Vampires Don't Cry: The Collection

by Ian Hall

  “Yet you are what you are, and I am sworn to kill you.”

  “Sworn?"

  Maurice never lowered the pipe. “I am a vampire hunter. It is both my vocation and my destiny. My family has hunted vampires for years. It is in my blood.”

  I considered his words. For years I had wondered if there existed an anti-vampire force in the world, but since none had presented itself, I thought it absent. Now, in front of me, Maurice told me a different story. I remembered Bram Stoker’s Dracula: the vampire hunter had been called Abraham van Helsing. I did not want to insult Maurice, but I had little alternative.

  “So you are a modern van Helsing?”

  “I have been called worse and better.” He smiled. “But I have never met a vampire who killed his own like you do.”

  “First, put away the blow pipe.” I held my hands up, palms towards him. “Second, let us deal with Ramir.”

  “What do you recommend, American Vampir man?”

  “Oh I want to rip his head from his body and send them straight to the pits of Hell!” I laughed out loud and returned my gaze to Ramir who stood still frozen, suspended, trapped in the poison of the darts.

  “Is it vengeance you look for?”

  “Without taking half an hour to tell you my story, he killed my wife; tore her limb from limb. It’s not vengeance I’m looking for, or at least, I don’t think so. Vengeance is such a small word for the emotions I feel right now.”

  Maurice grinned. “Well in that case, I’ll leave you to it. But one thing before you do. Vampires take great delight in standing in front of the victims and telling them exactly what they’re going to do. I have incorporated that into my vampire hunting regimen.”

  I interrupted, such an evil grin suffusing my face. “Oh please, let me. I love the idea.” I rummaged in my rucksack for another phosgene grenade. I took some sticky tape and wrapped the grenade onto his head like some crazy bandage. “Ramir, you fucked-up son-of-a-bitch,” I began.

  I watched as his eyes grew large. He stood, so frozen from the blood coagulant; there seemed nothing else his body could do. Maurice and I pulled Warren 20 yards away, then I walked back to the once-proud Vampir. “A long time ago, you tore the head from my wife. I now return as a husband to return the favor.” Keeping my hand on the grenade’s release, I pulled the pin, and dropped it at his feet. The look of abject fear on Ramir’s face was pitiful.

  “You have exactly four seconds to live.”

  I retreated quickly to Warren’s side to watch.

  Ramir’s end did not bring closure; it seemed I had already journeyed way beyond that, but it did bring me a feeling that I couldn’t explain properly, I’m not even sure I can now, almost a hundred years later.

  With Ramir’s eyes the size of saucers, the phosgene grenade exploded, and the top of his body shattered, sending flaming parts all around.

  Before my eyes, like my wife before him, his shattered, burning body turned to dust.

  I turned to Maurice; I felt wonderfully calm. “We have much to talk of, my friend. My name is Howard Weeks, and I’m originally from Poland. Will you share a drink with us at the hotel?”

  “I am very pleased to meet your acquaintance, sir.” Maurice bowed slightly. “I feel that my story is actually shorter than yours. And I don’t meet many like that. Sharing a drink with a Vampir will be a new experience.”

  Maurice did indeed have a story to tell. We talked for hours that night, and way into the morning.

  “My name is Maurice Hagi,” he began, “born in Budapest in 1873, the year the city came together under Hungarian rule. When I was twenty-one years old, my father, Costel, took me on a hunting trip. What he told me, up in the hills, changed my life completely.”

  “He explained the existence of the Vampir species, and told me that he was passing on a two-hundred-year-old ‘family business’; I was a Vámpír Vadász, a hunter of the Vampir.”

  I felt intrigued. “Was there a reason your father gave? Is your condition hereditary?”

  Maurice grinned. “I do not know. But my father took me with him for the next sixteen years; he taught me how to smell Vampir and their kind, how to know them by their mannerisms. He made me into a killing machine, and I have been one for forty-five years.”

  “Is your father still alive?”

