The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  He turned away from the dead girl, and came face to face with Mancini, who was gasping for air. Over the big American’s shoulder, Herb saw Dan Bellamy, chugging along at his own pace, his face expressionless. The horror splashed across the ranch in every direction barely seemed to matter to him: Herb wasn’t certain that Dan even saw it anymore.

  Suddenly, he wanted very much to grab Dan and shake him until his bones ached. To shake some damn humanity back into him.

  “Stupid, Rennick,” Mancini wheezed, sucking in a deep breath and spitting it back out. “Running like that? Could’ve got yourself killed.”

  Herb stared hateful daggers at the older man, lost in his fury.

  “Where’s the bloody exit, Mancini? Where is it?”

  Mancini shook his head and spat out a wad of phlegm onto the bloody ground. “In the house,” he gasped, with a nod at the bloodsoaked porch up ahead. “Ground floor, to the right. But, wait, Renn—”

  Herb didn’t hear any more.

  He was already running.

  *

  Conny’s mind played devious tricks on her.

  She moved through the tunnel in absolute darkness for what felt like a lifetime, certain that at any moment she would feel something sharp puncturing her back, ripping out her spine. She suffered intense, recurring visions of the vampire stalking along behind her, creeping and invisible, matching its footsteps to her own. Looming over her in the perfect dark with an enormous grin on its inhuman face, waiting for the right moment to tear her apart.

  It was letting her feel some faint flicker of hope, wasn’t it? Taking delight in letting her believe that she might escape, only to snatch her life away at the last moment.

  She coughed.

  Tried desperately to shake off her rising terror before it sucked away her ability to think at all.

  Tried the radio again.

  She had already tried it several times, and received no response. Either the radio didn’t work this deep underground, or Herb and the others were dead. Conny would have given anything to see them right now. Even Dan. Hell, even Mancini.

  Conny staggered on until the weight of the weapons she carried and the comatose girl on her shoulders began to take its toll.

  Need to stop, she thought.

  Can’t stop. Are you insane?

  Yeah, could be.

  She carried on, her pace slowing with every step, her muscles burning. She was a machine now, fuelled by pain, built only to put one foot in front of the other.

  Keep moving, she thought, repeating the words over and over like a prayer. Just. Keep. Moving.

  She almost screamed in relief when at last she saw dim light up ahead. The tunnel was curving gently, but she had to be near the exit, at last. The light in the distance was daylight.

  Salvation.

  No more tunnels, Conny thought, and almost laughed aloud. No more tunnels ever.

  When she finally rounded the bend in the rocky passage and exited into the brilliant afternoon light, Conny staggered forward a few more steps before collapsing to the ground.

  In the dust, she saw footprints, leading away to the west, and when her eyes followed them, she could just about make out the distant line of clerics and initiates moving away from her; a snake of bodies winding through the emptiness toward the forest, and beyond it, the mountains that were still a couple of miles away.

  Walking farther would be torture. It would be agony. But with clear air in her lungs and light on her face, she knew that she could make it.

  She threw her head back, drinking in the air, choking out the last of the dust she had inhaled back in the tunnel, and dreamed of water. A single cup of cool, clear water. At that moment, it would have been a treasure to rival any other. She would gladly have traded every weapon she had taken from the closet at the ranch for just one sip.

  Her eyes dropped to the M4 carbine slung across her shoulder. A beautiful piece of equipment; a flexible tool of choice for armed forces all over the world.

  Well, maybe not every weapon, she thought, and smiled to herself.

  It was time to get moving. The longer she sat in the sun, the more she dehydrated, and the farther away the line of distant refugees would get. If she lost sight of them altogether, she would be reduced to stumbling around in a forest blindly, trying to find an entrance that she was damn sure would be well concealed.

  She started to haul herself back to her feet, wincing, and froze, her eyes drawn back to the open mouth of the tunnel.

  Movement inside?

  Had the monster caught up to her?

  She squinted, her gut clenching.

