The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  He stared at the tiny flame, transfixed, as it moved closer. His eyes struggled to adjust.

  And then he heard the sounds. A strange scraping. A grunting.

  He began to ease the pistol from its holster, though to fire it at what, he had no idea.

  And then when the dancing light moved close enough for Vega to see what it was, his mouth dropped open in astonishment.

  "Hey, Steve-O. Little help?"

  Ledger.

  16

  "We have to get to the bridge," Katie said.

  "What about the rest of the security?"

  "The rest of the security is either out patrolling the ship, or they just took all the guns and fucked off. Right now, I'm the security. And in case you hadn't noticed, my job is to sit and watch monitors to ensure nobody gets so drunk they fall overboard. Frankly, dealing with this shit is a little out of my comfort zone."

  Dan frowned into the darkness.

  "Okay," he said finally. "You go to the bridge. I have to get back to my wife. She's—"

  "In your cabin, I know," Katie snapped. "You did mention it. But I'm telling you we're going to the bridge, and we're going to tell the captain what you just said. Then I'll take you back to your cabin myself. If it’s safe to do so."

  Dan squeezed his eyes shut in exasperation.

  "Unless you think you can find your way back in the dark by yourself?"

  Dan's shoulders dropped.

  "Fine," he said miserably.

  "Sorry," Katie said softly. "This is just...getting to me, that's all. Listen, we'll be okay, just stay where you are for a minute."

  Dan couldn't be sure, but it sounded like Katie was trying to convince herself rather than him. He flinched in surprise when he felt her fingers brush against his arm.

  "Give me your hand," Katie said. She grasped his fingers in a surprisingly firm grip. "Follow me."

  Katie led him forward at a slow, steady pace, until Dan heard her opening a door, and felt cool air wash across him.

  "There are stairs here somewhere," Katie said in an exasperated tone. "We go up four flights. I think. Maybe five. That will take us to the bridge. The captain will know what to do."

  Dan grunted acknowledgment, and hoped she was right. He had felt like things were spiralling out of his control from the moment he stepped into the security suite, and the sudden loss of power lent an edge of genuine fear to the familiar anxiety.

  What was meant to be a wonderful honeymoon and a huge, positive step on his road to recovery was starting to feel like something dangerous and unstable. Something that was full of the dark potential to drag him backwards.

  At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to hand the situation over to someone in authority, and to cower in his cabin with Elaine until whatever the hell was happening on the ship was finished, and someone informed them that it was safe to come out.

  Safe?

  The notion struck him as crazy. Barely an hour earlier Dan had been napping blissfully and now, here he was, questioning whether or not his life might be in actual danger.

  What the hell could be happening to the ship?

  As Katie tried to locate the stairs, Dan let himself be tugged along while he searched his mind for answers. The best he could come up with was pirates: the TV news had mentioned several times in recent years that pirates routinely attacked vessels in the seas around Africa, but he had never heard of it happening in the Atlantic. Still, he supposed, the Oceanus—with all the blazing publicity around its launch—could well have attracted the attention of criminals. The boat itself was worth a fortune, and then there were the passengers. Most—virtually all—were people of significant wealth. They had to be just to afford the tickets.

  Sickly thoughts about hijackers and ransom demands popped into his head. The people, like himself, who had mortgaged their lives to the hilt to take the trip would be caught in the crossfire.

  His nerves rattled painfully.

  "Here," Katie hissed triumphantly, and tugged on Dan's limp hand. He allowed himself to be led a few steps forward, and followed Katie up the stairs in the darkness, moving carefully and testing out each step before he took it.

  The bridge was four flights up after all, and when Katie pushed open the door, Dan heard the bustling chaos inside the wide, flat room immediately. A lot of raised voices talking over each other. A lot of people panicking as the instruments they relied on completely failed them.

