Vigil

by Saunders, Craig

  He would make a new world. He had the means to do it, too.

  The particle accelerator. The hub of all his hard work, thirteen accelerators, linked to provide enough power to fuel the gateway. The gateway that was online and waiting below.

  It had been a long project. But he was eternal, and far more patient than most.

  The expressions on the vampires’ faces were unreadable as John Fallon walked past them. His face was stern. It was a cruel face. In life he had been a cold and hard man. In this, this strange kind of afterlife, he was immovable. A man made of stone. The years and the blood had made him into a monster, perhaps the most powerful creature to ever walk the earth.

  Even if it were not for his power, he had strengths they could only imagine. Who among the vampire kin could comprehend the things Fallon knew?

  Fallon strode the top of the stairs. He stood, sniffing the air, listening intently.

  ‘They have no weapons left. Go. Feed and heal. Grow strong.’

  The vampires roared and ran headlong down the stairs, already in a frenzy. John Fallon, uninjured and more able to control his hunger, walked slowly down the stairs after the last of his men.

  He was driven by other desires than the hunger. One of a kind among creatures of lust, he was driven, too, by hunger...but one more absolute than any of his kin would ever know.

  *

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Fallon Corp. Research Complex

  Level Two

  John Fallon walked through the feeding orgy to what had once been his office. He closed the door behind him. It locked with a fleet click. The screaming was muted now. He liked the sound of it, but it was not for him. Where he was going there would be no screams. His food would be docile. He was too old to chase down his meals.

  Too wise.

  He pressed the button hidden within the painting on the wall. Nothing happened.

  So they had thought to lock him out. He smiled to himself. They must have thought they could flee to the lower floor but there had not been enough time for all them to make it this far. The ones outside were the lucky ones. They would die a quick death.

  Then he had a moment to think. If they knew about the lower floor, then perhaps they had managed to figure out how the accelerator worked. What if someone got through before him?

  Then he thought, what if they had enough explosives to shut it down?

  His heart began to quicken. It did not matter. It would be a matter of moments to shut them down.

  ‘Hub One,’ he said.

  ‘Please wait for voice analysis…John Fallon…confirmed. Greetings, Mr. Fallon. It has been a long time.’

  ‘Is the gateway online?’

  ‘The gateway is in working order, Mr. Fallon. All specifications have been met.’

  ‘Has it been shut down?’

  ‘On the contrary, Mr. Fallon.’

  ‘Good, good,’ mused Fallon, thinking hard. ‘Has it been used?’

  ‘Once.’

  There was no point in asking if the test had been successful. Only a vampire could go through. Perhaps they had sent a vampire of their own through, one of the new breed. Maybe they had made the inhibitor work. His soldiers had faced the new breed. It was a possibility.

  John Fallon’s mind was remarkable in many ways, but his drive, his lifelong project, sometimes blinded him. In his desire to fulfil his life’s work he overlooked many things. Like the end of the world. John Fallon did not bother to rationalise destruction. There was only failure and success. The human cost of his project was irrelevant to him.

  The experimentation on Unknown Subject One was just a step along the path to his final vision. The inhibitor had obviously been developed, but too late for him and the world…but that had never been his plan. The gateway was all.

  To see the mind of God. To travel through time.

  No man but John Fallon could have even conceived of such a plan, let alone put it into action. Unknown Subject One was the catalyst that had allowed it to happen. John Fallon’s remarkable mind had driven the science behind it.

  Now he was close enough to smell success he thought of nothing else.

  Such as how the memory plays tricks on a mind. Such as the things he may have overlooked.

  But genius is often accompanied by such oversights.

  ‘Was it…?’ he began, but Hub One had no way of gauging the success of any travel. John knew the facts well enough. He was risking his eternal life on a chance. He had devised the science himself, and he knew the theory was sound. But that was all it would ever be. There would never be any way of testing if the thing truly worked, because anyone who went through could never return to tell the tale.

  ‘Sentence fragment…calculating possible response…’

  ‘Nevermind, Hub. Please activate protocol 1.’

  ‘Override is required.’

  Override?

  He laughed.

  ‘Tom has control? My son?’

  ‘Yes. But he is no longer present.’

  John Fallon could hardly believe it. ‘I thought he was dead.’

  ‘I have no way of knowing whether he is alive or dead.’

  The implications of Hub One’s throwaway statement sank in.

  ‘You mean it was my son that went through the gateway?’

  ‘That is correct.’

  There was no time to waste.

  ‘Override, Hub One. I am resuming command of this facility.’

  ‘Voice print accepted. Please verify code.’

  ‘AlphaRomeo13Tango2,’ said John from memory.

  ‘Accepted. Command?’

  ‘Terminate all lifeforms in the lower level as per Protocol 1.’

  ‘Terminating.’

  ‘Good. Now activate this elevator at once. I must get through.’

