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  ‘A Bloody London Tale 2, the Epidemic’

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  ISBN: 9781483549491

  Olivia

  The preparations were underway, but there was an undercurrent of worry. It had been there for a couple of years, because life was getting harder for the vampires, and it was something they’d been fighting hard to stop. I suppose I should really begin long before this. My story, though, begins a couple of nights before the 21st of December 2015 - ten years after the epidemic. Like so many people I remember 2005 like it was yesterday. 2005 was the year my life changed for good and that makes it impossible to forget. Until then I was a human, mortal, free from the need to drink blood for my own survival, and sometimes I look back on that time with what can only be called rose-tinted spectacles. Neither life was perfect. Being a human held its own challenges, which is what I sometimes forget when I’m dreaming of a life that didn’t change.

  A lot of vampires feel the way I do. I wasn’t asked if I wanted to become a vampire. My boyfriend at the time, Ben, made the decision for me, when he chose to bite me during sex. There was a moment when I thought he was just being a little kinky, until I realised he had actually drawn blood and that was terrifying. He stared down at me, smiling, and he told me later on that he truly believed he was doing me a favour. He was giving me the gift of immortality. I laughed at him when he said that, unable to believe he thought I would appreciate what he’d done to me. For a long time after that I hated him. There are days now when I still hate him, although that feeling has mostly faded, as time has brought with it some understanding of why he made the choice he did.

  Vampires are… when I say vampires I mean the old ones - those who’ve been through so much more than I have, because compared to them it’s nothing. I’m ten and that makes me a baby. Ben, as one example, had been a vampire for a hundred years when he changed me and he was lonely, as he spent a lot of his time pretending to be human. He even did that when the vampires showed themselves to the human race. Most humans, due to how vampires needed blood to survive, think of us as little more than parasites, which can be hard to deal with. When I told my family what had happened to me my baby brother gave me that look. At that point I knew the most logical thing I could do was walk away. I spent three nights crying, unable to believe I’d done that, but it was something that was for their benefit. They didn’t want to deal with a vampire.

  Occasionally I can’t help checking on them. I’m lucky - my parents haven’t moved and that’s how I know about my brother’s children. He’s got two little girls who know nothing about their vampiric auntie, but that’s his decision to make. They know about vampires in general, because they can’t really ignore our existence, although it does seem now that the world is trying to pretend there aren’t any vampires. No one wanted to help us in the beginning. Our explanations, telling everyone how we’d once been human too and we deserved to be treated humanely, didn’t work. Everyone who wasn’t a vampire looked at us and saw something that terrified them. Like in all the stories we were going to hunt them down to suck their blood… because it’s really that easy.

  Some of the vampires I’ve met have let go of their humanity. Those I can honestly say I’m scared of. When they look at me with those cold eyes I shiver, knowing that they’re the ones who would be out in the dark of the night hunting for humans to feed from, because they think of themselves as superior beings. They believe that we should be the ones in control. We’re fortunate that there are fewer of them than there are of us - the vampires who have clung tightly onto who they once were. We accept that we aren’t human, we accept was need to drink blood in order to survive, but that doesn’t mean we’re evil. Of course there are people out there that think we’ve lost our souls and there are hundreds of them who hunt us in order to free us from the torment.

  I realise I’m all over the place with this. At the moment that’s how my thoughts are and there’s very little I can do to stop that from happening. Change is in the air once again, so I need to write this down, before I forget. Please forgive me any tangents that I go on. This is a story that began so long ago. For me it’s a story that began ten years ago when I was a part of the changes that happened, when I was a part of the fight for our rights, and that, sadly, isn’t something that will happen again. It’s gone too far now. When I look at the humans I once thought of as allies I see the great divide between us. Vampires and humans are too different, apparently, for us to be accepted. I just don’t know why this has happened, because we managed to agree on things before.

  Okay, a couple of nights before the solstice, the longest night, we were preparing for our yearly gathering. Thousands of vampires would travel to London for the night and we would spend our time reminiscing, drinking, and dancing. I was hoping to see Ben for the first time since the last solstice, because he’d travelled to Wales, wanting to get away from all of the memories, and I did miss him. We’d spent a lot of time together and I have to admit there was a part of me, a silly human part, that did still love him. Due to the choices we’d made it was easier for the two of us to live apart. Due to the choices he’d made in the past it was easier for him to stay as far away from London as possible. Every time he visited he found himself dealing with another memory, or another person he’d hurt, or another moment when he wished he’d made a different decision. Vampires lived difficult lives before they became real and even more difficult ones when they admitted to the world they existed.

