The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  Maybe that counted as two firsts. Even three.

  Either way, his therapist had been dead wrong.

  He stepped out onto the deck, blinking at the grey sunlight filtering through the clouds, and did his best to remain invisible. It didn’t work; he felt the eyes of every man on the boat boring into him. The crew—most of whom looked bizarrely young; some even younger than Herb himself—regarded him with open hostility and more than a little fear.

  Herb led him past the battered container to the helicopter which took up the remainder of the foredeck. He waved half-hearted introductory gestures at the crew as he passed by them, reeling off names, but Dan didn’t try to commit them to memory. There was a Jay, a Stephen, a Christian, a Lawrence, but he couldn’t have put a face to any of those names if asked. He didn’t want to.

  “And that’s Jeremy,” Herb said finally, pointing at a man standing at the bow, who was by a distance the oldest person on the trawler. Jeremy didn’t speak or acknowledge Herb’s gesture. He stared at Dan across the deck, studying him as a surgeon might study a patient’s wounds, as though trying somehow to solve him.

  Dan stared back for a moment, but it was he who blinked first. Jeremy looked twice his age, but he was large and appeared physically fit, with stern eyes under a heavy brow. Staring down a man like that…well, it just wasn’t in his repertoire.

  He turned away, taking a deep breath, and gazed out across the ocean. For a moment, watching the hypnotic rolling grey waves of the Atlantic, he almost became convinced that he was hallucinating, and he rubbed at the wounds on his chest, trying to wake himself up; suddenly certain that he was actually lying in a hospital bed back in London, and that Elaine was at his bedside, waiting anxiously for him to wake from his latest seizure-induced coma.

  Almost.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it. Herb was somewhere behind him and was still talking, of course, but Dan had lost the thread of whatever he was saying. He glanced around the crew again, counting, before returning his gaze to the ocean.

  He frowned.

  There were a dozen men on the boat in total, including himself. A further four of the strange extended Rennick family had already perished, either at the hands of the vampires, or Dan himself. Judging by what Herb said, there were even more waiting for his return back at ‘the compound.’ How was it possible that all of these people shared the same delusion?

  He tried to get a handle on the bizarre relationship that the crew had with Herb, but could not fathom it. The people he saw on the trawler were young—with that one exception—and looked uniformly nervous. Yet it was almost as if they subverted their fear in deference to Herb. They looked at him as Dan imagined a peasant might have looked upon royalty back in the Middle Ages. When Herb approached them, Dan saw the men that he referred to as ‘clerics’ straighten their slumped shoulders, trying vainly to conceal their obvious fear.

  Dan could hardly bring himself to believe that it was actually happening. The creatures that had attacked the Oceanus had been bad enough, but the idea that the extraordinary tale of a secret history which first Edgar and then Herb had told him was actually true? Vampires that had been feeding on humans in secret for thousands of years, aided by a global network of cultists?

  It was just too much. It couldn’t be real.

  Couldn’t.

  Yet the look on the faces of Herb’s clerics left him in no doubt that they believed it. And hadn’t Dan seen them with his own eyes? Felt the thick blood washing over his hands as he decapitated one? What else could the monsters be? Did it even matter what Herb called them?

  This, Dan decided, was what insanity really was. Torn equally between two competing beliefs; unable to trust fully in either. Logic told him that he was back in London in that hospital bed with doctors frantically trying to wake him, but his senses told a different story. Logic—no matter how compelling—mattered little when he could taste the sea air and feel the pain of the slashes across his chest. When he could vividly remember the snarling teeth and the talons and the ship of blood—

  He shook the memories that threatened to overwhelm him away. He had been staring at the ocean for a long time. He turned back to face the deck, taking a deep breath.

  Herb was still talking to the crew, apparently declaring that they were within range, and Dan tuned in to what he was saying. They would take the chopper the rest of the way, and plant charges to sink the trawler behind them. Speed was of the essence now, Herb said. Getting the Sea Shanty back to the UK was taking too long. Already it was gone midday, and soon enough the light would be fading. If the vampires were going to rise, Herb continued, it would happen soon.

  “That’s the only thing we know for certain,” Herb said. “We have time, but not enough. So get moving.”

  Dan watched without emotion as the crew began to filter onto the helicopter, obeying without question or hesitation.

  What the hell is wrong with these people?

  Herb gestured at him to board the chopper with a friendly smile that set his teeth on edge. He’s almost acting like I have a choice, Dan thought, and his temperature rose, just a little.

  He took a calming breath through gritted teeth and nodded, making his way toward the chopper as a kid who looked barely old enough to drive swung himself into the pilot’s seat.

  My first helicopter ride.

  As the vehicle lifted off, leaving a ship primed with C4 behind it, beginning the two-hour-plus trip to the Rennick compound, Dan wondered what his next new experience might be.

  And how much damage it would cause.

  10

  When Herb had said that he lived on a ‘compound,’ Dan had pictured something militaristic: featureless buildings surrounded by an electrified fence, maybe; perhaps even some underground complex, the sort of place a villain in a James Bond movie might call home.

