A strong but contained shove to my shoulder awakened me. I gagged on a snore as my head jerked to an upright position from leaning back in the chair, one hand swatting in front of my face and the other going to my empty beltline. The chair tilted precariously as I pushed backwards and then I saw my brother standing silently a couple of paces off as still as a painting on a wall. My mind was so dazed, and awareness came more slowly than it ever had in my entire life. I could scarcely process his unsmiling face cast it was in an orange tint from the burnt down coals glowing silently in the fireplace or the grim corners of the room that were lit only with the greenish moonlight that seeped in from the night outside. My stomach bulged at my waist. It felt as if it was wrapped tightly around a gigantic egg that was incredibly dense and threatened to pull me over onto one side. The moisture had been drained from my face; my nostrils were dry and clogged with hardened snot and whistled with each breath. My vision was blurry through my sticky eyes and their lightly crusted lashes. My mouth and my throat were tight and spitless. I tried to scratch it with my tongue but that provided no relief. I felt if I was waking from a deep relaxing sleep into an uncomfortable nightmare. The type of nightmare where there’s no discernible source of danger but simply an oppressive atmosphere. I wiped my eyes and yawned as I sat up, my brother standing impatiently at my side. His neck glistened with those thin white scars, short straight lines that pointed in every direction and slid overtop one another. They even peeked out of the end of his sleeves like white hairs underneath the dark ones that crisscrossed his arms. His eyes were wide and looked gray in the darkness as they hood over his crooked nose. His chapped lips were tightly pressed together and reddened from coming in out of the cold. My body tensed as it awakened, and my mind recalled its circumstances as it began to shake off the mind dulling effects of the warmth of the room.
“Come with me,” he said and I instinctively reached down for my pack as I stood before I realized that it wasn’t there, that it had been stripped from me by my brother’s vampiric goons. My brother’s face, stern and unmoving yet still hinting at bitter amusement in his eyes, almost sent me into a rage. The anger washed through me with the taste of bile, but I bit it down as he turned away from me. “Come or I’ll have you cuffed and brought,” he said.
I followed him through the door and down a narrow hallway, our boots clomping on the wooden floor. I was gun less, I was pack less, anything could have happened to me and I would have had to start from square one, scavenging everything, if there was even anything to scavenge near this cluster of people. I felt naked and vulnerable and I imagined that everyone knew that my brother held me here hostage, without the supplies that a man needed. As I walked behind him, I could see that his scars ran all the way around his neck and disappeared under his shirt. At the end of the hallway a vampire who’d been sitting on a stool smoking, nodded to my brother, got to his feet, and opened a door. We stepped inside a large room that held a desk, a large bed laden with quilts and a dresser with a full candelabra perched atop it. He took a candle down, pulled a lighter from his pocket and then used the lit candle to light the remaining candles. They burnt with a sickly orange glow and spewed oily smoke into the room but were able to light up the center of the room, even though they could not reach into the corners. He picked up the candelabra and moved it to the desk trailing wax across the floor and dancing shadows along the walls before sitting on a chair behind the desk and motioning for me to sit in a straight backed chair across from him. As I sat down, he pulled off one boot and upended it, showering the floor in dirt, pebbles, and other brown bits. He eyed them curiously for a second and then turned his attention back to me.
“The vamp told me you came from the general,” he said in a tone that I couldn’t read. I watched the light run over his chin and between his emerging stubble like water seeking the easiest path as he spoke. His eyes burnt like an animal in the light and his words were slurred together like a growl but with no evidence of hostility. He pulled off the other boot as if he were unconcerned and I sat half in shadow scowling to myself
