The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  There had to be a fire escape. Had to be. Even if there was just a ladder leading down from the roof, they would be able to come up with something. If necessary, Herb would find some way to haul Dan down himself.

  If it comes to that.

  He listened intently, trying to gauge whether the monster was making its way up through the building. London Bridge Hospital was all-but empty according to Conny, its patients and staff evacuated almost entirely. If the vampire planned to search the hospital, it wouldn’t take long before it found its way past the deserted floors below.

  Or it might just decide that the building is empty and move on.

  He ran back out into the corridor, just as Conny and her son exited their room and began to head for the stairs.

  “We won’t be able to sneak past it,” he said, waving at them to turn around. “Go for the roof, and listen,” he grabbed Conny’s elbow, making sure he had her full attention, “these things are like Medusa, right? You know the story of Medusa?”

  Herb glanced from Conny to Logan. Both were nodding.

  “Don’t look directly at them. If you lock eyes with one of these things, your mind is gone, understand? Kill yourselves before you let that happen.”

  He tightened his grip on Conny’s arm until she flinched.

  “I’m serious. These things like to play with their food when they aren’t hungry, and I’m betting they’re pretty well fed right now. Head for the roof, look for a fire escape. I’ll be right behind you. I have a place nearby. If we can get to it, we’ll be safe.”

  He released Conny’s elbow.

  “Well, safe-ish.”

  He wished he could tell her more; explain that if she needed to, she should take her son and run without looking back, but there just wasn’t time. He sprinted to the double-doors which led to the stairs and elevators, and recoiled in horror.

  Glass.

  He hadn’t even thought to check. The doors to the stairwell were two panes of thick, floor-to-ceiling glass. He could bar the handles, but that trick had barely worked once before. And then the door had been made of sturdy wood.

  Gently, he pushed the left door open, prodding it with a shaking finger.

  He heard it immediately.

  The clicking of talons on the marble floor somewhere below him.

  It was in the stairwell, and it sounded like it was coming up, moving floor by floor.

  With a strangled yelp, Herb slammed the door and searched desperately for something to put through the handles. His eyes landed on a forearm crutch, and he snatched it up, his heart sinking in disappointment at how lightweight it felt. Flimsy aluminium; even as he slipped it between the door handles, he knew that it would not hold for long.

  Somewhere at the back of his mind a faint, nagging voice muttered that if his best plans always amounted to makeshift deadbolts, he would eventually run out of doors altogether. He ignored it, and scanned the rooms. Many were glass-walled, and he could see that there were still patients in several of them; those whose poor health made fleeing a virtual impossibility. There were a handful of fearful doctors and nurses, too, all of them staring at Herb like he was holding a bomb.

  There was no time to explain.

  “It’s coming. Run,” he snarled, and he took off toward the roof exit, not pausing to check whether anyone had heeded his warning. He had done all he could.

  The lock on the roof exit was smashed beyond repair where Herb had kicked it to get into the building. There was no way to seal or barricade the door from the outside. If there was no other way off the roof, he and the others would be faced with a stark choice: jump to their deaths, or be torn apart.

  Or taken.

  A violent shudder ran through him. Back on the Oceanus, he had been fully prepared to take his own life rather than let one of the monsters break into his mind, but that had been before he met Dan Bellamy. Now, Herb wasn’t sure he had it in him to jump from the roof if the vampire cornered him. There was too much at stake.

  Outside the broken door, three steps led up to the small helipad which Herb’s chopper had briefly ‘landed’ on before ploughing across the roof and finally coming to a halt only when it collided messily with the low wall which ran around the perimeter.

  He searched for the others frantically, and for a moment, when he couldn’t see them, his hopes rose a fraction. Maybe they had found a fire escape, and were already heading down to street level.

  He sprinted to the nearest edge, peering over it. The hospital overlooked the river, but it was a five storey drop, and the wide path below meant that even if they did jump, hitting the water was extremely unlikely. He turned away, and headed for the other side of the roof.

