Underground Vampire (4 page)

 Noticing a vacuum and without
any organized opposition, the Queen was able to establish a presence in
Seattle, nurturing a Clan to full strength and ultimately dominating the
Northwest. By the time the San Francisco Clan decided to see what was going on
up North, she was entrenched from Alaska to Portland and easily rebuffed their
advance. 

 Petru played a singular role
in the negotiations by abducting the initial foray from San Francisco and
imprisoning them in a metal cage.  On a spectacularly sunny August day he
exposed them to the sun until, one by one, they smoldered into flames. 
The powdery remains were returned to the San Francisco Clan in an exquisite
Chinese porcelain bowl with a charming note suggesting that from now on, any
emissaries properly present themselves and request permission to enter her
territory.  

 Every Vampire residing in the
Northwest, everyone except her, Arabella knew, was of the bloodline.  She
was the only outsider, a status that afforded her some freedom, as she had no
blood allegiance to a maker, but left her alone and vulnerable to suspicion at
times like these.  In matters of treason the Queen would start with her;
she would be the first suspect.

 Arabella faced the Queen now,
ignoring Petru.  If this went against her, she knew she was no match for
the two of them.  Facing Petru alone would be fifty-fifty at best; add in
the Queen and she wouldn’t last more than a minute.  She knew that any
preemptive attack on the Queen would bring Petru onto her back with his nails
and fangs deep into her neck, so thoughts of that were just that, useless
thoughts, a distraction from the danger in front of her. 

 “Oliver escaped, with or
without the help of others I don’t know.  If you remember, I wanted to cut
off his head; I still do,” she said, facing the Queen and speaking softly, with
great respect.   “The only reason I would free Oliver from his grave
would be to complete the task I undertook those many years ago. He’s too
powerful to leave alive and too charismatic to ever trust.  You brought me
here to capture him and I did.  Then you decided he should live.  I
did as you directed, even though it placed me at peril, as him alive leaves an
enemy behind.  Nevertheless, I put him in his coffin and threw him into
the Sea; Petru was there and is my witness.”  

 She and Petru, she embracing
the weakened Oliver while Petru drained more of his life from him, draining
enough from his veins so that they could force him into his coffin, but leaving
enough that he knew what was happening, as the Queen had directed. Apparently
eternal damnation and suffering with the cold of the deep instead of the fires
of hell suited her sense of retribution.  Sealing the lid, binding it with
iron straps, loading it onto the wagon and the late night trip to the
waterfront, winching the heavy load aboard a trawler; casting off in the rain
and out to a spot known only to the two of them, then unceremoniously dumping
the coffin off the stern and Oliver sinking into the agony of perpetual
hunger. 

 “Whether others have located
him and are helping him, I do not know.  I did not rescue him nor do I
know who might have helped him, if anyone did.  Although not of your blood
I am loyal to you and have been since you allowed me membership,” Arabella
finished in a rush and waited for the verdict.

 She stood calm and peaceful,
at ease in the middle of the cream rug; if the Queen’s suspicions had settled
on her, then there was nothing to do.  She could not escape and the facts
were as she had said.  Behind her she felt Petru shift his position. 
He was directly behind her now and a step closer.  Her future, if she had
one, was out of her control; she’d lived long and if it was to end she was
ready. 

 “You need to find him,” the
Queen ordered, “find Oliver.” Whether it’s him alone, or with a group, find
them all,” she hissed, reminding Arabella of the Komodo dragon that devoured
the renegade Shin Tsu after she had staked him to the soil of Rinca in the
Indonesian night.  Ignorant of the lizard’s existence, she had watched as
the beast surged from the shadows swallowing Shin Tsu’s head.  The ten
foot long lizard lifted the unfortunate into the air, his arms and legs akimbo
and twitching like an insect on its back in an attempt to swallow the prey
whole.  Finally, frustrated, the beast repeatedly rammed Shin Tsu’s hindquarters
into a handy tree, forcing the torso down its engorged gullet until Arabella’s
last memory of Shin was the lizard’s forked tongue flickering between Shin’s
protruding feet. 