  The movement was a product of her imagination, wasn’t it? A lingering echo of the fear that had drenched her spirits while she walked blindly in the dark?

  Better to be certain.

  She grunted, lifting herself fully upright and leaving the comatose girl on the ground, and moved back to the mouth of the tunnel, aiming the grenade launcher. It was a heavy weapon, and she would be glad to be rid of its weight, but she wasn’t about to dump it without it being useful one more time.

  The launcher held five more rounds.

  Whump-whump-whump-whump-whump.

  Conny pumped them all down the long, pitch-black passage, and pressed her lips together in satisfaction as the slightly staggered detonations brought the roof down, sealing it off forever under tons of solid rock.

  She tossed the empty launcher aside.

  And her radio crackled to life.

  *

  Herb breathed a huge sigh of relief when Conny answered. He had tried to reach her a half dozen times with no response over the past couple of minutes, and had just about resigned himself to the fact that she was dead.

  He wasn’t quite sure why he cared so much, given that there were dead people everywhere, and that virtually everyone he had come into contact with over the past couple of days had been snatched away from him, but the thought of Conny dying made a well of despair open up in his mind.

  It wasn’t that he liked her, he knew that, and it was clear that Conny had no romantic feelings for him either. Conny had to be fifteen years older than him at least, and if he had to characterise their relationship it would have been something like weary parent and troublesome child. Maybe that was it. Maybe she was the mother figure he had never really had.

  Or maybe it was because Conny, Logan, Remy and Dan were all that was left of home now. Perhaps because she had saved his life, and on more than one occasion had laughed with him, reminding him that there was still light in the world; that there still could be.

  Herb was fiercely loyal. He always had been. It was a quality that most would say was admirable, but when you found that most of your life had aligned you with monster-worshipping scumbags, loyalty sometimes proved to be a hindrance.

  It was Herb’s loyalty to his brothers—his steadfast refusal to turn his back on them and abandon the mission, no matter how much he had wanted to—that had brought about the destruction of the Oceanus in the first place. His loyalty to a security officer he had briefly bonded with on the ship had seen him almost burned alive as he tried to save the guy, unaware that he was already a corpse.

  His loyalty to Dan kept him moving forward, deeper into the madness of battle with the vampires, standing alongside the guy even as he slowly became something else for Herb to be afraid of.

  Hell, Herb wouldn’t admit it, but even Mancini had earned his loyalty.

  It struck Herb that only his loyalty to Conny did not bring with it a prospect of him getting punched, killed or mindfucked. She was an innocent swept up in the chaos, oblivious to the existence of either the vampires or the Order until a combination of Herb and Dan’s mistakes on the ship and chance had brought her into his orbit.

  Herb would be damned if fate pushing Conny into his destructive path would get her killed. Not if he could help it.

  “Good to hear your voice, Conny,” Herb said, laughing into the radio.

  Static buzzed.

&
nbsp; “Back at you, Herb. Thought you were dead.”

  “You too. Where are you?”

  “Just exited the tunnel. It’s...uh...not a tunnel anymore.”

  Herb laughed again. “I see that.”

  He was standing, along with Mancini, around halfway down the narrow, half-destroyed stairwell that the American claimed led down into the basement, and a tunnel that Jennifer Craven had built as an escape route for the oldest members of the Order, to use if things at the ranch ever got out of hand.

  At the bottom of the steps, the dark stairway terminated in a huge mound of rubble.

  Herb glanced back up the ruined stairs. Dan was at the top, standing guard. All three men had agreed that the stairway had the look and feel of a trap, but so far, no vampire or puppet had tried to sneak up on them from behind.

  Herb lifted his finger from the transmit button.

  “Anything, Dan?”

  Dan shook his head.

  “No movement. No vampire.”

  Somehow, despite the presence of death all around, Dan managed to sound pissed off about that.

  Herb hit the button again. “What happened, Conny? Where are you now?”

  While he waited for her to answer, Herb’s eyes dropped to the rubble below him, where something had momentarily seemed to reflect the faint light spilling down the basement steps. He squinted.

