Prolog
Stephen came home to a sight that made his blood curdle. The front door of the house that he shared with his wife and four children was ripped off it’s hinges. There was no sign of life. He cautiously entered the house. There on the living room floor pale and lifeless were the twins. Luke and Louis were the light of their parents lives, and now they were gone. Six year old Devon was laying on the floor next to his brothers. All three of their throats had been ripped out. Though in Devon’s case it seemed that he had been slammed repeatedly against the wall. Knowing Devon he had tried to defend his mother and siblings when the attack came. Of his wife Tanya and his seventeen year old daughter Stephanie there was no sign.
He had known it was dangerous not to arm his family with the knowledge he had gained about the vampire take over. He had been warned any that didn’t cooperate in his office would not be spared when the end came. He had chosen not to believe the co-workers that shared his friendship would not betray him and his family. Now he knew he was wrong. Tanya had been warned not to invite anyone in. That means it had to be someone that had been a welcomed guest into his home.
All Stephen could do now was run. They must know he had started speaking up in the office about the up rising. Up to this point the vampires had been content to stay in the background. Now they wanted the power. The take over was well under way. How could he stop them from completing this? The answer was simple he couldn’t. All he could do now was go underground and try to find out if his wife and daughter were still alive.
Before he could leave this house of death behind. Stephen would need a few things. He walked up the stairs cautiously. He was perfectly aware that the vampire assassins could still be in the house waiting for him. The upstairs was well lit. He doubted that he would be ambushed. If only he had come home before dusk. He glanced at his watch. It was 4:30 am, almost dawn. He was safe from the vampires for now. Though he was not safe from the human police.
By now all the human police would be in the vampires control. They would have taken over the authorities before they took over any other agency. If he didn’t leave soon he was dead either way. At the top of the stairs was a long hallway that ran the length of the house. On the right side was the twins’ room, then the small upstairs bathroom, and at the end of the hall on the right was Devon’s room. On the left side of the hall was Stephanie’s room and then his and Tanya’s bedroom. It was the master bedroom he was headed for.
He was acutely aware of the smell of blood as he entered the bedroom. Try as he might he couldn’t help but look around for the source of the smell. There was blood all over the room. The mirror had a long smear of blood down it’s surface. The smear closely resembled a hand print. He wondered if this was where his wife had died or had they injured her and taken her to one of the donor stations they had started setting up all over the city. "I don’t have time for this." The sound of his own voice startled him. He had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. The back of the closet held a large safe behind a false wall. Quickly he dialed the combination of the safe and opened it.
Inside the safe were the things they thought they might need in an emergency. Almost an entire record of their life was in this safe. Birth certificates, marriage license, and assorted family pictures. All the accumulated clutter of a life that you wouldn’t want lost in a fire. Stephen was only after a few of these precious things. The first thing he grabbed was a large backpack from the closet shelf. Into this bag went the one hundred thousand dollars in cash that he had stocked away over the last three weeks. Hoping he would never need it. On top of this he placed the hand gun he had purchased last week. Then he placed the bag on the floor and grabbed a duffle bag off the same shelf. In this he placed the ammunition he had bought with the gun. The ammunition was specially made. The bullets had been cleaned with holy water before they were completed and then a small cross was scratched on the end and blessed by a priest. He wasn’t taking any chances.
The last thing he packed before leaving the house forever was a family picture that they had taken last month. He could use it to help in his search for the rest of his family. God willing he would find them before something worse happened to them. Stephen closed the safe. He left all the lights on that had been on when he came in. He walked down the stairs and walked over to where the bodies of his youngest children lay. Then and there he made a vow to them. "I will find the blood suckers who did this to you and make them pay." He leaned down and as a single tear slipped down his face he placed a tender kiss on each small cheek. Got up and left the house he had shared with his family forever.
Where was his wife and daughter. He had to find them, but he was no use to them dead. First he had to disguise himself. He walked to the bus stop. He had left his car behind. He knew part of their plan. He got rid of his wallet and identification. He could get a new one easily in the time of chaos that would soon come. He needed a new hair color first. Not hard to come by right now but soon it would be. He decided to use peroxide which would be easy to come by soon. He proceeded to the drug store to buy supplies. With that task completed he needed a new name. That would have to wait until they set their plan into action. He had nothing but time. He knew in his heart it was already too late to save his wife and daughter from most of the horror that they would encounter. So, he would wait. The scars he inflicted on himself to change his appearance was the hardest part. He could stay hidden until the wounds healed. The homeless where to be the last to be classified. He took his pocket knife from his jacket pocket and in a dark alley ran it from his hair line to his jaw. Using the things he had purchased at the drug store he bandaged his face and proceeded to dirty himself up and look for a shopping cart to collect his belongings.
