The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  “Because I like you assholes so much?” Mancini sneered.

  “You’ll help because you know it is the right thing to do. Not morally. I think we both know you don’t possess much in the way of morals. Tactically. You’re a military man, and you know it’s the right thing to do if you want to live through this. Maybe the only way you survive. The vampires are going to rise, and I don’t see why it will be any different here to how it was in London. They’ll come for me. If we’re lucky, all of them. Everyone at the ranch is going to have to fight. It will be in everybody’s best interests to pull together. They need someone to give them orders. You said so yourself.”

  “If we’re lucky?” Mancini sounded incredulous.

  “Yeah,” Dan replied. “This might be our only chance to predict where they will be before they turn up, and we have a few hours of sunlight to prepare. If we miss this opportunity, if they move on to attacking other parts of the country, you might find it’s too late to fight at all.”

  Mancini didn’t respond. Dan figured he was probably weighing up the argument and coming to the conclusion that, as much as he disliked it, he was right.

  “So, what’s the deal with this ranch of yours?” Dan continued. “Can it be defended?”

  Mancini paused a moment more before replying.

  “Similar deal to what Rennick’s compound looked like,” he said at last. His tone was filled with heavy resignation. “Steel shutters, UV lights. Cameras, motion sensors. Plenty of weapons. But it’s a lot bigger. And sections of it are walled off, separating new initiates from ascended clerics. There’s a high wall running around the entire perimeter—”

  “To keep vampires out?” Dan interrupted. “That won’t be worth a damn.”

  “Naw, to keep initiates in,” Mancini said. It sounded like he was grinning now. “And to keep... others out. We’ve had people trying to document what happens at the ranch. And the government is interested, of course, but they have kept their distance so far. It’s not like they can just send the cops in. Not without starting a small war. But they’ve been trying to put the ranch under surveillance for years. Hasn’t got them anywhere.”

  He sounded proud. That, Dan guessed, had been one of Mancini’s primary roles at the ranch. He was head of security, after all. It was probably his main duty to ensure prying—human—eyes stayed out. No wonder he had seemed so unequipped to deal with vampires. Judging by the way Mancini had acted since meeting Dan, he hadn’t even believed the creatures existed until he came face-to-face with one.

  “What about explosives?” Herb said.

  “Sure, Rennick, we got plenty of stuff that goes bang. Why?”

  Herb paused a beat, apparently letting his train of thought run on.

  “We can rig the ranch. Lead them into a trap. We have the right bait, after all.”

  “Thanks, Herb.” Dan said, smiling into the hood.

  “You’re welcome. It might work, though,” Herb continued. He seemed to be warming to the idea. “Fire won’t kill them, but when I was aboard the ship, I saw an explosion hit one. The blast ripped its arm clean off. It was bleeding.”

  Dan considered Herb’s words. It was a desperate plan, but it was a plan. No matter how many people there were at the ranch, fighting the vampires with small arms would end only one way, even if everybody was prepared. But if he could somehow draw them all toward him and blow them up...

  We’ll kill some, he thought. Maybe a lot. But not the river. The river might be the only way to affect them all at once. And if we do blow them all up, I might never find it.

  Dan pondered that for a while. How much did the vampires rely on the control of the river? If this was some Hollywood movie, killing their leader might win the war at a single stroke before it began. Maybe, without their god, all the vampires would just keel over and die.

  Yeah, right, Dan thought. If this was a Hollywood movie. But it’s not.

  For what felt like a long time, nobody spoke. The truck had been travelling for around twenty minutes, Dan estimated. They surely weren’t far from their destination, now.

  It was Conny who finally broke the pensive silence.

  “You’re all forgetting something. The first attack in London happened around midday. Some kid at a supermarket. We all thought it was terrorism, or just some lunatic running amok with a knife. By mid-afternoon, people were dying on the underground. By the time the sun went down, the entire police force was already dead.”

