by R. G. Nelson
Okay, I’m guessing that he still means this ironically. Or seriously, but then that would be ironic. My irritability is still in full effect, and I answer a bit more abruptly than perhaps I otherwise should. “Is there something I can do for you? Or do you just get off on making cryptic comments to newbies?”
“My, aren’t we a bit testy!” he returns. It comes off like something a parent would say to a child, and I regret my tone. I turn away so that he can’t see my expression and keep unpacking. “Actually, I was just stopping by to see how you were doing. I haven't seen you over in my area; I thought maybe you were avoiding it since they drained that little girl.”
I stop cold. He means Annie. “What? They killed her?” It’s like a huge leaden weight was just thrust on my soul. My chest feels compressed, like it’s about to implode. Guilt, anger, sadness–all are crushed together there into a ball so tight I cannot separate one from the other.
“But, of course! You can't very well turn one so young. And you can't let her go after what she's seen,” he asserts reasonably.
“They couldn't … enthrall her or something?” I press, searching belatedly for solutions. I’m not sure why I ask; it’s too late to change anything now, and maybe knowing that there was another option would make her loss even more painful.
Metz smiles sadly. “You're still so young. No, you can't simply make people forget weeks of their lives using our abilities. Moments, yes; a few hours, perhaps, if you’re powerful. But erasing weeks? No.” He stops, and I can tell that he is genuinely sympathetic to my anguish. And then his mask is back on. “But don't take it so hard. Here it's par for the course.”
“And her parents?” I manage to ask, remembering that they are (or were) alive and sentient beings as well.
“Her mother was a great help–helped me finish a certain chemical compound that I’m working on. It will be extremely beneficial for my cause. But after we were done?” He pauses to shrug his shoulders as if he couldn’t care less. “We got what we needed; she had no more real use for us.” He moves to leave–it seems as if he has said what he wanted to.
“And the father?” I probe, certain that I already know the answer. I guess I just need to hear it said out loud; maybe I’m a glutton for punishment.
Metz half turns back from the exit and shrugs again simply, “Who knows? Who cares? He was just a human, after all.”
And then he is gone, leaving me alone with the knot in my chest.
20)
Days pass. Days spent inside tiny rooms now converted into military-style bunking areas. Not that I’d really know what those look like, but with ten of us sardined in here and very little free space, I can’t imagine how it could get much worse. If this were South East Asia, the place would be a hostel to avoid–and not just because of the vampires.
But at least I get to sleep with Vera–she tucks into my single bed beside me at dawn every morning, and we lie there all entwined for the daylight hours. As comforting as this is, we don’t have much privacy. There’s no room to be intimate really, but I’m gonna have to find a solution for that at some point soon. Being so close to her keeps me fairly riled up. Even worse, though, with all the sharp ears around, there’s definitely no room to share some of the growing concerns that are accumulating and swirling in my head. Not that she’d listen.
From time to time, I still think about home. My old home. Strange, but now that I’m forbidden from contacting my dad, I find myself more often wondering how he’s doing and what he’s up to. Has he been following the developments on the street? The growing tide of discontent that spills over into violence day after day, night after night? Does he worry that I may be caught up in it somehow? Has he been in contact with any of his buddies on the force to see if they’re okay?
Police haven’t been faring well against such masses. Tear gas, batons, and rubber bullets haven’t been doing the trick: It seems to be a matter of time before things must necessarily escalate in a bloodier–deadlier–direction, either against the police or against the protestors, or maybe both, but something has to give. I wonder if all this has stirred anything in him and given him any desire to get back into the game.
I still don’t think I’d do anything differently or give up Vera, but maybe I could manage to slip away some night, just for an hour, and make it up there to visit from afar. Maybe it wouldn’t even really be breaking any rules–is it really contact if we never talk? Perhaps I could even slip him an envelope … though cash bonuses have been less frequent as of late–cost of revolution, according to Joseph.
Anyway, nights pass, too. Nights that turn into weeks. Despite Joseph’s big speech, there aren’t too many special missions at first. To Hamad and Jesús’ frustration (and even mine), it’s just more of the same. There are tedious missions like making the cash collection circles. There are mindless missions like providing security at rallies. And there are the sometimes dangerous missions (even for us). The other vampires out there sense that something big is happening and are coming out of the woodwork. Many are joining us, feeling an inevitable rising tide.
But some are resisting. And those we have to deal with. The bloodshirt cells are often hard pressed. Meng’s team lost two vamps–prior to this, they hadn’t lost anyone in over a decade, apparently. But Joseph doesn’t seem to care. They get no vacation time as we did after Mike. Nor do they get replacements. We mostly stay thinned out; Meng’s team is operating at just over half strength now. Joseph says that he doesn’t trust the new joiners enough to send them into the field, so it’s still just up to us.
Eventually, our frequent requests for additional support finally get an answer, but not the one I was looking for. True to her word, Vera is now often assigned to us and comes along quite a bit, though I try my hardest to shield her from anything even remotely dangerous. How can I pay attention and operate effectively if I’m worried about her? I almost wish it were Laney assigned to us while Vera handled the dwindling recruiting duties.
