Disclaimer: I don't own Blade or any of its characters. I do Max, Xavier, Rev, and Cam, so no stealing!
Chapter 18: Digging Up the Past
That night, after Blade had conceded to an explanation as to why he had to stay with them, King and Max walked off to a set of computers. She sat down, straddling a chair, as he started tapping at a few keys on the keyboard. Blade, Abby, and Sommerfield soon followed as Hedges left to fix Abby's bow and Dex went to get some shuteye. The rest of the group gathered around King and Max, watching at images began to pop up on the computer screen.
"You know the kind of woman that just screams trouble? You see her and every warning bell in your brain starts going off but still, you manage ask for her number? Well, that's all I ever hook up with," he said to Blade, earning a smack in the gut from Max. "Except for the lovely Maxine here, who does scream quite loudly on some occasions," he corrected, earning a sick look from everyone. "But this Betty, whoa! She blew 'em all away in the shitstorm sweepstakes."
King reached out to the keyboard once again, and called up a piece of surveillance footage on a nearby monitor. The footage featured Danica, Asher, and Grimwood. It was slowed to a near standstill until it advanced frame by frame.
"Her name is Danica Talos. You met her earlier. And, unlike typical vampires, her fangs are located in her vagina," he joked grimly, but when all he received was silence and blank stares, King cleared his throat. "Moving on! The man on her left is her brother, Asher." King typed a command, and the image switched from Asher to zoom in on Grimwood. "And this walking diaper stain is Jarko Grimwood." King froze the footage on Danica's grainy, pixilated face, fangs bared at him.
"I picked Danica up in a bar, and spent the next five years playing hide-and-go-suck as her little vampire cabana boy," he explained. "Eventually, Abigail found me, Sommerfield managed to treat me with a cure, and now I kill them." Max looked up at Blade and saw him nodding ever so slightly. "And that's basically turning a frown upside down."
"We need to pool our resources, Blade," Abby told him before anyone could even groan at King's pun.
""We"?" he echoed incredulously.
"Yeah, we," she reiterated firmly, trying not to lose her temper. "He's come back." Blade just looked over at Max, waiting for an explanation to Abby's serious tone. In reply, Max nodded to King, who nodded right back.
"Take a look at this," King told him and tossed a Tomb of Dracula: Lord of Vampires! comic book over to Blade. He glanced at the cover, and then looked at their serious faces incredulously.
"You gotta be kidding me."
"He's real, Blade," Max told him seriously and walked over to a display case that held one of the most important historical artifacts to the know world. As she turned away from it, she saw that Blade had followed her. "This is a piece of his armor," she said, handing him a piece that was yet to be added to the growing display. "With it, the gang here was able to extrapolate a basic idea of what this fucker looked like. Dig beneath all the movies and myths, all the layers of bullshit that have cluttered our culture for the last five hundred years, and eventually you'll strike the truth."
"So the movies are true?" he questioned incredulously, putting the piece of armor back on the table and crossing his arms.
"The movies are just a comforting fairytale compared to the real deal. There's no happy ending with this guy. Peter Cushing isn't going to run in at the last second and save the day with a cross and some holy water," King replied, shaking his head and looking back at the comic book. "See, good old Bram Stoker, he wrote a nice yarn. But the events he described in 1897 were only a tiny piece of the mosaic. The rea1 Dracula's origin goes back much earlier than that."
"How early?"
"Try six or seven thousand years," Abby answered.
"Dracula's only one of the names he's gone by," King began, more pleased when he saw how astonished Blade was. "The Babylonians worshipped him as Dagon, and now they call him Drake. If you believe the legends, he was born in ancient Sumeria. Nobody really knows the specifics of his origin. But we do know this: he was the first of his kind. The patriarch of Hominus Nocturna. Every vampire – every single monster that's walked the earth since then – owes their existence to him. He was born perfect. He's like the Patient Zero of evil. The original Serpent in the Garden of Eden. And, just like the great white shark, this guy has never had to evolve.
"Scour the history books, read between the lines, and you'll find countless references to him. Always mentioned, never named. Forget the movies, forget the books. There is no happy ending with this guy! He's been there, moving behind the scenes, cutting a bloody fucking path through the Ages until suddenly," he cut off with a snap of his fingers, "just like that, he up and disappeared. About a century ago the trail went cold. Then we heard a rumor. The vampires were searching for him, trying to find the place where he'd retreated. And, according to our information, they found him in Iraq about six months ago. And he was pissed."
Sunlight was just starting to slice down through the skylights, bathing the hunters in warmth. Zoë has joined them, clutching to her mother's side. She was still cautious and shy, but she was also curious.
"Why wake up Drake now?" Blade asked.
"That's exactly what we've been trying to figure out," Abby told him.
"When I was under the fang," King began, "there used to be talk about some kind of vampire "final solution". But I could never figure out why they'd want to destroy their food source. I mean, it makes no sense, right?"
"They vampires have always had plans for the human race, B," Max told him. "You know that, and Whistler knew that. It seems likely that whatever they're cooking up, Drake's return is a part of it." Blade just nodded, pensive and tense at the mention of his mentor.
"Let's face it," King continued, "we are fighting a losing battle. So we kill a few hundred of them a year. Big deal! There are thousands of them out there – maybe tens of thousands! We need a new tactic."
"Like what?" he asked skeptically, but Max could tell he was getting curious. Not to mention interested.
"A biological weapon," Sommerfield announced, and moved to type at her Braille keyboard. On a nearby monitor, they saw a real-time magnified view of a virus replicating. "For you sighted people, here's a little show and tell. For the last year, I've been working with synthesized DNA in order to create an artificial virus targeted specifically at vampires. We're calling it Daystar."
"Think about it, Blade. We could wipe them all out in a single move," King baited.
"So what's been holding you back?" It was there that Sommerfield sighed solemnly.
"We've tried it on a number of captive subjects. We've got the disease vector worked out fine – it's easily transmittable. But the lethality in vampires is still spotty."
"Bottom line is, we need a better DNA sample to work with," Abby reiterated simply for the non-biochemical geniuses in the room. "We need Dracula's blood."
"Vampire DNA is a hodge-podge of different genes, mixed in with all sorts of useless junk DNA. Because Dracula's the progenitor of the vampire race, his DNA is still pure. It hasn't been diluted by a hundred generations of selective mutation. It still has all the necessary cellular compounds for the virus to code to. We get his blood, we can boost Daystar's viral efficacy to a hundred percent," Sommerfield explained confidently.
"All the vampires go bye-bye," King explained in his own special way. "So, can we just go ahead and sign you up for a Nightstalkers secret decoder ring?"
P.S.: Four pages total