  And that faint flicker of hope crumbled.

  Conny’s voice, calling to him from the other side of the ruined helicopter toward the rear of the building.

  “There’s no way down,” she yelled.

  Herb paled, and sprinted toward her. Lawrence and Scott were standing alongside Conny’s kid, propping up Dan with fear plastered on their faces. Remy was staring up at Conny with an incredulous look in his eyes, like he was wondering how his human had managed to lead them to such a disastrous bolt-hole.

  Conny pointed toward the chopper, and after a moment, Herb saw it.

  The wall that he had crashed into had been home to a black metal ladder.

  A ladder which now rested where it had fallen on the street far below, mocking him.

  No way down.

  31

  Stay in the light!

  Mancini rocketed away from the intersection, aiming for the intermittent glow of streetlights, too afraid to look back. He trusted his ears to tell him whether the monster was gaining on them.

  His ears were full of bad news.

  Judging by the thunderous sound of the pursuit, he was trying to outrun a creature that could move like a damn cheetah. The team had a significant head start, but it sounded like it was eroding by the second.

  The vampire shrieked, the sound making Mancini’s blood freeze in his veins. The noise was an attempt to draw attention, he knew; the creature’s bid to get the fleeing humans to look in its direction.

  No chance.

  “This way,” he snarled, unwilling to turn to check whether the others had heard him, and he loosed a short burst from the MP5, shattering the front window of a restaurant which occupied a corner plot dead ahead. Inside, the lights were blazing cheerfully over empty tables and booths. It all looked so normal.

  Mancini pumped his legs, running like he was a teenager again, and when he was close enough, he threw himself forward, vaulting over the waist-high window sill and crashing across a table and into the warmly-lit dining area. His momentum carried him on.

  With a grunt, he rolled into a chair, and saw stars as one wooden leg impacted on his ribs. He gasped the pain away and hauled himself to his feet, throwing the flimsy furniture aside.

  As Burnley threw herself into the restaurant behind him, Mancini took off again.

  The lights of the restaurant might slow the vampire down. They wouldn’t stop it.

  He charged through the dining area into the kitchen to the rear of the building, slamming into a fire exit that led back outside.

  Kept running.

  Further ahead, across a narrow side street, he saw a car dealership. More lights, reflecting off the polished surfaces of eye-wateringly expensive sports cars. He fired the MP5 again, making straight for the shattering window, grimacing as he heard gunfire behind him. It sounded like someone—Montero, most likely—was laying down some covering fire, probably trying to dissuade the creature from following.

  He was wasting his time, and his bullets.

  Their only hope was to find somewhere that offered a sturdy wall to hide behind.

  He burst into the showroom, darting around a black Ferrari, and blasted out the next window. Beyond it, he saw something that gave him faint hope: an old church, standing at odds with the sleek glass skyscrapers that had sprung up
around it. The church had to be several hundred years old; its walls looked like thick, solid stone. Even better, the ground-level windows looked narrow—maybe even too narrow for a vampire to squeeze through.

  Burnley shot past him. With a clear run, she was the fastest by far.

  “The church,” Mancini panted as she passed, moving with a smooth fluidity. If anyone was going to make it, Mancini thought, it would be Burnley. He cursed his bulk, and tried to ignore the fire slowly building in his muscles.

  “On it,” Burnley yelled, and tore away from him, eating up the ground. Somewhere further back, Montero was still shooting, and Mancini risked a glance behind, his eyes landing first on Jeremy Pruitt, struggling to keep his sprint going. Behind Pruitt, Montero was firing wildly back through the car dealership, peppering the showroom with automatic fire. Maybe, Mancini thought, he was trying to hit one of the car’s fuel tanks and trigger an explosion, like in the movies.

  But this wasn’t a movie.

  Mancini didn’t glance at Pruitt as he huffed by him.

