THE STANDARD BEARER, Journal DATELINE: One Year, One Month Ago.
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH ‘MR. BLACK’
In the plush leather-back chair across from me, in this somewhat exclusive club’s most private room, sits one of the most dangerous men in America. He claims that if people knew who he was, just being seen with him would put my life in grave danger. He has gone to remarkable lengths to arrange this meeting and to conceal his identity. I partially believe his story. He has proofs that his account, however far-fetched, is at least believable to some extent.
He appears to be in his early-to-mid sixties. He is a smart dresser but otherwise nondescript in appearance. He could pass for any of the lawyers, stockbrokers, or businessmen that frequent this club, except for the fact that he is in better shape than most of them. For obvious reasons, he wants me to keep my description of him to that minimum. For the purposes of this interview, we will refer to him as ‘Mr. Black’. Other than the descriptions I’ve already given, he tells me not to report where this interview took place. He assures me that he has emptied his bank accounts and liquidated all his assets. He intends to leave the country immediately after the conclusion of our conversation.
He claims to be retired, but as recently as a year ago he claims that he was a Nocturn hunter. More interesting, however, are his claims that he exercised his profession in the employ of none other than the United State government. Over the course of the next hour, he proceeds to go on a rambling account of his tale before departing hastily. The following is a transcript of the interview, as it happened. I have undertaken some minor editing for space, but I wish to assure my readers that I have not substantively altered any of the content.
MR. BLACK
Look, I know folks don’t have to believe me. I know I’m telling the truth, and it will all come out in the end anyway. You’re staring at one of the old heads, and there ain’t many of us left.
THE STANDARD BEARER
And you make the somewhat incredible claim that you were a Nocturn hunter…
MR. BLACK
Ain’t no Nocturn about it. I don’t much go in for that PC crap. Vampires. That’s what they are and we shouldn’t pussyfoot around the issue.
THE STANDARD BEARER
Okay, you claim you hunted ‘Vampires’ for the U.S. government.
MR. BLACK
That’s right, under the UMBRA Special Programs for the NSA.
[Editor’s Note: The National Security Agency and the United States government deny any knowledge of any program, official or unofficial, which specifically targeted Nocturns in any way.]
THE STANDARD BEARER
Um, why have you decided to come forward now? Aren’t you afraid of reprisals?
MR. BLACK
Like I said, I’m an old head. The world is changing too much, and too fast. They can’t allow me to stick around. I’ve become a liability. I know too much to overlook and I’m not valuable enough to keep around. If this thing ever goes overt, and that’s a big ‘if’, I have no doubt some boy scout will come chasing after us wanting to prosecute for the crime of keeping you Saps safe. That’s the way of things after all. When the shit is going down, people talk big. ‘Take off the gloves,’ they say. ‘No holds barred,’ they say. But after the body count’s been tallied, and not all the dead guys were bad guys – when it comes time to pay the piper, well guess who’s left holding their dicks in their hands.
No, it’s time for me to cash in my chips and get out of Dodge. I figure if I don’t, I’ll wind up having some interesting accident like slicing my neck open while shaving, blowing my brains out while cleaning my gun, or maybe drinking a little too much and trying to drive home. That’s always a favorite.
Oh, don’t worry about your life buddy. As long as you publish this you’ll be okay. See I picked your ‘journal’ [he does air-quotes with his hands] because, well no offense, but you guys come across as kind of a whack job rag, ya know? If they come after you, they’d just be lending credibility to the whole thing. I figure you guys are safe. They sure as hell don’t want to confirm any of this. To your readers who remain skeptical? Well, what I’d say to them is that a couple of months ago, there was no such thing as a vampire either, right?
THE STANDARD BEARER
Right. To get back on track, you were talking about something called the UMBRA Special Programs?
MR. BLACK
Yeah, got a little ahead of myself. I have to go back a ways, so you can get some perspective. UMBRA didn’t get started until the late forties. Truman issued NSC directive 42. It might have started earlier. But I don’t know about that. Our government involvement with vampires really got official after dubya dubya two. Seems vampires had come to our attention thanks to the Thule-Gesellschaft.”
THE STANDARD BEARER
Umm, you’re referring to the Thule Society that’s been tied to the Waffen SS and the Nazi Party?
MR. BLACK
You know your stuff. Well, there ain’t no other one. [He laughs.] Oh I know it makes me sound like a whack job. But then, that’s the beauty of the whole thing, isn’t it? It all sounds so bug shit nuts that no one would ever believe it. Anyway, when they weren’t being complete sons-a-bitches, the Nazis were digging into all kinds of obscure and occult shit. And I don’t really have the details of the whats, the whens, and the wheres, but best as we could figure is that the bastards caught themselves a couple of vampires when they were busy rounding up the Jews, Gypsies, and everyone else who didn’t fit into the picture for the master race.
