The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

CHAPTER 10

  When life is woe,

  and hope is dumb,

  The World says, "Go!"

  The Grave says, "Come!"

  -arthur guiterman

  The winter before the sundown party-before Tana went missing and maybe was infected, before Pearl got scared and mad as the days went on without Tana calling to tell them anything-there had been an assembly at the high school to discuss vampirism. Even though the seventh and eighth graders were in a different building, they were all, including Pearl, marched over and herded to the very front of the auditorium.

  As Pearl went down the steps, she craned her head, looking for her sister. The upperclassmen seemed so much older than she was, loud and intimidating. Some of the senior boys had stubble and the girls dressed as if they were in college. In her denim skirt with leggings under it, with brand-new pink sparkly Converse sneakers and a side ponytail, Pearl had felt she looked cute when she got dressed in the morning. Now she felt like a little kid.

  "Pearl!" a voice called over the roar of students finding seats and shouting to their friends. Turning, she spotted Tana and Pauline waving to her from about halfway down the auditorium.

  Tana cupped her hands around her mouth to make her voice louder. "Come sit with us!"

  Pearl looked after the rest of her class, obediently trooping to the front. Then she looked at her sister waving. Finally, she decided and picked her way past the older kids to the seat Tana had saved for her.

  "I'm supposed to be over there," Pearl said, pointing to her teacher.

  "But we're going to have more fun over here," Pauline promised her, smiling a big let's-all-get-in-trouble-together smile. She was wearing a black-and-white-striped dress, bright orange boots, and a vintage pink hat with a veil. Seeing her and Tana together at school was weird-like seeing a part of her sister that was usually hidden.

  At home, Tana was the one who made dinner when Dad forgot (which was a lot); who knew only three recipes (spaghetti, salad with a chicken cutlet on top, and burritos); who was good at braiding hair and not pulling too hard (except for when she did French braids); and who could fix almost anything (sinks, toilets, favorite mugs). At school she was obviously somebody else. Somebody who swaggered around in her big boots and black leather jacket, taking auto shop with the boys and glowering at everyone who wasn't Pearl or Pauline as if she wanted to knock them out.

  She and Pauline leaned back in their chairs, grinning at each other over Pearl's head. It was weird.

  "We have a special speaker today," Principal Wong told them in her no-nonsense, embarrass-the-school-and-I'll-make-you-sorry voice, short hair combed tightly to one side and gelled to stay there. "We're going to hear from someone who was trapped inside Springfield when the walls went up. Thank you for agreeing to come and tell your story, Yashira Baez. Let's give her a big Astell Regional welcome!"

  Everyone applauded noisily, with a few sarcastic whoops from boys in the back. Pearl leaned down to take a strawberry-scented pen and notebook out of her bag, in case she was supposed to write stuff down.

  A small Latina woman stepped onto the stage, wearing jeans and a muted yellow cardigan, looking old enough to be someone's grandmother. "I'm going to tell you this story just like it happened. I was headed into Springfield to get my great-aunt out when the military blockaded the area. She was in an assisted-living apartment complex and she was too old to drive. So when I heard the rumor that the city was going to be closed off, I thought I could get her out in time. Unfortunately, I got trapped in there with her. I lived in the first Coldtown for two long years until I could figure out a way to get enough cash together to buy myself a marker from a bounty hunter. I could never have done it without donations from my church, so now I go around to schools to try to give back to the community.

  "People ask all the time whether vampires are like us. I always say that in my two years trapped inside, I played checkers with vampires. I sat on stoops with vampires. And they were a lot like the people they'd been before. But they weren't the same. Vampires are predators and we're prey. You've got to never forget that. "

  She looked out at the audience very seriously. "Circuses tame tigers. Get them to jump through flaming hoops. Those tigers are real nice to their trainers, I bet. Bump them with their big heads. Roll on their backs like house cats. But if they're hungry enough, those tigers are going to eat those same trainers they were so nice to. "

  A couple of people in the audience laughed nervously. Tana didn't laugh. Pauline looked over at her a little worriedly.

  "Now, I never assume that everyone knows the basics, so we're going to go over them again. Infected people-people who have vampire blood in their veins, people who've gone Cold-they can't spread the infection. They're infected, but not infectious. Got it?"

  "Obviously," Pauline said under her breath. "Otherwise, the whole world would be buried in vampires. "

  Ms. Baez went on, going over stuff she considered basic. Pearl knew most of it-or at least she felt like she'd heard it before.

  Once a person was bitten, symptoms appeared within twelve to forty-eight hours. Sometimes people were rescued before a bite could be completed and experienced minor symptoms, but didn't actually go Cold.

  A very small number of people had immune systems able to fight off the infection. Ms. Baez told the story of an Indonesian bounty hunter who'd been bitten on eight occasions, and even though his skin was mottled by scars from the attacks, he didn't get infected. He swore by the cocktail of snake blood mixed with a drop of infected human blood and plenty of arrack that he drank each morning-his recipe for staving off infection. He considered himself immune until he was bitten for the ninth time and succumbed to Cold, turning soon after.

