Not If You Were the Last Vampire on Earth

by Cara Coe

  I sat on the phone quiet for a moment and considered his question. I wanted to give him an answer I would want to hear if someone finally found me after several years but chose to remain hidden. “I won’t tell you where I am because I don’t know you. Things got pretty hairy towards the end where I am. I had to kill to stay alive. I don’t want to have to kill you.”

  “Nicely put. I went through similar experiences.”

  “So you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why do I feel like we’re agreeing on something?” I asked.

  “Because we are. You can call me tomorrow. Same time. And we’ll get to know each other. On the phone. With supposedly miles of land between us and anonymous but hilarious fake names.”

  For the second time in this exchange I smiled. “Okay.”

  “Okay, Jenny.”

  “Okay, Forrest.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Chapter 3

  Her

  Vampires are real. They’re the reason the world has gone to shit. A lot of vampire lore was inaccurate but lore usually grows from kernels of truth. Staking is a myth. Wooden or otherwise. If you do that, they’ll just bleed all over you and be pissed. Garlic, crosses, sleeping in coffins: myth, myth, myth. Vampires, unfortunately, really did eat people. And they couldn’t stand the sun. Their skin burned quickly, often resulting in a melanoma disease that killed them. Other than their weakness for daylight, they were indestructible. Their cells regenerated at alarming rates. Injuries healed quickly. Pathogens were laughable. Even aging bowed down to their superior make up with old age taking them fifty or sixty years later than it would claim one of us.

  The world was introduced to vampires when Harvey Leewall blew the lid on a long standing CIA project that studied, experimented, even worked with vampires in dirty truces for military advantages and back door deals for advances in health. The first vaccinations weren’t merely weakened viruses injected into our bodies for harmless scrimmage practice with our white blood cells. They were laced with vampire venom, the shit that squirts from their fangs when they bite you. It makes you high so that you smile as you’re sucked dry and don’t even care about your rapid blood depletion. If you are unlucky enough to keep enough blood to live, it ravages your body with sickness. And if you survive that then you aren’t even human anymore. You become one of them.

  There wasn’t enough venom in the vaccinations to make people sick. It was only a hint – the small amount turned our antibodies into superheros against whatever virus it got delivered with. The more cunning the virus, the more venom that needed to be used which is why AIDs eluded us. Too much vampire venom and the point of the vaccination is lost.

  The side effect no one realized for decades and the ones the vampires never revealed is that women who were vaccinated were able to bear vampire children. The trace amounts altered the DNA in the reproductive cells. Vampires began seducing women to bear hybrids. Or as we called them, vamps. Same lethal bite. Same regenerative cells. Same hunger for blood. Only these suckers could walk freely through daylight.

  By the time secret government entities discovered them, there were hundreds of thousands of them. By the time the general public caught wind, they’d been living among us for years. And we were pissed.

  Wars broke out. Witch hunts tore communities apart. A government entity called Containment formed to seek them out and destroy their kind. It was said the only way to tell a vamp from a human (besides witnessing something obvious like feeding time) was to stab it and watch the wound heal. Which is true. If one had the patience to stare at the injury for several hours. Because it’s not a ten second, skin-growing-before-our-eyes kind of deal. That didn’t stop people from slashing at one another, though.

  Then came the brilliant plan. A virus made to cut through their immunities. A man-made biological weapon aimed at vampires and vamps. And it worked. It wiped them out. But guess what?

  Joke’s on us.

  Karma is a Bitch with a capital “B” because that virus mutated and attacked its creators. And it mutated fast thanks to those wonderfully quick regenerative properties the scientists loaded them up with to combat vampire antibodies.

  We called it The Sweep because of how fast it raged through the population. There was no time to stop it. There was no drug to cure it. No one was safe. There were no survivors.

  Except, for some reason, me.

  And the voice in Houston.

  Chapter 4

  Her

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, may I please speak to Pumbaa?”

  His laugh filled the line. It was hearty and striking and startled me in the most pleasant way.

  “Timon? Is that you?” he asked.

  “The one and only. Literally.”

  “I’m so glad to hear from you.”

  “Because my fur is cute and my best friend is a warthog?”

  “Because I was afraid you wouldn’t call and I lifted the receiver about a dozen times to make sure the dial tone was working.”

  “Oh. Well that’s rather stalker-ish.”

  “You just referred to me as your best friend and this is after a solitary seven minute conversation, sight unseen.”

  “I’m working with slim pickings. That said - if we go with your logic, you just called yourself a warthog.”

  “Haha. Fine. I’ll be a warthog if I win this debate. Totally worth it.”

  “So…”

  “So…”

  I waited but he didn’t say anything else so I sighed audibly into the receiver and asked, “How do we go about getting to know each other?”

  “Well, Bestie, we can do it through the normal routine of chit chatting about our day and glean facts from the answers and read clues into each other’s personality based on responses. Or we can fast forward and ask each other direct questions.”

  “Questions.”

