They entered the barracks house, stepping inside a wide common area. The space resembled a cross between an upscale waiting room and the lounge of a college dormitory. An old episode of
In cushioned, pastel-colored chairs, a dozen women sat around in clean white jumpsuits, as opposed to Nora’s and Sally’s dull gray. Their bellies bulged noticeably, each woman in her second or third trimester of pregnancy. And something else: they were allowed to grow their hair, made thick and lustrous from the pregnancy hormones.
And then Nora saw the fruit. One of the women was snacking on a soft, juicy peach, its inside threaded with red veins. Saliva gushed inside Nora’s mouth. The only fresh, not-canned fruit she had tasted in the past year or so were mushy apples from a dying tree in a Greenwich Village courtyard. She had trimmed out the spoiled spots with a multitool blade until the remaining fruit looked like it had already been eaten.
The expression on her face must have reflected her desire, for the pregnant woman, upon meeting Nora’s eyes, looked away uncomfortably.
“What is this?” said Nora.
“The birthing barracks,” said Sally. “This is where pregnant women convalesce and where their infants are ultimately delivered. The trailers outside are among the best and most private living quarters in the entire compound.”
“Where did she get”—Nora lowered her voice—“the fruit?”
“Pregnant women also receive the best food rations. And they are excused from being bled for the length of their pregnancy and nursing.”
Healthy babies. The vampires needed to replenish the race, and their blood supply.
Sally went on. “You are one of the lucky ones, the twenty percent of the population with B-positive blood type.”
Nora knew her own blood type, of course. B positives were the slaves that were more equal than the others. For that, their reward was camp internment, frequent bloodletting, and forced breeding.
“How could they bring a child into this world as it is now? Into this so-called camp? Into captivity?”
Sally looked either embarrassed for Nora or ashamed of her. “You may come to find that childbirth is one of the few things that makes life worth living here, Ms. Rodriguez. A few weeks of camp life and you might feel different. Who knows? You may even look forward to this.” Sally pushed her gray sleeve back, revealing bull’s-eye bruises that looked like terrible bee stings, purpling and browning her skin. “One pint every five days.”
“Look, I don’t mean to offend you personally, it’s just that—”
“You know, I’m trying to help you here,” she said. “You’re young enough still. You have opportunities. You could conceive, deliver a baby. Make a life for yourself in this camp. Some of the rest of us… are not so fortunate.”
Nora saw this from Sally’s perspective for a moment. She understood that blood loss and malnutrition had weakened Sally and everyone else, sapping the fight from them. She understood the pull of despair, the cycle of hopelessness, that sense of circling the drain—and how the prospect of childbirth could be their only source of hope and pride.
Sally went on. “And someone like yourself who finds this so distasteful, you might appreciate being segregated from the other kind for months at a time.”
Nora made sure she’d heard that correctly. “Segregated? There are no vampires in the birthing area?” She looked around and realized it was true. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. It is a strict rule. They are not allowed.”
“A rule?” Nora struggled to make sense of this. “Is it pregnant women who have to be segregated from vampires, or vampires who have to be segregated from pregnant women?”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
A tone rang, akin to a doorbell, and the women set aside their fruit or their reading material and pushed themselves up from their chairs.
“What’s this?” asked Nora.
Sally had straightened up a bit as well. “The camp director. I strongly suggest you be on your best behavior.”
On the contrary, she looked for a place to run to, a door, an escape. But it was too late. A contingent of camp officials arrived, humans, bureaucrats, dressed in casual business wear, not jumpsuits. They entered the central walkway, eyeing the inmates with barely concealed distaste. Their visit seemed to Nora to be an inspection, and a spot one at that.
Trailing them were two huge vampires, arms and necks still bearing tattoos from their human days. Once convicts, Nora surmised, now upper-level guards in this blood factory. Both carried dripping black umbrellas, which Nora thought strange—vampires caring about the rain—until the last man entered behind them, evidently the camp director. He wore a resplendent, mudless, blindingly white suit. Freshly laundered, as clean an article of clothing as Nora had seen in months. The tattooed vampires were this camp commandant’s personal security detail.
