Civil Blood_The Vampire Rights Trial that Changed a Nation

by Chris Hepler

  My victories have been limited. I spent the last few nights in a holding cell usually reserved for suspects awaiting their arraignments. I preferred it to any hotel with a flimsy wooden door, but I was up all night worrying about its lack of an escape route. There's an officer specifically devoted to me out in the bullpen, a young type who tells the TV crews that Mister Lorenz is not available for interviews.

  Still, the reporters camp out in the waiting room. They clog the station bathroom and drink the vending machine dry. All this just for one shot of me walking out with a cashable expression on my face. Sour look, jubilant smile, anything that can be fed into the first half of a sentence about me meeting my court date. I loved disappointing them with the virtual appearance. Let them wallow in vampire hype and then eat footage of lawyers, carrying a box.

  It didn't take long for Net-savvy people to find my police station. My mail, both e- and paper, is a hodgepodge. I've got friends, even now, who send me links to op-ed pieces, logged chatterbot conversations, and headline collections. I have letters from lawyers trying to outcompete Cho. I got a voice message from a man with liver cancer asking me to infect him so he won't have to take so many drugs. Then, there's the nun who told me Jesus could burn the virus out of me if I walked in the sun, sandwiched between two requests from agents offering a generous price for the print, motion picture, and electronic game rights to my life story.

  I guess the story might sell. It has tragedy hitting me at a young age. It has a self-made man narrative if you hype up me clawing my way into law school. But this pseudo-fame isn't about me. It's about some myth of sexy undead superheroes that's been in people's heads long before I came on the scene. Cashing in on that seems worse than dirty. It seems irrelevant. If I can afford to be morally superior, don't I have an obligation to do so?

  I put the cigarettes away, turning to my other reading material: the bio-safe Coke bottle. After a second, I throw it out. The caffeine has done nothing to stop my withdrawal headache. There's no recommended serving size for a vampire and worse, I have no idea what I need to eat. I drank so much bagged blood yesterday, it made me sick. When I tried fast food afterward, the fried chicken came up, along with the genetically modified potato cakes. I sat by the toilet, muttering to God, asking what I needed to drink or snort or smoke to take the edge off. Nothing will work, but I can't stop hoping.

  This morning was no better. I spent it with six pounds of raw hamburger, draining the runoff into a cup. Thin. Salty. Useless.

  "Morgan," says Luis, a uniform who has pulled the late shift. "We gotta go."

  "What's happening?"

  "Your transfer got approved. Come on, man, get your stuff." Here, "stuff" means my jacket, puffed out in all pockets with carb-ridden snack foods. I snatch it from a locker outside the cells and throw it on. I make a phone call as I walk.

  "Geoff, I need a donor and not here at the station. Guys, where are we going?"

  "We'll be taking a cruiser," Luis says. "Out the back. I'll get the fire door."

  "I need to know the location," I insist to Luis.

  Cho's voice comes over the phone. "No can do."

  Right on the heels of that, Luis says "Sorry, you can't tell anyone."

  I stop. Cho needs answering first. "What? You said we had a donor."

  "We had five, but I put the waivers in front of them, and they backed out." Luis gestures frantically, and I absently follow him, mind on the phone.

  "So do it without a waiver, just now. Cow blood doesn't work—"

  "Morgan, I can't do this. There's a little voice in my head saying forget it, and it's right. I can't advise that you open yourself up to the exact same kind of wrongful infection suit that we're spearheading here. These will be newly infected people who will think you have money. You will get nailed just like we are nailing the Health Initiative—"

  My ear bounces away from the phone, and I dig the earbuds out of my jacket. I ignore Cho while I head for the emergency exit. Luis shuts off the alarm and unlocks the door. The lot behind the station is wide, well-lit, and clogged with cars. No media in sight.

  "Where are we going?" I ask.

  "Can't tell you. We're just handing you off," says Luis. "FBI takes it from there."

  I hesitate, noticing for a moment that I've been led outside, where there are no other cops. Has Luis been bought? Does he want me to himself so I can be dropped off at hatemonger central? Just as I get worried, another cop comes through the fire door: Pierce, the one who escorts me on smoke breaks.

