Of course it benefitted Baka. The vaccine gave the old vampire a new humanity card. Twice. No cause for complaint there. He was even tapped to head up the task force to convert hunters to healers, another great Vaccine Era slogan. He formed a network of rehabilitation and treatment centers for vampire who had been successfully reconverted to human.
The original target date of how long it should take to effectively stamp out vampirism was calculated based on the best guess estimate of the number of vampire, number of active hunters, and the amount of vaccine being produced and dispersed.
At first there was a marked decline in vampire activity. So much so that Jefferson Unit was quickly and efficiently reconceived as a research and training facility. Too quickly and efficiently in Sol’s opinion.
Of course J.U. had always been a research and training facility, but it had also been one of the crown jewels of the Black Swan Hunters Division, home to the most elite slayers on the planet. There was such a certainty that the vaccine was going to be the end of the vampire plague. The rush to reorganize and redistribute resources left Jefferson Unit feeling like a ghost town. The hunters and all the staff who supported them, including medical, were transferred. The facility felt sad, abandoned, and retired.
If that was the whole story, you might be inclined to say that it was a good time to die. And, if that was the whole story, he might have been inclined to agree. But he was privy to information about the progress of the “Great Vampire Inversion”. That was the name given to the era of revolution, when humanity would free itself from the most dangerous and most rampant of the monsters that make prey of people. It was a phrase that later mocked the hope it implied and made them seem childlike in their naïve and gullible rush toward belief in the vaccine as a fait accompli.
The reports had come in during his time away from work with Farnsworth. Sol had been called to Edinburgh for an urgent meeting and had to leave Farnsworth where she was and not knowing whether he’d make it back before the clock ran out on their vacation time. As a fellow employee of Black Swan, there was no question that she understood, but that didn’t make it feel less like leaving her on her own in the middle of their long-planned romantic interlude was a shitty thing to do.
Farnsworth though? In Sol’s opinion she was a great dame. She didn’t make him feel worse by looking disappointed, didn’t even mist up when he kissed her goodbye. The first ten years she worked at J.U. she saved most of what she earned by living in the small onsite apartment that came with the job. With food, utilities and housing included, she was able to sock away enough to make her modest dream come true.
She bought a precious yellow cottage on the beach at Cape May and spent whatever needed to be spent to keep it maintained to perfection. It was less than a two hour drive away from Fort Dixon, but it was a world away. Every chance she got she retreated to her little bit of private heaven.
When the question arose about where they would go for a romantic escape, she suggested her getaway.
“Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate a cheap date as much as the next guy, but I’ve got a lot of unused vacation funds. I could take you anywhere you want to go. Do anything you want to do.”
She gave him that special smile that never failed to make him feel like he was made of pure gold. Made his cock feel just about that hard, too.
She turned her chin up at an angle and kept a hint of that smile on her lips as she said, “Can I have a rain check on that? Next time I might just rise to the challenge of spending all your vacation stash, but this time I’d like to just hide you away and have you all to myself.”
Damn if that didn’t make Sol fall even more in love with her. Before that he would have said he couldn’t love her more, but she just kept stretching the limits. Like she was bringing a withered heart back to life and gradually filling it with healthy fluids, making it swell bigger and bigger.
“Whatever you say, beautiful.” She saw both love and amusement on his face when he reached up and tucked a stray tendril behind her ear. “Have me all to yourself, huh? I like the way you think.”
When the big day came, Sol borrowed Storm’s silver convertible Porche roadster. Storm had never driven it to California because he didn’t need it there. It had been parked in the underground at J.U. for months without use, but it turned over when Sol pressed the ignition. There were two seats in the car and not much room in the trunk, but most of what Farnsworth would want and need was already at her cottage.
It was too cold to put the top down, but convertibles are romantic even when the tops are up, wind noise and all. They have a way of making a vehicle's occupants feel young. And sexy.
On the trip down they chatted easily about places where they’d been, people they knew in common, and bucket list items even though it was still early in life for them to be composing bucket lists. When they were twenty minutes away, they made a grocery stop at the last supermarket en route. They bought more than the space left in the trunk, but Farnsworth was a good sport and laughed about sharing the passenger seat with one of Sol’s duffels between her legs.
It was cool but sunny when they arrived and the March wind was doing its reputation proud. Sol pulled the car underneath the house between thick weathered support pillars. There was a store room and guest room next to the carport, but the two floors she used as real living space began twelve feet above ground level.
He carried groceries and bags up the stairs while she opened up the house. That involved engaging the motorized storm shutters, lighting the pilot and turning on the heat plus her favorite part of the ritual - affixing a unicorn flag to its holder on the deck.
“There,” she said, turning toward Sol with a grin. “Now we’re officially in residence.”
He stared at the flag for a minute. “A unicorn?”
She laughed. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” It was a blue and white unicorn on a light gray background. And it was beautiful. As unicorns go it was dignified with a fine proud head, flying mane and long elecorn.
“I guess,” he conceded. His scowl was more obligatory than sincere, lip service to the code of macho.
Using an armload of logs from the half cord of firewood on the deck, Sol built a fire to warm up the cottage while they were waiting for the small gas furnace to do its job. When everything was put away, they drank a glass of wine and made love in front of the fire on a white rag rug that was so thick it felt like a pallet.
When Sol had assured her that he had the resources to take her anywhere she wanted to go, she had immediately formed images of having him in her house. And, once that vision had taken root, it appealed to her more than anything else she could think of.
Farnsworth was so accustomed to relaxing at the cottage and letting work stress dissolve away that her nervous system responded to the environment automatically and put her in getaway mode. Sol, on the other hand, had muscles that were knots on top of knots on top of knots. If he had ever known how to relax, it had been decades in the past and, certainly, the idea of "vacation" was foreign to his nervous system.
So he fidgeted and paced and suggested things to go and do. She sat watching him, casually sipping chardonnay, in a yellow cable sweater the same cheerful color as the cottage.
“Let’s go for a walk on the beach,” she said.
He stopped abruptly, his gaze going toward the ocean. “A walk on the beach?” He looked and sounded as if he'd never heard of such a thing.
“Um-hmmm.”