By Blood We Live

The richest men and women in the world had been my fellow passengers. Very few of them stuffed their jewels in their pockets before getting into the lifeboats. Of course the treasure-hunters would come, as soon as science made it possible for them to do so.

And even as I thought this, I sent up the feeblest of human prayers:

Please, God, no.…

As if He'd listen.

At 3:30, far off to the southeast, a flicker of white light pierced the blackness, followed by a cannon's distant boom.

A slight breeze had come up, making the ocean choppy and the air yet more bitterly cold. Tiny as a nail-clipping, a new moon hung over the eastern horizon. Men had begun to fall off the collapsible, which was now almost up to its gunwales in seawater that hovered right around the temperature of ice: fall silently, numb, dead within sight of salvation. I could see all around us the ocean filled with the pale-gleaming blobs of what the sailors called "trash" and "growlers," miniature icebergs the size of motorcars or single-story houses, ghostly in the starlight. Among them, or west and south in the clearer water, I could make out the dark shapes of the other lifeboats. Could hear the voices of the passengers in them, tiny occasional drops of sound, like single crickets in the night.

It wanted but an hour till first light. I think I would have wept, had it been possible for vampires to shed tears.

The sky was staining gray when one of the lifeboats was sighted, slowly inching toward us. How far we'd drifted I don't know; I'd sunk into a lethargy of horror, watching the slow growing of the light. It might have been the effect of the water in the boat, which was up to our knees by this time; there were only a dozen men left, and a woman from third class. I could barely move my head to follow the lifeboat's agonizingly lentitudinous approach.

Everything seemed to have slowed to the gluey pace of a helpless dream. It was as if time itself were slowly jelling to immobility with the cold. Far across the water-perhaps a mile or two, in the midst of the floating ice-loomed the dark bulk of a small freighter. All around it the lifeboats were creeping inward, some from miles away, like nearly frozen insects painfully dragging themselves toward the jam-pot that is the Heaven of their tiny lives.

And I could see that, even if the lifeboat reached us-and each second it seemed that we'd go down under their very noses-there was no way under God's pitiless sky that it would reach the freighter before full light.

Don't make me do this, God. Don't make me…

Like the laughter of God, light flushed up into the gray sky, turning all the icebergs to silver, the water to sapphire of incredible hardness and depth. At the same time my frozen flesh was suffused with unbearable heat, my skin itching, writhing… my flesh readying to burst into flame.

Hiding in a boiler on the wreck, curled in some corner of the grand staircase or the Palm Court Lounge, I would have only to wait for the treasure-hunters to come.

The cold and darkness would only

seem eternal.

Would hope in those circumstances be more cruel than the comfort of despair?

I closed my eyes, tipped myself backward over the side.

I was about to find out.

Hit by Bruce McAllister

Bruce McAllister is the author of the novels Dream Baby and Humanity Prime and more than fifty short stories. His short work has been collected in The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories, and has appeared in numerous anthologies, including the prestigious Best American Short Stories series. His stories have also been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. He's currently working on two "quiet fantasy" novels, both of which incorporate vampire elements.

McAllister says that he suspects vampire stories are Christianity flipped to its dark alter-self. "In communion we do drink blood, and we're promised immortality, so in one sense vampirism is communion and immortality but without God's grace," he said. "So that plays a role in the attraction, as does the neo-Romantic gothic feel of it."

This story, which first appeared in the online magazine Aeon, is inspired by classic and contemporary hard-boiled fiction. But while the characters of Dashiell Hammett and Robert Parker may have found themselves in similar situations, none of them ever had a client or a mark quite like this…