A People's History of the Vampire Uprising_A Novel
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Representative Drew’s daughter, Wendy, re-created at age twenty-two, when she graduated from college and fell in love with the famous Gloaming artist Peter Kiyokawa after a torrid affair that culminated in their separation, then reconciliation and subsequent separation. It was the stuff of gossip columns and Internet rumors.
Not surprisingly, a majority of the House considered the bill a nonstarter, and its prospects appeared bleak when the Speaker of the House assigned it to the House Judiciary Committee. Representative Bill Jones, the head of the committee, was a confident and unrepentant opponent of the Gloamings and the process of re-creation. Although his tone and language had softened since his earlier statements advocating a form of quarantine for the Gloamings and denouncing attempts to allocate federal funds for research into Gloaming and NOBI vaccines, he recently expressed concern as to whether the Gloamings were a threat to Homeland Security. Even some of his colleagues questioned whether he could be neutral and consider the alternatives.
Many of the major lobbying firms seemed unsure about how to proceed. Their only concern was to ensure that the potential legislation did not interfere with any private business interests when it came to accommodations. That was already agreed to by all parties, so the remainder of the proposal was left to the devices of each individual legislator. The real effect of that was that the Gloamings’ lobbying groups had the field to themselves when exerting their pressures and flattering with campaign donations. Protests from various anti-Gloaming groups were held in cities across the country but they were relatively peaceful.
At this point, everyone in Washington assumed that the bill would never make it out of committee. But Representative Jones, averse to being seen as a complete obstructionist and feeling the influence of other ranking members, allowed the committee to begin work on refining the bill to make it more palatable to the members at large on both sides of the aisle. And this was the point when Marcy Noll, counsel for the House Committee on Homeland Security, was asked to lead the judiciary staff to work on the bill. As this was an extremely high-profile bill pending in Congress, Jones was pleased to lend his input.
They began work with the most controversial parts of the proposed act. The Gloamings envisioned a portion of their bill to be a sort of Title IX for their community. For those who don’t know, Title IX is the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded educational institution. Basically, it made women’s athletic programs receive funding equal to what men’s programs receive. But this Gloaming Title IX would cover every aspect of university life to put the Gloamings on equal footing with non-Gloamings in college.
Marcy Noll floated the proposal to the NCAA and a coalition of higher education associations, and the pushback was pretty intense. Most of the universities objected primarily to the cost of keeping a university open with essentially twenty-four hours of classes. Not to mention operating twenty-four-hour stores and cafeterias and retrofitting dormitories or building underground dormitories to accommodate people who cannot be exposed to any amount of sunlight. In addition, the universities would have to ensure that there would be some kind of substance edible to Gloamings on campus. Compromise had to come eventually, but they felt early on that a good way to bridge the large gap would be to allow the universities a considerable amount of latitude in terms of how far they would be required to comply.
The judiciary staff proposed that any qualified university that accepted more than ten Gloamings in a regular school year would be obligated to offer night classes of an equivalent that would keep the Gloamings on a five-year degree plan. The educational institute would be required to offer night classes at a minimum of two nights per week during a semester.
In addition, it was decided to leave athletics and extracurriculars out of the bill and not enforce an accommodation for those types of activities.
The next and most important section of the bill pertained to accommodations for essential government functions. This was one of the more contentious aspects of any proposed bill. Most House members did not want to be blamed for any budget problems that would result from maintaining state offices for twenty-four-hour periods of time. Therefore, the staff actively sought compromises and rules that would be less burdensome on state governments.
The first function would be to restore full voting rights and access to polls for the Gloamings during hours when they could safely be outside. Most members on both sides of the aisle had no concerns about that aspect of the act. No one wanted to be accused of denying a segment of the population the right to vote. Any House member could easily sell this aspect of a bill to his or her constituents.
A subsequent and significant portion of the bill concerned the desire of the Gloamings to prohibit state and municipal governments from denying Gloaming access to essential public facilities. These services could range from the ability to acquire or renew a driver’s license to the opportunity to acquire a new birth certificate. This would be the issue of either opening state offices at night or building out Gloaming accommodations to all state government facilities. Either choice would incur significant expense, to be sure.
