SNAP: The World Unfolds

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I was sitting in a chair across the cabin from Jean-Louis when Chrissy came back to remind us to fasten our safety belts.  We were about to take off for Budapest.  Vampire country, here I come, I thought.

“Don’t look so stricken,” Jean-Louis smiled.  “Everything’s the same as it has been for months now.   Do you want to talk about it?”

I nodded yes, still afraid that I couldn’t make sense of spoken words.

“Didn’t you wonder about the offices always being dark?  Didn’t you wonder about the sound of the phones?”

“Yes,” I croaked.  “I’ve asked Jazz about some of those things.  Oh, my god,” I suddenly blurted, “the nurse’s office!  I asked her about that right before we left.”

“You hadn’t seen that before?”

“No.  I just usually came in through the garage on a lower floor.  Or sometimes I even used the front entrance.”

He chuckled.  “You’ve probably given the Ice Princesses a shock.  They don’t know what staff are vampires and who aren’t.  I’m sure they think that all senior staff are.”

“The Ice Princesses?  I thought I was the only one who called them that.”

“No.”  He shook his head. “They’re known as that.  There’s a look that the Baron likes for the SNAP staff who interact with the public.”

“Like Chrissy,” I mumbled.

“Yep.  There must be about a hundred of them scattered throughout the offices.  The two in the LA office are the best known donors.”

“Donors?  What does that mean...,” my voice trailed off.

“A medical lab?  Maybe a blood bank?” he asked.  “Because it is.  We can feed in different ways.  We can take directly from a donor,” here he smiled again to show fangs, “we can use blood that’s been drawn from a donor and stored, we use some of the blood substitutes they’re developing and testing and we use blood from other animals.  Notice the steak tartre on the menu?”

“But I thought if you bit somebody, they died and came back as a vampire?”

“No, you have to have almost all of your blood drained for that to happen.  And we clearly don’t want to do that to donors.  If they stay alive, they can manufacture more blood.  We have some who’ve been donors for more than 20 years.”

We were airborne over the Atlantic and heading east, chasing the sunrise.  As light started to seep under the shades, Jean-Louis noticed. “Time for me to get some sleep.  I have sleep masks that fit tightly over your eyes if you want to use one.”

I’d noticed there were no windows in the bedroom area of the plane.  Now I understood why.  And why dim lights and why pulled curtains and why, and why...and why no one from work had taken me up on my offer of a glass of wine on my balcony to watch the sun set. 

It was clear that the plane crew weren’t vampires.  We’d fly in sun until we began a landing pattern and we’d deplane in Budapest about 9 that evening.  Then what?  If I was headed into a nest of vampires they’d be awake all night, meaning I’d have to be, too.  There were less than seven hours left in the flight and I’d have to get freshened up.  There was a bath with a small shower and my bags were stowed in a closet so giving myself an hour at the end of the flight meant I had about five hours to sleep and I better use them.

I had so many questions, still.  How did they come to LA?  How many were there?  When did they come?   What did Jean-Louis mean when he talked about the fan movie magazines from the 30s?