They learned real quick what they had of course. Be hard not to. Started experimenting, with how much a vampire could take before it died, with vampire blood and its effects on humans, all kinds of shit. A lot of the early science we got from them, I’m ashamed to say. Anyway, Hitler or Himmler or some other high-up Nazi fuck gets the bright idea that they could turn a bunch of their best and brightest and create some kind of ‘shadow regiment’ to fight at night and run wetwork and such. Only by then, the war’s not going too well for the Germans, and everything goes quickly to shit.
So then when the PAPERCLIP boys are up in Peenemünde trying to get all the rockets and scientists they can grab, the UMBRA boys, or the pre-UMBRA boys really, got to grab themselves a couple of bonafide vampires. The Brits got some, the Ruskies too, but then from what I hear, the Ruskies always had ‘em.
Well turns out that we wound up treating ours a little better than the norm and word got out. We started getting ‘defectors’ showing up in the good old U.S. of A. These defectors, well they turned out to be some of the ‘good’ ones. Not that any of them are ever really ‘good’, not after living as long as they do. Compared to some they were good. Anyway, some of them tried not to feed on humans, to consume mostly animal blood. They wanted to work with us, co-exist. Some of them had been around the block for a while. We’re talking might-have-walked-out-of-Goshen-with-Moses old. They opened our eyes a bit to some things we’re better off believing were spook tales.
THE STANDARD BEARER
What things? You mean other than vampires?
MR. BLACK
Yeah. But I don’t want to get into that now. They’re not the real threat. Not yet. The astrologers tell us we have some time yet. Vampires are where it’s at for now. Baby steps right?
Anyway, UMBRA gets started up and tries to keep all its research and relationships on the Q.T. Then somehow word gets to Hoover and he flips out. The idea that there are real vampires out there sucking down red-white-and-blue blood while the world might go to sleep underneath a Red moon drives him up the wall. He’s able to get UMBRA’s mandate expanded. And then it’s on.
By the time I came on, UMBRA was pretty set in its ways. The NSA had absorbed it to cover expenses, personnel, acquisitions, and trump congressional oversight. Teams had been set up. See there are some vampires out there, well they’re so bad, even other vampires don’t like ‘em and need ‘em gone. Guys that would make Ed Gein look like Mr. Rogers. Real horrible stuff.
[Mr. Black pauses, for the first time in the in the session, I see a crack in the gruff exterior. He looks genuinely shaken and I’m too afraid to ask him about what memory could trouble him like this. He takes a long gulp of brandy.]
Shit. Sorry about that. Yeah, they got all kinds of organizations too. Houses, bloodlines, and things like that. Feuds that would go on for centuries. Longer even. We’d exploit that. Could turn one against another to make things work in our favor. See even the average vampire has a lot of time on his hands. They learn to be patient and they can become master manipulators. We had a couple of ‘em even counsel the state department and higher-ups in negotiations and strategy. As far as I know, they’re still on the payroll.
THE STANDARD BEARER
Do you think the Russians did the same thing, I mean, during the Cold War, to try and get an edge?
MR. BLACK
Probably, probably. Everyone else does. Despite all the legal hoopla going down in Europe about the Sangers, don’t be fooled. There are plenty of them over there. But they have to be protected, really taken care of. ‘Cause things go down different in the old country you know? They got a real beef with your run of the mill ‘Nocturns’.
[He chuckles and takes another sip of his brandy.]
Anyway, you have to look no further than the old story of Rasputin to learn how they deal with vampires over there.
THE STANDARD BEARER
Rasputin?
MR. BLACK
Yeah, you know, Rasputin. The Mad Monk? Seriously? You don’t know? You knew about the Thule Society… well, okay. Just so we’re clear, we’re talking about the advisor to Tsarina Alexandra Romanov. We’re talking about one of the most open vampire stories around and people just don’t want to see it.
When they finally tried to kill him, it took a dedicated group of Russians and some British SIS guys to take him out. They poisoned him, stabbed him, shot him, clubbed him, and then threw him into the frozen river. Yet he somehow survived all that. He nearly got away too, but some local peasants still remembered the old ways, dug him up, and took fire to him and even then it was a close thing. But anyway, that’s the sort of treatment vampires can expect over there.
You remember all that crap that went down in Hungary a couple of months back? That riot that broke out were a bunch of vampires killed some protesters. Whole damn thing caught on camera phones. Was a real pain in the ass to that LightBearer group trying to get all that stuff suppressed. It was all over the internet already. So there was really no point. Anyway, I’ve kind of rambled off topic there a bit.”
