He began to feel that familiar sense of injustice well up inside and remembered exactly why The Cause had become so important to him and the others.
He pointed towards a line of doors.
‘That one leads to the general lab areas.’ His finger shifted towards another door. ‘That’s where we’re going: I.T. and records.’ He pointed then to a third door. ‘And that one leads to the basement.’
‘Project Nos labs?’ Blake asked.
‘We deal with that later.’ Camille reminded the group. ‘First priority is to get the formula so we can start our own manufacturing process.’
‘Immortality for all,’ Belfour said, repeating the cadre slogan, ‘not just for the rich.’
‘Exactly,’ Camille replied. ‘We need to keep things simple. We need to manufacture our own version of the drug and for that, we need the formula. Then, we destroy the Immortech labs and flood the market with our own variety before they become operational again.’
Whiting grinned. ‘And then it’ll be too late. Everybody will have access to the immortality drug, not just movie stars and rich politicians.’
‘And what if we can’t manufacture our own?’ asked Cavendish.
Camille Bourdais gave him a stern look. ‘We destroy everything. It’s all or nothing. No compromise. We’ll blow this whole damned building to Hell if we have to.’
Belfour turned to face Cavendish. ‘You’ve never been down there into the labs, have you?’ he said, indicating the door to the basement with a nod of his head.
‘I got as far as the security lock,’ Tony replied. ‘There’s only a very select few individuals go near the place. All I know is that they’ve got it squirreled away in their very own version of Fort Knox. I managed to get some pictures of the door in the basement with my hidden camera before a guard chased me back upstairs.’
Whiting nodded. ‘I’ve seen them. Typical electronic locking mechanism. Shouldn’t be too difficult to open now that the alarms have been disabled.’
‘Maybe so, Cavendish replied, ‘but beyond that, I really have no idea what we’ll find down there.’
‘Let’s get the first part of this mission done with,’ Bourdais interrupted. ‘Then we can worry about the next phase.’
Once inside the I.T. and records department, it didn’t take Whiting long to validate the suspicion that, unlike the building defences, all sensitive data was stored on standalone machines. It confirmed that it simply wasn’t possible to hack their way in remotely and forcible entry into Immortech had been the only practical solution.
‘Can you break through?’ Camille asked as she watched Whiting hunched over, working the keyboard of a console.
He nodded and continued typing commands. ‘Eventually. Just give me a few minutes.’
Tony looked at his watch. A quarter of an hour had passed since breaching the fence and every moment they spent inside increased the chances of discovery. He wiped a bead of sweat from his brow and watched in a silence only broken by fingers rapidly hitting buttons on the keyboard.
‘I’m in,’ Whiting said at last. ‘I’ve found the files. Now, let’s see just exactly what Nos is…’
‘Stop!’ Camille commanded.
The tech expert looked up from the console with a quizzical expression.
‘We don’t have time.’ She tossed Whiting a memory stick. ‘Download everything relevant to Nos. Don’t leave a thing behind. We can check it out later once we get out of here and back to safety.’
Whiting shrugged. ‘I was just curious…’
‘As are we all,’ Camille replied. ‘The quicker we do our job, the quicker you can satisfy your curiosity.’
The tech expert nodded. ‘Understood. Downloading.’ When he was done, he returned the memory stick to Camille.
The mechanism clicked and the LED changed from red to green. The door in the basement swung open.
‘We’re in.’ Blake Whiting disconnected his hacking equipment from the electronic lock.
‘About time,’ Camille muttered. ‘I thought you said this was a standard mechanism.’
‘I was wrong,’ Whiting replied as he rolled up a small cable.
Tony Cavendish pushed the door open and peered inside. ‘What the hell?’
‘What is it?’ asked Belfour.
‘Not what I was expecting…not that I knew what to expect,’ replied Cavendish as he moved inside.
They stood on a small platform and took in the scene. Lamps hanging from the ceiling illuminated a stair leading down to a room where a bank of surgical equipment and consoles was ranged around one patient lacking arms or legs. He was strapped to a table. Not only that, noted Cavendish, the limbless man was gagged and wearing sunglasses. A red bag and plastic tubing hung from a frame by the bed and terminated with a needle feeding the blood into the subject’s neck.
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Whiting.
They stared perplexed at the male, limbless body, who did his best to struggle against the bindings when he saw them enter.
‘Where’s the drug?’ Belfour asked.
Whiting pointed to the patient. ‘Why don’t we ask him?’
‘Charles,’ Camille commanded, ‘watch the door.’ Her boots clattered against the steel steps as she made her way down.
Belfour duly did as he was told but made his feelings known by the sour look on his face. Cavendish followed directly behind Whiting to join Bourdais, who had already descended the steel staircase to the concrete floor and stood next to the patient. Even through the dark lenses, Tony knew the limbless man was watching their approach intently. There was a hunger about him that hung in the air like a miasma. The limbless man craned his neck to be able to follow their every movement and only ceased struggling against his bindings when they all stood around his table.
Whiting grimaced and broke the silence. ‘It stinks in here.’
