by Seth Eden
She gunned the bike, shivering again as the noise caught the attention of a cadre of soldiers and, worse, a couple young Vampyren females.
Time to go. The females were so much more deadly. The males might rape and drain and kill. The females, reports said, enjoyed their meals still alive and screaming.
Cassi wheeled around, back the way they had come, finding another street to lead them to the Mellow Hello bar and its new designation.
The End of the World Bar had never seemed more like a haven.
2
DANTON
"I t's a waste of blood."
Lan glanced up at him and shook his head, black braid shining in the sunlight. "Even these creatures can understand a warning." He stalked around the barrier created by the pikes driven into the street and the heads adorning them, then stood on the far side, fists on his hips, looking back at Danton.
Danton Trask smothered the irritation growing inside him. Lan was one of his best, oldest friends. Raging at him would do nothing to calm the increasingly frantic restlessness. No more than this barbaric display would do anything to curb the humans who had caused it.
Most of the race was – not pacified, but, what, lulled? Probably. The first thing most peoples did when something catastrophic disrupted their way of life was try to get back to it. They might be living in the remains of their civilization, but they weren't ready to admit it. They were still struggling to turn the lights on in homes that no longer had roofs. Or walls.
That was partly metaphor, partly just what he'd witnessed. Hit a city and drive it to its knees and the people that lived there would simultaneously light fires and hunt for clean water and at the same time, seek out the technology they'd just lost. Business as usual was the most comforting soporific the conquerors could offer if they wanted a smooth transition.
Vampyren didn't care about smooth.
Which meant he shouldn't either, he reminded himself. They were all going through a similar culture shock. No way around it. The conquered didn't stop to consider that the victors were out of their element and might be homesick.
"Who are they?" He pointed at the heads on stakes.
Lan tilted his head to one side as if the heads on pikes might have explanations written on them somewhere. "Local government. Rebels. Damned if I know. Doesn't matter. The warning's interpreted by the viewer."
Danton grunted. Probably true. Seemed it might be more effective if it was spelled out. And it was still a waste of blood.
The planet was rich with humans. But a huge percentage of the males had been killed in the invasion. There were five male heads on pikes in front of him where it seemed one or two would do. Five was a waste.
It wasn't like the Vampyren could eat the offspring of human women bred to Vampyren. Only to those bred to male humans. So the captive breeding programs needed human males to produce food stock with human females, and human females to produce Vampyren warriors when bred to he invaders. It was safer that way. Even warriors didn't breed with Vampyren females if they could help it.
Sex was fine. Sex with the females was great. They were lithe and acrobatic and uninhibited.
But breeding changed their hormones, producing an unquenchable blood hunger. For their own kind. After breeding, the number of Vampyren males who got away was shockingly small.
On one of the cross streets, a cadre of motorcycles went by, their frames straining under the weight of the aliens riding them. Humans and their fuel-burning vehicles should be beneath the invaders, but the motorcycles raced fast and made noise and drummed up attention, like mag sleds from their own world. He'd ridden a few himself since they'd been here.
They made it easier to hunt down the humans trying to run from whatever they'd been assigned.
Another bike sounded and he looked in that direction, waiting to see another flank of soldiers, but this was a single bike, a girl with a long dark braid coming out from under the shiny black helmet she wore, another human female holding on to her. The visors on their helmets were down and they were half a block off, but Danton could see the girl in front clearly enough, the round fullness of her arms, the muscled set of her shoulders, the lean legs under leggings. She was in good shape, like a fighter, though her full breasts offered less martial comforts.
Even as he watched she'd stopped the bike and was staring at the heads, the girl behind her still hanging on as if they were still moving. He could tell by the angle at which the helmet sat on the girl in front that she was staring directly at the heads. As he watched her, she raised the visor on the helmet, maybe trying to get a closer look. Maybe only letting anyone around her know that she was looking and without flinching.
That was Vampyren enough for him to admire.
He could almost feel the connection when she looked up from her contemplation – prayer? – of the dead and looked directly at him.
Still without flinching that he could see.
He raised his chin and martialed his stance, his muscles flexing as he made himself look bigger.
She should tremble. She should definitely flinch.
Their eyes met. She was too far away for him to really see her eyes. But there was no doubt of the connection.
They stared at each other across the intervening streets. He waited for her to drop her gaze.
Finally, she did. He tightened his stance, waiting for her to look back up and acknowledge she'd lost.
But when she looked back up, it was to hold up one middle finger in her planet's symbol of hate.
His lips twitched. He refused to let himself smile.
An instant later he'd beaten the impulse. Full Vampyren again.
As was only right for the officer, the soldier, and the last in the line of Vampyren royalty.
"If you're quite finished," Lan said dryly, unimpressed by the contest between Danton and the girl.
