Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (40 page)

The carbon-fiber steps have been sheared off by explosives at the landing between Levels 88/9.

Dentino is the one with the submachine gun and the field glasses. She looks through the latter and says, “Five levels at least.”

Gaardner asks, “Damaged?”

“
Gone.
”

“That’s impossible, Dentino! It’s reinforced carbon fiber composite with an anti-brittling agent! They’d need high explosives!”

Dentino says, “Looks like they got ‘em.”

Someone howls, “They!?”

Gaardner says weakly, like a prayer, “It’s carbon fiber! Carbon fiber!”

He looks at Eve blankly.

Eve makes eye contact, something incredibly weird for her.

He turns to his soldiers. “People, I need intel here. Tell me what you think you saw.”

It explodes out of the five remaining grunts in delirious bursts while they wave their lights. Eve is totally blinded as she listens intently to the Frosties chatter:

“monsters—”

“—humans, but pale, flying—”

“—flying!”

“That wasn’t rappelling, that was
flying
!”

“
—Mothman
or something—”

“—like demons—”

“—like the Devil!”

“—yeah, the Devil! Like medieval paintings—”

“I know I shot — ten, maybe? Twelve?”

“I shot some too! I know I hit them!”

“My shotgun hit one point blank. It didn’t go down!”

“I saw them drag Dillard away in the air and—”

“I saw them
feed.
”

“Oh, God, Eve saw that too? I think they — I saw them open his throat—”

“—her carotid—”

“—his femoral—”

“—this huge big gout of blood—”

“—teeth like knives—”

“Sucking blood. Sucking blood!”

Dentino shrieks, “Vampires!”

Everyone stops.

Someone says, “Dentino, are you
high?
”

Eve says: “What’s a vampire?”

Everyone looks at her.

Eve doesn’t feel the least bit gratified that she finally recognizes their expressions. They think Eve is crazy. She’s getting used to that, but she’ll never get used to being blinded, so she screams at the top of her lungs: “Get those fucking lights out of my face and tell me what the fuck a vampire is!”

They shy away from her as if slapped.

Dentino says, “You really don’t know, Doctor? Don’t you have
vampires
in Agartha?”

Eve howls: “How the hell should I know? What the hell are vampires?” She adds desperately: “Are they real?”

There’s a big silence.

Someone says, “No.”

Someone says, “Maybe…”

Someone says, “No…”

Someone says, “Then what the fuck were those?”

Someone says, “She’s the scientist.
Could
they be real?”

Dentino shouts, “No! They’re not. Vampires aren’t real. They’re characters from stories. Monsters.”

Eve asks warily, like she has a hidden agenda — something Agarthans never, ever have: “What do the stories say vampires are?”

Everyone has something to add to the answer to that question. All of it comes in multi-voiced hysteria with the emphatic waves of a half-dozen ten-million-lumen flashlights.

Someone says, “Vampires are dead people.”

Someone says, “They get bit by other vampires.”

Someone says, “Then
they
turn
into
vampires.”

Someone says, “And they live forever.”

Someone says, “But they can’t be killed.”

Someone says, “They can be killed by sunlight, but not by bullets.”

Someone says, “They feed on human blood.”

Someone says, “On our blood.”

Someone says, “On our
souls.
”

Someone says, “Souls?”

Someone says, “Souls. That’s how I heard it.”

Someone says, “Dentino, are you
trying
to scare the doctor to death?”

Eve says: “They feed on your
souls?
”

“Well, they’re fictional characters, so it depends who you — wait, Doctor. Did you say
your
souls?”

Eve looks at Gaardner, who sits, dazed and staring.

Eve says: “I don’t have one, remember?”

Gaardner says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t really mean that.” He adds, “I guess you’re learning about irony.”

Someone says, “I always heard blood,” but nobody wants to talk about it anymore.

Gaardner asks Eve, “Doctor, can we be rescued? By a rope ladder, crane, something from above where they sheared the stairway? Level 80, maybe, the last load-bearing entry point with granite?”

Eve says: “Of course. If we get the
seeds.
”

“
If
we get the seeds?”

“If we get to the seed bank, I can send an ELF — extremely low frequency — transmission through the ground. If we have the seeds, they’ll come rescue us.”

Someone says, “We’re closer to the top. We should go up, not down. We can send up flares.”

Then, to Eve, someone says, “They’ll come down and get us, right?”

Eve says: “Of course not. If we don’t have the seeds, it wouldn’t be worth the resources.”

Someone, outraged, snaps, “Resources?”

Eve says: “Without the seeds, we’re irrelevant to Agartha’s survival.”

Ondrusek says, “Great. So they’d just abandon us?”

Eve says: “I don’t understand your question.”

Dentino says, “Just like that? No guilt, and you think that’s reasonable, Doctor?”

Eve says: “I don’t understand what your question is.”

Dentino growls viciously, “Does that bother you, Doctor?”

Eve says: “God damn it, I don’t understand what you keep asking me!”

Eve is getting the hang of using profanity to indicate displeasure with their behavior; whenever she does it, it seems to shut them up quickly.

