Vigil

by Saunders, Craig

  The dream switched and I saw a young man come to visit the man.

  I could see the horror in the young man’s eyes, but John Fallon could not. Unthinking of the young man’s sensitivity, he reached out with his false arm and touched the boy on the shoulder, and under my sleeping hand I could feel the boy tense and understood his desire to pull away for while there was love there he knew that the old man did not love him.

  Love is not something that can be faked. Even I understand this.

  I saw a house in the countryside.

  I saw John Fallon climb into a limousine and followed the car as it drove through bright sunshine that did not hurt in my dream.

  And all the while I understood that this was not a dream.

  This was memory.

  John Fallon smiled down at me as I sat up at his footsteps.

  I was not surprised to see his mechanical hand.

  At last, after hundreds of years, I was awake.

  I understood more than John Fallon. I understood more about humanity than he ever would. But I would not be the one to tell him. I needed to think. I needed to get away.

  In my memory I could see the future because I had already lived it. Once as a willing catalyst for the fall of man.

  Now I had to figure out a way to save them. These people that were my tormentors, my food.

  I had to save the world from myself.

  John Fallon was me and I was the man that would destroy the world.

  *

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Fallon Corp.

  I could feel it now. My life, a river running, eternally toward the sea. Finally, I was at the end, the future stretched out before me. I have never seen the sea. I had been alive for the span of centuries, and I had never seen the sea.

  But I could feel it. Just over the horizon, and then…stretching off, as far as the eye could see. New lands waiting, new vistas, a new life.

  Do people feel this way, when they realise the life they have been leading is a sham? How many people spend their lives trudging through fields, sitting in offices, staring out of the window, thinking there must be something better than this, there must be more to life…

  Hemmed in by walls, poisoned, cut, abused, I closed my eyes and imagined myself on a coast, any coast. I tried to smell the sea, the spume flavouring the air, tightening my skin. I listened for the waves, lapping at the shore, erosion changing the landscape as I watched throughout the millennium. No blood, no people, no temptation, just the endless susurration and peace.

  My heart, such as it was, was full of shame and despair. Throughout my long years, years of wasted life, I had been in a shell. I was no different than the man in the cubicle, the scientist pouring over data, the farmer living life by the seasons, the wife spreading her legs for a man she despises. What shame, to squander the gift of endless life.

  I remembered when I had been John Fallon. The dreams I had held. A world at my feet, a world to mould in my image, one where I would be a king for all eternity. Instead I had turned into a pauper, a nothing of a man floating aimlessly across the landscapes of Europe, living hand to mouth and never understanding my purpose in the world.

  I had a purpose now. I had, at last, a future.

  In my mind’s eye the sea turned to grey, then black, and I saw the world as it would be, the world of my making. Myself to come, bringing the plague to the world of men, infecting them with my tainted blood.

  In this world men had been food, but always figures of curiosity, of interest. I did not want to live in a world without them. Vampires are not interesting. My kind are dull, creatures driven solely by hunger. We create nothing. Art is alien to us. Once, I created a picture, a picture of something beautiful.

  I believe I am the only one of my kind to create something. My kind destroy. We harvest those with souls, the creators.

  Should they fall, should mankind end, what of art?

  I remembered with joy my first experience of music, the first time I read a book, fell in love with a picture. Vampires would not create such a thing. If man lived they would be as slaves. What value would art have if it was enforced, enslaved? Could a work of art ever be forced? Could it be produced under duress?

  I was imagining a world where mankind were slaves, like my first slave, a nameless girl locked in a dank cell to serve only as food to me, long ago, a continent away, in my home. I had learned from her, I had learned of my nature and what it took me to survive. Could she have painted a picture in such circumstances, or composed an opera?

  Of course not. True art requires freedom. That is its beauty. A thing created for no gain but through love is when art is at its greatest, when it can let the soul soar and the imagination bath in glory.

  A vampire cannot appreciate these things. I know this, because I have lived through Armageddon and it is a dark soulless place, a place where the beast reins.

  And I was its author. Then as now.

  But the future is not a story. It is not a book. There is no revelation. The future was in my hands, once a man.

  I paced the walls. I gave my blood. I was a good slave. I followed the newspapers so I knew when the end was coming. I counted down the years and waited for a chance, for a half chance.

  I could not fail. If I tried and did not succeed I would never be free of this place, and when the world fell I would remain for eternity in a cell, a vampire doomed to insanity until the earth itself was swallowed by the sun.

  There was no room for failure. I watched, I waited.

  John Fallon, unaware at the time of who I was, watched me, visited me. I befriended him as best I could, even though I remembered myself all too well. I was a man with no friends.

  But I had learned and grown. I was no longer the soulless man that taunted me with his parody of kindness. I had a soul. It was something I had never had as a man. It had taken vampirism to teach me the value of humanity.

  So I watched, and I waited.

  John Fallon grew older as I watched. One day, he stopped coming.

