Iwas released the next day. That was their term for it:released. Cast out from my sanctuary. They escorted me back to my room to get my belongings and gave me a bag to pack them in. Then they walked me to the college gates, and for the first time in over a year, I set foot into the world beyond my campus.
It was fine in the beginning. Better than I dared to hope for. The entire college town had been tested, the black stars already rounded up and taken away, and while families grieved and mourned their loved ones, there was a sense of relief, too. Was it not better that their loved ones be taken somewhere safe…so the remaining family members would be safefromthem, if they turned? That’s what it came down to in the end. What left us safe.
I boarded with an elderly couple who’d lost their live-in nurse and declared that my limited medical experience was good enough for them.
It was four months later when we heard the first report of a yellow sun turning into a vampire.
No one panicked. The story came from California, which might only be across the country, but was now as foreign to us as Venezuela had been. The reports kept coming though. Yellow suns waking in the night and murdering their families. Then rumors from those who worked in the nearest black star facility, that they’d had only a few occurrences of the dormant vampires turning. Finally, the horrible admission that the testing had failed, that the stars seemed to indicate only a slightly higher likelihood of turning.
That’s when the world exploded, like a powder keg that’d been kept tamped down by reassurances and faith. People had been willing to trust the government, because it seemed they were honestly trying their best. And you know what? I think they were. As much as my early life had taught me to trust no one, to question every motive, I look back and I think the authorities really did try. They simply failed, and then everyone turned on them.
I lived with the elderly couple for almost a year before their daughter came and kicked me out. She said I was taking advantage of them, pretending to be a nurse without credentials. The fact that her town had been taken over by militants had nothing to do with her decision to move home. No, her parents—whom she’d not contacted in years—needed her, so she’d be their nurse now.
The old couple argued. They cried. They begged me to stay. Their daughter put a gun in my face and told me to leave.
A month later, after living with some former classmates in a bombed-out building, I went back to try and check up on the old couple. I heard the daughter had turned. She’d killed her parents. Killed their neighbors too because these days, no one was watching. Unless someone reported them, the vampires justkept killing, night after night. Some committed suicide. Some surrendered. Some ran off into the wilderness, hoping to survive where they’d be a danger to no one. The old couple’s daughter just kept living in their house while her parents’ bodies rotted and a growing swath of neighbors died.
I thought about that a lot. The choices we made. What it said about us. What I’d do if I woke covered in blood. I decided if that happened I’d head for the wilderness. Try to survive and wait for a cure. Or just survive, because by that point, no one really expected a cure. No one even knew if the government was still trying. Or if there still was a government.
I spent the next year on the streets, sometimes with others, but increasingly alone. I was lucky—none of my companions turned on me in the night. I hadn’t even seen a vampire. That wasn’t unusual. Unless you spotted one being dragged from a house to be murdered in the streets, you didn’t see them. And even those who were hauled into the street? Well, sometimes they weren’t vampires at all. No one asked for proof. If you wanted shelter, you could cut yourself, smear the blood on some poor soul, drag him out, let the mob take care of him and move into his house. Two of the groups I was with discussed doing exactly that. I left both before that thought turned into action.
I’dbeen walking for six months. That was really all there was left to do: walk. Wander from place to place, seeking shelter where you could find it. The cities and towns weren’t safe, as people reverted to their most basic animal selves, concerned only with finding a place to spend the night and food to get them through the day.
It was better in the countryside. No one could be trusted for long, but that was the curse of the vampirism. That kindly old woman who offered you a warm bed might rise in the night, kill you, and go right on being sweet and gentle when she woke up. Until she saw the blood.
In the country, there were plenty of empty homes to sleep in and flora and fauna to eat. I met a guy who taught me to trap and dress game. I returned the favor with sex. It wasn’t a hardship. He didn’t demand it, and in another life, it might even have turned into something more. It lasted six weeks. We would meet at our designated place to spend the day together, walking and hunting, and talking and having sex. Then we’d separate to our secret spots for the night, for safety. One morning, he didn’t show up. I went back twice before I accepted he was gone. Maybe he turned, or he met someone who had. Or maybe someone had fancied his bow and his knife and his combat boots and murdered him for them. He was gone, and I grieved for him more than I’d done for anyone since Katie. Then I picked up and moved on. It was all you could do.
