Disappeared.
But the soldiers and the barbed wire remained.
Ready.
Waiting.
Because there were still plenty more of the Hemophages—
vampires—
on the outside. The number of infected had gone from a few thousand to tens of thousands, so they weren’t gathered up all that easily or quickly. As for themselves, the Hemophages saw the proverbial writing on the wall . . . they saw their
fate.
And when that same fate had seen fit to take your life and reduce it to only ten years, why would any intelligent man or woman simply stand passively and let the government—or anyone else—steal away what little you had left?
The Hemophages had one chance, and they took it. They went underground, melting easily into the darkness their uninfected brothers and sisters now abhorred. It wasn’t as though the night as a subculture didn’t already exist anyway—the goth clubs, the nightclubs, the entire economy of those who had already preferred the starlight to the daylight, who hated the sound of an alarm clock in the morning and the morning to night routine. Besides, they were tired of the looks of loathing, the sneers of aversion, and the snide comments—how easy it was to simply take the H.P.V. armbands off in private and be rid of them. Those same armbands began turning up in waste facilities around the world at the same time the number of newly infected registrations dropped drastically—they would not be singled out anymore. They would not be discriminated against and despised. They would not be secretly . . . or openly . . .
exterminated.
They began fighting back.
There were open battles on the street, with H.P.V. victims blatantly ignoring police orders and the police retaliating by trying to take them with force. Seemingly overnight the cities were filled with blood. With
infection.
The virus went from a blood-borne pathogen to something that could be caught from nearly anything, and the people of the world went from free to prisoners of their own paranoia. Fashion was lost in favor of head-to-toe anticontamination suits, vanity was sacrificed for the sake of breathing masks. Beauty disappeared behind a shield of safety that turned out to be faulty. Everything changed.
It was the age of contagion, and the great uninfected masses weren’t pleased with the new, uncompliant breed of disease carrier. Things went from bad to worse really,
really
fast. A new unit of governmental and military control was invented almost overnight; called the Special Hazards Teams, they went through the ranks of the registered Hemophages and eliminated them, sometimes at home, sometimes in public—
The middle-aged woman forces herself out of the hospital bed only because her doctor demands she walk daily on the hip he worked so hard at reconstructing four days ago. She used to be a dancer and while the degenerative arthritis took that career, she’s found new purpose in teaching the skills she spent her life learning. The walking hurts, a lot, but she forgets the pain when the door to her hospital room crashes open and four heavily armed men clad completely in black stamp inside. They’re wearing a kind of uniform she’s never seen before, with red biohazard symbols on one sleeve and a strange logo with a styled “SH” on the other. Her pulse jumps but there is nowhere to run to, nothing to do but face them and see what happens.
She’s closed the blinds because her eyes are so sensitive, but she can still see the lead man point a weapon at her, something long and dark and heavy. The kids to whom she teaches class are at the elementary school level, first grade, so she has no idea what kind of a gun it is. “Are you Elizabeth P. Watkins?” one of them demands in a voice that’s probably loud enough to be heard all the way down at the nurses’ station. It’s so sadly clear that they know she has H.P.V., but perhaps he thinks her deaf, too.
She blinks and tries to think of a way to stall, a way to reason with the insanity that this soldier represents. “I . . .”
“Are you Elizabeth P. Watkins?” he practically screams.
She swallows. “Well . . . yes. But I—”
Whatever else she was going to say is lost in the thunder of gunfire. The nearly pulverized remains of her body are taken care of by the white-clad members of the Fumigation Team that streams in after the Special Hazards men back out of the room. And, finally, all that’s left of Elizabeth P. Watkins, onetime winner of the Best Yearly Performance award at the Ruth Page Foundation School of Dance, is the slowly dissipating clouds of poison gas used to sanitize the bits of bone and flesh splattered across the walls, floor, and furniture.
And so began the Blood Wars with which Violet was so sadly, bitterly familiar.
