A People's History of the Vampire Uprising_A Novel

by Raymond A. Villareal

  “This is a lot larger than it seemed in the diagrams,” Jack said as he skipped over a pile of rotted wood. “I’ll go down this way,” he continued with an expectant look, as if he wanted someone to disagree with him.

  “Sounds good,” Hector replied while trying to look everywhere at once with his light.

  “Go down the opposite way, Hector, and I’ll take this side with the office,” I told him.

  He looked at me with a fixed gaze. “Are you sure? I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “You’ll be in the other room,” I countered. “If I need you it would take all of ten seconds for you to be here. And if you need me, the same.” He nodded and walked across the room with his eyes on me until the darkness took his face from me.

  I took each step deliberately with my flashlight in front of me like a sacred staff of invulnerability. I shined the light from end to end but it was only trash and furniture. Ducking under a fallen beam, I slipped inside the office and saw a torn-up old couch and a desk tilted from a missing leg. Nothing that indicated there was anyone else but vagrants in this area.

  I knew that I should go back and find Hector and Jack, but I wanted to check out the corner area of the floor first. My feet could barely keep up with the light shining on the ground as I stepped over bottles and needles strewn every few feet. A large doorway was located at the end of the wall and I couldn’t make out exactly where it would lead, given its proximity to the walls.

  A freight elevator. I should have guessed. I lifted the gated door and the metal accordion scissor gate and stepped inside. The wood reeked of rotting water damage and that should have been a clue to step out, but I went one foot too far and—

  Snap!

  I wasn’t sure if it was the wood or my ankle that made the sound, but the pain made me scream from anger and not fear. This would bring Hector and Jack running this way, for better or worse. I pulled my foot out from the splintered wooden floor and leaned against the wall.

  I heard Hector’s and Jack’s loud voices calling my name.

  As my eyes scanned the room, my nose twitched with that familiar sweet smell, and my instincts kicked in as my knees buckled. I rose up with pain and turned to sprint—

  A figure stepped in front of me from I don’t know where and I tried to lift my other leg but it wouldn’t move with me and I slipped again, stumbling back against the wall, and the figure slammed the metal gate down and closed the elevator door. Banging sounds rang through the elevator as Hector and Jack attempted to force their way inside. No hope of that happening.

  The elevator ascended and I was surprised there was even any electricity in this building to power it. But up we went and it seemed I had too much time to think about it. It’s weird what thoughts we have in times like this. My old German grad school boyfriend came to mind. So eccentric. People would ask where he was from and he would always answer, “I am from the Free State of Thuringia.” He was a nervous bundle of energy, always lamenting the many things that could go wrong in any situation, however benign—“We shouldn’t eat there. We could get sick or not find parking or get mugged or…” He hated the situations I would find myself in. Every time I involved him in something, he would mutter the German word durchwurschteln. It was one of those untranslatable foreign words. He said it meant literally to “sausage” through a situation by winging it, usually compounding the problem somewhat. I took to muttering “Durchwurschteln” to myself in certain sticky situations. Like this one. I was going to sausage myself out of this one, one way or another.

  “Why are you here?” the voice asked in a cultivated Australian accent.

  I couldn’t even bring myself to shine the flashlight on his face then, so I gradually moved it up with care as if it weren’t even my own hand. His face was a mess, covered with curly black hair, open scabs, and an angry red tint. His hunched body was thin, as if it were merely skin covering bones without any muscles in between.

  The elevator stopped with a shake. The man opened the metal screen and pulled up the door with a rattle. Another door stood about five feet away. He then reached out his hand to me and I could only stare at it for a moment before grabbing it and rising up. I stumbled on one leg and placed a hand on his shoulder as he walked and I hopped to the door, scanning for any escape routes.

  He opened the door and a rush of wind and rain slapped my face. We were on the roof.

  The Wanderer led me to the edge of the building, with the lights below blinking and the sound of the chaos below filtering up ever so slightly. My hands and legs shook and the pain in my ankle seemed to disappear for a moment, taken over by the nerves firing off shots throughout my body.

