by Laura Bickle
“Yeah. And I had nowhere else to go. The university went into quarantine. I wasn’t sure if it was to keep the rioting out, or to keep us inside. They closed the iron gates, blocked off the roads. Campus police started shooting anyone who wanted in or out. Hell, I didn’t even know those guys were armed.” His voice was thin.
I sucked in my breath, thinking of Mrs. Parsall’s children, at their own distant colleges. “Go on.”
“I thought it beyond barbaric, until I saw a pack of rabid cheerleaders take out some cops in a patrol car. It was like they peeled open a sardine can, then dragged them out and chewed them up on the pavement.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.
“The lab was barricaded while Cassia and the other graduate students tried to figure out what the hell they were. The National Guard came in. They were better shots than the campus P.D.
“Odd thing was, they only came out at night. During the day, the streets were empty, almost peaceful. Cassia said that photophobia—extreme sensitivity to light—was a symptom of rabies. That perhaps we were seeing a mutated, sped-up version of that.”
His breath quivered when he blew it out. “I’ve seen rabies. This was . . . Jesus. This was something else. Something more atavistic in its power. Something . . . beyond science.”
“Something evil,” I whispered.
“I said they were vampires.”
My heart froze. “Vampires?” I wanted to say, They aren’t real—but the destruction of a world didn’t seem real, either.
“Yeah. Cassia laughed at me. A plague of vampires? She said that it would be impossible for the human digestive system to adapt to survive on blood in the space of two days. Eventually, the Guard brought a corpse into the biology department for them to cut up. She said that it had a gullet full of blood. Cassia thought it was due to internal bleeding, that the key had to be some blood-borne infection. Maybe rabies with a bit of hematological fever mixed in. I didn’t understand all of it.”
“But you thought of vampires.”
“I wasn’t the only one. It seemed as good a way to describe them as any other. Like I said, the violence was only at night. People were walking around with garlic strung around their necks. Some of them even found refuge in the campus church. That worked well for a while . . . until someone set fire to it. I remember watching the fire from one of the windows in the biology building. It was about three in the morning . . . People came streaming out of the building, right into the arms of the vampires. They ripped them limb from limb.” His eyes squeezed shut.
“It was nothing like you see in the movies, these creatures. There’s no seduction. No passionate luring of the victim to a dark side of velvet. This is just the stinking, rotting underbelly of evil without its makeup. This is exactly what the Undead were in the old folk stories, the world around. Every culture has a vampire—a creature that drinks the blood of the living. And it’s not a pretty process.”
“There’s nothing . . . nothing human remaining of them?” I struggled to articulate the question. “Is there anything intelligent there?”
“I think so. Cassia said they’re capable of speech, of strategy. They figured out how to burn down the church. They would circle the biology building at night, like moths drawn to the flame, calling out for help. Once, one of the Guardsman went to help a woman who was being attacked in the street. Turned out it was a ruse—she was a vampire too. She shucked him out of his body armor like a squirrel with a nut. Maybe they would be less frantic if there was enough food to go around. But they’re smart enough to find it.
“I suspect that the corpse that the Guard brought into the biology building was also a ruse, that it was something planned.”
“How?”
“I think that they infected the body, left it for us. They knew that we were looking for answers. They couldn’t get in. The biology building was built to contain all manner of nasty bugs in the event of a grad student dropping a petri dish full of Ebola. So . . . they sent something in. And that’s what got us.”
“The corpse became a vampire?”
“I told them that it would.” His hands balled into fists in the straw, broke the hollow stalks. “I told them what our ancestors did . . . that they stuffed the mouth with garlic, cut off the head, cut out the heart and burned it . . .”
“They didn’t do that.”
“No. Their microscopes told them that the pathogen was dead. And they believed what their microscopes showed them.”
“Cassia didn’t believe you?” I couldn’t understand believing a machine over a person.
“Not at first. I pleaded with her to let me sever its head. She wouldn’t allow me to damage their evidence. She believed . . . she believed that they were close to an answer when that damn thing crawled out of the cooler and chewed the head off of her dissertation advisor. I think she believed me then.”
He lapsed into an opaque silence.
I prodded him. “And then? How did you escape?”
“Not everyone did. The monster woke up just before dawn. I was able to get my bike out of the basement, tried to convince Cassia to leave. She wanted to stay, study that monster that was sucking her advisor dry in the next room.”
I couldn’t fathom it. That kind of loyalty to an idea. I had felt some loyalty to my community, but not enough that I would never leave it. I would leave it for anything as entertaining as Rumspringa. For a moment, I was ashamed.
“What did you do?” I asked, dreading the answer. Had he left her behind? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“She was wearing one of those plastic suits. She’s small, so she swam in it. The sleeves were extra-long. Long enough that I could straitjacket her in it. She fought me, kicking and screaming, all the way down to the bike. I heard gunshots upstairs, breaking glass. I knew that we didn’t have much time, that if we had any future, we could work on the forgiveness part.” His mouth turned up darkly.
“The vamps are fast. But not as fast as a motorcycle. Not that they didn’t try. We got past the stadium just as the sun rose.”
