The land around Kengir in central Kazakhstan was bare and malnourished. Dry rock and brush were sprawled across the Kazakh steppes as the sun scorched the sediment. The nearby river had all but run dry, providing very little water to the parched land.
It was harsh and inhospitable, and yet, plopped upon that arid wasteland was what looked like a small city. Power cables stretched across the clear sky, swinging lightly above chain linked fences covered in barbed wire. Wooden watch towers stood like sentinels at every corner.
Osamu and Taeko found themselves walking through the city-like settlement together as the searing breeze kicked up a cloud of dirt in their faces. There seemed to be two kinds of people inhabiting the settlement; armed, Soviet guards and prisoners dressed in ragged, work down, filthy clothes. Everywhere Osamu looked, he saw prisoners chopping at the bases of trees with axes, groups of prisoners being led onto trucks to go and mine for copper or carve gravel out of solid rock with heavy pickaxes.
There were many different kinds of prisoners. Males and females, young and old. Thousands upon thousands of prisoners lived in the settlement, always with armed guards looming over their shoulders. Osamu noticed their shoes were worn down and some had even made makeshift shoes out of string and tire rubber. Anything would do, as long as the ground wouldn’t scorch the soles of their feet.
The only people who had names were the guards. The prisoners, however, were always addressed by the number stitched onto their uniform. The prison population was mostly comprised of Ukranians, but the camp included smaller numbers of Poles, Kurds, Moldovans, Russians, and East Asians. No matter who they were, they were all put to work. Woodcutting, copper mining, digging in the quarry, constructing new housing for future cities and towns, there was all sorts of work to be done.
A young, blonde girl ran right past Osamu and Taeko as they wandered through the camp. They turned and watched as she went to grab a pair of socks that were left hanging on the perimeter fence in her section. She stood on an empty, wooden barrel and got onto the tips of her toes managing to pinch the socks between her thumb and index finger. She then carefully climbed down from the barrel and sat down to put them on, but was interrupted when a guard spotted her.
The girl immediately stood on her bare feet, the sun-soaked ground stinging her soles. She bowed her head and clenched her socks tightly, her eyes widening with fear. The guard approached her, the sunlight casting a shadow from the bill of his cap that stretched across his face.
“Are those your socks?” the guard asked.
The girl raised her head. For a mere second, her innocent, green eyes met with his shadowy brown eyes. It was enough to make her bow her head again and drop her gaze towards her feet.
“I asked you a question. Are those your socks?”
The girl nodded her head. “They got wet…”
Osamu stared into the guard’s eyes as he stood behind the terrified girl. He instantly recognized the the scowl on his face and the fury in his eyes. After all, he was wearing the exact same emotions on his own face.
“Are they dry?” the guard asked.
The girl squeezed her socks to feel for moisture, but all she felt was warm cotton. Seeing they were dry, she nodded her head again.
“Then go.” the guard said.
The girl raised her head, a slight smile blossoming across her face. “Thank you…”
Relieved, the girl turned around and ran back towards her camp. The moment she turned, the guard pulled out his TT-33 pistol and aimed at the girl’s head. He squeezed the trigger and shot her, the bullet passing through the back of her head and exiting through her left cheek. She fell face-first onto the dirt ground as screams rang out across the camp.
Just as quickly as the screams rang out, they immediately fell silent again as several more guards approached the girl’s body. They picked her corpse up, four guards each grabbing a limb, and carried her over past the perimeter fence, where no prisoners were allowed to go without explicit permission.
The guard that shot her put his gun back into his holster, scanning the shocked faces of the prisoners. “What are you all looking at? Get back to your shifts.”
“Why are they carrying her there?” Taeko asked.
“To make it look like they shot her because she went out on her own.” Osamu answered, his hands stuffed into his pockets. He turned and saw the girl’s socks lying on the ground where she was shot. Just a minute ago, they were dry. Now, they were soaked in the girl’s blood.
Taeko turned and saw a young man with black, shoulder-length hair, a full beard, and a black top hat to match his black suit. He was the only person at the settlement not in either Soviet uniform or a drab prisoner jacket. He pulled the slinky, gold chain in the breast pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a watch. He stole a quick glance at his watch before turning and walking away from the scene.
“Osamu. Look.” Taeko said, pointing to the man as he walked away.
