The Fall: Sanguine Series: Book One Read online

  THE FALL

  Sanguine Series: Book One

  By Chris Laughton

  Copyright © 2017 by Chris Laughton

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  For Natalie,

  Even if I could have done it without you,

  what would’ve been the point?

  PROLOGUE

  He opened his eyes. At first, he felt the animal panic of being unable to move, but this was a familiar sensation to him now. As it was every time he awoke from his sleep, his memories took time to come back and they did so chronologically. His mind was an empty vessel slowly being filled by his past, allowing him to relive it all as if for the first time. From his childhood near the river, with fleeting glimpses of his father who was already an old man when he had been born, to his ascendance, and all that had transpired since, it took quite some time for his mind to process and reorder all of his experiences. Each sleep took longer to fully wake from, as each waking had more memories to be restored. He felt every pain and slight of his past anew, every joy and sorrow, and all their accompanying highs and lows. It took days for him to wake from these sleeps now, but by the end of them, he was always himself.

  During this time, he lay, smelling the earth that grew cold as he regained his senses. He had dug deep, to ensure that whatever happened to the world around him, his sleep would not be disturbed. His only company was the small sounds of the dirt around him compacting as his body rebuilt itself and needed more space. The dirt was no longer soft, but moved in frosty chunks. Any bugs left near him when he awoke would have tried to find a way to get away this phenomenon they didn’t understand. Not all of them would be so lucky though. Inevitably, over the time he’d slept, some of them would have eaten their way into him, and the ones still left inside now found themselves being consumed for fuel in an ironic twist. Their wriggling death throes inside his body were never a comfortable feeling.

  When he was sufficiently restored after several days, he reached outward with his mind to get a sense of time. The world had summoned him as it always did when it needed him. As he always did, he would answer. He sensed that he had slept for over half a century, and the world was a very different place than when he had last drawn breath. It was quieter now, but not the quiet of peacefulness. It was the quiet of impending death. A slow death, made even more tragic by the fact that it could have been avoided, but one that was in its initial stages. Humanity now was like a hermit crab whose shell was beginning to crack, but there wasn’t another to move into. Perhaps this fate could still be averted, but its avoidance was not why the world had deemed it necessary to wake him. This time, the affairs of man were for them to sort out and if those affairs destroyed their home and doomed their kind, then that was their fate. A fate he could not share with them, but he no longer mourned his mortality.

  Millennia ago, when he was still young by his family’s standards, it was true that a sort of listlessness had set in. He had been many places, met many people, and witnessed many great and terrible things. But after several lifetimes, he had begun to notice the cyclical nature of humanity and he had grown dismayed. Every mistake they made was repeated once enough time had passed for their collective memories to forget the lessons their forefathers had learned. He began to shun human contact, and wandered aimlessly for ages. He had never seriously considered ending his own life, not because his existence held any appeal to him, merely because he was fairly certain he could not die. Instead, he had grown more and more lethargic and traveled smaller and smaller distances, before finally succumbing to his boredom and digging a place within the earth for him to sleep; to wait out millennia until perhaps the world could show him new wonders. He did not sleep millennia, however, only a few years until his destiny was revealed to him. The world had found him while he slumbered, his mind cleared of all else, and had shown him a purpose. It was not a purpose that called to him, or felt like his own, but it was a purpose nonetheless and after so many years without one, any purpose felt like a blessing.

  He would balance the scales. Any time they tipped too far towards Prosperity or Poverty, he would balance them so that mankind knew roughly equal measures of both, for it was not their place to experience solely one or the other. Presently, they were tipped too far towards Poverty, but perhaps this was what the world wanted. Perhaps it had grown tired of them as he had. No, he had been woken for what was to come: the consequence of a previous action taken to shift them back from Prosperity. He was more directly responsible for this imbalance than any previous one he had been made to correct, but he felt no guilt in the matter. Like a conservator tasked with culling a herd they had reintroduced, he merely performed his task because it was required. He was not entirely unfeeling; he could still feel emotion from time to time, though they typically rolled in like tides, taking quite a while to develop, and just as long to subside. Subtle shifts that never reached the dizzying highs or nauseating lows of his youth, but in many ways, were more profound.

