Everyone Dies in the End #79

Zak

   Surreal. The word described, albeit inadequately, the scene. They strode down a brightly lit street. That alone was surrealistic. The world hadn’t ended, Zak knew that. Armageddon had arrived, sure as sure, but humankind bore an uncomfortable resemblance to cockroaches, rats, or any other persistent vermin that came to mind. In short, humans survived. Knock them down, tear their hearts out, raze their cities, it didn’t matter, let them catch their breath and they came back at you. He didn’t need to see this incandescent street to know that. Long before he fell in with the blonde-haired woman with the green eyes and the ability to throw her molecules from one location to another, he knew that his country still lived. Hardened communication units and messengers, had brought the news to Fort Benning. Florida survived and so did many of the Midwestern states. Summer rains washed much of the radiation’s alpha particles from the air and cleansed the land. Problems existed. Significant problems, cataclysmic problems even. Feeding America’s pre-war population with reduced farmland and a crippled transportation infrastructure would be impossible; millions more would die. And communication? Outside of the military’s hardened radios and computers, communication barely existed; the electromagnetic pulse from the numerous nuclear explosions had all but ruined any radio wave communications. But the communications could be rebuilt from spares, and troops were headed home from Europe to restore order to the lawless swatches in America. Zak knew these things, knew them before he left his base in Fort Benning, Georgia. Knowing, however, is one thing and seeing is another.

He was seeing now. People thronged the streets. He and the girl were jostled and pushed by the flowing crowd. Every store shown light on the humanity-covered sidewalks, and it seemed as if a bar adorned each street corner, its doors open to the night air, its customers spilling onto the sidewalk. Zak peered in the windows of a small grocery. The shelves were by no means full, but there was food on them, and additional offerings he had never seen in a pre-war grocer. Guns lined a metal rack on one wall, five-gallon gas cans—empty or full, Zak didn’t know—sat on the floor in front of the checkout counter.

The lights, the stores, the bars, and the crowd were bizarre, almost pre-war, but not quite. Pre-war pedestrians would have at given a pair of gun-toting toughs a wide berth and police would have quickly tossed them into the back of a black and white, but now no one cared. And it was no wonder; guns were everywhere—in holsters strapped to young women’s shapely hips, slung on the muscular shoulders of the men talking to them, or held at the ready by rough looking guards standing in front of the stores. The world was different, stranger, and that thought brought his eyes back to his current partner. She walked a few paces in front of him, the shotgun held easily at her side, head in constant, yet relaxed, motion, looking for trouble. Trouble that she no doubt could handle.

First he had met Cindy. He didn’t know what Cindy was, didn’t even know what to call someone who was here now, and over there a heartbeat later. Teleporter? Probably. Strange? Surely. And the woman in front of him? What was she? It was a rhetorical question, asked give his mind a moment to logicize the illogical. He knew damn well what the woman was. He just didn’t want to admit it. The blood on her chin wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t her own. It was the overweight prison guard’s blood, and the name of a being that sucked another being’s blood wasn’t a mystery. That name was strange, yes. Mythical, yes. Non-existent, yes…but, no, it wasn’t non-existent. She walked in front of him. She was a vampire. A vampire without the cape, huge fangs, or heavy Euro-trash accent, but a vampire nonetheless. The thought quickened his step until he strode beside her.

“You’re a vampire.” 

She glanced at him, then resumed her crowd scanning, her stride unabated.

“You killed the guard,” Zak persisted. “There was blood on your face, blood on your teeth for Christ’s sake.”

“I do nothing for his sake. He has done nothing for mine.”

A shot cracked from across the street and both whirled, but it was nothing. A drunk with a pistol raised above his head, a shot fired in celebration. They resumed walking, threading their way through the mass of humanity.

Zak didn’t press. That wasn’t his style. He had not been querying, not really. He knew the answer, but it was a big answer, a reality-shattering answer, and he wanted to hear it from her lips.

They walked another half block, people, music, and lights barraging them from all sides. They passed a large bar with a good-sized crowd, many of them drunk. Certainly it was a big draw, because after they passed the watering hole the crowd immediately thinned. She spoke.

“My name is Katarina and yes, I am a vampire.”