by T M Linville
“Your first opponent will be close to your size and build,” the woman said in the same monotone voice, like she has said it a thousand times before. “As you progress, if you progress, you will be given increasingly tougher opponents. You are only allowed three fights a day as long as you fight with this group. Other groups offer more fights, but they don’t offer the supervision of our fights. All of our fights are supervised by a medical professional and a trainer, the referee. The medical professional is there for obvious reasons, the referee is there to make each of you better fighters and to make sure you don’t kill each other. The higher the fighter is in rank, the better the weekend crowd. The bigger the weekend crowd the bigger the bets. I’m in this for the same reason every other gym and group owner is in this, to make money. Big crowds bring big money.
“The only rule is ‘No killing’. No direct claw penetration to the heart area and no crushing of the sternum. If you kill your opponent, you will be sentenced to two weeks in confinement for your first offence. If you kill again, the Guardians will deal with you personally. No exceptions. Each fight is three minutes long and the best fighter wins. Simply put, the fighter that gets wounded the most, loses. Any fighter that is knocked out, also loses. In weekday fights, the trainer and referee judges the fight and therefore decides who wins. Do you have any questions?”
Lily looked over at Erica and waited. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for but there seemed to be something missing. If it were this easy for her to blow off steam and pent up energy, why did everyone wait so long to introduce her to it? Erica raised her eyebrows and gave a quick shrug. She was about to take a step back when she remembered something. She leaned over and whispered in Lily’s ear.
“Don’t use your spikes.”
“They’re going to know sooner or later,” Lily whispered back. “They occasionally have a mind of their own, you know.”
Then Lily nodded, removed her shoes and turned toward the ring. Her opponent was just entering the room as she stepped through the ropes. He was her height and was wearing a leather vest with black pants and no shoes. His fangs and claws were already out when he faced her in the ring. Two other men walked into the room and sat on stools against the back wall.
“Do you have a name?” the trainer asked Lily.
“Lily,” she replied.
“Fight is Lily versus Tyler in three, two,” the trainer announced.
A bell rang and Tyler instantly took a swipe at Lily’s face. She stepped back and leaned away from the blow. Then before she could blink he was swinging again. She ducked and came up swinging. She took two swipes at his chest and made good contact with one. His leather vest then had four slashes across the front.
“And I liked this vest,” Tyler said as he looked down at the torn garment.
Apparently he wasn’t accustomed to being hit because he looked at his chest until it healed then he came at her again. They danced around the ring for a minute then he came at her even harder and just as before, she dodged his blows. She had landed four strikes before he finally got in a good lick. He froze when he smelled the blood on Lily’s shoulder.
“Time,” Tyler yelled. “Since when are fucking humans allowed to fight? I may not be a high rank fighter, but I’ll be damned if I will resort to fighting humans. Lily, how did you get the claws and fangs to work?”
He looked at Lily as he tasted the blood from his claws.
“I’m not human,” she said, pointing to the wound on her shoulder that was visibly healing. “I’m just as much vampire as you are.”
The referee examined Lily’s wounds as the slashes closed on her shoulder. He wiped away the blood and looked closer at her arm.
“They’re superficial cuts, Lisa, and healed like they should,” the ref said, looking toward the woman in the leather skirt.
Lisa looked at Erica and then at Lily.
“What are you?” she asked. “Part human, part vampire?”
Lily nodded. “I have a layer of human skin, and that’s about the extent of the likenesses. It heals almost instantly, like your skin, there’s just a slight hint of human to the blood’s scent.”
“Your blood does smells human,” Tyler affirmed.
Lisa nodded and grinned. “The smell of human blood? That should bring quite the crowds.”
“Then let’s continue,” said the referee as he stepped to the side.
Lily was pretty amazed that they simply took her word for it and let the fight go on.
The remaining minute and a half consisted of her ducking and dodging flying claws while landing the occasional four claws across a chest or shoulder and once across his face with all five claws. That pissed him off. He flew into her just as the bell rang. He stopped in his tracks and let his arms fall to his side.
“Dammit! I lost that one,” he mumbled as he ducked through the ropes. “Next time, Lily.”
“Fight goes to Lily,” the ref called.
“That’s all for today,” Erica said.
“Aw, come on!” Lily whined. “I can do three a day, she said. We just got here.”
“And now we are leaving,” Erica ordered.
There was no use arguing.
As they walked through the dreary, asylum-like hallway toward the exit point, Erica explained to Lily that Eric had joined the same fighting group and that’s where he had been keeping himself lately. She also told her that this particular group was one of the most respected.
“Respected?” Lily asked. “It just looks like a place for vampires to nearly kill each other.”
“Yes, respected,” Erica confirmed. “Their fights are supervised and all activity is monitored by the Guardians.”
“Oh,” Lily replied.
The Guardians were the overseers of the vampires. Like law enforcement for humans, vampires had their own laws to follow, their own code of conduct. Vampires and their activities were monitored by both human law enforcement agencies and by more closely by the Guardians. Yes, the existence of vampires was known by the government. The departments were paid very large sums of money to keep it quiet. There were also vampires in every branch of the government. They made sure that the existence of vampires was kept quiet. Those who knew about them and helped them remain discrete were paid very well to keep it to themselves.
