Or that they’d been afraid of me.
Past doors and through darkness, I sprinted. I heard voices echo in the halls behind me, and footsteps chasing. Lost in the dark, I collided with the corner of two walls. The impact sent me sprawling onto the hard chrome floor. My lip split and my knuckles were badly bruised. I didn’t care. My body didn’t matter anymore.
Nothing would matter if I didn’t find the room in time.
Wiping the blood from my chin, I picked up the rifle and ran down a last hall. I glanced again behind me, but couldn’t make out the shapes emerging from the doors. They might’ve been human, afflicted with the contagion but not fully Strigoi. Or they might’ve been monsters.
No way to tell.
No time to kill them all.
Too late, I faced forward and collided with a hard, flat wall. I fell again, my face and forearms striking the unforgiving floor.
Nothing hurt.
All I heard was my heart pounding and another door opening behind me.
I picked up the rifle and touched the wall I’d hit. My fingers, wet with blood, slid against frigid metal.
I’d found the elevator.
Buttons, where are the buttons? My breaths were hot and hard. Come on, Cal. Find them.
Several doors slid open behind me. I fired a warning shot down into the darkness, burning a hole in a faraway wall. Sparks leaping from the burning metal gave me just a glimpse of what I needed to see:
The figures in the hall…they’re just people.
They’re ghostly. But they’re still human.
The button is right in front of me.
I mashed the button and leapt into the elevator. I swore I heard a voice cry out just before the door closed, but I couldn’t understand it. Either the Arcadians had changed their dialect in the fifty years I’d been gone…
…or they all speak the dark language.
Inside, I called out the location I needed.
“Fortieth floor.”
The elevator didn’t move. I reached out, counted buttons in the dark, and tapped the sequence in manually. I was sure I’d entered it correctly. I’d done it a thousand times before.
Not counting hypo-sleep, I was here just a few months ago.
“Fortieth floor,” I tried again. “Science code – Callista.”
The elevator jerked into motion. For all my fears, they’d never deprogrammed my voice activation. I’d just forgotten to say my name.
The elevator gained speed. Higher and higher, I sailed into the tower. I traveled in total darkness, which made my heart bang hard against my ribs.
When at last the elevator came to a stop, I aimed the rifle at the door. I pitied anyone waiting on the other side.
Can’t stop for anyone, I knew.
Or anything.
The door slid open. A black hall greeted me. In my mind, I knew this place. I’d rode the elevator and walked the chrome halls of the fortieth floor a thousand times before. My only fear was that they’d moved the nano-machine. Or disassembled it.
Or destroyed it.
I wondered if I’d have the courage to kill myself if I made it to the room only to find it empty. If the machines weren’t there, I had no other reason to live.
I emerged into the hall, whose left side was lined with black-curtained windows ten meters tall. I stripped one curtain away, then another, and I heard screams and glimpsed faraway shadows as people fled the invading light. The suns’ hot light became my guardian as I advanced. I peeled curtain after curtain down from the windows, and the darkness fled before me.
With a pool of sunlight radiating at my back, I turned a corner and marched into a final hallway.
What’s that sound?
Wait…
An elevator hummed to a stop at the hall’s far end.
A door opened.
Three men strode out.
No.
Their faces were paler than any moon. Their clothes were black, their forearms and necks plumbed with wires and tubes. They carried weapons exactly like my own, which they aimed the moment they emerged.
We were thirty meters apart.
I froze.
I knew what they were.
They were prototypes. Experiments. Humans modified to be the vanguard of the Strigoi on Sumer.
The first of millions to come.
I didn’t fire at them. I knew I had no chance to kill all three before their weapons destroyed me. Instead I threw myself onto my back, aimed at the hallway’s opposite end, and fired a single shot at the ceiling’s edge.
I should’ve died then. The horrors’ energy blasts cut the air right where I’d been standing. I felt the hairs freeze on my neck. I smelled the back of my shirt burning.
The world seemed to slow when my shot hit the ceiling at the hall’s end. The stream of dark energy melted a hole in the dark chrome, burning straight through to the windows above and beyond.
The building shook. Glass rain thundered in the outer hall. Sheets of window and globs of chrome crashed on the floor, echoing through everything in Arcadia. I glanced back at the three half-Strigoi, who looked at me lying on the ground as if to mock me, as if to say, ‘What have you done, you silly girl?’
But when the ceiling collapsed and sunlight poured through the hole I’d blasted, they looked no more. Light invaded the hall, carving up the shadows. Screaming, the horrors dropped their rifles and scrambled to escape into the elevator. Their hands and faces smoked, and their eyes turned black.
Before they could close the door, I popped up to my knees and fired a half-dozen shots into the elevator. The horrors had given themselves over to darkness, but the Strigoi rifle cooked them all the same.
I stood, a sweaty mess, and listened to the elevator as it freefell forty stories to the tower’s bottom. My shots had severed its electro-cable. When it impacted on the first floor, the half-Strigoi were not only ashes, but dust.
The building shuddered in the aftermath.
