The Last Vampire

by Whitley Strieber

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “You will talk to the prefect.”

  The prefect? That sounded ominous. As Miriam followed along behind the customs official, she considered that they must have found the body. They had traced Marie Tallman; it was that simple.

  As she walked, she felt somebody fall in behind her. She could smell the gun the man was carrying, just as she could smell the polish on his brass and the wax on his shoes. She knew he was a policeman, in full uniform. His breath was young and steady, powerful. He was also quite close to her, alert for any attempt at escape.

  They thought, therefore, that she would be aware of why she was being detained. Ahead of her, the customs officer had hunched his shoulders. He feared that she might attempt to harm him.

  These men did not think that they had apprehended some poor soul caught up in a fiasco of identity confusion. They believed that they were escorting a criminal who knew very well that she was in serious trouble.

  These thoughts passed through Miriam’s mind in a flash. The next instant, she was looking for a means of escape. She was a master of the human being, smarter, stronger, and quicker. It would be nothing for her to overpower both of these men. The gun was a trivial problem. Before his hand had even started to reach for it, both creatures could be knocked senseless.

  The problem was the surroundings. There were other people going up and down the hallway. The customs area they had just left teemed with dozens more. The offices, most of which had glass walls, were also full of people.

  So Miriam kept walking, hoping that she would be in a private situation for the few seconds she needed, before they locked her away. They would lock her away; she had no doubt of it.

  It had been extraordinarily foolish to abandon that remnant. It was drilled into them from childhood: Never let man see the results of your feeding. Humans are cattle, but they are bright cattle and they must not be made aware of their true situation. The entire species could, in effect, stampede.

  As appeared to be happening — in effect. There simply wasn’t anything left to think. The Asians had already been swept away in the onslaught, and now she had endangered herself in a foolish, heedless moment of panic, and possibly many others of her kind as well. Because of what she had done, she was in the process of being captured by human beings. A Keeper!

  They came to a door. The customs officer said, “Enter, please.” She could feel the young policeman’s breath on her neck. There was no more time. She had to act, and no matter the crowd.

  She stepped away from the door and into the center of the corridor. This left the two men facing each other, their eyes widening in surprise at the speed of her movement. To them, she would have seemed to temporarily disappear. Keepers had bred humans to be slow, for convenience. That way they could be outrun, outjumped, and outmaneuvered. Prey should be easy to herd.

  Before the two men could turn to face her, she had slipped her hands behind their heads and pressed them together sharply. They dropped like sacks.

  A secretary rushed out of an office two doors down. She looked at Miriam. She could not associate a young girl in an elegant suit with two unconscious men. “What has happened?”

  “Gas,” Miriam cried.“The corridor is full of gas!” She turned and went striding on toward the emergency exit at the far end. A moment later, a horn started hooting. The terrified secretary had pulled the fire alarm and then rushed out into the customs area shouting, “Gas!” as she ran.

  Opening the emergency exit, Miriam looked about for a way back into the main part of the terminal. Once out of the customs area, she would be able to go into Paris. She’d have to get Sarah to work up a new identity and FedEx her the passport. She certainly could not use the Tallman identity, and dared not risk her own.

  Others were coming out behind her, so she climbed some concrete steps, then went down a long, empty passageway. Behind her, a man shouted that she was going the wrong way. She noticed his American-sounding voice, then glimpsed a narrow, dark figure starting to run toward her. She did not look back again.

  She soon found herself in a bustling staging area for the assembly of airline meals. There were shelves full of little trays and plastic cutlery, and a wall lined with institutional refrigerators. Workers stood at tables putting the meals together on trays. Others covered them with plastic wrap. Others still packed them in steel shelves, ready to be wheeled out to the waiting planes.

  There were aluminum double doors at the far end of the room. Striding with the confidence of a person who belonged exactly where she was, Miriam went to these doors.

  Behind her there was a cry, “Halte!”

  Miriam ran. She ran as hard and as fast as she could, speeding along the corridor and into a locker room. This was where the various workers changed into their uniforms.

  “Halte Halte!”

  A new man had burst into the room at the far end. Her throat tightened; she felt a sudden surge of rage. The reason was that this creature had appeared ahead of her. They knew exactly where she was. They must be using radios to surround her. She looked around for doors other than the ones she and the gendarme had entered.

  She slipped through one, found herself in a shower room. The door had nothing but a handle lock, which she twisted. At once, he began to shake it violently from the other side. She threw open a window. There was a drop of about three stories to an area of tarmac crowded with baggage lorries. As the door burst open behind her, she went to the window and jumped.

  Her teeth clashed together and her ankles shot pain up her legs from the impact. The palms of her hands burned when they slapped against the pavement. Immediately, she rolled under the overhang of the building, making herself impossible to see from above.

  The shock had damaged the heel of one of her shoes. She struggled away, moving among the speeding baggage lorries. Stopping for a moment, she pulled off her shoes. The heel was not usable.

  This dim, booming space was extremely alien. She’d never been inside a factory, never seen the raw side of human engineering and architecture. She’d preferred to live her life in an older, more familiar aesthetic. Her home in Manhattan was a hundred and fifteen years old; she stayed almost exclusively in old, familiar hotels when she traveled. She could handle the human world, but she’d never seen a place like this before, never imagined that the hidden parts of the human world were this mechanical.

