The Last Vampire by Whitley Strieber Page A

shoes. The heel was not usable.
    This dim, booming space was extremely alien. She’d never been inside a factory, never seen the raw side of human engineering and architecture. She’d preferred to live her life in an older, more familiar aesthetic. Her home in Manhattan was a hundred and fifteen years old; she stayed almost exclusively in old, familiar hotels when she traveled. She could handle the human world, but she’d never seen a place like this before, never imagined that the hidden parts of the human world were this mechanical.
    Ahead of her she saw a passageway. The floor was dark and marked by white and yellow lines. The passage curved up and to the right. This appeared to lead away from the customs enclosure, so she began walking along it. It was lighted by fluorescent tubes, some of them flickering and some completely out. The effect was eerie, and made more so by a high-pitched whining sound coming from ahead. She stopped to listen and tried to place this sound, but she could not.
    The farther into the passage she went, the louder it became. She stopped again. It would rise and fall, then rise again. Then it almost faded entirely. She resumed walking, passing the endless, black-scuffed walls, moving beneath the flickering lights.
    The sound screamed out right in her face, and her entire field of vision was filled with glaring lights. A horn began sounding.
    There was no room to lie down, the oncoming machine was too low. She looked up — and there, where the lights were, she could grab hold. She leaped, missed by inches. The machine got closer, the lights growing as big as saucers, the glare blinding her and pinning her like the stunned animal that she was. The horn blared and blared. She crouched.
    Like most animals’, the backs of a Keeper’s eyes were reflective. When she looked directly into those lights, the driver would have seen a flare as if from the eyes of a deer or a tiger. Human night vision had been bred away. Better that they sleep at night, giving the Keepers time to tend herd and feed.
    There were only seconds left now. The machine would tear her to shreds. She would die from that — actually die. It was an oblivion that had haunted her all her life. She did not think that Keepers persisted in the memory of nature. She did not want to cease to be.
    She sprang up from her crouching position and reached toward the light fixtures. She grabbed the edge and drew herself up, hooking one leg along the lip of the long fixture and pressing the rest of her body against the ceiling.
    With a hot blast of air the machine went shrieking past, not an inch below her breast. It seemed to take forever, and she soon felt her fingers and toes slipping. She was going to fall onto the roof of the thing.
    And then it was gone, and she fell instead to the floor, which she knew now was really a subterranean road. Would another machine come? Of course. Would the driver have radioed her position back to her pursuers? Of course.
    She knew, now, that she was in an extremely serious situation. Man had changed. Man was now effective and efficient. She remembered the Paris of fifty years ago, a compact, intricate city traveled by tiny automobiles and herds of bicycles. Only the Métropolitain sped the way this thing had. But it had been on rails.
    Ahead, the screaming sound had started again. Another of the machines was coming. She saw, perhaps two hundred yards farther on, a ladder inset into the wall. It led to a service hatch of some kind.
    The machine was coming, getting louder. There was a wind blowing in her face, getting steadily harder. This must be a subway system that served just the airport. But how could that be? Paris had a compact air-field, as she recalled, albeit a busy one.
    It had grown huge, that was the answer, and she was thinking that maybe her brothers and sisters were at least somewhat right. Maybe she needed to stick closer to home, too, because this situation was getting out of hand, way out of