Vampires Versus Zombies : War!

I'm going to make sure you stay dead this time, Ceylin Uygur said grimly as she swung the sword, swiftly decapitating the towering zombie whom she once called dad. The thing that had been Erol Hurrem fell and lay still, but his severed head still moved, his slavering jaws still twitched. Three days ago, fed up with her stepdad's constant physical and verbal abuse, Ceylin Uygur shot him twice in the chest. She thought he was gone for good, then the zombie plague happened and he came back. So Ceylin bashed his brains for good measure, since the virus which reanimated the corpse could only be stopped by destroying the brain. Satisfied that this bit of business had been taking care of, the young Turkish-Canadian woman grabbed her bag and walked out of the house, never to return. Grabbing her bicycle from the basement, she drove out of Mississauga, Ontario.

Seventy two hours ago, on July 3, 2017, a deadly virus was unleashed around the world by a radical terrorist group. In places like Los Angeles, Kinshasa, Istanbul, Marseille, Riyadh, Havana, Tokyo, Damascus, Toronto, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Beirut, Johannesburg and a few other cities, the plague was unleashed. Around the world, millions died. Three days later, they rose from the dead, as mindless corpses hell-bent on devouring the flesh of the living. Any person bitten by a reanimated corpse died and rose three days later as a flesh-eating corpse. That's the incubation period of the necrotic virus. No one knows where the virus came from, but it was created and unleashed by a terrorist group. This virus caused the end of the world. As civilization fell, hordes of undead roamed the globe, feasting on the living. Chaos reigned everywhere, and humanity seemed on the brink of extinction.

In the minds of many, the world ended the day a team of international terrorists unleashed a zombie virus around the world, thus ending civilization and placing humanity on the endangered species list. To eighteen-year-old Turkish immigrant Ceylin Uygur, the world ended a long time ago. Born and raised in the Malatya region of Turkey, she lost her father, Cemal Uygur, to an assassin's bullet when she was very young. Her mother, Sevgi Uygur married a wealthy Turkish-Canadian businessman named Erol Hurrem and the family moved to Ontario, Canada. It wasn't long before Ceylin discovered that the man her mother practically worshipped was a creep.

On the surface, he was the perfect guy. A secular-minded Muslim whose family once supported the Young Turks Movement, Erol Hurrem was very liberal in his views and doted on his wife and stepdaughter. Unknown to the world is the fact that he was a sexual predator. Erol Hurrem paid some nightly visits to Ceylin's bedroom while she was in high school, and he did far more than read her bedtime stories. He promised to kill her if she told her mother or anyone else what he was doing to her. The terrified young woman felt she had no choice but to obey. The abuse she suffered at Erol's hands intensified after her mother died of breast cancer. Ceylin's existence was a living hell. Until the day the world fell into chaos, with the dead coming back to life and eating the living. That's when Ceylin Uygur killed her abuser. Twice.

In what was once known as Toronto, Ontario, something dead prowled the darkness. Marcus Laroche looked at the decapitated corpses of the thirty or so zombies he'd had to kill in order to get the meager sustenance he needed to survive. The zombies had been fantastically easy to kill for one such as him. He found the lone human hiding inside, a forty-something, light-skinned and plump Black woman with short hair and greenish eyes. By her attire and the badge hanging around her neck in a lanyard, he figured she'd once been a businesswoman of some kind. She'd been so happy to see him, the man who single-handedly chopped up a horde of zombies to get to her.

Appearances can be deceiving, you'd think she would have learned that at her age. Oh, well. Mother nature didn't produce too many geniuses because just like the light needs the dark, the gifted need the dullards in order to shine. When Marcus Laroche pulled her into his arms as if to reassure her, she hadn't put up a fight. When he sank his fangs into her neck, she struggled but weakened by hunger and thirst, she didn't put up much of a fight. The vampire drained his victim, then hid her corpse in a shed. Seventy two hours later she rose up as one of his own. Marcus waited patiently for the woman to awaken as a vampire. Not everyone he bit came back to life. This time, he'd been successful. The fledgling vampire stared at her maker with the wonderment of new life. Marcus smiled at her, and introduced himself. Haltingly she told him her name, Maggie Walcott. Born in Alberta to a Jamaican immigrant father and Irish-Canadian mother, she'd been an accountant with Scotia Bank in downtown Toronto, Ontario, when the zombie plague started.

