Chapter 1

The Present:

Peter Harris started awake and shivered, though whether it was the cold or his dream that had caused his body to shudder he wasn’t sure. The memories of his time before the serum had been plaguing him more often of late, and he was finding it more and more difficult to get a peaceful night’s sleep. He still had no idea why he had been the only one to survive and the guilt he felt because of it made sure that he relived that night every time he closed his eyes. His last memory had been of darkness enveloping him and then there were snatches of memories where he had suffered terrible treatment by the thralls as they vented their anger on him and then nothing until he had seen Sandra Harrington’s face looking down at him when he had overcome the serum’s effects.

He had told no-one of his time before the serum. Somehow it felt too personal and what did it matter anyway? He had failed the people who had put their trust in him. He had survived when they had died. He could do nothing about those he had failed now but he could make sure that it never happened again and to that end he would never rest as long as there was a human being still in captivity.

He looked around with a start. How could I have fallen asleep? Everyone was still in position and, slowly, his heart began to calm. They had travelled for the last few days to get here and he must have been more tired than he had thought. He looked out over the valley below where the small town lay slumbering. A cold breeze drifted from the north and brought with it fingers of ice that teased their way through the heavy jacket he wore no matter how he secured it. He lay along a rocky ridge, prone on the frozen ground, suddenly aware that his body was numb with the cold. He felt stiff as he stretched his muscles and winced as he rolled to his feet and began stamping to speed the circulation.

On the horizon he could see the faint, tentative caress of the dawn as the sun peeped over the distant hills and cast its weak glow onto the dark canvass of the ebony sky. For a moment he watched the lazy flight of four shapes high in the sky as the vampires returned from their final patrol, ahead of the dawn’s deadly caress. The vampires seemed to gather the remaining darkness around them as if to shield them from the growing spread of the light. They might be evil incarnate but they were magnificent in the air.

He watched them riding the air currents as they scanned the area surrounding the town. Winter had hit early this year but the transportation problems they had suffered, the lack of food and the myriad of other issues that had plagued Harris and the others had been alleviated somewhat by the discovery that the vampires’ incredible senses were dulled to almost normal human proportions by the cold.

No longer could they sense or smell their prey at incredible distances. Their vision was unaffected, unfortunately, but their patrols had been cursory at best since the weather had changed. They may be immortal but they didn’t like the cold and the humans had been busy exploiting this over the last month.

It seemed like a lifetime ago when Harris and the other survivors had pulled themselves from their destroyed headquarters but, it had in fact, only been two months. In that time they had swelled their numbers to nearly three thousand strong. There had been no contact with other vampires since their victory. The vampires were very territorial and had little or no contact between each settlement. This had left Harris and his group relatively free to plan and prepare for their next foray.

They were under terrible time pressure with the knowledge that the serum the Vampires used to control their human captives was, in fact, killing those who were forced to take it. Their quandary, though, was that they could not simply take on every settlement directly, there were far too many thralls and they were far too well armed to even consider such an approach. And that was without even considering the power of the vampires themselves, even though many of the newly-freed people campaigned for just such action.

The knowledge that people would start dying of the deadly mixture soon made everyone impatient to do something. Some proposed that they tell the vampires of the serum’s deadly side effects but others argued that such an action would tip the vampires off that a resistance existed at all, and they were simply not ready for that. Their own survival was imperative, though it was hard to reconcile that at the cost of so many others’ lives, especially when many of those who would die were children. The debates raged on with all sides beginning to drift further apart and the internal strife was reaching critical levels.

While the debates continued, with no-one really offering any concrete alternatives, Harris and his men had continued to plan. They had quickly rounded up the remaining thralls, the loss of their vampire masters and the betrayal of their commanding officer had left them reeling and easy targets. It had helped also that a significant number of them had been slaughtered in the attack on the base and the survivors had regarded the humans with a new respect. Their new subservient position, along with their fear of reprisals from the remaining ‘cattle pool’, as they had labelled the food supply for the vampires, had made them eager to provide information on their former masters.

Harris and his team had discovered that the vampires had a strange social structure, if indeed structure could be used to describe it at all. Each area, or cabal, was ruled by a master vampire, this designation of master had, in times when humans had ruled the world, never been bestowed on any vampire with a life history of less than three hundred years and, even then, only on the very rare occasion of another master’s death. The fact that the vampires had hid in the shadows had meant that they would only add to their ranks in special circumstances, so the number of cabals had remained constant and their leadership had remained unchanged for centuries.

Many of the younger vampires had spent decades, even centuries, conniving and jostling for these positions of power and this had ensured that only the very best ever attained the position of leader of a cabal. Development came slowly to the undead; they received their strength, senses and limited transformation abilities immediately after their resurrection but after that their bodies took decades to develop further abilities such as resistance to holy water, the cross and the ability to change into other creatures.