I walked through a cloud of sunlit smoke and shining crystalline glass.
And I found the room I’d been looking for.
I didn’t enter gracefully. I smashed my way in with my rifle and discarded the weapon on the floor. Sunlight sliced into the room’s entrance, pooling on the floor like water. I didn’t need anything more. I remembered the place to perfection.
After all, I’d been born there.
Long ago, they’d shut down the nano-transfer machines and entombed them in grey drop-cloths. I knew as I entered no one had been inside the room for a long, long time. I stood and stared with eyes wide and wet. I heard the clamor in the halls behind me, the voices thick with fear. The sunlight shielded me. The Strigoi dared no pursuit.
A moment’s courage, I gulped down my breaths.
It’s all I need.
I stepped into the shadows. Giant glass cylinders filled with grey fluid lined the walls. They’d grown my body in one such chamber, pumping me full of nutrients long before I’d made the transfer to humanity. I wondered if Strigoi were grown in the same way. I was sure I remembered Joff telling me so.
I stopped in the room’s center. There, shrouded under the dusty cloths, the nano-transfer machine sat in silence. I pulled the cloth away and stepped back. The machine was powered down, but its long dark cables were still plugged into the wall.
It doesn’t make light, I thought.
Maybe that’s why they didn’t tear it apart.
A scream erupted in the hall behind me. I wasn’t sure whether someone had wandered into the light or a Strigoi had dared it just to find and kill me. I wished I had more time. I’d hoped they’d let me enter in peace. I would’ve liked to look at myself once more.
Just once.
Just to remember.
The dust cleared, and the machine came back into view. I tied one of the cloths to the metal switch on the machine’s flank, and tugged the rest of it into the machine’s heart with me. Chrome tubes and electric nodes surrounded the metal slab onto which I stretch
ed my body. It looked like a Strigoi device.
I shivered as I lay down, hating to touch the cold, hard metal.
I clutched the cloth in my fingers and willed myself not to cry.
Come on, Cal.
Joff had it worse.
Do it for him.
Without this, his sacrifice was for nothing.
I tugged the cloth. The switch I’d tied it to engaged, and the chamber door swiveled shut, encasing me inside. Through the glass, I saw shadows crawl across the floor. They’d shut out the light somehow.
They’re coming.
I flicked a console open beside me. It blinked to life, awakening for the first time in years. I closed my eyes and spoke the first commands:
“Activation sequence – reverse.”
“Initiate full removal of nano-particles from subject.”
“Initiation code: Callista zero-zero one.”
I opened my eyes. The shadows beyond the machine were complete. Beside me, the console smoldered red. I didn’t need to read the list of warnings. I knew what they said:
Upon activation, body death imminent.
Procedure irreversible.
No additional bodies in queue.
Insert cortical spike to proceed.
This is going to hurt, I knew.
A lot.
I unplugged the cortical spike from its jack inside the machine. It didn’t look like much, just a chrome needle six centimeters long. I heard the machine rattle. Someone, or something, had entered the room and was pounding on the door.
I blinked.
With my last human breath, I said, “Initiate full reversal.”
I glimpsed the panel light fade from red to blue.
And I plunged the needle into the top of my skull.
Darkest Before the Dawn
Long dormant, the nano-light sleeping inside me awoke.
Losing my humanity hurt more than I expected, though only for an instant.
I swam through the machine’s cold, dark cables. The sensations I’d grown to love abandoned me, drowned out by a familiar feeling of nothingness. I erupted from the port on the machine’s side, and as I coalesced into the shape of ten-centimeter tall woman, I watched as the two men tore the machine to pieces.
Even in the dark, I saw their hatred. They must’ve been among the first infected by the Strigoi virus. While the others had been pale and fearful, these two were vicious. Their skin was burned by the sunlight, their hairless heads glistening with sweat. Their eyes smoked with white lights, the tubes grafted into their necks shaking as they ripped the machine’s door from its hinges.
One of them sneered, growling words I couldn’t understand.
The other answered. He didn’t seem afraid. The only word of his I knew was “dead.”
I whistled while floating above their heads. They looked up, stunned to see little glowing me hovering over the machine they’d just dismantled. For all that I missed my human body, I was grateful to be alive.
They can’t hurt me like this.
Almost nothing can.
It only took a few seconds.
I invaded the first one through his ear. Stretching into a line a few nanos thick, I streamed into his skull and danced across his brain. Ages ago, I’d done the same to Joff while saving him from Strigoi draining. He’d almost died, but I’d entered his lungs, his brain, and his blood, reigniting life inside his cells.
I hadn’t realized it then, but I’d cured him. I was a living vaccine.
They made me this way.
It means…Doctor Abid knew. I don’t know how, but he knew.
This is what I was meant for.
I shattered myself into a hundred thousand particles of light. Flooding my host, I flowed through every corner of his body, destroying the Strigoi virus wherever I touched it. His blackened cells breathed in my light. His blood warmed. His heart, slow and cold, leapt back to life.
Finished with him, I burst out of his body and swept into the other. He couldn’t resist me either.
