The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  Tonight, there was a rock band playing, and so Harold didn’t make for the centre of the park. He skirted the edge of it for a while, just long enough to give Brody some exercise, and rested a while before heading back home. He could hear the music in the distance, the excitable murmur of the crowd.

  The music itself was muddy and indistinct: it didn’t travel well across the park; becoming little more than a dirge at distance. Harold didn’t recognise the tune, though that didn’t surprise him. Despite the winter chill in the air, it was still early, just late afternoon, and the stage would be home to a warm-up act at this time of the day. The crowds would gather in greater numbers for the main act in two or three hours. He probably wouldn’t have recognised their music, either.

  His ears were well-tuned, though: far closer, he heard the soft swishing of bicycles passing; there were always the fitness freaks lapping the park. Groups of joggers and cyclists, mostly. Occasionally, the heavier clatter of skateboards or rollerblades. The edge of the park was constantly shifting; home to those people for whom stillness and silence were reasons for discomfort.

  The benches were set a way back from the wide path, and in the summer they bathed in the scent of flowers. During the warm months, the one that he usually sat on would be surrounded by the hum of insects, and Harold liked listening to their quiet little symphony being played out. Yet the park was so much busier in the summer, so much noisier.

  In the distance, the crowd erupted in a loud scream, and Harold blinked into the unending darkness, surprised. The main act must have taken to the stage already.

  At his left foot, Brody whined, and Harold tilted his head.

  “What’s up, Bro?”

  The dog whined again; louder.

  Harold frowned. Brody’s communication skills were a minor miracle, but this was a noise that Harold hadn’t ever heard the dog make before. A frantic, fearful noise, like Brody had seen something that terrified him.

  Harold listened intently.

  The bicycles had passed thirty seconds earlier, and he had heard nothing in his immediate vicinity since. As best he could tell, he and Brody were alone.

  He reached out to pat Brody, and paused.

  In the distance, the screaming intensified, but it sounded odd to Harold now, different in a way he couldn’t place immediately. It took him a moment to figure it out.

  The crowd was still screaming.

  But the music had stopped.

  Brody whined again, once, and then took off.

  Harold had been holding Brody’s leash in slack fingers—an unnecessary gesture since the dog was as obedient and even-tempered as a mutt could get—and he was too slow to react when he felt the cold leather slipping across his palm. By the time he closed his fist, the leash was gone.

  And he heard Brody sprinting away.

  “Brody!”

  Harold stood uncertainly, stricken by a sudden anxiety. His stick clattered to the ground. Brody didn’t slow at his call. If anything, it sounded like the dog was picking up pace.

  And in the distance, the screaming seemed to be getting louder.

  No, Harold realised. Getting closer.

  Before the patter of Brody’s fast-receding paws had faded, Harold heard another sound, like rippling thunder.

  Footsteps, he realised, and felt a shard of icy fear lance his heart. Lots of people, all running frantically. All screaming, heading straight for me.

  He crouched and patted the ground until he located his stick. Something bad was happening in the park, something that Harold couldn’t even begin to understand. Without his sight, he relied heavily on his hearing, but right now his ears were filling with a dreadful, incomprehensible cacophony.

  Someone rocketed past him.

  Screaming the whole way.

  Harold turned away from the noise of approaching footsteps, following the direction Brody had taken.

  And suddenly, the air was knocked from his chest as someone barrelled into him at full pace. Harold went down hard, slamming a shoulder painfully into the bench he had sat on peacefully only moments earlier. Whoever had knocked him down didn’t stay to see if he was all right; they didn’t even speak. Harold listened in astonishment as they clambered to their feet with a whimper and took off again.

  And then a wave of chaos broke around him.

  Over him.

  Feet running everywhere, trampling him, knocking him back down when he tried to get up. A million glancing blows that landed on his limbs as a tide of people broke around him. Screaming, all of them; wordless shrieks that sounded like panicked, primal terror.

  Harold tried to get up one final time, and when a foot caught him on the side of the face, he gave up the struggle and curled up in a ball, hands held protectively around his head, and prayed for the madness to stop.

  Somewhere beneath the thundering of feet and the piercing yells of fear, Harold heard another noise. Something that sounded like thick paper ripping. A sound that he thought was like branches being snapped, but slightly muffled somehow.

  Bones, he thought, and his terror ratcheted up a notch. That’s the sound of bones breaking. And the ripping…it must be…

  Suddenly, the thunder of fleeing feet began to fade, and Harold lifted his head in amazement.

  Whatever had happened, whatever terrible event had just unfolded in Hyde Park, it seemed to have flowed right past him. He heard some screams; perhaps people who had fallen like himself, but whose injuries were more severe.

  The sound of fleeing people continued to move away.

  They’re gone, Harold thought, and let out a long, explosive sigh of relief.

  Click.

  Harold frowned at the noise. It almost sounded like a dog’s claws tapping on a linoleum floor.

  “Bro? That you?”

  Click, click, click.

  An animal of some sort exhaled loudly nearby; a snort that sounded far too big to have been made by a dog.

