Vigil (28 page)

Chapter Sixty-Four

Fallon Corp.

Gateway

John Fallon
placed his hand against the security scanner outside the door. He had to place his right hand down. The fingerprints on his left were indistinct. It was a side effect of the healing that the flesh was never the same. Something about the virus that granted immortality rewired the flesh, changed the body on the cellular level. The nanotechnology that made up the virus entered the cells, changing the nature of the host.

             
But it did not change the soul. That remained. Science could not change a man’s soul.

             
John Fallon had been born with a dark heart.

             
He stepped through the door as soon as he was cleared.

             
No man, not even a savant with the world’s finest technology at his disposal, could plan for every eventuality. There are forces at work that are outside the ability of science to predict.

             
No man can know the nature of the universe. It is ineffable, indefinite, chaotic to human understanding with rules written into the very fabric of time and space that only the infinite could ever understand.

             
John Fallon was immortal. But he was far from infinite. Despite his pride, despite his great intellect, he could not understand what was beyond all reason.

             
Nothing prepared him for the sight of the gateway, fully functioning, powered by all the sister facilities across Europe. The power it took to hold the gateway open was immense, the power of a sun, captured and contained within this shifting portal.

             
He stared at it, mesmerised by its impossible beauty. He was so close. All he had to do was touch it.

             
Something rocked the facility. It took valuable seconds before John Fallon realised what it was.

             
While he had been staring, captivated by the gateway through time itself, the first of the explosives had detonated.

             
Before his eyes the gateway shimmered. A powerful wind began to blow in the room, coming from nowhere, impossible.

             
He pushed against the wind as the second explosion came. He reached out to touch the gateway, to go through, but he had no time.

             
It expanded, warped toward him. It was hungry. The wind was immense, unnatural. It was scouring his skin from his body. It burned his eyes from his head and he screamed, blind, reaching out.

             
The last explosion rocked the facility and the portal blew outward, sucking John Fallon into the eye of the greatest storm in the universe, its moment of creation. He fell screaming into its eye.

             
In less than a second, the facility became nothing, just a crater left in the ground. The epicentre of a vast expanse of nothingness for miles and miles. It was as though a sun had burned a hole in the very fabric of the world.

*

The Parisian Countryside

2025 A.D.

Year Zero: Apocalypse

The man on the bed opens his eyes. Dawn is maybe minutes off.

              The watcher looks into those eyes.

             
Those eyes are full of madness and rage...the blind hunger of the new born. Even without blood, the dosage of FE612 that John Fallon took into his system has worked wonders.

             
The new arm is strong. The old man's skin is no longer waxen, but showing the first flush of vigour. His liver spots fade. His hair, wispy when night fell, is lustrous once again, like that of a much younger man still in his prime.

             
But the old man is in the throes of hunger, and something much worse, because the watcher, the elder vampire, is wise with many years.

             
The old man screams, his insides no doubt roiling, crying out for flesh or blood. His skin, too, burns, but with a different kind of heat.

             
Because John Fallon is tied to the bed with thin filaments of silver netting, holding him down and searing his flesh as the watcher looks into the old man's eyes and holds a silver knife against the idiot creature's neck.

*

Part Five

Blood

Chapter Sixty
-Five

Russia 

Near Verkhoturye Monastery

1844-1888

My life, such as it is, has been characterised by short periods of almost manic activity, followed by long periods of isolation or hibernation. Following the death of my wife I suffered a long bout of insomnia. As much as I wanted to sleep, having discovered the ability, I could not lay my head down. For nearly a whole year I laid in the earth, listening to the seasons change. I closed my eyes against the dirt and tried to dream. I tried to dream the dream of different worlds, but it would not come. My mind wandered during that year, but it kept returning to loss, and heartbreak, and pain.

             
I think perhaps I was lonely, in the dirt. I wished for someone to hold, a warm body to chase away the chill as the winter came down from the mountains, seeping into the earth and freezing it solid against my limbs so that I could not even move, not one inch.

             
That was when I decided I needed to get out of the earth. I could not do it until the first thaw, that false spring that often comes in the mountainous regions of Europe. No matter a man or vampire’s strength, he cannot break free of a cocoon of frozen earth. In the depths of the Romanian winter the earth becomes hard as concrete, and just as impossible to move through.

             
The ground began to soften as there was an almost imperceptible thaw. I could move my fingertips. I wriggled my body and began to shift the earth around me. It took tremendous strength to pull myself through the earth, but eventually I emerged into a night filled with powerful rain and a harsh wind. I stood for perhaps an hour in the freezing rain, letting it wash the dirt from my clothes and my hair. Only when I was completely sodden did I set out.

             
It may seem strange that a creature like myself would wish for goodwill, but I wish people could understand me. I do not expect sympathy. But can a man imagine the anguish that a vampire is burdened with? Such a long life, a creature whose every footstep is followed by death and tragedy, like a midnight shadow that cannot be shaken, cannot be fooled. I have such a lust for life, still, after my many years. I am drawn on by the call of something greater than myself. I am drawn inexorably toward a future I cannot plan, I cannot foresee. And yet I cannot die. I cannot avoid whatever fate puts in my path, even though I know it will never be joy, just more pain.

             
The future holds only pain for a vampire.

             
My loneliness was heavy and my future bleak. I knew that I could never share my life, that I would forever be set apart from the world of men. A lone traveller through the shifting territories of the world and its history. Destined to be an observer, a player of bit parts in a great show nobody but the divine could understand.

