In the year 2020, Vampires took control of society and ordered all humans placed in vampire custody. The people who were not captured formed a Resistance movement, headed by the Human Council, who began to plan the Insurgence.
I am, of course, indebted to Stephenie Meyer for this world we all play in, and these characters we all adore. Additionally, I am indebted to hitntr01, who has graciously allowed me to use certain concepts from her wonderful story "In Need of Rescue", which constitute much of the background of my own story. These include: the language Vampiri, the Rules, the machines used to draw blood from humans, Manners Training, and the plot theme of Edward working as a guard at a facility holding humans. Thank you, hitntr01
Chapter 35 – The Ardella Problem, part 1
Author's note – I have posted an outtake of the incidents that will be contained in the next chapter (Chapter 36) as a separate story, called "The Insurgency Outtake, Alice and Her Blood Slaves". If you are an Alice fan, this is not the story for you. It shows some of the events from the next few chapters from Alice's POV. If there is any interest in this separate posting (as in reviews), I will update it to include the actions covered in the future chapters. I may not leave it up for long, since, as a long time Alice fan, it makes me a little nervous. It shows a shallow, very self-absorbed Alice, but I believe the characterization is consistent and complete. I wrote it in response to a comment left by one of the reviewers. I originally wrote the chapter as an experiment, creating a monologue for an Alice that is quite different than the character I usually imagine.
(Jasper's POV)
These past few months had been unreal. It had really started February, almost three years ago. Carlisle had told me he was going on a trip to some town in the Midwest and asked me to accompany him.
That request was odd, as he and I had never been close. In his coven, I had always been the one they watched, the one too close to giving in to his bloodlust in any given moment. I was always so tempted by those children I was surrounded with on a daily basis while attending high school decade after decade.
So for me, the Event of July 2020 had been a kind of a release. Caius himself had called me in late March 2020, and summoned me to Volterra. I had actually missed a high school graduation with the Cullens.
Once I was in Volterra, Caius had taken me into his confidence and shown me the central planning room of Volterra. The room was like a war room, with walls covered with maps and grids. He had laid out the plan for the takeover planned for July 2020 and said he wanted me to organize teams to round up the humans. Initially I felt some hesitation and sympathy for the humans, but I steeled myself for the task. If the Volturi really turned the vampires loose on the humans, there would be a bloodbath that could lead to near extermination of the human race. I would use my skills to train groups to round up the humans and put them in confinement facilities.
Humans, after all, had been placing various populations in detention facilities throughout their history. Whether it was for petty crime, debt, major crimes, or war crimes, society never seemed to run out of excuses to keep some portion of their population imprisoned. In the long run, Cauis' plan would keep more of the humans alive and safe. Safe enough that their blood could be drawn on a regular basis in order to feed a vampire master race.
The Volturi had decided to divide up the world by continents in their new empire and wanted to send out Gathering teams by continent. I was given North America as my primary assignment, but I had oversight of all the Gathering groups. So I trained all of the group leaders, then hand-picked my own captains from among those I had trained. I built and trained my personal teams and dispatched them to cities to wait for my orders. On July 1, 2020, we had quickly moved to round up the human populations in all the major cities, before we worked our way through the smaller cities within the following weeks.
Once the humans were gathered, they were to be moved to the facilities that would house most of them for the rest of their lives. The human containment facilities had been worked on for over a year. They were generally on the edge of the towns they were to serve and were being built in the guise of warehouses. I toured a few out of curiosity. I noticed there was no access to sunlight in any of the buildings, and no exercise areas, but planning these buildings wasn't my responsibility.
One feature of these facilities fascinated me, though. I was very interested in the exsanguination equipment which was the centerpieces of the human containment facilities. These were marvels of engineering. They had been modeled on the milking machines humans had created for cows. When a human sat on the seat, a strap would be placed on the limb that was to be used. A human's arms, legs, and neck were all options for blood drawing sites. The machines would then calculate how much blood could be drawn by the weight of the human in the chair. The entire process was automated, so that the vampire only had to strap in the human and then could walk away during the extraction process. The extracted blood was placed in a disposable bag for removal after completion. These machines had gone into wide scale production, as they would eventually be placed in all vampire homes, as well as the facilities.
The exsanguination machines had been developed by humans, based on medical equipment designed for handling highly contagious blood-borne diseases. The Volturi had put out a request for bids for the machines in 2017, three years prior to the planned Event. The request for bids had cleverly disguised the true reason for the reason for the machines. The bid request had been couched in terms of medical necessity in the war on terrorism, for use in case of blood borne illnesses transmitted during a bioterrorist attack. The machines were to be developed, the bid request explained, so that patients in isolation units could safely be tested without exposing the medical technicians to possible airborne contagions. Humans were so obsessed with the various forms of their own brand of terrorism. Their public and scientific imaginations had been captured by various medical doomsday scenarios, which included the weaponization of any of the viral hemorrhagic diseases, such as Ebola or Marburg. They worried that either of these diseases could be developed into a biological weapon that could be dispersed via aerosol dissemination. In the end, there were multiple contest submissions, and Caius chose the one that appeared the sturdiest. After all, there weren't going to be human technicians around to service these things. The equipment had to be able to stand up for years for use on a daily basis.
