by R. G. Nelson
“Very true; they are both awaiting his pleasure in the holes. Job well done,” Dr. Metz says. I can’t tell from his voice if he is being sarcastic or not, and his expression isn’t helping. He is still half-smiling in a cordial manner, but I can tell that he is eerily evaluating my every word, my every facial tick.
“So tell me, Adam, why so glum then? Why walking the hallways so intense and brooding?” he continues after a long, searching pause. “You're just following orders, are you not?”
“Yes, I am,” I admit. I move to try to go around him.
He takes a step back to block my path. He’s not a physically intimidating man based on appearance alone, but with vampires looks can be deathly deceiving. I halt as he locks eyes with me.
“Doesn’t mean you have to like them,” he offers. I’m not sure what he means by this, or what his game is exactly, but I’m keen to get away before I slip up somehow.
“Regardless of how I feel about my orders …” I start, my mind flashing to Vera and my resolve to do whatever’s necessary to protect her–to protect us, “it’s part of the job,” I conclude. I hope that this will satisfy whatever suspicion he has of me. “So can I go now?”
“Yes, yes, I suppose obeying orders like that is just a part of your job,” Metz continues, blatantly ignoring my request to exit this dialogue. “My job is actually quite different, though; I'm a scientist here.” Again, a slight eyebrow motion indicates that he is waiting for me to respond or something.
I really don’t know what he wants me to make of his statement. “Yeah, I figured that,” I finally say. I mean, everyone knows he’s the chief scientist guy here. And he definitely looks the part.
Dr. Metz apparently isn’t satisfied with my answer. He sighs softly as if disappointed. I hate feeling like I’m missing some big point that I should be getting. “They recruited me in a very similar fashion, actually.” He says this softly, very matter-of-factly. He looked away as he said it and only at the end re-met my gaze. His words and the pain trapped beneath the ice of his eyes combine to reveal a new meaning of this exchange for me. I suddenly think that I’ve been getting this whole conversation wrong.
“What do you mean?” I probe gently. I want to make sure that I’m not just seeing things that I want to.
“Well, quite simply, they tortured my family in front of me to get me to join. I broke eventually and was turned, but too late for my family, as it turned out.”
His voice holds no anger, no regret. To anyone else it would sound like a simple statement of historical fact. No one would suspect that he was bothered by it. For many vampires, they regard their human past as though it belonged to someone else. They can remember it and recount it from an emotional distance–or more like from across a gigantic emotional chasm. But I know. I know that he also empathized with Annie and her family and is feeling me out.
“That's horrible. I'm sorry,” I say.
I think he can tell that I’m being genuine. And I think I can tell that he likes this response, although he certainly doesn’t explicitly state it verbally. “What are you apologizing for? You didn't do it. And anyway, that was ages and ages ago–in a different life,” he responds simply. “And they gave me this wonderful gift of immortality.” Only his ironic smile lets me know that my thinking was on the right track.
“Will that happen to them?” I ask, nodding back at the holes where a scared little girl and her dad crouch in darkness. “Are they in real danger?”
Metz’s face again takes on an indifferent facade. “Yes, I expect so. But things must be sacrificed if we are to meet our goals.” His voice is full of enthusiasm–it’s almost cheery, in fact–as he finishes that statement. I wonder how long he’s been living with this mask on.
I must not be as good at disguising my emotions because he can tell that I’m unhappy with his response. The thought of Annie being tortured or worse by vampires to get her mother to comply with Joseph doesn’t sit well with me. I know that we can enthrall people for only short periods of time, but there’s got to be a more productive way to achieve our goals besides torturing children. Or at least, if not more productive, then more … moral. Even as I think this, it strikes me as amusing: a big, bad vampire wishing to be more moral.