The battles were fought in the streets, in homes, in office buildings, even in hospital operating rooms, where the Special Hazard Teams were ordered not to stop at eliminating only the patient. Any person, no matter their rank or position, who had been exposed to the blood of a Hemophage had to be exterminated, no matter the cost. Doctors, lawyers, political leaders—after all, the politicians didn’t rule the day anymore. They’d proved to be helpless in the face of the epidemic, and few people in the private sector had ever believed them to be trustworthy anyway. The newly emerged power was a hybrid, a religious-medical-political structure that would take the drastic countermeasures demanded by the uninfected and clearly necessary to stop the spread of the disease, and it would not be influenced by petty things like human rights and the United States Constitution. Now it was survival of the fittest, and the members of that organization knew without a doubt that only the fittest were H.P.V. free.
The armored escort car pulled up in front of the main entrance to the enormous ArchMinistry of Medical Policy complex, and like a cat coming to a halt after a full run, settled back on its tires as the driver braked and cut the engine. The building in front was impressive and heavily fortified—bioterrorism, or blood terrorism as some people were now calling it, had risen dramatically in the last couple of years and they could take no chances here. Just going in and out required sanitation and extreme identification measures, even for the most powerful. The car’s occupants, the Vice-Cardinal and the Chief of Staff, would be no exception.
Even though they were inside the perimeter of the gated compound and had already gone through the first round of identification and the armed entry guards, the driver made a quick, suspicious scan of the surrounding grounds as soon as he stepped out of the car. Only when he felt sure it was safe did the veteran security officer press a lock releasing device that was keyed to his body heat, pulse, and thumbprint—should something happen to alter any one of those things beyond a pre-set range of accepted variables, the only other person who could unlock the armored car’s doors was inside the vehicle itself.
The heavy door opened and the first thing out of the car was an impeccable designer shoe hermetically attached to a suit by one of the world’s more expensive couturiers. A voice floated out of the opened door, slightly muffled by the fortified interior and more than a bit on the high side of anger. “As you’re aware, Doctor, there’s no definitive test for the virus.” The speaker’s words grew louder, clearly following the first occupant as he brought his other foot around. “For all we know, they’ve infected every blood storage facility in the country!”
The sturdily built Vice-Cardinal was out of the vehicle now and the Chief of Staff came out behind him in quick, jerky movements that made him look like a small, worried dog. He opened his mouth to continue but the Vice-Cardinal held up his hand, waving it impatiently in the air. Even though the Chief wasn’t sure whether it meant he should shut up or it was just the prelude to sanitization, just that movement was enough to silence him—at least for now.
Richard Daxus, the Vice-Cardinal, was only forty-eight, but he had made a good name and position for himself. He carried himself well, dressed well, exuded the confidence of a wealthy and successful executive. He was an out-of-the-ashes kind of man who’d parlayed his humble beginnings as a young veterinarian first into marketing, then marketing medicine, then eventually into medical management. It had been a long highway—or at least it had seemed like it at the time—from obtaining his animal husbandry license to Chief of Staff at Chicago’s foremost teaching hospital and then, finally, to his position here at the ArchMinistry, but he’d made it.
Daxus brought up his other hand and held it next to the first; his fingers wavered in the air for only a moment before a pair of attendants, themselves wearing protective gear, hurried out of the sliding glass and metal entrance and quickly stripped off the pair of rings Daxus had slipped over the surgical gloves covering his skin. The first set of attendants were followed by a second pair whose job it was to peel away the gloves themselves and reveal the second set of gloves beneath, these hermetically sealed to the cuff of his suit in the same fashion as his shoes. With their hands contaminated by the dirty gloves, the four attendants stepped back respectfully as the third and final pair arrived with a pair of fresh gloves and snapped these over the Vice-Cardinal’s already surgically gloved hands. In this day and age, layers did more than just keep a person warm.