I found a house a few days after that. Not just any house—there were plenty of those. The trick was to find exactly the right one, hidden from the road, so you wouldn’t need to worry about vampires or fellow squatters. Even better if it was a nice house. “Nice” meant something different these days, as in not ransacked, not vandalized, not bloodied. The last was the hardest criteria to fill. There’d been so many deaths that after a point, no one bothered cleaning up the mess. You’d find drained bodies left in beds, lumps of desiccated flesh, and tattered cloth. But other times, you’d just find smears of old blood on the sheets and on the floor, where some squatter before you had been too tired to find other lodgings and simply dragged the rotting corpses to the basement and settled in.
But that house? It was damned near perfect. Out in the middle of nowhere, hidden by trees, so clean it seemed the family had left voluntarily and no one had found it since. The pantry was stuffed with canned and dry goods, as if they’d stocked up when things started going bad.
I lived there for three weeks. Read half the books in the house. Even taught myself to use the loom in the sitting room. Damned near paradise. But one day I must have been sloppy, let someone see me return from hunting. I woke with a knife at my throat and a man on top of me. There was a moment, looking up at that filthy, bearded face, when I thought,Just don’t fight. Let him have what he wanted and let him leave. Just lie still and take it and he’d go and I’d have my house back.
That’s when I saw the others. Three of them, surrounding the bed, waiting their turn. And it was as if a pair of scales in my head tipped. I fought then. It didn’t do any good, and deep inside, I knew it wouldn’t. I don’t even think I was fighting to escape. I was just fighting to say,I object,and in the end, lying there, bloodied and beaten, I took comfort in that, when every part of me screamed in pain.I fought back.No matter what had ultimately happened, I’d fought back.
It was a week before the leader—Ray—decided he’d broken me and I could be allowed out of that room. It took another week to build their confidence to the point where they left me alone long enough to escape that place, because of course they hadn’t broken me. As a child, I’d been inoculated against far more than mumps and measles. They did what they would do, and I acted my part: the cowed victim who comes to love the hand raised against her. An old role that I reprised easily.
Which is not to say that those two weeks didn’t leave their mark, and not simply physical ones. But I survived, and not for one moment did I considernotsurviving, consider taking Katie’sway out. I respected her choice, but it was not mine. It never would be.
AsI walked along a deserted country road a day after my escape, I remembered an old TV show about a zombie apocalypse. I’d been too young to watch it, but since those hours in front of the TV were the best times I had with my family, I took them, even if it meant watching something that gave me nightmares.
That show had endless scenes just like this one, a lost soul trudging along an empty road. While I didn’t need to worry about the undead lurching from the ditches, at least in that world you knew who the monsters were. In ours, the existence of vampires was almost inconsequential. In the last year, I’d had a gun to my head twice, a knife to my throat three times, and been beaten and raped repeatedly. And I had yet to meet an actual vampire.
When I heard the little girl singing, I thought I was imagining it. Any parent worth the title had taken their children and run long ago. There were fortified communities of families run by the last vestiges of the military, sanctuaries you couldn’t enter unless you had a kid. That’s another reason parents kept them hidden—so no one stole their children to gain entry.
But this really was a girl. No more than eight or nine, she sang as she picked wild strawberries along the road. The woman with her took off her wide-brimmed straw hat and waved it, calling, “Hello!” and I cautiously approached.
“You’re alone,” the woman said. She was about thirty. Not much older than me, I reflected.
I shook my head. “I have friends. They’re?—”
“If you’re not alone, you should be,” she said, waving at my black eye and split lip.
I said nothing.
“Do you need a place to stay?” she asked. “Somewhere safe?”
“No, I?—”
