The Fall: Sanguine Series: Book One

by Chris Laughton

  “You can tell that?” Simone stammered. She looked at the vampire to see if there were any tell-tale signs. The gag covered the teeth, so there was no way Mason could have known from looking. Aidan could smell them as well, but he’d already known about vampires when he came to The Project, so it was still shocking for Mason to pick up on it that quickly.

  Mason nodded emphatically. “What is it?”

  “Well I can see there’s no use for pretense,” Simone answered, “it’s a vampire.”

  “No shit, like an actual Dracula vampire?” Mason asked.

  “Well that’s where it gets a little weird,” Simone took a deep breath. “See, the oldest living vampire is named Alexander, and he’s been a vampire for just over sixty years. We have no idea how the concept is ingrained in folklore and mythology and how the myth got so close to the real thing when it didn’t exist yet. But I’ll tell you what we do know.”

  Mason turned away from the vampire and looked around the room until he found a chair. He shuffled over to it, turned it to Simone, and sat down. “I’m all ears.” How quickly he had gone from flight risk to apt pupil! Then again, he had known the thing in the cage wasn’t human, so there wasn’t any initial skepticism to overcome.

  Simone nodded at Aidan to remove Mason’s restraints, and gestured to everyone else in the room. Mason extended his hands to Aidan, but never took his eyes off Simone. She began, “We are The Osiris Project, or just The Project for short. Vampires were our fault, and now they are our mission.”

  Mason smirked. “Well you said the oldest one is barely sixty years old, and I’m not sure you can legally drink, so not exactly your fault.”

  Dr. Westfield stepped forward. “Not hers, but they are mine.”

  Mason sniffed the air again. “You’re like her.” He pointed at Simone. “I can’t figure out how, but you’re not exactly run-of-the-mill human either. And you also don’t look sixty, let alone more than that.”

  Simone gestured with her hands that Mason needed to slow down. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let me start at the beginning.” She noticed she had everyone’s attention now even though they knew the story. “Twenty years before The Fall began, the government, much more powerful back then remember, discovered the oldest living being on Earth. He was named Methuselah and he was over six thousand years old.

  Mason interrupted her. “We’re talking biblical Methusaleh here?”

  “It would appear so.” Simone responded. Mason shifted himself back in his chair. If she didn’t have his attention before, she did now. She continued, “He did not seem to age, and had incredible healing ability. They apprehended him and started a genetic study to try to discover how he differed from humans, and if that gap could be crossed. The group they assembled for this task was titled The Osiris Project.”

  “After the Egyptian god of Death?” Mason seemed skeptical.

  “He was also their god of Resurrection and described as ‘permanently youthful’.”

  Mason gave a look that seemed to say, ‘fair enough’. Simone continued. “The problem was, at every level The Project checked, he appeared to just be a regular human. They couldn’t find any meaningful genetic difference between him and any other person. It wasn’t until they checked how his blood interacted with other organic tissue that they really started to get somewhere. It had amazing restorative properties, stimulating incredible rates of regeneration, even lengthening telomeres.” She could tell from the look on his face that she had strayed a little too much into the scientific weeds for a mass audience. “Two of the researchers, one of them being my father,” she gestured to Dr. Westfield who gave a slight nod, “were working independently, but thinking along the same lines. My father, without any type of official approval,” she gave him a quick disapproving look, “ingested some of Methuselah’s blood. He saw the same short-term gains the tests would’ve suggested with increased healing, energy, and by all measures appeared to get slightly younger. A long-term result, and one that he didn’t realize until long after, was that he ages at roughly a quarter the rate of a regular human, a trait he passed on to me. The other researcher decided on a slightly bolder course of action: a complete transfusion of blood. His name was Alexander, and that transfusion turned him into the first of his kind. He released Methuselah as a distraction to cover his own escape and fled. The Project evolved to have a black ops arm at that point and after The Fall we went entirely off the books.” She paused to let Mason digest this.

  “That certainly leaves me with a lot of questions,” he said after a moment.

