The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  For a moment, the world around her just melted away, and it was all worth it. All the running, all the screaming, all the blood. Every last drop; worth it just to have her boy hug her like this one more time.

  “Go,” Conny said sharply, pulling herself away, and Logan turned, sprinting after Andrew.

  Conny dropped her eyes to Remy, and pointed at her departing son. There was no need for conversation with the dog; his connection to her was almost psychic. He knew that she would follow when she could. He believed it at the core of his being.

  With a soft grunt, Remy charged away, closing the gap on Logan with each loping stride.

  Conny nodded to herself. If things were to end badly for her, at least Logan would have the best bodyguard a person could have. Remy would follow her last command until his dying breath.

  Tears stung her eyes.

  And she raced back up the dim stairwell.

  Into the light.

  *

  Bodies everywhere.

  A seething mass of flailing limbs burst past the spot where Mancini and the others hid, their own bodies still concealed—for the moment—by shrubbery. Dozens of the kids had apparently opted to hide when the shooting had first started, but at the sound of the recorded message from the guy they believed to be some sort of prophet, they bolted.

  And gunfire cut them down.

  Mancini watched with gritted teeth, and stayed in cover, peeking out through the branches.

  The chaos out in the garden gave him virtually no chance of assessing where the real danger lay from his position. Everywhere he looked, all he could see now was runners. Some made it, fleeing through the gate toward the clerics’ area, making their way toward the salvation of the distant ranch house. Many were chewed apart by bullets, their collapsing bodies causing others to stumble.

  Mancini felt an instinctive urge to join the runners as the chorus of panicked shrieks swept him up. He swallowed it back, forcing himself to remain still. There were times, in the heat of battle, when remaining stationary was the best course of action.

  He lifted a closed fist—a military wait gesture that he hoped the group of civilians behind him would understand, and silently watched the carnage, barely flinching as bodies riddled by bullets hit the deck just yards away from his position. Gradually, the number of initiates rushing past began to thin a little. Many had made it to safety, for now at least. There was a tunnel under the main ranch house that might even give them a shot at getting away altogether.

  Let the situation breathe, he thought, the words of his old drill sergeant echoing in his ears. The guys who rushed headlong toward danger without assessing it first were heroes, and they got their medals posthumously. Heroes don’t win wars. Soldiers do. Those were the words that had pulled Mancini safely through his time in the military. Words that had kept him alive.

  He waited a few seconds before he risked leaning out of cover.

  There were still stragglers fleeing through the garden, but the skeletal structures that had previously contained armed clerics were now empty. Either they had been torn apart, or they had simply decided that they were fighting a losing battle, and their best shot at survival was to run with the others.

  After a few seconds, he spotted a single cleric moving slower than the rest. Her expression almost beatific, she strolled through the trees at the centre of the garden, hip-firing into the receding crowd until her magazine was empty. She tossed the gun aside with something like a shrug, pulled a small knife from her pocket, and casually drove the blade into her right eye.

  Almost before her body hit the ground, gunfire started up again, farther away to the left, beyond Mancini’s sight.

  He ducked back into cover, his thoughts boiling over.

  Walked right into a fucking deathtrap, he thought. Fighting against an enemy I can’t see. Should have run when I had the chance.

  He glanced at Bellamy, who crouched right next to him with his eyes shut, and an expression plastered on his face that Mancini would almost have described as serene. He looked like some cheap carnival medium trying to establish an imaginary connection with the spirits.

  He’s trying to sense where the vampires are, Mancini realised, and felt a brief flicker of hope ignite in his gut.

  It was extinguished almost immediately. After a couple of seconds, Bellamy’s eyes flared open and he shook his head in frustration. “I guess I can’t do that, then,” he mumbled in a matter-of-fact tone that made Mancini want to wring his neck.

  What fucking good are you?

  Dan Bellamy was good in a direct confrontation with a vampire, at close quarters. But out here, with bullets flying, his psychic abilities were effectively useless. Being able to control the mind of a monster didn’t mean anything if the monster was determined to hide from view and use human puppets and conventional weaponry to fight its battles. Conny’s damn dog would have been more useful. He, at least, seemed to know when vampires were close.

  It was the same problem that Mancini had witnessed the British military struggling with in London, the same one that he imagined their US couterparts were currently encountering all over the country: the vampires refused to show up to the fight. They lurked on the periphery, inciting chaos and only wading into the fray themselves when they were certain of their victory. They threw people-shaped missiles at their enemies or they simply moved on, slinking away unseen, always striking where humans were at their weakest.

  Mancini shut his eyes once more, trying to block out everything but the sound of battle. There were less and less guns firing now: it didn’t sound like a gun battle. It sounded like a slaughter. Which meant that anyone still shooting was likely being directly controlled by vampires.

  How many?

  He breathed in.

  Out.

  In.

  Out.

  Trying to calm his nerves, to listen to the sound of battle beyond the thundering of his heart.

  Two guns firing? he thought.

  He waited a beat.

  No.

  One. One gun.

