Tom wasn’t watching for people. He watched for vampires.
That was what they had called them in the first few years. There had been hope, then. The televisions had still worked. But the trappings of man soon failed. The radio had been the last to fall, but even radios needed power.
The infection spread to the city, then the world. People were slow to learn. At first it was merely horrific. You could tell them apart. They were shambling and stupid. Their hunger made them idiots with only the most basic of functions – eat and breathe. It was the hunger that drove them on.
The police were called to the first few outbreaks. They would arrive in their armoured vans, guns at the ready. The shooting would start and the cured would fall. But they rose again. The cured came on, unstoppable as the tide. The flesh they tore from the police gave them strength and drove them on. The infection could not be contained.
Tom could see the results all around. Here, on the eastern most edge of Paris, the scars were still visible.
Then the army had come, and Paris had become a battleground.
If the cured had stayed stupid, mankind would have had a chance. But for the cured it was evolution on the edge. They learned fast. The older ones, weeks old, became cunning. While the newly cured ran straight into gunfire to be torn down and torched with the army’s flamethrowers, the older ones bided their time. They watched.
By the time someone made the call to burn the city down, it was too late.
Paris was a graveyard. Blasted rubble stood in place of headstones.
It was an eerie, foreboding sight.
Tom stared into space, his duty forgotten for a moment. Marie waved frantically to him from her hiding place across the street, but all he saw was fire. He could hear the screams.
The screaming haunted his dreams still, twenty-six years after the fall of man.
A small stone hit Tom in the head and brought him back to the present with a curse.
He saw Marie gesturing wildly at him.
Wanker.
Marie was French, Tom was English, but some sign language was universal.
He signalled back, letting her know he was OK, with his middle finger. She smiled.
Daydreaming out in the wastes. A fine way to get yourself killed.
He looked at Marie, questioning. She shook her head. She had seen nothing, either.
Tom steeled himself. He knew what he had to do.
He’d hoped it wouldn’t come to it, but it was his idea. He wouldn’t expect anyone else to do it.
He stood up as straight as he was able and drew a knife from the sheath at his hip. He gritted his teeth and slashed deep into his hand. The blood flowed freely. He held his hand out and let the wind take the scent.
There was little danger from the shamblers. They had died in the firestorm.
It was the elders they hunted.
Their hunger was more controlled. They would smell his blood, but he didn’t think they would rush in. Tom was planning on their cunning. No one was better at this than Tom. He was ideally suited for the job. He was old. A vampire would be able to hear his old heart beating out its broken rhythm from within his chest. The stab suits his team wore muffled their heartbeats. Tom wore only a ragged shirt and jeans. His gait would be uneven, because of a badly healed old wound.
The vampires would sense his helplessness. They would come. They must come.
He was the perfect bait.
Tom’s team watched from the shadows as he began to run down the centre of the street.
He ran in a hobble, his old heart pounding and sweat pouring already. The sun pounded down. Blinding for a human. Agony for a vampire.
He pictured his daughter as he ran. Ten years gone, her face mutated by the hunger, then by a shotgun blast in her face.
He had buried her ruined body in pieces ten feet apart with a silver coin pushed deep within each piece of her flesh.
That focused his mind. He did not want to end like that. But they all knew the risks. Rather a shot to the head than be one of them.
He stumbled on a shattered brick and rolled onto one shoulder. The impact jarred his teeth and took his wind.
Up, Tom. Up. Run.
He stood up to run again. Saw his marker. He had a hundred feet to go. He checked behind himself and breathed a sigh of relief. Set his feet, turned back, and his heart skipped a beat.
A vampire. Upwind.
It should not have been able to scent the blood upwind. Tom felt his heart kick in again. They had failed.
The vampire stood by the trap, as if he knew it was there. Perhaps he did. Their senses were more finely tuned than humans. Maybe some animal instinct in these perfect hunters told them what Tom was attempting.
There was nothing he could do. He was going to die but he wouldn’t stand still and bare his neck in expectation.
As he turned to flee the last shred of hope died. Another vampire approached downwind, strolling. It looked like he was smiling, even though he was squinting heavily. The sunlight would be agony on their eyes, but the smell of blood would be a strong incentive.
Effectively blind, the two vampires still held the upper hand.
Tom was going to die for being a fool. Both ends of the street were blocked and he didn’t have the luxury of leaping over houses to make his escape. His bowels turned to jelly. It was hard to keep his legs straight.
The vampires were in no rush.
‘Fuck it,’ he said, and drew his knife. He had no one left and his days were long. If he was going to die, he would do his damnedest to take one with him.
He flicked his head side to side, trying to watch them both. They walked toward him. Easy, ambling. Knowing where the rubble was, even blind.
They were a team. It wasn’t something he’d seen before. Vampires, sharing. Perhaps they would fight over him. Perhaps they would kill each other.
Then they ran.
Tom chose the one ahead and ran, too, to meet his death. He screamed as he ran. There were words there, but he never knew what they were.