The coven in each city had at least three human law enforcement officers as feeders. They were responsible for covering up sightings or rumors of the vampire’s existence. But the Underground was rarely monitored by local law enforcement. It just wasn’t a place that humans wanted to be or should have been, for that matter. It seemed bright and organized but it wasn’t a nice place. But apparently Erica seemed to think it was a good place for Lily to vent some pent up energy.
For the first few weeks, Lily was accompanied by Erica on her visits to the Underground and she learned how to get into and out of the tunnels without detection. There were multiple places to enter and exit the tunnels and Erica taught Lily all of them.
Lily moved up the ranks quickly and soon became a favorite among the betting crowd.
History to Present
There had been a whole lot of changes with the Underground and with the world in the one hundred and sixty years since Lily was born. There have been two world wars. The Race Wars of 2022 and what everyone now refers to as the God Wars that began in 2030 and lasted nearly ten years.
The Race Wars were probably the most ludicrous thing humans have done since Hitler thought he could create the perfect race. The thought of a superior race is as ludicrous as trying to improve the horse. You simply cannot improve perfection. There is, after all, no such thing as race. All humans are the same. The color of their skin does not make them different. They all have the same DNA, the same number of chromosomes, and at one time, had the exact same defects as the next. It made no more sense than killing someone because they had small ears or long fingers. Vampires tried to sit back and let the humans figure it out themselves, but after four years of pointless killing,
the vampires finally had to intervene. It wasn’t that their food source was being killed, they had their own supply of humans, it was that it just got so out of hand. Native Americans and Aborigines believed they were the truest human and the African population believed they were the oldest and truest humans. Then the Caucasian population had to get their two cents into the pot and before you knew it, the world had gone completely crazy. But the planet probably benefitted by the decrease in the population.
And then just four years after the Race Wars, the God Wars began as an argument between two groups at a Unison Rally. Then, over the next two years it grew out of proportion as more and more wanted to voice their opinions. This was another pointless war that humans created because they thought one idea was better than the other. For the most part it was a war against the Christians and the non-Christians. It got really ugly, really quickly. It spread like wildfire through the United States then Great Britain, the Middle East and eventually consumed every continent and corner on the planet. The first cities destroyed were Tokyo, Jakarta, Mumbai, New York, Los Angeles, Delhi and Cairo. But it wasn’t like wars of the past. This was a bioweapon war. Sometimes the attacks were obvious right away but in most cases no one would even know that there was an attack until hours or even days later. The world as a whole had gotten smarter and biology and genetics were two subjects the war leaders focused on. Everything needed to engineer a weapon could be bought on the extranet. Everything from a non-lethal strain of the latest flu virus to a living sample of the pneumonic plague or even Ebola, although pricy, could be ordered and shipped to anywhere in the world in only a day. Scientist and genetic engineers created deadly strains of everything, e coli, staph, even common bread mold was engineered to attack human lungs. At first, the war was quiet, no bombs, no F-22’s whizzing by overhead, no citizens walking the streets with rocket launchers. If you were outside, no one would’ve known the dangers had it not been for the overcrowded hospitals and headlines on the news every day. In one day, the water supplies for 35 major cities were hit with an artificially engineered virus designed to kill only humans. It was well coordinated but not well thought through. Everyone in the city who drank tap water was infected. That’s a lot of people. That’s when the war became indiscriminate. It soon turned out to be the scariest and most deadly war the world has ever seen.
For the first 5 years, the Atheists, the Jains and the Jews took cover and let the others fight it out. But when the water supplies were tainted, the killing became indiscriminant. And anyone that was in range, regardless of religious beliefs, were attacked. Everyone that was trying to stay out of it, started fighting back and making their own weapons. That is when the war turned into ‘who has the best bioweapons’ and ‘where are the biggest crowds of people’. Hence, more major cities were all but wiped out. Public activities ceased. Anyone not already affected by the weapons stayed inside but life on the outside continued only with far less crowds. People still worked in spite of the threats, but the majority worked from home. Security for manufacturing and shipping facilities used genetically engineered dogs who could detect even the tiniest amount of contaminated matter. Equipment that monitored brain waves and body language were used to detect persons that just acted suspicious. They didn’t catch everything, but they came close. Commerce continued throughout the world but the economy suffered drastically.
After fifteen years of constant, pointless killing, the vampires finally got involved. The vampires were like the most bad-ass special ops unit the world had ever seen, or never seen, for that matter. They went in at night and completely wiped out the engineering labs that harbored the bioweapons and the people that created them. It took two years to get the point across. And the point was, “If you kill, you will be killed”. Finally the war ended quietly and what emerged was a better planet.