  “I figured. I already know you like to cut through the fluff and get to the meat of something. See? It’s happening already, the getting to know you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, so who goes first?”

  He paused. “You can. But there are rules.”

  My eyebrows raised in intrigue. “Oh, really?”

  “Yep. Two simple ones. You must answer every question asked-”

  I blanched. “I don’t know about-”

  “-and you must answer any question you pose if the other person requests it,” he finished, interrupting me. “The second rule will police the audacity of the questions.”

  I considered this twist. “And questions about identity or location?”

  “Will be off limits.”

  “Okay. I’m game.” Now that I held a first question in my hand, my mind went blank. Whatever I asked would set the tone of this conversation. Perhaps all the conversations we’ll end up having.

  “I’m wai-ting,” he sing-songed after the silence stretched for a few measures. I decided to start easy.

  “What field of medicine would you have gone into if The Sweep never happened?”

  “Genetics. Which, technically I’m in. With no more scientists around, I call the shots on whose in the field or not. What would you have studied if you’d had the chance to go to college?”

  I thought about some of the afternoons I spent at the University of Arizona campus reading textbooks with my feet propped up on the desk, auditing ghost classes. A lone figure in the large, echoing lecture hall.

  “Sociology.”

  “Funny,” he said with a hint of curiosity. “Your preferred field of study is the epitome of no longer relevant.”

  “You just made it relevant, Pumbaa. It only takes two to make a society. Already, we’ve agreed on rules to this interaction we’re having, which is what a society is. People who coexist based on agreed rules, customs, and norms. Welcome to the building blocks of a society.”

  He gave a low, appreciative whistle.
“You. Are. Fascinating.”

  “You’re the first to tell me that in a long time.”

  “I’m the first to tell you anything in a long time.”

  “Touché.”

  “So where did you decide to set up house?”

  I balked. “Hey! No location questions, remember? And it’s my turn anyway.”

  “No, I asked you to answer the same question you asked me. Basically anyway. And I don’t mean specifically, I mean…what sort of place did you make your home? I bunk in a hospital so it’s easier to conduct my research. Where do you stay?”

  “In a cottage,” I told him. “Next to a church. It must have been where the minister lived. It’s kind of tucked away behind the church and there’s a lot of room to work on different projects. I couldn’t stay in my house anymore.”

  “I get that,” he replied in a tone that meant he got it exactly. He cleared his throat. “A church, huh? How religious.”

  “And I’m an atheist, so essentially I’m living on the edge. Three years and no lightning bolts yet, though.” I searched for another safe question. “What’s the most pointless thing you’ve done since The Sweep?”

  “I set up a drive-in movie. I dusted off the projector. Hooked up a k-cell generator. Maneuvered a few cars into place. It took a couple hours to get everything ready. Just so I could sit in a car and watch a movie.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the movie theater would have felt lonely with all those empty seats. In a car, I could imagine people in their own cars.”

  I understood. I understood with every fiber of my being. I didn’t tell him that.

  “What movie did you watch?” I asked him.

  “That will cost you a question.”

  “No, it’s an addendum to the original and therefore not in the regular rotations.” He groaned and I snickered. “Why don’t you want to tell me?” I prodded.

  “Grease, okay? It was what they had. Shut up.”

  “I didn’t even say anything.”

  “It was a preemptive shut up. Tell me yours. What’s the most pointless thing you’ve done?”

  I smiled. That was easy.

  “I dialed the same number from a pop song every day for seven months.”

  Chapter 5

  Her

  My father taught me everything I know. Growing up, it was just the two of us. He was much older than my mom when they married. He was thirty-eight and she was twenty-one. It was a whirlwind race to the altar, the entire affair spanning a mere four months. He was ready to settle down and she was enamored by his worldly knowledge which he gained from being in the military. His service time included two tours in Desert Storm and being stationed in every corner of the planet. Two years later, they had me.

  Perhaps I was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She hung in there like a trooper but she didn’t quite make it to my seventh birthday before she packed her things and left to find herself. And her search must have been a needle in a haystack situation because I never saw her again.

  Dad said I looked like her more and more every day. I suppose that’s true. My hair grew longer and spiraled out like hers did. My skin was a coffee mix between her dark tones and Dad’s alabaster. I started inheriting her curves but it’s hard to tell now since eating has become a thing of necessity and not so much an enjoyment. I ingest enough to keep my strength but the curves have melted away, my sacrifice for surviving The Sweep.

  Dad first started showing the signs of the sickness when I was seventeen. He lost his appetite and went from a healthy forty-seven year old in amazing shape to dropping fifty pounds in a matter of weeks and sleeping longer each day. While he was able, he used his waking hours to show me survival skills that would come in handy.

  “It’s only a matter of time before I’m sick, too,” I’d tell him which used to piss him off.

  “Rule number one, if you think you’re going to die, you will die,” he would snap at me. Because it gave him purpose and made his last days mean something, I went along with his lessons.

