The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  He pulled out the two guns he had acquired on the trawler, wondering what good they would do him if he was actually required to use them, snarled at the others to follow, and chased after Dan. When he glanced back, he saw that they were all terrified, but all were following—with the exception of Jeremy. It looked like the older man hadn’t even entered the mansion.

  Herb hadn’t picked him for a coward.

  He reached the entrance to the dining room just as Dan disappeared through a doorway at the far end, running like his life depended on it. In the distance, Herb heard the crying get a little louder. The survivor—whoever she was—had to be in the main part of the kitchen. Herb led the group at a sprint, his heart hammering, following Dan through the doorway.

  He slammed to a halt.

  Bellamy was standing a few feet in front of him, shaking his head and blinking slowly, as though he had just woken from a deep sleep. Beyond him, sitting on the island in the centre of the huge steel-and-stone kitchen, Herb saw the survivor.

  Her name was Zoe, he remembered. Zoe Yates. Her family had married into the Order generations ago. She was a few years older than Herb and, when he was a teenager, he’d developed a fearsome crush on her which had lasted for an excruciating couple of months.

  Despite that, it took him a moment to place her exactly.

  With all the blood.

  Zoe sat on the island alongside a knife rack, clutching a blade in each hand.

  Sawing.

  Slowly cutting her own legs off.

  For a moment, Herb’s thoughts drained away, his mind unable to cope with the horror his eyes served up. He stared at Zoe’s face, and crawling dread made his throat constrict. In her eyes, he saw a terrible awareness. She knew exactly what she was doing, he realised; she could feel every furrow that her hands were carving into her own flesh.

  She just can’t stop it.

  Herb’s jaw dropped.

  And his mind snapped into action.

  “There’s still one here,” he snarled, his muscles tensing involuntarily, preparing for the attack he was certain was incoming.

  Before anyone could react, the house began to rumble around them, and the steel shutters started to close.

  Someone had activated the lockdown.

  No. Something.

  It was under the bodies, Herb thought in dull terror. Playing a damn game with us. We walked right past it.

  The light began to fade as the shutters rolled down.

  It’s sealing us inside.

  In the dark.

  His eyes widened. “Turn on the lights,” he roared, and he ran from the kitchen back out into the corridor that connected to the dining room, flicking on the light just as the shutters closed, plunging the rest of the mansion into darkness.

  Herb threw himself back into the kitchen and slammed the door behind him, locking it with an ancient iron key that had almost rusted into the lock, and flicked the nearest light switch on. With a faint buzz, fluorescent strips hummed into life overhead, flooding the centre of the kitchen with cold, white light.

  The kitchen comprised several smaller rooms, and when Herb jabbed a finger at them, the stunned clerics fanned out quickly and lit the whole place up. There were two other doors into the kitchen: one leading down to the extensive wine cellar, and another that opened onto a narrow service stairwell which led up to a first-floor lounge and bar area.

  He dragged a table across the door, jamming it into the wood, praying that it would hold, and motioned at the clerics to lock the remaining two doors. Outside, he heard the faint smashing of glass and knew immediately that the vampire had taken out the lights that he had just turned on in the corridor. The kitchen was an oasis of light in the mansion.

  All exits and windows locked down, a vampire at the door.

  No way out.

  “It’s okay,” Herb said in a voice that came out high-pitched and tremulous. “It can’t get in.”

  As if in response, the vampire charged at the door, impacting on it with a thunderous crash. Herb saw the table that he had used for a barricade wobble a little, and realised that if he didn’t believe in his own words, he couldn’t expect anyone else to, either.

  “It can’t get in,” he repeated firmly.

  Outside the heavy kitchen door, there was only silence. The vampire had charged it once, testing its strength, but now…

  What the hell is it doing now?

  Herb’s heart hammered painfully, and he picked up the two handguns once more, and set them down again on a counter almost immediately. They weren’t the weapons he needed. Where the hell was the weapon he needed?

