The Last American Vampire

  “Mr. Sturges?” said the FBI man. “I’m to take you to the airfield. President Johnson would like you in Washington right away.”

  “I’m going home,” said Henry, stepping into the black car.

  “Sir, but the president—”

  “You can tell the president to go fuck himself for all I care.”

  Henry closed the car door. He told the driver to go and sank into the seat. They left the FBI man and his shocked expression behind.

  President Johnson, thought Henry.

  There was no hope in the sound of it. No life. Henry stared out the window as the car drove him back to his plane. Everywhere, flags at half-staff. They’re mourning more than their president, he thought. They’re mourning what America might have been. What she came so close to being.

  They all know, thought Henry. They know it’ll never be the same.

  As fate would have it, Jack Kennedy wasn’t the only famous man to die on November 22nd, 1963. The Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis and Brave New World author Aldous Huxley also shed their mortal coils that day. The world had little noted their passing, the noise of their deaths drowned out by the American president’s. But Henry had spotted their obituaries in the Dallas Morning Herald, and he’d been struck by the symbolism of it.

  I thought it fitting that those two, especially, had gone to their eternal rest on the same day as Kennedy. Lewis, whose Christianity was at the center of his life and his work, like Kennedy’s Catholicism was at the center of his. And Huxley, with his vision of an authoritarian world—a world in which genes would be manipulated, and individualism and capitalism outlawed. A vision that now looked perilously poised to come true.

  I felt exactly as I had in the wake of Abe’s assassination a century earlier. I didn’t see any light on the horizon. I didn’t feel any sense of purpose. I began to think of what Virginia had said… that the Great Experiment had failed. That America really was done. I didn’t know. But I knew one thing…

  I was done fighting for her.

  EPILOGUE

  The Last American Vampire

  In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count.

  It’s the life in your years.

  —Abraham Lincoln

  Henry didn’t much care for knocks on his front door, especially when he wasn’t expecting any visitors.

  He’d built his country estate for the purpose of keeping people away, and he’d surrounded it with high walls and heavy gates to underscore that point. In more recent years, an Orwellian array of cameras had been added to the list of deterrents, giving Henry a live view of every corner of his property, day or night. He’d made a lot of enemies in his five centuries. Most of them were dead, but you could never be too careful.

  Henry had been sitting in the nook of his large, brightly lit kitchen that evening, its pantries empty, its stainless-steel refrigerators filled with bags of donated blood (one of the perks of owning a private chain of hospitals), and catching up on his newspapers, their front pages plastered with the smiling face of a White House intern. A small television on the kitchen’s marble countertop was tuned to CNN, the word “impeachment” on the lips of every anchor.

  Henry had largely retreated from the world, but he still liked to have the information, and it was easier to come by than ever. Recently, a cardboard envelope had shown up in the mail. Inside was a shiny compact disc with the letters “AOL” emblazoned on the front. The next day, Henry canceled all but a few of his newspaper subscriptions. The world was at his fingertips now, anytime he wanted it.

  I’ve always prided myself on my ability to adapt. To change my hair and clothing, alter my manner of speaking to stay current. I’ve gone out of my way to remain connected to popular culture, whether it’s books or music or television or cinema. There are some vampires who pride themselves on being anachronistic. You see them strutting around, flaunting their outdated fashions and idioms, passing themselves off as “Goths,” or “Steampunks.” I’ve never understood that. To me, when you can’t keep up with the world anymore, it’s time to get off the merry-go-round and make room for another rider.

  The curtain was falling on the twentieth century, and in true theatrical tradition, things were a bloody mess heading into the finale. The president was embroiled in scandal. Fanatics were running around proclaiming the end was at hand. Scientists were predicting a global computer meltdown at the stroke of midnight 1999. India had gone from Gandhi to nukes in the space of fifty years and had its finger on the button, ready to destroy neighboring Pakistan. Pakistan, in turn, stood ready to destroy India. Just about everybody wanted to destroy Israel.

  To those living their first lifetimes, it all seemed like an escalation. As if the world was indeed growing more violent. As if we really were building toward some kind of catastrophe. To me, it was simply par for the course.

  There are certain constants in the laws of human nature. Like the speed of light, they’re fixed and universal. And the biggest one of them all, the one constant that thundered down the mountain long before Moses and his stone tablets, is this: each generation will hold the next in contempt and cherish the imaginary memory of “the way things used to be.” It’s as baked into our bones as the need to breathe and screw. For five hundred years, I’ve heard men lament the fact that the world was “going to hell.”

  It would be lovely if we could go our entire lives believing in Santa Claus or be awestruck at the sight of jingling car keys well into adulthood. But that’s not the way it works. Some of us grow cynical. Some of us grow wise. But all of us grow old, if not in body, then certainly in spirit.

  Henry had been born into a violent world. A world of plagues and panics and mass killings. And so it went, decade upon decade. Plagues and panics and mass killings. The methods changed, nothing more.

