Underground Vampire (12 page)

The late afternoon drizzle damped
the grey light, making the walk from the Library to Pioneer Square quite
comfortable.   After so long in the dark, his eyes were painfully
photosensitive and he habitually wore the darkest Ray-Bans available.  He
liked the look, dark ovoids with the classy gold rims.

 Still learning his way about
the City, Oliver marveled at what the Humans had been up to during his
internment. The alterations to downtown were so astonishing that at times he
lost his way on the streets, old landmarks replaced by ghastly towers. Many of
the buildings were what they called postmodern and were hideous.  The
weather, though, comforted him with its continuous cozy damp as he meandered
through puddled sidewalks, studying the architecture and hunting, always
hunting. Today a gray light pleasing to the skin highlighted the angles and
ridges in buildings and streets, the gloomy daylight casting small shadows
oblique to his way.

The parochial city he’d left had
grown up in his absence and gussied itself with ugly and tall buildings without
discernible meaning.  Nowhere was this more evident than the disappearance
of the downtown library.  In its place was a jutting, angled, overhanging
lattice of glass.  Lacking majestic stairs leading to a formal entry, the
structure felt oddly uninviting, as if part of the fun was finding one’s way
in.  

Inside were vast, impersonal
airport concourses bounded in cement, areas furnished for children were
everywhere and garish colors marked this or that passage leading to improbably
forlorn red walls.  Bored police lounged about and one even had a desk at
the top floor where the glass floor cantilevered into space over the sidewalk
stories below, and tourists longed to scramble out onto the delicate lattice so
their families could snap death defying pictures on phones.  Huge and
impersonal, the place dwarfed literature.  He went there often.

Admirably situated downtown, there
was access from different streets, and the building had an underground parking
facility accessible to him from an adjoining utility vault, when his activities
required discretion.  Best of all, the entire library was an extraordinarily
popular destination, providing a rich supply of potential lunch partners. 
He found the least uncomfortable chair in the most detestable color in the
jungle section, adjacent to a hostile purple rug.  The chair provided a
convenient seat to view the escalators and electric powered sidewalks parading
in front of him, rather like the cafeterias that were once popular where your
selections ran on a conveyor belt and you selected your fancy at your
whim.  Instead of wilted sandwiches and molded Jell-O, there were
businessmen, the occasional waif and, for dessert, the incomparable backpack
toting co-eds. 

Other than the coliseum erected
farther downtown, this was his most favorite spot to sit and visit.  The
coliseum was an exciting venue for local blood sport, and he had recruited a
Human with season tickets, keeping him as his personal blood slave and
immensely enjoying the spectacle when the local barbarians played a home
game.  I really must sample one of the athletes, he thought, although the
disappearance of such a high profile Human would engender too much
publicity.  Still, perhaps one of the visiting barbarians could be taken
from the streets.  He’d noticed that the athletes took every opportunity
to avail themselves of the local women, and most were very lax about personal
security, relying on transient notoriety to protect them.

Today, he needed lunch.  While
it was true that most Vampires could happily subsist on a monthly feeding, he
was unable to curtail his desire.  During his long deprivation he thought
only of revenge and food.  Now, as he plotted the death of the three he
was free to dine whenever hungry but, unfortunately, was never truly
satisfied.  After a feeding, no matter how deeply he drank, he craved only
the next victim and the next taste. 

He’d restricted himself to
compliant Humans, but his needs were so deep and his lusts so violent that the
Humans had suffered such grievous injury that they had to be terminated. 
To so abuse another Vampire’s Human was a disturbing violation of ethics, and
he’d already accumulated obligations to two Vampires, obligations that could
only be fulfilled by providing each Vampire with a suitably trained
replacement.  Or, thought Oliver considering the problem, the demise of the
two Vampires in a way that did not reflect badly on him.