  “You see that, Mancini?” Herb pointed down.

  The radio crackled. “The vampire happened, Herb. I had to blow the tunnel.”

  Herb watched Mancini. The big American was nodding, his eyes narrowing.

  “I’m on the way to the bunker,” Conny continued. “Looks like I have a couple of miles to go yet. We got a lot of people out of there, Herb. We saved a lot of lives.”

  Herb took a couple of steps down, toward the rubble.

  “Okay, Conny. I’m glad you’re alright. We’re still ticking, but I don’t know yet what our next move is. If you see any sign of vampires, let us know, yeah? Stay in touch.”

  “Will do, Herb.”

  Herb started to drop the radio back into his pocket, but paused, remembering. He lifted it back to his lips.

  “Conny, I think the vampires can’t take minds in the light. It’s just a hunch, but it feels right. They need the shadows. So...stay in the light, okay?”

  Mancini shot a sharp glance at Herb, his expression undecipherable.

  “Got it, Herb. Be safe.”

  “You too. See you soon.”

  Herb slipped the radio back into his pocket and took another couple of steps down. He stood right in front of the rubble, peering down intently. After a moment, Mancini squeezed into the narrow space alongside him.

  “It’s blood,” Mancini said. “Black blood.”

  Herb nodded, crouching down. He reached out gingerly, running a finger through the small, wet stain he had spotted on the rubble. His forefinger came away sticky with thick black residue. It had the consistency of treacle. “Vampire blood,” he said, standing upright and peering at his stained finger, fascinated. “She must have brought the roof down right on top of it, pinned it under the rocks. It’s injured.”

  Mancini grunted.

  “Not badly enough to hold it here. A few spots of blood. Barely scratched it.”

  Herb studied the steps, hoping to see more blood leading up; a trail that they could follow. There was nothing.

  “So where is it now?” Mancini continued, apparently reading Herb’s mind.

  Herb began to climb back up the steps, his shoulders slumping. The vampire could have forged ahead, digging its way through and into the tunnel; it could have escaped back the way it had come, up into the house.

  “No way to know.”

  “Until it attacks us.”

  Herb had no response to that.

  15

  They were wasting time, and Dan’s irritation at the delay grew deeper with each passing moment.

  It had been a full half hour at least since Herb had found vampire blood in the rubble blocking the basement, and following a fraught and far-too-slow search of the ranch house and its immediate surroundings, they had discovered nothing other than dead teenagers.

  Herb and Mancini were continually slowed by the revolting scenes they encountered; the torn bodies and sightless eyes, and Dan wanted to scream at them to just get on with it.

  The vampire was gone. Either it had burrowed away and died of its injuries—which didn’t seem likely given how small the pool of blood in the rubble was—or it had fled from the ranch altogether. Either way, it wasn’t attacking—and that meant there was no way for the group to track it down.

  Every minute wasted staring at corpses was another step toward darkness.

  The three men were standing outside the ranch house. Dan glanced at the sun. It was a bright afternoon, but the October sun was deceptive. It was already dipping fast toward the western horizon, and he figured they had a couple of hours left before the light started to fade fast. Once night crossed America, the carnage that followed would be worse than anything the vampires had mustered so far.

  Herb had explained his theory about the vampires use of shadows; the reason they avoided the light, and both Dan and Mancini had agreed that it sounded plausible. Ever since he had discovered the existence of vampires, Dan had been keen to classify them among the planet’s other creatures, seeking out the characteristics that made them similar to certain animals or distinct from others. The creatures, he was certain, were not supernatural. Their behaviours—and even their psychic abilities—had a place in the real world. They were defence mechanisms; they were predatory instincts. The vampires weren’t the immortal gods that the Order had been led to believe all those centuries before. They ate, they slept, they bred. They hunted.

  That they used light—or the lack of it—to their advantage wasn’t surprising. They were the planet’s apex nocturnal predator, evolved to bend shadows to their benefit.