  “No, Father was killed three years ago, in a small town near Kiev.”

  I explained my own research into the vampire subject, and told him that I wanted to take a blood sample from him to analyze. He grinned and bared his arm; it seemed that his fear of us as vampires had either been clouded by the plum brandy or by our affable demeanor.

  As I pulled on the syringe, he smiled. “I never thought I’d give my blood to a Vampir and live to see the day.”

  We spent two days with Maurice, and our leave-taking tainted with some reservation and sadness, we had become close friends in the time we had spent together. Warren and I had much to talk about, driving down to Constanta.

  We had been in Romania for less than three weeks, and I’d learned so much. In my pouch I carried Maurice’s blood, and a sample of the plant-based coagulant he’d used so successfully against Ramir. He had my New York address, and promised me seeds of the plant, the name of which he had forgotten. When we returned to America, there would be much research to be done.

  For some reason it seemed a shame not to use the rest of the paid leave, and when our route took us to Egypt, we lingered in the desert outside Cairo. Pyramids and sand dunes made more sense than returning to a French winter.

  We travelled along the coast, from Cairo to Morocco, and at each town we visited, I asked about the legend of the vampire. At every one, there seemed someone who knew of a local tale, a small-town version of the vampire story.

  Also as we travelled, the news of the growing flu pandemic got gradually worse. It seemed tens of thousands were dying all over the world, and I felt it my duty to get back to my laboratory in the Johns Hopkins University to help.

  We arrived in New York in February 1919, and were given masks by the American Red Cross as we walked off the ship. The ‘Spanish Flu’, as it had been promptly named, now ravaged the United States, killing tens of thousands. It had become such a serious condition, if you didn’t wear a mask in public places, you were likely to be arrested.

  “It’s a new strain,” the head physician told me as I walked the corridors of the University to my new laboratory. Warren walked in our wake. “It’s stronger than the first, and it’s hitting harder.”

  “Does anyone have immunity?”

  “Those who survived the first wave.”

  I mused for a second. “So the flu hasn’t changed physically, it’s just more virulent.”

  “Possibly. That’s one area we’d like you to investigate.”

  Luckily, in those panic-stricken days, when people were literally dropping like flies, no one questioned my great longevity. I celebrated my 83rd birthday, but of course, looked only sixty, the age of my turning. There seemed simply no time for such attention to detail. Over a third of the world’s population had now either been infected by the flu virus, or were already dead.

  Warren and I worked on the new strain for many weeks, taking out findings to the laboratory head, who passed them up the chain. Immune from the disease, it proved an interesting time, when new discoveries were made every week, new advances every month. As we needed better microscopes and other scientific instruments, they were either quickly produced, or we made our own.

  Thankfully, the flu strains that travelled round the world maybe five times, got progressively lighter. By the early days of 1920, there was little mention in the newspapers, but mass graves in and around towns and cities attested to its destructive early days.

  However, the problem of my age began to press my conscience. As little old Howard Weeks, I had no problem with living forever, but as Colonel Howard Weeks, well-known research chemist and soldier, I couldn’t maintain my timelessness much longer. As our time at Jo
hns Hopkins came to an end, we decided that the name of Howard Weeks should pass out of circulation for a while.

  I sold the house in New York, pocketed the cash, and moved to Chicago. It seemed easy enough to allow the Army pension to accrue in the bank, but I had to get a new identity, and fast.

  Calling myself Hugo Terry, an old name from school, I bought a ranch on the outskirts of Chicago, in Burbank, and built a small laboratory on the property. I registered a company, Unicorps, Inc., with myself, Hugo Terry and Warren Fleece as joint directors, and put a sign over the laboratory door.