  Ahead of her she saw a passageway. The floor was dark and marked by white and yellow lines. The passage curved up and to the right. This appeared to lead away from the customs enclosure, so she began walking along it. It was lighted by fluorescent tubes, some of them flickering and some completely out. The effect was eerie, and made more so by a high-pitched whining sound coming from ahead. She stopped to listen and tried to place this sound, but she could not.

  The farther into the passage she went, the louder it became. She stopped again. It would rise and fall, then rise again. Then it almost faded entirely. She resumed walking, passing the endless, black-scuffed walls, moving beneath the flickering lights.

  The sound screamed out right in her face, and her entire field of vision was filled with glaring lights. A horn began sounding.

  There was no room to lie down, the oncoming machine was too low. She looked up — and there, where the lights were, she could grab hold. She leaped, missed by inches. The machine got closer, the lights growing as big as saucers, the glare blinding her and pinning her like the stunned animal that she was. The horn blared and blared. She crouched.

  Like most animals’, the backs of a Keeper’s eyes were reflective. When she looked directly into those lights, the driver would have seen a flare as if from the eyes of a deer or a tiger. Human night vision had been bred away. Better that they sleep at night, giving the Keepers time to tend herd and feed.

  There were only seconds left now. The machine would tear her to shreds. She would die from that — actually die. It was an oblivion that had haunted her all her life. She did not th
ink that Keepers persisted in the memory of nature. She did not want to cease to be.

  She sprang up from her crouching position and reached toward the light fixtures. She grabbed the edge and drew herself up, hooking one leg along the lip of the long fixture and pressing the rest of her body against the ceiling.

  With a hot blast of air the machine went shrieking past, not an inch below her breast. It seemed to take forever, and she soon felt her fingers and toes slipping. She was going to fall onto the roof of the thing.

  And then it was gone, and she fell instead to the floor, which she knew now was really a subterranean road. Would another machine come? Of course. Would the driver have radioed her position back to her pursuers? Of course.

  She knew, now, that she was in an extremely serious situation. Man had changed. Man was now effective and efficient. She remembered the Paris of fifty years ago, a compact, intricate city traveled by tiny automobiles and herds of bicycles. Only the Métropolitain sped the way this thing had. But it had been on rails.

  Ahead, the screaming sound had started again. Another of the machines was coming. She saw, perhaps two hundred yards farther on, a ladder inset into the wall. It led to a service hatch of some kind.

  The machine was coming, getting louder. There was a wind blowing in her face, getting steadily harder. This must be a subway system that served just the airport. But how could that be? Paris had a compact air-field, as she recalled, albeit a busy one.

  It had grown huge, that was the answer, and she was thinking that maybe her brothers and sisters were at least somewhat right. Maybe she needed to stick closer to home, too, because this situation was getting out of hand, way out of hand. She sprinted, moving easily twice as fast as the fastest human runner — but what did that matter in a world where the machines hurtled along at phenomenal velocity? Even the strength of a Keeper was nothing against fifty tons of speeding steel.

  As she reached the ladder, the lights of the train appeared. Immediately, the horn started blaring. Worse, a screaming sound began and the train started to slow dramatically. This time, the driver had seen her and put on his brakes. The last thing she needed was a confrontation in this damned tunnel. That would be the end. She’d be trapped then.

  She bolted up the ladder, only to find that the steel hatch was battened down tight. Her great strength enabled her to push it until it bent and popped open.

  The train came to a stop about ten feet from her. It stood there, invisible behind its lights, its horn honking and honking. Back where she had come from, voices rose, people shouting in French not to move . . . French, and also that one American voice.

  She clambered up through the hatch. Now she was in an access tunnel, and not far away there was a door. She didn’t think it would make any sense to go along this tunnel, even though it was obviously meant for pedestrians and not trains. Tunnels were damned traps. She went through the door.

  Light flared in her face; a roar assailed her. She staggered, and a voice said, “Pardon.” She had stumbled into a man in a taxi queue. He reached out, took her waist. “Madame?” he said, his voice rising in question.

  “Sorry,” she babbled in English, then, in French, “Pardon, je suis confuse.”

  He looked her up and down. The other people in the queue were staring.

  “I have broken my shoe,” she added, smiling weakly. Then she crept to the back of the line. She had escaped the horrors of the police and the dangers of the maze. Somehow, she had reached the outside world.

  She must get a hotel room, she thought, then seek out Martin Soule. He had been a friend of her mother’s back in the days of powdered wigs. She’d seen him fifty years ago. Martin was very ancient and wise, very careful. He was also stylish, powerful and daring. Like Miriam, he was a wine enthusiast, and had even desensitized himself to some of their fodder, because it was so difficult to move in French society without eating. Once, he’d made her laugh by drinking the blood of an enormous fish. But then his preparation of it according to human cooking principles had revolted her. She still remembered the ghastly odor of the hot, dense flesh when it came steaming out of the poacher.

