Vampire Rising by Larry Benjamin

Author:Larry Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: vampires, literary, political, lgbt, mm, gay romance, allegory, novella, civil rights

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Our Seed And Our Feet Are Rooted In The Carpathian Mountains

BARNABAS RECOGNIZED FROM EXPERIENCE, the telltale gathering of exhaustion at the edges of Gatsby’s eyes which signaled the new day was coming. Gatsby’s energy was waning, but Barnabas needed a few more minutes to finish sketching him. Seeking to distract his attention from the rapidly approaching dawn, Barnabas said, “You once said Dracula was fiction. What’s different?”

“We don’t need blood for sustenance—it’s more like a supplement. And we don’t need to drain a body of blood—that’s just gluttony. We can drink the blood of animals but that’s like eating a McDonald’s Big Mac. Or we can drink blood from a blood bank but that’s like eating frozen pizza—it’s OK until you taste a freshly made one—heaven!”

“One can drink blood from a woman but most of us find that distasteful. Though there are those who do, for a variety of reasons, including money.”

“But you do need to drink human blood?”

“No, not really. Many Vampires opt to only drink the blood of other Vampires.”

Barnabas looked up from his sketchpad in surprise.

“That has the added advantage of increasing the number of copies of the virus in one’s system which makes one stronger and increases longevity, while also limiting contact with humans and the risk of infecting one—to say nothing of the violence inherent in most human-Vampire interactions.”

While he talked, Barnabas’ fingers, holding the fine-pointed Sharpie, flew across the page. He quickly finished the drawing. When he turned it to show Gatsby, he was disappointed that Gatsby had already succumbed to sleep.

Barnabas didn’t often watch Gatsby sleep for it frightened him; in sleep, Gatsby was so pale, and still, so utterly gone. Now though, he looked at his lover locked in sleep’s embrace, and watched his eyes dance beneath their closed blue-veined lids. He wondered what he was dreaming of. There was so much he didn’t understand about Gatsby, about Vampires. He turned for a moment to the window, whose closed shutters and blackout shades imprisoned the sunlight, without hope of parole. Despite not being visible, the sun’s seductive lure remained undimmed for Barnabas. He was a child of light, always had been. He and Gatsby still hadn’t managed to synch their sleep cycles. Gatsby had to sleep at sunrise in a darkened room; Barnabas slept at midnight leaving the blinds open so the rising sun could kiss him awake. Turning from the window, he switched on the tablet, and when it blinked to life he typed a single word into the search bar: Vampire.

An hour later, he shut off the tablet, and tried to process everything he had learned.

Vampirism was caused by a virus. Discovered in 1984, simultaneously by two scientists, one American, the other French, each of whom claimed to discover it first, the Human Vampire Virus, was transmitted through the exchange of infected bodily fluids such as saliva and blood. Unlike most viruses, though, which target specific cells in the body, HVV infected and altered every cell

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