Hello, intrepid reader of my loathsome short fiction. This is an old story of mine. It isn't complete. Think of it as a teaser for my next project which will be heavily based on this universe. Many thanks to paolojcruz and linahanson for their feedback on this story in it's previous form. 

It was like one of those moments, you know? Those moments where you know exactly where you were when you heard the news. Like when Zayn left 1D. You know what I mean right.

I was at school, which was in Besel. That was around fifteen kilometres away from my house in Arkhanpyst. I used to go back home every weekend.

We were eating breakfast in the main hall and me and Fatima and Maria were passing the newspaper around, all of us straining to look at the huge photo on the front page.

It was the parliament building (we'd gone there on a class trip the year before). A lot of MPs were clapping and thumping their hands on the table.

And in the middle of the photo, our president Hans Augustus Vordok, was shaking hands with a vampire.

Vordok was a bit of a massive prick. He looked like he was sixty, though he was actually twenty three. He was short and thin and had a pencil moustache lining his upper lip. Everybody knew he totally gamed the last election to get re-elected. They were saying then that he was trying to pass a bill to make it possible for him to get re-elected a third time.

And he was shaking hands with a vampire. I'm sorry, that's not the politically correct term anymore, I'm afraid. He was shaking hands with a haemophage.

This was 2015. I was around twelve at the time, I think.

It was maybe ten years after the first purge. The vamps were burgeoning. Little kids were getting nicked from villages. The US Army was getting testy again. We didn't want any more bombs dropped on us.

The Kazakhstan border patrol on the east was threatening to open fire if any of them tried crossing. Turkey wasn't happy. They had a refugee crisis, the US was using it like a sort of base of operations. Erdogan had enough and more things to worry about.

Russia wasn't all too pleased either. Putin was trying to start measuring dicks with the US again (which was stupid as shit if you ask me).

Basically, what I'm trying to get at is that vampirism wasn't a global concern.

Of course, when they started popping up in the seventies, a shitload of scientists and anthropologists and military officials and an even bigger shitload of tourists started showing up to study them. Some of them turned. We have a whole clan of red-head vampires, and the queen mother was an army general's secretary from the UK.

Then after a while, everybody stopped giving a shit. The world moved on. There weren't any vampires popping up anywhere else. When they grew too numerous, we shot them down. They died when we shot them with silver bullets. So all of us carried revolvers. Boys and girls. We learned to shoot from grade one.

There were two revolts, one in '85 and one in'96.

The US intervened, of course. Not too many people died. Three of our cities got bombed.

Shit like that.

And now, our president was shaking hands with a vampire. Sorry, haemophage. I meant haemophage.

Miss Liesel and Miss Kadija called a special assembly together so that we could watch the newscast.

I wonder why I wasn't scared.

The first was copied BBC footage with the logo blurred out. But we knew it was BBC. We lived our lives here with international newscasts as background music.

A secretary working in some high security unit of the British government was found dead in front of the Palace of Westminster. The autopsy confirmed it. She was drained of blood. The residue of the usual toxins were all there.

Death by vampire.

Then CNN. A U.S State Legislator. Dead as a doornail.

I remember being in that stuffy assembly room, pressed tight to Fatima and Maria, rubbing my glasses on the sleeve of my pinafore. The air was stale with sweat and apprehension.

Most of us in Year Six didn't actually know why we were expected to be afraid. Vampire killings were a regular feature in all the local newscasts. It happened every day. Some young, pretty girl would be found naked, her blood drained, her eyes glazed with pleasure.

Even the sexual aspect of it wasn't downplayed anymore. We knew the girls got all excited when the vamps bit in. We didn't understand the specifics of the biology of course, but we knew. We understood.

The video cut to a very familiar feed from our local parliament building.

The MPS were milling about in their suits and caftans, leaning across the seats, whispering to each-other.

Vordok was sitting right in front of the hall, face to face with the speaker. Vamp King Alsyf was nest to him. His dreadlocks were dangling in the breeze from the fan. His fangs were glinting in the lamplight. His eyes were red with lust.

The voice over was in Russian and Russian wasn't my strongest subject. I asked Maria what the newsreader was saying.

"Hush. Let me watch." She brushed me aside.

Confused, and a little hurt, I waited and watched.

The Parliament footage cut to the press room. Vordok stood tall and proud next to Vamp Alsyf.

"Today, Chyornyj has become the new super power."

Our Vordok. Never one to mince words.

"An overwhelming majority of Members of Parliament have signed a new amendment. An amendment that destroys old enmities and solders the bond of communal friendship and trust. Human and vampire can now live together. Our brothers in blood can now be welcomed into our society. We shall not slaughter them. We shall not butcher them like animals. The American pigs shall quench their natural thirsts. Our borders shall be secure. And we will live the lives we deserve. All hail the V-Amendment."

