Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

  > You and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team. They are your clan. You derive no nourishment from their blood.

  > You can “go invisible” by standing still and folding your arms over your chest. You can’t bite invisible vamps, and they can’t bite you.

  > This game is played on the honor system. The point is to have fun and get your vamp on, not to win.

  > There is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winners begin to emerge. The game-masters will start a whisper campaign among the players when the time comes. Spread the whisper as quickly as you can and watch for the sign.

  > M1k3y

  > bite bite bite bite bite!

  We’d hoped that a hundred people would be willing to play VampMob. We’d sent out about two hundred invites each. But when I sat bolt upright at 4 A.M. and grabbed my Xbox, there were four hundred replies there. Four hundred.

  I fed the addresses to the bot and stole out of the house. I descended the stairs, listening to my father snore and my mom rolling over in their bed. I locked the door behind me.

  At 4:15 A.M., Potrero Hill was as quiet as the countryside. There were some distant traffic rumbles, and once a car crawled past me. I stopped at an ATM and drew out $320 in twenties, rolled them up and put a rubber band around them, and stuck the roll in a zip-up pocket low on the thigh of my vampire pants.

  I was wearing my cape again, and a ruffled shirt, and tuxedo pants that had been modded to have enough pockets to carry all my little bits and pieces. I had on pointed boots with silver-skull buckles, and I’d teased my hair into a black dandelion clock around my head. Ange was bringing the white makeup and had promised to do my eyeliner and black nail polish. Why the hell not? When was the next time I was going to get to play dress-up like this?

  Ange met me in front of her house. She had her backpack on, too, and fishnet tights, a ruffled gothic lolita maid’s dress, white face-paint, elaborate kabuki eye makeup, and her fingers and throat dripped with silver jewelry.

  “You look great!” we said to each other in unison, then laughed quietly and stole off through the streets, spray-paint cans in our pockets.

  As I surveyed Civic Center, I thought about what it would look like once four hundred VampMobbers converged on it. I expected them in ten minutes, out front of City Hall. Already the big plaza teemed with commuters who neatly sidestepped the homeless people begging there.

  I’ve always hated Civic Center. It’s a collection of huge wedding cake buildings: courthouses, museums and civic buildings like City Hall. The sidewalks are wide, the buildings are white. In the tourist guides to San Francisco, they manage to photograph it so that it looks like Epcot Center, futuristic and austere.

  But on the ground, it’s grimy and gross. Homeless people sleep on all the benches. The district is empty by 6 P.M. except for drunks and druggies, because with only one kind of building there, there’s no legit reason for people to hang around after the sun goes down. It’s more like a mall than a neighborhood, and the only businesses there are bail bondsmen and liquor stores, places that cater to the families of crooks on trial and the bums who make it their nighttime home.

  I really came to understand all this when I read an interview with an amazing old urban planner, a woman called Jane Jacobs who was the first person to really nail why it was wrong to slice cities up with freeways, stick all the poor people in housing projects and use zoning laws to tightly control who got to do what where.

  Jacobs explained that real cities are organic and they have a lot of variety—rich and poor, white and brown, Anglo and Mex, retail and residential and even industrial. A neighborhood like that has all kinds of people passing through it at all hours of the day or night, so you get businesses that cater to every need, you get people around all the time, acting like eyes on the street.

  You’ve encountered this before. You go walking around some older part of some city and you find that it’s full of the coolest looking stores, guys in suits and people in fashion-rags, upscale restaurants and funky cafes, a little movie theater maybe, houses with elaborate paint jobs. Sure, there might be a Starbucks, too, but there’s also a neat-looking fruit market and a florist who appears to be three hundred years old as she snips carefully at the flowers in her windows. It’s the opposite of a planned space, like a mall. It feels like a wild garden or even a woods: like it grew.

  You couldn’t get any further from that than Civic Center. I read an interview with Jacobs where she talked about the great old neighborhood they knocked down to build it. It had been just that kind of neighborhood, the kind of place that happened without permission or rhyme or reason.