With the way Dr. Metz is staring at me, I can’t help but feel that he is reading my mind. Or maybe I’m just an open book. But he’s apparently very curious about something. “You are not like the others,” he starts after a few moments. “New additions to our family are usually so eager to please, so eager to break their ties with humankind.” He again gives me the up and down treatment. “You appear quite to the contrary; you appear to have retained your conscience.” He pauses briefly before continuing, as if about to touch on a delicate subject. “Some might call it … your humanity,” he finally confides.
I stay silent. I don’t want to disappoint him, but I’m not sure how he can say that someone who has drunk blood from a living human being can have retained his humanity. I’ve done things, bad things, and I’m going to do more. I may not like them, or even agree with them, but I’ll do it if it comes down to them or me and Vera. I guess, though, I am at least still constantly fighting that little voice in the back of my head. Maybe that’s my fading humanity.
Again, I have this uncanny feeling that Metz senses the struggle inside me. “Tell you what–if your conscience bothers you, call me.” He writes his number on a piece of scratch paper that he pulls from his pocket. “I may be able to help you.” As an afterthought, he adds, “That is, we may be able to help each other.”
I take the paper hesitantly, not completely certain what he meant by that last comment. “Thanks. I'll keep it in mind.”
He steps back, finally unblocking my path, and I hustle past, looking back once or twice curiously. He stands and watches me go, his ice-blue gaze never wavering.
18)
It’s been a long series of nights, even by our standards. The pace of our operations is really intensifying, a mirror to the Movement’s escalating mob actions on the streets. As I drive, I rub the outside of my Kevlar suspiciously and feel the concave indentation from last night. Another close call. They’re getting less and less rare. My mind flashes back to when Jesús caught a glimpse of the deep impression as I pulled my torn shirt off over it.
“We got lucky, bro. This is bullshit–fighting like this when he could give us the strength we need,” Jesús vented. He punched the locker in frustration. It dented significantly under his preternatural blow, not unlike my body armor.
Hamad tried to calm him down, “Joseph must have his reasons.”
“Yeah, to him, we're expendable. He can always just make more of us,” Jesús countered. He held out his own battered Kevlar for us all to inspect.
Hamad saw it and looked grim. He also had not been happy about the assignment. “I'll speak to him again. Until then, we train harder.”
Jesús looked to me for support, but I just shrugged my shoulders. I completely agreed that it was bull-crap, but I knew that complaining to Hamad wouldn’t change anything. He knew the deal. He was in the boat getting soaked with us, too.
Hamad turned to me next. “You're really coming along. Stepping up.” I nodded solemnly. The praise felt good, but it came on the tails of another close brush with vampires. In truth, with the battle buzz fading behind me at that point, I was feeling a little shaken, like a sailor who had just survived a very rough ride at sea, but who knew he had to go back out on the ocean tomorrow.
I kinda sensed Hamad waiting for me to say something more. To confirm that I was okay with all this. That I’d back him and toe the line. And I knew that for Vera and our future, I would. But it was nice to know others were sometimes dissatisfied with the ways things were being run and not just me.
“Thanks. I just got lucky, I guess,” I finally got out.
“That wasn’t luck. You took down two of those Yakuza vamps yourself,” Hamad asserted.
It was true. I had. And at the time, it had felt great. “Well, Joseph said they were newborns and wouldn’t be a problem. And they were Triad, not Yakuza,” I said.
“What makes you say that? Just because they were in Chinatown? That one puta busted out a samurai sword on us,” Jesús said argumentatively.
All that was true. They had been in Chinatown, ironically not far from where our temporary base had been. But that wasn’t the give-away. “They were speaking Cantonese,” I intoned with an air of finality to end the conversation. No point in us fighting over things that didn’t matter just because we were frustrated with yet another assignment.
There had been four of them (against our more experienced three, as Joseph had pointed out). The vamps had come over from China, I guess to try their fortunes here. Unfortunately, they didn’t even speak enough English to understand our offer for them to join us–not that they probably would have, anyway. Now they are just ash.
