The choppers disappeared from sight, but the noise of their engines remained ear-splittingly loud. They were circling nearby, Frank realised, searching for a place to land.
A voice on a loudspeaker boomed through the trees, shattering the tension and making Frank flinch.
“This is a restricted area. Remain where you are.”
He glanced at the rest of the team. Nicole, Dirk and Bella were all looking at him with wide eyes, their expressions almost comically baffled. Nicole arched a quizzical eyebrow.
Frank held his hands up.
“I’ve got no more clue about this than you do.”
“Princeton?” Nicole looked like she knew the answer even as she asked the question.
He shook his head, his expression dubious.
“They’re the only ones I called. But this? This isn’t Princeton. This is something else.”
“Police, then?”
“Must be.”
Nicole opened her mouth to reply.
Snapped it shut again, and turned to face the murky forest.
In the distance, Frank heard raised voices and heavy footsteps trampling toward them through the trees. Beyond that, the roaring of the engines was slowly fading. He felt a surge of anxiety, and told himself to stay calm. They had done nothing wrong. If the police were looking for somebody, it clearly wasn’t them, and they were digging with a permit. It had to be a mistake.
Still, some part of him wanted to turn and flee into the woods.
“Frank?”
Dirk’s voice. He sounded as nervous as Frank felt.
“It’s okay, Dirk. Let me deal with this. It has to be some misunderstan—”
The words died in Frank’s throat as he saw the first of them charging through the trees, and knew that the picture was wrong immediately.
Not police.
More than a dozen heavily armed men burst into the clearing, none wearing anything which identified them as law enforcement. They were all dressed in plain black paramilitary uniforms; all wore balaclavas; all had the same unsettlingly cold edge to their gaze.
More questions erupted in Frank’s mind, these ones even more troubling: the government? Men in black? Is Nicole right?
Aliens?
The notion was surely ridiculous.
Frank began to lift his hands in surrender as the men surrounded the dig team and hefted assault rifles, aiming them directly at him.
“Th-there must be a mistake,” he stammered, flushing, before adding a feeble “we have a permit.”
“Not for this, Professor Mather.” A woman’s voice. “Step aside, please.”
The woman, who spoke in a smooth southern drawl, wasn’t dressed like the others. She emerged from the trees behind the armed men, wearing a plain suit and a gun holster that immediately made Frank think CIA. When he moved aside, the woman walked past him and made straight for the dig site. She was young, he realised; mid-twenties at most. Surely too young to be a government agent.
For several seconds, she stood at the edge of the dig, looking down silently.
Frank divided his time between staring at the back of the woman’s head and glancing fearfully at the barrel of the nearest rifle. The tension in the air was intolerable; the air of menace the woman and her people carried like a naked blade. He had to speak.
Had to say something.
“Uh…are you with the government? Because—”
She laughed.
“My name is Jennifer Craven.” She turned to face Frank with genuine mirth in her eyes. “Don’t worry; you haven’t heard of me. I hadn’t heard of you, either; not until a couple of hours ago. Maybe it’s fate that we meet. You believe in fate, Professor?”
Frank searched for words.
Found none.
“You’ve discovered something which my family has been searching for for a very long time, Professor. So long, in fact, that we didn’t really believe it could even exist. When you’re dealing with myths, after all, it’s hard to know which ones to believe.”
Frank’s brow creased.
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course not. That one, that one and…that one.” Jennifer Craven pointed at Dirk, Bella and Nicole, and before Frank could process what was happening, the air in the clearing erupted with rifle fire. He watched in horror as his young team dropped in a storm of blood. They were all dead before they hit the ground. Before the cry of shock could even gather in Frank’s throat.
He stared fearfully at Craven, and at the ruined bodies on the dry soil, and tears stung his eyes. He shook his head and let out a low moan.
Craven motioned at her men to lower their weapons.
“Now, Professor, you have a choice. You can die right now…”
She pointed at the bodies leaking on the floor and nodded encouragingly at Frank.
“O-Or?” Frank breathed, staring with terrible fascination at the ragged holes in Nicole’s long, graceful neck.
So much blood.
“Or: you can give me the honest truth about that hole you’ve been digging over there. And maybe, just maybe…you won’t have to die at all.”
Frank shook his head.
“I don’t under—”
He bit down on the word as Craven took her pistol from its holster and stared at him evenly. She gripped the gun casually, not aiming it at him. There was no need. Frank couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“We got here this morning,” he said, the words tumbling from his mouth chaotically. “We’ve been digging, and—”
He snapped his mouth shut abruptly, aware that he was babbling and it was likely to get him killed.
Taking a deep breath, he started over.
“What do you want to know?”
Craven’s eyes narrowed.
“Who have you told about your work here?”
Frank swallowed painfully, and thought about lying.
“Princeton,” he said weakly. “I called a colleague at Princeton.”
She’ll kill me now.
Craven nodded curtly, almost as though somehow she had expected to hear that.
“Who else?”
Frank’s eyes widened.