  John Fallon stepped into the elevator. There was a slight lurch as the elevator began its descend. John Fallon waited, calculating possibilities in his head, but it was all guesswork until he could find his son’s destination. It was a wildcard. He wondered what his son had been thinking when he stepped through.

  He had to entertain the possibility that someone would be in the same realm, the same plane of time, as he had chosen.

  A thousand thoughts careened through John Fallon’s mind as he descended into the deep hidden heart of the complex. There was another slight lurch and the door opened.

  The poison was still in the air. A deadly nerve toxin that had been pumped through the complex. There were bodies lying here and there. There faces were blackening. Saliva frothed from their mouths. No human could survive the toxin. But a vampire could.

  He stepped from the elevator and weaved in and out of the dead and dying people in the corridor.

  But there was something else…something unknown. He could smell a woman, but there was a strange, different tang to her smell. She irritated his nostrils. Her heart beat was jarring against the silence, even though it was distant.

  One of the new breed, he realised. The only explanation for the unaccustomed scent and their obvious immunity to the toxin.

  ‘A vampire is on this level,’ he said to himself.

  ‘Your summation is correct.’

  ‘Thank you, Hub. Lock down the elevator.’

  There was no point in sharing the world with the others of his kin. They had no control. The world would end the same way as this. There was no place for his brethren in his vision of the new world he would create. They were animals. They had no culture. No education.

  What would be the point of a century of work toward one perfect moment in time if he had to share it with creatures driven solely by their lust for blood? He wanted virgin shores. A place to hunt and live where there was no hunger. A place he could make into his own image.

  The power he would wield over the earth would be complete. And when he tired of it he had the knowledge to recreate the gateway. He would build again and travel to anytime he wanted. The world would be his to rule for eternity.

&nbs
p; But first he had a loose end to tie up.

  ‘Where is she, Hub?’

  ‘In accelerator tunnel A2. I believe she is trying to disable the accelerator.’

  ‘Well, we can’t have that, can we?’ said John Fallon, and set out at a run.

  *

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Fallon Corp.

  Accelerator

  Marie set the timer on the last of the explosives. The timer read 5:00.

  The clock began to tick down as she heard him running toward her. She turned to face him as he ran along the corridor. He was so fast!

  She thought about running, but only for a moment. There was really very little point. It would all be over soon enough. He couldn’t stop it in time. They had won.

  He was not what she was expecting. She had expected this god among vampires to be tyrannical. A looming, powerful man.

  He was rather ordinary. He slowed to a walk and smiled.

  ‘I think you have wasted your time.’

  She laughed at him. His face turned red.

  Perhaps, she thought, if I can anger him he will do it quickly and I won’t have to die under a mountain of rumble, crushed and unable to move, perhaps for a thousand years. There were many ways to die. That was her least favourite.

  She drew her weapon and pointed it at him, but he was much faster. In the blink of an eye there was a gun in his hand and he fired.

  Marie registered the pain before she realised her hand was hanging by just skin below her wrist.

  ‘I don’t see any reason we can’t be civilised,’ he said and then he was at her side with her neck in a crushing grip in one hand. She tried to bring her bleeding and ruined hand to his face but he flung her away. He was too smart, she realised. He would not risk being infected with the inhibitor. After all, his team had developed it. There was no doubt he knew what it could do to a vampire if it came after the cure.

  He leaned down to look at the explosives. With a tut and a sigh he pulled a wire from the simple device. The timer continued to count down but now it was attached to nothing.

  She struggled with her own considerable strength to push herself up but he had broken her leg. She fell to the floor again as her broken leg buckled under her weight. Bone stabbed through her trousers. She didn’t bother to push it back in again.

  Her weapon was ten feet away. She wondered if she could reach it before the first of the explosives went off. At least she could end her own life.

  ‘I have so much to ask,’ he said, peering at her in a parody of fatherly concern. ‘I would like to know how you were made. I think that would be very interesting indeed. I would like to know where my son went. And what you think you’re doing with those explosives. But I think I need to know only one thing.’

  ‘And what is that?’ said Marie.

  ‘How you want to die.’

  ‘Why don’t you bite me and find out?’ she said.

  John Fallon smiled and stepped forward. The smile on her face gave him pause.

  ‘I think you have a trick up your sleeve.’

  ‘Think what you want.’ That smile still played on her face. John Fallon found himself growing angry.

  Then he thought about it. Sometimes his rage and his hunger overtook him, but he was an intelligent man, well cultured. He had to remind himself of this sometime.

  He swore as he figured it out. She was distracting him. There were more explosives.

  ‘Oh, you clever child,’ he said. ‘Where are the rest of the explosives?’

  Marie pushed herself upright, holding onto the wall.

  ‘Fuck you. You’ve lost.’

  She leaped toward him. He panicked. He drew a pistol and fired into her skull. She fell to the floor with a wet thud.

  John Fallon cursed himself. He had wanted to ask her more. But there had been no time. Time was still ticking away.

  Still, he could not afford to take risks. Not now that he was so close.