Marcus patiently listened to Maggie Walcott as she basically told him the story of her life. She went to Seneca College then the University of Toronto, and got married to her college sweetheart Roy Dickinson and they were planning to start a family until the day she caught him in bed with her best friend Michelle Dixon and shot him and buried the bodies in the woods of Savannah. That's how my marriage ended, Maggie Walcott said with a smile. Marcus laughed, surprised that a boring-looking gal like Maggie Walcott was actually a killer. Oh, well. It's true what they say. It's the quiet ones you got to worry about, the ones you never see coming. After all, Marcus Laroche had once been a quiet lad, a long time ago in a distant land.

In 1804, the island of Haiti became the first independent Black republic in the New World after a group of African ex-slaves overran the French colonial forces, abolished slavery and took control of the Caribbean nation. Marcus Laroche was born a slave on a plantation in the environs of what would later be called Cap-Haitien, northern Haiti. He ran away as soon as his legs could carry him, hiding in the woods with a group of escaped slaves. Marcus was a good friend of Boukman, one of the early leaders of the Haitian slave revolt.

Marcus Laroche participated in the Ceremony of Bois Caiman where the slaves pledged to fight against the French colonial forces to abolish slavery and win freedom for all black men and black women living in the island of Saint Domingue. When Boukman was captured and executed by the French colonists, Marcus continued to fight under other Haitian leaders like Jeannot, Jean Francois and Biassou and eventually joined forces with legendary Haitian military leader Toussaint Louverture to overthrow the colonial system and establish Black rule on the island.

Yes, the history books recorded all that. What they didn't record was that while living in the woods in northern Haiti, Marcus Laroche encountered a living legend, a creature once worshipped by the Arawak people who lived on the Caribbean island of Haiti before the arrival of whites and their African slaves. The creature was a thousand-year-old vampire who called himself Amonhana. The ancient vampire sensed a kindred spirit in the runaway slave and transformed him into one of his own. The master vampire's sole charge to his fledgling minion was to use his newfound powers to help his fellow Africans win their fight for independence against the whites who oppressed them. For the Arawak vampire had fought against the Spanish and French colonists to save the Natives of the island and lost.

Amonhana had seen much darkness and wonder in his ten centuries of life. He'd watched helplessly as the Arawak culture he loved and cherished was destroyed. Use your immortality well, Amonhana had said to Marcus as he welcomed him into the ranks of the vampire race. Marcus smiled, remembering the ancient one's words with fondness. He kept his promise, alright. The Haitian slaves fighting for freedom and independence in the Caribbean in the late 1790s and early 1800s had an unexpected ally in their fight against the French legions, a bloodthirsty demon that simply would not die. all those centuries. He was still keeping it even now.

Yeah, one thing about being a vampire is that living forever was both a curse and a blessing. Marcus Laroche was twenty five years old when Amonhana turned him into a vampire. And he remembered every detail of his entire existence from birth until the day he became a vampire. That's one of the perks of being a vampire. You can never forget. In Marcus case, he couldn't forgive either. He still remembered the racist French plantation owner who beat him and taunted him all the days of his life until he ran away. He remembered the slave catchers and their dogs pursuing him and the other runaway slaves into the dark forest. Everything a human being was or has ever been affects the vampire they become. Being a vampire changed Marcus, but in many ways it didn't change him at all.