“Nobody, I swear to you. Nobody at all. I don’t even know what I’d say. We don’t even know what it is—”
“It’s a vampire, Professor Mather. More pertinently, it’s a dead vampire, and that makes it very interesting indeed. Tell me, Professor,” Craven said, grabbing Frank’s elbow in surprisingly strong fingers and guiding him to the edge of the hole, “the way these skeletons are positioned…do you think it was deliberate?”
Frank stared down at the bones.
“Yes,” he said nervously. “That was our assumption.”
“And would you say that the position of the bodies indicates that the human killed the vampire?”
Frank’s brow furrowed.
Vampires? Is she actually serious?
The woman was clearly a lunatic, but Frank thought better of telling her as much.
“Bella thinks…” He felt a lump forming in his throat, and coughed. “Bella thought so. She was working on the human remains. She thought the human was buried holding some sort of hatchet.”
He pointed at the sharp stone near the bones.
“Thank you, Professor. Very helpful.”
She raised the pistol, aiming it at him, and Frank stared down the barrel of the weapon in horror.
“B-but…you said if I helped you, I wouldn’t have to die!”
Jennifer Craven grinned, and he saw the detached cruelty in her eyes clearly then, and knew exactly what it meant for him.
“Everything dies, Professor Mather.”
1
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Dan Bellamy shut his eyes, searching for some sort of calm, but memories lurked in the darkness, waiting for him like a starving predator.
Stalking him like wounded prey.
*
“Are you sure that you want to g
o through with this? You don’t have to, you know; not for me. I’d be happy to spend our honeymoon right here, as long as we’re together.”
Elaine smiled, and he was struck by her beauty for the thousandth time; the way her eyes lit up when she looked at him. She was telling the truth, he knew. She would be happy with that, and she wouldn’t resent him for letting his illness taint what was supposed to be the best vacation of their lives.
“I’m sure. You deserve it, and I need to give it to you. A proper honeymoon, I mean.” He rolled his eyes and chuckled when Elaine arched a salacious eyebrow. “Defuse those eyebrows immediately,” he said in a mock-stern tone, and they both laughed.
“I’m serious,” he said earnestly, leaning forward and taking his fiancé’s hand. “I know it’s scary, and I know it’s a big step—”
“A ‘big step’ for an agoraphobic is picking up milk from the nearest store,” Elaine said, and the smile faded from her lips, just a little. “You’re talking about taking a cruise! Three weeks trapped in a giant floating box with thousands of other people, and no way for you to escape from it; no way to get home. That’s far more of a giant leap than a big step, and you know it.”
He nodded.
“You’re right. But I have to do this, El. Not just for you; for me, too. I have to beat this. Normal people go on honeymoons; they take cruises without a second thought. All I want is to be normal again.”
“We’ve talked about the N word,” Elaine said sternly, and gave him a playful punch on the shoulder.
“Okay, okay,” he said, mock-flinching away from her. “Not normal, then. Healthy. Better?”
Elaine surprised him by darting forward again, this time planting a kiss on his lips.
“Much better,” she said. “I have my doubts about you doing this, but—”
“So does my therapist,” he interrupted with a grin.
Elaine ignored him.
“—but, if you’re determined, then I believe you can get through it. You know I do.”
She left a little extra emphasis on those last two words, her eyes sparkling with excitement, and he felt his heart swell with happiness.
Elaine had protested when he first raised the idea, reeling off all of the perfectly rational reasons why a man with his condition absolutely should not book a cruise, but he knew as he looked into her eyes that, deep down, she wanted to say ‘yes,’ and that she was just being cautious; protecting him. That was the way it had been, ever since the attack: every decision, no matter how small, had to take how Dan might react under consideration. His illness had done that to her—to them both—but he could see the excitement in her eyes now; the flicker of hope. Of course she wanted to take a cruise.
And, as much as the prospect of actually going through with it unnerved him, he found to his surprise that on some level, he wanted to as well. The more he thought about it, the more right it felt. Scary, sure, but in a good way. Different to the terror that had crushed him for too long; this was a fear that felt healthy and positive and, yes, even conquerable.
He’d endured over a year of therapy, and had sampled more medications than he could count. Klonopin and Zopiclone and Mirtazapine and Fluoxetine and others whose names he couldn’t even recall. One by one, the doctors took him through the drugs, searching for the elusive combination that would quiet the shrieking in his mind. The process of trial and error, they informed him, was regrettable but necessary. It was, after all, impossible to predict how any one individual brain might react to treatment.
As a result of the search, his mood had oscillated wildly between despairing numbness and a hyper-alert state of anxiety. The only constant amid the chemical chaos had been the fear; insidious and resilient, the cockroach of the emotions. For two years, it was as though his fight or flight response had been permanently engaged, constantly yelling at him to pay attention to the fact that he was unsafe. Eventually, submerged by a tsunami of modern and alternative medicine, even the iron grip of that clammy dread had started to weaken.
Progress. Real and tangible.
It had been more than six months since his last seizure, and on more than one occasion in recent weeks he had left the house all by himself, venturing out into the world for a few giddy moments.
