Chapter 3
Cassi
Brecca sat at the bar with her arms on the scarred hardwood and her head buried in them.
Cassi nudged her elbow with a beer in a frosty mug. It was probably worth noting that the power rarely went down inside bars, though whether that was from human ingenuity stretched to cover the essentials, or because the Vampyren found a drunk population easier to control, Cassi didn't know.
Or care. Right now she just wanted to get Brec's first beer inside her.
At the nudge, Cassi's best friend sat up and shoved some of her hair out of her face.
She was a natural redhead, but had dyed her hair midnight blue right up until she ran out of the product after the aliens disrupted both essentials and nonessentials of life.
Her hair coloring might be considered an essential, because without it, Brecca was fading back to her normal color by way of many, many abnormal colors. The current one was kind of a moss purple.
She nodded her thanks at Cassi and then yawned before she could even get a swallow. "I'm twenty-three," she said morosely. "Am I supposed to be this tired?"
Cassi nodded. "When under siege. I'm twenty-three too.
Objectively. Subjectively. One million years old today.
Be right back." Though they both knew better.
It was after hours, post-work, when people dropped into the neighborhood bar as if doing the same things they'd always done would make it the same world it had always been.
It wasn't working. As she filled waiters' orders and served the people at the bar, Cassi caught shreds of conversations.
"Sneaking out in the middle of the night because she's sixteen, I mean, there's sixteen and then there's suicidal, there's a difference…"
That was a parent, obviously. Nobody she knew. Nothing she needed to worry about.
"Ammo to blow up the world, not if we can't reach…"
That was Tommy, generally known as Tommy Boy.
Loud, showy, harmless. Unlikely to try and use ammo on anything.
If he did, he'd only blow himself up. Nobody could stay around Tommy Boy for long.
He'd be solo when he went up, and it would be easy enough for everyone to disavow any knowledge of him and whatever harebrained scheme he'd had.
That mattered, because if the strike back wasn't well orchestrated, the results were–
Well, she'd seen the heads on her way to work, and for the Vampyren, that was an enormous waste of food. Generally death came about through the feeding of the invaders.
Though she realized she didn't know what they'd done with the bodies. Probably didn't want to know, either.
Another bit of conversation, something about water pressure. Utilities worker. And another about thread – just about anybody. Basic supplies were no longer basic; now they were kind of exotic. Old skills like sewing were back in high demand.
It's only been less than a year. How are we going to sustain this for any amount of time?
And then the next conversation – Make her sweet sixteen the best it can be – because parents worried more about their kids than about themselves, and a conversation about recipes for potatoes, which had become practically worth gold now that potatoes were a huge staple.
Vegans had their day – the cattle had been picked off the planet within three months of the Vampyren's arrival.
All those stories about aliens and cattle suddenly made true.
She was pouring a beer for a clutch of postal workers when a conversation reached her and she had to force herself to keep moving. There were no vamps in the bar but that didn't mean somebody wasn't watching for them.
Down the bar, Brecca had started her nightly discourse and disclaimer, the one she couldn't ever finish. It started off I'm not a nurse, damn it; I'm not even supposed to be a nurse, though she had been for the last year, which kind of prima facie made her one.
What Brec couldn't say was what she had been: a phlebotomist. Say that one aloud and there'd be a Vampyren breathing down your neck before the words were out. Nobody admitted to knowing how to work with blood anymore.
Not if they didn't want to live with the Vampyren.
Living with them meant dying with them, and soon.
The invaders might be able to overtake the planet and set up new systems of government and control themselves to some degree, creating human camps of breeding stock and --- and worse, but that didn't mean they could control themselves when they'd stashed a human in their midst round the clock.
Even if that human was essential eventually something would cause a reaction.
Reactions were uniformly deadly.
But when you were used to being free, suddenly being conscripted and restricted was too hard to not fight against. There was a thrilling sense of pleasurable danger to coming oh so close to saying the thing you couldn't say just to see if you could get away with it.
So far, Brec had. Nightly she complained around the edges of being a nurse when all she was supposed to do was draw blood. It was the smallest of rebellions, but they all mattered even more.
But tonight Cassi could neither join nor indulge her. Because the conversation at the bar had just started and it had to do with canning. Because not even the most suspicious Vampyren would listen to that.
Because the words home grown had crept into the conversation.
And because most people weren't supposed to know.