His knife plunged into the vampire’s chest as its fist came crashing down, driving Tom backward through the air. The vampire’s head exploded. Tom landed on his bad leg, hard, and cried out. He turned to face the other. He wouldn’t meet his death on his knees. But the vampire was on the floor, screaming and cursing, bucking and tearing at the net which encased it. The net burned it. A chary stink came from the vampire.
Samson came out with a flame thrower and stood over Tom.
‘Did you get any on you? In your mouth?’
Tom was too shaken to answer.
Sam pointed the flickering jet at Tom. ‘Did you get any fucking blood on you!? Tom!’
Marie, all skin and bone, ran out and pushed the flamethrower aside.
‘Stop it, Sam! Tom, can you hear me?’
Tom stopped screaming with a hitching breath. When he spoke his voice shuddered and his shoulders shook.
‘Clean me off and net me. Just in case.’ He pointed to the vampire whose head was all over the pavement. ‘Burn it.’
Samson grinned. Flames spewed from the tip of the flamethrower and the smell of scorched meat and burning fuel wafted on the air.
Marie cradled her rifle in the crook of her arm, but the safety was off, and she scanned the cityscape endlessly.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Back to the van. We haven’t got much time.’
Samson nodded. He put his fingers to a black wire running around his throat.
‘Lucius. Pick us up. Be fucking quick about it, would you?’
Tom put his face down to protect his eyes as Marie blasted him with the net.
Marie was small, but strong. Tom wasn’t struggling, but with the net on he was dead weight. She shouldered him easily, nonetheless.
Samson couldn’t afford the proximity, but he was a bull. He grabbed the screaming vampire by the ankle and dragged it. He held the flamethrower out to one side, sweeping, checking their back trail.
It was just a matter of time before more came.
Lucius bumped and rocked the van over the ruined road toward them. It screeched to a halt. The fourth member of the team jumped out and pulled open the rear doors.
‘Fuck, they got Tom?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ Samson shrugged. ‘Come on. Help me with this one.’
Marie loaded Tom into the back of the van as gently as she could. Lucius and Samson didn’t take as much care. They quickly bundled the netted vampire into a large body bag, and threw it in with Tom.
Tom scooted as far away as he could, but to his team, he had the same rights as the vampire for the first twenty-four hours. He didn’t complain.
Lucius jumped back into the driver’s seat and lit a cigarette before he hammered the accelerator to the floor.
‘Lucius, that’ll draw them from miles away!’
He winked at Marie. ‘Lighten up, love. Blood and screaming’ll do that well enough. Besides, blood and screaming always make me want a smoke.’
Marie did the fake spitting thing she’d learned from her mother.
‘Thanks, Marie,’ said Tom. He didn’t need Marie getting into a pissing match. She was the only one who gave a damn if he lived or died. ‘That was a hell of a shot.’
Marie didn’t take her eyes off the city. ‘Don’t thank me, Tom. It was Sam.’
‘Well, then, thank you, Sam.’
‘Don’t thank me, either, Tom,’ said Sam, with a humourless grin. ‘I was aiming for you.’
*
Chapter Seven
Fallon Corp. Research Complex
They drove the rest of the way in silence. Samson’s bulk was jammed into passenger seat. His shoulders were hunched despite the seat being pushed back as far as it would go. Marie rode in the back, eyes scanning the deserted cityscape. Both Samson and Marie wore shoulder holsters under their left armpits.
Lucius wore a handgun, too, but slung low on his hip, like a gunfighter. He drove silently, cigarette clamped between his teeth.
Tom bounced about in the back. He bore the indignity without complaint. There was very little danger of infection from the vampire next to him, but even subdued with a silver mesh net and bagged so that the vampire could not spit or bleed on him, it was an uncomfortable situation. Probably the most uncomfortable he’d ever been. It was somehow worse than being faced by two of the elders working in unison. Then, he’d known he was going to die. Now, he knew he might live.
The vampire had ceased struggling, but was making pitiful sounds. It had to be in agony. The mesh had silver somewhere in its chemistry. The stink was making Tom’s nose itch, even through the body bag.
He tried to push himself up so that he could see through the back window. He wanted a view of the outside world to hold onto before he returned to their home. He wriggled and pushed himself into a sitting position. The road was pocked and bumpy and his head cracked against the side of the van a few times, but what was a little more discomforted weighed against his peace of mind?
The city scrolled by through the window. Small cars abandoned, burnt black, then turned to rust. Warehouses, factories, collapsed in on themselves. Entire streets destroyed so utterly that any map of the city from before the bombardment was effectively useless. There was a hint of a train track, off in the distance. Scrub grass grew in patches. Scraggly trees tried to reach the sky through the scorched buildings.
Once, the whole city had been burned black and coated with ash. Then the rains had come, radiation burning what the fires had not.
Life was returning, at last. It was slow. Another ten, twenty, thirty years? Maybe the planet would purge itself of the poisons of man.
