RED TIDE

 

Red Tide

I woke up one day to find the country I lived in was no longer the place I knew. The plague ripped through the nation in a matter of weeks. We all know where it began for America – it all started in the Big Apple. New York, New York. No one goes to New York anymore – while the city is relatively “safe” during the daylight hours - and I use the word “safe” with severe reservations – anyone who goes into the city at night doesn't come back. Or if they do, they come back changed, and not for the better.

It all began with a plane from Romania fleeing the dawn, landing in La Guardia. Port Authority personnel boarding the plane found no one alive on that 747, just a pile of mangled bodies drained of their blood. The pilot was found in the cockpit, but interestingly, he was found to have died of a broken neck. They believe he landed the plane – perhaps under duress, or perhaps to put off the inevitable for as long as possible – and then whatever that was that flew with him during that lonely, terrible flight over the Atlantic put him out of his misery once the plane touched down in the land of the free. At least his death was clean. He didn't come back to haunt his wife or kids in Westchester County. He didn't wait at their windows and whisper in a cold and dead voice, “Let me in.” Who knows? Maybe that was the bargain he struck. Some bargain. For a few more hours of life he condemned the rest of us to hell on earth. He could have driven the plane into the ground or speared it into the sea, and spared us all. Even those things couldn't survive that. But we weren't there, and we don't know what his last moments were. It has been said that the measure of a man is what he does when no one is watching. We all think we can do better. Maybe. But in the presence of the reaper, probably not.

Regardless, if we knew then what we know now, we could have cut the plague off at the root. We could have torn open the doors and bulkheads, and burned those bloodsuckers into a crisp right there on that tarmac under the midday sun. But we didn't. The Port Authority sealed off the crime scene for the FBI, and they dutifully preserved the crime scene and conducted forensics looking for clues. When the sun set the bodies got up and moved, and immediately latched onto anything that had a pulse. It was a massacre. There were people with guns there, but they were fighting something that came from legend, and besides, those things could take several rounds to their central body mass and keep fighting at peak effectiveness. The slaughter ended at dawn, and we frittered away another chance to end the plague right there and then. The National Guard could have established a perimeter, and gone door to door clearing every residence around Queens. Every hole, every drain, every cellar, every basement, every culvert where a bloodsucker could have gone to ground could have been covered in that first day. But we didn't. Even then, when all the signs screamed and pointed and begged us to take note, we refused to believe it. Who believes in literal vampires? No one thought literal bloodsuckers existed. I saw my first vampire on YouTube, and dismissed it as a stupid hoax. Then a famous influencer named Tara dressed up as a foxy vamp on TikTok, and the clip went viral. Soon everyone online was a vampire.

Now we know better, but it is too little, too late. America has fallen. The red tide expanded from ground zero, and now our northern and southern neighbors have closed their borders. Mexico is building a wall, if that can be believed, while Canadian Mounties patrol the northern wilderness armed with guns, stakes, and crucifixes. It's too late for them as well. Sooner or later the plague will spill over their towns and cities, and they too, will find their loved ones waiting for them on the other side of that window, ghastly eyes staring hungrily, and asking to come in. In truth, we never had a chance. The enemy without we can rally against, but the enemy within knows us, knows our intimate weaknesses and foibles. Most murders are committed by someone the victim knew. Same with vampires.

All most people can do now is to flee – flee west, and try to outrun the contagion. Many tried to flee by boat or plane, and this worked, to an extent, as long as you could leave before the sun set. People waiting for commercial flights out of the country failed to consider that everyone else wanted to do the same thing, and they all watched together in horror as the delays mounted and the shadows lengthened on the tarmac. The story of the siege of La Guardia is well-known now, and I can only imagine how it felt to be waiting at the airport, looking outside those large bay windows and seeing hundreds of red eyes staring back from the darkness, waiting for the sun to set below the hills. There are thousands of smartphone videos of the place being overrun, of tear-stricken people saying their final goodbyes as pandemonium erupted around them. They cowered in the toilets, hid in the service corridors, and crouched beneath duty free displays covered in expensive liquor and perfumes. Some fought with maniacal courage – others crumbled to pieces in 4K - all to no avail. When dawn broke there was no one left alive in the airport.