He found himself a nice place in the park and proceeded to be a homeless man of no means. This would also make his cash last longer. He needed to wait the initial panic out. Then he could set his plan into motion. They would regret the fact that they had ever decided to come out of hiding. He knew their weaknesses and their strengths. He would learn more as time went by. Then he would make their lives very interesting indeed.
Chapter 1
The fall of mankind.
In the three years since Stephen had left his home. Life in the world had vastly changed and not for the better. In the beginning, just after he ran, things started happening quickly. The takeover happened in every city and town in the world on December 31, 2005 through January 1, 2006. The one night of the year where people were most likely to be out after the dark in a public place. There for avoiding the having to be invited in thing. It wasn’t a slow or gradual thing. That had been going on for the last two years. They had already subverted the army of every nation in the world. Every public service office had a human servant in it. The local police departments were in the vampires pockets. The good cops and their families were eliminated in a variety of accidents that were never investigated.
Small pockets of resistance groups sprung up, and were quickly put down. The Romanian Resistance Movement lasted the longest. They held out for six months. Eventually they too were infiltrated and betrayed by one of their own for the promise of eternal life. The problem is that traitors never realize that the ones they betray their friends to won’t trust them. Everyone knows if you’ll sell out your own friends, you’ll sell out anyone. Traitors there for were sent to a donation center or killed outright along with their entire family. No one can be left to seek revenge. There are still rumors circulating to this day that a few brave souls escaped and are even now plotting revenge on the vampire enemies.
When the human herd had been significantly thinned. Then the real work of sorting began. Humans were to be sorted into a few very significant groups. The first and most important was the breeder group. Breeders are the ones even to this day that the vampires will defend with their lives. The breeders insure the vamp. food supply. As long as you have a good population of breeders the other groups can be replaced. All the groups are micro chipped much like pets have been. Breeder chips contain the breeder’s name, sex, designation, and special skills or attributes. It also contains the number of children that have been sired or bred by the individual. Breeders are given the best food and the best medical attention. They also get the best living locations in the cities. Their living accommodations are second only to the vampires themselves.
Breeders that give birth to or sire twins are given even better treatment than normal breeders. The vampires are nothing if not envious of breeders in their ability to have children. Not to say that the vampires don’t have the most vicious sexual appetites. The just can not procreate in the same way that they could when they were human. Twins are so important in that one can be made into a vampire and the other can be bred with another identical twin. The vampire set then raise any children of the union as their own.
The second group to be sorted was the humans to be sent to the donation centers. Since vampires can only get high or become intoxicated through blood. Several humans were kept addicted to several different drugs. This being the case donors are promptly sterilized upon being assigned as a donor. They usually don’t mind this though. They are given food that they like. They are only forced to donate through the an I. V., and then only at levels that they would in a blood bank in the time before the takeover. The worse thing that could happen to you was if you became pregnant before the sterilization. If it happened before designation it wasn’t a crime, but if it happened after it was crime punishable by death. The child could then be raised by a vampire couple and the donor mother and sire were both executed by feeding. This was witnessed on video screens by the entire donor population of the world.
It was widely believed that the vampire doctors occasionally botched a sterilization on purpose. This was actually the case. The non-sterilized couple were often bunked in the same wing of the donor center. There for increasing the odds of an illegal pregnancy. The public feeding vampire being chosen by lottery. The tickets for the lottery were expensive. It is an excellent source of revenue. The city also gets to collect a fee from the vampire couple that adopt the child. Under any other circumstance it is illegal to hunt or kill a human except in self defense. Being creatures of great strength there are rarely any self defense killings. Killing or being caught hunting a human are punishable by death. Except in the case of vampire police hunting renegade humans. The sentence is being bound to a stake with specially reenforced chains, and being left out to wait for the rising sun. This is why the lottery happening fairly regularly is a good thing. The lottery is also held for rebels, a rebel is any human who willfully disobeys a justifiably vampire order.
The next group to be sorted is the children. Children are not chipped until their sixteenth birthday. Then they are sorted into the group that they will live with for the rest of their natural lives. It is a crime punishable by disembowelment and being staked out for the sun for a vampire to harm a child in any way. The only exception to this rule is an imperfect child. One that is born or develops a major injury or illness. In such cases the child’s life is mercifully terminated. This is an assurance that the world human population will not rise too high.
