by Jeff Seats
The one design flaw they had discovered was a lack of storage. They were piling up gear behind and between the back seats and the command wall, making it difficult if not entirely improbable, for the computers to be accessed while in transit. Why the hell didn’t we have a roof rack installed? Craig thought with frustration, as he tried to find one more space for the team’s first aid kit. All prototypes came with a certain number of bugs and poorly thought out features. He hoped this would be the last one he discovered or, at a minimum, the most annoying. Not that there was ever going to be enough money to provide a second of these babies to Con-West.
“That coffee maker is pretty slick,” Paul said.
“Huh?” Craig turned to the voice. “Oh, hey Paul. Yep, caffeine’s my life’s blood.” He gave the Keurig a tender pat. Then there was a moment’s pause as it dawned on Craig that he had made a vampire pun, of sorts. “Sorry you guys can’t come along, but someone needs to stay behind and keep an eye on the whole damned world. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, sure, I get it. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.” Paul said.
“K.”
Paul swallowed heavily. The meeting had just wrapped up, and before that Craig and Liz had barely arrived back to the base from their trip to Eugene. There had been no time to tell him about going to Vamp Town and talking with Alex. He wasn’t looking forward to this, and now that the moment was here, he was choking. He took a quick glance over to Ellie. She had been watching, saw him hesitate, and flashed a reassuring smile. Go on, you can do it. The smile was telling him.
“Okay . . . You, uh, knew that Ellie and I were sent to Vamp Town to talk with Alex. Right?”
Craig nodded. “Yeah. Couldn’t be in two places at one time. Though next time you can go say hi to my mom and I’ll chat with the vamps.” Craig grinned.
“He wanted to talk with you, but Cole sent us. Obviously, ‘cause you weren’t available. Which you just said.” Nervously, he continued. “She, uh, told us that Ellie and I would be in your shoes one day and needed to start learning how to deal with the undead on our own.”
“So, what did Alex have to say?”
“Actually, not much. I’m confused by that. He lectured us about how immortals appreciated what humanity brought to the world.”
“And how, by happenstance, through no fault of their own, they had become blood-sucking monsters and shouldn’t be held to account for how a vampire simply had to survive. And how an immortal life wouldn’t be worth shit without the arts and sciences, which only humans can bring to the world. Yes?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“I was afraid of that.” Craig sat down on the deck of the van. “That was Alex’s warm-up, shot across the bow, saying that he was done with the whole thing.”
“You mean the treaty?”
“Yep. He was telling you, me, us, that if he couldn’t be a part of our solution, then he was going to deal with Vlad on his own. SHIT!” Craig stared through Paul and into pure space, everything that had been bothering him coming home to roost on his shoulders with this unwelcome news.
“One more thing.” Paul removed his hands from behind his back. He was holding a well-worn plush toy duck. He handed it reverently to Craig. “Alex. He, uh, said you might want this.”
“That’s Cindr…” His voice trailed off with the realization that Cindra was dead.
“Sorry, man.” Paul placed his hand gently on Craig’s shoulder.
Chalk up another person to that pestilence called vampirism. “I thought that somehow—somehow a toy might help Alex with her transition. Foolish. Did he tell you how she died?”
Paul smiled slightly. “Sweet tooth. Apparently, she couldn’t cross over to blood. She was hungry and got into that stash of old army rations in the back of the bar. He found her, what was left of her, surrounded by several open cans. She was holding an open tin of pound cake.
Craig rolled the yellow duck around in his hands. “She died resisting. Don’t know of too many who could do that.”
“Yeah, a real fighter.”
“From what I see coming down the road, it’s probably better that things ended as they did for her.” Craig wiped moisture away from his eye. A tear for the lost little girl. A tear for all those who would certainly die, or be changed, in the days and weeks to come.
««« ‡ »»» THEY LEFT THE base a little after midnight; driving through Boise fifty minutes later. After another hour they crossed the Snake River, the border line of Oregon and Idaho, and drove on through Ontario heading west towards Portland. The drive on Interstate 84 would have allowed the team to see some stunning high desert terrain if it hadn’t been the middle of the night, made all the darker by the overcast, blocking out the stars and moon. Otherwise, a breathtaking landscape.
Unfortunately in the dark, the only things visible were those ubiquitous road edge indicators, which monotonously ticked past the windows mile after mile. The blackness of the night made darker as the markers starkly reflected the vehicle’s headlights back into the driver’s eyes and seemed to be even brighter than the lights of oncoming cars. The only things that cut the eye strain were the occasional truck stops, which appeared to be floating islands of bright light in the night as if they were landing fields for flying saucers and given this world, they might have been. Particularly if you considered the drivers of the big rigs in search of fuel and human contact—slamming down a cup of coffee, grabbing a shower and a quick nap only to hit the road again, towing two or three trailers behind them—as aliens.
