain and rage.  I sighted down the barrel and his head went up in a burst that splattered the tree trunk behind him, and he toppled to the ground twitching.  Before I could get up though a vampire in an old body came running through the trees with the herkie jerky motion of those newly turned.  He ran straight up to me, grabbed my arm and twisted it around, the gun went off ripping a piece of bark from a nearby tree, then he yanked the pistol away from me almost pulling one finger off with it and threw it away into the brush.  He looked at the fallen vampire with an expressionless face and shook his head slightly before jerking me to my feet.  He pulled my arms behind my back and cuffed them together with a click.  Pushing me forward with one hand in the small of my back he guided me back to the clearing where Abdul had fallen.

As I walked, I kept my head down watching my feet, avoiding roots and branches that would trip me and tuned out the vampire who walked behind me muttering to himself.  Everything collapsed down to that one strip of dark moist soil just in front of me stripped of its covering layer of reddish-brown needles, the occasional gray chunk of stone or roots laying in waiting like snakes.  Even that soon slipped into an unconscious scanning and navigation so that I just stewed in my mind.  The vampire behind me seemed unconcerned with our speed so I walked along at a slow pace placing my feet deliberately.  Once again I found myself in the power of vampires with no reasonable route to escape but I felt no fear, or what fear I felt was so inundated with the seething rage that washed across my face that I did not notice it.  My heart pounded in my chest but with a fury.  According to the General and the Ambassador vampires living this far north were very sparsely populated and we were within a couple of days of my brother’s camp.  He was supposed to have cleared out all the vampires.  He’d killed all that the General had sent to negotiate yet here was a