  He scanned the kitchen. Dan Bellamy had collapsed to his knees in a large walk-in pantry, and was gasping for air, with his hands gripping the sides of his skull. He looked like he was about to have another seizure, or perhaps even a heart attack.

  Edgar was wrong about him.

  Suddenly, the unmistakeable truth rolled out in front of Herb, and he saw it clearly. Even if Dan Bellamy was somehow special, it didn’t matter. The guy couldn’t actually fight the vampires. He was terrified and broken. Weak. His survival on the Oceanus had been a fluke, and Bellamy was coming apart at the seams because of it. So what if they couldn’t take his mind? They would just tear apart his body while he cowered and whimpered.

  Herb felt like a lawyer who’d built an entire defence on a gross miscalculation, and only realised his error when the judge began to laugh in his face. He had followed his heart, determined to do something, to fight back somehow—and his determination to act on impulse would end up killing them all.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, and saw his father’s face, twisted into a sardonic grin.

  Who’ll be the head of the Rennick family?

  You?

  Dan gurgled and choked, gasping for breath like he was drowning, and despair washed over Herb. He turned away.

  Just in time to see Zoe throw herself from the kitchen island and drive a knife deep into the chest of the nearest cleric. Stephen gasped as the blade lodged between his ribs, and he staggered forward a couple of steps, passing Zoe on like a virus. She hurled herself off him and drove the other knife into Christian’s neck, sending an arterial spurt across two other clerics before anybody could move.

  When Christian crashed, gurgling, to the floor, Zoe went down with him as the legs that she had mutilated beyond comprehension buckled beneath her. She barely seemed to notice the fall. Upon landing, she instantly shot out a blood-soaked hand like a striking viper, plucking the knife from Christian’s neck. It came free, and the blood came with it; a crimson fountain that finally put an end to the cleric’s ragged panting.

  Zoe began to drag herself toward the others, smearing a trail of gore across the tiles behind her. With every staccato lurch forward, she swung the knife with her left hand, each wide arc spraying thick crimson droplets across the room.

  The attack took only seconds, and the sudden savagery of it rooted Herb to the spot. He watched in dumb fascination as the clerics retreated from the swinging blade, shrieking in terror. Only when one of them unlocked the door to the wine cellar, and they began to flee from the kitchen, did Herb finally snap out of his stupor.

  “No!” he yelled, and he sprinted around Zoe, hurdling over the blade that she swung in his direction.

  Already, two of the clerics had fled from the room, blind panic setting in and making them lose their minds. A third—Scott—was halfway through the door when Herb grabbed his shirt and pulled him back into the kitchen.

  He slammed the door shut and locked it.

  “That’s what it wants,” Herb snarled at the cleric, and he turned to face Zoe.

  She was only feet away.

  Still coming; still clutching the knife.

  Still crying.

  Herb wanted more than anything to turn and flee from the hideous sight, but he grimaced and darted forward, skipping around the knife and stooping to catch her arm. His fingers closed on her wrist and he twisted it violentl
y. The knife fell to the tiles with a metallic clatter, but Herb didn’t even hear it landing.

  His entire focus was taken up by Zoe’s eyes: wide and pleading, so terribly aware.

  She’s still in there somewhere, he thought, and felt a scream gathering in his lungs. She’s living every second of it.

  He pushed Zoe away and rose to his feet, taking a step backwards and kicking the knife away from her grasping fingers.

  Zoe’s eyes dropped to her hands in despair, and she whimpered as they began to drag her back toward the distant knife rack.

  She won’t stop, Herb thought. It won’t let her. It will use her until she is dead…or we are.

  Zoe’s commandeered body was reaching up, straining for the knife rack on the kitchen island when Herb picked up one of the guns he had left on the counter and put a bullet in the back of her head, slamming her into the floor.

  Doing what was necessary.

  Just like Dad.

  Herb gritted his teeth, and shook away the grinning image of his father.

