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--Snoink
The Great Blood Heist
“Can you bite me?”
“No.”
“Now?”
I gave Jerry a stare that would make most vampires wilt. His grin only widened. He leaned on the chair and put his feet on the desk. My desk. “You know, one day you’re going to have to do it. It’s just a matter of time. My expertise comes in handy, you must admit. I’m too useful to stay a human.”
I rolled my eyes and twisted my hair around my hands. “Yes. You can stare at a computer screen all day and not care. How special.”
He laughed. “Just imagine! I could spend all of my immortal life working on leveling up my mage! I would have all the time in the world.”
“An honorable goal, to be sure.” I rubbed my eyes and squinted at the screen. “My eyes are going to fall out,” I said, groaning. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“What, balancing data sheets? You got to be kidding me.” He stood up, walked around my desk, and rolled his eyes. “No wonder. You’re trying to do this the hard way. Let me build some macros for this worksheet and then you’ll have enough time to level up a mage! Not that you would do any of that nonsense,” he added, laughing. “You’re as straight as they come.”
I sighed. “Just do whatever you do, Human.”
“Gladly, Vampire.”
He clicked around a bit and I winced and rubbed my eyes more. The screen wasn’t the sun, so I wouldn’t turn to dust or anything else dramatic like that, but it took only a couple of hours for my head to start spinning. It was too bright. I wanted to curl up in complete darkness and drink blood. The warmer, the better. In fact, I could hear Jerry’s heartbeat thrumming in my ears. It sounded so good. It would be so easy to bite him in the neck, and I knew I wouldn’t even have to kill him. He would let me drain him without struggling or screaming. He would even enjoy it.
I shook my head. No, it wasn’t right. Besides, there had to be a process. If I bit him, then other vampires would start biting the other humans. We would have too many vampires and not enough humans. And there had to be humans. Otherwise, where would we get all the blood?
“There you go, Mallory!” he said finally. “All fixed. And look, your bank accounts are balanced.”
“Good.”
He waited for a moment, grinning. “Aren’t you going to thank me?”
I wheeled back to the computer. “Thank you.”
“You were thinking about biting me, weren’t you?”
“Shut up.”
His eyes brightened. “You were!”
“Any vampire would. You were leaning close to me.”
“Evidently, not close enough,” he said, winking.
“Jerry.”
“All right, all right. I can tell when I’m not loved.” He shot me a pout, but I just rolled my eyes and swiveled my chair away from him.
“Not in the mood.”
“I know. But I am the CEO, you know. You should respect me just a tiny bit more. After all, I can cross rivers and eat garlic.”
“And I can beat you in ping pong. What’s your point?”
“Touché.” He smiled at me. “I like you. I’m not sure why, but I like you. You’re the sexiest vampiress I know.”
“And you’re the shallowest human I know.” I typed in the rest of the data and closed the worksheet. “We’re running low on A-. We need more donors.”
“Figures. There are too many vampires running around with A-, aren’t there?”
I shrugged. “Now we try to limit the amount of rare blood types in our vampires. But before recent medical technology, we didn’t. We didn’t even realize that the blood type mattered until ten years ago.”
Jerry snorted. “Yeah. Those were the good old days when you could just bite people without worrying about the technicalities.”
“Ah yes, the good old days when vampires would melt from an immune response from the wrong blood type.” I frowned. “The old timers don’t like it, of course, but they forgot how bad it was. This way, by organizing a blood bank, they can safely have blood without risk of blood rejection. Plus, the humans feel as if they’ve contributed to society.”
“Really?” Jerry said, feigning a shocked reaction. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard this story before!”
I rolled my eyes. “Sorry. Long day.”
“It’s all right.” He came close to me once again, grinning mischievously. Too close. I could hear his blood throbbing through his veins. “What blood type do you have?”
I gritted my teeth. “Don’t you remember? You’ve asked me enough. It’s B+.”
“Just like mine.”
“Yeah, but I can take blood from O+, O-, B+, and B-. I am in no way limited to just your blood. Not that I’d want it anyway.”
“Sure. Whatever you say.” He was still close.
“I would move back if I were you.”
“Oh? Are you going to bite me?”
“I was thinking more of giving you a black eye.”
He stepped back abruptly, making a face. Then he grinned. “One day it’s going to happen. You know it.”
“Don’t remind me.” I shut down my computer and buried my head in my hands. “Please tell me that tomorrow is going to get better.”
“Tomorrow is going to get better. Now, do you want me to tuck you in your coffin?” I glared up at him. He grinned.
“We don’t sleep in coffins, you know.”
“I won’t believe it until I see it.”
“You’ll have to wait a long time then. Maybe an eternity.”
