Vigil (13 page)

             
When he finished it he turned to the start and read again.

             
The team came and went. Tom looked up and realised shift had changed. He was thirsty and his old bladder was screaming at him. He had read enough. He had understood too much.

             
He closed the file and put it under his arm. He left the room. The door shut behind him with a determined click.

             
Outside, the sun slid below the horizon.

*

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Romilly Sur Seine

A convoy rolled along the side of what had once been a dirty river. Now it ran clean.

             
It had been a long time since the army had been seen in France. In the early days, when people were still calling the cure a plague, the army had tried to stem the tide of the infected with guns and barricades, with armoured trucks and eventually flamethrowers and tanks.

             
It had all been in vain. The blood was too powerful. It was hungry blood and it ate and ate, changing anyone who came within touching range, close enough to their teeth.

             
At barricades across the country the army had been unable to hold back the press of ravenous infected, mindless creatures that would run through a barrage of gunfire to get to a quick heart, to feed…

             
Just one bite, just one drop of blood was all it took to turn the quick into a creature bent on feeding. The infected would charge the barricades mindless of their wounds, picking themselves up time and time again. Even the heavy artillery only slowed them down, unless a soldier was a good enough shot to destroy the head. But soldiers, by and large, are not marksmen. Their weapons are not designed for such accuracy. They are not taught to aim for the head, but for the easy shot; a sure shot to the body.

             
By the time they learned it was too late.

             
The army fell, then fell back to their enclaves, hiding behind barbed wire in their barracks, hiding behind thick stone walls and firing out. The lure of their quick hearts was strong though.

             
Many barracks withstood the onslaught, and soldiers survived for many years across the world. But their days of standing against the vampires was done.

             
Then the vampires had learned. They had learned that although they were strong, they could not withstand the flame. They watched their kind falling to head shots from snipers and did not see them rise again.

             
They learned. When the hunger became a constant companion and they could think again, they imagined ways to get into the army compounds, to take the power that they had.

             
Some soldiers, too, became vampires. They knew how to use the weapons of war. The vampires evolved. They were intelligent. They had time to learn. They were doctors and scientists and academics, just as often as they were plumbers and waiters and taxi drivers.

             
They did not sleep.

             
Over years groups of vampires began hunting. They were hunting, now.

             
But the days of relying on their speed and their power were gone. Now they had guns. They had trucks and missiles and tanks. They had picked up the technology that was left lying around after the fall and turned it to their own ends.

             
A convoy of tanks and trucks, some of the trucks extremely large, with missile platforms on their flatbeds, pulled up to a bridge over the river Seine.

             
A vampire stepped from the cab of the leading truck and made a hand signal. The missile platforms halted and took up positions at the rear of the column.

             
With another hand signal, he took his seat again and pulled off, heading at a steady speed toward the wreckage of the capital city, toward Paris, and the final goal of his conquest.

             
For many years he had travelled. He had allies in countries across the world.

             
The vampires were no longer lone hunters. They were legion. They controlled the world and slowly it was falling under their dominion. The vampire leading the convoy was their leader. Vampires in each continent of the world bowed to his will.

             
Where human kind had failed to pick up the pieces of a fallen civilisation, he had succeeded. Together with his vast army he had succeeded in turning the power back on in key cities. His communications network was vast.

             
But their food was learning, too, and it was becoming more difficult to find food. The blood, as always, drove his every move. But he was more intelligent than most. Far more intelligent.

             
He knew where the food was. The blood was calling to him. Across the miles.

             
Across the ages.

             
The end was in sight, and a new beginning for the vampire nation. A world to mould into one that they ruled completely.

             
Fallon Corp. was the key. It was the alpha and the omega. Finally, after so many years, it lay within reach.

*

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Tom handed most of the responsibility for researching the inhibitor over the rest of the science team. He wasn’t sure he could cover all the ground necessary to understand the workings of the LHC on his own. He didn’t head into the chamber, or even go down that path. He was undecided as to whether he ever would, although part of him knew that he must, and that he was just putting off the inevitable.

             
At the end of the day the research team would update him on their various discoveries and he would listen intently. Three days passed in that way. At some point it became his team, not Jean's. He didn’t mind. At least if he was going to be responsible then he would do the best job of it he could. He didn’t trust anyone else to make the right decisions.

             
The bulk of the files on the computer were vague reports on what he knew from the secret files. He didn’t learn much that was new, but he filled in a lot of the blanks in his knowledge. Pierre Dupont, the dead man, had helped with notations and explanatory files in many of the folders on the computer. None of the files were encrypted. There wasn’t anything in there that his father’s team of scientists would not have known anyway. Mainly they were reports and saved emails from others.

             
His father’s thoughts on the subject must have remained in his head. There was nothing to say what had gone on in that head. He had kept his own council. Occasionally there would be a response to an email from him that he had saved in his inbox. These, Tom soon realised, did not so much enlighten as obfuscate the issues.

             
Tom had spent most of his time in deep thought. It was the particle accelerator that fascinated him. He grilled the Hub computer, ordering it to restrict its responses to his office.

             
He had been afraid when he had first read the file. Now he was terrified.

             
The first particle accelerator, CERN, had made some interesting discoveries. They had succeeded in a small way, creating a miniature nuclear explosion in a controlled environment, by accelerating and colliding particles at phenomenal speeds, powered by the accelerator itself, nearly 30km long. Tom didn’t understand the science behind it, and much of his understanding was just guesswork, but it seemed that the long tunnel was basically the bore of a gun, firing particles at each other, reaching nearly the speed of light.

             
What they had succeeding in doing was to create a controlled explosion, at exactly the point of impact. The point had remarkable properties. They managed to stabilise it, so that it did not expand or contract. It was stuck in time.

