Black Vampire Universe

The existence of my species has always puzzled humans. Personally, I sometimes wonder why. We're everywhere they are. At the office, inside the boardroom, on the subway, in the halls of congress and everywhere else. On college campuses, on the street and in the armed forces. We're from all walks of life, you know. Yet still there are so many of these weirdoes who think we don't exist. Isn't that funny?

My name is Jerome Claude and I am a vampire. Standing six feet one inch tall, with broad shoulders and a stocky build. My skin is dark brown and my curly black hair is cut short on the sides. By all appearances, I appear to be twenty four years old. That's cool, because that's how old I am. Vampires can and do age. And no one lives forever. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Presently, I'm walking through the unfamiliar halls of Westlake College in Andover, Massachusetts.

I'm back to a place which should seem familiar but isn't. Westlake College has really changed since I enrolled as a freshman, years ago. Back then, the school was smaller. There were only two thousand or so students. Now, Westlake College has thirty eight hundred students. This small private school has really gone big-time. There is a new athletic complex on campus and it houses an Olympic swimming pool. The Department of Athletics is bigger and better-funded than I remember. They now sponsor men's varsity baseball, basketball, soccer, swimming, wrestling, volleyball, lacrosse, ice hockey and football along with women's varsity softball, basketball, soccer, swimming, field hockey, equestrian, lacrosse, ice hockey and volleyball. They compete in the NCAA Division Two. That too is a new. When I originally enrolled, we were Division Three. I'm still a triple minority on campus, though. Black, male, and nonhuman.

I started college at the age of nineteen and stuck around long enough to complete three semesters. Afterwards, I took a long break. I had a lot to do, folks. Vampires everywhere had to put their differences aside and work for the common good. You see, an international cabal of men and women armed with high-tech weaponry were hunting us down. I don't know why they were hunting us. We're not the monsters lousy horror movies make us out to be. We just lead our lives like ordinary people. Yet these fanatics came after us like the frigging Nazis or something.

The war lasted several years. All of us had to answer the call. I had to submit to survival training, along with every other adult male and female vampire I knew. The Hunters were a well-organized bunch. They had billions of dollars at their disposal, along with the kind of equipment and weaponry you only see in Saturday night science fiction movies. I mean, they had these guns that could vaporize you. Only a few specks of dust would remain. I had never seen the like in my life, folks.

A lot of people who don't know jack about vampires think they're invincible. We're far from invincible, folks. I possess three to five times the physical strength of an average-sized human male in good health. I can run fast, somewhat faster than most Olympic athletes but I'm not a frigging speed demon. I don't have superhuman speed, whatever that is. I heal quickly. Much quicker than any human being. But vampires like myself cannot and do not regenerate like something out of a Marvel Comic book. Accelerated healing and cellular regeneration are two completely different things. Learn the difference.

Many humans believe that vampires are exclusively nocturnal creatures. If they only knew how many vampires run past them while jogging early in the morning. We can walk in sunlight. It doesn't bother us. We let humans think sunlight was our weakness a long time ago because it amused us to do so. Who knew you people would take it so seriously? The Hunters studied us carefully before moving in on us. At any given time, there are perhaps five to six hundred thousand vampires living on the planet, scattered in various countries around the globe. We live in small, close-knit communities. Invisible within the human population.

Somehow, the Hunters had a satellite keeping track of us. They studied our movements around the planet. And then, one day, they struck. The attack came without warning. Ordinary men and women armed with never-before-seen high-tech weaponry descended upon us in our homes, workplaces and various other favorite dwellings. Thousands of us were killed in the early days. We rallied around one another and fought back fiercely. My species isn't a lazy one, folks. We've known persecution for centuries. During the Middle Ages, hordes of humans on horseback would stalk us in the woodlands where we lived. We learned to fight, and fight hard.

The battle between vampire and Hunter raged. In the end, we won. The showdown took place at a certain small desert island in the Caribbean. It was there that vampire scientists unleashed a devastating weapon. A virus which attacked anything that lives. There is one thing that humans have right about us. Vampires walk, talk, eat, drink, piss, shit and sleep. Yet our hearts don't beat. Scans of our brains show zero brain activity, though we're a sharp-minded breed. Our blood flows very slowly. When they called us undead, they were right. The virus had zero effect on us. However, it killed every living thing on the island. Every blade of grass. Every insect. Every bird. Every animal. And every last human. Including the thousands of Hunters who had come to slaughter what they thought was the leaders of the vampire community. It was a clever trap that we set for them. And they bought it. Aren't we clever?

The virus was unleashed on an island which is privately owned by a multinational corporation which is owned by the vampire community. No one asked questions. There was no story on the news, or the web. The Hunters were dead. And for us, life continued. The vampire community had survived and defeated the humans who sought to destroy it. We aren't a bunch of megalomaniacs who want world domination. We just want to be left alone. We don't prey on humans. And we absolutely cannot allow them to prey on us. Rest assured that should any human militia rise against us in the future, we're going to make what happened on that island look like a picnic. You've been warned.