“Lemme sleep on it,” she said. I tried to get more out of her, but she only kissed me and distracted me with lovemaking. Afterwards I heard her whispering to the other women. I lifted my head and called out to her. She came back to kiss my forehead.
“Sleep, Danny,” she said. Her hand was cool against my forehead. “No more dreams. Just sleep…”
I should have tossed away the dirty blanket and demanded to know what was going on. Instead, I fell asleep in that comfortable bed. I don’t remember having my usual nightmares that night. I don’t think I dreamed anything at all. I woke up with the first rays of sunlight seeping through the window. I rolled out of bed and stretched my limbs. Outside and far below the broken city spread for miles, a kingdom of rust, dust, and vermin. At first I didn’t notice that Marion was gone. She usually woke up earlier than me and let me sleep for awhile. But she wasn’t in the stairwell stoking the fire or making coffee. None of the other men were awake yet. Then it hit me.
The women gone. All of them.
I ran down the stairs, screaming Marion’s name. I ran all the way to the street, when Mudder caught up with me and dragged me back into the shadows, trying to calm me down. Slowly it began to sink in. Marion was gone, along with Jennifer and the two older women. At some point in the dead of night they had abandoned us.
“Where are they?” I asked. “Where did they go? There’s nowhere to go.”
“Yes there is,” Mudder said. Our eyes locked.
“The boat.”
Now there were only thirteen of us — ten grown men and three boys between 10 and 14. They might as well have been full-grown men after growing up in such a world. We stopped thinking of them as kids once they had killed their share of vamps. Now we all ran through the cold bright morning, clutching our weapons and packs, hoping that we hadn’t really lost our women, that they would be waiting for us at the boat. That they had come along early to prepare for the exodus.
We reached the docks and saw that the boat was gone. Not a sign of it.
I sat down on the wharf’s edge and stared at the sparkling blue ocean. Somewhere out there four women were gliding into the unknown. Why had they done it? Why had they forsaken us? A couple of the men began to weep. Others started beating on each other to release their anger. Mudder sat down next to me, almost as heartbroken as I was.
I reached into my pocket for cigarette and found a letter from Marion. She had written it with a ball-point pen from one of the hotel desks, on stationary printed with curling lavender flowers. I didn’t need to read it to know what had happened. I already knew it in my heart. I read it anyway.
She started with an apology, then told me how much she loved me, how good I was for her. She went on about how grateful she was to have known someone like me. She saved the real message for the end of the letter:
The master calls, Danny.
He whispers in my dreams.
Even when I’m awake, I hear him.
I didn’t know until I saw him. Until I saw his face on that TV, I mean. I didn’t understand. But now I do. I know you’re going to hate me for leaving, but I am sorry. I had no choice.
I saw it in his eyes.
I belong to him now. We all do.
I’ve spoken with the other women and we’ve all agreed. Together we stand a better chance of crossing the water and reaching Romania. It’s where we belong.
Stay here and keep yourself alive, Danny.
Please forgive me.
There’s nothing I can do to resist him. Not since I’ve seen his face.
I belong to him.
Don’t come after me.
There was more, but that was the gist. His insane power drew women to him and made them his willing slaves. It worked even through broadcast media. Or maybe that old TV had never really worked at all; maybe it had been some kind of spell. Dracula’s dark magic, cast across the world from his icy mountain, summoning fresh concubines to his castle. Now he had Marion. Or he would, as soon as she reached his mountain, looked into his perfect face again, bared her neck to his fangs. To him she would be another piece of livestock, another slave to satisfy his needs both carnal and bloody. Just another stolen soul, another Bride of Dracula.
Unless of course she died on the long journey to Romania. I knew she would make it. I didn’t know if I could survive without her — if any of us could survive without her — but I knew she would make it to that castle. I knew Drac would admire her strength as he made her his slave. He would taste it in her sweet blood.
“Whadda we do?” Mudder asked.
He and Torres looked to me for an answer. So did everybody else.
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” someone said. “We need to hide.”
“No,” I said, watching the sun reach its zenith. “No way in hell.”
“Then whadda we do?” Torres said.
“Find another boat,” I said.
And just like that I was their new leader. I didn’t ask for it, didn’t really want it, but the guys just followed me. I guess they figured I had been the closest to Marion, so I would have to do now. Or maybe they were just scared shitless and needed me to pull them out of it.
The vamps came for us that night. We heard them coming up the stairwell, so we had time to prepare. Mudder greeted the first blood-sucker with a Molotov cocktail in the face. I knew he’d regret losing the booze, but it was an effective method. The vamp went down in a blaze of flames, wings and skin blackening to ash. They poured through the doorwell, trampling the burnt one’s body, hissing open-mouthed at us like cobras, ripping at our throats and bellies with their filthy claws. We opened fire until our ammo was gone, then the bladework began. It was Marion’s go-to strategy. She had turned our haphazard brutality and survival instincts into focused teamwork. Automatic weapons were good to have, but ammo never lasted.
It always came down to cross and blade. Wetwork.
We lost two men that night. I don’t remember their names. Admitting that still shames me. In my defense, they were new to the group. Next day we found a new hiding spot. That’s the trick of surviving in a world of vamps — stay invisible unless the sun is out. Any sign or whiff of you in the night, and they’ll track you like bat-nosed hounds. The sound of the trawler’s engine before sunup must have tipped them to the presence of wild humans in the city. They had followed Marion’s trail right back to the hotel. In the process of leaving us behind, the women had also revealed our location.
I didn’t blame Marion for it. She was under his spell. She loved me as much as I loved her. She couldn’t help the call that made her leave, but she had still tried to spare me. It’s why she left that note for me.
It took us weeks to find another intact fishing boat and scavenge a few more barrels of fuel. Sometimes we tussled with roaming bands of vamps, but we managed to sail out of NYC harbor before its subterranean hordes came pouring out to devour us. We sailed past Lady Liberty, something I had never seen with my own eyes. Blackened by fire and scored by dozens of mortar wounds, she looked more like a Goddess of Death than a symbol of freedom. Someone had spray-painted a pair of crimson fangs protruding from her lips. I wondered if vamps had a sense of humor after all. Maybe some stray resistance fighter had done it to make a final statement. I never got an answer.
On the open ocean we retched and puked and clutched our bellies. Twelve of us living on canned food, bottled water, and a stash of beef jerky Mudder had found in a burned-out supermarket. Only one of us had any real experience at sea. His name was Gimble, he was from Florida, and he hadn’t said a word in six years. Not since his own family was wiped out. He’d been in the Navy back when one existed, and after that was he was an avid boater. He wrote messages to me on little pieces of paper he carried around with one of those stubby little pencils.