The stupid humans bought into it, and any lingering doubts that they might have had about the true reason for such equipment were conveniently dismissed when Caius put a large cash prize as an incentive. Many teams went to work developing design specs, competing for the prize. In the end, four companies produced completed machines, and Caius finally selected one and had it put in large scale production. He wanted the production process completed automated, because when the Volturi took over, he wasn't going to leave a lot of educated humans around to continue manufacturing and servicing them.
Vampires had come out into the open ten years earlier, and Caius had also been funding the development of a tranquilizer at one of the pharmaceutical facilities. The Volturi wanted a tranquilizer to be placed in human blood to stop the blood lust that occurs once a vampire tastes human blood. The development of this tranquilizer had been kept top secret. This had been simple enough, due to the highly secretive nature of pharmaceutical research in general, and by promising the humans doing the research cash bonuses for their silence. The Volturi also assigned mind-readers to the key personnel doing the work, and any human who was thought to be on the verge of talking about their work was simply killed.
The Event went forward as planned, and I oversaw the gathering of the humans. Within weeks, the worldwide human population had been placed into some form of vampire custody. In addition to the facilities, humans were taken to auction houses or in some cases directly to vampire homes. There had been some small, futile attempts at resistance initially, and various populations outside of the main cities had attempted to go into hiding. Trackers loved the opportunity to look for those who had escaped, and not many of those human who managed to escape the cities and were located by trackers actually survived. But my gathering groups had placed enough humans into the containment facilities that the vampire race could be reliably supplied with bottled human blood for decades to come.
I had gone back to Forks in mid-August 2020. Carlisle had not been particularly happy with my role in the Event, but I told him it meant more humans would live. A few years later, when Alice and Rosalie both decided they wanted to buy their own human pets, a rift had come in the family. Obviously in order to keep a human pet, we had to move out of the main house. So Rosalie and Emmett had picked a house in Forks for themselves, and I had moved into my own house with Alice. After all, Alice and I had traveled together for years prior to finding the Cullens, and I felt I should stick with her now. Female vampires weren't really safe on their own. Male vampires could be vicious, and bottom line, we were territorial. Alice had become part of my turf; I would defend her from the others. Though she wasn't my mate, she was my responsibility.
Carlisle and Esme said they wouldn't visit our houses as long as we kept humans enslaved in them. For me, their decision to stay away from us had come as something of a relief. This way I didn't have to put up with Carlisle's disapproval anymore. I just went to work and came home. Sometimes I went out with Edward and Emmett to Seattle; sometimes I went to visit Peter and Charlotte in Texas. We had stayed in Forks, though. One key component of the laws laid out by Aro was that you had to register in a city and live there for five years before you could move. The girls had wanted to stay close to Esme. So we had stayed in the rainy hick town of Forks for almost 17 years when I started to get restless. I was close to leaving Alice behind and moving back to Texas.
One of the more bothersome components of Aro's new order had been the restrictions on travel. You had to register travel plans with the cops, as they were trying to pen in the nomads. I had saved my trip vouchers for my Texas trips. Alice liked to go to New York, Paris, and Milan for each new fashion season, and she started traveling separately to see the fashion shows. What they were showing, I don't know. It's not like there was new fashion. With the humans gone, gone too were the industries devoted to clothing production. Vampires didn't like performing the tedious jobs of manufacturing textiles or producing clothes on a mass scale. But the fashion houses had not only survived the Event, they thrived on the vampire appetite for novelty.
The fashion "designers" would go into the warehouses of existing clothing the humans had produced prior to the Event, and assemble outfits and accessorize them in very odd ways, as far as I was concerned. They claimed that human fashion had always recycled the looks from previous eras. How many ways were there to make a skirt, after all? They took a lot of their inspiration from Hollywood movies. There had been a resurgence in the Annie Hall look one season, and the geisha look was all the rage now. Heavy white paint on the girls' faces, with eyebrows and lips put on with pencil. Me, I was waiting for the western look to come into vogue. Put some of these girls into jeans and boots. Now that would look hot.
