Blood Sisters

by Paula Guran

  Matilda set the camera on the stack of crates, pointed toward her and the wall where she’d tied a gagged Lydia. The girl thrashed and kicked, but Matilda ignored her. She stepped in front of the camera and smiled.

  My name is Matilda Green. I was born on April 10, 1997. I died on September 3, 2013. Please tell my mother I’m okay. And Dante, if you’re watching this, I’m sorry.

  You’ve probably seen lots of video feeds from inside Coldtown. I saw them too. Pictures of girls and boys grinding together in clubs or bleeding elegantly for their celebrity vampire masters. Here’s what you never see. What I’m going to show you.

  For eighty-eight days you are going to watch someone sweat out the infection. You are going to watch her beg and scream and cry. You’re going to watch her throw up food and piss her pants and pass out. You’re going to watch me feed her can after can of creamed corn. It’s not going to be pretty.

  You’re going to watch me, too. I’m the kind of vampire that you’d be, one who’s new at this and basically out of control. I’ve already killed someone and I can’t guarantee I’m not going to do it again. I’m the one who infected this girl.

  This is the real Coldtown.

  I’m the real Coldtown.

  You still want in?

  IN THE FUTURE WHEN ALL’S WELL

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo awards. Valente has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

  Valente’s near-future “In the Future When All’s Well” has been called (by SFRevu) “the most original vampire story written in the last ten years.” Whether you agree or not, is up to you. But there is something particularly unnerving about vampirism viewed as something unremarkable that “just happens”…

  These days, pretty much anything will turn you into a vampire.

  We have these stupid safety and hygiene seminars at school. Like, before, it was D.A.R.E. and oh my god if you even look crosswise at a bus that goes to that part of town you will be hit with a firehose blast full of PCP and there is nothing you can even do about it so just stay in your room and don’t think about beer. Do you even know what PCP looks like? I have no idea.

  I remember they used to say PCP made you think you could fly. That seems kind of funny, now.

  Anyway, there’s lists. Two of them, actually. On the first day of S/H class, the teacher hands them out. They’re always the same, I practically have them memorized. One says: Most Common Causes. The other says:

  High-Risk Groups. So here, just in case you ditched that day so you could go down to that part of town and suck on the firehose, you fucking slacker.

  Most Common Causes:

  Immoral Conduct Depression

  Black Cat Crossing the Path of Pregnant or Nursing Mother Improper Burial

  Animal (Most Often Black) Jumping Over Grave, Corpse

  Bird (Most Often Black) Flying Over Grave, Corpse

  Butterfly Alighting on Tombstone

  Ingestion of Meat from Animal Killed by a Wolf

  Death Before Baptism

  Burying Corpse at Crossroads

  Failing to Bury Corpse at Crossroads

  Direct Infection

  Blood Transfusions Received 2011–2013

  High Risk Groups (HR):

  Persons Born With Extra Nipple, Vestigial Tail, Excess Hair, Teeth, Breech

  Persons Whose Mothers Encountered Black Cats While Pregnant

  Persons Whose Mothers Did Not Ingest Sufficient Salt While Pregnant

  Seventh Children, Either Sex

  Children Conceived on Saturday

  Children Born Out of Wedlock

  Children Vaccinated for Polio 1999-2002

  Children Diagnosed Autistic/OCD

  Promiscuous Youngsters

  Persons Possessing Unkempt Eyebrows

  Persons Bearing Unusual Moles or Birthmarks

  Redheads with Blue Eyes

  I swear to god you cannot even walk down the street without getting turned. That list doesn’t even get into your standard jump-out-of-the-shadows schtick. Like, half the graduating class have to get their diploma indoors, you know? Plus, I think they just put in that shit about promiscuous youngsters because it’s like their duty as teachers to make sure no one ever has sex. Who says youngsters, anyway? The problem with S/H class is that, just like the big scary PCP, we all know where to get it if we want it, so the whole thing is just … kill me now so I can go get a freaking milkshake.

