A People's History of the Vampire Uprising

by Raymond A. Villareal

  No doubt Eric had reached out to several news sites, probably several a lot more hard-hitting than BuzzFeed. But this Eric Holcombe individual was an extremely paranoid sort of man, and I’m guessing no one at the New York Times or The Guardian had paid much attention, especially as it took many weeks of communication through email and private message boards on obscure role-playing video games before Eric would agree to a meeting. He would not meet me at the BuzzFeed offices, however, so we arranged to meet at an obscure San Francisco ramen bar—this particular one located upstairs from a craft brewing lounge.

  I arrived and, with my love of ramen intact, ordered a big bowl of chicken, oyster, and spinach ramen. It was long past the dinner rush, so the restaurant was sparsely occupied. I kept one eye on the staircase and slurped my noodles from the large bowl. I really could have ordered another when I noticed a disheveled man in his midfifties coming up the staircase. He wore black pants and a black jacket—a sharp contrast with his treated blond hair and white skin. I knew this had to be my man.

  I waved him over. He sat down hard. “Eric,” I said. “Hi. I’m Jerome.” I stuck my hand out but Eric refused to take it. Not a good start.

  “We should have met during the day,” Eric said, looking around the restaurant. “I don’t know what I was thinking—I should have my head examined.”

  “I assure you I am not a Gloaming,” I responded.

  Eric stared out the window and seemed to think on this for a long while before he looked at me with a downcast gaze. “Let’s make this quick, then. I was a lab technician for Dr. Robinson—yes, after the kidnapping. And yes, that Dr. Robinson who disappeared from Prestonwood Mall in Dallas after buying a new shirt at Macy’s.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Eric barreled on. “I knew Robinson had been kidnapped. I looked the other way because of the money and the allure of the Gloamings. I thought that one day they might re-create me. I admit it. Then I realized it would never happen. I’m not what they want in a Gloaming! It’s all eugenics for them! The perfect being!”

  As Eric had grown louder and louder, people were beginning to stare. I put a hand out. “I know this is stressful, but keep it down. We have to stay in the shadows here.”

  Eric nodded. “I know. I know.” He took a long breath. “I couldn’t take it anymore and I escaped from that place. Nothing is foolproof.” He was breathing hard.

  I had to coax him back to his story. “What do they do at the institute?”

  “Everything. Anything to enhance their population. They’ve been trying to procreate naturally for years and then they tried in vitro—and none of it worked. We have been responsible for destroying completely healthy humans and Gloamings in the interest of science. And none of it has worked.”

  I moved my seat closer to Eric. “So they kidnapped all those doctors and scientists?”

  “Of course they did!” Eric leaned forward. “They’re obsessed with their food supply. We know scientists have been working on a synthetic blood supply for years. The Gloamings took that research and perfected it. Yet their bodies have not been able to adjust. They need human blood. They will never admit that—they can’t. They need the human population to think that they’re not a threat so they pay top dollar for human blood donated to blood banks, but they make it sound like some kind of luxury—like caviar. But make no mistake: it’s a necessity. They need it to live. They have a blood bank at the institute filled by their captives.”

  “How is that even possible?” I asked, my own voice rising.

  “You know how many people disappear in every country? It’s fucking easy. Some humans come willingly. It’s not hard at all.”

  “And these human captives…They just sit there and give blood?”

  Eric laughed, a loud, scratchy cackle. “You know how foie gras is made? It’s the same thing. They’re strapped to a table and force-fed through a tube. I don’t know what they feed them but it’s been perfected by their scientists so that the humans’ blood is rich in iron and nutrients. The recipe is a closely guarded secret and so is the optimal measure of nutrients in the plasma—they know exactly what they need in the blood to keep them at their ideal health. Proteins, glucose, minerals, iron, carbon dioxide, red and white cells and platelets.” Eric stopped, out of breath. “Their bodies require an exemplary amount of each particular item. They have it all down to a science—to every microscopic particle. And only human blood can provide it. The humans they have are no more than a locked vessel for their pursuit.”