  Harold froze, and the dreadful truth of his situation unwound in his mind. Suddenly, it was like he could see again; like the thick veil that had been draped over his eyes for more than thirty years had lifted abruptly.

  The people who were running were gone.

  Escaped.

  The thing that scared them is still here.

  Click.

  Click, click.

  Harold swallowed; his throat felt like it was filling with broken glass.

  It’s right in front of—

  Something large and heavy breathed onto Harold’s face: a warm, moist wave of air that reeked of meat and blood. The creature grunted, and Harold thought the terrible noise, mere inches away from him, sounded almost like confusion.

  He reached out gingerly, feeling the air in front of him.

  And whatever was lurking out there in the syrupy darkness, beyond the reach of Harold’s ruined eyes, laughed.

  His mouth dropped open, and he had no idea whether the breath he drew in was intended to fuel words or a scream.

  It didn’t matter.

  Harold’s lungs were still inflating when something sharp punctured his chest. Huge; it felt like someone had just steered a train into his ribcage. He felt and heard the cracking of his bones, and then the terrible pulling sensation as something began to furiously rearrange his internal organs, before—finally—a new sort of darkness claimed him.

  *

  On the crowded, slow-moving streets of Camden, the lights were blinking on and the stream of daytime shoppers was slowly preparing to hand over ownership of the streets to the night-time revellers. Much of the expansive market was shutting for the day, the stalls trying to shift a few last items before the sun went down.

  The vampire erupted near a railway bridge, spearing up from the ground into a crowd of people who were determined to spend the last few minutes of daylight sitting in a beer garden at the rear of one of Camden’s most popular pubs.

  It emerged from the dirt already swinging.

  Its first victim didn’t even have time
to scream.

  But others did.

  *

  In Oxford Circus, the traffic had slowed to a crawl as the evening rush hour began. Tourists moved in almost aimless herds, winding their way from one pedestrian-crossing to another, waiting patiently for the traffic to ease, or simply walking out in front of it and delaying the whole process still further.

  The vampire rocketed from a manhole in the middle of the road, leaping onto the roof of a bus under the gathering darkness, and shrieked as it clawed a courier from his bicycle, sweeping him up and tearing him apart in a dull explosion of blood that spattered across windscreens and stunned faces.

  In the distance, others answered.

  With a roar, the vampire charged toward a group of stunned pedestrians, impacting upon them like a speeding combine harvester, chewing up muscle and sinew as it carved through them before smashing into the window of a large department store.

  *

  They came from the river; from the soft ground beneath parks and gardens. From the tunnels and stations of the Underground; scattered across the city, but rising as one.

  Blood flowed across London.

  And the last scraps of weak daylight dissolved.

  Sundown.

  24

  Stay in the light.

  Jennifer Craven’s warning rattled in Leon Mancini’s head like small arms fire as the van headed toward London.

  It would be full-dark by the time the van reached the city, despite the fact that it was only around six in the evening, and it felt like reaching England’s capital was taking forever. The roads around the south of the country were nothing like those back home: no wide, fast-moving highways here; instead, single-lane traffic crawled at infuriatingly slow speed through village after village.

  And then there were the ‘roundabouts.’ Navigating them was logical enough, but the behaviour of the other drivers made each one a little hair-raising.

  And slowed them down even more.

  If Mancini had been able to speak to a local, they would have reassured him that the van was actually making short work of the trip to the capital; he wouldn’t have believed them.

  Still, the journey did give Mancini plenty of time to absorb the story that Jeremy Pruitt told. The Rennick family had attempted to satisfy a vampire rising on a massive scale, unleashing the creatures on a cruise ship and then sinking it to bury the evidence.

  Not a bad plan, all things considered, but somewhere along the way, one of the ship’s passengers had begun murdering the monsters, and what was left of the UK arm of the Order when the dust settled was Herbert Rennick, an idealist in his twenties with more balls than sense, and a group of young clerics, most of whom, Jeremy said, had entered the mansion, but had never come back out.

  But Dan Bellamy had, and Herbert Rennick had bundled him into a chopper, fleeing to the north just minutes before Mancini and his team arrived at the compound. According to Pruitt, the Rennicks owned an apartment in the city. It was there that Herb would head, the Brit was sure of it.

  In a way, Pruitt’s certainty made Mancini’s heart sink. If Bellamy and Rennick had really disappeared; if they were on the wind, never to be seen again, he wouldn’t now be heading toward the epicentre of the apocalypse.

  Braxton drove, navigating the winding roads with only the occasional curse, and when Pruitt finished filling them in, Mancini held up a hand to silence him and pulled out his cellphone. He was only supposed to break radio silence in extraordinary circumstances.

  He figured this counted, and punched in a number.

  Jennifer Craven answered immediately.

  “We’re too late,” Mancini said. “The vampires are already on the surface. By the look of things, they have been for a while. The Rennick compound is gone.”

  For a moment, Craven said nothing, and he wondered if she was suppressing a smirk at his sudden acceptance of the fact that vampires did exist after all.

  “What about the Hermetic?” she asked finally.