Across the street, she wheeled the bike around, gunning it away. Just before they disappeared he saw the rider's hair hanging past the helmet was an unattractive purple, and the girl piloting the bike had a tattoo of a star on her right shoulder, revealed by the tank top she wore.
They struggled so hard to be individuals. But none was very different from the others.
"I'm finished," he said dryly to Lan. "What are we doing now?"
Lan shrugged, looking out onto the mostly empty streets. "Thought we'd take in the fights."
That was a perfectly reasonable suggestion for an afternoon off. Watch the humans and when the loser was executed, slake his thirst in blood.
He fell into step beside Lan.
3
CASSI
Brecca sat at the bar with her arms on the scarred hardwood and her head buried in them.
Cassi nudged her elbow with a beer in a frosty mug. It was probably worth noting that the power rarely went down inside bars, though whether that was from human ingenuity stretched to cover the essentials, or because the Vampyren found a drunk population easier to control, Cassi didn't know.
Or care. Right now she just wanted to get Brec's first beer inside her. At the nudge, Cassi's best friend sat up and shoved some of her hair out of her face. She was a natural redhead, but had dyed her hair midnight blue right up until she ran out of the product after the aliens disrupted both essentials and nonessentials of life.
Her hair coloring might be considered an essential, because without it, Brecca was fading back to her normal color by way of many, many abnormal colors. The current one was kind of a moss purple.
She nodded her thanks at Cassi and then yawned before she could even get a swallow. "I'm twenty-three," she said morosely. "Am I supposed to be this tired?"
Cassi nodded. "When under siege. I'm twenty-three too. Objectively. Subjectively. One million years old today. Be right back." Though they both knew better. It was after hours, post-work, when people dropped into the neighborhood bar as if doing the same things they'd always done would make it the same world it had always been.
It wasn't working. As she fi
lled waiters orders and served the people at the bar, Cassi caught shreds of conversations.
"Sneaking out in the middle of the night because she's sixteen, I mean, there's sixteen and then there's suicidal, there's a difference…"
That was a parent, obviously. Nobody she knew. Nothing she needed to worry about.
"Ammo to blow up the world, not if we can't reach…"
That was Tommy, generally known as Tommy Boy. Loud, showy, harmless. Unlikely to try and use ammo on anything. If he did, he'd only blow himself up. Nobody could stay around Tommy Boy for long. He'd be solo when he went up, and it would be easy enough for everyone to disavow any knowledge of him and whatever harebrained scheme he'd had.
That mattered, because if the strike back wasn't well orchestrated, the results were–
Well, she'd seen the heads on her way to work, and for the Vampyren, that was an enormous waste of food. Generally death came about through the feeding of the invaders.
Though she realized she didn't know what they'd done with the bodies. Probably didn't want to know, either.
Another bit of conversation, something about water pressure. Utilities worker. And another about thread – just about anybody. Basic supplies were no longer basic; now they were kind of exotic. Old skills like sewing were back in high demand.
It's only been less than a year. How are we going to sustain this for any amount of time?
And then the next conversation – Make her sweet sixteen the best it can be – because parents worried more about their kids than about themselves, and a conversation about recipes for potatoes, which had become practically worth gold now that potatoes were a huge staple. Vegans had their day – the cattle had been picked off the planet within three months of the Vampyrens arrival. All those stories about aliens and cattle suddenly made true.
She was pouring a beer for a clutch of postal workers when a conversation reached her and she had to force herself to keep moving. There were no vamps in the bar but that didn't mean somebody wasn't watching for them.
Down the bar, Brecca had started her nightly discourse and disclaimer, the one she couldn't ever finish. It started off I'm not a nurse, damn it; I'm not even supposed to be a nurse, though she had been for the last year, which kind of prima facie made her one.
What Brec couldn't say was what she had been: a phlebotomist. Say that one aloud and there'd be a Vampyren breathing down your neck before the words were out. Nobody admitted to knowing how to work with blood anymore.
Not if they didn't want to live with the Vanpyren.
Living with them meant dying with them, and soon. The invaders might be able to overtake the planet and set up new systems of government and control themselves to some degree, creating human camps of breeding stock and --- and worse, but that didn't mean they could control themselves when they'd stashed a human in their midst round the clock. Even if that human was essential eventually something would cause a reaction.
Reactions were uniformly deadly.
But when you were used to being free, suddenly being conscripted and restricted was too hard to not fight against. There was a thrilling sense of pleasurable danger to coming oh so close to saying the thing you couldn't say just to see if you could get away with it.
So far, Brec had. Nightly she complained around the edges of being a nurse when all she was supposed to do was draw blood. It was the smallest of rebellions, but they all mattered even more.
But tonight Cassi could neither join nor indulge her. Because the conversation at the bar had just started and it had to do with canning. Because not even the most suspicious Vampyren would listen to that.
Because the words home grown had crept into the conversation.
