I check the clock on the DVD player. There’s still time to go to the computer store and get things set up before sunrise. Not that I want to leave Isuzu in the apartment by herself, but…
I grab my phone. The tethered one—the landline. I switch off the ringer, and then call the number with my cell. I tiptoe to where Isuzu’s still snoring away, the jack all slapped out of her. I open the door a crack, just enough to slip the receiver through. I attach the headset to the cell, slip it on, and step away from the door, listening to Isuzu snore through the tinny static.
I grab my keys and wallet and step out into the hallway, trying not to disturb my line of bloodhound repellant. It’s weird, having her in my ear like this, the sound of her snoring undiminished, even as I put more and more distance between us. It’s weird, but reassuring, too.
I get into my car, and Isuzu’s still there. Still there, in the store. Still there, coming back.
It’s not great, this ad hoc baby monitor. It goes out under bridges. I lose her, panic, get her back, sigh. It’s not great, but it will have to do. Just like the webcams, and the warnings, and the locks.
Just like yours truly, in the parent department. When all is said and done, I’ll just have to do.
My job—the thing I do when I’m not figuring out how to raise a mortal in a revamped world, the thing I do to make money to make the raising possible—my job is…well, I write memos. Memos for someone else’s signature, someone higher up the bureaucratic ladder, someone too busy to do their own writing, or—I suspect—their own signing. Someone who has no idea who I am, or the role I played in making the world what it is. The Benevolent Vampires were anonymous, and given the dubious nature of our results, we like to keep it that way.
I write reports, too, and rewrite the reports the technical staff have managed to render entirely in Martian. I also do briefings in PowerPoint, write position papers, and have even published the occasionalFederal Register notice, revising this or that regulation to comport with whatever the political flavor (or favor) of the month happens to be. In short, I sell time-shares on my brain and try not to think about it when I’m off the clock.
The organization I do all this scribbling for is the Bureau of Blood Quality—BBQ, for short. You’ve probably seen our mascot, the Hemogoblin—our version of Smokey the Bear. The Hemogoblin’s mission is “to warn the public regarding a number of blood quality issues.” That’s what we say, at least. Really, he’s pretty much a guardian of the status quo and a capitalist tool, offering aid and comfort to the mega-super-multinational bleederies while demonizing the mom-’n’-pop microbleeds.
“Consider the source,” the Hemogoblin advises.
“Stick with names you can trust.”
Meaning, of course: Corporations good, independents bad. After all, it’s the microbleeds who water down their product line with horse, cow, and pig blood. It’s the microbleeds who lace in vampire blood, which acts like a tapeworm on heroin, consuming the consumer and making you buy more and more, trying to quench a suddenly unquenchable thirst. It’s the microbleeds who doctor expiration dates, skimp on quality control, let stock thaw and refreeze over and over again, and still have the balls to call it “vein fresh,” “just tapped.” “If it were any fresher, the bottle would have a pulse.”
Yep, that’s exactly who it is—the little guys. The guys who have absolutely nothing to back them up, except their reputation among satisfied customers and good word of mouth. It’s the microbleeds cutting corners with impunity, knowing the Hemogoblin’s just itching to lose all that corporate tax revenue by shutting down, say, the blood-bottling equivalent of a Coca-Cola.
As the Hemogoblin says, “Do the math, sucker.”
And don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Isuppose you could say I’m the cynic of the office, though I prefer the term “realistic.” I find that cynicism, as an operating principle, makes the evil we do easier. It helps clarify what would otherwise be as inscrutable as Zen koans.
Like: The job of the Recall Division is tonot initiate recalls.
Like: “Oversight” means closing your eyes, looking the other way, seeing no evil—at least when it comes to the macros.
Ah me. Oh my. Your tax dollars at work.
Do you know what I like about my office? By which I mean, do you know what shocks me for no other reason than the fact that it doesn’t seem to shock anybody else? All the corporate logos on pens, pocket protectors, scratch pads, baseball caps, what used to be called “coffee” mugs. The coworker in the cube next to mine, for instance, sips all night long from a mug hawking Sneaky Pete, the Sleepytime tea of bloods, while another glugs from a sports bottle advertising Xtreme Unction, the vampire’s Jolt Cola.
“Get some Unction in yer junction if ya wanna function in da…Xtreme!”
The last word is pronounced like two: “ex” and “dream.”
Adrenaline.
That’s why I almost killed Isuzu. And that’s why her mom was killed, in all likelihood, by a band of bottle-feds looking for a little taste of old school.
Adrenaline is also the big thing in the blood biz nowadays. That’s the thing they add (or withhold) to simulate various long-gone “blood acquisition modalities.” Sneaky Pete, for example, includes almost no adrenaline at all. It simulates blood gotten by way of the sneak attack, after the victim’s been seduced into acquiescence and mistakes the pressure at his or her throat as an arousing (but not fear-inducing) love bite. In the midadrenal range, there’s Headlights, named after that deer cliché. Headlights simulates the short shock of realizing you’re dead just before you are.