  As he made his first movement to extract himself from the earth, he realized he was beginning to feel one already. For this task, he would need to help the one person arguably more responsible for mankind’s impending peril than he was, and he felt a low, rumbling rage. Mankind was in its twilight, but if it had a next dawn, there would be a reckoning.

  1

  Maya was at a cabin and she could see love. Not some physical avatar of the emotion of course; that would have been ridiculous. She was watching a couple that was clearly in love, and it changed the very air around them. To think the air changed was a little crazy, but then again, so was Maya. The snow falling outside the cabin gave the scene a dreamlike quality and made it feel as if these two were the only two people in the world (the snow falling inside the cabin was just confusing). Maya knew this was not true. She knew that if she wanted to, she could watch many people in this world, but the couple held her interest for now. The Man was brushing hair from The Woman’s face.

  It reminded Maya of when she had been little, and Mother had brushed and braided her hair with so much love. A different kind of love to be sure but it was the same at its root: to put someone else before yourself. And that’s what Mother had done, every night, quite literally by standing behind Maya and fussing with her hair. But then, The Little Girl getting her hair braided in these memories was much smaller and younger than Maya, so could it still have been her? The Man nodded his head yes, but The Woman seemed less convinced.

  If The Little Girl was not her, then why did Maya have her memories? She hoped she hadn’t stolen them, as Mother had always taught her that stealing was wrong. But if she wasn’t The Little Girl, then Mother wasn’t her mother, so perhaps this lesson had never been taught. The Man seemed to consider this possibility. The Woman just glared with contempt. If Maya was not The Little Girl, then Mother had not died on that fateful night, but had also not braided her hair. Maya was not sure which was preferable. And if she was not The Little Girl, then who was she? We were nothing if not the sum of our memories, but the memory of this cabin was not hers – in fact, it wasn’t anybody’s yet – but here she was. The Braided Hair and The Dead Family memories were therefore not necessarily hers, but as they were definitely somebody’s and Maya could trace the path from those memories to where she was now, she decided that she would make them hers.

  This alleviated some of her anxiety, beca
use she had begun to think that if Mother wasn’t her mother, then she wasn’t sure who had given birth to her (brought into this world with so much pain and blood and kept in it by the same), and as far as she knew, everyone had to come from someone else. So not having a mother would’ve meant not being someone! What a terrifying thought! So Mother was hers and she was The Little Girl Who Wasn’t Little Anymore and that was that. But of course, even in this scenario, Mother was dead, and so she still didn’t have a mother. People died all the time, but their families didn’t cease to exist, yet if the memories weren’t hers and she definitely had no mother now, did that put her right back where she started? She decided the best course of action would be to have someone else clear this up for her. Having a question answered certainly heavily implied that you existed, after all! She hated to interrupt The Man and The Woman Who Had Not Been Here Yet, but as they were the only two people in this cabin, they were the only ones she could ask. “Excuse me,” she asked, “but am I someone?”

  This time it was The Man who seemed confused by the question, so The Woman would be the one to answer. She cleared her throat to speak, but this hadn’t happened yet, and when it did, Maya wouldn’t be there, and so she couldn’t get an answer to her question. The Woman closed her mouth. This was disappointing, but liberating.

