The Last Vampire

by Whitley Strieber

  When she grasped this enormous reality, something so rare happened to Miriam that she lifted her long, tapering fingers to her cheeks in amazement.

  Far below the crazy streets, in the fetid ruin of this holy place, a vampire wept.

  TWO

  Blood Nocturne

  The samlor moved with what now felt like maddening slowness through the sighing showers of rain, down the empty streets, while Miriam listened to the tremble of her own heart and smelled the air for danger.

  What odor did she seek? The acid stink of a dead Keeper, perhaps, or the oil of a policeman’s gun?

  How could a human policeman kill one of them? The idea was absurd.

  Yet the book had been destroyed. No battle among the Keepers, no matter how violent, would have resulted in the destruction of a Book of Names. Keepers fought for love and herds, but only occasionally, and never that hard. Not even in their days in the sun.

  Miriam longed now to spend the night beneath the whirling fan, sucking deeply on her pipe, but thousands of years of hunting brilliant and dangerous prey made her too wary now even to consider such repose.

  “Airport,” she’d told the samlor driver. She’d pulled the plastic curtain across the front of the cabin and sat in the stuffy interior smoking and watching the rain pelt the driver’s back, trying not to dwell on the scent of his blood.

  The ride to the airport was a long one, and toward the end the creature had slowed to a slumped, struggling walk. If this had been another time, she would have whipped him.

  She might be a rebel, but just now she felt an absolute, burning loyalty to her own kind. They had a right to life, just like any other creature. More of a right — this whole earth and every single creature living on it was their property, and much of it — including man — was their creation.

  They had given man everything — his form, his mind, his life itself. It was the Keepers who had originally bred the crops that man had been taught to cultivate, the grains and the fruits of the land, and the dumb beasts that he had been given to eat.

  Her own great-granduncle had given the northern herds the apple, breeding the plants carefully through a hundred generations, then planting them where human tribes would discover the apparently wild orchards. This had been done as a solution to a nutritional problem. Humans needed fruit or they became constipated. It was most unpleasant to feed on a constipated human.

  The samlor came to a stop before the shambling Chiang Mai airport, which proved to be empty in the predawn. Flights, it seemed, did not begin early here. She certainly couldn’t sit alone in the lobby, not and invite the curiosity of security guards by being the only passenger present.

  Nearby there was an area of warehouses, lit only by a few overhead lights. As the driver walked down a ramp to an area where others of his kind slept beneath plastic sheets, she slipped into the shadows at the edge of the main terminal building. A few yards away there was a chain-link fence with a locked gate. She twisted the lock off and moved toward the nearest warehouse, slipping in through a side door.

  The black interior smelled of cotton and turned out to be full of T-shirts intended for the western market. “Grateful Dead,” “Adolf Hitler, European Tour 1939–1945,” “I Am a Teenage Werewolf.”

  She knew a great deal about fear, as something that her prey experienced. It was interesting to watch, in an abstract sort of way. She never felt it herself unless she got careless or unlucky. After all, humans couldn’t do anything to a Keeper. Being killed by man was regarded as a freak accident, about as likely as being caught in an avalanche. Or, that used to be the case. Since about the time of her mother’s death, things had been changing. The Keepers had responded by becoming more and more wary and reclusive.

  Keepers were ten times as strong; they could climb sheer walls and leap long distances. They were far more intelligent. But were they faster than a bullet or a warning cell-phone call? Had they the skill to outwit investigators armed with the tools of forensic science?

  She had been surprised to see the shadow of man in that ruined holy place. But she realized, now, that she should not have been.

  Given the destruction of the Asian Book of Names, she had to assume that there were human beings who knew of their Keepers and were efficient enough to have destroyed a whole conclave.

  The question was, how much had they actually understood of that book? If man had learned to read Prime, the ancient Keeper language, then a terrible doom might be upon all the Keepers. That book not only contained records of the locations and property of all the Keepers in Asia, but also all of their familial and fiscal relationships to every other Keeper in the world. It told the locations and times of the other centennial conclaves that would be held this month.

