Eternal Vigilance
Gabrielle S. Faust
Stafford England
Eternal Vigilance
By Gabrielle S. Faust
© 2008
Smashwords edition 2009
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Cover Design by Gabrielle S. Faust
Cover Photo by Wojciech Zwoliñski
A Smashwords edition, originally published in paperback by Immanion Press, 8 Rowley Grove, Stafford ST17 9BJ, UK
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For all of those I love who have fought the darkness within them and emerged victorious.
And for all of those who have fought bravely and lost, may your souls finally find peace.
You are still loved.
Eternal Vigilance
Book One
From Deep Within the Earth
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
–“Tao Te Ching”
1
A deep rumbling like the chaos of a storm rising from far within the earth's interior clawed its way to the surface. From near the center where it was always warm, it bridged time and space, traveling through the fluxing structure of existence, caring little for the restraints of our defiant physical laws. I could feel it reverberating through the thin blades of grass beneath my arms and legs. I dug my fingernails into the rich black soil beneath my palms and stared up at the gray dome above me. It churned and writhed with the wind, spinning in upon itself like a massive silver serpent squeezing the life out of the atmosphere.
The dragons of the land were awakening. Wrapped in mist and fire, slate scales of blood and jet, they rose in a warning of chaos and inevitable change. Their cry was a call to the very core of the universe to return to the forgotten altar where they were once worshiped, where blood was spilt to sate their demand for balance, and hymns were sung in their name on moonlit eves. My reason refused to accept such a possibility: that beasts that had once incited both fervor and fear in the eyes of my grandfather could truly return. Every nerve within me screamed with a primal fear that I could not deny. Paralyzed, I lay still and watched and waited.
The winged serpents roared again and reality quaked. The vibrations traveled from the packed soil and sediment to a place that seemed lodged deep within my bones. The sky began to melt, the contours of the gray clouds shifted away from one another to recede in the wake of an engulfing darkness. I gasped as a piercing cold crashed into me as if the sea reached out to consume my soul. Like quicksand it drew me down into its womb, pushing the air from my lungs in a hollow soundless scream.
The sky became a distant sliver before my eyes. The ghost of a damning unearthly wind howled aggressively in my ears, the distant sunlight becoming icy and fractured. For a moment I drifted, my will leaving, entranced by the fading beauty of the world I had once known. Suddenly, the dragons shrieked again sending wave after wave of shearing vibrations through the very marrow of my bones. I struggled against the invisible pressure that held me captive. My heart careened against my ribs until I thought they would shatter. The palms of my hands slammed down against something hard and smooth as I momentarily regained the control of my arms. I gasped. Instinct, bred of war, moved my hand to reach for my sword, but it was no longer there. Panic! Desolation! I gasped for air as the universe collapsed into my chest...
My eyes fluttered open.
Darkness. Dense, formless shadows pressed down on me with the weight of a corpse. All sense of dimension was lost to me in the pitch dark. My stomach twisted in a nauseous delirium, my teeth chattered uncontrollably as if from a severe hypothermia. Blind in my instinct to fight, I began to flail, searching for a way out of the smothering nothingness. My fists collided with a hard flat surface—thick marble—to my left and then to my right. In a fleeting moment of clarity, I paused, the silence a high-pitched wail deep within my skull. I pressed my palms against the cold flat surfaces to either side of me. A heartbeat passed through my fingertips and into the stone. Confused rage engulfed my soul as the second of hesitation snapped like a matchstick. I slammed my body against the smothering walls containing me, fighting furiously against my prison. Whatever sanity might have remained vanished in a hellish unearthly shriek as I punched upwards with all of my strength.
Something exploded above me. The air rang with the sudden impact as a thick cloud of dust and hard tiny shards of stone rained down upon my face and arms. Coughing and sputtering blindly, I pulled myself from the coffin, falling to the floor with an unceremonious thud. For a long while, I lay curled up on the icy stone floor shivering, my arms wrapped tightly around my bent legs. My lungs ached from the dust and grit that filled the air around me, that settled like a thin veil of ancient holy gauze upon my skin and hair. My body convulsed uncontrollably with pain, my mind whimpering as it raced without rhyme or reason, clawing for the fragments of dreams that now spiraled away from my grasp like shreds of white silk in a cyclone wind. It was cold. It was silent.