  After the mayhem of the war, then the work on the flu strains, my early days in Burbank were a grateful solace. With money being no concern, we decided to look at four aspects of the vampire problem. In seconds, we had our corporate strategy:

  1. Rid the world of the vampire menace through physical and aggressive means.

  2. Find a cure for the vampire disease by any means possible.

  3. Find the natural enemy of the vampire race.

  4. Trace the ‘Helsing’ family from Maurice’s grandfather.

  With the strategy in place, we knew the Vampir were never going to be the same again. Despite our corporate name and feel, we never quite got ourselves away from the Helsing name, and I’m afraid it stuck. We had Unicorps stationary printed, but in my head we were Helsings.

  Amidst a great uproar, Nosferatu was released in 1922, a definite copy of Stoker’s novel, even though the film portrayed a ‘Count Orlov’ as the main character. Stoker’s widow later kicked up a terrible fuss about copyright.

  Both Warren and I went to see the movie in Chicago. It was both terribly good, and terribly bad, and we discussed it at some length for many days.

  I sent letters to both addresses that Maurice Hagi had given me, and felt overjoyed when, almost a year later, he answered; still alive, but not killing vampires anymore. He introduced us to a branch of the family, living and ‘working’ in New York.

  The next year, we were visited by two of these modern ‘Helsings’, a Henry Muscat from Romania, and David Ptovev of Russian descent. Despite their obvious initial reservations with Warren and I both being actual vampires, we became firm friends; we had the same objectives, and we traded information, blood work, and samples of the natural coagulant that they used in their darts. And best of all, they gave us seeds for the plants to grow our own chemical weapons.

  The marriage of Unicorps to Vámpír Vadász, the original ‘Helsings’, had been born.

  We worked on a synthetic strain of the plant-based coagulant, and managed to begin manufacturing in 1925. The delivery system would have to remain the same blow-dart, but we had ideas there, too.

  In 1928, at the grand old age of 92, Howard Weeks died.

  “Silently, in his sleep.”

  We had to. It had become obvious that we didn’t need his war pension, we were doing quite well on accumulated money, and it seemed a gracious way to go. We even had a funeral.

  I got papers officially inserted into the Chicago birth register and census for Hugo Terry, and we worked onwards.

  With new vigor, we followed every new invention and discovery in the field of genetics, and blood analysis, and contributed our fair share too; always under someone else’s name, of course.

  During the depression, we just worked, we researched, and we chronicled.

  Due to our insensitivity to any drug, we tried them all on ourselves first, and through the years, we took some very lethal compounds. Gradually, the Helsings that visited our laboratory became aware that they could ‘sense’ our vampirism less and less as the years progressed. We began to monitor that, too.

  We did watch the increasing tension both in Europe and Japan, and were not surprised when Germany invaded Sudetenland in 1939.

  We both decided that since we were both way older than the draft would ever be, to stay out of this particular war, no matter how big it got. We even avoided military contracts of any kind, keeping our goals set in the vampire area.

  In 1945, at eighty years old, we decided that the end of the war to be a good time for Warren to also hang up his boots. In December that year, we toasted his demise with a wonderful Romanian plum brandy. As I drank it, I remembered my wife chastising me for calling it Tuică. With a tear in my eye, I lifted my glass, and said, “Palincă, my love!”

  Warren chose ‘Vance Petron’ as his new moniker, and with a nose job and a change of hair color, he returned back to work in only a few days.

  As the war years ended, we noticed a huge number of advances in many of our associated fields. Not only were the fields diversifying, but in a strange way, they were also merging, as discoveries from one field influenced another. Previously distinctly separate biological disciplines such as biochemistry, genetics, and microbiology were merging under the simple banner of molecular biology.

  The fifties marked two great advances for us. One, we got a government grant to chase these new frontiers, and three separate groups working independently discovered a thing called DNA. It seemed the breakthrough we needed to investigate both vampire and ‘Helsing’ genetics and blood work at a new level.

  With the need for a larger plant, we moved farther outside Chicago, and with government money, we built a huge Unicorps headquarters with two distinctly separate layers. We had the public persona, where we dealt with all kinds of government departments, and we had our little ‘private labs’ where we continued our investigations.

