recruited for a very special role in the
fight against terror, Aurora.”
Maybe if I stared at Melcher hard enough he’d come right out
and say what he meant.
“What is a VH recruit?” I asked, remembering what the guy at
the front gate had said.
“Vampire Hunter,” Crist said.
I started laughing so hard I had to grip the arms of my
chair to keep from falling to the floor. The agents won points for creativity,
I’d give them that. Great way to break the ice. Now we could move onto the real
reason I was there.
As my giggles subsided, I noticed Melcher and Crist weren’t
laughing.
“You heard right,” Melcher said. “You’ve been recruited by
your government to eliminate the reanimated dead.”
“Vampires,” Crist clarified in a harsh voice.
I looked from agent to agent. “Is this some kind of joke?”
Melcher frowned. “The demonic plague is no joke.”
Since when did the military start allowing fanatics to run
their own special units? Now that I was trapped on base, playing along seemed
like the best idea until Mom picked me up and got me the hell out of that
madhouse once and for all.
“And how exactly do I eliminate vampires?” I asked.
“That’s the beauty of it,” Melcher said. “Your body is now a
weapon—your blood. As I mentioned briefly before, a team of government
scientists recently discovered a combination of organisms that, when mixed with
AB negative blood cells, are lethal when consumed by the undead. From there,
they found a way to safely inject these organisms into hosts, such as yourself.
When your blood cells are transferred from you to the infected, it sends them
into a state of temporary paralysis.”
Crist looked me in the eyes. “By transferred, he means when
one of them bites you.”
Right, ’cause that’s what vampires were all about. Biting
people. It definitely concerned me that people like Melcher and Crist had
access to automatic weapons.
No wonder Melcher was always smiling. He had a lot of funny
ideas in his head. It made me smile, too.
“So are we talking storybook vampires with fangs and claws,
only come out in the night, hold the garlic, please?” I asked with a smirk.
“Not exactly,” Melcher answered, missing my sarcasm. “They
have every appearance of being human, but they’re not. They’re infected by
disease and they feed on healthy humans.”
“Ohhhh,” I said, thinking I finally got it. “You mean sick
people who have escaped quarantine. You’ve made me immune so I can hunt them
down and bring them back in?”
Crist huffed. “No, he means vampires!”
Melcher continued speaking as though there’d been no
interruption. “What you need to understand about the undead is that their
disease is what keeps them in their reanimated state. Disease is the trigger.
Rabies, plague, porphyria—we can trace plague vampires all the way back to
outbreaks in sixteenth century Italy.”
“Are you saying that people who caught the plague never
died?”
Sounded more like zombies than vampires to me.
Melcher sucked in a breath and released it quickly. “No,
thank goodness. Only individuals with type AB negative blood are at risk.”
I shot up in my chair. “I’m type AB negative! And you
injected me with a virus.”
Shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Why hadn’t I been
able to see myself clearly in the mirror since the accident? And why was everything
so loud? I swear I’d developed a heightened sense of hearing. But I felt cold,
chilled. Vampires loved the cold. I hated the cold. I was panicking. That’s
all. This was all just a hazing.
I took a calming breath, determined to play along and not get
laughed at when Melcher admitted it was all a ruse and they’d been observing my
reactions from the very start.
“So now I’m a vampire?”
I should have earned points for asking with a straight face.
“We have an antidote to prevent that from happening,”
Melcher said. “That’s what your monthly injection is for.”
A smile tugged