  “Yeah,” Mancini said, “What’s your point?”

  “The point is that they didn’t just wait for nightfall. They don’t just come out at night. You should all understand that by now. They might prefer the darkness for whatever reason, but they’re not afraid of the light. It doesn’t stop them operating. You can make plans all you want, hoping they wait until sundown to strike, but if the vampires are rising in America, it’s probably already happening. Right now.”

  4

  In Clinton, Illinois, a thousand miles east of the ranch in Colorado and around a hundred and sixty miles south of Chicago, Ross Carney was about five paces away from his Toyota when he realised he’d left his ID card on the passenger seat.

  Ross muttered a curse—he was already late for work, a fact that his supervisor, Fred Darnell would not let pass without comment—and turned back, disengaging the central locking.

  Click.

  Click, click.

  He was just reaching for the door handle when the strange noise broke the silence and stopped him in his tracks. He cast a curious glance over his shoulder. He was alone, of course, yet just for a moment there he’d had the distinct impression—reinforced by that odd, distant clicking sound—of a presence somewhere behind him.

  He scanned the large, empty parking lot. The shadows gave up nothing. No hint of company. After a moment he returned his attention to his car, pulling the door open. There was no sign of his ID card on the seat.

  Dammit.

  He’d definitely had the card in his hands just minutes earlier. He’d flashed it at the armed guards on the front gate, receiving typically blank stares by way of response. If he had somehow lost his security pass, arriving for work a few minutes late would be the least of his problems. Fred Darnell would take great delight in issuing a formal warning, and Ross would have to figure some way to swallow it without giving in to the urge to wrap his hands around the bastard’s jowly neck and squeeze.

  Cursing again, he leaned into the car, patting at the shadows around and below the seat and letting out a relieved grunt when his fingers finally closed on plastic.

  Click.

  Ross frowned.

  There it was again. Still distant, but perhaps a little closer than before? Someone moving toward him?

  Straightening, he turned, putting his back to his vehicle and slipping his ID into his pants pocket. He peered out across the lot intently.

  “Hello?”

  No response.

  Which was exactly the response that Ross had expected. After all, his was one of only a handful of cars in the vast underground lot: the plant was on downtime for routine maintenance, and there was only a skeleton staff on duty. For Ross, though, downtime didn’t really exist: he was part of the cleaning crew, and in any nuclear power plant, the cleaning process never truly stopped. The giant structures were built with reinforced concrete that could withstand a direct impact from a passenger jet, but inside, in the building’s soft, vulnerable gut, even a grain of dirt getting into the generators could provoke a total shutdown. The cleaning crew painted walls and scrubbed at floors continuously, on a loop, fighting an eternal battle against a microscopic foe.

  He glanced around the lot once more. Empty.

  Ross shook his head and slammed the Toyota’s passenger door shut, far harder than was necessary. The car rocked in protest.

  Beep.

  Engaging the central locking, he started the short walk toward the distant stairwell that would take him from the third subterranean parking lot up to the surfac
e, his mind dreaming up pithy retorts to Fred Darnell’s inevitable better things to do today, Carney?

  Damn, he hated that bastard.

  Click.

  Click, click.

  Ross froze, and felt a sudden surge of anxiety as his mind jolted him back to his surroundings. The bizarre clicking noise definitely sounded like it was moving.

  “Is someone there?”

  No response, but this time the silence was unmistakably ominous. Heavy somehow, as if it hinted at some subtext that Ross was aware of, but could not decipher. He glanced back at his car, half-tempted to jump back inside it and lock the doors. To wait until some other folks showed up to keep him company.

  You’re being ridiculous, Carney.

  The voice in Ross’ head had a point. If someone had made it past the power plant’s formidable front-gate security with the intention of doing harm to either the company or its employees, why would they be waiting on the third basement level of the parking lot? And if there was someone out there who wished to do Ross himself harm—some unlikely assassin who specialised in hunting down life’s awkward nobodies—how could they possibly have known that he would show up to work late? Or that he would even park down here?

