Vampire Hunter D Read Online Free PDF Page B

inferno, but the immediate fatalities were far outstripped by the wholesale death dealt by radiation more potent than tens of thousands of x-rays.
    The theory of a limited nuclear war, where sensible battles would be fought so the winners might later rebuild and rule, was obliterated in a split second by a million degrees of heat and flame.
    The survivors barely made it. Their numbers totally insignificant, they shunned the surface world and its toxic atmosphere and were left with no choice but to live in underground shelters for the next few years.
    When they finally returned to the surface, their mechanized civilization was in ruins. With no way of contacting survivors in other countries, any thoughts these isolated pockets of humanity might have had of things returning to the way they’d been before the destruction, or even of rebuilding to the point where it could be called a civilization, were flights of fantasy, and nothing more.
    The regression began.
    With generation after generation striving merely to survive, memories of the past grew dim. The population increased somewhat after a thousand years, but civilization itself plunged back to the level of the Middle Ages. Dreading the mutant creatures spawned by radiation and cosmic rays, the humans formed small groups and moved into plains and forests that over the years had gradually returned to verdure. In their struggles with the cruel environment, at times they had to kill their newborn babies to keep what little food they had. Other times the infants went toward filling their parents’ empty bellies.
    That was the time. In that pitch-black, superstitious world they appeared. How they—the vampires—kept themselves hidden from the eyes of man and lived on in the luxuriant shadows was unclear. However, their life form was almost exactly as described in legend and they seemed the best suited to fill the role of the new masters of history.
    Ageless and undying so long as they partook of the blood of other creatures, the vampires remembered a civilization the human race could not, and they knew exactly how to rebuild it. Before the nuclear war, the vampires had contacted others of their kind who lurked in dark places around the globe. They had a hidden super-power source that they’d secretly developed in fallout shelters of their own design, along with the absolute minimum machinery required to reconstruct civilization after the absolute worst came to pass.
    But that’s not to say they were the ones who caused the nuclear war. Through cryptesthesia, the black arts, and psychic abilities mankind never guessed they’d cultivated, the vampires simply knew when the human race would destroy itself and how they, the vampires, could restore order to the world.
    Civilization was rebuilt and the tables were turned for vampires and humans.
    How much friction and discord that course created between the two sides was soon apparent. Within two thousand years of stepping onto history’s great stage, the vampires gave the world a sprawling civilization driven by super-science and sorcery, dubbed themselves the “Nobility,” and subjugated humanity. The automated city with its electronic brain and ghostly will, interstellar spaceships, weather controllers, methods of creating endless quantities of materials through matter-conversion—all this came into being through the thoughts and deeds of them and them alone.
    However, who could have imagined that within five short millennia of this golden age they would be treading the road to extinction? History didn’t belong to them after all.
    As a species, the vampires possessed an underlying spark to live that was far less tenacious than that of humans. Or perhaps it would be better to say that their life held an element that ensured their future destruction. From the end of the fourth millennia A.D., the vampire civilization as a whole started to show a phenomenal decline in energy, and that brought on the start of mankind’s