Free Dead Beat by Jim Butcher Page A

many now, but there are plenty more where they came from. They're only one flavor of vampire. And vampires are only one flavor of supernatural predator. It's a jungle out there, Butters, and people aren't anywhere near the top of the food chain."
    Butters shook his head. "And you're telling me that nobody knows about it?"
    "Oh, lots of people know about it," I said. "But the ones who are in the know don't go around talking about it all that much."
    "Why not?"
    "Because they don't want to get locked up in a loony bin for three months for observation, for starters."
    "Oh," Butters said, flushing. "Yeah. I guess I can see that. What about regular people who see things? Like sightings and close encounters and stuff?"
    I blew out a breath. "That's the second thing you have to understand. People don't want to accept a reality that frightening. Some of them open their eyes and get involved—like Murphy did. But most of them don't want anything to do with the supernatural. So they leave it behind and don't talk about it. Don't think about it. They don't want it to be real, and they work really hard to convince themselves that it isn't."
    "No," Butters said. "I'm sorry. I just don't buy that."
    "You don't need to buy it," I said. "It's true. As a race, we're an enormous bunch of idiots. We're more than capable of ignoring facts if the conclusions they lead to make us too uncomfortable. Or afraid."
    "Wait a minute. You're saying that a whole world, multiple civilizations of scientific study and advancement and theory and application, all based around the notion of observing the universe and studying its laws is… what? In error about dismissing magic as superstition?"
    "Not just in error," I said. "Dead wrong. Because the truth is something that people are afraid to face. They're terrified to admit that it's a big universe and we're not."
    He sipped coffee and shook his head. "I don't know."
    "Come on, Butters," I said. "Look at history. How long did the scholarly institutions of civilization consider Earth to be the center of the universe? And when people came out with facts to prove that it wasn't, there were riots in the streets. No one wanted to believe that we all lived on an unremarkable little speck of rock in a quiet backwater of one unremarkable galaxy. The world was supposed to be flat, too, until people proved that it wasn't by sailing all the way around it. No one believed in germs until years and years after someone actually saw one. Biologists scoffed at tales of wild beast-men living in the mountains of Africa, despite eyewitness testimony to the contrary, and pronounced them an utter fantasy—right up until someone plopped a dead mountain gorilla down on their dissecting table."
    He chewed on his lip and watched the streetlights.
    "Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether."
    "You're saying that the entire human race is in denial," he said.
    "Most of the time," I replied. "It's not a bad thing. It's just who we are. But the weird stuff doesn't care about that—it keeps on happening. Every family's got a ghost story in it. Most people I've talked to have had something happen to them that was impossible to explain. But that doesn't mean they go around talking about it afterward, because everyone knows that those kinds of things aren't real. If you start saying that they are, you get the weird looks and jackets with extra-long sleeves."
    "For everyone," he said, voice still skeptical. "Every time. They just keep quiet and try to forget it."
    "Tell you what, Butters. Let's drive down to CPD and you can tell them how you were just attacked by a necromancer and four zombies. How they nearly outran a speeding car and murdered a security guard who then got up and threw your desk across the room." I paused for a moment to let the silence stretch. "What do you think they'd do?"
    "I don't know," he said. He bowed his