  "You key in the map?" he asks Luis.

  "It's nothing. We get to 395," is the answer. "Lorenz, come on."

  I hook my earbuds in. Cho has hung up.

  I follow them toward a cruiser, wincing at my stomach that is now imitating a clenched fist. I steady myself on a car, trying to breathe deeply. I breathe, but that's all.

  "You okay?" asks Luis. "You look messed up."

  "Medical condition," I say, "and an idiot friend." No one responds. I open the back door to the cruiser. At least it has tinted windows so the media won't ID me. Luis gets in on the other side, and Pierce is up front. I appreciate that Luis is in back so I don't feel locked in alone like a perp. I don't touch my seat belt, steadying myself by hand as the car rolls out. The scents come at me sharply: pine air freshener, vinyl seats, recirculated air.

  "It's about an hour's drive," Luis says. "No problem."

  "Easy for you to say."

  "Did you have blood this morning? I know you were sick."

  "I had cow blood. I need a donor," I say between gritted teeth. I fumble out a Menthol, tap it furiously against my hand and roll down the window. "I can't believe this. The only things I haven't tried for the pain are alcohol and heroin."

  "Man, if you could survive on alcohol," Pierce laughs, "I know ten guys who would love to get bitten."

  Don't scream. Don't scream. He doesn't know. I can't feel the nicotine from the cigarette anymore. Have I expelled it that fast?

  "Maybe you got the flu," Luis says. "Lot of people in the station."

  "You coulda picked it up from the burger," says Pierce. "Food poisoning or something."

  I say nothing, making an effort to shut out their voices. I drop the cigarette out the window and close my eyes. My heartbeat is loud, and my head pounds with it. It brings anger and dread because I know what will happen next. It has happened before, in a friend's house, to someone with my name who looks exactly like me. But I didn't move my body. It moved itself.

  I grab Luis's arm and bite into his wrist.

  The fact that I'm sitting on Luis's right saves my life. The contact high is weak, and Luis doesn't go slack. Instead, Luis first struggles to pull me off, then awkwardly reaches for the pistol on his right side with his left hand. I feel it coming and shove up against him, trapping his hand in the tangle of arms. Pierce is yelling something from the front seat, but I don't care what.

  The car swerves and hits something, probably the median strip, because then it lurches the other way across four lanes of traffic and off the road. I'm latched on to Luis's arms to avoid being thrown off him, but with the contact high gone, the officer starts to struggle with a purpose.

  I have no skill, but I have a lot of strength. I dig my fingers into the bite wound as I grip Luis's arm harder and, with my other hand, seize him by the throat. Luis's left hand goes for the gun, but his angle is poor, and it falls uselessly from his hand. He puts the hand on my arm but can't pry off my clenched fist. The fist has his windpipe in it.

  "Nine nine nine! Nine nine nine!" Pierce yells into the radio. "Shoulder of 395, get over here!" He's halfway turned in his seat and is undoing his seat belt. I can't reach him through the partition. If Pierce gets out and draws his gun, I don't stand a chance. Virus or not, I'll be a fish in a steel barrel.

  I scramble to open the right rear door as Pierce goes out the front. He tumbles onto the asphalt and stays low. I have only one chance before Pierce comes around the back and empties the pistol into me
. I slam into the car as hard as I can and shove like a football lineman.

  The cruiser is driven sideways and strikes Pierce in the legs and body like a giant's club. I stumble and go down on all threes, but the damage is done. Pierce, too, is off his feet, knocked into traffic. There is a screech of brakes and an unmistakable thump.

  My head clears, and I stare at the dent I just made in the car's frame. My shoulder is stinging, like it's one enormous bruise, but Pierce is done. He must be done, right?

  Numbly, I circle around the car to see the mess. The driver of the car is still in shock, probably rethinking his entire life as he stares over the steering wheel. From what I know of personal injury, two things tend to happen when a car strikes a body. The body can go up onto the hood, or it can go down, under the wheels. Pierce, in his stumbling, went down.

  I stare at Pierce's gun, now three meters from his hand. I look back to the driver, who sees something in his rearview mirror and turns back behind him. I follow the man's gaze.

