Drifting the Dark

[Saint_]

Here's a fun story I wrote to challenge myself with two ideas:

1. Can I write a vampire story without ever saying the word "vampire?" (And hopefully avoiding cheesy cliches which is MUCH harder than it sounds.)

2. How would being in space effect a vampire? (I also wanted to add a little research to make it more believable, but I totally over did that.)



Drifting the Dark

Time. The word stretched across my brain like a red-hot wire. I had it now, all of it. Eternity, or at least as much time as the Universe had. I squinted hard to my right. With my finely tuned senses, I could barely make out Radcliff. He was probably a hundred miles from me now. I tried to do the math, how long until I couldn’t see him at all? In the 300 years I’d been drifting, he’d moved only about 20 more miles away from me, so I still had at least another 1000 years until he was invisible and I lost even the companionship of his vision.

For a long time I had thought that I would eventually get captured by a sun, and drawn to a quick, flaming death. That would have ended my pain, as not much else would have. But I eventually realized, after the first hundred years or so, that the chances of that happening were remote indeed. Space is unimaginably large, and the distances vast enough to blast the very soul. Unfortunately, much as I might wish it, insanity was not an option. Creatures such as myself are damned to eternal sanity.

A chance encounter with an asteroid or rogue planet was my only hope, and a slim one that was. How many times had I dreamed of a planet with life? Even the firmness of a barren rock would provide a little solace. But as I looked at the blackness of interstellar space, and thought of my velocity, I knew that millennia after millennia would pass before I ever came close enough to anything to hope for a rescue from my torture. No…fate had caught up to me with a vengeance, and I had nothing left to me but time to contemplate the vagaries and whims of chance. My intellect and my memories were my sole possessions now, and like a miser in a vault, I toyed with them endlessly…

As usual, I found myself traveling back to that bright day in the past when my world was full of light and life. I was 30 then, newly married, and with a life that was well under way and a future that I, in my naivety, thought was assured. How smug I was about life in those days! I was a village blacksmith; it was The Year of Our lord 115. Rome had spread North to Gaul and then to Britannia, under the armies of the Emperor Trajan, and I had traveled with it. I was living and working in Londinium, the largest village in Britannia. I had a small forge with a little log house next to it. I had a good supply of customers and was well known and well liked in the community.

It was a cold night in November when all that changed. I was sleeping soundly in my bedroom, when suddenly I awoke. Something had warned me. What was it? I heard a small scratching noise coming from the door. Instantly, I was wide-awake. My heart was hammering in my chest as I slowly turned my head to look at the entryway. The sight I saw there froze me solid. My body went completely rigid. I couldn’t move a muscle. As I lay there, every hair on my body standing on end, screaming silently in my mind, the creature unfolded itself through the door.

The oppression of the weight on me, the terrible smell of the breath, the ecstasy of every nerve jangling with the electricity of death; All these things I remember very clearly. Then the creature was gone and my life was changed forever.

In the early days, I truly thought I would lose my mind. I didn’t know yet that it was impossibility. I reeled from the intense hunger, the nightly ballet of death, and the assault on my mind from my newly acquired senses. I was no longer human, of that I was certain. I could see vast distances. I could smell every living thing within miles of myself. I could climb vertical walls, and throw boulders a dozen times my weight. At a thought, I could vaporize to a mist and travel through cracks in masonry too small for a normal man to see. I could read the thoughts and control the minds of those who were unfortunate enough to come within my gaze. Of course I couldn’t stay with my little family, I knew only too well what their fate would be with me around. So, within a week, I took to the open road.



In those days, it was very, very easy to find an army and even easier to join it. The battles gave me more than enough blood to slake my thirst, as I feasted on the bodies of the wounded at night. I traveled across Aquitania and Narbonensis. I fought the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths at Dacia. As the decades passed, I found myself strengthening, I could travel in the day now, my marble-hard skin disguised by robes and armors.

I found I couldn’t stay in any one army for too long. The sight of the carnage I wreaked on the battlefield froze even the most hardened soldier’s blood in his veins. After a while, my own comrades would turn on me after too many nights of screams from the wounded on the battlefield.

In 632 AD. Islam began to spread across the world, foreshadowing that never-ending struggle that continued into the 21st century. I was among the warriors that saved the sole survivor of the Omayyads and carried him off to the Franco Empire after Abdul al-Abbas as-Saffah overthrew that family in 749 AD. I visited the city he built; Baghdad, once… but I recall it as a dusty mud-hole, not really the stuff of legends.

During the 10th century, I fought and rode with Temujin. I was there when he proclaimed himself the Supreme Ruler of the Mongols in 1206 and assumed the title of Genghis Khan. I returned with his hordes to China, this time as an invader, and helped to capture Peking. For the next two hundred years, the Khan’s empire reached from the Pacific to the Volga River.

In the fifteenth century, the Mongol rule in Asia collapsed and the overland trade that they had encouraged fell off sharply. As a result, I found myself drawn to the Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator. Those were golden days for me. I loved the sea, although it did present problems for one such as I. Luckily, slavery was well in fashion, and the poor wretches died with considerable consistency, so that the occasional slave that I “helped” to a quick death was unnoticed by the crew.