Marcus the vampire needed blood to survive. Animal blood could sustain him but to him it was like bread and water to a human. Human blood on the other hand strengthened a vampire and fuels them like nothing else can. The superhuman strength and speed that Marcus gained when he became a vampire could only be sustained through drinking human blood. His hunger drove him to do unspeakable things throughout the ages. After the Haitian War of Independence, he lived on the island of Haiti until 1969, then he left for the United States. Filled with wanderlust, he traveled all over the world. That's how he ended up in Saudi Arabia, where he was captured by a radical Islamist sect that experimented on him.

The Islamist terrorist cell did unspeakable things to Marcus, and by exploring the intricacies of his vampire blood, they discovered something. The virus which reanimated him three days after he was bitten by the vampire master Amonhana could be altered. They used Marcus blood to create a weapon. The viral weapon they created would reanimate the dead, but instead of awakening as intelligent and blood-addicted super predators, they would arise as walking diseases, forever decaying, and craving the flesh of humans. The radicals used Marcus to bring about the end of the world.

Too late he escaped from their clutches, and returned to North America. As far as he knew, he was the only vampire left alive. The radicals had dutifully exterminated all the vampires they could find to ensure that none of them threatened their plans for world domination. They saw the vampires as a threat since they were intelligent super predators who would never allow mankind to be exterminated since they would lack their favorite food source if that were to happen. The terrorists had everything all planned out. They intended to use the virus to destroy countries they considered Godless. They never imagined that the virus would destroy the world, for zombies cannot be harnessed or controlled. They feel no fear, no hatred, only hunger.

We must preserve humanity from the zombies, Marcus told Maggie, shaking his head as he pulled back against centuries-old memories. Without its food source even the strongest and most adaptable predator dies, he explained to Maggie, who nodded dutifully. Together, master and fledgling got on the road. What an odd pair these two made, that's what most people would have thought when seeing them coming, if Toronto was still populated by people instead of zombies. A six-foot-six, massively muscular, dark-skinned Haitian male and a short, plump mixed-race businesswoman. Both of them vampires, prowling the urban landscape by night and hiding from the sun's lethal rays during the day.

Elsewhere...Ceylin Uygur biked down the normally busy but strangely deserted Ontario highway, ducking zombies as she rode between abandoned cars. Once she got out of Mississauga, things had been pretty good. The further she got away from the populated areas, the fewer zombies she saw. So far she hadn't seen any survivors, until about eight o'clock that evening. She went into a seemingly abandoned Loblaw's to get some food, carefully walking through the aisles with a baseball bat in hand and a shopping basket in the other. She went by the canned good section, figuring that the less perishables she picked, the better. All the meat and fruits were starting to stink anyways.

In minutes Ceylin gathered about everything she could carry and still be able to move freely, and resolutely walked toward the entrance. That's when she ran into a trio of zombies still wearing the green Loblaw's T-shirts they died in. Grumbling, she cursed herself for being so careless. She should have been more careful. Hefting her bat, she put down the grocery bag and got ready to defend her life. Moaning softly, the zombie trio advanced on her. Through the undead were slow and stupid, she knew they were exceptionally resilient. And their moans would attract more of their kind, they always did. She had to get past these three one way or another before their moans attracted every zombie in the vicinity to the store...

Marcus and Maggie pulled the bright red minivan to a stop by the Loblaw's, attracted to the faint human scent. Both of them could smell it a mile away. Man's flesh had the most delicious flagrance in the universe. Marcus sniffed the air and his lip curled with distaste as he sensed the telltale stench of rotting corpses. There were zombies nearby, and they were converging near the human. The vampire master and his pupil went into the store, hastily searching from aisle to aisle. They hurried, drawn by the sounds of battle. At the center of the store, they found their quarry. A tall, blonde-haired, fair-skinned and green-eyed human female swung a bat at a large zombie, striking its skull. The zombie went down and lay still. Two other zombies surged forward, cornering the young woman.