Today, though, was a training day,
no time to dilly-dally about, surveying the menu.  He intended to toughen
and educate the cadre he’d chosen, teach them so they could teach and lead the
others. The whole group had gone soft; without him to nurture their development
they lacked basic hunting and killing skills.  They simply had no
knowledge or appreciation of their heritage, a void in their education that he
intended to fill, that and a bit of the old mind indoctrination.  At the
library, one of his joys was discovering the writers of his dark period. 
George Orwell was one of his favorites, explaining and codifying the
duplicitous use of language and its power over men.  He’d learned so much
at the wonderful library and now it was time to put it into practice.

What he had in mind involved a
variation on an ancient Vampire ritual.  As long as Vampires relied upon
Humans for sustenance, they had sought to enliven dinner by first playing with
their food.  Like felines and killer whales, a bit of sport before feeding
stimulated the appetite and there was nothing like the stew of hormones
produced in a crazed victim to properly season the blood. Long ago, it had been
a simple matter to abduct a villager or two, loose them in a forest and run
them down.  The modern world had changed all that, but he was adaptable.

Recruiting prey had been easier
than he thought.  There was an endless supply of men and women, boys and
girls with paranoid fantasies in this modern society. Strangely enough, the
safer their society became the more threatened they felt. They stockpiled guns
to protect themselves from friends and foes and carried concealed weapons, even
though the incidence of public violence was at an all-time low.  

Some thought illegal aliens were at
the back door, others that the government was at the front; most believed in
violent crime, although none had actually witnessed any; many loved murderous
video games, an invention that truly astounded Oliver; and many fervently
believed that someone wanted to take their guns away as prelude to internment
in concentration camps.  They had their own television network trumpeting
fear around the clock under the guise of news.

They were marvelous and Oliver
couldn’t wait to eat one.  There was something about their ignorant
paranoia that stimulated his appetite; he was sure their warped brains would
produce a chemical stew with a unique bouquet. 

 They hung around gun shops
and shooting ranges, got tattoos, owned houses in the suburbs, played
paintball, their children went to school except for the ones who didn’t and
they all were convinced of an existential threat lurking just around the
corner. Oliver concentrated on the gun nut subculture and was quickly able to identify
three young men and one woman who hallucinated the glory of battle. Why they
didn’t enlist in the military and satisfy their atavistic impulses in any of
the available wars escaped him, but they all professed a desire to experience
the real thing and Oliver had just the opportunity for them.

Of course, the glorious hunt was
strictly forbidden and had been replaced by a bastardized simulacrum where pet
Humans decorated with feathers and horns ran laughing through the Underground,
pursued by Vampires who accumulated points for the order in which they touched
the runner.  Oliver was appalled by the degeneration of Vampire society
and longed to return to the days of glory when to be a Vampire meant you were a
noble, a savage who killed what he wanted and took his fill, as was his due. No
favor begged, no quarter given. 

Soon, the nights and days hiding
Underground would be over and the Vampire Nation would resume its rightful
place at the apex of society, the top of the food chain. Before he could put his
plan into action, though, he needed troops who were ready, hungry and
trained.  They needed blood from the source, fresh blood gotten from a
Human, not a rat plucked from the sewer or a plastic bag purchased from a
store, but a terror stricken human on its knees pleading for its life. 

Once he introduced them to, oh how
he loved the phrase, “free range Humans,” they would be free of the corruption
of modernism and ready to take their rightful place in the world.  And
while they were at it, perhaps he’d have them tear down these glass and steel
boxes and put up some proper buildings made of stone with gargoyles on the roof
and a lion or two guarding the front door.

Under the guise of a private paint
ball battle that promised to be as close to the real thing as you could get, he
lured his quarry to the city.  They met each other for the first time and
he was gratified to notice that they had all taken his suggestion to heart and
had come armed with their favorite handguns, in addition to their paintball guns. 
He had stressed to them that verisimilitude was all and he was heartened that
two had strapped the large knives that many of this urban tribe affected to
their thighs. 

