Blood Type: An Anthology of Vampire SF on the Cutting Edge

by Watts, Peter

  "That's enough, Eudora," her father said. "No, these are like fishing worms. Earthworms. Angleworms. I'll help you dig some in the yard after supper."

  Eudora agreed. She was only a child. What choice did she have? After supper she went out with him in the garden and watched as he showed her the different kinds of soil, and how to arrange them in layers between the wormery's two sheets of transparent plexiglass. Filling the thing up like it was a box. He showed her how to use layers of pebbles as well, for drainage, and how, then, to add water from the hose, but not so much that it became too soggy. And how to cover the final layer with grass clippings and dead leaves, so that the worms would have something to eat.

  The best part, she thought, was digging the worms themselves, which she helped with, dangling them first before putting them in, just before adding the pebbles and leaves.

  She was into Goth culture too.

  On school days she wanted to wear black skirts, and black blouses as well, until one of the teachers sent her home with a note saying she frightened the other children. So she wore black and gray plaids and black jackets over white tops. And black tights with black shoes. When she was fifteen, she bought her first corset, with money she earned on summer vacation. Her father didn't know.

  As for the worms, they did help her grades. She spent hours in her room with her home computer poring over invertebrate biology. And not just Annelida, the segmented worms, like earthworms and fishing worms, but other kinds of worms. Flukes and pinworms. Nematodes. Ribbon worms—some of which grew to be hundreds of feet long. These lived in the ocean.

  Tube worms that lived on the ocean's floor next to sulfur-spewing vents. Giving her Bosch-like visions of what hell must look like when people died.

  In college, she studied Dante in the original fourteenth-century Italian.

  But, mostly, the worms she liked best lived in people.

  ~

  She felt an affinity after she grew up and left her father's house. After she graduated from college. She had many boyfriends—she sponged on them, knowingly. Living with boys, she didn't pay rent.

  As she—and her lovers—grew more sophisticated, she bilked them for presents. How did the song go, that "diamonds are a girl's best friend?"

  She had many men friends, some of them dying young. Tragic. Byronic. As a live-in girlfriend, in more and more states now she found herself able to inherit property.

  Yet she did love them.

  She dreamed about vampires, sometimes, especially on nights when the moon was nearing full. Of their preying on men, too—she liked vampire movies.

  She often met new men at horror film festivals. Classic movies like Nosferatu. The Great London Mystery. Dracula's Daughter. "Call me 'Carmilla,'" she'd tell them, laughing. "Beware I don't suck you dry."

  As often as not she'd go home with them too. Then, within a week, move in.

  Always on the go, that was Eudora. Seductive. Beautiful. Treating Goth clubs as if they were smorgasbords. Meeting new men there as well.

  So often they died young.

  ~

  When she was little, her "worm farming days" as she liked to think of them—often she, svelte, black-clad, fishnetted, corseted, used stories of that to intrigue men all the more—when she was young, she did not raise just earthworms. She experimented. Would earthworms eat nematodes? She'd add some to the soil. Would flatworms bore through dirt? One way to find that out.

  Eventually, of course, it started to smell bad. That is, even after she cleaned out the wormery, washing its sides and its black plastic ends, and putting in new dirt.

  And putting in new worms—sometimes exotic kinds she found in pet stores.

  It smelled like a grave, she thought. Like a grave must smell.

  She told her new man that. She'd only just met him Saturday night, after her lover of the present had left to go back home to stay with his parents. Some kind of sickness he'd managed to pick up. She didn't know what. She didn't like hospitals, though enough people she met ended up there.

  She thought herself unlucky, yet in a way she was fortunate also, her loves always ending, or mostly always, before they could go stale. She told her new loves that, too.

  "I'm a jinx," she said. "Beware of me—I'm bad luck. That's why I'm so grasping, because love is so short, one must take it as one can. Drink of one's life deeply.

  "Some say that I'm worth it."

  She had such a charming smile.

  ~

  And, on more and more nights as time went on, she dreamed about parasites.