Not in Tom’s lifetime. The vegetation was still stunted. Yellow. Trees looked like smoker’s fingers. The weeds, the grass, the wild flowers…everything had that sickly yellow hue.
Beautiful.
Tom smiled and stuck the memory away.
Death might be a release from pain. He hated this existence. And yet, there was still beauty in the world.
But hope?
No. No hope. Not for mankind. But hope for the world.
The car swerved and bumped. Tom’s head cracked against the window and he slid back to the floor.
Before he fell, he saw three vampires standing in the shadows. He felt a shiver travel down his spine.
He’d told them all, but they hadn’t listened.
His theories were so often ignored. He was the crackpot old man. Marie cared for him, he knew, but no one else.
Besides, what would the people think if Tom told them that there was a group of vampires watching their retreat?
It didn’t matter a damn what Tom knew. He had no chance of making them listen now he might be infected. From the moment the vampire’s blood had touched him he had become a non-person. He would hold his tongue.
If he lived, there would always be tomorrow.
‘We’re here,’ said Marie, more for something to say than any real desire to inform them. She was looking over her shoulder at Tom. She nodded once. He nodded back to her, as best he could.
She would be cold from now on. He wouldn’t hold it against her, should he live. It was necessary.
That nod told him all he needed to know. If she had to, she would not hesitate to end his life.
A gate clanged shut.
Tom didn’t feel any different, but some of the blood might have got into his eyes or his mouth. The infection was virulent and the transmission rate for those coming into contact with the cured unbelievably high.
Marie and Samson dragged him out of the van. He thumped against the cold concrete.
‘Careful. He’s probably infected,’ Samson told the two men who were waiting, net guns at the read. Four more men waited behind them, slightly off to one side, armed with rifles. The tips of the bullets would have been dipped in silver. They were waiting for the vampire.
‘Fuck. Tom?’ said a man with a fat cigar in his mouth. He wore a badge on his shoulder. It was the badge of an officer.
‘Don’t talk to him!’ Samson told him.
‘Yeah, OK. But, seriously…fuck.’
‘Did you get one?’ asked another man.
‘It’s in the van.’
Tom watched their smiles grow. Idiots. Who would be happy to have one of the cured in their home? The last time had nearly spelled the end for their little enclave.
But it was what the council had decreed, and Tom was just a scientist.
He shut his eyes and let the two security guards carry him away to isolation. There was no point in arguing or complaining. To the people who lived here he was effectively dead. He didn’t make it any harder on them by talking to them. He might have known them for more than twenty years, but they would tear him apart in a heartbeat if he changed.
They would call it an experiment.
But Marie wouldn’t let it come to that.
*
Chapter Eight
Fallon Corp.
Level 1
The enclave was underground. Once, it had been the Fallon Corporation’s research complex.
The majority of the survivor’s time was spent trying to understand the work that Fallon Corp. had been engaged in. It was an impossible task. Computer data had been purposely corrupted before the end. Many of the weapons within a deeper level of the complex were useable, but the technology for making further ammunition was lost. They were civilians with no scientific training trying to piece together what they could from the wreckage of Fallon Corp’s experiments. Tom had worked there, before the fall. He understood the necessity of this. If this war was ever to be won they needed to understand the tools that had created the virus.
It could take years, but the research centre had been designed to withstand meteor impact, nuclear strike, global warming…end of the world scenarios. It was powered by a nuclear reactor, giving it independent power that might last centuries. It boasted extensive medical facilities, biological engineering, a weapons development lab, ad
vanced computing capacity, self-defensive capabilities, and comfortable living quarters for up to six hundred full-time staff. There were gardens with artificial light and storerooms as long as warehouses. The complex had enough freeze packed foods to feed the survivors for generations. It had water filters that ensured the underground water was safe to drink even though the city’s water was poisoned by blood and ash and radiation.
The scientists that had lived and worked there had prepared for everything except the speed at which it all happened. The majority of them hadn’t even realised the world was ending until it was too late.
Some, like Tom, had seen it coming. Among the survivors currently living in the base, more than thirty had originally worked for Fallon Corp. in some capacity.
In total, three hundred and twenty-seven survivors, one time denizens of Fallon Corp., had been lost over the years.
Billions dead above ground. Three hundred and twenty-seven below.
All things considered, Fallon Corp. was probably the safest place left on Earth.
*
Chapter Nine
Fallon Corp.
Level 13
Tom was dragged through the entrance, past the staring faces of the men and women he shared his life with. Their faces were like stone. Not one smiled at him. No one spoke to him.
He didn’t speak to them, either. If their places had been reversed, he would be the same as them.
There had been infections before. It was hard enough to kill someone you lived with. It was easier if you accepted their death before you pulled the trigger.
Tom bore the bumps of the staircase from level 1A to 1B without a sound. Eventually the two guards, handling him with extreme care and thick gloves and face masks, placed him in the elevator.
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