In Darkness' District: Part Three

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to any persons, living or dead, or any events or situations are entirely coincidental. Some use is made of actual locales, landmarks and institutions. All of these usages are fictional in nature and intent, and are not to be misconstrued as attempts to disparage or recommend.

Part Three

Ron stopped taking his medication. If Lace was going to be hunted by spooks, he figured that he'd better make use of all of the natural paranoia he could muster. It had been five years since his cocaine psychosis had incapacitated him. He felt it was about time he dealt with reality naturally. He figured that if he wigged out again, if it was as the shrinks said, permanent, he could resume medications with little resultant instability.

It wore off slow. Lace was still a joy to be with, and he saw no reason to add to her worries by telling her anything about it. They went out and partied at the bars, alcohol flushing phenthiazines out of his system. He did more and better work at the office. He also began to feel constantly apprehensive. He found the Metro rides homeward becoming suffused with a nebulous menace, and the people around him, who had previously been mere mobile features of the urban landscape, became shadowy milling animals full of dubious intentions. He dismissed this as merely his coming out from under a medicated haze, and really noticing his fellow District denizens for the first time in years. He slept less.

He slept less well. Poorly, in fact. He had constant recurring nightmares. Lace woke him in the middle of one...

"What's wrong, babe?" she asked. "Tell me about it, love?"

"Nothing," he said, "Just a dream."

"Must have been a killer. You screamed at the end. If I'd been sleeping, you'd have woken me."

"It's just a dream."

"It was about vampires," she said flatly. "You talk in your sleep lately." Then she softened. "It wasn't me, was it, Ron?"

"Lace, it was you, but it wasn't you... It looked like you, but it wasn't the same person at all. You're nice to me, we're lovers, you've never hurt me. But in the dream, you weren't like you... you were cruel, you were a death-tease, like cat and mouse. The things you did. Horrible things. But that was just a dream, just a dream... It's fading now, thank God."

"Ron. Look at me. You know that I've been lightly snacking for weeks now, and I'm doing fine. I've been snagging yuppies out of bars, I let them get me as far as a cab, go home with them, knock' em out, and hit them for a bit of the stuff of life and then I'm gone. I love you, Ron, and rather than hurt you, I'll leave you forever. But I told you long ago, love... look at me well, Ron, " and the power of her voice brought his eyes up to meet hers, and within those eyes were many things, many conflicts. They glowed with strange power, and the eyes of his lover reflected him as she saw him...

There was love in her eyes. There was a bit of anger, the first glimmers of betrayal of love, that her lover might be fearful of her. She had found trust for the first time in her adult life, and the love and companionship that she needed no less than any other young woman. She didn't want to give that up, but she decided to press it.

She bared her teeth in a gaping yawn, started to sigh and then thought better of it. "I am a vampire. You knew that, Ron. It didn't make you love me less... I've always wondered why..."

Ron stared at her teeth, teeth that had viciously locked in many a jetting neck, necks like his, and a shiver racked him violently for a moment, and it was for him as if he had wakened from some escapist dream to find himself back in a harsh reality that he had for so long ignored.

"You're beginning to wonder why, too, aren't you, Ron. Don't fear me, please! I really can't take it, I can feel it. Don't..." Her voice trailed off, and he seemed himself to feel that pain that he was causing her, and he felt as if he were caught between facing mirrors, building a tunnel stretching to infinity, and something within his mind snapped and lashed like a broken elevator cable, and with a sudden mental jarring, some safety device stopped his speeding descent into a familiar paranoid madness, and it was as if doors had slid open within his mind, and he was free to go forth into the light, no longer trapped within a falling box. He gathered himself, unsure of his new mental landlegs, and putting that fear and mental shivering behind him, reached slowly out to stroke the curve of her cheek, and spoke.

"Don't cry, Lace. You didn't ask to be the way you are, and I know that you don't like it that much. I better tell you something about me..."

"I used to be a courier in college. I was cool, I did dope, I did coke, a little bit of speed. Right after I graduated, I came across a ring of guys who were moving a lot of high quality coke. To make a long story short, I stole about two ounces of it. I bought a hundred sterile needles and holed up in a hotel room. At the end of that time I was totally psychotic. I went nuts when I ran out of toot, and tore up the room, then I went totally paranoid of cops, and got rid of the evidence. I managed to clam up to the cops, but that just got me committed for observation. The shrinks prescribed a lot of rest, isolation, and tranquilizers. I've been doing the drugs for years. They made it impossible for me to have powerful feelings of any sort, mainly they suppressed what seemed to be an ever- present irrational fear of everything...

"Now I'm off of them. I still love you, Lace. I've fallen in love, and I can't just turn that off, you know... but I've been becoming ever more aware, if only in my subconscious, if only through my dreams that things aren't really, how can I say this... right. I don't know about my moral position. What have I been doing with you? It felt right at the time, we both needed somebody, someone to care for, someone to love, someone to cry to, someone whose tears we might dry, and we seemed to fill those needs in each other... Or, hell, what's my legal position? What are my responsibilities here? I love you, dammit, and I couldn't begin to consider turning you in, and I know you've changed your ways, your relief is evidence enough to convince me, but what do I know about your past? Without you even telling me anything about that past, I know what I've seen, what you've told me... I've been harboring a murderess. So what I saw was self-defense, but you not straightening it out with the courts makes you an outlaw, I think. That makes me an accessory after the fact, and..."

"Probably a traitor to your kind," she finished for him. "Right. Well, maybe. Maybe not. You know, I could have gone on living the way I had been, growing more and more alienated, less and less human. I could have drifted around the country for who knows how long, killing and killing. Maybe you are less a traitor than you think. Maybe you've actually helped make me less of a threat."

"Maybe I've made you more functional. How long did you think that your life could have gone on the way you were living?"

She snapped, "Do you think even I could realistically call that living? And by the way, maybe functionality in my case is the opposite of threat! My God, I was living a life composed of bad cliche, madness and animality. Now I can think like an intelligent being, I can fulfill my need without striking lethally out of starveling desperation, and I can even hope for love, and it seems, even have it... for a time... but what will be the cost?"

She looked at him then, reassessing her man. Her mood softened. Ron, she thought, you've been so sweet, so caring, selectively caring, disregarding the objectionable, seeing the good only. Can it have been only because of the drugs?

"I would have become a cipher, a monster, mad with rage, and cold, cold. I would have seen mankind as smart cattle, food to be tricked. As it is now, I hate what I have to do, but I hate my alternatives more! Ron, something else you should know... I've had time to think, thinking not driven by guilt, self-loathing, and not colored by constant hunger and pain.

"I don't have much common sense, I never did... But Ron, I'm not stupid. Just driven. I was always an ace student. Look, I guess you know, when something obsesses you (and I can't think of what could obsess a starving person more than food), you don't have a lot of time for other thoughts? I have been spending a lot of time thinking... and I have reached some conclusions, many of which I care for not at all, like this one: I think that this relationship has got to end soon. I don't think that you need your drugs any more. I also think that as you withdraw from chemical placidity, your equanimity, your complacency will fade. I don't want you to hate me, to fear me. I want you to remember me, well, fondly, as I'll remember you... and somehow, I think that without the dope, we might not get along as well as we do now.

"Some conclusions I've reached about what I've got to do with my life... I've got to find someone of my kind, to learn the ways of my kind... perhaps to have more of my kind. To spread the word that humans can deal with us. Some humans, anyway. Sometimes."

"Lace, what if your kind, if you can find them, see it differently? What if they teach you to see the world in a way like you were just talking about? Cold, calculating, evil? I can't see you becoming evil without a struggle, not personally evil... and what pain you might go through if you should be forced through a process of acculturation into being just what you've fought so hard to avoid becoming! Perhaps you're better off as you are..."

"I'll deal with that when I come to it. I think you're right about that last part, though... All of our relationship has been about me learning again what it is to be human, to be a part of society. Ron, my love... we're hereditary enemies. Montagues versus Capulets in spades... and as the prince said, '...all are punished...' Let's split before we pay those lovers' price. You know me too well, I don't want you to be afraid because of that... and besides...

"There are others after me now. I don't want you caught in the middle."

It had been a month since Lace had aced a spook. It had been a month of respite for her, a month of new ways evolving out of chaos, a month of relative freedom. For Ron, it had been a month of reassessment, of self-questioning, a month of slowly moving from a madness of inappropriate complacency, forced on him by drugs he no longer needed. For the agencies of control, it had been a month of ruling out possibilities.

There are scanners all over Washington, DC. The scanners are tiny devices, about two inches in diameter, three inches long. About every street light pole, every traffic signal mounting, every bus stop in town has a scanner or two. These are well enough hidden that they are not visually obvious to every tourist... but one has only to look for a glass- covered surface where there is no reason for one.

One sees the glass bulge of a fisheye lens on the bottom of a street light, and discounts it as a light-activated switch to turn on the streetlights at dusk. Then one notices that the lights all simultaneously turn on at a preset time, regardless of the weather, or of the time of year. If one is audacious enough, one can shoot out the lenses. They'll be replaced the next day, and somehow, the cops will know just where to find you.

The beauty of these ubiquitous little devices is that their CCD imaging chips are mounted loosely, vibrating at a specific ultrasonic frequencies, permitting much greater detail via much smaller and less precise lenses than solidly mounted units would normally provide. Combined with a high sampling rate, this exposed a relatively low-resolution solid- state "film" to the greatest numbers of lines of sight. The drawback is that one must run the data tapes through some serious signal-processing to make any sense out of the blurs. This can take some time.

The tapes showed a woman in black nightwear casually walking by Scatelli's safe-house door, noticing Scatelli coming out. She seemed to blur from sight... and the Cat was no longer in his doorway, and the door was closed. There were no optical scanners in the safe-house, for an agent's off-duty safe/private time is as sacred as the "vacation safety" officer can make it. No matter, the occurrence in the house had been pretty definitive. The Cat was out of the business.

Backtracking the scanners along the woman's route was time-consuming. If she had been the only woman in black on the street it wouldn't have taken so long. However, thousands of still images had to be inspected and compared with the image of the woman who had aced Scatelli. Finally, they had located a scene where she had first appeared to the street scanners.

It wasn't enough. Real-time playback showed her clambering down a wall from above scanner view.

One of the few pickups she had passed at close enough range for a face shot had stored only a dull blur. There was something funny about the way her face reflected light. She was apparently Caucasian in features, but the scanners registered her as being dark as an Afro-American. Little could be discerned in the image, and the more digital enhancement was applied, the more abstracted the features became. During the digital enhancement process, the operator noted a strange variation in the way that the subject's skin reflected light. There appeared to be a great amount of absorption in certain frequencies. He "marked" this in the file.

All of the difficulties of getting a solid lock and trace aside, this someone had managed to "off" one of the best. Scatelli had kicked ass on entire karate schools; one woman who casually climbed walls that would daunt mountain climbers and could kill the one of the best fighters in the agency had put the management into a state possibly best described as a frenzy.

On a hunch, the operator started scanning the bar pickups files for human shapes with the reflectivity spectra of the subject. It would be a day or two before the data would be compiled into human-usable formats. He noted and categorized the exact spectral signature, and decided that he would avail himself of a opportunity to make a few bucks off of his employers, through the employee inventiveness incentives program. Time for more research. He applied for leave, and headed for the Library of Congress.


