Vampires of Kennedy Space Center
The Operations and Checkout Building
A short story of another future

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This is another tale of the Kennedy Space Center's multiverses, both in the distant past and the far future.
Follow ghosts, demons, gods, AIs, tourists, DNA experiments, vamps, and witches as they travel the multiverse only to discover their interconnections as allies and enemies across an endless history or future.

Every story is the true story.

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FYI

The vampires on KSC, if any, stay out of sight and would never let me write about them. Come on......

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The O&C Building in the Industrial Area of KSC.

Story name: 

Trading places, a tale of O&C vampires

She was harshly roused from her secret dreams of warm sunlight. Cold fingers like sausages on her lips. They were sticky.

She spat, "Lime, you bastard!"

Even in the blackness, she recognized the foul touch of Marcus's salamander.

"The mistress, she wishes you," said Lime, his voice a grunt in the dark.

The voice again, hushed, pleading, "If you only have a little patience with me, I'll show you how to escape the Mistress and Master," said the voice.

She flew at Lime only to hear him slither away. Her fury a carmine tide surging in waves of rage and pitiless shame. 

"Again and again, I comply, I agree, and you never fulfill your promise!" she yelled into the black tunnel. 

"Come, Eileen," said the voice in the dark. Lime's voice was full of hurt and loneliness. 

"The Mistress....waits."

They walked past the other cells of the Operations and Checkout building catacombs, down a tunnel, past the whispering and begging for Marcus the hunter to return and spreading hopeful rumors of an approaching blood feast.

Eileen followed Lime, walking up the steep stairs into the Highbay decorated with faded Artemis and Apollo murals . 

The cry of a night heron echoed through the vast Highbay full of antique Orion space ships in various stages of completion

Ophelia eagerly waited on the Highbay throne, a dusty mock-up of Mars Station. Her lips slightly parted, exposed to the temptations of Eileen's smooth and pretty face, and her ivory neck pulsing with the delicacy of love poetry.

"Pulse of drink," moaned Ophelia, "To me, precious Eileen."

Lime stepped away, his eyes averted for their privacy. 

Whisperings of insanity came from the tunnel below.

In the shadows of the Operations and Checkout highbay, Eileen went to her mistress, burning kisses crushed against her mouth and then the sharp sting on her neck.

After feeding the false words of love again, "I'll let you die sharply and mercifully, your freedom at last," promised Ophelia, the lie smooth as blood as she wrapped Eileen in her arms.

"Only words," Eileen whispered, fighting hidden emotions. Love? Yes, love, her embrace, and the insanity of leaked dreams of other lifetimes and other suns, endless dreams during the great misery of hiber-sleep, cradled in love and protected by Lime's great strength. 

Eileen wept, leaking tears of misery and mute despair.

When feeding, Ophelia caught glimpses of Eileen's lost dreams of lilacs and afternoon sunshine, exquisite blue-white glacier rivers, storm-wrecked treasure ships, and de-orbit burns.

When had her aristocratic eyes last wept under the sun? Ophelia shivered, irritated, suddenly off-balance.

Her hands reached again for Eileen's white neck, sublime, the exquisite cup that would not empty. The soft flutter of silk, the neck covering pulled back.

"A second feeding," whispered Ophelia in a moist breath of anticipation recognized as lovers' passion.

"No," begged Eileen, her sobs of awful remorse and low iron the ancient songs of love.

But the beautiful night heron chained to its datura perch flashed carmine eyes. Ophelia's eyes rolled back in her head, and she fell to the hard asbestos tiles in the grasp of a seizure-electron-mind-freeze of chaos and neuron short-circuitry.

Her legs and arms were rigid and trembling, the language of fear that required no interpreter, the neurons slamming into closed pathways, the electrons colliding surprised and overpowered, calling with furious obsidian blades on hungry stone altars. 