So when Carlisle asked me to go on this trip with him in late January 2037, I was surprised, but I agreed to accompany him. I immediately picked up that he was restless too. When we got to Columbia, MO our restlessness increased. I sensed that we were both looking for something, and we were both willing to revert to our more primitive vampire selves seeking it. It was strange to see Carlisle give in to his primitive side and move into hunter mode as we searched the town. Carlisle dutifully went to his seminar, something about the falling reproduction rate among the women living in the containment facilities, during the days while he attended his seminar sessions, while I was left on my own. I scouted every inch of that town, not sure what I was looking for.
When Carlisle was done with his seminar, he joined me. We spoke little, but together we re-covered every inch of the town again. Since our visit occurred during late January and early February, the trees were bare and the grass was dead. The town looked bleak, hardly any natural color anywhere. The snow had mostly melted, leaving slush and mud on the roads, and there were abandoned houses everywhere. Some houses that had probably run down at the time of the Event seventeen years earlier were close to collapse. Fast food restaurants, empty for seventeen years, still looked garish. There was the usual human containment facility on the edge of town. There were even some human bones in the woods by the facility, obviously only a few weeks old. But whatever it was we were looking for in that town, we never found it.
But a bond began to form between Carlisle and I that week. We started spending more time together, traveling together in a comfortable silence. He started accepting every request to cover for a doctor at another human containment facility anywhere in the country, and he also accepted every invitation to a seminar. He could always argue that he needed a travel companion, so I never had to use my travel vouchers for our trips together. I knew that if I really needed to travel, Caius would just let me go wherever I wanted, but I didn't like calling in favors. I didn't want the Volturi in my business, asking questions. I took their monthly stipends for my work on the Gathering, but I didn't want their involvement in my life.
Then, last July, Carlisle had gone alone to Chicago. There had been freak weather patterns over the past several years, and this one had caused an anomalous cold spell in what should have been the heat of summer. Carlisle called me from Chicago and said he had found her. He didn't need to say anything else.
He told me he had asked Esme to prepare a room for her in his house. He warned me that the girl was scarred and severely malnourished. It would take time for us to earn her trust. I wanted to catch the next plane to Chicago, but he said he needed me to help get the house ready for her, and to spend the next few days getting some of his other properties prepped in case we had to move her. He was going to drive back to Forks from Chicago, because he said her scent was intoxicating, and he wasn't going to risk taking her onto a plane.
Eleazar and his coven were at the house when Carlisle brought the girl in. He had wrapped her in a blanket, and she looked tiny in his arms. She had wide brown eyes and a heart-shaped face framed by short brown hair trimmed close to her head. She had looked dazed when he walked in with her, and she hid her face in Carlisle's coat when she saw all the vampires in the living room. I started to approach Carlisle to get a closer look at her when I was hit by her scent. It nearly knocked me over while at the same time drawing me in. She had the sweetest blood I had ever smelled. Every vampire in the room was having the same reaction, and the combined blood lust was hitting me hard. But this was my mate, and I needed to protect her. I started to go into a protective crouch in front of Carlisle, but he moved quickly and took her to the prepared room upstairs. He paused in front of the door to his study, and suggested I go to a window, get a breath of air, and then hold my breath before coming into her room.
I did so quickly and returned to watch as he gently set her down on her bed and let her out of the blanket. I stood back, watching while he acquainted her with the upstairs rooms, assessing her emotional state. She seemed oddly unafraid. Her emotions, which had initially been over shadowed by the bloodlust of the other vampires in the living room, finally came through. Her emotions startled me, as she seemed happy, almost carefree. I hadn't felt those emotions from a human in almost twenty years. Sensing these emotions from a human who had just been brought into a house with over ten vampires seemed very odd, but it was good that she was so trusting. In the short time Carlisle had spent with her, he seemed to have gained her trust.
Now, a few months later, her emotions have stayed on this even keel. She has gained weight, and her body is filling out. She has become a lovely young girl by anyone's standards. Her hair is growing out; it has reached her jaw line. Esme and Alice want to trim it, so it will look styled, but Carlisle and I don't want anything but shampoo near that hair. No scissors. We want it to grow out long, shiny, and beautiful. We want to see it halfway down her back. All that hair cutting will only make it shorter.
She's got secrets, that's for sure. Carlisle has said little about how he found her, except that she knew how to defend herself. She told us that she was in the Human Resistance movement, but she is only 13 or 14 years old. What could she have done in the resistance? She's told a few stories that didn't make a lot of sense, including how she had fought and killed vampires. She's never given details about how she did that fighting. I've asked around, but no one knows much about the human resistance. There are a few colonies, as there always have been, but all human colonies have to be registered with Caius. Each colony is overseen by a vampire tracker, and these colonies really only exist as sources of vampire entertainment. The humans didn't set them up this way and certainly never intended this when they formed the colonies hoping to escape enslavement, but this was the reality. All forms of human existence were to be overseen by vampires in our world. No independent human existence was permitted under our laws.
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