Oddly enough the safest place during the darkness was your own home. I don't know why a home keeps them at bay. They say a man's home is his castle, and apparently, all vampires believe it. It has nothing to do with owning or renting, whether or not you're staying at your parents or have paid off your mortgage. If you love a place and call it your home, that belief alone grants you sanctuary from them. What is odd is that they don't attempt physical ingress, or try to burn your house down. They come back night after night, clawing at the windows, but not physically attempting to break down the windows. I've seen them throw motorcycles like they were made of foam, and leap over six foot fences. You can hear them skittering on the roofs, or scratching around outside your garden mere feet away from where you cowered. But for whatever reason, some power compels them to respect the boundaries of a home, and a simple pane of glass might as well be five inches of armored steel as far as they're concerned. There is – was – a homeless man living in a tent in the park a few blocks down from my one bedroom apartment. We called him Smoking Joe, after the boxer, and he was a staple of the neighborhood. He'd been a boxer, too, but not the good kind – he was the kind that was too tough for their own good, and took too many punches to the head. He used to sing songs off key in a slurred Philadelphian accent, and we never knew what tune he was warbling at any given time. He stank of booze, shambled around like he was about to keel over, but was always friendly to me. “Hey boah! Good ta see ya aht an’ abaht.” He would pat me on the shoulder and I would do my best not to retch. “Ey, make shoah ya call ya momma, awright?” I'd told him once that I was bad at remembering birthdays and Mother's Days, and he'd never let me forget it. “Dat woman bore ya an’ raised ya, boah. Do right by her, y’hear me?”

His home was a raggedy tent, and a small patch of grass where he used to pitch a crate to sit on and chat to other bums and vagrants in that sad little community. The vampires surrounded his circular patch like wolves but they didn't enter that circle, which couldn't have been more than eight, nine or ten feet in diameter. He was a tough old buzzard, and he cottoned on fast that he was safe in that circle. He survived for days out there on his own, but I never knew what happened to him. One day he just wasn't there anymore, and I helped myself to the mass of supplies he'd amassed from looting the deserted supermarkets and stores. I would have bartered for them, but he was nowhere to be found. I just hope that one day he doesn't come knocking on my door, eyes red, teeth long, and demanding why I'd stolen his stuff.

It would be a mistake to think yourself safe in your home, however. The greatest peril lies in looking into the eyes of one of these beings for too long. Those who have been mesmerized but managed to escape through the intercession of others tell similar tales. The horrific visage of the monster disappears, and is replaced by a vision of how you knew them, or how you perceived them, or how you wanted to perceive them. Folks with pre-existing relationships were in the most danger, because the vampire retains the memories of its human life, and uses that knowledge to either lure the person outside, or compel the victim to open their homes to them. They take advantage of fear, compassion, love, lust and empathy to disarm their victims. Parents are lured to their doom by their children, and children are devoured by their parents. That pretty but distant coworker becomes a sultry seductress, beckoning you outside with the promises of fulfilling a long, deeply held secret fantasy, while the strong handsome colleague you admired from afar tells you that he loves you before tearing your throat out. All it takes is one person to invite the vampire into the home, and then your sanctuary is gone. That's why large barracks or communal homes were not safe – the wards that kept the creature at bay were too easily removed. One weakness in the human chain would compromise its safety. Conversely, that's what led to many small groups of people surviving in areas infested by the bloodsuckers. You were completely safe in your one bedroom apartment because you could deny them ingress. As long as you stayed at home after dark. As long as you didn't let them in.

The existence of vampires was problematic to a secular world ruled by scientific paradigms. Of course we all wanted to know where they came from, and more importantly, how to destroy them. But the question of what kept them at bay also nagged at those who had time to think and reflect. Does the presence of the devil prove the existence of God? Many people certainly thought so, because crosses, the star of David, Buddhist prayer flags and Japanese ofuna kept the undead at bay. But it was never enough just to brandish a ward. You had to have faith. Without it your charm, ward, talisman, whatever you want to call it – was just wood, paper or common metal. Children were potent weapons against the plague, because their young, undeveloped minds could believe in ideas in a way adults no longer could. There was a story of a 3^rd grader keeping a pack of vampires at bay with a simple cross made up of two pens, and because her faith was pure and true, she was able to escort her astonished parents to safety. The reverse also held true, with an entire diocese of priests being overrun despite the golden crucifixes held aloft in their trembling hands. That church was notorious in the media for allegations of child abuse, and apparently the vampires didn't buy their bullshit either. And so the question persisted. What power held them at bay? Was it a relic of the vampire's bloodline, some kind of genetic memory that made them fear manifestations of faith? Or was there something truly out there, waging an ancient battle against the forces of darkness since time immemorial?