  ~

  She was that herself, she knew. Like a big tick, or a tapeworm, or hookworm. But much more beautiful.

  Vampire-like, sucking life. She didn't understand, though it worked out for her, why life for those who loved her was so tragic. Not just men only, sometimes women loved her. So it wasn't just some kind of frail man thing, like people getting hurt when they fought over her. Though that happened sometimes too.

  Vampires. Vamps—the slim, dark-eyed females in silent movies who seduced and destroyed men. Like Theda Bara. The 1920s and '30s. The terms were related, she'd learned in college. Kipling's "The Vampire," his "rag and a bone and a hank of hair." The vampire as parasite morphed into the predatory woman.

  She was fascinated by worms that ate people. Like grave worms. Maggots—although these weren't true worms. She thought of herself like that sometimes as well, as worming herself into people's bodies, some part of herself, at least. Into their brains perhaps, certainly in their hearts.

  Feeding on them.

  Emerging winged, beautiful, not as a fly, but more as an exotic moth. A creature of the moon, dark, iridescent, flitting through the night. Gossamer wings shining.

  As she shone also, dancing to jazz beats, to drums, to tympani, in a new lover's arms. Black dress tight on her breasts, raven braids swinging. She thought of herself as a computer virus, scampering through wires—her home computer, on which she first learned about worm-borne diseases, of elephantiasis, river blindness. One of her boyfriends had lost his sight when she was nineteen. Guinea worm disease. Filariasis. Poor people's diseases.

  Although she herself, of course, preyed on the more rich.

  Coursing through wires with electrons, infecting them. Wasn't that how computer worms harmed their hosts? When she was fifteen, her hard disk had crashed. Her father had bought her a new computer.

  She learned about men that way.

  ~

  "My name isn't really 'Carmilla,'" she said as he took her up to his furnished loft. "It's Eudora, from a Greek word that means 'generous.'"

  "It's a nice name," he said. "Beautiful, like you." She nodded and nuzzled him.

  Later that night, as they lay side by side, naked, wrapped in each other's arms in his bed, she kissed him full on the mouth. Thrusting her tongue in. She felt her own mouth fill—his questing tongue's answer. The familiar tingle. Not knowing as worms coursed up, white, as thin as pencil-leads, mixed in saliva out of her throat to his. She who, at sixteen, had fallen deathly ill—adding, at that time, to her skin's natural pallor, so much now part of her charm—and, in recovery, became herself immune.

  To whatever it was they bore.

  And he, responding, rolled between her thighs. Tangled and sweaty, they made love again, then both went back to sleep.

  ~

  She dreamed about vampires.

  James Dorr’s newest collection is THE TEARS OF ISIS, released by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing in May 2013. This joins his two prose collections from Dark Regions Press, STRANGE MISTRESSES: TALES OF WONDER AND ROMANCE and DARKER LOVES: TALES OF MYSTERY AND REGRET, and the all-poetry VAMPS (A RETROSPECTIVE) from Sam’s Dot/White Cat. An active member of SFWA and HWA with nearly four hundred individual appearances from ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE to XENOPHILIA, Dorr invites readers to visit his site at http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com.

  A RIVER OF BLOOD, CARRIED INTO THE ABYSS

  John Palisano

  T
he bugs would soon return. Galaday willed his body to move, but the ache was too great. He needed sustenance. He needed blood. He needed life.

  Oh, please come back soon.

  Moonlight filled the Draconia's large command module. Reflections outlined the rim of his bed, his cane, and his feet. His toenails had grown long, pointed, and sharp. One split into two points at the end, like a piece of bamboo. He smelled and tasted silicone–– it helped keep the outbreak at bay. His period of rejuvenation had lasted four decades.

  Are two hundred years long enough?

  Will it return?

  Will I?

  XNA. Building blocks changed and made. Worked for decades. Until Jet Cassidy figured out a way to weaponize the stuff. Turn people into other things. Distortions. Mutations. Manipulations.

