Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (5 page)

“And you could be one.”

I sprang from the bench, or tried to. The blood spread into my bones and tissue, but I felt like the heaviness from my stomach went with it. I twisted back and forth on the bench, wondering if she’d multiplied me as easily as the seeds, scanning the fields for twins of myself before finally coming to my senses.

“That’s ridiculous,” I told her. “I have the least impact of anyone who’s ever come here. I’m cold and dead and pure.”

“I suppose that’s why I ended up talking to you,” she mused. “You’re the only one I feel safe with. Would this spread if I had sex with a live person, or just told a live person what I’ve told you? What if I can do more than make blood and seeds? What if I can give other people the ability to make blood and seeds?”

My bones groaned at the thought. “Now that’s just cruel.”

“I suppose you’re right,” she admitted. “I could divert you all night by making seeds, but you can’t get any sort of nourishment from them, can you?”

“I think seeds are supposed to confound vampires because they’re symbolic of the early Christian church. Jesus was talking about spreading the smallest seeds of spiritual nourishment that would be the hardest to stamp out and grow into the biggest church. I think I want to count them just to keep track of the competition, the way one political party conducts polls to find out how much support the other one has, but all our political parties are fundamentally vampiric.”

“Stefan’s Law doesn’t apply to liquids,” she said.

I had no idea what Stefan’s Law had to do with the point I was trying to make. But I did know that if she didn’t have the sense to stay away from me, I could still wring her neck, right then and there. And might, as soon as I could figure out what the hell Stefan’s Law was.

I reached to my pants pocket for my smart phone and couldn’t get my hand
into
my pocket, since my legs seemed to have swollen up, so I took my pants off. It wasn’t like I needed them for warmth anyway, and mosquitoes never bit me, either because of my undead skin or from professional courtesy.

I did a search on the ‘net.

“I’m such an enabler,” came her voice, but she sounded far away. “I hope I haven’t overdone it. I don’t know which is more incredible: that vampires exist, or that they could survive the advent of the ‘net. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me, though. You’re not just socially acceptable, you’re a model citizen. You’re passive, compliant, a consumer, a blood recycler, and you give me a safe outlet for my creative powers. You make me feel like it’s a crime to duplicate my own cells, that it’s evil to exhale, that the only good Canadian is an undead Canadian.”

Stefan’s Law was an equation stating that the intensity of radiation given off by an object is proportional to its surface area, its efficiency at taking in and letting out radiation, and especially its temperature, which was so important that they multiplied it by itself four times, just for emphasis. I couldn’t find any mention of it not working for non-solids, though. This was going to be a tough search. I tried to roll up my sleeves, found that they bunched more than I’d expected, and took off my shirt.

In the meantime, the background voice droned on. “There were times when teenagers were rebels. Maybe everyone has always hated us for being younger and more alive than they were, but at least we fought back. Now we’re fed an empty, self-destructive mockery of real youth and life, and they’ve got us believing it’s cool.”

It turned out that the sun was considered cool because of Stefan’s Law. You could take a satellite measurement of the intensity of sunlight above the earth, trace its path back to the sun, figure out how much more concentrated it would be there, and calculate the sun’s temperature. The funny thing was that the outermost part of the sun was supposed to be millions of degrees, while the lower surface where our sunlight came from was supposed to be only a few thousand, which seemed to violate another law saying that something farther from a heat source can’t be hotter than the source itself. It was all very vampiric, like blotting out the sun with math. I wondered if I could take some night courses on it.

“Strictly speaking, I’m not a teenager,” said the voice. “I’ve been away from high school for a few years. I still feel like one, though, and I think my abilities have made me a biological teenager again, although I wasn’t old enough to see the difference when it happened. Everybody’s adolescence is longer now; we go from high school to university to apprenticeship. Why shouldn’t we always feel like we have a future ahead of us, like we could go on learning and trying new things and improving ourselves forever?”

On earth, though, the equation was full of fear. Sunlight warmed the ground and the ocean and caused them to give off more radiation, which warmed the air so that it gave off more radiation. This heated the ocean and ground some more, so they gave more radiation back to the air. It was like sunlight could multiply, feed on itself and burn us all to a crisp.

I went on searching for quite a while. I couldn’t guess the question behind the answer she’d given me. I couldn’t even find the answer. All the while, the ominous radiation seemed to build within my mind, not only from the material I was reading, but from some other source I couldn’t quite identify. I became aware of my unwitting donor again, attributed my fear to her and accused her of cheating.

“Search for ‘The Little Heat Engine,’” she said.

I found the article and read it. It talked about how a solid has to radiate much more when it’s heated, but liquids and gases don’t, because their atoms have more freedom to do other things.

“You can’t do the same heating job twice with the same unit of energy,” she said. “Even if the air made energy and sent it back as radiation to heat water, hot water just flows more freely; it doesn’t give off any more radiation than cold water.”

“That sounds like more than one answer,” I said.

“There are about twenty more like that.”

“So you’ve given me the total.” I smiled inwardly.

“Actually, those are just the contradictions of basic physical laws. The contradictions also contradict each other.”

My bones rumbled, and I swelled some more. I tried to go back to my keypad, but my fingers were getting too fat to punch the buttons. I felt dizzy and had to lie down on the bench.

“I’m trying to reenact
Nosferatu,
the silent movie about a village plagued by a vampire, but with a healthier ending,” she said. “In the old
Nosferatu
movie, a young woman saves her people by making love to the vampire all night, delaying him until the sun comes up. In my version, I prepare the vampire to see the sun come up and live. I’d call my movie something like
The Vampire Who Drank from the Holy Grail.
”

“Why are you making me ask all these questions?”

