by Paula Guran
Noah was counting the bits of gravel. He didn’t want me to know he was doing it, but he moved his lips when he counted. That’s why OCD is on the high-risk list. Because vampires compulsively count everything. I think it’s the other way, though. You don’t turn because you’re OCD. You’re OCD because you turned.
“Yeah, no, it’s not private. It’s just not that interesting. Remember when the HR list first came out and I was so freaked because I was conceived on a Saturday and I have that mole on my hip? I was so sure I’d get it before everyone else. But it didn’t happen like I thought, like when that third grader just flipped one day and the CDC guys figured out it was because her mom is a crazy cat lady and she doesn’t even have a path to cross without a black cat there to cross it for her. Ana Cruz. I thought it would be like that. Like Ana. I couldn’t stop thinking about how it would be. Just walking down the street, and bang. But it wasn’t. I woke up one night and this woman was looking in my window. She was older. Pretty, though. She looked… kind, I guess.”
“How old was she?”
“One of the oldest ones in California, it turned out, so about six? Her name was Maria. She used to be an anesthesiologist, down at the hospital.”
“Were you guys… together? Or something?”
“No, Scout, you just kind of get to talking eventually. Afterward, there’s not that much to do but wait, and she was nice. She stayed with me. Held my hand. She didn’t have to. Anyway, I opened the window, but I didn’t let her in. I’m not an idiot. I just sat there looking back at her. You know how they look after they’re past the first couple of years. All wolfy and hard and stuff. And finally she said: ‘why wait?’ And I thought, shit, she’s right. It’s gonna happen, sooner or later. I might as well get on with it. If I do it now, at least I can stop thinking about it. So I climbed out.” He laughed shortly, like a bark. “I didn’t invite her in. She invited me out. I guess that’s sort of funny. Anyway, you know how it works. I don’t want to get all porny on you. It was really gross at first. Blood just tastes like blood, you know? Like hot syrup. But then, it sort of changes, and it was like I could hear her singing, even though she was totally silent the whole time. Anyway. It hurts when you wake up the next night. Like when your arm falls asleep but all over. My mom was really mad.”
I picked at the peeling paint on the side of the swingset. “I think about it.”
“Oh! Do you want me to…?” God, Noah was always so fucking eager to please. He’s like a puppy.
It took me a long time to answer. I totally get him. Why wait. But finally, I just sighed. “I don’t think so. I have a bio test tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Noah lit a cigarette, just like Emmy. He looked like a total tool. Like he’s the vampire Marlboro Man or whatever.
“What does blood taste like now?” I asked. I can’t help it. I still want to know. I always want to know.
“Singing,” he mumbled around the cigarette, and puffed out the smoke without inhaling.
The other week, my Uncle Jack came to visit. He lives in Chicago and works for some big advertising company. He did that one billboard with the American Apparel kids all wrapped up in biohazard tape. My mom cooked, which means no salt, and Uncle Jack just wasn’t having that. He travels with his own can of Morton’s and made sure my steak tasted like beef jerky.
“Kids in your condition have to be extra careful,” he said. “Yeah, I’m not pregnant, Uncle Jack.”
“You really can’t afford to take the risk, Scout. You have to think about your future. There’s so much bleed these days.”
That should pretty much tell you everything you need to know about what a bag of smarm my uncle is. He’ll use a terrible pun to talk about something that’ll probably kill me. He was talking about how that list of common causes is actually kind of out of date. Like how kids used to use textbooks that said: maybe someday man will walk on the moon. About a year ago, some of the causes started having baby causes. Like, it doesn’t have to be meat killed by a wolf anymore, it can be any predator, so hunting game is right out. Even for non-HRs. We’ve always kept kosher, so it’s not really an issue for us, but plenty of other ones are. They’ve acted like sex was on the no-no list since the beginning, but I don’t think it was. I think that was recent. If sex could turn you into a vampire way back in ancient Hungary, we’d all be sucking moonlight by now. Some people, who are assholes, call this bleed. But never in front of an HR. It’s just flat out rude.
My Uncle Jack is an asshole. I mean, I said he was in advertising, right?