And then there’s Xtreme Unction and its imitators—Death Rattle, Little Seizure, Chest Cracker. All have roughlytwice the adrenaline needed to instigate a heart attack in your average mortal. Having tasted the real thing, I can assure you that these last don’t simulate anything. They’re aimed at the pumped-up imaginations of bottle-feds, dreaming about what hunted blood must have been like. And it’s these bottled, romanticized lies that get my adrenaline going, whenever I think about all the damage they’ve meant for the likes of Isuzu and her mom.
Hell, I almost fell for it myself, even though I know better. Sip at the same lie often enough, and you start to believe it. The bar gets raised, the exaggeration becomes the baseline, and all we can remember—those who think we remember what real blood is like—is that “real” wasalways better than “bottled.”
Of course, without those myths, Isuzu would never have been born. And I wouldn’t be sitting here in my cube, using my email window to hide my webcam feed, clicking back and forth whenever someone passes. I wouldn’t be sitting here, catching glimpses of Isuzu napping, watching TV, offering some of her pet food to some invisible someone.
“Whatcha got there?” my supervisor asks as I click back to my email and try not to look guilty.
“Lab says the sample from that Tucson microbleed’s clean as a whistle,” I say. Just like all the samples always are. Your tax dollars, et cetera.
“Okay, okay,” my supervisor says, nodding before bending to sip from his “Got Blood?” mug. He screws up his face like a clean lab report is some kind of a problem. Which it kind of is—especially when it’s for a micro that’s started cutting into a macro’s share of the market. Macros don’t get lab reports. We’ve already discussed this. The math’s been done; the feeding hand left unbitten.
“Okay,” he says, deciding it. “Bust ’em on that licensing technicality and have enforcement destroy their inventory.” He smiles in that midmanagement way, with his fangs denting his bottom lip.
So much for free and open competition in a market-driven economy.
“Will do,” I say, as he returns to his office, clicking his Xtreme Unction giveaway pen—just a nervous habit, or so he claims.
Isuzu stands framed in her little window on my PC. I click Expand and she fills my screen, maxing out the pixels, turning into a pointillist version of herself. A face behind stippled glass. She�
��s mugging in front of the mirror I’ve hidden a camera behind, pressing her nose into a pig snout just like I showed her, tugging down her lower lids, experimenting with various tortured mouth shapes. Now she’s cupping her forehead with her hand, hiding her hair. She squeezes down and makes furrows, followed by a stern setting of the lips. She pulls her brow smooth again, followed by a grin almost maniacally wide.
I glimpse my own reflection, notice my expression matching hers, smile for smile, frown for frown. I check the clock at the bottom of my screen. Two more hours. Two more hours here instead of there. Two more pointless, non-Isuzu hours before I can walk in through that door behind her there, scramble that hair, ask her what she did while I was away, nod, nod, smiling away like the luckiest vampire on earth.
“No watching TV on the company dime,” a voice says behind me.
I flinch and turn. It’s a coworker with less seniority and a sense of humor that manifests itself in the form of barked orders, as if she actually outranks me.
“I’m on break, Cindy.”
“I know. I was just kidding,” she says. “Hey, is that a new one?”
At first, I don’t know what she’s talking about and don’t know what to say.
“I’m a Little Bobby Little fan, myself,” Cindy says, and then I get it.
KidTV.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from the farms, there’s KidTV. After all, vampires are as prone to nostalgia as anyone else, and the thing we’re nostalgic about is the thing that’s impossible to get back: our childhoods. Unlike before, we can’t use kids as an excuse to buy toys and relive our own childhoods. So while the farms raise little Isuzus for private slaughter, the Little Bobby Littles of KidTV are raised like celebrities. Instead of being hunted on some secluded preserve, the KidTV kids play before the cameras in their idealized 1950s bedrooms, their nostalgic cuteness beamed from some undisclosed fortress to sterile vampires all over the world.
“Caught me,” I say, trying to put myself between Isuzu and my coworker.
“Hey, she’s cute,” Cindy says, peeking around behind me. “Looks a little like me when I was that age.” Pause—and I already know what’s coming. “Have I ever shown you the pictures of me when I was a kid?”
God, what a pathetic bunch we are, reliving our childhoods by watching strangers grow up on TV. Strangers a lot of us would make into fast food, if we knew where the hell they were being kept, if they’re even real in the first place, and not some computer-generated fiction or some old videotape being passed off as live. And if it’s not KidTV, then it’s our own childhood photos, passed around, cooed over, bragged about, displayed on our desks as if we were somehow our own parents.
“Yeah. Yeah, Cindy, you have.”
“Oh…”
She seems disappointed, and normally I’m not this rude, but I’m still a little shaken over being caught, mooning over my very own personal version of KidTV.
