I heard my mother gasp for breath and when I turned around, she was flailing and thrashing. As her lungs rattled with phlegm and her back arched in her fit, I ran back to her. She settled into a fit of weak coughing as I knelt beside her. Her lips and chin were completely covered in spittle. She turned her unseeing eyes to the heavens and dug into the bed of sand on which she lay. I got a small plastic cup from my pack and dipped it into the river. Small flecks of mud and plant matter drifted in the turbid water. Cradling her head on my knees, I tilted her forward and held the cup up to her. As soon as the water touched her lips she gagged and spit, her head twisting and her eyelids fluttering. I let her head fall softly to the ground where she lay quivering. She muttered, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I walk, and walk, and walk and there’s no one to comfort me.” My brother watched me sullenly not even sitting up as I crouched beside our mother.
“You’re slow,” he said
“And you’re a bastard,” I retorted. He sat up and pulled his toothpick, a long double-edged knife from his belt and a whetstone from his pack, glared at me, and began sharpening. He drew the blade slowly and evenly across the stone, adding a tiny flourish each stroke at the blade’s tip. He took his time with each side. The blade made an awful hiss, like a snake in the grass. Seething I faced the river, resisting the urge to slap him for trying to pull the same tricks on me that he pulled on any old scrounger or frightened patsy. Someone who’d follow whatever strong man they could tag along behind. I was his brother and even if we were unrelated, I’d killed a few vampires in my day, maybe even more than he had.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” I said. “You should have just kept on running.” A thin sliver of the sun setting behind the squat trees that grew along the opposite bank was all that remained of the day. Its rays transformed the brown river into burnished copper intricately laced with the shadows of leaves and branches. His knife continued its steady scraping.
“Papa never came back, but I did.” He answered. I scowled but didn’t look at him.
Our mother cried out, “I’m so cold. My blood is cold,” before rolling over onto her side and dry heaving.
When she’d stopped, I said, “Papa never came back, and neither should have you.” We didn't speak again as the sun disappeared below the horizon and the first stars appeared. Crickets and tree frogs began their incessant nightly chirping. My paranoia shaped their choruses into the sounds of pursuit, and I heard vampires’ light steps in the light breeze.
My brother stood and stretched. He was just a featureless shape of a man in the dim light.
“She’s going to turn,” I said quietly.
“No, she’s not,” he yelled and knelt beside her, laying one hand on her pale forehead. Sweat had soaked through her clothing as the fever had ravaged her body, but in its wake, she was left shivering as if blanketed in snow. Her skin wore the pallor of cold blood. A state that she would soon have to endure at all times, except when she had just enjoyed drained someone. I shivered.
“She’ll turn or she’ll die of the thrall sickness,” I said.
“What do you know about it?” He stood slowly and stared at me with cold hard eyes. “Besides, we wouldn’t be in this predicament if it wasn’t for you.”
“As if you’ve been a great help, running ahead and then complaining that it took me so long to carry her.” We both looked at her. She lay on her side with one cheek comfortably resting against the sand. Her chest barely rose with each breath. “They will find our scent again and they will catch up to us.”
“Let them,” he grunted and then shoved his knife back into the sheathe that hung from his belt. He walked to the river’s edge and stared into waters too murky to reflect even the moon. An owl hooted and several dogs barked in the distance as a chill wind blew down the river and tussled at my shirt. My brother wore nothing but short sleeves and shivered. He’d always been a fool.
“And by then she’ll be one of them,” I said, “and we’ll have to fight her as well.”
He pressed his lips together and shook his head, then ran his hands through his hair as he stamped one foot in the sand. She moaned and writhed in the sand behind us, making a fallen sand angel with the twisted turns of her limbs. Her chest heaved and she pressed her hands and feet into the earth, arching her back and lifting her head from the ground. It twisted back and forth frantically. “Let’s put her to rest peacefully,” I said. “Let’s not let her become one of them.” I carefully pulled her book from her backpack. Its tattered pages and worn cover comforted me and I caressed it gently as I carried it over to her and laid it on her chest. She quieted as I did so. Her arms stopped flailing and her breath came easier as the book’s heavy weight settled onto her. I crossed her arms over its cover. My brother shook his head and wrung his hands as