Unfortunately for them their rapid spread over an unprepared world had left them with more cabals than they had eligible candidates to lead them. Because of this, vampires had been promoted or had massacred their way into the position of master based purely on their successes during the war. This had led to squabbling on a scale the vampire overlords had never before experienced and had been completely unprepared for. They were used to an existence in the shadows where their control over their own cabals was paramount to their very survival. Respect was earned over centuries and each cabal leader had always been mature and well tested before they were raised to the position of master.

Now they had a nightmare of petty jealousies and arguments over territory among young vampires who held positions of immense power but without the experience or the respect needed to control such areas. Many vampires had fought among themselves. Vampires had been assassinated; their loyal thralls butchered and whole cities of precious human food had been destroyed in the aftermath of their victory over the humans. The situation had deteriorated rapidly with alliances being hastily forged and just as quickly broken. A full scale war loomed and threatened to tear them apart.

Many of the older and wiser masters, not caught up in the insane jostling for power, had banded together in the face of their own destruction and they had implemented a council where territorial disputes were to be heard and ruled upon. These masters had seen many centuries of warfare and still retained the respect of the older vampires and commanded a certain level of fear among the more recent masters. The various cabals, reluctantly, had agreed to give the council a chance at restoring some order.

Council meetings were held once every six months but many of these new masters were reluctant to wait that long for a resolution to their immediate problems, and didn’t always agree or abide by any decisions that did come from these courts. The last two years had seen vicious raids into rival territories, stealing of scarce resources and kidnappings and assassinations of thralls who excelled in key positions of power. The killing of vampires had stopped abruptly after the last vampire to be found guilty of such a crime had been staked naked to the dawn by his peers. The council did, however, provide some order and many of the larger raids did stop, or at least became less frequent as the cabals began to realise that the cost in terms of lost thralls, resources and food was just too high. An uneasy truce had finally limped into being with all sides mistrustful of the other. This had led to the vampires becoming very insular over the last year.

In a very short time each cabal had begun to develop independently, basing their strength and power base on those resources that their own territory was rich in. Some areas were rich in food, others in people and others still in power sources or natural resources and their ability to defend these resources or steal others’ resources soon became the primary measure of true power. Tradition and respect were ignored and each faction watched its borders and protected their resources jealously. Mistrust grew and rivalries increased until the entire country seethed with a barely contained, but often violated, truce.

In fact the only thing that had prevented a bloodbath from engulfing them all was the power and fear of the last remaining true master on the continent. Von Richelieu was an ancient vampire from Eastern Europe, one of the few that had actually left their ancestral country and sought to grow their influence in the new world. His prowess in military matters had swept away the human’s defences. His political acumen and ruthless efficiency had quickly removed any other vampire master during the chaotic closing stages of the war with the humans that might have threatened his position in the new power structure.

The remaining vampire masters were all mere youths compared to him and he had become the only thing that all the others actually feared. None of the new masters were prepared to confront him openly, and they were far too mistrustful of each other to join together to challenge him, so the uneasy peace remained. In the last few months, Harris had learned from the thralls, things had settled down after restrictions had been put in place by a revitalised council. Von Richelieu had finally decided to take action and he let it be known that all vampires would answer to the council if they continued their fighting.

The council had never had the power to enforce their decisions before but, with Von Richelieu now supporting them, things began to settle down. The fact that he sent out his own lethal vampire enforcers that killed anyone who went against a council ruling soon focused the younger vampires’ attention on the council’s authority. Harris had not been able to find out exactly what these restrictions had been but news had filtered down to the thralls that no forays into other territories would be tolerated. As a result the thralls had all grown complacent over the last few months and ruled their own areas in much the same way as the fiefdoms of the Medieval Ages.

This gave a much needed reprieve to the humans and allowed them to wean the new recruits off the drug and train them for whatever might come their way. They were under terrible time pressure with the serum’s fatal concoction but it was also incumbent on them to survive. With this in mind they had decided to try to take advantage of the unrest among the vampires and try to nudge the cabals back into more direct action by playing one against the other.

****

Today would be the first step in their campaign. Harris did not actually have the full blessing of the newly-formed government back at their base. He had tried many times to lay out the plan about how they hoped that they would be able to siphon off people and supplies from the neighbouring territories while the other cabals were otherwise engaged but, now that they had more people to cater for, they also had more representatives in the fledgling government and agreements were few and hard-fought. Harris had decided to present them with a fait accomplit and hoped that the resulting fallout would not be too bad.

He was well aware that his own view was a blinkered one; he was focused only on the task of saving lives while others were just as focused on their own areas and commitments. He knew that he too would have to change as their community grew, otherwise there would be anarchy if everyone just went off and did what they felt was right, but, the serum’s effects were non-negotiable – they just did not have the time for debate. If they did not act now then there would be no point in acting later.


They had been lucky that Nero, the master who had controlled their own area before Harris had beheaded him two months ago, had been a particularly singular vampire. He had not made contact with the other cabals for anything and expected the same in return. He had been quite a senior vampire during the Vampire war and many had seen him as a direct threat to Von Richelieu himself. He had only come to America to satisfy a particularly insatiable appetite for carnage. He had already won large estates in the initial battles in Europe but quickly grew bored as territory after territory fell too easily. It was only in America that battles had been fought that satisfied his blood lust, at least until the serum had been used and the human defence had crumbled almost overnight.