 Since her Chinese masters had
stipulated that she produce proof of Shin’s demise (the usual form being ashes
in a presentation vase), Arabella was forced to track the beast until it
regurgitated the gastric pellet. Collecting the bones, teeth and jewelry proved
relatively simple, although the cloying odor of the beast’s insides required
her to undergo cleansing ceremonies involving bales of sage. 

 “And when you capture Oliver,
I want him before me, alive, with a tongue in his mouth or at least able to nod
his head.  The others I don’t care about; rip out their tongues as you
root out the treason.  Show no mercy.  Do you understand?  No
mercy.”  Peevish, she plucked at the antimacassar like a hen pecking for
bugs in the dirt. 

 “I understand,” said
Arabella, thinking insanity was rampant.

 “Good,” smiled the Queen, standing
up and posing like a model with her left toe pointing forward, “do you like my
hat?”  

 “Yes,” she replied,
struggling for a compliment, “it's quite charming.”

 “Off with you then,” she
ordered, jabbing at her with the knife nail on her index finger.  “Times
like this people become unsettled, some see an opportunity for advancement,
others just like to cause trouble.”

 “Of course,” said Arabella
not at all sure what she was talking about.

 “You have always known your
place and most important you never try to rise above your station, I like that
about you.”

 “I am content to serve you,”
seemed an innocuous, safe reply to a puzzling turn in the conversation.

 “Others may have pretensions
to my chair, to my house, to my power.”

 Arabella was unsure about the
direction the conversation was going and tried to look like she certainly had
no pretensions.  If it was up to her she would burn the house and the
chair to ashes, so hideous were the furnishings, so oppressive the atmosphere.

 “If you are referring to
Oliver…”

 “Not just Oliver,” shrieked
the Queen, “it might be anyone.”

 “Of course,” said Arabella,
“anyone.”

 “You understand, then. 
Go and get them.”

 Arabella turned and walked to
the door, her footsteps quiet in the thick carpet. She wished only to be free
of this oppressive room.  As she reached the door Petru, once again the
loyal retainer and polished servant, reached across and opened the door, polite
and gracious.  She nodded her head in thanks for the courtesy when, from
behind she heard, “Petru doesn’t appreciate your sarcasm.  He has no sense
of humor; come to think of it, neither do I.”

 “He still keeps the old
ways.  You might try a return to the dirt; it would do you good,” as the
door closed quietly behind her, leaving the Queen in the dark room, plotting
and planning with Petru.

 Escaping the oppressive room,
Arabella descended polished stairs and impulsively turned away from the front
door toward the back of the house.  A wood and steel advertisement for
industrial home cooking, the kitchen had been designed, fabricated and
installed by a Swedish company, specialists in creating culinary environments
for people with great wealth and no inclination to cook. 

Next to floating metal racks, which
served as pantry étagère for spices and condiments unknown to all but the most
discriminating epicures, she opened an architectural door of forbidden
Brazilian Rosewood.  The entrance, artfully obscured by bouquets of herbs
drying in artificial light, gave off a delightfully illegal floral scent as it
silently swung shut behind her. 

Descending, she entered the
original servants’ quarters, hidden parts of the mansion built to obscure the
serving class.  It never occurred to the Queen to upgrade the quarters
during her successive renovations, so visiting was to enter a lath and plaster
maze of narrow passages and steep stairs stuffing as many servants as possible
into the least amount of space.  Separate and hidden, the old quarters
held a quaintly esoteric attraction to the subversive personality. 

At the bottom of the stairs was a
narrow hallway; lining it were doors to claustrophobic rooms with no
windows.  The rooms, she knew, were empty of all but dust, spiders and the
faintly sweet odor of old mold.  The hall ended at the cheap door to a
bedroom with a closet on the right hand wall.  The closet was tiny, hardly
worth having, she thought, as she thrust her hands into old clothes hung on
wire and, pushing the rear panel, stepped through as it ali babad open.

She stepped into a cave carved out
between the basement retaining wall and the hillside sloping from Highland
Avenue to the back of the property.  Decades of burrowing and amateur
construction only a building inspector could appreciate had produced rooms
smelling deeply of original earth, primeval dirt never touched by sun,
undisturbed from the beginning of time.  The trogs found it ideal for
sleeping and the earth the perfect heat sink for their Cray.

