9: Old Friends
The noisy, dim restaurant wasn’t Hubert’s usual scene. It was the most sedate place he’d been able to find on the Scarlet Strip, the area around the Scarlet City gates where vampires visiting the human city above tended to linger. For some reason, vampires and their ‘victims’ alike (unsurprisingly, since the vampires themselves were previous generations of ‘victims’) had similar tastes on what vampire/human encounters should be, and the vast majority of them had tastes that tended towards loud clubs with dark corners and daring outfits.
So even the restaurant was dark and loud and lit by fuzzy neon. At least the food was normal.
Hubert and Benny should be a jarring sight in such a place, Hubert thought; one old man more at home with paperwork and a nice cup of tea, and one babyfaced youth with wide eyes. But they weren’t. Old people frequently became interested in meeting vampires; immortality became more and more appealing the closer the grave loomed. And vampires, even those turned late in life, had a tendency to look young. Terry had explained to him once that it’s easier to guess a vampire’s age by looking at what era’s standards of beauty their features match, rather than how ‘old’ they look; in fact, younger vampires tended to look older, as their infection took time to bring them back to their subconsciously ideal age. None of that mattered with Benny, though. Benny had need turned young, and Hubert already knew how old he was. And Benny… Benny looked exactly as he had the last time Hubert had seen him. More than fifty years ago.
“It’s good to see you, Benny,” Hubert said.
“You, too,” Benny said. “How have you been?”
“Oh, not too bad. Married Ellie. Have a great-granddaughter now.” Hubert sipped his wine. (Synthetic; real wine was incredibly expensive inside the city and needed work credit to buy, which he had but the restaurant wasn’t well-off enough to accept. Growing grapes using only uncontaminated water was expensive, so it was actually easier to get good wine in poorer, contaminated areas outside the city; inside, such contaminated wine was fit only for visiting vampires.) “How have you been?”
“Fine, fine. Recently moved into a new place.”
“How’s that going?”
“It’s alright.”
“I’m sorry about Penelope.”
Benny looked away. “Yeah. Thanks. The timing… right when I could… it would’ve been nice to be able to catch up and get to know each other again, y’know? I, I guess I should be saying I’m sorry for your loss. You knew her a lot better than me, I imagine.”
“I’m sure she would have loved to see you again. She loved you so much.”
“Yeah.” Benny sipped his own wine, avoiding Hubert’s gaze. (Real wine, blackwater contaminated. Hubert wondered if it tasted better than his synthetic wine.) Benny really had changed very little over the past half a century; he still had that way of setting his jaw when he was trying to hide his anger.
Hubert narrowed his eyes. “You might s well say it.”
“Three years.”
“You’re still mad about that?”
“Mad about you two nearly getting me killed?”
“We did not nearly get you – ”
“You did! I had immortality in the bag and you – do you know how hard it was to get Madame to look at me a second time? You nearly cost me eternity because o your petty little – ”
“You were a child! You might have looked like you were in your twenties with the right clothes and haircut, but you were seventeen when you started messing with vampires! By the time you had her ready to turn you, you were eighteen! You think Penelope and I were going to stand by and say nothing while you made decision like that as a kid?”
“What, the objectively correct decision? Seizing the chance to live forever? Do you know what it was like, Bert? I went to our meeting spot, ready to embrace eternity, and she looked right through me, like I was fucking invisible! I’d worked so hard to be the centre of her world, I’d done everything right, and suddenly I was nothing to her, like I wasn’t even there! Because someone had gone and let it slip that I wasn’t nineteen yet! And then when I reached age I had to start all over again! Do you know how hard that was? To get her to look at me a second time? Do you realise how fickle Madame is? An extra three years it cost me, three more years of keeping her attention before she’d turn me! Three years in which she could’ve gotten bored and turned to anyone else! I’d won an impossible challenge and gained endless life and you two made me win it a second time! And now, because of that, Penny’s dead.”
“What does her death have to do with – ”
“If I’d been turned three years earlier, I’d have been able to come back three years earlier. I would’ve had time to convince her to join me. There would’ve been time, before she gets murdered in a fucking train station. I survived the consequences of you two telling on me, but I guess she didn’t.”
“She wouldn’t have become a vampire. She had work here, ties here. She had no interest in joining the Scarlet City.”
“I could’ve convinced her.”
“No, you couldn’t.”
“Well. I could’ve at least had a relationship with her again, for a few years. Even if she chose not to become a vampire and extend it.”
