Damn I miss them.

The men in my family had been coal miners for as long as people had been pulling the black rock out of the ground. I went to school because that was the law, but I knew it was just a matter of time before I went down into the mines. Do you know how it feels to step into an elevator covered in dirt and grit, and sink down a few hundred feet until the air is hot and heavy and you know the place you're in now has never, ever seen the sun? Now think about how you'd feel if you knew that's what you'd be doing every day for the rest of your life. For me it was like the mountains on top of us all were resting squarely on my shoulders. I hated it with a passion, I mean c'mon, wasn't I going to spend enough time underground after I was dead?

How was I to know what fate had in store for me?

It turns out I didn't spend the rest of my life riding an elevator down to the basement of Hell. Someone handed me a gun and air-mailed me there instead. I had never put a tremendous amount of effort into my schoolwork, but believe it or not I knew where Vietnam was. I even had a pretty good idea of why I was being sent there.

We called it the Green Hell. I thought the mines had been rough. I didn't know what rough was. Rough is when you're being hunted by people who know the language, locals, and terrain infinitely better than you ever will. Rough is watching somebody cut themselves in half with a burst from there own gun because they're too high to know what they're doing.

It was a wake-up call. Once I was surrounded by death on that scale and in that manner I had no choice but to dwell on some ideas that I just hadn't considered before. What in the world was I doing here? Why was my country making me do this? Was I ready to die? If I wasn't, did it even make a difference?

I don't know. Maybe it was just all the drugs.

Regardless, I survived. I had scars on my back from being too close to a Jeep when it exploded , and I had come within an inch of losing both my eyes to a piece of flying shrapnel, but when my year was up I was still standing. That was a whole lot better than a lot of the other boys I had come over here with. I wasn't the same person though. I had asked myself questions that, in my opinion had to be answered, and that couldn't be answered back home.

I put in for another tour of duty, and another after that one actually. I rode the war out. I didn't find the answers I was looking for, only more questions. By the end I think I was just trying to prove to myself that I was stronger than the war was.

Ten days before the last American troop was pulled out every lucky break I had ever gotten and every close call I had come out of got evened out. I met my sire.

Me and some buddies of mine were celebrating the end of tribulation by getting trashed at some local dive. We were all sitting around a table knocking back shots of cheap liquor when this little local guy walked in by himself. I saw him come in, glance around, and walk over to our table. He started talking to us in broken English. He said he needed one of us to come with him. We laughed. One of my friends told him to buzz off, then he took a swill of booze and spit it all over the guy. The little man put his hand on my friend's wrist and slung him out of the chair and across the room. We stopped laughing.

All false modesty aside the bunch of us knew how to fight. But that five foot nothin' weakling beat us all over that bar. It was only a matter of minutes before I was lying face down on the floor staring up at the ceiling fan through a red haze of blood that was running into my eyes from a cut on my forehead.

The last thing I saw when I was alive was that local who had started this ruckus standing over me. All he said was "You'll do"

I woke up some time later as a vampire. He didn't tell me what I was, but you hear a lot of ghost stories growing up in a holler. And I'm not so pig-headed that I'll keep on claiming something's impossible after I've seen it with my own two eyes.

The Vietnamese man's name was Bay. It turns out that he was in trouble with some local boys called the Demon Tigers or something, and needed a ticket out of the country. He figured hooking up with a US serviceman was a good way to go.

I hated him. I still do. Not that there was anything I could do to him. I was so Blood Bound it wasn't even funny, even though I didn't know what that was back then. We made it out of Vietnam on a military plane headed for San Francisco. Bay settled down there and got in with some of the Asian communities well enough to suit him. I hung around for a while keeping myself busy with odd jobs.

I spent twenty odd years living in Bay's twisted shadow. I ranged all up and down the West Coast from Baja to Vancouver, but something always pulled me back to San Fran. Strangely enough I usually got back into town just in time to pull Bay's butt out of some mess he had gotten himself into. The jerk would've gotten himself killed ten times if it hadn't been for me. Each time I saw him in a tight spot I hoped I would have the strength to just let him off himself. I never did. I was always there just in time to pull his staked carcass out of some bonfire or take a spray of bullets for him. Every time it made me hate him that much more though.

Six months ago I got a break.

They've been calling it the Week of Nightmares, and in my opinion that sounds appropriate. From what I understand San Francisco was hit harder than a lot of places. I don't know why, but in a strange way I'm glad. During the chaos Bay disappeared. I prayed to God that he was dead, but I didn't waste any time making sure. I had been making preparations for the last couple years to make a break for it, but had never had the guts. In the confusion I disappeared from the West Coast.