Safe Houses » Mark

SAFE HOUSES » MARK

Dialysis for ten thousand vampires — or more than a hundred thousand patients requires about two thousand ‘caves’.

There is no way we could hide two thousand caves in California. So we didn’t. We hid about 80. The exact number, I don’t know. They were set up without me even knowing who created them, let alone where they were. Maybe 100 in Texas. 60 in Massachusetts. 40 in Pennsylvania. 80 in New York. In total we had something about two thousand caves throughout the contiguous 48 states. Alaska and Hawaii had caves also, but because they required air or international travel, we did not consider them. The primary goal of the two thousand caves was to support the exodus of ten thousand vampire slaves to a safe refuge. They also supported the local communities’ dialysis needs.

Detailed design plans and purchasing information was available on both our ‘dark’ and ‘plain sight’ web sites. Any vampire could easily acquire the equipment needed to support a multi-shift dialysis clinic. They just had to provide the safe and sterile facility. And figure out how to get a base-level of patients. Enough to support a few vampires visiting for a while.

With the safe-house caves in place, we simply had to communicate where they were. Simple, except the complication of preventing anyone else knowing the location. Turns out this was trivial as long as our resistance wasn’t significantly infiltrated.

Vampire powers varied per person — but one skill was available to all of us. We had heightened visual acuity towards blood. About 100-fold better than the average person. Blood diluted one part to a hundred parts of water looked the same to us as obsidianblack ink looked to humans. We could paint signs with this diluted solution in plain sight to us, but completely invisible to the living. A few of these signs in succession and we had a treasure map that only a vampire could follow. Or an exodus plan.

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An exodus plan is a balancing act — We need to get the vampires out of harms-way by moving them as quickly as possible, but at the same time we need to avoid visibility of the migration. The approach we picked was the simplest possible.

After each shift was complete, that vampire would simply leave the clinic and head for their safe house. The relationship of vampire to safe house was random: they simply knew where their first marker to the East was, and that marker could cause them to backtrack West or continue forward across the United States. The first marker varied by the time-of-day of their shift (earlier shifts had further markers) but were otherwise randomly assigned. Cohorts of vampires had an identifier and the marker would show which cohort should go where next. By the end, the vampire would be at their refuge.

At the end of each shift — a thousand vampires went into motion from a thousand different locations … heading for a hundred different markers … and would arrive at them sporadically throughout the day. Vampires would likely reach a particular marker at least 10 minutes apart from the previous and next vampire, but it they could possibly be spaced by hours.

There was no particular hurry for the vampires to progress along their trail: they could last a week without dialysis… as long as they allowed for how weak they would be near the end of that time period. Fortunately blood-sight improves with blood-loss, so the treasure map would always be visible.

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