2011 - by pat worden
I know something you don’t know.
I know something you don’t want to know. I know things that would shatter your little worldview, that would tear your mind inside out.
I know truths you used to believe in, long ago, when you still believed that safety equaled hiding beneath your covers…when you were certain that the nightlight by the bedstand was your surest talisman against evil.
You put away those childish things, didn’t you, and began to worship at the altar of rationality. Because those things – those horrible crawling things of your nightmares – they couldn’t be real, could they?
Could they?
You have to trust me now. I will explain these things to you…but you must trust me to explain them my way. I have explained them to others, dozens of others, and I have learned that the truth must be sipped, like harsh alcohol, lest it choke you.
So I explain it like this: it’s somewhat like AIDS.
Not that it’s a virus; that’s not what I’m saying. It isn’t, or at least we don’t think it is.
But…are you old enough to remember the onset of AIDS – when it was a worrying curiosity, rather than a terrifying pandemic? This would be the early eighties, when it seemed like a new disease had been born out of nowhere.
Things don’t happen that way. That’s what we should have realized, when we thought AIDS was something new. We should have known there is nothing new under the sun.
There were lab-coated miracle workers chasing down this problem. Most of them were formulating vaccines, vaccines that never worked. But others were tracing back the pathology of the disease, seeking to learn where and when and how it had come about.
And in so doing, they kept pushing back its timeline. First, they found old vials of blood, forgotten on the back shelves of morgue refrigerators. People who had died in the seventies, even the sixties…people misdiagnosed with flu, or pneumonia, or Legionnaire’s; yet the vials revealed the truth. The virus was there, lurking, for decades.
And they pushed it back further. Tissue samples from the fifties, the forties…the thirties.
And then they shrugged and admitted it had always been with us, it was a curse we’d known for ages. We’d just never noticed, is all.
It was in the last days of World War II that we saw this other pandemic begin. It was in the mountains of Eastern Europe, behind retreating divisions and amongst feral partisan fighters. It came down from those hillsides and began sweeping through towns and villages.
How do you separate such a thing from the warfare raging around it? When do you admit to yourself that these corpses – there’s something different about them from the millions upon millions of others?
Well – you don’t. At least not right away. Because even back then, you and your kind pray before your rational altar. Even during a war that threatens to topple civilization itself, you trust your chemistry, your physics, your biology.
So…it must be something Hitler did, yes? Some horrible new weapon he tested on these people? That’s the only explanation that makes sense.
And if something about this seems familiar…something hearkens back to stories you shivered at as a child – some of those stories originating from these very mountains – you ignore that. Because it simply couldn’t be.
Hitler’s weapon, then. A virus, maybe? Probably. But how could it cause…those changes? Did it not seem to bring the dead back to life? Did it not provide them with inhuman strength? And whence comes their terrible hunger?
Regardless, you studied the problem. You buried the dead, and cut off heads to keep them from rising again, and you studied the problem. The war ended, the Iron Curtain fell, and you were still studying the problem.
The first thing you found was that it wasn’t a virus – or at least not a detectable one. Was it transmitted by the bite? You didn’t know. Certainly, some of the bitten changed over, but then again, some didn’t. It wasn’t air-borne, water-borne, food-borne, and it wasn’t genetic.
Decades later you were still studying the problem, and you hadn’t come much closer to an answer. Like the white-coated miracle workers fighting AIDS, you decide to look backward, to see if this thing really started when you assumed it had. And like the AIDS-fighters, you’re shocked to learn it hadn’t.
Those stories? Those folktales? They had to come from somewhere, didn’t they? So reluctantly – oh, so reluctantly – you come to admit that this disease, this pathology, this curse…has marched alongside mankind since time immemorial.
This, then, is the first lesson I want you to take with you, and it’s the lesson we learned from decades of studying this thing: There is nothing new under the sun.
The change can take a day; sometimes more, rarely less. After the attack the patient is lifeless, without heartbeat or respiration. Rigor mortis sets in. Decomposition sets in.
The change takes place at night. Always at night. It begins with a stirring, a twitching of muscles. If you were listening with a stethoscope you would find that the heart has resumed beating, very slowly.
The circulatory system has changed. It has gained new efficiencies, now supplying only the core organs and the brain. The skin and extremities are not fed, and they remain cold and pallid.
About the time the organs are reanimated, the teeth will begin to grow and sharpen. Not all of them, of course – just the canines.
