“Then drink that. Drink it, and you’ll see the castles again. You’ll go there, and you won’t ever need to come back.”
He took the bottle, and he drank it all in one gulp. As soon as he did, the dragons stopped screaming, and he saw Mrs. Yates, glowing, every inch of her glowing, like sunlight trapped under her skin, her eyes filling with it, drawing him in as she reached out to hug him. He fell into her arms, and the glow consumed everything, the world turned to gold, and when he opened his eyes, he was sitting on sun-warmed grass, staring up at a castle, and a girl laughed behind him and said, “Come and play, Bobby.” He turned, and she looked like Hannah but not quite, and she smiled at him, the way Hannah used to smile at him. He pushed to his feet and raced after her as she ran off, laughing.
And that was where he stayed, just as Mrs. Yates promised. Endless days in a world of gold and sunshine, days that ran together and had no end. Every now and then he would fall asleep in a lush meadow or in a chamber in the beautiful castle, and when he did, his dreams were terrible nightmares, where he was bound to a hospital bed, screaming about dragons. But thenights never lasted long, and soon he was back in his world of castles and meadows, running, chasing, playing, dancing until he forgot what the screams of dragons sounded like, forgot he’d ever heard them and forgot everything else—his grandmother, his sister, his parents, the girls, Mrs. Yates—all of it gone, wisps of a dream that faded into nothing, leaving him exactly where he’d always wanted to be.
We Are All Monsters Here
After decades of movies and TV shows and books filled with creatures by turns terrifying and tempting, it was a guarantee that real vampires could never live up to the hype. We knew that. Yet we were still disappointed.
When the first stories hit the news—always from some distant place we’d never visited or planned to visit—the jokes followed. Late-night comedy routines, YouTube videos, Internet memes…people had a blast mocking the reality of vampires. The most popular costume that Halloween? Showing up dressed as yourself and saying, “Look, I’m a vampire.” Ha-ha.
Then cases emerged in the U.S., and people stopped laughing.
While vampirism was no longer comedy fodder, people were still disillusioned. They just found new ways to express it. Some started petitions claiming the term “vampire” made a mockery of a serious medical condition. Others started petitions claiming it made a mockery of long-standing folklore. There was actually a bill before Congress to legislate a change of terminology.
Then the initial mass outbreak erupted, and no one cared what they called it anymore.
Ifirst heard about the vampires in a college lecture hall. I couldn’t tell you which course it was—the news made too little of an impression for me to retain the surrounding circumstances. I know only that I was in class, listening to a professor, when the guy beside me said, “Hey, did you see this?” and passed me his iPhone. I was going to ignore him. I’d been doing that all term—he kept sitting beside me and making comments and expecting me to be impressed, when all I wanted to say was, “How about trying to talk to meoutsideof class?” But that might be an invitation I’d regret. So I usually ignored him, but this time, he’d shoved his phone in front of me and before I could turn away, I see the headline.
The headline read,Real-Life Vampires in Venezuela. The article went on to say that there had been five incidents in which people had woken to find themselves covered in blood…and everyone else in the house dead and bloodless.
“Vampires,” the guy whispered. “Can you believe it? I’d have thought they’d have been scarier.”
“Slaughtering your entire family isn’t scary enough for you?”
He shifted in his seat. “You know what I mean.”
“It’s not vampires,” I said. “It’s drugs. Like those bath salts.”
I shoved the phone back at him and turned my attention back to the professor.
Twoyears later, I was still living in a college dorm, despite having been due to graduate the year before. No onehad graduated that term, because that’s when the outbreak struck our campus. Classes were suspended and students were quarantined. The lockdown stretched for days. Then weeks. Then months. The protests started peacefully enough, but soon we realized we were being held prisoner and fought back. The military fought back harder. The scene played out across the nation, not just in schools, but every community where people had been “asked” not to leave for months on end. Martial law was declared across the country. The outbreaks continued to spread.
Given what was happening in the rest of the world, soon even the college’s staunchest believers in democracy and free will realized we had it good. We were safe, living in separate quarters equipped with alarms and deadbolts so we could sleep securely. Otherwise, we were free to mingle, with all our food and entertainment supplied as we waited for the government to find a cure.
One morning I awoke to the sound of my best friend Katie banging on my door, shouting that the answer was finally here. I dressed as quickly as I could and joined her in the hall.
“A cure?” I said.
Her face fell. “No,” she said, and I regretted asking. I’d known Katie since my sophomore year, and she bore little resemblance to the girl she’d been. I used to envy her, with her amazing family and amazing boyfriend back home. It’d been a year since she’d seen them. Three months since she’d heard from them, as the authorities cut off communications with her quarantined hometown. She’d lost thirty pounds, her sweet nature reduced to little more than anxiety and nerves, unable to grieve, not daring to hope.
“Not a cure,” she said. “But the next best thing. A method of detection. We can be tested. And then we can leave.”
Amethod of detection. Wonderful news for an optimist. I am not an optimist. I heard that and all I could think was,What if we test positive?At the assembly, I was the annoying one in the front row badgering the presenters with exactly that question. “What would happen if we had the marker?”
That’s what it was—a genetic marker. Which didn’t answer the question of transmission. Two years since the first outbreak, and no one knew what actually caused vampirism. It seemed to be something inside us that just “activated.” Of course, people blamed the government. It was in the vaccinations or in the water or the genetically-modified food. What was the trigger? No one knew and, frankly, it seemed like no one cared.
Those who had the marker would be subjected to continued quarantine while scientists searched for a cure. The rest of us would be free to go. Well, free to go someplace that wasn’t quarantined.
The next day, the military lined us up outside the cafeteria. There were still people who worried that the second they got a positive result, the nearest guy in fatigues would pull out his semi-automatic. Bullshit, of course. The semi-automatic would make noise. If they planned to kill us, they’d do it much more discreetly.
To allay concerns, the testing would be communal. As open as they could make it. I had to give them props for that.
They took a DNA sample and analyzed it on the spot. That instant analysis wouldn’t have been possible a couple of years ago, but when you’re facing a vampire plague, all the best minds work day and night to develop the tools to fight it, whether they want to or not.
My results took eight seconds. I counted. Then they handed me a blue slip of paper. I looked down the line at everyone who’d been tested before me. Green papers, red, yellow, purple, white and black. They didn’t dare use a binary system here. So we got our papers and we sat and we waited.
When Katie came over clutching a green slip of paper, she looked at mine and said, “Oh,” and looked around, mentally tabulating colors.