  “I know. I’m sorry I’m giving you a very high-level overview of the history, because the present is what’s important. Alexander is looking for you. We don’t know why,” she lied, but it was better to leave Maya out of their story at this point, “but I suspect he believes that turning a Sanguine into a vampire will create some sort of super-weapon; the kind he needs to tip the scales and place vampires atop humans as a ruling class.”

  “Wait, slow down. Sanguine?” Mason was confused.

  Dr. Monroe spoke up from behind Simone. “It’s what we call you and Aidan. You are genetic offshoots of humanity. An interesting experiment by nature to take a process that normally takes a large number of generations, evolution, and compact it into one generation. Your trillions of cells act very much like a population of animals. Instead of selective pressure being applied based on who reproduces as an entire organism, your cells are somehow able to measure their efficacy and they simply don’t replicate if they notice they’re not as good as the ones around them. Combine that with a high rate of mutation, and you get a constantly-improving organism.”

  Simone gestured for him to be quiet. “He’s trying to make it sound like we understand the process; we don’t. Sanguines absorb traits from the genetic material they’re exposed to. There doesn’t seem to be any hereditary link or way to determine when a Sanguine will manifest.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. I’ve eaten plenty of steak. I’ve never grown hooves.”

  “Because your body has judged that it wouldn’t be an advantageous trait. Look, we keep getting off into the weeds here. The important thing is that you and Aidan are marvels,” Simone responded.

  “Damn right I am,” Aidan said quietly.

  “Just like Methuselah is,” Simone continued, “and just like, in a way, Alexander is. He is the world’s first carrier of a symbiotic, communicable disease, for lack of a better phrase. But he wants to use his power to rule over humanity and that means he needs to be put down.”

  Mason was struggling to put the pieces together. “So Methusaleh is another Sanguine?”

  “He may have started out that way, but regardless, he is something else entirely now. We learned about Sanguines long after Methusaleh’s escape, and since we’ve never been able to find him again, we haven’t gotten answers to any of these questions. There’s a lot of this stuff that we just don’t understand, but Alexander is a grave threat: that much is clear.”

  “How does a smarty pants scientist turn into a megalomaniac?” Mason asked.

  “When a vampire is turned, sometimes their personality strays from what it was as a human. It’s tough to go through that sort of biological tidal shift without consequences, and sort of like a head injury, you can’t be sure what you’re going to get when they wake up. Maybe he’d always had delusions of grandeur and just kept them hidden, who knows? But they’re there now, and he’s actually got the power to pull them off if we don’t stop him.”

  “And that’s where I come in: you think I could be your super-soldier the same way he does,” Mason made the comparison a little overly simplistically for Simone’s taste, but she could hardly say he was wrong.

  “Essentially, yes,” she responded.

  “But why do you need me? You already have Aidan,” he asked.

  Dr. Monroe chimed back in. “You’re different. See, every Sanguine eventually sort of levels off on their changes. We have no idea why or what dete
rmines that limit, but we obtained a sample of your blood from the car crash – seriously rough looking crash by the way, must’ve hurt like hell – and you exhibit a much greater potential for change. Your limit is most likely astronomically high if you have one at all.”

  “I don’t like the idea of having experiments run on me,” Mason appeared to be a little more guarded now.

  Dr. Monroe was forced onto the defensive, “Think of it more like a screening. We just wanted to make sure you were what we thought you were.”

  Aidan chimed in, “They’ve already taken plenty of blood from me to see what it did, but - spoiler alert,” he put his hand next to his mouth as if he was telling Mason a secret he didn’t want the others to hear. “Our blood doesn’t play well with others.”

  “It’s true, unlike Methuselah, or even Alexander in a way, your blood aggressively attacks any other living cells it’s exposed to, except a vampire’s. Their ability to metabolize blood is too strong for your blood to overcome, meaning we can’t even weaponize it. To put it simply, you’re a research dead-end,” Dr. Monroe explained.

  Mason had another thought. “Why would you need to recruit soldiers one at a time? Why not just televise this little presentation to everyone? I assume you have evidence to back it up. We sort of skipped past that part since I can smell what that thing is.” He gestured to the vampire before continuing. “I doubt humanity would be excited to learn they aren’t at the top of the food chain. You could mobilize the entire world to hunt them down.” He clapped his hands for effect, as if it seemed the most obvious conclusion in the world.

