He feels the happiness like warmth now, the heat from a blazing conflagration. As if the fifth house on the right was an inferno. On fire with joy. Sheer, raging happiness that will ignite the houses on either side unless it’s stopped. The doors are locked, and heavy curtains block the windows. He slips in through the back door. He carries tools for the opening of locks, and he’s very good with them. His primary tool is the gun now back in his hand. The soft moans of a woman drift from a back room with roaring fireplace. He moves closer on noiseless feet.
At first they’re only shadows. Locked in a tight embrace on a shaggy rug by the fire. He watches them for a moment, removes his square glasses. His eyes are blank and colorless, like dead fish scales. But he sees the happiness. He watches it spill from their sweating bodies, rippling waves of color, invisible to the human eye but glaring to his own. Their naked joy mesmerizes him, and he cannot look away from the sheer beauty of it. The awesome beauty of the awful thing he was made to root out and destroy.
Happiness. The man and woman have found it together somehow. The quiet man’s fascination turns to outrage. He’s never seen such an intense bliss. Suddenly he’s ashamed of himself for watching. He pulls the trigger.
It’s fear that makes him do it. Time and time again, he pulls the trigger out of sheer fear. He accepted that long ago. He imagines what it would be like to be happy, to lose himself in those blazing energies he’s witnessed so many times. To spark like comet and burn yourself to nothingness, existing as pure ecstasy.
To be happy.
It is a horror he could never endure.
That’s why the government has agents like him. To keep its people from the threat of bliss. To keep the entire population from being devoured by voracious joy. Happiness leads to oblivion. To keep mankind alive, he must keep it suffering. The next stop he makes is at the lakeside, where a man with long hair mediates by the water, coming perilously close to bliss. The quiet man approaches, making no sound in the wet grass, and shoots him in the back of the head. Nobody notices. They never do.
In a rust-eaten trailer park three children play with a stray dog. Their faces are dirty, their clothing little more than rags. He shoots the dog and walks away while the children weep, poking at their dead friend with a stick. On the other side of the trailer park a man hangs up the phone. He’s going to meet someone later that night — someone he can’t wait to see. His happiness is like a flare in the dark. It draws the quiet man toward him, and the gunshot echoes above the squalor.
On his way out of the park, he shoots down an old lady feeding pigeons. The birds scatter as her blood stains the yellow grass to red. If her deep joy had spread any further than the pigeons, it might have infected the entire town. He considers shooting the birds, but they’ve already lost themselves in the gray sky. Not his problem anymore.
That night the radio calls him back into the city, where a young father celebrates the birth of his first child. Far too happy, especially for the urban district. Even with a permit for a birth celebration, the new father’s happiness had been blazing in his heart for a week, exceeding his allotment. Too much happiness. Expired permit.
The quiet man intercepts the new father in a parking lot, and shoots him in the leg. He doesn’t always have to kill. Sometimes a maiming shot is enough to restore the balance, squelch the gout of happiness. Close the psychic wound. The father howls in pain, bleeding on the concrete, until his co-workers drag him away. He doesn’t thank the quiet man for sparing his life. He’s no longer happy, but he’ll be fine walking with a cane from now on.
After midnight the quiet man sits at an all-night diner, drinking black coffee. Long day. He tries not to think about the couple on the rug, the vortex of ecstasy that almost smothered him. It had been close, but he’d pulled the trigger. Restored the balance. He would never understand how they could be so terribly happy, so insanely elated. Some cases weigh on his mind, and he realizes this will be one of them.
He doesn’t see the girl come in and walk toward his booth. He’s looking at the plastic menu, lost in thought. She slides into his booth with a rustle of her silk blouse, and before he knows it she’s looking right into his eyes. Her face is exquisite.
It’s a face he’s seen in his most secret dreams, the ones he can’t even admit to himself. Her eyes are dark with secrets, brighter than stars. Staring at her, he cannot reduce the magnificence of the moment to the stumbling weakness of words.
His heart beats madly and he smiles at her. It’s all he can do.
She raises the gun.
“Is this happiness?” he asks.
She pulls the trigger.
Love in the Time of Dracula
“There is no greater glory than to die for love.” —Márquez
We never should have come to New York. The skyline was jagged, like broken fangs against the sunrise. The streets were deserted. The vamps were all sleeping deep in their holes, their slaves locked in underground pens during daylight hours. That Big Apple landscape in the morning, all those magnificent towers like sparkling mountains, it messed with our heads, made us think for a minute that there was no danger. We knew better, but still the splendor of the ruins made us careless.
There were about seventeen in our group at that time, strapped with rifles, crossbows, and silver blades. A few carried pistols. We were young and fearless.
Sunlight flared against the shattered skyscrapers, and the wind howled like a ghost chorus. Rats scuttled between heaps of rusted-out vehicles. Mounds of skulls overflowed a line of dumpsters.
“We can’t stay here,” I said. “Too many places for vamps to hide.”
Mudder had been a sharpshooter before the plague. He agreed.
“Sewers and subways full of bloodsuckers,” he said. “A whole city of ’em down there. Thousands of prisoners in the breeding pens.”
The others looked from me to Marion. As usual, they waited for her to make the final decision. She shielded her eyes from the sun’s glow and scanned the empty streets.
“We came here to find transport,” she said. “So we’ll be here until we do. For now, we find an old hotel with some intact beds. “ Our bus had broken down a hundred miles west, and we’d hoofed it since then, sleeping mostly in abandoned basements.
“What we need is a good boat,” Mudder said. “Sail away from all this shit.”
“To where?” I asked. “Everywhere else is just as fucked up.”
“Boys,” Marion said. “You’re missing the point.” She rested her big gun across her shoulder and lowered her shades so I could see her green eyes. Deep green eyes, like the summer leaves I remembered from childhood. Green, fresh, and full of sunlight. The most beautiful eyes in the world. “We’re not leaving until we find something to drive. So we might as well make ourselves comfortable.”
We found a big luxury hotel that hadn’t been completely stripped by raiders. Getting into the building was no problem, and we climbed to the thirty-third floor before we found a suite that was pretty much intact. We built a fire in the stairwell to cook some squirrels we snared in Central Park. We slept with our bellies full as the sun went down.
So far the search for a functioning vehicle — and the fuel to power it — had been fruitless. Most of the cars and trucks we found were burned out, trashed, or rusted to immobility. And we had yet to find any gas. The vamps had secured all of these resources and tucked them away underground somewhere. We heard rumors of blood-warrens, underground cities where vamp hordes lived for years without ever coming up for moonlight. I had hoped we’d never find one of them. I should have known that Mudder was right. We were camping on top of the new New York — the one that only came to life in the dark. The NYC underground used to belong to the rats, but now even they served the master.