The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

Way short.

  A glimpse through the smashed windows of the first carriage was enough for Conny to truly grasp that what was happening in the tunnels below London really was far above her paygrade. Shit, it had to be above everybody’s.

  The passengers inside had been slaughtered—no, shredded—by something. What was left in the carriage, pooled on seats and splashed up walls, looked more like a grisly stew than human bodies. Conny’s eye fell on a dismembered foot here, an exposed jawbone there. Something sitting on a seat, which looked for all the world like a severed head with a human heart stuffed into its final scream.

  Conny tore her eyes away and gulped for air, felt her stomach heaving, and then finally, when she drank in a breath and tasted the meat hanging on the air, she gave up the fight and let her breakfast out onto the track, loudly.

  She heaved twice.

  Spat.

  Click.

  Gasped for air.

  Spat.

  Click, click, click.

  Conny froze.

  Somewhere behind me.

  Too late to run.

  This is it.

  She straightened, her nausea forgotten, and aimed her gun at the darkness, squinting; wishing that the light spilling from the train would just turn the hell off for a moment. The weapon shook wildly, and she figured her chances of actually hitting anything were around zero.

  The clicking kept coming.

  Closer.

  Closer.

  Conny loosed off her entire magazine, and the report of the Glock was deafening in the tunnel. When the echo of the gunshots faded, Conny lowered the weapon, drawing in a tremulous breath.

  Click, click.

  The shape emerged from the darkness slowly.

  “Don’t shoot.”

  The shape rasped out a wheezing chuckle.

  Conny’s jaw dropped. Robert Nelson shuffled toward her, his own gun held in listless fingers, pointed at his feet. He was pulling the trigger, over and over again. Click, click, click. In his other hand, Robert clutched Jackson’s leash.

  It looked like there were still parts of Jackson attached to it.

  Robert stared straight through Conny, his eyes filled with tears that made his wide grin all the more unsettling.

  “Don’t...shoot,” he gurgled again, thickly, and collapsed to the ground.

  He was still pulling the trigger of the empty gun repeatedly, and when Conny knelt next to him and plucked the weapon away, his finger just...carried on. Firing the phantom gun that his mind still held.

  Robert’s eyes fixed on the roof of the tunnel, wide with fright and shock, and Conny knew as she looked into them that the roof would be the last thing Nelson saw. He was bleeding badly; choking out thick mouthfuls of blood.

  Conny ran the light down across his body, expecting to see savage tears; half-certain that she would see his innards hanging out, just like the driver of the train.

  What she saw was far worse.

  A single bullet hole, punched into the base of Robert Nelson’s throat.

  Blood spurted from the wound at an obscene rate, and when Conny shrugged off her jacket and pressed it to the awful chasm in his neck, the heavy fabric soaked through almost immediately. She tossed it away and pressed her palm into that slippery, ruined throat, praying that she might hold his life inside him through sheer will.

  She felt the pumping; the dreadful throbbing of blood.

  Ebbing.

  Slowing.

  Stopping.

  When Robert Nelson died, Conny couldn’t help but let out a scream of despair. For that moment, the fearsome creature and the tunnel and the train of torn bodies ceased to exist, and there was only the fact that she had messed up everything, and it had cost a man his life. She screamed because she had to. Because there was no choice.

  And somewhere in the darkness, something answered her.

  The shriek that echoed through the tunnel ripped a gasp of horror from Conny’s lungs. It was close. Jesus, in the silent darkness, the noise sounded terrifyingly loud.

  She stumbled to her feet, and for a moment her legs just wanted to start running again, but she caught herself in time. The front of the train was almost certainly blocking the thing’s view of her—but judging by how close the creature sounded that would only remain the case for a matter of seconds.

  Have to get out of sight.

  Conny stared about her frantically, and saw only two options: under the train, or in the train.

  She could drape the bodies over herself, maybe; camouflage herself beneath the horror.

  The prospect of lying in that lake of gore was numbing; something beyond terrifying, but there was no time to consider just how grim it might be. Right now there was only survival. Only those two options.

  In the distance she heard it coming fast.

  The hideous clicking.

  Charging toward her.

  Under the train.

  Or in the train.

  Conny grabbed Remy’s collar firmly.

  And made her choice.

  22

  It didn’t run along the ceiling this time.

  Conny saw the clawed feet approaching, and her blood froze. She and Remy were wedged beneath the train, and most of her view of the tunnel was cut off by the tracks and the undercarriage.

  But she saw the feet, and the sight of them dropped the temperature of her blood to zero. Each toe ended in a talon that looked like it belonged to some prehistoric predator.

  Alongside her, Remy’s body had gone alarmingly slack, like the dog was so scared it had slipped into a state of shock. She kept a palm pressed over his mouth, though it didn’t seem likely that he would make a sound and give away their position, and she craned her neck.

  The creature paused near the front of the train, and Conny’s eyes widened with alarm as her mind tossed up a horrific possibility for the first time.

  Can it smell us?

  The creature took two quick strides toward Conny, and she almost screamed, certain that it would reach a clawed hand beneath the train, but suddenly, those terrifying feet were gone.

