Unnamed Vampire Story 3

He sprints through the persistent drizzle, feeling the light, cold sting on his cheeks. He thinks about his mother. Her hands were soft. She sang abolitionist songs in the warm radius of an oil lamp while putting bloody stitches into living flesh. As a child, he had seen her at work once. He vomited violently onto the dirt floor of the medical tent. "How do you do it?" he asked. She had crouched beside him and folded his trembling body into a gray jacket that smelled like his father.

His mother was a woman of few words and simple wisdoms. "You try real hard, my dearest." They sat together, curled on the floor; he could barely see the injured soldier's toes over the edge of their kitchen table, which had transformed overnight into a surgeon's bench. Above their heads, the soldier moaned. "And then," she murmured, obviously eager to resume her sewing, "you keep your head above you, and your feet beneath you. That's all."

These days, he wears designer sneakers, but he's always mindful of where his human feet would have faltered. With the grace of a parkour master, he launches himself at a fire escape, hand over hand climbing the rungs; he can't feel the cold, but he knows the paint is flaking off and the metal is slippery. Head up, feet down. A pleasant electricity runs through his fingers; the sensation keeps him alert. He focuses. Head, feet.

Two hundred yards away, he hears a woman inhale sharply. It gives him enough time to dodge. For a moment, he remembers what his flesh was like: skin, sinew, muscle. A large-caliber bullet rips through his calf, and he lurches forward and up. She leads him expertly, and the second shot pierces his upper back.

After the first night, his mother never asked him to assist, but she did invite him to watch. He could see her biceps flex as she bent her full weight onto the bone saw. She spoke in relaxing tones, but that wasn't enough. Until the end of the war, their house was stocked with plenty of cheap whiskey for future amputees. Over the sounds of her patients and the grind of metal on bone, she told him, "You could take away his arms or his legs or his pride or his country, but he's still a man so long as he drinks hard liquor."

Cool blood pours out of the exit wound in his chest, but now he knows exactly where she is: a warehouse window, four blocks east, six floors up. Taking a liquidy breath--she punctured a lung, apparently--he lines his legs behind him and pushes off like a swimmer doing laps. He doesn't have the mechanism nor the magic to fly properly, but gliding is a different story. His arms fan wide, and for a moment, it's like free fall.

Head up, feet down. He lands on top of her, chest on her chest, but she doesn't scream. She's already got her combat knife drawn, the sharp edge flush against his throat. "You're getting old, Steward. Maybe a century and change is your limit."

He grins when he hears her gasp. The blade digs into his skin, then his throat. He presses his lips to her neck, feeling the hot rush in her jugular. Even soaked in the same stinging rain, her heat makes him drunk. He is surprised and pleased to find fear radiating from her, and it gives him goosebumps. He bares his teeth against her skin. Up, down. Reorient. Draw back.

They sit side by side on the cement floor. She dismantles and polishes her weapon, replacing each piece in its molded foam groove. "I guess I deserved that," she says, her face molded back into the impenetrable mask he was used to working with. "I used real bullets. FMJs. The blanks fly wrong with the wind. Sorry, bud." She shows him a sheepish face, but he knows she doesn't mean it. Nevertheless, their working relationship is based on a mutual deception and tolerance; he lets her apologize as best she can. "My bad."

He nods, but the gesture hurts. He opts instead to wait for his body to repair, holding the halves of his throat together with cold fingers. He is extra conscious of his parts, muscle binding, skin cells reknitting into the pattern they remember. When he finds his voice again, he says, "Don't forget, Anabelle. They're not like you. They don't have to stop."

"Lesson learned, steward." When he was on top of her, she had grown pale. The color returns to her cheeks again, a perceptible glow that he can feel on his skin. "Next time, I won't need a second shot."

Unnamed Vampire Story 2

September was the worst, especially towards the end. The tension and exhilaration before and after the candidates' first debate were difficult to bear. Marion monitored the television, newspapers, conservative radio talk shows, even the tabloids with a feverish obsession. Her husband loaned her one of his junior aides, Lauren Schiavone, to create what he called his personal drudge report. At one point, while Mark was at a rally in Ohio, Marion received a personalized assassination threat at one of their campaign offices in Pennsylvania. The campaign staff agreed that there was no way to link the threat to Kerrigan, but afterwards, Marion was constantly flanked by two secret service agents.

In addition to her daily gossip report, which she gave over breakfast, Marion did what she called "The Patrol," a series of mostly unscheduled walks in the towns wherever her husband happened to be speaking. She shook hands and held babies and made the late night talk shows every time a baby decided to spit up on her carefully selected casual suits. Every once in a while, people would try to book her for patrols, but she had a reputation for graciously turning down invitations, instead preferring to show up unexpected. All of these variables frustrated her two guards to no end. Geri, despite having biceps the size of Marion's thighs, objected shyly, but Richard, a retired police sergeant, barked his disapproval every day before they stepped out in public together. She placated him once by visiting his old precinct house, beaming as she helped the police captain turn the news media and tourists away from the door. Then she spoke solemnly with the newest class of academy graduates. "Fight the good fight," she said. "Never forget that the man you capture is a human being. Never forget that when you take off that uniform at night, when you have your straight scotch and watch the Steelers highlights, that that criminal is trying to have a life like yours. We're all hoping to go home, settle down, have a drink. You can't just protect and serve nothing. You have to protect and serve everything you possibly can. Remember: I can only walk the streets because folks like you make them safe."