After about four and a half hours of travel, they had reached Boardman. The sun had not quite risen, but if it had, the mighty Columbia River could have been almost visible to their right. From this point on, the interstate would quickly align with the river, and together head west until they reached Portland where I84 stopped, and the Columbia continued on to the sea.
Another hour and a half later, they passed through The Dalles entering the Columbia River Gorge. Basically a canyon, the Gorge was a gash cutting through the volcanic Cascade Mountains; marking the transition between the dryer, high-desert terrain of Eastern Oregon, and the wetter, temperate western side of the state typified by conifer rain forests.
This morning it was evident that their transition between east and west was going to be a wet one. Terry had to turn the windshield wipers from intermittent mode to the more frequent, normal setting. The increased use of the wipers having more to do with the road spray and how fast they were moving through the rain than how much water was falling from the sky. The weather report Liz read from her phone indicated that this was just the beginning of a number of storm systems coming down off the Gulf of Alaska, stacking up like airliners waiting their turn to land on the tarmac at PDX.
“Looks like we’ll see some rain in Portland,” Liz said turning back to Craig who was sitting in a reclined position.
He didn’t answer, pretending to be asleep but his gaze was fixed out the left side window of the van.
Shrugging, Liz turned back and poured Terry a cup of coffee out of a thermos. Craig watched their heads rock back and forth as the vehicle surged on toward their destination. He was lost in his own thoughts—thoughts an analyst might interpret as defeatist, but he knew to be bordering on fatalistic. He had a dark foreboding about what they were heading into, with no delusions of how badly things were going to go, and the dreary weather perfectly mirrored his feelings.
BICYCLISTS WHIZZED AROUND and past Terry as he stood on the east side of the river, making him feel more like a target than the tourist he believed he was. He was looking west towards downtown Portland, the view framed left and right by the Hawthorne and Morrison bridges.
This was an entirely different vantage point of the city in which he had grown up in the 1960s. And right at the moment, it felt as unfamiliar to him as Beijing or Nairobi. Since he had left for the Army, he had not returned to the place of his birth, save for a quick fly-in and out for his mother’s funeral an
d again for that of his brother. Still, he considered this place his home, even if it was an, albeit, estranged relationship.
But family was not the reason Terry left. It was that this city was just not all very friendly to African Americans. Up until WWII, Portland was basically an all-white town. Oregon had been admitted as a state in 1859 as a compromise, just before the civil war. The South didn’t want another free-state in Congress to outnumber them, and likewise the North refused to allow another slave-state to be added. The compromise: no Negroes in Oregon free or slave. Of course, there were no long, drawn out debates about the unfairness of such a policy. Most of the residents in the petitioning region had no problem with a ban on blacks. The long-lasting effects of that political decision resulted in the population of African Americans in Oregon in 1940 to be around one percent—roughly a total of 2,000 people in the entire state.
With the declaration of war in 1941, the US became focused on producing the machinery needed to win. Thousands of black and white workers from all parts of the country flocked to the Northwest to work in the shipyards at the urging of industrialist Henry Kaiser attracted by the 88 cents an hour wage, which was considerably higher than the norm of 25 elsewhere; swelling Portland’s population by an additional 160,000 people. To accommodate this influx of residents, Kaiser built a new city of temporary housing—Vanport—on a floodplain between two cities where he owned shipyards—Portland and Vancouver, Washington.
Vanport was unusual in its ethnic diversity, as all races were welcome to live in the two-story plywood, cracker-box, apartment buildings. Though there were definitely black and white areas in the town, it looked thoroughly integrated from the perspective of longtime Oregonians.
Terry’s parents met in the yards. His father, an electrician, was from Greensboro, North Carolina. His mother, a welder, came from Baltimore, Maryland. They took up residence in Vanport soon after their marriage, making it their home until war’s end.
After the shipyards closed many of the workers who had flocked to the area for the jobs left but not all. The Terrys, along with many others chose to remain living in Vanport until 1948 when the Columbia River flooded, erasing the city and leaving its inhabitants homeless.
Losing everything, the couple lived in a succession of temporary and inadequate housing until his father could secure a loan to buy a house in the Albina district of Portland—the part of town begrudgingly ceded to the 6,000 or so blacks who had survived the flood.
The one-story Victorian was not much larger than the apartments that had been hastily erected in Vanport. But it was sturdy and warm and just big enough. It was in this house that Jackie Robinson Terry (JR) was born in 1952, and his brother Satchel Paige was born four years earlier in 1949.
Not that it was too obvious, but Terry’s father was a huge baseball fan, and worshiped the heroes of the Negro league. He was especially proud of Jackie Robinson when he broke the race barrier in 1947 to become the first black to play for the majors when the Dodgers hired him. When Satchel Paige played for the hometown Portland Beavers during the 1957 season, his father dragged both boys to Multnomah Stadium to see as many home games as he could afford.
JR grew up a black kid in a white city. On its surface, Portland wasn’t a segregated society as it was in the South. But the racism was always there just below the veneer of polite society, and everyone lived by its unspoken, unwritten rules. In 1970, at the age of 18, he enlisted in the army and got his ass out of town, never looking back.
