Free The Last Vampire by Whitley Strieber Page A

and his crew found these things, they collected them with reverence and they blessed them and they cremated them and made a little ritual of scattering the ashes.
    Melodramatic? You could say so. Sentimental. Sure. But his crew were united on two things: Any human remains they located would be respected, and no vampire would be left alive. Scorched-earth policy. Absolute.
    Think if they had to read Miranda warnings. Think if the vampires were allowed legal defense, say, in India, where the prisons leaked and it could take years before a case came to trial? What if they claimed murder as their natural right, and proved that they were created by God to prey upon the human being? Presumably, laws would then have to be written allowing them to take a certain number of humans as prey each year, much as we allow ourselves to take whales.
    And what about the endangered-species acts in various countries, most especially Europe and the U.S.? If the vampire was declared an endangered species — and it was conceivable, given their comparative rarity — then Paul and his crew would be out of business altogether. Governments would end up in the business of encouraging the vampire to breed and protecting its habitat — the ghetto, the teeming slum, the homeless shelter.
    A man with glasses approached Paul. “We understand that you will be able to inform us of the manner of death.”
    “Death by misadventure.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “The man had a bad adventure, obviously. So that’s the conclusion — death by misadventure.”
    “You are coming all the way from KL to tell us this — this nothing?”
    “The corpse is U.S. property,” Paul said. “I’m going to remove it to the States.” He needed it. He needed any trace of nonhuman DNA he could find. The hair from Tokyo wasn’t enough. But two samples — that would end the human-animal controversy.
    “Now, wait,” the colonel inspector said, “now —”
    “It’s a done deal.” He pulled the fax he’d gotten from the Thai foreign office before he left KL. He unfolded it. “ ‘You will deliver the remains to Mr. Paul Ward of the United States Embassy.’ That is what it says.”
    The man nodded, reading the letter. Then his eyes met Paul’s. His eyes pleaded. “Please tell me in confidence what has happened.”
    “He met with a misadventure.”
    You rarely saw anger in the Thai. They were a reserved and very polite people. But the inspector’s eyes grew hard and small, and Paul knew that there was fury seething within him. Thailand had never been colonized for a reason. The Thai might be polite, but they would fight for their independence quite literally to the last man. No deals. “I would like to know, then, if I may, whether or not we are likely to see any more such murders.”
    Paul gestured toward the yellow, sticklike corpse. “I’m a scientist. I’m trying to figure it out.”
    “Is it, then, a disease?”
    “No, no, he was killed. You can count on that.”
    The room was full of police and forensics experts. Bangkok was not happy with this bizarre situation. Interpol was not happy, and asking all sorts of questions about who the hell had been running around with forged ID of that quality in his wallet, while at the same time pretending to Thailand that they knew who the guy was. Lots of secret handshakes being traded all around.
    Somebody was going to have to tell the widow and her three kids, too, and Paul suspected that he would be elected.
    “I am Dr. Ramanujan,” a compact man said, jostling up, gesturing with his sterile gloves. “What has done this? Do you know what has done this, because I do not know?”
    Paul hated to lie, and he did not lie now. He kept his secret and revealed it at the same time.“A killer did it, using a very special and unusual method of fluid extraction.”
    “And where are the body fluids? The blood, for example?”
    “The fluids are gone.”
    “Gone?” “We will not find the fluids.”
    Ramanujan grinned,