I stared at him, hard. He was here now. Without his bike, and without the girl. “That wasn’t the last time you saw them.”
“No. I had thought to head north, back to Canada. There are enough unpopulated places there . . . I thought we could evade them until someone figured it out. Somewhere.” He shook his head. “We avoided the cities, stuck to the rural roads, slept during the day.
“But I underestimated them. We were riding not too far from here, at night, when we were ambushed. At first, I thought that it was a herd of deer blocking the road. I slowed down. And that’s when I saw . . . I saw that they were just corpses of deer, propped up on the road. I tried to weave around them, but I saw the figures of men around them, like ghosts.
“I went off the road, through a meadow. They followed. I hit a barbed-wire fence, wrecked the bike.
“Cassia was easy to see in the dark, wearing that white plastic suit. They attacked her like vultures. I had a knife, but . . . it wasn’t enough.” He swallowed hard, and his gaze glistened. When he spoke again, his voice was low. “I ran. I ran until I couldn’t hear the screaming anymore.”
The hair lifted on my arms. “They didn’t follow you?”
“They tried. But I stumbled, inadvertently, into a place they couldn’t catch me.”
“Where?” My brows knit together.
“An old family burial plot. A farmer’s cemetery. Not more than six or seven graves, no larger than a small room. It was marked off by unkempt grass, no fence . . . but they couldn’t go in. I passed in and out of consciousness. They circled me all night, like wolves, until they slunk away before dawn.”
I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe him. “They left you alone?”
“It wasn’t me. It was the cemetery. It was holy ground. Vampires aren’t supposed to be able to cross into it. Someone must have still believed in it. I found the skeletons of wildflowers there . . . I imagined that there was mayb
e a child who still visited the place, left flowers on those Civil War–era stones.”
“And you found your way here?”
“I don’t remember much after that.” He touched the wound on his temple.
He saw me looking at him with dubious, fearful eyes.
“I’m not infected,” he insisted.
I backed away, allowed the sunshine that had warmed my back to strike him in the face. He squinted through it quizzically, unlike the creatures I’d seen at the Laundromat.
“I’m not,” he said. I don’t know if he was trying to convince me or convince himself. He reached into the light, let the dust motes and sunlight drift over his fingers.
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” I said. “They’re in town.”
He looked at my disheveled appearance. “They found you.”
“I escaped.” I shook my head. “It won’t be long before they find us.”
“They probably already know. Like I said, they seem to be pretty intelligent.”
“Then why haven’t they eaten us alive?”
“If I had to guess . . . your community is holy ground. Like the cemetery.”
“Holy ground?”
“Well, yeah.” He stared up at the barn. “If I recall my comparative religions courses, you Amish are pretty strict about the sacredness of the everyday, right?”
“Ja. I guess so.” I’d never heard it put like that.
“Prayer services rotate from house to house, not held in a central church?”
“Of course.”
“Your land may be holy enough to keep them away. You may just have the last fortress against the Undead. Right here.”
I sat back against the wall of the barn, hard. “We’re safe?” For the first time since the attack in the Laundromat, I began to feel the warmth of certainty again. Much like having God’s favor made tangible.
“Well . . . if I’m right. As long as you don’t do anything stupid.”
“Like going outside the gate,” I whispered. The Elders had known, on some visceral level.
“And don’t invite them in. They can’t get in any other way.”
Chapter Ten
I took my time returning to the house, absorbing everything I had seen and heard. I felt numb, unable to process all the information. My mother saw me crossing the backyard to the water pump, where I washed my hands until they were red and raw.
“Katie! What happened to you?” she cried at my filthy appearance.
“I . . . one of the bulls knocked me down. He didn’t mean it. He just didn’t see me.” I bit my lip down on the lie.
She grabbed my shoulders. “Are you hurt?”
“No. Just a bit shook up.” The smear of blood had dried brown, indistinguishable from mud.
She put her arm around me. “Come and wash up. You’ll feel better when you’re clean.”
My mother sat me down at the kitchen table and gave me a glass of fresh milk while she carried wood to the basement to heat the water for a bath.
I stared into the milk for what seemed like a long time before lifting it to my lips. It tasted cold, rich, and pure. It grounded me, brought me back to myself.
My mother returned to take me to the spring room in the basement beside the root cellar, leading me by one hand. The other held a small kerosene lamp. We had a spring on our property, which was a blessing, but no natural gas well. Many Plain folk were able to jerry-rig a system that provided hot water with a natural gas well, but we relied on a wood stove in the corner of the spring room to heat water for the scarred clawfooted bathtub in the center of the floor. I remembered bathing in it since I was a child, feeling the cold porcelain under my hands and chin.
My mother began to untie my bonnet, but my fingers wrapped around hers. “No. I’ll do it.”
She nodded and turned her back to give me privacy while she poured a kettle of hot water into the tub. The boiling water steamed as it hit the cooler spring water. My mother topped the bathtub off from the hand pump in the floor, dipped her fingers in to check the temperature, as if I were a little girl. She’d even laid out a clean dress for me on a table against the wall we used for folding laundry. The one she picked she knew was my favorite: dark blue like the sky after sunset.