  I knew where he was. He was in his bed, in his estate, insensible after a massive heart attack.

  Soon, all too soon, his staff would take the final, last ditch attempt to save his life. They would inject him with my blood, and my blood would bring the beast to earth. The reign of the beast would begin, and the bell toll for mankind.

  Time was ticking. What once had been a whisper was now booming with each passing day.

  I saved my strength. I took the blood they offered me. I grew stronger. I bore their experiments.

  The day drew near. I could think of nothing to do. There was no chance of escape.

  It was a last ditch effort, but I decided to try and feign sickness.

  I laid on the floor and began to shiver and shake, like I had seen victims of plague do in their last throws. I knew someone would be watching.

  I lay on the floor and then I smelled something that strangely gave me hope.

  The smell of one of my kind.

  *

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Paris

  2025

  Tom Fallon moved through the night, a creature learning the secrets of the dark. He walked among man a man alone. He was no longer one of their kind. Their ways were alien to him. It had been so long since he had lived in this world. This Paris, full of life. Even now, as the dark reached its zenith, the city bustled around him. Tom moved through the people without touching, wordlessly skirting the revellers and late night drinkers. The hour was rolling around to three in the morning. He passed a club, people spilling onto the paved streets, and moved through the throng of drunken hedonists, ignored and forgotten.

  Once, long ago, he had lived in this city. Now, un-dead, he remembered how he had felt as a man, before the fall. He had always been outside of this scene. Tom had never been drunk late into the night. His had been a life of quiet revelry, a slow glass of wine in the evening, a dinner alone in his apartment, listening through the open window to the slow sounds of
the evening, the cars and the chatter.

  He was not sad to have missed that world. It was largely forgotten. The bulk of his life, his growth into a man, had come after the fall. This world was now alien to him. The sounds of laughter, people shouting, sirens in the distance and a plane high above, all punished his acute hearing. The sounds were screaming through his head. He longed for the days of peace that came after, the deserted cityscapes he had grown used to.

  Strange, he mused to himself as he walked tirelessly through the city to the outskirts. All those years of solitude wishing he was among the bustle of the city, missing the life he had once had, and now he wished only for quietness to surround him once again.

  Was this the curse of the vampire? To be a man apart, a creature of the night surrounded by the people of the light?

  He wondered if this was to be his fate. If he survived in this version of the past, would he be forced by his blood to seek solitude once again, to separated himself from humankind and live in some high pass or isolated forest, coming out only at night and waiting for man to encroach on his last place of peace? Man was spreading throughout the world. He would be hard pushed to find peace in the world, a place untouched by man.

  But how long would he have to live out his life? His blood, tainted with silver, would not last forever. He was a vampire, but not one of the true blood. His time on earth would be measured in decades, not centuries. He would not be witness to the future of the world, unlike the true vampire kin that would become a plague upon the earth should he fail.

  He had but one chance to save these people, these idiot people, singing and shouting and drinking, people sleeping unaware in their beds how tenuous their hold on the planet truly was. The world could be taken from them so easily. Perhaps the people he passed on the streets had the right idea. At least they were living. When he had been alive had he truly lived? Was that a life, a life spent each evening drinking a lonely glass of wine, each day spent working below ground, out of sight of the sun?

  Who could say how a man should live his life to the full? Tom didn’t know. He knew he felt the breeze on his skin, the moonlight warming his skin with the reflected glory of the sun, a sun he was unlikely to see again.

  How would he live his life should he succeed this night? Come day break he planned to be far away from this place.

  Besides, when he was finished, this city would cease to exist. He would destroy these people and this place to save the rest of the world. A small cull to save the human race. Perhaps it was this new blood coursing his veins, but he felt no remorse. There was no other way.

  This city was the root of the infection. It was where his father’s work was carried out. It was the home of the first, the carrier. Unsub 1.

  It would be the place of his death, too.

  Without pause he walked to the front door of Fallon Corp. research facility. The above ground entrance, should anyone become curious, leading to the vast complex below ground. The secret LHC and the birthplace of the virus.

  A torture house, below ground, hidden from the eyes of the world. Where the secret of eternal life waited to be unleashed upon the world, the cure for all that ailed mankind.

  What ailed mankind was humanity.

  Tom pushed through the front door and into the foyer. The guard at the front desk looked up and smiled.

  ‘Bit early, aren’t you?’

  Tom remembered the guard from the day shift. He had imagined that the guard would be different during the night and that he would have to explain who he was.

  ‘Morning. I couldn’t sleep. Thought I may as well come and get some work in early. Knock off early, too. Got a date tonight.’

  ‘Scan in. Don’t often get many people in this early.’

  Tom scanned his card and checked his retina. His eyes were perfect. No degradation. The laser light that passed through his retina burned and blinded him for a second. It was much more powerful that he had imagined.

  ‘Go on through,’ said the guard.

  ‘Thanks. See you later.’