  All of which meant that delaying so that Herb and Mancini could wring their hands over the kids who’d lost their lives at the ranch was costing them precious minutes of daylight.

  At least for now, the vampires were confined to using puppets or attacking fast and falling back. Night would bring them out in force, and electricity had probably been cut off over most of the country by now. Just spotting the creatures in the dark would be a challenge; facing them directly, when they were in their element, would be near-impossible.

  “We can’t wait here,” Dan said stiffly. “If it was going to come back, it would have done so already. And if it went after Conny, I think we would have heard about it by now.”

  Neither Herb nor Mancini responded. Conny had given them regular updates on her progress via the radio. She hadn’t encountered the vampire.

  Herb’s radio crackled again, breaking the confused silence, and he pulled it out.

  “Conny?”

  “We’re almost at the mountain now, Herb. Still no sign of vampires. I might lose you when I go inside, but keep your radio with you, just in case. We have plenty of injuries to deal with, but everybody here is safe.”

  “Got it,” Herb said. “No sign of trouble here, either. I think we’re gonna have to go out looking for some.”

  Conny laughed. “Roger that. Be careful.”

  “Will do.” Herb dropped the radio back into his pocket, and turned to face Dan. “So...what’s the plan?”

  Dan lifted his eyes to the sky once more. It was so peaceful in Colorado.

  Because there’s nobody here to kill, he thought. Craven wanted isolation to hide her operation, but all this emptiness isn’t helping us now. We need to be where people are dying. Where the vampires are.

  “We need transport,” he said.

  Mancini arched an eyebrow.

  “To go where?”

  Dan thought back to the news broadcast. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since he watched it. He replayed the stories the horrified anchor had relayed, and conjured up a somewhat-fuzzy mental map o
f the United States. His knowledge of the country’s geography was limited: he had a vague idea where some of the fifty states were, and he could recognise a select few, like California or Texas, by their unusual shape. Beyond that, he knew roughly where the major cities and landmarks that usually appeared in movies or on TV were located, but not much else.

  “We know they attacked the Hoover Dam,” he said, staring at Mancini intently. “That’s Nevada, right? Not too far?”

  Mancini snorted.

  “Sure,” he said sarcastically, “just one state over; no problem. It’s not like Utah is big.” Mancini rolled his eyes. “This ain’t Britain, Bellamy. You can’t just drive across what you guys call counties in thirty minutes here. Vegas from where you’re standing is five hundred miles, easy. Probably closer to six. And that’s as the crow flies.”

  Dan swallowed a curse. Mancini was right. On Dan’s mental map, Nevada and Colorado looked close—almost right on top of each other—but he wasn’t taking into account the sheer size of the country. Close was relative.

  Six hundred miles? He thought. No chance of making it before nightfall.

  “What if we don’t drive? What about the jet?”

  “Needs a pilot.”

  Dan fought back the urge to reach out and shake Mancini in his frustration. The bigger man probably wouldn’t even feel it, anyway. He’d probably slap Dan to the ground without breaking a sweat. But Mancini wasn’t offering up solutions, just shooting down ideas, and the casual way he was torpedoing Dan’s suggestions and wasting time made anger burn in his gut.

  Anger that seemed to have set up a permanent home inside him now.

  He took a deep breath.

  He couldn’t be sure if it was the three days that had passed since he had last taken his medication, or his growing frustration at his own mistakes, but he seemed to be just one wrong word away from blind rage at any given moment.

  During the trial-and-error period of Dan’s treatment after the knife attack, when the doctors had been searching for the correct combination of meds to calm his mind, he had briefly taken a drug called Mirtazapine. One of the side effects had been rage, and Dan had suffered it badly for a short time, before the medication had ultimately been deemed unhelpful to him. It had been incredible to hear the vitriol that had spilled out of his mouth during that period, like he was a completely different person. Even Elaine had taken the brunt of his uncontrollable fury. When he had screamed at her one night over nothing at all, he had known for sure that Mirtazapine wasn’t for him, but the memory of that rage still burned bright.