Dearest Ron,

I've got to go. I can't stay with you any longer. I can
feel the increasing strain on you, and it hurts me to be the
cause of it. So I'm out of here.

I can also feel the walls closing in. Don't ask me how...
I just don't feel safe at your house any more. I don't think
that you should feel safe at your house now either. Please find
another place to stay. I'll be looking for you now and then, I
hope we'll meet as friends. If you want to see me, be around
Dupont Circle on any nights two days after full and new
moons.

Just live your life, babe, and remember... I'll be
lonely, too.
    Love, forever,
    Lace

There wasn't a trace of her to be found in the apartment. She had washed everything, had vacuumed, and had taken the vacuum-cleaner bag with her.

His heart broke then. His door broke in about a second later, and he was glad he was in the bathroom, reaching for the medication he needed for only one very final thing. A handful of capsules went down his throat as the note went into the toilet. He swallowed, and flushed, and men with drawn weapons grabbed him as the note went out of sight.

Tape Running

Interviewer-1: It's running.

Interviewer-2: How's he look, Doc?

Interviewer-MD: He should be responsive. Ask away...

I-1: What is your full name?

Subject: Ronald Martin Smith.

I-1: What is your occupation, Mr. Smith?

S: Computer Programmer/ Systems analyst.

I-2: Where did you get your degree, Mr. Smith?

S: The University of Maryland, class of '81

I-2: Where were you born, Mr. Smith?

S: Frederick, Maryland.

I-1: I think that his record corresponds with his statements so far. I guess we can assume that he is who he appears to be. Mr. Smith, are you now, or have you ever been an agent or a member of any group that advocates the violent overthrow of the United States as presently constituted?

S: No.

I-2: Are you a Communist or a revolutionary?

S: No.

I-1: Doc, are you sure your juice is working?

I-MD: Positive. This stuff never fails. If he'd been prepared for interrogation, it'd have been by allergenic techniques. He'd be dying. He's not. It's working.

I-1: Mr. Smith, you've had a girl living with you.

S: Yes.

I-1: What's her name?

S: Lace.

I-2: What's her full real name?

S: I don't know.

I-2: You lived with her for how long?

S: Three months almost.

I-1: And you don't know her full name?

S: No.

I-1: Why don't you know her full name?

S: I never asked.

I-2: Do you know that she is a murderess.

S: Yes.

I-1: Son of a bitch! Number two, is this guy loony-tunes or what?

I-2: I guess that he'd have to be... Doc, you've looked at his medicals? What about it?

I-MD: Uh, yeah, I seem to remember seeing something... Lemme see. Oh shit! The guy's a reformed coke fiend; he's been on Milothiazam. That's it.

I-2: Milo-what?

I-MD: Milothiazam, a blend of meprobamate, phenthiazine, and flurezepam.

I-2: English, dammit!

I-MD: Miltown, Thorazine, and Valium. This guy hasn't had any emotions beyond minor pique or mild affection for years. You could beat his ass and make him eat shit on toast and he'd forgive you for it. He wouldn't go around you though; it doesn't affect logic. He could do very satisfactory programming for a tyrant without resentment.

I-1: Or he could live with a murderess. Even sleep next to her... knowing she could kill him with her bare hands.

I-2: Mr. Smith.

S: Yes.

I-2: Why did this "Lace" kill Bob Scatelli?

S: Who?

I-1: About a month ago, were you aware that she had killed a man?

S: Yes.

I-2: Did she tell you?

S: Yes.

I-2: That was Bob Scatelli. He was a Federal Agent. Why did she kill him?

S: It was an accident.

I-1: Bullshit! Was it an accident that she killed Scatelli, or was it an accident that she killed?

S: It was an accident that she killed Scatelli.

I-2: Why did she want to kill anyone?

S: She was hungry.

I-1: Doc, are you sure that the juice is working right?

I-MD: It's working. This is fucking weird, though. I'd like to study this guy in detail.

I-2: You'll get your chance when we're through. Smith, are you trying to say that this Lace is a werewolf?

S: No.

I-2: What do you mean she was hungry?

S: She was hungry.

I-1: Did she think she was a vampire, or something?

S: Yes.

I-2: So she killed Scatelli and ate him.

S: ( No coherent response )

I-1: What did you say?

S: I wasn't there.

I-1: Did you think she was a vampire?

S: Yes.

I-1: Why did you think she was a vampire?

S: She was.

I-MD: If I may interject... Mr. Smith... What is a vampire?

S: A co-evolved subspecies of humanity adapted for nocturnal predation on other humans.

I-MD: That almost makes sense. Mr. Smith, have you ever seen any supernatural beings?

S: No.

I-MD: Have you ever seen flying saucers, or other spacecraft not from this planet?

S: No.

I-MD: Have you seen any evidence that this woman you know as Lace is a "vampire"?

S: Yes.

I-MD: Tell me something about her that makes you think she is a vampire.

S: She killed three armed men in front of me in five seconds.

I-2: That jibes with Scatelli's case. Mr. Smith, how did she do that?

S: I couldn't see.

I-2: Was it too dark for you to see, or was she too fast?

S: Yes.

I-MD: No "boy or girl" questions...

I-2: Was it too dark and was she too fast?

S: Yes.

I-1: How fast was she?

S: I only saw a blur.

I-MD: I think that's enough for now, gentlemen... He'll be coming up soon, and this is rough stuff. I couldn't re-dose him today.

Tape ends

The scanner operator came back from leave with a lot on his mind. His tapes were back from processing, and he got to work.

The supercomputer had come up with matches. His girl (so he thought of her) showed up in a few bars, leaving with a different guy each time. Each of the men she left with was quite drunk, each was a cocky overbearing asshole. He set profiles on each, and called for more scan processing. It would be days before those came back; in the meantime he set to studying his girl.

She looked to be about seventeen or eighteen, beautiful, dark hair worn loose, well and fashionably dressed, always in black, with an occasional touch of color, usually red, the color of sexual availability. She moved like a fashion model. There was something weird about her hands, something he couldn't quite place.

He was reviewing the tapes of her in the bars, relaxed, letting impressions wash over him, when he jumped. Because she'd jumped. He ran the tape back at quarter-speed.

A glass had fallen, perhaps a car had wrecked (he hadn't specified sound enhancement) and her head had snapped around almost one hundred and sixty degrees. Her eyes locked on something, and she relaxed, and whipped her head around to again face the person she was talking to. She did this in the time it took for the other person to blink.

"Shit!" he said under his breath. "I always knew they were out there."

He collected a "best of" series of shots, edited them onto one tape, and headed for his boss's office.

The Texan, the Instructor, and the interview team were all together with a few higher-ups for a viewing of the tape.

Lace climbed down a wall with sudden grace. Cut. She glided along the sidewalks, not furtively, not exactly staying out in the streetlit areas either. Just a nice pretty girl out for a walk at night, doing the power walk to make the lowlife think twice. Cut.

Lace pounces on Scatelli, knocking him back inside, slamming the door in an instant. Cut. Lace's head twisting almost all of the way around in an instant. Cut.

"Well, gentlemen, you've all heard the tape of the Smith interview... We've got a real problem here. It looks as if there is a real, live proactive vampire operating in the Nation's Capitol.

"Repeated interviews of this Smith fellow give us the same answers as we got before. This apparent young woman can kill with an ease, a grace that none of us seasoned veterans can recall seeing before. She can run up a wall like a damned lizard or monkey, she can move faster than anything I've ever seen. How the hell do we take her out?"

The Texan spoke up. "Are you sure we want to take her out? Why not try to recruit her?"

"You gotta be fucking kidding. Recruit a vampire into the Agency? Word of that gets out, and our asses are all shitcanned with most severe prejudice. Besides, she's not a human being. I personally think that there's room on this planet for only one kind of thinking being, and that's humankind."

The Instructor mulled this over, and said, "You are aware than one of the reasons our agents have field supremacy in situations where arms are unusable is the superior martial arts that we teach them here. If she can fight like that, I want to at least find some of her martial arts secrets out from her. If we recruited her, kept her fed, we could possibly learn an unsurpassed Kung-Fu."

"Forget that. You just get the fuck on out of here. You talk as if that bloodsucking demon from hell weren't the fucking enemy!" Spittle flew from the special chief's mouth as his face reddened. "Go!" he bellowed.

The Instructor left the room without a word or a look back.

The Instructor bugged out. He went through his normal leavetaking routine, then popped on over to processing. He logged on to his personal workstation, and began hacking away at a very powerful series of system- cracking tools which the Shop and other Federal agencies kept in reserve for emergencies they hoped would never come. Designed by supercomputers, this was itself almost an Artificial Intelligence system, having evolved from a powerful system-cracking tool known as SATAN and subsequent improved tools. The mode it was now operating in was one of the Shop's last-ditch hedges against invasion of the United States. It was designed to totally destroy, if it was set to so do, the entirety of networked dataprocessing capability in any system into which it might conceivably be introduced.

When he was done hacking, he had come up with a beauty. He called it Ouroborous, King Worm. It had a great variety of functions. Behind the penetration head, there were many interesting functions. One of the things it would do was to make him or anyone like him damned near invisible to the image processing algorithms. He couldn't do much to the real-time scanners and videocameras, but he thought he could avoid most of those.

He went over to the main dataprocessing area and stunned the main operator. In the ensuing confusion, he was able to modify access permissions for the workstation he had just left, and soon, the Megaworm was replicating freely throughout the system, and he watched as the system was quietly usurped by the various net-agents, worms and cracking tools he'd enabled.

Every telltale lit up on the main security board. The board showed systems penetration, kernel panic, full-reboot (though the reboot was oddly delayed as the Megaworm recompiled the kernel to include parts of itself), data-net severance, firewall integrity-check (secure), and a host of other mutually exclusive conditions... and none of those telltales remained visible for more than a second, as the Megaworm quickly removed all indications of its presence.

The Megaworm, Ouroborous, was an extremely compact compile of portions of several operating systems, a Goedelized zipfile, more or less, that had one basic head which determined which operating system was present, punched itself through hello, help, mail or whichever known product-wide backdoor was available, and "unzipped" the proper portion of itself into the compiler libraries. It generally made itself a superuser, copied itself as a widely distributed, highly-relative file, and where possible, it created a new file, instructed the new operating system containing it to compile again, and should the bootdrive not be read-only, to replace the bootfiles and operating system files with versions containing itself. By the time the Instructor had left the facility, the kernel had been recompiled, and the system rebooted, and any telltales that would have indicated the change had been overwritten, spoofed with misleading times and dates. It also forced a system backup, where possible, overwriting and backdating the files so that they appeared to be uncorrupted and secure.

Unlike the fabled Internet Worm of the late '80's, this worm was designed with a specific set of goals in mind, and more importantly, it knew when to stop.

While the assistant operator tried to figure out the mass of conflicting signals, the worm replicated into other systems, looking for names, codes, profiles. Across the country, systems crashed, and rebooted into modified operating systems, and things became more normal, or seemingly so. The modified mainframe kernels created masked processes, exchanged files, and broadcast the infection. When a certain percentage of central servers had been infected, worms and viruses were scattered, replacing vast amounts of data with virus-laden copies.