  “Why are you here?” he asked again.

  “I’m—I’m a doctor with the Centers for Disease Control in the United States.” My breath came out fast and I was talking too quickly. “I’m looking for a sample of your blood or tissue for my research into the NOBI virus.”

  The Wanderer laughed and it sounded like two rocks scraping together. His lips were cracked and swollen. “I’m not well. I’m not like the others.”

  “I know that,” I replied. “That is exactly why I want a sample.”

  He looked me directly in the eyes and it made me feel the fear of Liza Sole all over again. “Is that why you brought the man with the gun?” he spit out.

  “Well, that’s one of the reasons,” I answered, my hand shaky on the flashlight.

  He laughed again and a chill went up my neck like a cold hand around it. “Points for honesty, Doctor. But you’re still in the negative, my dear. I used to be a doctor myself, you know.”

  For some reason that statement made me move closer to him for a better look, as if I could see the doctor inside him. “What did you practice?”

  “I was an oncologist. A pediatric oncologist, if you must know.”

  “That’s a tough one.”

  “Tell me about it,” he continued. “I can tell you the name of every child that died under my care. Every time it happened I thought about joining them. I would think of different ways to do it. If there even is a heaven, I thought they might be at the gates waiting for me. Either to welcome me or throw things at me.”

  “I would say the former.”

  “You will never be able to know or understand what we feel,” he stated.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that but I felt offended in some way. “Maybe so,” I finally answered as I rubbed my ankle.

  “We feel everything. It’s like being attacked by parasites every second of the day. Our minds are compartmentalized: there is madness, truth, love, hope…But nothing compels us more than our own survival. You can look in your microscopes all day but we will always be here.”

  His eyes left my face and looked out over the skyline. “What kind of blueprint or design could have made people like us? What do you see in your microscopes so casually to think you can see what is inside? Our fecundity is not measured in eggs or seeds or environment! And you’re going to find a so-called cure with your microscopes! ‘The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.’ Isn’t that what they say?”

  “I’m not—”

  He coughed and stepped back a bit. “Fuck. I’ve never been good at being the villain. Why would you want my blood? I’m a mess. I have pain every minute of the day, like my body is trying to burn whatever is inside of me. Every second of the day. They say we live two hundred or more years. I can’t imagine being in purgatory for so long.”

  “I don’t mean to—”

  “Yes you do!” He looked back at me with a fatigue of a hundred years. “The sun will be up soon. I can feel the tingling in my spine. Some dormant fear response, I imagine. I do miss the daylight for whatever reason. I miss it all. The brightness of it all.”

  “I would miss it all,” I replied, not sure what I was thinking or saying. “It’s where things come to life. Nothing is hidden.”

  “Everything is hidden.”

  A loud b
ang on the rooftop door rang through the rain-splattered night and I jerked my head with the sound.

  “Your friends are here,” he said.

  “They’re probably angry,” I replied, as if he needed a warning.

  I almost screamed for help when he held up his hand. “Look, I’m still a doctor. I still have my oaths. Take it. Take the blood and tissue. Take it all.”

  I opened my bag and pulled out my blood draw tubes and a knife. He held out his arm for me. “This shouldn’t take long,” I told him.

  “What’s time to me?” he asked, with the hint of a smile, but with the rain in my face I wasn’t so sure. He put his arm under my shoulders to hold me up. I pulled up the sleeve of his dirty white shirt and saw a tattoo sleeve of faces.

  I looked up at him and he could sense my questions. “They’re just people. Cut them out. Take the flesh and blood, if you must.”