Blinking through more of Johan’s memories, Osamu and Taeko suddenly found themselves found themselves in the settlement’s cantina, where the prisoners were served bricks of dry bread and tasteless gruel. They sat at long, rectangular tables cut out from dark wood and ate their food in total silence as armed guards stood watch over them from all four corners of the dining hall.
Osamu marched down the aisle with Taeko trailing close behind them. They barged out the back door of the cantina and found the man in the black suit yet again, this time sitting with some of the camp administrators as they ate meat, drank beers, and played cards. The food given to the man was enough for Osamu to tell that he was in a special position at the camp. None of the prisoners were ever given meat or sugar, let alone alcohol.
Osamu felt someone gaze crawl upon his back. He turned his head and saw a young, blonde haired boy watching the guards play cards from the barred window of the cantina. The boy wore a dejected expression on his face, the corners of his mouth sinking low and his blue eyes cast downwards.
“Ah! You guys are assholes.” said one of the camp administrators, lifting his cap off his head and sweeping his raven hair back with his hand. “I can’t believe I lost to you!”
“You really haven’t been on the ball lately.” chimed another administrator. “Johan, do you want another beer?”
The man in the black suit smiled and shook his head. “I’m fine, thank you. Shall we go for another round?”
“I see now.” Osamu said. “This is the Steplag. It was set up in the village of Kengir in central Kazakhstan. The Shoku Twins and I have seen this place before, but it was just one of many in the Soviet gulag system.”
“I don’t understand. Was the fake Johan born here?” Taeko asked.
The next memory brought them to the camp orphanage. It was crammed full of children who had been separated from their parents, the result of Soviet efforts to break up the families of those they deemed enemies of the people. The children weren’t fed any better than the prisoners, leaving many of them sick and malnourished.
Head lice, gum disease, and weight loss plagued nearly every child being raised at the camp. Though they were too young to handle hard labor, the children were expected to learn and regurgitate the pro-Soviet propaganda fed to them by their teachers, as to assure they never develop the same reformist beliefs of their parents.
There were two orphanages in the children’s sector. One was for human children, the other for vampire children. While the vampires were still taught to love and honor the Soviet Union, the man in the black suit was in charge of teaching them another ideology, one that promised to make the world a better, more peaceful place.
The children’s faces lit up with joy the moment they saw Johan walk into their classroom, which only had a few chairs and rectangular, wooden tables to sit at. The kids got up from their seats and sat in a semicircle on the floor around Johan. Johan always brought poems and picture books with him to the classroom, each one telling innocent stories about finding courage when one is scared, sharing responsibility to help those around you, and the value of following directions handed down from one’s superiors. He told tales of talking caterpillars, courageous butterflies, and loyal dogs, but never of free-willed, free-thinking human beings.
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The children’s stories captured the essence of what he was trying to say in a much more digestible way, but it was when he took those teachings to the adult vampires in the Steplag that he communicated his message as clearly and nakedly as possible. In the next memory, Johan used the cantina as a lecture hall for his teachings. It was late at night, after all the work had been done for the day. Johan’s lectures were the last thing the vampiric population of the Steplag heard before they were sent off to bed every night.
Osamu and Taeko stood in the shadows of the back corner of the cantina, sitting behind a blonde haired, blue-eyed child who listened to Johan’s message intently. Surrounded by roughly four-hundred vampires, Johan had everyone’s attention as he stood in the center of the dining hall with his hands behind his back. He took off his suit jacket and hung it over one of the nearby chairs, revealing his bright, red vest and white dress shirt beneath.
“For those of you who haven’t met me yet, my name is Johan Sommers, and I, like the rest of you…did not consent to being born. Each of us was plucked out from our peaceful oblivion and put here. No, not here in this labor camp. Not here in Kazakhstan. On this earth. In this world.
“Many of you here were born in the old kingdom. Your parents were proud vampires. They were soldiers, farmers, blacksmiths, sailors, you name it. The Vampirical Monarchy was a kingdom of industrious and ingenious people. We stretched our nation from the banks of the Drava to the Strait of Tartary. Free from our Catholic oppressors, we roamed the Balkans, soaked by the Caspian Sea, and even rode horses across these very Kazakh steppes. We stepped out of the bounds of Europe like curious children to find deserts and high mountains, vast oceans and windswept valleys, all of it stolen and paid for in the blood of those who lived there before us.