That was last night.
In the blackness, I near the factory in our “going out car” (as we affectionately call it). With tinted windows and a constantly retouched midnight black exterior, I imagine to human eyes we must look like a shadow flickering by in the night when we run with no headlights, as is so often required these days. Joseph lends it only for special missions: assignments that require stealth and secrecy rather than the societal camouflage offered by normal vehicles. Missions that typically have violence included somewhere in the mix, in which it would be very bad to have someone catching a glimpse of a person inside a car fleeing the area of what will undoubtedly be a very hot crime scene in a matter of hours. Missions like tonight.
I begin to pull into the back alley that we use as an entrance to the base. The factory itself is shrouded in darkness; only a few specks of light escape from the boarded-up windows. Most of the activity occurs in the lower levels–Joseph chose this place partly for its huge underground facilities. I catch a quick glimpse of ice-blue eyes checking us out. Most humans would never know they were there.
In a matter of seconds, the graffiti-filled, rusted-over loading door begins to rise slowly up. It’s amazing how silent it is, given its visual state. To look at it, you’d think it hadn’t moved in years. Even the graffiti is probably a decade old at least (no contemporary tagger would last more than a minute in the vicinity with guards like these). Joseph’s been busy turning this place into a fully functional secret base. A base for the militia–not for the Movement. A place for vampires.
Inside the prep room, I shrug off my armor and inspect it. Yep, multiple bullets impacted in the vest further down under last night’s dent. I see now what I suspected earlier: One bullet managed to punch its way through into my chest. Of course, it didn’t really slow me down; my body ejected it and has long since healed. Still, it speaks to the chaos we just came through. I even had to use my gun.
It’s not the first time, but tonight was the first time I actually shot to kill. And kill we did. By the end, seven or eight of our foes were on the ground, motionless, wasted blood seeping out of them and staining the cement floor of the non-descript back room they used as their little base camp for operations. It was like a scene out of a movie–one of those cheesy action flicks where the good guys take down an entire base of sketchy mafia types without losing a single man. Of course, it’s not exactly a fair fight, as my punctured vest shows.
The hardest part was trying not to give away our abilities in the fight. We had hoped to take some of them alive. Well, actually we didn’t want to have it come to a fight at all, but once it did, we hoped to resolve it quickly and bring the survivors into the fold like Tyrone’s crew. The movement can always use more funds. And more control of the streets.
But something about some people’s nature doesn’t let them back down. I don’t know if it’s pride or some form of twisted criminal honor, or if they just hold on to misguided hope for too long, but this crew fought on with such tenacity that we were hard pressed not to use powers. I know that bullets can’t really hurt me, but when they start to fly, some human instinct for self-preservation kicks in, and I just want to blur over there and knock the bad guys through the wall.
We all showed pretty decent restraint until Jesús took a bullet in the head. When he got back up, to the shock of the humans, we all knew what that meant. The four guys remaining had to go. So Hamad and Jesús put them down. We had to make sure it seemed like a human turf fight, so we cut out without indulging the thirst that our conflict engendered.
I have to say, I found myself more bothered by the wasted fresh blood than the fact that we killed a bunch of people. Maybe it’s because they were criminals–the kind that operate brothels filled with young women society has forgotten, that run illegal card games from which some people never return, and that lend people money and break legs or worse to get it back. My moral code can cope with that.
And yet ….
Sometimes at daybreak when I’ve been lying in bed waiting for sleep to overtake me, I can’t help but picture little Annie, hopeless, in a cell somewhere in the holes.
Suddenly the door to the room flies open and bangs into the wall behind it.
Laney rushes in, overflowing with enthusiasm. In her excitement, her cheeks are flushed, and I realize again just how cute she actually is. I’ve never given her too much attention because when Vera is around, I barely even notice other females. And because Laney always struck me as a little too … girly, maybe? Simple? I dunno–I just get the feeling that there isn’t much depth there or presence. But I see why Mike was into her and why she’s a recruiter, too. She has great dimples.