Gradually, my heart began to ease and with it my mind. My muscles began to loosen making me weak and queasy as the adrenaline rushed through my veins and into my stomach. Slowly, I opened my eyes again. I lay at the base of a massive stone sarcophagus. The tiny tomb was windowless and drenched in shadow. Angles and planes were one and the same, shadows converging in the same ephemeral fashion as if swept to a dusty corner to be forgotten. It was a strange archaic beauty of a time long past. I marveled at my surroundings; it was as if I was seeing the features of the room by moonlight. Time had not dulled my preternatural vision and I found myself lost within the cold alien beauty. A shudder breezed through me. Icy recognition gripped my heart as I began to separate the remaining tendrils of dreams, wrapped like whispers of cobwebs, from reality.
Chunks of what had been the lid of the sarcophagus lay scattered around me in dusty irreparable ruins. With trembling fingers, I reached up and grasped the sides, using their solid strength for support to pull myself unsteadily to my feet. A dull ache invaded my legs as I attempted to use them, the muscles hurriedly repairing and rejuvenating themselves even as I rose. It made me wonder just how much time had passed since I had crawled into that box. It was a strange and distant sensation, that of my own tissue knitting together in fibrous strands, becoming stronger and stronger with each second. I listened to the blood rushing through my ears, simply learning to breathe again.
With great care, I turned from the coffin, my gaze drifting along the unadorned, stone walls to finally rest upon the small chamber door. Gradually, like sand sifting through the cracks in an Egyptian temple, my memories began to fall about me. The truth was sickeningly sharp, twisting my innards, the images like swarming hornets. The spell I had cast upon myself was supposed to have been permanent; I was not to have awoken to the world ever again.
A nauseating anger ripped through my bones. I staggered towards the door and, with trembling fingers, traced the outline of the crucifix chiseled on the stone. I watched my fingers as they danced delicately across the intricate and ancient curves. How skeletal the digits appeared: animated bones bathed in false blue light. My eyes traveled over my wrist to my arm. So thin, the flesh, an albino white almost transparent, marred by ropes of blue veins that wrapped around my arm like earthworms. In much the same way that a starving prisoner forgets the pleasures of food, an aching numbness had replaced the unquenchable Thirst that had bound me to my madness. I could barely even remember the smell of blood or the taste of the flesh that held it. My parched swollen tongue danced over my sharp fangs testing the tips in search of my past.
I felt the remnants of my former paranoia return, stalking the edges of my mind; savage little beasts. How long had I slept and what remained of the world above? The human race was a hive of industrious destructive insects. I had seen revolutions spawned of revolutions, bloody wars quickened from the ashes of their predecessors. The centuries, flying past me as quickly as mortal decades, had elevated and leveled empires, cultures, and technologies, all the while dictating a silent directive of slow planetary death. The fabric of the world I had left behind had been riddled with a heavy stifling fear. Layers upon layers of devious demons crept up behind the sleeping denizens of civilization whispering their black intentions in riddles even a child could discern. No one listened, though, to the ever-pervasive moan of global societal collapse. No one dared to breathe the truth. Scream and the glass might shatter; sigh and the house might blow down. They were too enamored of watching the dirty whirlpool spiraling down deeper and deeper to a place of no return.
I had tried to watch it all from the detached place that all Immortals watch life. At least, it should have been a detached place. I was too young to have had my heart grow numb and, possessed with the idealism and naivety of innocence, embraced my new path with every ounce of my soul. I tried to change the world. I tried and failed, and after a mere two hundred and seventy years of Immortality, had found myself driven to the brink of madness by my own powers and an embittered disillusionment.
I had always longed for the aloof arrogance that seemed to come so naturally to most vampires. Where the hearts of others of my kind seemed to turn to stone as the centuries passed, mine only became tender, my antipathy for all that was vicious and cruel about the world nearly crushing my spirit. As my powers progressed and my unique ability to absorb the memories of my prey evolved, the atrocities inflicted, whether with malice or ignorance, and the sadness of humanity became a mantle of broken glass I donned each time I fed. I could not understand how my kindred could swim in excess and gluttony, when everywhere I looked there was chaos and pain. At times I hated them; at times I envied them. They saw the world as a tediously simple game in which they partook only for mild amusement: a world that they ruled with ease and without conscience or remorse. Mortals were random senseless creatures, their lack of unity was their undoing. I had never been able to see it that way, always too swept up in the philosophical debate of man versus vampire, predator versus prey and the great evolution of the universe’s preordained plan. The others had said I retained too much of my own ancient sense of humanity. They had said it would be my eventual downfall.
My pulse pounded in my ears as I considered the possible fate of my own race in the cruel fist of Time. From my prison deep within the earth, there was simply no way of knowing what had become of them.
