by Sloan Archer
Jason, amateurish criminal that he was, had foolishly believed that he’d be able to fly under the radar (no pun intended) if he hopped a flight leaving from Los Angeles instead of San Francisco. Jason had no idea who he was dealing with. If he had, he would have saved himself the trouble. The VGO could find anyone, anywhere, at any time. This, I knew from experience.
Jason was apprehended at the airport by Joseph’s “collection engineers” (that’s VGO speak for abductors), and was subsequently held in a location that was never disclosed to me. I didn’t want to know specifics about what went on once a person was “collected” by the VGO, so Joseph did me a solid by keeping me in the dark about Jason’s presumed torture. The worst I could imagine was still probably better than what my aspiring poisoner had actually endured. I wasn’t gullible enough to believe that Joseph wouldn’t hurt Jason if I asked him not to, so I saved myself the breath. Fortune cookie-dropping aside, as far as the VGO were concerned, Jason was a coconspirator of the Nolans. End of story.
Joseph’s methods of gathering information (full body shudder) must have been pretty persuasive. After his capture, it didn’t take Jason much time at all to roll on his employers. Perhaps Jason’s disloyalty also stemmed from his apathy. He wasn’t a ruthless fanatic like Richard and Maxine, seeking to be martyred for his cause. Jason had no cause. Joseph later confirmed that Jason had told him the same thing he’d told me: He had only helped the Nolans because they’d paid him a lot of money to do their bidding. He cared absolutely nothing about seeking vengeance on vampires. In fact, Joseph wasn’t entirely convinced that Jason even knew that vampires existed in the real world.
Jason must have figured out mighty fast that the VGO weren’t going to let him live—now he knew how I had felt when he’d locked me inside the shed—because he didn’t make an effort to beg for his life. Prior to his death, however, Jason did make a bargain with Joseph. He would give up the Nolans whereabouts if, in return, the VGO promised to pay his wife and child the money the Nolans owed him for his services. Jason really didn’t have a choice in the matter—the VGO would have made him talk regardless—but a deal was struck nonetheless. Joseph assured me that he’d made good on his word.
Thanks to Jason’s betrayal, my great-grandparents were apprehended by the VGO. I couldn’t believe it when Joseph told me where they’d been hiding. Neither could Robert. They’d been staying in a luxury hotel just a couple blocks down from their New York City penthouse. They’d been using an assumed name: the Rolans. (They’d really made the effort with that alias, hmm?)
And Richard and Maxine’s overconfidence wasn’t even the crazy part. According to Joseph, the “Rolans” behaved almost as if they were happy to have been captured. They mocked the VGO with all the nasty little things they’d been up to since fleeing Napa, showing zero concern about suffering the wrath of livid vampires.
Like Jason, Richard and Maxine knew that the VGO would never let them live, so they went all-in with their taunting—Richard especially. At age ninety-four, he probably figured that he’d done all the living that could be done. Maybe he was hoping that if he made the VGO angry enough they’d lose their tempers altogether and end him quickly.
The Nolans bragged to the VGO how they were going to end all vampires, and that it was only a matter of time before the world witnessed their destruction. They added that they only regretted getting caught because now they weren’t going to be around to witness immortals suffering firsthand.
The VGO initially dismissed the Nolans as members of Team Crackpot: demented old humans who had lived on the planet about twenty years longer than nature should have allowed. Then, however, the VGO started to learn of the awful occurrences taking place all over the globe. Vampires were turning back into human. Worse, once they became human, it was impossible for them to turn back.
The crazy bastards had done it. The Nolans had actually managed to replicate Leopold’s serum using—guess what—the blood they’d stolen from my veins.
My destiny was being fulfilled, just as Michael Graves, proven not so paranoid after all, had predicted. You can imagine how that made me feel, with a best friend and husband who were vampires.
Had the VGO killed Richard and Maxine off in haste, they would have been in real trouble. Seemed they’d learned a valuable lesson after the debacle with all the murdered scientists in the lab: hesitate before assassinate. (Catchy, right?)
A serious question was posed that nobody could find an answer to: Exactly how had the Nolans managed to distribute the serum? Despite how much they were threatened (and undoubtedly tortured), the Nolans would not give up that information. They were their own extra-nutty brand of geriatric kamikazes, willing to sacrifice themselves in death if that meant winning their war against vampires.
Those infected by the vampire epidemic were random; it didn’t appear as if a specific gender, race, economic group, or age had been targeted. They were located in random pockets around the world. The times they changed over were random. All of it: random-random-random.
The VGO launched a global investigation, ceaselessly deploying reps to interview those who had suddenly lost their immorality. Was it possible that they’d been punctured and not realized it? Had they sampled any unusual blood—blood from an exotic animal, perhaps, or from a human who could have been polluted by radiation? Had they gone anywhere or done anything—anything at all—that was out of the ordinary? The data provided by residents from one country was crosschecked with data from other countries located clear on the other side of the world. No matter where they were on the globe, the answers the new humans gave were the same: they hadn’t been stabbed or shot—not by a needle, not by a dart, and most definitely not by a serum-tipped bullet. They’d gotten their blood from the same bank that they’d always gotten it from. No, they’d done absolutely nothing out of the ordinary . . . One minute they were vampire, the next they were human.
