Turned

shaded with the floppy broad brimmed hat I’d worn since losing my baseball cap in the river.  My windbreaker had ripped at the elbow and my jeans were stained on the knees and the backside. My brother, however, did not look like shit, but instead looked as if he’d been living well.  His body had filled out, his arms and chest bulking up and his stomach protruding somewhat beyond his belt.  He didn’t wear scavenged clothes but instead wore what looked like a homespun woolen sweater and leather pants that all looked somewhat rough and clumsily made compared to the tight weaves of scavenged materials but still looked thick and warm. His feet were clad in soft moccasins beaded with childlike depictions of wolves.  All his clothing fit perfectly, close to his body, but not overly tightly still allowing him freedom of movement without the worry of his clothes snagging on branches.  His face was freshly shaven down to the clean pale skin and showed the angle of his jaw line and his scar-covered neck.  I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d seen a shaven face.  I hadn’t even trimmed my beard in weeks.

He wore a thick leather belt around his waist embossed with ornate letters spelling his name.  From it hung a black pistol snapped into its holster and sitting on his opposite hip gleaming as its blade peeked over the top of it sheathe was his Henkel Blade.  It had been almost ten years since we’d found a block of the knives unmolested in a partially collapsed kitchen.  I’d carried a long, thin blade from the same cache until my run-in with the General’s vamps had left it lying on the ground back south.  My mother had told us that our grandmother had received a block of those knives as a wedding gift in a time when they’d been used solely for cooking.  She’d pulled another blade from the black and slanted it back and forth in the sunlight, watching it glisten and dull as her words drifted to a tale of cutting watermelons and hurling the rinds into the woods.  Then she’d slid the blade back into its block as if unwilling to bear the burden of the memory.

I was happy that he still carried the blade.  It hung there at his belt bringing forward the past that we’d both left behind, and I looked into his face, into his eyes, eyes that were slightly red and dry, searching him.  He smiled at me and his eyes did not crinkle but the scars on his neck danced in the sunlight.  A vampire started to walk up to us, and he waved it away with a finger.  It rejoined the rest of the group who stood around the Ambassador lighting up his cigarettes as he stood aloof looking coldly past them at my brother and I, some calculation in his eyes.

“This is the real shit,” one of the brothers exclaimed as he inhaled, then he offered one to Abdul who accepted with a shrug of his shoulders holding the cigarette with his lips and smoking it slowly.

“How’d you know we were coming,” I asked just to break the silence that had sprung up and consisted of my brother staring at me.  The stare hardened into a glare and his eyes narrowed and he came out of his thoughts.

“Why do you?” he began but then stopped.  “A couple of vamps sent word that some warm bloods were moving north.  It seems they were only half right.”  He looked from me to the ambassador and back again with a curious mixture of animosity and what seemed to be pride.  “I figured those southern vamps hadn’t gotten my first two messages, so I thought I’d send them another.  The third time’s the charm.”

“What are you doing here?” he asked but I couldn’t answer right away, something in his look restrained me.  Those scars encircling his neck chilled me.  I was struggling to contain my emotions.  I felt worn out, worn down, worn so thin that allowing the tiniest bit of emotion to trickle out it would punch through my grasp and pour out without restraint.  I wanted to scream for him to send all the vampires away, Abdul included, if he had the power to, but I did not.

“Looking for you,” I said quietly, and he snorted.  I had to deliver the General’s message, no matter how powerful my brother’s camp proved to be there was no way that it could withstand an army of vamps, but I decided to wait for a more private moment between the two of us.

Benjamin stepped away from me then and said, “Well no use standing round here all day. Robert scout North, Peter South.”  The old-bodied vampire snuffed out his cigarette and then ran north along the highway as fast as a deer while the large vampire headed south at a more relaxed pace.  The rest of us began walking north at a quick pace, my brother with his rifle slung on his shoulder and Abdul with his hands bound at his back moving with such ease while I felt just short of trotting.  The two brothers fell slightly behind us while the middle-aged vampire dashed forwards and backwards across the road, prodding bushes with his rifle and jerking back at the sound of their branches crackling.  After about an hour we turned off of the highway onto a smaller road that cut through a land turning from the orderly pine groves into a chaotic mess of hardwoods with their hints of yellows and reds beginning to peek through the fading green.  Despite its crumbling edges, the way along the two lane road was clear and as the branches and the shrubs that grew between the trees and the road had been neatly cut back so that they formed a mock hedge that fenced off our path.  The road curved as it sloped up a