Sanguine Series (Book 1): The Fall

by Chris Laughton

  Alexander was incredibly difficult quarry, but his nests were easy enough to find. When vampires were young, they needed to feed almost every night. Combined with their inexperience at covering up their kills, it made that sort of carnage easy to track. Missing persons’ websites and sometimes even crime blotters could be useful tools at tracking them down, but truthfully, it didn’t take much. It was hard to hide the kind of death they caused. Which is why it was clear to Trevor that Alexander wanted them to be found. Occasionally, a vampire or two would escape their judgment at the hands of Trevor and his team, and disappear. Perhaps they rendezvoused with Alexander and bolstered his ranks, but even if it was the case, this was obviously a fringe benefit to their creator. If Alexander had simply been after more troops for his army, he would turn a single human at a time and wouldn’t leave them on their own. Instead, he usually turned ten to twelve, so they’d make a big enough mess for The Project to notice and send Trevor and his team to clean it up.

  From experience, Trevor knew that when the enemy very clearly wanted you looking one way, it was so you didn’t have time to look another. Still, it’s not like they could afford to let these nests go unchecked. The Project was, by necessity, a small operation and too many vampires allowed to mature and come into their powers could overwhelm them. For the first few months, sometimes even as long as a year, the newborn vamps wouldn’t develop any sort of unique power. They were just a little stronger, a little faster, and a lot more vulnerable to sunlight than most humans. Given the training Trevor and his men went through, these nests presented little danger to them, and there was always the off-chance that Alexander would slip up and leave his newborns with some clue that would help The Project find him and end this, once and for all, making them worthwhile targets.

  This latest nest in Bakersfield, California had been different, however. This nest spoke of Alexander in hushed tones. Some of the ones Trevor had kept alive to be questioned by Aidan believed him to be Alexander the Great. And none of them had ever met Alexander. There had been internal debate within The Project on whether Alexander was the only vampire that could make others, or if he simply hadn’t taught others how it was done so that he could control their population. Dr. Westfield had championed the idea of ‘non-infectious carriers’ to describe second-generation vampires, but this nest had blown that idea straight to hell. They’d been made by some egghead vampire, one of Alexander’s brood, and didn’t seem to have any role in what Alexander was planning. If The Project was going to have to track multiple vectors for how this could spread, they were sorely outmatched.

  And so, this new creator of vampires that Trevor had learned of was next on his list. And while he and his team drove in their van northwest towards an old government facility east of San Francisco where he’d learned the threat lived (thanks to Aidan’s interrogations), he was calling in to The Project. He sat on a bench in the back of the van, sharing the space with five of his men. It felt cramped, even more so because there were no windows. The typical horizontal row seating had been replaced by two benches on either side that ran the length of the van. Easier to load and unload quickly, but more difficult to get comfortable in. Thankfully, this van had been customized to allow them to store their gear in overhead bins. If each man had to wear their vest and carry their rifle while riding on the rock-hard benches, it would have been unbearable. “Simone, is your father in the room with you?” This was hardly news he wanted to deliver over the phone, and frankly, he was shocked he could get a satellite uplink this far out of any city, but in the unlikely event that the vampire he was now hunting was another one-off like Alexander, he needed to be the top priority. He had already shown would be nowhere as difficult to track or kill as Alexander had proven, with the very first nest they found that he’d created giving up his location. They needed to snuff out this second creator to keep the problem from spiraling even further out of control.

  “Yes, Trevor, I’m here.” Dr. Westfield had been sounding older lately. Not surprising given his age, but still somewhat jarring. He’d looked roughly the same age the entire time Trevor had known him. It’s not as if Trevor was a spring chicken either, but he liked to think he was aging well. He’d just turned thirty-seven last week, but he kept his head shaved and never kept facial hair, so you couldn’t see the grey mixed in with the dark brown unless it grew out a little (like it had now that he’d been in the field for several days). He was in phenomenal shape with plenty of time spent in The Project’s weight room, but he had always valued function over vanity, so it wasn’t like he had single-digit body fat or anything. If he was ever forced to fight a vampire hand-to-hand, something had gone terribly wrong, but should it ever happen, he’d need every bit of human muscle he could muster to have a chance.

