THE NIGHT THE VAMPIRES CAME
CHAPTER 1
I COULDN'T TELL YOU MY EXACT THOUGHTS the day the Blight Rain came to Windflower Springs. I could tell you that as the sky turned grey and then black, like smoke from an invisible fire, that I thought of death. My failing heart ached in my chest. It always did that when I was scared. I knew we were all going to die that day. I knew it before the first drop of rain fell.
How did I know? To everyone else, it was just another stiflingly boring day in a small town in Florida, one of many since the toxic rain started and forced us all indoors. This storm was different. This one would change everything. This was the beginning of our last days on earth.
The creatures — these vampires — they were here to invade the very cells of our being. Science would tell us this in a few days. But on that day, I knew death was coming; I knew it in my soul.
"Moth Street!" the bus driver yelled, interrupting my reverie.
"A lot of traffic for 3 o'clock in the afternoon," the old woman next to me mused. This wasn't my stop, but I grabbed my bag and ran for the door. I felt the fog coming like an ache in my chest. From the bus stop, I watched the bus slowly creep along, sputtering and groaning, past me. My house was at least twenty minutes away.
I couldn't explain it. I just felt it.
The storm was coming.
The water level had been rising along this part of the shoreline in Florida for years. The government used to reclaim land from the rising tides, but eventually, they just gave up. This was Windflower Springs; we weren't exactly South Beach in terms of value to the powers that be.
"Better find cover, Ailith. It's going to rain!" Mr. Weintz, the store owner of the local 7-11, told me.
Rain. It didn't mean what it used to. Once there was just ordinary rain, the kind that nourished plants and washed the sky clean of car exhaust and factory pollution. Then, one day, the rain turned on us.
They called it Blight Rain now.
This wasn't the kind of storm you wanted to be caught out in.
At first, it started as small, cold droplets that fell into dark grey splotches on the sidewalk. I felt the rain like watery pinpricks on the top of my head. I snatched a plastic bag from a nearby garbage bin, wrapped it around my head, and started running in the direction of home.
I wasn't supposed to run.
When I was a baby, before I could even remember, I underwent heart surgery for a defect in my heart. Until then, I've had to undergo monthly tests to make sure my heart rate and blood pressure were under control. Sometimes, when I got too excited, my heart started skipping beats. On days when the weather started turning weird — my heart also started beating out of whack.
I used to wonder if my heart was completely my own or if it marched to its own tune. My heart wasn't completely mine. They used a graft to fix the hole in my heart that was causing the oxygenated blood to mix with the used-up blood. It was a new stem-cell treatment; they told my parents.
The doctors called it a KoRi cell treatment. It was an experimental surgery. Most of the people who resorted to it didn't last long. My body proved special. I never needed another surgery after that one, and those cells found a happy home inside my heart.
That was until the rain started.
I ran in the direction of Windflower's small Chinatown. What my parents called a "Chinatown" was just a city block composed of a Golden World Chinese supermarket, a multi-floored dim sum hall, and a street cart selling jianbing. No one cared about people like us. The corporations that were bleeding this planet dry cared the least. Call them whatever you will — Morendi, Yagerin, Sylvirua — they were all full of wicked men and women in suits who couldn't care less about our future.
The street there were lined with red paper lanterns in the shape of magpies celebrating the QiXi festival. The story goes that five thousand years (or a very long time) ago a cowherd fell in love with a weaver girl and met over a bridge of magpies. Grimly, I thought to myself — there won't be another five thousand years left for this planet.
I doubt there will be another hundred.
Blight Rain burned concrete and made people sick. It was so caustic, it even eroded the stone lions guarding the nearby Dim Sum restaurant.
The rain was different this time.
I knew it even before the puddles started to ripple black.
I made it to my house as the fog started to smother the streets. It was thick and dense as pea soup. I had never seen it this bad before. Usually, when the Blight Rain falls, I felt a dull ache in my chest. This time, my heart was beating like a bird trying to break out from under my rib cage.