At least in a sense, it did help the planet by decreasing the world population by more than 60%. But that is a whole hell of a lot of bodies. The planet reeked of decay for a decade after the killing stopped but all that decay left behind a very fertile planet. Since only humans were killed, everything else thrived. Plants grew twice as fast and were more resilient. More plants meant that the amount of oxygen in the air increased which also meant that the carbon dioxide levels needed to increase to sustain the abundance of plants. Animals grew larger and bred more rapidly. The increase in both plants and animals lead to more food and the world, for perhaps the first time, was never hungry. Humans still consumed meat but slaughter houses and the meat packing industry had changed so dramatically that it was now considered cruel not to kill animals. The natural reproduction rate was so high and there were so few natural predators, that animal populations had to be kept in check. Farms and ranches no longer killed animals at the prime of their lives. All animals were now free range and allowed to live their lives without very much human involvement. They were looked after and treated for any illnesses or injuries, but the natural order of the animals were left to its own devices. The older animals were painlessly euthanized then the meat was processed by machines. And there was no shortage of older animals either. Just like a natural predator, the old, weak or badly injured animals were killed for food while the strong, young animals were left to breed.
The humans on the planet also changed. The Earth’s atmosphere thinned, offering less protection from the sun. In a very short period of time, human skin became darker, less easy to burn in the stronger UV rays. Light skin and blond hair were a lot rarer. There were still blue, green or hazel eyes, thanks to the Aborigines, and when light eyes were combined with the dark hair and dark skin, it makes for some really beautiful people. Lily’s skin was naturally far from tan but she still had the pale blue eyes and although born blonde, had jet black hair. Although she would doubt beautiful would be the description Vincent would’ve given of her when he was chasing the newborn Lily through the forest so long ago.
People still wore cotton clothes although they were a lot more expensive than synthetic material. The plant that produced the cotton was engineered to grow continuously, instead of having to be planted and harvested every season. They grew into trees like in an orchard and bloomed yearly. Machines tended the fields, cared for the trees and did all of the production. Clothes hadn’t changed very much. Although, the materials they were made out of went through different stages throughout the years. But the old favorites were still jeans and a tee shirts or sweats and a hoodie.
Cars drove themselves and auto accidents were extremely rare. Public transportation was fast and inexpensive. Single railed trains that ran on solar power, called Monos, crisscrossed over and between every major city. They were built on elevated platforms, thirty feet off of the ground. They reached speeds of over two hundred miles an hour when traveling long distances between cities. A Mono could be ridden from New York to Los Angeles or Miami to Seattle in a day.
The humans also managed to find a cure for cancer. Well, not really a cure, but a complete elimination of the disease. Scientists had found the gene that was a precursor to developing cancer. 100% of all cancer patients had the gene, but only 90% of humans with the gene developed cancerous tissues. So it stood to reason that there had to be another gene that turned off the cancer gene. It took 20 years to find it, but humans did indeed find the gene that turned it off. The only problem was, when the ‘off’ gene was introduced into DNA that didn’t have the cancer gene, the ‘off’ gene would cause problems with the normal growth of the developing fetus. So after finally figuring out the ‘off’ gene was related to normal human growth, they still couldn’t figure out why there were no growth issues in DNA that had the ‘off’ gene and the cancer gene. So after years of trying to find a happy medium, the humans finally got smart and just added the off gene and the cancer gene to the DNA. It worked. Today, only one person in approximately every two million will develop cancer. And that’s due to some other DNA defect that had nothing to do with the cancer gene or the ‘off’ gene.
The United States bar
ed very little resemblance to what it had been a century ago. All the rules had changed. Thanks to the God Wars, public school buildings were eliminated and children attended classes at home via the extranet. Extra, as in extraordinary net. What was once known as the internet, a web of supercomputers that linked millions of computers together via hard wired connections, was replaced with massive structures constructed to send free wireless communications out to the world. There was an extranet hub for every one thousand square miles. Not a whole lot if you stop to think about it. Everyone, no matter their income, had instant access to endless information.
Hackers and computer viruses were stopped in their tracks by bio-passwords. At birth, your DNA code was recorded, then your fingerprints and a retinal scan were taken and added to the DNA code database. This became your bio-password. There was no longer a need to have to remember fifty different passwords for fifty different accounts. Computers came with retinal and handprint scanners and DNA analyzers. You were now your password and in order to use any computer, you first had to be positively identified. This eliminated hackers completely. Since every program, code or data of any kind that was created was bio-marked, nothing could be done anonymously. Nothing could be faked because the creators DNA was programmed into anything and everything they did. Cyber-bullying also ceased to exist. Turns out, people aren’t so tough when everything they say can be linked directly back to them.
And if someone still managed to drug or kill someone else for their password, there were no longer prisons, only holding facilities for euthanasia. Crime was no longer tolerated. One strike and you were out. But one of the best things that the US did was to eliminate the need for private and personal injury attorneys. The courts consisted of a trial before a six party peer review. Part of every child’s education, was an early understanding of the law. In the lower grades, K through six, children were taught the laws, why they existed and how to protect themselves against others. In the upper grades, seven through twelve, the court process and sentencing processes were studied. Then, since every student was required to have a bachelor’s degree before their graduation, grades thirteen through sixteen taught not only practicing the law but in order to graduate, every child had to score a passing grade on the state bar exam.