She had heard the knock on the door, as she studied in bed, her books piled high on the locker to her side: and instinctively said,
“Come in.”
It was all the invitation he’d needed.
She’d pulled the duvet up to her chin as he entered, eyes widening at his approach.
Then he sat on the edge of the bed – and, she shook as he did so.
“I mean you know harm,” he told her.
“Then why are you here?” the curvaceous redhead asked, still in fear.
“To touch, caress…” he began, “to know a human, as I have.”
“A human? You said ‘human?’”
Jacob Royal ran a hand down her right cheek.
“Yes,” he replied, with memories of his making, two hundred years earlier.
“Human.” Royal grinned mirthlessly: aware how dramatic his words would seem to the young woman.
He had entered the college dorm with the intention of seeking food.
But, something had felt different this night.
And, as Jacob Royal had walked the shadow clad corridors, as memories of his own time at the same school flowed through his own mind: 0f a time before his death – at this very same school, when he had been a military cadet.
And then he had met Angelina, one night on a street near the theatre.
She had smiled at him, flashing eyes of the most vivid green.
And, he’d returned the smile; which had led her to beckoning him.
He had followed her, into an alleyway; and the depths of the night, expectantly.
‘Human,’ he mused, smiling.
Jacob Royal remembered being human.
The smile broadened and the redhead gasped at the sight of his pronounced canine teeth: his fangs.
“You’re.. a.. a.. ” She stammered.
Stroking her cheek again, very aware of the lifeblood flowing through her, Jacob answered slowly, “I know what I am.”
He did.
His first kill had been so many years ago. Yet, that memory was as yesterday.
Jacob recalled how she had drawn the girl from her parents, with just her will alone.
And, his maker had drawn open a vein in her arm, then encouraged him to taste.
It hadn’t been hard to teach him the rest, after he’d realized his true nature: and within an instant he’d straddled the girls body, his mouth pressed to her neck.
He had torn at her flesh and drunk deeply of her.
“Do not drink past that final heartbeat,” she had told him: and later he’d heard stories of those who had done so – and died again.
He had drank ..and nearly forgotten her teaching, until she’d pulled him from his food, dark red arterial blood spraying from the girls neck.
He’d been thrown against a wall; and his Angelina had stood over him, screaming:
“Remember my teachings, or die.. You hear me?”
And, he’d nodded his acquiescence.
So it was, he’d learnt to ensnare his prey, with deed; and words – when he was hungry; needing to feed.
Jacob Royal looked deep into the redhead’s eyes: gazing deep.
He smiled – he wanted so-much.
And, she lowered the duvet a little, to fully display her neck to him, shivering a little with anticipation.
“Yes,” he murmured, “I want to feel human again, but I cannot. So, instead, I will feed.
*
The late 1940’s had seen the birth of the prototype super soldier, whose heightened senses produced abilities previously not seen in a mortal man.
Then, in the dark days before the new dawn of man, there was a period in his history when the two superpowers of that time warred covertly, for many years.
Yet, there were many experiments, to destroy or rent asunder the opposition.
There were results: some were aberrations of nature, true abominations of all that was human; whilst others were an extension, or refinement of Homo sapiens.
Papers of the time called these enhanced beings Homo superior; and for decades, the public had known these individuals as super heroes.
Yet, there had been a long forgotten antecedent to the days of the hero.
There had been a project that had been long forgotten.
Whilst announcing the demise of the project with the end of the cold war, certain parties were still altering D.N.A. and they did this though without the knowledge of the participants involved.
One of the experiments would have ramifications decades later, which bore fruit seven decades later.
*
In a small room, a the end of a corridor, within a labyrinthine basement, two men sat in a room strewn with notebook, many labelled, ‘TOP SECRET.’
The room was dark: and they sat over a light: an open folder before them.
“I tell you, if it’s true, this’ll blow the lid off all of ‘em,” John Desaurius said with certainty.
But, in the shadows behind him, the archivist was not aware of the changes in his colleague, as a strange metamorphosis began: and his face melted, to reveal a blank beneath. There were eyes and a mouth. But, that was it.
“Oh, it is true..” the blank intoned, “there are many like us now.”
And as hands closed tightly around Desaurius’ neck, he continued to talk, “And John, I am sorry it had to be me.. I.. liked you.”
And, amidst the darkness his screams should have meant something: if there had been anyone to hear them. No one would know of the sleepers, destined to live their lives in ignorance of they’d been programmed to be. There would be no knowledge of their bloodlines either; as the last evidence of their inheritance, a manila envelope, burned in an old olive green metal waste bin..
*
Jake stalked quiet empty streets, in the early hours of the morning, with no awareness of his surroundings.
He was tall for fifteen in bare feet: he was barefoot and sleepwalking.
He had found himself drawn to a small side street at the side of the Town Hall and the Moldovan Embassy, a legacy of a time that helped form who he was.
And now he stood outside the Embassy, closed long ago, staring at a brass plaque to the right of the front door, with its peeling paintwork.
Jake Meadows stared with blank eyes toward this emblem of the enemy and slowly he raised his hands, so that his fingertips pointed directly toward the door.
Small vessels appeared to break within his eyes, so that they rapidly suffused with crimson.
His gaze focussed solely on the door; as a low vibration began to fill the air; and his hands began to glow.
Abruptly the darkness of the night was torn apart by twin focussed beams of white, directed toward the door from his hands.
He had no knowledge of the streams of energy streaming from his fingertips, pouring from the core of his life’s energies, toward the door, weakening him; until the they ceased and he collapsed to the floor, drained.
And, the door blackened, then burnt, fast.
He was found hours later, curled into a foetal ball, by a passing policeman, who called in his find, puzzled by the incinerated wood, that showed no sign of an accelerant.
The sleepers children had heard a call programmed into their genetic code ~ and, one by one they would awake, their reason for existence, the eradication of an enemy that had long before made peace.
Jake Meadows had been the first; and all over the globe there were others, still to waken, with a mission to destroy the enemies of their creators..
*
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