I banged on our front door for a full minute before my ten-year-old sister, Grace, cracked it open.
"Where were you, Snoria?"
"At school! Sure took you long enough to open the door, greaseball," I retorted. I couldn't believe that my sister was reminding me of my snoring at a time like this. Siblings! I stepped inside and tossed aside the wet plastic bag that I had been wearing as a rain cap. I tried not to think about the dirty droplets of water that splattered everywhere as I kicked off my sneakers. "Where's maw?"
"Went to her room to lie down. She was in the rain, like you, but now she's not feeling so good."
My sister went back to watching cartoons on the living room floor. I don't know what it was. Maybe it was the ghostly lights projecting over the pitch-black walls, or the way that my sister was laughing emotionlessly at the game show, or the stray bits of popcorn scattered over the damp carpet. Something just felt wrong.
"Do you feel it?" I asked Grace as I took a deep breath of the suffocating air. She ignored me as though she was lost in a dream. The Blight was going on outside, and although we were dry in here, I still felt it all around us. I reached for the remote to change the channel to the news. A woman in a maroon jacket with big shoulder pads and a stack of papers was speaking somberly into the camera.
The anchorwoman reminded us once again, as always, that as long as we stayed indoors and out of the rain, the Blight Rain will pass. Stay inside. Lock your doors. Don't drive unless your life absolutely depended on it. If any family members are affected, keep them in a dark, quiet room until the rain passes. Then take them to the hospital. No EMS will come to get you in the middle of a Blight Rain.
I knew all this. The woman had nothing new to tell us.
We had been through this before. I didn't know why — this time the rain was different. I just had a sense of foreboding. My heart continued to race.
Thump, thump, thump.
My heart was banging against my sternum like a fist pounding on heaven's door.
It's here.
Something that wasn't here before.
"Is anyone else here?" I demanded, wondering if I was losing my mind. Maybe the fog was affecting me too. It was making me paranoid, and I heard voices. The Black Waters can make people hallucinate; I recalled from the lecture they gave us at school during a practice drill.
Whatever happens, whatever you think you hear — stay away from the water.
It was easier said than done. We already lost three kids from my class this year who walked into the ocean. The newspapers blamed the victims, saying they should have resisted. They said that — back in the day, there was a thing called personal responsibility. I'm sure back in the day when those elephants in suits were growing up; water was just a thing you drank out of a cup. And only the poor kids were personally responsible. If a rich kid growing up on South Beach got swallowed up, they'll call it a national emergency.
Windflower Springs was nothing but an impoverished enclave of undesirables. We were told again and again that we should thank our stars that the charitable corporations donated medications to those caught in the Blight. They said we should be grateful. Accuse them and they'll take the medication away. Then what will we do? Pay? We couldn't afford it, not even if we worked our minimum wage jobs for many lifetimes.
"Paw's still at work," Grace said. Two years ago, Grace started to call papa by the nickname 'paw' around the time she started befriending the neighborhood stray cats. Soon enough, she began calling our mother 'maw' too, just to remind our parents how badly she wanted a pet of her own. "He called to say that he's staying at the office until the rain's over. He took the train so he can't come home until they're running again."
I nodded. I saw dad's car keys on the dining room table. Sometimes, when the weather forecast said rain, dad takes the train to work in the morning. The Blight was hard on his tires. We had to be frugal since we had just paid for the repairs on the roof.
"I'm going to go check on maw," I told her. Grace didn't respond and went blankly back to her cartoons. She wasn't usually like this. She was usually full of energy and endless noisy chit-chat. Even without the rain, the fog affected people in strange ways. The medical professionals on the TV said it wasn't permanent. I had my doubts. They'd say anything if the right people paid them off. Everyone has a price, even people whose job it was to help us.
I went to my mother's bedroom and knocked on the door.