  He gave it a moment, expecting to hear more guns begin to rattle, but it didn’t happen. The remaining clerics with weapons had either died or fled. Any left in the buildings around the garden now were staying out of sight, hoping to ride out the insanity. One active shooter meant one puppet.

  One vampire.

  Mancini squinted at the garden.

  Where?

  After a moment, he saw movement, at the opposite end of the garden, but it was headed in his direction. A single cleric, ambling, that same vacant expression on his face that Mancini had seen on the puppet, moments earlier.

  The cleric would be on top of Mancini and the others in thirty seconds.

  Less.

  Dammit.

  Mancini was out of options.

  He hoisted his rifle, lining up the iron sight with his right eye, scanning the garden. He found the puppet almost immediately, and put the centre of his sight clean on the guy’s forehead.

  Squeezed the trigger once.

  Blasted the puppet’s brains through the back of his skull.

  It was a sixty-yard shot, at least, and though the vampire might have an idea of the general direction of the sound of gunfire, Mancini thought there was a more than decent chance that their hiding spot was still secure.

  The next move belonged to the vampire.

  Let the situation breathe.

  He held up a clenched fist once more.

  *

  Dan stared at Mancini’s clenched fist.

  It was like he could read his mind, without even having to take and control it. The ex-soldier had implicitly believed that a firefight was his specialty, but he had never been in a firefight like this, and now, having led the small group right to the heart of the massacre, he had frozen up.

  There was a very real threat out there somewhere, and Mancini’s execution of what looked like the last puppet had almost certainly given their position away. What was needed now was ac
tion, but all the American had to offer was that clenched fist.

  Mancini clearly didn’t know what to do next.

  But Dan did. The only way to discover where that threat was located, was for someone to step out into the open and become live bait. The sort of bait that a vampire couldn’t just assume control of.

  He considered moving out of cover. If the vampire was hiding in one of the buildings, would it attempt to break into his mind? Would it know that it would lose that fight, as others had before it?

  Dan’s heart pounded.

  If he stepped out, and the vampire was sitting in a building with a human under its control, he would be dead in moments. No amount of bizarre psychic power could stop a bullet if it came his way.

  No, it can’t be me.

  He turned away from Mancini, and came face-to-face with one of the four clerics, whose painfully wide eyes and fearful expression suggested that he was seriously considering flinging his weapon aside and fleeing after the departing crowd, taking his chances with the hail of bullets that might be unleashed in his direction if he dared to break cover.

  Judging by the looks on their faces, the rest of them were almost certainly considering the same thing.

  Heavy silence fell over the ranch; tension fell like rain. The air itself felt bloated, like it was waiting to see who would make the next move.

  We have to fight fire with fire, Dan thought. We have to become monsters just like them.

  I have to.

  He took a deep breath.

  Because nobody else can.

  Dan cleared his mind of everything but the rumbling background hum of the black river.

  Focused.

  And he drilled his gaze deep into the terrified cleric’s eyes.

  *

  Mancini flinched when the cleric appeared alongside him.

  “Get the fuck down,” he started to hiss, but the words died in his mouth. The cleric wasn’t creeping forward to get a better view. He was walking upright, almost nonchalantly, strolling out toward the centre of the garden like he didn’t have a care in the world. He didn’t even have his weapon raised.

  A puppet, Mancini thought, his mind reeling in horror.

  He turned, and saw Dan on his knees behind him with his eyes rolled back in his skull and blood beginning to leak from his nose. His gaze switched to Herb, who was apparently joining the dots at roughly the exact same time.

  Dan was in the cleric’s mind.

  Herb shook his head in dismay, and started to reach for Dan’s shoulder, but Mancini grabbed his hand.

  “No,” he whispered.

  “He’s going to get that kid kill—”

  “It’s too late, Rennick. It’s done.”

  Herb flushed angrily, and opened his mouth to spit out a response that would almost certainly be too loud, and would draw the wrong sort of attention.

  Mancini fixed him with a meaningful stare.

  “Bellyache about it later, Rennick. If you’re still alive. Right now, keep your sights trained on that kid,” he pointed at the cleric, who strolled casually toward the garden of corpses. “Watch for movement.”

  Herb’s eyes were filled with impotent fury.

  Mancini got it: what Bellamy had just done was obscene; inhuman. But right now, there was nowhere for Herb’s anger to go. He either swallowed it down like bad medicine, or he lost his shit and wound up dead.

  Mancini held Herb’s gaze a fraction of a second longer.

  Herb’s eyes flickered, and Mancini knew that he got it, too. Dan was out in front again, acting alone, following a strategy only he could see. Killing indiscriminately.

  Without another word, Mancini turned away, aiming his rifle at the cleric that Dan had just chosen to offer to the vampire.

  And waited.

  *

  Dan walked in the terrified cleric’s shoes, feeling every step. He tried to keep the young man’s movements natural, hoping that the vampire wouldn’t detect the ruse until it was too late.

  When the remote-controlled teenager reached the garden, he began to stalk around the perimeter, moving from building to building, leaning into each doorway and checking inside.