Things took a turn for the worse when members of the VGO started changing. Joseph, who remained vampire despite his colleagues changing all around him, began to study the data. He could find no connection and was at an utter loss.
Then, one night Joseph had an epiphany just by being at the right place at the right time. He overheard a man on a cell phone say, “I’m human and I make mistakes,” and it got him thinking. What if they were concentrating on the wrong species? What if it was something the humans had been given that was causing the vampires to change? The VGO had been so focused on vampires that they hadn’t stopped to consider humans!
With this new theory, Joseph approached the Nolans, who still remained tightlipped. But, unfortunately for Richard and Maxine, Joseph had also had another epiphany that night, except this one was in regard to his prisoners.
The VGO had been (torturing) applying pressure on the Nolans, no doubt about that. But what Joseph now realized was that they’d overlooked Richard and Maxine’s true sweet spots of agony: each other. Richard and Maxine were willing to die for their cause, which they’d both proved by not crumbling after being subjected to unspeakable torment (again, I didn’t want to know specifics). But what if the torture Richard and Maxine were threatened with was aimed at their partner?
It worked. Surprisingly, it was my great-grandfather who caved. Richard may have hated many things, but his wife wasn’t one of them. He couldn’t bear to see Maxine suffer. So he talked.
The VGO got their answer. They finally knew how the Nolans had done it.
With the Nolans dead (you didn’t think that the VGO would let them live, did you?), the remaining vampire VGO members could get cracking on finding a remedy.
And that’s when things started getting really awful.
18
It was in the water that humans were drinking. Vampires across the globe were dying off—starting to live again as humans with no chance of ever turning back—all because of what Richard and Maxine had put in the water supply: my blood.
It wasn’t just my blood they’d used, however, but some ki
nd of virus they’d created with it. I was no scientist, so I didn’t know exactly how the virus functioned on a chemical or biological level, but the way Joseph described it made it sound as if Leopold’s original serum had been recreated in a slightly altered form. This new formula had been chemically manipulated so it could be given to humans instead of vampires, like the original serum had been intended.
The Nolans sent their cronies out to the farthest corners of the world to poison the water supply. They couldn’t cover every aqueduct in every city in every country, obviously, but they still were able to cause significant damage because of their strategic mapping.
This was how it worked: Humans drank the tainted water, totally unaware that they were doing so. It was just like how some cities in America added fluoride to the water unbeknownst to the residents drinking it. The water contaminated with the virus in no way harmed humans—of course it didn’t, since Richard and Maxine had no problem with mortals—but it did hurt vampires who drank blood from humans who’d sampled the water.
Once a vampire drank from an infected human, it was game over: goodbye immortality, hello humanism. And if a vampire drank from a new human—a vampire who’d recently been turned mortal, that is—then that vampire would also become human. It was a vicious, vicious cycle.
Unless they actually wanted to become mortal (and there were a few vamps out there who wanted to, like Jerry), vampires now equated drinking blood with playing Russian roulette, since they had no way of discerning which humans had been infected by the water. The VGO had a rough idea of which areas had been infected, but beyond that there was no way to tell. Vampires became terrified to go to blood banks, even, because the supplies had already been corrupted by the time the VGO had figured out what was happening.
I wondered if my psychotic great-grandparents ever took a step back from their scheming long enough to reflect on the backlash that would follow, should their plans of vampire genocide come to fruition. My guess was no. Had the Nolans employed any foresight they would have realized that vampires weren’t going to be the only species that would suffer. Humans would suffer, too, and maybe even worse than the vampires.
Vampires began purposely starving themselves. The reason behind this was that they could recover from starvation but not from being permanently stripped of their immortality. Vampires could survive a very long time without blood. Their existence would be a painful one, but they would still be immortal. However, what many vampires didn’t seem to grasp was the extent of how awful their quality of life would be when they were famished. They’d be weak and sick and have zero impulse control—that was expected. It was the accompanying madness that came along with starvation that most vamps hadn’t considered.
Vampires the world over fell ill. With no impulse control, and out of their minds on hunger, they began attacking humans on the street. Murder rates in every major city on the planet skyrocketed. The VGO tried their hardest to get a handle on the situation, but with their members turning human right and left, they had their own catastrophes to contend with.
Fanning the flames of disaster were the frequent kidnappings. Picture for a moment what would happen to humans if suddenly all the food on the planet possibly contained poison—that every single bite a human took might be their last. To vampires, returning to humanism permanently was on par with being poisoned. So, with all food on earth becoming potentially lethal, imagine how humans would react after stumbling upon crops they knew for certain weren’t tainted. They’d hoard that food supply, right? Maybe even fight over it?
See where I’m going with this?
To vampires, mortals who hadn’t received the bad water became the unspoiled crops. Some humans, once verified “clean,” were kidnapped and held captive for weeks on end. They were considered nothing more than a food supply to hungry, crazed vampires. Some humans were trafficked, sold like cattle in vampire black markets. And accidents happened. Sometimes the vamps got a little overzealous with their food supply, draining them completely.
