Prophecy of the Undead (10 page)

Keisha fought the momentary urge to scream and run with panic away from this monstrous boy-child. She was well aware that to a stranger, she appeared the oldest in the group since she was the only one over thirty in mortal years. These men were all suspended in the bloom of their youth. All healthy young men who hadn’t yet achieved full adulthood. Yet, according to what Yuri told her, this boy in front of her was more than seven hundred years old.

She felt faint but realized that was only her imagination. Fainting involves a change in blood pressure and she had no real heartbeat to have speed up, slow down, or otherwise change. She took a deep breath and waited for him to speak.

“Is this Moorish queen the woman you spoke of, Casimiro?”

His tone still held the breathy squeakiness of a young man whose voice has not yet finished changing to an adult’s. Combined with the jeans shorts and T-shirt that he wore, he looked like just another teenager holding a paintbrush. However, his words and his mannerisms belied his age. He bowed to Keisha, who extended a hand to him. He took her hand and kissed the backs of her fingers, as Casimiro had done. Then he turned to Yuri.

“You must be Yuri Kozakov. I was told I met you once, long ago, but I’m afraid that I don’t remember. Forgive me, but when your mind is as old as mine, there are memories which must be purged in order for there to be room to make new ones. You are both welcome in our home. Let us move to a more comfortable area where we can sit and talk. It’s exciting to have new people to talk with—especially someone as interesting as you are, my dear Keisha Brown.”

They all walked over to a grouping of low couches with huge overstuffed cushions. There was an open bottle full of a dark red liquid on the table and four wine glasses.

Casimiro regarded Yuri gravely, “I hope you won’t mind but I wanted to have something to offer to our guests. I assure you that it was voluntarily donated by one of the servant girls no more than an hour ago. She is upstairs sleeping. You are welcome to meet her later—if you desire—so you can tell by her smell that she is the donor.”

Yuri bowed deeply. “I would never think to impugn your honesty in your own home. We are comrades from the same mother country. I am honored that you would offer such hospitality to us.”

Keisha tried to be as invisible as possible but took the glass the teenager offered to her, waiting for them all to hold a glass.

“A toast: to good friends who brighten the monotony of endless nights by bringing new ideas to share with us.” Apolinar raised his glass and smiled at all of them.

They all raised their glasses and said, “To friends,” before taking a sip of the liquid.

It was still warm and quite tasty to Keisha, who forced herself not to gulp it greedily. Her eyes met Yuri’s and he shook his head almost imperceptibly. She took only one more small sip before putting the glass down on the small table in front of them. She leaned back into the comfortable cushions trying to quiet her nerves.

“Ah, what fools we are.
Querido
, we have forgotten that she is new to the blood.”

Apolinar looked distressed as if he had been an impolite host. He turned solicitously to Keisha.

“You can have more. Go ahead and finish the glass. See, the bottle is still half-full.”

Yuri cleared his throat. The two hosts turned to him expectantly.

“Casimiro hinted that you could answer some of our questions.”

The teenager nodded with a smile that was on his lips but didn’t extend to his eyes.

“What is it you want to know?”

“You told Casimiro to bankroll the research that Keisha was doing. Why? What possible interest could there be for you in learning how to create intelligence in our mortal brothers?”

Apolinar laughed an awkward sound that made Keisha’s skin crawl.

“Why should I care to increase the intelligence of our cattle? You are silly to suggest that. The answer is I don’t care to. Decreasing their intelligence can’t be done until you have found out what causes intelligence in the first place. Now that this wonderful woman has found that key, we can begin working on a compound to work in concert with the decline in respect for education and intelligence already put into place so many years ago. The coarsening of public discourse, the dumbing-down of educational standards, the idiocy which passes for entertainment—all of these will be supplemented by the discovery and secret dissemination of a supplement to decrease the curiosity and general intelligence level of a significant portion of the population. That, my dear Yuri, is a part of what I am celebrating today. That was worth every penny I had Casimiro invest. That was worth all of the years of hard work done by this fine woman. That was worth everything.”

Yuri persisted, “But why? What is the point? They are already beating up nerds and laughing at kids who enjoy school. Already everyone has a computer but the main uses for it are socializing and viewing porn. Why do you feel a need to decrease the general intelligence level more than it has already done on its own?”

Apolinar fixed him with a penetrating look.

“What year is it, Yuri Kozakov?”

“2012. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Do you have any idea who it was who brought me across so many centuries ago?”

Yuri shook his head. Keisha began to have a very uncomfortable idea of where this discussion headed.

“If I say Mayan, would that make anything clearer to you?”

Yuri shook his head wearily. “The Mayan prediction of doom for 2012? That’s been proven a hoax. Even the Mayans of today don’t believe anything special is supposed to take place this year. It’s just another year with some special celestial events, but there are special celestial things going on every year.”

Apolinar hugged himself as he giggled. Keisha watched him with horrified eyes.

“The Ancient One, who brought me over, confided in me before he disappeared into the ground. Humans are only to be allowed to advance so far and then we need to stop them. They need to be dumbed down so they will accept what is coming.”

“The end of the world?” Yuri asked with disbelief evident on his face.

Apolinar shook his head, smiling.

“No, silly. The world won’t end for you and me...for any of us. We are eternal, remember?”

“But we need to feed so it can’t end for our mortal brothers either, right? They don’t need us but we sure need them.”

“The blood doesn’t care if they are smart or dumb. In fact, the less intelligent ones make for better servants. For you...for us...for them.”