  Maya realized that because this hadn’t happened yet, she didn’t need to see it for what it was, but rather she was free to see it as it really was. The cabin walls were exploded away in a hail of splinters and the pristine day was turned to smoky night. The trees surrounding what had been the cabin were sickly and dying and the stream that had been frozen over was now just a dry gulch. The Woman was a thunderstorm, pacing back and forth on one side of the cabin and The Dead Family was with her. The Man was a fever, pulsing with power that radiated out from him in waves and he sat calmly on the other side of the cabin. The Braided Hair was certainly not with him per say, but was definitely on his side of the cabin to stand against The Dead Family. The Braided Hair taking a side made Maya realize that The Man and The Woman were against each other now, and the air had changed again. Gone was the love, replaced with hate, and even though apathy was the true opposite of love, the hate made Maya sad, and she decided she liked things as they were and not as they really were.

  The sun rose and the trees grew new buds to soak in its energy. The smoke blew away on a gentle breeze. Water began flowing down the stream, and the cabin grew new walls like branches that blossomed into a roof as well. The Man brushed yet more hair from The Woman’s face and Maya thought of Mother (now her mother again!) brushing her hair, and was happy.

  2

  Alexander entered the room already impatient. This was a small compound he had set up specifically for Maya when he realized what she was capable of. Beyond the blast door set into the same Montana mountainside as his own compound, it was much more spartan than his own home. Its location was more due to proximity to his home than any functional reason; it allowed him to travel here quickly if he so chose. He had been summoned here many times since he had given the team responsible for her a concrete goal, and they dutifully notified him of each one of Maya’s little episodes. The problem with her gift when you tried to focus it was like trying to perform brain surgery with a chainsaw: you were asking for precision and bringing too much power to bear, and so he had come away mostly empty-handed each time. His agents out in the real world were equally fruitless, however, and so here he was, ready to be disappointed again.

  Kai Lim was waiting for him, with a self-satisfied look on his face, in the monitoring room. Down the hall from the elevator entrance, past a room for the generator, and a small barracks for whoever he left stationed here, the monitoring room was the true reason for this facility. It was currently staffed by Kai, who no doubt was itching for the end of the assignment, so he could get back out in the field. The young man had been a physical specimen when Alexander had turned him, and the change had only improved his gifts. He stood an imposing 6’4” with close-cropped hair. He dressed in a vaguely military style that was modest, but Alexander was sure Kai chose clothes to show off his physique. He took a private pride in his ability to speak English without an accent, and almost never spoke his native Korean, though surely he was still fluent. Christ, or was he Japanese? Alexander couldn’t remember, and he’d learned the one and only time he’d asked, that Kai took it quite personally that Alexander didn’t know. It didn’t help that ‘Kai Lim’ was almost certainly a pseudonym. Either way, the man was brutally efficient, and his specific talent was uniquely valuable to Alexander.

  But it was nothing compared to Maya’s. He glanced past Kai, to the monitors he was responsible for viewing to get a look at Maya’s room. ‘Cell’ would have been a more appropriate word, but many times the only difference between a room and a cell was whether you could leave. It was a large enough area, but like the rest of the compound, sparsely decorated. It felt clinical, and Alexander felt that appropriate given Maya’s mental state. She oscillated between a vicious, conniving killer whom Alexander was quite fond of, and a naïve, self-righteous bleeding heart that he couldn’t stand. But it was when she was in between these two personalities that she held her true value. Sure, she would routinely babble on about God knows what, but when you could figure out what the hell she meant, she truly shined. An actual crystal ball that could tell the future. When she was transitioning from her useless self into crazy, she was generally incoherent, but when she transitioned from her ruthless side into it, she was able to steer her visions towards what she was trying to learn. And that vicious side was all too eager to help Alexander interpret her visions once she took control again.

  That side of her was the reason that several months ago, he had learned of a remarkable man living somewhere out there amongst the humans. Maya had shown him that should such a man be turned, he would be just the weapon Alexander needed, and so he had dispatched his trackers with a rather vague goal: find him this remarkable man. It was searching for a needle in a haystack, except you didn’t even know which farm the haystack was on. It was a long shot, but Alexander’s only other option was to bide his time, and Maya had shown him how that tactic played out.