Chroniclers scratching forbidden knowledge on dying CPUs, death-shocked circuit boards, or flayed parchments and clay tiles had written about the mysteries and dreams of hard shut-downs and forced reboots of the falling-down sickness.

An infinite fractal curve, packets of electrical impulses sharing stories and emotions of dark-hidden monsters or brilliant golden spaceflight, told as a haunting sense of lighting micro-shocked conceived images on winding fiber cables through dark space, the weltering abyss.  

Ophelia awoke from her witchery, confused, lying on the cold floor, copper hair disarranged.

Her head rested softly on Eileen's lap.

Eileen's vacant, hollow eyes stared into the abyss. Eileen's chin was carmine with blood, ghastly, lost in ancient fears, aggravated by chaos blindness of other dimensions. 

Ophelia felt the stickiness on her neck and the twin wounds. Eileen had fed on her while in the dark lightning storm of the hard shut-down.

"Oh, Eileen," she whispered, knowing only full well the infinite fractal curve of the night.

An eyelid flickered, a hint of awareness as Eileen returned to her own body after her journeys to other realms and times. 

"Chain her, teach her to beg for the freedom of death," ordered Eileen, "Marcus is mine alone as it has always been."

Lime licked his lips, "Yes, Mistress," and led his former mistress queen down the stairs and past the O2 monitors to her new prison cell to be tormented as befitting a former mistress and new pupil.

"If you only have a little patience with me, I'll show you how to escape the Mistress and Master," cooed the hulking Lime.

One night, Ophelia followed Lime from her prison cell under the Highbay of the fallen angel, algorithms sparse.

"The Master has returned," said Lime.

The other cell doors were open, having released Orbital flight engineers, heat shield specialists, HR representatives, Quality Assurance, and cryogen technicians; their jeers and laughter echoed from above, heralding the arrival of Marcus the Hunter. 

The tease and the taunt of the damned, laughing and tittering with joyous energy of the blood-thirst, the gathered suddenly turned on Marcus, caviling at the unjustness of their situation, their food, their prey, contaminated and polluted. 

"Sire Marcus," said the blood leader, who bowed deeply to his lord.

"We have decided," the multitudes held up their cell phones. "We have decided, a unanimous vote, to ask that you set up a blood donation center."

"Vlad is too polite," said a pushy bottle-blond. "We suffer ulcers from our drinks of synthetic blood and angel dust." 

A beautiful woman who could have been an extra on the set of "Bounty" added, "As if Hep-C wasn't bad enough, those synthetics are killing us," said the undead Polynesian.

"I should have never watched that movie," hissed Marcus to the sleepy Ophelia. Eileen was silent and smirked at Ophelia and Lime while she leaned against her hunter.

"What volunteer blood donors have the correct certification numbers to get into the O&C building?" demanded Marcus.

"Mallet and stake!" Let me speak!" demanded Vlad, who saw Marcus getting exasperated. 

"A Blood bank and blood donors, Sire, a small boon."

Marcus was cold rage; Marcus was furious as space froze ice.

"You dare to swear in my presence!"

The former Karens did not back down.

"O-negative transfusion!" sniped a former woman weightlifting champion.

"Mallet and Stake?" grunted the balding man with a cute perm, the same man who had dethroned the woman weightlifting champion. 

"Your salamander, the accursed Lime, teases us incessantly with his microaggressions! Oak stake, Pine stake, tent stake! State out! He is relentless in his abuse."

Marcus glared at Lime. "Is this true?"

Lime cowed under the dark glare.

"Yes, sire," grunted Lime, "But they complain about clean blood, so I ask, Would you like a rare bloody steak at a steak house, ribeye steak, cut with a steak knife. No harm sire," said Lime, with a mildly evil gleam in his mucus-free eye.

The assembled vampire minions roared in anger.

"It's their self-respect at stake," said Ophelia, with a straight face.

Marcus, his upper lip twitching, glared at Ophelia and then Lime. "Well, we are the stakeholders."