I sank to the floor, barely able to draw breath as my mind raced over the infinite scrolls of confusion: a madman debating truth with his own reflection. The world I had turned my back on had been polluted and tortured, the ranks of humanity seeming to have lost complete control of their own governments. Societal voices had been buried beneath the screech of propaganda and loyalist contributions, technology evolving around them at such an infinite speed that the line between fact and fiction had nearly faded completely. What if time had not taught the lessons all empires must learn in one dawning era or another? Was it conceivable that the world still grew outside, more gluttonous and numb and silent than the patronizingly pacified generations before? My heart slowed and plummeted, a stone ricocheting off the rotten gullet of a dead tree. Red tears of anguished rage streamed down my gaunt white cheeks as I pounded the walls like a child denied. NO! No. Nooo.
It was useless.
I was awake.
* * * *
Venting the last of my blind rage and frustration upon the crypt door, I made my way up the maze of the catacombs. I followed my instincts without question, traveling the ruined stone pathway that would lead me to an uncertain destiny. There was obvious destruction to the narrow corridor. Here and there the ceiling or wall had given way, as if a catastrophic explosion had shaken the earth years before. Tree roots arched from the holes in the walls, warped and snaking tentacles of some petrified sea anomaly. Small iconic statues and cremation urns that had once adorned the alcoves of the walls lay shattered at my feet. The soft crunching of the fragments made beneath my weathered black boots was enough to quiet my internal fretting for a while. I focused on the sound and clawed through the debris.
Time seemed to have been my enemy. I had grown incredibly weak and feeble, so human. A breath of fresh air seemed as impossibly mythical as ambrosia as I clambered over a gnarled mass of tree roots that bridged the walls of the dank gritty passageway in their search for nutrients in rotting bones. As I neared the entrance to the hall, a raucous symphony of crickets and the deliberate scurrying of beetles replaced the dull munching of earthworms. Insects. How strange that they meant freedom.
I burst through the last of the doors and stumbled, gasping, into the thick night air. After being deprived of light or sound for so long, my senses were set ablaze, burning and crackling as the material world in all its crystalline chaos exploded into my body. The moon’s brilliance burned into my eyes like a prison yard floodlight, the gentle hum of tree frogs reverberating like the aftershock of gunfire. I squinted into the night, hands clutching the sides of my head until, slowly, the night began to retreat. The cemetery into which I had emerged was in ruins. Had an earthquake shaken the blessed earth where I had lain? I was shocked.
Headstones lay shattered upon a butchered field of mud and upturned grass. The ancient oaks that had once stood guard over the quietude of the cemetery were badly scarred and beaten. The largest one had been split in two, its limbs rotting upon the ground in front of me. I staggered forward and dropped to my knees, my chest rising and falling as I fought to bring the sweet and cold night air into my lungs, rich with uprooted earth and cleansing rain.
Suddenly, I felt a presence in close range. It was human, male and very young. I blinked, slowly surveying the space around me. A childish anger filled me at the thought of being disturbed so soon. Mixed with a violent outrage at the bleakness surrounding me, my body became rigid and tense. In my weakened state, I hesitated to trust my senses. Even though my instincts told me this boy was indeed mortal, I could not be sure. I lowered my breathing, tucking my thoughts deep inside me just in case something else might be listening.
The mortal was getting closer. I thought of retreating back inside the mausoleum, but a heavy and foreboding pressure stayed me with a predatory will of its own. I could smell his scent; the rich, salty perfume of sweat intermingled with the pungent copper of young blood. My chest constricted, pain arcing out through my abdomen and throat. I fell forward, barely able to stifle the scream that struggled to free itself from my soul.
“Hey, mister? You alright?” A quavering adolescent voice accosted my shaking form.
I hesitated for a moment, my fingers digging into the dirt in front of me. His voice was full of fear and jaded anticipation. His mind was an open and unguarded book. The youth’s primal urge to flee conflicted with his instinct that told him I might have something worth stealing and, if nothing else, it was a tale to tell to the disarray of fractured friends he would return to later that evening. Without actually looking at him, my face lowered towards the earth from which I had come, I could see him within my mind: a battered youth, painfully thin with starvation. His clothes were ragged and heavily mended with crude hand stitching in raw hemp thread. His hair hung across his smudged tan features in jagged bleached locks. His body was rigid with tension, his gaze unwavering as he pointed the long cylindrical barrel of a scarred AK-47 at me. He was a fierce and proud spirit trapped within the battered decaying flesh of a human being, scared and beaten but too proud to buckle and be warmed by charity.
Curiosity finally overwhelmed him. The youth jumped from the large chunk of stone where he was perched and approached me cautiously. His worn army boots made soft sucking sounds in the mud with each step. He stopped an arm’s length away, sure that I was too weak to be a threat. I lifted my eyes, turning my head towards him only enough to catch him in my line of vision.