  Looking at her now, she was sitting quite calmly on her bed, sensor pads removed from the various points on her head where they had been attached to wirelessly relay their signal to the monitors. Her serenity meant he was watching a replay on the monitors, since if she was still ‘transmitting’, she’d be frantically scrawling gibberish on the walls, or something else equally disconcerting. This being a replay also meant he frustratingly couldn’t try to steer Maya’s vision while it was happening, but Alexander’s mood changed when he saw Kai’s face. The young man obviously had something to tell him.

  “I think we really have something this time, sir. She’s talking about a cabin, and there’s a man whom I think she’s also called The Fever, that definitely fits the description.” Kai waited anxiously for Alexander’s response.

  “Well what’s she giving us on the cabin? I already know the man exists, and I need a more specific location than ‘a cabin’ to give the trackers.” Alexander was still impatient.

  Kai had obviously been hoping for this line of questioning, and stepped up out of his chair in front of the monitors in case Alexander would like to sit. “See for yourself.” Alexander stepped to the monitors hooked up to the sensors that had been on Maya’s head. They were able to decrypt her brain waves and display them as an image on the monitors, now a replay of the recording; some tech a large pharmaceutical firm had been working on as a luxury form of entertainment/therapy for the rich, but it had been quickly abandoned after The Fall when such a frivolity was no longer the priority. When Alexander had learned of its development, he had found the team that had worked on it and turned the leader, Gabriel, so he could finish their work for him. Truth be told, he’d turned the whole team, but Gabriel had been the only one interested in continuing the work after his transformation. He had been sta
tioned here with Kai to help refine the tech, but the tiny compound was no research facility, and his intellect rebelled at the confinement. Alexander had let him set up a lab across the country to continue his research. Since then, any vampires he turned that showed an aptitude for the work, he sent Gabriel’s way. It was something of a policy of his: once his progeny had served their purpose and ‘repaid their debt’ so to speak, he let them wander off and kept them in his back pocket should he need their services again. He made a mental note to check in with this particular group, since he realized it had been quite some time since he’d heard from them, and any improvement in their tech could only help his aims with Maya.

  Regardless, what they’d left him with was already quite useful. It wasn’t quite a Rosetta Stone for Maya’s visions though. Her thoughts were incredibly disjointed and only through piecing together different chunks of the recordings could you get anything useful. There was no sound (perhaps the scientists had figured this out since his last exchange with them?), so they recorded Maya’s ramblings while she was having the visions and tried to decrypt what she meant. Sometimes the image was distorted beyond usefulness if it was too emotional for Maya.

  But in this case, Kai was right: there, clear as day on the monitors was a small log cabin with a gable roof and a stone chimney surrounded by snow and pine trees. It looked to be nicely updated, but in an older style, with center bar windows and covered back porch to look out on the stream running behind it. It looked to be in a mountainous area, with a slope rising abruptly in front of it.

  Because her dreams were not bound by perspective, it often took multiple monitors to follow her vision and this one was no exception. While the first monitor was fixed on an outside shot of the cabin with only the falling snow to prove it wasn’t a still shot, the second monitor was Maya’s view from inside. Two people sat on a couch deep in conversation, and although he couldn’t make out any distinguishing details, Alexander wasn’t really trying to. Identities in Maya’s visions tended to be blurred or swapped entirely with someone from her past. It wasn’t unusual for Maya’s mother’s or Alexander’s visage to take a starring role, regardless of the person she actually had in mind. The important part was all the details he could see about the inside of the cabin. He looked back and forth between the two monitors (the third was just showing Maya’s point of view looking into a mirror as her mother brushed her hair and Maya constantly shifted between a young girl and her present self) trying to find something else he could use. A portion of what was presumably the couple’s car was visible in the first monitor, but that didn’t mean much. Vehicles, like personal appearances could be swapped randomly with ones from her past, or something she remembered from a movie, or hell, something she imagined herself.