“I never used to be the monster-attracting type. The vampire in the movie got the prettiest girl in the village, and he was just a shriveled old corpse. I assume you have a reputation to uphold.”

“Why didn’t you just have sex with me?” I wanted to ask the question in present tense; I hadn’t been interested in her at first, but now I was bloated, oozing from my ears, and about to die. My standards were dropping fast. Or maybe they were just changing. She could do some unique things with blood flow.

“Maybe it won’t be like in the movie,” she said, almost pleadingly. “No sex, no death. Maybe this could be an opportunity for personal growth. You could embrace your inner child.”

I could only scream. My ‘inner child’ went through a pulse of growth, increasing the pressure on what surrounded it. I felt as though I grew a new heart, gut and lungs that joyously heaved and throbbed, limbs within limbs, bones within bones, a new penis inside the old. One hot, self-creating, multiplying mass pressed outward on the cold dead shell in expansive waves, with no canal to carry it to birth. I was ecstasy wrapped in torture, a scream in stereo surround, a singing kidney stone.

“I’m sorry. I know you’re in pain. Try to breathe. Breathe and push. I think my cells can teach yours to make younger versions of themselves. Imagine the new life copying and flushing out the old necrotic tissue.”

This was hardly welcome advice, since I considered necrotic tissue to be the only kind I had. “You sadistic raping bastard!” I shrieked. “You did this to me!”

“You did it to yourself. You called yourself a vampire, identified with your vampire oppressor. Maybe I should have called you on it sooner, but if you hadn’t identified yourself as a vampire, I wouldn’t have opened up to you.”

It was easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one being pushed open from the inside. I wanted to tell her to put a stake in me, just to relieve the pressure. I tried to say as much, but my lips and tongue had swelled too; it was getting too painful even to talk.

“You can live and stay young and healthy, or you can die, but you can’t try to do both anymore. I needed to spread what I have. Biting me wasn’t evil; it was brave. You acted like a one-man government, only better. An institution can take from one person and give to another, but an institution fears self-sufficiency above all else, because making everyone self-sufficient would make it unnecessary.”

She leaned over me and looked straight into my eyes, but she seemed to be farther and farther away. I had two sets of eyes, one growing beneath the other, both buried deeper and deeper by my swelling face. I looked up out of myself as if from the bottom of a well.

“You can get through this,” she told me. “You can be more alive than you ever were. But you have to want to live. You have to try.”

I could feel my very thoughts being copied, washed away, replaced with living duplicates. I saw more and more of the flaws in my old undead way of looking at the world. I was frightened to think of them and pushed them down, then felt them resurface, at shorter and shorter intervals. At least thoughts could be hidden. There were organs forming within me, layers of new skin beneath the giant blister I’d become. A body didn’t build things it didn’t intend to use. When my inner self was complete, the blood might wash away the outer self as well. How could I walk among people who thought and acted like vampires if they couldn’t see me as one? I’d be utterly vulnerable.

“There’s no morality without choice, and no choice without life,” she said. “You didn’t kill for me, or die for me; you risked living for me, when that was what scared you most. No lifeless idea or faceless organization could have done that. You’re beautiful, and precious, and you deserve to live, to breathe, to own yourself and be your own creator. I’ve given you all I can, and now I have to go. It’s better that I don’t know if you survive so that if I’m caught, I can’t tell on you. We live in a country where life is illegal, but life will find a way. Spread life, and leave no trace, and one day there’ll be too many of us to drain away.”

Then she ran. She ran from me, from herself, from the sunrise and from those who might hunt us when it rose. If I’d been wretched, emaciated, a bringer of disease and death, she would have stayed, and feared me no more than she had all night.

No Sangreal,
she could say,
no holy blood, no holy grail. The transfusion can’t be substantiated.
The question of the holy vampire wouldn’t even be asked.

The sun hit the Rockies first, then the foothills, then the ski jump at Canada Olympic Park. My outer self gasped like a bureaucrat with an unspent budget. The light hit me; I smoked and sizzled. My inner self cringed in anticipation of its coming exposure. I thought for a moment that I’d never realized how much internal pressure blood could exert. My outer skin burned, thinned, and then gave way.

From the outside, I disintegrated. From the inside, I watched myself explode.

The blood consumer died; the blood producer was born. I tried to convince my new, living, fangless self that I could still pass as a vampire. Trying to drink one’s way to youth was passé; blood would never have kept me young because it was the result of my youth, not the cause. Self-sufficient youth could still make me hated and hunted, probably more than I would have been before. Maybe I’d heal and replace my blood too quickly to slit my wrists and be drained again by the grassland, the true vampire, Nose Hill Park, the
Nose Feratu,
but—

I realized that I’d never quite been able to name my master. I’d never been a full-fledged vampire, only the individual decoy to the institutional real thing, the park that drank the blood of a suicidal young man. True vampires let their lackeys do the biting.

I lay on the bench for a moment, silent, breathless, unwilling to acknowledge myself, to accept that my womb was gone. Maybe the bright harsh world would go away. All around me was still—

Except for a faint, irritating whine.

It grew louder and louder, then stopped.

I felt a burning itch.

I slapped my hand to my neck, jumped up, and pulled the dead offender away. Then I gasped at the sight of the crushed insect body, full of my blood.

Crying, throbbing, bloody, and shivering, surrounded by my own smoking remains, I gathered up my clothes. In the glassy panel of my phone, shocked, I saw my reflection, younger than my vampiric self had been, young as the teenager who’d been bled to death by the park. It didn’t fascinate me; if I’d ever been narcissistic, her influence had prepared me to give up that vampiric defense.