‘No wonder,’ said Cavendish as he pointed to the undressed stumps where arms and legs should have been. They were black with gangrene. ‘The flesh is rotten. Why isn’t he already dead?’
‘Philippe?’ Camille bent over the limbless man and removed the gag and glasses. ‘It’s you,’ she said in a voice breaking with anguish. ‘You’re the source.’
‘Oui, ma soeur. It’s good to see you again.’ Philippe Bourdais rasped as he gave his sister a weak smile.
‘Sister?’ Whiting exclaimed to Camille. ‘You’re his sister?’
Camille ignored him. ‘I’m sorry it took so long to find you. I had my suspicions that the source was one of us and when you disappeared, I feared the worst.’
‘They took me by day, when I was at my weakest. They brought me here. The sunglasses and gag were to prevent my using hypnotism on them. Then, they cut off my limbs. That way they knew they were safe from the possibility of me breaking free and killing them all.’
Tony stepped towards the bed. ‘What the hell’s he talking about, Camille?’
The Frenchwoman gave him a shove that pushed him back hard into the banks of surgical equipment. He found himself clattering into a table holding an array of hypodermic needles and a tray of small, glass vials. They tumbled about him noisily as he fell to the floor with that familiar pain flaring in his abdomen. When Whiting tried to intervene, Camille Bourdais turned on her heels, thrust her fist into his chest and ripped out his heart. Before the organ had stopped beating she was at the top of the stairs and had torn off the head of Charles Belfour. As Tony Cavendish pushed himself upright and free from the tangle of medical equipment, he noticed the glass vials all around him. Could it be? He thought as he grabbed one and quickly thrust into a pocket of his trousers. When he finally stood up, he watched in stunned horror as the head rolled down the stairs. It came to a stop by his feet and he stared at it numbly.
Belfour’s knapsack landed next to the head and he looked up into the eyes of the Frenchwoman. Her gaze pierced his soul like a stiletto and filled him with a stirring primordial terror of recognition. The knowledge unfurled itself
with an ever-increasing certainty. Vampires were real and Tony Cavendish understood that a part of him had always known this.
‘Set the explosives. Don’t think about trying to escape.’ She held up the data stick and squeezed her fingers around it until its structure collapsed. It fell to the floor in tiny pieces.
Cavendish felt powerless to resist and stooped to retrieve the bag. Fearful for his life, he kept one eye on the siblings even as her power compelled him to carry out her command.
Her face softened as she returned her attention to her brother. ‘What can I do?’
Philippe sighed. ‘Look at me. I’m just a lump of defanged flesh. You know what you can do.’
She leaned close to him and stroked his forehead. ‘But why did they keep you like this?’
‘Why didn’t they just kill me?’
‘Why didn’t they just get you to turn them. You could have made them into vampires without all this pain. They would have had their precious immortality.’ She gestured to the equipment in the room. ‘They could have killed you when they were done. It would have been much kinder – so much more humane.’ She spat the last word with venom.
Philippe Bourdais shook his head. ‘You never understood humans, my sister. They didn’t want to become what we are with the limitations of blood that we have to endure. They are greedy and selfish creatures that only want the good for themselves and refuse to countenance any downside. Becoming a vampire was not what they desired, and yet they coveted our lifespan. They were able to isolate the immortality gene in my vampire DNA but they couldn’t replicate it. They had to keep me. I was the only source of Nos.’
‘Nos as in Nosferatu?’
Philippe nodded. ‘It was their idea of a joke. Hide the truth in plain sight. Since then, they’ve kept me here, fed me just enough fresh blood to keep me alive and milked me like a cow.’
‘They didn’t hide it well enough. When you disappeared and Nos came on the market, I started to guess what lay behind it. That’s when I decided to infiltrate the cell.’
‘The others? They know?’
‘Not yet. But they will. Soon. And when they do, our community will avenge you. We’ll make the humans pay for this outrage.’ She turned her attention to Cavendish, who busied himself setting the timer for the plastique. ‘You hear that, human?’
Still under the influence of the female vampire, Tony Cavendish felt himself turn to face her. His face was a blank mask but he was still aware of the abject horror coiled inside his gut, constricting the last vestiges of his courage. He stood transfixed by her loathing, arms by his side, unable to move. He felt like a mannequin about to melt in an inferno.
‘You’ll all pay!’ Camille Bourdais screamed at him, her face twisted with hatred. Then, she returned her attention to Philippe and her expression immediately softened as she slipped the small backpack over her shoulders, removing a wooden stake from it. She bent over and kissed the limbless vampire. ‘Goodbye, my brother,’ she said as she thrust the stake into his heart.
Philippe Bourdais sighed and shrivelled until nothing remained but a dark patch of gangrenous ooze on the table. Cavendish could only watch as the woman howled out her rage and anguish for a time, beating her fists against the table that had once been her brother’s prison.
