“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 type.”
Nora knew her own blood type, of course. B positives were the slaves that were more equal than the others. For that, their reward was camp internment, frequent bloodletting, and forced breeding.
“How could they bring a child into this world as it is now? Into this so-called camp? Into captivity?”
Sally looked either embarrassed for Nora or ashamed of her. “You may come to find that childbirth is one of the few things that makes life worth living here, Ms. Rodriguez. A few weeks of camp life and you might feel different. Who knows? You may even look forward to this.” Sally pushed her gray sleeve back, revealing bull’s-eye bruises that looked like terrible bee stings, purpling and browning her skin. “One pint every five days.”
“Look, I don’t mean to offend you personally, it’s just that—”
“You know, I’m trying to help you here,” she said. “You’re young enough still. You have opportunities. You could conceive, deliver a baby. Make a life for yourself in this camp. Some of the rest of us … are not so fortunate.”
Nora saw this from Sally’s perspective for a moment. She understood that blood loss and malnutrition had weakened Sally and everyone else, sapping the fight from them. She understood the pull of despair, the cycle of hopelessness, that sense of circling the drain—and how the prospect of childbirth could be their only source of hope and pride.
Sally went on. “And someone like yourself who finds this so distasteful, you might appreciate being segregated from the other kind for months at a time.”
Nora made sure she’d heard that correctly. “Segregated? There are no vampires in the birthing area?” She looked around and realized it was true. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. It is a strict rule. They are not allowed.”
“A rule?” Nora struggled to make sense of this. “Is it pregnant women who have to be segregated from vampires, or vampires who have to be segregated from pregnant women?”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
A tone rang, akin to a doorbell, and the women set aside their fruit or their reading material and pushed themselves up from their chairs.
“What’s this?” asked Nora.
Sally had straightened up a bit as well. “The camp director. I strongly suggest you be on your best behavior.”
On the contrary, she looked for a place to run to, a door, an escape. But it was too late. A contingent of camp officials arrived, humans, bureaucrats, dressed in casual business wear, not jumpsuits. They entered the central walkway, eyeing the inmates with barely concealed distaste. Their visit seemed to Nora to be an inspection, and a spot one at that.
Trailing them were two huge vampires, arms and necks still bearing tattoos from their human days. Once convicts, Nora surmised, now upper-level guards in this blood factory. Both carried dripping black umbrellas, which Nora thought strange—vampires caring about the rain—until the last man entered behind them, evidently the camp director. He wore a resplendent, mudless, blindingly white suit. Freshly laundered, as clean an article of clothing as Nora had seen in months. The tattooed vampires were this camp commandant’s personal security detail.
He was old, sporting a trim, white mustache and a pointed beard, which gave him the mien of a grandfatherly Satan—the sight of which nearly choked her. She saw medals on the breast of the white suit, fit for a navy admiral.
Nora stared in disbelief. Such a bald, stunned stare that it immediately drew his attention, too late for her to turn away.
She saw the look of recognition on his face, and a sick feeling spread throughout her body like a sudden fever.
He stopped, his eyes widening in similar disbelief, then turned on his heel, walking toward her. The tattooed vampires trailed him, the old man approaching her with his hands clasped behind his back—his disbelief spreading into a sly smile.
He was Dr. Everett Barnes, the onetime director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nora’s former boss, who, now nearly two years after the fall of the government, still insisted on wearing the uniform symbolic of the Centers’ origin as a branch of the U.S. Navy.
“Dr. Martinez,” he said in his soft Southern drawl. “Nora … Why, this is a most welcome surprise.”
The Master
ZACK COUGHED AND gagged as the camphor s
cent burned the back of his throat and overwhelmed his palate. His breathing returned, his heartbeat slowed down, and he looked up at the Master—standing before him in the form of the rock star Gabriel Bolivar—and smiled.