Somalia: The Last Vampire

If I had a dollar for every time some fool who fancies himself or herself a Hunter came after me, I'd be a rich woman. Ever since the world found out about my kind's experience in 2015, it's been pure hell. Vampires have lived among humanity for thousands upon thousands of years, existing in secret, stalking the shadows. We only killed when we had to, and were happy to stay out of the limelight. And then a squad of police officers in Los Angeles, California, took on a gang of vampires, and the whole thing got caught on camera, thus exposing our kind to the world.

My name is Rama Suleiman, and I was born in Baalbek, Lebanon, to a Lebanese father, Abdul Suleiman, and a Somali mother, Amina Kader. I lived a normal life in Lebanon, just a young gal in a complex society. My parents were merchants, and I grew up in a lovely home. This was in the old days, back when the French ruled the country, long before the conflict between Muslims and Christians tore apart post-colonial Republic of Lebanon. In 1934, in the nineteenth summer of my life, I encountered a man named Rafiq Washim, and he seduced me.

Rafiq Washim was tall, dark and handsome, a well-traveled and charismatic guy who took my breath away. With his light bronze skin, curly black hair and lime-green eyes, he was simply irresistible. When he arrived in Baalbek, a wealthy young man of impeccable breeding and taste, lots of us girls of marriageable age couldn't shut up about him. Imagine my surprise when he came to my family's villa, and sought to do business with my father.

Thus Rafiq and I were introduced. He was even better-looking than I thought he would be. When our eyes met, my heart skipped a beat. There was a power emanating from that man, and I was drawn to him like a moth to the proverbial flame. I used to dream of running away with him. I was young and impressionable, you understand. No man had ever looked at me the way Rafiq had.

Soon we began meeting each other in secret. Rafiq is the first man I ever had sex with. His passion was unforgettable. Rafiq promised me the world, and I fell for it hook, line and sinker. What he neglected to tell me is the fact that he was a vampire. Rafiq had been around for centuries, traveling the world, seeking adventure and of course, preying on humans for their blood. I fell in love with him, and that proved to be my undoing. Rafiq abducted me and transformed me into one of the undead.

I still remember it like it was yesterday, even though it's been almost a century. I went to bed with Rafiq, and we made love. As I slept, he sank his fangs into my neck, and drank my blood. He leeched away my humanity and replaced it with the monstrous, poisonous and vile venom of life-in-death, as he called his immortality. When I awoke the next day, I was...changed. Transformed from the wee gal I'd been into one of the undead. I became monstrously strong, stronger than five able-bodied men, and I learned that I could outrun a racehorse. Oh, and I will never grow old or get sick. Unless I get decapitated or burned to ash, I'll live forever.

I'm only five-foot-six and weigh one hundred and seventeen pounds soaking wet. With my light brown skin, golden brown eyes and long black hair, I've often been told that I'm cute, sweet and innocent. Rafiq Washim transformed me into the world's deadliest predator. A creature that drinks blood, and slaughters humans like animals. A monster that will not die. A vampire. Rafiq wasn't kidding when he said he wanted to be with me forever. For a time, we were happy together. Two vampire lovebirds, terrorizing the Middle East and Africa.

For decades Rafiq and I wandered the world, from Lebanon to Israel, from Saudi Arabia to Somalia, from Ghana to Nigeria, from Ethiopia to Syria, killing and feeding. We cut a bloody swath across these nations, terrorizing the locals and transforming a sizeable number of them in order to fill our ranks. The thing about vampire society is that there are just a few rules that aren't meant to be broken.

Number one, humans can never know we exist. Number two, we cannot turn too many humans into vampires because an overabundance of predators in any ecosystem will cause the food course to dwindle. Rafiq and I kind of broke that rule with our ceaseless predations in the Middle East and Africa, and became outcasts because of it. Whenever there's a lot of us vampires around, we run the risk of discovery. To our kind, that's a potential extinction-level event. If humanity were to discover our existence, they'd rise against us and hunt us down like rats. We'd be extinct...fast.

I didn't know these things at the time, but Rafiq, being six hundred years old, should have known better. Looking back, it's not hard to understand why he was so careless. For centuries Rafiq had been a rogue and habitual rule-breaker among both mortals and vampires, and he was practically daring the Elders of the vampire world to take him out. Well, this time they desperately wanted to grant him his wish. They hunted us fiercely, and tracked us down across a continent. We fled, and as we did, our followers were slaughtered, our former strongholds raided and destroyed.

We faced the full might of the vampire nation, and they ran us to the ground. At last, we were holed up in a cave in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and utterly surrounded by our enemies. With thirty vampires armed with guns and swords less than a hundred feet from where we hid, I knew that short of a miracle, Rafiq and I wouldn't make it out of there alive. Well, we were already undead but you know what I mean. In mortal life I'd been a devout Muslim, but after becoming a vampire, I doubt I still counted in the eyes of Allah. The Most High wouldn't bother with the vile creature I had become.