When I rewatch that clip nowadays I can't understand how that ridiculous, bombastic man managed to frighten us.

Then I remember the smell of fear from that crowded auditorium. I remember the look in Vordok's eyes as it was projected on to the stained wall.

He really did mean it.

Although we didn't understand it then, we would soon. The V-Amendment meant only one thing.

War.

For the first couple of months, it felt really weird.

(This is a bit hard for me because I was twelve at the time and I wasn't very interested in politics so most of what I know I learned much later. The whole V-Amendment thing became a topic in Social Studies by the time I was in the eleventh grade.)

The International community flipped out. The UN went apeshit almost immediately. Vordok didn't care very much, but that wasn't very unusual for him. We were one of the limited recognition member countries anyway so it didn't really matter.

Locally, the whole scene was a bit different. Chyornyj is basically nothing more than a bunch of little shires cobbled together. We elect one MP from each constituency and they run parliament together. The MPs elected the president.

Vordok was from a constituency called Quma which was in the outskirts of Chyornyj city. He wormed his way up the ladder. It was the year of dynamic youth, none of the old buggers really knew how to handle the vampire crisis and the whole host of crises we already had. Our economic policy was a massive failure. We had a nominal military force but really, we were relying on the US to bail us out whenever the vamp clans joined forces.

What was in it for them? We didn't have a lot of oil, but our position was of strategic importance to the States. So Obama had a couple of operating bases here and there. They shot down the vamps when they got too excited, they cleared away the bodies and studied them or something and in return, they got access to Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Of course, we weren't too popular with the neighbours, but we generally accepted that you couldn't have it all and we tried to live our lives as safely as we could.

Of course, the flipside to this was that we were practically at the beck and call of the United States. If they wanted us to cease imports from Ukraine, they coughed a bit. If we ignored them, they ignored us and one of our little shires would get turned into a ghost town.

But I was twelve. I had no idea all this crap was going on. We knew about the bases. We visited one of them for a school trip. Most of us failed to catch the blatant pro-American propaganda.

"So you see, kids." a ridiculously blonde, petite woman told us in heavily accented Arabic as we walked around the outpost, the size of one of our towns, all filled with American soldiers smoking, drinking and cussing like sailors. "It's these hard-working men that keep you safe at night so that you can sleep, play and learn in peace."

We had a lot of western media in the market. They were our heroes. We knew all of them by name. Taylor Swift. Miley Cyrus. One Direction. Justin Bieber. Imagine Dragons. Everybody.

We watched The Avengers the same day it came out in the US.

Some girls' dads worked in the refineries or for the government and they'd come back every weekend with Pop-Tarts or Kool Aid or something exotic like that.

Then Vordok and Vamp Alsyf signed a piece of paper and everything changed.

There was complete lockdown at both US bases. Zero contact. They were waiting for orders.

The amendment did get a clear majority, but that didn't mean it wasn't controversial.

Vordok's campaigning idea was 'Emancipation from the US'. Nobody thought his methods would be so extreme.

But for the first few months, we accepted it. We rolled with it. The vamps, now haemophages stopped randomly killing people.

Vampire chic overrode US junk from the market (which was surreptitiously embargoed by Vordok).

We wore our hair long now, a lot of us tying it in dreadlocks. Leather became the in thing again. Some of the more extreme among us got ceremonial tattoos and got faux-fangs fixed on to their teeth.

The vamps, particularly the Reds and Alsyf's on clan, the Violet Eyes became celebrities.

The news reports revelled in the murders happening overseas.

There was a false justice to the whole set-up. Corrupt Cops from Mumbai. Bribe-taking judges and lawyers from the UK. Lesser members of the middle-east royal families found dead in their sports cars, the illicit booze still cold in their hands. As cold as their flesh. Drained of blood.

We took 'desensitized to violence' to a whole new level. Our parents who used to weep every time they showed a newscast of a little Chyornijian girl dead in the woods, or even worse missing, now laughed when they were shown the same thing in the urban jungles of New York or London.

Now, when we study it, they tell us it was a psychological thing. Years of being controlled by the Western world and all of a sudden we're a super-power.

It didn't feel like a psychological thing then. It felt real. And vivid. It felt like getting our own back. It felt like what mattered.

We studied Nazism when we reached Grade 9. We had no trouble understanding just how those people could do what they did.

The vampires were angels and that ugly prick Vordok, he was a god.

Vampires did not suffer from anymore bloodlust. People escaping Ukraine, migrants crossing to Russia, sailors, low level delegates, soldiers, all of them were fair prey.

A few of them would go Kamikaze and kill a girl again, but nothing like the rate at which things were going before.

We were living decent lives again.