  The outbreak. Thousands carried it unknowingly for seven years. Its incubation undetected. Contagion through aerosol. Coughing. Wheezing. Breathing. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. Multi-millions. Death the only cure.

  Cure.

  Galady knew of one, but was not a scientist, so few listened. Exposure to the Wilson bacterium could fight it and win. There were consequences. The body would eject iron. The skin would pallor and hair would fall out. Unpleasant.

  The worst was the need for blood.

  That’s where the bugs came in.

  The Wilson Bacterium was known only to a few, a mocked rumor to the rest of the world. A secret of the Glass Company. Wilson Bacterium could slow the degradation of cells. In some cases it stopped them from dying completely. For Galaday, it slowed the disease inside him from a race to a crawl. His life extended. Changed.

  New nutrients necessary. New fuel.

  How to get it without getting caught?

  Feeders. Bleeders. Little black dots with very precise tastes. Galaday bred them and taught them what to do.

  He heard them come from behind. Minute sounds were as loud as tidal waves, if he chose to single them out, to listen. Hundreds of hair-like legs rushed across the floor toward their host.

  The first Feeder reached him, crawling at the back of his right arm. He felt his heart lighten at the touch. Soon there were many tingling things on him. Galaday imagined his pores opening to welcome them. Like a thousand needles, the Feeders bit. First a few, then many, as the others heard the chorus of pain and sang along.

  Galaday’s flesh responded. Signals shot up and down his nerves. His calf and bicep twitched. His throat opened. His eyes shut. His blood flowed.

  Moving one hand slowly on top of the other, Galaday felt the burrowing Feeders under the top of his hand with his palm. He gently stroked them, encouraging them to stay. Like bee stings. Remember those. When I was a kid. On Cape Hatteras.

  Only these stings hurt worse. He liked it.

  “Means you’re alive.” He heard his uncle Frances in memory. “It’s when you don’t feel pain that you’ve got to worry.” A soldier’s philosophy, spoken matter of fact. Galaday, for a moment, recalled how his Uncle’s strong hand grasped his young shoulder. Immediately he squeezed his own hand to see if he had grown as strong. He hadn’t. A hundred years later and I still have that man inside my head like it were yesterday.

  His skin felt soft like damp paper. It was not made to live this long.

  There aren’t too many of us left, though at least there are some people who listened to me.

  Galaday separated his hands and put them by his side. The feeding would be done soon, and so, too, would the hurt.

  Hundreds of Feeders burrowed inside his epidermis. They delivered blood. He felt the drops—only one or two per insect—fill him. Within moments the blood went to his head and face–– Galaday flushed. His joints loosened. The muscles around his eyes and mouth went lax. Before long, each crux and tissue felt rejuvenated. It hurt like crazy. Coming back to life always did. Not that he’d truly died, although it felt that way.

  Dozens of the Feeders, having unloaded their sanguine cargo inside him, began processing. They filtered the toxic minerals from his new blood as it raced along blood vessels and stripped the plague-like clots from within. They did so by inserting their legs inside his veins and allowing the toxins to gather round the limbs. Galaday had discovered the phenomena during his research years earlier.

  ~

  He’d used his Glass system to peer down at Moniga’s arms. “I’m splitting apart,” she’d said. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  Galaday’d said: “You’re more than my wife,” and bent down on his knees with the Glass. He positioned it around her wound and observed. "You'll be the first to be cured."

  “How can you be so sure?” she’d said from her seat. "If you love me, just tell me the truth so I can make peace and say my goodbyes."

  He did not look up. He said, “I never lie to you.” Then he saw something remarkable: one of the Feeders inside her wound. They’d been thought of as a plague. The last sign right before someone passed from outbreak’s complications. Like vultures circling a dying animal.

  Moniga said, “They’re there, aren’t they? The things. Eating me alive.”

  Galaday did not reply, instead, he kept watch.

  He needed to see what happened. If he could stop them, he could stop the inevitable. Or so he’d thought.

