Vampires Don't Sparkle! (27 page)

I glanced at the capture above the Gulf Coast trip. It was a more modern clip of John taking his oath of office. While the rest of our Yalie cronies had comfortably settled into middle age, John’s thick black hair and deep blue eyes belonged to a man ten years his junior. Standing tall with his right hand raised, he embodied our college pact to change the world. Two years into his second term of office, it was time to see if he actually had the guts to do it.

“They have a vaccine, John.”

“What?”

“The Chinese. They have a vaccine, and they’re choosing not to use it.”

John came out of the bathroom, pulling the loose bow-tie apart. I could see my old friend measuring the likelihood that this was some kind of perverse lobbyist joke.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I have the ambassador from the African Union outside. He flew directly from their emergency headquarters in Paris.”

“Damn it, David.” John glanced at the backdoor to his office, considering a quick escape. “It’s one thing for you to sneak up here to say hi, but don’t corner me with something like this right before a state dinner. I’m the foreign relations chair for God’s sake. There are channels for this sort of thing.”

“There isn’t any time for that.”

John gave the backdoor a second look. “Has this …
vaccine
even been tested?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re sure it works?”

“Of course I’m sure. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t sure.”

“Fine, you’ve got five minutes.” John took off his jacket and punched the antique intercom button on his desk. “Liz, let the ambassador in.”

The door opened and a distinguished African statesman entered the room. His dark, shaved head framed a graying goatee.

“I hope you will pardon our rather unorthodox meeting, Senator Mitchem.”

“Call me John.” He offered the ambassador a heartfelt handshake. “Your people are in my prayers, Ambassador … ”

“Hounsou.”

“Ambassador Hounsou, of course. Please, sit. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Scotch?”

The ambassador looked past him, sizing up the tattered colonial flag that suspended itself on the wall behind John’s desk. Before fading into the state flag of Pennsylvania, the simulacra morphed from a stained relic of the Revolutionary War to a spotless, fifty-two star standard.

“I thank you for the offer, Senator, but that will not be necessary. I am well aware your time is limited.”

“Of course.” John leaned against the front of his desk and motioned me to take a seat next to the ambassador. “I understand that you may have found a cure to the terrible plague ravaging your country.”

“A member of your Gates Foundation smuggled the original formula and its antigen vaccine out of India.”

“
India?
” John straightened his tuxedo shirt, shooting me an angry glare before returning to the ambassador. “I was told this was about China … and what do you mean
original formula?
Are you suggesting this is somehow man made?”

“That I am, sir. The Indian scientist that created the formula committed suicide shortly after the plague appeared in Benin. One of his former aids helped the foundation obtain the technical information necessary to stop it.”

“That’s a very serious accusation, Ambassador.”

“It is not an accusation. It is an unfortunate fact for both our countries. India has been providing bio-weapons research and technical support to the Chinese. The documentation that accompanied the antigen vaccine is proof enough of that.”

John closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “And you’ve actually tested it?”

“We dispatched two of our remaining SANDF teams into Africa through the Mediterranean. The Chinese blockade shot down both helicopters, but one managed a hard landing in the foothills of Tipasa. The team captured and treated five test subjects in various stages of transformation. Within forty hours, all but one of them had stabilized and was beginning to exhibit non-violent cognitive thought. I personally linked into the operation from our headquarters in Paris.”

“How much time does your team on the ground have left?” John asked.

Ambassador Hounsou met his gaze with cold, dark eyes. “Their makeshift compound was overrun twelve hours ago. They held out as long as they could.”

I could see the pain on John’s face. For all his flaws, he understood this type of loss better than anyone. We both did. John’s older brother Sam was killed the summer after our sophomore year when militants overran his UNICEF operation in Darfur.

Three college summers, three causes. That was our freshman pact. The idea had been Sam’s, but he let John pick first. That’s how we ended up spending two months cleaning beaches in the wake of the Gulf Coast oil spill. Sam’s passion for Africa made it our sophomore destination. He spent two years there with the Peace Corps before joining his younger brother at Yale.

When the three of us were tapped to be Bonesman, just weeks before the trip, Sam was the only one to say no. Instead of joining Yale’s most prestigious secret society, he boarded a plane for Africa. I never chose a third destination. I left the university shortly after Sam’s death.

“With the help of the French,” the ambassador continued, “we have set up a facility to mass produce the antigen vaccine. But we are in no position to challenge this blockade. The only military assets we have left flew President Mobunte and his cabinet out of the capital city. China and India are bursting at the seams, and it appears our continent is the perfect solution to their population problems.”

I knew the vaccine put the United States in a difficult position. Africa had plenty of natural resources left, but their most valuable one was space. In a world of eight billion people, disease and war had conspired to under-populate their continent. The vampire plague, properly contained, went a long way toward mitigating a whole host of population problems.

“With India’s support,” I began, “the Chinese have a dominate position, but they can’t afford to ignore us on this issue. We could —”

“Just stop, David. It’s not fair of you to get the ambassador’s hopes up. As much as I wish it wasn’t the case, the President’s not going to go for this. He’s as isolationist as they come, and there is no way he’ll risk pissing off China and India over a country with, I’m sorry Ambassador, little to no strategic value.”

I shook my head, unwilling to accept John’s cursory dismissal. “If this was happening in the Middle East —”

“We’d be deploying troops out of the Iranian Protectorate. I don’t disagree. This isn’t the turn of the century. Our nation building days are behind us. The Chinese played it smart and let us exhaust our resources trying to change the world. Now they’re on top, and we play by their rules.”