  Click…click.

  It sounded farther away this time.

  Ross blew out a long, slow breath and forced his tense shoulders to relax. The noise had to be mechanical or structural. Pipes, perhaps. Air-conditioning; whatever. The sort of noise the building made routinely, but which nobody would even notice when the lot was full of cars and people. Ross smiled to himself. That had to be it. He hadn’t slept well the previous night, and tiredness was making him paranoid, that was all. Making him perceive threat where there was none.

  You really are an asshole, Carney.

  He snorted out a quiet laugh, and started walking.

  The underground parking lot was creepy, though, he decided. He had never really noticed before just how creepy. The company had installed motion sensors to control the lights, ensuring that only those that were strictly necessary were ever in use—part of the company’s Greener Thinking initiative; a series of half-assed directives that were supposed to somehow offset the fact that it was a fucking power plant.

  Right now, Greener Thinking meant that the only part of the huge space which was currently lit was that which Ross himself had driven right under on his way in. A snake of illumination led straight to his car, the lights near the entrance ramp beginning to dim even now as they sensed no further movement. The rest of the lot outside that ghostly line of light was wreathed in shadows, and if Ross stood still too long, he would find himself in pitch-black darkness in a minute or two.

  There could be anyone out there. Unseen. Watching me—

  His skin prickled.

  Except that if there were somebody moving in the darkness, they would set off the lights.

  And who the fuck would want to sit down here and watch you, anyhow? Fred Darnell? Some secret admirer?

  You ain’t that pretty, Carney.

  Ross grinned to himself. He was being stupid; panicking for no reason. If there were some assailant out there in the gloom, the lights would flick on the moment they moved. The darkness wasn’t his enemy, it was his ally; it existed because he was alone.

  The strange clicking noise?

  It was nothing.

  Ross marched to the double-doors which opened into the stairwell, and threw them wide open. A head-height bulb on the wall to his right pinged on to welcome him, flooding his immediate vicinity with cold, sterile light. The stairs wound up through three flights toward the ground level, itself currently lost in thick shadows.

  Ross started to climb. The lights above would flare to life as he neared them.

  CLICK.

  He froze with his left foot between stairs, unbalanced.

  Holy shit.

  The clicking noise was loud in here, and somehow purposeful. It wasn’t muffled; didn’t sound like it emanated from the walls. Not structural, not mechanical. Whatever it was, it skittered. It responded.

  There’s something in here with me.

  The thought erupted into Ross’ mind, singular and massive, like a voice bellowing directly into his ear, and he felt a cold bead of sweat pop on his forehead. He didn’t think to examine the fact that in his mind, the who in the shadows had become the it in the shadows.

  He glanced up, through the winding steps which would take him past the next two sublevels. It was full-dark up there, but had he just seen movement? Some solid shadow moving in the gloom?

  How could that be? Unless whatever is up there is clinging to the damn ceiling, the motion sensors should pick up—

  The thought froze in his head.

  CRASH.

  Another noise. One that made all doubts collapse and the hair on Ross’ neck stand up.

  Glass smashing.

  He heard shards of it raining lightly down the stairwell, tinkling on the bare concrete steps; playing a dreadful melody that made his throat constrict.

  Whatever was up there had just taken out the lights on one of the levels above. A distant part of Ross’ brain shrieked at him to move, to turn and flee back toward his car, but his muscles refused to cooperate.

  It can move freely now—

  Click, click, click, CRASH.

  Another light broken.

  It’s coming down. Coming straight for me—

  Click, click, click.

  —and I won’t even be able to see it until it’s right on top of—

  Click, click,clickclickCLICKCLICK—

  Ross finally lost his balance, beginning to tumble backward a fraction of a second before something large and heavy hit him like a train, knocking him back down toward the pool of light at the bottom of the stairs. He hit the concrete floor, and two things happened simultaneously: a spear of pain lanced into his lower back at the impact, and the sound of glass smashing repeated once more as the thing in the stairwell took out the remaining light, plunging the space into bottomless darkness.

