James Gardner - Withered Gold, the Night, the Day

The vampire Rogasz had taken to carrying a knife when he walked the streets on his hunt. It was not for protection; it was to slash the faces of his victims as they lay drained of blood, to cut them for being so stupid. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” he screamed at them... and sometimes witnesses heard his cries, drunks hidden under piles of trash or street kids waiting to turn tricks in darkened doorways. The witnesses sold their accounts to impatient Eyewitness News teams and so the story spread throughout the city, “STUPID, STUPID, STUPID!” ran the headlines, and in the coffee shops, reporters from all the media brainstormed what they would call this latest novelty. The Stupid Slasher? No. Not menacing enough. And menace was what sold newspapers.

Meanwhile, Rogasz stalked through the city like a jaded library goer who can’t find any books he wants to read. Some rainy nights he would just stake out a territory, attacking anyone who violated the space: striking them down, cutting them with his knife, throwing them off his land without even drinking their blood. He couldn’t bring himself to feed on such meager feasts; they would taste the same as all the others, back through the centuries. Besides, he hardly needed to drink these days — the city air was so full of blood and desperation, it seeped into his pores by osmosis. In a more lucid moment, he wrote in his notebook,

I have the feeling I do not drink blood, but rather karma — the personal richness of a human soul. This explains the poignant flavor of a virgin as opposed to sluts... and yet, in this bleak age, the difference is nearly imperceptible. The best wine is but a hairs-breadth from vinegar. The world has lost its saints.

There came a steamy summer night when the city smelled of garbage — garbage rotting in Dumpsters as hot as ovens, garbage thrown into the streets by children whose mothers said, “Get this stink out of the house, I don’t care what you do with it.” Long ago, no one heaved decaying food onto someone else’s sidewalk, nor did people sit in front of overloud TVs, too desensitized to realize they were bored. Rogasz prowled past fortress apartment buildings and screamed at the flickering television light reflected in every window. “Poisons, poisons, poisons!”

(Lately, he had taken to saying things three times. He knew he did it; he couldn’t stop.)

On he walked, words pouring from his mouth and tears streaming from his eyes, until he reached a corner bus shelter, its glass thick with obscenities written in faded black marker. A man leaned against the doorway of the shelter; and as Rogasz drew nearer, he recognized the man as the Adversary — the Fallen One, the Lost One, the Morning Star Eclipsed.

“Good evening, little brother,” the Adversary said.

“Lord of Pus, Lord of Pus, Lord of Pus,” Rogasz replied. “I am drowned in the depths of your ocean.”

“Then it’s time you learned to swim, isn’t it? Whatever you’re doing now, try something different.”

“Different?”

“Yes, change your ways.” The Adversary paused a moment. “I’ve heard it can be pleasant to do good. Why not give that a stab?”

The Adversary smiled. His teeth were white and even. He had no fangs.

Rogasz thought how soothing it would be, to walk through the world so pure and clean.

That night, he killed a hundred pushers.

They died firing their guns at blackness, and their backup men, hidden in doorways or parked Cadillacs, also emptied their pistols into the dark executioner who seeped out of the night’s shadows. Seven innocents were injured in the panicked gunplay, one fatally... if you can use the word innocent for someone who has come to the Zone in search of a fix.

Police talked of gang wars and gritted their teeth — not that most of them cared about the scum who got killed, but they dreaded the media circus that would follow. Besides, the streets got jittery with so much death in the air. Teenage kids necking in stairwells might suddenly catch the blast of a shotgun, fired by some righteous citizen terrified at the sound of a kiss. People might park their cars in their own garage, then find they’d lost the nerve to step outside, to walk the dozen paces to their dark back doors; and maybe come morning, their blue-lipped corpses would be found by paperboys or postmen, once-living mothers or fathers reduced to inert depositories of carbon monoxide.

That’s what happened when death went on a spree: it was too contagious to be constrained by the hands of one person, even if that person had the ancient strength of a vampire. Rogasz killed a hundred pushers. Those higher up in the drug-peddling chain gunned down hundreds more, every rival or potential rival, every employee whose loyalty could be questioned, every wino or panhandler who sat too long across the street.

“I am cleaning up the city,” Rogasz told himself. “Cleaning up the city. Cleaning up the city. I am changing my ways by doing good.”

But when he killed a pusher, he never bothered to take the pusher’s stash. The next customers to come along usually ripped off whatever they could find, unless the drugs had already been picked up by dogs or rats or street kids woken by the noise of gunfire.

So a few more deaths got added to the tally, this time from clumsy overdoses. Coke-ravaged nostrils poured out blood. Junkies sat dead on the toilets of all-night doughnut shops, infinitely reused needles still dangling from their arms.

“STUPID, STUPID, STUPID” read one paper’s headline the next morning. The editor had seen no reason to change it from the previous day.

Rogasz stood in front of his soot-stained mausoleum and watched the eastern sky brighten before dawn. The weather looked like it would be lovely and clear. He felt changed, the claws of insanity easing their grip on his skull. Colors seemed more vivid — a dandelion growing beside his tomb had tiny yellow petals so sharply distinct, he could stare at them for hours. It took every drop of his strength to pull himself away, to retreat to his coffin before the sun’s corona inched a blazing bead above the horizon.

Yet the promising daybreak faded quickly to gray overcast. Cops, ambulance drivers, waitresses snatching sips from their own cups of coffee whenever they picked up orders in the kitchen... many of those awake to see the dawn were struck by the way its initial brightness soon bleached out of the sky, leaving a hot muggy gloom no forecaster had predicted. Thunder rumbled softly as parents laid out their breakfast tables in the muted light of morning; and a troubled few who had somehow freed themselves from the compunction to explain things rationally whispered that the city itself had created the clouds — that the pall of death simmering in the streets had ascended on its own convection currents to block out the sun.

Near noon, a riot broke out in Shantytown. Every TV station gave a different reason for how it started, but their footage was identical: the broken windows, the angry accusations, the weeping faces, all interchangeable.

In response, middle-aged men wearing business suits sat in air-conditioned conference rooms and discussed the possibility of martial law; but they only dithered and delayed. Perhaps it was the dispiriting gray overcast seeping down from the sky. Perhaps even middle-aged men wearing business suits could feel weighed down by the overwhelming sadness, the hopeless, restless sense of damnation that smoldered in the streets.

Rogasz felt it as soon as he woke: the crushing sameness, the sense that any change had only been for the worse. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he hissed, not knowing whom he meant. “Stupid, stupid, stupid... stupid, stupid, stupid.” Like steam, he gushed from his tomb and flowed through the open window of the first car to pass the cemetery. Death to the driver; then Rogasz sped through the growing twilight, never slowing for stop signs or traffic lights, seizing a new car whenever the one he was driving got T-boned at an intersection.