THE STANDARD BEARER
How was UMBRA organized?
MR. BLACK
The whole thing got spawned out of the OSS, so it maintained a lot of that structure. You know, all compartmentalized. Left hand never knows what the right hand is doing and vice versa. By the time I came onboard, the Ops section was broken down into two-man hunter-killer teams. One human and one vampire. They’d operate autonomously in different parts of the world fed by intel from Washington. If they were going after someone really bad, and by this point, we’re really talking shades of gray here, because the really really bad ones got wind there were new players in the game and went quiet.
If you were going for a real hard target a couple of teams might join up. Or they might rope in conventional spec ops folks using some kind of cover story. Tell folks we’re going after war criminals, ethnic cleansers, etc. Open up the R.O.E. and let them go to town. The snake-eaters don’t stand for much shit anyway, so when you tell them ‘dead or alive’, that usually means dead. Then all the UMBRA guys had to do was make sure the target stayed dead.
THE STANDARD BEARER
Why human-vampire pairs? Was there an express purpose behind that? I mean, why not send out only vampires or only humans?
MR. BLACK
“Oh, there were a whole slew of reasons. First was to keep the vampires grounded in the present. They tend to get archaic. Don’t know if it’s a kind of by-product of immortality or whatever, but they’ll get stuck in one time if they don’t have an anchor to the present, they just won’t adapt to it. That’s why almost all of them went back to using their original names after The Reveal instead of sticking with their established aliases. But another big reason is that a human-vampire team complements each other. We don’t really know what goes into it, and there’s been a lot of research on this. Humans have more than five senses, or maybe not…there’s some debate on that point too. Anyway, the theory works like this, whether it really is a sixth sense like intuition or something or whether it’s the brain cobbling together all your sensory data, you know sight, smell, hearing, etc., and coming up with a conglomerate sixth sense, we don’t really know. The fact is, it exists. Any good field guy will attest to it. It’s the old hunch or gut-feeling. You tend to know when something is wrong or something is right. You can feel when someone’s watching you. That kind of thing. Well, the vampires lose that. Might have to do with them being higher up on the food chain. That’s one of the theories, that the more predators there are above an organism on the food chain, the more refined this extra sense is.
Back on topic, humans pick up on things that the vampires miss and of course, vice-versa. The vampires senses are so highly attuned they can hear and smell things we’d never pick up on. Hell, I used to work with one guy who could tell if a guy had a headache from across the room, just based on his smell. The bottom line was that humans have fear to keep us alive. It works wonders to boost your senses. The vampires don’t feel fear, though they can sense it, so they don’t have that sense. Plus, you know, a lot of these vampires – their hearts ain’t really in it. They’re doing it because the government is blackmailing them into it. So the humans were there to make sure they’re walking the line.”
THE STANDARD BEARER
How many of these teams were there?
MR. BLACK
I don’t rightly know. At least thirty that I know of and worked with. There had to be more. I mean, we were carrying on ops all over the world. UMBRA wasn’t the only game in town either. On our side, I know the Brits and the French were running their own programs. The Chinese and Ruskies had their own thing going. Back in the day, it was just like a little annex to the grander Cold War. Except that when it came to some ops, the Sangers could be such a problem joint ops weren’t out of the question. Shit, if only people knew. A common cause to rally against. Vampires as the great unifiers of humanity. Reagan’d be having fits.”
THE STANDARD BEARER
You mean the President didn’t know?
MR. BLACK
Some presidents didn’t know. Depended from person to person. You conspiracy nuts like to talk about a shadow-government. You have no idea. UMBRA, true to the name, was the original. We’re talking no oversight, unlimited budgets, and operators answering to no one as long as the job got done. Part of me is glad it’s gone, that part anyway. Because, well shit, you ain’t ever seen craziness till you’ve seen an UMBRA team let loose after a hairy mission. Civies lost their minds over ‘Tailhook’. That shit wouldn’t have even been an appetizer in UMBRA. Think about it, you’ve got blackmailed vampires working against their will. The whole carrot and stick approach doesn’t work too well without the damned carrot. So as ops got more and more hairy but the missions still got done, people started caring less and less if a vampire operative went a bit too far with an escort or a human operative’s new pastime was too young to vote. Condoning that kind of behavior by ignoring it narrowed the gap between the ‘good guys’ and the monsters we were going after. Like I said, shades of gray. No one did anything. We just shook our heads and explained it as someone just letting off steam after seeing some of the worst things this world has to offer.
I don’t want to paint the wrong picture, not everyone was like that. Some bad apples for sure. The no-oversight atmosphere lent people to excesses. There were some good teams out there that took to their jobs with religious fervor.
THE STANDARD BEARER
Nocturns as well?