Marcus rushed forward, grabbing a vampire and slamming the short, plump Asian chick it had once been against the wall. The creature moaned, and reached for him. Stupid zombies, Marcus growled, they never know when to quit. The average vampire has the strength of ten men, and can outrun a cheetah. A single vampire could slaughter a hundred zombies all by himself provided he had room to room. Only through sheer numbers and in a confined space could zombies ever overwhelm a vampire. Zombies were slow and stupid, with numbers their only advantage. Vampires were supreme predators with spectacular battle skills. Marcus easily dispatched the zombie. Maggie made short work of the other one, decapitating it with the meat cleaver she'd been carrying since before she ever met Marcus. The two vampires looked at the human female, pausing to evaluate her.

Ceylin Uygur blinked, and exhaled the breath she hadn't even realized she'd been holding. The two people standing before her seemed human enough. The tall young Black guy waved at her and introduced himself as Marcus. The plump woman who was with him did the same. Hesitantly she shook hands with Marcus and Maggie. Thank God you showed up when you did, she said. Marcus smiled and nodded, then asked her if she was alone. Ceylin nodded, though something about him seemed a bit off to her. She'd have to be careful with him, a little voice at the back of her head warned. The woman, Maggie, seemed friendlier. You must have been so scared out there all alone, she said in a soft, motherly tone. Gently she touched Ceylin's shoulder. Though the woman's hand felt strangely cold in the hot Ontario summer night, Ceylin didn't mind. When Maggie invited her to come along with them, Ceylin hesitated, but only briefly.

The three of them left the store, after stocking up on supplies. Ceylin found it puzzling that Maggie and Marcus seemed more focused on finding blankets and tools than food but whatever. They were peculiar, for sure, but it was good to have some human company. For the first time in ages, she was in the company of her fellow human beings. Incredibly, and perhaps it was understandable after all the things that she'd been through, Ceylin Uygur fell asleep in the back of Marcus and Maggie's minivan. The vampires sensitive hearing let them know that she was truly asleep and not faking. Finally, they could speak freely. Since they met Ceylin, the question on Maggie's mind was whether she would be food, or a convert. Looking Marcus in the eye, she awaited his answer. Conversion to perversion, Marcus said with a wry grin.

Ceylin Uygur slept peacefully, for the first time in ages. In her sleep she wasn't visited by her abusive stepfather, but rather, a beautiful female angel came to her, promising to make her stronger than ever before, and to end her suffering. Smiling, Ceylin held out her arms and embraced the angel. Safe at last, she had the best sleep of her young years. When she woke up, she was...changed. She looked at Marcus and Maggie, who stood over her. Smiling, Maggie told her that she'd been out of it for three days. Welcome to a whole new world, Marcus said, offering her a hand. The three of them stood atop a building they secured on the outskirts of Toronto, and Ceylin looked at the night sky with her new vampiric eyes for the first time. She could see things she never could before. To her eyes, darkness was as clear as daylight. Even total darkness. The ancestors of vampires dwelled in near-total darkness deep below the earth at a time when giant reptiles still roamed the world...long before humans.

Marcus looked at Ceylin, and knew at once what Maggie first saw in her. This young Turkish-Canadian woman would make a magnificent vampire. He winked at Maggie, who nodded. Gazing at the darkened landscape of Toronto, the three super predators scanned the vast metropolis. Everywhere they looked they could sense the rotting ones, the slow-moving, mindless dead. Here and there, they could sense something promising. Living humans. Leaping off the building, they gracefully landed on the ground, four hundred feet below. After making sure all entries and exits to their new dwelling was secure, they began hunting. Moving faster than cheetahs, they made short work of the hundreds of zombies in the vicinity, slaughtering them within moments. Their true prey was out there, well-armed, well-hidden and paranoid. Only human beings with such attributes and traits could survive the zombie-infested world. Some they would convert to the glorious state of vampirism, the others were food, simple as that. When the world ended, two new predators became the bane of human existence. The zombie dullards, and mankind's hidden, ancient enemy...the vampires. Tonight, they're coming out to play.