  Dr. Westfield stepped forward. “Would they? By most estimates, we’re down to a couple billion people on Earth. We’ve turned the planet into somewhere it may be difficult to survive for much longer. If we suddenly revealed that they could be transformed into a creature that could live forever, are you so sure they would all rally behind our cause? It seems to me that could be the start of a global civil war with humans vs. vampires and their sympathizers. I was alive during The Fall and saw how people treated each other for their own gain; how much they were willing to take from others if it improved their situation by just a fraction. And how better to improve your situation than by making yourself immortal?”

  Mason considered this. It was true that in a place like Seattle, it was easy forget how much other parts of the world had deteriorated. The idea of immortality instead of clawing a life out of a more and more unforgiving world would hold a lot of appeal to a lot of people. In truth, it would’ve been quite a feat to broadcast to the entire world these days anyway. Communications infrastructure had broken down so that each region essentially had their own internet, cordoned off from the rest of the world, and television ownership was plummeting world-wide as people adjusted to a new life where focusing on the essentials was key.

  “We suspect, however,” Simone tried to temper her father’s cynicism, “that Alexander is worried about the scenario you laid out, so both sides are caught in a stalemate where neither wants to risk engaging the general populace.”

  Trevor stepped in. “Look, forget all the science and sociology. Do you want to see what they can do?” He motioned to the vampire who was beginning to panic, realizing it probably wasn’t going to live through this.

  Mason eyes lit up. “Hell yeah!”

  Trevor approached the cage, and opened the side door. “Aidan, would you mind?” Aidan picked himself up from leaning against the wall behind Mason and entered the cage. The vampire was restrained without enough slack to reach the cage door, so it didn’t pose a threat to Trevor. It fumbled with the gag in its mouth for a moment, trying to use its lips to reposition it, but it was too tight. Its fangs became visible over the gag from the struggle, however. Twice as long as any other tooth in its mouth, they took the place of the upper canines like in legend, but the lateral incisors were sharper and longer than usual as well, though not quite to the extent of the outer fangs. The two pairs of fangs looked to be of a slightly different material than the other teeth, vaguely translucent, and a glimmering pearly white. The vampire’s eyes were wide with fear and it retreated to the farthest corner of the cage from where Aidan was, holding its arms awkwardly behind it and to the side to try to stretch for more room.

  Aidan held two fingers in front of his mouth to mimic the fangs. “These are like a reflex. Always out when they’re scared or ‘ungry, otherwise they keep ‘em ‘idden. Fools these wankers,” he gave a dismissive chin nod to the rest of the room, “but you and me know better.”

  Trevor turned to address Mason. “When we caught this one, it had just finished feeding, meaning it’s at the peak of its power. However, it’s still young, so that power is limited, and it takes it much more energy to heal than an older vampire needs.” Aidan removed his sidearm from the holster at his hip, and fired a shot into the vampire, striking it in the stomach. Mason jumped in his chair, the gunfire startling him. The vampire crumpled slightly, and grunted in pain. The wound spurted blood across the floor of the cage with each beat of its heart, but each beat produced less blood than the one before it as the wound closed.

  Aidan lowered his gun to his side as Trevor continued, “They are not the walking corpses of legend. These are living, breathing creatures that are simply much hardier than humans with the obvious exception of UV light,” he explained. By this point, the wound no longer bled, and the hole had been filled with puffy, pink new flesh. The vampire was angry, glaring at Trevor and Aidan, but still in the back corner of the cage, as it knew it couldn’t reach either of them. “That was a through and through, but had the bullet been lodged in the body, the healing would have begun at the base of the wound and continued towards the surface, pushing the bullet back out as a consequence. Healing is still very fast in young vampires, as you can see, but it is also inefficient. The energy expended to heal just that wound will have left it vulnerable to any subsequent wounds.” Aidan raised his gun again, and fired three more shots into the vampire’s torso. This time the vampire howled in pain, muffled but still loud, even through the gag. It stayed bent over as the blood poured onto the cage floor. After a few seconds, one of the wounds healed at roughly the same rate as the first, but the other two were still spurting blood. The vampire’s eyes fluttered and it stumbled forward slightly before catching itself. “Once it runs low on energy, its body will begin sacrificing soft tissue to repair any pressing injuries. None of the damage is permanent, and it all will be repaired if the vampire feeds. Of course, you’re probably already familiar with a similar process,” Trevor said, hinting at Mason’s car crash.

