'I shouldn't have told you that,' Quincy said, watching the blood drip from the bag into my veins as if it were a bad sign. 'I know he was a friend of yours. I wouldn't have told you only Dad said to tell you yours was the last name he said before he died. Just before the DA went up. 'Jack,' he said, like he knew what was going to happen, Dad said, and called out your name.'
He didn't though, I thought. And 'that bloody murderer Nelson' hadn't refused to evacuate him. Jack had just gone on working, oblivious to Nelson and the DA, stabbing at the rubble as though he were trying to murder it, calling out 'saw' and 'wire cutters' and 'braces'. Calling out 'jack'. Oblivious to everything except getting them out before the gas killed them, before they bled to death. Oblivious to everything but his job.
I had been wrong about why he had joined the ARP, about why he had come to London. He must have lived a terrible life up there in Yorkshire, full of darkness and self-hatred and killing. When the war came, when he began reading of people buried in the rubble, of rescue wardens searching blindly for them, it must have seemed a godsend. A blessing.
It wasn't, I think, that he was trying to atone for what he'd done, for what he was. It's impossible, at any rate. I had only killed ten people, counting Jack, and had helped rescue nearly twenty, but it doesn't cancel out. And I don't think that was what he wanted. What he had wanted was to be useful.
'Here's to making the best of a bad job,' Mrs Lucy had said, and that was all any of them had been doing: Swales with his jokes and gossip, and Twickenham, and Jack, and if they found friendship or love or atonement as well, it was no less than they deserved. And it was still a bad job.
'I should be going,' Quincy said, looking worriedly at me. 'You need your rest, and I need to be getting back to work. The German army's halfway to Cairo, and Yugoslavia's joined the Axis.' He looked excited, happy. 'You must rest, and get well. We need you back in this war.'
'I'm glad you came,' I said.
'Yes, well, Dad wanted me to tell you that about Jack calling for you.' He stood up. 'Tough luck, your getting it in the neck like this.' He slapped his flight cap against his leg. 'I hate this war,' he said, but he was lying.
'So do I,' I said.
'They'll have you back killing jerries in no time,' he said.
'Yes.'
He put his cap on at a rakish angle and went off to bomb lecherous retired colonels and children and widows who had not yet managed to get reinforcing beams out of the Hamburg Civil Defence and paint violets on his plane. Doing his bit.
A sister brought in a tray. She had a large red cross sewn to the bib of her apron.
'No, thanks, I'm not hungry,' I said.
'You must keep your strength up,' she said. She set the tray beside the bed and went out.
'The war's been rather a blessing for our Vi,' I had told Jack, and perhaps it was. But not for most people. Not for girls who worked at John Lewis's for old stewpots who never let them leave early even when the sirens had gone. Not for those people who discovered hidden capabilities for insanity or betrayal or bleeding to death. Or murder.
The sirens went. The nurse came in to check my transfusion and take the tray away. I lay there for a long time, watching the blood come down into my arm.
'Jack,' I said, and didn't know who I called out to, or if I had made a sound.
Vampyr
Jane Yolen
Jane Yolen has been called 'America's Hans Christian Andersen' (Newsweek) and 'the Aesop of the 20th Century' (New York Times). With more than 200 books to her credit, she is a two-time Nebula Award winner, a three-time Mythopoeic Award winner, and a recipient of the World Fantasy Award .
In 1991 she edited Vampires with Martin H. Greenberg, and she has contributed tales of the undead to other anthologies such as Blood Muse and Sisters of the Night, as well as Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (in collaboration with Robert J. Harris). Among her latest books are the collection Sister Emily's Lightship, the novel Queen's Own Fool, and a romp called Boots & The Seven Leaguers: A Rock-and-Troll Novel.
'My only insight about vampires is that they suck,' reveals the writer. 'This poem was written with a melody in my head (I was writing songs for Boiled in Lead at the time, as well as for the Flash Girls and Lui Collins), but the melody has gone away.'
VAMPYR
We stalk the dark,
Live in the flood.
We take the madness
In the blood.
A moment's prick,
A minute's pain
And then we live
To Love Again.
Drink the night.
Rue the day.
We hear the beat