  “Good. Dr. Westfield, I’m sorry I can’t discuss this with you in person, but Alexander is not the only vampire who can make others like him. We’ve discovered another.” No point dressing it up. He waited out the awkward pause that followed, rattling around in the back of the van, locking eyes with one of his men, Aidan, on the other side as if to say, ‘is this silence good or bad?’ Aidan, as he so often was, was completely unreadable. If he had even taken note of the awkwardness of the silence, his face betrayed none of it. Then again, he was hardly big on respecting authority, so why would he care about delivering unwelcome news to Dr. Westfield? Trevor should have had Aidan make the call. That definitely would’ve been good for a laugh.

  “Go on.” Dr. Westfield broke the silence with a puzzling command. Go on? Go on about what? ‘You were wrong the entire time, you self-righteous old man’ pretty much summed it up. So Trevor decided to shift the subject a little, “We’re on our way to the one that made the nest we just cleared. If Gabriel – that’s what his nest called him – if he’s been taught some special secret by Alexander, it could mean he’s part of some inner circle. He may be the best lead we’ve ever had on finding their actual command location. From the description the last nest gave us, I doubt he’s one of Alexander’s usual para-military vampires, so he may be more susceptible to interrogation.”

  “Two nests in one trip? Do you think that’s wise?” Dr. Westfield apparently wasn’t interested in pressing the issue on how this Gabriel could make new vampires either. Instead, he had questioned the professionalism of Trevor’s crew. This apparently merited a response from Aidan.

  “That was ‘ardly a fuckin’ nest,” Aidan replied succinctly in his Irish brogue. “I ‘adn’t even finished unpackin’ my tools, and they were already givin’ up their boss. Didn’t get to interrogate a single one o’ the bastards. Well, not much anyways.” Trevor felt slightly nauseous at Aidan mentioning his tools. Aidan took a little too much pleasure in extracting information from vampires, and doing it slowly and methodically. Trevor preferred they be put down quickly. He suspected that most of them hadn’t even chosen to become vampires, so he’d always felt a clean death was the most humane way to go. Even if he needed something from them, he preferred to just threaten them with sunlight and follow through if they didn’t give the information up fast enough. Aidan preferred to save sunlight for a last resort. He generally didn’t even mention it during his interrogations. “Sunlight’s death for them, and death’s a release. Better to let ‘em think there’s nothin’ in their future ‘cept me and pain until they give me what I want,” he had told Trevor once. The memory sent a reflexive shiver up Trevor’s spine. Aidan and his fucking tools.

  Trevor could hear Simone laughing on the other end. “I’m so sorry, Aidan. That must have been very difficult for you.”

  “It was, but you’re more than welcome to comfort me when I get back, darlin’.” Trevor had gotten used to a lot in this job, but Aidan’s ability to be fighting a vampire to the death one minute, and get right back to working on his pursuit of Dr. Westfield’s daughter the next was remarkable. Aidan had always been something of an enigma. For as disconcerting as his fixation on inflicting pain on vampires could be, he was completely no
nchalant about everything else in life. He’d been that way since he joined the team.

  Normally, The Project identified candidates and made the approach, just as it had been with Trevor, but Aidan had found them. He had never explained how. He had merely shown up at the end of Trevor’s team clearing a nest and told them they needed his help. As dumbstruck as they had all been initially, they were even more so when they saw what he could do. He was something more than human: his genetics rewrote themselves when exposed to new genetic code, integrating pieces of the foreign DNA into itself to test out modifications. Aidan had no conscious knowledge of this, and it was unclear how the process was guided, but it was obviously more than random. The bits it took, and the abilities Aidan gained because of it were always beneficial, and sometimes eclipsed even what the source’s properties were. Simply put, Aidan was faster, stronger, and smarter than a normal human.

