When You Have Vampires, Part 1

Vampires: the princes of darkness, the scourge of innocence, and the sexiest goddamn dead people you’ll ever meet. Think you can survive? You’ve survived a zombie apocalypse, after all. You’ve avoided the pitfalls of being a superhero’s girlfriend. So you’re ready for vampires, right?

No, you’re not.

Unlike those shambling hordes of half-rotten zombies, and unlike those cretinous superheroes, vampires have a way of sneaking into your life before you even know they’re there. But there’s hope. If you follow these handy tips, you too can uncover, survive, and even slay the most seductive and cunning tribe of the undead.

Read on, mortal chattel.

Actually, I Look Damn Good in Black

 

Let’s kick this off by addressing the entrancing elephant in the room: do you secretly want to be a vampire?

Don’t be embarrassed to answer honestly, because you can save yourself a lot of trouble in the long run. While a career in the vampiric arts isn’t for everyone, it’s worth weighing the pros and cons before you go stake-crazy and burn all your bridges (or all your future family, for that matter.)

Ask yourself, what are my favorite things? If you answered nightlife, looking effortlessly fantastic, or hunting people for sport, then vampirism might be just perfect for you. Now, that doesn’t mean you should go running to the spooky castle, bang on the door, and shout, “Hey in there! Make me a vampire!” This is a major unlife decision, so you should sleep on it first. If you’re still happy with your choice when you wake up, invite your friends into your room and let them know your decision. Then lock them in and bolt the door. Go to the vampires and offer the blood of your friends as an unholy gift. Consider it a sort of dowry.

I mean, you weren’t going to keep those friends anyway, you know. You’re going to be a fucking vampire soon. And if you thought your circle of friends grew apart after college, you have no idea what distance will come between you when you die and are reborn as a demonic bloodsucker.

Trish Never Used to Be So Pale and Hitting on Me

"You look different. Did you cut your hair?"

But let's say you decide not to join the other team. How are you going to defend yourself? The first step is to stop the enemy from infiltrating your ranks.

Remember that your friends may become vampires without your knowledge. Unlike zombies, who have no impulse control and will immediately go after any living flesh like it’s a Black Friday deal at the Sarasota Wal-Mart, vampires play it cool. So if and when your friends turn into vampires, it's not going to be obvious.

Yet even vampires can only do so much to suppress their urges. You can tell when your friends have become vampires, if you only look for the following warning signs:

• Be on the lookout for what we in the vampire-hunting business call neosexual tendencies. If your exclusively heterosexual friends suddenly become aggressively bisexual? Then they’ve definitely been turned into vampires. A note of caution: while all modern vampires are bisexual, it hasn’t yet been confirmed that all modern bisexuals are vampires. They probably are, but we can’t be sure.
• Always remember that it is never normal or socially acceptable for a person to stare hypnotically at your neck. I hate to break it to you, but your neck is not that great. I mean, it’s a nice enough neck, but it’s not entrancing, dummy.
• Even night people come out during the day. Normal people do not sleep straight through 12 hours of daylight, or have to rush home at sunrise, no matter how weird their work schedule is.
• Porphyria, Anemia, Hemophilia. Sufferers of these diseases absolutely do not have an urge to drink human blood, and they sure as hell don't have centimeter-long fangs. If a friend tries to excuse their behavior by mentioning any of these conditions? Stake them through the heart immediately.
• Your living friends don’t need an explicit invitation into your home, and they will never stand at the threshold, trying to bait you into offering one. They just walk right in and drink all your beer. If a close friend lingers outside, asking for permission to enter? It ain’t your beer he wants to drink.
• Atheists are not physically repelled by crucifixes, no matter what Pat Robertson says. I can assure you that your friend isn’t recoiling from that cross because she just read The God Delusion. She’s recoiling because she’s a freaking nosferatu.

Check for Holes in that Plot Armor

The odds of making this exclusively-white vampire family by chance alone are 1 in 10.

To put it another way, there's a 90% probability the Cullens are racist.

Even if you’re the only chaste white girl in your circle of friends—which under normal circumstances is like winning the monster-victim lottery—don’t expect your racial and sexual immunities to hold up against vampires.

You see, for the purposes of death-order dynamics, being bitten by a vampire is tantamount to wild monkey sex. So, no matter how much sex you haven’t had in your life, the moment that vampire pricks his teeth into you, you instantly become a viable target. Furthermore, vampire victim selection, unlike that of other monsters, is based not on resentment but on desire—and most vampires are white racists. I mean, it's not like they’re attending Klan rallies or anything, but they sure do have a curious aversion to biting people of color, don’t they? It’s the soft bigotry of low exsanguinations.

None of which, mind you, means that you’re safe just because you’re not white. In a reversal of historical segregation, in which white racists didn’t want to sit at an integrated lunch counter but would happily eat food prepared by a black cook, the typical white vampire will refuse to eat you, but will have no qualms about snapping your neck.

It’s sad on a lot of levels.