  We're drifting, Dan thought, and a new and unsettling possibility entered his head. What if the power never came back? The Oceanus would be at the mercy of the sea, dragged toward who knew where. What if the ship was dashed against rocks? Would the vast hull survive such a collision?

  What if the ship—dark and surely all-but invisible on the sea—smashed into another vessel?

  Did anyone on the Oceanus even have the means to call for help?

  He forced himself to stop thinking about it, and concentrated on following Katie, who pushed her way into the bridge through the milling bodies.

  There was light enough to see in the bridge—barely—with the floor-to-ceiling wraparound windows admitting the barest illumination from outside, but still Dan could only make out dark shapes. Lots of people, all moving around, bumping into each other and muttering muffled curses.

  "Captain?" Katie yelled suddenly, making him jump.

  There was no response other than the chaotic mess of indistinct voices.

  Dan felt Katie's grip on his fingers relax, and then disappear entirely, leaving him alone in the dark and the confusion. He was reminded of standing among the crowds back at the terminus. There, the anxiety he felt had been familiar and expected, almost comforting in a strange way. He found himself wishing he could feel that fear once more. The current, heightened version was far worse.

  Moments later, he heard Katie's voice again, and guessed that she had grabbed someone else.

  "Where is the captain?" he heard her say.

  "Went to the engine room," a voice responded grimly. "For all the good it will do."

  "Does he know what's happening?"

  Katie's voice again. Somehow, the irritation in her voice, which had already been clipped and abrupt, seemed to have increased exponentially.

  "What do you think?" the voice responded. "Nobody knows what's fucking happening. Lost all power, but that's about all we know. The captain seems to think it's the electrics. There's an electrical storm building outside, maybe something to do with that, I don't know. I guess he thinks they can get the engine restarted manually, but if you ask me, the ship's fucked. We can't even call for help."

  "Has anyone sent up flares?" Katie asked.

  "Not yet," the voice responded. "Captain didn't want to, not until he had some idea about what's happened. Said it would be a PR catastrophe if we have to get rescued by some trawler on our maiden voyage."

  "PR? Great," Katie said bitterly. "Sounds like the captain's got his fucking priorities straight."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The ship's under attack," Katie replied. "EMP strike, and most likely it was detonated on board. We’ve already had one murder, and Steven Vega has taken all the guns and disappeared. PR be damned: the time to call for help is right now, and if what turns up is a trawler or a fucking pedal boat we should be grateful."

  Dan felt his skin prickle. He'd only really been thinking aloud about the possibilities, but hearing Katie repeat his own words made them sound somehow far more real, and far more disturbing. He had hoped that going to the bridge would give him a sense that the situation was in hand, but it turned out that the people up there hadn't even joined the dots that he and Katie had. At least, not yet.

  The man responded with a vague groan, and for a moment Dan thought Katie had given up talking to him in frustration, but after a few seconds, he heard her voice snapping once more.

  "What is it?" she said.

  The man coughed.

  "I was monitoring the radar just before it went down," the man replied. "
I thought the readings were screwy..."

  "Screwy how?"

  "Uh...I was getting a reading, right at the edge of radar range. It was coming and going, and I thought it was a malfunction. I was going to tell the captain as soon as I got the ch—"

  "A reading," Katie interrupted flatly. "Just outside of radar range."

  "Yeah."

  "For how long?"

  "I picked it up for...maybe an hour or so. Off and on."

  The man sounded apologetic.

  Dan yelped in fright as he felt Katie's fingers clutching at his t-shirt, and she began to pull him back toward the stairs.

  "What is it?" Dan said, as she burst through the doors, leaving the chaos in the bridge behind.

  "We've got flare guns in security," Katie replied. "I don't think they have any electronic components. They should work."

  Dan felt himself getting irritated, and pulled his arm out of Katie's grip.

  "Just…wait," he snapped.

  Is that my voice?

  Dan couldn't remember when he had last spoken with such authority.

  "Flare guns for what? What's going on?"