And if you were that observer, that rational scientist studying this change, then you would do well to backpedal at this stage. Back out of the room as quick as you can, and bar the door with a lock strong enough to keep an elephant at bay. Because once the teeth grow, the hunger awakens.
I first learned these truths in the summer of 1970. I was a young captain, newly promoted, assigned to U.S. Army intelligence in Saigon. My day-to-day task was an impossible one, that of ferreting out Viet Cong agents and infiltrators in the capital. The task was impossible, though I didn’t know it at the time, because the Viet Cong owned that city, more surely and completely than we did, and administered it far more effectively than the comically corrupt South Vietnamese government.
So those occasional successes I enjoyed, what I thought were successes, were simply the bones that were tossed to me by the local communist hierarchy. They were either cleaning house of no-longer-useful agents, or maybe squaring up some internal divisiveness…maybe they just felt sorry for me and were trying to be sporting. Whatever their motivations, they’d send these infrequent tipsters to whisper in my ear, and I’d make an arrest or machinate an assassination…soon after that I’d receive a commendation and a slap on the back from some smiling, jaded general who knew this cause was lost…and then the cycle would repeat itself, eternally it seemed, in that stinking, steaming hot city where everyone, near as I could tell, were self-serving liars.
I drank a lot, and scribbled and bitched in a pretentious journal, and fucked away my frustrations in a few of the cleaner Eurasian whorehouses…and counted the days until my tour was over.
I guess it was a kindness, then, that I found what I found. I’m certain that Saigon monotony would have driven me stark raving mad before my orders came. I’m sure I would have eaten my .45, or strangled one of those smiling generals, or maybe I would have just started ignoring the whispers, in hopes that one of those VC cells would grow and prosper, and – God willing – insinuate a bomb into my headquarters and end it all for me in one big fiery roar.
Nice fantasy. But impossible, I know now. Because it was inevitable I would have learned the truth, and that the truth would transform me. It was there all around me; the generals already knew it, the Pentagon knew it…the VC, I’m certain, knew it. They were all just trying to ignore it, hoping no one else would notice, hoping that the Others were only feeding on whores and peasants and occasional isolated infantry platoons.
There is nothing new under the sun, and the Others have always been attracted to war zones. Easy pickings, I suppose.
The second thing you should take with you is knowledge of how to survive.
That starts with recognizing it.
Monitoring news reports is next to useless. If an attack is in progress, chances are overwhelming the authorities are aware of it and are pumping out disinformation. You might hear something about a serial killer on the prowl, then again you might hear nothing at all.
Missing-persons reports will increase; keep an eye out for that. Co-workers or friends or even family members might go missing. The police will seem unalarmed, they will tell you that people just take off sometimes – that sometimes the missing don’t want to be found. That’s true enough…but when the reports begin to pile up, when three or five or a dozen people from the same office stop coming to work, when stores and restaurants and the very streets themselves start to seem sparser…then be wary. Very wary.
If you have the chance to examine the bodies, then you can confirm this thing, for better or for ill.
There will be more than one body, to begin with. The Others do not clean up after themselves, they don’t bury their dead…and when they feed, they rampage.
There will be six to ten bodies, on average, and they will be lying where they died. There will be no sign of a struggle. Their carotid arteries will be severed, and they will be drained.
There will be very little blood at the scene, almost no gore on the floors or walls. Very little would have been wasted.
If you see these things – and this is paramount – you must act quickly. There is no way of knowing which of those dead, if any, will rise again. But you cannot – must not – take the chance. If anyone else is with you, anyone who doesn’t know the things you know, they will probably try to stop you. Don’t let them.
There’s just one sure way to make sure the fallen stay down. You’ve got to take their heads.
I learned these things on my own. My lesson began in August of 1970, at a whorehouse called Madam Chin’s.
Usually a bouncer would be sitting outside Madam Chin’s, on that little Colonial veranda with the paint so faded that it was impossible to tell what color it had once been. It could be one of many bouncers, maybe a thickly muscled Asian loaned by the local syndicate, or even a Special Forces guy on furlough, exchanging a couple hours of door-watching for a free weekend romp.
Either way – there was always someone sitting by the door at Madam Chin’s, giving you an implacable stare as you mounted the stairs and headed for the delights inside.
That day, there was no one. There was no one on that street, no one on the block.
I knew something was wrong, and I thought about drawing my weapon. I didn’t, though. I think I thought there were VC inside, and I think I wanted them to kill me. So I left my weapon holstered, and I walked into Madam Chin’s.
