Vigil (36 page)

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.’

             
‘I cannot give you reasons, Tom. I cannot give myself absolution. There is no forgiveness for the man who ended the world.’

             
Tom watched his father’s eyes for a sign, any sign, of remorse. There was none. But there was something there he had never seen while his father had been alive. There was a glimmer in John Fallon’s eyes.

             
‘I have come a long way to see you one last time. While I lived I wished for your love. Now I am dead I just want to know why. Can you not even give me that? In all your life you never loved me like a father. Now I ask as a man. I am no longer a child.’

             
‘I remember, Tom. I know you followed me through. I came to my memories the hard way, but I see you have kept yours. Perhaps that is as it should be. If it were not for the loss of my memory, I think this chance would never have come around.’

             
‘Chance?’

             
‘Chance of redemption, son.’

             
Tom took a deep breath. ‘I come not to give you redemption. There is no redemption but this death I bring to you.’

             
John shook his head.

             
‘You don’t understand, Tom. I followed you through. You would not be here if I was not here now.’

             
‘I understand perfectly. If I end you, then the plague can never come.’

             
‘I thought you would have understood, Tom, if anyone could. I allowed you to follow me. I set this up when I was alive. Who do you think allowed HUB to recognise you? I knew, in the future, that you would come. How did I know this? Tom, I told myself. Don’t you understand? Time is on a loop. I created something that I could not control. I created a hole in the universe with the LHC. Everything that happened from that moment was predestined. You cannot break the cycle, Tom. It is eternal. The cycle rests on me. If you destroy me in this moment it will not matter, because thirty miles away I am still alive.’

             
‘If I destroy you the disease cannot spread.’

             
‘You are wrong, Tom. I had such high hopes for you, but it seems they were wasted. This facility will not be destroyed. The charges you have set are being discovered as we speak. The facility is not destroyed, Tom, because you are here. This plays out the same way each and every time. You kill me and you in turn are killed. Throughout eternity we are destined to meet at this point and we both die. We are anomalies, Tom. We are ghosts. Neither man nor vampire can escape time. That was my sin, Tom, to create the gateway. I thought I could see heaven through the gateway, but instead I have opened a doorway into hell. I am doomed to live life in this cycle, doomed to learn where I went wrong and learn and grow a soul, only to be killed in this moment and relive it over and over again, while you, my son, are my executioner.’

             
‘I don’t believe you.’

             
‘It doesn’t make any difference, Tom. You will kill me, and in my chateau I will rise again. It is not this version of me that you needed to kill, Tom, it is the old version, the me without a soul, the me that thought he could be whole should he travel through the gateway. I was guilty of sin, Tom, but the worst sin of all, the one that has long been the downfall of man, of civilisations and great men alike. Hubris, Tom. I thought I could control the world, but I could not. Neither can you. We are stuck here in this moment. For you, a moment that will last a mere blink of an eye. For me it is the same. It may seem to take centuries for me to reach this moment, but in reality it is a blink. We are in the eye of the universe, Tom. The centre of everything. The moment of creation, the moment of destruction, also. We are in the eye of God, Tom, and you cannot fool the divine.’

             
Tom shook his head.

             
‘I thought to ask you why, in this last moment. But there is no time. I will not die here…’

             
‘But you have no choice, Tom. You are not in the future. You are here now, and this is where we both meet our end, until time begins again.’

             
‘Then I will destroy you before you change, I will make it to the chateau.’

             
‘You will never make it in time, Tom. Already the sun sets. When the sun rises, I...him...your father, will be the first vampire again, and the source. There is only one way for this cycle to end.’

             
‘And what would that be?’

             
‘Break the cycle, Tom. I know it’s hard, but to break the cycle you must set me free. This loop, Tom, this aberration, this is my prison and all the world is a player in my imprisonment. I have learned, Tom, but without my freedom I cannot end it. If you kill me here, then the world will still end. My other self, your father, is this day being injected with my blood. While we waste time here my other self is growing in power, changing. I am being born now in another place while I die here. Only I can end it, Tom. You do not have the power, no matter the gift of your blood. This is not about power or strength or pride or forgiveness, Tom. It is about sacrifice.’

             
‘You expect me to set you free?’

             
‘It is the only way Tom.

             
‘Put your hands on your head!’ shouted someone behind him...Tom felt dizzy. Weak...revelation after revelation pounded in his head. Someone...a guard...shouting again.

             
How did the guards get down here? Tom couldn’t think. His mind was spinning. Was he living an endless moment? Was he doomed to failure no matter what he did? Could he forgive his father what he had wrought, set him loose upon the world? Was this man any different to the indifferent father he had known in his other life?

             
Without thinking, almost on automatic, his hand drew the grenades from his belt.

             
‘Kill them Tom, set me free.’

             
Did he want to live? Did he want to die?

             
He thought of Jean, and Marie, and even Samson, surly Samson, in his world. His friends. Living a loop in a world full of despair and without hope. A world where they were doomed to live in the same cycle of pain should he fail.

             
The first bullet tore through his arm, and the hand holding the grenade fell to the floor. The bullet continued through to hit the glass behind him but it did not even chip.

             
Tom fell to the floor and turned his back on the men holding the guns. Their guns were more powerful than the security guards he had killed upstairs. He didn’t think they would try to kill him. After all, he was the son of their boss. But then they had just blown his arm off. Were all his assumptions so wrong?

             
Hidden from the guards, who were still shouting, he pulled his disembodied hand toward him and shielded the grenade from view as he looked at his father.

             
The guards were advancing, but cautiously. He could hear their boots, harsh upon the steel floor. The floor would not be destroyed, but perhaps the glass would shatter, weaken, just enough. Either way his plan had failed. He had fallen and there was no one else.

             
He saw the truth in it now. He saw that the only chance to save the world rested with the man who destroyed it.

             
He took another bullet through his chest and his ribs and lungs exploded outward. He looked down dumbly and the wreck of his body. It was trying to repair itself already.

             
It didn’t matter. It couldn't repair. Of course it couldn't. The guards here knew the nature of the man in the cage. Their bullets were laced with silver. Tom had lost...

             
He looked up at his father. His father was looking down at him, and Tom saw the one thing that he wanted to see in his father’s eyes.

             
It was not love. It was sadness. Sadness at the loss of a son, the sadness Tom had felt when he had lost his father.

             
He knew the look came from love. It was as close as he was going to get.

             
He pulled the pin and rolled the grenade the last few feet to the base of the glass.

*