“Yes!” I whispered, taking the disc and placing it into the hard drive. I listened to the computer whir to life. Another box appeared on the screen which read ‘View Files’. Clicking onto the box, the screen revealed a series of files. There were hundreds, no thousands. I scanned my eyes over them, not knowing what exactly I was looking for, but hoping that one of them would grab my attention.
I dragged the cursor down the page, and about halfway down, I saw a file that had been named, ‘Facility 1’. Opening up the file the screen became awash with diagrams of what looked like big, glass pods. With Bruno Mars singing in my ears, I scrolled down the page, and was baffled by the series of technical diagrams of what looked like a hangar full of racks, on each one there was row upon row of these glass pods. I had no true idea of what they were, but they looked like a series of glass coffins. Then beneath the diagrams, there was a drawing, similar to something that an architect might draw of the monastery. Then, as I looked at the diagram more carefully, I could see that built into the foundations beneath the monastery was a chamber, which held a mass of these glass-like coffins I’d seen above. I clicked on the image and it increased in size. I continued to zoom in until I gasped at what I could now clearly see.
In each of the coffins lay what looked like a person. It was hard to tell because these were just computer images and not photographs, but each of the people inside the coffins, were featureless. As I sat and stared at the images, I remembered something that one of the monks had said when Potter had been pretending to freak-out for some of the red stuff.
“Brother, take him to the crypt, there is plenty of human flesh for him there,” the monk had said.
Were the images on the screen in front of me what he had been referring to? I wondered. Row upon row of humans, waiting to be fed upon?
At the bottom of the page, in bright red letters as if in warning, the following message had been written.
FACILITY CLOSED
I shut down the file and beneath this there was another which had been named ‘Facility 2’. Just like I had with the first, I clicked on it and the file opened. Again, I was faced with a series of diagrams of the same pods come glass coffins. But this was slightly different and had thick umbilical type cords coming from them. I scrolled down the page until I came across another technical drawing of a building. It looked like a large hangar, the type that you might find on an airfield. Again, the diagram had been drawn in such a way that you could see through it and all the hundreds and hundreds of pods that lined the walls. But there was something else. Beneath the building, there seemed to be a tunnel of some kind. It didn’t show or say where it led to.
I enlarged the image and zoomed in. There was an upper level to this facility and it had been divided into corridors with rooms leading from them. Some of the rooms had been named. There were examination rooms, laboratories, and an operating theatre. As I sat and stared at the picture, I wondered if this wasn’t the facility where Isidor, Kayla, and I had been kept before moving to the zoo. Scrolling to the bottom of the page, I came across a similar message to the one that I had seen before, but this was more of a warning. In bold, red letters it said:
FACILTY CLOSED
BIOHAZARD – NO ADMITTANCE!
Just like I had before, I closed down the file, and was just scanning over the others, curious as to what else I might find on the disc, when a shadow loomed over me, casting the screen in darkness.
Switching off my iPod, I gasped and said, “You nearly scared the hell out of me!”
Without looking at me, Potter leant over the table and switched the computer off.
“I was looking at something,” I said.
“Shhh!” he said, raising a finger to his lips. “There mustn’t be any light. Not even from the screen.”
“What are you talking about?” I whispered.
“Come with me,” he said, and walked towards the windows.
I followed him, and turning to look back at me, he said, “Keep your head down or they might see you.”
Crouching over, I made my way towards the window. Peering over the ledge, I looked out. The window gave a view of the street below, and just opposite I could see the supermarket that I had taken the tins of fruit from. The lights inside were now out. The shop looked in complete darkness, but as I looked into the gloom I could see figures walking about inside amongst the isles and displays.
“Who are they?” I whispered, not taking my eyes off the view below.
“What’s left of the townsfolk,” Potter said. “Yet, they’re not people anymore, they’re vampires.”
I remembered all those dead people in the cars that cluttered the road leading out of town, the bodies in the store and supermarket. My fears had been right; they had woken as vampires, created by the Vampyrus.“They’ve been coming out every night now, for as long as I’ve been hiding out here with Seth and Eloisa,” Potter whispered.