  Miriam had to warn her kind.

  An hour after dawn, workers were coming to open the warehouse, and the airport was slowly returning to life. As Miriam went among the crowd in the terminal, she found herself coping with strange urges, ferocious urges. She wanted to grab a few of them and tear their heads off and drink their spouting necks with the savagery of the ancients.

  Perhaps she was afraid. A predator experiences fear as an urge to attack. It was why her mother had roared and gnashed her teeth back when — but she didn’t want to brood on that again, not now.

  Her hunger was starting to actually make her bones ache, and her skin was turning whiter and whiter. The dry, corpse-like coldness that marked a hungry Keeper’s skin was stealing her usual girlish flush.

  “Bangkok,” she said to the ticket clerk, producing a Visa card in the name of the traveling alias Sarah had set up for this trip. A French national called “Marie Tallman” had entered Thailand from the U.S. and would leave for Paris. Miriam Blaylock, a U.S. citizen, would return to New York.

  She went to the surprisingly ornate first-class lounge. A hostess came up. Miriam ordered sour lemonade, then sat down and lit a cigarette. She contemplated what had become the problem of her hunger.

  She’d ignored it for too long, and now she was going to have to feed before she left Thailand. Why hadn’t she noticed this back in New York? She could have sent Sarah down to the Veils to bring back some wanderer. At home, she had reduced the hunt to a simple, safe procedure that delivered her prey right into her arms. Sarah found appropriate victims and lured them to the Veils. Miriam consumed them in a basement room built for the purpose, or she took them home and dined there.

  She gave them a lovely time. They died in ecstasy.

  She sucked a cigarette hard, blasted the smoke out of her nose. If she didn’t feed soon, she would slow down, she would lose her edge. Then she’d have to find some weak human and do a thin feed. This would only stave the hunger off for a few days, no more. So there would be a second hunt in Paris, and more danger.

  She ought to race straight back to New York and the hell with the rest of the Keepers. They probably wouldn’t appreciate her efforts anyway.

  But she couldn’t, not when the greatest disaster she had ever known had befallen an entire continent. Of all the Keepers, how could it ever have been the Asians who would be attacked by man? Many of them were true ancients, more than ten thousand years old. Immensely wise, extraordinarily careful, not moving so much as an inch except to feed, they would stay in their black lairs, shadows with gleaming eyes and slow, slow breath, amusing themselves for months by gazing at a bit of intricately woven cloth or some subtly reflective gem.

  When these Keepers walked among their herds, the humans would stir in their sleep, sighing with the sighing wind, clinging to one another without knowing why.

  They had seen vast ages of man pass, empires rise and fall and be forgotten, thousands of human generations go to dust. More effectively than any other group in the world, the Asians had managed their herds, inducing migrations in order to evoke new strains, breeding their stock for beauty and intelligence and succulence. Humans called it famine and war and migration. Keepers called it stock management.

  The more she tho
ught about it, the more uneasy she became. How much of the secret of their Keepers had the humans involved understood, and who were these creatures? How could cattle enjoying the riches and ease of the feedlot ever realize the truth about their lives? Especially when not one in a hundred thousand of them would ever come into contact with a Keeper. But human beings were not cattle, and it was a mistake to think so.

  Somehow, they had used their clever little brains to discover a secret that was larger than they were. They had used their damned science. They never should have been given the wheel, let alone electricity and — God forbid — flight.

  But they had been. They were fun to watch, damned things. Also, as their population had risen out of control, they themselves had taken their science to greater and greater heights, seeking to make more food, to move faster, to create room for more and more of themselves on the groaning planet.

  She’d had a brush with human science herself back twenty or so years ago. It was hard to believe, now, just how much trouble dear Dr. Sarah Roberts had caused her back then. She’d taken samples of her own blood into a laboratory. She’d damned well discovered the secret of the Keepers, that smart little vixen.

