Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead Read Online Free PDF Page A

lakes, no water more menacing than the drowning pool below the irrigation weir.”
    “And they got rid of that,” I reminded her.
    “So here you are, in Nose Hill Park, all flowers and no water, surrounded by what you could become and safe from becoming it. Narcissus turned into a flower in the end. You could still be shaped by what you fear.”
    “Do you think our fears define us?” I asked.
    “They can if we let them.”
    “And what are you afraid of?”
    She shrugged. “Living. Dying. Killing. Myself. The usual.”
    The lady doth protest too much, I thought. “It’s not usual to be that aware.”
    “I’ve never been the sort of person that people notice. I’ve made a career of observing other people, trying to understand them, living vicariously through them.”
    “Or dying.”
    She paused and scrutinized my face again. “Is that what you’ve done?”
    “No, I’m a cautionary tale. I came here too many times on my own at night. I try to steer people off the path I took myself. If they continue coming here, becoming more lonely and desperate, at least I provide them with company. When the time comes for them to end their lives, some allow me to be with them. Then, if they slit their wrists, I drink their blood. They die knowing they at least gave a little life to someone.”
    “Being a vampire is socially acceptable now, isn’t it?” she said. “Is it comforting for you, drinking despair, knowing that there was nothing you could have done to save them?”
    “Now that’s the question of someone who dies vicariously,” I said. “Even as an animated corpse, I can see that what I do is unhealthy. My existence will end more slowly than that of those I fail to save, more quickly than those I frighten into saving themselves. But in the end, there’s no treatment for suicide, only palliative care. Perhaps I’m a monster for believing that, but at least we’ve established what sort of monster I am. I’m the scapegoat servant of a vampiric institution. I divert attention away from the greater monster, a park that provides seductive comfort to those who feed it with a belief in its sacredness and the money to maintain it. Meanwhile, the park quietly waits for them to give up their lives. The question is, what sort of monster are you?”
    “I don’t know.” She stood and paced back and forth in front of me, alternately blacking out and revealing the brightness of the cityscape. “Maybe I’m an advanced version of you, but here’s what I’m not: There’s a story about a policeman who drove with his partner toward a high, windswept bridge where he saw a young man preparing to jump. His partner stopped the car. The policeman leapt out and grabbed the young man just as he jumped. He started falling over with the young man, and would have plunged to his death if it hadn’t been for his partner, who arrived in time to pull the two of them back. People asked him, themselves and each other the same question over and over: How could the policeman have hung on for that moment when it seemed certain that he would die? How could he sacrifice his life, his hopes, his dreams, his career, and his ties to his family, and everything else he had ever held dear for the sake of a total stranger? The policeman said, ‘If I had let that young man go, I could not have lived another day.’ In that moment, he saw himself and the young man as one and the same person. That’s what a good, moral person, a hero, is supposed to be.
    “Now, what if it became possible for me to say to myself, ‘I’m not going to die. Not now. Not ever.’ Where’s my oneness, my connection to everybody else then? I lose the one thing everybody alive has in common. If I can choose to live forever, everyone else who can’t do the same becomes suicidal to my eyes. So maybe I’m the kind that sees bridges and people jumping off them no matter where she goes, the kind that doesn’t have to stalk her victims, the kind that could truly save