by Drew D'Amato
The police had gotten there a few minutes later, responding to calls from the sound of the grenade going off. They gazed upon the burning fire in the alley and bodies broken in pieces and scattered all around.
“What the fuck?” is all the officer who got out of his car first said as he looked at the macabre scene. No one else said a word. They were all thinking what the officer had just said.
3
Carried through the air by a vampire didn’t feel like what Lois Lane might have felt with Superman. A question presented itself. Are you more afraid of getting dropped, or landing with the monster?
“Where are you going, Father?” Vlad asked him.
“You can put me anywhere.”
“Look you have nothing to fear. If I was going to kill you, you’d have been killed back there with the rest of them. What’s your name?”
“Pacami, Father Pacami.” Pacami answered even though he felt he shouldn’t. He answered because to resist did not seem wise.
“Good, Father Pacami, you are starting to have trust in me, and trust is the foundation of any good relationship. Where is your parish?”
“I actually don’t work around here.”
“Oh, you see Father, we established trust and then you go and lie like that. Now is lying the way for a man of the cloth?” He paused to let the fear set in with the priest. “Where is your parish? What do you care if I know, do you not feel safe in a church?”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.”
“Welcome to the real world. Now you are starting to get heavy, and our conversation is getting us nowhere. I’ll have to drop you off here.”
Vlad let go of him. Pacami fell at a fast speed to the ground that now looked only a hundred feet away from him. In two seconds it would be a hundredth of a foot away. How stupid I am to not play his game, was what ran through his head as he fell to Earth. Not a quick prayer to The Supreme Being; right then he wasn’t sure if that God even existed. The Father prepared to die and braced himself the only way he could. He closed his eyes. Then Vlad scooped him up from underneath, and brought them down. Even with his feet on the ground, the Father was still scared. If this was a dream then what did it take to wake up? They stood on a secluded street.
“Divine Saviour, Divine Saviour, on Cypress Avenue,” the Father said before he even opened his eyes. His hysteria from the fall stayed with him. He breathed hard and tried to get back any sense of safety.
“Good, that’s only a few blocks down. You can walk from here. I’m sure that’s what you’d rather do.”
“Yes, I would.”
Pacami waited at first to see if he really would get out of this alive. Vlad looked at him with a smirk waiting for Pacami to move. He didn’t need to be told twice. He turned and started to walk away from Vlad, afraid to turn around. He felt like Lot’s wife, but still he looked back.
Vlad still stood there. A quick rush of fear soared through Pacami’s body.
“Could I get a thank you?” Vlad asked.
“Thank you.” He paused, not sure if that was all Vlad wanted. “Son, I owe you everything.” Pacami turned back around and walked toward the direction of his church.
He heard from behind him, “Don’t worry Father, you may get a chance to pay me back.” Pacami turned around to look back down the alley. There was no one there. He looked up in the sky, nothing. He turned around and started to walk back. Surviving tonight was a miracle, anyone believing a word of his story would be another.
SIX
1
Vlad never liked mornings. He never liked waking up early, except before a battle. Now as a vampire he didn’t like them because he didn’t get enough sleep. Vlad didn’t need to sleep anymore. He just sincerely hated mornings. The smell of the air at seven o’clock in the morning did not sit right with him, along with the way the sun started to shine. It does not seem like anyone should be awake at this time, nevermind doing something.
Their flight to New York left at ten, it was now eight. Only Michael, Vlad, Jericho, and three others from the house were coming. The meeting was scheduled for midnight in upstate New York, but his plane was landing in JFK. He had to meet some men in the city first.
Vlad did not tell Jericho about last night. Jericho would be the only one he would tell, if he would tell anyone. Jericho told Vlad about how his hunt last night went. He had run into some gang members selling crack on a corner. These three idols of citizenry were also involved in a drive-by shooting last week that resulted in five fatalaties—one of them a six year old sitting on her bed next to the window in her bedroom. Jericho bragged about how the last one pleaded for his life after he saw a figure in black fly out of nowhere and kill his two friends. The two both had their jugulars ripped out. Vampires liked to use this technique the most—a quick attack that kept the victim silent.
As the man tried to plead, Jericho ripped out his eyes and stuffed them down his throat. This technique also kept the victim from screaming. It was also slower and more painful. Then Jericho cut open his stomach and let his insides fall out. Killing can get boring sometimes so Jericho liked to get creative. If you thought killing was wrong, Jericho would say you’re killing the wrong person. Once it was decided one was so evil that they deserved death, why show any mercy? When a vampire hunted, it resembled a shark during a feeding frenzy. They tried to keep the death as quick as possible, but didn’t care to avoid the victim’s pain. The vampires showed no quarter, they just tried to keep the rest of the world from knowing about their attacks.
Jericho flew over the Angeles National Forest with three bodies in tow, and dropped them. Hopefully, the wildlife would take care of what was left of them until they were discovered maybe weeks later. If possible a vampire could bring the body back to the castle to let others feed on. To the human world they just ended up missing for good.
