—rose and lilac—a relic from the past. Someone, somewhere had made this bar of soap. Along with thousands of others, and packaged and shipped it in a normal day with traffic jams and school drops and hurried lunches. Someone had thought the bar of soap with rose and lilac scent would sell well and designed it—its shape and scent and color—to attract the attention of housewives and mothers on the crowded shelves of a Kmart or a Walmart. And now that bar of soap was here—in a processing plant. An archaeological artifact that smelled of roses and lilacs and of times gone by.
A new gray jumper was folded on a bench in the middle of the room, with a pair of white cotton panties set on top. She dressed and was led back through the quarantine station to the front gates. Above her, on an arch of rusting iron, dripped the word LIBERTY. The town car arrived, as did another one behind it. Nora got in the back of the first car; no one entered the second car.
A glasslike partition of hard plastic separated the driver from her passenger. She was a human in her early twenties, dressed in a man’s chauffeur suit and cap. Her hair was shaved tight below the back of her cap brim, leading Nora to assume that she was bald, and therefore perhaps a camp resident herself. And yet the pinkness of her flesh on the back of her neck and the healthy color of her hands made Nora doubt that she was a regular bleeder.
Nora turned again, obsessing over the tail car as she had done since pulling away from the camp. She couldn’t be sure, through the glare of its headlights in the dark rain, but something about the driver’s posture made her think it was a vamp. A backup car, maybe, in case she tried to escape. Her own doors were completely stripped of their inside panels and armrests, with the lock and window controls removed.
She expected a long ride, but little more than two or three miles away from the camp the town car pulled off the road through an open driveway gate. Rising out of the foggy gloom at the end of a long, curling driveway was a house larger and grander than most any she had ever seen. It appeared out of the New York countryside like a European manor, with nearly every window lit warmly yellow, as though for a party.
The car stopped. The driver remained behind the wheel as a butler exited the door, holding two umbrellas, one open over his head. He pulled Nora’s door open and shielded her from the dirty rain as she exited the vehicle and walked with him up slick marble steps. Inside, he disposed of the umbrellas and snapped a white towel off a nearby rack, dropping to one knee to attend to her muddied feet.
“This way, Dr. Martinez,” he said. Nora followed him, her bare soles silent upon the cool floor down a wide hallway. Brightly lit rooms, floor vents pushing warm air, the pleasing odor of cleaning solution. It was all so civilized, so human. Which is to say, so dreamlike. The difference between the blood camp and this mansion was the difference between ash and satin.
The butler pulled open twin doors, revealing an opulent dining room featuring a long table with only two settings laid out, adjoining one corner. The dishes were gold-rimmed with fluted edges, a small coat of arms in the center. The glassware was crystal, but the silverware was stainless steel—not silver. It was apparently the only concession in the entire mansion to the reality of the vampire-run world.
Arranged on a brass platter kitty-corner between the twin settings were a bowl of gorgeous plums, a porcelain basket of assorted pastries, and two dishes of chocolate truffles and other confectionery treats. The plums called to her. She reached for the bowl before stopping herself, remembering the drugged water they had given her in the camp. She needed to resist temptation and, despite her hunger, make smart choices.
She did not sit, remaining standing on bare feet. Music played faintly elsewhere inside the house. There was a second door across the room, and she considered trying the knob. But she felt watched. She looked for cameras and saw none.
The second door opened. Barnes entered, again wearing his formal, all-white admiral’s uniform. His skin beamed healthy and pink around his trim white Vandyke beard. Nora had almost forgotten how healthy a well- nourished human being could look.
“Well,” he said, striding down the length of the table toward her. He kept one hand tucked in his pocket, aping a gentleman of the manor. “This is a much more amenable setting to reacquaint ourselves, isn’t it? Camp life is so dreary. This place is my great escape.” He swirled his hand at the room and the house beyond. “Too big for only me, of course. But with eminent domain, everything on the menu is priced the same, so why settle for less than the very best? It was once owned by a pornographer, I understand. Smut bought all this. So I don’t feel all that bad.” He smiled, the corners of his mouth pulling up the trimmed edges of his pointy beard, as he reached her end of the table. “You haven’t eaten?” he said, looking at the food tray. He reached for a pastry drizzled with a sugary glaze. “I imagined you’d be famished.” He looked at the pastry with pride. “I have these made for me. Every day in a bakery in Queens, just for me. I used to long for them as a kid—but I couldn’t afford them… But now…”
Barnes took a bite of the pastry. He sat down at the head of the table and unfolded his napkin, smoothing it out on his knee.
Nora, once she knew the food was untainted, grabbed a plum and made quick work of it, devouring the fruit. She grabbed her own napkin to swipe at her juice-slicked chin, then reached for another.
“You bastard,” she said with her mouth full.
Barnes smiled flatly, expecting better from her. “Wow, Nora—straight to the point… ‘Realist’ is more like it. You want ‘opportunist’? That I might accept. Maybe. But this is a new world now. Those who accept this fact and acclimate themselves to it are much better off.”
“How noble. A sympathizer with these… these monsters.”
“On the contrary, I would say that sympathy is one trait that I lack.”
“A profiteer, then.”
He considered that, playing at polite conversation, finishing off his pastry and licking each of his fingertips. “Maybe.”
“How about ‘traitor’? Or—‘motherfucker’?”
Barnes slammed his hand against the table. “Enough,” he said, waving off the word as one would a pesky fly. “You’re clinging to self-righteousness because that is all you have left! But look at me! Look at all that I have got…”
Nora didn’t take her eyes from him. “They killed all the real leaders in the first weeks. The opinion makers, the powerful. Leaving room for someone like
Barnes smiled, pretending her opinion of him did not matter. “I am trying to be civilized. I am trying to help you. So sit… Eat… Converse…”
Nora pulled the other chair back from the table, in order to give herself some distance from him.
“Allow me,” he said. Dull knife in hand, Barnes began preparing a croissant for her, swiping in butter and raspberry preserves. “You are using wartime terms such as ‘traitor’ and ‘profiteer.’ The war, if there ever was one, is over. A few humans such as yourself haven’t accepted this new reality yet, but that is your delusion. Now—does this mean we all have to be slaves? Is that the only choice? I don’t think so. There is room in the middle, even room near the top. For those few with exceptional skills and the perspicacity to apply them.” He set the croissant on her plate.
“I had forgotten how slippery you were,” she said. “And how ambitious.”
He smiled as though she had offered him a compliment. “Well—camp living can be a fulfilled existence. Not only living for oneself but for others. This basic human biological function—the creation of blood—is an enormous resource to their kind. Do you think that leaves us with no leverage? If one plays things right, that is. If one can demonstrate to them that one has real value.”
“As a jailer.”
“Again—so reductive. Yours is the language of losers, Nora. I believe that the camp exists neither to punish nor oppress. It is simply a facility, constructed for mass production and maximum efficiency. My opinion—though I consider it a simple fact—is that people quickly come to appreciate living a life with clearly defined expectations. With simple, understandable rules for survival. If you provide, you will be provided for. There is real comfort in that. The human population has decreased by almost a third worldwide. A lot is the doing of the Master, but people kill each other pursuing simple things… like the food you have before you. So I assure you, camp life, once you give yourself over to it fully, is remarkably stress-free.”
Nora ignored the croissant prepared by his hands, pouring some lemon water from a pitcher into her glass instead. “I think the scariest thing is that you actually do believe this.”
“The notion that we humans were somehow more than mere animals, mere creatures set upon this earth—
