Vampire Rising (4 page)

Gatsby’s faced clouded, and then cleared, as
if a decision, long pondered, had, at last been made. Barnabas
watched as Gatsby’s expression changed from anticipation to
puzzlement to disappointment. And then Barnabas remembered. “Come
in, Gatsby. Come in.”

In a fraction of a second, Gatsby was
pressed against him, his fingers tapping out an apology as they
traced Barnabas’ face and wiped away his tears.

Barnabas stepped back, and fell over his
drafting table, which lay flat. Gatsby tumbled on top of him.
Clothes shucked, Barnabas’ body welcomed him, opening and closing
around him like a kid glove welcoming a hand.

After, they retired to the floor where they
lay half covered by a paint-spattered canvas drop cloth. Barnabas
lay with his head on Gatsby’s broad, flat chest, Gatsby’s arms
tight around him. Gatsby’s galloping heart beat an erratic tattoo
against his cheek.

Barnabas sat up, breaking their embrace.
Gatsby barely reacted. He seemed distracted, far-off. “What are you
thinking about?” Barnabas asked.

“Yvet.”

“He broke your heart, didn’t he?”

Gatsby chuckled and the sound chilled
Barnabas for it was a sound utterly devoid of joy. “Yes, he broke
my heart—no! More than that. He broke my heart then stomped on it,
and kicked the remains into the gutter.”

“It sounds like he continues to break your
heart.”

Gatsby looked at Barnabas. His eyes were
hard and shiny. “For more than a century,” he said, “I have felt as
if my heart was like some priceless crystal bauble that got broken,
and I—I was doomed to carry the pieces around in a satchel hoping
one day I would find some wizard who could put it back together
again—” Gatsby paused, and smiled. “Sometimes,” he said quietly, “I
think you are that wizard.”

With those words ringing in his ears,
Barnabas lay back against his chest, and drifted into a light
sleep.

Gatsby shook Barnabas’ shoulder. “I can’t
stay here,” he said pointing to the skylight above where they
lay.

Barnabas rubbed his eyes, embarrassed to
have fallen asleep. He often slept in his studio because surrounded
by his art, and enveloped in the smell of paint, he felt safe. He
sat up. “Oh, OK.”

“You can come home with me—”

“Really?” Barnabas grinned, then jumped to
his feet and started pulling on his clothes. He stopped to tug
Gatsby up. “Come on,” he said, “get dressed!”

Gatsby shrugged into his clothes, without
his usual care and grace, feeling for the first time in centuries,
reckless and young.

* * * * *

BARNABAS RECOGNIZED FROM EXPERIENCE, the
telltale gathering of exhaustion at the edges of Gatsby’s eyes
which signaled the new day was coming. Gatsby’s energy was waning,
but Barnabas needed a few more minutes to finish sketching him.
Seeking to distract his attention from the rapidly approaching
dawn, Barnabas said, “You once said Dracula was fiction. What’s
different?”

“We don’t need blood for sustenance—it’s
more like a supplement. And we don’t need to drain a body of
blood—that’s just gluttony. We can drink the blood of animals but
that’s like eating a McDonald’s Big Mac. Or we can drink blood from
a blood bank but that’s like eating frozen pizza—it’s OK until you
taste a freshly made one—heaven!”

“One can drink blood from a woman but most
of us find that distasteful. Though there are those who do, for a
variety of reasons, including money.”

“But you
 
do
 
need to
drink human blood?”

“No, not really. Many Vampires opt to only
drink the blood of other Vampires.”

Barnabas looked up from his sketchpad in
surprise.

“That has the added advantage of increasing
the number of copies of the virus in one’s system which makes one
stronger and increases longevity, while also limiting contact with
humans and the risk of infecting one—to say nothing of the violence
inherent in most human-Vampire interactions.”

While he talked, Barnabas’ fingers, holding
the fine-pointed Sharpie, flew across the page. He quickly finished
the drawing. When he turned it to show Gatsby, he was disappointed
that Gatsby had already succumbed to sleep.

