Episode 19

"Lady, I don't know who you are-"

"Silverbullet," Rose DeVega answered for her lover. "That's one word and no dash, right?" For her part, Silverbullet simply shook a bowed head and grimaced ever so slightly at Rose's zealous enthusiasm.

"Look, I want to thank you for saving us from getting our blood sucked out and all." The middle-aged man expressing his gratitude looked to be the head of a typical suburban family, "but the idea of these-gang members, escorting us to our house," and then in a low whisper, "knowing where we live..."

"But it'll be dawn soon," an anonymous voice from the just-liberated crowd called out, "the vampires will be hiding from the sun and the werewolves will be men again!"

"They'll be armed men," Rose yelled over whoever she assumed might interrupt her while Silverbullet playfully rubbed one ear with an index finger. "Those backpacks the Wolf Pack is carrying around ain't got boxes of 'Kibbles & Bits' in them, you know! And they're still a bunch of white supremacists too, so I wouldn't take any chances."

"If you live too far from here, and you happen to come across a church, a temple, a synagogue or any place you feel..." Silverbullet struggled to find the right words, "spiritually comfortable in, by all means, hide out there until you can find another way home. Now let's go!" Big Poppa Pimp (a.k.a. Marcus, a former student of Lily Sloan) of the Bloody Crypts reluctantly issued members of his gang to various couples and families and told them to meet him back on their turf after they had provided the exodus Silverbullet called for.

Soon, the first beams of sunlight comprising the morning of Sunday, January 2, 2000, began to shoot forth from the distant east. All over Sin City (and wherever else the Vampire Empire/Wolf Pack had a foothold), high-ranking vampire officers would retire to their coffins while junior officers would don solar suits (which offered some degree of protection from ultraviolet rays) in order to command soldiers in the field. After those who were assigned to stay out in the day had their solar suits on, the sun then forced the werewolves back into a more humanoid form. Once the painful transformation is over, the weremen (as it were) gather their senses and reach into their backpacks to either get out spare uniforms (to replace the ones ripped to shreds when they go from being 6 feet/200 pounds to 7 feet/500 pounds) or weapons. During the daytime, the weremen take to the rooftops so they can maintain the high ground as snipers. The advantage is needed, because although a wereman can still track a spoor as well as any animal, they're still "human." And since vampires lack their usual mobility stuck in stuffy solar suits, the strategy whenever it's sunny is not to attack but simply to defend whatever was conquered: Keep the humans off the streets, keep them afraid and separated, and if anything, feed them.

From the very beginning, supermarkets were raided not by looters taking advantage of the Y2K glitch, but by the empire itself. The blood camps contain however many humans the vampires felt like ordering the werewolves to drag in, but much of humanity is still holed up wherever they were when this all came crashing down around them. So while heavily armed weremen patrol the streets to maintain an intimidating presence (so people won't think to fight back en masse while the sun is out), they also indiscriminately pass out (extremely fattening) food like paperboys on an early-morning route. That way, by the time the humans are eventually dragged out of their homes to a blood camp, they'll be plump and juicy.

Since neither the solar-suited vampires nor the more human weremen were in much of a position to hunt, it took only a modicum of street wisdom to slip like ninjas past the patrols. Stick to the alleys and back steets, leave the main thoroughfares for the monsters, Silverbullet thought as she wound her way back to Saint Michael's with Rose in tow as well as a handful of others she had freed from the blood camp. She felt like Harriet Tubman leading people through the Underground Railroad, except usually Tubman's clients knew better to remain silent until journey's end, and yet there was one man under Silverbullet's charge that she already wished had gone with one of the Bloody Crypts. He was in his early 50s and looked too sickly to be considered tasty and "Aryan" enough to be left alone by these racist creatures of the night-which made him either very lucky or...a spy? One of the "leeches" Rose warned Silverbullet about who wanted nothing more than to become a beast themselves?

The sickly Aryan kept loudly insisting that as soon as they reached Father Mario Garibaldi's church he be given a private audience with Silverbullet, claiming it was of the utmost importance, and Silverbullet finally promised such an audience if he would just shut up until they actually got there.

TO BE CONTINUED