Vaderia

Cane

Cane's fingers tapped idly upon his table as he waited for the espresso he'd ordered to be brought out to him. He watched the waitress, amused, as she hovered at the edge of the solar exclusionary safety zone (SESZ), the drink spilling onto her quivering hand. A fat, bald man with sweaty pits and thinning hair sauntered up behind her. Cane could not hear what was being shouted in her ear, but the man snarled like a savage dog and thrust a mighty sausage finger in Cane's direction. The waitress morosely hunched her shoulders, raised her free hand feebly above her head, and stepped out into the sunlight.

The vampire had moved his table out into the open; he hated being amongst the sweaty crowds beneath the shadows, whose cloud of perspiration tended to latch onto his pristine suits and made him smell like a sewer for days afterward. No, he had sat himself in the centre of an open-air courtyard, within the centuries old Capital shopping mall. The walls of every shop showed their age with cracks wrinkling across their tired, graying faces. Most windows had been removed to be sold elsewhere, or melted down and turned into solar visors and redirection prisms. The SESZ boundaries were little more than a metre-high pile of sand bags, sagging pitifully in the intense heat.

From his vantage point beneath the sun's brilliant red spotlight, Cane watched the final dregs of humanity, as dirty and diseased as cockroaches, pushing and shoving each other in a violent competition to avoid the sun. He saw as they scurried with the anxious tension of rats sniffing for food scraps, and heaving baskets, bulging with Old World trinkets worth a Solar Point or two, over their shoulders.

The waitress ended up sprinting the twenty or so metres to Cane, tears sizzling off her reddening cheeks. There was barely any espresso left in the cup she tossed at him before making her way back to shelter.

Her steps slowed considerably by the time she reached the relative safety of the cafe interior. The owner barked at another waitress, who obligingly brought over a large jug, sloshing with the unmistakably, luminously green concoction, Methavera; the cheap, strong remedy used by the laymen to treat solar burns, primarily made from aloe, menthol and methanol. The waitresses legs gave out as they began to rub it upon her swollen skin, her wails echoing across the strip, mollifying as she sank to the ground in shock.

The pain from the salve itself could knock a human out for days. In Cane's experience, the longer the human was comatose following Methavera treatment was a decent indicator of how long the human would live after solar exposure. A 24 hour stint indicated no lasting health effects for at least a year; from 48 hours, you'd have six months, 72 hours gave you roughly five months, and so on. The cafe owner glared at Cane. Cane waved back, unphased.

For Cane, the sun merely pinched him, almost playfully, teasing what was in store for him when the bubble finally burst. The Sun had swollen considerably in the last one-hundred thousand years or so; the solar physicists at the Bureau of Vampiric Study warned that the final stage of growth would occur rapidly in the coming century, though they had no way of measuring exactly when the end would truly begin.

There was a mere dribble of espresso left in the glass, but Cane brought it to his lips and sipped, slowly. He enjoyed putting on this display, being one of the last people alive who could relax and enjoy the Sun. He watched the humans watch him, envy dripping down their sullen faces and staining their ragged clothes. Cane did not just enjoy soaking in her toxic radiation, no, he enjoyed being able to embrace what she was; a once-god, fallen from grace, not unlike himself. Together, they were despised by the shadowed creatures who had thought, for a blip of history, that they were the masters of the universe.

It was, of course, a myth that vampires could not survive in the sunlight. It was a rumor vampires had spread on their own accord, to encourage humans to let their guards down between dawn and dusk. Cane's friend Amun had conjured it himself to avoid suspicion in the late 400s. For a few million years, it had worked, along with other such myths on how to kill a vampire, such as the wooden stakes and the burning pyres and the cloves of garlic. It was astounding what humans would believe in their moments of desperation. Cane and his fellow vampires used the stories as props, playing dead and letting human imagination rebury them in history as legends. Much of a vampire's life was a performance of sorts, intended to grant a few more hundred years of peace until conspiracies would begin to resurface. Cane had noticed that humans tended to resume The Hunt during wartime or famine or drought; really, any disaster which threatened their existence, for which they needed someone, or something, to blame other than themselves. Whenever evil seemed to be haunting the humans, Cane would be rediscovered and a match would once again be lit beneath his feet.