He raised his eyebrow. “I like the sound of that. Then you’ll have to bite me.” He grabbed his coat and winked. “Goodbye, Mallory. And don’t worry. I read my horoscope for tomorrow and good things are in store for us all.”
“You do realize that reading your horoscope in advance is bad luck?” I called out to him as he disappeared into the hallway.
He only laughed.
*
The first time my cell phone rang, I ignored it. It was from Jerry’s number, so I thought it was just some sort of prank he was pulling. After all, he did love his jokes, even if nobody else liked them. Besides, he knew it was too early. Vampires, as a general rule, do not like waking up early and especially do not like waking up early when the sun is shining. We get the worst sunburns ever. And by worst sunburns, I mean we pretty much burst into flames.
The second time it rang I also ignored it. It was the third ring that irritated me. I tried to ignore it, really, I did, but even though I didn’t answer, the ringtone kept playing on and on in my head. My eyes were glued to the phone, waiting for it to burst into its cheesy song once more. The fourth time. I flipped my phone open and slammed it to my head. “What?” I yelled, spitting all over the screen.
“Mallory?” He sounded uncertain.
“This is she.”
“Uh... I got some bad news for you.”
“What?”
“You know the new president?”
“Yeah?”
“The one that promised real change?”
I began to feel annoyed. “Yeah?”
“The one who said he was going to weed out all corruption in Washington?”
“Jerry, you better have a point to this.”
“Well, don’t look now, but he wants to take over the blood bank industry.”
I snorted. “Good luck to him. We’ll just have our lobbyists wine and dine him and he’ll understand soon enough. In the meantime, please, never call me this early. I know that you don’t mind the sun, but I--”
“No, you don’t understand,” Jerry interrupted. “This morning, he took over our bank.”
I stopped. “What?”
“People are starting to panic. I don’t know what to do. The officials he sent say that we can still run the bank, but we have to distribute the blood according to what they say, or else we will lose our permits.”
“Can’t we just lie?”
“I would if I could, but the computer programs they have installed will take a while to crack. I think a month or so.”
“But the vampires. How will they get their blood?”
“I don’t know.”
I glanced at the clock – it was still sunny. It wouldn’t be dark until a couple more hours. “Look, I won’t be there until it gets dark, but I’ll be there as soon as I can, all right? We’ll figure out a way to work with this.”
“If there’s anyone who can figure out this situation, it’s you Mallory. It’s times like these that I’m glad that I’m only the figurehead.” Then he laughed harshly. “Maybe you’ll have to have my blood after all.”
I wanted to cry.
*
When I arrived, the scene was so somber it would have been ridiculous if I hadn’t known better. The humans were on one side of the table, looking thoroughly nervous, while the vampires were staring at the humans like the humans were food. At the head of the conference table was Jerry, though he quickly jumped up when I walked into the room. “Just the person we wanted to see!” he said quickly, ushering me into the head seat.
“I can get another chair—“ I started to say, when Pieter cleared his throat in an impressive way that meant he was going to lapse into a long, completely irrelevant speech. I turned to Sharlene. “Sharlene, report, what exactly happened?”
Sharlene, one of the humans, glanced at Pieter with worry. “The government took us over. They have a list of recipients they want us to give our blood to, and they won’t let us distribute our blood freely.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re a bunch of blood-sucking vampires that want the blood for themselves?” Jerry suggested.
I glared at him. “Not helpful,” I said.
Jerry shrugged, looking grim. “To be honest, we’re still a bit in shock. You would think that we would have known about this beforehand, especially with everything that this entails. The government is taking over a free enterprise. You would expect that there would be protests in the streets or something like that.” I was about to ask him what he meant, but he handed me a stack of papers. “The bill. It was signed unanimously by both the Senate and Congress and signed into law by the President yesterday. Apparently, this is a top priority for the government.”
I flipped through the papers, confused. “But, why would they move so fast on this? They move so slow on everything else.”
Jerry shrugged. “I don’t know. But I don’t like this.”
Pieter coughed impressively again. “This blood bank has never been a good idea,” he began. “I’ve been against it from the beginning, but nobody’s listened to me. They all wanted peace and peace and more peace, but they’re not willing to work for it. Why, in my day, we had to work for our blood!”
“And in your day, the humans killed the vampires quite frequently, if I remember the stories right,” I remarked, flipping through the bill. “It was written a week ago. How could they pass it this fast?” I turned to Jerry. “When you said they were vampires, were you serious?”
“Do you see them burning up in the daylight?”
“No.”
“Then how can they be vampires?”
Sharlene smiled. “Maybe they’re the sparkling type.”
“That would explain a lot.”
A collective groan went throughout the vampires while the female humans giggled. I rolled my eyes. “Continuing on! We have a problem here. We have a collection of vampires who need blood from us and we have a government trying to keep us from giving away this blood. And we have a human population that is blissfully unaware of the presence of vampires. Now what?”