  My dad says this is all because of the immigrants coming in from Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria. I don’t know. I read Dracula and whatever. Doesn’t seem very realistic to me. Vampires are sort of something that just happens to you, like finals. I know people used to think they were all lords of the night and stuff, and they are, I guess. But it’s like, my friend Emmy got turned last week because a black dog walked around her house the wrong way. Sometimes things just get fucked up and it’s not because there was a revolution in Bulgaria.

  But I guess the point is I’m going to graduate soon and I’m just sort of waiting for it to happen to me. There’s this whole summer before college and it’s like a million years long and I have red hair and blue eyes so, you know, eventually something big and black is just going to come sit on my chest till I die. I told Emmy: it’s not your fault. It’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s just random. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like a raffle.

  So my name is Scout—yeah, my mom read To Kill a Mockingbird. Leave it to her to think fifth-grade required-reading is totally deep. She also has a heart thing where she’s had to be on a low-sodium diet since she was my age, which means while she was pregnant with me, so thanks, mom. With high-risk groups, birds don’t even have to fly over your own grave. It can be, like, anyone’s grave, if you’re nearby. It’s like a shockwave. I heard about this one HR guy like two towns over who was a seventh son with a unibrow and red hair and was born backwards, and he just turned by himself. Just sitting there in English class and bang. That’s what scares me the most. Like it’s something that’s inside you already, and you can’t stop it or even know it’s there, but there’s a little clock and it’s always counting down to English class.

  The other night I was hanging out with Emmy, trying to be supportive friend like you’re supposed to be. In S/H class they say high-risk kids should cut off their friends if they get turned. Like it’s one of those movies about how brutal high school is and we’re all going to shun Emmy on Monday if she’s wearing a little more black than usual. As if I would ever.

  “What’s it like?” I said. Because that’s what they don’t tell you. What it feels like. PCP is bad, it’ll make you jump off buildings. Yeah, but before that. What’s it like? Before you crave blood and stalk the night. What’s it like?

  “It’s stupid. My hair’s turning black. I have to go to this doctor every two weeks for tests. And, I don’t know… it’s like, I want to sleep in the dirt? When I get tired, my whole head fills up with this idea of how nice it would be to dig up the yard and snuggle down and sleep in there. The way I used to think about bubble baths.”

  “Have you… done it yet?”

  “Oh, blood? Yeah. Ethan let me right away. He’s good like that.” Emmy shoved her bangs back. She had a lot of makeup on. Naturally Sunkissed was a big color that year. Keeps the pallor down but it doesn’t make you all Oompa-Loompa. “What? What do you want to hear? That it’s gross or that it’s awesome?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it is.”

  “It’s… like eating dinner, Scout. When somebody goes to a little effort to make something nice for
you, it’s great. When they eat healthy and wash really good but don’t taste like soap. When they let you. But sometimes it just gets you through the night.” She lit a cigarette and looked at me like: why shouldn’t I, now? “Did you hear about Kimberly? She got turned the old fashioned way, by this gnarly weird guy from Zagreb, and she can fly. It’s so fucking unfair.”

  Emmy wasn’t very different as a vampire. We had this same conversation after she lost her virginity—Ethan again—and she was all it is what it is then, too, with an extra helping of I am part of a sacred sisterhood now. Emmy has always been kind of crap as a friend, but I’ve known her since Barbies and kiddie soccer, so, whatever, right?

  I don’t know, I suppose it was dumb, but things can get weird between girls who’ve known each other that long. Like this one time when we were thirteen we did that whole practice kissing on each other thing. We’d been hanging out in my room for hours and hours and rooms get all whacked out when you lock yourselves in like that. We sat cross-legged on my lame pink bedspread and kissed because we were lonely and we didn’t know anything except that we wanted to be older and have boyfriends because our sisters had them and her lips were really soft. I didn’t even know you were supposed to use tongue, that’s how thirteen I was. Her, too. We never told anyone about it, because, well, you just don’t. But I guess I’m talking about it now because I let Emmy feed off of me that night, even though I’m HR, and it was kind of like the same thing.