  What he saw, when the chopper finally flew over what Herb called our land, was nothing like that. The Rennick compound was huge, buried deep in a thick forest that Herb said was protected green-belt land: no developer had been permitted to build on it for centuries; nor ever would. Dan hadn’t thought it was possible to find such a wilderness hidden in the crowded south of England.

  The buildings themselves were even more of a surprise: Dan did see several modern-looking pre-fabricated structures, but they were all clustered around a spectacular mansion that had to be three hundred years old at least. As the helicopter swung around it, he thought the house looked more like a castle, or some vast museum: a huge, imposing stone structure liberally sprinkled with Gothic trimmings. Buttresses and delicate arches and sneering gargoyles that had been carved into the walls; they looked like they were leaping from the house, desperately trying to escape the clutches of the stone that birthed them.

  Dan’s heart sank when he saw the place, not because of how oppressive and intimidating it appeared, but because, even from the air, he could tell immediately that it would be very difficult to escape from.

  Once they were travelling over England, the familiarity of the landscape had allowed him to feel a spark of hope; of normality, and he had started to daydream about fleeing the moment the chopper set down. But even if he could somehow slip away from the watchful gaze of Herb and his followers, the compound looked so isolated. There had to be a road leading from the place somewhere but he couldn’t see it through the chopper’s narrow windows. All he could see was trees. If he was going to make a run for it, he would have to do so blindly; fleeing through unfamiliar countryside as night began to fall.

  He didn’t know whether to believe Herb’s tale of a nest of vampires rising to avenge their dead at sunset or not, but the notion of finding some way to escape, only to end up stumbling around the forest, lost and alone in the gathering dark, made a shudder course through him.

  Like it or not, with daylight fading quickly, the only way forward was to go into the house, but he had no intention of staying a minute longer than he had to. He told himself that at the first opportunity
, he would slip away—presuming that neither Herb nor his strange band of followers decided to physically restrain him—and find a way to get home. It was all that mattered now: retreating to the apartment, taking his pills, praying that the medicine would somehow knit together the yawning chasms forming in his head before he lost his sanity entirely.

  “Circle it again,” Jeremy barked suddenly. It was the first time the older man had spoken. During the helicopter ride, Dan thought Jeremy had looked increasingly agitated, and he had tried to avoid meeting his gaze as much as possible.

  “What? Why?” Herb lifted his voice from the co-pilot’s seat.

  “We need to know that it’s clear, Herb. We have more than enough time for that. It won’t be dark for at least an hour.”

  Herb looked like he wanted to argue the point, but decided against it.

  “Fine,” he said, staring at Jeremy quizzically. “Go around again, and then take us down.”

  *

  The chopper touched down on a small helipad set alongside a long, flat building which looked like an enormous garage, a hundred yards or so away from the main house. As the engine began to wind down, a pensive silence settled over the men gathered inside.

  The Rennick compound looked deserted.

  Dan watched as Herb dropped his eyes to his wrist.

  “Almost three-thirty,” he said without emotion. “We have around seventy minutes until sundown. Maybe less.”

  He squinted up at the gloomy sky.

  Seventy minutes, Dan thought bleakly. It was like there was a timer in everybody’s head, counting down toward the moment when darkness would arrive and bring the monsters. Yet despite that terrible ticking, nobody moved a muscle.

  They all just sat in the helicopter, staring at the distant house.

  Dan followed their gaze.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Herb scratched at his jaw, his expression thoughtful.

  “What’s wrong is that there are around forty people in that house, and all of them should be pretty frantic about not hearing from us.”

  “And?”

  “And a helicopter just landed on their front lawn,” Herb said, “but I don’t see a single person at the windows.”

  Dan studied the enormous main house. Herb was right: it was eerily quiet. The tension in the chopper became a bloated, terrible presence, and it suddenly struck him that the vehicle carried an exclusively male crew. Based on what Herb had told him about the make-up of the people who lived at the compound, at that very moment the others were all thinking about their wives and sisters and daughters and mothers.

  All wondering.

  And in the distance, through the rain and below the darkening afternoon sky, the mansion waited.

  11

  It was the smell which hit Herb first, the unmistakable odour that washed across him immediately as he pushed on the front door of the mansion, and it swung open easily.

  Metallic, thick; hanging on the air like a threat.

  The stink of blood.

  Herb could almost taste it.

  The rest of the group paused behind him. The smell was an invisible boundary: it worked on a genetic level, like the stench of so much human blood conveyed a simple biological message which triggered an automatic muscular response.

  Stop.

  The mansion’s main reception area was huge, a cavernous space stretching back more than sixty feet to meet twin staircases at the back of the room which wound their way up to the east and west wings of the mansion.

  At ground level, the walls of the reception room were lined with bookcases and display cabinets that stood below huge canvases in ornate frames. Several plush leather couches were dotted around the centre of the space, beneath a vast chandelier that caught the grey light diffusing through the windows and sparkled like a diamond.