The last group to be sorted are the outlaws. There are always punished when caught no mater what group they belong to. There are even vampire outlaws that are frequently punished. Death is the only punishment that exists in this bleak future. In order for humanity to survive they have developed a go along to get along attitude. For the most part this works well. Sometimes as in the case of Stephen it doesn’t. This brave new world has lots of different people and creatures in it. All sorted out into neat little categories.
The initial takeover took approximately nine hours from December 31, 2005 to January 1,2006. From sunset when the humans were first going out to celebrate New Year’s Eve until just before sunrise on New Year’s Day. The vampires struck in a manner that was unusual for them. They fed, purged, and fed again. The population of the world had to be reduced to a controllable level. Millions of men, women, and children died that night. The few that had stayed home had no idea what had happened until the next morning when some entire towns were empty. The aftermath of the rounding up the others with promises of food and a better living situation took care of the rest. Individuals that had lost their entire families were promptly killed as and example to the others of what would happen if they resisted. In the end the world’s human population was less than one third of what it had been and only two thousand more vampires were created that night.
The new vampires were all very beautiful people in life. Mostly lover’s of vampires that had brought them over. A few were seen as perfect and spared to be perfect forever. Of these none was sadder than the only vampire child to be created. He was six years old and the victim of a vampire that thought it was funny to have an eternal child to use for his own sick pleasure. When it was discovered the poor child vampire was quickly put out of his misery, and the vampire that created him was destroyed. The cruelty of the vampire race is legendary. Though nothing is ever said about their sense of justice. This vampire was a vicious pedofile. His death served as an example to all that in this new society that kind of behavior would not be tolerated. The vampire was first shot repeatedly. The point being not to kill him, but to cause him pain. Then he was castrated, disemboweled, and scalped. Then allowed to regenerate and went through it all over again. His punishment lasted for thirty days and then he was staked out for the sunrise.
Things had not all been bad. The punishments fit the crime. Sometimes not, but no society is perfect. The small town of Longview, WA fell even before the great killing. It was there for spared the worst of the death and destruction. The mayor Paul Hanou having brokered a deal with the vampires from the start to save as many as possible. Very little changed in this small town. Life went on people reported to be sorted and chipped. Welfare payments stopped as all humans were given all they needed and most of what they wanted in return for using their special skills.
The town still underwent it’s own wave of death. The meth problem in this city was getting out of control. Therefore the vampires rounded up and executed seventy-five percent of the meth addicts in the city. Then the humans voluntarily reported to be sorted. Longview remained one of the few cities in the world that remained in control of a few vampires and a largely human panel of advisors. People still went to work it was just different jobs. Donors in Longview were allowed to live with their families. They were still sterilized and everyone was still chipped.
The few rebellious humans in this town were instantly killed. The population of this town was cut once again by the execution of all registered sex offenders. There was an unusually high concentration of these. This town was additionally cleansed when the vampires brought in a vampire whose special ability was that she could read minds. She was one of the few rebels that had ever been brought over. Her name was Tanya Devall. She was watched at all times. Her ability had been minor before the change. Hatred of what they had made her allowed her some freedom. The fact that they had killed three of her children before they realized she held a power that could be useful fueled her hatred. What kept her in check was the fact that they had her only remaining child held in another city. Stephanie was still human and there for could still be killed. She did shelter a few precious rebels and turned over a few loyalists for execution. Tanya was guarded at all times but in Longview when the culling was done she could live with her daughter. They would be guarded at all times but they could be together.
Being as Tanya was only one of three vampires in existence that could read minds she was always traveling, but she had always loved to have a home. In this small southwest Washington town she could have a home and her child. The culling was done in a mater of days with Tanya there. Every resident was brought into have an audience with her. The registered sex offenders were brought in and she confirmed their crimes and they were taken away for execution. Of those only three were wrongly convicted or wrongly classified. One was the case of a 14 year old girl and a 18 year old boy. The girl had lied about her age. The other two were wrongly convicted rapists. There were almost two hundred that hadn’t been caught. They were also taken away and executed. She also sent the evil to the executioner. The rebels had to be thinned, but not eliminated. In all the culling she saw a ghost.
They brought Stephen before her. She couldn’t believe it he was alive. He had scars she had never seen before. He was listed as a breeder migrant named Steve Devon. He couldn’t be a breeder. He had a vasectomy about a month before the night of the take over. He looked at her and the shock registered on his face. He had thought her dead too. She sent him a silent message. "Don’t let on and I’ll protect you. Stephanie is alive and will be in town soon. I Love you." She hoped it worked the only other it had worked with was Stephanie. He blinked and then she heard in her own head. "How? Why? What can I do to save her? Is this why they tried to recruit us?" She only had one reply for him. "I don’t know." She sent him one more thing. "Wait and I will send for you." She proclaimed this one is a fine addition to our little city and to my bed. Prepare him for me.
