The Human Condition

They say it's the one thing that will save us.

That our humanity is the one thing that seperates us from them.

But I'm not so sure anymore.

- Lucy

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In 1999 the vampires stopped hiding amongst us. Our fascination with the supernatural was growing and they were welcomed into a world that had only ever feared them based on ancient fables, hollywood horror movies and best selling novels. It wasn't the millennium bug we had expected, but life did change as the clock ticked over into a new year and it was never the same again.

I was sixteen when the vampires announced their existence to the world. It was as if an alien species had finally been confirmed to exist and it gave a new meaning to life. Death was no longer seen as the end. The promise of immortality was as alluring to the masses as a flame was to a moth and it burned just as deadly. But fear of the unknown gave way to hatred, acceptance that had been given so easily was removed and extremist groups blossomed on both sides. As humans fought to understand or eliminate the new aspect in their life, the vampires were merely there as they always had been. The take over had been a silent one, occurring before people even understood that it had happened.

From day one we were disadvantaged. Everything we knew about vampires came from legends, urban myths and pop culture and this was our downfall. The majority of our knowledge extended as simply as they need blood to survive, daylight is their kryptonite and they will burn and die upon contact but more importantly, to kill them you only need to drive a wooden stake through their heart.

I was eighteen when I learnt two of those three things weren't true.

Blood was their life source and in the balance of life and death, one cannot occur without the other. For the vampire to live, the human must die. While the monsters were more active during the night, they were not confined to it like we had all presumed, to ignorant to realize the fact they had already been living amongst us for centuries undetected. The light kept their human qualities weak, they moved slower, their hearing was not as sharp and their eyes struggled to see.

In the night you couldn't hide.

Silver bullets were pointless, the first wave of resistant groups died in their thousands with this weapon of choice, followed by holy water and garlic. And it was as I drove a stake through the heart of a vampire, that I learnt this was wrong too. Others before me knew this, but it hadn't become common knowledge. Stabbing them only slowed them down. To actually kill a vampire, you had to two options. Beheading but that wasn't as easy as you'd think or you burned it; the torturous death was labeled as the only sure way to send them back to the depths of the hell they escaped from.

The numbers of dead began to mount up on both sides as the war hit its peak, the vampires loosing the control they had so easily gained in the beginning as the humans continued to fight back. The day a treaty was signed my Mother cried, thinking the horrors of the last few years would be over and we had all worked out a way to live in peace like we always had.

But she, like many others thought wrong.