Vigil (4 page)

Chapter Seven

Fallon Corp. Research Complex

They drove the rest of the way in silence. Samson’s bulk was jammed into passenger seat. His shoulders were hunched despite the seat being pushed back as far as it would go. Marie rode in the back, eyes scanning the deserted cityscape. Both Samson and Marie wore shoulder holsters under their left armpits.

              Lucius wore a handgun, too, but slung low on his hip, like a gunfighter. He drove silently, cigarette clamped between his teeth.

Tom bounced about in the back. He bore the indignity without complaint. There was very little danger of infection from the vampire next to him, but even subdued with a silver mesh net and bagged so that the vampire could not spit or bleed on him, it was an uncomfortable situation. Probably the most uncomfortable he’d ever been. It was somehow worse than being faced by two of the elders working in unison. Then, he’d known he was going to die. Now, he knew he might live.

The vampire had ceased struggling, but was making pitiful sounds. It had to be in agony. The mesh had silver somewhere in its chemistry. The stink was making Tom’s nose itch, even through the body bag.

He tried to push himself up so that he could see through the back window. He wanted a view of the outside world to hold onto before he returned to their home. He wriggled and pushed himself into a sitting position. The road was pocked and bumpy and his head cracked against the side of the van a few times, but what was a little more discomforted weighed against his peace of mind?

The city scrolled by through the window. Small cars abandoned, burnt black, then turned to rust. Warehouses, factories, collapsed in on themselves. Entire streets destroyed so utterly that any map of the city from before the bombardment was effectively useless. There was a hint of a train track, off in the distance. Scrub grass grew in patches. Scraggly trees tried to reach the sky through the scorched buildings.

Once, the whole city had been burned black and coated with ash. Then the rains had come, radiation burning what the fires had not.

Life was returning, at last. It was slow. Another ten, twenty, thirty years? Maybe the planet would purge itself of the poisons of man.

Not in Tom’s lifetime. The vegetation was still stunted. Yellow. Trees looked like smoker’s fingers. The weeds, the grass, the wild flowers…everything had that sickly yellow hue.

Beautiful.

Tom smiled and stuck the memory away.

Death might be a release from pain. He hated this existence. And yet, there was still beauty in the world.

But hope?

No. No hope. Not for mankind. But hope for the world.

The car swerved and bumped. Tom’s head cracked against the window and he slid back to the floor.

Before he fell, he saw three vampires standing in the shadows. He felt a shiver travel down his spine.

He’d told them all, but they hadn’t listened.

His theories were so often ignored. He was the crackpot old man. Marie cared for him, he knew, but no one else.

Besides, what would the people think if Tom told them that there was a group of vampires watching their retreat?

It didn’t matter a damn what Tom knew. He had no chance of making them listen now he might be infected. From the moment the vampire’s blood had touched him he had become a non-person. He would hold his tongue.

If he lived, there would always be tomorrow.

‘We’re here,’ said Marie, more for something to say than any real desire to inform them. She was looking over her shoulder at Tom. She nodded once. He nodded back to her, as best he could.

She would be cold from now on. He wouldn’t hold it against her, should he live. It was necessary.

That nod told him all he needed to know. If she had to, she would not hesitate to end his life.

A gate clanged shut. 

Tom didn’t feel any different, but some of the blood might have got into his eyes or his mouth. The infection was virulent and the transmission rate for those coming into contact with the cured unbelievably high.

Marie and Samson dragged him out of the van. He thumped against the cold concrete.

‘Careful. He’s probably infected,’ Samson told the two men who were waiting, net guns at the read. Four more men waited behind them, slightly off to one side, armed with rifles. The tips of the bullets would have been dipped in silver. They were waiting for the vampire.

‘Fuck. Tom?’ said a man with a fat cigar in his mouth. He wore a badge on his shoulder. It was the badge of an officer.

‘Don’t talk to him!’ Samson told him.

‘Yeah, OK. But, seriously…fuck.’

‘Did you get one?’ asked another man.

‘It’s in the van.’

Tom watched their smiles grow. Idiots. Who would be happy to have one of the cured in their home? The last time had nearly spelled the end for their little enclave.

But it was what the council had decreed, and Tom was just a scientist.

