by Jemma Chase
All The Order’s weapons were made of this gold-covered mixture. It made the weapons expensive, but the cure for any plague is costly.
The true genius, however, was the invention of the Nightstick.
“You’ve progressed faster than any other,” Armand told me. He was pleased and that meant I was pleased. “Time for you to learn to wield a Nightstick.”
I hadn’t been allowed a Nightstick yet, and I had to work to contain my excitement. “Thank you.”
Armand grinned as he handed me the best weapon The Order had ever produced. “You’ve earned it.”
The Nightstick looked like a large combination wrench and was used in a similar way. One end was rounded, with a hexagonal opening. A Star of David was formed inside the hexagon by thin bars of iron which were covered with silver.
My hand sat between this rounded end and the perpendicular bar forming the Cross of Christ with the main shaft. The other end had U-shaped pinchers.
Armand showed me how the pinchers could open or close as needed, their mechanism housed in the cross-bar.
Like all Nightsticks, mine was made of the woods and metals combination, covered in gold. “It’s been blessed by everyone here,” Armand said. “Ensure any clergy you meet bless it as well.”
“Why?” I asked while I practiced making the pinchers work.
“The more blessings received, the stronger the Nightstick becomes.” Armand smiled sadly. “This is our best weapon. It means we have a hope of winning this war.”
I knew he was lying to me. The invention of this weapon made fighting against ’Pires seem possible, but there were so many, legions by the time the Nightstick was perfected, and humanity was thinning quickly.
I smiled back. “I know we can stop them.” I lied, but it was a lie I wanted to make a reality.
Weapons technology wasn’t the only thing The Order focused on – saving great scientific minds had been a priority from the start, and their “think tank” was impressive. Finally enough great minds were together long enough to come up with the ultimate breakthrough – time travel.
Initial tests – going back an hour, then a day, then a week – worked well, with one drawback. Coming back to present day caused brainwave issues, and the longer the jump, the worse the problems.
Armand called all the operatives together. “We’ve lost the one-year team,” he said without preamble.
“I saw them,” Hannah protested. “They looked fine.”
Armand shook his head. “Their bodies returned. Their minds didn’t.”
“We can tell they did what they were supposed to,” Liam said. He was alive, which proved the time-travel was working, since he’d been killed twelve months prior. The year-back team’s mission had been to save his life.
We’d known their task had been completed because suddenly Liam was with us. The scientists had prepared us, so his reappearance, and its effect on our memories of him – both those that showed he’d died, and those that showed him being with us for the past year – weren’t too skewed. We’d all taken a drug that ensured everyone in present time would have no trouble aligning the memories.
Liam had been given the same drug, so he was also able to align his dead self with his now-living self. He could also confirm that the year-back team had come, saved him, then disappeared.
“Yes,” Armand said slowly. “The trip back is completely effective, and clearly the operatives retain their present-day memories when they arrive in the past. However, we have to scrap our plans to make short jumps to the past. I’ve decided to cancel the rest of the short-term jumps because we can’t regain the teams.”
“Can’t we give them the same drug we took?” I asked.
Armand shook his head. “We tried that. It…made their madness worse.”
“Why not send the three- and five-year teams back and let them do their work?” Jonathan asked. He was on the five-year team, and clearly disappointed to lose the mission he’d trained for. “Leave us there. We’ll catch up.”
“It’s one thing to go back and return,” Liam said. “It’s another to go back and stay there.”
Armand shook his head. “The tests all agree – the space-time continuum can be negatively affected by leaving the shorter-jump teams in the past for too long.”
“Meeting yourself is never a good thing,” Marcus said.
Armand nodded. “Yes, exactly. And that’s only one of the problems.”
“So, we’re giving up?” Adrienne asked, sounding appalled.
“No. But…” Armand sighed.
“But?” David asked.
“But if we hope to save humanity today, we must send a team back farther in time. So far back there is no hope of them ever returning.”
“This team wouldn’t be able to get help, to know if their work was successful,” Marcus said. “You go back forever, you live and die in the past?”
“Yes.” Armand looked around. “We will be sending the next team back a thousand years. Whoever volunteers will never know if their efforts saved us or not. You’ll only be able to do what you can, for as long as you have.”
My hand was already in the air. Armand smiled at me. “I knew you would offer. I’m sorry we have to cancel our plans for the three and five year jumps.” The three-year team was to have been tasked with saving my family.
“I understand.” I did. We needed to save everyone, not just my family. “If I can change the past, then maybe Violet will…” I couldn’t finish, couldn’t say that maybe if we were successful, then my little sister wouldn’t have to die by my hand.
“I’m in,” Marcus said, filling the silence my throat tightening had created. He put his arm around my shoulders. “Can’t let you be the only risk-taker.”
He was tall and handsome, with black hair and sparkling blue eyes. I smiled up at him. “You know I don’t need protecting.” I liked going on patrols with Marcus. I liked doing other things with him, too.