  My knife sliced his skin and a smell hit my nose like an odd fragrance—unlike the metallic scent from our own blood. The chunk of skin peeled off and I placed it in a secure metal container. The Wanderer tilted his head back as the blood flowed out into the vial, but then he tilted it forward, close to my face, and I wondered if he was becoming ill. Or if I was in danger…

  A loud bang and crack behind the lone door jerked my head up as I capped the last vial of blood. I didn’t even feel him step away from me as I heard the shouts of Hector and Jack, and I flexed my leg to rise and call off the dogs when bullets whizzed by and the Wanderer pushed me to the ground, and he stood up on the ledge, the flapping lights skewed from the rain and his body windblown like a tattered scarecrow. He stepped off the ledge and I screamed in silence as the sunlight rose above the darkness and through the angry clouds.

  My mind was a mess. The boxes where I compartmentalized everything were spilling over and thoughts pushed aside each other like maniacs bum-rushing a stage. Our bags were packed on the hotel bed, and Hector sat next to me on the couch, staring at the samples sitting snug inside the medical case. “This is more valuable than we know.”

  I nodded my head. “Look, we need to get out of this hotel and back to the lab before my paranoia hits harder.”

  “This is totally going to change your research.”

  “I hope so,” I said with a sour look on my face. But I wondered if this would really make a difference in my research, or if it would only lead me down another mad search inside the maze of the NOBI virus that seemed to change with every re-creation. “I still need blood from Liza Sole—I need to see the origins—and that’s about as likely as winning the lottery.”

  Hector ran his hand through his hair and sighed. “If only I had done a true, substantial autopsy we would have had all kinds of specimens to choose from.” He pointed to the specimen in the container. “What is that? Why is it so dark?”

  “The guy had a tattoo sleeve. By the way, what kind of autopsy did you do?” I was suddenly looking for a fight to calm my nerves.

  Hector shrugged with an impatient look on his face. “A cursory examination. I had to wait for you to arrive. Didn’t want the Feds to get mad at me. I only took—” He slammed his hand on the table and his phone bounced off the glass.

  “What?” I screamed.

  Hector jumped up from his chair. “Liza Sole. She had a tattoo near her waist. I took a picture—”

  “Okay, so?”

  “So, I was worried that it might degrade, so I cut it out!”

  I hopped up and held him still. “The tattoo? You kept it?”

  “Yes!”

  “You kept it!”

  “Yes! I put it in a specimen jar and put it in the alarmed refrigerator.” Hector looked up at the ceiling as if to thank whoever might be up there.

  “My God, I wonder if it’s still there,” I said, cursing the fact that I was in a Melbourne, Australia, hotel room and not in Nogales, Arizona. “We need to get back there now!”

  I could go crazy with the moon so bright…Hector drove the rental Prius down the dusty road, as I watched each crooked cactus on the highway from Phoenix to Nogales. It was monsoon season and dark clouds fought with the blue sky as I was a witness to it all. It looked so different from those early days, when we scoured the West like miners seeking the gold rush. Was the road always this long? Did the brush always sweep across the horizon with the sand? Back then the chase seemed so erratic and exciting—so intense and yet satisfying. I wasn’t so tired back then.

  I turned again to look out the back window. “That Escalade is still behind us,” I said with a smug look across my face.

  Hector checked the rearview. “Are you sure? There are a few cars behind us.”

  I rolled my eyes. “We’ve got the Wanderer sample and we might have another Liza Sole specimen soon. To say I’m pretty unnerved to have those samples in my possession would be an understatement. We need to get back to the lab.”

  He nodded at me. “No argument here.” He stole a glance at me. “But less paranoia, please.”

  I popped him in the arm.

  We pulled into the Nogales Department of Health; in it was the medical examiner’s office. I had waited until we were about twenty minutes away before I called Sheriff Wilson, in order to keep it low profile in case someone was listening to our phone calls and beat us to it. More paranoia, thank you. I was intentionally vague, but Wilson agreed to meet us. As our car pulled into the parking lot, the sheriff was waiting in front of the entrance with a worried look on his face.

  We stepped out of the car and shook hands. Hector grabbed him into a hug. “Good to see you, Sheriff,” he said.

  “Thank you so much for meeting us,” I added.

