Vigil (35 page)

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Unknown

1999

The indignities I suffered were different. Science moved on at a rate unimaginable in the
20th Century.

             
They never cut anything off. But they did take samples. Endless samples. Samples of my liver, my brain, my heart, my kidneys, my gonads, nails, skin, blood, hair…every part of me was examined.

             
John grew old. I did not. The fervour that once lit his eyes dulled.

             
In 1999 John was given licence to run his own facility in France, and for the first time in fifty years I was moved to Europe.

             
Fifty years of reading the paper every day.

             
I learned, and I learned well.

             
I was taken underground, chained, in a box, and placed in a room.

             
Then, at some point, I was unchained. John Fallon, grey and full of wrinkles, was looking at me with solicitous eyes.

             
‘I thought it was time there was an element of trust.’

             
I flexed my arms with wonder. I felt stronger. I had hope. Wasted, as hope always was, but such a human emotion.

             
‘I am becoming like you, and you like me,' I said, but I do not think John Fallon understood.

*

Chapter Seventy
-Nine

Unknown

John Fallon came and went. He got older while I stayed the same. My life was a long succession of indignities and pain.

             
But in the year 2000 something changed.

             
John Fallon came in one day beaming like a much more youthful man. He must have been coming up for 75 or 80, the way I figured. He had been young when I had first met him, back in 1945. There had been so many new discoveries based on my blood, experiments into longevity for which I had been a guinea pig. He had taken full advantage of my blood and my unique abilities to test those advances.

             
He was a vibrant man, always. Never once had I seen him less than full of energy. This day, despite his age, he was practically leaping out of skin.

             
‘What has got into you?’ I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer. He stood safely behind the glass. It was not glass but some other material that would not shatter, would not mar. It was thick enough to withstand my pummelling. There were holes in the glass, so sound could travel. A thick shield could come down on the outside making it airtight so that they could use their gas on me and continue their experiments.

             
They thought it was kinder to allow me to roam this cell.

             
Ten metres by ten.

             
I preferred it when their cruelties hadn’t been wrapped in an air of humanity.

             
‘I have had some good news, Sam. I have been blessed with a son!’

             
I could not help but smile. All I could think of was how a man of his years expected to be any kind of father. But then I had known that peculiar pride in a child before.

             
‘Congratulations, John.’

             
‘Thank you, Sam. Even at my age, it is a blessing. Thanks to you I am still alive to enjoy fatherhood. He is a fine boy.’

             
‘May he have a long and interesting life.’

             
‘Still, that is not why I came. I wanted to apologize to you.’

             
‘What for?’

             
‘For this,’ he said. The shutter came down and he was obscured behind it, but I could hear his words drifting through the haze as the gas pumped into the room.

             
I lost consciousness then. I fought it.

             
At least when I had been awake I had known what they were doing to me. This way was so much worse.

             
As I faded from waking to sleeping, I imagined the terrors that they would commit in the name of science on my scarred body.

             
When I awoke I screamed with agony and clenched my fists. I was chained again and there was a team of scientists. Cameras were running, set into the ceiling.

             
There was now a mechanical monstrosity in the place of my arm. It burned like silver, preventing me from rejecting it. I could not regenerate. I was in agony. All the while the scientists looked on, fascinated.

             
John Fallon walked along the corridor toward my room and smiled, as though nothing was wrong.

             
‘Please understand, Sam, this is important for mankind. If you cooperate, I will remove the arm and everything will go back to normal.’

             
I laughed through my pain. Even now we held onto the fallacy that was the core of our relationship. I thought feign friendship would save me some indignities. But now I knew the only way I could ever be free of this shame would be to tear his head from his body, to drink his flowing blood, put his eyes out.

             
‘Just pick up the cup to your right,’ he said.

             
Shame. In my pain and through my red tears, invaded and violated, raped by this mechanical arm, I reached out and took the glass in unfeeling metal fingers.

             
John Fallon actually clapped.

             
‘Now, Sam. We just want to test your dexterity. Would you write a few words on the sheet of paper on the table?’

             
I was chained upright, so I could see what I wrote. I would jump through hoops for them. I wrote.

             
I wrote the same thing, over and over, in French, Romanian, Turkish, Arabic, German, Austrian. John clapped like a child.

             
‘It works!’ he exclaimed, patting the other grinning scientists on the back.

             
‘Goddamn, it works.’

             
I will drink your blood, I wrote, and with the mechanical hand I crushed the pen.

*

Chapter Eighty

Unknown

They took the arm from me after a week. They gave me so much plasma my stomach bulged, but the wound took weeks to heal. The silver they had put in their monstrosity slowed my regeneration. I had further weeks of indignity learning to do things with just one hand.

             
John Fallon was solicitous, often enquiring about my health, but his nature was clear to me in a way I had not seen before. He was driven, and that was how he slept at night, telling himself that his experiments were in the name of science, but he was a monster to the very bone.

             
He had no conscience. He had no soul. He was a man with darkness at the very heart of him. He was no newspaper sadist. He was no unthinking murderer like in the stories I read each day.

             
Science can be cruel. Humanities progress can be charted through the trail of bodies.

             
Then one day he did not come.

             
I waited for him, like a puppy. The experiments continued. The other scientists did not speak to me or pretend to be my friend. For that I was grateful. I could not take the pretence any longer.

             
But John Fallon was absent. For a week, two weeks. I asked, but they would not answer me. But there was a darkness about their eyes. A fear?

             
I think it was.

             
I thought he was ill. Perhaps even dead. He was well advanced in years. Had I thought he would live forever, like me?

             
Maybe I did. I was so used to seeing him nearly every day that the change was jarring.

             
It did give me time to think. After a month had passed the tests tailed off, until I was left for days at a time to think.

             
I decided to try to sleep. The light in the room was always bright, but it didn’t hurt. Still, I took off my shirt and wrapped it around my head and laid on the floor in a corner.

             
I slept.

             
And I dreamt.

             
I dreamt of John, laying in a bed, sweating, crying out in agony.

             
Only his arm was not his own. It was the cybernetic arm, the metallic prosthetic that had been tested out on me. He sweated and cried and railed and time passed, in the way of dreams.

             
Then he was flexing his arm, picking up a glass.

             
He was sitting up, spooning food into himself, with his new arm. There was a grin on his face and he flexed his arm.

             
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.

*