  Miriam had eaten her cohort and seduced her. She’d flooded Sarah’s body with her own blood, but Sarah had fought the transformation. She had refused to eat, claiming that her medical oath was stronger than her love of life. So she had spent a little time among the undead, her soul trapped in her slowly decaying body.

  Meanwhile, Miriam had read Sarah’s scientific papers and gained new insights from them about the synergy between Keeper blood and human blood. She had managed to resuscitate Sarah.

  In doing so, she had gained a complex and fascinating companion. Sarah had honor, and so could be trusted. But she did not like to feed. She considered it murder.

  Miriam had lured Sarah into finding buried parts of herself that loved the soft skin and the considered touch of another woman. When they lay together, Miriam would draw her to climax again and again, with the pressure of the finger or the exploratory flutter of the tongue.

  “Passengers for Thai Airways Flight Two-Twenty-three to Bangkok may now board through Gate Eleven.”

  She began to file toward the gate that led to the plane. Normally, she minded travel far less than other Keepers. For a woman of their kind, travel was limited to courtship during her four fertilities and, of course, attending the centennial conclaves.

  Defying convention, Miriam had traveled all over the world. She had tasted it and enjoyed it and watched it change across time, had walked in the grand alleys of ancient Rome and the perfumed halls of the Sun King.

  She had lived a long time in the cellars of the House of the Caesars on the Quirinal Hill, had heard mad Caligula screeching and fed on the blood of his slaves, who were fat from their constant stealing of his peacock breasts and zebra haunches, and were too numerous to be missed.

  Despite all her journeying, she detested small spaces. During the eastern European crisis of the nineteenth century, when local humans had briefly learned to recognize their masters, Keepers in the Balkans had been forced to hide in graves. Miriam had gone there to see firsthand what had gone wrong. She ended up spending a week hiding in a coffin, an experience that still haunted her dreams. It had taken almost all of her strength to dig herself out of the grave. Their use of this particular hiding place was how the legend that Keepers were somehow undead had begun.

  It was some time before anybody understood why simple Transylvanian peasants had come to understand that they were property. Not until the publication of Dracula did the Keepers realize that out-of-date clothing could give you away in a world where fashions had begun to change more than once in a human generation. The Romans had worn togas for a thousand years. In the Middle Ages, fashion had changed perhaps twice in a century.

  In the nineteenth century, it began to change every fifteen years or so. Isolated in the Carpathians, the Keepers who lived there had failed to notice that powdered wigs and buckle shoes had ceased to be worn by humans. The peasants soon realized that every time one of these bewigged oddities was seen in the night streets, somebody disappeared. Twenty-six Keepers died during the Balkan troubles, the largest number by far ever to be destroyed at one time by man.

  But there had been sixty or more here in Asia. Sixty. What if they were captured, starving in prison, or being tracked like foxes? Or worse, already dead.

  They were dead. She sensed this. There was something missing in the air . . . a sort of silence where there had been music.

  She strode toward the far back of the fetid tube full of seats. The only place she would sit on most flights was the very last row. If something went wrong, her great strength might give her an edge, for she would be perfectly capable of ripping a hole in the fuselage in order to escape, if escape was possible. The impact of a jet slamming into the ground at four hundred miles an hour would reduce even a Keeper to pulp.

  The damn plane was going to be full, she realized. The wretched creatures were just piling on, and her belly was churning. She had to feed, and soon. She had to do it in Bangkok, and never mind the urgency of the situation or the danger of just being in Asia.

  The plane was an A-310 Airbus, a type that particularly troubled her because it was too easy to fly. Pilots got careless in this airplane. Worse, it had only two engines, and she knew from her hobby of reading technical manuals that one of them was not enough to keep it aloft forever.

