Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(108)

“Leave it,” his voice drifted back. “I trust you better when you’re not armed.”

I grinned this time, and dumped the knife through a crack in the boards. It was swallowed up by the house.

It wasn’t twenty-four hours yet, but somehow, I felt like I could probably make it the rest of the way.

Probably.





AUTOMATIC


Another anthology tale, written for the Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions collection, edited by Melissa Marr and Kelley Armstrong. That amazing anthology is the result of Melissa and Kelley inviting a bunch of their author friends along for a road-trip signing tour called the Smart Chicks Kick It event, and it was a huge success and blowout fun. To help fund the tour (because all of us pitched in for costs), they put together this anthology, which also allowed us to give back a little to our readers.

This stand-alone story is set late in the series, but before the Daylighters show up, and it deals with something I’ve always wondered about. . . . We have vending machines for snacks, cold drinks, even hot drinks. Why don’t the vamps have one for blood?

Well, this examines why it might not be such a great idea, by way of Michael’s experience. A sweet little love story, too, in an unexpected way.

Fun factoid: I was addicted to soft drinks in college (not coffee) and if I couldn’t find a working machine that served Dr Pepper, my day was bound to go almost as badly as Michael’s is about to in this story. Physics class without the sweet relief of soda? Unthinkable!





There was a new vending machine at the Morganville Blood Bank. In the withdrawal area, not the deposit area. It looked like a Coke machine, only instead of handy ice-cold aluminum cans, there were warm cans labeled O Neg and A and B Pos—something for everybody. The cans even had nice graphic logos on them.

My girlfriend, Eve, and I were standing in front of the vending machine, marveling at the weirdness, and wondering a lot of things: First, what the hell did they tell the can manufacturers about what was going in those containers? And second, would the blood taste like aluminum? It already had a coppery tone to it, like licking pennies, but . . . would it be any good?

There were twelve vampires in the room, including me, and nobody was making a move to get anything out of the shiny new machine. The Withdrawal Room itself was clean, efficiently laid out, and not very friendly. Big long counter at one end, with staff in white lab coats. You took a number; you got called to the counter; they gave you your blood bags. You could order it to go, or drink it here; there were some small café-style tables and chairs at the other end, but nobody really liked to linger here. It felt like a doctor’s office, someplace you left in a hurry as soon as you could.

So it was odd how all the tables and chairs were full, and the sofas, and the armchairs. And how there were vamps standing around, watching the machine as if they expected it to actually DO something. Or, well, expected me to do something.

“Michael?” Eve said, because I’d been a long time, staring at the glossy plastic of the machine in front of me. “Uh, are we doing this or not?”

“Sure,” I said, resigned. “I guess we have to.” I had actually been asked—well, ordered, really—to lead the way on this particular new Morganville initiative. Morganville, Texas, is—to say the least—unusual, even for someplace as diverse and weird as our great state. It is a small, desert-locked town in the middle of nowhere, populated by both humans and vampires. A social experiment, although the vampires really controlled the experiment. As far as I knew, we were the only place in the world vampires lived openly—or lived at all.

I was on the side of the vamps now . . . not through any plan of my own. I was nineteen years old, and looking at eternity, and it was starting to look pretty lonely because the people I cared about, that I loved . . . they weren’t going to be there with me.

Somehow, the machine summed up how impersonal all this eternal life was going to get, and that made it so much more than just another Coke machine full of plasma.

I was still amazed that eleven other vamps had shown up today for the demonstration; I’d expected nobody, really, but in the end, we weren’t so different from humans: novelties attracted us, and the blood dispenser was definitely a novelty. Nobody quite knew what to make of it, but they were fascinated, and repelled.

And they were waiting.

Eve nudged me and looked up into my face, concerned. She wasn’t too much shorter than I was, but enough that even the stacked heels on her big Goth boots didn’t put us at eye level. She’d gone with subdued paint-up today: white makeup, black lipstick, not a lot of other accessories. We were so different, in so many ways; I wasn’t Goth, for starters. I wasn’t much of anything, fashion-wise, except comfortable. And she seemed okay with that, thankfully.

“Swipe?” she said again, and tapped my right hand, which held a shiny new plastic card. I looked down at it, frowning. White plastic, with a red stripe, and my name computer-printed at the bottom. GLASS, MICHAEL J. My dates of birth and death (or, as it was called on the vamp side, “transformation”). The cards were new, just like the vending machine—issued just about two weeks ago. A lot of the older vampires refused to carry them. I couldn’t really see why, but then, I’d grown up modern, where you had to have licenses and ID cards, and accepted that you were going to get photographed and tracked and monitored.