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

threat gets serious, but it can creep up on you.”
    She nodded and motioned for me to sit down next to her.
    “It’s so quiet,” she said, “like perhaps everyone in the city has vanished and I don’t know it yet. The cars could be driving themselves, the traffic lights changing color automatically, but when I get back everyone could be gone.”
    It was a strange sort of rapture to hope for, wanting to be the one left behind. “Just don’t make a habit of coming here, especially at night,” I said. “I don’t want to see you become one of those people.”
    “Those people?”
    “People who gaze into the lights as if there were one person they needed to find, and they could reach into the city and pull out that person by staring long enough. People who lie down in the grass, thinking they can draw strength from the earth. People who talk to the wind, because they have something they need to confess and can’t go to church.”
    “We’re natural rivals.”
    “You and the church?”
    She nodded.
    “The park isn’t any better,” I told her. “People may say they love it, that it’s beautiful and worth preserving, but coming to a park won’t make them treat anyone like they’re worth preserving. This place can anesthetize you, suck the life out of you, just as surely as the government, the corporations, the financial system, even sheer force of habit, or our national insect.”
    “Our national insect?”
    “The mosquito.”
    “I’ve known a few people like that too,” she said.
    “The individuals aren’t so bad,” I told her. “People who go around sucking the life out of other people, they don’t last. They gorge themselves to death or get swatted. It’s the institutions they serve that advance, that evolve, while the people suffer and die. I heard a radio phone-in not long ago where they seriously discussed putting reflective dust into the atmosphere to blot out the sun. Who would pay people to come up with a scheme like that, and seriously discuss it on public radio? Who could devote their time to creating a country of people so mind-controlled that they’re scared to see the sun come up?”
    “It’s a deeply rooted fear,” she said, “the fear of living. Institutions have exploited it for centuries.”
    “But how? An institution can have hypnotic appeal and many servants, can wield both natural and bureaucratic powers and appear in corporeal or incorporeal form, but it’s also vulnerable. It loses much of its power if you refuse to let it into your home, it can be burned by the light of truth and, in the case of this park, it can’t cross water. So how does an institution keep people in thrall without being demonized or exposed as a monster? By masquerading as its own enemy, the monstrous individual.”
    “And you’re one of them? One of these mythical monsters?”
    “Do I look like one? You tell me. If I were a mythical creature, which one would I be?”
    She turned and looked me up and down, taking in my face, my shoes, my clothes, as if for the first time. “Narcissus,” she said. “Good looking, graceful, impeccably dressed, alone. I could see you hypnotized by your own reflection.”
    I laughed out loud at that one.
    “Am I far off?” she asked.
    “Well, it’s hardly very Canadian, is it? To have a reflection is to have an identity, and that’s the number one thing Canadians are supposed to lack.”
    “And yet we have a third of the world’s fresh water surfaces,” she said, a teasing lilt to her voice. “Strange how we never look down and see ourselves reflected in them.”
    “Some do, in the end. Some of the favorite Canadian places to commit suicide involve a plunge into water: Niagara Falls, the Lion’s Gate Bridge. Seductive, romantic places, where one might go with a lover to enjoy the view, or go without one to fall fatally for oneself at the last moment.”
    “Calgary’s hardly the setting for fatal seduction, is it? No dramatically high bridges, no big