He shut his eyes and let the two security guards carry him away to isolation. There was no point in arguing or complaining. To the people who lived here he was effectively dead. He didn’t make it any harder on them by talking to them. He might have known them for more than twenty years, but they would tear him apart in a heartbeat if he changed.

They would call it an experiment.

But Marie wouldn’t let it come to that.

*

Chapter Eight

Fallon Corp.

Level 1

The enclave was underground. Once, it had been the Fallon Corporation’s research complex.

The majority of the survivor’s time was spent trying to understand the work that Fallon Corp. had been engaged in. It was an impossible task. Computer data had been purposely corrupted before the end. Many of the weapons within a deeper level of the complex were useable, but the technology for making further ammunition was lost. They were civilians with no scientific training trying to piece together what they could from the wreckage of Fallon Corp’s experiments. Tom had worked there, before the fall. He understood the necessity of this. If this war was ever to be won they needed to understand the tools that had created the virus.

It could take years, but the research centre had been designed to withstand meteor impact, nuclear strike, global warming…end of the world scenarios. It was powered by a nuclear reactor, giving it independent power that might last centuries. It boasted extensive medical facilities, biological engineering, a weapons development lab, advanced computing capacity, self-defensive capabilities, and comfortable living quarters for up to six hundred full-time staff. There were gardens with artificial light and storerooms as long as warehouses. The complex had enough freeze packed foods to feed the survivors for generations. It had water filters that ensured the underground water was safe to drink even though the city’s water was poisoned by blood and ash and radiation.

The scientists that had lived and worked there had prepared for everything except the speed at which it all happened. The majority of them hadn’t even realised the world was ending until it was too late.

Some, like Tom, had seen it coming. Among the survivors currently living in the base, more than thirty had originally worked for Fallon Corp. in some capacity.

In total, three hund
red and twenty-seven survivors, one time denizens of Fallon Corp., had been lost over the years.

Billions dead above ground. Three hundred and twenty-seven below.

All things considered, Fallon Corp. was probably the safest place left on Earth.

*

Chapter Nine

Fallon Corp.

Level 13

Tom was dragged through the entrance, past the staring faces of the men and women he shared his life with. Their faces were like stone. Not one smiled at him. No one spoke to him.

He didn’t speak to them, either. If their places had been reversed, he would be the same as them.

There had been infections before. It was hard enough to kill someone you lived with. It was easier if you accepted their death before you pulled the trigger.

Tom bore the bumps of the staircase from level 1A to 1B without a sound. Eventually the two guards, handling him with extreme care and thick gloves and face masks, placed him in the elevator.

They did not look at him. He did not look at them.

They entered behind him and pushed the button that led to the thirteenth floor and isolation.

Tom watched the muzzles of their guns the whole way.

The door to the isolation chamber sealed shut with a small hiss for such a heavy door. The air filters kicked in with a low whir.

There was absolutely nothing Tom could do for twenty-four hours. He tried to hold his urine in for the first few hours but then he couldn’t hold it anymore so he had to wet his trousers. His hip and his knee ached and burned. He didn’t think it would have been so bloody painful after just a short run, but there it was: he was old.

He rolled on the floor and tried to wriggle over against the wall so that he could sit up straight. Sometimes it eased the pain if he could get into sitting position, but every time he managed to get up against the wall he slid down again, the fine mesh slipping against the smooth floor and steel wall.

With a sigh he gave up and submitted to the indignity of being treated like one of the cured. Nothing more than an animal to be culled from the face of the earth. In another room, bound and subdued, the vampire they had captured would be suffering much worse.

He knew the tests they would be running on the beast. They would be taking its blood for observation. Hair and skin cells would be studied. Brain matter and bone samples would be taken and pored over with perhaps the finest instruments remaining on the planet. The facilities at their disposal were all state of the art twenty years ago.

What heights might man have reached in twenty years without the plague?

Now mankind were reverting. Science would soon be forgotten. Tom often wondered how many years it would take for people to forget there was ever electricity, television, email and mobile phones. Would they eventually resort to using spears to hunt the vampires?

Vampires had no need of tools. Without mankind to pick them up, the trappings of civilization would eventually lie disused and forgotten, turning to dust over hundreds, thousands, of years. Seven billion people on the planet before the fall, and just how many of them were there left to pick up? Were there millions, hiding away in enclaves such as this?

Tom’s mouth was dry and his head ached from dehydration. He rolled around for a while for something to do. He turned to face the window and saw Marie watching him with her cold face.

