His gaze met mine. “What?”
“That’s just . . . the first time I’ve heard a man say he loved a woman for her brilliance.” I was used to hearing about men who loved women for their eyes, for their smiles, for their ability to work hard, for their gentleness and kindness. Not for their brilliance.
“Yeah, well. Women are different out there.” He let out a snort of derisive laughter.
“I don’t mean to sound insensitive about your dating life.” I lifted my chin in defiance. “But I want to know more about ‘out there.’ Why, with all those brilliant people, is there no more ‘out there’?”
He flinched. I felt a momentary sting of satisfaction at taking him down a peg. We Amish did not suffer pride well. Normally, I’d have accepted his condescension with a thin smile, but not today. Not after the world had ended. No one was observing the rules anymore.
“It’s not as if we weren’t working on it. I went with Cassia to the biology lab, slept in the hallway while all these people in their plastic suits stared into microscopes.”
“You went to protect her?” That was a feeling I could understand. Though I knew very little about his world and the things he spoke of, I understood human emotion.
“Yeah. And I had nowhere else to go. The university went into quarantine. I wasn’t sure if it was to keep the rioting out, or to keep us inside. They closed the iron gates, blocked off the roads. Campus police started shooting anyone who wanted in or out. Hell, I didn’t even know those guys were armed.” His voice was thin.
I sucked in my breath, thinking of Mrs. Parsall’s children, at their own distant colleges. “Go on.”
“I thought it beyond barbaric, until I saw a pack of rabid cheerleaders take out some cops in a patrol car. It was like they peeled open a sardine can, then dragged them out and chewed them up on the pavement.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.
“The lab was barricaded while Cassia and the other graduate students tried to figure out what the hell they were. The National Guard came in. They were better shots than the campus P.D.
“Odd thing was, they only came out at night. During the day, the streets were empty, almost peaceful. Cassia said that photophobia—extreme sensitivity to light—was a symptom of rabies. That perhaps we were seeing a mutated, sped-up version of that.”
His breath quivered when he blew it out. “I’ve seen rabies. This was . . . Jesus. This was something else. Something more atavistic in its power. Something . . . beyond science.”
“Something evil,” I whispered.
“I said they were vampires.”
My heart froze. “Vampires?” I wanted to say,
“Yeah. Cassia laughed at me. A plague of vampires? She said that it would be impossible for the human digestive system to adapt to survive on blood in the space of two days. Eventually, the Guard brought a corpse into the biology department for them to cut up. She said that it had a gullet full of blood. Cassia thought it was due to internal bleeding, that the key had to be some blood-borne infection. Maybe rabies with a bit of hematological fever mixed in. I didn’t understand all of it.”
“But you thought of vampires.”
“I wasn’t the only one. It seemed as good a way to describe them as any other. Like I said, the violence was only at night. People were walking around with garlic strung around their necks. Some of them even found refuge in the campus church. That worked well for a while . . . until someone set fire to it. I remember watching the fire from one of the windows in the biology building. It was about three in the morning . . . People came streaming out of the building, right into the arms of the vampires. They ripped them limb from limb.” His eyes squeezed shut.
“It was nothing like you see in the movies, these creatures. There’s no seduction. No passionate luring of the victim to a dark side of velvet. This is just the stinking, rotting underbelly of evil without its makeup. This is exactly what the Undead were in the old folk stories, the world around. Every culture has a vampire—a creature that drinks the blood of the living. And it’s not a pretty process.”
“There’s nothing . . . nothing human remaining of them?” I struggled to articulate the question. “Is there anything intelligent there?”
“I think so. Cassia said they’re capable of speech, of strategy. They figured out how to burn down the church. They would circle the biology building at night, like moths drawn to the flame, calling out for help. Once, one of the Guardsman went to help a woman who was being attacked in the street. Turned out it was a ruse—she was a vampire too. She shucked him out of his body armor like a squirrel with a nut. Maybe they would be less frantic if there was enough food to go around. But they’re smart enough to find it.
“I suspect that the corpse that the Guard brought into the biology building was also a ruse, that it was something planned.”
“How?”
“I think that they infected the body, left it for us. They knew that we were looking for answers. They couldn’t get in. The biology building was built to contain all manner of nasty bugs in the event of a grad student dropping a petri dish full of Ebola. So . . . they sent something in. And that’s what got us.”
“The corpse became a vampire?”
“I told them that it would.” His hands balled into fists in the straw, broke the hollow stalks. “I told them what our ancestors did . . . that they stuffed the mouth with garlic, cut off the head, cut out the heart and burned it . . .”
“They didn’t do that.”
“No. Their microscopes told them that the pathogen was dead. And they believed what their microscopes showed them.”
“Cassia didn’t believe you?” I couldn’t understand believing a machine over a person.
“Not at first. I pleaded with her to let me sever its head. She wouldn’t allow me to damage their evidence. She believed . . . she believed that they were close to an answer when that damn thing crawled out of the cooler and chewed the head off of her dissertation advisor. I think she believed me then.”
He lapsed into an opaque silence.
I prodded him. “And then? How did you escape?”
“Not everyone did. The monster woke up just before dawn. I was able to get my bike out of the basement, tried to convince Cassia to leave. She wanted to stay, study that monster that was sucking her advisor dry in the next room.”
I couldn’t fathom it. That kind of loyalty to an idea. I had felt some loyalty to my community, but not enough that I would never leave it. I would leave it for anything as entertaining as
“What did you do?” I asked, dreading the answer. Had he left her behind? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“She was wearing one of those plastic suits. She’s small, so she swam in it. The sleeves were extra-long. Long enough that I could straitjacket her in it. She fought me, kicking and screaming, all the way down to the bike. I heard gunshots upstairs, breaking glass. I knew that we didn’t have much time, that if we had any future, we could work on the forgiveness part.” His mouth turned up darkly.
“The vamps are fast. But not as fast as a motorcycle. Not that they didn’t try. We got past the stadium just as the sun rose.”
I stared at him, hard. He was here now. Without his bike, and without the girl. “That wasn’t the last time you saw them.”
“No. I had thought to head north, back to Canada. There are enough unpopulated places there . . . I thought we could evade them until someone figured it out. Somewhere.” He shook his head. “We avoided the cities, stuck to the rural roads, slept during the day.
“But I underestimated them. We were riding not too far from here, at night, when we were ambushed. At first, I thought that it was a herd of deer blocking the road. I slowed down. And that’s when I saw . . . I saw that they were just corpses of deer, propped up on the road. I tried to weave around them, but I saw the figures of men around them, like ghosts.
“I went off the road, through a meadow. They followed. I hit a barbed-wire fence, wrecked the bike.
“Cassia was easy to see in the dark, wearing that white plastic suit. They attacked her like vultures. I had a