  “Get in the church,” Mancini muttered absently, his gaze fixed on the roof of the car dealership. He could have sworn he saw movement up there in the darkne—

  The vampire launched itself down onto Montero with a shriek.

  While Montero had been attempting to slow it down, the monster had simply scaled the building, traversing it in a matter of seconds. Montero was shooting at nothing.

  Mancini turned away as the creature landed on the man and the gunfire stopped abruptly.

  He didn’t wait to see the former SEAL die.

  He was already running.

  Fifty yards to the church entrance.

  He saw Burnley holding the heavy wooden door open, waving at him frantically.

  Forty yards.

  Saw Jeremy Pruitt disappear inside.

  Thirty yards.

  Saw Burnley’s eyes widening in horror as she began to close the door.

  Twenty yards.

  “No!” Mancini shrieked, and he emptied the submachine gun blindly over his own shoulder, praying that he might slow the monster which he knew was bearing down on him, closing with every stride.

  Ten yards.

  Click, click, click, click clickclickclickcli—

  With a desperate scream, Mancini hurled himself forward, aiming for the narrow gap as Burnley finally threw the door shut.

  His hip glanced off the wood painfully, and he landed heavily on a cold stone floor as Burnley barred the door and something heavy crunched into the other side a fraction of a second later.

  Mancini rolled onto his back, still screaming, slammed another magazine into the MP5 and scattered bullets at the inside of the door until the weapon clicked apologetically.

  When he released the trigger, and the echo of gunfire receded, he heard only silence.

  Mancini leapt to his feet, reloading and scanning the interior of the church.

  “Vampires, right?” Burnley said in a shaky voice. “They…uh…can’t go inside churches…right?”

  Jeremy Pruitt snorted.

  “Don’t bet on it,” Mancini replied, casting a glance around the huge interior of the church. The stained-glass windows looked too narrow for one of the vampires, but…

  The glass shattered as he looked at it, and he had the briefest impression of a dark shape and glowing red eyes peering in before he tore his gaze away.

  “Don’t look at it,” he roared, and ran for the back of the church. “Keep moving!”

  He felt the monster’s deadly gaze burning into his back the whole way.

  The church—or maybe cathedral was more accurate—was huge, much bigger than it had looked from the outside. Far above, delicate arches propped up a decorative ceiling, and there had to be seating for five hundred, at least. Lots of fabulously intricate and expensive ornamentation lined the walls, images depicting violence and bloodshed and reverence. In some ways, it wasn’t so different to the ranch back in Colorado. Different gods, same worship.

  Mancini led the others down the centre aisle, panting for air.

  To the rear of the building, there was a raised altar beneath a huge wall, filled with carved statues representing various bishops and saints. To either side of that were two wooden doors. Mancini slammed into the one on the right. Some sort of private chamber; a place for the bishop to relax between sermons, perhaps. More importantly, there was no way out. He turned, barging past Pruitt, and made for the opposite door. It opened onto a narrow corridor, with several smaller rooms and hallways branching from it, at least one of which looked to lead up to a bell tower.

  Mancini grimaced. It wouldn’t be long before the vampire made its way up there, and found a route into the church. He slammed the door to the base of the tower shut, searching for a key to lock it.

  Nothing.

  “Keep moving,” he snarled again, and ran through the gloomy corridors, searching for an alternative exit. He ran frantically from room to room, his fear increasing with each door that he tried. There surely had to be another way out.

  Somewhere above him, muted by thick stone walls, he heard the bell in the tower clanging, and adrenaline flooded his system. In a panic, he burst through several featureless doors blindly, until at last one spat him out into the night.

  And headlong into the site of another atrocity.

  He was standing across the street from the main entrance of a hospital, and there were corpses everywhere, chewed up and scattered across the street. Some wore uniforms marking them out as healthcare staff; others were clearly patients. Still others wore military clothing. The British Army, clearly, was having no more success when confronting the vampires than Mancini himself.