  I was content to stay holed up in my little country manor like a lord of old. Writing letters, attending board meetings, taking the occasional jaunt into town, strolling past the shops on East Market Street, exchanging nods with familiar faces. Watching the seasons change and the living change with them. Watching them share in the experience of life together. Growing old together. Birthdays and graduations and weddings and funerals and birthdays and graduations and weddings and funerals and so on, and so on, and scooby dooby doo.

  Always one for secretive associations, he joined as many as he could now, becoming a member of the Knights of Columbus, the Kiwanis, the Elks, the Masons. Realizing he’d never had any formal schooling, Henry enrolled in Dutchess Community College and got a bachelor’s degree in English literature. Suffice it to say he was the only member of his class who’d been friends with many of the authors on the reading list.

  When there was somewhere to go (and there rarely was, other than the occasional board meeting), a black town car1 would show up at Henry’s doorstep and chauffeur him an hour north to Albany, delivering him right onto the tarmac, where his jet2 was fueled and ready, its engines already spinning. No more than two minutes after climbing aboard, he was airborne, on his way to Europe by way of London, or Asia by way of Los Angeles or Seattle. Or anywhere he wanted to go. It was all a phone call away now.

  His most frequent flights were to Maryland, where the Howard Hughes Medical Institute was now headquartered, and where Compound 220 was being developed behind a veil of secrecy. It was the result of decades of trial and error, and unlike many of the compounds that came before (including the one that had killed the institute’s founder, Howard Hughes), Compound 220 required only a single dose. One injection, and the body would revert back to its human self.

  At least, that was the theory. It was still a long way off from animal testing, let alone any sort of real application. Still, I was hopeful that my vampire days were coming to an end.

  But Henry was grateful for his claws and fangs that summer night, when the unexpected visitor came.

  The staff had gone home. He could have afforded to keep a round-the-clock army of help on hand, but he liked having th
e house to himself at night. He didn’t venture out to feed anymore—he didn’t have to, thanks to the well-stocked refrigerators and the nondisclosure agreements signed by his staff. Still, killer or not, Henry couldn’t shake four hundred years of sleeping habits.

  The night was still a vampire’s domain, even if that vampire chose to spend it watching CNN in his breakfast nook.

  The knock came just after ten o’clock. He put his papers down and walked to a dark monitor on the counter, just beside the small television. He touched a button on the monitor, and its screen came to life with eight small black-and-white boxes, each a live feed from one of the cameras on his property.

  There was a boy at the front door. He looked to be about thirteen or so. Probably just some kid from the neighborhood, asking if I’d seen his lost dog, or selling raffle tickets for his Boy Scout troop. How he’d gotten onto the property was another matter. The maid forgot to close the gate on her way home from time to time.

  Henry walked the long hall from the kitchen to the foyer, passing neatly hung photographs that had been laid out in chronological order, with the oldest closest to the kitchen, becoming more contemporary as he neared the front door.

  It was intentional, meant to subtly urge me out of the past and into the present as I stepped into the world on any given day. It’s one of those little things that only people with way too much time on their hands think to do.

  The hallway began with old daguerreotypes and wet plates, some dating back to the 1840s, the blurred suggestions of landscapes and portraits growing sharper as the nineteenth century approached the twentieth.

  Most people look at them, these [photographs of] men with their grand mustaches and decorative canes, of women with their oversize hats and bustles, with a sort of passing fascination. In books, on screens, in museums. They look at them as if they’re looking at a fiction. Something elaborately staged to give their present day some context.

  I look at them and remember being there. I remember the noises. The smell of the air. The unspoiled burnt orange of a new brick town house. I remember sunsets every bit as colorful and breathtaking as they are today. The feeling of warm, living flesh against my own. I remember the faded laughter of friends now centuries in their graves. The pitch of their voices, the color of their eyes, their hair. As alive as you and me. Briefly, brilliantly. Grabbing onto as much as time would let them.

  Here was his old friend Twain, holding a lightbulb in Tesla’s lab… Abe, Henry, and Eliot Ness, the original Untouchables, posing with a pile of confiscated whiskey barrels… Henry and a few of his brothers in the Eighty-Second Airborne, flashing victory signs in Salerno, Italy. Here was Henry standing on Venice Beach in 1953, laying eyes on the Pacific Ocean, nearly four hundred years after crossing the Atlantic… A picture of his brand-new Gulfstream II jet, the day he took delivery in 1976… An image of Halley’s Comet in the night sky in 1986, when it had returned for the fifth time in Henry’s memory. The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s new Maryland headquarters in 1991…

  I hesitated before opening [the front door]. There was something off about it, something strange about what was on the other side. My instincts told me to fear it. This thing that looked like a thirteen-year-old boy.

  It had been a long time since Henry had been in a fight. Physically, he was still the same specimen he’d been in 1963, but decades of rust had dulled his technique.

  I opened the door. Our eyes met, and I knew, instantly, where the hesitation had come from.

  There was a vampire on my doorstep.

  “Hello, Henry,” said the boy.

  “Who are you?”

  The boy smiled. “Alex,” he said. “But you would have known me as Alexei Romanov.”