  Jacobs said that she predicted that within a few years, Civic Center would be one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, a ghost town at night, a place that sustained a thin crop of weedy booze shops and flea-pit motels. In the interview, she didn’t seem very glad to have been vindicated; she sounded like she was talking about a dead friend when she described what Civic Center had become.

  Now it was rush hour and Civic Center was as busy at it could be. The Civic Center BART also serves as the major station for Muni trolley lines, and if you need to switch from one to another, that’s where you do it. At 8 A.M. there were thousands of people coming up the stairs, going down the stairs, getting into and out of taxis and on and off buses. They got squeezed by DHS checkpoints by the different civic buildings, and routed around aggressive panhandlers. They all smelled like their shampoos and colognes, fresh out of the shower and armored in their work suits, swinging laptop bags and briefcases. At 8 A.M., Civic Center was business central.

  And here came the vamps. A couple dozen coming down Van Ness, a couple dozen coming up Market. More coming from the other side of Market. More coming up from Van Ness. They slipped around the sides of the buildings, wearing the white face-paint and the black eyeliner, black clothes, leather jackets, huge stompy boots. Fishnet fingerless gloves.

  They began to fill up the plaza. A few of the business people gave them passing glances and then looked away, not wanting to let these weirdos into their personal realities as they thought about whatever crap they were about to wade through for another eight hours. The vamps milled around, not sure when the game was on. They pooled together in large groups, like an oil spill in reverse, all this black gathering in one place. A lot of them sported old-timey hats, bowlers and toppers. Many of the girls were in full-on elegant gothic lolita maid costumes with huge platforms.

  I tried to estimate the numbers. Two hundred. Then, five minutes later, it was three hundred. Four hundred. They were still streaming in. The vamps had brought friends.

  Someone grabbed my ass. I spun around and saw Ange, laughing so hard she had to hold her thighs, bent double.

  “Look at them all, man, look at them all!” she gasped. The square was twice as crowded as it had been a few minutes ago. I had no idea how many Xnetters there were, but easily a thousand of them had just showed up to my little party. Christ.

  The DHS and SFPD cops were starting to mill around, talking into their radios and clustering together. I heard a faraway siren.

  “All right,” I said, shaking Ange by the arm. “All right, let’s go.”

  We both slipped off into the crowd and as soon as we encountered our first vamp, we both said, loudly, “Bite bite bite bite bite!” My victim was a stunned—but cute—girl with spiderwebs drawn on her hands and smudged mascara running down her cheeks. She said, “Crap,” and moved away, acknowledging that I’d gotten her.

  The call of “bite bite bite bite bite” had scrambled the other nearby vamps. Some of them were attacking each other, others were moving for cover, hiding out. I had my victim for the minute, so I skulked away, using mundanes for cover. All around me, the cry of “bite bite bite bite bite!” and shouts and laughs and curses.

  The sound spread like a virus through the crowd. All the vamps knew the game was on now, and the ones who were clustered together were dropping like flies. They
laughed and cussed and moved away, clueing the still-in vamps that the game was on. And more vamps were arriving by the second.

  8:16. It was time to bag another vamp. I crouched low and moved through the legs of the straights as they headed for the BART stairs. They jerked back with surprise and swerved to avoid me. I had my eyes laser-locked on a set of black platform boots with steel dragons over the toes, and so I wasn’t expecting it when I came face to face with another vamp, a guy of about fifteen or sixteen, hair gelled straight back and wearing a PVC Marilyn Manson jacket draped with necklaces of fake tusks carved with intricate symbols.

  “Bite bite bite—” he began, when one of the mundanes tripped over him and they both went sprawling. I leapt over to him and shouted “Bite bite bite bite bite!” before he could untangle himself again.