  A thump above her made the carriage shudder.

  It was inside the train.

  She heard its clacking footsteps move from one side of the carriage to the other, and several quieter thumps, like the monster was tossing body parts around. Searching methodically.

  Looking for someone hiding among the bodies, Conny thought, and she felt like vomiting again when she realised how close she had come to hiding beneath the corpses herself.

  Above her, the creature continued to hunt.

  They weren’t just animals, she realised. They were intelligent; capable of considering their prey’s thought process. It was surely just a matter of time before the thing decided to check underneath the train.

  Run?

  She felt despair well inside her. Just crawling out from beneath the train would surely make enough noise to alert the monster to her presence. And even if she did make it out, where was there to run to?

  And what about Remy?

  She couldn’t run.

  All she could do was wait, and pray.

  Glass breaking.

  Another thump; further away.

  It went into the next carriage!

  Conny felt a surge of hope rush through her. Was it possible that she could be so lucky twice? To have the creature right on top of her a second time, only for it to head off in the wrong direction once more?

  She tensed her muscles, and listened. If the thing moved even further down the train, she might get a chance to run after all.

  It would mean leaving Remy behind. It had to: there was no way she could carry him quietly, and he was lying on his side, staring at her with abject, wide eyes; barely breathing. She doubted he could stand, let alone run.

  She clenched her jaw.

  It would break her heart to leave him.

  It would break her heart not to.

  She heard another series of thumps, even fainter still. />
  Now, or never.

  She willed her muscles to move.

  Wanted to reassure Remy; to whisper that she would come back for him.

  She didn’t dare.

  Couldn’t make a sound.

  She stared into Remy’s panicked eyes, her vision blurring, and turned away.

  Just in time to see clawed feet landing heavily on the ground barely a yard in front of her face. She almost let out a yelp of surprise, and her muscles went rigid. She was too terrified even to shrink back into the shadows beneath the train.

  Definitely more than one of them.

  Another pair of feet appeared out of nowhere, just barely illuminated by the faint emergency lighting.

  And then another. Another.

  A lot more.

  The creatures were making plenty of noise. Conny figured that she was at greater risk of being spotted than heard, and quietly eased herself alongside Remy, listening as the creatures—there had to be a dozen of them—leapt up into the carriage.

  And began to feed noisily.

  The horror of the sound was incomprehensible; meat being torn and chewed. Bones being snapped like breadsticks. Human beings.

  On more than one occasion, the carriage erupted in sudden grunts and shrieking, and Conny recalled nature show footage: animals feeding alongside each other suddenly going on the attack. With each shriek and each crash, her fear intensified until it almost felt unreal. The world began to spin around her, and she shut her eyes.

  Perhaps I have gone mad.

  Maybe I’m still sitting in the van.

  Staring at my phone.

  Those two words.

  Huntington’s Disease.

  Incurable. Unstoppable. It killed usually within a couple of decades. Conny knew the disease and its cruel symptoms all too well. She’d known all about it even before Logan had been born, and she had prayed, every day since, that the hateful condition which had taken her husband would spare her son.

  But prayers had a tendency to go unanswered. Logan had exhibited symptoms so young. He had been born to die, and she wasn’t going to be around to make it right, and—

  Her eyes flared open as she heard the carriage above erupt with a new noise. It sounded like the creatures were shrieking in unison, over and over. If it hadn’t been a sound that could only have existed in Hell, Conny could have sworn that it was some sort of language, like a chant or prayer. Twisted and demented and terrifying.

  She felt Remy begin to quiver alongside her, and reached out a hand gently to reassure him, stopping dead when she heard the creatures bellow a final shriek that shook the walls, and then there was silence for a moment, before they came crashing out of the train, their clawed feet once more slamming into the ground right in front of her.

  The creatures charged away down the tunnel without pausing, almost as if answering some urgent rallying cry that she could not hear. When the thunderous clacking of their movement dissolved into silence, Conny remained frozen in place for a long time, her palm hovering above Remy’s belly, her mouth open.

  Still alive.

  23

  The London Eye was on its final rotation of the day. The vast Ferris wheel built at the turn of the century offered a magnificent, panoramic view of London from its slow-moving passenger pods, but to Hideo Kagome, the view had already been boring for at least twenty minutes.

  Hideo’s parents still seemed enthralled, though that didn’t mean a great deal; Hideo thought they were enthralled by pretty much everything in London. It was, after all, the vacation the Kagome family had been waiting to take for several years, combining a visit to Hideo’s older, UK-based brother Kasamo, with an opportunity to take in some of the most famous tourist spots in the world.

  And it was all so boring.

  Kasamo had barely been able to get any time off work, and so only saw them in the evenings when he was tired, and London? London was dusty old buildings and people with angry faces. Places where someone supposedly important had lived or died, like, hundreds of years earlier. Museums that took all day to trample around. Who cared?

  At least the Eye had been an exciting prospect, like a giant fairground ride. It had even looked cool from a distance, sitting right on the south bank of the Thames, soaring high above the nearby buildings, all lit up like Christmas as dusk began to settle over the city.