It took another five minutes to get through the pre-sanitization and pre-identification areas, but finally the two men were walking rapidly down the hallway that led to Daxus’s office deep in the heart of the building. Actually, walking didn’t quite cover it—Daxus was striding, and the Chief of Staff was struggling to keep his pudgy body from falling more than three steps behind. Daxus had neither patience nor sympathy for the other man; he had a public image to maintain and it was necessary that he look good and radiate health. Everything in his daily life was engineered to ensure that he did just that; he needed to look sleek and fashionable and so he had his hair done at the same salon that handled the Mayor’s family and visiting Washington dignitaries. He was a model for the people, the embodiment of everything that American life should be, of everything
they
wanted to be.
His Chief of Staff was outright puffing now, and his face was turning purple at the edges from exertion. That would teach him to overindulge in the bagels, lox, and cream cheese in the mornings. From the looks of the gut around his middle, the man had probably been following his daily breakfasts with a coffee and double Danish. “Doctor, sir—” The man coughed, then managed to make his legs move faster so he could at least be at Daxus’s side. “What I’m trying to say is that these circumstances leave us with no choice but to destroy all standing blood supplies.” He paused and Daxus wasn’t sure if it was for effect or just because it was a little amazing that the situation had actually come to this. “And anyone who may have been transfused or come in contact with it.”
Daxus stopped in midstride and turned to stare at his Chief of Staff. He sucked in his breath, then let it out. His mind tried to do the calculation but the numbers didn’t want to display in his brain. All he came up with was a mental image of blackness with way too many zeros added. “So how many deaths are we looking at?” he finally asked.
The plump man’s mouth thinned out as he ground his teeth. The muscles in his jaw ticked. “We don’t have a final number yet,” he admitted. “In the thousands . . . at least.”
Daxus shook his head in disgust, then pulled off the heavy ring he always wore on the outside of his gloves. It was a black and yellow diamond rendition of the hazard symbol; at its centerpiece was a drop of his blood, pristine and uninfected, encased in polyurethane. “What we don’t understand,” the Chief continued, “is why now? Why are they escalating all of a sudden?”
Daxus shrugged as he passed the ring beneath a DNA scanner. “It’s simply population geometics,” he finally answered. An instant later he was finally stepping through the hermetic doors that separated his office from the rest of the building. The other man stayed respectfully back as Daxus walked through a bath of green gamma rays that killed the last of any microbes he might have picked up during his travels outside the building. The heavy glass doors slid shut behind him; now the Chief, as well as the aide who had come up to join them, would have to communicate via the speakers embedded here and there in the barrier. On the surface it was an annoyance, but there were added benefits. Every time he came in here and left someone behind, psychologically this placed him in the ultimate position of power: he was a man who was so important that he did not have to breathe the same air as those around him.
It had other effects, too. In here, Daxus felt that he was finally safe, and now the Vice-Cardinal stripped off the outer gloves with a pleased expression. “There’s a minimum critical number that any population must maintain in order to propagate and survive,” he explained. “Very plainly, we’ve been so effective in exterminating them that we’ve reduced them
past
that number.” Daxus walked behind his desk, then settled comfortably on his chair and let his gaze scan the desktop critically. Nice and clean, dust-free—the cleaning crew had done their job, right on schedule. “They’re on the verge of extinction and they know it.”
On the other side of the sanitary barrier, his Chief of Staff stood up straighter. “Then we have to capitalize,” he said excitedly. He was practically bouncing up and down. “We have to take this opportunity to deliver a knockout punch!”
Keeping his face carefully expressionless, Daxus reached behind him and retrieved a cup of coffee from the tray waiting on his credenza. He took his time pulling off the sterilized wrapper, enjoying the impatience of the two men, relishing the fact that neither dared say anything to voice it. When he finally spoke, he did so slowly and very clearly, as if he’d waited for this moment for a long, long time and wanted to savor every second. “For the last ten years, in partnership with the Laboratories for Latter Day Defense, I’ve overseen the development of a weapon that can locate and kill every Hemophage on the planet.” Daxus paused and watched their expressions as this information sank in, then he smiled vaguely. “In a matter of
days.
”