  It had been eighty years since the night Alexei had been dragged from his bed and riddled with machine-gun fire, along with his parents and sisters. Eighty years since he’d played dead, lying in the back of a truck, next to their bodies, not moving a muscle as he was thrown into a shallow grave beside their still-warm bodies, waiting for night to fall so that he could make his escape.

  They sat in Henry’s study, Norman Rockwell’s large 1964 painting Young Lincoln hanging prominently on the wall. It was Henry’s favorite image of his old friend, for it captured him in the heart of his youth, his ax in his right hand, a book in his left, looking down, reading as he strode tall and confident though an Illinois prairie. His emotional connection to the painting was bolstered by the fact that Rockwell had created it, unknowingly, less than a year after Abe’s death.

  To a casual observer, it looked like a man of twenty-five sitting with a boy of thirteen. But here were two old men—one in his nineties, the other well over four hundred—both refugees from the countries of their birth, forced to find their own way in a strange and hostile world.

  “You aren’t an easy man to find,” said Alexei.

  “I’ve gone to great lengths to remain unfound. How did you, if I may?”

  “Well… I can’t take all of the credit. I had to enlist some of my friends in the Union.”

  “The Union?”

  I was surprised to hear the word. The Union—at least the one I’d known—hadn’t been a viable organization for more than sixty years. The [headquarters in New York] had sat empty since the 1930s, all that marble and gold gathering dust in the dark. All those mirrors with nothing to reflect.

  “I’ve been working with them,” said Alexei. “Lending a hand when needed, just as you did.”

  “I didn’t know there was a ‘them’ to work with.”

  Alexi studied him for a moment. A smile.

  “My God,” he said. “It’s really you. It’s just—forgive me, but it’s just that I’ve heard so many stories.”

  “Oh? Is there anyone left to tell them?”

  “A few old relics, holed up in their houses, waiting for time to swallow them up.”

  Alexei realized what he’d said, then added: “No offense.”

  “None taken,” said Henry. “We relics have thick hides.”

  “They told me about your days with the old hunters. The early days, when we recruited humans to our cause. Trained them to fight as we do. They told me about you and Lincoln. They said he was one of the best vampire hunters there ever was.”

  “Not one of the best,” said Henry.

  “Forgive me,” said Alexei. “Of course. They also told me that no vampire ever fought as valiantly or as often for the Union as Henry Sturges.”

  “Why have you come?” asked Henry. “Why’d you go through all of the trouble of tracking me down? Was it curiosity? The need to put a face to all these stories you’ve heard?”

  I knew, of course. He was young and still clumsy at hiding his thoughts. I’d known what he wanted since the moment we’d sat, but I wanted to hear him say it.

  “I thought,” said Alexei, “perhaps, if you ever wanted to venture out into the world again; if you wanted to—”

  “If I wanted to leave my lonely estate behind and don my cape again? Fight for truth, justice, and the American way?”

  Henry couldn’t help a smile. Here’s a vampire, all of ninety-three years old, trying to lead me back to the light, as if I myself haven’t been in that chair a thousand times, full of purpose, sounding the rallying cry. Henry was overcome with fondness.

  “I’m flattered,” he continued, “but I’ve done my bit for king and country. I’m content to be a relic, I’m afraid.”

  Alexei smiled.

  “I envy you,” he said. “The things you’ve seen… the battles you’ve won. You’ve made a difference.”

  “I envy you,” said Henry. “You still want to.”

  Henry walked Alexei to the front door, the Hallway of Time bringing them closer to the present with each step. The sun would be rising soon, and the younger vampire was still sensitive to light, though less so with each passing year. He had a chauffeured town car waiting out front (he preferred to drive himself, he told Henry, but w
as always getting pulled over for looking underage).

  [Alexei] handed me a card with his phone number and e-mail address and told me to call or write if I changed my mind. I knew I wouldn’t. Hell, I’d probably throw the card away as soon as he left. But I thanked him and promised I’d consider it. Better to be polite.

  “There are more of us than you know,” said Alexei. “Not as many as in the old days… but enough to make a difference.”

  Henry shook Alexei’s hand and watched him drive off… the taillights of his town car growing dim as they twisted down his wooded drive.

  To be young again, he thought.

  When you approach your five hundredth year, the bar for what’s considered “memorable” is impossibly high. But that was a memorable morning.

  Henry had been roused from sleep by the sound of weeping. He’d found the maid in the kitchen, watching the small TV on the counter—the one that was always tuned to CNN. She had her hands clutched at her mouth, tears in her eyes, mumbling, “Ay, Dios mío…,” again and again. She’d never seen anything so horrible in all her life.

  Henry had. Many times.

  I knew, within minutes of the first breaking news. I could see it clearly, even through all that dust and chaos.

  A war was coming.

  It wouldn’t be a war between two armies, shooting it out on the battlefield. It would be fought face-to-face, in dark alleys and far-off hotel rooms. It would be savage and secretive and would violate every article of law or code of moral conduct ever devised by man.

  Henry turned the television off. He didn’t need to see any more.