“We ignore the government and continue to provide blood to the vampires while forging our documents to make it look like we’re giving blood,” Ursula, another vampire suggested.
“Impossible,” Jerry said. “They installed tracking technology so that we can’t send it anywhere without them knowing. We can probably hack into their system, but it’ll take us months.”
“Then there’s only one method,” Pieter said grinning, showing his fangs which he refused to file down. “We suck their blood the old fashioned way!”
I sighed. “No. We have spent years building up relations between vampires and humans. We’re not going to destroy this relationship just because an unfair government act."
"Couldn't you use animal blood instead?" Sharlene asked. "Blood's blood, right?"
Humans. They were always bad at biology. I shook my head. "It is blood, but it's not the right type. If we lived off animal blood, we would have a constant danger of an immune response rejecting the blood. It's already difficult enough to account for the different blood types."
"So you have to have human blood?"
"Yes, we have to have human blood." I looked around -- Pieter looked like he was going to launch into a long tirade. "Does anybody besides Pieter behave anything constructive they would like to say about this?" Pieter leaned back, sulking. When nobody said anything, I tapped my fingers on the table. "Come on, everyone. There’s got to be a better way to do this, short of stealing.”
Jerry snapped his fingers. “That’s it. We steal.”
“What?”
“We steal,” he said more clearly. “We’re in the perfect position to steal. We know everything about this bank, save for the new tracking system which we haven’t had the chance to override. While we hack into that, we can steal the blood from our donors before it gets a chance to even get into the system! Our clients get the blood and the humans don’t have to worry about having to be attacked by vampires. It’s a win-win situation.”
I rolled my eyes. “So you’re suggesting that we steal a bunch of blood mobiles from ourselves?”
Jerry smiled. “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”
*
You know those sorts of things that are ridiculous until you do them and then they aren’t ridiculous at all? This was not one of these sorts of things. When Jerry handed me the black ski mask, I had my forty-seventh doubt of the night. “We shouldn’t be doing this,” I murmured.
“Shhh. We’ll be fine.” The blood mobile was parked outside a hospital, but the blood hadn’t been unloaded yet and probably wouldn’t be for the next twelve hours. The hospital staff were busy and besides, the equipment holding the blood was state-of-the-art and built to be able to hold blood for seventy-two hours, easily. “All we have to do is slip the keys in and we’ll be driving off into the sunset.”
“Except it’s dark.”
“Same difference.” He pulled on his ski mask and grinned. “Tell me honestly – am I the definition of sexiness in this thing?”
“Let’s get this over with,” I groaned, shoving past him. “The security man is sleeping over there, the blood mobile is over there, and the keys are in your pocket, right?”
“Right.”
"And it's going to be smooth sailing?"
"Yep. Has been for the last nine times. Plus, we have plenty of back up, should things go wrong. Nine vampire sentries are in various positions, ready to strike if we need them. So far, we haven't." He grinned. "Not that I wouldn't mind to see a vampire attack. I hear they're pretty entertaining."
"They're not entertaining, trust me."
"Been in a couple?"
"That's how I became a vampire in the first place."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Another vampire bit me so I would survive."
He grinned, his smile looking strange in the ski mask. "Maybe we should have a vampire attack, if it means you'll bite me."
I rolled my eyes. "If you're that desperate, then I'll bite you once when we get this situation under control."
"Promise?"
"Promise. But let's get this done first."
I sucked in my breath and glanced at the van. Nine times. Jerry had done this nine times already with absolutely no incident. Of course, he hadn't done this with me yet, but he the last nine times he had done this with Pieter. If he could rob it with Pieter, who had the common sense of a gnat (not to offend the gnat) he could do it with me. There was no reason why I should be worried. "And you're driving?" I asked.
"Unless you want to."
“Give me the keys.”
"What's this?"
"Give me the keys. I want to drive."
He raised his eyebrow and smiled. “I always liked a woman that knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to get it.”
“Just hand them over.”
He dropped them in my hand and winked. “All right, just walk naturally. No running or drawing suspicion to ourselves. The ski mask is just to confuse the cameras.”
The ski mask also seemed to be there to make my face itch until it felt like it was going to peel off. I groaned and tried my best to walk naturally. One step, two step, three step. I lost count after twenty steps. Then we were at the van.
“Open the car,” Jerry whispered. The security guard grunted.
I clicked the keychain to unlock the car. “No luck, the keys are dead.”
“Here, give me that.” He slid the key into the keyhole and turned it. “There, perfect.”
“I was going to do that next,” I muttered.
“Just get in.” He had already slipped in the passenger seat, looking backwards at the blood supply.
“Everything there?” I murmured, climbing into the driver’s seat.
Several guns were raised to our levels. “FBI. Hold it right there.”
*
To be continued!
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