Undead Paladin: Prologue

DNA is a powerful thing. It tells
every cell in your body how its suppose to behave. It tells the fat
cells how to store fat and where. It tells the liver cells what is a
toxin and removes it from the bloodstream. It tells the blood cells
to either carry oxygen to the other cells or to fight off entities
that do not belong in the body, depending on the type of blood cell
it was. It tells the brain how to store information and how to
transmit signals to the rest of the body.

DNA is a powerful thing. So is RNA, quicktime scripts that can tell the cells of the body to do many things as well. While DNA remains concrete and unchanging, RNA is less stable, and it is forever combining with itself to form the same instructions that DNA is capable of.

So this is how the problem starts.

You see what commonly uses RNA? Viruses. While in nature a virus can kill or disable a lifeform, in the lab they can be used to mutate lifeforms harmlessly. Want to make someone tougher? Smarter? Faster? Stronger? A geneticist can, with some difficulty, create a harmless virus with the sole purpose of transmitting such information to the various parts of the body. When done right, morals aside, a victim can become a super human.

Course, like anything we do is done
right.

For it wasn't long before this ability was being more than simply weaponized. No, military black ops who wanted to know the bounds and limitations of this method of bettering human life decided to see if they could make vampires as they read it in human lore. One would think that this is a silly escapade, or for the conspiracy nut, a dangerous one that could do damage to the world.

Well, good news conspiracy nuts! They went and did it! They made a virus that can turn an otherwise healthy human being into a blood-crazy monster that would get more
than a horrible sunburn if caught in direct sunlight for merely a short period of time. As predicted, they couldn't contain it either.

What does that leave us? A disease that transmits by biting delivered by people who are merely pale with shoddy circulation at worst out on the streets. Assuming that the victim doesn't die, anyone caught by a vampire becomes one themselves, and the fact that the body now has a sudden high demand for iron vampires find themselves going right to the haemoglobin in human blood. As the virus also affects behaviour, as other infamous viruses have (like rabies), the victims crave blood to the point where they would be more than willing to commit murder (and sometimes on relatives) to get this blood. If they are starved of blood long
enough they will develop severe anaemia, further adding to the desire for blood in the vampires.

Now, this isn't like zombism where you can see a stinky zombie coming along a mile away walking with their bones showing at a slow pace while stupidly moaning. As in the case of the AIDS virus, it is invisible. The infected, while they may be
lusting hard for blood, do have the sense of acting like a normal human, long enough to get what they want. Like a drug addict: many can act straight enough to get their fix, but when shit hits the fan they need their fix ASAP.

Course, on a more interesting note, vampires age much slower than an uninfected human. One of the odd side effects of the virus is the production of Telomerase, a chemical that is known to slow (or stop) the aging process, causing the affected to live longer naturally (naturish).
On top of this, the evil black ops people that created the virus in the first place felt the need to make the body capable of regenerating itself. Not regeneration as in growing back limbs (or changing into an entirely different person in place of actually dying if morally wounded, tee hee I made a funny), however, some wounds on
a vampire do heal faster, such as broken bones. Another sad fact is that vampires don't have to eat as much and don't have to breath as much, and people who have tried to suffocate/strangle them have learned the hard way that they don't exactly stay down for long.

Then the horrid fact that their pain tolerance and threshold for pain aren't the same anymore. You do not want to get into a fight with a vampire: they don't feel the pain as strongly as you would, giving them the illusion of super strength and speed. After all, you can do so much more if your muscles aren't aching as much. Now, to be clear, they still feel pain.

Scared yet? Well, in the fifty years that the outbreak has been globally (remember, its an invisible condition?) it has become an outright war between the
true, uninfected humans, and the vampires, who

1. are still
   technically humans
2. want to live
   like the rest of us
3. want to
   fucking eat the uninfected humans.

At the early stages it was thought that things were being contained, as the black ops thought they killed the test subjects.

Ha ha they were so wrong.

Some of the subjects bit guards at this place, and the guards transmitted the condition to their family, friends, and neighbours. The survivors would continue to bite, kill, and infect others, with protruding fangs that can be totally hidden in your lips, but nevertheless where there, somewhere in the RNA sequence that changed them.

Now, in this time, as the vampire population grew with time and as the body count increased regional governments everywhere implemented many means and measures in an attempt to control the outbreak. I can only be truly sure of what Canada did. What we did when the vampires got big enough in numbers to pose a real danger was impose the War Measures Act - Canadianism for Martial Law – countrywide. The most noteworthy thing done was a strong curfew, where anyone caught outside between dusk and dawn are arrested on the spot. More merciful than what I've heard in other countries where night-walkers^*, infected or not, were killed on the spot. Still a stiff penalty for walking at night, though people have found ways to get past the police – vampire, criminal, and insomniac alike – for they can only be in so many places at once.

War Measures has been in effect for the last ten years. There seems to be no end in sight for vampire at the present time, though the drug companies are working hard to find cures and vaccines, and task forces among special ops, police, and military charged to kill the vampires who are what has been refereed to as “blood ravaged”: the ones whom have let the disease turn them into serial killers. Though the good news is that there are vampires who have figured out that they could get their blood from other sources, like bribing a blood bank or using animal blood, or syphoning blood from volunteers using a tube and a jar.

Now, only naive people don't think there are vampires that use their vampirism as an excuse to kill humans. Some argue whether or not vampirism causes aggressive behaviour. The debate is hot, and this has had some people claim that vampires have killed and infected as many as they have because they don't want to get their blood through the other avenues that don't involve hunting people. Others think that this is merely an inflated stereotype and the panic around the vampire is nothing more than hype being used as an excuse by governments to have absolute power over people.

The drug companies are at war over themselves trying to develop a vaccine to the disease so at least the current vampires couldn't spread the virus to others and thus make more vampires. Its hard to know what shortcuts these companies are taking, I just know that there have been no breakthroughs for the virus has proven to be hearty and finding a vaccine for it is proving to be difficult. Or their being fucking lazy, I don't know anymore.

Of course there are those assholes who are tasked by the RCMP to hunt and control vampires. They use the research of the scientists from both the government and the drug companies on how to deal with the vampires. It isn't so bad in Canada, I mean the mercenary groups in the states seem to be, well, blood-crazy for some vampires. They act like they are monsters from hell whose sole purpose is to inflict terror and pain as opposed to them being humans ravaged by a disease that makes them crave blood more than you or I would crave food.

Well, I think this is all the background you need before I dive into the tale of the Undead Paladin, and the new subset of vampires that can walk through daylight... with a catch.

*Night-walkers referring to people who simply walk around at night, and is not slang for a vampire as is common in continua involving vampires.