  We began working directly with the Helsing groups around the country, and in 1952, we developed the first anti-vampire dart gun.

  Invented in 1950 by New Zealander, Colin Murdoch, we adapted his 50-caliber rifle down to a 30-caliber pistol version, which fired a syringe bullet by a compressed air charge.

  Edwin Forester came to us in 1952, a forward-thinking Helsing who organized our understanding of the vampire community in the United States, and catalogued details of their group structure. He also gave his name to the phenomenon in which a vampire’s body instantly regresses to its state, had it been killed back at its turning; the crumbling to dust of the older vampires. Since his investigations, we’ve always called it the Forester Effect.

  By the early sixties, we had expanded our initial corporate statement; we now had four distinct departments working on the vampire menace.

  V-Study (Vampire Study), a genetic program on a molecular level which looked at the historical database of all captured subjects. We were already getting our Helsings to take blood samples before killing, wherever possible. With each new genetic fingerprint, we were tracing the ancestry back hundreds of years.

  V-Recovery (Vampire Recovery), had been started as a simple research into the vampire phenomenon, but soon changed to a genetic-level study to discover an antidote to the vampire gene. Both Warren and I hoped that we could achieve some level of success here.

  V-Nemesis (Helsing Study), was the study of the Helsing gene, its origins, its transfer, and its actual physical makeup. Maurice started us on this one, and we were locating new possible Helsings all over America.

  V-Regenesis (Vampire Eradication), was the most difficult to build. We realized that even as we worked for the eradication of the vampire threat at a genetic level, if we left the vampire population alone, it would increase exponentially every year. V-Regenesis was set up as the basic destruction and eradication of the vampire menace on the streets today.

  We even had a new name for the vampire department: Transperian.

  Today, at the present time, we have five Research and Development facilities, in Chicago, Atlanta, New Jersey, Miami, and San Francisco. There is no coincidence that they have the largest populations of vampires in the country.

  On our boardroom walls hang the pictures of our founders and CEOs:

  Hugo Terry 1920-1945

  Vance Petron 1945-1965

  Warren Fleece 1965-1985

  Howard Weeks 1985-Present

  They hang with pride.

  The Turning of Alan Rand


  By Ian Hall and April L. Miller

  April 1958

  I had no idea why Valerie Queen-of-Homecoming Lidowitz would be inviting me out for a milkshake after school. The note had been stuffed into the crack of my locker, folded all prettily into an origami swan and smelling of some too-sweet perfume. And there at the bottom lay her flowery signature, all in big, scrolling letters:

  Valerie from homeroom.

  XO!

  “Yeah ,right,” I said, crumpling the counterfeit love note and chucking it into the nearest trash bin.

  Probably that Clark Dugan; he constantly tried to get under my skin. Some of the Littleton High student body had too much time on their hands. Not me – stopping to unfold that swan put me three minutes behind schedule, and marching band tryouts wait for no man. Clutching my clarinet case, I dashed off to the auditorium before Mr. Schuster crossed my name right off the list.

  But yards away from the double doors, a white, fuzzy sweater stretched tight over a generous bosom intercepted my intended trajectory. Valerie was a tall girl and my outstretched arms were perfectly level with the bumps she took no trouble to conceal.

  “Hi, Alan,” she said, arching her shoulders, successfully jutting her bust out that much further, “I thought I might run into you here. Did you get my note by any chance?”

  Well of all the childish nonsense. So, Valerie participated willingly in Clark’s little setup. I’d been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt that her signature had been forged. No such luck. Pretty Valerie had a bitchy side, just like everybody else.

  I lowered my gaze and lifted my clarinet case. “I’m late for tryouts; will you please excuse me?”

  I made off to one side but Valerie moved quick – very quick. If she wasn’t the fastest thing on two legs then I’ll be dead duck. Side-stepping in a blur, she cut me off.

  My glasses had slipped down the bridge of my nose. I pushed them in place and looked straight into her flirty eyes.