The Missing Boy

Chapter 10 - Eyes Shut

"Here, Axel, is where all the magic happens." Elias has stopped referring to Axel as boy and on his 15th birthday thought it was appropriate to reveal to him what laid hidden underneath the mansion that had been his home for the past 2 years.

The elevator ride down was longer than Axel anticipated. He hated being in such a confined space and sighed in relief as the large metal door finally opened. That sigh, however, quickly turned into a gasp as he laid his eyes onto the sight before him.

There was a long white corridor leading out of the elevator and on either side of the corridor were glass windows. Him and Elias walked down the isle and Axel was confused as he looked through the large windows on either side of them. There were rows and rows and rows of what looked like glass coffins side by side. And in the gaps between each coffin, women and men in pristine white lab coats walked, peering into the glass coffins and occasionally making notes on their clip boards.

Elias spoke then. "This, Axel is what immortality looks like." He said it eagerly.

Axel didn't understand what a load of glass had to do with immortality.

"Look here. Look closely."

Axel listened to his older mentor. He focused his attention on the glass coffin Elias was referring to. He looked closely.

There was an old woman inside.

At first Axel thought he was mistaken. He rubbed his eyes, blinked rapidly and then looked again. The once old and frail hand in the glass coffin looked almost revived. It no longer looked like the hand of an 80 year old woman. A couple minutes later, a woman in a white lab coat opened the glass coffin and the woman stepped out. Naked. Axel immediately averted his gaze, shutting his eyes which caused Elias to laugh.

"Axel, you are no longer a boy. You should be able to look at a woman and not get flustered."

Axel opened his eyes and was glad to see that the woman now wore a white robe. She couldn't have been older than twenty.

"She's so young." Axel said breathlessly. Elias chuckled and sighed.

"She is, isn't she. And beautiful. Trust me, she didn't look like that before getting here."

"How is this possible?" Axel asked, perplexed. He looked around at all the other glass coffins and the other hundreds of people he could only presume were in them. "What is this place?"

"This is how we stay alive Axel. We always knew we could live for a long time. But before all this, before our breakthrough, there was a limit. Now there isn't. Vampires, scientists, have found a way to use the venom in our system to manipulate our cells into ageing the way we want them to. Those glass boxes that they're in, they're called incubators. Not for premature babies or chicken eggs, we use them to create the perfect environment for our cells to adapt in the way we want them to. Men used to die at their thousandth year, now we can live to the nth. That's if we allow ourselves to. Or if others do."

Elias spoke so eagerly. He didn't restrain from expressing to Axel how passionate he was about the matter and went on to rant about everything to do with the incubators and "the breakthrough". Axel stopped listening early on and found himself staring at a boy coming out from his own incubator. He must have been the same age as Axel. A man in a lab coat passed the boy a robe and as he put it on, caught sight of Axel staring. He gave him a smile and Axel couldn't help but feel uncomfortable at the fact that the boy in reality was an old man.

Axel will hate the day he steps foots into that coffin.

••••••••••

"Wow." Miles says.

"You've said that a lot today." Axel chuckles.

"It's just- it's so crazy."

"You've said that a lot too."

"So people just show up at the mansion one age and just leave another? I assume they would want to be younger right? I doubt anyone would want to be older."

"There are bases like that in most of the larger vampire sanctuaries. And yeah, most people do go in to look younger. Don't get me wrong, it's a shit-tonne of money. But we've got a shit-tonne of time to pay it back."

"So the rumours are false then? You could survive a stake to the heart?"

"Could you?" Axel asks.

"Obviously not, I'm human."

"No one would survive a fucking stake to the heart, Miles. We can still die. There are ways of dying. Elias, he taught me some ways." Axel doesn't elaborate.

•••••••••••

"Look at the fucking TV screen Axel! Look at it!"

Axel kept his eyes shut.

He was tempted to put his fingers in his ears to block out the sound too, but Elias was already angry at him for not looking.

A particularly gruesome sound came. Axel was becoming used to the painful screeches that came out of the speakers but wasn't prepared to hear the snapping of bone. When he did finally open his eyes the tiniest bit, he saw the rogue vampire laying motionless on the ground, his head lolled to the side, his neck broken.

"You have to look at the screen if you want to know how to kill a vampire Axel. There are rogues out there, uncivilised vampires and you need to know how to defend yourself when one attacks. And they will attack. They're feral. They're dangerous. They're a disease. You have to kill it before it spreads."