The Coldest Girl in Coldtown Read Free

time Tana turned seven. Springfield was only fifty miles from her house, so it was in the local news before it went national. Initially, it seemed like a journalist’s prank. Then there was another outbreak in Chicago and another in San Francisco and another in Las Vegas. A girl, caught trying to bite a blackjack dealer, burst into flame as cops dragged her out of a casino to their squad car. A businessman was found holed up in his penthouse apartment, surrounded by gnawed corpses. A child stood at Fisherman’s Wharf on a foggy night, reaching up her arms to any adult who offered to help find her father, just before she sank her teeth into their throats. A burlesque dancer introduced bloodplay into her act and required audience members to sign waivers before attending her performances. When they left, they left hungry.
    The military put up barricades around each area of the city where the infections broke out. That was the way the first Coldtowns were founded.
    Vampirism is an American problem , the BBC declared. But the next outbreak was in Hong Kong, then Yokohama, then Marseille, then Brecht, then Liverpool. After that, it spread across Europe like wildfire.
    At ten, Tana watched her mother sit at her mirrored vanity and get ready to go to the party of an art buyer intent on lending her gallery a few pieces. She had on a pencil skirt with an emerald-colored silk shell top, her short black hair gelled tightly back. She was fastening on a pair of pearl drop earrings.
    “Aren’t you afraid of the vampires?” Tana had asked, leaningbonelessly against her mother’s leg, feeling the scratch of tights against her cheek and inhaling the smell of her mother’s perfume. Usually, both of her parents were home before dark.
    Tana’s mother had just laughed, but she came back from the party sick. Cold , they called it, which at first sounded harmless, like the kind of cold that gave you the sniffles and a sore throat. But this was another kind of Cold, one where body temperatures dropped, senses spiked, and the craving for blood became almost overwhelming.
    If one of the people who’d gone Cold drank human blood, the infection mutated. It killed the host and then raised them back up again, Colder than before. Cold through and through, forever and ever.
    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there was only one cure. The victim had to be prevented from drinking human blood until the infection was flushed out of the system, which could take up to eighty-eight days. No clinic provided such a service. In the beginning, hospitals had heavily sedated Cold patients, until a middle-aged and very wealthy woman came out of her medically induced coma to attack a doctor. Some people managed to take the edge off the craving for blood with booze or drugs; nothing worked for others. But if the police found out about a potential case of infection, that person would be quarantined and relocated to a Coldtown. Tana’s mother was terrified. And so, two days in, once the shakes had gotten bad enough and the hunger came on, she agreed to be locked up in the only part of the house that would hold her.
    Tana remembered the screams rising from the basement a week later, screams that went on all day long, while her father was at work,and then all through the night, while her father turned up the television until it drowned out every other sound and drank himself to sleep. In the afternoons after school, between bouts of screaming, Tana’s mother would call for her, pleading, begging to be let out. Promising to be good. Explaining that she was better now, that she wasn’t sick anymore.
    Tana, please. You know I would never hurt you, my beautiful little girl. You know I love you more than anything, more than my own life. Your father, he doesn’t understand that I’m better. He doesn’t believe me, and I’m frightened of him, Tana. He’s going to keep me imprisoned here forever. He’ll never let me out. He’s always wanted