It was dark, someone had doused the lights. So I didn’t see any bodies, at least not right away. I was concentrating on the silence, which is something that normally never exists in places like this. You could expect to hear some drunken shouting, chitters of laughter, clinking of ice cubes at the bar and of dice on the floor. Far off in the back you could usually hear the grunting of customers, and the exaggerated squeals of the girls paid to service them.
There was none of that. Just heavy silence.
The smell was the other thing. Madam Chin’s never smelled pleasant, nor did any of those places. But this was a new stink, thick and oppressive, that I couldn’t identify. That’s because I had never been that close to that many bodies before.
As my eyes adjusted I began to see the dead. They were everywhere, in every direction I looked. I adjusted still further to the gloom, and could see the dead were ghostly white from their lack of blood, their eyes still open and glassy, frozen from the horror that had been their last moments.
I still didn’t draw my gun.
But I wandered throughout Madam Chin’s, counting the dead. I’ve forgotten the exact tally (which is amazing, now that I think of it, and very very sad). I’m certain it was more than fifty. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was remarkable. It meant that one of them, one of the hemavores, was off on a particularly bad rampage, and had to be stopped.
Hemavores. That’s what we call them. Blood-eaters.
I don’t know who coined that term. It came early on, I think, when they still thought Hitler was somehow responsible. The name stuck, and it’s what we still use.
Because none of us, not even me, can stand to use that other word. The other word, the one you’re thinking of…the one that starts with ‘V’…we never say that. Because doing so would be just a little too honest for our taste.
I called it in. The phone at Madam Chin’s was still working, so I called it in. I called my CO, a stuffed-shirt Lieutenant-colonel, and told him what I found. He told me to sit tight.
Twenty minutes later the place was crawling with CIA guys.
Something you should know about Saigon in 1970 is that the entire city was crawling with CIA guys. Until its fall, Saigon hosted the largest CIA station outside of Langley, Virginia. The CIA had their fingers in every Saigon pie, and they had their people everywhere.
But I’d never seen so many of them in one place, excepting maybe the embassy compound. And each and every one of them looked frightened beyond belief.
They tried to hide that from me, doing a poorly job of it, and they tried to tell me this appeared to be the work of some crazed GI. They didn’t bother answering me when I asked why the CIA would take such a strong interest in a case like that.
Instead, they just nudged me out of Madam Chin’s, nudged me back toward my headquarters, and nudged me rather strongly to keep my mouth shut.
Two days later most of them were dead, and the CIA recruited me.
Two days after that I killed my first hemavore.
You might need to kill one of those things one day, so you’d better learn how.
Your optimum weapon is a combat-configured shotgun, 12-gauge or better, loaded with Foster-type rifled slugs.
Assume that you will only get one shot. Do not fire from a range beyond 100 feet. If you do, you’ll miss. And you’ll die.
Try for a headshot. A hemavore, hit in the head, will at least be temporarily disabled, even if it’s not a killshot. So try a headshot, then keep firing. Your goal is to shred the hemavore’s brain so thoroughly as to kill it.
Their nervous systems are similar to ours, although far more robust. They cannot live without a functioning brain. Their brains can continue to function with quite a bit of damage, though, so you must be sure.
The only way to be sure, as I’ve mentioned, is to remove the head completely.
In 1970, in Vietnam, we were still using M16s.
Hemavores laugh at M16s.
Two days after the rampage at Madam Chin’s, a 15-man CIA Special Ops team tracked the hemavore to a warehouse in southeast Saigon, and tried to take it down.
We counted shell casings later, and learned they fired at least 500 rounds, most of which were hits. None of which were killshots.
That Special Ops team was murdered, to a man, and two of them were turned into hemavores.
So I was recruited, hastily, given some vague version of the truth and put into the field. I never saw the stuffed-shirt Lieutenant-colonel or the smiling generals again.
Don’t waste your time with wooden stakes.
Can a wooden stake kill a hemavore? Sure it can. Just like it can kill you. A hemavore needs its circulatory system arguably as much as it needs its brain. Bisect its heart with a wooden stake and it will probably die.
But you’d be crazy to try that. Why get that close? You can be sure the hemavore won’t cooperate. They don’t sleep, and they don’t stand still while you try to kill them.
A 12-gauge slug can destroy their heart, and that will kill them. The same is true for a reasonably large pistol or rifle bullet.
Only…don’t miss. A heart is about the size of your fist, and it’s buried behind gristle and bone. In a hemavore’s case, that gristle and bone has become hard as iron.