  Pearl noticed Tana rubbing her arm, where Mom had hurt her. She had a big scar that sometimes she hid and other times she showed off, as though she was daring people to ask her about it. Grandma and Grandpa had taken Pearl aside years ago and told her that Tana was going to be messed up in the head because of Mom and that Pearl was going to have to watch out for her. Pearl wasn't sure what that meant except for times like right then, when she leaned over, took Tana's hand, and squeezed.

  Tana squeezed back.

  What Grandma and Grandpa didn't understand was that Tana wasn't messed up because of Mom, she was messed up because of Dad. If Dad had just given Mom some blood, instead of locking her up, none of the bad stuff would have happened. Mom wouldn't be dead and Tana wouldn't be scarred and no one would be sad. Maybe they'd all live in Coldtown now, or maybe they would have emigrated to Amsterdam or something, where it was still illegal to be a vampire, but no one cared.

  "It can happen very fast," Ms. Baez was saying. "Even before the symptoms appear, the vampire blood is preparing the body for turning-so once that person drinks human blood, they're going to become a vampire. It takes less than an hour to die and as soon as fifteen minutes they can be back up again, with new teeth, denser muscles, and that newborn vampire hunger.

  "Uses up a lot of energy to change the way they do, so until they feed, they're not going to be able to control themselves too well. You got to stay away from the newly turned, no matter how well you knew them in life. "

  Ms. Baez walked to the edge of the stage. "How about a fun exercise? I am going to teach you a big word. Does anyone know what an apotropaic is?"

  Pearl didn't, but some boy called out that it was stuff vampires didn't like.

  Wild roses. Garlic, called "the stinking rose. " Holy symbols. Running water. Hawthorn. Pearl knew all those already; Hemlok explained about them on his bounty-hunting show. According to Ms. Baez, though, some of them didn't work. She'd used a holy symbol twice while she was in Coldtown and neither time did it have any effect.

  "I bet they won't let her talk about all the creepy stuff," Pauline said under her breath. "All the people drinking animal blood to stay human, even drinking their own blood. People staying drunk for months to reduce the hun
ger. "

  "Is that true?" Pearl whispered back. "Does it work?"

  Tana shrugged.

  "People even drink vampire blood, if they can get it," Pauline went on, low-voiced, talking as though she were telling a ghost story. "They say a couple of the bounty hunters in Europe are pretty much addicted to the stuff. But you don't get better-you just don't get worse. It's like resetting the infection from day one. "

  "Time for questions," Ms. Baez said from the stage. "I can't promise I have all the answers, but I'll be as honest as I can. "

  "Why don't they just let people out of Coldtown if they want to go?" a girl asked. "If they're not infected, what's the difference?"

  "Money," Ms. Baez said. "It costs the government a lot of money to run Coldtowns and a lot of money to test people for release. That money has to come from somewhere, so it comes from the budget for bounty hunters. Plus, the government doesn't want all the people to get out. If they did, what would the vampires eat? Each other? The quarantine would break down. "

  "Look at Principal Wong," Pauline whispered to Pearl. "She almost blew a gasket at that answer. "

  "Aren't you mad you were stuck there?" one of the boys asked.

  Ms. Baez shrugged. "I left mad behind a long time ago. The world is the way it is. I can only fix my little piece of it. And I choose to do that by telling kids the facts, so they don't believe everything they hear on the Internet. "

  A pulse of laughter rose up from the teachers at that.

  Tana stuck up her hand suddenly. Pearl's heart started to thud, afraid of what she was going to say.

  "Yes?" asked Ms. Baez, pointing to her.

  Tana stood up. "Can't they drink each other's blood?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "I mean, if all the humans were dead or if they ate everyone in every Coldtown and they couldn't get out, what would happen?"

  Ms. Baez nodded. "You want to know a secret? Vampire blood is pretty great for vampires. It grants them a piece of the drained vampire's power. So, yeah, they can drink it. "

  "Why?" one of the teachers burst out. Pearl hadn't heard anything like that before and she was surprised.

  "Think of it like the accumulation of toxins in animals. At the lowest level of the food chain, there is a very tiny bit of toxin in each, say, blade of grass. Now, if a mouse comes along and eats lots and lots of grass, all the toxins from those individual blades accumulate in the mouse. Then a raptor comes along and eats a dozen mice, and gets all those toxins and so on and so on. If you think about toxins like power, then you can see why the older the vampire, the more power it's accumulated and the more power another vampire can absorb by draining it. "

  "They don't need us at all," said Pearl, under her breath. She imagined a world with only vampires in it, all red eyes and cold skin.

  "So long as they can't have babies, they do," Pauline whispered back, "You can't have new vampires without new people. And if you eat all the old vampires, you're going to need new ones ASAP. "

  "How come they don't then?" Tana called down, still standing, not bothering to raise her hand again. "Why don't they just eat one another and leave us alone?"

  Principle Wong stood up, ready to scold Tana, but Ms. Baez wasn't paying any attention.

  "Oh, they do, kid," said Ms. Baez. "They eat one another. They eat us. They eat every damn thing. They'll drink up the whole world if we let them. "