His gasp punctured the steady moan of the wind, sharp and short. The shallow slate pools of his eyes widened in confused fear. From his mind burst forth the horrifying image of me as I knelt in the mud and stones. I had become a monstrous construction of white waxen angles and hollow sunken caverns that stretched as purple bruises beneath my dark hazel and gold eyes. What once served as hair stuck to my scalp in dust-matted locks of dark yellow streaked with brown bits of rope and twine. It hung over my eyes as a disheveled curtain. My skeletal frame was a craven thing all but naked draped in the remnants of my ragged clothing. The torn fabric of my paper-thin shirt lifted in the wind with a life of its own.
A pounding rhythm echoed from deep within the youth’s chest, resonating within my sensitive ears. I began to rise. Slowly, dreamlike, a mummified creature of creaking joints and sinew. The young man’s feet seemed cemented to the mud and stone. Even as I approached him, the sleek black outline of his weapon still saluted me, though it trembled in his grip. A cold predatory intensity locked his gaze to mine as my hand reached towards the gun. Though he was no innocent soul, his confusion was heartbreaking in its honesty. Such silent appeal was lost upon me as the numbness that had replaced my starvation retreated. Empathy for humanity had no righteous place before the primal demand of the Thirst and my conscience was quickly crushed to dust by its power as the mad current of the young mortal’s pulse drowned out my newfound reality.
I felt myself reaching out to him with my mind, threading tendrils of my will through his mind to coax him into submission. For him, I sculpted a new image of myself, one that I plucked from my own memory, when I was flawless and beautiful in my eternal youth. His eyes widened, his lips parting in an unspoken question and I knew that what he now saw before him was unexplainable and holy, a vision of a god resurrected. I reached slowly towards him, a living statue of contorted wax, and removed the gun from his shaking digits, letting it slip heavily to the ground. It struck the weathered stone with a crack that reminded me of splintering bone. We stood mere inches apart, our scents blended: stale earth and salty sweat. The smell caused my heart to contract painfully. My fingers brushed the sides of his arms. Even clothed in the thick, decades-old army jacket, I could feel the electrifying tension buried beneath the subtle warmth of his skin. Every ounce of his being screamed out, but as his thin pale lips parted, slack and dazed, the only sound that escaped was his shallow breath.
I wrapped him in the archaic cold of my embrace. His will was mine to mold, though his pulse still made his skin burn and vibrate with a futile fierceness. My right hand traveled slowly up to lodge firmly on the back of his neck as I lowered my mouth to the soft flesh of his throat. The agony of my starvation exploded to the surface of my own essence, devouring what little reason still clung weakly to my mind. My fangs plunged deep into his flesh, through skin and muscle and tendon to rape the tough vessel of life force that ran through him. Blood, hot and coppery, erupted in my mouth spilling over my tongue: molten shards so sinfully wicked and delicious and taboo. I lost myself in the sound of his heart caught in the draft of my kiss. I let the beast consume me.
Serpentine, I coiled my arms around him tighter and tighter, my body shaking in the orgasmic pleasure that I had long since forgotten; an aching, spiraling ascension that rendered me merciless as it surged through the fibers of my body. Sugary electric impulses, an arcing lightning, thrilled me as his heart began to slow. His memories flooded through me in a tidal wave of unfettered emotion: his orphaned childhood amongst the ruins of the city, terrified scavenging for food between derelict buildings, a brutal indoctrination of beatings into the only family he ever knew, pain, anger, hatred, confusion. I fought to dismiss them, to keep them from invading the deeper parts of my soul. As my body filled and replenished its barren reserves, his clung tenaciously to life, but now it was slipping away, strangely saddening me. I suppose it was the realization that nothing had changed; I hadn't slept away the evil dreams as I had so longed to. The demon had not been exorcised. I still took life and gave nothing in return. I was still a vampire.
I pulled back from the gaping wound torn in my stranger's throat. Nothing neat and clean as I might have done in the past. Starved and frenzied, I had ravaged his body. I could see the last threads of existence leaving his eyes, a small white receipt swept away upon wispy currents of wind. What he might have seen in those last few moments would forever remain a mystery to me. I only hoped that it had not been a vision of me.
“Thank you,” I whispered in a voice inaudible to mortal ears and I graced the soft dirt-streaked skin of his cheek with a simple kiss.
I let him slip from my alabaster arms, which were already healing with the power of the new living blood that coursed just beneath my flesh. He crumpled at my feet, an existence soon to be forgotten. It began to rain. For a long while, head bowed as if in prayer, I stood vigil over the broken body until the soft cries of his friends reached me over the storm. I knelt beside the youthful form of my one-time lover and gently ran my fingertips over his eyes, lowering the lids that were now a pale gray to match his stare.