MR. BLACK
Yeah. Especially some of the vampires. You’d be hard pressed to find someone that hates himself or herself more than a vampire trying to be ‘good’. They’re fighting a losing battle and they know it. So they try to over-compensate by taking out as many bad ones as they can. But it’s all based on point of view, and over time that changes, so a guy who was deadly evil in their book one day, ain’t so bad the next.
THE STANDARD BEARER
So, you’re saying there’s no co-existing with them”
MR. BLACK
No. No. Shit, I’ve co-existed with them almost my whole professional life. I’m just saying you can’t have illusions about what you’re getting into. Modern people ain’t ready for that kind of honesty with their reality. People want things spelled out for them, black and white. So you get folks loving the vampires and welcoming them with open arms and open necks, or you get these vigilante squads running all over Europe putting the Sangers to the torch, damn near like the Spanish Inquisition all over again.
That’s when we really got flooded, and just when we needed UMBRA the most, we got shut down ‘cause of the Supreme Court.
THE STANDARD BEARER
You’re referring to the decision of Ferenczy v United States?
[Editor’s Note: In the decision of Ferenczy v United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution did not specifically define what constituted a ‘person’. Therefore, the Constitution, and all the protections it grants applied to Nocturns as well.]
MR. BLACK
Oh yeah. Never mind that four of the justices had it right. That was the whole shebang really. UMBRA became an embarrassment and simply had to go away. I mean, you have to remember who was in office, and they weren’t going to have something like UMBRA show up and blow up in their faces, right when we were poised to reap so many benefits from our sunlight-sensitive friends right? So we were told to bug out and had to sign the requisite NDA’s for the umpteenth time. Never mind the many monsters we’d actually taken down. Nope, they just wanted to forget and pretend the whole thing had never happened.
THE STANDARD BEARER
What happened to the vampires that aided you? The good ones?
MR. BLACK
First of all, like I’ve been saying, there’s no such thing as a ‘good one’. That sounds racist; you know ‘the only good one is a dead one’ type rhetoric. That’s not what I’m getting on at all. A lot of these vampires come from times with different moralities. The longer they live, the more isolated they become from what society considers the norm.
I’ll relate it to us. Look at some of the outfits young ladies wear today. I’m not talking about the crazy club ‘look at me’ outfits, though that applies – I’m talking about what society considers acceptable. Go back in time only about a hundred years and society would consider those outfits outrageous! Hell, you don’t even have to go back in time, that’s the case in some parts of the world.
So say you’ve got a vampire that came of age during the middle-ages. He’s going to have a completely different set of morals. Then you add to the fact that with longevity comes this arrogance that the human world and its rules don’t apply to them. Human Life is already cheap from their point of view. Eventually, they wind up in two camps; someone keeps them in line or drives stakes through their chests.
But to answer your question about the ‘good ones’, I’m sure they kept them on in some manner. Like I said, UMBRA had stuff over every single one of ‘em. Didn’t fully trust them. This is good advice. We found out where they kept caches of valuables or had certain old mementos they still clung to. Maybe they liked keeping tabs on their relative’s descendants. They get sentimental that way, the old ones. Reminds them of when they were human. I guess it keeps ‘em grounded in some way, and maybe that’s why they don’t go all bug-shit and psycho. Anyway, the governments had stuff, ‘hostages’ against them going ‘off the res’. They’d use that to keep them motivated. Let me tell you, once you have an asset like a vampire willing to do your bidding, you don’t let that go. Ever.
THE STANDARD BEARER
Do you think there are more ‘bad ones’ out there like you used to hunt during your days in UMBRA? More ‘monsters’ as you put it?
MR. BLACK
You ain’t been listening too well, have you? It’s a guarantee.
THE STANDARD BEARER
Sorry, I had some of these questions written down in advance. Um, since the government dissolved UMBRA, is there a replacement organization out there? Something to keep tabs on or stop the really bad vampires?
MR. BLACK
Don’t know. If there is, it isn’t in the white world and it’s gotta be more black than UMBRA ever was. The Vatican keeps an eye on ‘em with some kind of secret order. Other than that, I don’t know. Trying to deal with them like common criminals isn’t going to work. Our legal system is completely inadequate for dealing with these guys. What’s 25 to life really mean to a vampire? But that’s all we’re left with, regular old law enforcement. They’re woefully unprepared. It’s like sending out your local small town sheriff to try and deal with a hodgepodge collection of the worst serial killers in history.
The only hope we have is, well… I know some former UMBRA teams went into law enforcement when we got told to stand down. We can only hope that they’re the ones who will run into the really bad ones and that when they do, they take the gloves off. But they’d be risking everything. After all, what are the odds? Not good my friend. Not good.
