Thirst No. 1 (12 page)

"I want to save you," I say. "Do you want me to save you?"

"Can you?"

"Yes. I can put my blood in your blood."

He tries to smile. "Become a vampire like you?"

I nod and smile through my tears. "Yes, you could become like me."

"Would I have to hurt people?"

"No. Not all vampires hurt people." I touch his ruined cheek. I haven't forgotten Yaksha's words about coming for both of us at dawn. "Some vampires love a great deal."

"I love ..." His eyes slowly close. He cannot finish.

I lean over and kiss his lips. I taste his blood.

I will have to do more than taste it to help him.

"You are love," I say as I open both our veins.

Ray's sleep is deep and profound, as I expect. I have brought him back to the house, and laid him in front of a fire I built, and wiped away his blood. Not long after his transfusion, while still lying crumpled on the driveway, his breath had accelerated rapidly, and then ceased altogether. But it had not scared me, because the same had happened to me, and to Mataji, and many others. When it had started again, it was strong and steady.

His wounds vanished as if by magic.

I am weak from sharing my blood, very tired.

I anticipate that Ray will sleep away most of the night, and that Yaksha will keep his word and not return until dawn. I leave the house and drive in my Ferrari to Seymour's place. It is not that late—ten o'clock. I do not want to meet his parents. They might suspect I have come to corrupt their beloved son. I go around the back and see Seymour through his bedroom window, writing on his computer. I scratch on his window with my hard nails and give him a scare. He comes over to investigate, however. He is delighted to see me.

He opens the window and I climb inside. Contrary to popular opinion, I could have climbed in without being invited.

"It is so cool you are here," he says. "I have been writing about you all day.'4

I sit on his bed; he stays at his desk. His room is filled with science things—telescopes and such—but the walls are coated with the posters of classic horror films. It is a room I am comfortable in. I often go to the movies, the late shows.

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"A story about me?" I ask. I glance at his computer screen, but he has returned to the word processor menu.

"Yes. Well, no, not really. But you inspired the story. It comes to me in waves. It's about this girl our age who's a vampire."

"I am a vampire."

He fixes his bulky glasses on his nose. "What?"

"I said, I am a vampire."

He glances at the mirror above his chest of drawers. "I can see your reflection."

"So what? I am what I say I am. Do you want me to drink your blood to prove it?"

"That's all right, you don't have to." He takes a deep breath. "Wow, I knew you were an interesting girl, but I never guessed .. ." He stops himself. "But I suppose that's not true, is it? I have been writing about you all along, haven't I?"

"Yes."

"But how is that possible? Can you explain that to me?"

"No. It's one of those mysteries. You run into them every now and then, if you live long enough."

"How old are you?"

"Five thousand years."

Seymour holds up his hand. "Wait, wait. Let's slow down here. I don't want to be a pest about this, and I sure don't want you to drink my blood, but before we proceed any further, I wouldn't mind if you showed me some of your powers. It would help with my research, you understand."

I smile. "You really don't believe me, do you? That's OK. I don't know if I want you to, not now. But I do want your advice." I lose my smile. "I am getting near the end of things now. An old enemy has come for me, and for the first time in my long life I am vulnerable to attack. You are the smart boy with the prophetic dreams. Tell me what to do."

"I have prophetic dreams?"

"Yes. Trust me or I wouldn't be here."

"What does this old enemy want? To kill you?"

"To kill both of us. But he doesn't want to die until I am gone."

"Why does he want to die?”

"He is tired of living,"

"Been around for a while, I guess." Seymour thinks a moment. "Would he mind dying at the same time as you?"

"I'm sure that would be satisfactory. It might even appeal to him."

"Then that's the answer to your problem. Place him in a situation where he is convinced you're both goners. But arrange it ahead of time so that when you do push the button—or whatever you do—that only he is destroyed and not you.”

"That's an interesting idea*"

"Thank you. I was thinking of using it in my story."

"But there are problems with it. This enemy is extremely shrewd. It will not be easy to convince him that I am going to die with him unless it is pretty certain that I am going to die. And I don't want to die."

"There must be a way. There is always a way."

"What are you going to do in your story?"

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"I haven't worked out that little detail yet."

"That detail is not little to me at the moment."

"I'm sorry."

"That's all right." I listen to his parents watching TV in the other room. They talk about their boy, his health. The mother is grief-stricken. Seymour watches me through his thick lenses.

"It's hardest on my mother," he says.

"The AIDS virus is not new. A form of it existed in the past, not exactly the same as what is going around now, but close enough. I saw it in action. Ancient Rome, in its decline, was stricken with it. Many people died. Whole villages. That's how it was mopped. The mortality rate in certain areas was so high that there was no one left alive to pass it on."

