Vampocalypse (old first draft)

Chapter Four

Sleep, for me, was easier than it should have been while living amongst superiors - because the undead were just waiting for me to come outside to be devoured. I guess you could say I had grown custom to it. Better to sleep inside, within the thick metal walls, than out in the wild with the horrors.

Even during the day, there were terrors in the wild. Anyone could get lost in the wild's huge overgrown forests and jungles. Gramma told me the trees and plants never used to be so grand. Less people on the planet meant more room for the foliage to grow, and grow it did. It grew along old, cracked buildings, through broken pavement on the ground that used to be called roads, which sounded like small versions of the passageways - how the superiors transported goods -to me, and the plants swallowed up the old fashioned, little homes within it's colossal, green bulk. It would be much too easy to get lost in all of the green.

During the day, there were still the deaders to worry about, since they didn't sleep. Also, there were untamed animals that could rip a firsty to shreds as easily as any superior could. Gramma said these, too, were never as large as today. It seemed like whatever happened when the deaders began to rise, had given everything else a boost.

We were lucky, on some levels, that the pathogen that reanimated the dead didn't seem to effect the animals. In turn, that reason is probably why the hybrids weren't effected, since they were more animal than human. It wasn't like anyone could just be bitten and be a hybrid. That was a myth; something only in the books I'd read and the stories my grandma told. The truth was it was a mutation. Evolution had changed them, not a magical bite. We never knew who had the gene and who didn't until they hit puberty. Sometimes, firsties in the compounds would just wake up one day and realize they were different. When the superiors noticed it, they tossed out the hybrids. They can't feed on their blood. Either it makes them sick, or they just didn't like it; I wasn't sure which. The superiors had no use for them. If they were a hybrid, they were basically safe from the superiors and the deaders, because the deaders weren't interested in their flesh either, even if they were a lot like firsties sometimes.

I suppose that was evolution's way of keeping firsties around. Deaders were...well, dead. Superiors looked like us, but they were something else. Hybrids were firsties half of the time. If we weren't born a hybrid, we would never be one, but to honest, they were becoming much more common as the nights go by. I knew two perfectly regular firsties could have a hybrid child, but I had no idea if two hybrids could have a firsty. If they did, they never brought them to the compounds. If they did, they protected them somehow. From what I'd seen on the programs, they were pretty efficient whilst battling deaders. I could only imagine what a pack of them could do.

•••

Upon waking that night, I didn't ponder on the frightening aspect of things. This night was a special night for me, by firsty terms. It was my seventeenth birthday. I would be considered an adult from now on. That didn't mean I would move out to my own living quarters, or that I would necessarily get a chore around the compound - though I would be eligible to request one.

It meant a party.

Not the kind of party that my grandma remembered, back when they would throw extravagant bashes to welcome a human into adulthood - the age was eighteen then. It was simply a small celebration of recognition with cake and booze available. This benefited both firsties and superiors, I've been informed. The firsties could drink away their troubles and have some fun, and the superiors could bleed them after they'd gotten nice and sloshed. If the firsties had alcohol in their blood when the superiors took it, they could get drunk on us. Superiors loved to get drunk. It was the perfect type of chaotic rush their brains relished on; an extra oomph to their ever monotonous routine.