  At his feet, Zoe’s body was motionless at last, her eyes fixed and empty.

  And as the echoing blast of the gun in the enclosed kitchen faded, and Herb tried to process the insanity of what she had been forced to do—what he had been forced to do—the vampire outside the kitchen door began to chuckle.

  The sound coiled around Herb’s nerves like razor wire, but even as his instincts howled at him, his mind was calling his attention to something else. A very important detail. The rest of the house remained quiet. The two clerics that had fled through the wine cellar in a panic hadn’t even started to scream. Not yet.

  Because it has been busy with us.

  There’s only one here, he thought.

  Could it be that there was only one more vampire? According to the texts, the English nest was small, but was thought to number in the dozens.

  Maybe that was a lie, too.

  It made sense, didn’t it? That the creatures who had decided to erase their existence from human history might exaggerate their own strength? They weren’t immortal, that was for sure.

  Herb frowned, and in the distance, he began to hear the shrieking of the two clerics, exactly as he had known he would. A flurry of terrified yells which cut off abruptly, until there was only one voice left.

  And his screams were long, and slow.

  Herb tried to tune out the horror of the noise and think.

  One vampire.

  If there are more out there, where the hell are they?

  13

  The absence of light made the noise all the more terrifying; a high-pitched scream that shredded Adam Trent’s nerves like a hacksaw.

  He froze, the wrench in his hand forgotten, and stared into the blackness. The cone of illumination cast by the light mounted on his hat dissolved after a few feet. Beyond it, the darkness was an abyss.

  Sometimes the tunnels could play tricks on you—especially when you were working near an active line. The shriek of metal on metal could sound otherworldly in the dark, and most of the staff working the lines had let their nerves get the better of them at least once. It took some getting used to, working down there in the pitch black, tending to the roots of the city. The darkness and the isolation; the musty air and the dislocation from reality. It all took its toll, especially on those who were new to the job.

  Yet Adam had been working maintenance on the London Underground system for ten years and counting. He was no rookie.

  And that isn’t metal-on-metal.

  The noise which Adam heard, ricocheting around the cavernous tunnel, was a twisted fusion of terror and pain. Definitely not mechanical; it was unmistakably the sound of someone screaming. It rang out clearly over the clanging noise of Roni hammering at a stubborn section of the rusting track a few feet to his left.

  It sounded like it came from a distance down the tracks, somewhere around the curve of the tunnel. Even if there had been light in that direction, Adam doubted that he would have been able to see what had caused the noise, and maybe, he thought, that was a good thing.

  The scream spoke to him on an animal level, and his senses shifted into a state of high alert.

  It lasted for maybe five seconds, rising in pitch.

  Ending suddenly.

  And then there was thunderous silence.

  The two-man sub-team’s work—routine repairs on a section of the Northern Line—ceased immediately.

  Adam turned to face Roni, and flooded his colleague with light.

  “You heard that?”

  Roni nodded slowly, but both question and response were unnecessary: Adam knew that he hadn’t imagined the noise as soon as he saw Roni’s eyes; painfully wide, darting with incomprehension. He looked as unnerved as Adam felt.

  Adam took a hefty flashlight from his belt, and aimed it down the tunnel. The other sub-team—Colin and Tarpey; good guys, whose easy banter generally made the long hours pass quicker—were a few hundred feet further down the line, working their way back towards Adam’s position.

  The scream had come from their direction.

  It had to have been one of the two men that screamed, but Adam had no idea what could prompt a man to make such a noise.

  Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure he even wanted to know.

  He tried not to notice the beam of light jerking as his hand trembled wildly. The flashlight’s bulb was a good deal more powerful than the one attached to his hat, but it, too, was eaten by the void before it revealed anything out of the ordinary.

  He saw nothing.

  Heard nothing.

  “You think one of them is hurt?” Roni hissed, and Adam flinched at the sudden break in the oppressive silence.

