Shiloh shuffled down the filthy alley muttering to himself. Behind him, air cars whisked back and forth along the boulevard, kicking up spray from the rain that had been falling all evening. To his left he could hear a tri-d playing porno through a window in someone's apartment. He didn't pay any attention to it. He'd gotten a beer and two whacks of gold hammer in him and was trying to make it back to his shanty before he fell into the sun, so to speak.

Ahead of him, behind a little Italian restaurant, the flag stones were heaving themselves up and down. He could see a hand scrabbling out from under one of them. He stopped and watched in amazement as the hand gripped the three by three slab of stone and tipped it over. A tall, wraith thin figure with rotting clothes and long, dark hair rose out of the hole and stepped toward Shiloh.

"My name is Ash Lithalind." The man hissed. "I'm....new in town. Tell me please, what year is it?" He smelled of death.

Shiloh thought that he should run, but with two whacks of gold hammer in him he was lucky to still be on his feet. "It's May." He stammered. "May, 2631."

The strange man looked at the cloudy sky moving his lips silently. "Five-hundred years." He muttered then stretched. If the appearance of the man from under the flagstones was creepy, the stretch was horrifying. The man had lanky arms with unnaturally long fingers. He reached from one side of the alley to the other. He also stood head and shoulders above Shiloh. Shiloh could see long, yellow fangs behind his withered, black lips. Rain ran down the haunted face.

"Shit." Shiloh managed to say.

Quickly but gently the creature grabbed Shiloh by the neck. "Forgive me." It said. "I'm very hungry."

"Last mistake you'll ever make." Shiloh said as the thing's head bent toward him.

*

"Hey, Sarg." Corporal Bicks said, sitting up in the passenger seat of the squad car. "I just got a weird signal. A V-19."

Sergeant Henson looked up from his nav console. "A V-19?"

"Right. V-19, Homicide committed by vampire?'" The question was clear in the young Corporal's voice.

Sergeant Henson touched his screen. "It's just down the street from here. Let's roll." The air car whizzed forward, down the eight lane boulevard its red and blue lights flashing.

"A vampire." Bicks mused. "Who'd have thought?"

"We get one every once in a while. A left over from the plague. They say they're sleeping all over,

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