The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)
Page 82
*
The air in the dark tunnel filled with rumbling thunder; the sound of Remy growling urgently.
It was the third time that Remy had alerted Conny to the close proximity of the vampire, and judging by the frantic manner in which Remy began to tug on his leash, it would be the last.
Sweat had soaked through the blindfold; it threatened to slip from Conny’s eyes at any moment.
Behind her, Logan’s grip on her vest tightened. She wanted to tell him that it would all be okay, that she would keep him safe, but she didn’t dare make a sound.
Didn’t want to lie.
This was a desperate plan, she thought. Hopeless; a hail-Mary thrown in the dark.
Click.
Click, click…
...click.
The vampire had paused somewhere ahead of her. Clearly, it could hear Remy growling, even as the dog’s voice became that plaintive whine instead. Was it sitting there in the dark, wondering what a dog was doing down here in the guts of the Earth? Was its vision so effective in the pitch-black that it could see her and Logan cowering there?
Was it, even now, grinning?
Wait, Conny thought. Wait. Listen.
She would get only one shot. She had to be sure of the direction, had to fire in a wide enough arc and pray that her bullets found the target.
Her finger curled around the trigger.
Wait.
She held her breath.
Clickclickclickclickclickclickclick—
*
Herb was drenched with sweat by the time he had half-rappelled-half-fallen down not one, but two long shafts that speared into the earth. Just when he thought the drop would never end, his feet touched down on something unexpectedly soft.
Not the ground.
A backpack, filled with climbing equipment.
Coulda left that at the fucking top, he thought.
He eased Dan off his shoulder, placing him gently on the ground, and rifled through the pack until he found an old ascender. He started to fix it to the line, flinching when Dan’s eyes flared open and his fingers clutched tightly at Herb’s calf.
“It’s here,” Dan hissed.
Herb shot a confused glance about him. He got the impression that he was standing in a huge space, big enough that when he shone his flashlight, he couldn’t even see the walls. For a moment, he felt bizarrely like was an astronaut on a spacewalk, hovering in endless nothing.
He saw no sign of trouble.
“Go,” Dan said urgently. “Go now. Climb! Shut your eyes and don’t look back.”
The urgency in Dan’s voice made Herb’s nerves quiver.
“Dan, I—”
“Go!” Dan screamed, striking out at Herb weakly. “GO!”
*
Conny shrieked as she pulled the trigger, the recoil of the M4 pushing her back into Logan, her own howl mirrored by Remy’s as she released her grip on his leash and heard him scampering away behind her.
Run, Rem, she thought, and her heart broke as she pictured Remy slowly starving, traipsing endlessly around the dark tunnels, crying by the side of her corpse. Alone.
Behind her, Remy paused, barking, a note of uncontrolled panic in his tone.
Logan’s grip on the back of her vest was gone.
And Conny lost her balance, hitting the deck hard.
Still firing.
*
Dan tore his gaze away from Herb, lost in his rage at last.
It was here.
He could feel its foul presence, close by.
The creature that had torn his life apart. That had torn the whole world apart. The very air stank of it; of age and death and suffering.
He started to crawl away from Herb, and tried to pull himself upright.
Collapsed back down.
And his mind flickered.
Her beautiful face, he thought. Talons reaching under her delicate chin. Starting to pull…
A huge sob ripped through his body, sending white-hot pain crashing into his mind, threatening to tear it apart.
I believe in you, Dan.
Elaine’s words, ringing in his head, cutting through the pain and the avalanche of memories that didn’t belong to him.
I know you can do it.
He clenched his jaw, pushing the agony aside, and pulled himself forward through the dark, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
Leaving the pain behind him.
And at last, he saw it.
It was real.
He was on the bank of the black river.
*
Mancini’s finger began to tremble when he heard the screeching in the night outside.
Jesus, he thought. There must be dozens of them.
Sweat beaded his brow.
His gun held thirty rounds, and he would literally be firing blind.
There was still time to get to the chopper.
Still time.
Every muscle in Mancini’s body tensed.
“Incoming,” he roared, and he shut out the world, listening only for the first sign of talons clicking on hard rock.
*
The vampire roared.
It was a noise that Conny had never heard one of them make before: a guttural cry of pain.
I hit it.
Click.
Conny’s heart almost gave out when she heard it, but it was just the click of the M4’s magazine. Empty.
Her nerves sizzled, but there was no sound other than Remy, still barking furiously, refusing to leave her.
She heard nothing of the vampire.
Did I kill it?
“Logan?” Conny yelled.
He didn’t respond.
“LOGAN!”
Conny let out a roar of her own, ripped from her throat by her frustration.
Logan wasn’t answering.
She couldn’t hear the vampire.
She had to take the blindfold off. Had to know what had happened.
Ripping the wet fabric from her face, she flicked on her flashlight, flooding a narrow passage with light.
And tried to piece together what her mind saw.
The vampire was twenty yards away, sliding toward her slowly on its belly. Bleeding, but still very much alive.
Looking straight at her.
Conny stared into the fearsome red eyes, expecting at any moment to feel her mind crumble, but it didn’t happen. The vampire kept on looking right at her.
She looked right back.
Paralysed by fear and uncertainty.
Until the truth unravelled in front of her. It couldn’t take her mind.
It had already taken another.