But in some ways it’s nice to have Vera on the team, even if it’s part-time. She can soften Hamad up a touch, and in the small group dynamic of our cell, he seems to be a bit more open. We’ve all been feeling the pressure lately, and the confinement and cramped conditions have taken their toll. Still, I don’t dare to voice my concerns about the militia with them yet, but I do take advantage of the opportunity to deepen our relationship and find out more about them.
One late night over cards with just Hamad and Vera, I decide to press him on his origins. He’s in a good mood: The small stack of chips in front of him shows that he’s up by a lot.
“You know, you never told me where you’re from,” I say out of the blue.
He looks at me in surprise. “What is this? Some type of tactic to distract me?” he says off-handedly, obviously trying to gloss over the question. “It’s not gonna work, you know.” He ups the ante. I follow suit and match. Vera folds.
“No, I’m legitimately curious. I’m guessing Middle-Eastern.”
He smiles and deals another card. “Wow, what gave it away? My name or my appearance?”
I sort of blush. I guess that was a pretty lame guess/attempt to get him talking. I’m about to give up when Vera chimes in. “I think Egyptian,” she adds.
“Tsk-tsk,” he responds, shaking his head with mock offense. But then his joking nature changes, and I swear I almost see a look of sadness cross his countenance. Vera and I both stay quiet–I get the sense that she doesn’t know his story either.
After a few moments, an internal decision is made and he puts his cards down on the table. The game forgotten, he starts his tale. “I was born as both human and vampire in Sudan. I don’t know the year exactly, but I became a man in the time of the Mahdi. You see back then, during the Turkiyah, we were ruled by th
e Turco-Egyptians. We hated the foreigners and resented their presence. My family was simple; we lived by the old ways and frequently moved from place to place. I saw the discontent growing, and when the Mahdi announced his intention to free the country, I wanted to fight.
“I was the oldest, and against my parent’s wishes, I left and joined the rebellion. I fought in several battles and even won some small measure of renown in my unit for killing a British officer with my sword. As a reward, one time during a lull in the fighting, I was allowed to go back and visit my family, who had last been camped not too far away.” Here Hamad pauses. He looks at the table, his face a blank mask.
When he next starts to speak, his voice sounds hollow. Almost robotic. “But when I arrived home, everyone was dead. They had not been treated with the respect of Islam; they were spread about and not buried. I took care of all this myself and put my mother, father, and sisters and younger brothers all in the ground. And then I took my sword and went to look for the animals that had done this. I knew that it was treason to abandon my unit, and I did not know whether I was seeking bandits or enemy soldiers or even another clan … I had no real hope of finding whoever was responsible. But he found me.
“He was vampire, of course. He was impressed by me and turned me. I barely even knew what was happening; I thought at first we were djinn. But slowly, I realized what he had made me. He taught me to survive as he did, prowling the deserts for isolated victims that no one would miss. Or so he thought. I hated him. But I bided my time and learned all I could.
“His methods were sound. You might think the barren desert to be inhospitable to vampires, but the sun has a way of scorching bodies quickly so that you can’t tell they were missing blood. And the sand absorbs as well; no one would know two vampires had been hunting. By day, we dug into the sand and waited out the powerful sun. By night, we were ghosts in the dunes.
“While he taught me to survive, he told me very little of our species. He couldn’t; he had very little knowledge himself. He claimed that the one who made him had been undead since before the Prophet. That one day only a month after turning him, his giver, as he called it, had climbed up and gone into the sun. He said he listened to it all, powerless to help. The old vampire burned the whole day, but still did not die. At night, when he finally could emerge, his giver begged him to cut off his head and end his life. He did. His story helped me learn how we can die; I made a mental note of it. And over a year or two, I learned more ways. But sword at my side, still I waited for my revenge.
“When the Mahdi took Khartoum and killed the British governor sent to aid Egypt and to put down our uprising, I wanted to go there and see it. I had not completely made the break from my human days at that point, and the rebel in me wanted to see the fruit of our conquests. My giver did not care, and so we switched from hunting desert nomads to being the scourges of army camps. Luckily, with so much sickness and so many battle injuries, no one noticed a few more dead bodies here and there.
“One night, I heard the Mahdi was sick. We went to see him, sneaking across the rooftops and infiltrating his headquarters. I had some half-formed idea of turning the Mahdi into one of us so he could carry on the struggle. When I told my giver this, he laughed at me. He leapt down into the room and slaughtered the servant posted to keep watch. Then before my eyes, he drained and killed the Mahdi. This I could not abide. I took off his head with my sword–too late for the Mahdi. Too late for my family.
“There were many rumors surrounding the Mahdi’s death, but I did not care. He was dead.” Hamad shrugs before continuing. “I went back to the desert and lived as I had been taught.”
Here I interrupt, “So you hated your giver for murdering your family and plotted to kill him, yet you went back and did the same thing to other families?” Vera takes my hand gently, as if to hold me back.