  Eric stopped. He looked around and lowered his voice, although at this point it was pretty much a stage whisper. “And I know what else they’re working on.”

  “Yes?”

  “They’ve been studying the effects of a nuclear winter on the population in general, especially Gloamings.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “What would be the point?”

  Eric looked at me like I was a child. “What’s their greatest weakness?” he asked slowly.

  “Sunlight,” I said.

  “Correct.” He nodded. “Remember the Kuwait war, when Iraq lit all of those oil wells on fire?”

  I didn’t want to point out that I had been in nursery school during that war, so I just kept silent.

  “The soot and smoke blacked out the sky,” Eric continued. “They want that. It would kill the ozone layer, of course, which would kill the humans even faster. But they don’t care. They love radiation.”

  I realized I was holding my breath. I saw what he was saying. “So, you’re saying…that they want to get rid of the sun.”

  Eric nodded. “Exactly. Imagine if there was never another sunrise. Permanent nighttime.” He leaned forward. “And I have proof.”

  “Well, where’s the proof?” Barbara yelled as we sat in my cramped modular office. She had her fists balled up. I could never tell where she kept all that nervous tension.

  I felt the other reporters staring at us over the cubicle walls. “Keep your voice down,” I told her. “He didn’t actually give it to me. You know confidential sources aren’t going to spill their guts on the first night.”

  “Not like the girls you date,” she replied.

  Classy, I thought.

  Eric was jumpy as fuck, so I waited for him to reach out again. And waited. Then I dropped him a quick note. And then another. I must have emailed him ten times before it occurred to me that perhaps Eric wasn’t who he portrayed himself to be. Was I being played?

  A week later I received a call from a detective with the Seattle police department informing me that Eric had been found murdered in his apartment the night before. The shock lasted a couple of seconds. “How did you get my name?” I asked. Barbara was staring at me over the wall between our cubicles.

  “I’d prefer to discuss it in person, if possible, Mr. Liu,” the detective said.

  I told him I would be on the next plane out.

  “You bet your ass you’ll be on the next plane out,” Barbara said when I hung up. “With me next to you. And I want the goddamn aisle seat.”

  In Seattle, I met Detective Harold Moss at the precinct station. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Liu,” Moss said, motioning for me to sit.

  “Not a problem.”

  “Well, the reason I made contact with you was, we found Eric’s body on the floor. There was a piece of paper. It had your name and number scribbled on it. There was blood on the paper too. As if it was written while he was being attacked.”

  “How could you know that?” I asked.

  Moss glared. “Well, the paper was inside his mouth.”

  He tossed a file on the desk and a couple of photos slipped out. I picked them up and gasped at the scene: Eric Holcombe upside down, naked, and nailed to a wall in an X figure, his large body impossibly white. I had seen enough pictures of Gloaming kills to recognize the signs.

  “The blood was drained from the body, correct?”

  Moss’s beady eyes cut to me. “Good catch. You’ve got experience with the Gl
oamings.”

  I nodded, but I was barely listening at this point. I couldn’t wait to tell Barbara.

  She was waiting for me at a Starbucks around the corner. “You want to break into what?” Barbara yelled.

  I was waiting for her to punch me in the arm or chest—her common nonverbal reply to one of my crazy propositions. But it hadn’t come. “Look, it’s not really—” And there it was, a sharp punch on my forearm. I winced. “It’s not really breaking in. Technically no one lives there anymore.” I wasn’t even sure I believed that reasoning, but it was worth a try.

  “Okay,” Barbara said. She dropped her cup of coffee, still half full and steaming hot, in the trash. “I’m not even arguing with that logic.”

  Within an hour we were standing across the street from Eric’s Rainier district apartment building. A single officer guarded the front door, smoking a cigarette and walking back and forth to ward off the boredom.