  More vamps were arriving. The suits were really freaking out. The game overflowed the sidewalk and moved into Van Ness, spreading up toward Market Street. Drivers honked, the trolleys made angry dings. I heard more sirens, but now traffic was snarled in every direction.

  It was freaking glorious.

  BITE BITE BITE BITE BITE!

  The sound came from all around me. There were so many vamps there, playing so furiously, it was like a roar. I risked standing up and looking around and found that I was right in the middle of a giant crowd of vamps that went as far as I could see in every direction.

  BITE BITE BITE BITE BITE!

  This was even better than the concert in Dolores Park. That had been angry and rockin’, but this was—well, it was just fun. It was like going back to the playground, to the epic games of tag we’d play on lunch breaks when the sun was out, hundreds of people chasing each other around. The adults and the cars just made it more fun, more funny.

  That’s what it was: it was funny. We were all laughing now.

  But the cops were really mobilizing now. I heard helicopters. Any second now, it would be over. Time for the endgame.

  I grabbed a vamp.

  “Endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you’ve been gassed. Pass it on. What did I just say?”

  The vamp was a girl, tiny, so short I thought she was really young, but she must have been seventeen or eighteen from her face and the smile. “Oh, that’s wicked,” she said.

  “What did I say?”

  “Endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you’ve been gassed. Pass it on. What did I just say?”

  “Right,” I said. “Pass it on.”

  She melted into the crowd. I grabbed another vamp. I passed it on. He went off to pass it on.

  Somewhere in the crowd, I knew Ange was doing this, too. Somewhere in the crowd, there might be infiltrators, fake Xnetters, but what could they do with this knowledge? It’s not like the cops had a choice. They were going to order us to disperse. That was guaranteed.

  I had to get to Ange. The plan was to meet at the Founders’ Statue in the Plaza, but reaching it was going to be hard. The crowd wasn’t moving anymore, it was surging, like the mob had in the way down to the BART station on the day the bombs went off. I struggled to make my way through it just as the PA underneath the helicopter switched on.

  “THIS IS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. YOU ARE ORDERED TO DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY.”

  Around me, hundreds of vamps fell to the ground, clutching their throats, clawing at their eyes, gasping for breath. It was easy to fake being gassed, we’d all had plenty of time to study the footage of the partiers in Mission Dolores Park going down under the pepper spray clouds.

  “DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY.”

  I fell to the ground, protecting my pack, reaching around to the red baseball hat folded into the waistband of my pants. I jammed it on my head and then grabbed my throat and made horrendous retching noises.

  The only ones still standing were the mundanes, the salarymen who’d been just trying to get to their jobs. I looked around as best as I could at them as I choked and gasped.

  “THIS IS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. YOU ARE ORDERED TO DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY. DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY.” The voice of god made my bowels ache. I felt it in my molars and in my femurs and my spine.

  The salarymen were scared. They were moving as fast as they could, but in no particular direction. The helicopters seemed to be directly overhead no matter where you stood. The cops were wading into the crowd now, and they’d put on their helmets. Some had shields. Some had gas masks. I gasped harder.

  Then the salarymen were running. I probably would have run, too. I watched a guy whip a $500 jacket off and wrap it around his face before heading south toward Mission, only to trip and go sprawling. His curses joined the choking sounds.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen—the choking was just supposed to freak people out and get them confused, not panic them into a stampede.

  There were screams now, screams I recognized all too well from the night in the park. That was the sound of people who were scared spitless, running into each other as they tried like hell to get away.

  And then the air raid sirens began.

  I hadn’t heard that sound since the bombs went off, but I would never forget it. It sliced through me and went straight into my balls, turning my legs into jelly on the way. It made me want to run away in a panic. I got to my feet, red cap on my head, thinking of only one thing: Ange. Ange and the Founders’ Statue.

  Everyone was on their feet now, running in all directions, screaming. I pushed people out of my way, holding onto my pack and my hat, heading for Founders’ Statue. Masha was looking for me, I was looking for Ange. Ange was out there.