  It was true, Mason needed no education on how this worked, but it was strange to see it in a different creature. He had always assumed his gift was somewhat unique, but it turned out he was simply one of many who could recover from such grievous injuries. It was a complete shift in world view, but hardly one he had trouble adjusting to. Once you knew something was possible, seeing it repeated wasn’t that surprising.

  “What about head shots?” Mason asked.

  “They have some sort of redundancy for memories, personality, all of that. Head wounds heal like all others, and the vampire can continue on, unchanged.”

  Aidan smiled from inside the cage. “Just means you should’ve used a bigger gun.” He raised his arms as if he was holding a shotgun and taking aim at the vampire. He made the noise of a gun firing, throwing his hands up. “Remove the whole ‘ead, and they don’t get back up.”

  Trevor nodded his acknowledgement. “Removing the head, whether by blade or gunfire, does kill the creature. As does sunlight.” Trevor reached outside the cage and grabbed a long metal pole with a steel cable noose at one end; a sort of heavy-duty pole restraint that an animal control officer might use. He handed it to Aidan, who threw the loop over the creature’s head. The vampire was too out of it to notice until Aidan removed the slack, tightening the loop around its neck. The two wounds were still open, but only oozing a dark, thick blood. Aidan pulled the vam
pire off the bars and nodded to Jackson to remove the restraint keeping the vampire attached to the cage. “It’s too weak at this point to pose much of a threat, but normally you shouldn’t underestimate their strength. Perhaps you would care to follow us upstairs?”

  Mason rose from his chair, still enthralled, and as Aidan drug the semi-conscious vampire towards the stairs, Mason dutifully fell in line next to Trevor to follow him onto the main level of the warehouse. As they climbed the stairs, the vampire began to struggle meekly, sensing through some animalistic instinct that it was nearing its death, though it clearly wasn’t capable of much higher-level thought at this point. The wounds had stopped oozing blood, but hadn’t closed, and the vampire had lost enough weight that its pants were beginning to fall down. Still, Aidan drug it up the stairs, and Mason could smell the slight burning of the vampire’s flesh even though it wasn’t in direct sunlight. Just the indirect exposure appeared to be enough to begin the decay. It was moaning through the gag as they reached the main level, collapsing to the ground once the last step had been cleared. Small tendrils of smoke were rising from the open wounds, its inner tissues exposed and less capable of handling even the slight amounts of UV light they were facing.

  “The simplest way to kill them is just like in all the stories. They cannot handle direct sunlight. Their age doesn’t appear to have any impact on their tolerance; it is always lethal within seconds.”

  The rest of The Project members from the basement were ascending the stairs to join them. Trevor nodded to Aidan, who began dragging the vampire’s body across the warehouse floor towards the nearest square of sunlight that streamed in from the windows. As he got closer, the creature mustered the last of its energy, but it amounted to barely squirming as it tried to free itself. As soon as the top of its head broke into the sunlight, it screamed, wide awake now as its flesh charred and peeled back. It burned like kindling, never rising to a flame, but smoldering so intensely the bone and muscle were exposed in an instant. Even the bone blackened and crumbled as the soft tissue melted away. It all happened so fast that the noose of Aidan’s pole restraint slipped off the charred remains of the head before he’d even drug the entire body into the light. The effect was that the upper half of the creature was ash, as its lower body lay smoking just outside the range of direct sunlight. “Fuckin’ ‘ell,” muttered Aidan, who tossed the pole restraint to the side and returned to flip the legs into the sunlight, where they burned just as quickly.