“You shouldn’t have left mama behind.” Though he didn’t answer right away I knew that he’d heard me, and I could hear his slow, soft, steady breathing.
“We didn’t have any business with those people. Look what it brought down on us.”
“I know, but mama wanted to help.”
“We can’t help everyone,” he snapped, and we sat for a moment separated by darkness so complete that we could have been alone. I bristled with a rising rage at the selfish attitude that had been growing in my brother, and my own stifling inability to change him only intensified my anger.
“I’ll take first watch,” he said.
I blew air out through my nose in irritation, lay down and rolled over onto my belly. The chill of the rock seeped through my clothing and tightened the skin on my face. It felt good to have my skin pushed to the forefront of my thoughts and senses. The sensation was so tangible, so near that it could not be denied, or analyzed, but could only be experienced.
When my brother awoke me, it felt like the very early morning though there was no indication of time in the cave’s stale air. I grumbled wondering why he’d not awoken me for a watch. My mother was already up and had walked to the back of the cave to urinate. The sound of its splashing crashed all around us loudly. As she walked back towards us with the dim beam of the flashlight bobbing along her path my brother whispered to me.
“About five of them are outside sniffing around.” I nodded and then felt like a fool for doing so in the pitch-black darkness. I pulled my gun from its holster and checked the clip. Then I pulled on my pack and handed my mother’s hers when she returned. We followed my brother cave’s entrance. As we turned a corner in the grey rock a dismal light filtered in that compared to the darkness of the cave behind us lit everything in a grisly shifting imitation of day and allowed us to turn off our flashlights. We crawled quietly up to the entrance of the cave our three pistols drawn and pointed into the trees beyond. The trees of the holler were cast in ghastly green moonlight and the outline of the slender old woman stood amongst them. She stood straighter than the trunks of the trees that grew around her for they leaned towards the light and dug into the flat ridge with their thirsty roots and she had been pushed beyond life. Her back was a straight as if her spine had been replaced with rebar. The sight of her stiff unwavering body surrounded by her four hunched companions sent a shiver across my skin. She’d turned purely, untouched by the thrall sickness and she was not the only vampire lurking in the night.
Her eyes blazed and suddenly a thick voice that cut through the night like a knife burst from her body, but she didn’t waver from her statuesque pose. “Nurse Sue,” she said her s’s hanging in the air and permeating her words in a hiss that degraded my mother’s nickname. In her voice the name sounded weak, childlike, and foolish, as if my mother had been messing with things far above her, things that she had had no business messing with.
“You ran away. You left us.” She paused. “Nurse Sue can heal anyone they said.” Her last words rose into hyper feminine sweetness. Then her volume dropped, but her words were still distinctly audible against the little night sounds of crickets and tree frogs that rose and fell together in an ominous backdrop. “But you couldn’t help them, and you couldn’t stop the vampires, but they favored us anyways. He turned me and now I will live for a hundred years. I will take my place amongst the eldest of vampires.”
If I had not been there I would have wished that a mature vampire would have heard her words, because she was just a newly turned vampire, and her superiors would have had her bowing and scraping for fear that they would drain her to immobility and lock her in a coffin for a week. If her mind survived that ordeal intact, which her new body could easily survive then perhaps, she would learn her place.
There were no older vampires within earshot, and she smiled with her still unchanged teeth as she waved the thralls forward with one arm. Her husband limped heavily so that the ragged ends of his t-shirt swayed from side to side as he shuffled forward and the female thrall’s one eyes was still covered with a green gunk but the only sign that the child and the other man were thralls was their stiff gaits. Their nostrils flared in and out in quickening rhythms as they neared us. The old woman vampire laughed and clapped twice gleefully like a child who receives a gift.
The laugh must have triggered something in my brother because he squeezed off three quick shots and launched himself from the cave’s mouth, scrambling on his hands and knees out onto the soft ground. The gunfire exploded with yellow and orange bursts from the pistol like fireworks in the darkness and its sharp cracks roared deafeningly inside the cave. The tall shadow of the old woman vampire