All three broke into gusty laughter while the other vampires wailed, "Microaggressions!"

Marcus shook his cape. "Vlad, go copulate with bottle-blond until your hunters settle down."

The Karens still wailed, gnashing fangs at the unjustness of their treatment. Not even the threat of copulation with Lime would silence them.

"Have done with this nonsense!" he ordered sharply.

Marcus asked the gathering, "Who among this gathering has hepatitis C or COVID-83.5 from bad blood?"

The complaining magnitudes of spirits and demons, the multitudes assembled, with raised hands or paws, "Us sire!"

Marcus pushed a hanging control switch, and a UV-protected Lexan screen covered him, Ophelia, and Eileen. The east High Bay doors rolled open with a squeal of rusted gears and protesting arachnids.

Suddenly, the nightfolk turned from complaining about everything to screams and wails of terror. They tried to run, slither, or fly to escape the emission of electrons, specifically the electromagnetic radiation known as light, washed over them. 

Panic and despair at their photoelectron terror of specialized light and precisely timed electron emission from the small star known as Sol.

Dawn came into the highbay like the winter solstice at Newgrange Barrow, the cleaning and loving light.

The odor of burning garbage and tick blood assailed Ophelia—the miasma of the obliquely damned.

Ophelia sat, overwhelmed at the mass murder by sunlight; old feelings rose from deep inside, and the desire to cut herself bubbled like a dark spring. Only ruthless ambition to be at the side of Marcus and the hatred of that bitch Eileen pulled her from the shadow realm of the razor.

"You must not suppose that all this lasted a long time," said Marcus the Fallen. "The pain brief. How long could it have been?"

"I would stake a claim it was the speed of light," said Eileen, her striking beauty of heavy brows and weak chin in a nimbus of blond braids in the Florida dawn.

Ophelia turned upon her former food slave with blazing eyes faded blue and anemic pale to the lips.

"Those..." said Ophelia, but she did not know what to say about the annoying undead. They were annoying.

"Sit by my side and listen to the explanations as I have promised. Give me your hand," said Marcus.

She felt the taint of the action, nevertheless gave him her hand-as always.

"Ophelia-once my favorite," said Marcus. "Thus it came that I found you in a dark wood, bound in seizure-electrons-circuit-mind-freeze. Your life prey to morbid introspection of the razor and shrillness of outcry, an artist eager of hand and frenzy of body, and much more for every moon under my eternal oath."

Marcus smiled down at her, recalling her long-ago beaming face and dancing eyes, sublime invocation half-mad, half-listening prosaic, "The dammed? They dreamed of lost sunshine, their dreams of wonder, the alien half-bewildering longing of light waves transferring energy to electrons, the sun-burn of accumulated energy to be feared and missed. 

I gave them what they wanted. A free radical capable of independent existence? That unpaired electron in an atomic orbital burn?"

Ophelia wiped at her eyes, leaking pink tears, the eyes of a charming anemic woman, with which she covertly searched for Eileen while barring her long neck to Marcus. 

Conjured in the dark, her wild frenzy of desperation and low iron wishing only to knock Eileen back to the cucumber hands of Lime.

Madness. Who but the trapped could think such thoughts? I am damned with only three options, Marcus, sunshine, or the Salamander Lime. 

Thus, as Marcus bent to her exposed neck, Ophelia felt the approaching storm of scintillating flashes darting about her like swallows and fell to the floor in an epileptic fit. 

In her seizure dreams, who were the others? Dreams of intimate strangers eminently raving in somehow familiar stories of bears, falcons, photographers, and rockets viewed in her dreams of madness? Winged children resting on a canyon ledge? The ruined VAB, the grave marker of fallen astronauts, a burning space shuttle falling from the sky, seeing herself in the mirror, and a feathered dinosaur stared back. In the carmine shadows, a coven of witches chanted, "Too cold to launch!" Excursions in the chill Florida spring days, distant laughter of Eileen.

