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The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency (FVZA):
A History
Vampires arrived in the United States with the first European settlers and followed the general population shifts of Americans in the early days of the Republic. During this time, fighting vampires was a task left to individual bounty hunters and local militias known as the Vampire National Guard. As the country grew and became increasingly urbanized, a more ambitious vampire abatement program became necessary. The Copper Creek Seige of 1855, in which vampires took over an entire California mining town, underscored the country's need for an organized, well-trained force to combat the growing plague. The Civil War delayed implementation until 1869, when President Ulysses S. Grant officially formed the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency.
An early vampire patrol
Initially, the FVZA was a specialized branch of the Armed Forces, modeled after similar troops in France and Great Britain. The troops were known as the "Vanguard," a contraction of Vampire National Guard. They worked mostly in large cities. By day, they scoured likely vampire/zombie hiding places; by night, they patrolled areas of high vampire/zombie activity (slums, waterfronts, parks, etc.). Though they were underfunded, ill-equipped and often shuttled off to fight wars on foreign soil, the FVZA made some strides in controlling resident vampire and zombie populations. However, the huge surges of immigrants coming to America helped increase the U.S. vampire population to 300,000 by the turn of the century.
Zozobra Project security
checkpoint
In 1897, President William McKinley moved the FVZA into the Department of Justice. The Agency was split into two groups: a scientific team in Washington, and a military unit with bases all over the U.S. In 1901, new President Teddy Roosevelt hired his friend Hilton Dickerson as FVZA Director. Dickerson ruled the FVZA with an iron fist for the next 34 years. When the zombie vaccine was created in France in 1911, the FVZA administered vaccination programs in the U.S., while the "Vanguard" focused on destroying remaining zombies.
With zombies largely eradicated, the focus of the FVZA shifted to vampire research and abatement. A 1935 Supreme Court ruling declaring that vampires have the same rights afforded to all citizens complicated the FVZA's job greatly. In response, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Emergency Relief Act in 1936. The Act converted the Agency to an undercover operation. Roosevelt also put together the Zozobra Project, which brought the best medical minds in the world to a secret lab in New Mexico to work on a vampire vaccine. The Project was operated by the FVZA and reaped its greatest success with the creation of a vampire vaccine in 1950.
After 1950, the FVZA shifted to identification and destruction of remaining vampire populations. Despite exhaustive training and rigorous safety practices, over 500 FVZA soldiers lost their lives between 1950 and 1960. For the most part though, the program was a dramatic success. In a 1963 Rose Garden ceremony, President Kennedy declared that the war on vampires had been won. Those FVZA members who developed the vampire vaccine were given the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Lazo, Soviet Union:
after the blast
Sadly, President Kennedy's declaration was premature. Over the next two decades, vampire packs continued to turn up in isolated regions of the world. And the rush to study vampire blood for human applications had tragic consequences in the Siberian village of Lazo when a mutant strain of vampire virus escaped from a secret lab. Soviet authorities were forced to destroy the town with a nuclear weapon, killing over 750 souls.
Despite these developments, the FVZA shrank in size and significance, and in 1975, President Gerald Ford pulled the plug on the Agency.
RECENT HISTORY
President Reagan signs bill
overturning research ban
In the wake of the Lazo Disaster in the Soviet Union, the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved Resolution 144.C, banning research on vampire blood across the globe. But with the development of genetic engineering in the 1980s, the pharmaceuticals industry began clamoring to have the ban overturned. The industry spent untold millions lobbying members of Congress and, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation allowing government-supervised research on vampire blood. The Santa Rosa Institute was chosen as the base for this research.
THE FUTURE
On July 20, 2000, an international consortium of scientists gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, to announce their opposition to the testing of manipulated vampire DNA on animals. The statement read, in part: "With testing on animals, the chances of a mutated virus getting outside the lab are greater than ever. The Lazo Disaster offers ample evidence of what can go wrong under these circumstances. Who will we turn to if that happens? Vampires are extraordinarily successful predators; once they have a foothold, it is nearly impossible to root them out. It took us 7000 years to gain the upper hand with them. Why are we in such a rush to return to the past?"
Two months later, testing on animals began at the Santa Rosa Institute.
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