             
Was there some great design that I too was a part of? I did not know. I did not wish to know. I only wanted to be left alone. The world of men had lost its allure for me.

             
All that was left was the seasons, changing until I too passed from human consciousness. I would watch the seasons and leave men behind. I would wait out the end of the earth in solitude.

             
So thinking, I set my heart. The mountains were to the west of me this time. I put them at my back and began to walk.

             
I walked for many years, never stopping, feeding only sporadically, and never sleeping. I had never been conscious of my insomnia before. There had been times when I had been awake for centuries at a time, but I had never felt the need to sleep accompanied by the failure to do so. Wanting to sleep so badly, longing to curl into the bosom of the earth, yet completely unable to rest.

             
My trouble had always been myself. I did not realise it for many years. I had a restless heart and a lively mind. I was wide awake in the world, a creature neither of the night nor the day. My cycle, it seemed, was the seasons, the years and decades and centuries.

             
I walked. As I walked, pounding miles and turning in circles to start again, searching for a place to sit and watch the seasons, I began to feel myself slowing. I could count my heartbeat by my long stride. For the first few years it beat once every ten strides or so. As my long search neared its completion I counted nearer one beat for every fifty or so strides.

             
I was slowing down, like a clock that has counted time until it has grown weary of the never ending slide of time from seconds, to minutes, to hours…and on into eternity. Who would not grow weary in the face of infinity, stretching away so far that it cannot even be imagined?

             
Should I live to be a thousand years old, or ten thousand, I wondered if I would eventually slow like the earth had, cooling, occasionally creaking and shifting but slowing…slow…and then, what? Would I become stone? Would I sleep and become a part of the earth, my thoughts eventually fading away until there was nothing left but a fossil for future men to examine?

             
Something about the thought was attractive, but I suppose in some ways I was feeling low and the thought of a slow death was invigorating, in its way. For most people the urge to die, to feel pain, is unfathomable. But when you are in the depths of a long depression the idea of pain and its reality can sometimes wake you, remind you of what it feels like to be alive.

             
Even pain is a relief when you spend years numb to all but the changing of the seasons.

             
That is not to say I did not feel emotions during those years. I felt them keenly. But on the surface of my heart, like a breeze on the skin that does not chill to the bone.

             
In these ways people pass the lonely years, numb, wishing they could feel, feeling, wishing they could be numb.

             
Melancholia, my sole companion on my journey, became constant, like the stars, watching over me and weighing me down so that I would not fall forever into the sky. Its weight held me to the earth.

             
When I fed, rare though it was, I made sure I never left any of my bastard children behind. I would not leave this legacy of cruel loneliness to any child of mine. Should I have a child I would want him to feel love and joy and warmth. It is a curse, this long life. To give it to another willingly would require hatred and I was too sad to hate anyone or anything but myself.

             
With this thought in my heart I took my last step. I was in the depths of Russia. My limbs were numb from the cold, my nose and fingers and toes were frostbitten and I had already lost two digits. The cold was stopping them from growing back.

             
I didn’t mind at all. I wanted to hurt. I wanted to scar myself and bleed and maim the body that I had come to hate.

             
But I am a coward. I am craven and weak. If I was strong I would have built a pyre and stood atop it as it burned my body to nothing but ash.

             
Instead, I fed on a wolf and took its fur for my own. I finally made my home at the top of a hill overlooking a winter landscape of surpassing beauty. The country rolled out for miles in every direction. The trees were frozen and the only sound was the cracking of their sap and the occasional slithering of snow from branches to the ground. There was no birdsong. I could not hear a heart beat, not even a bird. It was perfect.

             
I built myself a hut on that hilltop. I tore trees from the ground and with patience born of eternal life I cut lengths of wood with a dull blade that I always carried with me.

             
It took nearly a year until I had a serviceable hut, but then I did not sleep and I did not need to rest. The work, as the walk, were therapeutic, in their way.

             
I stayed that way for a number of years. But for some reason mankind thinks if a man lives a life of solitude he must have some wisdom that they lack. I think this isn’t seeking wisdom on the pilgrim’s part. I think it has a hint of jealously.

             
What man has never thought to walk away from it all? Walk away from the death, the despair, the fighting and yes, the loving, the blissful and painful.

             
I suppose I could have killed the first man, a hunter, that happened upon my cabin, but I was feeling the loneliness particularly sharply on that day. I took him in so that he could warm himself by my fire. And so it goes. That is how rumours start. With the word of one, passed on and growing like an avalanche.

             
People began to seek me out. I think they thought there was something mystical about the man who lived in his cabin, alone atop a hill. I was unkempt and unwashed. I had but one possession.

             
Talk began of my heartache. It must have been monumental, they said, for the man to live alone with nothing but a painting. The woman was hauntingly beautiful, they said. She must have died and left him heartbroken.

             
Somehow, despite the stories that circulated among the people in villages far and wide, they thought this man who had suffered such a loss must be wise because he lived alone in the hills.

             
People who live alone in the hills are not often mystics, but they often bear scars that cannot be seen.

             
People wish, as I have said before. People no doubt came to visit me, taking the long hard path to my home like it was a pilgrimage, thinking I would have the answers to their troubles. But to wish is no wiser than chasing rainbows.

             
The people that came were all driven by hope for an answer. Only one who came during my time as a hermit wanted something different. God help me, he took it, and in doing so manufactured my downfall and shaped the world to come. In some small way his actions were the first pebble tumbling down a shale hillside. Europe was the shale, the pebble was a man called Rasputin.

             
The blood that flowed within that traveller’s veins was mine.

*