             
The point itself could be sped up or slowed down with an influx or decrease in power. It required no input, however, to remain constant. It was unchanging. The applications of the discovery were mind blowing.

             
But the scientists based at CERN never had that chance to experiment further. Their findings ended up on some colonel’s desk, and the army came in and shut it down.

             
It was not the end of the story, though. John Fallon had immense power throughout the world and many ears. He found out about the results of the test and he had an idea. The idea took nearly two decades to put in place, but he managed it. He had nearly unlimited resources and power – if anyone could have achieved such a goal, it was John Fallon.

             
He had created a network of reactors. The focus, the nexus of that combined power, was down the corridor from Tom.

             
There had been trial runs, and startling results.

             
The pinpoint could be expanded, under control, and things could be put into the point. They vanished without a trace.

             
But John had a theory. He had tested it.

             
He had never been able to carry out his final piece of research, or prove his theory was correct, because he had had a thunderclap coronary.

             
Tom understood the theory. He was not a stupid man.

             
He also understood something else.

             
If his father really had been injected with FE612 before he could finish the job of dying, wasn’t it possible that he had healed? Wasn’t it possible that he was still alive?

             
And if he was, he had had nearly forty years to think and perfect his theory.

             
Would his father continue his work?

             
Of course he would. It was his obsession. Tom thought it would have more power over his father than the hunger.

             
And now he was afraid, and not just for the people of the complex. He was afraid for the world.

             
‘Tom!’

             
He jumped and clutched his chest as pain blossomed there.

             
‘Jesus, don’t do that!’

             
‘Sorry, Tom. I knocked, but you didn’t hear me. You’ve got to hear this. I think it might work. You won’t believe it, though.’

             
Tom sighed and pushed himself to his feet. ‘You’d be surprised at what I’d believe these days. Show me.’

             
The man dashed off ahead like an excited puppy. Tom walked at a more sedate pace. He didn’t want to die just yet, but he had a sneaky suspicion that his heart might have something else to say on the matter.

*

Chapter Thirty

The man, Phillipe, Tom remembered, was nearly jumping with excitement. His team were all looking at Tom, eager for his approval.

             
Tom resolved to give it, no matter what they had discovered. He knew all too well how hard his team had worked over the last few days.

             
‘OK, go ahead. Blow me away.’

             
Phillipe beamed. Tom found himself smiling, too. He had precious little to smile about since reading about the accelerator, but the young man's enthusiasm was infectious.

             
‘Right. We have read and reread everything about the inhibitor and the cure. We’ve read all the notes on their experiments. It’s unbelievably advanced.

             
‘All along we’ve been calling the cured 'vampires'. There didn’t seem to be anything else to call them. They drink blood. They heal. They don’t like the sun…it’s like a story book. It’s a myth come to life. Legends walking the earth, feeding and infecting anyone who comes into contact with their blood. But the blood doesn’t bring people back to life. It doesn’t work on the dead.

             
‘I’m with you so far.

             
‘We call them vampires, but nobody really believes in legends. But that’s precisely what they are, Tom. Real vampires. This UnSub One, he was the first. They believed that he had survived for hundreds of years, and that all along there had been other vampires throughout history. They didn’t think that he was the only one. They worked on that assumption, and through sheer chance they discovered what we had, long ago – silver inhibits the production of the virus.

             
‘The virus itself is a compound, nanoparticles in viral form, unbelievably contagious. They fell down because the inhibitor was discovered afterwards, then it was too late to produce it on a large scale. They didn’t have the facilities for that here, and the facility was soon abandoned. They could have saved the world from the contagion, but they didn’t have time!

             
‘Instead, they shut the facility down and walked away. Why did they do that?’              ‘Well, why?’

             
‘Because they saw that there was no hope, Tom. It was too late by the time the infection had spread. The inhibitor doesn’t cure the afflicted of their hunger. It stops them from being contagious, but what good was that? They didn’t have enough, and by the time the cure had spread, who had the power to round up the infected? No one. There was no one left.’

             
‘They could have tried.'

             
‘No, Tom. It wouldn’t have worked, because it was so complicated to create the inhibitor. It required nanotechnology. The answer was simple. It was something we had right there in front of us. Stories as a child, mythology provided the answer, with a solid scientific base – silver, Tom.'

             
‘In the inhibitor?’

             
‘Sub-microscopic. Particles of silver in a titanium compound that are so small they can travel into a person’s cells. They inhibit some of the properties of FE612. It’s a cure out of legend, a time old remedy to ward off the bogeyman, kills werewolves, burns vampires…the old tales were true all along.

             
‘Silver has purifying properties, as you well know. Ancient people knew this. They used to use silver to purify water. It’s something that people have just forgotten over the years. The silver halts the infection, Tom! We can cure it.’

             
‘That’s brilliant. Can we produce it?’

             
Phillipe's face fell. ‘No. We don’t have the technology or the expertise. We can’t recreate what the scientists here did. We just don’t know how. Perhaps if we had years…’

             
‘Well, we can test it.’

             
The floor rocked underneath them.

             
‘What the hell was that?’

             
‘Hub One?’ said Tom.

             
‘Yes, Tom,’
replied the computer’s cold voice.

             
‘What’s happening up there?’

             
‘I believe the upper level is under attack. Turrets are currently operational.’

             
‘Can you see above ground?’

             
‘My systems are independent of the main facility. My responsibility is to guard the gateway.’

             
A tremor ran through the walls and the steel beneath the scientist’s feet.

             
‘What was that?’

             
‘An explosion. The eastern turret is no longer operational. Defensive systems above ground are running at 54% capacity.’

             
‘I think we just ran out of time ourselves,’ said Tom, more calmly than he felt. ‘Come on. We need to test it now.’

*