The Night the Vampires Came

Chapter 1

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.