  But it was so slow. The egg-shaped pods, each large enough to hold twenty-five people—and which you couldn’t even lean out of—sealed up for the duration of the ride, and that was it for the next forty minutes: crawling up into the sky inch by boring inch until the city was laid out below…and then crawling back down. Hideo’s time would have been far better spent on his PS4, no doubt about that.

  At least it was nearly over. He pressed his face to the curved glass, trying to look straight down. The pod was, he guessed, still at least a hundred feet above the ground. Far below, the queuing area was a functional square of concrete, spattered with token splashes of greenery. It was almost empty, most of the tourists having moved on.

  Suddenly, his attention was taken by movement to his right. Something on the water. He glanced toward it, expecting to see yet another slow-moving riverboat, and frowned.

  Nothing there.

  He squinted into the last rays of the sunset, certain that he had seen something out there.

  And movement erupted directly below him.

  Hideo’s mouth dropped open, his boredom forgotten.

  So fast.

  The thing—a dark shape that he could not even begin to identify—leapt from the water up onto the path that ran alongside the river with ease, landing with a fluid motion like an uncoiling snake. It took a couple of loping strides forward and then launched itself onto all-fours, galloping like a cat toward a small knot of people sitting outside a coffee shop which overlooked the river.

  It barrelled into them at full speed, oblivious to their fearful screams…

  …scattering tables and chairs like matchsticks…

  …and began to tear them apart.

  Hideo’s eyes widened painfully as he saw an enormous splatter of blood—dark in the failing light—arcing across the pale concrete below. And then another. It looked like somebody had been ripped in two at the waist, the obscene pieces that they became tossed aside like garbage.

  He screamed then, his mouth making the noise all by itself, and he stumbled backwards, away from the window, colliding with his stunned mother and sending her crashing to the floor.

  He didn’t even hear his father yelling at him as he helped her back to her feet. For a moment, all Hideo could hear was the noise of that distant splatter; inaudible and deafening at the same time. His eyes glazed over.

  Somewhere below, a loud thump jolted him back to the present.

  The thump became a shatter.

  Glass breaking, Hideo thought in horror, and he scrambled to press his face to the window once more. The pod was closer to ground level now, ninety feet or less, and suddenly the giant fucking wheel was moving far too fast.

  It’s gonna deliver us right to it.

  He searched, panicked, for some sign of the terrible creature, but all he saw was the bodies it had left behind. Maybe, he thought, just maybe, it had already moved away from the Eye. Jumped back into the river, perhaps. Or it was in the pod at the bottom of the giant wheel, tearing the passengers to pieces…

  Hideo gagged as he stared at the remains of the group of people who’d been enjoying their last ever cup of coffee, and began to offer silent thanks that he hadn’t been down there when the monster had leapt out of the Thames.

  His relief withered and died as the creature erupted from one of the pods directly below his, swinging easily on the frame of the Ferris wheel with long, gangling limbs, as comfortable climbing up the steel lattice of the structure as a primate.

  Oh, no, Hideo thought. Oh, no, please don’t—

  With a screech, the creature swung up to the next pod, smashing the thick glass with a single blow
and leaping inside, out of sight once more.

  Distant, muted screaming.

  Hideo turned to face his mother and father, and saw his terror reflected in their eyes. They, too, had seen it. He wasn’t going crazy; the monster wasn’t a product of his imagination. It wasn’t what his mother would smile and label teenage hormones running amok.

  It was real.

  They were all about to die.

  He opened his mouth to say something, though he wasn’t sure what that might be. My final words, he thought numbly. How could a sullen fourteen-year-old boy possibly conjure up the right ones?

  “Mother,” he began to say, and the window behind him imploded.

  The words, whatever they might have been, remained unsaid; there was just no room for them as the air thickened with terror. Suddenly, in the slow-moving pod, there was only enough room for screaming.

  And dying.

  *

  Harold Birch patted at the air for a moment before his fingers landed on the cool, rough wood.

  He gripped the bench and levered himself down onto it with a sigh, setting his stick against his right leg.

  With his left hand, he reached out and ruffled the back of Brody’s neck.

  “Good boy. Take a break, Bro.”

  A moment later, Harold heard the soft whump as the dog’s generous backside hit the ground.

  Harold breathed in deeply, listening to the sounds of Hyde Park. He used to love taking Brody to walk there, and each time they visited, Harold would try to navigate to the very centre of the vast green expanse, judging that he was close to it when the sounds of the city—the background pollution that never truly dispersed—was at its quietest.

  The middle of Hyde Park was the only place in central London, in Harold’s opinion, where you could go and almost forget that you were in the city at all.

  Increasingly, though, the park hosted noisy events; on most nights it seemed that there was some band or other performing there now. Even at times when the park should have been quiet, the relentless noise of London invaded. Kids playing godawful music through tinny speakers, or people chattering loudly—and constantly—on their mobile phones. The various pings, whistles and buzzes of information hitting the electronic devices the whole world now carried everywhere. Everything so damn connected. No way to escape any of it and just be.