"That's interesting. There is no mention of that in history books."

"Do not trust in your books too much. History is something that can only be lived, it cannot be read about. Look at me, I am history." I sigh. "The stories I could tell you."

"Tell me."

I yawn, something I never do. Ray has drained me more than I realized. "I don't have time."

"Tell me how you managed to survive the AIDS epidemic of the past."

"My blood is potent. My immune system is impenetrable. I have not just come here to seek your help, although you have helped me. I have come here to help you. I want to give you my blood. Not enough to make you a vampire, but enough to destroy the virus in your system."

He is intrigued. "Will that work?"

"I don't know. I have never done it before."

"Could it be dangerous?"

"Sure. It might kill you."

He hesitates only a moment. "What do I have to do?"

"Come sit beside me on the bed." He does so.

"Give me your arm and close your eyes. I am going to open up one of your veins. Don't worry, I have had a lot of practice with this."

"I can imagine." He lets his arm rest in my lap, but he does not close his eyes.

"What's the matter?" I ask. "Are you afraid I will try to take advantage of you?"

"I wish you would. It's not every day the school nerd has the most beautiful girl in the school sitting on his bed." He clears his throat. "I know that you're in a hurry, but I wanted to tell you something before we? Begin."

"What's that?"

"I wanted to thank you for being my friend and letting me play a part in your story."

I think of Krishna, always of him, how he stood near me and I saw the whole universe as his play. "Thank you, Seymour, for writing about me," I lean over and kiss his lips. "If I die tonight, at least others will know I once lived." I stretch out my nails. "Close your eyes. You do not want to watch this."

I place a measured amount of blood inside him. His breath quickens, it burns, but not so fast or hot as Ray's had. Yet, like Ray, Seymour quickly falls into a deep slumber. I turn off his computer and put out the light. There is a blanket on the bed that looks as if it was knitted by his mother, and I cover him with it. Before I leave, I put my palm on his

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forehead and listen and feel as deep as my senses will allow.

The virus, I am almost sure of this, is gone.

I kiss him once more before I leave.

"Give me credit if you get your story published," I whisper in his ear. "Or else there will be no sequels."

I return to my car.

Giving out so much blood, taking none back in return.

I feel weaker than I have in centuries.

“There will be no sequels," I repeat to myself.

I start the car. I drive into the night.

I have work to do.

S eymour has given me an idea. But even with his inspiration, and mine, even if everything goes exactly as planned, the chances of it working are fifty-fifty at best. In all probability much less than that. But at least the plan gives me hope. For myself and Ray. He is like my child now, as well as my lover. I cannot stand the thought that he is to be snuffed out so young. He was wrong to say I would give up without a fight. I fight until the end.

There is a concept NASA is entertaining to launch huge payloads into space. It is called Orion; the idea is revolutionary. Many experts, in fact, say it won't work in practice. Yet there are large numbers of respected physicists and engineers who believe it is the wave of the future In space transport. Essentially it involves constructing a huge heavily plated platform with cannons on the bottom that can fire miniature nuclear bombs. It is believed that the shock waves from the blasts of the bombs detonating—if their timing and power is perfectly balanced—can lift the platform, steadily into the sky, until eventually escape velocity is achieved. The advantage of this idea over traditional rockets is that tremendous tonnage could be shot into space. The primary problem is obvious: who wants to strap themselves atop a platform that is going to have nuclear bombs going off beneath it? Of course, I would enjoy such a ride. Extreme radiation bothers me no more than a sunny day.

Even with my great resources, I do not have a nuclear bomb at my disposal. But the idea of the Orion project inspires a plan in me. Seymour hit the nail on the head when- he said Yaksha must be placed in a situation where he thinks all three of us will perish. That will satisfy Yaksha. He will then go to Krishna believing all vampires are destroyed. I theorize that I can build my own Orion with dynamite and a heavy steel platform, and use it to allow Ray and me to escape while a secondary blast kills Yaksha.

This is how I see the details. I let Yaksha into my house. I tell him that I will not fight him, that we can all go out together in one big blast. I know the possibility will entice Yaksha.

We can sit in the living room around a crate of dynamite. I can even let Yaksha light the fuse. He will see that the bomb is big enough to kill us all.

But what he will not see is the six inches of steel sheeting under the carpet beneath my chair and Ray's. Our
two
chairs will be bolted to the steel sheet— through the carpet. The chairs will be part of the metal plate—one unit. Yaksha will not see a smaller bomb beneath the floor of the plate. This bomb I will detonate, before Yaksha's fuse burns down. This bomb will blast my amateur Orion toward the wide skylights in my ceiling.

