Vigil (3 page)

Chapter Five

Panaci

Carpathian Mountains 

It was a small village. There were only a handful of houses. People had banded together and made something solid and real. People need to be together. I needed to be with people. But I was not people. I was something else. I understood this as I watched them from the undergrowth. They bustled, busy in the day to day tasks that people had to do so that they could live. They tended crops, they spoke to each other in that strange harsh language that was so unlike my own, yet somehow familiar at times. The meaning floated before me, so close I could almost reach out and pluck it from the air like a falling leaf.

I sat on my haunches in the bushes, a long way back from the people, just watching. They wore clothes spun from some dull cloth, with the occasional hint of colour in a sash or a headscarf. The adults went about their work, the children ran and played. A mother fed a child from a pendulous breast as she walked and I could smell the baby, hear its heart tripping within its chest. The beating heart of the mother was calm, the baby’s heart like a mouse in flight. I could hear the sucking sounds of the feeding baby, the slashing of hoes in the earth, the creak of the buildings in the wind, and underneath it all the heavy yawning of the mountains stretching from the earth.

The pain became too much to bear after a short time. I shut my eyes against the sunlight. Part of me understood even then that this life was not for me. The hunger burned but it would wait until nightfall. That was when I came alive. I was just a pale shadow during the day. Night time was the only time a shadow felt truly at home.

I curled up on myself and pulled a leafy plant over me and listened to the people, their growling language and their little footsteps on the hard packed earth. I waited and hungered, but night was a long time in coming. Part of me wanted to run out and feed, feed until my belly stood out and my jaws ached from chewing. The part of me that was slow to wake spoke softly to my hunger and bade it wait. Night was a time for feeding. When I could see and hear and run and the moon was shy.

I did not sleep. I lay huddled like that child at his mother’s breast, cradled in my hunger, but I had no mother to feed me. I had been born full grown and had never known a mother’s teat. But I needed flesh, not milk. Soft, wet flesh.

Dusk came all too slowly. It always does when the hunger is upon me. By that time my hunger had teeth of its own, gnawing and tearing at my belly.

The sun sank and I imagined I could hear the night’s blissful sigh as it rose out of the east from behind the mountains where it had been hiding. It rose fast until there was nothing but the lights people need to keep back the night. Were they afraid of the night itself, or the things within it that they did not understand?

I could wait no longer. I ran toward the village. The night, warm around me, held me in its arms. It gave me strength. I ran silent in that warm embrace, faster than I had ever run before.

I followed my ears to a house at the edge of the village. I had heard the mother come and go there. I knew her voice and I knew the babe’s wailing. I followed those sounds. I crashed through the door. She looked up, surprise and shock on her face and then she was screaming and the baby was screaming. Perhaps it was because of my nakedness. The people here all wore clothes. Whatever the reason for the screaming, it hurt my ears and I was hungry so I pulled the woman’s head to one side and took a bite from her neck. Her blood gushed from the wound and sprayed across the room. I put my head to the wound and lapped like a dog, gulping and slurping in my hunger. I was making small satisfied noises in my throat as I drank. This was better than meat. It sated the hunger. There was no chewing. It quenched my hunger, my thirst, and my desire.

The blood dried to a trickle soon enough and she slumped back in her chair but I caught the baby.

There were noises coming from the village, now. Shouting and footfalls, running toward the place where the baby’s screaming would not have brought them but the mother’s scream had.

I didn’t know if I would be hungry enough to eat all of them, but the baby looked delicious. I sank my teeth into its fat leg and drank deeply.

The door burst aside and a man was screaming at me. He grabbed me around the throat. It made me angry. I was eating and he was in my way. I pulled free, lashed out and tore part of his face off. Then another man took my arm so I tore his arm from the socket but that made me drop the baby and there were so many people in the room now. They were crowding around me, pulling me away from my meal, so I bit anyone I could. I sank my teeth into arms and shoulders and necks and faces, eating and eating, growing stronger all the time.

Their shouts hurt my ears but I was so hungry now that I barely noticed the pain. I clawed and bit until they held me down and held me around the throat and by the arms and legs so that I could not move. 

I screamed then, in hatred and in hunger, wanting to feed and not being able to, being held tight and my vision blackening, but really it was turning red as I cried.

They dragged me away from the bodies, holding me tight.

I was like the bear to them. I wasn’t a part of their world. They were my food. I should have controlled the hunger, but it ruled me then. It was more powerful than I was. I was thrashing and bucking in their grip and even through my dimming vision I could see their veins standing out and sweat dripping from their foreheads and their muscles, these dirty, grubby people, straining to hold a bear.