“My firm is sponsoring a clean camp up in Wisconsin. Totally safe environment, absolutely scrubbed. For HRs, it’s the safest place to be. God, the only place to be, if I were HR! You should think about it.”
“I don’t really want to move to Wisconsin.”
“We wouldn’t feel right about that, Jack,” said my mother quietly. “We’d rather have her close. We take precautions, we take her in for shots.”
Uncle Jack made a fake-sympathetic face and started babbling the way old people do when they want to sound like they care but they don’t really. “My heart just breaks for you, Scout, honey. You, especially. You must be so scared, poor thing! I feel like if we could just get a handle on the risk vectors, we could gain some ground with this thing. It’s pretty obvious the European embargo isn’t doing any good.”
“Probably because it’s not the like it’s the Romanian flu, Uncle Jack. You can’t blockade air. I don’t even think it really started there. Practically every culture has vampire legends.”
Mom quirked her eyebrow at me.
“Come on, Mom. There’s like nothing left to do but read. I’m not stupid.”
“Well, Scout,” continued Uncle Jack in a skeevy isn’t-it-cute-how-you-can-talk-like-a-grown-up voice. “You don’t see people here detaching their heads and flying around with their spines hanging out, or eating nail clippings with iron teeth, so I think it’s safe to say the Slavic regions are the most likely source.”
“And AIDS comes from Africa, right? Isn’t it funny how nothing ever comes from us? Nothing’s ever our fault, we’re just victims.”
Uncle Jack put down his fork quietly and folded his hands in his lap. He looked up at me, scowling. His was face scary-calm.
“I think that kind of back-talk qualifies as immoral conduct, young lady.”
My mother froze, with her glass halfway up to her mouth. I just got up and left. Fuck that and fuck you, you know? But I could hear him as I stomped off. He wanted me to hear him. That’s fine, I wanted him to hear me stomping.
“Carol, I know it’s hard, but you can’t get so attached. These days, kids like her are a lost cause. HRs, well, they’re pretty much vampires already.”
The problem is they live forever and they can’t have kids. That’s it, right there. That’s the problem. They don’t play nice with the American dream. They won’t do the monkey-dance. They don’t care about what kind of car they drive. They don’t care about what’s on TV—they know for damn sure they’re not on TV, so why bother? Guys like Uncle Jack can’t sell them anything. I mean, yeah, there’s the blood thing, too, but it’s not like nobody was getting killed or disappearing before they came along. Anyway, Noah says they mostly feed off each other when they’re new. Blood is blood. Cow, human, deer.
They all think I don’t get it, that I’m just a dumb kid who thinks vampires are cool because they all grew up reading those stupid books where some girl goes swooning over a boy vampire because he’s so deep and dreamy and he lived through centuries waiting for her. Gag. I guess that’s why that crap is banned now. No one wants their daughters getting the idea that all this could ever be hot. But guess what? They don’t have body fluids. They only have blood. You do the math. And then come back when you’re done throwing up. No one dates vampires.
Anyway, I’m not dumb. It’s hard to be dumb when half your friends only come out at night. I get it. Pretty soon they’ll outnumber us.
And then, pretty soon af
ter that, it’ll be all of us.
Noah and I went to the park most nights. Nobody gave us any shit there—no kids play in parks anymore, anyway. It’s just empty. And it was so hot that summer, I couldn’t stand being inside. Even at night, I could hardly breathe.
One time Noah brought Emmy along. I wasn’t freaked or anything. I knew they weren’t dating anymore. Gossip knows no species, you know? I guess it must be pretty lonely to hang out with a human girl all the time and explain your business to her. They sat in the tire swing together and kind of draped their arms and legs all over each other. They didn’t make out or anything, they just sat there, touching.
“Do… you guys need some time alone?” I asked. Okay, I was a little freaked.
“It’s just something we do, Scout,” sighed Emmy. “Share ambient heat. It’s cold.”
“Are you kidding? It’s like ninety degrees.” “Not for us,” Emmy said patiently.
“It’s not just that, you know,” added Noah. “Ever seen pictures of wolf pups? How they all pile together? Well, you know, some days, a bunch of us just sleep that way. It’s… comforting.”
