Dead, undead… Rose had often mused upon how she considered such states, now that she was a vampire. But she always came to the same conclusion: the difference between her and a human was huge, but the gulf between undead and true death was much larger.
Jane surprised them by disappearing from the chamber, uttering not a word as the tunnels swallowed her up. The others fed where they were. Patrick still had several blood packets left, and each of them withdrew to a far corner or behind one of the tumbled lockers to feed. The cold blood was on the verge of turning bad. Stale and bitter, Rose wondered what Jane tasted when feeding from a body that had been dead for just too long. Its blood would be tainted. This blood, donated by the living to help those in need, lasted much longer. It was a mystery that none of them bothered to muse upon it too much.
Rose could never taste blood without recalling the suit she had once killed. She could not feel guilt. She supposed that she had started feeling disgust, if anything. Not at the blood or the death, but the way the man had pleaded and fought, and how ineffectual he had been.
Sometimes the call of the kill came loudly to her, and she knew that Francesco saw that. She’d never spoken to him about it, not even after the suit, because when it came to such matters, he had succeeded in scaring her many times. But she assumed it was because she was still young compared to the others. Francesco himself claimed almost two hundred years.
She wondered if the hunger was a distant memory to him now, or whether it was something a Humain simply learned to control.
The blood gave her strength, thrumming through her altered systems and conferring a thrill she had never experienced while alive. It was moments like these when she felt as close to her brethren vampires as ever, and most likely to submit to the urges that drove them all. Because, really, being Humain was a play, wasn’t it? They convinced themselves that they were the more civilized, welcoming a vampire’s extended life while existing side by side with humanity. But perhaps it was like vegetarianism in humans: a denial of the animal’s true nature.
Rose remembered a joke her father always used to tell in front of their mother’s vegan sister: If God hadn’t meant us to eat animals, why did he make them of meat? Sometimes she thought that if she wasn’t meant to prey on humans, why did they carry the blood she so craved?
She should ask Patrick about that one day. He believed they were all God’s children. Alive or undead, Rose had never believed in anything.
She sighed and licked a few errant smears of blood from her fingers. She tried to rest, but peace was elusive. Patrick paced the chamber, his footsteps an annoying metronome. Francesco alone seemed able to find rest, and he left the three others glancing at each other now and then, but saying nothing.
It’s like holding a fucking wake, Rose thought. And perhaps they were. Marty and Lee might be safe during the day… but maybe not. Vampires employed their mortal servants, and in a way that’s just what Lee was to the Humains. They treated him better and had no intention of ever turning him. But he was still their servant. Their pet, as Patrick called him.
What the hell had she been thinking, leaving Marty with him?
Way above them, the sun passed across the sky and gave the earth life, flooding the surface with radiation that would only bring death to such as them. Rose and the others sensed its passage, and when the time came to move, Francesco stirred awake.
They gathered in the center of the chamber and Jane joined them again, her eyes sparkling and skin glowing. She’d fed somewhere, and as usual none of them inquired where. Perhaps when they started talking about things like that in the open, they’d finally become a family.
6
BY THE TIME THE crying boy was asleep, Lee Woodhams was ready to flee into his world once more. It spanned the globe and the minds, thoughts, and actions of those who lived there, but he rarely left his house. He explored through the internet, but he treated the net as a much more advanced animal than most people. For Lee, it was more than music and blogs, porn and social networking, online purchasing and information exchanges. The internet for him was a living, breathing thing. A bleeding thing. And more than once he had considered the irony of how he used it. He drew blood from the internet and absorbed it into himself, and it was long past the stage where he could give it up.
He made a large mug of coffee and sat at his computer, randomly selecting which ISP to use today. He logged into several message boards under one of a dozen pseudonyms he had registered, then initiated some automatic search software. It brought up over a hundred new mentions of “vampire” since he’d last searched yesterday, and he started scrolling through the messages and postings involved. They were mostly casual chat, deluded monologues, or book or movie reviews. He rarely found anything significant in these places anymore—the vampires had grown too careful—but he was thorough. If they knew these sites were too open and public, that might well mean they were the perfect camouflage for certain messages.
His coffee steamed, and he scanned the screen and thought of the boy sleeping in the next room. There was something wrong about him. He’d just seen his mother killed and father kidnapped by monsters, true, but there was a strange awareness about the kid that Lee couldn’t shake. It wasn’t that vampires were known to him, he was sure; he could almost feel the terror coming off the boy in waves. But he was holding something back. He’d talked about the most terrible aspects of what had happened, and yet Lee felt that he’d only skirted at the edges of events. There was something at the heart of what had happened that Marty—and perhaps Rose—was keeping from him.
So Rose and Francesco had killed one of the fuckers. Good. He wished he’d been there to see that, after all these years. He was jealous that it had been them instead of him, but he hoped they had both gained some sort of catharsis from what had happened. From the time they had joined ranks against the monsters, he and the others had agreed that they could know nothing about one another. First names, and that was all. No personal background, no history, no reasons why they hated the bloodsuckers so damn much… nothing that the vampires could use against them, if one of them were ever caught. To begin with, Lee had been uncomfortable that it was his house used as a meeting place, but Francesco had persuaded him that it made sense. He was the one who was ex-SIS; he had the computers, the know-how, the string of contacts around the globe. He was in touch by email with a score of people doing the same thing, and he acted as a focus for their own small group. Francesco and the others had made him feel like their de facto leader, though Lee wasn’t stupid. He knew that wasn’t the case at all. He might be clever and have access to the resources, but Francesco was the wise one. If Lee wanted to know any of their backgrounds, it was Francesco’s.
And he could have found out. There were ways and means, after all. But he had honored his group’s vow of silence and anonymity, and honor, after all, was one of the things that set them apart from the vampires.
He started checking his fifteen email accounts, each under a different name and with randomly generated passwords. He used each account slightly differently. One was for the nut jobs whose emails inevitably ran to thousands of words and were rants and diatribes about the vampire curse. They were usually written by people who’d never seen or encountered a vampire in their lives but who thought themselves stalked. Too many bad movies, perhaps, or too much time on their hands, they grasped on to something and it became a part of their lives. Lee rapidly scanned each message and discarded them all.