Marcus grinned. “Absolutely. I just want to visit the motherland.”
Everyone chuckled. “Marcus brings up a good point,” Armand said. “We can have only those of clear European descent on this team. Those of us who won’t blend in at first sight can’t go.”
“All races were there at the time,” Lin protested. She was Armand’s wife, and I knew without asking that she’d hoped the two of them could go back with us. But her Chinese heritage was as clear as his African-American roots.
“Yes,” Armand agreed, “but most were in their home countries. The occasional traveler from foreign lands was a rarity, and the less time spent explaining to the locals what the team is doing there, the better.”
There were arguments from those operatives whose features would force them to remain in the present. Armand let it go on for a minute or so, the he raised his hand. Everyone quieted.
“We stay here. Not only because we’ll stand out, but because our place is to deal with whatever the changes in the past cause in the future – our present. We’ve made the decision to send a team, we have to be here to deal with the ramifications. That’s the fate of leaders, or it should be,” he added, looking at Lin.
She nodded slowly. “I agree.”
Armand smiled widely. “Besides, won’t it be wonderful to discover there are no ’Pires when we wake up the day after the thousand-year-back team leaves?”
Everyone laughed and agreed this would be wonderful. Everyone but those who were busy volunteering for the team. We were discussing other things.
None of us spoke of dying.
Seven was the most that could be sent at one time without risking the travelers being lost in the time-stream. It ended up that the team was made up of three women and four men — me, Marcus, Hannah, David, Liam, Adrienne, and Jonathan. We were all fair skinned with the right looks to be Europeans of the day.
More had volunteered to go, of course. But out of all the volunteers, we were the best trained operatives and had the most ’Pire kills.
“We shouldn’
t let Liam go,” Lin said. “We worked too hard to get him back.”
Liam was short and stocky, with a wide grin and a shock of red hair. “Sorry, but I was resurrected for a reason. I’m the medieval scholar, remember? You don’t get to keep me here when I’ll be more useful there.”
Best of the best or not, we trained long and hard, learning every form of martial arts known, becoming experts in a variety of weapons we might come across in our travels, learning about the mores, classes, and expectations of the day.
Our hearing and vision were medically improved – we could hear a whisper a mile away and read the lips of the person sharing the secret. Our bones and teeth were strengthened, our bodies immunized against ancient illnesses as well as modern ones.
Our blood was altered, a dangerous and expensive process. The taste of garlic, tang of iron, bite of silver, and smell of oak made our blood vile to the ’Pires, which ensured we wouldn’t be turned. Because of its new properties, our blood also provided no nourishment to them.
Blood alteration was easier than time travel, but the process was slow and the ’Pires were working fast. If we’d found that serum a decade earlier, maybe we could have immunized the population and scrapped our time-travel plans. Instead, we used it for those in The Order, but, even though our preparations had taken another eighteen months, there was no time for mass distribution.
Once trained and physically prepared, the Far Away Team, as we called ourselves, were outfitted. The Order wanted to ensure we’d be well-equipped – and we were.
We were given two Nightsticks each, two pairs of infrared-heat goggles, medicines and first aid supplies, clothing we hoped would allow us to pass for, if not natives, at least people of the time period, and gold, though not as much of that as we’d have liked.
All our supplies but the Nightsticks stored in carrying bags that were leather on the outside and lined with water-, shock-, heat-, and cold-resistant material that would protect the contents, potentially for centuries.
Everyone had full-body underclothes which were a cloth hybrid that would keep us cool in hot weather and warm in the cold. We all wore leather boots rolled up over our knees, and secured our leather pants with a thick leather belt from which our Nightsticks hung. The belt also “looked” like it was holding our pants up, which allowed us to hide our more modern fastenings.
For protection as well as adornment, we wore leather vests over black shirts. The shirts’ color would hide stains and the fact they were a special blend of several layers of silk with gold and silver threaded through the fabric.
Each of us had a cloak as well, made from the same fabric as our shirts, with the addition of a middle layer of the lightest chain mail made of the metals and woods mixture we knew would keep us safe.
Speaking of adornment, we were also given gold and silver jewelry. We wore two necklaces with two charms – the Star of David and the Cross of Christ. One necklace was under shirts, one was worn out, to be seen. We had charm bracelets on each wrist, worn the same as the necklaces – one under our sleeves and hidden by our leather gloves, one worn on the outside.
We were all clergy and well versed in the purification ritual, so holy water wouldn’t be a problem. However, we each carried stainless steel vials of it, because it never paid to be without.
The eighteen months passed swiftly, but not fast enough. Humanity’s numbers went down while we prepared. By the time we were ready – standing in front of The Order for the last time, dressed in the clothes we’d spend the rest of our lives in – we knew, without a doubt, that we were humanity’s last hope.
Armand hugged me. “Be true to your training, your goals, and yourself.” He kissed my forehead. “You’re like my daughter. I look forward to finding you in the new world you’ll create, so I can tell your other self about how you saved us all.”