Of course no one knew, but plenty pretended they had the answers. I was a member of a chat room on Discord, and here we discussed the plague, passing on what we knew worked and what didn't. Many of the fellas online were like me – single, living alone and isolated. The Discord channel started out as a Tara fan site, but it morphed into the vampire wiki of the east coast. As the red tide rolled north, west and south it seemed the end was nigh. According to a long time poster named Greg if we assume that a population of vampires doubles every three to four days the whole world would be overrun in three to four months if we don't take into account geographical barriers and human resistance.

But humans didn't become the dominant species by rolling over and exposing their necks. We fought back. We owned the daytime, and so the military pushed back hard while the sun was high in the sky. During the day we dug them out of their lairs, pulling them out of the cellars and basements, watching them shriek as their flesh blackened and burned under the sun. Others were dispatched by stakes in the heart or by decapitation. At night we retreated to fortified compounds ringed by powerful ultraviolet lights. Garlic festooned residences, wooden stakes were made by the truckload, and metal gorgets worn by witch hunters in the 17^th century became a fashion item. The newly turned were particularly vulnerable. They were new to this existence, and their main focus was the unbearable hunger that drove them to feed. They could be lured, misdirected and destroyed in detail in the daylight hours. Even Tara appeared on Instagram to give tips and pointers on how to deal with the bloodsuckers. She'd escaped to the West Indies, and in between photos of her in bikinis she gave us tutorials on how to scavenge safely and efficiently in the red zones. She told us the kinds of foodstuff that would keep the best, and suggested prioritizing items like gaffer tape, nails and tool kits. She was a link to a life before, and a promise of a return to what once was. It made my day every time she made a post, and I always made sure to download and archive every one.

In the early days when it seemed like we would take back our country Discord was full of bravado. We had our share of vampire hunters – we owned the day after all, and striking down the enemy while they were lifeless and comatose seemed like something we could do. I went to my mother's house after being egged on by the boys, and I realized it was a mistake - I hadn't been back for over a year. One missed birthday had turned into a missed Thanksgiving, then Christmas I had to work, and New Year's was spent with friends. I couldn't recall the last time I spoke to my mother. The front entrance was ajar, and a pair of slippers was placed neatly facing the door into the cellar. I picked up the slippers and they were definitely my ma's. I pushed open the door and stared at the stairs leading into the void below. I could not make myself go down there. I was going to get some of my stuff but instead I hightailed it out, and did not stop until I was back at the apartment. It was only then that I realized I'd left my phone behind. I stewed and fretted, but eventually my need drove me to go back a few days later. I found my phone – not where I left it, but on the kitchen table, and the slippers back facing the cellar door.

I never went home again. I couldn't. The war went on without me, and we cheered every bit of news that came down the pipe about how the military was taking back sections of the east coast. If newborns were all we had to deal with we would have been fine. We would have ground them down eventually. But there were nodes of intelligence in the pathogen, ancient, malicious and aware of the weaknesses of human nature. Ultraviolet lights need fuel, power and infrastructure and they were hard to defend. People need food and water. Most importantly, most people needed to see their loved ones. This was the weakness that was exploited ruthlessly time and time again, and the guys on Discord kept stressing it to everyone.

You gotta be strong, bro.

Don't be a simp. They're counting on that.

They ain't your family no more, bud.

Remember, you have the power.

None of it made any difference. The vamps waged their own campaign at night, and retreated before dawn broke. They laid booby traps, made bolt holes deep in the earth, and made the cost of advancing so much that the military was no longer willing to pay it. They were also an enemy whose numbers could increase after every encounter. We fought like hell, but slowly the lights continued to wink out westwards until the entire continent went dark. Still, we told each other – just hang in there. A popular online theory was that the plague would consume itself. Like the ebola virus, it was so virulent and devastating that the pathogen would run out of hosts to infect. It would burn itself out. To be a successful parasite you needed to reach an equilibrium with your host, not destroy it. Perhaps the craftier and far-seeing individuals of their species did just that. They masqueraded as humans among us, picking off the lost and forlorn, never doing anything that would draw untoward attention. But in a pandemic like this, they would run out of food, grow weak and die, and then humans could reclaim the world. So the theory went.

As the lights went out so did the activity on Discord. The bad asses that talked a big game stopped posting. One particularly gung-ho fella named Jake told us that our community meant the world to him and helped him get through a lot. But he had to leave now. My papa is waiting for me outside. We told him, begged him, pleaded with him not to go out there. Instead he typed, I love all you guys, and never came back.

The online count continued to plummet. What finally fractured our community was Tara's last post on Instagram. She wore no make up and wore a simple T-shirt and track pants. She looked plain, frightened and desperately human. We're being overrun here, she said. If this is the last time I just want to tell each and every one of you guys that I appreciate you all. You made my life possible. Thank you.