  He fired the remaining cartridges from his clip into her head, turning it to mush. She would not come back from that.

  Then he ran. There was no point in asking Hub to find the explosives. He had but one chance to get through the gateway. He would not fail.

  He would not.

  He was a blur as he ran through the tunnel to the control room. As he ran he shouted the coordinates to Hub.

  Hub followed his instructions. In his headlong flight he forgot to ask Hub for his son’s coordinates.

  *

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Fallon Corp.

  Gateway

  John Fallon placed his hand against the security scanner outside the door. He had to place his right hand down. The fingerprints on his left were indistinct. It was a side effect of the healing that the flesh was never the same. Something about the virus that granted immortality rewired the flesh, changed the body on the cellular level. The nanotechnology that made up the virus entered the cells, changing the nature of the host.

  But it did not change the soul. That remained. Science could not change a man’s soul.

  John Fallon had been born with a dark heart.

  He stepped through the door as soon as he was cleared.

  No man, not even a savant with the world’s finest technology at his disposal, could plan for every eventuality. There are forces at work that are outside the ability of science to predict.

  No man can know the nature of the universe. It is ineffable, indefinite, chaotic to human understanding with rules written into the very fabric of time and space that only the infinite could ever understand.

  John Fallon was immortal. But he was far from infinite. Despite his pride, despite his great intellect, he could not understand what was beyond all reason.

  Nothing prepared him for the sight of the gateway, fully functioning, powered by all the sister facilities across Europe. The power it took to hold the gateway open was immense, the power of a sun, captured and contained within this shifting portal.

  He stared at it, mesmerised by its impossible beauty. He was so close. All he had to do was touch it.

  Something rocked the facility. It took valuable seconds before John Fallon realised what it was.

  While he had been staring, captivated by the gateway through time itself, the first of the explosives had detonated.

  Before his eyes the gateway shimmered. A powerful wind began to blow in the room, coming from nowhere, impossible.

  He pushed against the wind as the second explosion came. He reached out to touch the gateway, to go through, but he had no time.

  It expanded, warped toward him. It was hungry. The wind was immense, unnatural. It was scouring his skin from his body. It burned his eyes from his head and he screamed, blind, reaching out.

  The last explosion rocked the facility and the portal blew outward, sucking John Fallon into the eye of the greatest storm in the universe, its moment of creation. He fell screaming into its eye.

  In less than a second, the facility became nothing, just a crater left in the ground. The epicentre of a vast expanse of nothingness for miles and miles. It was as though a sun had burned a hole in the very fabric of the world.

  *

  The Parisian Countryside

  2025 A.D.

  Year Zero: Apocalypse

  The man on the bed opens his eyes. Dawn is maybe minutes off.

  The watcher looks into those eyes.

  Those eyes are full of madness and rage...the blind hunger of the new born. Even without blood, the dosage of FE612 that John Fallon took into his system has worked wonders.

  The new arm is strong. The old man's skin is no longer waxen, but showing the first flush of vigour. His liver spots fade. His hair, wispy when night fell, is lustrous once again, like that of a much younger man still in his prime.

  But the old man is in the throes of hunger, and something much worse, because the watcher, the elder vampire, is wise with many years.

  The old man screams, his insides no doubt roiling, crying out for flesh
or blood. His skin, too, burns, but with a different kind of heat.

  Because John Fallon is tied to the bed with thin filaments of silver netting, holding him down and searing his flesh as the watcher looks into the old man's eyes and holds a silver knife against the idiot creature's neck.

  *

  Part Five

  Blood

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Russia

  Near Verkhoturye Monastery

  1844-1888

  My life, such as it is, has been characterised by short periods of almost manic activity, followed by long periods of isolation or hibernation. Following the death of my wife I suffered a long bout of insomnia. As much as I wanted to sleep, having discovered the ability, I could not lay my head down. For nearly a whole year I laid in the earth, listening to the seasons change. I closed my eyes against the dirt and tried to dream. I tried to dream the dream of different worlds, but it would not come. My mind wandered during that year, but it kept returning to loss, and heartbreak, and pain.

  I think perhaps I was lonely, in the dirt. I wished for someone to hold, a warm body to chase away the chill as the winter came down from the mountains, seeping into the earth and freezing it solid against my limbs so that I could not even move, not one inch.

  That was when I decided I needed to get out of the earth. I could not do it until the first thaw, that false spring that often comes in the mountainous regions of Europe. No matter a man or vampire’s strength, he cannot break free of a cocoon of frozen earth. In the depths of the Romanian winter the earth becomes hard as concrete, and just as impossible to move through.

  The ground began to soften as there was an almost imperceptible thaw. I could move my fingertips. I wriggled my body and began to shift the earth around me. It took tremendous strength to pull myself through the earth, but eventually I emerged into a night filled with powerful rain and a harsh wind. I stood for perhaps an hour in the freezing rain, letting it wash the dirt from my clothes and my hair. Only when I was completely sodden did I set out.