  Did I know in advance that Ben was a vampire? No, I didn’t. I never thought to ask him, because he was a student at the same college I went to and I cou
ldn’t, at that time, have imagined why anyone would have wanted to put themselves through that when they had another choice. The only reason I went was so I could go on to university. Back then I was planning on becoming a lawyer. The law studies I did, before I had to leave college for good, have helped me, and I’ve done a lot of study since then, but it’s very different now. Becoming a lawyer isn’t possible. The few vampires who did have ‘proper’ jobs soon lost them when people found out what they were. Unfortunately it was impossible for us to fix that, although we did try multiple times. We believed then, and we believe now, that vampires shouldn’t be treated any differently to humans - yes, we drink blood to survive and daylight will kill us, but that doesn’t make us monsters. I know I’m not a monster. I have only ever taken blood from people who’ve been willing donors.

  Finding willing donors is getting slightly more difficult, as the donor houses that had been created during the time when the world was trying to pretend it could accept us have been closing down. Some of the donors come to us, offering to help, but we can’t pay them. None of us have jobs now. None of us have homes. Everything that was given to us in the past has been slowly taken away by changing governments. During the last ten years there have been two general elections and two different parties in power. I think the epidemic changed what would have happened a lot - in the end the winner of the first election was chosen by the nocturnal vote. We believed in them, we believed they were going to help us, and found that we’d been very wrong. They were the party who took away our right to vote, because we aren’t truly alive.

  There is now a pro-vampire party. Very few people vote for them, but at least they’re trying. The more I write this the harder it becomes. I can’t imagine what it must be like for those vampires who have lived for hundreds of years and are a part of this fight, because this isn’t something that will fade away any time soon. Our lives had been deeply affected by the choices of the humans who see us as animals. Now I’m crying. I hate crying over this. It’s just… when I think of everything I’ve been through in the time I’ve been a vampire - I left my family so they wouldn’t have to try to come to terms with what I had become - it hurts. Why can’t people look at me and see me the way I am? I didn’t magically change it some soulless monster on the day Ben changed me, although that was what I thought I’d become for a little while.

  I remember staring at myself in the mirror. I looked deep into my own eyes, trying to work out what Ben had done to me, and it took me a few weeks to come to the conclusion he’d actually done very little. I still felt the same way I had when I last woke up a human. Having the need to drink blood wasn’t something that really affected me all that much. As a young vampire I thought I’d feel the urge every time I walked past someone, but I didn’t. Hearing a heartbeat had no effect on me whatsoever. Smelling blood, occasionally, did. How much it affected me depended on when I’d last fed. There were times when I didn’t feed as regularly as I knew I should, because I couldn’t find donors, and when that happened the scent of blood could make me very hungry. Vampires, however, do not just attack people - any more than humans attack cows when they’re feeling hungry. If I felt I could I would ask them to help me out. It helped them out at the same time as vampire saliva helps wounds to heal.

  One of the things I know some of my donors were worried about was the possibility of me become addicted to their blood. That, fortunately, isn’t something that’s ever happened to me. It is possible and those vampires find themselves in therapy. Some can be helped. Those that can’t… well, I’ll be honest; I try not to think too much about them. I know it’s best that they’re executed, so they can’t hurt anyone, but that doesn’t make it easy to accept that we do it. However everything I’ve learnt about that sort of addiction makes it obvious that the only logical path to take is to end their lives. Otherwise all they’ll do is spend all of their time going after one person, the human they’re addicted too, and if something were to happened to that one person the addict would probably end up going mad - which would cause more trouble than executing them does. Unfortunately logic doesn’t override emotions, even though I wish it did, because there was a vampire I deeply cared about who found herself in that position and there are times now when it hurts to think of her. At this moment in time I’m grateful she’s not a part of this mess.