Yuri leaned forward.

“Who is
them
?”

Apolinar giggled again.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out. They’ll be here soon enough...of course, soon is relative when you’ve been alive as long as I have. Certainly they will be here before 2021. That’s the really special year. The whole 2012 thing was a goal for us to figure out how to decrease worldwide intelligence while increasing the population. Now that we are well on our way—thanks to your research you lovely lady—all we have to do is wait. He was promised that they would leave more than enough of them here to keep all of us fed. There weren’t enough mortals for them to take more than a few hundred the last time. This time there will be.”

Keisha felt nauseated by the knowledge that her research would be so misused—as well as—terrified by his words. This ancient teenager insinuated that aliens visited the planet in the times of the Mayan empire and planned on coming back to take large numbers of hapless human beings back to their planets as servants. She also realized that once she shared blood with these two Old Ones they would be able to read all of her thoughts— including her opinions of them. What if they were upset to learn what she thought?

She shot a panicked glance towards Yuri and realized by the look on his face that he already knew what she thought. At that moment, Casimiro, who had been silent for a while, spoke up.

“I think it is time for us to share our ancient blood with our new friend. Since I am younger, I am more anxious to taste your intelligence. You have an analytical mind schooled in the methods of scientific inquiry. I am more interested in mathematical equations but science is science, eh?”

He moved from the couch he sat on, to the cushion next to Keisha. He smiled at her in what he apparently thought was a warm manner and took her hand in his.

“I assume Yuri has explained to you that we both want a taste of you. We crave your youth and intelligence. In return, we offer you the strength and protection of our ancient blood. Yuri is the only one who burns to know how and why...but all of us know that the longer the blood is alive within a body, the stronger it becomes. You had a taste of age from Yuri. I now ask that you let me sample you and then take from me.”

Keisha had a moment of panic and then felt herself relax under the concentrated gaze of Casimiro’s eyes. Their light blue color burned like twin flames and she leaned towards him as his head tilted to one side to allow his descended fangs to penetrate the skin of her neck.

Instantly the noise in her head exploded. She was invaded by another mind that trampled all through her memories, peering into the corners of the parts of herself that she kept private. She fought him, and then felt him calming her down with his voice of reason.

“
I won’t look where you don’t want me to. How did you know what field of science to choose? What are your earliest memories of being proud of your intelligence?”

She showed him moments from grade school, when the teachers praised her quick grasp of the math concepts. She showed him the letters sent home, telling her mother that such a bright child needed to be encouraged to pursue big dreams. She showed him the hours she spent at the library, devouring every book she could find on the lives of famous scientists. He felt her disappointment when none of the faces she studied were black like hers but shared her feelings of determination when she decided that hers would be a face to inspire future generations of young, black children.

She showed him her high school graduation and the scholarship letters which led to her earning of her first college degree three years later, with a double major in biology and chemistry. She showed him how hard she worked to earn the respect of her coworkers and her bosses. She showed him how little gratification she received from earning her Masters degree in neurobiology and how quickly she earned her Doctoral degree in neurobiology and biomedical engineering. She showed him the hours she devoted to solving the problem she now wished she had never figured out.

Then she felt herself being pushed gently away.

He used his own fangs to tear a hole in his arm and ordered her, “Drink.”

She leaned forward and pulled his arm to her face and drank. She drank in his memories of a youth spent proving he was smarter than the farming family he was born into. She reveled in his love of pure mathematics—the magic of numbers and equations. She absorbed his knowledge of how he would only be allowed to work as a lowly bean-counter for the lesser nobility who served the Tsar and his family. She drank in his dedication to his job, along with his growing fear that the female he was married to didn’t attract him.

She watched as he had children with her but took his real pleasure from forbidden assignations with those who hinted their desires to him. One of those men was the one to turn him. He wasn’t given a choice. One minute the man sucked hard on his dick, the next moment he bit through the femoral artery in the inner upper thigh and quickly drained him dry. Then Casimiro had a bloody arm thrust in front of him with the order to drink or die. So he drank. All of the wonders of the world were suddenly his to savor for an eternity.

Casmirio’s arm pulled away from her. She whimpered with the loss of the blood.

Casimiro smiled at her, patting her cheek gently. “Wonderful child, beautiful woman. I thank you for sharing yourself with me.” Then he rose on unsteady feet and walked slowly over to sit on the couch he was on originally.

Apolinar quickly moved over to the vacant cushion next to Keisha.

“My turn,” he said, pulling her arm up to his face and tracing the veins that ran under the surface with his tongue. Then his fangs descended from his gums and into her arm with one movement.

She gasped at the sudden intensity of the emotional turmoil that raged within her mind.

“Show me the colors of your life, Keisha. Show me your emotions...your rages...your hatreds...but especially, show me your loves.”

She showed him the first boy she had a crush on...and the way he had laughed at her, choosing the prettier blond girl as his special friend. She showed him her early fumbling attempts at romance with boys in the back seats of cars. She showed him her love for her siblings and her piercing grief when they buried the sister she shared a room with. She showed him her protective love for her mother, and her rage against the father she never met, for not loving her enough to want to meet her. She showed him how she decided to lock away her emotions so they wouldn’t distract her from her pursuit of knowledge. She showed him her boredom with the few sexual partners she shared herself with over the years, then showed him her terror when she was locked in the trunk of the car and shot.She tried to keep him from the memory of what she shared with Yuri but he rolled over her pitiful attempts to hide what was the only really enjoyable sexual experience she had ever had...and she had to die for it first.