  All of that had taken place before he joined the team, however. Whatever process drove his evolution, it considered him a finished product now. The Project’s Lead Researcher, Dr. Monroe had been overjoyed at the prospect of helping to ramp up Aidan’s transformation, but no matter what genetics he collected and administered to Aidan, there was never any change in Aidan’s capabilities. That’s not to say anyone else shared Dr. Monroe’s disappointment.

  Aidan was their secret weapon against particularly difficult nests, but he took none of it seriously. It was unclear if his insanity was due to the same condition that gave him his gifts, or if that was part of his human side. Dr. Monroe had taken to calling Aidan a “Sanguine”. You had to squint really hard and potentially be slightly drunk, but Dr. Monroe said it was an acronym of sorts for ‘Single Generation Evolution’. As terrible as that was, when you were part of a group that hunted vampires, and someone came up with an acronym that referred to blood, you probably weren’t going to get much argument.

  When Aidan joined them, he had immediately taken a liking to Simone, Dr. Westfield’s daughter. It wasn’t hard to see why: she was tall and gorgeous with olive skin, jet-black hair and dark green eyes. She had the athletic figure of a soldier. If Trevor were running the show, she’d be on his team, sitting in this van with all of them right now, but there was no way Dr. Westfield would put his daughter in the field, regardless of how qualified she was. She could outshoot half of Trevor’s squad, and beat the other half hand-to-hand. Right off the bat, Aidan had been incredibly forward, but the fact that this didn’t make her uncomfortable only raised his interest. Not that he was getting anywhere; Simone appeared to oscillate between amused and indifferent to his advances.

  As entertaining as their (non)relationship was to Trevor, he was more interested in Aidan’s loyalties. It was still unclear why he was fighting for them, and he still didn’t seem to have any deep ties to the team. For all the nests they’d cleared since he joined them, and for all they’d been through, he still seemed to be on these hunts merely because he enjoyed the violence and had nothing better to do. He was loyal to Trevor, that much was true, but the cause? It remained to be seen.

  “As tempting as that sounds, I’ll have to take a raincheck, ‘darlin’,” she emphasized the last part to try to embarrass Aidan, but she may as well have asked a dog to mow the lawn: he was simply not equipped for the task.

  Dr. Westfield’s voice came back on. “I’m sorry to interrupt you two, but perhaps we could talk about our next move?”

  “Kill ‘em all, but only after they tell me where to find my next kill.” Aidan’s levity made the rest of Trevor’s team smile.

  Trevor could almost hear Dr. Westfield’s annoyance at his uncouth team member over the phone, so he stepped in. “Aidan is blunt, but he’s correct. Our first priority needs to be discovering how this ‘Gabriel’ can make other vampires. Our second priority needs to be clearing his nest. And our third priority is to try to use Gabriel to,” Trevor exhaled. It felt good to be saying these words and actually think there was a legitimate chance at following through, “Find Alexander.” Maybe he liked all this after all.

  7

  Paul Lewis rarely got to get out into the field, but the freezing weather meant he was enjoying this even less than he would have normally. He switched which hand he was using to hold the case containing some of his instruments, so he could shove his numb hand deep into a pocket of his coat. It was a long trench coat, and as Paul was a shorter man with a bit of a belly, it looked somewhat comical on him. He stood on the street corner trying to determine which of the police officers he should try to talk to. He took his hand back out of his pocket and ran it through what hair he had left. It was a nervous habit left over from his younger days that never failed to remind him that he was getting old when his fingers found so much less hair up there than they used to.

  “Oh good, you’re here.” The detective that had snuck up behind him patted him on the shoulder. “This is some real weird shit. You’re gonna love it.” Paul furrowed his brow. What the hell did that mean? The detective strode past him, his hands back in the pockets of his tan trench coat. When he turned and saw Paul hadn’t started walking again, he took one hand out to gesture for him to follow.

  Paul protested, “I don’t usually get called to crime scenes, detective, and especially not car crashes.” This was work, and Paul had made an entire career out of avoiding that whenever possible. If he had been an introspective man, he might have wondered how many murders had gone undetected due to his lax methods as Medical Examiner labelling them natural causes, but Paul was not an introspective man. The world was going to shit anyway. Who cared if a few people shuffled off this mortal coil sooner than the rest of them? As far as he could tell, they were all circling the drain and maybe the ones who left now were lucky.