  The scale of the slaughter was almost incomprehensible. Mancini’s mind wanted to recoil in horror at the sight of so many torn bodies; to retreat to some warm, safe place and pretend that Hell wasn’t opening up all around him, but his instincts drove him on. He charged forward, feeling the terrible burning ache caused by the extended sprint beginning to weaken his thighs, and made straight for the hospital, with Burnley and Pruitt behind him.

  And a monster somewhere behind them.

  Beyond the hospital, he saw the building which Pruitt had pointed out as their destination looming. The Rennick apartment. Just a few hundred yards away.

  If they were lucky, Mancini thought as he streaked across the bloody road, the vampire might take a wrong turn in the church’s narrow labyrinth of stone corridors. Maybe it wouldn’t even be aware that they had found an exit, and would waste time searching the building, giving them enough time to lose it on the streets.

  If they were lucky.

  Mancini sprinted through the bloodbath with his jaw clenched, trying not to look at the corpses that littered the ground.

  Luck looked to be in short supply in London tonight.

  32

  Herb heard a soft thump somewhere behind him, and knew instinctively that the noise had been caused by Scott and Lawrence dropping Dan’s comatose body onto the flat roof.

  He could hardly blame them, really.

  He didn’t turn to check whether Dan was okay. His entire focus was taken by the doorway, and the steps leading down to the corridor beyond. He couldn’t see as far as the glass doors which he had barricaded, but the top floor of the hospital looked—and sounded—quiet. Those who remained—the most severely ill patients in their rooms and a handful of doctors and nurses—were apparently unharmed.

  So far, at least, there was no screaming.

  Herb turned away and scanned the rooftop again in growing frustration, hoping that he might see an adjacent roof that they might be able to jump to. There was nothing.

  “We have to go back inside,” he snapped at the others. “Find some other way down. Maybe the elevators—”

  “Too late,” Conny said.

  Herb turned to face her. The policewoman had one arm wrapped tightly around her son—who looked like he desperately wanted to struggle away from her—and pointed a
t Remy with the other.

  “Remy can sense them, or hear them. I don’t know. But it’s close. Getting closer.”

  Herb dropped his eyes to the dog. Remy stood at Conny’s feet; muscles tensed, startled eyes fixed on the same open doorway that Herb had studied moments earlier. As Herb watched, Remy began to edge backwards, and shot a pleading glance up at his master.

  The dog knew something was close, all right. The mutt looked as terrified as he thought it was possible for a dog to look.

  “Found a drainpipe!”

  Herb flinched as Scott hollered from the other side of the roof. When he turned to face the cleric, he saw that Scott was already swinging a leg over the low wall.

  There was, he supposed, little point in remaining quiet now.

  “We can’t get Bellamy down a fucking drainpipe,” Herb roared, but Scott simply shook his head and kept on climbing down. Herb could see Scott’s intention written across his face, and he didn’t hold it against him. The cleric simply wasn’t prepared to die for Dan Bellamy. Why should he be? The brainwashing that all those who were inducted into the Order underwent clearly wasn’t comprehensive enough. When faced with imminent death at the hands of one of the creatures they were supposed to worship, all that manufactured belief and loyalty just…crumbled away.

  His father would have been mortified at just how quickly the tiny empire he had built up had fallen apart. At any other time, that thought might have made Herb smile.

  Not now.

  Seething in frustration, Herb turned away and sprinted back to the roof access door, peering back down into the hospital. It still seemed quiet. The vampire hadn’t come through yet. Was it possible that the glass was strong enough to stop it?

  Why was nobody screaming?

  He crept halfway down the steps, and stopped dead, his heart hammering.

  At the far end of the corridor, the doctor who had stitched up Dan’s belly was walking toward the glass doors slowly, her arms outstretched, moving unsteadily, as though in a daze.

  Oh no, Herb thought, don’t do that—

  The doctor slid the aluminium crutch out from between the handles obligingly, and pulled the door open.