The men and women who surrounded me seemed so much more ragged than they had when I’d first walked into the village. Their clothing was tattered, torn and dirty. Their hands were covered in scabs and calluses and their faces were dirty and wrinkled from the sun. They glared at me with a mad hatred in their eyes as they ran into me with their shoulders or blocked my path daring me to try to force my way through them. My refusal to provoke them both amused and irritated them. One ran up behind me and shoved me to the ground. Mud ground into the knees of my pants and the crowd around laughed. The man stood stroking a trimmed mustache as he dared me to bother him. I went on. The sun was burning brightly warming me in an unpleasant way as if I had a fever. I felt dizzy and my vision swam. A man shoved me hard with one hand, but I didn’t fall though my legs were weak. I could smell his sweat, a sickly-sweet odor, and another scent not unlike raw meat beneath his usual stench of smoke and filth. My mouth watered in response. A pulsing of pressure grew in my ears quickening. I ignored the urge to grab his arm and jerk him closer so that I could huff his scent. He must have seen in it in my eyes because he jumped back and disappeared into the crowd. I barreled through the rest of the crowd sweeping the people to the side with my arms. They felt as light as cord wood. They shouted at me from the ground as I fled them, running as soon as I escaped the crowd. I dashed down the narrow alleys of the village finding my way back to the cabin I’d left that morning by some instinct. I disappeared into the semidarkness of the cabin and fell across the cot and lay unmoving though my body moved as if possessed of a powerful alien energy. I could not get the scent of the crowd out of my nostrils, whether it permeated the entire atmosphere of the camp or simply my memory I could not say. I closed my eyes but when I did an image of a throbbing neck sprang unbidden to my mind and would not be banished. My stomach started to clench and quickly the pain grew so intense that I rolled up into a little ball and dug my hands in the thin blanket I lay on. It felt as if I’d been shot in the stomach but that the hot lead had not left my body. I attempted to count the dust mites as they glided through the dusty yellow air but lost count when the cramps shot through my abdomen. Saliva ran down the side of my face and pooled up on the bed, but the pain scarcely allowed me to care, let alone wipe it. My body began to convulse, and red veins stabbed through my vision with the bursts of pain.
I lay cursing my brother and wishing for a pistol to end the spine twisting pain that wracked my body. Relief from the pain seemed as if it would never come. An icy cold burning ripped through my extremities, up through my bowels and deep into my skull. My stomach cramped tighter and tighter and my throat grew painfully parched as I faded into a darkness that only contained the pain, and the pulsing veins of people’s neck. I could see them pounding in frightened rhythm and I could smell the fear that coursed through the blood that they pumped. A bright new pain as if my gums were being seared ran along my jaw and shot through the centers of my teeth as they grinded against one another.
Suddenly a warm liquid splashed onto my lips and ran across my swollen tongue. I licked the thick coppery liquid without even open my eyes then immediately rolled to the side and vomited. The cot shook with my spasms. When I opened my eyes, I was staring at the puddle of black bile that was rapidly being absorbed by the dusty dirt floor and three pair of leather moccasins. My brother chuckled as I looked up at him wiping my lip with my sleeve. “What did you get me,” I asked in a voice little removed from a whimper.
“Better than you deserve.” He swirled the wooden mug he held. “Cow’s blood. I thought rat’s blood would suffice but I was told by my vampires that this would scarcely suffice. Seems that they were right.” He held the mug out to me, and I gagged. “You’re going to have to get used to it,” he said but I refused to take it. I lay back down and rolled away from him. “Petulant child,” he swore and doused me with the sticky blood. It ran down the back of my neck and around my chest in rivulets soaking into my shirt. “You’ll be begging for it soon enough. I guess that you and I aren’t as alike as I’d hoped. Maybe we didn’t even have the same father.”
I turned back over just to stare at him in disbelief. “Mother said.” He cut me off.
“I know what mother said. Neither of us saw the guy. She could have been making the whole thing up, along with a ton of other bullshit that she fed us.” They turned and filed out of the one room shack, my brother lingering in the doorway after the rest of them had exited, staring at me in the dusky light. “It could be a lot worse brother. At least now you’re
