It will be dark soon and they will come out
to hunt us.
I slide out of my daytime hideaway under
five layers of crushed cars and scrabble up to the usual vantage point in a
concertinaed Ford saloon on top of the stack. This gives me almost 360 degrees
of vision to scan of the wasteland of the Epidemic. Hunger strikes me only
seconds after I awake and I spend five painful minutes resetting the web of
fishing-lines hung with the DVDs and strips of cooking foil that are my early
warning system. Waves of nausea and cold
sweats assault my body like a fever. To survive for any length of time in this
world I long ago adopted the only rules that count: stay hidden; stay covered;
stay awake and alert all night long. Oh, and search for the dwindling supply of
food that won’t kill you, and do it by using stealth and camouflage. This last
consists of a green boiler suit and a hood, boots, respirator mask and
gauntlets; all taken from a hazmat technician who no longer needed them. I’ve
stitched fishermen’s netting all over it in patches and bunches and festooned
the mesh with strips of rag and plastic bags and fake foliage from a florist’s
shop so that at any distance I resemble just another patch of rubbish-strewn,
weed-covered Epidemic devastation. In short, I look like nothing at all. I
wonder if Cal and Jaz will be about tonight (dusk is falling quickly now) so we
can forage as a team again for greater ground coverage and hopefully a modicum
of protection against stray Hunters.
I pick at the wing mirror of the Volkswagen
one layer down with my multitool: a device so complex, versatile and varied
that it makes a Swiss Army knife seem like a flint axe by comparison, hoping to
set up another line of sight in my perch so I can monitor the path going
westward through the scrap yard to the high wall whilst I concentrate on
staring east towards the blocked gates that would one day be unchained and
thrown aside. It’s my favourite gadget as it had been even before the Epidemic:
before the actual Swiss Army became a blood-sucking horde - as have the Boy
Scouts, the Neighbourhood Watch, Greenpeace and the Women’s Institute. The
Jehovah’s Witnesses no longer knock politely at your door.
Before the Epidemic, vampire attacks were
rare and were undertaken in remote, undeveloped parts of the world whose
natives and law enforcement officials were laughed to scorn by the
sophisticated journalists and TV audiences of the modern world: vampires were merely
the fantasies of superstitious tribesmen or invented as alibis for corrupt,
drug-dealing policemen. When the infection spread and the reality of the Undead
became inescapable the authorities rushed to investigate the historical
evidence of those old cases and it soon emerged that the world’s thousand or so
old-style vamps had mostly dwelt in the West or in Russia and travelled to the
Third World for what the New York Times dubbed ‘blood tourism’. A kid turns up,
drained and cold in a Manila rubbish dump, and
it’s all So what? Plenty more where she
came from. Mexico City Haiti
I pick dirt from my nails and double check
the kit in my rucksack: lighter and lighter fuel; machete; yards of climbing
rope and three spools of fishing line. Change of pants and a spare bra. Comb
and hairbrush. Rouge and brushes. Roll-on deodorant – I was always a fragrant
girl even during adolescence but it’s literally a life saver to be odourless in
the Fourth World . A pack of silver plastic
survival bags and a Thermos complete my portable wealth – ‘wealth’ now meaning
simply whatever’s needed to keep death at bay. Perhaps that’s what it always
meant. All those luxuries like television and medicine and law had been
camouflage to hide the eternal truth that the world is just one great big food
chain and the only true value is whatever is required to keep you at the top.
In the Third World
the old methods seemed to work pretty well at first; the Indian and Chinese
governments had sent their huge armies to remote and overrun provinces; the
tribal lands and wildernesses where people had always been one step from
starvation. The wooden stake and the decapitating stroke of a sword or machete
had been enough to dispatch the infected; especially when accompanied by
cleansing fire and so the city folk could relax again and turn off their TVs
when footage of the charnel pits became too graphic. But it was in the oldest
industrialised countries that the contagion transmuted into the Epidemic.
Western governments tried whatever they could to keep their territories safe
but even a series of twenty megaton extensions to the Panama Canal and flooding
the Channel Tunnel were weeks too late. Homeland Security clods must have been
patting down returning tourists and missing the signs for at least forty days
and forty nights before they closed the airports, and here in Britain it turned
out that possessing the right European Union paperwork at Dover really was a
passport to previously undreamed of opportunity. Towards the end the TV had
begun to blame long exposure to its own broadcasting frequencies or microwaves
or mobile phone towers or processed food for whatever had mutated the original
vector of old-time vampirism: be it God’s curse (or the Devil’s); a virus; bad
attitude; bad breath; sinful thought, whatever. So it became a global pandemic
that transformed the pampered citizens of the First and Second Worlds into
blood-hungry monsters who can survive in full sunlight unlike their terrified
parents (though they still prefer to hunt by night) and who are also strong
enough to feed on human survivors and their own horrified progenitors alike.
The wing mirror comes off the Volks at last
and I jam the glass into the Ford’s empty rear-view frame; unlike the Old Ones
this new breed of vampire casts reflections. My stomach churns again and I
begin to think more urgently about looking for my friends... Jaz said she’d
noticed traces of humanity over by the gasworks the night before last; a small
remnant of homo sapiens holding out against both races of vampire until their
food runs out and both they and the unmutated vampires go extinct. The new
ones’ll disappear soon thereafter too, if cannibalism turns out to be a busted
flush. I scan the rear view from the driver’s seat. I can see straight through
to the back window and then towards the western wall of the yard. Nothing at
all obscures my view in the mirror, but then nothing has been able to since the
English broke our advance at Waterloo
It
will be dark soon and they will come out to hunt us.
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