Nora asked her, as she had the day before, “Where is my mother?”
Sally’s smile was all customer service, tolerant and disarming. “How did you sleep, Ms. Rodriguez?”
Nora had given a false name upon admission, as her association with Eph had certainly landed her name on every watch list. “I slept just fine,” she said. “Thanks to the sedative mixed into my water. I asked you where my mother is.”
“My assumption is that she has been transferred to Sunset, which is a sort of active retirement community associated with the camp. That is normal procedure.”
“Where is it? I want to see her.”
“It’s a separate part of the camp. I suppose a visit is possible at some point, but not now.”
“Show me. Where it is.”
“I could show you the gate, but… I’ve never been inside myself.”
“You’re lying. Or else you really believe it. Which means you’re lying to yourself.”
Sally was just a functionary, a messenger. Nora understood that Sally was not intentionally trying to mislead her but simply repeating what she had been told. Perhaps she had no idea, nor capacity to suspect, that this “Sunset” might not exist exactly as advertised.
“Please listen to me,” said Nora, growing frantic. “My mother is not well. She is sick, she is confused. She has Alzheimer’s disease.”
“I am sure she’ll be well looked after—”
“She will be put down. Without a moment’s hesitation. She’s outlived her usefulness to these things. But she is sick, she is panicked, she needs to see a familiar face. Do you understand? I just want to see her. One last time.”
This was a lie, of course. Nora wanted to bust the both of them out of there. But she had to find her mother first.
“You’re human. How can you do this—how?”
Sally reached out to squeeze Nora’s left arm reassuringly but mechanically. “She truly is in a better place, Ms. Rodriguez. The elderly have rations sufficient to support their health and aren’t required to produce anything in return. I envy them, frankly.”
“Do you really believe that?” said Nora, amazed.
“My father is there,” said Sally.
Nora gripped her arm. “Don’t you want to see him? Show me where.”
Sally was entirely sympathetic—to the point where Nora wanted to slap her. “I know it is difficult, the separation. What you have to focus on now is taking good care of yourself.”
“Was it you who drugged me?”
Sally’s smile drained of conviviality, replaced by concern—perhaps concern for Nora’s sanity, for her future potential as a productive camp member. “I have no access to medication.”
“Do they drug you?”
Sally offered no opinion on Nora’s response. “Quarantine is over,” she said. “You’re to be part of the general camp community now, and I’m to show you around, to help you get acclimated.”
Sally led her out through a small, open-air buffer zone, along a walkway beneath a tarpaulin keeping them from being soaked by rainfall. Nora looked out at the sky: another starless night. Sally had papers for the human at the checkpoint, a man in his fifties wearing a white doctor’s coat over his slate-gray jumpsuit. He looked over the forms, glanced at Nora with the eyes of a customs agent, then let them through.
Rain found them despite the overhead canopy, splashing at their legs and feet. Nora wore hospital-style foam sandals with spongy soles. Sally wore a comfortable, if damp, pair of Saucony sneakers.
The path of crushed stone fed into a wide circular walkway surrounding a high lookout post similar to a lifeguard’s station. The rotary formed a hub of sorts, with four other paths extending from it. Warehouse-style buildings stood nearby, long and low, with what appeared to be factory-style buildings farther away. No signs marked the way, only arrows fashioned out of white stone embedded in the muddy ground. Low-wattage lights marked the paths, necessary for human navigation.
A handful of vampires stood around the rotary like sentinels, and on seeing them, Nora fought back a chill. They were completely exposed to the elements—bare, pale skin covered by no coat or clothes—and yet showed no discomfort, the black rain striking their bare heads and shoulders, streaming down their pellucid flesh. Arms hanging limply, the
“Security enforces routine so that everything runs in a very orderly manner,” said Sally, picking up on Nora’s fright and distress. “In fact, there are very few incidents.”
“Of people resisting?”
“Of any disruptions,” said Sally, surprised at Nora’s assumption.
Being this close to them without any sharpened silver to protect herself made Nora’s skin crawl. And they smelled it. Their stingers clicked softly against their palates as they sniffed the air, alerted by the scent of her adrenaline.
Sally nudged Nora’s arm in order to get her moving. “We cannot linger here. It is not allowed.”
Nora felt the sentinels’ black and red eyes tracking them as Sally led her down a long offshoot path leading past the warehouselike buildings. Nora sized up the high fences that formed the camp walls: chain link laced with orange hurricane stripping, obscuring the view outside the camp. The tops of the fences were angled out at forty- five degrees, beyond her view, though at a few points she glimpsed tufts of barb wire sticking up like cowlicks. She would have to find another way out.
Beyond, she saw the bare tops of distant trees. She already knew she was out of the city. There were rumors of a large camp north of Manhattan and two smaller camps in Long Island and northern New Jersey. Nora had been transported there with a hood placed over her head, and she had been too anxious and concerned about her mother to think about estimating travel time.
Sally led Nora to a rolling wire gate standing twelve feet high and at least that length wide. It was locked and manned by two female guards standing inside a gatehouse, who nodded familiarly to Sally and worked together to unlatch it and push the gate open just wide enough to admit them.
Inside stood a large barracks house resembling a homey-looking medical building. Behind it, dozens of small mobile homes were arranged in rows like a neatly maintained trailer park.
They entered the barracks house, stepping inside a wide common area. The space resembled a cross between an upscale waiting room and the lounge of a college dormitory. An old episode of
In cushioned, pastel-colored chairs, a dozen women sat around in clean white jumpsuits, as opposed to Nora’s and Sally’s dull gray. Their bellies bulged noticeably, each woman in her second or third trimester of pregnancy. And something else: they were allowed to grow their hair, made thick and lustrous from the pregnancy hormones.
And then Nora saw the fruit. One of the women was snacking on a soft, juicy peach, its inside threaded with red veins. Saliva gushed inside Nora’s mouth. The only fresh, not-canned fruit she had tasted in the past year or so were mushy apples from a dying tree in a Greenwich Village courtyard. She had trimmed out the spoiled spots with a multitool blade until the remaining fruit looked like it had already been eaten.
The expression on her face must have reflected her desire, for the pregnant woman, upon meeting Nora’s eyes, looked away uncomfortably.
“What is this?” said Nora.
“The birthing barracks,” said Sally. “This is where pregnant women convalesce and where their infants are ultimately delivered. The trailers outside are among the best and most private living quarters in the entire compound.”
“Where did she get”—Nora lowered her voice—“the fruit?”
“Pregnant women also receive the best food rations. And they are excused from being bled for the length of their pregnancy and nursing.”
Healthy babies. The vampires needed to replenish the race, and their blood supply.
Sally went on. “You are one of the lucky ones, the twenty percent of the population with B-positive blood