  “He’s not letting us in there, I guarantee it,” Barbara stated.

  I wasn’t about to give up at the first sign of police. Ah—I could see the solution right in front of my face. “Behind the building. We’ll go up the fire escape.” I cut my eyes to Barbara but she was busy looking the other way. “Come on.” I brushed her arm and she followed me behind the building, where two cars were parked.

  “There we go.” I pointed to the drop ladder that began the fire escape that vined up the back of the building. “Watch my back,” I whispered as I jumped up and pulled it down. It made a mechanical groan.

  “Wake up the whole building, why don’t you?” Barbara said. “Do you know which one is his apartment?”

  “Third floor nearest to the end,” I replied. “Look—the window is even cracked open.”

  “Have fun. I’ll guard the bottom.” Barbara looked at me with a poker face and hands on her hips.

  “Both of us need to be up there so it doesn’t take so long searching the place.”

  Barbara sighed. “Okay. I just hope that ancient ladder holds both of our weight. I don’t have money for bail.”

  It took longer than I care to admit to climb to the third floor. Rung by rung, my arms burned, and I made a mental note to renew my lapsed gym membership. We had a close call on the second floor with a man cooking dinner in his kitchen, but luckily his ridiculously oversize potted plant hid us until he went into another room and we could sneak past.

  Once inside Eric’s apartment, I flicked on my phone’s flashlight. Plastic coverings, labels, tarps, and bags were scattered in the living room, remnants of the recent police forensic crew and their search for DNA.

  “Any idea what we’re looking for?” Barbara asked as she threw pillows off the couch and looked on the shelves that lined the wall.

  I could only stare at the marked outline on the wall where Eric’s body had been nailed. Could I have done something to protect him? Probably not; his hysteria had kept any sane person at bay. But there was a reason he had my name in his mouth when he was killed. He knew I would come looking.

  I stood in the middle of the living room, sweat rolling down my body. I stepped into the kitchen and looked through the cupboards: nothing. Barbara stood behind me, her mouth pursed. “There has to be something here,” she said.

  Where would Eric hide something he didn’t want the Gloamings to find?

  And then I saw a few packages of ramen noodles next to the knife rack. Ramen…

  It couldn’t be that simple.

  Then again, sometimes the best hiding place is in plain sight.

  I grabbed the packages. Hard ramen spilled all over the floor. One of the packages was already open, and inside, buried at the bottom, lay a flash drive.

  Barbara and I looked at each other. “Motherfucker!” we both whispered.

  On the plane ride back to New York, I plugged the thumb drive into my laptop. Eric had filled it with pictures of the institute.

  The pictures were horrifying: modified stainless steel meat hooks suspended from the ceiling; bodies hung like pieces of meat; rows of functional oxygen saturation machines that measured arterial hemoglobin measurements; miles of polypropylene tubes attached to workstation racks; over three stories of low-temperature freezers, mix frozen epoxies, cryogenic detectors, blood bank refrigerated centrifuges and blood storage cabinets; human holding pods with chains and modified metal hog pens with head locks.

  More disturbing were the pictures of hundreds of human bodies held in these hog pens and holding pods, faces numb from what could only be sedatives or pain.

  For once, Barbara was speechless. “Unreal,” I could only whisper.

  We could only look at the pictures for so long on the plane. When we got back to the office in New York, we kept going through all the files obsessively. A few times, Barbara stood up and proclaimed, “Fuck this,” and took the elevator downstairs to chain-smoke and stare at the Manhattan traffic. Asleep or awake, nightmares filled my head.

  BuzzFeed hired forensic computer and photographic specialists, under strict nondisclosure agreements, to certify that the pictures had not been altered in any way, and then published our story a week after our return from Seattle. We called it “The Institute of Terror.”

  Every news organization on television, in print, and on the Internet took hold of the story and added to it.