But Hamad doesn’t get mad. He looks at me blankly, as though he almost doesn’t understand my question. “I was a vampire. And those were the times,” he replies simply.
“So what did you do next?” Vera coaxes, trying to get the story back on track.
“Nothing really. I stayed in the desert. I thought those days would go on forever. But eventually the British came back and times began changing. They overpowered the Mahdi’s successor and put their own people in place. I decided to move on to Great Britain to be a terror in the night and punish their people. It required some adapting: England at the turn of the 20th century was a very different place from the Sudan I had known. I remained for a while, but in the end, it’s such a tiny little island. I missed the wide open spaces, the real wilderness, and so I went to America.” He stops here as if that concludes his tale.
“And how did you end up with the Vampirists?” I prod.
He smiles ironically, the old Hamad again. “They can be persuasive.” And then he chuckles to himself, “Besides, better to be on the biggest, baddest team on the block: No one likes losing. And they have a vision. More than I ever did.” And now he picks his cards back up, “So are we gonna finish this game or what?”
We play. Hamad cleans us out. But my mind is distracted. I keep replaying his story, trying to sort out what meaning I can. Honestly, I don’t know what to make of it. It certainly accounts for a lot of his personality: his warrior nature, the casual brutality just under the surface …. It may even explain his sardonic exterior–a front developed in reaction to the horror of his beginnings.
But I’m not sure how it will bode for me if I ever want to voice some of my concerns about the Vampirists with him. On one hand, it certainly seems that he doesn’t have a problem resisting authority where he feels appropriate. His joining a rebellion against his parents’ wishes doubly proves that. But on the other hand, he seems to be a dedicated follower once he’s made his mind up. And he might just be waiting for his chance finally to see a revolution through to the end.
21)
We suit up in the gear room. Jesús buzzes excitedly in the corner with Meng’s few bloodshirts. Finally, the night has come when we’re all going out to do “something special.” Whatever it is was supposed to have gone down in a few days, but for some reason the timeline got pushed up to tonight. It’s all been very hush-hush until now. I look to my side and try to force a grin, but I’m not very happy. Vera smiles back, but I can tell she knows that I’m worried by her presence.
“Don’t worry; it’ll be okay,” she tells me confidently.
“I'm just not sure I like the idea of you coming out on a special mission when we have no idea what it is. Or what it will entail,” I reply. I look over at Meng’s guys–if we’re getting backup, it has to be something big.
“That's sweet. But you know I can kick your butt,” she reminds me with a hard punch on my arm.
“Probably true,” I say, smiling against my wishes. But I try to refocus on the issue at hand. Aside from the potential for danger, when I think back on the unusual missions that I’ve had to do, I can’t help but think about the night we took Annie. And that’s a lot of what’s bothering me now.
“I guess I just don't want my illusion of you ruined,” I admit very softly. “Sometimes on missions we have to do things ….” My voice trails off, but she knows where I was headed.
Her own voice takes on a warning tone, “Adam, we’re vampires. I'm not all good, but I'm not all bad. Just like you.” She approaches and looks me in the eye, half-lecturing, half-comforting. “Undeath is complicated like that.”
I’m about to respond … but I still haven’t formed the words yet when Hamad bursts into the room carrying a huge box. I hear clinks and rattles from inside.
Sounding like a child on Christmas, he says, “We got special goodies for tonight. Saddle up, everyone! We have a big night ahead.”
* * *
I’
m driving. We’ve split into two vans, our cell and Meng’s. They trail behind us, but don’t stay too close. In the darkness in the back of our vehicle, the others are preparing small backpacks for our mission tonight. I see that some of the things Hamad was carrying in his box look like wine bottles. I realize a moment later that they’re Molotov cocktails–which explains the clinking I heard earlier and the pungent smell of gasoline now filling the van. They are corked up and appear to have something that looks like a … well, like a damp tampon rubber-banded to the neck of the bottle.
“Make sure you don't put glass on glass. And everyone takes two lighters,” Hamad commands as they work.
I don’t know what the other stuff is, but in the rearview mirror I see that Vera is also confused.
“What are these?” she asks. I guess it’s a good sign my angel doesn’t know either.
Hamad smiles. He’s obviously excited by these. “The target’s too big for a simple car bomb–so we need to do this in person. But I brought goodies-,” and here he holds one out, “Incendiary grenades–courtesy of our contacts at the Pentagon.”
“Woah, I’ve heard about these. They burn super-hot–white phosphorous, right? This is serious stuff. Coño, we can do some damage! Give me some extra,” Jesús beams back.
Hamad also unzips another pack to reveal an assortment of pistols: the usual fare for our past missions.
“We might also need these,” he adds.
Vera reaches across and takes one. She casually inspects it, visually checking the chamber and safety with a little too much familiarity for my comfort. But I guess she’s been around for a while and picked things up on the way. She checks out another and slips it into a bag for me, along with a few extra clips of ammo. It’s kinda twisted having my girlfriend prepare such a pack for me. In another life, she would’ve been packing me a lunch and a paper or something human and adult like that.