  The Thai were smoking and chattering and eating human fodder: bits of pork and mushroom and pepper wrapped in what looked like edible plastic. Various of her human lovers had tried to introduce her to the pleasures of sweets and such, but she had not been able to digest any of it. She watched human food evolve steadily for thousands of years — until recently, that is, when continued population pressure had caused an increase in quantity and a corresponding decline in quality.

  Herd tending was not her specialty, so she wasn’t particularly concerned with what the creatures ate. Her parents had been breeders and practiced the art of inducing particular humans to breed with each other, so that babies with preferred characteristics would be born.

  Her father and mother had bred a new race among the Egyptians, seeking to make a smarter human. They had eventually caused the birth a brilliant child called Ham-abyra, who is known to history not by his Egyptian name, but by the Hebrew inversion, Abyra-ham. He had been cut out of the Egyptian herd and sent to found a new one in another part of North Africa.

  The herd of Abyra-ham were great survivors because they were so clever, but their blood had a bitter aftertaste, unfortunately. You ate a Jew, her father always said, you remembered it for a week.

  Originally, there had been good reasons for wanting humans to be smart. The brighter they were, the better their survival skills, and the cheaper they were to manage. Also, the blood of the brilliant usually offered more complex, interesting bouquets. Keepers bred humans for blood the way humans bred grapes for wine.

  The engines of the airplane began to whine. She hated to fly as much as or more than she had hated to sail, but she did it anyway, just as she’d always traveled. Her thirst for knowledge had made her take the spring galley from Rome to Alexandria to read in the library, and the summer galleon from Spain to Mexico to plumb the secrets of the Maya.

  There was a problem, though. She’d often ended up eating every single soul on those slow old sailing ships. She never meant to do it, but it was just so tempting, all alone in close quarters with a gaggle of sweet-blooded humans for weeks and weeks. She’d do one and then another of them, starting with the low slaves and working her way up. She’d create the impression that they’d jumped or fallen overboard. Come a storm and she’d do five or six, gobbling them like bonbons.

  Ships she took would arrive empty . . . except for one seriously overweight Keeper well hidden in the bilges. One of her most particularly self-indulgent trips had been aboard a Dutch East Indies spice trader. She’d consumed a c
rew of fifty and all six of their passengers in just two months. She was so packed with blood she feared that she must look like a big blue tick. She’d come into Surabaya at night on the ship’s sailing dinghy. As for the ship, it had sailed on alone for years, still a legend among humans, the Flying Dutchman.

  Shuddering, the jet rose into the air. Fog, touched golden by the sun, hung over the ancient Thai city below. Miriam gazed down at the temple district, at spires just visible through the billowing fog, and wondered.

  The hunger was beginning to claw at her belly. Her muscles were tensing, instinctually getting ready for a kill. Her mouth was filling with the sour flavor of need. The scent of people swept through her with every breath.

  She turned on the air nozzle above her head to full force, but there was no escaping the succulent odor of her fellow travelers, not packed into this tin can.

  You certainly couldn’t feed on a jet. If you stuffed the remnant down the toilet, it would be found later in the plane’s holding tank. Remnants had to be completely destroyed — ground up and burned, usually. Humans had found just a very few of them over the generations, generally taken for mummies. In fact, she’d once wrapped a news hawker in tape and put him in a mummy case in the basement of the British Museum. That had been when — oh, a few hundred years ago. He was probably still there, her old hawker. It had been the St. James’s Gazette that he’d been selling. Pretty good paper in its day.

  Look at the humans around her, she thought, all happy and fluttery and unconcerned about the thirty-thousand-foot maw of death beneath their feet. How could anybody be as careless of their lives as humans were? They flew all the time; they raced around in automobiles; they went on roller coasters and fought wars. Miriam’s theory was that humans did indeed have souls, and inwardly they knew it. That was why they came to her for sex, thrilled by the danger they sensed. They weren’t really afraid of death, the humans. For them, it was nothing more than another thrill ride.