  Then he went to the Glass and tuned it so he could see closer.

  The magnified bugs were doing something curious. If he watched one long enough, they followed a pattern. They’d scoop up blood or tissue and leave, depositing their payload somewhere nearby...somewhere dark.

  Galaday followed their lead and spotted a larger pale tubular insect hidden a short distance away. The Feeders deposited the blood inside the thing’s maw. After a time, they stopped. The tube bug changed color to pink. They’d fed it. He thought of the possibilities. What were these things? Why would they need human blood to survive? How had they been drawn to their hosts? How could he use them to save lives?

  He’d find out.

  ~

  Only three Feeders were left on his chest, so Galaday made to sit up. He was weakened from their draining. His head spun. He wanted to move faster but could not. Still, he made his way up and off his bed. The last Feeders rolled from his body and hit the floor, where they scurried away inside the shadows. Galaday watched them, and thought it oddly unlike him to trust they'd always return. Well, where else would they go? There was nothing to do outside the Draconia. He doubted they'd be able to survive within the vastness of space, but who knew.

  Galaday approached the hallway that led to the main corridor of the ship. There, to his right, was the Phoenix wing of the Draconia. That was where she was—his Moniga. The Feeders had taken so much from her, so long ago. She'd nearly died from them. Her pain was immeasurable. "Take me," she'd begged. "Release me."

  He wouldn't.

  Not then.

  Not now.

  Not ever.

  No.

  Instead, he would find a way to cure her.

  Venom is made from poison. It was a lesson...a basic lesson...he'd learned at University. How simple. Elegant. From the feeder's poison he'd save Moniga. That was Galaday's hypothesis.

  The right side of his head hurt. That was always where he'd been sensitive after the Feeders. It hurt worse as he leaned down to open the airlock to the Phoenix wing, where the laboratory station had been created. He cultivated the area to its essence. The Draconia needed to run only the most essential tasks. Galaday had no idea how much power the craft had left in the thermo engines. He'd heard its engineers brag about a lifetime lasting millions of years, but Galaday was doubtful. How would the Draconia be able to sustain itself for so long? How could its metals stay together? What if the shields went down, and what happened if there was something that could not fix itself. Then the entire bloodline would be gone. His race. He, Moniga and the six others would be the last. Why risk going out in such a way? Perhaps there might be other beings roaming around the galaxy that would find and rescue them. Similar beings from whom they'd
be able to recover and thrive and become reintegrated. These were all maybes, and he gave all of his hope to the possibilities.

  Galaday opened the door to the Phoenix wing. The room was dark: very different than the holofilms he grew up watching. It was functional, not pretty. It smelled of chemicals. He lowered the sliding door covering Moniga. He wanted to preserve her until he knew he'd be able to bring her back. Galaday didn't want her to see him. His body had changed. Appearing as though he was suffering malnutrition, Galaday's once lush hair had thinned considerably. His fingers looked smaller, skinnier and longer. How would Moniga react? Probably be frightened, if not terrified. His teeth had withered into small triangular things that made him look like a shark, when he opened his mouth. His tongue had gone dark, probably from the poor rations he was eating.

  I can't see me. I don't want anybody to see me like this. I look horrible. Desperate. One of the last men alive, but I look like a monster. Why couldn't I be frozen the way I looked in my prime? I had long flowing dark curls, and bright green eyes. I was strong with rippling muscles. Everything worked. I could drink a bottle of wine and be perfect. Now? I get all my food out of plastic boxes. Everything has been freeze-dried and preserved. All my food. All my drinks. All my entertainment. And what am I going to do when the thermo engines run out? Then what?

  The ship was packed with a hundred years of food. That was for a full crew, too. He should have enough for his lifetime and theirs. And then some. What if some spoiled? What if some got destroyed? There was no source of food in outer space. They'd have to starve. Or he could take the little trapezoid-shaped black pill in the tube. The emergency suicide pills. Painless. Quick. Classy. There just in case of such an outcome.