– Sure thing, Joe. You got it. Just tell me where to meet you and I’ll be there.

– I’ll find you.

– Uh, sure, sure OK. Um, where ya gonna find me?

– You’ll be at Blackie’s, right?

– Sure.

– I’ll find you there.

I make my way out of the place, leaving behind the low fog-bank of cigarette smoke, the fake wood paneling and the aroma of puke that drifts from the can every time someone opens the door. Leaving behind Philip, hip deep in his element.

The Count.

There’s one born every minute. Or every couple years anyway. Seems there’s always someone coming down the pike calling themselves The Count, or Vlad or Vampirella or some shit. Some asshole geeked on the whole vampire scene and wanting to play the role to the hilt. Whatever, I’ll meet this guy and talk to him. Won’t be the first time I’ve grilled a dude in a red satin-lined cape. Sad to say, it won’t be the last.

It’s close to one. Blackie’s won’t open ’til the regular bars close at four. I wander past Doc’s. A sheet of plywood has replaced the window I sent The Spaz through last night. I think about going in to talk to the bartenders, see if they saw anything I didn’t, but it’s pretty packed. I’ll save it for later. I walk to the corner of 10th and A. Take a left and I can stop by my place and grab some more cash, dig into that emergency fund. I stand on the corner for a minute. But I’m just putting shit off. I know where I need to go now, and my money’s no good there anyway. I walk one more block down A, take a right on 9th, and cross over to Avenue C.

When I come through the front door of Hodown, Evie glances up at me from behind the bar and gives me a look. She’s weeded back there. I slip past the pedal steel, fiddle and harmonica trio jamming on the tiny stage, collecting empties from the tables. I take the bottles behind the bar, dump them in a plastic garbage can with a couple hundred others just like them, and start washing glasses. Evie nods at me as she shakes a martini. Fifteen minutes later the glassware situation is looking better, so I go back around to the fun side of the bar and take a seat.

Evie’s still serving the crowd. It’s not a bad bunch. This late at night in the middle of the week it’s mostly waiters and waitresses getting off their shifts at the ten thousand cafés and bistros that opened down here in the last decade. Or it’s regulars coming in to work on their liver disease and listen to the music. She pops open a Lone Star, slides it down the bar to me. A half hour later things settle down and she comes over.

She wipes her hands on the bar rag tucked into her studded belt, picks up my smokes from the bar and sticks one in her mouth.

– Got a light?

She hardly ever smokes.

– What happened today?

She picks up my Zippo and lights the Lucky herself.

– No big deal.

– Good. What’d the doctor say?

She looks at the band.

– You hear these guys before? Corpus Christi?

– Yeah. I heard them before. What’s the doc say?

She takes a drag, coughs on the smoke.

– Said. Cough! Said. Cough! S’cuse me.

She takes a sip of my beer and stops coughing.

– Doctor said my viral load was up. Said the HIV is showing again.

I try to touch her hand, but she moves it. She stares at the band, holding the smoldering cigarette unsmoked.

– OK. Then what’s next?

A guy at the other end of the bar tries to catch her eye. She doesn’t see him.

– Well, it’s the second test showing a load, so that means we have to test to see if I’ve developed a resistance to the Kaletra.

– And if you have?

– We try other drugs.

– So when do you get the resistance test?

The guy at the bar is waving his hand.

– I get the resistance test after I take the recommendation from my doctor to my insurance company and they say I can have it, and if it comes back inconclusive I have to get them to approve a different test, and if that’s inconclusive we start shooting in the dark, trying different meds, but since Combivir and Kaletra are the Health and Human Services-recommended treatments, I’ll have to get every new drug we try approved first, and that will take Jesus knows how long, and they all have a different set of side effects so, instead of just puking all the time, I might start putting on something charmingly known as back fat or losing my hair or, you know, experiencing sudden heart failure.

She hands me the cigarette.

– Here, take this. I gotta go help this asshole.

She crosses over to the guy who’s been waiting for his drink. I stare at the cigarette she was smoking. She comes back, plucks it from my fingers, puts it to her lips, then pulls it away and hands it back to me.

– Sorry. Didn’t mean to blow up on you.

I take a drag from the smoke.

– What can I do?

She tucks some loose hair behind her ear.

– Honestly. There is something.

– What?

– Do you know your blood type?

– Um.

I take another drag.

– No. I guess not.

– Well, if you could find out that would be cool.

– What’s up?

– The doctor. He’s says I should start, this is so gruesome, he says I should start laying in a supply. For later. If I need transfusions. I can’t save my own obviously, so I need to find donors. I’ll get credits or something in the blood bank. So if you could find out. And then, if you’re a match.

She laughs.

– If you’re a match maybe you could give me some of your blood. Man, that’s about the most fucked up thing I’ve ever had to ask.

She looks at me.

– You OK, Joe?

– Yeah. I’m fine.

The infected population is pretty stable. And it’s that way for a couple reasons. One of the reasons is that it’s hard to infect anyone. It’s not just a matter of a couple bites on the neck. Somehow your infected bodily fluids need to mingle with someone else’s bodily fluids. The amount of mingling is up for debate. But seeing as how the Vyrus can’t survive outside the human body, it’s kind of tricky to get it from one person to another. It’s also not clear if it exists in any fluids other than blood. Not that I’ve done a lot of research into this stuff. My education stopped when I was about twelve. Biochemistry’s not my strong suit. I’m just getting by on the introductory lectures I got from Terry way back when. But I’m not special in my ignorance. Nobody has done any real research into this stuff. Way I understand it, researching a virus under the best of circumstances is a pretty tough proposition. But when the facilities at your disposal aren’t much more than a high school chemistry set, you’re doomed to operating in the dark.

Not that people don’t try.

The Coalition took a crack at it. They got their fingers into a very big pie called Horde Bio Tech, Inc. Took a shot at taking over the whole deal. Wanted to use their labs to start cracking the Vyrus. Didn’t work out for them. That was at least partly my fault. OK, mostly my fault. That’s why me and the Coalition don’t get along so well anymore. That’s why Predo has shifted me from his barely tolerated list to his torture-maim-and-kill-on-sight list. Anyway, they got as close as anyone’s gotten to having a chance to really dig into this thing. The Coalition Secretariat has built up some big piles of money over the decades, centuries, whatever. Money like that creates cracks. And they have become very adept over the years at working their fingers into those cracks and widening them. Once again, that’s the way Terry tells it. And I got no better way of knowing. But that kind of brings up the second reason why Vampyres aren’t cropping up like mushrooms: The Coalition doesn’t want them to.

The Coalition operates on a charter that is the exact opposite of the Society’s: They want to keep the Vyrus under wraps. They’ve been around for a long time, long enough to have a historical perspective of sorts, and they’ve already decided that no one is ever going to accept us as anything vaguely resembling normal. It’s pretty much the only thing I agree with them about. So while their grip on Manhattan may have slipped since the sixties, they still draw some lines, and one of the biggest is about keeping the numbers down. Not that they need to convince anyone. We all get it. This is a pretty delicate ecosystem here. It’s an island for fuck sake; the food supply, as it were, can only support so many predators. But in this case, the problem isn’t that the prey might be hunted to extinction. The problem is that when you get right down to it, we’re not predators, we’re parasites. And we are vastly outnumbered by the true masters of the territory. So it’s in all our interests to keep the numbers as they are.