I watched in fascination as Christopher Columbus proposed his journey to the West Indies, and I sailed with John Cabot in 1497, when he discovered the North American continent. I was tired of civilization by then. So, I left Cabot’s ship behind and haunted the primordial forests of America for many, many years. I preyed upon the innocent natives there, and worked my way into their legends and songs.

Of course I wasn’t alone for too long. Civilization followed me and caught me. I fought with Washington, and wintered at Valley Forge. I watched with interest as the French Revolution careened out of control. I lived in relative peace for much of that century, in a great mansion in Hardin County, Kentucky, neighbors to a very nice family named Lincoln who had a small 8-year old named Abraham. They moved away in 1809, and I missed my talks with him terribly. I was finally forced out of my sedentary lifestyle by the Civil War in 1863 and forced to return to my militant ways again.

Time seemed to me to begin to accelerate then. The Civil War was followed by the Boer War, then The War To End All Wars. I became almost a legend then, as I stalked through the gas-clouded trenches, dealing death viciously to some, and mercifully to others. World War II came next, and I was fascinated at the time by the increasing perfection of aviation, so I enlisted and became a pilot. I was assigned to P-47’s in North Africa, and flew at the Battle of Brenner pass in Italy.

One memory sticks in my mind of that time, I flew down on a Nazi troop train to destroy it, only to find that the Germans had made all the women with babies sit on the roof of the train car and hold their babies skyward to any attacking plane. I don’t know why, after so many centuries of brutality I had witnessed, I should have been so surprised at mankind’s inhumanity to man, but I was shocked that day. Nevertheless, the Germans hadn’t counted on a being that was totally ruthless at the stick of their enemy’s aircraft, and they, along with all those innocent women, paid the price that day.

Vietnam, the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, Antarctica, the Dark side of the Moon, I fought everywhere. I traveled as mankind advanced. Like the bacteria in their systems, I dogged them relentlessly. I was as inescapable and untouchable as a nightmare.

Once, at the first Martian colony I was almost caught. Alerted by their machines, the men of the colony were hunting me down. I was forced to take the most drastic of measures. I overrode the controls to their pressure dome and slaughtered the entire population of the colony. I needn’t tell you of the long decades of cold hunger I suffered through until the arrival of new colonists.

I was at Deneb during the Machine Wars, and rode in an AI Cruiser in The Battle That Shook Worlds. I saw the burning of Adriak’s Fleet above the galactic plane of the ecliptic. That event brought me finally to rest on the world of Harker’s Field.

Harker’s Field was a good home to me for many centuries. The calm slow progression of civilization there soothed my troubled mind. Many long decades I spent wandering its virgin forests, and climbing its towering volcanoes.

But as I drifted along peacefully, mankind began their most terrible war ever. The Reckoning. Whole worlds were burned, with weapons beyond imagination. Merciless as ever, mankind nearly wiped themselves from existence in that war. The few worlds left were falling one by one to the massive cold and robotic killing machines of the Silver Horde.

The day came when Harker’s field had to be evacuated too. I knew what this meant, leave or spend eternity on a radioactive cinder. As usual, however, my luck saved me. Before the gigantic Sleeper ships could launch, a Wormhole fusion-fission-fusion torpedo surprised them and blasted three quarters of the planet to ash in a millisecond. Only one ship was left untouched, and on it one small family made it to safety. One small family…and me.

I was stowed away in cargo hold that was not pressurized, so my chances of being found were small. Still... the situation was pretty desperate for me. I knew from my time on Mars that I could go for long periods without feeding, but the Sleeper ship would cruise for centuries before reaching a destination far from the carnage behind her. I couldn’t feed on any of the small family without risking giving away my presence, so I had nothing, absolutely nothing to do but sit in the cold until we arrived. If only I had known what was in store for me, though, I think I would have stayed on the planet and ridden out the atomic blasts.

The first indication of trouble came when the computer I had plugged into warned me through the chips implanted in my head that an intruder alert was in progress. I was confused. How had the computer found me? I hadn’t moved from the spot in which I sat for ten years, literally. I had been sitting so motionless that even the best motion detectors couldn’t have found me. I gave off no heat, so that wasn’t the answer. Then it occurred to me...maybe I wasn’t the intruder.

Quickly, I accessed the computer. No need for secrecy now, the alarm was already given. I found instantly that one of the hibernation capsules had been broken into, 400 decks above me. Faster than any human being could run, I sprinted through the ship to the hibernation compartments. I didn’t have much time. The shipboard AI was already in the process of waking the family.

One look was all I needed to understand the situation. The young girl’s hiber-coffin was shattered and there were two marks of blood on her neck. Unmistakable. Another of my kind was aboard!

Using senses that humans couldn’t understand, I reached out with my mind to touch the other. I found him in the ship’s shuttle bay. Radcliff! I knew Radcliff well. I had crossed paths with him for centuries now. He was much younger than I, having only come into existence in the 20th century and he was much, much more rash.

