Excerpt: One Hundred Ways to Die Slowly (C)

Jerome:
Vampires are, essentially, infertile. Males are because mitosis is needed to create our little swimmers, which vampires lack. Also, if a vampire were successful in impregnating a human, the effect would be similar as to a dog impregnating a cat. Female vampires are only infertile by extension, since males cannot cultivate the egg, and human males are technically a different species, having a vampire baby is impossible. If a woman is transformed during pregnancy, the fetus’s blood type is not a match for the new vampire blood and eventually it shuts down and has to be removed. Sometimes, I imagine, if a woman was not aware she was pregnant when she was transformed into a vampire, she could live an eternity without the awareness that a little embryo is frozen in her stomach.
Eternal infertility leaves vampires without the ability to reproduce their own children. This kind of barrenness, the inability to do God’s good work of continuing the world with a new soul that has her blue eyes and your crooked nose, can be insufferable. So, a good substitution of having a family of your own is to transform an already existing human into a vampire. As I said before, the transformation is extensive and complicated making it almost impossible without the consent from both parties (almost).
Though I never understood why anyone in his right mind would want to transform a human just so they could live an eternal semi-humanlike life together. For, we aren’t wolves: we don’t ban travel together in packs; people get hurt that way. Vampires are generally lonely creatures lacking the natural desire to have a family. Love, I see, is a possible reason of conversion, but there isn’t anything a restless, nagging coexistence for eternity has over a brief blood sucking rendezvous. I always promised myself that if I ever found the girl who I could stand to talk to for the rest of my forever life that I would suggest she be transformed instead of just killing her when I got bored. It has yet to happen.
However, I was close to this desire once, but I missed the chance to create her heathen existence by five years, making her rebirth year 1934. Her name is Vera and I imagine she is still out in the Middle East sucking the life out of pseudo terrorists in her attempt to revitalize any humanity she has left.
We met in the French countryside 1939, just a few months shy of the Nazi invasion in France. Neither of us was French, she was born of English aristocracy and I was—still am—American. She knew a bit of the language from school and I was fluent, an attribute I credit to 100 years of sleepless nights to perfect ambiguous proficiency.
She was the closest thing I had to a killing partner, and though our first meetings were anything but a friendly exchange, we became something like friends. And even though our intimate relationship was much more than what we ever knew about each other, I couldn’t help but wonder what it was in her recent past as a human that made her so rigid. Somehow, she preferred puffing her cigarette smoke in men’s faces when they made eyes on her rather than accepting their suggestion and having them for dessert. She would do this in my company during our days in Britain during the Blitz. It was a disaster for us to be there; things predictably went favorably when we were devouring Nazis in France and Germany.