  He taught me how to start an open fire and to cook over it. He taught me which plants were poisonous and which to eat. He taught me how to hotwire a car and how to siphon gasoline. He taught me how to shoot. Not only to hunt, using faraway targets. But he also made me pull the trigger on mannequins dressed to the nines up close with the barrel aimed between the eyes.

  “You’ll never sleep okay after you kill someone and every time you do, your footsteps will be heavier,” he told me, popping open a beer for me. (Right after he said to fuck the legal drinking age.) I still drank it hesitantly. As an ex-military sergeant, he was comprised of order and honor and rules. His recent descent into debauchery was unnerving.

  ‘Well, maybe I won’t have to,” I said hopefully.

  He eyed me sadly. “You will have to, sweetheart. I’ve been in war torn countries where it degraded into every man for himself. You won’t see the other end of this tragedy without taking a life. Do not hesitate. You have a good soul. Follow your gut.”

  I didn’t even tell him about the two men I killed outside the pharmacy a couple months later. He was so gone, such a glimmer of his former self. I left his mind in peace. That night I opened a can of peas and mashed them and tried to coax him to eat it.

  I read Walt Whitman to him until his eyes went glassy from exhaustion. Exhaustion from living.

  I wiped the thin trail of blood that leaked out of his nose. His breath gurgled and I got the machine out to pump the liquid from his lungs. The bag filled crimson.

  I stroked his hair and lied on the bed with him and said nothing about the shooting. Two days later he died.

  When things got really bad, when the population had thinned considerably and no one bothered to pick up the bodies anymore and people turned on each other like we were never civilized, I stayed in the house. I had buried my dad in the backyard and I could see the mound from upstairs when I peeped out of the corners of my blinds without disturbing them. I holed up inside that house until it was more quiet than not outside. When signs of life only came every few days.

  Then I carried the pistol with me everywhere. I named it Wayne because my Dad used to love John Wayne. I never had to shoot anyone else but I almost did when I saw a man pounding his fists into a woman on the corner of Baker Road and Jorgan Avenue. I drew it out and pointed it at him. Wayne trembled in my fist.

  “Back off,” I said with more bravado than I felt.

  The man stopped swinging and ran and the woman yelled at me for being a psycho before taking off after him.

  When I realized I was alone, really alone and not just lonely, I began talking to Wayne. I remember smiling as I thought of Tom Hanks befriending his volleyball in Castaway and the sharp pain I felt knowing I was doing the same. With a gun.

  About the time I was drugged out on pills was when Wayne and I broke up. It was a sad night, the one right before I went on my hunt for Baloo. I put several bullets in the gun and traced my finger around the barrel over and over and over. A tiny pull, a brief moment and I could possibly end the human race. That’s all it would’ve taken.

  My father ended up being right. He taught me a lot of things that I ended up using after The Sweep. I even let out a whoop of joy when I hotwired my first vehicle and then felt sad that he wasn’t there to see it.

  I threw Wayne into a holding pond by a factory. I’d get another gun. I had plenty to choose from. But I’d wait. Wait until I it was a survival tool in my hand and not a friend or an escape.

  My father was an amazing teacher.

  But he didn’t teach me how to kill myself.

  Chapter 6

  Her

  “Have you ever killed anyone?” I asked him softly. Did he hear me? His breathing was light on the phone. I waited for his answer.

  “Many,” he said.

  “Do you remember their faces?”

  “Every one of them.”

  Chapter 7

  Her

  “How can an
ything be good?” I asked incredulously. I stuffed four saltines into my mouth and crunched loudly.

  “Can’t you eat before you call me?” he complained.

  “Did thu wanth ho waith another thenty minith before I callthed?”

  “What?”

  I swallowed the large mass and took a swig of water before repeating myself. “Did you want to wait twenty minutes before I called you?”

  “No.”

  “Then deal with it.”

  “You are so frustrating, Evie.”

  I nearly spit out my water. “Uh…no,” I said. “Adam never nicknamed Eve. You can’t just morph it into Evie.”

  “And yet I did. Come on, answer the question.”

  Oh, the question. What is something I found good in the aftermath of this whole plague?

  His questions were so infuriating. Innocuous upon first inspection but then they revealed themselves to be beastly as soon as I struggled to answer it. I kept trying to find complete answers that didn’t let him poke too far inside my head.

  “It can be anything,” he coaxed. “No matter how insignificant. If there was nothing at all, you wouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t be talking to you right now.”

  I did as he said and thought through the times when it was easier to exist. When I didn’t feel like I was struggling. I glanced around the room to seek answers in my dogs’ faces but they weren’t here. I could hear one of them barking outside, probably protesting his annoyance at an out-of-reach squirrel. I loved them. They were a beacon of happiness.

  But it wasn’t my answer. The answer came to me, rising up from within to be dusted off and shared for the first time with someone. His voice soothed me and made it okay. I trusted him today more than I did yesterday which is why I didn’t stow it back inside and throw him a safe “my dogs” answer.