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) The shock wave from it will also trigger the larger bomb.

Simple. Yes? There are problems, I know.

The blast from the hidden bomb will trigger the larger bomb before we can fly clear. I estimate that the two bombs should go off almost simultaneously. But Ray and I need rise up only fifteen feet on our Orion. Then the blast from the larger bomb should propel us through the skylights. If the two bombs are more than fifteen feet apart—ideally twice that distance—then the shock wave from the hidden bomb should not get to the larger bomb before we have achieved our fifteen feet elevation.

Our heads will heal quickly after we smash through the skylights as long as we are in one piece.

The physics are simple in theory, but in practice they are filled with the possibility for limitless error. For that reason I figure Ray and I will be dead before sunrise. But any odds are good odds for the damned, and I will play them out as best I can.

I stop at a phone booth and call my primary troubleshooter in North America. I tell him I need dynamite and thick sheets of steel in two hours. Where can I get them? He is used to my unusual requests. He says he'll call back in twenty minutes.

Fifteen minutes later he is back on the line. He sounds relieved because he knows it's not good to bring me disappointing information. He says there is a contractor in Portland who carries both dynamite and thick steel plating. Franklin and Sons—they build skyscrapers.

He gives me the address of their main warehouse and I hang up. Portland is eighty miles away. The time is ten-fifty.

I sit in my car outside the warehouse at a quarter to midnight, listening to the people inside. The place is closed, but there are three security men on duty. One is in the front in a small office watching TV. The other two are in back smoking a joint. Since I have spent a good part of the night thinking about Krishna, hoping he will help me, I am not predisposed to kill these three. I climb out of my car.

The locked doors cause me no problem. I am upon the stoned men in the back before they can blink. I put them to sleep with moderate blows to the temples. They'll wake up, but with bad headaches. Unfortunately, the guy watching TV has the bad luck to check on his partners as I knock them out. He draws his gun when he sees me, and I react instinctively.

I kill him much the same way I killed Ray's father, crushing the bones in his chest with a violent kick. I drink a belly full of his blood before he draws his last breath. I am still weak.

The dynamite is not hard for me to find with my sensitive nose. It is locked in a safe near the front of the building, several crates of thick red sticks. There are detonator caps and fuses. Already I have decided I will not be taking my car back to Mayfair tonight. 1 will need a truck from the warehouse to haul the steel sheets. The metal is not as thick I wish; I will have to weld several layers together. I find a welding set to take with me.

There are actually several suitable trucks parked inside the warehouse, the keys conveniently left in the ignitions. I load up and back out of the warehouse. I park my Ferrari several blocks away. Then I am on the road back home.

It is after two when I reenter Mayfair. Ray is sitting by the fire as I come through my front door. He has changed. He is a vampire. His teeth are not longer, or anything silly like that.

But the signs are there—gold specks deep in his once uniformly brown eyes; a faint transparency to his tan skin; a grace to his movements no mortal could emulate. He stands

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"Am I alive?" he asks innocently.

I do not laugh at the question. I am not sure if the answer is something as simple as yes or no. I step toward him.

"You are with me," I say. "You are the same as me. When you met me, did you think I was alive?"

"Yes."

"Then you are alive. How do you feel?"

"Powerful. Overwhelmed. My eyes, my ears—are yours this way?"

"Mine are more sensitive. They become more and more sensitive with time. Are you scared?"

"Yes. Is he coming back?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"At dawn."

"Will he kill us?"

"He wants to."

"Why?"

"Because he feels we are evil. He feels an obligation to destroy us before he leaves the planet."

Ray frowns, testing his new body, its vibrancy. "Are we evil?"

I take his hands and sit him down. "We don't have to be. Soon you will begin to crave blood, and the blood will give you strength. But to get blood you don't need to kill. I will show you how."

"You said he wants to leave this planet. He wants to die?"

"Yes. He is tired of life. It happens—our lives have been so long. But life does not tire me." I am so emotional around Ray, it amazes me. "I have you to inspire me."

He smiles, but it is a sad smile. "It was a sacrifice for you to save me.'?

He takes my breath away. "How did you know?"

"When I was dying, I could see you were afraid to give me your blood. What happens when you do? Does it make you weak?"

I hug him, glad that I can squeeze his body with all my strength and not break his bones.

"Don't worry about me. I saved you because I wanted to save you."

"Is my father really dead?"

I let go of him, look into his eyes. "Yes."

He has trouble looking at me. Even though he is a vampire now, a predator. Even though his thought processes have begun to alter. He didn't protest when I told him about the blood-drinking. But his love for his father goes deeper than blood.

"Was it necessary?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Did he suffer?"

"No, less than a minute," I add gently. "I am sorry."