I plunked down on one of those plastic dragons that bounce back and forth on a big spring. I bounced it a couple of times. I didn’t know what to say.
“So what are you guys gonna do in the fall?”
They just looked at each other, kind of sheepish.
Noah moved his leg over Emmy’s. It was just about the least sexual thing I’ve ever seen. “We were thinking we might go to Canada. Lots of us are going. There’s jobs up there. On, like, fishing boats and stuff. In Hudson Bay. The nights… are really long. It’s safer. There’s whole towns that are just ours. Communities. And, well. You probably heard, about Aidan?”
Aidan’s the kid from group who thinks he’s Van Helsing. Emmy sniffed a little and sucked on her cigarette.
“Well, you know, he was kind of seeing Bethany?”
“What? Bethany turned like a year ago! Why would he even touch her?”
They shrugged, identically.
“So they were messing around in back of his truck and all of the sudden he just fucking killed her,” Noah whispered, like he didn’t really believe it. “She trusted him. I mean god, he let her feed off him! That’s like… I don’t know how to explain it so you’ll understand, Scout. That’s serious shit with us. It’s way more intimate than screwing. It’s a pact. A promise.”
Emmy and I glanced at each other, but we didn’t say anything. Some things you don’t want to say.
Noah’s voice cracked. “And he put a piece of his dad’s fence through her heart. And they’re not even going to arrest him, Scout. He got a fine. Disposal of Hazardous Materials Without Supervision.”
“It seems like a good time to clear out,” said Emmy softly. Her eyes flashed a little in the dark, like a cat’s.
“You could come with us,” Noah said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I bet you’ve never even seen snow.”
Well, you know what he meant by that.
“I have a scholarship. I’m gonna be a teacher. Teach little kids to do math and stuff.”
Noah sighed. “Scout, why?”
“Because I have to do something.”
Whenever people have more than five seconds to talk about this, they always come around to the same thing.
Why did it happen? Where did it start?
You know that TV show you used to like? And somewhere around the third season something so awesome and fucked up happened and you just had to know the answer to the mystery, who killed sorority girl whoever or how that guy could come back from the dead? You stayed up all night online looking for clues and spoilers, and still, you had to wait all summer to find out? And you were pretty sure the solution would be disappointing, but you wanted it so bad anyway? And, oh, man, everyone had a theory.
It’s like that. They all want to act like it’s a matter of national security and we all have to know, but seriously, we’re way past it mattering. It’s just… wanting the whole story. Wanting to flip to the end and know everything.
You want to know what I think? There were always vampires. We know that, now. There’s still about ten of them who’ve been around since before Napoleon or whatever. They’re in this facility in Nebraska and sometimes somebody gets worked up about their civil rights, but not so much anymore. But something happened and all of the sudden, there were HRs and lists of common causes and clean camps and Uncle Jack’s billboards everywhere and Bethany lying dead in the back of a truck and oh, god, they always told us PCP makes you think you can fly, and I’ll never play soccer again and at the bottom of it all there’s always Emmy’s mouth on me in the dark, and the sound of her jaw moving. All of the sudden. One day to the next, and everything changes. Like puberty. One day you’re playing with an EZ Bake and the next day you have breasts and everyone’s looking at you differently and you’re bleeding, but it’s a secret you can’t tell anyone. You didn’t know it was coming. You didn’t know there was another world on the other side of that bloody fucking mess between your legs just waiting to happen to you.
You want to know what I think? I think I aced my bio test. I think in any sufficiently diverse population, mutation always occurs. And if the new adaptation is more viable, well, all those white butterflies swimming in the London soot, they start turning black, one by one by one.