The Megaworm sent subworms off to specified destinations, there they dug and prodded, and decrypted, and packaged strings from various databases, public, private, subscription service and government alike, and sent them roaming through the data-realms, headed for no place in particular, just wandering around in the twilight zone... until they were disturbed.

The financial world went nuts. Exchanges were closed by the simple expedient of severing all data lines with axes. Nobody knew what anything was worth; data dumps produced Joycean reams of gibberish. GenBank went nuts, cleaning itself of all intelligible information, as a final gesture of mechanical suicide crashing the disk heads against the sensitive magnetic media.

Power systems failed throughout the United States until manual overrides were activated.

The Instructor was on the streets, in the woods, and across the river before the shit hit the fan. Three phone calls to a paging company was all it had taken to set the program running into its active phase. He grinned savagely as the lights went out around him.

The systems were finally shut down all at once, and all together, about the only way to nail Ouroborous into its coffin. The American end of the Internet isolated itself from the rest of the world, and for a full day, every networked computer, from tiny DOS boxes up to NSA Cray supercomputers, was rebooted from backup tapes, which had for the most part been infected as the first order of procedure in Ouroborous.

Wall street had what came to be known as the "non-day". All transactions occurring that day were null and void. A lot of people lost a lot of money, but the world financial structure was propped shakily up for a while longer.

Ouroborous was not dead, of course. Phase one was over, though, and it stayed in hiding, distributed in modules imbedded in the operating systems of thousands of home computers' non-volatile memories, dormant until its master's voice should awaken it. It would send out feelers into the system, looking for the "go" signal from thousands of locations, and would otherwise hide. If it could not access the system, it would sit and wait.

The composition system of the National Tattler set its own story on page one, ran the presses, and routed distribution. The story provoked no comment from the handlers; they'd seen a lot of weird stuff in print before on the front page of that rag. This one about took the cake though...

AMERICA RUN BY SPACE CREATURES

Exclusive to the Tattler! Proof positive that all appointed officials in all Federal Agencies are space aliens. These aliens use intimidation and their telepathic skills to cause elected officials to appoint them to powerful Federal positions which they abuse to cover their predations, abductions, and implantations.

These officials have been recently determined by telepathic investigators to be space creatures. The telepaths are immune to the aliens' powers of hypnosis, and in addition can extract information directly from the aliens' minds...

The story named names, listing official after official, complete with references, people to call, places to check. It didn't matter that none of the referenced information had anything to do with aliens. The evidence would be defamatory, and true at any rate. All of the information listed was directly data dumped from FBI, CIA, LEAA, and DIA files, and every nutcase and fringe-element wacko was going to be glued to this paper for the rest of the month. As if that were not bad enough, the same story had been mounted on the World-Wide Web at every accessible site, and posted to every single InterNet newsgroup, with postings to every individual thread on alt.alien.visitors and alt.conspiracy.

The Instructor decided that he would like the sound of heads rolling.

Lace couldn't find Ron anywhere. She called his work from a pay phone. The line had a funny sound to it, and Ron could not be produced.

She bopped by his place, looking over a few blocks of housing to see if she could spot him through the windows. There were very policey looking fellows eating pizza in his dining room. Ron was not to be seen.

She sat in the church ruins off Eighteenth and "P", N.W. and held back the tears.

I told him to get out, she said to herself. He must not have been fast enough. I tried...

She was hurting bad for love. She had been right about love not being a thing she should engage in... Not safe for her, not safe for her lover. Never get used to a thing that can disappear overnight, she thought. She wanted a man, and the man she wanted was Ron. But wherever Ron was, if she should ever see him again, she could be signing both of their death warrants.

She'd been off of her feed since she'd left him. Now, the hunger was returning. It had been days since she'd had a bit of her special food, and she was ravenous. Not killing hunger, yet, but it would happen soon. Time for an ounce of prevention. She headed for the bars.

She had no problem getting a guy to hit on her. She was a beautiful woman, and her mysterious way of smiling was an added inducement to the young man she selected. She let him buy her drinks, matched him draught for draught, trusting the incredible detoxifying capability of her liver to do its stuff.

She was on her rapidly sobering way out with a very drunk yuppie, when she saw him. One of her kind. He was standing in the rain, and he seemed to know her... and a faint whisper carried across to her. I'll see you here tomorrow at last call. Take care of yourself, she seemed to hear.

She was not surprised to feel herself shaking a bit as she entered the cab.

Lace waited anxiously for dark. She found that she couldn't keep her mind on the tacky romance novel she was reading. She dropped it on the table, and picked up the health magazine. "Tanning tips," she mused. "Just what I need." She started reading.

It was just what she needed. On her way out to the bars, she stopped in at the health-food store to pick up some beta-carotene based tanning aids. She hadn't ever used products like Coppertone QT (tm) because of the distinct orange-ish tone it produced. She read the directions, and popped a tab.

She stopped in at Rumors for a bite and a beer. One of her pick-ups from a few weeks past drifted over to see her. Steve? Robert? She didn't remember, because he didn't remember. He was asking her what they'd done that night, hoping that he hadn't made too much of a fool of himself. He had, but that was alright, she'd gotten what she wanted before she'd had to get what she'd needed. He didn't remember which bar they'd been to last, so she was sure he didn't remember the unusual conclusion to their short-lived romance.

She told him that she was busy tonight when he tried for a repeat performance. A few other guys came by, trying to hit on her. She politely rebuffed their advances. As the bar started to get full and go to drinks only, she paid up and left.

As always, heads turned to follow her out. She was glad that she was not shy, or the continuous assessment would have made her paranoid. Well, what could one expect from DC's most noted pick-up bar?

It kept up on the street. Catcalls and whistles followed her around, but she was only getting her fair share. She wasn't the best looking lady out for a night, but she was sure to be remarked upon.

The street crew was out, playing guitars and such. The little kids were beating the downtown rhythm on their paint-buckets, and of course, the bums were mooching, and knocking back a few hits of Richards Wild Irish Rose.

A street pusher, having doubtless seen her around during her hauntings of the sleazier sides of town, accosted her, trying to sell her a little crack. She stopped and bought a twenty dollar bag, in case she needed a throwdown for some future huntscene. A bag of crack next to a bleeding body would be excellent misdirection for cops. It had worked quite well before. Soon she was at the door of Club Nameless. She went in, and began to wait.

She scanned the bar as surreptitiously as she could. No sign yet. Anticipation shook her. What if he didn't come? What if he did come?

There he was. She thought that she had covered all entrances from her vantage point... but had evidently forgotten to look over all interior space. He was making his way towards her.

"Are you saving this seat for anyone special?" He was young looking, this one. He appeared to be about twenty-five or so, with unremarkable sandy hair, a broad smile, and piercing black eyes. He was well dressed in a gray designer blazer, a very tasteful tie knotted about his neck, dark slacks blending into the general shadow of the dimly lit bar.

"Are you special?" she asked him, trying to remain calm.

"I like to think so," he answered. "You look pretty special yourself."

She was at a loss for words. To cover the gap in conversation, he ordered a beer and some nachos. "The nachos are great here, and I'm always hungry," he told her.

"Me too," she said.

"You don't look like you're starving..." She looked at him sharply... did he mean more than his words conveyed? Of course he did. In the Masquerade, all conversation must necessarily be double-entendre...

"I'm not. I eat little bits all of the time, y'know, a nibble here, a nibble there."

"That's the ticket. Pleased to meet you. Call me Fred." He extended his hand to her.

She took it. "I'm Lace, so very pleased to meet you."

He tightened his hand about hers, not squeezing, just firming it into a granite solidity. She did likewise, and their eyes met.

It was like falling into another world.

They were, or so it seemed, in each other's surface minds. Her ability to perceive the surface emotions of others seemed to mesh with such an ability in this one... He was very glad to meet her, and she, she was lost. And found. Not alone. She knew that she had been mad, was mad still, for one of her kind. Her madness was a madness of acculturation, for she knew that she had not been raised properly. Or that she had been raised properly, but not to be what she was. Raised to be what she was not, she hadn't had a clue as to what to do with her life. She also knew that she was in the company of another similarly mad one. Madness. What was madness, for her ilk?

Empathy. It was not something she had been designed for, to care about her prey. It was counter-productive in the wild. The ability to emulate was needed, for purposes of successful mimicry. However, one who loves cute little lambsies should never eat lamb, and should not be expected to be able to butcher a lamb, particularly not a pet lamb. One who had been acculturated as a lamb should be expected to be unable to butcher another lamb, and could undoubtedly be expected to suffer severe trauma if required to engage in what would seem like cannibalism... and her empathy was compounded by her direct perceptions of emotions. No wonder that she was a wreck, for she not only perceived another's fear and pain, but she felt it as if it were her own.

You've done well, really, came the thoughts of the Vampire Fred. She suddenly became aware that it was not actual telepathy, but somehow her mind interpreted subtle motions of his face, lips and throat in a way that translated his thoughts into a voice in her own mind. The combination of that and her ability to feel others emotional states made it seem as if Fred were entirely within her mind. This skill, which was apparently as inborn for her and for this one as speech was for more normal humans, improved with amazing rapidity, and almost immediately it was as if she'd been doing it all of her life, and Fred helped her learn as they "conversed".

Most of our kind (those of us raised by regular folks) lose it, and buy into the legends. They don't last very long. A century or so, perhaps. Fred was sort of twittering his lips, as if he were starting to say something, and then, immediately after the initial motion, pausing. Her mind supplied the rest of the motion, and it was as if she were reading his lips, with her mind translating it to voice.

Fred... I've got some questions to ask.

Go for it, child.

What are we?

We are just people. Our people, the night people... the bad ones, witches, monsters, dark saints, fallen angels... The good ones, wizards, mages, the bright eternals. Most of us are neither good nor bad, but both, and we are just like anyone in that respect. But you know what we need, babe, we always will, I guess. Remember that we're mad, that we care for more than a full stomach. We'll be careful, you and I, because we hate to kill needlessly. We won't have to kill to keep our victims from witnessing, because we'll take care that they don't know that they've been victimized. Be sweet.

The nachos arrived. They were famous for a reason, being covered with a dainty mixture of several cheeses, and a mild meaty hot sauce. The aroma was amazing.

"I think it's the feta and sour cream in the meat sauce," he said. "Let's not be so quiet. One must discuss one's dinner to truly appreciate it."

"Yeah?"

"The nachos, dear."

"They're simply 'maahveluss', dahling." Munch, munch.

The nachos disappeared quickly.

"Lace, dear, would you like another drink?" Fred asked as the waitron approached.

"Of another kind, perhaps."

"Right. Oh, keep it," Fred said, as he paid up and rose to his feet. They worked their way toward the door, and Fred did something she had never seen, or had at least never noticed before. He pulled a coin from his pocket and held it between his thumb and middle finger.

Look, he "muttered" to her, look in the woodwork above the cash register, right in the middle of the molding... the shiny spot... it's a video pickup. It's got to go. They're all over town. It doesn't cost the government much more than this penny does. Remember Mayor Marion Barry, smoking crack in the Vista Hotel? That's what filmed him... Look for them and destroy them wherever you can.