He wanted to smile, but that would just make it harder. If it had been Samson he would have kept him and experimented on him the same way as the cured in the other room…dissection, burning, sawing.

Marie was cold, but she was human. She saw the necessity for the experiments, but she hated it as much as Tom.

Instead of smiling he turned away. He wasn’t ashamed or afraid, but he wished he didn’t have a wet patch at the front of his trousers. He never imagined that he might be trying to hide the fact that he’d wet himself from a woman at his age. Public school education, two homes, a wife who had left him long before the fall and a beautiful daughter.

Now he was wetting himself like a child and hoping a pretty woman wouldn’t notice the stain when she shot him in the head.

He concentrated on the feel of the cool steel under his cheek. He imagined the pain the vampire would be suffering. The experiments were pointless. There was nothing they could do. They were all just marking time until they were cured, or they died. Either way, their problems would be over soon enough. Mankind’s time had passed.

Tom rolled, shuffled. He tried to sleep, just to pass the time.

His knee and hip began to moan at him, then complain, then scream. His ribs ached, where the vampire had punched him. His lips cracked. It was five hours before he had to urinate again. He didn’t mind so much the second time.

Outside, day ended and night fell.

*

Chapter Ten

Level 13

Marie watched Tom through the reinforced window. If he turned, it would hold him. The room had been tested before. Jean had been watching then, when the newly made vampire broke free of its bonds and thudded against the window, cracking its head against the glass over and over. Jean had panicked and opened fire. The window had a few scratches on it but it had not shattered. They knew the glass was tough enough.

Marie wasn’t worried about the glass breaking, or Tom tearing through the door with his bare hands. The strength did not come until later. Much later.

She had known Tom for nearly five years. She had been a teenager when a group of scavengers from the compound had found her grubbing out an existence over ground. Always small, she’d been little more than skin and bone. She was one of the few children born after the fall to survive. Her mother had kept her alive, somehow managing to survive a pregnancy in a world where even the smallest infection could kill. Her mother had been tougher than any of the cured. That was the thought Marie held onto when she went out into the wastes…that her mother had survived with a child to protect.

When her mother had been killed Marie had become like an animal herself. It was Tom who had brought her out of her self-imposed isolation. When she had refused to speak to anyone he had persisted. He brought her food and kind words. He was the first person she spoke to. He was only person to make her laugh since her mother had died.

In some ways she was like the cured. For her, it was about the hunt. She lived to destroy them.

She only hoped that when she was too old to fight she would be as brave as Tom.

He had warned them that the vampires would begin to work together. They might be vampires but they still had all the thoughts of a human, if none of the emotion.

They were driven by their hunger, but when the food became scarce, would their hunger not drive them to find a better way of hunting? Would it not force them to fight together? Even wild beasts knew the value of a pack.

It had been man’s only advantage. Man could work together.

Were they to lose that advantage?

Marie thought it might happen.

She steeled her heart as she watched Tom. Soon she would have to kill him, or release him from his bonds. Would he understand that she wanted to be the one to do it? Would he forgive her?

When he looked at her she did not smile. But she did not embarrass him by looking away, either. He looked away first. She wished he could have read her face and understood that it had to be this way.

If he turned they would use him, like they used the animal in the medical bay.

She would not see it come to that.

Her wait was cut short. A klaxon sounded.

Even Tom heard it, through the thick steel. It hurt Marie’s ears. It must have been agony for the vampire in the cell down the hall.

Tom looked at her through the window, his look one of sadness and understanding.

She nodded to him. She mouthed, ‘I’ll be back.’

The others would be taking up positions and arming the defences. But there was something about this night. She had learned long ago to trust her feelings. It was the predator in her. Animal instincts honed through long years of survival, gradually turning from hunted to hunter.

She had seen the way the two vampires had worked together, even if Samson and Lucius remained blind to what was happening.

The vampires were evolving. If they were evolving, time was suddenly short. And if time was short, they would need Tom. He was their best chance.

She picked up her rifle.

She could understand Tom all too well. When Tom had lost his daughter, Marie imagined how her mother would have felt had she died first.

What would it be like, to protect someone for so long, only to lose them?

She hoped she would have the chance to save Tom, as he had saved her.

The klaxon changed tone. Insistent. Not a warning. An emergency.

Marie broke into a run.

*