  As it happened, yeah, Adam did think either Colin or Tarpey was hurt. Maybe even worse than hurt. He couldn’t see how a man could scream like that and not be in terrible agony. Men had been injured in the tunnels before, plenty of times, and Adam had rushed to their aid without hesitation, tending to injuries that ranged from concussion to electrocution to—on one particularly horrible occasion—dismemberment. It was, he thought, part of the job description. He imagined that it had to be the same whenever people worked in places that were so inherently dangerous. You developed a bond, even with the colleagues you didn’t much like. An unspoken code. Look after each other down there.

  Further down the tunnel, it sounded like somebody needed looking after, all right, but this time, Adam found his feet unwilling to move and his skin prickling. Suddenly, he felt terribly afraid at the prospect of calling out to see if everything was okay. Frightened that he would draw the attention of something; some awful creature out there, sharing the shadows with them.

  He wondered if he should shut off the light, and hope whatever was out there could not see him.

  Sweat beaded on Adam’s forehead as his mind ran to dark destinations. Whatever was out there, it had surely killed Colin and Tarpey, and it was crawling toward him at that very moment, unseen in the dark, licking its lips…

  He willed his legs to move.

  And then the whimpering started up; faint, but audible. The soft, gurgling cries of a man suffering terrible pain. The sound was somehow even worse than the screaming.

  “We have to help him.”

  Roni’s words.

  High-pitched and breathless; the voice of a man out of his mind with fear.

  Adam swallowed hard and nodded almost absently, his eyes fixed on the section of tunnel that he could not see. Someone was still alive, and they were hurt. He had to help. He lifted the wrench above his head, brandishing it like a club. Roni acknowledged the gesture, but there was no question in his eyes, and Adam knew, then.

  It wasn’t just him. Not his imagination. Roni felt it, too: the air in the tunnel, suddenly thick and syrupy; laced with danger. A nagging certainty that there was another presence in the tunnel with them, something foul and dangerous.

  Adam advanced slowly, his heart hammering painfully, the wrench raised.

/>   Ready.

  Click.

  He froze again, and this time the message his nerves tried to send was run, but fear had tangled the wiring in his brain. He felt like he was standing in quicksand.

  He remembered listening to Tarpey talking about the time when he had seen a train heading straight for him in a tunnel which he had believed was inactive, and about the grey area between fight or flight; that rabbit-in-the-headlights paralysis.

  Tarpey had called it fight, flight or shite.

  It had been funny. Adam had laughed.

  Click, click.

  He swallowed painfully.

  The noise was heading toward him, getting louder. Advancing a little and pausing. It sounded to Adam like the cautious movement of an animal. But there weren’t any animals in the London Underground, not really. Rats, of course; maybe the odd stray dog. Yet the sound he heard wasn’t made by any rat or dog. It skittered and tapped, and struck Adam as more like the noise an insect might make.

  Yet for the noise to be that loud, it would have to be huge.

  Or very close.

  He felt his heartbeat ratchet up in intensity until he was sure his chest would burst open.

  The shuddering beam of light gave up nothing. He frowned, and felt a dry panic squeezing his bladder. The noise sounded close enough that he was sure he should be able to see something.

  Click, click, click, cli—

  So loud, Adam thought. Like it’s right on top of us.

  Oh.

  Shit.

  Adam knew that it would be there even before he jerked his jaw up and illuminated the roof above his head with ghostly light. Some crazy intuition told him before he saw it.

  Bursting from the shadows toward the two paralysed men, bewildering and obscene.

  A creature born in a fevered nightmare.

  It came at them fast, scuttling along the ceiling like some horrific spider; humanoid in shape and yet somehow insectile at the same time. Glistening skin that seemed to absorb the light. Angular limbs whirring in furious motion, eating up the distance at extraordinary speed.

  Glowing red eyes.

  Teeth.

  It shrieked as the light spilled across it, and launched itself down onto Roni before he could react, opening up his body from shoulder to groin as it fell, cleaving him in two almost casually with a talon as long as a pocket knife.