He was over four hundred years old but his ambitions and bloodlust had been satiated by the war, at least this had been what he had informed the council when he had removed himself from the committee and also from the resulting carnage as the vampires fought over the spoils. Von Richelieu had let him go, mainly, it was understood by the thralls that Harris questioned, because his numerous attempts at removing him had failed. Nero had retained enough respect from the younger vampires so that they turned their greedy attentions towards easier and less established prey.

The surviving thralls had been most informative as to the relations between the cabals also. It seemed that the vampires had pretty much kept to the old state lines when carving up their territories after they had taken over. This was the easiest to administer and control, except for some notable exceptions where lines had been stretched to include certain advantages depending on the level of strength and political weight each vampire master could exert.

Cases in point were their own neighbouring cabals. The states, formerly known as Michigan and Indiana were now controlled by the Von Kruger and Wentworth Cabals respectively and bordered what had been Nero’s Cabal, in the old state of Ohio. It seemed that there had been a long rivalry between these two states that predated the vampires’ coming over the provision of power from the Cook Nuclear Power plant. It was situated just over the border in Michigan and before the energy crisis this plant had powered all the surrounding states.

As the energy crisis of the last few years had worsened, just before the vampires had come, Michigan had stopped supplying power to her neighbouring states and people had flocked to Michigan, leaving the other states, especially Indiana, with poor resources and too few people to manage what was left.

When the vampires had come, Von Kruger, a two hundred year old vampire from Bonn in Germany, had used his seniority to redraw the map to include the power plant in the newly drawn Indiana state line. Wentworth, the former governor of Michigan, had ranted for over a year before settling down to his fate.

The need for heating and power really only affected the thralls, as the vampires were nocturnal, so he really couldn’t argue too loudly. Von Kruger, as the elder vampire, could have demanded Michigan, as it was more generously populated, but had opted for the warmer state. Wentworth, with a much larger population to feed upon had relented and an uneasy peace had reigned.

Neither vampire had given a second thought to the thralls. Wentworth’s army, far bigger and better armed, began to grumble and complain about the arrival of an early winter. They had used up their entire stock of oil and fossil fuels last winter, convinced that they would be able to obtain at least a small feed from the power plant for the next year, but negotiations had broken down and they had been left with nothing. Their barracks were cold, their food was rapidly going off without proper refrigeration, though the cold weather alleviated this somewhat, and the lack of power left them literally in the dark; they even had to light large campfires each evening to patrol their territory and this strain on their limited resources left the thralls irritable and difficult to control.

Von Kruger’s thralls on the other hand had plenty of power; in fact they particularly enjoyed lighting their state line to such an extent that the immediate area with Michigan was lit up like daylight. Their barracks were warm, however; their food levels were very low. They also had a surplus of fuel as the stockpiles they had hoarded before Von Kruger had annexed the Nuclear plant were not as critical now and they delighted in offering these supplies at exorbitant prices to their neighbours.

Ever since the vampires had taken over, the thralls had lived off the huge food stocks that all the states had hoarded during the energy crisis before the vampires had come. The thralls did not see past their immediate needs and lusts and animals had been left untended, fields remained unploughed and all the time the stocks grew lower. Some of the more intelligent cabals had seen the potential disaster and had set their human captives to work but, for most, it wasn’t until the stocks had become dangerously low that they had even thought of food production. Recently there had been a scramble to find humans who had knowledge of farming and animal husbandry that would be able to coax food from a neglected land and a search had begun for any animals that may have survived in the wild.

Indiana had a dangerously low human population. Von Kruger had to curtail their feeding habits to the extent that they had to ensure that they did not overfeed. Many of the humans were tapped for their blood too often already and many were dying from a combination of disease and exhaustion. A breakout of cholera last year had taken nearly a third of their already low human population.

Von Kruger had been one of the few vampires to see the oncoming food shortages and he had set his remaining human population to work some months before and had already tilled fields and gathered a growing animal base to feed his thralls and his dwindling human food supply. They had quite a surplus of food now but a dangerously low population to maintain it.

This left an interesting balance of power between the two cabals; Wentworth had an impressive army that could threaten the whole area but had no power, fuel and little food to feed his surplus of people while Von Kruger needed people badly to continue to safeguard and produce the food surplus he had developed. He also needed more humans to tend his power station or risk the plant shutting down or even becoming dangerously critical from a lack of careful attention.

It seemed to Harris that if left alone both parties might come to an agreement which would cater to both their needs. However, Harris judged, that it would not take a lot to nudge both parties along a more direct and physical confrontation and he and his team planned to make sure that peace and cool heads did not win out. The resultant fallout would be enough, he hoped, to allow the humans the chance to add to their own dangerously low supplies and growing requirements, and at the same time save as many people as they could in the resulting confusion.

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