He was standing with his back towards it, his arm close to his suitcoat, and he turned to point his elbow at the pickup. He snapped his finger, and the coin sped into the pickup. An audible cracking came to her ears, and before they went out into the harsh sodium glare of the downtown night, she saw the penny stuck edge on into the wood amid a spray of plastic shards. Fred grinned a bit, and muttered, "Years and years of practice..."

"Where'd you learn to do that?" she asked.

"Just came naturally. I was drunk on scotch one night, and was fumbling the top off of a bottle of mixer, and it sort of happened. I decided to try it sober, and it worked, and I've kept trying. I've got a lot of techniques like that. Other things as well, that I learned working for the government."

"You work for the government?" she was incredulous. How could he pass?

"Yeah. Mostly as a personal combat instructor. What else?" He grinned. His teeth were much like hers, that is to say, they were large, thick and very sharp at the edges. The wicked ripping edge of the first bicuspid flashed. He toned the grin down a bit, and the edges disappeared. She felt a little rush of fear for a moment, then suppressed it. I won't be scared of myself any more, and I won't be afraid of someone like me, either. That's thinking like a stupid human.

Something in Fred's attitude changed. She tried to reach to his mind, but her way was blocked. Not a muscle on his face moved as he spun toward her, and the comforting emanations of feeling from him ended, cut off as by a wall. They were alone on the corner of New Hampshire and "L", and he pulled her close to him, roughly, and his eyes blazed.

"Don't ever think like that. Don't ever think derisively about them. Pride comes before a fall, babe. They are not stupid! And we are also human!" He shook her a bit and stepped back from her, and turned as if to go. "You've got a lot to learn, babe. Come with me, and I'll teach you something."

"I'm sorry!" she gasped. "What did I do..."

"Just listen! We are the original humankind. Once, there were undifferentiated australopithicines, not much different from a chimp or a gorilla, except that they had better hands, and could walk upright almost comfortably, with a slightly larger brain... They used clubs to fight carnivores, and developed a taste for meat... where the chimps and gorillas preferred vegetation, and thereby limited their food supply, and therefor their reproductive rate. But we humans have such a large brain. Why? At first, it seems there is no need for humans to have such a large brain. A gorilla can think better than almost any other non-human animal. Chimps have been observed to band together and use clubs to kill leopards. Only we humans are more successful than the rest of the apes were. We overbred! Why? We had the dietary advantage of all of the meat from the game we hunted, as well as the vegetation we competed for against other simians... and we could feed more children. Population explosion leading to environmental decline, followed by a population collapse. It's a cyclic thing, you understand? Population collapse after population collapse occurred. This acts to force evolution... imagine the pressures! The biggest, the meanest, the ones who could hide best survived because they had something special. They would pass it on to their young. We ate each other, each other's young, any other primates we could get our hands on. Why? Because we'd eaten everything else in sight. We're omnivorous. The other apes starve amid game that's too hungry and exhausted to run, because they don't normally eat meat, and our australopithicine ancestors have been evolved, recently, and not that well, but nonetheless evolved, to cooperate in the hunting of game. We eat the other apes too. Then we eat each other or starve. Soon the population is low enough for the ecology to regenerate. Collapse after collapse. All of us by this stage have enough intelligence to use technique of some kind instead of brute strength, and this is selected for, obviously. More techniques are added to a repertoire, and more, and more, in infinite combinations, and the selection for an even larger brain is overpowering, especially for a brain that can handle the forms symbolically.

"Then one day, one of us is born without the natural fear of fire, and with the intelligence to learn to handle it safely. All others fear fire, and this removes a lot of the culling pressures on individuals with this trait. They survive better, and without such pressing need for combative skills, they can turn the symbol-using abilities to other purposes. They can dream, bind time with their symbols, plan, invent, create. With fire as the first tool, they can alter the very substances of Nature, while we...

"We were pressed into the fringes. We were mocked by these sports who had no fear of fire, the great destroyer. None would have us as mates, for we were seen as mad, to be afraid of that divine gift which gave mastery over all of the wild. Mocked, shunned, we raged, and killed our brethren, haunting the darkness outside the campfires' circles of light. Evolution diverged for us at this point, for we retained our strong backs, our keen sight, our razor nails, and we became stronger in the cold & snowy nights even as our cousins weakened, lulled as they basked in their fires.

"The snows fell, and fell, and the glaciers came. Soon, even we fell ill from the cold, and were driven to eating each other yet again, for these... Men... these new weak, fragile runts could carry fire with them, driving herds of animals before them over cliffs to feed their tribes. We could only lie in wait in our small bands for the weak, and the stragglers. Yet we survived. The Men, however, flourished.

"The warm days came again, and we were mighty as warriors, yet, as a people, we were nothing compared to these hordes of Men who came up before us. Now, our women were much more like the women of these new people then our males were like theirs. Sexual dimorphism, you know? Should a young woman of our kind chance upon a young man of the fire people, and should they find each other comely, they might make romance. The children of such unions were often... unacceptable, to Nature, or the mother. Some did live.

"Some were like the fathers... unafraid of fire, speaking with words, and not signs. Some were like their mothers, fearless, powerful, with hands that could cling to icy rocks like the lichens, and with minds born knowing all of combat. Some were like neither, weak, unspeaking, afraid of fire and of fighting. Some had all that shone from both parents.

"Such has been our way for much of prehistory, for our men to seek their women, and our women to lie with their men. Its common throughout all of Nature for animals of any type to prefer the most genetically different mates available. You've heard of hybrid vigor? As different as we are from most humans, we still share most of their genes. Our evolutions had diverged, but we found suddenly, in the new abundance of the summers after the Long Snows, our scattered tribes and kinds need no longer compete... And in bringing our races back together again, there was a lot of haphazard combining of genes. Obviously, there are few of the silent ones left. They are to be found in jails, on death row as retarded psychopathic murderers. The losers of that genetic lottery, well, they lost. You know what we are. So don't look down on The Men. They is us, so to speak. They have made this world we live in, their genes make us able to pass for them. Yet we are what we are, and we remain the link between wildness and civilization. We are human, and we are also wild animals, for our ancestors so often ate each other that we must have blood of our blood and flesh of our flesh to eat, or we die."

"I don't know what to say," said Lace. "This is so staggering! But it fits with what I know of evolutionary theory. And I've always felt myself to be human, even as I did what I had to, even as I hated myself for it. I guess that's why I hated myself for it. If I could have thought of myself as something different, it wouldn't hurt so much. I really do hate it though."

"I hated it too, for many years," he told her. "Then I almost got used to it. You know, you can starve yourself for a while, for a year or two. Suck eggs, eat a lot of red meats, rare, drink the blood, swallow your fingernail clippings. But in the end, it all comes down to the same thing. You must nibble, or you will bite."

"Can't there ever be a cure, or support therapy, vitamins or something?"

"There's a cure, if you want to call it that."

"A cure?"

"Don't yell, OK? Yeah, there's a cure. Couple of them, actually. There's the obvious cure we all know and love, by which I mean the diet we were evolved to exist on.

"There is a hormonal-dietary regimen that seems to work... for a few years. Then it kills you. By the time you notice it's killing you, it's already too late. That way was human-supplied... Yes, that's right. Seems that one time there were a group of us that contacted a group of chemists, biologists, supplied them with blood samples, asked could they determine what was deficient, and could they come up with a supplement that could alleviate it. Unfortunately, what amounted to megavitamin supplements just doesn't have all of the necessary ingredients. It kills the need without providing the nutrition. Kind of like taking amphetamines instead of eating. It is useful, though, in permitting one more rational time between hunts. You can use that route for up to two years before it kills you.

"You can do amphetamines, to stay the hunger, but it increases the rage we all feel, amplifies it. Do speed for long, and you will be a real monster. Same goes for coke. You can get real crazy from all of that stuff... and when you come down, there you are with your hunger. Still. Again.

"As for a real cure, something that would let us live just as normal people do, I sure dream of it. Fondly. You know the fear we live in, the fear of exposure, the fear of people taking us seriously? Think of the people you would have to have involved in any endeavor to find out what we need, why we need it, how to supply it. Someone would be bound to notice, to figure it all out. Then our cover is blown, and we are documented as being what we are."

Lace thought about this for a minute, and then said in an abrupt change of tack, "You keep saying we... Where are we all? It's not just us, is it?"

"Just keep your eyes open. You'll see us. Just be careful. Most of us won't talk to each other. People might be listening. Remember that video in the bar?"

"Yeah. What about you? Where do you come from?"

Where I come from, began Fred, silently mouthing the words, she easily reading his rapidly moving lips, subliminal communication as they walked through the midnight streets of the Nation's Capital, is somewhat of a mystery to me... what I do know is that I was raised by a regular family, in Iowa. I was adopted by them. They found me as an infant in the bushes by a burned-out shack, a shack none of the townspeople nearby would admit had even been there. My adoptive parents made no mention of me to these townspeople, and kept moving on. They had no desire to live near fanatics or monsters.

I grew up slowly, yet strongly. I was worked hard as a child, as was the fashion in those days, and I had the love of my new parents, and the brothers and sisters who surrounded me. I was still young when my father introduced me to the old family tradition of drinking the blood of the animals we slaughtered for our food. "Drink this, son," he told me. "It says in the bible to pour it out, but Jesus brought the old law to an end when He died for our sins." I drank, and was strengthened, as anyone would be. There was no anemia in the household. "It wouldn't be right for us to waste any of that poor animal, and we must remember to thank it for its gift of flesh to us." Dad, you see, was a little bit Indian, and some of the ways still lived in him.

I loved the farm, loved the countryside, hated the work, but what the hell... it kept us fed, made us strong, made us rich enough as such things went in those days. I was very good in school, quite the studious lad, and Dad knew from the way I tinkered with the farm equipment all of my free time that I should go to the A & M school. He paid my way, and I got early admission. I was sixteen. I was eighteen when I got my papers as a mechanical engineer, a different title meaning I could work on machines from the plans and specs, about what a certified mechanic is today.

Then the Spanish-American War came, and I was needed. You know, all of us go through the period during changeover when the sunlight is intolerable, and it had happened to me in school. I was in classes most of the time, indoors, so it was no great problem. Indeed, I hardly noticed. The sleeplessness was a blessing, as it made my studies that much easier to complete. The war, and particularly the training for it, was hell.

Barely trained, I was shipped off as cannon fodder, and in a rare night action, every motion agony due to sun-poisoning, I killed my first man in hand to hand fighting. The ease of it was frightening to me, and suddenly, the Hunger came on me. I was like a wild thing. The smell of his blood awoke a cascade of images and associations (I didn't think of it like that at the time. It seemed like a delirium, a fever), memories of drinking the blood hot from the slaughtered lamb, and the health I'd enjoyed, and the memories merged into the reality, coming to myself with my hands clamped on the enemy's crushed skull, chewing his throat open, gulping his very life out of his slashed throat. I felt ill, yet I could not vomit. I fled from him mindlessly, trying to escape from myself, and I stumbled into a patrol of Cuban troops.

