by Unknown
Eve says: “We have to get to the seed bank. I know what they are.”
The Frosties gape at her, disbelieving.
Eve says: “I’ll tell you while we go down.”
Eve tells it in a spiral, fourteen booted feet tap-tap-tapping on the carbon fiber.
She says: “Agartha was built on the basis of limited biodiversity. They had about fifty years’ worth of warning before the disaster happened. As with people, limited genetic lines of food crops could be brought underground and the crops tend to be vulnerable to the same diseases. That’s why they built the seed banks. But they had limited time and resources. An elevator that size was power-prohibitive, so they built the stairway.”
Someone says, “We know.”
Eve say: “That’s fact. Here’s the story. When they built the stairway, they didn’t have Agarthans yet — they hadn’t bred us; they hadn’t genetically engineered us. In any event, if they had, we wouldn’t have been good choices; we have too little upper-body strength and need too much mental stimulation to function optimally. The City Managers needed workers who could work in low light, without needing lights, in low oxygen without needing respirators, who would survive on very low protein diets. So they created them. This was in the early days. Genetic engineering wasn’t as advanced. They were very short on time. They … they improvised. Radical modifications were attempted.”
“At the end, the bureaucracy was confused and inefficient. There were contradictory orders. There ended up being thirty or forty different batches of workers. Some got away.”
“Got away?”
Eve says: “Some went unaccounted for. Others vanished. Over the rails, off their ropes, out of tunnels. Sometimes witnesses saw them go — other times, they were just gone. Some were never found. Most were found … drained. Whatever did it didn’t seem to like the light. So they built the grow lamps on Level 85.”
Someone says, “How do you know all this?”
Eve say: “Everyone knows all this. They tell the story in Kindergarten. At Halloween.”
“But you don’t have stories.”
Eve says: “We don’t have many stories. But we have some. That’s one of them.”
Someone says, “Captain Gaardner, did you know this?”
Gaardner says, “I just knew there was a story. They told me it was just a story.”
“Then why are there grow lamps on at Level 85?”
He says, “How the hell am I supposed to know? They didn’t give me the details.”
Ondrusek yells, “You’re saying you didn’t tell us crap that Kindergartners know?”
Gaardner snaps, “I didn’t go to Kindergarten in Agartha. I went to Kindergarten at the Santa María del Cordero Catholic school in Vancouver. I’m from a thousand years ago, and I don’t belong here anymore than you do!”
Ondrusek growls, “You don’t know how true that is.”
As the Frosties are distracted arguing, Eve’s the one who sees what’s coming.
Faces drawn and bloodless, lips pulled back to show fang-like teeth flashing deadly, naked starved bodies white with flesh stretched over sharp bones. The creatures have murder in their big open cat-eyes that blaze green-white at the faintest hint of illumination.
Eve screams at the top of her lungs, a real scream, so big it feels like she is turning inside out.
In an instant, the Frosties’ panic-swept tactical lights and the vampire faces vanish into her blindness.
Then the lights start spiraling over the edge of the landing amid bleating howls and wet sounds and sprays of hot blood.
Eve raises her gun and starts shooting; hysterical with terror, she never stops screaming as she fires and fires and fires…
Eve hears her scream — fragmented, gone staccato between gunshots.
She’s really getting the hang of this screaming thing.
Eve returns from the black haze of terror as if from dreamland.
She is on her back, legs cocked at an improbable angle.
The slide of her gun is locked open; it pours smoke. The thirty-round magazine is empty.
Sobbing, she feels in her pockets for the magazines she picked up after the second attack. They’re all gone.
She can’t see a thing. She gropes on the floor. She finds empty cartridges and shotgun shells — no fresh magazines, no unspent ammo.
Eve hears Ondrusek’s voice in darkness, whispering, hoarse from screaming, “They got Gaardner.”
Then Dentino, equally hoarse, much weaker, “They got everyone.”
Ondrusek says, “Head count.”
“Dentino.”
Ondrusek says, “Anyone else?”
Eve says softly: “Doctor Mojica.”