  I didn’t see her much, though, after that. It was just awkward. I guess that sort of thing happens after senior year. People drift.

  Back in seventh grade, right after the first ones started showing up, like every freaking book they assigned in school was a vampire book. That’s when I read Dracula. Carmilla and The Bride of Corinth, too. The Vampyre, The Land Beyond the Forest. Varney the Freaking Vampire. Classics, you know—they said all the modern stuff was agitprop, whatever that means. It’s weird, though, because back then there were maybe twenty or thirty vampires in the whole world, and people just wrote and wrote about them, even though there’s like statistically no way that Stoker guy ever met one. And now there’s vampires all over. Google says there’s almost as many as there are people. They have a widget. But nobody’s written a vampire book in years.

  So I’ve been hanging out in cemeteries a lot lately. I know, right? I mean, before? I would never. Have you seen how much it costs to get up in black fingernail polish and fishnets? And now, for an HR like me, it’s pretty much like slitting your wrists in the bathtub with a baby blue razor for sensitive skin. Everyone knows you’re not serious, but there’s a slim chance you’ll fuck up and off yourself anyway. If you want to get turned you don’t have to go chasing it. Not when some bad steak will do you for about $12.50, and a guy down on Bellefleur Street will do it for less than that.

  So, I’m one of those girls. Like we didn’t know that already. Like you never did anything embarrassing. Anyway, it’s kind of peaceful. Not peaceful, really. Just kind of flat. I don’t do anything. I sit there on the hill and think about how like half my family is buried down there. Any second, a black bird could fly out over one of them. I wonder if you can see it when it happens, the affinity wave. What color it is. That’s what Miss Kinnelly calls it. An affinity wave. She leads an after-school group for HRs that my dad says I have to go to now. He picked Miss Kinnelly because she’s a racist bitch, or as he would put it, “has a strict policy against Eastern Europeans attending.” I was all: duh, we’re Jewish, and isn’t Gram from like Latvia or wherever? And he was all: Jews aren’t Slavic, it’s the Slavs that are the problem, why do you think they knew about all the HR vectors before we did? And I was like: what the hell do you know about HR vectors? Your eyebrows are fucking perfect!

  Anyway, group is deeply pointless. Mostly we talk about who we know that got turned that week, and how it happened. And how scared we all are, even though if you keep talking about how scared you are eventually you stop really being scared, which I thought was the point of having a group, but apparently not, because being scared is like what these people do for fun. All anyone wants to talk about is how it happened to their friend or their brother. It’s like someone gets a prize for the most random way. Some girl goes: “Oh my god, my cousin totally drank three bottles of vodka and passed out at the Stop & Rob and woke up a vampire!” And even though that is highly retarded, and it probably doesn’t work that way, at least, it doesn’t work that way yet, everyone goes oooooh like she just recited The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Oh, yeah. We had to read that one, too. It’s not even about vampires, it’s about zombies, which is totally not the same thing, but apparently it falls under supplementary materials or something. Anyway, Miss Kinnelly then lectures for a hundred years about how immoral conduct is the most pernicious of all the causation scenarios, because you can never know where that “moral line” lies. By the time she gets to the part about abstinence is the only sensible choice, I want to stick her fake nails through her eyes. Once I said: “I hear you can totally get it from drinking from a glass one of them drank from.” And they all gasped like I was serious. God. Before, I wouldn’t have spent three seconds after school with those people. But the sports program is basically over.

  This one time Aidan from my geometry class started talking about staking them, like in old movies. Everyone got real quiet. Thing is, it’s not like those movies. A vampire’s body doesn’t go anywhere if you mess with it. It doesn’t go poof. It just lies there, and it’s a dead person, and you have to bury it, and god, burying things by yourself is practically a crime these days. There’s hazmat teams at every funeral. It’s the law, for like three years now. Plus, it’s not that big a town. Everyone knows everyone, and you try stabbing the kid you used to play softball with in the heart. I couldn’t do it. They’re still the same kids. They still play softball. We’re the ones who’ve stopped.