And because most people weren't supposed to know.
Only Cassi did. She'd known since before Jayce did the stupid thing he did and got himself stupidly dead.
Home grown meant grass roots. Grass roots meant resistance.
The governments had rallied and organized in the face of a war that didn't involve them. The war the vamps brought wasn't about countries, it was about the whole damned world, because that's what they wanted. The water, the soil, the plants, the humans for labor and food and sport and sex and if there was anything else on Earth that pleased their voracious appetites, they'd take that, too. It was hard to fight Invaders who lived essentially for centuries, died extremely rare, were hard to kill, and had no one stated objective.
They hadn't come to colonize. They hadn't come to drag slave labor back to their own planet. They hadn't come just to breed more of their own kind or to breed more humans for food or to do any one thing.
They came because that's what they did. They found a planet, they conquered the people, they ruled until they got bored, and if the people were lucky, they left without torching the whole thing.
It was the Vampyren behind the New World Next Generation advertisements. They knew humanity's time had come and gone.
It was humans who thought they could fix things by going back to what they'd always done and always had.
It was humans who fucked things up beyond measure by trying to do anything but launch at the damn aliens.
By the time they realized that, it was over. Over but for hanging from the light posts in their own districts any politicians stupid enough to protest.
After that the governments that came back together did so with permission and operated small, thinking they were taking care of the needs of their communities and constituents when what they were really doing was convincing a people that there was safety somewhere (there wasn't) and hope too (ditto).
She heard Brec every night. Tonight she could let her words flow in one ear and out the next while she concentrated on pinpointing the voice that was talking about canning. About when the best time to can was – full moon, which was tonight, she thought – and where, which she didn't get and she started to panic.
Her father was dead but her mother was alive and in one of those damned tank farms, and the people who said those people taken there were lucky were wrong – her mother was donating blood round the clock and no, she wasn't of breeding age any longer and yes, the Vanpyren hadn't just killed her, how very nice of them and thank you very much but Cassi knew a great many people she'd never killed and she not killing every person that came to seemed like a low bar.
Her mother was alive but she was being tortured and screw being warm in winter and having a place to stay and not being eaten, she was being eaten, one pint at a time and then fed all foods that would thicken her blood and bring up her iron and make her healthy and fat and nothing within her tank.
Her mother, who had run races and laughed with that abandon.
I'm going to get to her.
She still had a parent and she still had a best friend who was not a phlebotomist and so she had something to live for.
Home grown.
Canning tomatoes.
Full moon.
And something about a number, maybe an address, maybe a highway number? And in her panic to figure out where the meeting was or where whatever it was would happen she guessed they were talking about taking somebody to join the rebellion or even just to find weapons she didn't care for anything that felt like she was taking a stand, taking a step Cassi leaned in too close.
The conversation stilled. There was one last word about a number and she didn't think it was the same one but they didn't keep talking and now she had to get to her job again without calling any kind of attention on what she'd heard or even that she'd heard anything.
She left the bar, Brecca wandering to a stop in her own narrative, as if Cassi's leaving wasn't rude but just a fact of nothing happening.
A year ago the aliens had come and Cassi had been a bartender at the Dew Drop Inn because trendy stupid names were in. She'd been a bartender and as good at it as she'd be with anything else in her life, like TaeKwon-Do and writing poetry and running and through it all she was just so damned bored.
And then one sum
mer month turned into the next and the sky filled with proof that no, the academics were right, Earth wasn't alone in the universe after all.
And after that, the screaming started.
She let herself into the storage room, looking for the next box of carefully hoarded bar towels. She heard the door squeak right before she started to turn, already the words on her lips, "You can't be back here – "
When a hand caught the back of her neck and another hand caught her arm and twisted it up so hard and high behind her back that something snapped and Cassi gave a startled yelp that turned into a moan.
"What did you hear?"
The hands were pressing her against the wall so hard she figured her voice would come out muffled. She figured anybody would tell whoever this was anything to make them stop.
"Get off," she said. "You know what I heard. Recipes. I could use them too, you know."
At which the hand holding her let go fractionally, just enough for Cassi to start to turn toward him before he slammed her hard into the wall again. This time he put his forearm against the back of her neck.
That scared her into stillness. Pressure on her spinal column was terrifying. All he had to do was injure her and she'd never walk again. Become paralyzed, become dinner. The Vampyren had no regard for disability. Everyone tasted equal to them.
4
DANTON
Humans used the outdoor amphitheater for musical performances and plays. The tree-shaded area fit into a natural bowl and at night it was high enough above the sea level city to see stars. Musicians famously preformed to sold out audiences and sang to the "tree people" who would climb into the trees beyond the official arena and listen along.
The Vampyren had their own uses for the space. Using human labor they built fences around the nearly 6000-seat theater, hemming it in. The stage was open and generally bathed in blood.