Ondrusek says, “Crap.”
A light goes on. Eve’s half-blinded again but sees Ondrusek’s face illuminated briefly. She puts her hand up to shield her eyes and tells Ondrusek: “I’m out of ammo.”
Ondrusek takes Eve’s gun, reloads it, and hands it back to her.
She says, “Did either of you hit any?”
Eve says: “Yes.”
Dentino says, “Yes.”
Ondrusek says, “Me, too. I must have hit five. Chest shots, head shots. They didn’t go down.”
Dentino says, “I know. I know. I watched them take Tillett.”
Ondrusek says, “I saw them get Verbasco.” Her voice quavers. “They drank his blood.”
Dentino says urgently, “They’re vampires. Let’s get the goddamn seeds and get out of here!”
Ondrusek and Dentino are both out of breath and wheezing by the time they reach the landing between Level 128/9 — just one level above the seed bank on Level 130. They’re soaked with sweat and shivering. They’ve both lost their respirators and are so out of breath that they’re stumbling.
Neither talks about resting. Neither does Eve. Not even when the two Frosties start panting hard, swaying with exhaustion, pouring sweat.
There’s a whoosh behind Eve.
Something big, very big, goes by. Eve screams and fires as Dentino opens her submachine gun right into the thing’s face.
Blood sprays out behind it.
It keeps moving.
It grabs Dentino.
The gun lands, pouring smoke. Its forestock light goes dark.
Eve sees the horror in Dentino’s eyes as she’s snatched from the platform. She goes to scream, but the thing has her over the railing before Eve can fire another round; then it’s all just a swirl of black wing and red blood and pink frostbitten face and white bony, grasping hands as the thing tears into Dentino, ravening wetly in midair. Her scream vanishes into the wet sounds.
Eve fires wildly, as fast as her finger will pull the trigger.
Eve misses the black things and hits Dentino instead. Dentino screams. After that, Eve hits the black things — one, then another, then a third, fourth and fifth. They keep flying, ripping into the violently-thrashing, screaming Dentino in midair, and—
—then Eve’s blind again. Ondrusek’s sweeps her shotgun with its tactical light.
Eve feels the hot shotgun wind above her — three blasts in quick succession.
Then she feels the cold wind passing over.
And hears the shotgun hit the platform.
Blind and desperate, following the sound of its metal scraping towards the edge, Eve grabs for it.
Her hand comes up empty. Light spins through the stairway. The shotgun hits with a clatter far below; the light goes dead and she is in blackness.
Eve covers the tactical light on her pistol with her hand and clicks the button. The light flares once, pink across the empty platform, hot against her hand.
Eve sees shapes in the dark past the railing.
Then the light pops and goes dead.
Eve shakes it. Nothing.
Panicking, she falls backwards, and then stares up into the black. Even the best night vision won’t let her see in total blackness.
She rests and waits for them to take her.
&
nbsp; Minutes pass.
Eve lies very still. Everything becomes still.
Then, something moves on the platform and she feels the platform jiggle slightly.
She hears spent cartridges swept away from its path. Are the feet bare? Booted? Clawed? Hooved? Eve can’t speculate. She doesn’t do that.
Something hovers above her. Eve hears flapping wings, feels their cool wind. Something settles on the carbon fiber railing — Hands? Feet? Claws?
Eve does not move. She stares and waits.
She hears more fluttering sounds in the big empty; more scraping of hands gripping carbon fiber.
The thing high above her gets closer.
Something touches her cheek.
A hand? A claw? She can’t tell. There’s no heat. She can’t speculate.
Eve stares up into black and says to the darkness: “Who are you?”
No answer.
The only thing she can think to do is be more direct.
She says: “I’m afraid.”
A chorus of soft sibilant voices respond — much closer than she expected.
As one, they say: “We know.”
How long does it take?
A minute, an hour?
Time telescopes in the darkness.
When Eve finally stands and pads barefoot down the last flight of stairs, she feels as if she’s passed through a millennium or a thousand or a million of them, and arrived at the end of time.