  Despite the searing pain, Ross knew instinctively that the darkness was worse than the fall. What it meant.

  Laying on his back, trying to draw in a breath which felt like a hot knife in his throat, Ross felt rather than saw something huge looming over him; some enormous presence. When he opened his eyes at last, his curiosity briefly overcoming his fear, he saw that there was some light in the stairwell after all.

  A faint crimson glow.

  Illumination cast by the two red eyes which hovered directly over his own, the terrifying stare which seemed to pierce down through him, lodging itself deep into his brain like a needle. The force of the stare, drilling down into him, felt like it pulverised a vast part of his mind, smearing it across the inside of his skull like putty.

  Ross opened his mouth to scream.

  Almost managed it.

  Whatever was left of Ross’ mind braced itself for the tearing of those terrible teeth, praying that death would come quickly.

  But it wouldn’t.

  Instead, Ross’ body rose, and began to robotically climb the stairwell. He was no more than a passenger as his legs carried him into the power plant, past the banks of ancient equipment that ran the place, looking like a bad set from an old Star Trek episode.

  He walked right past Fred Darnell, who glanced knowingly at his wristwatch.

  “Better things to do today, Carney?”

  Ross wanted to say something. Anything.

  Couldn’t.

  Without a word, his expression not even registering the contemptuous, baffled look his supervisor shot his way, Ross’ body made its way toward the generators; toward their fragile innards. Externally, the power plant was a tank. Inside, a delicate flower. A fine balance that had to be maintained at all times.

  A balance that Ross Carney’s hands would work furiously to disrupt, while somewhere inside his head, locked away behind invisible bars, his soul screamed endlessly.

  5

  The Cra
ven ranch was a blemish on the barren Colorado landscape; a human stain on nature’s perfect canvas.

  Set against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains, with the dense foliage of the White River National Park nestling against its northern perimeter, the ranch existed in near-total isolation, with no sign of civilization apparent for thirty miles in any direction. Only a single winding track—only the most charitable observer could label it a road—offered any indication at all that there might be something to see in this part of the country. Yet the track was little more than a scratch in the dirt, really, and only those few who knew to search for it would ever truly see it. Fewer still would even consider attempting to steer a vehicle along its treacherous length.

  Where the Rennick family had been forced to carve out a hiding spot for their compound at the heart of a thick forest in the overcrowded south east of England, the Cravens had encountered no such difficulty. The vastness of America handed them obscurity on a plate.

  Hundreds of years earlier, the Craven compound had begun life as a single large ranch house surrounded by smaller farm buildings, growing slowly over time until recent years, when it had swelled up like an out-of-control infection.

  Roughly circular in shape, and with a high wall that ran around the entire circumference, the ranch was comprised of three main areas. The largest, the initiates’ area, was at the edge of the circle.

  There, widely-spaced, single-level buildings provided a home for the new recruits, as well as training and recreation areas. The initiates’ area, which those at the ranch called the Outer Ring, was the newest part, and it was still a work-in-progress, always building. One of Jennifer Craven’s key methods for instilling loyalty was to put new faces to work on constructing their own homes and infrastructure. Making them feel invested in their new home. It made the eventual realisation that they were serving a strange new religion all the easier to take.

  Beyond the Outer Ring, the road led to another wall, and to the clerics’ area. Only those who had passed the Ascension Test—murdering one of their fellow initiates in a grim re-enactment of a medieval duel—lived in that part of the ranch; all wore the tell-tale black robes that marked them out as true believers. Yet even they didn’t know the whole story, not even close. The truth—or, at least, what Craven and her forebears had believed to be the truth—was reserved only for those in the inner circle, who lived in or around the old ranch house, at the heart of the settlement.