There were no more posts after that. One by one the Discord denizens disappeared, until it was just me, Greg, and the bots. Weeks later, out of the blue, he told me, I'm going to make a run for the quarantine zone.

You'll never make it, dude. You have to overnight somewhere. Maybe 2-3 nights.

Better than staying here doing nothing.

You won't make it.

I got a car. Plenty of fuel. MREs. Crosses. Guns. Enough garlic for every pizza joint in Queens.

Crosses don't always work. Neither does garlic.

Alone my chances are slim. We could meet during the day. We'd have a better chance together. Watch each other's backs.

Dude just stay put. The army will come.

They're pulling back everywhere, dude. Soon it will take a week of traveling to get to anywhere safe.

It's too dangerous.

Please bro. Please. We can't live like this.

Sorry bro.

Greg told me he was leaving the next day, and I told him to get online as soon as he got to safety. He wished me luck, and logged out. I never heard from him again. I logged onto Discord for the next few days, saw no one else online, and left messages for him. Then one day I saw another user online and my heart leapt. Greg! You made it, you crazy mofo.

The answer made my blood run cold. Where do you live?

I didn't answer. I just saw the user count begin to rise, and the channel began flooding with messages.

Where do you live?

What's your name?

I want to meet you.

Can I be your friend?

Would you like some company?

Are you lonely?

Let's meet.

Let me in.

I logged out in panic. That was the last time I logged onto Discord. From that time on I made sure my VPN was always active, and I turned my phone to airplane mode. I never logged online again except far, far away from where I lived and always during the daytime.

I still live in my little hole in Queens. I have enough preserved food to last me the rest of my natural life, and can even scrounge vegetables and fruit from some groves outside the city. I have the run of the city during the day. I used to take precautions but now I don't even bother. They know where I live, and don't bother me anymore. Occasionally a newborn might tap and scratch on my window, but I'm used to their fumbling attempts to lure me out – I just retreat deeper into my bedroom, close the door and watch old movies or play video games at full blast. There are bigger and more opulent places in the city, but I'm worried that whatever protection safeguards my home won't work there. So I stay in my one bedroom, eating whatever I like, playing video games, masturbating constantly to Tara's OnlyFans and occasionally crying in the corner. The worst part was the loneliness. I hadn't seen another human in months, and the TV and radio systems had long ceased broadcasting. The Internet stopped working two months ago. That was the worst day of my life – to be cut off from social media, news, and the rest of the human race. My situation was bearable as long as I could see people in Asia and Europe talking to each other on podcasts and long form videos. Once that stopped the jitters and dread began in earnest. I spent the next day trying to find a signal all over the city. Perhaps the satellites were still working in the cold vacuum of space. But I got nothing, and in the end I threw my phone away in frustration. The next day I found it waiting outside my front door.

One night I finally saw Smoking Joe standing outside my window. His eyes were red and fangs protruded from his mouth, but it was unmistakably him. He wasn't tapping on the window asking to be let in – he was looking from across the street and shaking his head.

“Yo, whaddaya doin' down there, boah?” he grunted in that Philadelphia accent. His voice carried in the empty street, and it was strong and clear and free of the slurring. “Why doncha come aht an' join the resta us already?” I was peeking through the hole in my door, but I swear he was looking right at me. “Damned fool,” he muttered, as he started singing another one of his nameless tunes. But he looked good – his limp was gone, his hands didn't shake and he moved with purpose. I wanted nothing more than to chat to him, shake his hand and hug him, but he didn't hang around. I almost ran out after him. Almost.

It's been two years. I haven't seen Joe since, but maybe I'll be able to catch up to him tonight. I'm sitting in front of my porch, watching the sun set, feeling the city wake up around me, sensing the movement stirring in the attics, closets and under the floorboards. I'm hoping the change won't hurt – or at least, it won't hurt for long. But I can never maintain the courage. As soon as the last rays of the sun start slipping away I bolt back into my apartment, shut the door and gasp with terror. They don't even try to trap me outside. They know me too well. And so I sit in my apartment, packed with nice shiny things pilfered from all over the city, and distract myself as much as possible. I weep and wait and eat and sleep. The red tide has consumed the world – but it hardly even matters. Nobody ever came – not Greg, not Tara, not Jake, not the army, not any of my online friends. I never saw Joe again, but I swear I can hear him on some nights, warbling happily somewhere in the city. Sometimes I can almost understand what he is singing. The worst part, however, is that during all these years, my mother never came knocking on my door.