  "He had a reading," Katie said quietly. "Something that sounds like it was right at the edge of radar range."

  "Yeah, I heard. So?"

  "So that sounds to me like we're not alone out here, Mr Bellamy. It sounds like there's another ship out there."

  Dan swallowed painfully.

  "Isn't that a good thing?"

  "Not if they've been following us for an hour. Not if it wasn't just radar range they were trying to stay out of."

  "EMP range," Dan said weakly.

  "Exactly."

  Dan felt Katie's fingers grab his arm once more, and he let himself be led down the stairs, moving a little quicker than seemed safe. With his free hand, he clutched at the banister to maintain his balance.

  It didn't stop him from feeling like he was falling.

  *

  Elaine walked straight into a wall and cursed.

  As she had moved into the ship, away from the cabins that lined the exterior of the hull, she entered a network of corridors that contained no light whatsoever; cabins without windows. They represented the very cheapest accommodation the Oceanus had to offer, and Elaine had argued long and hard that they should take one, but Dan had insisted their honeymoon would not be a matter of choosing all the cheapest possible options.

  She deserved better, he said.

  The memory of it made her smile, but she brushed it away.

  Of far more importance right now was the absolute lack of light, which made her progress difficult, bordering-on-impossible. Having already turned several corners, she had no idea how to even navigate a course back to her own cabin.

  Why the hell wasn't the power coming back on?

  The surprised screaming she'd heard had been followed immediately by another noise: footsteps receding. Elaine figured at least one other person was stumbling around the corridors in the darkness, trying to find their way out to the park, where the other passengers would surely gather in the event of a power cut.

  She stopped for a moment and took stock, trying to recall the warren of corridors she and Dan had walked through earlier. It was hopeless. In their excitement, they had rushed to find the cabin, and had even joked about leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way back to the central part of the ship. Without light, she was running blind, and she had to concede that there was a good chance she was walking in circles.

  Furious at herself for leaving the cabin, and trying to suppress her irritation that of all the times her husband could have chosen to decide he felt like going for a walk, he'd picked this one, Elaine turned on the spot and tried to retrace her steps.

  She had definitely taken a left turn a few moments earlier, hadn't she?

  She stepped forward cautiously, and found the corner she expected.

  Maybe this would work after all. All she had to do was take it slow, and search for the lights of the cabins that had sea-facing windows. All the doors were open, so if there was a break in the clouds, a little light should flood the corridor.

  She just had to make sure she was in the right place to see it.

  She frowned as she tried to remember the route she'd taken before that left turn.

  A right turn?

  That seemed correct.

  Elaine felt her way forward, and found another corner, right where it should be.

  She breathed a sigh of relief, and stepped forward confidently.

  And then she was tumbling down a set of stairs, smashing into them painfully, and when she reached the bottom, her head crashed into the floor and a different sort of darkness claimed her.

  17

  "Oh, shit. I see Phil."

  "Where?" Edgar snapped. By his estimation, he and Seb had already been searching through the area surrounding the Climate Control Centre for more than four minutes. It had felt like four lifetimes, and it was definitely taking too long.

  On several occasions, they had been forced to pause when they heard mumbling or footsteps nearby. Voices in the dark. Maintenance staff who were stumbling around, oblivious to the two men with nightvision goggles, but each time Edgar and Seb were forced to wait for them to move on, vital seconds ticked away.

  There was no sign of Herb or Phil, and Edgar had been almost ready to give up the search for his brothers when Seb spoke.

  "Ahead and left, between those pipes," Seb said. He pointed, and Edgar followed the direction indicated by Seb's ghostly green arm.

  It was Phil all right, and as Edgar approached, he saw instantly that his brother had taken a beating. Even with the blurred view offered up by the goggles, he could see the split lip, and the dark stain of blood that bloomed beneath Phil's nose. One of Phil's eyes was swollen almost completely shut.

  He wasn't moving.