Several things were going on in the international scene, of course. The US didn't want to take action yet. Obama's term was coming to a close and he was pretty tense about the whole thing, I think. He came on BBC's Hard Talk and said that he didn't want to be the president who started the next World War.

Vordok taunted him every day in some form or the other. In press conferences and interviews and things like that.

Vamp Alsyf became a sort of interim-leader for the haemophages. The amendment granted them reserved seats in parliament and most of them were gobbled up by the Tribe-mothers and fathers who wanted to hold on to whatever vestige of power they could get before things became completely democratic.

They stayed in their ghettos for the most part. they did Vordok's dirty work when he needed it.

Things stayed relatively safe and sane.

But not for long.

Then, they took Arkhanpyst.

I can talk about this now, I suppose. It's been ten years. I'm twenty two now. My parents were away visiting relatives, apparently. Most of my friends were in school. My friends' parents though. And all the people who ran little businesses there. Mr. Jamal, the barber. Uncle Abdul from the grocery store.

Some people escaped, of course. My Aunt Fazilah managed to hitch a ride with a pig-farmer from out of town. Probably because she looked so pretty.

Then, when he tried to act funny half way to the capital, she elbowed him in the stomach, leaped out of the moving car into a wheat field and managed to crawl her way to a nearby farmhouse.

She had the biggest success story to tell.

My cousin Emilia was married to an Oshnim. They turned her. They killed her husband. He was a nice man. We used to play Frisbee together whenever he visited. They genuinely loved each other. She was pregnant.

My friend Nafisa was at home on sick-leave. They turned her. She was the first Oshnim vampire.

This was two months after the Amendment.

The whole bias against Oshnims was always there in some form or the other. It was possibly a race thing. If you traced them back, the Oshnims came from either Iraq or Kazakhastan. The Christians could be traced back to East Europe or Russia.

Things were changing though. Inter-religious marriages were happening all the time now.

The two communities could see eye to eye in parliament.

I told my sister I was sweet on Viktor Poldek from class seven. She ratted to my mother. My mother only tousled my hair and told me not to waste my time.

Things were changing.

For the better.

Vordok's party was never into Oshnims though. The COS was almost exclusively white (three Oshnims. The minimum legal requirement). The Oshnims were a minority, though.

Arkhanpyst and Stanik and places like that were our areas. We had our MPs representing our areas. Most of the Oshnim dominated shires were reserved constituencies for Oshnim candidates so that never was a problem.

We never wanted power. We just wanted a place to eke out our existence. To live and let live.

But Vordok's haemophages were hungry.

Our international contact had almost ceased by then. We still got what we needed, of course. Vordok was a stupid prick but he wasn't idiotic. Saudi still gave us oil. we grew our wheat. We raised our own cows. We managed to import sugar and tea and other essential things like that from here and there.

Mostly by doing favours for them. We were like international mega-hitmen.

We had a vampire army.

We were unstoppable and invincible.

But then, the refugees stopped crossing. The ships did not stay long enough and we couldn't safely leech the sailors anymore. International relations and things.

The Kazakhastan border was quiet. We heard they reinforced their silver-artillery.

Our vamps were starving.

Haemophages can cross entire oceans in a matter of days. They can pass undetected through the most advanced scanning systems.

They can conceal themselves whenever they want to. They can hypnotize.

They have two weaknesses. You know, right? The usual. Silver and the sun.

Oh, and blood. They need blood to survive.

And they weren't getting any anymore.

"The incident was most regrettable." Vordok said later on TV. "But remember, sacrifices have to be made for the good of the nation. We must be emancipated from the shackles of bondage to the west. We must be made free. Those citizens were not productive and they have met their justice."

Yes.

This was 2015.

The whites ate it up and asked for more.

Vordok was not working on party orders anymore. They were too powerless to stop the juggernaut.

We tried to stir up the Oshnim MPs but it was useless. The vampires answered exclusively to him.

There was international outrage, of course.

The US bases were quiet. The UN issued warnings but they couldn't prevent anything. It was a local conflict. Nobody invited them.

Social Welfare groups shouted for a bit.

Social Media exploded for a couple of weeks.

Then the Kardashians purchased a new bunny rabbit and everybody forgot.

Things were happening in school as well.

Maria stopped playing with Fatima and me. When we asked her why she told us that she had new friends now. Friends who were like her.

We were by ourselves after that.

The Oshnim kids stuck to ourselves.

Some of the teachers began to act strangely with us. They'd make correction mistakes on our tests and then they wouldn't give us a reason when we asked them why.

We never spoke about the Arkhanpyst incident.

Me and my parents stayed in Besel during the weekends, in my grandmum's house. We couldn't go back.

My dad still had his work permits. We could still pay for my school fees.

There was still food on the table.

We prayed. We did not forgive. We waited.

Then, the US bases opened their gates.