  The first couple of buildings were empty, but he fired the rifle anyway, pouring a short burst of bullets into the bare walls; making noise. Drawing attention.

  Somewhere inside the head that Dan had borrowed, the real cleric’s mind was shrieking in fear.

  Dan felt it too, that all-encompassing fear, despite the fact that it wasn’t his body in harm’s way: fifty yards back from the cleric’s position, his own pulse was racing, and he heard it like an echo running alongside the frantic kick drum-pound of the cleric’s heart.

  With each passing moment, he felt more and more like he was the cleric, and that Dan Bellamy was a distant dream.

  He kicked open a third door.

  Nothing.

  Once more, he unleashed some rounds before moving on to the next building.

  Time began to stretch out, and Dan began to wonder what the range on his ability was. Could he reach the far side of the vast garden and still maintain the connection?

  He kicked open the fourth door.

  And knew immediately.

  The smell hit him.

  A solid wall of it. Blood and ripped organs. Whoever had been in this building hadn’t died of gunshots, like all the others outside. They had been torn ap—

  Red eyes.

  Bursting through the shadowy interior, appearing right in front of the cleric.

  Trying to burn their way into his mind.

  And finding that it was already occupied.

  Dan watched those fearsome red eyes widen in understanding and something like fear, and then he saw the long, curved talons racing toward the cleric’s face—

  —my face—

  He opened his mouth to scream...

  —Not my face. The cleric—

  ...felt the bright star of pain explode as the vampire’s razor-sharp talons pierced his cheek, carving easily through his eye socket, drilling down into...

  The connection severed.

  Dan gasped out a ragged breath as his mind was returned abruptly to his own body. He had brought the pain back with him: the spearing, savage agony that had been the cleric’s final experience.

  The world pulsed; reality threatening to shift once more, promising to send him tumbling into a world of endless nightmares.

  I’m Dan.

  Dan Mancini.

  No…

  Bellamy?

  Darkness pulled at him with oily, insistent fingers. The river, begging him to return to it; to stay there and lose himself in its embrace. Singing a siren’s song. Offering sweet oblivion.

  Dan Bellamy.

  Dan resisted the lure of the river, biting down hard on his tongue, letting the sharp pain—the real pain—guide him back into the real world.

  In the real world, Dan was back inside his own body once more, and he was staring at the distant wooden building that he now knew the vampire was hiding inside. Trapped inside.

  “It’s in there!” he roared, lurching to his feet, pointing at the building.

  And he set off at a sprint.

  12

  “Straight ahead,” Conny yelled, pointing through the ranch house’s front door. “Then take a right. Look for the stairs leading down. Follow the others. Keep moving.”

  She stood on the wide front porch of the main house, repeating the words over and over like a mantra, her voice rising to do battle with Andrew Lloyd’s recorded message, which still played on a loop through speakers dotted around the compound. So far, she estimated that she had guided somewhere north of three hundred clerics and initiates in the right direction. By the time the kids reached her, none questioned who she was nor what she was telling them. They were propelled forward by sheer panic. She could probably have pointed them at the waiting jaws of an alligator and they would have sped right toward it.

  There were so many of them. So many children
who Craven had taken advantage of.

  She squinted toward the distant gate which led toward the clerics’ area. There were still bodies streaming through it, but many now were covered in blood, and some were clearly carrying injuries. Those ones must have been out there near the perimeter wall when the attack started.

  Soon, the numbers would surely thin.

  There was no sign yet of Herb, Dan and Mancini.

  Conny dropped her eyes to the radio that Herb had given her for a moment. It was quiet, the green on light blinking, waiting to receive word.

  Come on, Herb, Conny thought, waving the population of the ranch toward safety.

  Come on.

  *

  “It’s inside,” Dan whispered.

  Herb didn’t like it one bit.

  He stared at Dan dubiously, and couldn’t help but wonder if the guy would happily take his mind, too; if and when it suited him. If he would walk Herb’s body toward certain death and shrug it off like it was nothing.

  “Are you sure?” he breathed, trying to keep the anger he felt out of his voice.

  Dan nodded. He had come to a stop around fifteen yards short of a building that looked like a large storage shed. It was a single level, strictly functional. Four wooden walls and a roof, with a single doorway. No windows. The door stood open, and beyond the shaft of light that spilled through it, the space inside was wreathed in deep shadows.

  Herb took it in at a glance, and looked away quickly, afraid of what his eyes might find in the gloom.

  “I’m sure,” Dan muttered, never taking his eyes off the doorway. He wanted to see red eyes in that darkness, Herb thought, and he shuddered. “It tried to take control of the cleric,” Dan continued. “But you can’t control a mind that’s already taken.”

  Herb blinked, remembering what had happened back at the Shard in London. The vampires had sent an ordinary man to kill Dan alongside a luxury swimming pool, and Dan had been powerless to defend himself as blows had rained down on him. The vampire had already been inside the attacker’s head; there was no room in there for Dan, too. It had been a lesson learned while dangling on a cliff edge; the only way they seemed to ever learn anything real about the vampires.