“To fresh meat like you, when you see those thralls all you think about is how they’re going to drain you and most likely leave you as another one of them.” He grinned at me with yellow teeth, and then spat into the pit. As he talked, he sprayed a steady stream of water into the pit, moving it from side to side, sometimes laughing as the stream hit a thrall in the face. Occasionally he yelled for me to crank faster. “But to a man like your brother he sees opportunity. An opportunity to use what the Lord has given us to our advantage. These thralls are the best work horses you’ve ever seen. Harness a couple up to a plow and then put a man in front of them and they’ll pull all day long. Don’t need much to eat either, just toss then a bleeding animal now and then. Of course, as you can see, they’ve been rendered harmless. Of course, they still require a lot of precautions. Everyone would have a fit if they got free.” The pungent odors of the barn must have been augmented by the spray of the water stirring them up because my stomach clenched in protest and I vomited off to the side. Once my stomach had ejected all my previous evening’s meal, I resumed my turning and he sprayed the vomit down into the pit laughing. With the taste of bile strong in my mouth and my vision water with tears the world shimmered, and I felt hot. I cranked the pump though weakly as I felt as if I were slipping into an alternate world.
“So, they can live off animal blood then?” I asked my voice small against the constant ebb and fall of the squalling from the pit. He ran his finger across his throat, and I stopped my turning as he sat the hose down and retrieved a long pole with a net at one end from hooks set into the wall. He swung it rapidly down into the pit yelling at the thralls as he did so.
“Get off that you bastards.” He brought the pole back up with a black mass of hair, skin, feces and other unknown materials clustered in the net which he regarded with distasteful amusement as he waved it near my face and then dumped it into a chute set into one corner. “I was hoping you’d puke again.” After he’d returned the pole he went back to the hose and we began our rinsing. “You’d think they could live off animal blood. Blood is blood, right? But eventually they just seem to disintegrate. Their skin starts to come off in strips, then their knees get all twisted and give out and if it continues their flesh rots and comes off in chunks. Nasty thing that. If you give them some human blood occasionally, though they survive.” He seemed to forget about the hose for a moment just letting it flow into the pit in one place. “Makes you wonder though. How much human blood do those bastard vampires need?”
He signaled for me to cut off the flow again and he began winding the hose up. “We’ve been trying to keep around twenty thralls lately, though I hear that they’re going to increase that number soon, especially with the war effort. So, we can’t really let these die. A shame about that one.” He looked into the pit. “Hope no one blames me. Oh well, that’s life.
He headed back over to the ladder and descended as I followed. “Mucking’s not really so bad. Everyone thinks it’s hard and nasty so you can take your time and then relax a bit when you’re through. You don’t have to do a good job because nobody really wants to come up here and inspect your work. There’s the off chance someone might complain when they’re getting a thrall out, but I doubt it.”
We sat with the thrall’s scratching through the barn’s wall at our backs facing up the hill to the pines that grew along the ridge beyond the pasture. Behind us camp sounds broke through the otherwise peaceful quiet of sporadic breezes and cows mooing. Kid’s shrieked, gunfire echoed down the valley and voices were heard yelling but not urgently. Andy pulled his hat low over his eyes, his knees pulled up in front of him and his chin falling onto his chest. “Damn,” he said quietly. “I wish I would have thought to bring something to drink.” I was thirsty as well though no doubt he meant booze of some kind. He soon fell asleep, his breath whistling softly and left me wondering what I should do. I felt a sense of exposure, even though I was not visible from the camp and I could see no one along the hills above me. It left me tense and restless, unsure of myself. My brother had said not to leave the camp, but the trees seemed to beckon me with their covering branches. I stood and walked to the two corners of the barn, peering around each in turn. No one was worried about me. Everyone was at their own tasks. I began walking up the hill.
As I climbed the hill, keeping myself hidden from below by the barn for as long as I could I cursed myself. There must have been tons of tools around the camp and here I was with nothing but clothes on my back and shoes on my feet heading towards a forest and cold nights. I thought about turning back until I at least had a knife. Surely there would be other opportunities to flee later, but my legs were filled with a tense energy