  One of the cars stopped in the near-lane pileup is a news van. Did they follow the cruiser from the police station parking lot? Or are they just lucky? I can see a man and a woman get onto the asphalt. The camera operator fires up the bright spotlight on the top of her machine.

  The light spills over the bashed-in cop car. It spills over the driver who has stopped in shock, and it spills over me. I shield my eyes.

  I probably could do something to save myself, perhaps seize the camera and hurl it to the ground. But none of this is happening. Look at the man at the steering wheel. He doesn't know what to do any more than I do. So, I just think. I stand by the still-running cars, and I touch my mouth. My fingers come away wet. The hands I raise to hold back the light do nothing but cast shadows across my face. The image of myself as a blood-spattered horror is now burned into the circuits of the video camera, captured and as immortal as anything ever really is.

  23 - TRANSCRIPT

  "The Blood Will Tell," E Pluribus Magazine

  Released online and at newsstands on September 3rd

  Morgan Lorenz's attack on two police officers

  suggests VIHPS is a vampire virus even worse than feared

  "I'M SUPPOSED TO BE THE LUCKY WIFE?" NINA RODOLFO ASKS, and there are no tears, no quaver in her voice. We are standing by her husband's bedside at the George Washington University hospital, three days after the attack in which Morgan Lorenz allegedly choked him unconscious and drank his blood. To Nina, there is nothing alleged about it—her husband, Luis Rodolfo, has undergone two transfusions. Now doctors fear that the lack of oxygen to his brain while he waited for medical assistance may have caused permanent damage. The only mitigating news is that it could have been worse. Rodolfo's partner, Pierce Hauptmann, expired four hours ago from the same attack. Hauptmann's family declined to be interviewed for this article.

  If it was a terrible week for the Rodolfos and the Hauptmanns, it wasn't an easy one for the vampires, either. In Detroit this Tuesday, police shot hit-and-run driver Neville Gleason over twenty times before he finally succumbed to his wounds. The autopsy indicated Gleason's tissues were suffused with a previously unknown, qi-saturated lyssavirus, identical to the one volunteered for testing data by Morgan Lorenz.

  It did not take long for news of the vampire killing to be replaced by the story of those the vampire had killed—Gleason had human body parts cut up with a hacksaw at his Sanilac home, believed to be the answer to over a dozen missing persons cases. Across the country, police and the FBI have been examining homicide files from the last ten years to see if vampirism might have played a part. "This has sent us back to the books," said Dan Bremer, a twenty-three-year veteran of homicide investigations in New York City.

  But nowhere is the paranoia about VIHPS greater than the nation's capital. It is here that the face of vampirism first loomed large, and now those faces have grown younger: Rodora Redding, 15 and Aiko Tsunano, 16, infected two girls and eleven boys in their classes at the Sidwell Friends School, in what police informally call "the Trust Fund Clan." (See related article, p. 33, "The Monsters Next Door.") The D.C. police are instituting a curfew for those under eighteen. To help enforce it, they are calling upon off-duty and early-retired officers and pressing them back to work. Nor are they alone: National Guard units have been posted at the Mall and area airports. "The last thing we want," says one Sergeant Oliver Baker, "is one of these guys on an airplane with some political agenda. We don't know the full extent of their strength and have no intention of it being tested on a cockpit door."

  Though such a move may have made the public feel more alarmed, not less, Wednesday's report by Surgeon General Cilana finally provided the panacea we were looking for. Framing VIHPS as a threat to public health rather than a malefic organization of boogeymen, she requested that anyone who had suffered a human bite or had saliva-to-blood contact within the last month to report to a hospital.

  There, they would donate samples and be assigned case workers. Within hours, hospitals from Florida to Boston were packed with complainants informing on their friends and neighbors.

  Which brings us back to the question we really want answers to: what made Morgan Lorenz need blood so badly that he was willing to attack two armed police officers? The incident did not occur from lack of planning. Lorenz, under medical advice, was consuming cow's blood and more traditional food throughout his stay in police custody. At the time of the attack, he was being transported into FBI protection, where he was to be given more spacious quarters and a twenty-four-hour guard—everything an infamous vampire could want as he awaits his date with justice.