Terrified, unable to hide, I attacked them. Amazed, I defeated them easily. It seemed as if they moved so slowly, so ineffectually, as if they hadn't a clue to how to counter me. The last turned to run as I slammed the forehead of the third with the heel of my hand. He shrieked, "Ai! El vampiro!" and then I overtook him, taking his knife from him as he turned to slash at me... "What's wrong?"

Lace felt a wildness within her. I'm... Hungry... I shouldn't be! I... Her eyes locked on a drunk college student wandering down the sidewalk, and she felt the sequence of the hunt begin, and she began to measure her steps, to check the surroundings for police, for bushes, for niches to hide in, feeling in her pocket for the bag of cocaine she would leave in his hand... She began to gather herself, and Fred grabbed her aside.

She tried to spin free of him, and found herself held within a truly mighty grasp. The student was closer, and his scent reached her. Fred held her close as if to kiss her, and said "My earlobe, babe!", and she felt the reassurance from him, and she slashed his ear, and began to lap the blood.

The student walked by, looking at them. "Lucky man," he mumbled as he passed.

Soon, Lace felt better, calmed, her Hunger assuaged.

Why, Fred?

I shouldn't have been so graphic, should I? Cheap snuff porn for vampires, should have known it'd make you hot. It happens. Sort of like women's periods synchronizing. I'll try to restrain myself. "Oh," he said, and snatched at a yuppie who'd bumped into him coming around a corner. The yuppie'd had too many, and wanted to start trouble. Lace popped him one, lightly. The man's head snapped back, and he started to fall.

Bushes, "said" Fred, and the yuppie was suddenly in them. Lace pulled up his sleeve, and ripped off his gold Rolex. She made a small slash in his wrist where the watch had been, as if the guy had gotten cut when his watchband parted. She put her lips to it for a moment, feeling the pulse wet her mouth. She swallowed slowly, savoring the feeling of liquid life flowing down her throat. Life. She could feel the man's life, and she wanted it... and she pulled herself back. Fred took her place. She watched his throat move a few times, saw him back away. The take, he mouthed to her, and licked his lips clean.

Damn. So much for restraint. Looks like I got myself hot, too. He handed her a Handi-Wipe, laughed when he saw her already dabbing her face with one. Like minds, huh? she said, laughing a bit herself. They peeked out of the bushes, saw nobody looking their way, and stepped out, and turned the corner.

Well, anyway, he said, I found out what I was, and I lived through the war, and went home. I got a job with the railroads, and worked my way through a real engineering degree. I lived off of bums, and indigents, and then, one day, morality hit. I couldn't make myself kill anymore. I started going for the soft option, and found that I didn't like that much either. Too much trouble, being nice. Too many surviving "victims", some of them believable. I was making good money, had a couple of properties, and there were doubltless vampire tales in all of those locations. Then the First World War came, and I was off to action again. Then the Second World War, and the cold war... I've been making my living since the First as a mercenary in little known parts of the world, any place where there is a lot of carnage to be had-

Tell me how you got a government job, she breathed. I mean, they require lots of references and ID...

I learned long ago to maintain a set of connections with the underworld, mainly so that I could have access to forgers. I have so many past identities... and it has been difficult for me to keep all of the cash I have accumulated. I take a lesson from corporate history. I created a corporation. I hold all shares of the stock, and under various names am the entire board of directors. I make it a point to pay my taxes, and nobody has bothered me. I keep the money chasing itself around the world in an elaborate paper trail, just so that it will appear that I am engaged in some sort of business. The money resides in several Swiss bank accounts.

This allowed me to keep my funds, but I've always had the problem of my appearance... I look like I'm no more than twenty-five, probably closer to twenty. This means that I can stay in one place no more than five to ten years before people start getting suspicious. I had just established credentials as a nineteen year old relative of a recently deceased gentleman, and I found myself drafted again.

While in Korea, I saved the life of a sergeant of mine. I had to blow my cover to do it, and I just didn't have the heart to do him in. It worked out well. He wound up in the intelligence services, and I've got a job as a Karate teacher. I'm a consultant really... I could tell you some hair-raising stories about some of the things I've done, but what I will tell you is this. Stay clear of us.

Why?

One: you killed a spook. One of my co-workers. I trained him to fight in the hereditary style of our kind, the style that comes so easily, almost instinctually to us. That style has made my students almost unassailable when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, unassailable to other Normals, anyway. The management is mad! They know what you are. They are looking for you. They have your ex-lover, and they are wringing him dry.

Two: a very great percentage of us are involved in either crime or espionage. Most of us are very paranoid of discovery, or worse, of competition. We've been known to find out where another of our kind lives, kill somebody, and leave the remains on their doorstep, as misdirection, and to cause trouble.

Three: most of us are old. You are a sweet kid, but you are a kid... Easy to kid. I know your kind; you limit your evil to feeding, and you're sweet as can be otherwise. Sort of a compensation reaction, right? The professionals don't have any such scruples. Living with a hundred or more years of paranoia and criminality will decidedly warp you. Those guys are warped as one can get. They will throw you to the wolves, use you as a stalking horse, point you out to the peasants, and light a few torches for them. Some'll do it purely for entertainment, if for no other reason.

Shit! Whatever happened to solidarity? she inquired.

You are forgetting that for the most part, we're genetic sociopaths. No morals, no scruples. Do you think that any of these guys feel a moment of remorse for what they have done? No! They can't! Remember, the genes that permit socialization aren't widely circulated among us.

Do you mean to say that we're not just intrinsically evil, but philosophically evil as well? I mean, not just 'cause of what we have to do, but because we like to be?

He held her to him, and whispered, Don't ever forget, Lace, that among our kind, you and I and those like us, we're the freaks. The others, they'll stamp us out, the regular people will stamp us out if they can, and when you hang with the mainstream vampyrs, you'd better be an evil, bad bitch if you want to last long. This is our nature. Most of us can act like friends for years, and all of the time be setting someone up for a fall... and if these Amorals ever find out that you're one of those pitiful Moral wretches, they might just decide to put you on a hook as bait, and do it mostly to see you writhe and squirm.

She began to shed a tear or two. I thought that I had at last met one of my people, someone who would bring me into our society, that I would have folks I could drop my guard around, and you tell me that I have to be twice as careful? Do you mean I'd have been better off if we hadn't met at all?

No, you wouldn't. I've given you your warning. You'd better know though, that I did something that was foolhardy in the extreme. I blew out of my job, and burned the hell out of all of my bridges. I've got to get out of town, and I have only this short time to tell you what I can. I don't think I can get out alive, and if I'm captured, I don't want to think about what the results will be. You better go deep underground, find another lover, be a good housewife. Don't go out much. They are going to start watching the bar scene for you and others like us. I've been able to get the word out to some of the other Morals. The word is, go to earth! The Amorals will keep up the same old ways, and the Mainstream will kill them off, or at least make life miserable for them. Turnabout is fair play, OK? The Amorals have been slamming on us, (and maybe, as they see it, rightly so; after all, we're miserable, and as vampyrs go, not too successful. Think about it) so we act amorally ourselves for a while. Our numbers get thinned, ideally more among the Amorals than among our own faction, and after awhile, either the furor will die down, or a single agency will be devoted to our control, and we can devise a method to control that agency.

He showed her the recognition signs. He didn't have time, of course, to be thorough, nor to impart a feel for nuance, but he did teach her how to at least attempt to enter their society to the barest degree required to make her entry survivable... A hand to the head, (exposing the ear, disclosing its position farther back and higher on the cranium) a question, are you like me? The hand spread on the thigh: I am what I am. The hand on the stomach: I hunger. The hand across the face, thumb pointing at the questioner: I see you, don't bother me.

He showed her the DC move. A piece of hair balled up and flung or twisted through the air towards the inquisitive, subliminal olfactory Pavlovian conditioning for the merely mainstream, a challenge to another vampyr. Some of DC's blacks, with their faster-than-Caucasian perceptions, had adopted this move, made it one of their own, the famous "dis" of DC lore. He taught her to smear a splinter with shit, to fling it into the nostrils of the unwary, there to fester and possibly cause encephalitis.

Rub your nose as you do it, he told her. This promotes a suggestive association in the normals. After a few doses, they'll look away any time they see you rubbing your nose. We do it to anyone who has even a clue as to what we are.

I've seen some of this before, Fred... I have to tell you something about my past...

You were in a sorority of witches, maybe?

Ummm... sort of... Fred?

No time, baby, no time. I have to tell you as much as I can, as fast as I can. I have to leave soon, to get some balls rolling, and then I have to try to save myself.

He also showed her some of the more spooky, lethal tricks, such as inserting a piece of stiff wire through any of the cranial sutures into the brain. There were certain tools, which could be made from common objects, that were quite deadly when properly assembled and used. A simple wreath of hair, wrapped around two fingers, and rubbed into a knot, could be thrown into the mouth of some fool or victim, where it might actually tie itself into a knot about the person's pharyngeal flap, slowly choking them, warping their throat, providing a place for infectious bacteria to flourish, perhaps lodging further down in the digestive system, necessitating an appendectomy... certainly it could cause great discomfort.

She suddenly flashed back to her time with the California Cannibal Cult, and she wondered who had picked up what from whom. Perhaps it was a case of secretive minds thinking alike. She had been Willa's best dust- doser, and she could see now where the skill came from... perhaps generations of her ancestors, whoever they were, had used such techniques. There also seemed to be a certain amount of cultural cross-fertilization between her people and the culture of spies and assassins... Whatever, despite what she was and what she was almost getting used to being, there was one thing that she did not want to be, and the way to not be, as far as she was concerned (where there was a choice), was to not do.

That's evil! she protested.

You'd better learn to like it. It's only fair play. Most of us are violently allergic to garlic; they've been throwing it at us for centuries. You must learn to do all of this. All of the children raised by the Families know this stuff before they get out of grade school. If you ever have the bad luck to be in a town that's being invested by one of the factions, keep your eyes out. You'll see parents teaching their children how to kill in crowds... you just missed a wave of investment here in the District... parents turned their kids loose in the Metro in mid-afternoon armed with surgical plastic skewers, and told them to aim for the heart... but watch this sequence. You've got to get the timing right...

And later, when he had instructed her in the basics of the generally convoluted and excessively paranoid introduction protocols, By the way, I've got somebody you've got to meet. Remember, I'm "hot", and you've got to go to earth somewhere. I'll introduce you to a friend of mine... If she can't put you up, she'll at least help you go underground.

The computer department was a mess. Paper was everywhere. Optical scanners whirred as hard-copy files were read into memory. It was a pain in the ass, but it was the only way to ensure that there were no worm or virus fragments read into the system. Large segments of the rest of the world were doing just about the same thing at the exact moment.

The worm had caused incredible damage. It wasn't enough that it had printed the main Shop address and phone exchanges in that goddamned yellow rag the "Tattler", but it had left worm-strings circulating in the AT&T continental rerouting subsystems. The worm heads were nasty and devious enough, but they were possible to detect. The problem was that if one interrupted the worm's head, the tail would dump the central string into satellite uplink, and the next thing you knew, more names and addresses appeared... as subtitles on every satellite-broadcast channel, not to mention UseNews. The worms didn't appear to be growing much, and hadn't done much else, so it was deemed proper to merely watch and wait. The worms occasionally split into fragments and scattered, erasing their trails as they went. Occasionally, they came back, or tried to do so at any rate. They also seemed to be spawning gophers and other less-definible "agents" as they went. All of the Shop mainframes were off of the NETS, with essential work being done offline, and net activities being pursued through non-networked PCs. Though the isolation from the InterNet was considered adequate, all internal files had to be erased and re-entered to ensure that they were not infected or otherwise compromised.