I was their bear. The hunger was mine.

I understood much then about my nature.

But as usual, moments of revelation come too late to make a difference. Through the haze that had become my sight I saw a man approach with an axe. My neck was freed but still I was held tightly on the dirt. There was hatred in the eyes of the man with the axe. I did not understand why. I was only hungry, and people were food. The mouse and the fox and the rabbits, were they angry? Were the cows and sheep in the fields angry?

I did not think so.

The axe rose and fell.

It bit deep into my head. Pain blossomed. Bone drove into my brain, pushed by the sinking blade. For a second I thought I saw a bright corona of light and it didn’t hurt my eyes, but that was all I saw. Then thoughts and sights and smell, the things that made me what I was, stopped.

To my knowledge, that was the first time I had died.

*

Chapter Six

Paris 

Year 0026

Post Apocalypse

Tom Fallon crouched in the shell of a burned out building looking out over the city. Smoke no longer curled above the sky line. The city was a necropolis, abandoned by the living these past years. Even in the early days, when it had been ground zero for the plague that cured mankind of all disease and sickness but one, the living had fled to the countryside to escape the cured.

Tom wasn’t watching for people. He watched for vampires.

That was what they had called them in the first few years. There had been hope, then. The televisions had still worked. But the trappings of man soon failed. The radio had been the last to fall, but even radios needed power.

The infection spread to the city, then the world. People were slow to learn. At first it was merely horrific. You could tell them apart. They were shambling and stupid. Their hunger made them idiots with only the most basic of functions – eat and breathe. It was the hunger that drove them on.

The police were called to the first few outbreaks. They would arrive in their armoured vans, guns at the ready. The shooting would start and the cured would fall. But they rose again. The cured came on, unstoppable as the tide. The flesh they tore from the police gave them strength and drove them on. The infection could not be contained.

Tom could see the results all around. Here, on the eastern most edge of
Paris, the scars were still visible.

Then the army had come, and
Paris had become a battleground.

If the cured had stayed stupid, mankind would have had a chance. But for the cured it was evolution on the edge. They learned fast. The older ones, weeks old, became cunning. While the newly cured ran straight into gunfire to be torn down and torched with the army’s flamethrowers, the older ones bided their time. They watched.

By the time someone made the call to burn the city down, it was too late.

Paris
was a graveyard. Blasted rubble stood in place of headstones.

It was an eerie, foreboding sight.

Tom stared into space, his duty forgotten for a moment. Marie waved frantically to him from her hiding place across the street, but all he saw was fire. He could hear the screams.

The screaming haunted his dreams still, twenty-six years after the fall of man.

A small stone hit Tom in the head and brought him back to the present with a curse.

He saw Marie gesturing wildly at him.

Wanker.

Marie was French, Tom was English, but
some sign language was universal.

He signalled back, letting her know he was OK, with his middle finger. She smiled.

Daydreaming out in the wastes. A fine way to get yourself killed.

He looked at Marie, questioning. She shook her head. She had seen nothing, either.

Tom steeled himself. He knew what he had to do.

He’d hoped it wouldn’t come to it, but it was his idea. He wouldn’t expect anyone else to do it.

He stood up as straight as he was able and drew a knife from the sheath at his hip. He gritted his teeth and slashed deep into his hand. The blood flowed freely. He held his hand out and let the wind take the scent.

There was little danger from the shamblers. They had died in the firestorm.

It was the elders they hunted.

Their hunger was more controlled. They would smell his blood, but he didn’t think they would rush in. Tom was planning on their cunning. No one was better at this than Tom. He was ideally suited for the job. He was old. A vampire would be able to hear his old heart beating out its broken rhythm from within his chest. The stab suits his team wore muffled their heartbeats. Tom wore only a ragged shirt and jeans. His gait would be uneven, because of a badly healed old wound.

The vampires would sense his helplessness. They would come. They must come.

He was the perfect bait.

Tom’s team watched from the shadows as he began to run down the centre of the street.

He ran in a hobble, his old heart pounding and sweat pouring already. The sun pounded down. Blinding for a human. Agony for a vampire.

He pictured his daughter as he ran. Ten years gone, her face mutated by the hunger, then by a shotgun blast in her face.

He had buried her ruined body in pieces ten feet apart with a silver coin pushed deep within each piece of her flesh.

That focused his mind. He did not want to end like that. But they all knew the risks. Rather a shot to the head than be one of them.

He stumbled on a shattered brick and rolled onto one shoulder. The impact jarred his teeth and took his wind.

Up, Tom. Up. Run.