I flashed into mist at that second, since the Father was beginning to awaken. Smoothly I flowed to the shuttle bay, knowing full well that the search for the killer of the daughter would soon take place and that on a ship in deep space, even one as big as this one, I had no chance of not being found. They would search the ship with matter detectors, I knew. That was something that not even I could avoid, for even in mist form, I was still material. No… my only hope for salvation was to give the humans another answer to their question.

Radcliff was waiting for me in the hold. He was holding a long and sharp piece of construction material. He looked at me with narrowed eyes, flashing with the same desperation that I was feeling. “Victor! I might have known. Only you could have found me so quickly,” he said, slowly circling to his left.

I crouched and circled too. "‘Radcliff, you insufferable idiot! You’ve awoken the humans and their computers. They’ll find us soon now and we’re cut off. None of the shuttles has the range to make it to a planet from here. There’s no escape! If I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d say you’ve lost your mind!” I glared at him, watching every movement. I knew that he was as superhumanly fast and intelligent as I, but I couldn’t understand his plan.

“Right as usual, Victor. Only a culprit will satisfy them now, lucky for me I have one, eh?" He grinned evilly, and then rushed at me faster than a human eye could follow. I dodged left at the last second, narrowly avoiding being separated from my head. Looking around desperately, I picked up a one-ton steel girder lying in the bay and took a swipe at him.

“Radcliff, I’m older and stronger than you. You haven’t got a chance. Give yourself up to the humans and let them deal with you. You may receive mercy from them, but you will get none from me.” Throwing the beam at his head, I raced across the shuttle bay and grabbed a fire axe from a cabinet. The battle was on. In the blink of an eye we grappled, swung, cursed, and thrust at each other. No human has ever seen the likes of that battle. The fight was a blur of motion as both of us, moving with superhuman reflexes, fought to the death.

Exhausted, we both broke apart and circled each other.

“You’re not thinking Radcliff! This little family can’t possibly supply even one of us for long. We have to wait until they reach their destination!”

“The Devil take you, Victor! I’m hungry! I’ve been starving for months now. I can’t go as long as you can! When I sensed your presence, I knew I didn’t have to wait any longer! You’ll be the reason, Victor! You’ll be my excuse, my decoy!” At that statement, he rushed towards me. I parried the blade with my axe. Blow after blow rained down from him and I replied in kind. He was desperate, but so was I. Both of us were beginning to tire, but that wasn’t what worried me. From my implant I knew that the humans were now awake and were rushing to the shuttle bay with particle-beamers. We were running out of time!

As Radcliff paused to size me up for another high-speed rush, I looked over his shoulder to see a red blinking light. A desperate strategy occurred to me. As I thought of the plan, cold terror crept over me. Death was nothing. I had avoided it for millennia, and dealt it to uncounted millions, and I knew that even creatures such as Radcliff and I could be destroyed. Death held no fear for me, but what I was contemplating could turn out much, much worse!

Oh! How many times since that day have I deliberated, questioned my actions, and rethought my motives? How many myriad of times have I gone over what happened next in my mind’s eye, trying desperately to see any other alternative I might have missed?

I circled to the left, hoping that Radcliff was too absorbed with me to notice that I was slowly working my way to that red button. Then, he was ready. He flashed into a mist and shot at me across the bay. In a second, I spun around and slammed down on the emergency shuttle bay airlock switch. The bay doors blew out; the air in the bay became an instant hurricane. I saw the cloud that was Radcliff caught by the force of the winds and swept towards the open doors.

I grabbed the metal bulkhead next to me as the wind increased to a howling pitch. I gripped the metal so hard it began to warp and twist. I looked over my shoulder to see Radcliff flash back into human form and make a grab for the edge of the door as he shot past it. A forlorn scream was ripped from his chest as he narrowly missed it and spun away into deep space.

I grinned evilly and turned to hit the close button. I had only seconds to get under cover before the humans got here. What would I do to avoid them? If I killed them all, could I control the ship myself? I had no idea, but right now all I cared about was that Radcliff that was out there and I was in here.

That’s when it happened. Fate? Chance? Divine intervention? Most likely, I’ll never know. As I turned to hit the close switch, the girder I had been crushing with my grip buckled and fractured. The piece I was holding came off in my hand. Instantly I was flung out the same door that Radcliff had so recently exited.

I stared stupidly at the receding ship. I could still see wisps of oxygen coming out of the open door. I reached frantically towards the ship but it was a lost hope. The hard vacuum sucked the air out of my lungs, the bitter cold of near absolute zero stung my skin…but I didn’t die.

That was 300 years ago. At first, I communicated with Radcliff by hand signals and sign language. But eventually we drifted too far apart to make them out. Soon now I will be all alone, just my memories and myself. My memories of thousands of years of war. My memories of death, destruction, and evil. Sometimes, and more and more often now, I begin to wonder if perhaps some greater power arranged this horrible predicament for me. Perhaps a Protector of the Universe decided that it was time to balance the scales, and so arranged for that girder to break just at the right time to leave me here with my memories…drifting the dark forever.







Copyright 2006 by Jonathan St. Ives

All Rights Reserved

[LarsMac]

Nice work