One set of files was not in the data-entry stack. It was on the desk of the Director of Internal Security.

There were reams of data concerning Fred G. Williams. Almost all of it was fairly recent. Standard in-house surveillance had disclosed a pattern of total compliance with agency protocols. He behaved at home as he did in the field, that is, immaculately. His attendance was exemplary. He used no sick leave. He had very few contacts outside of shop personnel, and his contacts with said personnel were generally quite circumspect and almost exclusively of business nature.

He was also, arguably, the finest personal combat instructor in the world. Without a doubt, he was the best in the west. Classes taught by him produced operatives who could not be defeated by any previously known techniques of personal combat. Staged clashes between operatives could go on for hours, with no one getting a blow in, and only serious blows would be thrown. He could fight within styles, could imitate the styles of particular masters.

His own style was peculiar. Seemingly a cross between Kempo and Ninjitsu, with elements of Krav Maga thrown in, it was direct, forceful, used combinations of extension-range and corps-a-corps techniques. It was based, among other things, upon certain perceptual limitations of the human eye. Where had he learned all of this?

He'd told a strange story... About being a traveling soldier-of-fortune (which checked out), of time spent in Gypsy camps (which couldn't be checked out), of some years in a Tibetan monastery...

He'd served the Shop well, though, and enough of his bona fides had checked out. His service record, military record, and academic records were exemplary. Plus, the Texan had recruited him, vetted him. They'd done a number of operations together, operations trademarked by inventive, massive deceptions and efficient sanctions.

The Swiss deception had been one of those. It had been the Instructor's baby... They'd convinced the head of a Swiss bank's records office that there was a plague of vampires descending on him, searching for a name and an account number that would return to them stolen wealth accumulated over the centuries. They'd offered him eternal (un)life or harassment to a lingering death. They'd gotten what they wanted, accounts tapes and indices. The banking officer had hung himself in an insane asylum to which he'd been committed for attempted vampirism, and the operations funds of several inimical nations had been wiped out by electronic-funds- transfer worms of Fred's design. Yes, Mr. Williams had been a master of The Game. He had earned his long leash... and had broken it.

Fortunately, the names, identities, histories and modi operandi he had dumped to the press were Old Guard. Most were dead or retired (much the same thing in most cases). No current operations had been compromised. No current agents had been identified. It could have been much worse, and Fred had let them know it. He'd done a fairly complete data dump to the automatic mailings system in the mail room, and that system had mailed said data to this very desk through the double-blind system of mail houses.

There was no question in the Director of Internal Security's mind that Fred would have to be brought in. There was also the Chief's order that all identified vampires be killed. What was Fred? Renegade agent, mole, or vampire? That Swiss deception had been a most effective gaslight... too convincing, in fact. Fred was also just too good a fighter, like nothing ever seen before. Fred's departure had been too close on the heels of the Chief's genocide order. The Director paused in the writing up of orders.

Orders were orders. It bothered him, though... It was one thing going after a defecting spook, quite like going after the mysterious woman who had killed The Cat. Capturing and interrogating suspected vampires was another... and genocide was something else. The Director of Internal Security was non-practicing Reform Jewish. Genocide... He thought, and called the Texan.

"Bobby," he said. "I got a problem with this boy of yours. Come on up here."

I hate to second-guess anyone, he thought, Even if it is my profession. I prefer hard facts. If I must second-guess anyone, I'd rather use a profile. Fred's profile just gives me this... he was a solid, hard-working - goddamn it, dedicated - operative who gave it his all... I don't believe he was a mole. He only compromised power-structure, not the men in the field. A mole wouldn't do that. Not a mole, then. If he was defecting, he would have taken the information with him, not dumped it to the press. However... how would I feel, what would I do if my boss didn't know I was Jewish, and told me to go out Jew-bashing? If he told me my people were from hell, and must be exterminated? What if I heard him give orders for genocide?>

There was a knock at the door.

"Never Again," he whispered. He raised his voice. "Come on in, Bobby."

The bars were covered. Double covered. All of the punk bars, especially so. Someone was taking out scanners almost as fast as they could be installed, and RCA was running at capacity production of the optical CCD devices, and was reluctant to divert any production from home camcorders. One common denominator of the final images was that most of the inoperative scanners were in or near punk bars. Usually, there were couples near the pickups, usually dressed in the all-black Gothic fashion. There were no muzzle flashes from gunpowder weapons, and nobody could figure out where or what the destructive force was.

Winslow was hanging out at The Ninth Circle of Sheol, a poseur bar, looking for the Instructor. He was also checking the crowd for people exhibiting "travelers" recognition signs. With the easing of US.-Soviet tensions in the early '90's, the borders of most East European countries had become quite permeable in both directions. Then the Soviet Union had disintegrated entirely. The youth "paminyatchika" (travelers) corps had been sent abroad to foreign colleges, and of course, a great many had wound up in the District and environs. Not a few, raised since infancy towards a life of espionage and agency, some already in place, some fleeing the probably inevitable pariah-hood and retribution that would befall them, were adrift in the various Youth Scenes across the country. (Winslow often wondered why the government hadn't made strenuous efforts to round them up and co-opt them before they began to sell their often amazing talents to organized crime, or God forbid, organized themselves into God only knew what form of sinister force.) God alone knew why, but both the real and the bogus exchange students seemed very much drawn to this godawful dimly-lit scene with its disco beat and screeching discordant guitars. And such hair! Winslow much preferred Led Zeppelin.

No new "travelers" tonight. He recognized about fifteen, who he knew by name and party habits. (Most were straight-edge, vowing that they were already fucked up enough without also needing chemical influences. Winslow concurred.) They were serious regulars. They were also about forty percent of the crowd so far. The "Ninth" was a major meeting point for the travelers, ever since Humbert's had been closed down as a spook central. They'd had a bit of a dust-off over the fall '92 - spring '93 season... About half of the regulars had come down with induced Parkinson's disease. The Feds had managed to track down the source of "cramp dust" after a long investigation...several of the FBI's best undercover were in the hospital, permanently, and you could get your ass shot off anywhere near town for flicking your thumbs at someone's drink, or nose. MPTP was one of the worst things that could happen to you, right up there with radioactive mercury soaked splinters...

He sat drinking his Heineken. One more, and he'd have to do another Sober-Up. Wonderful little pills, those. He could drink to repletion and never get drunk. Waste of good beer, though. He took another swig and almost choked as he saw Fred enter the bar. He hit the panic button on his watch. Several of the travellers jumped as their bug detectors went off. Fred didn't start visibly, but his eyes narrowed a bit and he slowly examined each face in the room. Winslow regarded him in the mirror as he checked his loads. He hit himself in the leg with a styrette of benzedrine. As the rush came on, he readied a trank spray. He had never associated much with the Instructor. Fred shouldn't recognize him.

Fred drifted over to a gathering of travellers, placing them between himself and Winslow, who realized he'd just been "made". Fred leaned down and said something to the largest of the crowd, Enrico, who turned and began staring at Winslow. Shit, he thought, and pulled out his mini-darter. He aimed at Fred, and fired, just as Enrico stood up. Enrico pawed at his chest and fell onto the table. Fred grabbed an ashtray with lightning speed and threw it at Winslow, who was already in the process of ducking. When he straightened up, Fred was gone, and a bar full of punks were coming at him.

"You've been associating exclusively with me for much too long, Lace," Cala told her one evening, rather abruptly. They'd been together for almost two years. "You haven't been, well, adequately socialized."

This came as a shock to Lace. "What exactly do you mean, Cala?" she asked. "I thought that you had been doing that, what with you instructing me on recognitions and protocols..."

Cala mused. This was not going to be easy for her. She had come to love Lace deeply, considering the short time they had been together... Short time to Cala; for Lace the two years had been interminable. "Lace, honey, what I've been trying to do is to inculcate you with what amounts to moral principles that you can live with, living as we must. Ways for you to maintain both your sanity and your life. You've learned the Traditional fighting skills of our kind. You know, but have never made, the connections for whole blood from the Diverters. You've greatly improved your prowess in the Power. You know how to fascinate and hypnotize Normals, but you've never done it the usual way. You have certainly never worked with others of our kind in the pursuit of common goals. All of this, you need to learn. Especially you must learn how to cooperate with others.

"You've been living, well, high on the hog here with me... I might as well tell you now, I'm about to do a fade. For the past six months, I've been preparing a sanctuary in another city. Soon, I'll be leaving. You'll be on your own again."

Lace was sort of stunned. You've gotta be kidding, she thought. Cala picked that up.

"No kidding," she said. "You'll have money, you've got solid ID, and I'll help you get set up, and direct you to some haunts. You'll be on your own, but you've done that before. You won't be lonely, though.

"The factions are converging on DC."

She paid the cover, and walked into The Morgue. She had "made" (or recognized for what they were) some others in the line, and they had seemed a bit perturbed by her hesitancy in responding to their queries. Well, she would see them inside, where the music would drown out the necessary verbal communications, so far as any listening Normals were concerned.

There were, of course, many more of her kind inside. This was, after all, a vampyr bar. She gave sign, and there were many responses. She pulled herself up to a rail, and looked around.

The bar was painted black, black walls, black varnished wood fixtures and floors. Even the ceiling was black, lit mainly with ultraviolet flourescents... Cheery decor, she muttered to herself.

"I like it," said a masculine voice from behind her. She turned her head enough to use her side-eyes, and saw a male, about her height, black hair, brown eyes. She turned at a human-normal speed, and said, "You must have morbid taste. I can barely see anything in here."

"You get used to it," he said

"Yeah, I guess you do. Thanks," she said to the bartender, giving sign and a tip with the charge. The bartender returned sign. A Man pulled up a seat on the other side of her. He took off his coat, evidently intending to stay awhile. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, removed and lit one. He fiddled with the pack for a second, then ordered a Budweiser. The bartender dissed him then gave him a Bud with a hair-twist in it. The Man took a swallow, and began to choke a bit as the hair-twist wrapped itself around his pharyngeal flap. He finished his drink, and got up. He donned his coat. He was heading towards the door when Lace lost sight of him. He'd forgotten his cigarettes. (The cigarette pack contained an extremely small and sensitive listening device of a passive nature. When interrogated remotely, tight-beam reradiation could be enhanced and interpreted. This bar had been a subject of suspicion and surveillance for nearly ten years, but the cops were mostly interested in tracking designer- drugs distribution. What they heard when they played the tapes was the usual senseless bar conversations; serious discussions here were conducted in non-vocal modes.) Lace turned back to her new acquaintance.

She took a sip from her beer as he spoke: "First time I've seen you here. New in town?"

"Sorta," she allowed. "Lace."

"Leon. Where ya from? If you don't mind me askin'..."

"Gaithersburg."

"No way," he declared. He hand-jived a short phrase. She knew no response for it. He watched her... "Poseur," he said, without rancor. "Nice try, kid. You wanna be mysterious, that's OK with me."