  She was still well back in the queue when she noticed the policeman with a radio to his lips, staring at her as he talked. Her heart sank. At home, she dealt easily with the police. The police were her friends. She had the Sixth Precinct, where her club was located, well paid off. But she could not pay these cops off.

  The policeman came striding toward the queue. He had his hand on the butt of his pistol. She thought to run, but there were two more of them coming from the opposite direction. Her only choice was to leap out into traffic and trust to her speed and dexterity to get through the cars that shot past just beyond the taxi stand. But even that would lead only to a wall.

  When she realized that there was no escape, she let out an involuntary growl that made the woman standing ahead of her whip round, her face pale, her eyes practically popping out. Miriam’s whole instinct now was to kill. Had she not applied her powerful will, she might have torn the creature’s throat out.

  Quelling her damned instincts, she forced a smile onto her face. She’d play her last card — give them her emergency Cheryl Blackmore driver’s license and claim to have lost her passport. Maybe before they discovered that Cheryl Blackmore was a long-dead resident of Nebraska and most certainly did not rate a passport, she would have found some means of escape.

  The three policemen arrived — and began chatting together. They were laughing, completely at their ease, taking no notice whatsoever of her. They’d been talking on their radios merely to arrange their coffee break.

  Now, she thought, laughing to herself, there was the old mankind, the gentle, sloppy, genial humanity that the Keepers had so carefully bred.

  As she slipped into her taxi, she was filled with a sort of glee. It was delicious to have escaped, delicious and lovely and joyous. And damn, damn lucky.

  Her mouth began to dry out, her muscles to relax. The waves of hate stopped crashing in her heart. The taxi moved up a long ramp into the sunlight, and Miriam relaxed back against the seat.

  “Votre destination, madame?”

  “The Ritz,” she said. She’d take a huge suite. The Ritz would mean silk sheets like the ones at home, and a long call to Sarah to say how lonely she was and how far away she felt . . . and to tell her to get that new passport over here fast.

  In the cab, she pressed her shoe together as best she could, rearranged her hair, freshened her face, and tried to smooth the wrinkles in her suit. Her suitcase was gone forever, of course, and so she would have to buy new clothes, and there would be no time for proper tailoring at Chanel. That would make Sarah happy. They were both extremely fashionable, of course, but Sarah thought Miriam much too conservative.

  So much of the Paris whizzing past was unfamiliar. The huge roads, the endless blocks of buildings that had grown like monstrous cliffs beyond the Périphérique distressed and confused her.

  It was remade, entirely remade, and in just these few years! But then the taxi swung off the flying roadway and went down into territory that was, thankfully, more familiar. They were on the Rue de Vaugirard, where Philippe Vendôme had lived. She’d been fascinated by his alchemical studies, had stayed with him a few years while she was recovering from the grief of her mother’s destruction. She’d adored him, with his wonderful, sophisticated manner and his passable skill at whist. Miriam loved games, but finding humans who could be effective opponents was not easy.

  She had given Philippe of her blood, and turned back the years for him. He had become a searcher after the secrets of the Keepers. Useless, that, in the early eighteenth century. But he had been a pleasant companion, her entire pleasure for a while, until she’d met Lord Hadley’s son John.

  “Philippe,” she murmured, thinking of that lovely house of his. In 1956 it had been something of a ruin. She had walked silent halls where she had laughed and loved with him, and reflected on the brief lives of men. Now she cou
ld only glimpse it, the once-proud estate little more than a front on a huge building. The street the taxi bounced along had been laid over part of the elegant park. Here, she and he had come and fed his swans.

  Now they went underground, into a roaring tunnel full of autos and lorries, speeding along at a deadly clip. And here, quite suddenly, was the Champs Élysées. They had come by a new high-speed route.

  It was all so familiar and all so dear. She remembered it from fifty years ago, even a hundred — the same marvelous width, the same trees, the same grand ambiance. Yes, this was just as it had been since Louis Philippe had commissioned Haussmann to reconstruct the intricate, ancient spaghetti-bowl that had been the Paris of the last age.

  They were soon passing along the Rue St. Honoré, lined with luscious shops, in the windows of which she glimpsed the strangely simple clothing of this era, clothing that increasingly emphasized anything that was male about the female. The ideal form for human women was becoming that of the boy. She preferred elegance.

  Then, here was the Place Vendôme. The Ritz was exact. Lovely and beloved! She had first come to this place on a rainswept evening back before the motor. What trip had that been? Perhaps 1900, when she and John Blaylock had come here in search of the luxury that was just then gaining the hotel its grand reputation.

  Getting down from the taxi — or up, actually, out of this tiny modern sardine tin — she found herself face-to-face with a doorman in the hotel’s familiar green livery, even his coat reminiscent of more gentle days.

  She went into the lobby, passing across the thick carpet to reception. No face was familiar, of course. Fifty years and all the humans would have changed. They came and went like so much foam on a restless wave. Well, at least she had Sarah free and clear for another century, perhaps two . . . unless, of course, the dear found some clever scientific way to last longer. Sarah knew the ugly secret of her own artificial longevity. Such knowledge would have driven a lesser human mad, but Sarah was often at her test tubes, poor thing.