See? I’m not dumb. Maybe I used to be. Maybe before, when it couldn’t hurt you to be dumb. Because I know I used to be someone else. I remember her. I used to be someone pretty. Someone good with kids. Someone who knew how to kick a ball really well and that was just about it. But I adapted. That’s what you do, when you’re a monkey and the tree branches are just a little further off this season than they were last. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. If it makes you feel better to think God hates us or that some mutation of porphyria went airborne or that in the quantum sense our own cultural memes were always just echoes of alternate matrices and sometimes, just sometimes, there’s some pretty deranged crossover or that the Bulgarian revolution flooded other countries with infected refugees? Knock yourself out. But there’s no reason. Why did little Ana Cruz turn as fast as you could look twice at her and I’ve been waiting all summer and hanging out in the dark with Emmy and Noah and I’m fine, when I have way more factors than she did? Doesn’t matter. It’s all random. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or a good person. It just means you’re quick or you’re slow.
I went down to Narragansett Park after sunset. The sky was still a little light, all messy red smeary clouds. I’d say it was the color of blood, but you know, everything makes me think of blood these days. Anyway, it was light enough that I could see them before I even turned into the parking lot. Noah and Emmy, shadows on the swing set. I walked up and Noah disentangled himself from her.
“I brought you a present,” he said. He reached down into his backpack and pulled out a soccer ball.
I smiled something huge. He dropped it between us and kicked it over. I slapped it back, lightly, with the side of my foot, towards Emmy. She grinned and shoved her bangs out of her face. It felt really nice to kick that stupid ball. My throat got all thick, just looking at it shine under the streetlight. Emmy knocked it hard, up over my head, out onto the wet grass and we all took off after it, laughing. We booted it back and forth, that awesome sound, that amazing sound of the ball smacking against a sneaker thumping between us like a heartbeat and the grass all long and uncut under our feet and the bleeding, bleeding sky and I thought: this is it. This is my last night alive.
I kicked the ball as hard as I could. It soared up into the air and Noah caught it, in his hands, like a goalie. He looked at me, still holding up the ball like an idiot, and he was crying. They cry blood. It doesn’t look nice. They look like monsters when they cry.
“So,” I said. “Hudson Bay.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Learning Curve” © 2010 Kelley Armstrong. First publication: Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New U
ndead, ed. Nancy Kilpatrick (Edge Science Fiction & Fantasy Publishing, 2010.)
“Needles” © 2011 Elizabeth Bear. First publication: Blood and Other Cravings, ed. Ellen Datlow (Tor, 2011).
“The Coldest Girl in Coldtown” © 2009 Holly Black. First publication: The Eternal Kiss: 13 Vampire Tales of Blood and Desire, ed. Trisha Telep (Running Press Kids).
“The Power and the Passion” © 1989 Pat Cadigan. First publication: Patterns (Ursus Imprints).
“Vampire King of the Goth Chicks” © 1998 Nancy A. Collins. First publication:. Cemetery Dance #28, May 1998.
“Where the Vampires Live” © 2010 Storm Constantine. First publication: The Bitten Word, ed. Ian Whates (NewCon Press, 2010).
“Chicago 1927” © 2000 Jewelle Gomez. First publication: Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, ed. Sheree R. Thomas (Warner Books, 2000).
“Selling Houses” © 2006 Laurell K. Hamilton. First publication: Strange Candy (Berkley Books, 2006).
“From the Teeth of Strange Children” © 2011 Lisa L. Hannett. First publication: Bluegrass Symphony (Ticonderoga Publications, 2011).
“Tacky” © 2006 Charlaine Harris. First publication: My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding, ed. P. N. Elrod (St. Martins Griffin, 2006).
“Blood Freak” © 1997 Nancy Holder. First publication: The Mammoth Book of Dracula:Vampire Tales for the New Millennium, ed. Stephen Jones (Robinson, 1997).
“Greedy Choke Puppy” © 2000 Nalo Hopkinson. First publication: Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the Black Diaspora, ed. Sheree R. Thomas (Aspect/Warner Books, 2000).
“This Town Ain’t Big Enough” © 1995 Tanya Huff. First publication: Vampire Detectives, ed. Martin H. Greenberg (DAW Books, 1996).
“Shipwrecks Above” © Caitlín R. Kiernan 2009. First publication: Sirenia Digest #46, September 2009).
“In Memory of …” © 1996 Nancy Kilpatrick. First publication: The Time of Vampires, eds. P. N. Elrod & Martin H. Greenberg (DAW Books, 1996).