“You were a real cutie,” I say, making nice, clicking off the webcam window.
Cindy unzips a smile in this weird way she has, showing first one fang, then the other. “Thanks,” she says.
And then she winks. “P.S.,” she says. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
At the sound of the word “secret,” my heart clenches like a fist. It tries a knock-knock joke on the inside of my rib cage.How does she know? it wants to know.What do we do now? it demands.
But Cindy continues. “Just don’t let the big guy catch you. Break or no break, those Web TV broadcasts really put a strain on the network…”
Oh. My heart unclenches. She doesn’t know a thing. She just thinks I’m hooked on one of those kid shows. Good. That’ll be my cover story if I ever get caught again—and Cindy will back me up, saying she warned me, she did, and I’ll agree, and apologize, and swear I’ll never do it again.
“Thanks for the warning, Cindy,” I say, and she unzips that smile again.
“No prob,” she says, before leaning in and whispering, “I got busted for the same thing last year. They gave me the ‘resources’ talk and a slap on the wrist.”
“Good to know,” I whisper back, thinking: one hour and forty-five minutes to go.
9
KKK Day
Time passes.
That’s something new—or something old that seems new again—noticing the passage of time. It’s Isuzu who’s reminded me, just by being here. Watching what even a few months’ worth of it does to her, the changes it makes, the inexplicable pressures it creates. It’s made me impatient with my fellow vampires, the way they chat endlessly in the checkout line, the way they tell stories that zigzag in a hundred different directions, one step forward, five back, picking up subplots and background and stream-of-consciousness non sequiturs, taking forever to get to a point or a punch line and frequently forgetting both along the way. They spend their time like drunken sailors spend their money—plenty more where that came from—oblivious to the fact that some of us may not actuallyhave all the time in the world.
It’s been over a year since I found Isuzu, and I’ve started wearing a watch. Not one of the new ones with the preset alarm to let you know when the sun’s coming, but one of the old kind, with a second hand and everything. I wear a watch, and I find myself watching it—when I’m not watching Isuzu, on my PC or in person.
I have calendars, too. Plural. One of which is prominently displayed in the kitchen, on the wall where we’ve started measuring the progress of Isuzu’s lengthening bones. She’s passed a couple of hatch marks already, and I’ve already told her that at this rate, by the time she’s my age, she’ll be banging her head against the moon.
She’s already giggled at that, and I’ve already thanked God.
Glancing at the calendar tonight, I notice something new. Or really, something very old. It’s a date, one that Isuzu has circled in stars. It’s not her birthday; that was a few months ago. And it’s not Christmas, either, which was even further back. But each of those days got this kind of star treatment.
It’s a holiday, but one the calendar makers have stopped paying attention to, even as a matter of historical interest. These lost holidays are generally the food ones or the death ones—like Thanksgiving or Easter. Something tells me that these holidays were still celebrated in the Cassidy hole, perhaps as a political statement, perhaps in solidarity with things that die and are eaten. Or maybe they were just an excuse to eat some of that chocolate they stole before escaping.
“Boo!”
It’s Isuzu. She’s snuck up behind me while I was standing here, counting the days between now and the date she’s circled at the end of October.
Turning, I find her standing there, a bedsheet pulled over her head, a fresh pair of eyeholes scissored out.
I snap my fingers.
“Ku Klux Klan Day!” I say. “Of course!”
“Huh?”
“Joke,” I say. She stares at me through her eyeholes, not getting Marty’s funny way of talking, yet again. Which is fine by me. Which is great. Given the choice of which bit of history to forget—the KKK or Halloween—I’d drop the pointy-headed cross burners in a heartbeat.
“Bad joke,” I say, as much to myself as her.
Still:
There are some out there—the vampirically correct—who don’t see much of a difference between what the KKK and Halloween represent. Both celebrate intolerance, they’ll say. Both embrace stereotypes. Both demonize that which they don’t understand. And it’s for these reasons as well as the irrelevance of its candy-kids-and-death elements that Halloween has fallen off the calendar.
Well, every calendar except mine, it seems.
I look at Isuzu in her sad little retro costume. “Are you a g-g-g-g-ghost?” I stammer, a hand fluttering to my chest. She nods. A giggle leaks out from under the sheet.
“What have you done with Isuzu?” I ask.
“We drank her blood,” Isuzu says, mixing not only the type of undead she is, but also her pronouns.
I shou
ld probably worry about that—and I plan to, someday. But for now, what I’m thinking about mainly is:
How?
How are we supposed to celebrate Halloween? How are we supposed to make it special in a world that’s pretty much one long, monotonous Halloween after another?
How did her mother manage it? The whole door-to-door trick-or-treating thing is out, obviously. Did they keep it simple? Was it just a sheet and a boo, some stale chocolate, a pat on the head, and a “Happy Halloween, kiddo”? Were decorations involved?
And what about a pumpkin?
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