“What are they doing?” I said, as I watched a group walk into view from further down the street.
“They’re looking for food – blood,” Potter hushed. “I guess they’re thirsty.”
I continued to watch the vampires from the window as they almost seemed to roam the street in packs. Their faces were deathly white, their hair and clothes dishevelled. All of them bore the injuries that had been inflicted upon them by the Vampyrus and Lycanthrope. Some shuffled down the street, their heads resting against their shoulders. Others had limbs missing, and I watched one as he tripped over his own entrails that hung from his guts and fell flat on his face in the middle of the street. Then, something bizarre happened and I leapt back from the window. Seeing the vampire fall onto the road, the other vampires raced over to it and began to feed. With their arms swinging up and down, they ripped and tore the flesh from the fallen vampire. It screamed in pain, and I covered my ears with my hands in an attempt to block out its ear-splitting cries. Peeking over the lip of the window frame, I watched with sickening horror as the vampires in the store raced out onto the street at the smell of blood. Some of them were so eager to feed, that they simply crashed through the widows, sending a shower of glass across the pavement.
“What are they doing?” I whispered at Potter, but unable to tear my eyes from the gruesome scene below.
“I told you they were thirsty,” he whispered back.
“But they’re eating one of their own!”
“All the good human flesh has run out,” he said glancing at me. “All that is left is each other.”
“So what you’re saying is that their cravings will get so bad they will eventually eat each other?” I said.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Potter grinned at me. “They can’t leave the town as it’s been sealed off by Vampyrus and Lycanthrope, so in the end they will turn on each other to feed their thirst. Every night, once making sure that you were okay, I’d sneak from your cell and come in here to watch them. At first there were hundreds of them, but as the nights have passed their number has grown smaller. Look!” he said, “There goes another one!”
I glanced back out of the window, to see a pack of the vampires leap through the air and attack another of their own. The vampire went down in a flurry of shadows as it frantically thrashed its arms and legs about. Within seconds it had fallen still, and the others gathered around it like a pack of wild hyenas that had made a kill.
Not wanting to see any more, I turned away, sliding my back against the wall to sit on the floor. “You know we’re not the only people hiding out in this town, don’t you?” I said to Potter.
Joining me on the floor, Potter said, “Who else then?”
“Ravenwood, for starters,” I told him.
“How do you know that?”
“Hunt told me Ravenwood had escaped with half of the DNA code that they had developed,” I answered. I sat and told Potter about everything that I could remember from my time at the facility. I explained to him that most of my memories of what had happened had come to me in nightmares or visions, as I had been constantly drugged. Potter listened with a grim look on his face as I recalled how I’d been treated by Phillips and Sparky at the zoo. He smiled knowingly as I told him how I’d figured out my escape from my cell, but his smile soon faded as I described my last nightmare to him – the one in which the faceless man had said that he had let me escape so that I would bring Ravenwood and the missing part of the code to him.
“What did this man look like?” Potter pushed, his eyes the colour of an overcast sky bloated with snow.
“I’ve told you, I couldn’t see his face,” I said. “It’s always cast in shadow. It’s like he knows that I can see through the dark, so he has this way of blocking me out from seeing him.”
“But why would he do that?” Potter asked thoughtfully, then added, “Unless…”
“I’d already met him before – I would recognise him,” I said. “In my dream he said I’d seen his face because I could see everything.”
“So there was nothing that you recognised about this man?” Potter asked sounding frustrated. “What about his voice? You heard him speak in your dreams, right?”
“Sure,” I said, “but he always kept his voice low and shallow as if to disguise it in some way. But knowing that isn’t good.”
“What do you mean?” Potter asked, taking another cigarette and popping it between his lips.
“Don’t you see?” I said. “Whoever this faceless – invisible man – is, for him to go to such lengths to disguise himself from me means that he isn’t someone that I’ve met just once or twice – he is someone that I know extremely well. So well, that just the briefest glimpse of his face or the tiniest sound of his voice would reveal his identity to me.”
Blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth, Potter turned to face me and looking me straight in the eyes, he said, “Got any ideas?”