Stephen was taken away to the mistresses house. They had never seen Tanya take a human lover. All the other vampires had taken human lovers. This was a first for her. They all believed that she had finally accepted her existence. Maybe they could trust her a little more. She would be more cheerful if she could take fresh blood once in a while and have sex. They all thought that would make her a little less uptight.
That night they brought Stephen to her. He had been cleaned up and shaved. She touched his face and he cringed away from her. She instantly thought "don’t speak think." "How could you let them do this to you." She replied, " I didn’t have a choice." "Where is Stephanie I have to get her safe?" To this she sent back. "As long as I cooperate she is safe." A silent tear slipped down her cheek. He sent her the one question next that sent wracking sobs through her body. "Did the boys get a proper burial?" Her only reply to that was, "Yes." With that he took her in his arms and kissed her. To the vampires watching it looked as if his scared beauty had broken through her guilt over her husband and children’s death. The thought conversation was never heard or suspected. The other vampires did not know that this ability existed. Of all the vampires there had ever been only Tanya and the one’s that she loved could speak to each other using only their minds.
Stephen kissed her teasingly then deeper. He ran his tongue slowly up to tease her earlobe. Tanya moaned against his ear. She had already fed so she did not feel the need to take blood from him. This excited him all the more. He trailed his kisses down her neck. Lingering for a moment at the junction of her neck and shoulder. His hand found the hard peak of her nipple. He slowly unbelted her robe and allowed it to fall to the floor. Then his mouth replaced his hand at her breast. Tanya could feel him hard and ready against her belly as he kissed her. She had missed this.
He teased the tiny bud with his tongue and teeth. She moaned and that was almost his undoing. He realized he must slow down and make this last. Three years is a long time not to see the woman you loved. He trailed his kisses down her ribs pausing at her navel to dip his tongue briefly. Before continuing down to the center of her womanhood. He leaned her back on the bed. Then eased her long sexy legs apart. It had been so long since he had tasted her. She shuddered as he ran his mouth up the arch of her foot. He took his time kissing the backs of her knees. Working his way up to her thigh. Her moans of pleasure driving in further up those luxurious legs. He found the core of her womanhood hot and wet beneath his tongue. He drank in her scent and basked in her pleasure. He teased the tiny bud with his mouth and teeth as she writhed under him.
She couldn’t take it anymore she took his head in her hands as her hips bucked against his mouth. Being careful not to hurt him she pulled him up to kiss him. The taste of her on his lips excited her all the more. She felt the tip of his quivering member enter her. He entered her slowly and then sped up to a fevered pitch. He controlled himself as best he could. As her body gripped him in the hot wet sheath that was her body. He felt her release and his came shortly after. It was the best time they could remember. He wondered how long could this go on before the reality of what she had become took away the joy of their reunion.
He held her until just before dawn. At that time she asked him to go and pick out any room in the house for his daytime retreat. She told him of what he would see if he stayed until dawn and then he laid a gentle kiss on her brow and left to find his own rest.
With the coming of the dawn all vampires die. They look like the corpses they are. The longer dead the more mummy like they look. If a vampire cared for their human lovers they never allowed them to stay until the dawn. Some of the vampires that had ended up having to kill their lovers rather than see the look of horror on their faces every time they touched them. The human that could handle that sight was rare. Some that witnessed it went insane. There were always human servants that brought the blood at dusk so that their masters could regenerate. These were special people. Mostly archeologists and human doctors the ones most likely to be able to deal with the sight of a corpse.
The next night Tanya puzzled over how to Stephen about their youngest son Daniel. The night that the vampires came and destroyed their lives forever she had just discovered that she was pregnant again. It had only been about a month since Stephen’s vasectomy and they thought that they had taken enough precautions before his surgery, but by some quirk of fate she was about six weeks pregnant on the night of the take over. Tanya had been held until the birth of her child in a breeding camp. By then they knew of her special gift and kept her children as insurance against her betraying them. She was converted into a vampire. For that is what the vampire called it when they made a human into a vampire. The night they came to convert her was the night that Daniel turned six weeks old. She had not seen him for a month after that. They gave all the forced converts time to control their thirst before they reintroduced them to the people they knew in life.
Daniel was now about two and a half years old. He was a precocious little boy. He lived and traveled with Stephanie. She never saw her children until she had fed. She never fed on live humans. She always fed from the pool of donor blood. The children never saw her feed, and never would if she had anything to say about it. Stephen came to her about an hour after dusk. They made love. Then she took a deep breath and proceeded with her tale.