  I pushed and cursed. Elbowed someone. Someone came down on my foot so hard I felt something go crunch and I shoved him so he went down. He tried to get up and someone stepped on him. I shoved and pushed.

  Then I reached out my arm to shove someone else and strong hands grabbed my wrist and my elbow in one fluid motion and brought my arm back around behind my back. It felt like my shoulder was about to wrench out of its socket, and I instantly doubled over, hollering, a sound that was barely audible over the din of the crowd, the thrum of the choppers, the wail of the sirens.

  I was brought back upright by the strong hands behind me, which steered me like a marionette. The hold was so perfect I couldn’t even think of squirming. I couldn’t think of the noise or the helicopter or Ange. All I could think of was moving the way that the person who had me wanted me to move. I was brought around so that I was face to face with the person.

  It was a girl whose face was sharp and rodentlike, half-hidden by a giant pair of sunglasses. Over the sunglasses, a mop of bright pink hair spiked out in all directions.

  “You!” I said. I knew her. She’d taken a picture of me and threatened to rat me out to truant watch. That had been five minutes before the alarms started. She’d been the one, ruthless and cunning. We’d both run from that spot in the Tenderloin as the klaxon sounded behind us, and we’d both been picked up by the cops. I’d been hostile and they’d decided that I was an enemy.

  She—Masha—became their ally.

  “Hello, M1k3y,” she hissed in my ear, close as a lover. A shiver went up my back. She let go of my arm and I shook it out.

  “Christ,” I said. “You!”

  “Yes, me,” she said. “The gas is gonna come down in about two minutes. Let’s haul ass.”

  “Ange—my girlfriend—is by the Founders’ Statue.”

  Masha looked over the crowd. “No chance,” she said. “We try to make it there, we’re doomed. The gas is coming down in two minutes, in case you missed it the first time.”

  I stopped moving. “I don’t go without Ange,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she shouted in my ear. “Your funeral.”

  She began to push through the crowd, moving away, north, toward downtown. I continued to push for the Founders’ Statue. A second later, my arm was back in the terrible lock and I was being swung around and propelled forward.

  “You know too much,
jerk-off,” she said. “You’ve seen my face. You’re coming with me.”

  I screamed at her, struggled till it felt like my arm would break, but she was pushing me forward. My sore foot was agony with every step, my shoulder felt like it would break.

  With her using me as a battering ram, we made good progress through the crowd. The whine of the helicopters changed and she gave me a harder push. “RUN!” she yelled. “Here comes the gas!”

  The crowd noise changed, too. The choking sounds and scream sounds got much, much louder. I’d heard that pitch of sound before. We were back in the park. The gas was raining down. I held my breath and ran.

  We cleared the crowd and she let go of my arm. I shook it out. I limped as fast as I could up the sidewalk as the crowd thinned and thinned. We were heading toward a group of DHS cops with riot shields and helmets and masks. As we drew near them, they moved to block us, but Masha held up a badge and they melted away like she was Obi-Wan Kenobi saying “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”

  “You goddamned bitch,” I said as we sped up Market Street. “We have to go back for Ange.”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. “I feel for you, buddy. I haven’t seen my boyfriend in months. He probably thinks I’m dead. Fortunes of war. We go back for your Ange, we’re dead. If we push on, we have a chance. So long as we have a chance, she has a chance. Those kids aren’t all going to Gitmo. They’ll probably take a few hundred in for questioning and send the rest home.”

  We were moving up Market Street now, past the strip joints where the little encampments of bums and junkies sat, stinking like open toilets. Masha guided me to a little alcove in the shut door of one of the strip places. She stripped off her jacket and turned it inside out—the lining was a muted stripe pattern, and with the jacket’s seams reversed, it hung differently. She produced a wool hat from her pocket and pulled it over her hair, letting it form a jaunty, off-center peak. Then she took out some makeup remover wipes and went to work on her face and fingernails. In a minute, she was a different woman.