Barnabas didn’t often watch Gatsby sleep for
it frightened him; in sleep, Gatsby was so pale, and still, so
utterly
 
gone
. Now though, he
looked at his lover locked in sleep’s embrace, and watched his eyes
dance beneath their closed blue-veined lids. He wondered what he
was dreaming of. There was so much he didn’t understand about
Gatsby, about Vampires. He turned for a moment to the window, whose
closed shutters and blackout shades imprisoned the sunlight,
without hope of parole. Despite not being visible, the sun’s
seductive lure remained undimmed for Barnabas. He was a child of
light, always had been. He and Gatsby still hadn’t managed to synch
their sleep cycles. Gatsby had to sleep at sunrise in a darkened
room; Barnabas slept at midnight leaving the blinds open so the
rising sun could kiss him awake. Turning from the window, he
switched on the tablet, and when it blinked to life he typed a
single word into the search bar: Vampire.

An hour later, he shut off the tablet, and
tried to process everything he had learned.

Vampirism was caused by a virus. Discovered
in 1984, simultaneously by two scientists, one American, the other
French, each of whom claimed to discover it first, the Human
Vampire Virus, was transmitted through the exchange of infected
bodily fluids such as saliva and blood. Unlike most viruses,
though, which target specific cells in the body, HVV infected and
altered every cell in the body, resulting in many alterations to
their biological makeup, chief among them were enhanced muscle tone
and definition, and physical strength, an adverse, sometimes fatal,
allergic reaction to silver, bright light and ultraviolet rays, and
immortality. The virus was further peculiar in that it could only
infect the cells of gay men. When introduced into heterosexual men
or women—either heterosexual or lesbian—it died without
replication. It was widely believed that the virus attached itself
to the genetic directors in DNA specific to sexual orientation.

As he’d continued reading, Barnabas had
quickly realized Gatsby hadn’t been exaggerating; a Vampire’s lot
wasn’t easy.

Because Vampires were considered undead,
they had no rights under the law, not the right to vote, nor the
right to public accommodation, nor the right to sue for wrongful
death, or personal injury. If discovered, their property could be
seized, their assets frozen and transferred to the state. For most
Vampires, this was merely inconvenience as their holdings were vast
and their investments scattered around the globe. Even someone
earning a modest schoolteacher’s income could amass a fortune if he
lived for centuries.

Most outrageously, a human accused of
killing a Vampire could not be charged with murder thanks to a 1996
decision in which a judge had reasoned one could not kill something
already dead.

As he neared the end of his research,
Barnabas came across an ad for a Vampire rally scheduled for that
night at dusk. The main speaker would be Malcolm V—the V was used
in place of a last name to honor his Vampire heritage, a heritage
he insisted humans distorted and hid in a conspiracy of hatred and
fear. Malcolm V was a Vampire political leader who advocated for
the return of the Vampire Diaspora to its ancestral lands. “Our
seed and our feet are rooted in the Carpathian mountains,” he’d
once famously declared.

The rally was to be held outside in the city
square along the river. It was held outside because of the peculiar
commandment that forbade Vampires from entering any building
occupied by humans unless they were expressly invited in by a
human.

Most days, Barnabas returned to his studio
in the mornings, while Gatsby slept, to paint. Having painted all
morning, he’d then nap in the late afternoon so he was rested and
refreshed when Gatsby arose at sunset. He figured he could go to
the rally and be back at Gatsby’s in time for their usual late
dinner.

* * * * *

THE CITY SQUARE was a brick-paved plot
of land set directly in front of City Hall. It was accessed via an
historic cobblestone promenade which itself was part of the great
viaduct that spanned the dirty river from which the city took its
name. Broad, elaborately carved stone balustrades on both sides of
the promenade kept pedestrians from accidentally plunging to their
deaths in the river below, while providing convenient leaning posts
on which one could prop one’s elbows while watching the five
species of native fish slogging through the river’s murky
depths.

For the demonstration, giant projection
screens, aptly named Jumbotrons, had been mounted against the
granite walls of the city hall’s main building, and an elaborate
sound system installed.

