Turned

at Abdul’s loose lips.  I’d wanted to reveal it in my own time after I’d accessed our situation, but perhaps the Ambassador didn’t trust me.  Suddenly the realization came to me for the first time that I could use the camp to be shut of the ambassador and the General and that he’d told my brother that the General had sent me as a way to ensure that I didn’t abandon the mission.  Abdul hadn’t know that the concept of long term planning was foreign to a man who lived his life off the scraps of a former civilization, but the thought stretched into a vision of me full, fat and happy, with a little hut, a field and a wife, but then it dissolved around the image of the vampire standing guard outside my brother’s door.  I felt again the cold hands of the vampires as they’d captured me and brought me to this camp, and I let the image and its hope fall away.  My brother stared at me like I was a rat digging into his bag of rice, not seeing me at all, seeing the ambassador, and the general and his untold legions of vamps swarming over his land in jeeps with their machine guns and their wet fangs.  His arm shook on the desktop.  “We didn’t even have to torture him,” he said smiling.

“That’s it, no how are you?  What have you been up to?”

“I think I know what you’ve been up to.  Slinking along like the rest of humanity, living off scraps.  We can catch up on your important life later.”

My mouth must have been hanging open I was so aghast because he smirked at me and I felt my face burning with anger.  This was my little brother.  He’d ranged with me, he’d scavenged with me scanning the aisles of supermarkets hoping for an untouched can, and he’d slept huddled with me in caves, hollowed out logs and rotting houses, though we’d avoided those more when we’d travelled with our mother.  He’d had the same life as everyone else.  He knew that it was hard.

“How long have you been working for him?”  I sat very still weighing the question and debating keeping silent because he’d shown no intention of acting like a younger brother.  Was he insinuating that after I’d buried our mother along, without his help, I’d joined with the vampires and that instead of draining me and discarding me or turning me they’d decided to send me north with another vampire? At first this idea struck me as absurd, how could he think that I'd deal with vampires, but then I realized that it didn’t seem that far from the truth especially for one who must serve vampires.  If he didn’t serve other vampires, then why did other vampires serve him.

“I’m not working for him.  He picked me up outside of St. Louis.”

“He just picks you up.  Doesn’t drain you or turn you and sends you trotting north with a lieutenant, a made, just to have a little chat with your brother.”  He stood still wearing his thick socks and strode over to me, bending over so his face was even with mine and then sneered at me. “You know what Mades were before, right?” he said a bit frantically, rattling the desk with a pounding of his fist.  I nodded but he went on as if he hadn’t even asked me.  “They were assassins working for humans who turned against their masters.  They brought all of this about, they’re the reason that we live in such shit.” As he spoke, spittle spraying from between his lips with the force of his words, an image came unbidden to my mind; a young boy version of the ambassador tucked away in a small clean cell sitting on the edge of a tightly made bed swinging his legs in the air.  In my imagination his face was unnaturally pale and impassive as if he were a statue come to life.  “I wonder how many Mades the General has under his command,” my brother said quietly to himself.  Then he turned back to me.  “How many?”

“How should I know?”  I leaned back in the chair, folded my arms across my chest and avoided looking at him.  He paced in front of me his socked feet swishing across the floor.

“Well how many vamps then?  How many tanks, helicopters, planes?”  He spat the words out, one on top of another without waiting for me to answer while I sat in a stiff silence.  “Men?” he asked.

“None that I know of,” I responded, and he looked at me incredulously as if I were inappropriately joking.

He sat down again, setting his elbows down on the desk and folding his fingers together and stared at me.  Then he exhaled loudly and began again more calmly.  “Look, you waltz in here with a Made.  All the vamps are bristling.  They all want him dead. They don’t trust him, there’s no way they’ll ever trust him.  They told me he’s been with the General from the beginning.  Longer than you or I have been alive.”  A small grin crossed his lips and his eyes lit up.  “I am flattered by the General’s attentions though.  I thought he would just continue to send half-rate vamps until he lost interest.”

“They want you dead too,” I said.

He stared at me his eyes narrowed as the candles flickered and danced around their impurities.  “I thought I could always trust men.  They may not respect you and they may hold out on you come harvest time, but I would never have thought that a man could work for the General.  Now I don’t know. Any man could walk into this camp just like you did and be accepted.  He could fool us all.  How many of them are already here spying?  Do you know?”  He stared at the wall his hands trembling slightly against