  Daily Mail [United Kingdom]: “Gloaming Grocery Store of Humans!”

  New York Times: “Gloaming Abuses at Institute”

  Times of India: “Gloaming Terror Uncovered”

  Sydney Morning Herald [Australia]: “Feeding Gloamings Detailed in Report”

  Asahi Shimbun [Japan]: “Gloaming Terrors in America”

  Politicians in different countries denounced the institute, if the facts were to bear out. They called for an investigation to ensure that the institute’s subjects were treated fairly and voluntarily.

  BuzzFeed had a field day with our scoop, working overtime to promote the story—and Barbara and me, the “Woodward and Bernstein of the digital era”—in the months following. We toured the morning talk shows, CNN, The Rachel Maddow Show, Sky News, and the BBC World News, ready and eager to discuss our story. More importantly, we had to refute the Gloamings’ allegations that our evidence was falsified.

  One Friday, I sat with Barbara on the sidewalk dining area of a Mexican restaurant off West Fourth Street, watching the early evening crowds. I couldn’t feel any joy.

  “What’s wrong?” Barbara asked. “You own this town. At least for another fifteen minutes.”

  “You know Buzz Aldrin was the second man to step on the moon. He wrote a book when he left the astronaut program, about his clinical depression and alcoholism. And his whole point was, he said something like, ‘What do you do when you realize your life’s ambition at age thirty-nine?’ I feel the same way.”

  “I feel great about it. I’m already looking for the next adventure.” Barbara took a bite of her taco. “We’re already hated by all the Gloamings. Fuck them! They don’t run our lives.”

  Just that morning, the president had expressed feeling a “great disturbance” thanks to the details our article revealed. She promised a federal investigation into the institute to determine if it was following all relevant federal laws. And in the coming weeks, the FBI would open an investigation, which is where the first signs of the real conflict began.

  Amazing that it all began in a messy apartment, in a bag of ramen noodles.

  But thanks to my meeting with Eric, I knew even more. The Gloamings’ “blood bank” was just the beginning. Their goals were more innovative and horrifying but there was no way I could publish these allegations without the requisite proof—and that was something I did not have at this point.

  That Friday evening, before we could even know the changes that were nearly upon us, I already felt the nervousness of dusk as the sun retreated.

  All I wanted to do was find a safe place to hide—to stop spending every night looking over my shoulder, praying for daylight.

&n
bsp; Chapter 19

  In-Between Days

  The Seeker

  Museums are never open late at night. I miss the feeling of time crawling to a stop, of staring at a piece of art. On a snowbound Wednesday I broke into the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. A simple and satisfying activity. Inside, I spent hours staring at Andrew Wyeth’s Wind from the Sea. As if I were actually looking out of that window and could feel the breeze that moved the curtains. This was feeling, and that feeling was loneliness.

  I wept in front of The Ghent Altarpiece, its vivid re-creations and symbols. I wept standing next to the recently re-created Matthew Barney’s Vaseline sculptures, which gave off an electric chill of reality.

  Most of the time, though, I’m reduced to relying on my memory to realize how beautiful art tempted and amazed me. One night I found myself standing in the living room of one of the most wanted drug lords in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico. I stared at his prized possession: Vermeer’s The Concert. One of the most sought-after stolen works of art. I stood there for an hour, more, calm and centered, my body canted toward it. He indulged me because he thought he would fuck me, and that I would re-create him. It wasn’t to be. I slipped out before his guards even knew I had left.

  Instead, I walked to a bar in Sinaloa and watched an old man play a flamenco guitar and sing a feathery, halting corrido about a man who lost his wife to a wealthy landowner. The bar was like a painting of life in that moment: couples kissing, couples ignoring each other, someone alone with a beer for company. The loneliness of these broken people could devour your soul. So many puzzles in those I come across. The lure of searching for something that will show me my soul. The days of me indulging in pain to forget are over. From here on I resolved to step off the straight path and only follow detours.