“The guards tell you not to utter his name, but it would be impossible to talk of the old kingdom without mentioning him; Dracula. The man whose nationalist fervor saved us from the yoke of the Catholics. It was because of him that we vampires finally had a nation to call home. It is also because of him and his legacy that we are here now, still paying penance for crimes committed more than four-hundred years ago.
“Dracula’s ambitions rotted him from the inside like a cancer. They morphed him like a deformity. He had already accomplished what no vampire had ever done before, but he was a king with a tyrant’s heart. No single victory would satisfy him. And so, he set his sights upon the world itself, upon the the Balkans, the Caspian Sea, the deserts, the high mountains, the vast oceans, and the windswept valleys over yonder.
“And just like that, he became little more than a butcher. We wiped out entire ethnic groups, erased entire cultures. He had extrapolated every grudge he had with the Catholics onto all of humanity. We would never be safe anywhere on this planet until humanity had been brought to heel, until vampires formed an empire to balance out the global power dynamic.
“His self-appointed mission of shattering all of mankind’s most prominent empires culminated in the Second Great Holy War when he sought to conquer Japan as well. This war was his downfall. Japan’s Shinto pantheon was very much prepared for our arrival. The reports of weakness and fragility within the pantheon weren’t accurate at all. Amaterasu had already reorganized and re-centralized the gods.
“Dracula never gained a foothold on mainland Japan, and soon after, he fell ill. He took his wife and most trusted soldier with him so they could die on Japanese land rather than at sea. Dracula’s death signaled the end of the Second Great Holy War, and because he died without an heir, it also proved to be the end of the nation he sacrificed everything to build.
“Soldiers were left stranded on Japanese soil and our empire was picked apart by feuding lords in a violent succession dispute. The chaos invited reprisal from humanity, and the lands we stole from them were soon awash with our blood and returned to their rightful owners. The Great Erasure, it was called. It was the genocide of our race at the hands of humans after the Second Great Holy War.
“Very few vampires survived the Great Erasure, but those who did scattered across the world, living in obscurity and poverty, existing just for the sake of existing. You see, all of us are here right now because of Dracula. More than four centuries later, we are still paying for his catastrophic ambitions and the cruel methods by which he sought to achieve them. The great irony is that it was his attempt to make a free world for vampires that ensured that no vampire would be safe anywhere.
“He had brutalized and crossed so many people that none would accept us. His legacy lives on to this day. It’s why we’re all here in Steplag. It’s why you build for the Soviets and are paid your wages in bullets and beatings. It’s why Hitler and the Nationalist Socialists thought we were just as much of a cancer upon them as the Jews, Gypsies, and Negroes. It’s why we share bunks with the Japanese, an old enemy we once thought of as rodents, in American internment camps.
“For all your romanticization of the old kingdom and of Dracula, did any of you ever stop to consider any of this? Did you ever stop to think of the irreparable and long-lasting damage he caused to our race? He ushered in an era where simply being born a vampire entitles you to an existence of pure suffering, because all they see in us is him.
“Well…it is my ambition to end my people’s suffering. I wish to free my fellow vampires from Dracula’s curse and prove to the world that our wish to atone for our unforgivable crimes is real. A race like ours, with no nation to call home and no neighbors on this planet willing to shelter us, can only atone and free ourselves in one way; euthanasia.
“The time I spent at Goethe University in Germany was spent refining and debating this philosophy. Before the Nazis took power, there were quite a few vampire students attending in secret. They were young intellectuals with the sharpest of minds. Much to my chagrin, they formed a school of thought named after myself; Sommerism.
“It is the acknowledgement and acceptance of our collective guilt for our role in brutalizing the world during the Second Great Holy War. We believed that the circumstances we found ourselves in as a result of Dracula’s failure demanded that we find a solution to our scattered people’s suffering. After much debate, we came upon the answer.
“Sommerists advocate for the reunification of the vampiric race, but not to form a new nation. Instead, we unite so that we may live out the rest of our lives together. We renounce the senseless impulse to have children, and through pacifism, isolationism, and strict adherence to anti-natalism, we can continue to live in peace until we slowly pass away. With a minimal to non-existent birth rate, nature and demographics will take their course. Instead of being rounded up and slaughtered in camps, we can fade from this world peacefully and quietly.