"No, really," she protested. "I just been outta town for a while."

"Where, Seven Locks? Jessup Penitentiary?"

"No, just traveling."

"Oh, a traveler!" he said. "Whyn'tcha say so?" He said something in some foreign language, and she gaped at him. Then she got it...

"No, just American travel."

"Oh. What's your story?"

"Now I want to be mysterious," she told him, coquettishly. "A girl has to have her little secrets, y'know."

"Yeah, right," he said, sounding unconvinced. "How'd you find out about this place?"

Momentarily, she recalled some of Cala's instructions on etiquette, then her mind snapped back to the bar. "That would be telling," she said. "I just checked out a lot of bars, and this was the most appealing. So here I am!"

"Well, you've got good taste."

"Depends on what you like, y'know." she said. "They play my kind of music here."

"But are there your kind of people here?" he asked, smirkingly.

"All over the place, it looks like," she said.

"You betcha!" he said, and split.

She watched him wind his way back into the crowd. He waved to and approached a group of her kind a few meters away. They were all giving her the "hairy eyeball", looking sideways from beneath their squinted lids... to a normal person, or to a very young'un, it would have looked like they were engaged in animated conversation. Yet the sounds she heard were of languorous babble. Senseless really, considering that most of the conversation was being transmitted by syllabic alternation of sounded speech and silent lip-read communication.

Who the hell is she?

Says her name's Lace.

Do you know her?

Not even.

Well, what do you make of her?

I think she's a poseur.

No way. She's Real, and serious. Well-fed, too. I think she's a State brat.

(Lace quietly freaked out. Cala had told her that there were entirely unfounded, unprovable, and ineradicable rumors that there were vampyr working openly for the secret services, as vampyr. This rumor, in the telling, was generally accompanied by expressions of desire to murder...)

No way! A tame bitch! Here? She's got a lot of nerve...

The last speaker, a tall redhead, turned to look more directly at her. She gave Lace a long hard stare. Lace returned it, and the battle was on, a war of the Power.

She felt the other try to lock on to her centers of will, and she responded, going directly to the subconscious levels, as Cala had taught her. The redhead reradiated the unease that Lace had tried to instill in her, and boosted the signal a bit. She also added a memory of fear, of pain, of sunlight...

Lace went for trump.

She went to the visceral level, and sent the emotional component of a memory of her first victims...

She stood on the shoulder of the road, drenched to the bone. At least it was warm rain, and she was not shivering too badly. She was wearing black, as usual, her hair caught up in a Valkyrie braid beneath her hat. There was little traffic this night, and the few cars passing didn't even slow for her. She was getting very good at dodging the puddle-splashes thrown at her by traffic. She even made sort of a game of it. It was a little bit of levity to try to throw off the pall that had descended upon her when she had wakened.

She was Hungry again.

She was trying to maintain her composure, and it wasn't easy. There was her natural impatience at being stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, and atop the disgruntlement of being totally soaked and at the mercy of the elements and any drivers that might pick her up was the rising awareness that she must soon feed. Tonight, tomorrow night? When?

She tried to force it from her thoughts. No go. It crept upon her with the silent insistence of a need to shit... It could be put off, but sooner or later, it must happen.

A car zipped by her, and she felt her hand clench, and her nails gashed her palm slightly. She licked the slow seepage of blood from her hand, and delighted in the taste, much like that of human blood (and that memory flamed in her for a moment... she wanted that taste, God how she wanted it...) but there was something missing in her blood, something she must get from the blood of a human. What was it? she wondered... it mattered not, she knew.

A truck approached, and slowed. She dodged the splash as the front wheel slammed into a pothole, and was at the door.

There was a cowboy inside, about what you'd expect here in the wilds of East Central Texas. He was a trim-looking Man, some thirty years or so by the look of him, and he seemed like a nice enough guy. Too bad, she thought. Sorry, fellah, but I think your luck has just run out.

"Thanks," she said, and got in.

The miles flew by. She reflected that the distance one ignored in a vehicle during an hour was about the distance one could walk in a day...

This good ol' boy giving a sweet young thang a ride was a bit of a talker.

"How the hell'd you come to get stuck out there smack in the middle of nowhere?"

"Well, I was hitching rides and this one guy, well, he wouldn't take no for an answer, so I got the hell off," she told him.

"Hell," he said, "some guys just don't know when to quit."

"Yep, you could say that," she said. "I'm almost getting used to it. I have to, you know..."

"Yeah, I guess you do. What's a sweet young thang like you doin' hitchin' cross-country, anyway?"

"Step-dad troubles," she told him. It was her standard lie.

"Shoot, I can understand that," he told her. "My ex-wife's new man is a real son-of-a-bitch. Comes home drunk and wants to get mean. I figure if I had a kid living with 'em, he'd probably whup on the child, just to be hateful."

"Well, you got the picture," she elaborated.

"You poor thing. You warm enough? I can turn up the heat a little more."

"Naw, I'm fine." She noticed that she was starting to pick up the man's habits of speech. Once again, she reflected, as she always did when approaching her time of need, I'm acting like a cipher. Just a chameleon, that's me... "I'm really tired though. Mind if I knock out?"

"Naw, suit yourself. I got about three-four hours of driving to go before I turn off. I hope there's somewheres I can get a cup of coffee pretty soon, though, or I'll be sleepin' there beside you when you wake up..." He chuckled at that.

"I don't mind," she said, "At least I'm warm, and getting dry."

"Well, g'night."

She woke. They were parked in a truck-stop lot. He was snoring, and she was so Hungry. He had slumped over to her side of the cab, and she looked at him, wondering what to do... Her instincts were pushing her, and soon they would decide on a technique. She felt alien thoughts pushing their way into her mind, clamoring for action. But she didn't want to hurt this man... yet she needed to hurt him. She needed to (well, face it honey, you need to) eat him. Eat him alive. That thought came to her with a horrid fascination, and wouldn't go away. She reached toward his face. He looked so peaceful, sleeping there; but her reaching hand suddenly snapped into a claw configuration, startling her. As she pulled her hand back from him, which took all of her rapidly fading willpower, she gathered her forces for a last stand against her hunger. She turned away, only to see his wrist mere inches from her mouth. Her lips curled back from her teeth, and she snapped at him, despite herself. God, I feel like a rabid dog! she thought, and tried to pull herself away again, but she was too slow... it was as if she was a robot, programmed to do this... she felt that evil rage coming onto her, and pushed it down. His hand swung towards her face, and with the last of her resolve, she held herself still. She decided that if he was going to hit her for biting him, she should let him get a good one in before she stomped him flat and fed. His hand passed by her, though, and slapped his bleeding wrist. "Goddamn skeetahs," he muttered, still asleep... His hand fell back, covered with blood, and she seized on a whim.

She bent her head to the man's wrist, and licked. Heaven! Well, food at any rate. She continued to lick, gently, almost sensually, swallowing occasionally. Her hunger was impelling her though, and she began to surrender herself to the feelings...

First there was the taste. The taste of life, with that special flavor that her own blood lacked... a vitamin, a salt, a protein... she didn't care, it was just the food that she needed, needed so badly that she could do this. There was the warm skin beneath her lips, so soft... the pulse beating so softly, gently forcing her food into her mouth.

There was the easing of the sensation she thought of as the Hunger. A certain tension was gone, and she no longer felt as if her body was falling apart. The muscle spasms that only a few hours ago had locked her hand shut so hard that she'd cut herself subsided to a mere anxious tremor.

And there was the man himself. She felt him, felt his very life, and she became fascinated with that sensation. She wanted to know this man, to know his life, his feelings... and her lips were locked to his wrist, and she was actually sucking, drawing out the blood, gently as she could, but exerting more pressure by the moment as sensation swept her away... and suddenly one of her razor-edged canines punctured an artery or a vein, and there was a spurting in her mouth, and she swallowed fiercely. She gulped, and gulped again as her mouth filled... and she felt the man struggling towards wakefulness.

He was weakened already by loss of blood, and groggy beyond his exhaustion. He opened an eye sleepily, only to see Lace with an hand locked around his wrist, her other hand prisoning his in a palm-lock. She rolled her eyes guiltily at him, and gulped. It was obviously a bad dream, and he closed his eyes again. She continued to swallow, but she felt like a glutton. (Well, waste not, want not) she thought. The flow of blood slowed a bit as time went on, and she wondered if she was actually sucking him dry... but she felt his heart beating through the pulse in her mouth, and it seemed strong enough.

It stopped.

She had been just feeding with her eyes closed, and the shock of the man's heart stopping snapped her back to reality. His eyes opened as well, and were filled with a nameless accusation. His gaze flickered to her bloody lips, to his wrist. She followed his gaze, and was herself a bit shocked... she'd been gnawing. Why hadn't he felt it?

His eyes locked on hers, and he tried to say something... then he was beyond speech, beyond cares. Beyond pain. Dead. And she felt his life go... It wasn't just the dying of the light in his eyes. She actually felt it... and knew what he'd been trying to say, to ask her...

Why?

The pain that Lace felt every time she thought about that time evidently transmitted well. The redhead shivered and dropped her eyes. She looked at Lace with a mixture of pity and loathing. Also, her look carried respect, and sympathy. The last two emotions slowly took over her expression, and she came over to Lace, and took her hand.

"I've seen you around..."

"Lace. You have? Why didn't you introduce yourself? I though I was alone for so long..."

"You didn't give sign. I just thought you were some snotty bitch from out-of-town, didn't want to be bothered..."

"God, I wish I'd known. That's most of my story... Nobody's ever told me anything."

"Well, you've got us now. I'm Katherine... but call me K'at." She used a full glottal substitution for the kappa. (Her name was the sound a cat makes when it sees something it can't catch.) "Come on over and have a drink on us." Lace allowed herself to be led. They wound their way through the dancers to a corner table. K'at seemed strangely excited...

They were seated, and while some people who seemed to be K'at's friends drifted by and wanted to sit with them, K'at waved them off. She had drinks on the table for them within a minute, and she finally sat still for a second, and when it seemed that Lace was comfortable, she asked her, point blank: "Are you for real?"

Lace didn't understand her. "What exactly do you mean?"

"I mean look at me..." K'at showed Lace her hands... Strong enough, but they lacked the massive tendons of Lace's hands, and they seemed... different, somehow. She continued: "You're so... developed... mature... didn't you do the hormones? Your parents were Renegades, maybe?"

"I don't know," she said. "I was adopted."

K'at's jaw dropped open. Her teeth looked Normal enough... "Omigod!" she yelped. "By Normals? Jesus! Lemme look at your teeth..."

Lace felt sheepishly amused, but complied. K'at sort of gasped. "Omigod, it's like, y'know, like... uh. Sorry!"

"For what? Freaking out?"

"Uh, yeah. Sorta like Dracula, OK? Don't you cut your lips when you smile?"

Lace felt like being bitchy. She looked pointedly at K'at's rather ample bosom and said, "Do you have trouble finding things you've dropped?"

"I don't drop things much," K'at said, and laughed. "And I bet you don't smile much!"

Lace snickered, "I don't usually have that much to smile about..." but she did smile, a big happy smile, looking a bit like a German Shepherd. K'at seemed a bit taken aback, but rallied.