The headshot is the preferred kill because nine times out of ten, a shot intended for the heart misses. Perhaps only by a few millimeters, but a miss is a miss.
And when you’re shooting at hemavores, a miss is your epitaph.
The thing about the CIA is that it’s loath to change tactics. You know that old saying – insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - ? To the CIA that’s not insanity, that’s standard procedure.
So they sent another killteam into that warehouse in southeast Saigon. Ten men, this time, because that’s all they could muster. I was one of the ten.
That the hemavore hadn’t bothered to move should have given us pause. The way it smiled at us as we walked in, did give us pause.
We arrayed ourselves into a firing line, spread over an arc about thirty feet across. We moved with military precision – locking, loading, taking aim. The hemavore just watched and smiled.
It couldn’t have been very hungry. It only tried to feed on one of us.
It had been perched on an ancient wooden crate, stenciled in some illegible French, poised like a cat with its knees bent and its arms wrapped around them.
And then – it wasn’t there anymore.
They can’t fly. That’s something else the folklorists got wrong. But they can move so fast it seems like they’re flying.
So one moment it was on that crate, and in an eyeblink it was right in front of our firing line. Then it was on our left wing, its claws wrapped around the throat of the man there.
His name was Delbert McShaw. He was from Oklahoma. He was 29.
We’d started firing, of course. Some of us even hit it. When I had a clear shot – and that wasn’t often – I aimed for center mass, just as I’d been trained. That never even slowed it down.
It was amongst us now, moving quick, from man to man, darting in and out of our firing line. Two more men quickly joined McShaw on the ground.
We tried to adjust – we were very well trained, so we tried to adjust. Our right wing, where I was, swung out and pulled back, trying to keep the hemavore in some kind of crossfire. Any kind of crossfire.
By now the air was sharp with cordite, the floor was littered with shell casings, and all of us, except the hemavore, I suppose, were nearly deaf from the continuous gunfire.
Three more men were down. It kept coming. I got a clear shot at its back and emptied half a mag into it. I don’t think it even noticed.
I was reloading when it went for the man next to me. The two of us were all that were left.
Hemavores don’t make many mistakes, but when they do it’s usually caused by hunger. That was the case here. It had worked up an appetite. So far it had killed men just by battering them. Now it was ready to kill by feeding.
The man next to me outweighed me by maybe fifteen pounds. That’s all it took for the hemavore to choose him over me.
The bigger the victim, the more they like it. More blood, you see.
So it latched onto him, holding him by the shoulders the way you might greet an old friend just before you shake his hand, and it smiled at him in a way that was almost tender…
And then it sank those teeth into the side of his neck, and drank.
He was conscious for a few moments, I could see that much. I was looking at him, at both of them, over the sight of my M16, but I was holding my fire because I didn’t have a clear shot at the hemavore.
A ridiculous consideration, that.
His eyes were pleading with me, for those brief seconds before they glazed over. It was clear what he wanted me to do.
I dropped my M16. I’m not sure what I was thinking, but it was the right move. Strapped to my back was a long, curved knife called a kukri, something like a machete and the favored blade of the Gurkha warriors of Nepal. It had been issued to me during my brief orientation; they told me it was perfect for lopping off the head of a hemavore. They made it sound like the easiest thing in the world.
Well, it was easy. This time, anyway. The thing was enthralled with its meal, it had forgotten about me entirely. I swung my kukri.
I took off its head, and the head of its victim. Two for one, you might say.
Another old saying: The past is prologue.
I never understood what that meant. And now, having taken some of your time to talk about my past, I realize that old saying is a lot like most old sayings: It’s utter horseshit.
My past is prologue to nothing. It helps you (and me) understand nothing. It proves nothing.
So with your indulgence, I’ll skim quickly over the rest of this prologue.
I killed hemavores for the CIA for the next five years. I was either good or lucky – I’ve never figured out which. I had dozens of partners who weren’t as good, or weren’t as lucky.
I went to work for the U.N., because that body decided, in 1976, that the best way to confront the hemavore problem wasn’t to confront it at all. They opted to cut a deal.
After that, less killing. More trying not to be killed, while watching the backs of diplomats – the ones who ask the hemavores to hold up their end of the bargain.
That’s my past. And if it’s a prologue, well, so be it. It’s irrelevant, really, and it’s not what I came here to tell you.
I came here to tell you that everything you believe, everything you know…is a lie.
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