  Edgar dropped into a low crouch next to Phil's prone body, and put an ear to his brother's face. He heard breathing; a wet rattling that told him that Phil's mouth was full of blood, or maybe his nose was broken.

  He shook Phil gently, and was just wondering if he had it in him to slap his comatose brother when Phil's good eye blinked open and he flinched.

  It took Edgar a moment to understand that Phil couldn't see him.

  "It's Ed," he said softly. "And Seb. Can you move?"

  "You did it. You fucking set it off." Phil tried to spit the words out venomously, but they dissolved into a low moan. He coughed and spat out a mouthful of blood onto the floor next to him, and Edgar thought he heard a couple of teeth rattling out with it.

  "I told you to come back in five minutes," Edgar said stiffly. "You didn't."

  "I was trying to get our brother, you fucking prick."

  Edgar flinched in surprise. Phil didn't talk much; never had. He couldn't remember when he had last heard Phil raise his voice in anger; maybe never.

  Edgar felt his blood temperature rising, but he forced himself to let it go. Losing his temper with Herb had led to serious problems, and there just wasn't time to go through it with Phil.

  "And where is he? What the hell happened, Phil?"

  Phil shook his head miserably.

  "There was a guy," he said. "Dressed in a security uniform. He had Herb down on the floor when I found him. I was dealing with the situation. Right up until the fucking lights went out."

  "And what happened then?" Edgar asked.

  "Take a look at my face, bro. That's what happened then. Herb's on the floor somewhere behind me. Propped up against one of the pipes."

  Edgar waved at Seb to go and check the direction Phil pointed out, and he pulled out a pair of goggles, placing them into Phil's hand.

  "They work," Edgar said. "Can you move?"

  Phil grunted and held out a hand. Edgar grabbed it and pulled him to his feet. Phil stood for a moment, wobbling a little, and then slipped on the goggles, wincing at the pain as the plastic hit the bridge of his nose.

  "I can walk," he said. "My p
ride took the biggest beating. Little guy, but he sure could throw a punch."

  "Good," Edgar said. "The package is being delivered right now. We have to get to the top deck in fifteen minutes, at most."

  "Great," Phil said miserably. "Remind me never to take a cruise with you again, Ed."

  Ed chuckled grimly, and turned to face Seb.

  "Got a problem," Seb said.

  Edgar grimaced.

  "Herb's not there," he said. It wasn't a question. Of course Herb wasn't there.

  "You got it," Seb replied. "I guess this security guy took him."

  A swollen silence fell over the three brothers. Edgar knew what they were all thinking; and knew that he would be the only one to say it. He had to play the bad guy, same as always.

  "Then we leave him," Edgar said, biting back on the tremble he heard in his own voice. His little brother, little pain-in-the-arse Herb.

  He would never see him again.

  "Ed, we can't—"

  "We will," Edgar snapped, "because we have to. I told Herb to stick with me. I told him I'd get us out. He fucking blew it. He could be anywhere on this ship by now. There's no chance of us finding him, and our ride is leaving in fifteen minutes. You both know what happens if we miss our window."

  Edgar let the words settle for a moment, giving his brothers ample time to picture the result of them not getting to the extraction point in time. He played the images in his own mind, letting his imagination run all the way back to the room behind the black door in Brighton, and he shuddered involuntarily.

  "Shit," Phil spat bitterly. "So much for us getting out of this clean."

  Edgar barked a harsh laugh.

  "Is that what you guys were hoping for? No wonder you've all been so damn jumpy. You came into this with unrealistic expectations. Getting out at all is a victory. Getting out clean was never an option."

  The words echoed in the darkness for a brief moment, until Edgar turned for the exit, and the stairs beyond.

  They had to travel up over a dozen decks. Most of it could be navigated via a single winding stairway, but when they reached deck twelve, they would have to move out among the passengers until they found another staircase that could take them up to the top of the ship. They would be like ghosts in the darkness, flitting between the frightened people unseen.