Sleeping with Marion in that fantastic hotel room — a relic from the world we both remembered — I dreamed about the slave-pens. Half-starved families stuffed into tiny cages, kept alive in the dark until their time came. Then the hooded ones came to choose the victim. The vamps would feast and the shriveled bodies were burned, or dumped into mass graves. In the dream I lay among the dead bodies, thirsty for the blood that was drained from my withered body. I suffocated and choked, and finally fangs grew from my mouth, and I rose up as one of them. That’s when I woke up shivering and sweating, like I always did. Always that same damn dream. Marion held me tight, and her whispers brought me back to reality. The first time I ever told her that I loved her was after one of those nightmares. She had gotten used to them over the years.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. She hushed me with a finger to my lips. We made love, and the fear faded as it always did. Fear can’t stand against love. It never could.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.” She knew what had happened to my parents, my sister. She knew I never wanted to talk about it. But I couldn’t help dreaming about it. I told her again that night how much I loved her.
“You better,” she said. She kissed me.
That night we couldn’t hear anything from the streets below. There must have been vamps down there, roaming about looking for strays. Or maybe they stayed in their underground city enjoying the comfort and privilege of their status. The next day we searched another sector of the city for transport. We found some tires that were still in good shape, but nothing to put them on. A few old car batteries that were still operational, but not a drop of gas.
“Tomorrow let’s hit the docks,” Marion said.
“Yeah, let’s find that boat.” Mudder said. He drank from an ancient bottle of whiskey. Marion laughed. We sat around the stairwell fire, eating canned beans.
“Where you wanna go, Mudder?” she asked. “Europe?”
“Yeah,” Mudder grinned, his dirty face lighting up. “Par-ee, the City of Lights!”
“Paris is a graveyard,” I reminded him.
He gave me a dirty look.
“The whole world’s a graveyard,” Marion said.
The others didn’t talk much. In our band talking could get you killed. We had learned to be silent, to the point that it had become our greatest habit.
Torres found an old flat-screen television. Nobody thought it would work, but he plugged it in anyway. The electrical grid had fallen apart years ago. To all of our amazement, the stairwell was suddenly full of blaring voices. Colorful images sprang to life on the screen, rabid pixels assembling into faces and figures.
“Holy shit,” Mudder said.
We gathered around the tube and watched as Torres turned the sound to a bearable level. And there he was, staring us right in the face: Count Dracula, Master of the World. It was some kind of talk show hosted by vamps, interviewing Drac like they used to interview heads of state. His voice was soothing, his face handsome beyond belief, his eyes miniature suns, red as blood and impossible to ignore. He wore a black suit and red silk tie, a golden amulet bearing his family sigil hanging at his breast. His hair was black as night, groomed to perfection, not a single strand out of place. About his golden chair lay or squatted his Brides, half-naked vamp women like lazy cats, rubbing their cheeks against his knees and hands. His shoes were black patent leather, and his fingers were long and expressive as he spoke directly to the camera.
There was too much interference and static to hear exactly what he was saying, but his smile held us all at attention. His ivory smile and his blood-bright eyes. Snatches of conversation emerged from the static: “…Old Romania is new again…”, “…human stock being managed toward optimum levels…”, “…after thousands of years the world’s true order has been restored…”, and something about “…carrying the wisdom of our blood to the stars…”
An audience of vamps shouted and applauded onscreen. A crowd of slaves were led into the TV studio by their neck-chains, and the pleasant talk-show atmosphere became an orgy of bloodletting. The vamps drank deep from the throats of their victims, while the master watched from his high seat. His eyes were still smiling.
“Turn it off,” I said.
Marion sat transfixed by the spectacle, along with everybody else.
“Turn it off!” I screamed. I grabbed the set and tossed it down the stairs. It exploded in a shower of sparks and lay still.
Marion looked at me. “Never seen him before,” she said. “Not his face.”
“Me neither,” said Jenny. She was only sixteen, the youngest member of our group. Another survivor from a massacred family. Sandy and Colleen, both in their 60s, sat in quiet contemplation. Drac’s irresistible beauty had scarred their minds.
“Marion?” I slapped her face gently. “Snap out of it.”
She looked at me and the spell was broken. She smiled.
“Hey, man,” Torres said, as if waking up. “You broke my television.”
Marion was too quiet that night. I knew something was wrong.
The next day we searched the harbor where the wrecks of trading ships lay like dead gargantua, slowly rusting into oblivion. There wasn’t much international travel these days. No more airlines either. Vamps didn’t like to cross water much, and they had no real reason to travel for the most part.
We found a small trawler — a fishing boat with a working motor. A few hours later we liberated six barrels of fuel from a wrecked warehouse and fired up the engine. The sun was low above the ruins as the boat’s engine disturbed the air. I knew the engine was too damn loud. It must be echoing off the stone walls of the city, seeping through the cracked streets into the blood-warrens. Into the places where the vamps slept, waiting for sundown.
“It’s getting late,” I told Mudder. “We need to get back. The boat’ll be here tomorrow.”
“Why not set sail right now?” Mudder said. His face turned to Marion — the question was really for her. The dusk light was golden on her braided hair. I should have grabbed her right then and ran, taken her far from that place. But that wasn’t how it worked. The group followed her, not me. I didn’t care to be the leader. Didn’t want the responsibility.
Marion stared at the dark water as night rolled in above the waves. “Yeah, we better get back,” she said. “Unless you want to be caught on the open ocean with nowhere to hide when the vamps wake up and start flying around. Leave now and we won’t get very far.”
Mudder couldn’t deny the wisdom of her words. We had all seen vamps sprout wings, or melt into the shapes of giant bats. At night they not only ruled the earth, but also the skies above it. Never forgetting this was key to our survival.
We killed the engine and hid the boat behind a wrecked battleship. We stocked it with the barrels of fuel we had found and planned to return the next day. We reached the hotel just before sunset, but dark shapes were already moving through the rubble as we crept indoors.
Everybody in the group was excited, nervous about the nautical adventure we planned. “What if we found an island out there?” Mudder said. “Somewhere there ain’t no vamps? Would could hide there forever.”
Marion said nothing.
“If we stay here,” Torres said, “it’s only a matter of time until they find us. Drain us dry. We have to try this…it’s the only possible way to escape hell.”
“I agree,” I said. I waited for Marion to add her own agreement. She stared at the fire, and I wondered what she was seeing. I remembered Dracula’s blood-red eyes glaring through the TV, spanning space and time, unholy photons gliding from the screen to caress her eyeballs and brain. Invading her soul.