He took them to the Underground
through a utility access tunnel, not concerned that they would learn one of the
secret entrances, as none would be leaving.  They immediately set about
daubing paint on their faces and seeing to their weapons, as ridiculous as
children at a costume party. They believed they would be fighting another team,
so none of them was concerned at the approach of the Vampire pack.  It was
only when they noticed that the Vampire team had no equipment, no guns, no face
paint, no silly commando knives that questions were asked.  Of course by
then it was too late.

Oliver suggested, “You should all
abandon your paint guns, as they certainly won’t help and might slow you
down.”  Of course, they objected.  In their cosmology, there were
rules governing the end of the world.  Nervously clumping together like
baleful, succulent sheep who notice the village dogs gathering at a hole in the
fence, they gabbled about rules.  “To make the exercise real,” continued
Oliver, “only the winner will be going on, so defend yourself at all times,”
like he was the referee at his favorite television show, cage fighting.

 “How do you win,” asked one
of the knife boys, “I mean, what are the rules?”  

“There is only one rule,” hissed
ugly, hungry Vampire Oliver, “if we catch you, we eat you.”

“Wait a minute,” said the large
tattooed one, putting his hand on the butt of his holstered hand gun, “what’s
going on here?”

“This one will be mine,” said
Oliver, as he flashed to knife boy, “The rest of you have a five minute head
start.” 

He turned to knife boy who was
unsnapping the holster strapped about his waist and seized his wrist.  The
other players stood watching as Oliver bent knife boy’s wrist, forcing him to
the ground.  As he leaned over to savor the pulse beating in his captive’s
neck, he turned his head to the dumbfounded Humans saying, “Time to run.” 
Stimulated by the sight of an impending bloody death, the Vampires crowded
round.  The Humans watched as Oliver tore into the offered throat and
began to suck at the severed artery; behind him, he heard the sound of retching
as the Humans stumbled off down the corridor.

Looking up at the Vampires edging
after them he ordered, “No cheating.  Wait, my friends; we act with
honor.”

He leisurely counted off the
minutes as the hunters watched him feed.  Their hunger lust hung in the
air like the potent musth of bull elephants.  Each minute reinforced his
dominance and increased the potency of their desire.  He’d brought six
recruits so that there would not be enough food for all of them, not enough to
go around.  They would soon learn that only the successful feasted
and  the weak fell by the wayside, for only the strong would live  in
the new world order he’d dreamed about all those years in his tomb.

Finally, looking up from the
savaged neck, the blood dripping from his jaws, he casually nodded his head and
started the six into the tunnel to hunt down the remaining three Humans. 
He felt like a lion teaching young males how to survive in the wild, how to
hunt and kill, skills that would be necessary in the days to come. 

Peering from the rubble to the side
he noticed the beady eyes of rats watching as he chewed the flesh from the
neck.  I don’t remember there being so many, he thought.  Perhaps I
didn’t notice them before.  Ignoring them, he turned back to his
meal.  The rats, unnerved that he had seen them, scurried off.

He’d thought about the Queen while
in his tomb, thought about her reign and the way she’d tamed the Clan so that a
quiet peace had settled over the Northwest.  Her control extended to all
and that, he thought, was the weakness in her plan, for not only had the
malcontents been deprived of the hunt and war but so too her supporters had
been tamed.  The balance of power would tilt to whoever could build an
effective fighting force of experienced killers.  He needed time, time to
recruit and time to train; then he could move to the next phase. 

The only problems were Petru and
the Bitch.  Petru, the 13th century anachronism, had somehow escaped the
civilizing polish of the last seven hundred years; granted, he could drive a
car and use the phone to order a pizza, but he remained a medieval warrior at
heart, implacably bound to the Queen and completely ruthless in her
service.  Petru and Arabella, warrior and assassin, remove them and she
would fall.  The rot was inside the Queen’s house, a rot he’d started
those many years ago and now he would nurture the traitor on the inside while
he attacked the outside.