  When I started this I was talking about the preparations for the festivities. We often started that a week before the solstice and as time passed we felt more uncomfortable. I can’t tell you why. People have asked us if we knew what was coming. Did we have any idea that the festivities were going to begin one of the biggest riots in recorded history? I wish we did. Maybe we could have done something more to stop it from happening, but we didn’t. No one said anything to us, probably because they knew we’d say what we’d said a hundred times before - we needed to be patient. The humans needed time to accept us. Once they did things would get better. Every time I said it I felt a little bit of my belief in those words fade away. In the end I was certain I wouldn’t believe it at all. Sometimes I thought that would be easier. Fighting for the rights of the… were we a race? All I knew was fighting. Granted my type of fighting was not the same as those in the riots. I fought with my words.

  As we prepared for the solstice I tried to focus on that. I didn’t think about how almost every shop was closed, when it wasn’t long ago that we had eighteen places to visit in the night, including one of the local coffee shops. Thinking about it just made me cry. A lot of things made me cry then. I had done all I could to convince those shop owners to stay open for us, but instead they’d started closing earlier in the winter, so we couldn’t visit at any time. The only shop still open was one run by a woman whose daughter was a vampire. We’d taken her in when she was changed accidentally by her boyfriend. He didn’t know what he’d become, so he didn’t know that he would turn his girlfriend into a vampire when they had unprotected sex for the first time. That was also before most vampires knew that what they were could be spread in that way. Everyone knew about the blood thing - they didn’t know that vampirism was also an STI. It’s hard for me to explain, because I don’t understand it that well myself, but it had to do with mixing certain bodily fluids. I can’t change someone by drinking their blood alone. I have to drink their blood and then they have to drink my blood…

  Yes, I did drink Ben’s blood. By then he’d taken so much it was become a vampire or die and I wasn’t ready to die. That was why I hated him so much. In the end I felt like I had no real choice. All I could do was become immortal or die. Neither of those were options I wanted to pick, but I couldn’t exactly tell him to give my blood back. Don’t ask me why it works the way it does. I have no idea and I’ve had it explained to me multiple times by people who understand these things. I’m glad they tried, because I wanted to understand, and when I had to accept it was simply one of those things my brain couldn’t assimilate I was disappointed. Unfortunately science has always been a weakness of mine.

  Some people say it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to be good at everything and I’m one of those people who is very good at talking to other people, at explaining, at convincing, at helping them to understand who we are. The science is all about what we are. That, when it comes to getting the humans to accept us, doesn’t really matter. All they want to know is that they can protect themselves from becoming a vampire and that really is a simple process. All they need to do is make certain they don’t had unprotected sex with anyone they don’t know and don’t drink anyone else’s blood. The latter is simpler than the former, but the one good thing about the vampire epidemic was it got more people to have protected sex. No one wanted to become a vampire by accident, although it did still happen occasionally, because there have been times the condom split. Fortunately a lot of time has been spent on making certain that condoms will keep everyone safe from becoming a vampire.

  Tangents… maybe I shouldn’t be the one writing this. I probably should have left it to so
meone who could stick to the point, rather than trailing all over the place, but to me everything is important. It all connects to what happened. Understanding why the humans are terrified of us I believe will help those who read this to accept some of the rather terrible choices the vampires made on the solstice of 2015. I know why the vampires made the choices they did. I know why they got so angry with this mess. I was angry too and I wish I could have done more to stop the riots, but I really feel like I did everything I could. I used all of the skills at my command to convince the world that we did deserve to exist. When they turned around and told us we didn’t they made some of us very angry.

  It was that anger that spread. One vampire talked to another vampire about how a human had turned on them, or had treated them badly, or had made them feel as though they were a lesser being. Those stories moved from person to person at a speed that I could never have imagined it happening. By the time midnight came it was obvious to everyone what was going to happen and I knew there was nothing I could say that would stop them from doing what they believed needed to be done. Everyone was too angry. Everyone wanted the humans to feel the anger, in the way that all of the vampires felt the pain of being alienated by those they thought were finally beginning to accept them.

  Paul

  “Is this something we’re certain is going to work?”

  “Does it really matter?” I shrugged. “What I think will help is showing the humans they can’t treat us the way they have been in the last few years.” I stood, needing to pace, because I’d never been very good at sitting still, especially when I was in the midst of a difficult conversation. “Maybe the riots won’t help, but there are so many of us that have had enough I can’t just sit around and pretend that everything’s going to be fine in the end, because I don’t believe it will be. The humans… they hate us for what we are. None of them care about who we are.” Unfortunately I knew that from experience. “Once they knew what we are they’re happy to walk away, to protect themselves from us, because we’re evil.”