Red Sky Archive

They called it The Crimson Quiet.

No sirens. No birds. No more prayers screamed into radios. Just the red sky that never left, and the things that walked beneath it.

Nobody really remembered how the world ended. The fires came quickly, some said. Others claimed it was a sickness that rotted the blood from the inside out. It didn’t matter. The vampires remembered, but they weren't telling.

They had ruled the cities for decades now. Not as kings—kings were loud. Kings had courts. No, the vampires ruled the way mold ruled a cellar. Silently. Without contest. With teeth.

Juno lived in the hollowed-out frame of a 24-hour diner, nestled between the rusted remains of two delivery trucks and the skeletal husk of a billboard that used to promise something called “Happy Meals.” The place smelled like rot and nostalgia. She liked that. It reminded her that things used to be worse.

Or better. It was hard to tell the difference anymore.

She slept during the day, curtains pinned tight with rusted forks, and awoke at dusk with the sky still bleeding above her. It had bled for twenty-seven years.

There were others like her, scattered in pockets beneath the city’s wreckage—humans who had not turned, not yet. They told stories on rare nights when the static cleared from the radios. Stories of safe zones, of silver mines, of bloodless resistance. Juno didn’t believe in resistance. Not anymore.

But she did believe in hunger.

She could feel them every night—the vampires. They didn’t breathe, but the space around them remembered what breath felt like. Cold crept in before them like a shadow arriving early. Their presence was a warning the air itself tried to give.

One of them had a name once. He still used it.

Asher.

He wore it like an old jacket—tattered, half-buttoned, but familiar.

Juno first saw him when she was sixteen, crouched on a fire escape and daring the moon to see her. He hadn’t fed yet. She could tell by the way his hands trembled.

He didn’t kill her.

She never asked why.

Now he visited the diner every Tuesday, as if their truce was holy.

Tonight, he brought her a book.

“Found it in a collapsed library off Eighth,” he said, setting it gently on the counter where people used to order burgers at 3 a.m.

The book was brittle and water-stained. Wuthering Heights.

She snorted. “You’re funny.”

“Am I?” he asked, voice velvet around broken glass.

She opened it. On the title page, someone had written in blue pen:

For Alice. For every storm we survived.

“I didn’t take you for a romantic,” she said.

“I’m not,” Asher replied, eyes not leaving her face.

“I just like the storms.”

The silence between them stretched like dried sinew. She hated how human he could seem when he wasn’t hungry. It made her forget.

“You fed tonight?” she asked, not unkindly.

He gave a slow, deliberate nod. “Voluntary donor.”

He always said that. It always sounded like a lie.

She reached for a chipped mug and poured him a splash of rust-filtered water. It was a ritual, pointless and warm.

“You know,” she said, “when I was little, I used to believe that when the sun stopped setting, the world would end. Like, really end. Gone. Just black.”

Asher sipped the water. “It did end. Just not for us.”

She didn’t answer. Outside, the wind scraped through the broken window like a whispered warning.

He stood. “I can bring another book next week.”

“You won’t,” she replied.

He hesitated.

“Because you’re starving,” she said plainly. “I can see it in your neck. You’ve been starving for weeks.”

His lips parted, but no words followed.

She stepped around the counter. “I’m not scared of you, Asher. You should know that by now.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s what scares me.”

The lights flickered—faint, solar-powered ghosts. She was close enough to smell iron on his breath, like old pennies and earth.

“You came here for something,” she said.

He nodded. “I wanted to remember what being forgiven felt like.”

She exhaled through her nose. “Romantic after all.”

Then, she did something she never had before.

She touched his chest.

Not hard. Just enough to let him know she saw him.

“You can stay,” she whispered. “Just for the night.”

He didn’t move. But his eyes—burning, bloodless things—softened at the edges.

And so they sat together beneath the humming neon, two silhouettes against a ruin, pretending—for just a little longer—that survival wasn’t the same thing as loneliness.

Outside, the red sky watched.

And waited.