Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (29 page)

“Preparing her hand for the imbedding,” said Charlie evenly. He didn’t look up. Quickly, he placed a number of other unrecognizable instruments on the ground beside Lola’s unconscious form. “The transfer of the chip must happen at the moment of incineration or else the Net believes the primary carrier is deceased and immediately deactivates it. It’s why we couldn’t just kill you earlier and take it.” He said this with calm, matter-of-fact assurance.

Kara stumbled backwards, shaking her head, her voice a cracked whimper. “No, no, no…” This couldn’t be happening.

“We’ve had a few near successes, but this time we’re confident we’ve resolved all our past problems. With your chip and security clearance, we should have no trouble bringing down the Net. Then, we purge and repopulate. Genetic recombination of all species. Except yours, of course.”

“What … what are you talking about?” she sobbed.

“Survival of the fittest, Kara.” He stood and faced the east.

Escape. With every ounce of energy she had left, Kara flew towards the edge of the circle. Charlie stepped easily into her path and she slammed into him.

“Charlie, let me go!” She screamed and slapped his chest. When he refused to move, she hit him in the face.

He grabbed her and forced her face towards the distant hills. She didn’t want to look, but her lids refused to close, all moisture in them gone. Horrified, she watched the first shard of fire pierce the horizon and a wave of light race down the hills and across the scrubby plain. Her legs gave way. At the moment of impact, her back arched.

Soundless white pain.

She crumpled and black smoking patches, like heat blossoms on paper, danced up her arm. She scrabbled at the ground and tried curling into a ball, but Charlie grabbed her hand and pulled her fingers open, holding her palm to the light. Black spots appeared between her fingers, spreading around her chip and into the meaty flesh of her palm.

“There, there, Kara,” Charlie whispered, stroking her hair as it fell out in clumps and turned to ash in his hand. “It’ll be over soon. Level 8, you said? Thank you, for that. Truly.” He placed his hand on her forehead like a blessing.

The other man worked feverishly on the husk of her outstretched palm. Charlie leaned into her ear just as it curled around itself like a blackened leaf.

“You should know Kara, Darwin was mostly right. How did you say he put it? Ah yes: man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature. But he was also wrong. What Darwin — your father — and all Vamparians failed to realize is, he was talking about … us.”

* * * * *

Leanne Tremblay is a new writer of fantasy for children and teens. So far, the fanged undead have rarely made an appearance in her tales, but that could change. “Survival of the Fittest” is her first published story. She was inspired by the idea that history is largely written by the victors, not the vanquished. A graduate of the University of British Columbia and a long-time technical writer, she lives with her husband and two boys in a little seaside town near Vancouver, BC.

The Faith of Burning Glass

By Steve Vernon

I see the bottle glint in the distance long before I can ever hope to be sure.

I know it is out there.

That’s what faith is all about.

Ask any television evangelist.

Not that there are many evangelists around these days. As far as I know they’ve all died and gone to heaven. I expect when the first big fire-blast hit the state, they clapped their hands together and peed their pants for joy. Cinder-fried into ashy cre-mains, one blessed-out, pissed-out rapture to go.

As for me, I’m burned dry.

My throat is parched like a two hundred mile crawl through a desert of pan-fried deep-salted squid. I see that glimmer up ahead. I see it reflect in the burning sunlight — tantalizing, transient, the wink of melting diamond.

I smell it.

I followed that glint of unbroken glass. It wasn’t much as vectors went, but in this Gehanna-painted desert, it’s a lot better than nothing at all.

The world has parched itself.

The world has smoked down like an ant under a burning glass.

How did it happen?

You could blame the nukes, but only in the round-about way that you would have blamed a zealous fireman for kicking down your burning door. The world was ready for desiccation long before the flying atoms ever got to it.

We did it to ourselves.

We emptied the sky. We poured it out like the last drop of cheap wine. That deodorized confidence that kept the earth safe, the Colgate shield that surrounded us, the ozone that distanced the earth from the sun’s blind rape had swallowed itself down into nothing, leaving us naked to the burning eye of fate.

Bottles and cans and spray cylinders. We wrapped it all into neat double shrunk packages, everything but the world itself. Now it’s all gone. Drained.

I understand this because of what I am.

A vampire.

I know what you read. I know what you saw in the movies. I know how you think we are so damned vulnerable. Sunlight will kill us. Garlic will kill us. Silver will kill us. Bible camp will kill us.

Forget that foolish prattle.

There is no race of vampires.

As far as I know, I am unique.

Alone.

I kept to the shadows for centuries — but now the shadows are burned away and I must walk. The steady beat of my footsteps is the only heartbeat I have.

It is slow going. I walk on sand glazed by heat. I feel each particle fused together like the icing on a funeral cake. The sun pours down on me like a white-hot acid bath. It doesn’t kill me but it is damned uncomfortable.

I wish for a bottle of SPF sunscreen three hundred times strong but all I have is my cloak, a tatter quilt sewed from a dozen black “Keep On Trucking” t-shirts.

How’s this for a slogan?
I Survived the Apocalypse and All I Got was a Dozen Crummy T-shirts!

My jacket is leather, homemade, flayed from a biker’s burned back. I wear high black riding boots, or they wear me. The damned boots rot to my skin. If I try to peel them off, I’ll peel myself down to the bone.

I like my hat.