  Motives to wish harm on Hauptmann or Rodolfo are equally elusive. Nelson Goetz, 40, was the uniform on shift before both men; he responded to Hauptmann's distress call when their car rode up onto the curb and was the first officer on the scene. "We're still investigating why this broke down the way it did," he says. "Lorenz got along with our officers. He didn't have a temper. He understood he wasn't safe anywhere else."

  The answer seems to be in the blood, the stuff smeared all over the back of the Aero and the pavement. Symon Wagner and camerawoman Lana Miter of Channel 4 news recorded the now-viral footage of Morgan Lorenz, bloodstained and furious, yelling at them before fleeing the scene. His confused look seemed to say, it's the active qi. It defies all reasonable precautions; it is the master, and he is its slave. Like the man-eating plant in the old play Little Shop of Horrors, what Lorenz needs must be fresh, and it must be human.

  Nina Rodolfo doesn't want to discuss her husband's chances of coming down with the virus. The bite nearly severed tendons in his wrist, and the saliva-to-blood contact is almost assured. She will take care of him as he heals and then wait for his attacker's day in court, whether he turns up as the plaintiff or gets dragged in as a defendant. She hopes when the decision comes, Luis will watch it with her, but more, she hopes he will not fall into the same legal category as Neville Gleason and Morgan Lorenz. We share a quiet moment together, and I try to leave the room before the doctor returns because her grief is, in its own way, infectious.

  24 - INFINITY

  September 4th

  On top of everything else, my dreams have started to fuck with me.

  I don't like using the word "nightmare." Before jiujutsu, I had nightmares. In the ones I have now, I fight back. So, my problem's usually with my conscious mind, when I toss and turn and stay up at all hours. Tonight, I'm completely out.

  It begins with me locked in my room, memorizing verses—I'm around fourteen. I'm in sackcloth, a robe my father had to special order off the Internet. My classmates always taunted me for looking like a beekeeper, but I was just grateful it covered the bruises.

  Aaron is there, which makes zero sense since I was out of this house long before I ever met him, but there we are, Old Testament study buddies, and he's asking me for verses.

  "Proverbs 3:12."

  "The Lord reproves him who he loves."

  "Psalms 52:17."


  Psalms are always tough. I manage. "The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise."

  He rolls up his sleeve, smiling, presenting me with my reward. I descend on his arm and bite into it, feeling it burst and dribble into my mouth, more like a fruit than a vein. He caresses the back of my head, and I go to work, licking and sucking. But he runs dry, and I have to bite further to get at anything good. This, too, doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's a dream, and logic is only a distant heckler in a box seat somewhere. I'm seeing, hearing, tasting the show firsthand.

  Aaron loves it. He's gasping and running his free hand all over me and slips it beneath the robe to loosen my pants. The room shakes. A fist—you know whose—is hammering at the door. Again, that's not true to reality because Andrew DeStard built his daughter's door to lock from the outside. I was a prisoner, and he could enter whenever he wanted.

  "Fini!" comes the yell. The dream gets that right. Always my middle name. He never acknowledges my first.

  I scramble, throwing a blanket over Aaron. I button up my pants. Then, I search for a gun, a knife, anything. But there's nothing, so I crouch, hands hooked into claws, ready to wrestle and fight. I have confidence, but, of course, the door never opens. The slamming sound grows, until I'm convinced that whatever is on the other side is three meters tall and has the strength of a bear. He's here. He's hunting me.

  I twitch. Real body, not the dream. My mind unfogs and I wake, disoriented. I'm not in a bed but on the floor of a laundromat, listening to a washing machine frantically throwing its load against its walls. My phone says it turned into Friday about half an hour ago. I stand up and open the washer. I fish out jeans and towels wadded up into a morass.

  The bloodstains on the towels came out better than I expected. Lady Macbeth can suck it. Of course, the lady is right if you get down to the forensic level, with those sprays and lights and swabs that can detect damn near anything, but what I need is something that doesn't make a horny twenty-year-old panic when he sees the cloth laid across the back seat of my car.