title: The Brazen Serpent
author: Swiney, Timothy
description: Two years after the death of his wife and seven year old son, Jesup remains tormented by sorrow and unable to heal from the tragedy. Time has not healed his grief, rather it has intensified it. Jesup is haunted by the same reoccuring dream. He sees his family moments before the accident and is unable to prevent their deaths. Waking from the dream, he sits alone in the darkness, grieving. He holds his pistol in his mouth, and squeezes the trigger little by little, testing how much pressure the gun can take without firing. Each night, he gets closer and closer to the trigger’s limit, but he cannot bring himself to fire. Rather than risking eternal damnation, Jesup instead offers himself up to chance. Nightly, he walks the dark and dangerous streets of a city caught in the grips of a prolific serial killer. Unarmed and defenseless, Jesup taunts fate to do what he cannot do himself … pull the trigger. When destiny finally brings Jesup face to face with death, it is not the peaceful release he had sought. Instead, the death he encounters is something much more sinister. He is bitten by a vampire and cursed to be resurrected as one of the living dead. Condemned to remain in this world and forever separated from the family he loved, his only hope for redemption is to find an ancient religious relic called the Brazen Serpent, believed to have the power to cure the vampire bite.