It’s a large black sombrero, stolen from the wreckage of a tacky souvenir shop. The hat makes me think of Eli Wallach, in
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

“Hey Blondie,” I croak — a mouthful of razor and scorpion song.

At least I don’t sweat. I don’t need that kind of teasing, that kind of torment.

But I can’t ignore the thirst.

Never mind. I’m focused on the glinting glass.

I am a walking shadow. I need no shade. I am a shambling darkled pocket of nothing, slanting through a wasteland.

Everything is dead.

Even the cacti are roasted dry.

I draw closer. Close enough to really see the burning glass. The light dances and tantalizes like the sharded mirage of a ripe-titted hooch dancer, shaking her naked juices at my sun-parched eye holes.

God, I am thirsty.

I want to lick my lips, but I resist the urge. A flick of my tongue will peel the dried-out membranes raw.

I plow ahead, immersed in the burning quicklime of want and my thirst for a glinting bottle.

What will it be?

A Pepsi?

A Perrier?

And then I see the actual bottle.

I pick it up. It’s empty, of course. The black label compliments my pitchy cloak. It’s square, like a miniature, transparent coffin.

I recognize the label.

Brother Jack Daniels, the patron saint of sun-parched sinners.

I glance skyward briefly.

“Are you up there, Jack Daniels?”

There is nothing but sunburnt sky. I haven’t seen a cloud in a long forever. I slip the bottle into the pocket of my leather jacket.

Carefully.

I don’t want to break it.

There is something else out here.

I can smell it.

It takes me two long thirsty days to find where it is hiding.

I count my footsteps, one to a second.

Habit or hobby?

Even the dead need something to do.

Here it is, or the face of it, anyway. A slab of concrete poured across a limestone cliff.

A gun slit.

I smell the life, hidden and cowering within.

“Hey,” I call.

My voice surprises me.

“Hey in there.”

Nothing.

Whoever is hiding is damned sensible.

They aren’t peeking.

Maybe he’ll go away, they are thinking. Maybe he’s crazy, talking to the rocks. Maybe he doesn’t know I’m hiding in here.

“I know you’re in there.”

I slide my hands over the rock, searching for any sign of a real opening.

“I can smell you.”

It feels so good to touch something after acres and acres of nothing but sun and heat and lonely thirst. My fingers revel in the sudden rough gift of texture.

I find nothing.

The camouflage is perfect.

“I’ve got something for you.”

I slide the bottle from my pocket.

Careful, now. It won’t do to break the damn thing.

I tap the bottle against the rock. It sounds so loud. I hadn’t heard anything for so very long but the wind and my endless lonely footsteps.

“Do you hear that?”

I clink it again, softly, letting the brittle ringing emptiness sound out.

“It’s glass.”

Clink.

“It’s a bottle. Full to the brim. Anything you’d like to drink. Whatever you’re thirsty for, that’s what it’s got.”

Clink.

“Can’t you hear it? Can’t you taste it? That cool kiss of glass on your lips. Aren’t you just aching for it?”

Clink.

“Don’t you want to drink it? Taste it swilling down, like a laugh in reverse. Don’t you want to swallow it right down to the bottom? That’s always where the best taste hides, deep in the dregs.”

Clink.

“That’s what you remember, isn’t it? The ease of refrigerators and the sound of ice cubes rattling in a glass. Good things, nothing but good things.”

Clink.

“It hasn’t all been broken. Not all the windows, and all the glasses, and not all the bottles. All those fine clear things you could see through. Not all of them were lost in that first great shock wave. Not all of them lost in that time of flailing around, throwing buckets of mass extinction at each other, trying to figure out how to kill the sun, not all of those holy transparent dreams were broken.”

Clink.

I keep talking.

It might have been an hour.

It might have been a day.

Clink.

I keep talking, praying in the wilderness, until the rock swings open. The man inside the rock pokes his head out slow, like a sleepy turtle.

“Come forth, Lazarus,” I husk out dryly.

He wasn’t much to look at. Nothing more than a handful of bones and carcinogenized flesh. A desiccant tumor balanced on a fork of twigged legs.

I’m not totally inhuman. I give him time enough for a single croak.

It sounds like he might be saying What, or Where, or maybe Why. Then I bring the bottle down hard against the back of his skull. Bottle against skull. Bits of broken glass imbed in a shattered egg.

Then I use the edge of the broken bottle to open his throat. His flesh is putty soft, and no muscle tone to speak of.

The blood is paler than it ought to be.

But the blood is good.

I drink it down. I drain him dry. I suck each mouthful of salty goodness. I take it all in until my teeth sizzle around nothing but wet air.

I suck until even that dries up.

I let what is left of the man fall. The bones, no longer supported by the cushion of blood, make a rattling shatter as they hit open rock.

“Good,” I rasp, enjoying the stolen fluid in my veins.

I close my mouth tight as a tomb. I don’t want to lose anything to the wind, the evaporation from heat. I peer into the shadows of the bunker mouth.

It looks good and cool in there.

I could lie down and sleep the centuries away. Maybe the next wave of species that crawl across this parched-out madness might give me a little more sustenance.

I sniff.

Inhale.

Nothing.

I stare at the carcass. How long did he hide? What did he live off? A cache of hidden supplies? A scrapbook of faded paste memories? His family?

It doesn’t matter.

He is empty and I am full.

I look at the bottle regretfully. I didn’t need to break it. He was weak enough to take without the waste. But somehow there needed to be sacrifice.