  The guard just waved and returned to his magazine.

  Tom stepped into the elevator. It felt strange, talking to a ghost.

  In the end, he thought, with a smile, he was a ghost himself. Perhaps not so strange after all. He was a spirit in a world of the dead, a world populated by echoes.

  He stopped off at the seventeenth floor, at a place he had only discovered after the fall of man. He loaded up on some essential supplies. The storehouse had been guarded, but his hunger was now sated as he tore off the guard's head and drank his fill of precious blood and felt no remorse. No remorse at all.

  Already, he knew, his humanity was fading with the power in his veins.

  Bloated and full of the power of the blood, Tom Fallon stepped out into the third floor of the Fallon Corp. Research Complex and walked along the corridor toward his father’s office for the last time.

  *

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Fallon Corp.

  Tom had made it through the complex largely unchallenged. Tom broke the lock on his father’s office with his new, powerful hands. The door hung on twisted hinged behind him. An alarm sounded behind him. In the future this room had been unlocked. He didn’t bother trying to figure out how the future and the present were being changed by him being here. There were anomalies. In his future, he had never travelled to the past, or if he had he had always failed. He would succeed this time. He would ensure that this could never come to pass.

  He walked calmly to the picture on the wall and pushed the button to raise the secret panel. It rose and he called up the elevator before the footsteps sounding along the hall could get any closer.

  A guard, his pistol at the ready, ran through the doorway into the office. Tom took advantage of his momentary confusion to press the button to descend.

  The guard called out to him to stop, raising his pistol. Tom knew he would be trying to justify shooting. Shooting the man breaking into the secret complex, the man who looked similar enough to Tom Fallon to give pause, different enough to warrant a bullet.

  But orders were orders. Here was an intruder, in John Fallon’s office, in an elevator that had not been there before. The guard would not have known about the elevator…

  Confusion won out. The door closed and the elevator descended.

  If he won out, he would have to come out this way. Then he didn’t want to be fighting his way through cordons of security guards. If he made it out alive, he would be in a rush and he couldn’t afford to fight his way through the complex to freedom.

  Time would be short once he was through.

  He hefted the bag he had taken from the armoury and stepped out into the secret facility. The alarm was sounding down here, too.

  Calmly, as he heard footsteps running toward him, he laid the bag on the floor.

  ‘Hub One, please disable the alarm and hold the elevator.'

  ‘Of course, Tom,' replied Hub One, and Tom smiled, because of the familiarity of the voice, even though a cold, alien one. A memory of a time still fresh, though it was twenty years into the future.

  The alarm was suddenly silenced but Tom’s ears were still ringing when a security guard rounded the corner. This guard did not waste time on confusion. He opened fire. The first bullet tore a hole in Tom’s shoulder. Then he was running, taking two more bullets as a second guard dropped to one knee, covering his partner. Tom didn’t want to take any more bullets. His hunger grew as he was wounded. He punched the first guard with a straight arm in the throat, taking another bullet, leapt to one side and broke the second guard’s arm. As the man’s weapon hit the floor with a clang Tom pulled his head to one side and tore the man’s throat out with his teeth. He guzzled the man’s blood until the flow stopped. He dropped the corpse to the floor and returned to pick up his bag.

  He ran now, his wounds healing as he ran and the bullets falling out through his skin. One slid down his leg and fell out onto the floor. Another fell out into the
crease between his shirt and his skin, resting above his belt.

  He ran into the LHC and began setting charges. He wanted to give himself enough time to escape. He set the timer on the charges for ten minutes.

  He took a deep breath and ran along the corridor to the room he knew existed. The source of the end of the world. He steeled himself, but he found he wasn’t afraid.

  His father waited down the hall. The sight of him was shocking.

  He looked nothing like the father he remembered. His skin was pale. Where he was shirtless Tom saw the countless scars and remembered well the cold accounts of the experiments that his father had carried out on Unsub 1, never knowing that the man, the vampire, he tortured in the name of science and his own drive to live in world remade in his image, was in fact himself.

  Tom took in the sight of his father standing behind the reinforced glass. He looked like a broken man, but Tom knew he was not. It was in his eyes. Tom’s remarkable eyesight was as good as his father’s, safely behind the glass.

  He should just turn around and leave, let the explosion end him and end it all, but he could not.

  He had to ask him why. He had to know what had driven his father to end the world.

  The man behind the glass smiled.

  ‘I didn’t think it would be you to end it.’

  Tom dropped the bag beside the glass and stood looking at the beast, the man who had destroyed a world. The man who was his father twofold.

  ‘It ends tonight,’ said Tom.

  ‘It does, Tom, but not the way you think.’

  *

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  Fallon Corp.

  ‘I’m going to end it here.’

  John Fallon just nodded. He waited. He was patient. Time had taught him that. His son had not had the luxury of centuries to learn the value of time.

  ‘I wanted to know why you did it.’