  The detective continued, “Do you get called to scenes where dead men get up and walk away? Scratch that, dead man.” Paul was having the toughest time remembering this detective’s name. Smug bastard was obviously enjoying drawing out his big reveal for what made this case so special, with an obnoxious smirk peeking out from under his moustache.

  “No. I don’t. Mainly because they don’t happen.”

  The detective made a grand half-bow gesture, like a circus leader presenting the next exhibition. “Then allow me to show you where Lazarus was unceremoniously hit by a car. But the old man’s upped his game: he returned much quicker than four days later and didn’t need anyone’s help to do it.”

  Paul followed the detective’s gaze to the car that was the subject of this crime scene. The entire front end was caved in and the windshield smashed. This wasn’t right. The only way a person could walk away from this was if the car attained this damage from hitting a second object after the initial impact with the person. Like after swerving and side-sweeping the person, it had gone into a telephone pole, or the side of a building. But this car was in the middle of the street, with the broken glass from one of the headlights and the windshield scattered all around it. “Detective, I don’t want to ruin your biblical narrative, but wouldn’t a simpler answer be that the corpse was stolen before your men arrived? I doubt there are any useable organs given the damage to the car, but it seems just a bit more plausible.” It certainly was in this day and age. As the gulf between the rich and the poor widened, organ harvesting had become a lucrative, if rarely spoken of, profession. The rich paid handsomely for transplantable organs to extend their lives.

  The detective looked at the car and held his chin, seeming to evaluate this new theory and for a moment, Paul thought the man had legitimately never considered it. “But, Paul, if that were true, it would mean that someone went to a lot of trouble to fake the video. And that just seems like more effort than it’s worth.” Paul glared at the detective. As soon as he remembered this little shit’s name, he’d never forget it again. The detective waited for Paul to say something, but when he didn’t, added, “Oh, I’m sorry, did I forget to mention that there’s video of the whole thing?” The detective brought out his phone and made a few taps to call up the
video, and as he walked over to where the Medical Examiner was standing, Paul glanced around the intersection and saw several traffic and security cameras, but none that were functioning. This video must have had a different source. The detective gave Paul the phone and put his hands in his pockets, seemingly finished with his little performance.

  On the screen, Paul saw some live blogger with a too-long beard and glasses holding his phone and recording himself prattling on about how all of this decay that could be seen in the city around him was punishment from God; that The Fall had been God’s warning for mankind to repent. He panned the camera to show the decline of the city and as he passed the phone over the intersection, wound up getting a perfect shot of a young man being struck by a car. Paul glanced back up at the real thing and confirmed that it was the same car. ‘Jesus,’ he thought, ‘that car had to be doing at least forty-five miles an hour.’ Turning his attention back to the video, the man, who was obviously dead, was now crumpled at a disgusting angle behind the wrecked car and the blogger was failing to hold the camera steady as he struggled to comprehend what he’d just seen. After more than a few “Oh God, oh God, oh God”s, the blogger began to slowly shuffle over towards the corpse, but then the strangest thing happened. Paul tried to make it out over the din of the city around him, but he swore he heard a deep pop. The sound had definitely come from the video though, as the blogger had the same reaction Paul did, and froze when it happened. Paul stared at the screen. That couldn’t be right… he rewound the video ten seconds to look at the last shot of the corpse before the blogger’s unsteady hand had taken it off camera for a moment. The man’s left hip was badly dislocated. Paul fast forwarded the video ten seconds and left it paused. The man’s hip was back in place and there was nobody near the body who could’ve put it back in, not that such a thing was possible to complete entirely in that amount of time anyway. It might have all been in Paul’s head, but he swore the corpse’s left arm didn’t look as badly broken either. The blogger was kneeling next to the body now, and he was panning over the body to show a close-up of the injuries, his religious rant momentarily forgotten to indulge in a little gore.