W.E. GUTMAN

THE VAMPIRE STATE


In the Year of Our Lord 2091, open season on street children has been declared,
and Lady Justice wears an ugly face

22:1O--A rank, sulfurous halo hangs low over Manhattan. Driven by icy gusts,
tentaclelike fingers of swirling amber gases swoop toward the slime-slick
pavement, probing deep behind yawning doorways, arcades, and atria, seeking out
the specters that lurk within their drafty expanses.

It's Christmas Eve in the Big Apple. Chiming in the distance in pious unison,
ethereal and uninvolved, churchbells summon the faithful. Chiming? No,
tolling-a wistful knell for a moribund metropolis, for the thousand and one
night creatures that stalk its streets, for the near living I will ferret out
and kill. Fifteen years is a long time. I must speak out.

It all came together a century ago with a salvo of statements and
counterstatements tailored to help save political face while giving the
citizenry the impression that justice was served. In time, words got sharper,
less conciliatory, and violence, sporadic and extemporaneous, grew bolder and
deadlier with each secret municipal emergency meeting.

No one protested. Not a single voice was heard. It was too late. Justice-like
truth-the stronger of two conflicting arguments, justice, the paradox suspended
on the point of a sword, had put on its ugliest face. The Lady had taken off her
blindfold and was winking lasciviously at the oligarchy. And the carnage began.

'Tis now open season, and the blood of children, thinner than water, coalesces
with putrid rivulets of swill and excrement that hug the curb and cascade down
the sewers.

Torn by civil strife, political corruption, and poverty, America's big cities
have fallen like gangrenous limbs. An orgy of bloodletting has turned rivers
red and transformed parks and playgrounds into open graves. Severe economic
downturns, spreading unemployment, homelessness, merciless slashes in social
services, all have contributed to a catastrophic increase in the number of
people living below the poverty line. Of the 2,000 children who wake up poor,
more than 400 die of neglect or abuse. There are more people in jail in the
United States than in all other nations combined. The number of one-parent
families keeps soaring, each producing its quota of juvenile offenders. More
than 400,000 are in custody for nonviolent offenses such as truancy, drug use,
prostitution, and petty theft. Most share a cell with hardened criminals.
There is no more room.

As the gap between the rich and poor widens, larger numbers of affluent urban
dwellers move out to escape the squalor, skyrocketing taxes, crime, and a
decaying infrastructure, all of which have turned cities into pockets of
depravity, poverty, crime, disease, and social unrest.

Sparked by a growing need for slave labor, mass immigration from Third World
Nations-where families are notoriously large and prolific-continues to add to
the ranks of the poor, the uneducated, and the culturally disconnected elements
of U.S. society, many of whom start out as street children and, if allowed to
grow up, soon graduate to adult crime.

What little food the kids can scrape to keep the heart pumping proves to be less
than enough for the brain. Out of the nearly 5 million minors subsisting on the
streets and in the cavernous catacombs beneath subway and railroad tunnels and
in the fetid sewers of America, more than 700,000 suffer from irreversible brain
damage. Drug-induced dementia and a form of Parkinsonism attributed to exposure
to carbon monoxide afflict half that many. Everyone is armed. Looting sprees
that had swelled during the long hot summer have abated. Thousands of children
have perished at the hands of vigilantes, sexual psychopaths, and agents of the
state, all plying their own brand of justice. I don't mind the competition.
There are simply too many kids out there. Inexplicably, in one last gasp of
puritanical fervor, bolstered by an apostate Supreme Court and a Church
obsessively committed to saving the unborn rather than the living, "pro-lifers"
have succeeded in reversing Roe vs. Wade and in making abortion a federal crime.
I get paid to pluck the fruits of this incestuous union.

23:40-Tonight will be Jimmy's turn. Only fourteen, he is resourceful and
clever. I've hunted him down day and night for a month, clambering up and down
the byways and alleys he and his six cohorts patrol in search of easy prey-old
folk or stragglers stranded in the night.

24:10-Off of Eighth Avenue, behind the Port Authority Terminal's mazelike
network of ramps and underpasses, a band of nine-and ten-year-olds take turns
scrounging through trash bins and peeking into dingy motels where couples come
to risk procreation for the shallow rewards of a brief grunt of ecstasy. A
block away, a known pedophile barters with a twelve-year-old. Envious and
resentful, four urchins encircle and pounce on the boy.

02:54-I've found Jimmy. Alone, propped against a pile of cardboard boxes by the
wharf near the old Fulton Fish Market, he is hallucinating. Could be glue or
crack or the new rage in town, stalactites, a deadly mixture of acetone-soaked
cannabis, rubber cement, and denatured alcohol. He could be dangerous.

02:55-Jimmy sees me but doesn't move. I unsheathe my revolver and point it at
him, slowly, deliberately, with the grace and ease and serenity granted those
whose conscience has been expediently stilled by convention or apathy. Jimmy
slowly spreads his arms, Christlike, and rests his head against his shoulder.
Defiance, fatalism, relief, all are etched in that life-hardened baby face, in
those glassy eyes where shimmer the eerie scintillations of night. I shoot,
repeatedly, remorselessly, satisfied that another street child, alone and
undernourished since birth, mistreated by his peers, another boy nobody smiles
to, nobody cuddles, nobody protects, nobody comforts, nobody loves will never
again have a chance to sully the society that begat him.

It's a living. The cost of Christmas keeps going up.



*
Could this happen here? On these pages you've seen one scenario depicting a
dark American future in which homeless children become targets of state
violence.

*
It does not have to go that far. Already the numbers of children on our
streets, and the streets of cities around the world, are growing. Every time
we turn away from this problem, every day we do nothing, the problem
grows.

*
Omni is the first magazine of the future, yet children are the future's first
resource. The future, we have said often in these pages, belongs to all of
us. What share of the future do homeless children hold? What price will we
have to pay tomorrow for ignoring today? The problem grows.

*
If individuals do nothing, if religious organizations do nothing-or less
than nothing by encouraging unfettered reproduction-the problem will grow until
it is out of control. Except by institutionalized violence. Except by
state-sanctioned murder.

*
The problem grows.