“You guys hear about the meeting?” she gushes, failing to pick up on the somber atmosphere of the converted prep room.
“I'm sorry, Laney–some of us have been out fighting and dodging bullets all night,” Jesús retorts. I flash to the way Jesús looked when he hit the floor with a bullet in his head: the neat little entry hole and the gaping wound in the back from which blood flooded out for those few tense seconds before the healing process kicked in. Dodging bullets indeed. For a moment or two, I had wondered if the head wound were too severe for him to get back up. But of course, he did.
Laney doesn’t share these memories with me. She shrugs in dismissal of Jesús’ comment, not impressed. “Well, whatever. But Joseph called an all-hands militia meeting–supposedly has big news. There’s even some out-of-towners from the other branches.” And with that, she storms out as fast as she entered.
An all-hands militia meeting? I rack my brain over the months I’ve been in the Vampirists; I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed an all-hands meeting before. Normally, mass assemblies are something Joseph saves for the Movement, for rallying the humans to our public cause. Us, he tends to keep separated. I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve had any significant interaction with Meng’s or Tomas’ guys, or any of the other cells for that matter. And I’ve definitely never met any others from the outside cities. This must be big news indeed.
We finish changing quickly, throwing on clean back-up bloodshirts, and slowly file out of the room. Other vampires are making their way down the hallways, too, so we follow behind. Eventually, we all arrive at the former factory assembly area. It’s the only room that I know of here big enough to host such a mass easily. I don’t know what the proportion of locals is to the visitors, but there are dozens and dozens and dozens of vampires crowding into the hall among the rusting machines of the defunct factory line. I don’t think that I ever fully realized just how many of us there are here in the Vampirist Militia. The room is lit up by frozen-blue eyes that glow with anticipation.
I pick out the set of eyes that belong to Vera (she’s next to Laney) and am instantly by her side. She doesn’t turn to look at me or say hello, but her hand finds its way into mine, and her head leans on my shoulder. I want to be alone with her and to hold her … to tell her about my night. To ask her about hers. I’ve been so busy that we haven’t been able to spend our usual quality time together. When I get home at sun up, she’s often already asleep. I haven’t even talked to her about Annie yet … or Dr. Metz.
Although maybe part of that is because I don’t know what I’d say.
I look ahead to where everyone is staring: Joseph is taking the podium. He has set up a sort of make-shift stage at the far end of the room. Behind him, he’s even hung some large banners with the Vampirist Militia emblem. Its color is such a rich dark red that I don’t want to think too hard about what could have been used as the dye, though my nose gives me disturbing hints. I’m impressed, though. Joseph definitely has an eye for the theatrics. Then again, I remember that he once told me he was responsible for our public relations–so I guess controlling appearances and perception is all part of his job.
It’s working, too. Excitement, tension, and uncertainty all combine into a palpable energy coursing through the crowd. It grows and rises to a peak as Joseph obviously prepares to speak. Suddenly, with a wave of his hand, the nervous whispering stops. The room falls silent. Deathly silent. No one is breathing heavily, or coughing, or swallowing loudly. With vampires, you don’t get those little ambient human noises that keep rooms from being truly quiet.
He begins. For a while, I’m so taken by his public speaking ability that I don’t really absorb what’s being said. I thought it must be something big, but with all the fanfare I think now that it’s probably just the usual motivational “Humans bad. Vampires good” speech. Yet, the way he pitches his tone and accents his words with his hands almost allows him to weave a spell on the crowd–it’s like he’s a conductor at the head of an orchestra that he directs. I watch them become captivated by his abilities. He has them all under such control that I wonder if he’s using supernatural powers. Maybe Joseph can enthrall us the way we can enthrall humans. But then I realize that there have been many notable humans throughout history with the same oratory skills–and not all used them for good.