The room stretched the width of the
mansion and into the hillside as deeply as anyone wanted to dig.  She
wondered why the front yard hadn’t collapsed, assuming that the trogs had
somehow reinforced the ceilings.  A hamster maze of what she thought was
industrial grade plastic spaced the room; dividers hanging over one by fours
laid loosely across four by fours served as flooring.  

The inhabitants favored spray paint
as a medium, splotching obscure glyphs where ever a spot presented and the
spirit moved.  She recognized some as now forgotten WWI totems; others
took meaning from the universal raised fist of resistance or Bob Marley
pictographs.  In between were obscure symbols of revolt and anarchy
apparent to those steeped from birth in complex dialectics of oppression and
struggle. 

The result was a vague space of
indeterminate dimensions, all visible through translucent sheeting.  In
the center of it all was their monolith, the super computer they’d somehow
smuggled down here. They’d proudly shown it to her on her last visit, with
detailed exclamations of teraflops and petabytes and scaling capabilities until
she said it looked like the cabinet where the cleaning crew kept its supplies
except shinier.

Data streams danced down the hall;
she thought she recognized banking information but the symbols blew by too fast
to tell.  Nakadai preserved his honor with wood as the Kabayashi classic
streamed perpendicular to the data across the room. The Trogs favored post war
Japanese cinema and played the entire catalogue in a continuous loop. 
When asked why, they said, “We like it.” 

As the battle in the courtyard
unfolded to the climactic death, she glimpsed the trogs supine in distant
rooms.  It had been years since she‘d actually seen one of them up
walking, their virtual immortality nourished by blood and nutrients delivered
through a system of pumps and tubes so the background was a hum of pneumatic
swooshing.   

It was one of her favorite spots in
Seattle and the only place in the mansion she ever relaxed. 

Exploring the basement one day,
she’d stumbled upon it.  Passing the movie test, an easy one with hordes
of soldiers with flags on their backs attacking the castle Kurosawa style,
she’d been allowed to witness their gestalt.  Solving problems that
required a physical presence cemented the relationship and they reciprocated by
maintaining a constant watch on her data cloud.  The slightest hint of
interest in her was detected, analyzed and dealt with seamlessly.  Now
with the Cray she understood they could mine world data, correlating,
analyzing, predicting.  For what purpose was a bit hazy, but ultimately it
was aimed at their desire to go machine. Vampire geeks.

Since their latest evolution, they
communicated exclusively by net, creepy communiques with no source, only text,
images, video appearing on whatever device she happened to be using.  More
than once she’d noticed their movies on public monitors, proof that they’d
invaded the security systems of everyone in Seattle.  She was used to
seeing her name flashing at odd moments as she traversed the city; what at first
felt like stalking had become a comforting presence.

The dominant feature of the cave
was cable snaking through the plastic halls and into shadowy rooms, either
office or bedroom there was really no distinction.  At some point the
trogs installed an electrical panel on the inside of the cement retaining wall
that was the back of the basement and tapped into the street side power line
pulling enough energy to operate several blocks of houses. 

When the household wanted secure
communications and access to worldwide television programming, they’d answered
the upstairs call by adding antennas to the roof capable of snagging signals
from everywhere.  Snug in their cave undisturbed, the trogs interfaced
with the grid, dancing in and out of data, leaching funds as needed, punishing
miscreants and generally living lives less connected to society either Human or
Vampire than to the constructs they found in code.

Enamored of data, they developed
the predicted interface allowing them to jack wet brains into the net living
the future, surfing perpetual waves of data.

Stepping carefully across the
boards in her spiky heels, she noted that several of the Vampires sported
sockets from shaved skulls connected to the omnipresent boxes of equipment that
served as furniture.  Spotting a monitor and keyboard, she sat at a
console and typed in ‘hello’ on a screen with what she thought was dos
interface.  She hit ‘enter’ and waited.  She still found it
unsettling talking to them through a monitor and keyboard when she could see
their bodies strewn about the cave, cables and tubes jacked to skulls.