He doesn’t want to.
When it was done, when I’d cleansed both men, I escaped their bodies in a burst of blue radiance. I became Callista again, the room’s brightest light, a tiny star floating over everything. Both men knelt beneath me, shivering in pain. I didn’t doubt they’d hurt for a long while, but they’d survive. I’d wiped out the contagion inside them.
“How do you feel?” I asked. I knew they wouldn’t understand. It didn’t matter.
They took many breaths to find their voices. I wasn’t sure the first one said. His eyes looked almost human again, though his horror at finding himself plumbed with Strigoi hardware was hard to witness.
The other groaned louder. He looked up at me as if to ask, “What did you do to us?”
I didn’t answer.
I considered what I’d started.
When I’d left Sumer, the planet’s human population had been nearly three million.
Three million people. Seven cities. Twenty settlements stretched over twenty-thousand square kilometers.
I don’t have time to answer questions, I told myself.
I can never rest again.
I left the two men sitting there in the dark. I hated to abandon them, but I couldn’t wait.
I had work to do.
* * *
On the first day, I cured the ASI tower. I swept into every room, every shadowed hall and dark corner. Nothing could stop me. I was the light they feared, the cure for which they’d forgotten how to hope.
Not everyone survived me.
Some, with Strigoi technology hardwired into their bodies, went into shock and died. Others fell comatose, their minds broken by my invasion.
But most of the ones I found, especially those who cowered in the darkness, awoke like children from a dream. Without the Strigoi shadow blanketing their minds, they remembered who they were, who’d they’d been before their lives had been repurposed.
I resurrected men and women, pale children and weary elderly. All of them awoke the same, wide-eyed and dazed, staring up at me as though I were an angel.
After the first night, I soared out into Arcadia. I overtook houses, black-glassed towers, hovercars, and subterranean machine-shops. I found underground lairs with hundreds of beds. I slipped into warehouses stacked high with giant machines and parts for things I didn’t dare imagine. The city I knew was gone, and everywhere lurked the technology of the dead.
A few more years, I knew, and it would’ve been too late.
I became the wind washing away the Strigoi poison.
I was the light reaching into every crevice, awakening the sleeping masses.
I found the nano-boy Joff’s sister had created for me and reprogrammed him to hunt the deepest, darkest Strigoi pits. He was like me, only far more calculating and far less human. Alone, he entered the Arcadian catacombs.
And cleaned them out.
I stormed gatherings of city leaders at night, erasing whole roomfuls of ideas meant to enslave the living. The looks in their eyes made it all worthwhile. They awoke from their nightmare, gazing up at me as though I were an angel.
Sometimes they even smiled.
Each dawn, after a night of turning darkness to light, I gathered the awakened and told them tales of what had happened and what would soon be.
And at dusk every eve, the newly-cured inhabitants forged safe-houses for protection and workshops to remove the hardware they’d built into their bodies.
Their lives would never be the same, I knew. Sumer’s culture was gone, its music, art, and happiness muted by fifty years of darkness.
It didn’t matter.
We’d either adapt or fall.
And I knew when we finished, whether it took us ten years or a thousand, a new era would be born.
We’ll push this planet into action.
I’ll tell everyone what happened in Nosfera.
I’ll lead a war against the Strigoi. Show everyone how to destroy the eaters of the li
ght.
Joff’s war, we’ll call it.
In my heart, I know it will last forever.
About the Author
J Edward Neill writes dark fiction, sci-fi, horror, and philosophy – all for adult audiences. He lives in North Georgia, where the summers are volcanic and winters don’t exist. He has an extensive sword collection, a deep love of wine and scotch, and a blind cat named Sticky.
He’s really just a ghost.
He’s only here to haunt the earth for few more decades.
Shamble after J Edward on his websites:
TesseraGuild.com
DownTheDarkPath.com
More by J Edward Neill:
Fiction:
Darkness Between the Stars
A Door Never Dreamed Of
The Hecatomb
Down the Dark Path – Book I in the Tyrants of the Dead trilogy
Dark Moon Daughter – Book II in the Tyrants of the Dead trilogy
Nether Kingdom – Book III in the Tyrants of the Dead trilogy
The Sleepers – A Sci-Fi Horror Short
Hollow Empire – A post-apocalyptic serial co-authored with John McGuire
Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows
Coffee Table Philosophy:
The Ultimate Get to Know Someone Quiz
101 Questions for Humanity
The Little Book of BIG Questions
101 Questions for Couples
101 Questions for Single People
101 Sex Questions
444 Questions for the Universe
The Ultimate Video Game Quiz
About the Artist
Amanda Makepeace has been drawing and thinking up imaginary worlds and characters since her childhood days in the suburbs of Maryland. Since those formative years, she's lived in the southern burbs, moved abroad to England, and now calls rural Georgia home. Her imagination is fed by a love of nature, myth and the fantastic. When she's not in the studio, you can often find her wandering the woods, collecting bones and other bits of nature for her ever growing natural history collection.
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