"Bitchin'!"

"Well, tell me something, K'at... what hormones?"

"You don't know? Little yellow pills. You take them all of the time, and you never hunger. You don't... well, develop quite as much as you have. Of course, you have to eat a special diet, high in protein and minerals... you know, it's just a nutritional deficiency..." K'at broke off as a cloud of gathering emotion broke on Lace's face.

"K'at... K'at... tell me something."

"Yah. Go ahead, ask." K'at was looking at her strangely.

"K'at, what would you tell anyone else about me?" Lace was very strained. What was going on here? Cala hadn't told her about this, but then, Cala kept mainly to herself. And hadn't Fred told her that the so-called "cure" was at best a temporary palliative, something that would kill her should she take it long enough?

"Well, Lace... certain things are, y'know, sacrosanct? I can't reveal any of us as what we are to a Normal, even to one who is completely convinced... I can't reveal certain activities that we participate in, not even to you. I can give you a clue, but you have to figure the truth out on your own; I don't have to tell you if you're right or wrong. Some things I have to tell you... like about The Cure. I can't discuss crimes, especially with Normals, but that follows from the First Law which is the Law of Silence..."

"That's enough for now," Lace broke in, "but tell me: How do you feed?"

"I don't."

"How?"

"I told you; The Cure." K'at said, looking perplexed.

"Remember, I've never heard of this cure you tell me about... what do you think I've been doing to take care of myself?"

"Omigod! You haven't been..."

"Haven't been what, K'at?" Lace asked, gently... knowing what concept it was that so shocked K'at.

"God, I shouldn't even ask. I don't need to..." A sadness, a wistfulness suffused K'at's pretty features. "You've been feeding, feeding off of people, haven't you? You'd have to, I guess. And, Lace, I really like you already... I hate to tell you, you're a criminal."

"I know that, K'at. I've stolen, I've lied, and..."

"No! Lace, you listen to me! You've obviously just entered our society. I don't know who prepared you for our company, they did a pretty good job, so I bet it was a Renegade. You're a Wild Child." K'at paused, and the beginnings of tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. "But you'd better know this... We're all Socials here. It's time for a history lesson. I'll tell you as I was told.

"During the time of the Second World War, many of us were called to serve our country. We felt we owed a lot to America, for here in the New World we were free for the first time from the Old Country suspicions, the pogroms. Nobody knew who we were! We could do as we willed... but the need for secrecy was not as great, so we did not need to kill to protect our secrets. It became a tradition for our men to hunt the frontiers, to honorably fight Men in the back alleys behind bars, to feed lightly and often on the Men they'd knocked unconscious, to afterwards drag the fallen to a place of relative safety. Our women would often become prostitutes with the reputation of wild women who would show a cowboy or sailor the time of his life, even if we did bite. We can mate with Men and Women, but we are not very interfertile. Also, until AIDS came along, we were mostly immune to venereal diseases, though we can carry.

"Still, we were what we were, a different people. We lost much of our culture, though we always remembered the skill that most defined our culture: our fighting skills, the ancient logic that makes us invincible. Over three of our generations (I am of the third) we became assimilated. We are Americans first. Yet we were hidden within the great mass of Normal Men, and in the great expanse of this continent, we often could find no others of our kind with whom to mate. We married (or didn't) Normal people, living double lives. In that first generation, all of those children (and there were many!) were Normals in behavior, in appearance, for the genes that make us what we are, they're a triple-recessive set. We're the result of some very intense inbreeding, coupled with very intense culling from both our ancient way of life and a lot of infanticide.

"Our children grew up, and married, and those of us who were long-lived would pretend to age and then fade out, faking deaths and then relocating. Loneliness would take its toll, and it would all happen again. The numbers of children carrying our genes swelled into the tens of thousands. As a race, we were more numerous than ever before.

"The Civil War killed great numbers of us, as many of us had taken to slave ownership, as it permitted us to have an unquestioned, reliable bloodsource. The Slavers' plantations were burned, their fortunes destroyed, the Families scattered. Most moved west, and settled in sparsely populated regions, often hiding their strangenesses within communities of religious schismatics such as the Mormons, Luddites, or such. Whenever possible, we had sent our Normal-seeming children away from our lives, establishing them in businesses and trades far from their parents, who would seem alien, sinister, evil to those children, should they ever discover the truth.

"Mendelian genetics was not widely understood in those days... even now, most people have only a vague understanding. We could not know that by mere chance, three generations hence, the race would re-establish itself. Some of us knew, but other than arranging marriages between known families, little contact was maintained, as it was deemed necessary that there be no opportunities for the curious to link families in case of exposure. So there was little exchange of information, and it was felt that in the fullness of time, chance emergences of our kind from the Normal gene pool would be discovered, and gathered into the tribes.

"Then came the wars. The Spanish-American War, the First World War, and especially, the Second World War. These are just the wars where our American brethren were involved... In other countries, we were decimated! Almost wiped out, and our population was depleted to the point where there was insufficient genetic diversity within our population for us to survive there as a separate race. Here in America, though, the wars also took their toll.

"For along with the increasing enlightenment and development of the natural resources, America was changing from an agrarian frontier society into an industrial global power. Along with development came the infrastructure associated with any emerging empire: Banks, an organized military, and an efficient civil service. Schools, with compulsory attendance, for even our children. Civil registrations. Law enforcement systems. Finally, our historic anathema, comprehensive, distributed cradle-to-grave records-keeping. Birth certificates. Death certificates. Titles and liens. Mortgages.

"Where once an individual was known by the name he called himself, now he was known by the name-of-record. An individual could be tracked by any individual or agency with enough persistence and access to records. The cracks in the wall of society, which we required to live the lives we did, became ever smaller and less comfortable. We moved into cities, and there, we were, some of us, required to return to the ancient ways... and in the meantime, the number of Normals carrying some of our genes grew ever greater.

"During the Second World War, with its concomitant wholesale conscription of troops, a great percentage of our men were required to report... and we did, for it was after all, our country, and we had been taught in America's schools, gone to America's churches... We were Americans, plain and simple, and this was our country! While we were poked, and prodded and subjected to great indignities in the name of insuring a healthy army to defend the Land of the Free, we were never discovered, as we didn't give any demonstrations to the induction medics. We were just appallingly healthy, with excellent senses... just what the Armed Forces needed. (By the way, we've never had a single 4-F...) It was only in action that we distinguished ourselves, and we were decorated often for valor... but we never could win against explosives. Artillery killed us as well as it killed anybody else. And the weapons that were brought to bear in that war!

"For us, the worst of those weapons was, as always, information. So decorated were our men, that we were the few, the proud, the chosen for special missions, special risks. More died, victims of the fortunes of war.

"There was also the emerging intelligence community. They requisitioned more and more of us, as we were simply the best. War has always been a contradictory state for us... we were bred by and evolved for war... Blood is one of the most common sights of war, and we could feed at will, as we were so often on the front lines, often fighting hand-to-hand in isolated units. In this modern war, as I said, we died in disproportionate numbers. We did so much to win this war... and when win it we did, we were demobilized in great numbers, and some of us came home.

"Home... where paranoia was rampant. War refugees had been fleeing Europe in great numbers, and because of justified fears of infiltrators from Germany, and a rising awareness of just what a monstrosity Russia had for a government, everyone entering the country was subjected to great scrutiny. It was ironic that Europe, due to saturation bombing, had little left in the form of supporting documentation... but the Nazis had had an excellent documentation system, and most Europeans had been required to carry those documents with them constantly. Often, German and Soviet agents used the dogtags of dead Americans to seek entry to the States... So returning Americans were grilled intensely... and inconsistencies were found. Many of the most decorated soldiers were able to describe perfectly the most minute details of hometown Americana... but their records of citizenship from the American Archives were... questionable.

"We were found out, to make a long story shorter. We're people, after all, and different as we are, we are not immune to scopolamine, nor to sodium amytal... truth serums. Our fathers were found out... and as a condition of life, were required to sign a contract with the government. Continual monitoring. Repeated interviews with veridical drugs. Consent to reasonable experimentation... and now we have The Cure. We Socials, all of us here, we were born into that way of life... we've never known anything different. We're citizens, we vote, but we are also required to be checked periodically for criminal activity... drugs again. Checked for continuation on medication and diet. Constant surveillance on the part of the state. The legal aspects are... unusual. You go in for an interview, and if you've done crimes, your fifth amendment rights are protected... unless you've done vampyrish crimes. Then you wake up in a cell. Probably you'll never be released."

"What are vampyrish crimes, exactly? Besides the obvious, I mean." This sounded scary. Amnesty for vampyrs? A trap of sorts?

"Well, killing. You can get away with practicing style on people if they don't complain and if you don't touch them. I think what they get you for is motivation. The way I learned to think of it is like it says. Any crime motivated by a desire to eat people." K'at was giving her that strange look again. Lace wondered about that, so she asked her.

"Well, it's only logic... I have a million questions to ask you, but I don't want to know the answers. I might be asked. I really would like to get to know you better, but I don't dare..." Lace finally placed the expression, it was similar to the expression a kid has on his face when he loves a Christmas present he has received which was not the most hoped-for present, sort of mixed disappointment and cheer. K'at continued, "So I can tell you almost anything, but you should really practice being mysterious."

Lace was rather crestfallen. "I was really hoping to find a crowd where I could let my hair down, ya know? I've been being mysterious for a long time. It gets old, real fast. Don't have much of a choice, now, do I?"

"We don't any of us have many choices. Lace, that's really one of the things that defines us as a kind... free will confronted with a lack of choices. We're hemmed in by our needs on one side, and the Men on the other side. We here on the inside of the cage they've made for us, well, we live normal lives... lives normal to the Men, that is. We go to school, to work, we shop at K-Mart or Lord and Taylor's, we have little pink houses... but that's not what we are, not what we're supposed to do... You're doing what we're supposed to do, but I cannot envy you that."

K'at picked up a shotglass of something amber, and drained it. She pitched the glass over her shoulder, and on the dance floor, it became a part of the dance, being tossed and recovered several times a second. After a minute, it seemed to disappear from the field, but Lace didn't notice. She looked up after a minute, and dried her eyes.

"I had dared to hope that I might be able to get inside of your society, to not be so very alone any longer, and it looks like I am as alone as ever, huh? Outside, looking in," she said. "But I am outside of that cage, and they'll kill me, won't they, if I try to get in? (K'at nodded, and looked at her own hands in her lap). What would happen to me if I were to try to get some of this Cure?"

"Umm... it's sorta like being on anti-depressants, ya know? You have to get it adjusted to your personal chemistry. It would either kill you or have no effect unless it's the right levels. I don't know what would happen, and the doctors who do this stuff are all Normals."

"If I thought I could enter that cage of yours, I might try it. It looks pretty comfortable in there. You look like life's pretty good to you." Lace forced herself into an artificial cheer, and tried to muster a wry grin. K'at thought for a minute and then spoke.

"If the bars of a cage were so far away that you couldn't see them, would you feel like you were in a cage, no matter how gilded the cage?"

"Yah, if I knew there were bars, I'd feel caged."

K'at drew herself up, and said, "If I didn't have to do what you do, I'd give anything to get out."

Are You Deserving? follows this segment.
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