When she was done with her grief, she turned to face Tony Cavendish and any fear he thought he’d felt previously paled into insignificance when confronted with the new ferocity that deformed the muscles of Camille’s face. She bared her teeth and looked down at him with eyes incandescent with rage. It made her look both beautiful and terrifying enough to turn his heart as cold as stone. He closed his eyes, afraid to look upon this white-fanged Medusa. He felt his tongue swell up in his mouth, clogging the back of his throat. Like an oily rag soaked in bile and acid, it grew bitter and spread, perverting every sensation in his body, filling him with new pains and nausea until he was ready to drop to the floor writhing in agony. But Camille’s power was too strong. It held him up like a puppet, forced him to endure every spit of venom, taste of rot, shit and garbage. Acid burned his throat and moved through his body until, in a moment, all the pain and suffering receded from the extremities and concentrated in one specific area in his abdomen. His windpipe began to clear and he gagged as he struggled to take in air with ragged breaths.
Blinking back tears, he opened his eyes and saw Camille standing close to him. Her cold breath wafted across his cheeks and she grinned. ‘I could smell the cancer inside you the very moment we met.’
He tried to speak but found himself unable to form any words.
‘Your kind are so typical,’ Bourdais sneered. ‘You hide your true, selfish motivations behind a cause you think is noble or somehow justified, when - all the time - what you’re doing is for you and nobody else. You don’t care if the poor in this world ever get access to the drug. You joined the cell because you want to live and you don’t have much time left. You want Nos for yourself and to Hell with everybody else. Do you still desire it now that you see the price that had to be paid? Do you see what they did to my brother? Does his suffering even matter to you? Or does the suffering of a vampire count for less in your eyes?’
Cavendish found himself able to move his head slightly.
‘You still want it?’ Camille asked in surprise. ‘You fear death so much that you don’t care how much agony your own survival might cause?’ She paused, licked her lips and smiled. ‘I could, of course, make you immortal in the traditional vampire fashion. But I won’t. Whilst the punishment of others will be their destruction, your punishment will be to wait in cancerous purgatory until your body eats itself from the inside out.’
She stepped back from him, her face hard and serious. ‘I want you to know what you have lost this night.’
Tony Cavendish felt his body sag as it was released from Camille’s power. He sighed, blinked and finally realised that she was gone. All that was left was the beeping of the timer on the plastic explosives…
As he walked rapidly towards the security gates, he could see that Camille had been here before him. All the guards lay dead. He glanced at their corpses as he passed. They were scattered under the pale moonlight, shrivelled like prunes. Tony kept on walking.
He was well away when Immortech went up in flames. It glowed bright orange against the night sky and he considered if this were truly the first act in a war between vampires and humans. As he made his way home, he realised that it didn’t really matter to him anymore.
Once inside his small house, he thrust his hand into the pocket of his trousers and took out the vial. It was filled with a clear liquid. He lifted the container to his mouth, hoping that what he was about to consume was the wonder drug he so desperately sought.
It tasted vile but he forced it down his throat in spite of that, fighting back the urge to vomit. The agony hit him a moment later and he lay writhing on the floor. Was this life or death? Immortality or the end? The pain made it so difficult to tell and he had no idea how long this situation might last. Violent spasms coursed through his muscles as the drug took hold. It felt as if steel rods were being thrust through his bone marrow, as if his skin were being scalded with boiling sulphuric acid and it seemed that every inhalation filled his lungs with a million poisoned darts.
It was only when he opened his eyes that he realised he had been unconscious. He lay for a moment, coming to terms with his body. It felt different in strange and indescribable ways. There was a new strength and vigour in his muscles. He watched a moth fly across the room and realised that he could hear every beat of its tiny wings, and the colours! Everything appeared to have so much more vibrance…and yet….that familiar thud of pain in his abdomen…it was still there. Worse than that, it was stronger than ever.
A gentle tapping at the window disturbed his thoughts. ‘Tony! Oh, Tony!’ Camille’s voice carried through the glass. For once it had lost its hard edge and she sounded almost playful. She reminded him of a cat toying with a mouse.
Cavendish got to his feet and made his way to the front door. On opening it, he found the vampire standing before him.
She smiled. ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’
Tony shook his head. ‘Like I did at Immortech? I don’t think so. Is that why you needed the team? To get you across the threshold?’
‘That and more,’ said Camille. ‘I needed a way of attaining and destroying all the information on Nos. My kind is not technologically minded. We are an ancient people and have no need for such things.’
‘No,’ Cavendish countered, ‘all you need are people to feed upon.’
‘True,’ replied Bourdais, ‘but at least we know how to keep things in balance. The predator must never outnumber the prey. We know this, but you humans show no respect for such simple truths. You take with little consideration to the consequences. You strip the whole world bare and then wonder why it’s in such a mess. We won’t allow you to strip-mine the vampire nation.’
She paused and studied him for a moment. Cavendish could feel her cold gaze like icicles piercing his soul. Then, she gave him a sarcastic grin. ‘How are you feeling, Tony?’
‘How do you think I feel? I’ve got cancer.’
‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she said in a little-girl voice. ‘Didn’t the drug make you feel all better?’
Cavandish’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘You know I had a vial?’
‘Of course I knew. Do you think I’m stupid?’
Tony’s shoulders slumped. ‘Then you know it didn’t work.’
‘Oh but it did, Tony dear. I can see it in you. You’re so much more….alive!’
9 Tales Told in the Dark 7 Page 10
