A lot of frankly melodramatic language has been used to describe me through history. Scourge, ghoul, night-bringer, despoiler, blah blah blah (blah! I vant to -- nevermind.)
100 years ago I despised the emergence of mass-market pop culture because the Bela Lugosi style hunchbacked Count is such a reductive and harmful stereotype. But then came a sort of renaissance: Anne Rice and True Blood and Twilight -- while reductive in their own ways -- at least brought with them a lot of really dumb teenagers who willingly (willingly!) fed themselves to me. I am no more the sparkly Edward Cullen of Stephanie Meyer's addled brain than I am the beclawed creeping Nosferatu of the silent era. But I would rather pretend to be the former than the latter. A wink and a little flash of fang was all it took to reel in a fresh new feed every single night.
So I was actually doing well for myself. I would never in a million years have traded that for what I've got now. I know you may have heard that I take a special sadistic pleasure in the state of the world today -- well, I don't. I was human once myself; I like human things and human culture. The destruction of society is as sad for me as anyone. And let me also be clear that every human in my stable lives there by choice. For the ones who want to leave, I allow them. I do not need to keep prisoners -- the willing chattel are not in short supply. I treat them well and I keep them fed. It's the basic tenet of reciprocity.
They come to me half-crazed and half-dead themselves, having wandered who knows how many miles through the ruin and having lost who knows how much. When they realize what I am, that I am Special, that I can walk freely in the outside world without drawing notice, that I can gather supplies for them while they remain indoors, deep underground and safe, that under my care they will never have to hide and flee and cower in makeshift bunkers and worry whether today is the day the mob finally wins -- when they understand implicitly the terms of the deal before I even have to say -- they fall to their knees and actually beg me to take them in. They yank down their collars and bare their grimy necks and say "look, see, you can drink all you want, just don't make me go back out there. Don't send me back to them." The truth is I don't need to take anyone anymore -- my stable has grown so large that I really shouldn't -- but like I said. I'm not the soulless monster of cinema. I want to help. So go figure: me, formerly one of the most hated things in God's creation, now a savior of the human race.