“I’d probably just end up killing myself with it, Mancini,” Dan snarled, pushing the gun away and scanning the closet. “Or you.” His gaze landed on a large machete hanging from a rack inside the cupboard. “I’ll take that.”
Mancini rubbed at his forehead as Dan snatched up the machete, testing its weight.
“Fine,” he growled. “But you’ll take this, too. If you don’t want to use it, that’s your business, but you’ll fucking take it.”
Mancini pressed a handgun into Dan’s palm. He briefly considered refusing it, before deciding that his carrying a firearm would probably make Mancini and Herb feel better, even if he knew that his chances of actually hitting anything if it came to shooting were virtually zero. Hell, he hadn’t ever even been any good at ‘shoot ‘em up’ videogames; it hardly seemed likely that using the real thing would produce better results. The one and only time he had fired a gun, it had been at point-blank range, and the act of pulling the trigger had given him a seizure.
It didn’t hurt to carry it though, he decided. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
The weapon was surprisingly hefty: just carrying it made him feel a little unbalanced. And powerful.
He was reminded of watching a television show about army recruits in basic training. They were forced to undertake long hikes while weighed down by fifty pounds or more of equipment to acclimate their bodies to movement under a heavy load. And I feel weird just carrying this one little gun.
For a brief moment, Dan’s mind lingered on the fact that virtually all of his knowledge of the world had been gleaned either from watching the television or by poring over dubiously-sourced articles on the internet. Very little of it had come by way of actual experience, at least not until the last couple of days.
Now, he knew what it felt like to actually carry a gun; the subtle ways in which it altered your balance, the way just possessing the weapon stirred up nebulous sensations of invincibility.
He now knew what it meant to truly flee for your life.
He knew what it felt like to murder somebody; to be the monster.
Red eyes reflected in a dark window…
He grimaced, and tucked the gun into his waistband, at the small of his back.
Given the way the vampires had so efficiently disabled first Britain, and now America, it looked like the days of learning from television screens might soon be over. Soon enough, knowledge might be the prize that people won when—if—they survived.
The notion chilled him to his core. He had spat out that line about the Dark Ages without thinking, simply to emphasize a point, but suddenly it struck him as a very real possibility. If the vampires brought about the collapse of civilization, if they culled the majority of the planet’s human population, the knowledge that would be lost could be the most grievous casualty of all.
His mind lingered for a second on a future in which pockets of humanity remained after a war with the vampires, trying to rebuild over generations. On the possibility of the monsters retreating back into the ground and allowing themselves to become a myth once more.
How many times has that already happened? Dan thought. Once? More than once?
It couldn’t be allowed to happen again.
The machete came with a sheath that was really no more than a leather holster and clip wrapped around the short handle. Dan attached it to his belt, and found that it, too, was surprisingly heavy. Running with the cumbersome weight of the weapons would be awkward.
Mancini was still stuffing magazines into the pockets of his combat trousers. He, apparently, had no trouble with the idea of carrying a heavy load.
Herb pointed into the weapons locker, at a shelf loaded with pocket radios.
“What’s the range on those?”
Mancini shrugged.
“Never had to find out. Few miles, maybe more.”
Herb glared at him, but swept up a radio and slipped it into a pocket. He took another and raced back to the meeting room with it. Dan heard him yelling at Conny to stay in touch, and moments later, Herb returned.
“More shooting outside,” he gasped. “Lots more.”
Mancini grunted. He seemed more interested in deciding whether or not the item he had just retrieved from the cupboard was worth taking. Apparently it was: he slung it over his shoulder.
Jesus, Dan thought, are those grenades? The final item Mancini had picked up looked like a heavy duty sash loaded with munitions; something a Miss World hopeful might wear if she expected the judges to start shooting at the contestants.
“Which way, Mancini?” Herb said.
Mancini jabbed a finger down the corridor.
“Stairs at the end lead down. We’re on the third floor. Whoever is shooting, they don’t sound close. Maybe out near the perimeter wall, in the Outer Ring.”
“You think it’s a vampire?”
Mancini grimaced. “What else?”
He thumbed a lever on his rifle and checked down the sights. Was that a safety? Dan thought. Does the one he gave me have a safety?
Before he could ask, Mancini turned away from the cupboard full of weapons.
“Move,” he growled.
*
Mancini was the heaviest of the three men, but he was also moving the quickest, despite being older than either Herb or Dan by at least twenty years, and despite being weighed down by enough ordnance to make Rambo blush. By the time they reached the first floor of the ranch house, the American had already opened up a three-yard gap on Herb, and Dan trailed even farther behind.