“What about the Grid? We could take this to the people.”

“Come on, David, nobody on the Grid cares about Africa or anything else. They’re all too busy wasting away in their private virtual worlds. Why fight to make this or any other country a better place when you can just link-in and have it any way you want? If we didn’t make them pay to be on the Grid, we wouldn’t have any ditch diggers left. Outside of the rich, nobody cares what we do.”

“But we’re talking about half a billion people.” I put down my scotch. “There has to be something you can do.”

“I can talk to the President about asylum and maybe even provisional citizenship for the refugees that made it to Paris. I feel for the African Union, I truly do. What’s going on there is unspeakable, but you’re gravely mistaken if you think the United States is going to challenge another nuclear power’s military blockade. In that respect, Africa is on its own.”

“I feared as much.” Ambassador Hounsou stood, extending his hand. “I thank you for your candor and your time, Senator Mitchem.”

“I really wish I could do more.”

“Oh, I believe you will.”

“Excuse me?” John tried to pull his hand away, but the ambassador held tight, cutting his fingernails deep into the palm. The whites of Hounsou’s eyes turned red as blood vessels swelled to the surface, nearly bursting.

“My country has had less experience with democracy than yours, but I have come to believe, from personal experience, that politicians only care about problems that affect them. For that reason, I injected the vampire plague into my body shortly before this meeting. Now, my problem is your problem.”

John pulled away from the ambassador, his hand red with blood. “For your sake, this had better be a joke.”

“I would not joke about such things.” The ambassador leaned closer, exposing the beginnings of nicotine-stained fangs. “Depending on your individual physiology, the virus will take between sixty to ninety days to permanently destroy your brain. The first forty-eight hours will be the worst for you. You will begin to feel the blood in your veins boiling. It will become progressively difficult for you to think clearly. Your reactions will become more violent. Your thought processes less human and more, shall we say, animalistic.”

“Why would you do that to me?”

“As you so eloquently stated, we have no strategic value to your country. That makes it easy for you to sit in comfort while we die. Aids. Ebola. Genocide. Your government has turned a blind eye to Africa in our greatest hours of need, never offering more than token sentiments and inconsequential donations. It’s time for your country to pay for its indifference.”

“Do you really think infecting me helps your cause? What part of avoidable nuclear confrontation do you not understand? There are seven and a half billion people on this planet that don’t live in Africa. David, tell him this isn’t something I can talk the President into.”

“You don’t have to talk the President into anything, John. You just have to go to dinner tonight and shake his hand. We’ve taken care of the rest.”

John turned to me in disbelief. “You really think I would knowingly infect the President?”

“To save your own life, and the lives of half a billion people, yes I do. I chose you for this. If you let Africa die, everything Sam believed in, everything he gave his life for, will die with it.”

“Don’t you dare bring my brother into this, you bastard.”

“He wasn’t just your brother, John. He was my best friend. There is no way he would let this happen to Africa and you know it.”

“Look, even if I helped you get the President, I wouldn’t have any control over the policy decisions he’d make. I’d be sitting in a quarantined jail cell right next to you. What makes you think he won’t just use this cure to save America and then turn his back on Africa?”

“Because I have taken that choice from him.” The ambassador stood tall, resolute in his statement. “The Chinese militarized their border before we could act, but the African Union used my diplomatic status with the United Nations to disperse several teams across your North America. These teams carry with them vials of a mutated strain of the vampire plague, one for which the Chinese have not engineered a cure.

“So now, Senator, my country’s problem is your country’s problem. Either you will help us convince your President to challenge this blockade and save Africa, or my people will open those vials … and we will all live in a Vampire Nation.”

CURTAIN CALL

Gary A. Braunbeck

Gary A. Braunbeck was born in Newark, OH (the city that serves as the model for his Cedar Hill Cycle stories) and currently lives in Worthington, OH. He has published 24 books, evenly split between novels and short-story collections, including
In Silent Graves, Coffin County
, and the forthcoming
A Cracked and Broken Path
. His work has garnered 6 Bram Stoker Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination. That is the end of anything remotely interesting about him.

Some of his favorite vampires include both film versions of
Nosferatu, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula,
Kathryn Bigelow’s
Near Dark
, and the little-scene, Richard Matheson-scripted television adaptation of
Dracula
, starring Jack Palance.

–––––––––––

(From the unpublished papers of Charles Fort)

I
have been, for most of my life, a collector of notes on subjects of great diversity — such as deviations from concentricity in the lunar crater Copernicus, to the great creature Melanicus and the super-bat upon whose wings it broods over the affairs of Man, as well as stationary meteor-radiants, the reported growth of hair on the bald head of a mummy, the appearance of purple Englishmen, instances of amphibians and blood raining down from the heavens, apparitions, phantoms, the damned, the excluded, wild talents, new lands, and “Did the girl swallow the octopus?”

But my liveliest interest is not so much in things as in the relations of things. I find now, in the twilight of my life, as I pour over the endless data that I have assembled throughout my days, that I think more and more about the alleged pseudo-relations we call “coincidences.” What if these events, rather than being happenstance, are the final result of great, secret, dark machinations of the Universe interacting with the subconscious to produce an event or events which guide humanity down certain roads certain of its members were destined to take?