He finally raises his eyes. "You gave me your blood out of guilt as well."

I nod. "I had to give something back after what I had taken."

He puts a hand to his head. He doesn't completely forgive me but he understands, and for

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) that I am grateful. He still misses his father. "We won't talk about it," he says.

"That is fine." I stand. "We have much to do. Yaksha is returning at dawn. We cannot destroy him with brute force, even with our combined strengths. But we might be able to trick him. We will talk as we work."

He stands. "You have a plan?"

"I have more than a plan. I have a rocket ship."

Welding the sheets of metal together so that we have six inches of protection does not take long. I work outside with the arc gun so that Yaksha will not notice the smell when he enters the house. He will have to come into the house since I won't go out to him.

Cutting a huge rectangle in the floor to accommodate the metal plate, however, takes a lot of time. I fret as the hours slip by. Ray is not much help because he has not acquired my expertise in everything yet. Finally I tell him to sit and watch. He doesn't mind. His eyes are everywhere, staring at common objects, seeing in them things he never imagined before. A vampire on acid, I call him. He laughs. It is good to hear laughter.

As I work, I do
not feel
Yaksha in the area.

It is fortunate.

My speed picks up when I bolt the two chairs to the plate and recover the plate with carpet. Here I do not have to work so carefully; the skirts of the chairs cover much. When I am done, the living room appears normal. I plan to use an end table to hide the detonator to the bomb I will strap beneath the steel plate. I bore a long hole through the table and slip in a metal rod that goes through to the metal plate. I hide the tip of the rod under a lamp base. I place a blasting cap at the bottom end of it. When the time comes, I will hit the top of the small table, the rod will crush the blasting cap, and the first bomb will go off, sending us flying.

The other bomb should go off as well, almost immediately. I keep coming back to that point in my mind because it is the central weakness in my plan. I hope we will be high enough to take the shock from the second bomb from below so the plate will protect us.

Attaching the bomb beneath the plate takes only minutes. I use twenty sticks of dynamite, tightly bound. I place fifty sticks, a whole crate, beside the fireplace in the living room, next to the most comfortable chair in the house. That seat I will offer Yaksha. We will live or die depending on how accurate my calculations are, and how well we play our parts in front of Yaksha. That is the other serious weakness ia my plan; that Yaksha will sense something amiss. For that reason I have instructed Ray to say little, or nothing at all. But I am confident I can lie to Yaksha. I lie as effortlessly as I tell the truth, perhaps more easily.

Ray and I sit in our special flight chairs and talk. The bomb in the crate sits thirty feet away, directly in front of us. Above us I have opened the skylights. The cold night air feels good for once. Even with them open, we will still strike glass as we rocket by. I warn Ray, but he is not worried.

"I have already died once today," he says.

"You must have had your nose pressed against the glass to fall with it."

"I didn't until just before he raised his flute."

I nod. "He glanced at the house then. He must have pulled you forward with the power of his eyes. He can do that. He can do many things."

"He has more power than you?"

"Yes."

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"Why is that?"

“'He's the original vampire." I glance at the time— an hour to dawn. "Would you like to hear the story of his birth?"

"I would like to hear all your stories."

I smile. "You sound like Seymour. I visited him tonight while you slept. I gave him a present. I will tell you about it another time."

I pause and take a breath. I need it for strength. The simple work of a terrorist has exhausted me. Where to begin the tale? Where will I end it? It doesn't seem right that it could all be over in an hour.
Right—
what a word choice for a vampire to make. I who have violated every injunction of the Vedas and the Bible and every other holy book on earth. Death never comes at the
right
time, despite what mortals believe. Death always comes like a thief.

I tell Ray of the birth of Yaksha, and how he in turn made me a vampire. I talk to him about meeting Krishna, but here my words fail me. I do not weep, I do not rave. I simply cannot talk about him. Ray understands; he encourages me to tell him about my life in another era.

"Were you in Ancient Greece?" he asks. "I was always fascinated by that culture."

I nod. "I was there for a long time. I knew Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. Socrates recognized me as something inhuman, but I didn't scare him. He was fearless, that man.

He laughed as he drank the poison he was sentenced to drink." I shake my head at the memory. "The Greeks were inquisitive. There was one young man—Cleo. History does not remember him, but he was as brilliant as the others." My voice falters again. "He was dear to me. I lived with him for many years,"

"Did he know you were a vampire?"

I laugh. "He thought I was a witch. But he liked witches."

"Tell me about him," Ray says.

"I met Cleo during the time of Socrates. I had just returned to Greece after being away for many years. That's my pattern. I stay in one place only as long as my youth, my constant youth, doesn't become suspicious. When I returned to Athens, no one remembered me.