Blood Rebel [COMPLETED]

Chapter Four - A Peculiar Encounter

London was in the middle of a heat wave. Even the nights were hot and sticky, and getting any decent sleep was difficult, especially after witnessing what had happened to Emma in the theatre.  Selene kept herself occupied, spending her nights dancing: either rehearsing or performing.

She slept naked and left all the windows open; any rest was impossible otherwise. She slept only a few hours every day, from dawn until about noon, and then she got up and walked to Hyde Park. 

The city was fairly empty during the day because the Vampires slept, leaving only the Sunlight Guard to roam the street, whose dark skin smouldered, leaving plumes of rancid smoke in their wake. In a city that had once numbered seven million humans, there were now only a few thousand, all of whom were owned by Vampires. Of course, only the rich Vampires could afford a human because they were status symbols, and the dancers, like Selene, were amongst the most expensive there were. 

The rest of the population were Vampires, and hungry ones at that. Humans were obliged to give blood at mobile units throughout the city, and those that refused were sent to Central Control, and from there they were dispatched to Bleedings.  Give blood, or die.  That’s how it went. 

Some of the blood was sucked directly from the neck by needy Vampires who couldn't afford their own human slaves. The rest of it was then bottled and distributed amongst the poor Vampires, the vagrants; and those were the ones to be truly feared. They lived in the tunnels of what was once the London Underground, and came up at night to feed. If you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, your luck was out. You had no chance. Even a starving Vampire had more strength, agility and speed than the fittest human. 

And of course, no one went looking for a missing human nowadays. There was no one to report it to, no one to ask for help, and because no one had a family anymore, no one was that concerned when someone went missing. And it happened frequently. The most you could hope for was that your co-workers would notice, but it was unlikely that they would do any more than that, because they knew what they would find: either nothing at all, or a dead body. 

Death had become commonplace for humans once more, and it was generally accepted without distress or concern. It was recognised as inevitable.

On her way to Hyde Park, Selene often walked past one of the city’s largest Institutions, where human babies were created.  It was, rather unimaginatively, called Institution One. 

Although London’s human population was small, it was entirely renewable.  Every time someone went missing, or someone was Bled, a child was sent out from Institution One to replace them.  They were sent out young, to educational institutions outside the city, where they were taught how to satisfy Vampires; how to fulfil their role in society. At the age of five or six they were assigned their particular role, depending on their individual appearance and skillset. It was now over ten years ago that Selene herself had left Institution One and been dispatched to learn her trade: to be a dancer, and entertainer.

If it were quiet, as it often was during the day, she could hear the babies crying when she walked past.  No human was ever allowed to see a baby, and the sound brought out no maternal instinct in Selene. The Vampires had thought it crucial to stamp out any reproductive impulse in humans, so that they wouldn’t view having children as a natural part of a human lifecycle. 

Selene had often wondered why the Vampires didn’t just have them all sterilised, so procreation was not only illegal and punishable by death, but a biological impossibility. The answer, Hector had once told her, was that a human who was capable of procreation tasted so much better. In fact, sterilisation had been trialled about fifty years ago, but with no success for that exact reason: the blood became inedible.