He stood up to run again. Saw his marker. He had a hundred feet to go. He checked behind himself and breathed a sigh of relief. Set his feet, turned back, and his heart skipped a beat.

A vampire. Upwind.

It should not have been able to scent the blood upwind. Tom felt his heart kick in again. They had failed.

The vampire stood by the trap, as if he knew it was there. Perhaps he did. Their senses were more finely tuned than humans. Maybe some animal instinct in these perfect hunters told them what Tom was attempting.

There was nothing he could do. He was going to die but he wouldn’t stand still and bare his neck in expectation.

As he turned to flee the last shred of hope died. Another vampire approached downwind, strolling. It looked like he was smiling, even though he was squinting heavily. The sunlight would be agony on their eyes, but the smell of blood would be a strong incentive.

Effectively blind, the two vampires still held the upper hand.

Tom was going to die for being a fool. Both ends of the street were blocked and he didn’t have the luxury of leaping over houses to make his escape. His bowels turned to jelly. It was hard to keep his legs straight.

The vampires were in no rush.

‘Fuck it,’ he said, and drew his knife. He had no one left and his days were long. If he was going to die, he would do his damnedest to take one with him.

He flicked his head side to side, trying to watch them both. They walked toward him. Easy, ambling. Knowing where the rubble was, even blind.

They were a team. It wasn’t something he’d seen before. Vampires, sharing. Perhaps they would fight over him. Perhaps they would kill each other.

Then they ran
.

Tom chose the one ahead and ran
, too, to meet his death. He screamed as he ran. There were words there, but he never knew what they were.

His knife plunged into the vampire’s chest as its fist came crashing down, driving Tom backward through the air. The vampire’s head exploded. Tom landed on his bad leg, hard, and cried out. He turned to face the other. He wouldn’t meet his death on his knees. But the vampire was on the floor, screaming and cursing, bucking and tearing at the net which encased it. The net burned it. A chary stink came from the vampire.

Samson came out with a flame thrower and stood over Tom.

‘Did you get any on you? In your mouth?’

Tom was too shaken to answer.

Sam pointed the flickering jet at Tom. ‘Did you get any fucking blood on you!? Tom!’

Marie, all skin and bone, ran out and pushed the flamethrower aside.

‘Stop it, Sam! Tom, can you hear me?’

Tom stopped screaming with a hitching breath. When he spoke his voice shuddered and his shoulders shook.

‘Clean me off and net me. Just in case.’ He pointed to the vampire whose head was all over the pavement. ‘Burn it.’

Samson grinned. Flames spewed from the tip of the flamethrower and the smell of scorched meat and burning fuel wafted on the air.

Marie cradled her rifle in the crook of her arm, but the safety was off, and she scanned the cityscape endlessly.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Back to the van. We haven’t got much time.’

Samson nodded. He put his fingers to a black wire running around his throat.

‘Lucius. Pick us up. Be fucking quick about it, would you?’

Tom put his face down to protect his eyes as Marie blasted him with the net.

Marie was small, but strong. Tom wasn’t struggling, but with the net on he was dead weight. She shouldered him easily, nonetheless.

Samson couldn’t afford the proximity, but he was a bull. He grabbed the screaming vampire by the ankle and dragged it. He held the flamethrower out to one side, sweeping, checking their back trail.

It was just a matter of time before more came.

Lucius bumped and rocked the van over the ruined road toward them. It screeched to a halt. The fourth member of the team jumped out and pulled open the rear doors. 

‘Fuck, they got Tom?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ Samson shrugged. ‘Come on. Help me with this one.’

Marie loaded Tom into the back of the van as gently as she could. Lucius and Samson didn’t take as much care. They quickly bundled the netted vampire into a large body bag, and threw it in with Tom.

Tom scooted as far away as he could, but to his team, he had the same rights as the vampire for the first twenty-four hours. He didn’t complain.

Lucius jumped back into the driver’s seat and lit a cigarette before he hammered the accelerator to the floor.

             
‘Lucius, that’ll draw them from miles away!’

             
He winked at Marie. ‘Lighten up, love. Blood and screaming’ll do that well enough. Besides, blood and screaming always make me want a smoke.’

             
Marie did the fake spitting thing she’d learned from her mother.

‘Thanks, Marie,’ said Tom. He didn’t need Marie getting into a pissing match. She was the only one who gave a damn if he lived or died. ‘That was a hell of a shot.’

Marie didn’t take her eyes off the city. ‘Don’t thank me, Tom. It was Sam.’

‘Well, then, thank you, Sam.’

‘Don’t thank me, either, Tom,’ said Sam, with a humourless grin. ‘I was aiming for you.’

*