CHAPTER ONE: BLADE
Nightime, a trauma ward at an inner-city hospital: It's 1967, the Summer of Love and -- BOOM! Entry doors swing open as paramedics wheel in a female bleeder, Vanessa (20s, black, nine months pregnant). She's deathly pale, spewing founts of blood from a savagely slashed throat.
A shock-trauma team swarms over her, inserting a vacutainer into an artery to draw blood, wrapping a blood pressure cuff around her arm. The respiratory therapist feeds an endotracheal tube down the woman's ruined throat, attaches that to an Amblu bag. The woman starts spasming violently. It takes three staff members just to hold her down.
Her water's broken and she's going into uterine contractions. The woman bolts upright, screaming to wake the dead.
Paramedics think she was attacked by some type of animal. Doctors perform an emergency C-Section, and her baby (a boy) is born alive just as she dies.
Nightime, thirty years later at an inner-city industrial ghetto: A decaying no man's land populated by condemned buildings and hungry homeless. Steam rises from manhole covers, drifting across the litter-lined streets. Suddenly a black Mercedes 850 appears over the crest of a hill, roaring past us, stereo system belting out.
Racquel, a wasp-wasted woman, sits behind the wheel. 20s, rich, sickeningly attractive. Hungry eyes. Squirming around in the passenger seat is Dennis, a model/actor boy-toy with a sub-zero IQ and a "fuck me sideways" grin. Racquel eyeballs Dennis, "if looks could devour". Racquel slides a manicured hand up his thigh, squeezes his groin. Dennis moans.
She pulls her hand away, downshifts.
They are heading to an underground nightclub (located, oddly, in a slaughterhouse) somwhere in Los Angeles. After addressing the doorman in Russian, Racquel brings the young man into the club. The man is confused and trying to understand the rules of the club.
Some of the regulars physically push him. And just as he says, "I need a drink." The sprinkler suddenly system activates, raining blood down on everyone inside. It is then that he (and the audience) realizes that everyone in the club is a vampire. Dennis desperately tries to get away.
Dennis lands on the floor, falling at someone's boot-clad feet. He looks up. A dark figure in the shadows, unnoticed until this moment. The figure stands, moves into the light as time screeches to a halt. A black man, towers above Dennis, wearing dark glasses and a leather longcoat. A sneer of cruel contempt etched upon a face tempered by a lifetime of horror.
His name is Blade. His gaze is as cold and pitiless as a midnight sun. The vampire club-goers stare back. Nuclear silence. And then -- All hell breaks loose.
Blade pulls out a shotgun and opens fire on the vampires, who instantly burn to ashes when killed.
When the gun is knocked out of his hands by Racquel, Blade uses a set of silver stakes to kill Racquel and more vampires, including the disk jockey.
Soon all the vamps are either dead or have fled except for one; a heavyset vamp named Quinn, whom Blade has apparently run into before.
Blade pins Quinn to the wall, and then sets him on fire before confronting the last member in the club (the human man from the beginning). Finding no vampire bite marks on Dennis, Blade lets him live and makes his escape as the police arrive. Quinn is extinguished and taken to the local hospital.
A morgue technician examines his blood and shows the results to Dr. Karen Jenson, who finds a number of irregularities, including abnormally developed jaw muscles.
As they are discussing the test results, Quinn springs back to life and bites both doctors. Before he can finish Dr. Jenson, Blade shows up and saves her, cutting off one of Quinn's arms.
Blade brings Karen to his hideout and asks for help from his mentor, an elderly man named named Whistler.
Whistler injects Dr. Jenson with a solution of garlic essence and silver nitrate and remarks that she has a 50/50 chance at best of recovering.
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