I began to walk quickly towards the city.
2
I entered the dark, wet city from the east. Except for the swirling wind and rain, there was little movement, the night air strangely vacant of what I knew of the modern world. Several blocks from what I remembered as an interstate highway that cut through the center of the city, a strange and eerie sensation began to creep in just below my skin. The once raging river of commerce, concrete and gasoline that flowed from Canada to Mexico was quiet. I could no longer hear the caustic tide of traffic that had once droned the siren’s call of progress. The buzzing flickering streetlamps, the wreaking odors of carbon monoxide and ozone were absent. I could not even hear a distant television accidentally left on all night by a dozing denizen. A thick silence emanated from the city before me, the rank breath of a dormant beast. It coiled about my body, tight and demanding. At one time I had hated the noise of the city. Now I ached for it.
A few of the rickety shacks that once crammed themselves beside one another on tiny barren lots still stood. Most, though, had been swept away, as if by a tornado so that barely even the foundations were left to peak up through the scarred ground. The earth was reclaiming itself; neighborhoods were now overgrown with thick rambling vines, dandelions, and shadows. The scattered beaten hovels that remained reminded me of the ancient pioneer ruins I had often seen throughout the rolling Texas hillsides, leaning top-heavy against an unseen shoulder. Gutted and black from within, the city’s hovels cowered before the presence of the savage night. Through the overgrown tree line, I could make out one or two buildings that glowed dimly. For whoever lived there, it could only be their last resort. My mind wandered dreamily through their moldy halls of splintered wood and peeling yellowed wallpaper. Midnight and amber rooms recklessly decorated with rusted relics surrounded souls that cringed with every movement. Their lives ached with a void of interminable darkness quickened in the brutality only war can evoke.
Hostility, like a fine dank mist, seeped into the pores of my skin. It was a feeling of always being followed by malevolent intentions. I gazed up at the swollen harvest moon that watched me suspiciously; I knew I was unwelcome in this new world.
Everything is unwelcome, I thought with fear as my feet sped over the broken concrete towards an uncertain fate.
The city lay wrapped within a web of mottled light and shadow; it beckoned to me, taunting me with secrets. The crumbling homes gave way to mountains of grungy gray concrete, riddled with spidering cracks made by coarse branches of weed. Banks of shattered architecture sloped upwards like a tidal wave frozen in its ascent to meet the long stretch of broken blacktop that graced their shared summit.
I had left behind a world that feared silence. It had been a world immersed in a culture that never stood still, never breathed and never closed its eyes. A culture that I had hated with such raw abandon that I had turned my back on it. I had fled the incessant drone of a society of neurotic, impulsive, and insanely intelligent youth and their older obsessive counterparts. Their chorus riddled my waking hours with high-pitched meaningless chatter ricocheting about the walls of my skull. It had been a sound whose purpose I suddenly understood was to fill the empty space the world had created with all of its concrete and steel. I stood alone beneath the highway’s overpass. It arched over me, the skeletal remains of some long extinct leviathan. I paused, listening to the rush of my own blood through my ears as it fused with that of the boy I had killed.
That sound of the screaming city had made us believe we were not alone. My mind searched for a glint of reason through the thick frost of shock that surrounded it. Now, all of the strength, all of the courage I had once sensed in the stone and mortar of the city had crumbled and blown away. It had been a mirage.
I was such a fool to believe the world would improve in my absence.
I moved past the hollow echo of the highway and along a darkened stretch of city high-rises. The same destructive pattern that had plagued the eastern neighborhoods continued to the outer edges of the central business district.
Stores leaned harshly against one another, glass shattered from towering display windows. What was left of the rubber soles of my boots crunched the scattered shards as my weight shifted uneasily from foot to foot. Debris filled doorways where patrons had once loitered aimlessly on their exploited lunch hours of cappuccinos and bagels. With the exception of a few banks, law firms, and the Salvation Army, the eastern section of the business district had not been heavily populated. However, very few of these stoic “modern” feats of architecture still stood. Some fooled the eye with a flawless glimmering surface only to reveal a gutted skeleton. Others were simply sharp-edged memories. It was now painfully evident that whatever had once struggled within those gritty lots had been exterminated; the void left by their forced departure stung my soul. A gnawing curiosity mixed with souring fear curdled in my stomach: how could the world I had known as so impermeable have become so utterly obliterated? Again, I wondered just how much time had passed?
