Book: The First - Part: Two - Chapter: 1 - Installment: i

        They healed faster. That was their biggest advantage. Some were faster and stronger, but all healed faster. To counter that, surprise was essential.

        There were a number of ways to kill a vampire. The classic cliché – a wooden stake through the heart? Highly over-rated.

        A magazine full of bullets through the chest was much more effective – particularly silver-tips, though again the advantages of silver were greatly exaggerated. Even with silver, she still needed to act quickly, the wound was already closing.

        It often struck her as strange that so many vampires let fire so close to their lives. Fireplaces and candles in particular. Must have had something to do with the romantic tie to the past which vampires ancient and freshly undead all seemed to share. People – humans – don’t burn, or more precisely, they aren’t flammable except at tremendous temperatures. Not so vampires. Hair and fabric burn people. Not their own skin. Vampire skin burns as its own fuel. Fire, Sylvette had learned early on, was often the most immediate way to keep a vampire down permanently.

        There have got to be candles – matches – around here somewhere. None in sight.

        “How close are you?” She said to the room.

        The chirp in her ear crackled.

        “Right outside. Three floors.”

        The blinds were heavy – not a big surprise. She pulled one back and looked down into the dark street. The QB-Van was across the street, not the least bit discretely, double-parked.

        “Anyone got a light?”

        “Always.”

        “Well, if you can live without a cigarette for a few minutes, send Simon up. Time for a practical lesson.”

        A moment later, the back door to the van cracked open and her latest lover stepped out onto the luminescent wet street.

        She wondered if it turned him on, her flirtatious charade with the half-destroyed vampire on the floor.

#

        The Lazarus Group had been aware of this one for some time now. Years in fact. There was something inherently psychopathic about the nosferatu. Sylvette was sure that if cows had the cognizance to appreciate that they were herded, slaughtered and feasted upon by mankind that they would have the same opinion of humans. But this particular nos’ was an extreme example. Fiendishly clever and as disgustingly vile as they came. Where most vampires were content to feed in small amounts on usually unsuspecting victims, rarely actually killing their prey, this one had left a trail of desiccated corpses and missing persons in it’s crimson wake.

        Vampire activity had spiked twice in Vancouver. It had previously been too small a city to have borne much, so the Lazarus had not concerned themselves with it. The first spike was what had brought Sylvette and her father to the city. Over the course of a few short years in the late eighties Vancouver had quite suddenly become the home of the biggest unfettered vampire activity in North America. 

Nosferatu loved the ‘New World.’ It had a false innocence that made it prime hunting ground. Europe and Asia in particular were tainted by ancient rumour. Anything that could be attributed to vampires, was by someone or another – and on occasion it was true. North Americans thought themselves above such folkloric superstition. For the nosferatu, it was a free pass.

As any smuggler of opiates from Asia would tell you, Vancouver was North America’s front door. Where South American drug lords struggled constantly with the ever tightening situation in Florida, Vancouver was the easiest port on the entire continent to get through. The evidence was on the streets. Canada’s poorest postal code and its richest were two SkyTrain stops apart. The victims of the cheapest crack and heroin in North America, lived a twenty minute walk from those who capitalized on it.

The warm climate made street life as easy as it got in Canada, so there were plenty of itinerants. Drug users were low on the list of vampire’s choicest targets, but there was nothing better for avoiding the sloppy dangers of desperation than someone who would never be missed. Some vampires – ‘younger’ ones, mostly – found it far easier to fit in amongst the chaotic denizens of the Downtown Eastside. The human citizens were harder to keep track of, so fledgling nosferatu would find themselves easier to hide as they learned the finer points of living lifeless amongst the living.

        Canada’s ‘Terminal City’ had blossomed after the World Exposition of 1986. The fair’s motto had been ‘Invite the World.’ The world had never left. Neither had the vampires.

        The second spike in Vampire activity had been a smaller one. It had been quite easy to deduce the cause. The pattern was quite simple. The Lazarus Group was quite certain that it was attributable to a single monster when the number of attributable deaths quite suddenly began to climb. Either a new vampire had arrived who had no compunctions against killing, or an existing resident had changed their habits. Things had been blurred by the concurrent existence of a serial killer – in fact it may have been the serial killer that gave the vampire the notion to kill wantonly. But the serial killer had stalked prostitutes – and when the killer was caught the vampire related deaths kept going and going. And now they had finally cornered him.


     Installment ii