"Eileen, I'm sorry," wept Ophelia, recalling the cup of forever given to Eileen. There was a time when you were mine.

 "Well, I'll have a taste," said Eileen for the first time, recalling their first kiss and first bite in the Launch Control Center vault.

Marcus had brought her as a new favorite; somehow, Eileen appeared in their dreams holding the cup of warm blood, musky copper-iron scent. Her nervous, eager eyes explained Marcus's choice, a foretelling of anticipated deliriums of pleasure.

Eileen was yet unaware of her future, the gnawing fangs and frolics with dark chaos, consorting with sprite or salamanders, the creeping cataleptic spasms of the locked jaw or songs of triumphant exultation, thrown into a pit of veritable vampires.

Ophelia could feel her locks sweat-plastered to her forehead and opened her eyes to see Eileen sitting on Marcus's lap singing a love song, burning as strong mead, tender as the murmur of the riverbank, finding the blood trickling down her neck. The sweet words evoked scenes of pale roses in the comet-light sear. "Bitter tears join body and soul with anguish clear."

Ophelia shuddered, shedding bitter tears at the ludicrously inadequate verse of love. Cinnamon pheromones were her song to Eileen.

Ophelia felt a discourse of sudden growls and wounded feelings escape her.

Chaos and order.

"To me," ordered Marcus. "Sit next to me."

Ophelia got up and sat next to Eileen. "We sup, and we dream while Lime watchers over us," said Marcus.

The sun-burned Lime limped from the shadows. His task was to keep the stake-wielders away during the long dream sleeps. His cucumber-sized fingers slipped around a lever-action model-98 rifle.

Marcus used a fleam knife to bleed the jugular of both Ophelia and Eileen, and all three shared in the feeding.

The softening influences of the blood feast allowed the two women to make amends, to look into the eyes of the other, to linger longingly, so familiar, and the dreams of other times swam before their eyes. Their lord with the head of a hawk, the sky god Horus.

"We sleep and dream," ordered Marcus, and all three coiled into the shelter of his cape, emblazoned with the letters NASA.

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Other tails of the Space Center:

Vampires of Kennedy Space Center

Demons of Kennedy Space Center

Demons of Kennedy Space Center, corpus callosotomy

Ghosts of Kennedy Space Center

Dreams of Kennedy Space Center

Aliens of Kennedy Space Center

Director of Kennedy Space Center

Hitchhikers of Kennedy Space Center

Witches of Kennedy Space Center

Cave Bears of Kennedy Space Center

Chimeras of Kennedy Space Center

Gods of Kennedy Space Center and the Nile

Dinosaurs of Kennedy Space Center

Kayakers of Kennedy Space Center

Remembering Kennedy Space Center

Ferals of Kennedy Space Center

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"Trading places" comes from my book "Woodpecker" on Kindle Vella

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The O&C building on Kennedy Space Center.

In the photo, the East High Bay doors that open to the dawn light.

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Other tails of the Space Center:

Vampires of Kennedy Space Center

Demons of Kennedy Space Center

Demons of Kennedy Space Center, corpus callosotomy

Ghosts of Kennedy Space Center

Dreams of Kennedy Space Center

Aliens of Kennedy Space Center

Director of Kennedy Space Center

Witches of Kennedy Space Center

Chimeras of Kennedy Space Center

Gods of Kennedy Space Center and the Nile

Dinosaurs of Kennedy Space Center

Remembering Kennedy Space Center

Shadows of Kennedy Space Center

Virus of Kennedy Space Center

Starman of Kennedy Space Center

Gate Jumpers of Kennedy Space Center

Allies of Kennedy Space Center (Pt 2 of Gate Jumpers

Savants of Kennedy Space Center

Gene Splicers of Kennedy Space Center

Ferals of Kennedy Space Center

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Return HOME from Vampires of the Space Center, the O&C

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