  The fragmented light it reflected illuminated a nightmare.

  There was blood everywhere.

  And in the centre of the room, directly beneath the chandelier, was a sight that made Herb’s blood run cold.

  Bodies.

  Tangled and torn, stacked chaotically in a gruesome pile; a dripping pyramid of death.

  Somewhere behind him, Herb heard someone gasping in horror.

  Someone else collapsing to the floor and emitting a low moan of despair.

  And all he could do was stare at it.

  It wasn’t a massacre; it was a message. It had to be. These people didn’t even look like they had been fed upon—just killed to erect the gruesome monument in the middle of the mansion.

  This must be for me, he thought. For anyone who came back from the Oceanus.

  Behind Herb, someone vomited loudly, and he snapped out of the daze that threatened to overwhelm him.

  “They’ve been here,” he said softly, his voice laced with wonder, “they’re on the surface already. How is that possible? How could they have known about the Oceanus before dawn?”

  “They could still be here,” a gravelly voice hissed, and Herb turned to see Jeremy, hanging several yards back from the doorway and taking slow steps backwards toward the distant chopper. He was the only one among them—aside from Dan—who couldn’t fly the helicopter, but judging by the look on his face, he wanted to learn fast.

  Herb shook his head and pointed at a large panel on the wall just inside the doorway. Inside it, a range of switches controlled the mansion’s steel shutters, and UV floodlights which covered the grounds entirely for several hundred yards.

  “The shutters aren’t down. If they were in here, why wouldn’t they block out the light?”

  “Uh, gee, I don’t know. Maybe because they’re monsters who don’t understand your damn alarm system?” Dan said.

  Herb glanced at him, and Dan clamped his lips shut and looked away abruptly.

  “Maybe not,” Herb replied. “But the people living here did, and as soon as the vampires took one of their minds, they’d understand it just fine. That’s the way these things are supposed to work, isn’t it, Jeremy?”

  Herb lifted his voice a little.

  “They take us, and they know what we know, right?”

  The group flinched as Herb raised his voice further still. He paused and listened intently. There was no sound from the interior of the house; nothing at all.

  “Unless the texts got that part wrong, too.”

  Herb watched Jeremy carefully. Something had been off about the older man on the trawler, and now his behaviour was even stranger. He had spent the helicopter ride sitting behind Herb in tense silence, refusing to engage in any discussion.

  Now that Herb came to think about it, what Jeremy had looked, back on the chopper, was scared. Almost like he knew they were heading straight for a bad place.

  Jeremy continued to back away slowly, his eyes fixed on the doorway, a look of horror on his face. A couple of the clerics began to follow him, and then stopped when they noticed Herb standing firm.

  “We need to get out of here, Herb,” he said, shaking his head.

  “And go where? It will be dark in a little over an hour—”

  “Anywhere,” Jeremy snarled. “You can’t seriously be considering going in there.”

  Herb returned his gaze to the reception room, trying not to focus on the monstrosity at its centre. The room was brightly lit by the huge windows, just as the rest of the house would be. He couldn’t imagine the vampires staying in a place like that, not unless they were hiding in cupboards.

  Indecision tore through him. His father owned an apartment in London that was rarely used, but it boasted few of the defensive capabilities that the mansion would once it was locked down. The apartment had been fitted with the same steel shutters as the buildings on the compound, but it lacked UV lights and, more importantly, thick stone walls.

  Beyond the apartment in the city, he couldn’t think where else he could possibly go. Fleeing blindly into the coming night without a safe destination would be asking for trouble.

  “Anybody here?”
>
  Herb yelled the words almost without realising he was doing it; bellowing them into the echoing silence of the mansion. He had to do something. The uncertainty was killing him.

  He strained his ears to catch some response; any sound which might indicate that there was a presence in the house.

  Nothing.

  He turned to the group.

  Opened his mouth with no clear idea how he was going to tell them that he thought they should go inside.

  He didn’t get the chance.

  Somewhere behind him, a woman’s voice broke the silence inside the mansion.

  Crying.

  Calling for help.

  12

  Dan heard the woman crying, but he no longer saw the vast reception room spread out before him, or the grisly mountain of bodies.

  Instead, he saw the face of the woman he loved, lit in the ghostly green of nightvision goggles. Her eyes wide and terrified as the talons hooked under her jaw and began to pull—

  And then suddenly he was running forward on autopilot, following the sound of pitiful crying blindly, and his mind felt like it was short-circuiting, neurons igniting in all directions; a fireworks display in his skull.

  He ran without looking back, without waiting to see if the others would follow.

  He had forgotten they were even there.

  He turned left into a large dining room, and the sound of the crying got louder.

  He ran.

  And the black river crashed over him.

  *

  For a moment, the only thing Herb could do was stare in amazement as Dan Bellamy bolted, tearing through the reception room without even pausing to glance at the pile of corpses, following the woman’s scream for help.

  Dan had already veered to the left, and out of his sight, through an archway that led to the main dining room, before Herb managed to persuade his own feet that they should follow.