The Gloaming lobbyists realized early on that any private entity accommodations would have to wait until the national environment changed with the attitudes of the citizens toward the Gloamings. Making private businesses liable for not accommodating Gloamings would lead to no votes, and most legislators knew better than to proceed with any laws impacting business. Therefore, the concentration of the act would need to be focused primarily on governmental accommodations. At this point, the bill began to form into its more complete and final proposal. But there was still work to be done: getting the votes.
Appendix Three
ProPublica
December 20
Inside the Gloaming Investigation Unit of the FBI
Although loath to acknowledge a distinct unit to investigate a particular class of United States citizens, the FBI has reluctantly assembled a small unit to resolve certain crimes with Gloaming connections. Named the Division for Undetermined Crime Origins (DUCO), it has taken the lead in many crimes in which Gloaming involvement is suspected.
Agent Hugo Zumthor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been at the forefront of criminal investigations with Gloaming involvement. Early in his career, he investigated a Gloaming group known as the Honored Society, which was heavily involved in human trafficking for blood and the illegal importation of blood to certain communities. Zumthor tracked this criminal organization from Chicago to London, where the society peddled the vials of blood collected from various Eastern European countries. The blood was then brought to the United States through containerships, smuggled with legitimate goods. Zumthor uncovered the trafficking scheme during the investigation of a warlord in Benin City, Nigeria, who had been tasked with smuggling the cocaine shipments.
Further DUCO, CIA, and ATF efforts reveal that the Gloaming criminal clans were also heavily involved in human trafficking from various poor economic countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia corresponding with the drop in container blood trafficking. The conclusion was that the Gloamings were not receiving the nutrients they needed from degraded blood shipped in canisters and had decided to go straight to the source and begin to procure humans to meet their needs.
Given their lack of true organizational structure similar to that of other criminal entities, the Gloaming criminal clans seemed to operate as lateral parallel groups that coordinated their actions through meetings and digital communications, such as outmoded IM networks and less regulated WhatsApp and UPchat platforms. Similarly, they emphasized a type of inconspicuous lifestyle to their members, so as to not be perceptible as criminals to members of the public. However, “Gloamings were pretty conspicuous to begin with,” Agent Zumthor clarified. “I’m not sure it was all that effective as the clans expanded their activities to include money laundering, bid rigging in construction, theft, extortion, and weapons smuggling. Their pro
fits are invested in hotels, restaurants, and real estate. Stolen gold was used, from the start, to safeguard the financial capital of the Nick Bindon Claremont independence regime.” Concluded Zumthor, “At least we can see the shape of what we’re dealing with now.”
Although its budget is small compared with that of other divisions, the DUCO unit has proven its worth on many occasions, apprehending many suspects and breaking up various crime rings known to have Gloaming involvement.
Acknowledgments
Here is the bottom line: you wouldn’t be reading this book if it weren’t for my agent, Daniel Lazar at Writers House. I could thank him a million times and it wouldn’t be enough for all the support and help with the writing he gave me since the beginning. Thank you for believing in this book and fighting for me every step of the way. Also thanks to everyone at Writers House for all of their help, including Maja Nikolic (awesome foreign rights director) and Victoria Doherty-Munro.
A HUGE (they won’t let me use a 200-point font) thanks to my editor, Joshua Kendall, for crafting this book into something more than I thought it could ever be. I can’t say enough about our work together and how much I learned about the art of writing. I will always be grateful.
Thanks to everyone at Little, Brown, Mulholland, and Hachette, including Gabriella Mongelli for all of her help in the editing process. To copyeditor Nell Beram: I don’t know how you do it, but you have serious editing skills. Also, thank you to Ben Allen for all of his help.
THANK YOU to Michelle Kroes and Jon Cassir at Creative Artists Agency. I wish I could really tell you how mind-blowing it is to have movie agents. You two are incredible people. Also, thank you to Anna Jinks and Michelle McPhillips.
Much thanks to the incredible Mike Ireland at 20th Century Fox for believing in this book.
Thank you to everyone at the amazing 21 Laps Entertainment, especially Dan Cohen and Shawn Levy for seeing something special in this book. Two talented and great people.
All my friends and family in San Antonio.
My sister, Veronica Villareal Mittelbronn.
Bentley.
Mom (Ernestine Folk) and Dad (Raymond Villareal).
About the Author
Raymond A. Villareal is a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law and is currently a practicing attorney. He was born in San Antonio. This is his first novel.
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