The blustery voice arose again, quite loudly and deeply from a man standing nearly straight across from me who projected his voice with ease. “He said this wouldn’t happen again. He promised us that he had them under control, but how can he control their appetites. It would be easier to control the devil that has created these abominations, but only Jesus who told the Devil to get behind him has such power.” The woman cried on oblivious to the man’s speech, her tears running down the back of the child’s neck, but several in the crowd nodded and murmured in agreement. Perhaps in another time he would have passed for nondescript, a man of average height, with a pudgy face that descended into jowls and a round protruding belly on an otherwise normal body, but his threadbare pinstripe suit set him apart from everyone else. He gestured with one hand as he spoke as if he were pulling the words out of the air and shaping them as he wished while his other handheld a pair of clean black dress shoes discreetly at his side. Two burly men with the same small square forehead and pumpkin shaped head stood behind him.
“How long can we tolerate these fiends within our midst? Ben cannot protect us. No matter how many times he lies down with the abomination.” When he spoke, his throat bobbed up and down like a frog’s and his jowls jiggled. I felt a flush of irritation at his criticism of my brother, but I said nothing. The crowd behind him jostled as if everyone were trying to gain a better view of the preacher and they begin to hum with agreement. I didn’t see the preacher moved but it seemed as if he and the crowd had swelled towards the vampire and its prisoners and I could feel their excitement. Those in the front row stared at it with blood thirsty eyes. The crying woman still knelt with her child now forgotten by those who’d rushed to her earlier, even the woman now idly rubbing her shoulder.
The crowd quieted suddenly, and we turned to see my brother surveying the assembly from the farmhouse’s porch. The preacher stood with a clenched jaw and his eyes dark and furrowed. As soon as the crowd’s attention had shifted my brother briskly descended and crossed through the parting people, trailed by the two human brothers who’d been with my brother when we’d first been captured and Peter. Except for my brother they all were wearing dingy camo. As he drew close Benjamin gestured at the men who held the vamp with a sharp snap of his wrist, they leapt away from the vamp, even dropping the muzzle and my brother quickly drew a pistol from his belt. The vampire took one dazed step towards the sobbing woman though he snarled at my brother as he moved and then a sharp crack split the air. A faint cloud of smoke wafted from the pistol’s thick barrel and the vampire fell to his knees howling. A mixture of tattered gray flesh and fabric steamed around a rent in his chest that oozed slightly. My brother spoke rapidly to one of his entourage and I was unable to make out the words over the ringing in my ears, but the vampire disappeared into the big farmhouse. The others pulled the vampire up from his writhing on the ground and jerked his hands away from his wound and held them at his back. The position pulled the wound open so ragged red ends of flesh were exposed to the air. An incredibly red ooze like concentrated blood soaked into his shirt. His face was contorted with pain, but his burning eyes were now locked on my brother. A trail of spittle ran from the corner of his lips which were pulled back to expose his fangs and down his chin and hung twisting in the air before it finally dropped onto his chest. A resounding knell burst forth from the farmhouse behind me and I jumped as it sounded. It rang three times and though the square was crowded with the villagers, the crowd’s outer edges jostled as more men, women and children joined us. In the meantime, a large wooden block had been carried over by two large vampires and sat down on the muddy ground near my brother. A shallow rounded trench that was stained a rusty brown and crisscrossed with notches and lines that left splinters lifting from the wooden surface.
“If you try to flee you will make it even worse on yourself,” my brother said and then ordered the vampire’s muzzle removed. He had been a skinny boy, maybe fifteen with a full shaggy mop of hair that had not yet begun to wither and crack, but his face was pulled taut in a skeletal expression of rage. His chest heaved the gunshot opening and closing with each breath.
No sooner than the muzzle hit the ground with a thud he spat on it and shouted looking directly at the vampire at my brother’s side. “He’s a tyrant. A petty little tool. We have already conquered this world once. Why should we allow him to have any part of it? Why should we not take back what is ours?” My brother didn’t speak, just stood stone still until the words ended and then he made one sharp motion. The large vampire grabbed the offender by his hair and forced him down onto his knees shoving his head onto the block. He sputtered curses as they pulled his head down so that his neck stretched tautly across the wood. Someone handed my brother a braided leather whip. Its snap, as loud as a pistol’s shot transformed the stream of curses into