Ondrusek pushes through out of the blaze of five hot suns. She steamrollers over Eve and grabs Gaardner’s shoulders. She asks, “Captain, what the hell are these things?”

In the darkness past the railing, something flutters.

Everyone backs away from the railing.

Everyone hoists weapons and aims at the dark — even Eve.

Her heart is pounding.

She doesn’t like being scared; she hasn’t been bred for it.

Blinded by the lights, she can’t see much.

But she sees enough.

They
move beyond the railings. Eve sees hints of
them
— cloaks, shrouds, robes, wings.

Then they’re gone.

Eve says: “We have to get to the seed bank. I know what they are.”

The Frosties gape at her, disbelieving.

Eve says: “I’ll tell you while we go down.”

Eve tells it in a spiral, fourteen booted feet tap-tap-tapping on the carbon fiber.

She says: “Agartha was built on the basis of limited biodiversity. They had about fifty years’ worth of warning before the disaster happened. As with people, limited genetic lines of food crops could be brought underground and the crops tend to be vulnerable to the same diseases. That’s why they built the seed banks. But they had limited time and resources. An elevator that size was power-prohibitive, so they built the stairway.”

Someone says, “We know.”

Eve say: “That’s fact. Here’s the story. When they built the stairway, they didn’t have Agarthans yet — they hadn’t bred us; they hadn’t genetically engineered us. In any event, if they had, we wouldn’t have been good choices; we have too little upper-body strength and need too much mental stimulation to function optimally. The City Managers needed workers who could work in low light, without needing lights, in low oxygen without needing respirators, who would survive on very low protein diets. So they created them. This was in the early days. Genetic engineering wasn’t as advanced. They were very short on time. They … they
improvised.
Radical modifications were attempted.”

“At the end, the bureaucracy was confused and inefficient. There were contradictory orders. There ended up being thirty or forty different batches of workers. Some got away.”

“Got away?”

Eve says: “Some went unaccounted for. Others vanished. Over the rails, off their ropes, out of tunnels. Sometimes witnesses saw them go — other times, they were just gone. Some were never found. Most were found
… drained.
Whatever did it didn’t seem to like the light. So they built the grow lamps on Level 85.”

Someone says, “How do you know all this?”

Eve say: “Everyone knows all this. They tell the story in Kindergarten. At
Halloween.
”

“But you don’t have
stories.
”

Eve says: “We don’t have
many
stories. But we have some. That’s one of them.”

Someone says, “Captain Gaardner, did you know this?”

Gaardner says, “I just knew there was a story. They told me it was
just
a story.”

“Then why are there grow lamps on at Level 85?”

He says, “How the hell am I supposed to know? They didn’t give me the details.”

Ondrusek yells, “You’re saying you didn’t tell us crap that
Kindergartners
know?”

Gaardner snaps, “I didn’t go to Kindergarten in Agartha. I went to Kindergarten at the Santa María del Cordero Catholic school in Vancouver. I’m from a thousand years ago, and I don’t belong here anymore than you do!”

Ondrusek growls, “You don’t know how true that is.”

As the Frosties are distracted arguing, Eve’s the one who sees what’s coming.

Faces drawn and bloodless, lips pulled back to show fang-like teeth flashing deadly, naked starved bodies white with flesh stretched over sharp bones. The creatures have murder in their big open cat-eyes that blaze green-white at the faintest hint of illumination.

Eve screams at the top of her lungs, a real scream, so big it feels like she is turning inside out.

In an instant, the Frosties’ panic-swept tactical lights and the vampire faces vanish into her blindness.

Then the lights start spiraling over the edge of the landing amid bleating howls and wet sounds and sprays of hot blood.

Eve raises her gun and starts shooting; hysterical with terror, she never stops screaming as she fires and fires and fires…

Eve hears her scream — fragmented, gone staccato between gunshots.

She’s really getting the hang of this screaming thing.

Eve returns from the black haze of terror as if from dreamland.

She is on her back, legs cocked at an improbable angle.

The slide of her gun is locked open; it pours smoke. The thirty-round magazine is empty.

Sobbing, she feels in her pockets for the magazines she picked up after the second attack. They’re all gone.

She can’t see a thing. She gropes on the floor. She finds empty cartridges and shotgun shells — no fresh magazines, no unspent ammo.

Eve hears Ondrusek’s voice in darkness, whispering, hoarse from screaming, “They got Gaardner.”

Then Dentino, equally hoarse, much weaker, “They got
everyone.
”

Ondrusek says, “Head count.”

“Dentino.”

Ondrusek says, “Anyone else?”

Eve says softly: “Doctor Mojica.”

Ondrusek says, “
Crap.
”

A light goes on. Eve’s half-blinded again but sees Ondrusek’s face illuminated briefly. She puts her hand up to shield her eyes and tells Ondrusek: “I’m out of ammo.”

Ondrusek takes Eve’s gun, reloads it, and hands it back to her.

She says, “Did either of you hit any?”

Eve says: “Yes.”