Conny turned slowly, by inches, terrified at the prospect of seeing what she knew was behind her.
Her boy.
Her beautiful boy, who had heard his mother fall and hadn’t been able to resist tearing off his blindfold.
Lifting a gun that looked enormous in his hands, cradled in those tiny fingers that had once whispered the meaning of life to her.
Aiming it at her face.
She met Logan’s gaze.
Pleading.
And saw hesitation in his eyes. Doubt.
He’s trying to fight it, Conny thought. He can fight it.
Tears streamed down Logan’s face. If he was able to fight the vampire’s control of his mind, it looked like it was a battle that he was slowly losing.
Something in Logan’s eyes began to crack, and his finger curled around the trigger of the Glock.
“Hold on, Lo,” she roared, fumbling at her M4, ejecting the magazine and jamming her hand into her pocket to retrieve another.
Coming up empty.
There wasn’t another.
*
Clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick—
“Fire!” Mancini roared, and the cave filled with a shattering symphony of gunfire.
He heard the screeches as the bullets hit home.
A human voice, to his right, crying out in terrible pain.
Didn’t need to.
His gun held thirty bullets, and the vampires were still coming.
He knew how this would end.
At least, he thought, I’m taking some of these bastards to Hell with me.
*
There was a presence to his right. Something forming in the water.
Becoming.
The river was taking on a solid shape, becoming a creature that looked like a prototype for the vampires it had spawned.
For he knew it, now. He understood. This was the wellspring from which the vampire species had sprung. The river wasn’t their ruler. It wasn’t their master.
It was their mother.
Dan hauled himself to his feet, and felt a stretching sensation in his gut. A deeply permanent tearing.
His life began to flicker, a million memories trying to cram into his mind all at once.
One journey left to make, he thought.
And as the liquid-vampire threw itself toward him, trying to claw him away from the oily water, he dropped face-first into the terrible black river.
It was in his skull, in his mind. A creature that had feasted on dinosaurs. If it had a name, it was Extinction. A foul, ancient evil.
An abomination.
Even now, it wanted to control him. It wanted his mind.
Dan gave it freely. All the pain, all the terror. All the rage and suffering. When the river pushed, he pushed back, driving himself down into its abhorrent consciousness like a blade, making it scream.
Making it feel pain. Tearing at it, clawing at it.
Ripping its dark soul apart.
*
The vampires in the cave shrieked as one, a mournful howl of anguish, lifting their voices in unison, like a choir of the damned.
Mancini’s eyes popped open in surprise, and the sight laid out before him made his jaw drop.
The cave was full of the monsters, two dozen at least, and they had all collapsed to the floor simultaneously, clutching at their heads, like their brains were exploding. They writhed in snarling agony, the humans in front of them forgotten.
“Now!” Mancini roared, and he reloaded his weapon.
And began the execution.
*
Conny’s eyes widened as the vampire pressed its hideous hands to its head and began to shriek.
She was still fumbling at her pocket, desperately hoping to find a magazine that didn’t exist, knowing in her heart that whatever strange force had incapacitated the vampire was temporary.
Her window of opportunity would close before she knew it, and she didn’t have a weapon.
But Logan did.
Conny flinched as the Glock roared, right above her head, making her ears ring.
The vampire had released its grip on Logan, unable to quite push itself into his mind before something else had torn its attention away.
Free at last, Logan strode past Conny, still firing. Emptying the gun into the twitching monster’s torso until there were no bullets left.
Even after the beast had fallen still, Logan kept aiming the gun at it. Kept on pulling the trigger.
Click.
Click.
Click.
*
Herb took Mancini’s hand gratefully, and let the big American take his whole weight.
“Jesus, Rennick. Ever thought about dieting?”
Herb was too tired to respond. When Mancini pulled him out of the abyss, he collapsed onto his back, panting.
“He did it,” Mancini said.
“Yeah,” Herb gasped. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
“We killed some,” Mancini said. “Seemed like whatever he did down there made ‘em lose their minds. For a while, at least.”
Herb tried to nod.
“There’s probably a lot of them still out there, though,” Mancini said.
Herb sat upright.
“Dan’s given us a chance. It’s more than we had before.”
“Huh. So what do we do now?”
Herb let that question settle on his mind for a moment.
“We do what they did,” he said. “Head underground; stay safe. Find others who can fight them. Other Hermetics. Learn how to fight them ourselves. We rebuild, and when the time is right to take back the world...we rise.”
Epilogue
Reality.
Dan’s eyes snapped open, drinking in the warm light spilling through the window onto the bed.
He smiled. At the other end of the apartment, he could hear Elaine in the kitchen, trying to mask the sound of her noisy attempts at making breakfast with an even noisier rendition of an old Madonna hit.
He shut his eyes, just listening.
It was all a dream, of course it was. Elaine was gone, and soon, Dan would be, too. He wasn’t in his bed; his body was in a cave somewhere far beneath the surface of Yellowstone, ripped and punctured, slowly dying.
That didn’t matter; he didn’t need it anymore.
His mind floated.
Let death come. He could wait.
In the meantime, he had the dream.
And, for once, it was better than reality.
Also by K.R. Griffiths
Wildfire Chronicles series:
Panic
Shock
Psychosis
Mutation
Trauma
Reaction
Other novels:
Survivor: A horror thriller
Last Resort
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Epilogue
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