Barnabas arrived early, but already human
protesters were lined up along the promenade brandishing their
signs like weapons, and chanting anti-Vampire slogans. A woman, her
mouth a savage line of determination limned in pink, who held the
hand of a small bewildered child, carried a sign with a single word
in a circle with a line through it: “Nosferatu.” This she thrust
like a drawn gun in the face of everyone who passed by her. Looking
at the sign, Barnabas winced. It was a word so derogatory, so
meanly reminiscent of the horrors history had rained down upon the
Vampire nation that it was seldom used, and when it was, it was
often referred to simply as “the N word.”

Barnabas hurried past her and entered the
square. Mockingbirds hopped about the ground on their long legs,
hunting for spiders, while others sat on telephone lines, on the
tops of lampposts, and in the trees that surrounded the square.
They seemed to be waiting for something.

Police officers lined up along the perimeter
of the square, their backs to the City Hall. Like blue-coated tin
men, they seemed more decorative than threatening. It was clear
from their tense postures that they expected something to happen,
though it was also clear, from their puzzled expressions, they knew
not what.

The skirmishes started well before the
demonstration, and foretold, in the way of prophesies, what was to
come.

As dusk spread her rosy wings, staining the
sky magenta and purple, the street lamps along the promenade
ignited, spilling pools of lavender light onto the brick and grass.
A group of young Vampires wearing wrap-around sunglasses, hoodies,
and low-hanging jeans that sagged enough to show the colorful bands
of their superhero-branded underwear, walked along the promenade,
whistling. A phalanx of raw-looking girls blocked their path. “Hey,
Nosferatu!” one girl, of about nineteen with limp curly blonde hair
tucked behind her large pink ears, taunted them, “Where ya going,
Nosferatu?” She stepped forward brandishing a gold cross. “What’s
the matter, Nosferatu? Afraid?”

The tallest Vampire leapt at her and bared
his fangs. With a scream, she fell back and dropped her cross. The
Vampire picked it up and flung it at her retreating back. “Next
time, leave your religious toys at home, little girl,” he growled.
“They have no power over us.”

Standing under a street lamp, an elderly,
white-haired man, who looked as benign as a church elder, held a
placard with a crude drawing of a Vampire with exaggerated fangs
and blood dripping down his chin. Under it, written in a font
designed to resemble blood running down a wall, were the
words:
Unclean. Unholy. Undead.

As a Vampire walked past him, the human
holding the placard shouted, “Undead!”

The Vampire seized him by the throat and
hoisted him in the air. “You, moron! Undead means not dead, which
in turn means
 
living
. Does my
hand around your throat feel
 
dead
 
to
you? Does it?
 
Does it?
” The
Vampire, his eyes glowing red, flung the man, already turning blue,
away from him. The man fell against a slender young tree which
snapped under his sudden weight. His placard tumbled over the
balustrade, and disappeared into the river.

Minutes before the hour, Malcolm V appeared
in the archway at the far end of the square. He was dressed in a
long, dark wool cloak with a hood which was pulled over his head.
Black wrap-around sunglasses hid his eyes. As the clock in the
tower, high above City Hall, struck the hour, the square filled
with Vampires dressed in what Barnabas now recognized as
traditional Vampire garb—gray high-collared shirts and gray vests
worn under black suits. Folding themselves like pretzels, they sat
on the ground in a great fan around the podium that had been set up
in the center of the square. Seeing the seated crowd, Malcolm
shrugged off the hooded robe, which an assistant caught. He removed
his sunglasses and, moving with the remarkable speed peculiar to
Vampires, appeared almost immediately at the podium. He wore an
earpiece, coiled like a snail, inside his ear. A thin microphone,
looped over his ear, snaked along his jaw bone. He bowed, and
waited for the applause of the Vampires, and the catcalls of the
protesters to subside. He looked up at his image on the Jumbotron;
his red eyes blazed like rubies.

“To be a Vampire is to spend your life in
hiding—not just from the burning sun but from the stinging enmity
of humans.”

The words cracked, like thunder, over the
square.

“To be openly Vampire is to risk being
shunned by your family, rejected by your friends, fired from your
job, no matter how competent you are. In society’s eye Vampires are
worthy of only the dregs and crumbs no human wants. To be a Vampire
is to know your pale skin and red lips offend others. To be a
Vampire is to be mockingly portrayed in the media, or stereotyped
as bloodthirsty and oversexed in books and movies.”