“I awoke in the middle of the night shivering atop the cold hard ground and forced my shuddering body into a sitting position clutching my arms around my chest. My breath came in little bursts of white clouds. There were no signs of the vamps, but my neck was raw, torn and throbbed dully. Blood covered the front of my shirt. I looked around dazed and weak, cold to the core. ‘I’m not dead,’ I muttered staring at the pallor of my hands as I flexed them against a rubbery feeling. The skin had lost some of its tautness along with its color and my hands felt more like flippers than hands. The snapping of breaking branches and the crunching of leaves came from the forest behind me and I looked over my shoulder as I reached for my pistol, but it was no longer at my waist. I struggled to stand and fell back to the ground. I pushed again with my arms as the sound approached but ended up falling to my chest in the leaves as an old man carrying a stack of branches and kindling came into the small clearing.
‘Don’t be a fool boy,’ he grunted as he saw me and dropped the wood to the ground. ‘I’m surprised that you’re awake. They drained you more than a typical turning so I was sure you’d die.’ He gave me a hand helping me into a sitting position. ‘You didn’t seem to have the thrall sickness, so I let you be. Figured you’d die and if you didn’t, well a young vamp doesn’t scare me much.’ He wore hides with the fur turned inside towards his body and a coyote skin hat. His bear was as brittle as corn straw and rustled against his shirt as he moved. ‘Ol’ John,’ he said extending his hand and I gave him my name as we shook. He then pulled a blanket out of a pack that was lying on the ground nearby and threw it to me. The fabric reassured me with its coarseness as I pulled it up to my chin shivering underneath it. Ol’ John wasn’t fazed by the night chill.
‘Let me guess,’ he said, ‘You were trying to reach a camp.’
I shook my head and asked, ‘What camp?’ but he ignored my question.
‘Better for you that you didn’t. The fools get reckless when they hope too much, and they rush. No doubt you’d have been dead if that were you.’ He began to break up the smaller sticks and twigs and arrange them in a teepee over a pile of tender. ‘A camp isn’t nothing but a bunch of men who live up north. The vamps don’t much like the cold.’ He smiled with yellow and black teeth. He pulled a worn-out box of matches from his pack and struck one along its worn-out strip. The familiar odor of sulfur was comforting. The tender burnt up in quick yellow flames that flitted up the twigs until the whole thing was a smoky orange mass. I watched the thin trickle of smoke rise into the sky.
‘Aren’t you worried that someone would see that?’ I asked.
‘I killed those three and I scouted around and didn’t see any signs of any others. Besides, we’re getting north and winter’s coming.’ He looked at me hard as if trying to figure something out. ‘You get close to the fire. You’re as pale as a vamp.’ He crouched down beside the growing flames peeling off his gloves and then rubbing his hands together over the fire. The effort of sliding over closer to the fire almost sent me back to the ground but I stayed up my arms trembling as I rested my weight against them. A wave of dizziness washed over me.
‘You don’t seem stupid enough to get caught up by three miscreant vamps. You had everything you needed.’
‘You went through my pack,” I asked.
He nodded. ‘Of course. Who knows what I’ll find? We’re just lucky the vamps didn’t take it. When I came up on them, they were squatted around you sated and waiting for you to begin to turn. Now they’re not going to turn anyone else
