narrow cots while blood was sucked from their veins intravenously every three days.
22
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Eight was a bad age to be left alone, especially since the bogeyman from Grimm’s tales actually walked the streets at night. She was living where the wild things were. Rabid, terrified dogs creeping out of their hiding places during the daylight hours to forage for food kept her on pins and needles. She was old enough to know that rabies could kill.
Downtown was mostly foreign to her, as she and her family had lived in the Sawtelle neighborhood of West Los Angeles, half an hour from downtown without traffic and ten minutes from the Santa Monica and Venice beaches that she could still vividly picture.
The Central Library was the only downtown site she knew with GPS preciseness as her parents had made a point to take the family there every other Saturday.
The whole family came downtown to attend a reception thrown for her mother, Beatrice, at the museum where her paintings were interspersed with neon lights depicting the seedy side of the city in a contemporary, loopy sort of way.
“It’s the type of exhibit that is so ludicrous that it is bound to be a hit,” her grandpa George had said.
Instead of having a fun night out, the gray clouds appeared and infected her brother Joe, her sister Sirena, and almost the entire population.
The holdovers couldn’t have left downtown even if they wanted as a permanent traffic jam created by survivors trying to escape by foot and automobile made the roads impossible. All the drivers could do was honk their horns and await an excruciating death.
It took her months to find a long-term refuge and feel a modicum of safety. In an obscure city preservation book she serendipitously read about a forgotten Cold War bunker under a nondescript three-story brick hotel in Little Tokyo. The isolation also 23
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brought on a not-so-unreasonable phobia of the outside world.
“You look green,” she’d say to her reflection on a chipped mirror. “Time to sunbathe on the roof and get some groceries.”
The Gray Armageddon killed off her family and friends, but vampires completed her imprisonment.
Caged and isolated, she learned to hate Sainvire and Trench.
Any information gleaned about the two came from the semi-lucid cattle they were able to rescue and from bitter custodians forced into post-apocalyptic slavery due to the hue of their skin, the size of their nose, and the shape of their eyes. A rift had opened between the two opposing heads of the city.
“Trench fancies himself a connoisseur of flesh. He has a weakness for perfect-ten women, and you know he has a thing for pigs because of their penchant for hitting first and asking questions later. An ideal force for a fickle vampire,” a tall, curly-haired smuggler named Morales who smiled too much told Poe when she was sixteen.
Goss and Sister had asked him and a fellow smuggler to bring Poe up to speed. He and Megan had both suffered as cattle. They were the lucky few who had escaped.
“To find Trench, all you have to do is follow a trail of be-mustached vampires and emaciated looking waifs that looked like they A-Ha’d their way out of a fashion magazine,” added Megan, a startlingly luminescent smuggler with guarded eyes and red hair.
She nearly gagged at the warm, fizzless root beer she’d been sipping.
“Sainvire’s another matter,” said Morales, massaging his temple. It was a tough thing trying to 24
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explain the powerful vampire in simple words, but he did it anyway.
“He’s cautious, logical, efficient. Our biggest danger. For the past ten years, the human holdouts were hunted and eventually herded into Union Station
– you know the cool passenger train depot near Chinatown. The Vampire Council and titled undead divided the cattle and took them to buildings around the downtown area that were snatched up by master vampires. They’re fed, watered, encouraged to squeeze out babies, and of course, used intravenously to satisfy the hungry vampos.”
With her face blanched of color, Megan added,
“The more important undead were able to hook up their own straw attachments. They feed directly on human sushi to savor the warm blood without the chance of contamination.”
“Sainvire was even nice enough to set up a vitamin regimen for human cattle with a large dose of iron tabs to stave off anemia. Other masters followed.
If the rumors are spot on, he came up with liver and onion Thursdays, too. He’s a true saint,” Morales fumed.