In the Army, he lost his longtime nickname, JR, for another. The other guys in his unit came to call him 42. Jackie Robinson’s—the ballplayer’s—uniform number. As he rose through the ranks, those who knew him as 42 became fewer as he moved up from private, to sergeant, to staff sergeant, and then 42 disappeared along with his given name, Jackie, when the promotions board awarded him the rank of master sergeant. From that point he was known only as Master Sergeant Terry. No other name required.
Somewhere along the line after Nam, he “got noticed” by people higher up in the food chain, eventually gaining the attention of the CSC, and was invited to join the highly secretive unit becoming a field agent in the containment of the global monster threat. He was assigned to Con-West and given the role of overseeing RES-SITE-ALPHA—Vamp Town. After a decade of babysitting vampires, he was sent back into the Army to run an enhanced training program intended to find and recruit the next generations of the CSC.
Now he stood on the banks of the Willamette River looking at his hometown—not recognizing it for all the construction that had gone on since his departure in 1970. The budget cuts that had been occurring since the great recession led to a policy of not replacing personnel as ranks thinned due to retirement and death. Officially retired from the army, Terry was nevertheless on the rolls of the CSC. Though he could by rights brush his hands clean of the whole mess, he knew if he didn’t help monsters would be again running loose in the world. Besides, he really had nowhere else to go.
Terry squinted his eyes—trying to connect his past with what he was currently seeing. Everything about this city had changed. A bike bell trilled a couple times from his rear as a rider warned him to get the hell out of the way. It seemed everyone road those speed demon bikes. Terry hopped backward as the guy blurred by him only to get yelled at by another cyclist whose path he jumped in, to get out of the way of the first. Yep, things certainly had changed. Even this view point on the east side of the river had not existed when he was a kid. Just the freeway, Interstate Five. And that was barely ten years old when he had left in 1970. This side of the river had been old warehouses and mill sites that were easily razed for the modern interstate highway system.
Staring at the buildings on the west side as they stacked up upon themselves rising away from the waterfront and up to the hills, he thought he could recognize at least a few of the remaining original cast-iron-front buildings that existed the last time Vlad had staked Portland out as his turf. The newer buildings he only knew from pictures online.
Vlad was here somewhere. That park over there on the west bank was the location of the original waterfront he had haunted. The changes must make this city even more foreign to Vlad than it was to Terry. The multi-tiered docks once lining the river bank enabled ships to off-load no matter the height of the river. It also allowed for the creation of the subterranean tunnels connecting the cellars of merchants to the boats.
The stories of how these passages were used ran the gamut; from boring (extensions of commerce), to the nefarious (Shanghai-ing sailors and opium dens), to the sensational (speak-easies and white slavery), to their complete non-existence
As an agent for the CSC who spent many hours with Vlad, he learned that the tunnels did indeed exist, and were not only employed for illegal human activities, but also very popular with the undead set.
With the possibility of interconnecting tunnels still under the city, Terry knew that if Vlad were here in Portland, that is where he would be found.
And then he remembered the promise made to his brother the last time they spoke—to look after his wife and daughter after he died. Of course, Terry meant it when he had said it, but his follow-through had left a lot to be desired. In fact, this was his first attempt. He fished a cell phone out of his jacket pocket and opened the contact list.
All the excuses played out through his head as he swiped at the screen; calling up the Terry name in the address book. He hesitated, finger hovering over the listing for Satchel Paige Terry, then stopped stalling and tapped on the green call button.
One ring, then the second and—
“Hello?” A female voice asked.
Terry hesitated. He was ashamed to admit that he couldn’t
recognize the voice as that of either his sister-in-law or his niece. “Um, hi. This is Jackie.”
“JR!”
Relief. It was Satchel’s wife, Martha. Naomi had never called
him anything other than Uncle Jack.
“Now what motiv
ated you to call?”
“In town on a sort of business trip.”
“Business? Thought you were in the Army?”
“They finally couldn’t stand me. Retired, last month. I, uh,
picked up a side gig to supplement the retirement pay.” “Okay. Been a while JR” Her voice was somewhere between
scolding and disappointment.
“I know. Look I’m not the best at—”
“Oh stop it. None of you Terry men were good at that sort of
thing.”
Terry felt the tension release from his shoulders. “How’re
things, Martha?”
“With me? Fine. I’m getting too old for teaching those sixth
graders, but only one more year to go.” She paused. “Now
Naomi—that’s another story.”
“Something up? Want me to talk to her?”
“I would, she always seemed to like you, but she’s not here.” “Maybe later.”
“Not here—as in moved out,” Martha said.
“Suppose it was about time. How old is she now? Thirty?” “Forty-one. And yes, too old to be still be living with me but
—but it was a part of her diversion agreement.”
He was thankful this conversation was happening on the
phone. His face would have betrayed his feelings even more
than the tone of his voice. “She on drugs?”