“You could’ve had a relationship with her for the last fifty years if you hadn’t chosen – no, I get it, that’s your choice. None of us could have known what would happen to her. None of us could have conceived what fifty years would be like. We were kids, for Outsiders’ sake.” He sipped the horrible synthetic wine again. “Are you happy, down there?”
“Y-yeah. It’s great. Great clubs, good entertainment. I recently moved into my own place. That’s been good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Of coruse, the cops think I killed Penny, so that’s been a bit stressful.”
“They do?!”
“Yeah. I mean, she’s my sister. And it was my first night back out when she… yeah. Obvious suspect, I guess.”
“And the other two?”
“What other two?”
“The others in her department.”
Benny gave him a confused look.
“Never mind. You’re a murder suspect and they just let you back out here?”
Benny shrugged. “Maybe they’re hoping I’ll kill more people and give them a solid case. Listen, Bert… you’re my best friend. I don’t… I don’t want to lose you, too.”
“I know what you’re gonna suggest, and no, Benny, not right now. I’ve got people here who I can’t abandon.”
“You’d abandon them all the same by dying.”
“I’m not dying yet. Ask me again in five years, and I’ll probably have a different answer. But my great-granddaughter’s a couple of years off adulthood and my daughter’s just divorced her husband and… I need to be here for my family.”
“There’s always going to be more family, who you’re always going to need to be there for. But if you don’t bite the bullet and come down to Scarlet sooner or later, then all those family members will be attending your funeral.” Benny grabbed Hubert’s hand, gripping it tightly. “I can make it happen. I have connections. What’s your blood type?”
Hubert pulled away. “Why do you need to know my blood type?”
“It determines how hard it would be to pull strings for you. If you’re AB, you’re out of my influence; the Abbies don’t like competition and they’re very selective about who they take on. Zeroes are very easy, and B is workable with some patience, but what you want to be right now is type A – they’re about to massively lift restrictions on Type A conversions, it’s going to be a free-for-all. If you’re Type A, I can get you in, easy.”
“Wait, what? Why?”
Benny shrugged. “Some political nonsense. The younger politicians are upset with the dominance of the elders and are throwing a tantrum about it. They’ve pushed through a rule where the Taipays can massively increase their numbers, and that’s going to prompt an equal and opposite response from the Bees who’ll want the same, to keep the two sides fair. I think maybe that’s the point – Zeroes are the more popular play because they’re not a political threat to the Abbies, and a massive influx of ‘Pays and Bees might be enough to – ”
“Okay, okay; I don’t have any clue what that means. But you’re saying that the Scarlet City is targeting people with Type A blood to turn them into vampires?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘targeting’, but they’re going to let the Taipays recruit, yeah.”
“Huh. Well, ain’t that a thing. Answer’s still ‘no’ for now, Benny. I don’t fear death enough to go lock myself away in the dark just yet.”
“The city’s great! It – ”
“I very much doubt that.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve spent the past fifty years down there embroiled in your exciting vampire life, and a few minutes ago you called me, a guy you haven’t seen since we were in our early twenties, your best friend.”
After saying their goodbyes, the two parted ways, and Hubert’s watch beeped. It was the Lakeview radio station, wanting to relay a radio message from out of town. Terry. (It had been a long, long time since anybody had been capable of launching a satellite into orbit, and cable networks weren’t worth the maintenance or materials between the towns around Lakeview – radio was the primary method of communication in the area.)
He accepted the routed signal.
“Grandpa! Hey there!”
“Terry! Is everything alright?”
“It’s fine! But there’s nothing out here! Not a fucking thing!”
“Well, rural areas won’t have the entertainment options that you’re accustomed to.”
“No, no, the town’s great. I meant the whole decontamination thing. It’s all bunk. Unless they’re all hiding something out here in cahoots with the vampires, and even I’m not enough of a conspiracy theorist to take that seriously, there’s no miracle decontamination method discovered out here. It was just a random blip in the data after all.”
“It happens, love. A lot more than you’d think.”
“Okay, but that leaves us at square one with the murders. I mean, if they’re not killing people to cover something up, then why? Is it really just random?”
“Three people from the same department and the same blood type? No. I have another theory.”
“Which is?”
The blood type thing had been puzzling, if it wasn’t just a coincidence. But if Benny’s information about recruitment was correct… “For some reason – and I don’t know why, yet, but for some reason – there’s a killer vampire out there who absolutely does not want anyone in my department to be turned into a vampire.”
Derin Edala 