“What do you mean?”
“Your pal, Abdul, won’t give up any information on the General. I’ve had it up to here with it. I’ll have him dismembered. I’ll have him burnt up. I don’t care. You tell him. Tell him if he divulges information and it turns out to be true, I’ll release him. He can live with us. The other vampires can tell him all about it. How much they like being out from under the thumb of the General. The General has grown soft; we’re going to crush him. Tell him he’s got this opportunity to jump ship. It won’t happen again.”
“Why me?”
“He asked for you.”
“He asked for me?”
“That’s what I just said isn’t it? He asked for you, so I’m sending you in with the hopes that you can get some information out of him. I want to know numbers, arms, locations, anything you can get out of him.” He glared at me with hard suspicious eyes shining like chips of knife blades half buried in frozen soil. “I don’t know what game the General and this vampire are playing but that vamp is still trying to play it.” He waved over Peter who handed him a key. “Here,” my brother said holding out a narrow candlestick. When I took it, he lit it with a Bic, pulled the lock from its hasp and opened the wooden door open with both hands, pulling its bottom through the soil. “For your sake I hope that you’re not a part of it.”
I couldn’t make anything out in the building’s pitch-black interior and as I stepped up to the doorway the cool damp air smelled stagnant. I thrust the candle into the building and waved it around trailing hot wax onto my hand and sputtering the flame. In the back corner a pale face flickered as the light hit it and then faded back into the darkness. Ducking I stepped into the building. Abdul looked up at me with a haggard face. His eyes were huge in the darkness. The door scraped in the soil behind me and I whirled around almost dropping my candle and shouting, “What are you doing?”
My brother’s face appeared around the door. “Don’t worry we’ll let you out when you’re done. I can’t risk an escape, he’ll let the General know everything.” The door pushed past the soil and swung into place followed by the click of the lock. When I turned around Abdul smiled at me weakly and I recoiled from his fangless grin. It made him look like a leech. His eye sockets were sunken so that his eyes bulged, and his cheeks had hollowed. His skin was paler than ever and wrinkled as it hung fell away from his bones. He wore the same clothing, now ripped and bloodstained, but this boot had been taken. My eyes flitted back and forth between his toothless maw, all pale gray gums except where they were bruised and oozing dark blood and his dirty feet.
“Not to worry, they’ll grow back,” he said and then began coughing. With each cough his body flailed rattling the chains that bound him hand and foot to the concrete wall. He leaned back against the wall in a crouch with his arms halfway raised into the air. “I wasn’t sure, but our gracious hosts were good enough to reassure me that I would be able experience them being ripped out again in a month or so. Amateurs. They never suspected that the fear of living fangless may be a greater pain than the actual pain they inflicted.”
“You told him why the General sent us?” I said in a quiet voice.
“That is what we were sent to do. It does seem now that the General has an inflated sense of his own reputation and the fear that it would strike in these people. Have a seat,” he waved at a dim patch of mud in front of me. The chill of the room had my flesh in goose bumps, and I fought the sudden urge to beat on the door demanding to be released. “I would join you, but unfortunately I am unable.” He slid down the wall a bit further and the chains pulled his arms straight into the air. “I know that you’re supposed to get information out of me. It’s easier to catch flies with honey than vinegar, the carrot, and the stick and all that nonsense. I think that your brother may also suffer from an inflated sense of himself.”
I sat in the mud cross-legged holding the candle in one hand and resting it on my knee thinking of my brother and his cronies outside, straining their ears and I couldn’t think of what to ask.
“How big is the General’s army?” I asked. Despite his shaky movements and ashen flesh sunk around his bones he looked at me with amusement. Even though he had been captured, tortured, and starved he exuded a palpable confidence that made me want to obey him more than anyone ever had. It was as if the idea of his own death was laughable. Maybe to one of the oldest living creatures on Earth it was.
“Oh, it’s big enough to crush this pathetic little camp. I tried to tell your brother he doesn’t know what an army is. An army isn’t a pathetic bunch of miscreants running around with rifles hunkered down on the edge of the world. That’s what I was sent to root out, that was what I was created for.” He sucked in a deep breath of air. “An army has glorious jets roaring across the sky dropping bombs from overhead and tanks thundering ahead of jeeps full of men in bulletproof armor and goggles. This is no army. Not even the General commands an army anymore, perhaps there’s not one left