Above all he was feeling a little better. Maybe enough that he was ready to take that giant leap forward. Ready to finally overcome the crippling condition that had shaped his life ever since a street thug buried a knife into his skull. All that was left was for him to actually do it. Take action; get back out into the world and live again.
“Earth to Dan. Come in, Dan. Over.”
Elaine waved at him and grinned. He had been lost in his thoughts for several seconds. He blinked, and returned her smile.
“I am determined,” he said. “This won’t set me back, I promise you. This will help fix me. Besides, have you seen the brochure? The ship is massive. I’m sure that if I get too freaked out, there will be plenty of places for me to hide away from the normal folks.”
He smiled as Elaine pursed her lips. The N word again.
“I’ll be like the hunchback of the Oceanus,” he said with a laugh. “Lurking in the shadows, scaring the normal passengers.”
He pulled a face, and Elaine giggled despite herself. She always admonished him for making jokes at his own expense, but in the end, she always giggled.
“Come on, El,” he said brightly. “Let’s book the tickets. It’s just a cruise, right? I mean, how scary could it possibly be?”
She threw her arms around him and hugged so fiercely that he feared for his ribs, and he knew then that the debate was over. Cost be damned, fear be damned. It would be the honeymoon of a lifetime. The one this wonderful woman deserved.
And it would fix him.
He hugged her tightly, burying his face in her hair and breathing in her scent.
No.
Not her scent.
Blood.
He pulled away from her, and saw Elaine’s once-beautiful, sparkling eyes fixed and glassy. Her mouth hanging open in a silent, terrified scream.
And the creature hulking behind her, its hideous talons hooked underneath her jawbone, beginning to pull, and—
*
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
His eyes flared open, his mind retreating from the once-joyous memory as it became toxic.
Back to the nightmare of reality.
Somewhere, the shipping container had sprung a leak. Just a little one, by the sound of it, but it would be enough. The air in the dark space was finite, and each drop of water that forced its way through the battered steel walls merely accelerated the end.
For Dan, it couldn’t come soon enough.
He wished over and over that he had died on the ship; that he had been torn apart in a single, merciful instant when the Oceanus finally exploded. Because when it came down to it, a choice between a moment of pain and a lifetime of it wasn’t much of a choice at all.
And pain was all that Dan had left.
His body was wracked by it: in addition to the bright chasms of fire that a taloned hand had ripped across his chest, his body felt like it was covered in bruises. When the container had been thrown clear of the blast, Dan had tumbled around inside like a ragdoll, crashing into the metal walls and colliding solidly with the man who shared the dark, sinking prison with him.
Herbert Rennick.
Herb was a talker, and apparently hadn’t considered the fact that every word he uttered used up more of the container’s dwindling oxygen. Or maybe he didn’t care either. He sounded young—certainly younger than Dan’s twenty-nine—and terribly afraid. Maybe that was why he kept talking. Maybe to Herb, the silence was the scariest thing of all.
Dan didn’t want to talk.
Didn’t want to listen.
The darkness in the container was absolute, like being buried alive, and when he tried to tune out Herb’s incessant chatter, he found that the only thing his eyes had to look at w
as the past. Yet, no matter which happy memory he tried to conjure up for his mind to retreat to for these final minutes of his life, what he saw was Elaine’s face as it had been in her own final moments; her absolute terror when she realised that she was about to die, alone, at the hands of a creature whose very existence was an impossibility.
I could have saved her.
You were busy crying and falling apart; busy being Pathetic Dan. You should have saved her.
He grimaced.
Didn’t want to think, either.
All he wanted was to wait for the end in peace.
He tried to clear his head. According to his therapist, it was possible for a person to remove themselves from their thoughts and feelings, to become no more than an impartial observer in their own mind, and, through that detachment, to find some respite from emotions that might otherwise overwhelm or paralyse. The trick was simply to focus only on the physical world, on physical sensation: the texture of a coin in your hand, perhaps, or the taste of a breath mint. To concentrate on anything that wasn’t torturous introspection.
In a therapeutic setting, the technique—mindfulness—had yielded some modest rewards for Dan. In the container, things worked out differently.
That was, perhaps, due to the smell. It was difficult to focus on clearing his mind when every breath he took delivered the sickly-sweet odour of charred meat.
Herb’s arm.
Shortly after Herb had first started to talk, he had explained to Dan that his arm had caught fire back on the Oceanus, and that he couldn’t even feel it.
“No pain. I think that means the nerves are all burned away, right? Second- or third-degree burns, must be,” Herb had proclaimed. He had almost sounded proud of it. “Guess I’ll need a skin graft. Do me a favour and call me an ambulance, mate?”
Herb had laughed at that, before descending into a violent coughing fit. The fire—and the smoke—had apparently damaged more than just Herb’s skin.
Dan didn’t respond.
The minutes wore on.
He remained impassive as Herb ranted about his father and about what he called The Great Lie. How his dear old Dad was responsible for the deaths of thousands. Charles Rennick, Herb said, was a servant of darkness.
The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy) Page 28