I hugged him back tightly. “I’ll make you proud, I promise.”
“I’ll take care of her,” Marcus said as he hugged Armand. “I’ll protect her with my life, I promise.”
Armand put his hands to our cheeks. “I hope to see you again, somehow. But we’ll meet again in Heaven, if nowhere else.”
Finally, all the farewells were said. The seven of us said our last good-bye to everything we’d ever known, stepped onto the platform, and went back in time a thousand years.
We landed in medieval France. Using historical records, the scientists had been able to choose an area that was scarcely populated. We arrived at night, and so were not detected.
It was the best luck we’d have.
We were prepared for anything, we thought. We’d spent months training, being outfitted, readying ourselves. But we weren’t prepared for the smell.
Medieval Europe stank to high heaven, especially to our twenty-fourth century noses. Vampires in our time had a scent – old blood and minor decay, mostly – but they were an aromatic treat compared to the average person in this time period.
Luckily, we didn’t find any ’Pires for a month, because it took us that long to adjust and begin to ignore the aroma of filth. I would never have guessed that our first challenge would be managing to breath without gagging, but it was.
The Order had chosen this era for a variety of reasons. Bubonic plague was raging across the land, so any dead bodies we might leave behind or funeral pyres we might have to light would be easily explained. We should be able to wear our protective clothing without causing an issue. And though the languages had changed over the centuries, they were close enough to our native tongues and other languages we’d learned that we could get by. We’d learned Latin as well, in hopes of being able to convince any clergy we might meet to help us in our cause.
But our scientists had also chosen this era because the ’Pire population was reasonably sparse and still restricted to the Eurasian continent. They hadn’t needed to migrate to the other continents – possibly hadn’t even traveled from Europe into Asia yet. So this was our chance to stop them at the source.
Clearing out an entire continent of vampires sounds easy, when you’re looking at ancient maps. We only needed a week to realize the land mass would have been a challenge for seven hundred of us. It was laughable to think the seven of us would manage to make a dent in the problem. Especially when we realized if we wanted to eat, we had to make our meager gold last, which meant we couldn’t buy horses.
“Find the pattern,” David said, whenever any of us mentioned the seeming futility. “There’s always a pattern. We find it, we can trace it back to the source. Find the source, stop the spread.”
“What if the pattern leads us thousands of miles?” Jonathan would ask in return.
“Then we walk those miles,” was always David’s reply.
Because bathing wasn’t commonly done, we had to hide the fact we cleaned ourselves regularly from everyone we encountered, and, despite our European heritages, we already stood out more than we’d hoped. We took to dirtying our faces and kept all our clothes on, including our gloves, even in warm weather.
Bathing made us stand out in other ways, and one of those ways was we smelled different to the vampires, when we finally found some.
In our time, the vampires were learning what a blood-altered human smelled like, but here we were different because we didn’t stink. It was an odd way to attract our prey, but we didn’t argue with the results.
Our first few run-ins with ’Pires – solitary and clans – were successful. Although many things weren’t working as we’d expected, we persevered and had positive results to show for our efforts. We got to thinking about what we’d do once we’d eradicated the plague, as we called it in this time, about having lives together that didn’t involve vampire hunting.
What none of us had taken into account was, before our time, most people didn’t believe in vampires.
It’s one thing to tell a populace you’re fighting an enemy they know and fear – they might assist you or at least get out of your way. But when you’re fighting what they consider a
figment of your imagination, you don’t get support or help – you get persecuted as crazy or evil.
We’d been prepared for the people to be superstitious – we’d planned for it, assuming it would help us win over anyone’s help we might need. Unfortunately, we were earning a reputation that far outweighed the dangers of presumed vampires or demons.
“Should the women disguise themselves more?” Jonathan asked, after a particularly unpleasant journey through a small village.
“I’m tempted to say yes,” Liam said with a sigh.
“You can’t seriously believe we’re having problems only because of the three of us,” Adrienne protested.
“It’s not helping that the people we meet can tell you’re women doing what’s considered a man’s job,” David said carefully. “But I agree, I don’t believe the three of you are our biggest issue.”
“Let them notice us,” I said. “Let them know who we are. We’re here to save all of humanity, and they’re a part of that. Those who realize and understand our purpose will join us, once they realize the virtue of our ways.”
“I agree,” Hannah said. “We’ve given up everything else. I refuse to give up being who I am.”
“We need to wear the Stars of David hidden, though,” Liam said firmly. “More people we meet stare at those than our female team members.”
“You mean they hate Jews in this time even more than they hate women,” Marcus said under his breath. “They don’t hate ’Pires, just people.”
“They don’t know any better,” David said. “We do. That’s why we’re here.”
“Let’s hope they learn, then,” Marcus replied.
“We’ll teach them,” I said. “We’ll show them the way. We’ll gather the few who can stand up to the ’Pires and create our own army.”