Only Cassi did. She'd known since before Jayce did the stupid thing he did and got himself stupidly dead.
Home grown meant grass roots. Grass roots meant resistance.
The governments had rallied and organized in the face of a war that didn't involve them.
The war the vamps brought wasn't about countries, it was about the whole damned world, because that's what they wanted.
The water, the soil, the plants, the humans for labor and food and sport and sex and if there was anything else on Earth that pleased their voracious appetites, they'd take that, too.
It was hard to fight Invaders who lived essentially for centuries, died extremely rare, were hard to kill, and had no one stated objective.
They hadn't come to colonize. They hadn't come to drag slave labor back to their own planet. They hadn't come just to breed more of their own kind or to breed more humans for food or to do any one thing.
They came because that's what they did. They found a planet, they conquered the people, they ruled until they got bored, and if the people were lucky, they left without torching the whole thing.
It was the Vampyren behind the New World Next Generation advertisements. They knew humanity's time had come and gone.
It was humans who thought they could fix things by going back to what they'd always done and always had.
It was humans who fucked things up beyond measure by trying to do anything but launch at the damn aliens.
By the time they realized that, it was over. Over but for hanging from the light posts in their own districts any politicians stupid enough to protest.
After that the governments that came back together did so with permission and operated small, thinking they were taking care of the needs of their communities and constituents when what they were really doing was convincing a people that there was safety somewhere (there wasn't) and hope too (ditto).
She heard Brec every night. Tonight she could let her words flow in one ear and out the next while she concentrated on pinpointing the voice that was talking about canning.
About when the best time to can was – full moon, which was tonight, she thought – and where, which she didn't get and she started to panic.
Her father was dead but her mother was alive and in one of those damned tank farms, and the people who said those people taken there were lucky were wrong.
Her mother was donating blood round the clock – and no, she wasn't of breeding age any longer, and yes, the Vampyren hadn't just killed her, how very nice of them and thank you very much – but Cassi knew a great many people she'd never killed, and her not killing every person that came along seemed like a low bar.
Her mother was alive but she was being tortured and screw being warm in winter and having a place to stay and not being eaten, she was being eaten, one pint at a time and then fed all foods that would thicken her blood and bring up her iron and make her healthy and fat and nothing within her tank.
Her mother, who had run races and laughed with that abandon.
I'm going to get to her.
She still had a parent and she still had a best friend who was not a phlebotomist and so she had something to live for.
Home grown.
Canning tomatoes.
Full moon.
And something about a number, maybe an address, maybe a highway number?
And in her panic to figure out where the meeting was or where whatever it was would happen she guessed they were talking about taking somebody to join the rebellion or even just to find weapons she didn't care for anything that felt like she was taking a stand, taking a step Cassi leaned in too close.
The conversation stilled. There was one last word about a number and she didn't think it was the same one but they didn't keep talking and now she had to get to her job again without calling any kind of attention on what she'd heard or even that she'd heard anything.
She left the bar, Brecca wandering to a stop in her own narrative, as if Cassi's leaving wasn't rude but just a fact of nothing happening.
A year ago the aliens had come and Cassi had been a bartender at the Dew Drop Inn because trendy stupid names were in. She'd been a bartender and as good at it as she'd be with anything else in her life, like TaeKwon-Do and writing poetry and running and through it all she was just so damned bored.
And then one summer month turned into the next and the sky filled with proof that no, the academics were right, Earth wasn't alone in the universe after all.
And after that, the screaming started.
She let herself into the storage room, looking for the next box of carefully hoarded bar towels. She heard the door squeak right before she started to turn, already the words on her lips, "You can't be back here – "
When a hand caught the back of her neck and another hand caught her arm and twisted it up so hard and high behind her back that something snapped and Cassi gave a startled yelp that turned into a moan.
"What did you hear?"
The hands were pressing her against the wall so hard she figured her voice would come out muffled. She figured anybody would tell whoever this was anything to make them stop.
"Get off," she said. "You know what I heard. Recipes. I could use them too, you know."
At which the hand holding her let go fractionally, just enough for Cassi to start to turn toward him before he slammed her hard into the wall again. This time he put his forearm against the back of her neck.
That scared her into stillness. Pressure on her spinal column was terrifying. All he had to do was injure her and she'd never walk again. Become paralyzed, become dinner. The Vampyren had no regard for disability. Everyone tasted equal to them.