Tonight things were going fairly smoothly. The recalcitrant Romeo was rebooted successfully, though a few minutes later the second server of the pair, Juliet, crashed. “I knew that was going to happen!” said Derrick. They all laughed. Some previous tech with a sense of humor had named the two systems because when one of them went, the other always followed soon after.

“Here,” said David, “I think I’ve got this thing licked. I’ll give you a hand.” He got to his feet and crossed the room to Derrick’s workstation. As he did so his eyes crossed the bank of windows that ran along one wall near the ceiling. Outside they looked out at ground level. There wasn’t much of a view, just the dark parking lot dotted here and there with the orangeish glow of streetlights, but as David’s gaze swept over the windows, he thought he saw something move in the dark.

He considered for a moment asking the others if they’d seen anything, but decided it wasn’t worth mentioning. He had just reached Derrick’s workstation and was bending over to take a look at the computer monitor when all of the lights went out. The room was dropped into darkness, lit by a single dim emergency light and the green glow of an exit sign. The computers had all gone dead as well. Before any of the men could respond to the sudden darkness the windows shattered inward with a crash. A small dark object, most likely a stone, hurled through them and bounced along the floor amid a rain of razor-sharp shards of glass. David expected the alarm to sound, even with the power off it should be working, but nothing happened. The stone was quickly followed by something larger. A man completely dressed in black and wearing a black trench coat, leaped in through the now glassless window and landed gracefully on the floor. His black combat boots crunched on broken glass. His face was lean, with long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. But nobody was looking at his face or his feet. All three of them were staring at his hand, which held a revolver. He swung it across to point at each of them in turn.

“You three just do what I say and nobody has to get hurt,” he said. “Well, not much anyway,” he added with a gleam in his eyes. The three technicians just stared, wide eyed.

“Out the door,” ordered the intruder, and gestured to the computer room’s entrance with his gun. “Come on,” he barked when they hesitated. “I’m not afraid to use this thing, so get!”

They got. He herded them down the corridor and into a little conference room. It was windowless and very dim. An emergency light in the ceiling shed just enough radiance for the trio to see each other’s shocked expressions. The intruder shut the door behind them and said, with a malicious grin, “You’re probably wondering why I’ve called you here today,” then broke out in hysterical laughter at his own joke. David, Derrick and Robert exchanged glances that said clear as words, great, this guy’s a loony.

When the intruder had calmed down he grinned again. David noticed something funny about the madman’s teeth. Before he could analyze what he’d seen the man said, “I’m going to let you three in on a little secret. Most of you mortals don’t know it, but there’s a secret society of immortals in the world. They’ve been around for centuries, and people used to cower at night in fear of them, and they liked it that way, but now people have stopped believing in them, and that’s even better. They live off of the blood of the mortal population and they can never die. You mortals call them nosferatu, or vampires. And I’m one of them.”