Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (44 page)

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I’ve asked Aurore: how long? The answer?
As long as it takes.
Which is no answer at all. But then, I am still young, filled with impatience. The fact that two sentences with Aurore take a year bothers me until I remember again that we will have nearly forever for conversation, the earth whizzing around the sun in an eyeblink.

Aurore and I will be the last. I am almost completely Turned now, my body smooth, but for a fine layer of something like down, my genitals retracted within my body cavity. To the vampires, “male” and “female” have no meaning. They — we — are both. And neither.

Aurore tells me of a time, centuries ago, as the humans reckon it, when the vampires tried to breed with humans, mix their DNA, raise hybrids that weren’t dependent on blood supply. It never worked well. And so the vampire fables started — half-breeds crazed with desire or bloodlust, Vlad the Impaler, Wendigo, mutants and myths. The vampires put a stop to it and went another route.

“We cultivated humans, raised them like … not cattle. Pets? Beloved intelligent pets,” says Aurore. This conversation takes nearly a decade, but I don’t notice the time passing like I used to.

I’ve changed. My body and Aurore’s have Slowed too. The blood we need is minimal. Once we’ve made sure the Elders and the rest of our population are suspended and safe, then we, too, will retire into the Long Night. The entrances to our cave system are well hidden by the brambles and spiny trees they encouraged everyone to grow before the world cooled; the encroaching ice is an added protection.

In the stories, I don’t think the bad fairy stayed with Sleeping Beauty in the castle, but maybe that’s how the story should really have gone: the two of them together, cooling bodies entwined, dreams meshing in warp and weft, and the spinning wheel turning endlessly, a metaphorical perpetual motion machine.

“If we — I mean
they,
the humans — were beloved, why didn’t it work out?” I ask Aurore.

Another year goes by. “I don’t know,” comes the answer, finally. “You bred too fast. Your blood thinned. You were too violent. All or none of the above. It grew harder for us to feed from you, and the world was growing too warm.”

“And it had happened before,” I say, after another year passes, our talks taking on the steady rhythm of stars wheeling in the sky.

The world is asleep, under ice. The noise of the humans and the remaining animals, a distant chatter.

“How will we know to wake?” I ask.

Meteors fall, humans breed, it grows colder before Aurore answers me. “When the blood we have stored runs out, we will wake. It will be quieter. We can begin again.”

“How many times have you done this?”

The pause is longer. A century goes by. Aurore is nearing the Long Night. “Many,” is the answer. “Many times.”

And then — nothing.

It’s just me left. I’m on the path to the final Slowing.

To awaken in a century or seven or a thousand and seven. When the thrum of the blood supply is done. The hunger will be the kiss that wakens us, and our bodies will warm, and the ice will retreat. And the humans will scurry and breed.

Perhaps this time we’ll play at being gods once more, demand blood sacrifice. Or maybe we’ll go the Fairyland route, whisking humans away to Tir-na-nog, Under-the-hill, Brigadoon. Or we’ll try interbreeding again. We have better data now, better knowledge.

I lie down in the sleeping pod next to Aurore. My body Slows further. The machinery whirs gently, and the blood — just enough to keep me alive, suspended — begins its slow journey through my system. I begin the final wind-down, the unspringing of the body’s clock.

When we waken, the world will be cleansed of its fever; the cool palm of ice laid on the brow of the earth will give us all a new beginning, an immaculate story.

* * * * *

Sandra Kasturi is a writer, editor, publisher and book reviewer living in Ontario. She is co-publisher of
ChiZine Publications
and poetry editor at
ChiZine.com.
Sandra’s work has appeared in various places, including
Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, TransVersions, On Spec, Taddle Creek, Shadows & Tall Trees, Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out, Chilling Tales
and several books in the
Tesseracts
series. She managed to snag an introduction from Neil Gaiman for her first full-length poetry collection,
The Animal Bridegroom
(Tightrope Books). She won the ARC Poem of the Year award in 2005 and the Whittaker Prize for poetry in 2010.

EVOLVE TWO

Vampire Stories of the Future Undead

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by

Edge Science Fiction
and Fantasy Publishing

An Imprint of

HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.

P.O. Box 1714,
Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7,
Canada

Edited by Nancy Kilpatrick
Cover Illustration by John Kaiine
Evolve logo by Ryanne Hamilton

e Book ISBN: 978-1-894817-93-6

* * * * *

All rights reserved. Under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

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EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing and Hades Publications, Inc. acknowledges the ongoing support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.