She lingered there, listening to each beat cop's complaints, making a mental checklist of names, hopes, and desires to share with Mark the next morning. By the time they left, it was almost dark. As they walked back to her hotel room, Richard, keeping his eyes straight ahead, said, "Thank you, Mrs. Summers. That was a mighty fine thing you said today. I'm voting for the other guy, but I like you better."

"That means a lot to me, Richard," Marion replied. She turned to look at him, to see if she could find that tiny twinge in his usually expressionless face, the way she swore she had seen it in Redding's.

She glanced over in time to see his forehead explode, shards of bone and blood flying away from his face as if anxious to escape. For a moment, his large body stood still, unable to catch up with the rest of him, and then he began to topple forward. Behind her, Marion heard Geri's soft voice: "I'm not voting for Mr. Summers either." Then pain. Then vertigo. Then black.

Unnamed Vampire Story 1

Marion was glad that she had accepted the last-minute face powder the show’s makeup girl had offered before stepping under the bright stage lights. She decided that the hot-burning whiteness could come from nothing in nature. Later, she would call her husband, and he would reassure her that her forehead was not shiny like a new car. But she didn’t believe it now, and she wouldn’t believe it later, looking for flaws on their TiVo. However, blasting towards the Redding Report’s stage desk in her new pumps made her feel like a superstar, and even she had to agree that her smile was radiant.

Clarence Redding, a notorious liberal pundit, was in his 20th year yelling at a camera about his agenda, and his age had only made him louder. He introduced her with an old timey auctioneer’s holler: “Ladies and gentleman, the potential first lady, Marion Summers.”

The words rolled off her tongue robotically, “Great to be here, Clarence.”

“So let’s get right to it. Vampire rights. Warren Kerrigan’s campaign has been giving your husband a lot of flak about this controversial subject. Now, the vampire vote carried Mark Summers to victory in California. Do you think Small Town, USA will buy it?”

Her husband’s PR team had given her a basic rundown of the things Redding would ask in advance, but it was essentially a lecture on the party line. Rosa, the media director, had finally buckled under Marion’s stress and told her, “Just talk how you want. We’re getting major blue collar votes from the way you talk straight and hit below the belt. Punching that racist at the last rally really got the middle aged white voter’s attention. You being you is your husband’s best chance.”

So Marion smiled, looked Redding in the eye, and said, “Do you mean evangelical Christian America, Clarence? I think you do. I’ve heard the in-human, in prison argument that Governor Kerrigan is making. But vampirism is a somewhat small movement at this point. When Joe Six-Pack sees another opportunity to spend time with his dad or his mom after their cancer treatments fail—which would not happen if the esteemed other candidate hadn’t voted against health care reform when he was a representative—then maybe they’ll come around. Now, they only see a subculture in those freaks out on the coasts. What we’re seeing is an opportunity for all of the country to heal, to reinvent themselves and reconcile with death in a different way. It’s a resurrection, Clarence, plain and simple, and it’s about time middle America gives that a second thought.”

This close to the TV personality, she imagined a smile that the cameras wouldn’t catch. Maybe later, they would edit the twinge away, so that the network could maintain its alleged no-bias policy. Clarence continued, “Your husband, a second-term senator, has spoken out against the career politician. Wouldn’t increase vampire rights encourage not just a lifetime politician, but an anti-lifetime government man?”

Marion nodded sagely in a way that she had seen thousands of other senators’ wives nod. She hoped she had gotten it right enough to carry on the legacy of the hot first lady. “No, of course not. I don’t think a vampire will be elected into office any time soon. I’ve spent a lot of time in the shelters and halfway houses in Oakland and the Bay area, and this isn’t a condition where you can just slather on some sunscreen and hop on a bus to Disneyland. These people are in pain when the sun’s out. A full-time vampiric candidate could never sit long enough in the Capitol to do their job. Not that I know many Republican senators who make it out to cast votes full-time, mind you.”

A chuckle from the audience. She understood then what her husband meant about momentum during the media parade. She took a breath and kept on going. “But you don’t see many beggars or battered women on the hill either. So we all get together and do what we can: select a person who will represent us, no matter how badly the world has treated us. My husband is ready to listen to everyone and do what he can to ensure that all human beings get fair treatment in these great United States.”

And there it was, that little grin again. For the rest of the interview, even after her impassioned rant on education reform, Marion didn’t see it again. Later, as she played and replayed the clip, her husband would be unable to see what she saw. After her futile search, they would go to sleep, as they had for 20 years, their fingers entwined.