“We should just shoot him and leave him for the buzzards,” the shifty-eyed middle-aged one said. “Or better yet drain him.”
They stopped looking back at me as I carefully navigated a tangle of branches. The leader’s face was impassive, the old one’s face grimaced, relaxed, and then settled into a scowl, but the middle-aged one never lost its disgust.
“Why don’t you just unbind him,” Abdul said as haughtily as if he could order them.
“What and let him run off?” asked the middle-aged one.
Abdul sneered pulling back his upper lip to expose his long fangs. “You northern boys are so self-deprecating. A human outrunning three vampires. All the cold weather must have shrunken your balls.” He laughed and the two white vampires glared while the black one’s face never even twitched as he held the chain that led to the ambassador’s helmet. He pulled a key from his pocket and tossed it to the young vampire who snatched it awkwardly out of the air with his old body and then unbound my wrists. The aroma of a pile of wet paper drifted from him as he stood so close to me, his musty breath hitting my back. Then he stepped away and the world seemed to widen again. I followed as we were led off again rubbing my wrists absentmindedly. Soon we burst out onto a long whit highway lying like a dried-out gnawed bone in the bushes. Cars lay along both sides of the road hoods up, doors open, missing tires, rusted used-up relics of another age. A stream of smoke climbed into the sunny sky over the road reaching for the wispy clouds that streaked through the blue. My heart sank a little more at the sight of that ostentatious plume. No humans would be so reckless if they knew that these vampires were about. Perhaps the General and the Ambassador had known all along. Perhaps my brother was a renegade vampire and I’d just assumed he was still a man. It would certainly explain the vampires doing his bidding.
We strode north towards the smoke at a quick clip along the pavement. A buzzard began to circle lazily overhead as we moved. The brisk northerly wind balanced the sun as it tousled the pines’ needles and the few hardwoods’ leaves that had just begun to take on their fall shades.
We had walked most of the day pausing only at a small stream so that I could drink and had entered a shallow valley. As we drew nearer a glint of sunlight, appeared, and disappeared as if the sun was striking a shiny rock, or binoculars or the barrel of a rifle. Later I saw the silhouettes of men or vampires standing along the ridgeline at that spot. They did not move to retreat or approach us, but instead paced, or squatted with the orange pinpricks of cigarettes at their faces. Our captors hurried our march once they’d spotted the others. The land rose smoothly and slowly up out of the valley, the road cutting through a dense grove of pines, birches, and beeches all tall and narrow sentinels with trunks as straight as arrows stacked together like pencils in a box.
Two bulky men with tousled brown curls atop their large heads kept their rifles trained on us as we crossed the ridgeline. My brother stood back from the ridge warily disinterested in us as he stood talking with two vampires who stood on either side of him. Somehow he seemed broader and taller, his body language was more open than I would have ever expected from the suspicious defiantly hunched over boy that he’d been only five years earlier, but his pale blue eyes, long neck and thin long legs were unmistakable. He turned towards us as we approached and one of our captors hurried forward to talk to him quietly. He gazed at my face calmly, contemplatively as I approached as if not hearing what was being said to him. His smooth-shaven face was tan, and the lack of beard brought the angle of his jaw to the forefront. Dark circles lay under his eyes.
He came at me then letting his rifle slip off his shoulder to the ground and opening his arms wide. He laughed at slow deep laugh like an engine sputtering to a halt. Clasping me to his chest he slapped my back roughly and hugged him back tentatively stifling a cough and scarcely believing that this was the same person who’d left me on the riverbank with our mother’s corpse. The embrace ended and he held me at arm’s length gripping my shoulders and squeezing them uncomfortably as he smiled broadly under cold blue eyes, paler than any eyes I’d ever seen. His smile disturbed me as if it were only one degree removed from insanity. One tooth was missing from amongst his yellow crooked teeth. His neck was unsettling as I stood so close to him that I could see that it was covered in many short sliver scars that rippled in the light. He let go of me and stepped back maintaining his impassive demeanor.
“You look like shit Eli,” he said despite our mother’s insistence that I was named Elijah.
I mumbled, “So do you,” in an unnoticed response as my eyes flitted back and forth to the nearby vampires. His voice had even changed. It felt deeper, gruffer, and more dangerous. He’d undergone a greater metamorphosis as he’d passed into manhood than I’d thought possible. It was the difference between a branch and that same branch but whittled down to a sharp point and then blackened and hardened in a fire completing its transformation into the short spears that people would carry when they were dry of ammunition.
I had no idea how I looked with my wiry beard hanging down to my chest and my face