The subtle amber glow of distant light caught my eye as I reached the top of a steep incline. At one time, I would have considered such warmth an intriguing blessing. Now, I approached it with caution. I knew too little of this new world to be blundering about as if I were its predator and master. My position in life was still uncertain. I was nearing what I remembered to be Congress Avenue, the main thoroughfare that cut through the middle of the city. It had been a marred silver carpet of struggling businesses and trendy restaurants that stretched from the regal pink granite capital to the muddy gray-green of Town Lake. At least, that was the way I remembered it.
A sound tweaked my ears. I froze in mid-stride, tensing and turning slowly on the balls of my feet to face the direction of the noise. Like the distant invasion of a horde of ravenous locusts, the shrill metallic whine was not quite organic, not quite mechanical. It wound its way through the maze of alleys and avenues towards me. It came closer and closer at an alarming speed; I could detect the slight soft whirring of a small motor, the distinct pungency of steel. I dared not even breathe. I pulled my thoughts deep inside me, locking them away from prying minds, and knowing that I was not fully restored to my previous flawlessness, gathered a more complete mirage of humanity about my lanky pale form to fool the eye, heart, and mind of any onlooker. Rivulets of rainwater trickled over my skin, clinging to my eyelashes, making the world disappear from time to time.
I waited.
It rounded the corner of a derelict building a block away. My eyes widened in disbelief. My mouth fell slack. A construct of glimmering cobalt-infused titanium and black rubber wires hovered a few feet off the ground, motionless. The sharp acidity of ozone emanated from it, the only odor I could perceive beneath the soot and grime of the city’s slow breath. I stood my ground, more curious than fearful. I wanted it to see me.
The machine sped towards me with a sound halfway between a contented cat and a furious cricket, then abruptly stopped to float directly in front of me. A brief shiver riddled my flesh uncontrollably. My instinct wanted to pull me away from a surreal abstraction it could not completely comprehend. It appeared to be a modified hovercraft the size of an adult trike, streamlined and flawlessly sealed with a smooth shark-like skin. Soulless, yet beautiful, a technological dream I had only seen in violent films. I let my eyes travel over the gleaming midnight blue surface of the machine’s base, then to its small cockpit that suddenly hissed up and back to reveal a stern humanoid figure seated within.
My heart careened against my ribs as my mind fought to absorb the minute details of this synthetic construction. Had my senses deceived me? I had detected no trace of human in the machine. The pilot of the craft was alien in and of himself, seeming more an extension of the vehicle than a separate entity. I searched for an expression behind the mirrored visor of his helmet, but all that gazed back at me were the beads of water that clung to its surface like symbiant life forms.
“State your purpose here.” The voice was emotionless and flat; a synthetic tone programmed for authority without conscience. Combined with the incessant whir of the craft’s operational propulsion system, the intonation of his question was oddly hypnotizing. I concluded that the figure must be a police officer, of sorts, though something instinctively told me his authority was of a military nature, rather than that of a mere neighborhood watchdog.
I hesitated nervously, wanting to study the creature that interrogated me for as long as possible. I explored it with my senses, gauging my opponent on all levels. A strange scent lingered about the patrol unit, part organic, part ozone and silicone. It confused me. I noticed that the flesh of his forearms had been replaced by interlocking plates of the same midnight-colored metal of the hovercraft.
That explains the scent. He was a hybrid of man and machine. I frowned in contemplation. Humanity had finally realized its nightmares of a cyber-organism.
“State your purpose here. Now!” The voice boomed down at me again.
I did not like being interrogated. I stared up at the hovering patrol. I knew I did not have long before it would take action against my insubordination, but I had to know exactly what the limitations of this creature were. If I were only on the fringes of what my city had become, the gods only knew what lay ahead of me. Opening the secret valves of my mind, I reached out with my consciousness carefully towards the thing before me.
I slipped into his mind with a shock as brilliant and fleeting as static electricity. I inhaled sharply; his “mind” was more terrifyingly different than anything human or vampire I had ever touched. It was a fluid maze of preprogrammed emotions and responses that wove an intricate web of electrical currents and blood through the still living tissue that encased it. If computers dreamed of human anatomy the way we dream of circuit boards, it would have been the embodiment of their wildest fantasies. I searched for the tiny hidden whorl of needy approval lodged deep within all minds; that coveted portion of our humanity that we grudgingly share, divvying it out to those most worthy. If I could find and alter that part of his mind, I would know that he was still at least partly human and thus, defeatable.
Seconds ticked by in uneasy defiance, neither of our gazes wavering. The rain persistently intensified as if urging us to end the charade. I watched as opalescent drops clung to the slick surface of his helmet and forearms. The patrol unit began to move its hand, reaching for something discreetly hidden from my line of view. It was too late though, I had already found all that I needed.