She also has little concept of space; even a genetically-engineered dark-adapted eye can’t see in the void. The big dark empty blinds all but the vampires.
But the spiral leads her. Her slim hand, held lightly on the railing, guides her down to the spiral’s terminus. She nears the seed vault. She thinks: “This is their price. Is it too much?” But she knows the answer. The creatures’ price is survival: Their seed for hers. Their crossbred variation on the human fugue will live in Agartha, in the shadows, as did the mythic vampires of old. She’s tasted their kisses and their blood; she knows nothing else matters. They must live.
Whether the City Managers will see it that way, Eve can’t begin to speculate. So she won’t tell them. Monsters live better in the shadows.
The seed bank is a simple affair: Eve enters a thousand-year-old code and puts her thumb in the tube; it pricks her and records her DNA.
The vault hisses open.
The full-spectrum lights inside the vault are dim enough not to hurt her eyes, but they’re still poison to the vampires. Eve is alone when she enters the vault.
It takes her an hour to select the seeds and check them. They’re viable.
She seals the metal backpack. Refrigerated, it steams slightly and hurts her if she holds it too closely.
Eve finds the control panel for the transmitter. The large, clunky keyboard carries the feeling of obsolescence. Designed to send minimal information at minimal energy expenditure, it can only send a single line of text at a time on the green display.
Eve types:
STAIRS DESTROYED AT LEVEL 88.
They respond immediately:
WE KNOW. SEEDS OBTAINED?
Eve types:
RESCUE AT LEVEL 88 IN 2 HOURS.
Response:
SEEDS OBTAINED?
Eve frowns and touches her belly. She types:
SEEDS OBTAINED.
Response:
RESCUE EN ROUTE.
* * * * *
Thomas S. Roche’s debut novel under his own name is The Panama Laugh, a hardboiled near-term science fiction zombie apocalypse due out from Night Shade Books in 2011. He has edited three volumes of the Noirotica crime-noir anthology series, two anthologies edited with Nancy Kilpatrick (In the Shadow of the Gargoyle and Graven Images), and two vampire anthologies edited with Michael Rowe (Sons of Darkness and Brothers of the Night), and published two short story collections, Dark Matter and Parts of Heaven.
Beyond the Sun
By Tanith Lee
Imagine a night that lasts for one whole year — or longer. Think what you could achieve in a year-long night—
That was what the recruiting flyer said, and their promise wasn’t a lie. While of course, when the sun finally constantly rises, you’re far away already. Even, if you play the roster carefully, straight into your next long nighttime.
Heth once said, in one of his more lucid moments, “It’s like a chessboard, isn’t it, where the white squares don’t come on until you’ve won.”
But I guess I’ve already won, me, and my kind. Present perfect, and the future beautifully dark. It’s only the past that can’t be improved. Because, I suppose, the more symmetrically faultless our lives become, the more dangerously unwieldy grow the things that already happened, and the memories that can’t be made to fit.
We look at Anka in the mirror, Heth and I. He seems happy, satiated. I, Anka, look — what word? Satisfied? Heth’s one of my two Blood-Donors aboard this ship. He loves to give of himself and blissfully comes, over and over, (a pleasant possibility bred into him) as I draw my meal from his smooth veins. His blood tastes good, as ever. And he’s a good-looking guy. The best wine, in a charming champagne flute.
“That was great,” he murmurs, sleepy now. He will need a full nine hours slumber, but that’s only sensible.
“Thank you, darling,” say I. “What would I do without you?”
“Starve?” he dreamily asks. Oh, a snippy moment then.
One can never tell with Heth. Amber skin and ice-blond hair, blue, blue eyes, the color of the sort of morning sky I haven’t seen, except on DV-dex, for almost 200 years.
Corvyra, my other Bee-Dee, isn’t at all like him. Sex doesn’t come into the equation. We use a slender crystal tube fixed in her alabaster arm. Her hair is a much darker blue than Heth’s eyes — more just post-dusk — my sort of time. She has a cat’s green eyes. She tastes of fresh oranges; breakfast in a wonderful hotel. We talk about clothes and books and politics as I leisurely drink her. She only requires an hour’s rest after sessions. But it all works out okay, or so it appears, for all of us. We’ve been together on 7 trips now, eight and a half years, we three. And the ship, too, of course, the Mirandusa. What a lot of numbers. One more: Simlon 12. The new sun.
