Two teams had luckily used pairs of fiberglass ladders, and they scampered up on top of their containers athletically. Our soap-misters had been running for an hour, but now the fog machines kicked in too. The goal of the mist was to obscure the metal plates functioning as blinds protecting our vampires. Most of the assault teams went down from the electric wires on the roof of the containers. A few cow bells in a row showed they weren’t initially convinced to vacate, but ultimately only three team members made it to the inner edge, the steel blind, and the vampire… who then turned into a bat… no… who then simply leapt up and tackled the assaulter onto their backs. The wires did the rest. One of the vampires was stunned as well, but the breach was over. We pulled down the bodies from the roof, checked their pulses, and then laid them out front of the camp, to wake up (or be fetched) sometime after our doors shuffled close. Overwatch kindly didn’t fire a shot in the dark.
SAFEHOUSES 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. - 99 -