  Sometimes, when I’m sitting up on the hill by the Greenbaum mausoleum, I think about Emmy. I wonder if she’s still going to State in the fall.

  Probably not, I guess.

  I dated this guy for a while during junior year. His name was Noah. He was okay, I guess. He was super tall, played center for basketball, one of the few sports we still played back then. Indoors, right? I remember when the soccer teams moved indoors. It was horrible, your shoes squeak on the floor because it’s shellacked within an inch of its life. The way itused to be, soccer was the only thing I really liked to do. Run around in the grass, in the sun. There’s something really satisfying about kicking the ball perfectly so it just flies up, the feeling of nailing it just on the right part of your foot. I’ve played since I was like four. Every league. And then, finally, they just called it off. Too dangerous, not enough girls anymore. You can’t just go running around outside like that now. You could fall down. Get cut. Scrape your knee. So now instead of running drills I have to read The Land Beyond the Forest for the millionth time and stay inside. God, I’m turning into one of those snotty brainy hipster chicks.

  Oh, right, Noah. See, the soccer girls date basketball boys. We’re the second tier. Baseballers are somewhere below us, and then there’s like archery and modern dance circling the drain. And then all the people who cry into their lockers because they can’t hit a ball. Football and cheerleaders are up at the top, still, even though it’s not exactly 1957 and not exactly the Midwest where they still play football. But some things stick. I think maybe it’s because all the TV shows still have regular high school. It’s a network thing. No one wants to show vampires integrating, dating chess geeks, whatever would be jam-packed with soap opera hilarity. TV is strictly pre. So we keep acting like what we did in sixth grade matters, even though no one actually plays football or cheers at all. It’s like we all froze how we were three or four years ago and we’ll never get any older.

  Anyway, I remember Noah drank like two jumbo bottles of Diet Coke every day. He’d bring his bottle into class and park it next to his desk. When we kissed, he always tasted lik
e Coke. Everyone thought we were sleeping together, but really, we weren’t. It’s not that I didn’t think I was ready or whatever. Sex just doesn’t really seem like that big a deal anymore. I guess it should. My dad says it definitely qualifies as immoral conduct. I just don’t think about it, though. Like, what does it matter if Alexis let the yearbook editor go down on her in the darkroom if she found out like not even a week later that the Hep A vac she got for the senior trip to Spain was tainted and now she freaks out if the teacher drops chalk because she has to count the pieces of dust? It’s just not that important. Plus, this couple Noah and I hung with sometimes, Dylan and Bethany, turned while they were doing it, just, not even any warning, straight from third base to teeth out in zero point five. We broke up a little after that. Just didn’t see much point. I don’t watch TV anymore, either.

  But lately, I’ve been seeing him around. He turned during midterms. I think he even dated Emmy for a while, which, fine. I get it. They had a lot in common. I just didn’t really want to know. Anyway, it wasn’t any big plan. One minute I barely thought about him anymore and the next we’re sitting on the swing set in Narragansett Park way past midnight, kicking the gravel and talking about how he still drinks Diet Coke, it just tastes really funny now.

  “It’s like, before it was just Coke. But now all I can taste is the aspar-tame. And not really the aspartame, but like, the chemicals that make up aspartame. I taste what aspartame is like on the inside. I still get the shakes, though. So I’m down to a can a day.”

  Noah isn’t exactly cute. The basketball guys usually aren’t, not like the football guys. He’s extra-lanky and skinny, and the whole vampire thing pretty much comes free with black hair and pale skin. He used to have really nice green eyes.

  “How did it happen to you?” I hated saying it like that. But it was the only think I could think of. How it happens to you. Like a car accident. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. If it’s, you know, private.”