Instant acknowledgment cascaded
down the monitor faster than she could read as the permanently connected
community signed back.  She was one of the few the trogs talked to under
the rubric of call and response since they made the decision to live as a
collective mind.  Information whirled across the screen in data spools
until order was enforced and ‘WELCOME’ appeared on the screen.  The
letters appeared one after another in the fashion of Marat/Sade, a comment on
the stupidity of classic communication and the kind of scorn she expected from
the collective.

In response she slowly typed “FUCK
Y.”  Before she got to “O” her screen filled with a torrent of abuse until
she burst out laughing and typed “BEHAVE or I WILL UNPLUG EVERY ONE OF YOU.”

Serene cherry blossoms drifted
across the screen.

“Just stopped by to say Hi.”

“No one stops by the Mansion.”

“True,” she replied, “She called.”

Complex mathematics ordered into
probability equations scrolled for longer than she liked, then “Danger Will
Robinson Danger” shrieked as B9 wriggled robot arms down the plastic hall
fleeing images of the Queen they’d grabbed somehow. 

As they’d gone deeper into
individual sublimation their communication skills suffered, at least when they
were limited to language, she thought.

“What do you see?”

All around her walls and halls
burst into vivid color mostly reds and oranges with violet purple spikes and
undulating waves of symbols.

“When you can put it in English or
French let me know.”

“Sure.”

“Could you keep an eye on
things?  I think Oliver is back.”

“Yes, he is.”

“And……..?”

“So NO TECH, he barely registers.”

‘How is the mind?’ she asked. 
Arabella didn’t understand the extent that they’d managed to blend to one
consciousness but accepted the proposition as true.  Their explanation was
a bit like when the physics people and philosophers discussed the singularity,
comprehension breaking down several light years short of home.

The cave went black, the movie vanished
as the wooden sword went in, the data streams collapsed into points that merged
into a single violet singularity that Hiroshima’d into infinitesimal images
splattering floor, walls, ceiling and, she noticed, her.  Standing, she
walked to the nearest wall and, squinting, saw images of fragments.  Bits
and pieces, shards with scratches, nibbled by vermin, burnt in fires, rotted in
cellars, cuneiform, Chinese characters readable by a solitary scholar sitting
alone in Beijing, pottery inscribed with the names of heroes dead long before
Troy, all of it incomprehensible.  On her arm she saw bits that reminded
her of Finkelstein’s basement; stretching her arms above her head she reached
through millennia of history to the stick etched with marks by the first woman.

“We collated every bit and scrap of
writing in every museum and library, the universities and private collections,
even in the Vatican into our data.” 

“Why?”

“When we have joined every bit we
will know everything.”

“How?”

“We are able to reconcile every
fragment with every other fragment.  We will have a complete record of all
the knowledge of man, a data base searchable by us.”

“You should talk to Finkelstein.”

“We are.  He digitized his
collection for us; in return we allow him to search our database for his
purposes.”

“And, of course, you know what he
knows.”

“We know what everyone knows.”

“Are you people crazy???”

“New paradigm.”

 “They will track you down.”

“Never happen; we no longer exist
anywhere.”

“This is what you do now??????”

“We want to hasten certain
transitions and believe they will trigger a decision point.”

The plastic sheets were glowing
again; images, numbers and text flashed across in complex rhythms faster than
she could comprehend.

“Is that you?  What is this
stuff?”  Leaning over, she ran her fingers over the nearest sheet. 
It felt liquid, not like plastic but alive somehow, like she’d lightly pressed
a lover’s skin.

“Organic polymers don’t touch.”

“Sorry; did I hurt it?”

“No.  Fingerprints.”

“What are you trying to
accomplish.”

Violent colors surged throughout
the cave, leaping from sheet to sheet until the colors coalesced to a blinding
white.

Squinting, she typed, “That hurts.”

Immediately the intensity lessened.

“We are hastening the end.”

“Sounds ominous.”

“Yes, it may be.”

“Watch over me and any sign of
Oliver.”

“We will.”

The screens dissolved and, as she
looked, mundane sheets of plastic hung as room dividers. Vague shapes of
reclining bodies connected to tubes and cables ghosted the blurry depths.

Her wave on the way out was
ignored.