  Mancini was sitting in the front passenger seat alongside Braxton. He glanced through the windshield at the sky ahead. Smoke was gathering over London, and several small fires lit up the skyline from east to west.

  “Looks like he’s in London.”

  “You know where?”

  “Maybe. But London ain’t looking so healthy right now.”

  “Yes. I’m watching the news. Tragic. Do you know where the Hermetic is?”

  Mancini gritted his teeth.

  “We ran into the guy who called you. Pruitt. He thinks he knows where Rennick took him.”

  “So what’s the problem? Go get him.”

  “Half the team’s already dead, Jennifer. I damn near died myself, and that was only coming up against one of them—”

  “You saw one? What happened?”

  “Some people died, some people ran. Defeat, Jennifer. That’s what happened. Comprehensive fucking defeat. And now you want us to go into a city full of these things?”

  Craven snorted.

  “Like I said, I’m watching the news. They don’t know what they are dealing with yet: reports are talking about sudden bouts of mass hysteria; people attacking each other or killing themselves. But they do know how widespread it is. So far, eight separate incidents have been reported across London. Which means eight vampires.”

  “Yeah,” Mancini hissed, “eight so far. I doubt this is all playing out in front of the cameras, Jennifer. We have no idea how many—”

  “It’s a big city, Mr Mancini. I’m sure a man with your qualifications should be able to grab one civilian and get out in one piece. That is what I pay you for. No?”

  Mancini pulled the phone away from his face for a moment, fighting back the urge to throw it out of the window. When he pressed it back against his ear, Craven was still talking.

  “…chances of us stumbling across another Hermetic in this or any other lifetime are virtually zero. You do realise that understanding this Dan Bellamy could be the key to stopping the vampires once and for all? To understanding how they are able to live for so long? Their abilities? War is coming, Mr Mancini. The secret is out. In a few hours, there won’t be anyone left on the planet who doesn’t know about vampires, and humans tend to respond badly to threats. It doesn’t matter whether the vampires come after us, or we go after them. The end result will be the same. We’ll need to be able to defend ourselves with something other than walls. He is the key.”

  “Great,” Mancini said. “And what if I can’t get him?”

  Craven paused.

  “Then don’t bother coming back. And pray for a quick death.”

  She hung up, and Mancini gripped the phone so tightly that he felt the plastic casing beginning to buckle.

  He sucked in a deep breath, and focused on the burning city ahead.

  Braxton shot a glance at him.

  “Mancini? What’d she say?”

  He slipped the phone back into his pocket.

  “We go on,” Mancini growled. “But at the first sign of trouble—the first fucking sign—we’re turning this piece of crap around and hightailing it outta here. I don’t give a fuck what Craven says. I’ll take her Gulfstream as severance pay. Fucking gladly.”

  Braxton glanced at him again, his eyes widening when he saw the anger written on Mancini’s face, and apparently thought better of asking any more questions.

  When the furious silence became too much to bear, Mancini leaned forward and flicked on the van’s ancient radio, twisting the dial until he heard a breathless news reporter reeling off facts that they clearly had trouble believing.

  There had been outbreaks of ‘unexpected violence’ across the centre of the city, and large parts of London to the north of the river were burning. All residents of the city were advised to evacuate immediately or to barricade themselves in their homes until the all clear was given. The military had been called in to restore order…

  In the rear of the van, Montero and Burnley were bickering quietly, just as they ha
d for most of the flight across the Atlantic.

  Jeremy Pruitt just sat there, frowning at the floor, muttering to himself.

  Mancini tuned it all out, and tried to persuade himself that Jennifer Craven wasn’t worth it; that she hadn’t been for a very long time. That the only rational thing to do was turn the van around and get the hell out of England immediately; find some way to disappear.

  He said nothing, glaring at the road ahead, watching the miles creep by.

  His gut told him that his entire world was about to be reduced to a single imperative.

  Stay in the light.

  25

  Conny only rolled out from beneath the train when Remy finally began to struggle. She released her grip on him, and he scampered out into the tunnel. It was the best indication she could get that it was truly safe for her to move.

  She hauled herself to her feet, a little unnerved at how shaky her legs felt beneath her.

  Remy was busy peeing. He glanced at her apologetically, and Conny almost laughed. She had damn-near pissed herself beneath the train. Under the circumstances, she thought he’d done pretty well to hold it in.

  She left her flashlight switched off, seeing only by the soft glow of the train’s emergency lights. Twisting her head left and right, trying not to look at Robert Nelson’s body and failing miserably, she saw only darkness in either direction.

  “Which way, Rem?”

  Remy finished his business and trotted toward her, turning to face the left. The opposite direction to the one the monsters had taken. He looked up at her, tongue lolling out, and seemed relatively like himself for the first time in a couple of hours.

  “Left it is,” Conny said quietly, and smiled.

  She detached Remy’s chain leash from his collar, afraid of the noise it might make. She would travel in complete darkness, she decided, sticking to one tunnel and using her light only occasionally, if she needed to get her bearings. Ideally, she wanted to travel completely silently, too. She placed the chain gently on the ground, and Remy gave it a look of disdain.