Rafiq and I were desperate, as you can imagine. So I did the only thing I could think of. As the vampire warriors outside ordered us to surrender or be destroyed, I took my blade and cut Rafiq's head off. Then I marched outside, holding his severed head in the air. I saved our race from the maddened traitor, I said, and hurled Rafiq's head at a towering vampire warrior who appeared to be in charge. His name was Yousef, originally from Egypt, and he'd been alive since the First Crusade. The vampire prince accepted my plea when I begged for forgiveness for following Rafiq's mad quest. Thus, I saved my skin. All it took was the life of a man I once loved. I had killed my Maker, the ultimate sin for a vampire to commit. My kind are said to have no souls, I don't know if that's true but if I do have a soul, it definitely belongs in hell for what I've done.

I returned into the fold, as it were. Since I laid all the blame on Rafiq, I was allowed to live. For the next few years, I mainly lived in America. I arrived in Los Angeles, California, in 1970, right after the Civil Rights Movement forever changed the nation. As an ancient predator masquerading as a woman of color, I was quite pleased. In the Muslim world, for all of their restrictions, color isn't the rigid indicator of social power that it seems to be in Western societies even as they push for racial diversity and inclusion.

In Arab countries, black men and black women didn't suffer through legally mandated racial segregation, though racism still exists. When I hear about how America treats black people, I shake my head in disgust. If a black man were to show up in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for Hajj in the 1940s, he would have been well-received by the Saudis as a fellow Muslim. In the United States of America, even today, churches are largely segregated along color lines, as are many places. We've never had that in the Muslim world. If you're Black, Asian, white, or any other color, and you're in a Muslim country, your skin matters a lot less to us than your religious affiliation does. That's just how we are.

I made Los Angeles my home, and after five decades, I was thoroughly Americanized and a full-fledged member of Los Angeles society. What can I say? I love Tinseltown. In recent times I remade myself as Rama Solomon, Hollywood actress woman, best-selling fiction author, and globe-trotting human rights activist. Being supernaturally beautiful and ageless totally works to my advantage in a town obsessed with youth and beauty. I'd done the whole guest-star bit on TV shows like Law & Order : SVU, Psych and Arrow. Yeah, life was good.

I'd already made three million working as an actress, and I had a couple of movie roles lined up. I was in a very satisfying relationship with a corporate attorney named Tyrone Kingsbury. You should have seen him, seriously. Tall and sexy, with light brown skin, curly black hair and golden brown eyes. Tyrone is originally from Memphis, Tennessee. His mother is white and his father is of Jamaican descent. He studied law at Howard University and has a brilliant mind housed in one sexy body. If Ty weren't a lawyer, he could be a model if he wanted to. He's that fine. Yeah, we had a good thing going.

Until the day my kind's existence was revealed to an unsuspecting and ill-prepared world. That was the day my world ended. All of a sudden, there was a witch hunt. The humans began looking at one another closely, and mandatory blood tests were instituted. We tried to hide but they flushed us out. Never underestimate the human race's natural viciousness and their willingness to persecute and destroy those who are different.

You'd think that an eternity of standing in the sidelines, watching as humans persecuted their own kind would have prepared us for dealing with them. I mean, our kind had front row seats for some of the worst events in human history. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Holocaust, the persecution of Civil Rights leaders in the U.S. and the Rwandan Genocide, to name but a few. We thought we knew what humanity was capable of. The truth is, we had no idea.

Mobs of angry humans stormed our houses, our apartments, and our lairs, and dragged us into the light of day. They set us ablaze, and slaughtered us gleefully. Thousands of vampires died in the first eight months of The Purge, as the worldwide manhunt for our kind was called. Me? I was one of the smart ones. I went underground...literally. I built myself a fortified, sun-proof and heavily fortified bunker in the desert outside Los Angeles, and slept. Vampires drink blood to survive, but we can also last long time without it.

There are stories of ancient vampires sleeping for centuries in their crypts, having grown disgusted with the world. Time to see if those stories are true. I'm going in for the deep sleep. I honestly don't know when or if I'll wake up. According to vampire legend, our kind can survive ages in hibernation but we cannot come out of it on our own. A fellow vampire must dig us up, and feed us human blood to jump-start our systems, bring our bodies back to life, and effectively reanimate us. Must be why there aren't any ancients left. They've gone to sleep without anyone to wake them up. Perhaps that is to be my fate. Sucks, but beats the hell out of being dragged into the sunlight and burned to ash by a mob of unruly humans, don't you think? I don't care if the sky is falling and the solar system is going nova when I wake up as long as I'm around to see it. I'm a survivor.