Missing

"It's 10 o'clock, do you know where your children are?" the television in the Allens' living room had asked, but there was no one there to listen. Amy and Derick's parents had sat down in the kitchen to eat, not needing the television to distract the children and, enjoying the quiet, went up directly from the kitchen to their bedroom without bothering to turn the television off. 

It was almost eleven when they realized their children still weren't home and that maybe that was a problem. Amy's mother blamed herself, and chided her husband for leading her astray. 

They called some of the neighbor kids' houses, but all of them had made it home. Amy's mother was the one who suggested calling Derick's school friends too, and that way they found another set of parents whose child was missing, and then another and another. 

It was almost midnight before they finally called the police. The cops zeroed in on the Shaw juvenile, who was known to them, 17-year-old Tommy. He'd been picked up earlier in the summer for shoplifting with a younger boy. Police suspected Tommy of an entire shoplifting ring, but he had an uncle who was a lawyer with plenty of free time and prosecutors didn't want to deal with it. Just make him stop, they told the cops, who picked him up a few days later, beat him up and dropped him off in the woods. They told him they'd beat him again and drop him off even deeper in the woods if they caught him with another kid again. 

Surely, the police reasoned, Tommy had convinced the children to abscond for some nefarious end they had not yet uncovered. 

Police spent the night looking for Tommy and the kids but it was fruitless. In the morning the parents and members of the community joined in. 

In the afternoon, police found a witness who said he saw a group of children digging under a fence to get into the abandoned shopping mall the day before. 

The vampire rumors flared up. But even Amy's mother didn't want to believe them, and she had often let her imagination run wild with possibilities. Vampires were just not possible. The vaccines eradicated vampirism.

But Tommy and the other children were dead, because there were in fact vampires in the shopping mall. The vaccines had not gotten rid of all of them, but had left them in a diminished capacity. Public health officials suspected that, but wanted the credit for eradicating a historical human scourge, and vampires finally faded away from the cultural consciousness. 

The children had come upon the vampires by surprise. They had been feeding on the wildlife roaming into the abandoned shopping mall and the smell of human blood sent them into a frenzy. 

Only young Amy was alive by the time the head vampire put a stop to it. 

-Turn her, he said. We need more. 

But the other vampires were not certain how to turn a human so young, and the head vampire had to do it himself. 

Young Amy didn't cry. She thought of the missing children on the milk carton and wondered what she would look like. Her mother had warned her about all kinds of fantastical dangers, but not vampires. Young Amy tried to struggle against it but the eyes of the head vampire put her in a trance, and then he slowly sucked the life force out of her and replaced it with his own brood's.

She was still Young Amy, but she was Young Amy no more. The creature had the make up and the memories of Young Amy, but it was as if the creature were wearing Young Amy. 

Most importantly the creature had young Amy's youth. That made it powerful. The creature tossed and turned and twisted the innocent sense of wonder it found in young Amy into a hunger for more. 

Ruing the wasted opportunity of the dead children, the vampire set about preparing the creature wearing young Amy to go out in the dark and lure more children into the den.

But the abandoned shopping mall no longer worked. It would be only a matter of time before authorities would search the mall and find the dead bodies. Vampires did not like to handle the bodies of other dead, and preferred to move. Besides, with the death and turning and the plan with the creature wearing young Amy they needed to be closer to the heart of things. 

So they went into the sewers, followed by the government agency men who had been surveilling them in the abandoned shopping mall. They were particularly curious about the head vampire's plan for young Amy and how it could be replicated to defend national interests abroad, or even at home. 

The vampire brood emerged above ground two evenings later in the middle of a playground. There was an equipment shed at one of the fences that had not been used in years because of budget cuts to the local parks and recreation department.

The creature wearing young Amy went out at dusk the next day to play in the playground. There were always children there well into the evening, and the later children stayed the less the parents were concerned with their well being. The creature that wore young Amy knew that because deep inside young Amy knew that.

The creature started with one child the first day and two on the second. The head vampire was very pleased. The creature who wore young Amy spent the next week collecting children for the brood, until eventually they stopped coming to the playground. 

Police believed Tommy was behind the disappearances. Eventually they decided they should search the equipment shed for clues, but by that point federal law enforcement was involved, and the government men who followed the vampires told their counterparts the shed was off limits for national security reasons and that there was nothing there to find in any case. Tommy, or whoever was abducting the children, wouldn't be operating out of the playground the children were going missing in. It would be too obvious.