Before my mind’s eye the acceptance trigger I had probed for seemed to flicker, simultaneously appearing as a swirl of electrical impulses surging through human tissue, and a tiny piece of computer chip, green-pearlescent shot through with a fine gold linear maze. I wrapped my mental fingers around the tiny area coaxing it into submission. It opened to my suggestions with an unnerving ease and allowed me to plant my impressions deep within its labyrinth...harmless...lost. Though I had experimented deeply with certain technologies as they evolved over the centuries, I had never attempted to use my powers on them; the most complex architectures had always posed little challenge for an intellect such as mine that processed information at a light-speed beyond any mortal programmer. The mind of the officer before me contained none of the dysfunctional human peculiarities or dispositions. Its technical resistance was almost intangible as I overrode its minor security programs, and I could tell that its biomechanical personality was accustomed to others altering its patterns.
Quickly, I withdrew from his mind. “I'm sorry. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.”
There was a long pause as my voice died away beneath the torrent of wind and rain. I could make out the faint glow of a string of digital text as it flickered in tiny obscure lines across the inside of his visor. Perhaps he was searching a remote database for records of my identification? If so, he would find nothing. I was beginning to fear that I had underestimated the complexity of his mind when he finally spoke.
“Sufficient.” He lifted his arm and pointed a long metallic finger towards the way I had been heading. “This sector is off limits. Trespassing is forbidden.” The tone was cool and definitive, leaving no room for explanations or arguments.
“Of course...officer,” I whispered under my breath as he sped away into the ruined cityscape.
* * *
I was a child once again.
How else to describe the pure, innocent awe I felt for the world. No matter how battered or bruised, each nook and fold carried within it a perfect crystalline mystery so sweet that I longed to take it in my teeth and taste it: taste it and know it as I had done when I was but a very small child. Perhaps that was what I had begun to lose in those long years before my Sleep, the feeling of seeing things with fresh eyes, of seeing things that were new and foreign. I felt alive again, as I had in the first few decades of my Immortality, when reality was still sharp and surreal. This alien landscape; I wanted to absorb it, to understand it.
Perhaps, I had not given the world long enough to find my true place in it? The Dark blood had only served to amplify the voice of the starry-eyed philosopher I had been in my mortal youth. Too quickly, I built a religion to lift my newfound brethren beyond the shackles of the curse that they believed doomed them to be supposed minions of the Christian Satan. My religion gave them purpose and hope and pride. However, just as I had seen the flaws in every other religion or philosophy I had studied, so too did my own begin to fracture from doubt and fear and anger.
My physical and mental vampiric powers had progressed far beyond others my own age, cursing me with the ability to take into myself the pasts, the memories, of my victims. I was not yet strong enough to control the power and eventually madness and pain began to gnaw viciously at the edges of my sanity. Knowing I could not go on feeding empty promises to the fledglings who followed at my heels, I turned my back on them and fled. Hundreds had died by their own hands in the nights that followed my resignation, the hopelessness too much for them to handle in a world they already had trouble accepting. One particular coven of Elders, led by an eight hundred year old Scottish vampire by the name of Adian, plotted my murder after their own fledglings gave themselves up to the sun. However, they had underestimated my powers and in a bloody battle just before dawn I killed Adian and his warriors. Their deaths only further alienated me from my Dark brethren as many believed my murder would have been justified.
What they did not realize was the tremendous toll the fight had taken on me, mentally and physically. In the final moments before Adian’s death, I had drunk deeply from him, draining him completely of both blood and spirit as I savagely tore his throat open. Adian’s blood had poisoned me, his memories nearly eradicating my own until I could barely distinguish imagination from truth. Soon I believed that it was I who had once been the eldest son of a great Chieftain and not merely a philosopher and the son of a shipmaker. There was no reasoning with me. No one could tell me otherwise. Since they could not publicly sentence me to death, the Council of Elders ruled to disown me permanently for my crimes, both in my abandonment of my disciples and the slaying of my own kind. No vampire upon any continent would henceforth acknowledge my existence. At first, I thought I had been given a lenient sentence, as I did not desire to speak to my brethren as it was. However, I soon realized that it was far worse than any other punishment they could have bestowed upon me, a social exile that left me completely and utterly alone in a world I already despised. I retreated further into my madness and isolation. I wrapped my indignation around me as if lying down to sleep in a field of broken glass, daring those on the outside to reach for me. When not even the closest of my kindred, or even my very Maker, reached out to offer me solace, some out of fear of the Elders’ verdict and some of their own festering loathing of me, I realized I had truly lost everything.
Now, I felt the scars of my own treacherous slumber. The confusion of the new world around me evoked stinging tears that hovered near the corners of my eyes before relenting and spilling down the sides of my face, already slick with rain. They were not tears of pain, or frustration, but of a sudden need to understand and be comforted.