The news each day was rife with grim tales of exsanguinated citizens washing up on shorelines. Drained humans were also found in cars and alleyways, and some were flung off rooftops. Terrified humans had no idea what to make of it, though vampires were never truly thought of as the culprit . . . Because vampires, naturally, were folklore. Humans pointed their fingers at religious cults, drug dealers, serial killers, and the old standby, terrorists, for the horror that was taking place around them.
I was only privy to the real story because of my affiliation with the VGO, which I was beginning to think wasn’t such a great thing. Sometimes ignorance truly is bliss. Hugely pregnant and ready to pop, I could have used some bliss. Did it make me feel better knowing that, no, it actually wasn’t assemblages of PCP-addicted Satanists or revenge-obsessed drug cartel members responsible for the killings—that it was, in fact, starved vampires? No, it really didn’t. The human race was in serious trouble. That was all the information I required.
Crackpots, as Joseph liked to call them, indeed had their conspiracy theories. The funny thing was that the humans who were being dismissed as insane were usually right on the money. Reputable news sources, however, wouldn’t go anywhere near the theories about vampires being responsible for the attacks. If anything, the crackpots endorsed the seemingly ridiculousness of vampirism, which was about the only silver lining in the whole debacle. That and Jerry becoming human.
Jerry, who’d desperately wanted to be human, got his wish after drinking the blood of his tainted husband. He’d gotten a brief taste of mortality after my blood had finally kicked in, but he’d already reverted back to vampirism by the time the water epidemic was in full effect. After Tim’s blood changed him back into a human once more, Jerry had no interest in being cured and was over the moon about his new mortality. He did, however, feel for the stricken vampires who were close to him.
That was all we—the humans in the know about the water epidemic—could do: pity the innocent vamps who’d suffered at the hands of Richard and Maxine. I tried to help as much as I could, offering my plasma to the scientists who were working on a cure. Because my blood was unique, I was hoping that maybe it would offer a reversal to the epidemic. Fighting fire with fire, if you will.
My blood didn’t help.
Nothing did.
The VGO—what was left of them—labored in underground labs around the clock trying to remedy the epidemic. They were unsuccessful, even after they began utilizing Leopold’s resources from when he’d created the original serum. The problem was that Leopold didn’t have very many resources left for the VGO to explore, since all his data (and don’t forget his scientists) were destroyed in the fire the VGO had set.
The most disconcerting thing of all was that some vampires seemed to be immune to the epidemic. Joseph, for example, had ingested some of the same blood that his now-human colleagues had and he remained unchanged. VGO scientists tested Joseph’s blood against that of tainted humans; the tainted human blood had absolutely no consequence on him.
With Joseph’s inexplicable immunity in mind, the VGO set out to create an antivenin to remedy whatever the Nolans had put in the water. And, again, just like what had happened when the VGO tried to use my blood to find a cure, it didn’t work.
Liz and Robert, who remained vampire, were fortunate enough to evade infection. Their good health had nothing to do with their blood, but with sheer dumb luck (which is sometimes the best kind of luck anyone can have). Back before the epidemic had broken out, I’d questioned Robert for stockpiling so much blood. Robert had a cache of it in the basement section of the house, much like a wine cellar, which I’d never understood. He said that he slept better knowing that it was there. He’d told me that he’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. I used to tease Robert for his hoarding, declaring that he was like those nutty humans who’d gone overboard in 1999 by building bomb shelters in preparation of Y2K.
I didn’t tease Robert anymore.
It was that wine cellar of blood that saved both Robert and Liz. On the very day—the very hour, actually—that we’d gotten word from the VGO about the water supply being polluted, Liz and Robert were heading out together to buy blood from their usual bank. That blood bank, we later found out, had the highest percentage of tainted supply in all of Northern California.
Thanks to the cache of blood in our basement, Robert and Liz were safe . . . at least for a while. But things would start to get hairy soon if an antivenin wasn’t achieved. Robert’s blood supply wouldn’t last forever.
The devil is in the details. I’d heard that phrase many times before, but I’d never quite grasped its true meaning until the night of that critical chat with Liz, Joseph, and Robert. Except, in this case, it was more like the angel being in the amoeba . . .
Liz and Joseph, who had just started dating, were over for Christmas dinner, though Christmas was officially a couple weeks away. Sure, the VGO were knee-deep in the worst epidemic vampires of the world had ever faced, but Joseph had to let steam off every once in a while or else he would have lost it. I felt that was reasonable.
Dinner, of course, was lots and lots of actual food for pregnant me, and very, very small portions of blood for Robert, Liz, and Joseph. Vampires were in the middle of a drought, after all, and forced into rationing. This meant only drinking enough blood to stay alive.
We were gathered in the living room after dinner, warming our bones by the fire. (Vampires tended to feel chilly when malnourished, and I, being pregnant, was always either boiling or freezing. On that night I was freezing). We were talking about home decorating, and Liz started chiding Joseph about a coffee table she’d stopped him from ordering online.