“We will never know peace in this world. Dracula’s failure has ensured that much. As long as we insist on carrying on this miserable existence, our race will always be at war with the world itself. Our children and their children will be condemned to a lifetime of fighting and persecution simply because they were born into this world as vampires. It wasn’t their fault they were born. It’s ours.
“If you know what cruelty lies in wait for the children you wish to have, then what possesses you to bring them into this world? To produce offspring for your own happiness, despite knowing that their lives will only amount to suffering, is a vile crime on par with genocide. And so, I call for our race to abstain from producing a new generation of children.
“The ones that exist now will be the final generation of vampires. All of us will pass first, and after living long, peaceful lives, they will pass as well. Then, the vampires will be no more. We’ll have gone from this world, extinguished as peacefully as a candle’s flame. That is the sole method by which we can save ourselves from the horrors of this world, and from the everlasting curse of Dracula’s failure.”
It wasn’t entirely clear to Osamu and Taeko whether or not Johan had won their hearts. Some of the men and women cried in silence. Others wore heavily contemplative expressions. Osamu looked into the eyes of some of the more ragged and worn down men, seeing the thousand-yard stares in their eyes as they thought back to their own roles in the Second Great Holy War.
“Your blind adherence to nationalism and to life itself will lock us into a cyclical fate of war and annihilation.” Johan said. “It’s a fate that you will never live long enough to undo. The conflict will outlive us all and our children will inherit it in our stead. Why do that to them? So…let us stop this charade. Sommerism is an ideology of atonement and peaceful resolution to a conflict centuries in the making. Please, take it.
“It may be too late for you to live peaceful lives, but when those children are sent off into the world, they might have a chance to avoid being brutalized in much the same way we were. The Great Erasure isn’t some old, historical event. It is still unfolding right now, and each of us are suffering through it. The key to peace is surrender. Let go of all your attachments, of all your dogma. Once you do that…you’ll find that it is far better to have never existed than to have lived and died at all.”
The blonde boy sitting in front of Osamu stood from his seat and clapped, tears streaming from his ocean-blue eyes. After him, the other vampiric men and women followed. One by one, every person stood from their seats and drowned the room in applause.
Starved of hope, the vampires knew that even if they won their freedom tomorrow, no nation would ever treat them with respect. They weren’t just trapped in Kengir. The world itself was their Steplag. The nations were the watchtowers, and all of humanity was a guard with a gun to their head.
Finally, Osamu and Taeko understood what Johan had spent his time doing during his reformative years in Germany. He had developed an ideology dedicated to the demographic euthanasia of his own race, a form of liberty and supplication for the crimes committed during the Second Great Holy War.
The applause and positive reaction to Johan’s message, the reluctant, yet complete acceptance of their proposed responsibility to fade from this world, struck Osamu and Taeko very deeply and very differently. Taeko was terrified to see what had just happened. She had never heard of a race trying so hard to wipe itself out from the world. She stood with her mouth agape as her gaze quickly bounced across the room to see all the tear-soaked faces and clapping hands.
But for Osamu, this moment in history inspired nothing but rage. His anger was so powerful that Taeko felt it emanating off of him. She turned her head and saw him grit his teeth. His nails dug into his palm until they drew blood from the skin. His disgusted and murderous glare was focused on Johan.
“Osamu?” Taeko muttered, her voice barely audible beneath the thunderous applause.
Osamu didn’t answer. His silence and visibly boiling anger terrified Taeko even more than Johan’s self-destructive ideology. As if the earth itself shared his rage, the cantina suddenly shook and shuddered. The applause came to an abrupt end as the prisoners all ducked under the tables.
“Earthquake! Cover your heads!” Johan ordered.
Brief shrieks and worried gasps filled the room as Kengir shook violently for nearly fifty seconds, then it all came to a sudden stop. Johan poked his head out from under the table, and the prisoners soon followed once they realized the earthquake had stopped.
“It’s alright, everyone. Be wary of aftershocks.” Johan said in a calm voice. “That’s strange…we don’t usually get earthquakes around here…”
Osamu stood in the darkness, his glare focused on Johan and his mind set on one thing; the destruction of Sommerism.