The avenue I had once strode along so many restless nights before had been transformed. Etched within my memory was a wide four-lane street lined sparsely with fledgling trees and peopled with business clientele, musicians, and colorful nomadic homeless. To the artistic melodies that had drifted from dark, eclectic side street bars, it had spoken hazily of history newly paved over by ignorance; at night it had whispered of hard times and new wealth.
Now, it was as if the skyscrapers had all but vanished. Some destroyed, some barely standing, but all gently receding into the rank exhale of darkness. Beneath these hollow towering structures, that spoke more as looming ghosts than solid physical entities, had erupted a chaotic maze of tents, booths and tiny makeshift hovels. They clustered together like driven sheep. The sleek and sophisticated modern society I had witnessed emerging in the years before my long sleep was now dust, replaced by the harsh cry of survival that echoed eerily off the ghosts of 21st century progress.
Voices swarmed about me like hungry spirits eager to visit the flesh again. A million caustic sounds burned a twisted path to where I stood at the edge of the mayhem, just beyond the reach of the light. People shouted at one another over the cacophony of haggling, trading, and bartering their lives away in one way or another. Voices filled with strife and hunger pleaded in angry incessant terms for another vague opportunity. If the light had not been so harsh and pervasive, if the rain had not chilled my face, I might have expected the abrasive kiss of desert sand on my skin. Again, I questioned the sanity of all of this, the solidity of this hallucination of mine. I could have still been sleeping, my mind tormenting me with the fretful anxieties of the past. But even if it were a dream, I could not deny it held my attention completely.
I plunged into the crowd. Instantly, the sensation of drowning overwhelmed me as I was pulled deep within the steady downstream of flesh. Heavy, spicy human scents forced their way into my nose and mouth. I sneezed violently, nearly falling backwards over my own feet. Jasmine, spice, patchouli, curry, mixed with the underlying odor of unwashed limbs and street rubbish. Too many hot bodies filled with blood crushed up against me, tempting my still starved body. I blinked and tried to fight the urge to devour them all.
I swam to the edge of the crowd where the current was not so intense. A long set of rough, undyed canvas awnings had been strung along the walkway to protect loiterers from whatever peculiar weather might occur. I leaned against the rough wood of a small food vendor’s stall. Rich aromas of roasted foods drifted out of the window and into the street. The world pressed in on me, smothering me. I struggled to breathe, to quell the rising nausea in my stomach. I had been foolish to think I could reintroduce myself to society so quickly after waking. I closed my eyes and quieted my thoughts, retreating deep inside until I stood alone and silent. To the outside world that flowed unyielding around me, it would have seemed as if I had simply vanished.
I let several moments pass in meditation. When I opened my eyes, the world seemed a much quieter place. For the first time since the cold marble of the tomb, I truly felt the ground beneath my feet. I did not feel alone, however, I did not feel separated and above my surroundings. There was someone else there, someone who saw through my shields, who knew what I was and watched me very carefully. Slowly, I scanned the crowd. I spied her a few feet away. She was a tall girl, and young. No more than sixteen. Her clothes—a pale yellow-white tunic, bound at the waist with a thick brown leather belt, and close fitting pants of a darker brownish-blue—were made of thick, rough linen. They hung loosely over her painfully thin frame: her girlish chest and willowy limbs. Her long black hair fell in even straight pleats over her narrow shoulders, fanning out delicately at the ends.
She stood so still that any other might have mistaken her for a statue. Only I could see the quick and shallow rise and fall of her chest and the subtle tremors that passed through her clenched fists where they hung at her sides. I met her eyes and knew her instantly for what she was: a telepath.
She knew what I was as well. Somehow, I felt she even knew who I was. I could read the fiery fear and wonder within her, though her mind was shut up tight and virgin behind steel walls of paranoia: a secret fortress like none I had ever sensed in a mortal. For this alone, she instantly held my respect, though I still wondered about the fear that emanated from her very pores. Even on my worst days, I had never evoked such dread. Perhaps I had not fed enough yet to reverse the waxen monster that had emerged from my slumber?
I turned towards her, wanting to approach her. The sudden movement startled her. Like a frightened deer, she bolted from her post. I found myself following her even before I could consciously decide otherwise. Through the landslide of human flesh and grit, we flowed in a twisting turning dance of predator and prey. She was fast and her aura so heavily cloaked that even my vampiric senses could not track her by mere mental prowess alone. At times it seemed that she lingered just beyond my fingertips, a blur of sylphish black and yellow. At others, she simply disappeared into the muddy shapes and shadows of the market, a fierce taboo I would never live to embrace.