Pictures of missing children decorated milk boxes; yet, there were no pictures for adults? There are almost just as many missing adults as there are children every year. The kids get the money. Three black gang members missing on a milk carton would not get any sympathy from a white suburban couple.
Vlad usually left no witnesses, but this time he did—the priest. Why the hell did I keep him alive? Something had to be done. He watched the morning news on the flat-screen TV in his office. The story of the two escaped convicts came on the news. They still had not been found and the police thought they might have gotten away. Just another thing the law has to thank me for, he thought to himself. He took his mind off the priest for a moment and thought about his experience in America, and how he had aided the start of this young country.
His experience in America started with Philadelphia. The history of the place, the birth of the Constitution—Vlad was there for it all. He was around for the Revolution, but did not want to take part in it, at least not publicly. What if he made a difference and got noticed in history? What if he got elected the first president instead of Washington? How would it look when he never died? No, he just enjoyed killing for a good cause.
He then set up base in Florida, using the wisdom of having the ocean for protection. He stayed there for about fifty years before hearing about the Gold Rush and following suit with all the other dreamers with gold in their eyes, and set out for San Francisco. He amassed more wealth while there. Then America fought itself. He returned to Floirda and took part in the Battle at Olustee, one of the bloodiest wars in the Civil War, which was not a coincidence. Then he returned west after the war, settling this time in Los Angeles.
Hiding his presence was easier in America than it was for Radu. The vampire myth had grown in Europe. Radu never cared about who he killed, but since he did sleep defenseless at night, he wasn’t immortable. He didn’t want every villager hunting for him. But the Wild West was so open, Vlad never ran out of a place to hide his bodies. This open air did not last too long. America modernized like the rest of the world. Vlad couldn’t survive with just buying open land cheap, money in the bank,
and random bank robberies. The twentieth century wouldn’t allow that. If he wanted cash he needed to liquidize. A new challenge for him.
His first major problem was that he could not simply continue to live off the grid. He needed fake identification. It was one thing if someone wanted a fake ID for a means to an end—get into a bar, rent a car, use a passport to get out of town. But Vlad and his men actually needed to invent someone. There was also the other complication of not being able to be photographed.
In the early days someone had to be bought off. Everything could be forged, if it could be made. Licences started a little before World War I, and in its genesis there were no people who dealt with making fake ones yet but there were those who made the real ones. He paid them off. That’s what Vlad loved about this country, anything could be bought. In 1911, throwing five thousand at a guy in town hall to produce a fake birth certificate was never rejected. Paying some stoop in 1911 to come up with a fake driver’s licence was actually cheaper. And they were happy when he asked them for more ID’s, with different names. And so he didn’t do just one. He has multiple aliases. Every few years the birth date got too old to go with his physical appearance, so he had to use a new one. He didn’t bother with faking the death of the old ones. As long as that person made no new appearance in the world, no one gave a shit. Even if someone searched for him he could not be found. And if anyone bothered to look up one of his aliases what would they think? He is missing, probably dead somewhere and the body was never found. They would not think he is centuries old and still looks forty.
But then came photos on driver’s licenses and Vlad needed help. He had to find someone who looked close enough like him to pose for the picture. More people became more guilty consciences, and more greed. People have even tried blackmailing him. What fools. They were dead days later. Every time Vlad decided to not kill a human, he was expressing mercy. His mercy went away once anyone tried to get the better of him.
But still anything could be bought, and anything could be made. As fake identification became more of a concern for law enforcement, the ID’s became harder to produce. However, the merchants of fake identifications also became more common. Vlad had one man, who only asked one question—disposable or substantial.
Disposable ID’s were easy to make. They were just used mostly for traveling. They looked exactly like the real thing and could fool even the best trained eye. But the name on the ID had no legs to it. He could not use it if he wanted to purchase anything that required a credit check. That would be a substantial ID, those were valuable and more expensive. For that an entire person was created, who had a social security number, fingerprints, and even a credit score. That required hacking into the toughest firewalls of the national and financial databases, but still this guy managed to pull it off. Vlad had no idea how, he just knew how much.
Anything could be bought.
But the biggest threat to his secrecy now, which was also his best weaponry, was how easy communication had become. He lived with the threat of not appearing on a camera phone video and then peaking people’s curiosity. Living a lie was so much harder now than it was five hundred years ago. Even hiding bodies was not as easy as it used to be. Now he just tried to leave a body without any vampiric signs. Destroying the skin of the neck; drinking blood via a limb removal; drinking less from the victims. These were all tricks, but the press was still the biggest motherfucker.
That was where he had to stick his hooks in. Reporters could be bought to, but not with money. Anything could be bought, but money didn’t buy everything. Some things were sold for other commodities, commodities more valuable. For reporters it was the story. He gave them insight into the criminal world, the political world, and anything in between; in exchange for certain incidents to be kept out of the media’s spotlight.
After last night, Vlad was going to have to call in another favor.
“Joseph Patrick, you dirt monger,” Vlad said on the phone to the chief editor for the local section of the Los Angeles Times.