A lump rose in my throat at her kindness. It was Saturday, and bath day, anyway, but she was still trying to care for me.
She patted and kissed my cheek. “I’ll be up in the kitchen. Let me know if you need anything.”
I swallowed. I needed a lot of things. I needed to tell her what I’d learned, what I’d heard and seen with my own eyes. I needed her reassurance that all was unfolding according to God’s will, that we would be protected.
But all I could do was nod and look away.
My mother took that for modesty and left, closing the door of the spring room behind her. She left the little lamp behind to cast its yellow glow on the earthen walls. Red embers emanated from the belly of the stove, crackling with the last of the wood my mother had burned for the water. The heat caused sweat to prickle from my skin, even though my flesh was still covered in goose bumps.
I ripped the bonnet off my head, cast it on the floor. I peeled out of my filthy dress and my underclothes, kicked my shoes into a dark corner of the room where I couldn’t see them. A sob caught in my throat. I wadded up my clothes into a ball and walked to the stove. I tugged open the cast-iron door with a potholder and stuffed the bundle into it. The fire sparked and sputtered, as if trying to reject the awful, blood-spattered knowledge I shoved into its gullet. Finally, the dress caught and curled, burning brightly.
I shut the door on it, tears blurring my vision. I climbed into the bathtub, hissing as the hot water licked my skin.
I grabbed a washcloth and a bar of homemade lye soap and began to scrub, hard. I scrubbed until I was red and raw, as if I could scrape my own skin off and remove all the terrible things I’d learned today that had somehow become a part of me.
Eventually, I stopped, the water cloudy with the residue of soap. I stared up at the wooden floor joists of the ceiling in the dim, flickering light.
Was Alex right? Were we safe here, safe from those terrible creatures? I had a difficult time accepting that they were vampires, though my logic could find no other way out of the forest of the problem. Was God still watching over us? Had he chosen the Amish to be safe, here in our little community? For how long? How long until we ran out of kerosene and patience?
And what could I say . . . what should I say? I wanted to tell my parents what I’d seen, what Alex had told me. But I knew that, no matter how much they loved me, they would not defy the Elders on my behalf. No one in our community ever did, not even for their own children.
I remembered that two years ago one of my classmates had been baptized very young. He had been sixteen, insisted that he was ready, that he had tasted enough of Outside—but then he returned to the ways of Rumspringa. He moved outside our community within six months. He had come around for a while to visit his family, wearing his English clothes of jeans and T-shirts, driving his car, and talking about the job he’d found Outside in a factory. He’d also found drugs—meth. His parents kept trying to talk him into coming back, where there would be no temptation. He could go through withdrawal at home, ask the church for forgiveness, go back to where he’d started.
But the Elders said that his visits couldn’t continue. They said that the only way to bring him back into the fold was to reject him. He could not have the best of both worlds. He had accepted the rules when he was baptized, and he should know better. They were confident that the disapproval of his family and community would cause him to come back, dry out, ask forgiveness and rejoin the church, and to live happily ever after. With us.
And so they shunned him. The Bann und Meidung. Under the Bann, he was not permitted on our property. We were not allowed to speak to him, not even if we saw him Outside. We were to turn away from him, cast our eyes and voices away. We were to do nothing to help him. We were to
release him to Outside like a wayward bird and let him find his way back.
It was heartbreaking for his family. I remember seeing him pounding on the door of his house, distraught, but no one would let him in. On the second floor, I could see his mother peering through the curtains, weeping. The only one who greeted him was the family dog.
He drove away and never came back. News came months later that he had died in a car accident. Alcohol was involved. His parents were not permitted to bury their son, and it was rumored that the government Outside had cremated his unclaimed remains. He’d turned against us, and his parents would never see him in heaven.
The Elders said that was God’s will. Gelassenheit.
And the Elders now said that no one was permitted in or out of the gate. I had defied those edicts twice. I had brought an Outsider in, and I’d ventured Outside myself. I could tell them what I had learned . . . that Outside suffered from a plague of vampires. But could they do anything with that knowledge that they weren’t already doing? They had placed our community in quarantine. That seemed to be working. According to Alex, it would continue to work unless someone invited evil in.
I squeezed my eyes shut. If I told the Elders, I did not know what would happen. I expected that they would throw Alex out to the monsters. For myself . . . I had never seen someone placed under the Bann until after they were baptized. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t. If they could shun someone for accepting and then renouncing the Ordnung, for the crime of being an addict, they would not hesitate doing the same to me for bringing risk to the community.
And, given what I’d seen and heard today, the Bann would mean certain death.
I sank up to my chin in the now-tepid water. I had failed to follow the Elders’ wisdom. Though they didn’t have all the information, they had chosen the correct course of action through faith.
I had no choice. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want Alex to die. I would have to keep silent.
But perhaps I could make amends to God, and he could forgive me. Perhaps he would not bring disaster to our doorstep.