  Wilson shot us a wry smile, which wrinkled his face even more, before he gave us the slow drawl. “Good to see you two again. Gotta be honest. I’m concerned as to why you’re here all of a sudden.”

  As we walked inside, each of us talked over the others about the past year of our lives and how much the NOBI virus and all of the accompanying chaos had changed us in so many ways. Hector got to the point after a few moments. “I’m looking for a sample from the Liza Sole examination that might still be here, unless it was discarded,” he said as we made our way to the medical examiner’s rooms.

  “Do you have a new coroner?” I asked.

  Sheriff Wilson shook his head as he pulled off his cowboy hat and wiped the line between his tanned face and pale head with a handkerchief. “We’ve been sharing an ME with Tucson. She comes down as needed. I used the money saved to hire a few more deputies. God knows we need them more than ever with all the bloodsucker groupie tourists coming here to see the so-called birthplace.”

  “Seriously?” Hector asked.

  “Oh sure. They come into town looking for something that ain’t here. There are no Gloamings in this town, far as I know. And I would know. These tourists come in, cause trouble, then leave.”

  We stepped inside the autopsy room. Hector moved over to the big refrigerator. He scanned the large shelves filled with various samples, and if I’d been religious I might have said a prayer, but I could only hope that the give-and-take of the universe would allow us something good after such a long time.

  “Yes!” Hector shouted as he raised his hand, holding a large jar like a championship trophy. And inside the jar were the blood and tissue from the body of Liza Sole. Cue the confetti and the marching band…

  Hector shifted and grimaced on the lumpy bed as a squeak spilled out inside our cramped motel room. “We just had to stay in the same busted motel room, didn’t we?” he said.

  I shrugged and smiled. “Don’t we all miss the good old days?”

  “I totally miss being beat down by crazy Gloamings.”

  I threw up my hands and moaned. “Shit.”

  “What?” Hector said, sitting up.

  “The cooler needs more ice. I want those samples ice-cold.”

  Hector waved a hand at the refrigerator. “Why do you have to scream it? Use the fridge.”

  “I don’t tru
st it,” I answered. “Just when I was getting ready to relax.” There was no way I was going to safeguard the integrity of the specimens in some old broken-down motel refrigerator. I wouldn’t be able to sleep, worrying over whether they were cold enough. I grabbed a couple of the ice buckets from the top of the desk.

  “Need help?” Hector asked.

  I smirked. “I think I got this.” I stepped out of the room and into the warm Arizona breeze. I walked down the outside breezeway, past the other rooms, and into the laundry room, where the ice machine sat against the back wall. I knelt down and slid the bucket under the dispenser opening, and as I raised my hand to push the button I felt something hard and metal press against my head.

  “Mind if I look up to see who’s pointing a gun at my head?” I asked.

  “Put the ice in both buckets and get up,” a male voice told me.

  I complied and stood up, holding both buckets of ice.

  “We only want the samples,” the man, who was wearing a blue bomber jacket, said, still holding the gun on me. “Then you two can go on your way.”

  “Just like that?” I asked. I rolled my eyes, but inside my guts were churning like a pot of boiling water.

  “If you want it to be easy, then yes.”

  We walked back to the motel room and I cursed myself for staying at this shithole again. They say you should trust your instincts, but looking back now it seems I don’t have a great track record on that. I stopped in front of the room door.

  “Open the door, Doctor,” the man said.

  “I didn’t bring the key.”

  The man didn’t say anything for a moment and then nudged me with the point of the pistol as he stepped to the other side of the doorframe.

  I knocked on the door.

  Nothing.

  “Again,” the man whispered.

  I raised my hand to knock again when the door opened and Hector stood in front of me with an irritated look on his face. If we got out of this I promised to knock that look off with the back of my hand. His eyes scrunched up, his hands on his hips. “Next time take the key,” he said as he stepped aside and pulled my arm and body to the other side of the doorway. My eyes opened wide as I saw Sheriff Wilson on the other side of the door holding a gun, which he immediately slammed against the side of the head of the man in the blue bomber.