“Raoul Wellington, if that even is your real name,” the thirty-eight year old successful husband and father replied. He was one of the youngest chief editors at a major newspaper. Patrick owed his meteoric rise at the newspaper thanks to information Vlad shared with him over the years. He was the reporter behind the story of a drug-dealing scandal that cost one state senator his office—and a few years of his freedom.
“You know it’s not.”
“Yeah, so what are you, CIA, NSA? Cause I’ve looked you up and I got nothing, except some house out in Malibu, which looked unlived in. Whatever you got that’s fake, it’s pretty good. You’re pretty far off the grid.”
“What are you doing looking me up? I told you eleven years ago when we met, I work for concerned families, some legit, some not. Sometimes they want certain things printed and sometimes they don’t. One thing they don’t want printed is any information about me, so why did you dig?”
“Curious.”
“Well, hope I don’t get curious enough to look you up.” Vlad heard Patrick swallow over the phone. Vlad continued his threat. “I can ruin everything about you. That adorable daughter—”
“Stop, Raoul, stop. I’m sorry, I was just curious. I was trying to kid around. You made your point.”
It was best to be loved and feared but if you could only choose one, it was better to be feared. Vlad did not have to put fear in Warburton. Warburton was a noble cop who knew the truth about Vlad and knew he was fighting on the right side of an inhuman war. Warburton in a way loved Vlad, and had his back. Patrick didn’t know the truth. Patrick was just a reporter, a worm, Vlad needed to instill fear in him to keep him in line.
“Good, because I’d rather our relationship be based on positive reinforcement than intimidation,” Vlad said. “I have a favor to ask of you.”
“What is it?”
“Those murders near Echo Park, those bikers.”
“Yes, those men were destroyed. One of them had their Adam’s apple ripped out, another had their skull crushed. They were blown up, but forensics was still able to piece some of that together. There wasn’t much about it in this morning’s edition, but tomorrow we are running the headline: Sons of Calamity.”
“That’s why I am calling you, like the characters in that show, these men were involved in the gun trade. And their weapons have been hurting some of the families I work for.”
“So they don’t want anymore attention on the incident and pressing the police to come up with some arrests.”
“Exactly.”
“Damn Raoul, there is this young kid Paul here, he reminds me of me. He’s got the whole story written already.”
“There will be others, I promise you that. Tell him you owe him, and you’ll make it up to him. But the older readers, which are most of your readers, don’t want to hear about Adam’s apples ripped out and silver bullets.”
“Hey, how did you know about the silver bullets?”
“Goodbye Joseph, and I promise you there will be a bigger story soon.”
After the call Vlad’s mind turned back to the priest he saved last night. It was good the story would die down. Day after day, the priest should feel less obligated to report anything about it. But that priest would never forget what happened that night. Vlad would have to reach out to the man to calm his nerves, to get him to play along—or he would have to kill him. He couldn’t afford loose ends.
He could not think about that now. He had the meeting to worry about. He would worry about it when he got back. Any decision now would be rash.
2
Vampires do not like hotels, especially nice ones. The better hotels tend to be decorated with objects vampires hate the most when they are in public—mirrors. Vampires do not cast reflections because part of their curse is that they never age. Since their face never changed, they never get to see their changeless face. This may not seem like a major drawback, but in public life, it is. When a vampire and a stranger stand in
front of a mirror, how could the vampire explain why he cannot be seen through the looking glass? There is no great lie, no perfect answer; vampires just try to avoid that situation.
At the same time vampires, do not like the poor side of life. They could stay over at a local Motel Six, nothing flashy, and avoid the mirror problem, but most vampires are too vain to submit to that sort of place. So they stay at the big hotels, not staying long in the lobby, and gambling that no one catches them near a mirror. They could get away with it, but when a large group entered a hotel it became nearly impossible. So Vlad and his men were lucky to have a fellow vampire in New York who did not mind putting them up for the night.
In a building that blended in with the rest of the Manhattan skyline lived Vlad’s New York “head,” Richard. The building had forty-five floors in it, and on floors forty-two to the top lived Richard and his men. Vlad’s empire broke down like a mafia, a government, the Catholic religion, or any other hierarchy. A head vampire, was like a Capo for the mob. They presided over different parts of America, but still answered to Vlad. They are given the freedom to determine who would be valuable vampire, and give the “bite” themselves.
Jericho never wanted to be a head and have his own territory. He liked working under Vlad. They had been together since the start of the war. That was why he had silver-finish .50 Caliber Desert Eagles. Vlad used the guns like symbols to tell the rank of the different vampires. Vlad had gold Desert Eagles; Jericho, second in command, had silver ones. Head vampires carried .44 magnum Desert Eagles, and regular vampires that were also great warriors, like Michael, used .357 Desert Eagles. The rest of the vampires carried whichever weapons they wanted. Michael, like Jericho, also never wanted to be a head vampire. These two cared more about spending their time with Vlad than having the power of being a head vampire. Others, liked that power. Richard was a head, and also the wiz behind managing the bloodline’s bank accounts.