It’s not even born yet. And I, the sun-hater, the one whose tribe carry the pure gene of sun-hatred, I’m the creator who will wake this sun, as I always do.
Once, only God woke suns — with a word or a breath or a sigh.
I, and my kind, do it with a building program and a finger on a button. The last, while we watch (and cower) in protected darkness.
And Anka said, Let there be light.
Or, the button says it.
After topping up from Heth, I go out to do my space-walking, and then to check Planet 3, down below. Unlike the still unborn sun, the individual worlds of this system-in-waiting don’t have names yet. Though Corvyra has nicknamed them Champion (1), Cuddles (2 — the planet that may not take) and Fatgirl (3). Fatgirl, fairly obviously, is the largest, and reads as the most earth-type and lush specimen. There are other little chunks and balls and slivers circling about. Not to mention the pair of handsome moons already mecho-chemically lit. They have a duration of 300-400 earth years, after which, if wanted, they and the others can be set up, and/or rekindled. But Simlon, like every sun that gets started, will last for millennia. The general consensus has it that these solarities will all exceed the span of the original earth sun, which by now, as we know, is fading fast.
Outside the airlock I drift free, pause and gaze about me. Beautiful. Can you ever tire of such a sight? The limitless heaven of space, deepest black, or luminously translucent with galactic swarms or holo-gas clouds, the inflammatory litter of distant stars — other suns, natural or man-and-machine created.
After a while I drift on, around the bulk of Mirandusa. She’s in good shape, just a minor repair finishing up on her left-frontal hull. I assess the outer work-machines. One is corroding slightly, so I send it back in and tap Main Comp for a
replacement.
Far off something glitters as it dives through airlessness like a flung knife. Some meteor. You often see them. A little eye blinks in the ship’s side, registering that the passer-by is harmless.
Before I joined the Space Corps I worked in various nocturnal jobs — night-gardens, aviation — I had, back then, another motive to govern my life. Afterwards … space opened its glamorous arms to me instead. And here I am.
Time to go down now to Planet 3.
It’s much easier, as they found out all those centuries ago, for my kind to do this. We don’t need jet-boosters, or separate navigation, or suits of any sort, beyond the minimum of sensible protection. We don’t need oxygen. We can levitate — or ‘fly’, as the earliest of our detractors described it. And since we can negate gravity for ourselves, we can also personally institute it. To lift away, select and use the correct direction, and once there anchor without fuss, is that very same thing they caught us doing back on earth in the Dark Ages, when we took off like bats across the sky, or walked upside-down from castle towers to the ground. As for the oxygen, when they were wont to find us in our graves and coffins, we didn’t breathe then — we ‘lay like the dead’. Our sort only breathe to take nourishment from oxygenated air, just as we drink oxygen from the clarity of human blood. But we can shut off respiration without difficulty, or ill-effect. Especially when supplied by a rich diet. We do need the power of a ship, however. No one wants to walk or fly that kind of distance. Anyhow, we can’t travel faster than light. Despite the stories.
But you know all this.
Or not, I suppose. There’s still a lot of ignorance about us. More no doubt since so many of us became employed by the Space Corps, and left earth behind forever, to make our lives in endlessly long and lovely sleepless Night.
The basement apartment on Czechoslovus Street was half a mile down, remnant of an old bomb-shelter from the ‘20’s. In summer, it grew boiling hot. The stone walls ran with pale green water, like exquisite sweat.
He looked up, when the young woman entered.
And she stopped, and stared back at him with enlarged dark eyes. She was scared, scared to death. She knew what he was, this — man? Did you call a male Vampire a man? Perhaps once. And since the R.U.S.A. Alliance of ’35, such a variety of mixed ethnic types… They said he was part Rus, part German, part Canad-François.