Herb divided his attention between keeping his footing in the unfamiliar house and keeping an eye on Dan. The former artist wasn’t just slender, he was frail and unfit to boot. That, Herb supposed, was the inevitable result of hiding out in an apartment for a couple of years: when the time came to start running, the combination of withered, unused muscles and panic could only do so much.
Herb, by contrast, was fit and strong. He had been trained rigorously by his father from the moment he had taken his first steps: he could run for hours, and he could fight with a moderate degree of skill. He was a good shot, though no marksman. In every respect, he had no doubt that Mancini outclassed him, not that he would ever admit as much out loud.
“You good?” Herb said, easing up to match Dan’s pace.
Dan gave a single nod by way of response. He seemed to be focusing on his breathing, but the nod alone was enough to give Herb pause. The gesture said that physical exertion might not come naturally to Dan, but he wasn’t about to let that stop him.
There was something...steely in Dan’s eyes now. A resolve that didn’t seem to fit at all with the anxiety-riddled man that Herb had met just a day or so earlier. Herb hadn’t missed how Dan had smoothly taken control back in the meeting room, when everybody else—himself and Mancini included—looked about ready to lose their minds. Dan had shown a flicker of unexpected leadership ability back at Herb’s family mansion, too: taking charge when a vampire had attacked Herb and a handful of his father’s clerics in the dark, enormous kitchen.
Despite his physical—and perhaps his psychological—shortcomings, Dan was the reason that Herb had survived that encounter, and the other encounters that had followed. He had been wrong about the vampires concentrating on the ranch, but despite his mistakes he was still in credit as far as Herb was concerned. He had earned some faith.
But is he right about this black river?
Is it all in his head?
There wasn’t time to think about it. Herb returned his attention to the path ahead.
Down at ground level, he saw a few black-clad clerics either frozen in place, wearing stunned expressions, or racing through the large, wood-panelled rooms in a frenzy, apparently uncertain of which direction they should run. A couple carried weapons, and when they saw Mancini, they fell in behind him. Mancini waved an arm at them, silently beckoning them to follow.
Numbers, Herb thought darkly, remembering Conny’s bristling
anger at how casual Dan had seemed about the prospect of young lives being lost.
He wondered if the clerics had any idea what they were running to. Probably not. He doubted the people who ran the ranch allowed its population unfettered access to communications with the outside world; that was likely reserved only for rooms on the top floor of the ranch house; for the places where Craven and her advisors had made all the decisions.
The clerics probably didn’t even know what had happened in London, let alone what was unfolding throughout their own country at that very moment. Most likely, the brainwashed kids thought they were rushing to deal with some insurrection among the initiates, maybe even someone attempting an escape.
If they only knew, he thought, they would be running in the other direction.
A part of his mind pleaded with him that he, too, should be running away, but he shut it down. His family had started this: the chain of events that led to America being torn apart had been set in motion the moment the Oceanus had been allowed to leave its fancy dock in Portsmouth. Or, maybe, it was later: at the moment when Herb should have followed through on the promises he had made to himself, and refused to build the EMP device which crippled the cruise ship and allowed the monsters to be unleashed.
It was too late to run away now, that was clear. If the news reports he had just watched were correct, there was nowhere to run to, not really. The chaos would spread: the vampires would come, for everybody. Hiding out in a mountain fortress might well mean that he got to live out the rest of his days in relative peace, but what sort of days would they be? Isolated from whatever was left of humanity, watching the world disintegrate outside, slowly starving to death?
No, Dan was right.
Mancini knew it, too. Herb could see it written in the gruff American’s hard eyes. Mancini’s demeanour had changed even before the Grand Cleric had turned on those televisions. Maybe, until that point—until he saw that the vampires were killing everywhere—Mancini had believed that this was another war he could walk away from.
He knew different now. Their best shot at survival—maybe the human race’s best shot at survival—was to run toward the danger; to fight it. To meet it face-to-face and try to finish what they had started before the vampires scoured the Earth and left nothing worth fighting for.
Up ahead, Mancini burst through the ranch house’s front doors, swinging his weapon left and right once more.
“Clear,” he yelled. “Move!”
Mancini took off again, rocketing past a flatbed truck that Herb recognised as the one he had clambered aboard with his hands bound just an hour or so earlier. It felt like a lifetime ago already, yet it had been less than forty-eight hours since he had first set foot aboard the Oceanus. It was hard to believe that so much death and destruction could fit inside such a tight space. While running breathlessly for his life, charging from one disaster to the next and making all the wrong decisions, time for Herb had taken on a strange, malleable quality.
Forty-eight hours, he thought, glancing back at Dan once more.
The end of the world moves fast.
*
Remy was still growling.
Conny stood at the window and watched as a small group of men—some of them wearing the all-black that denoted them as clerics of the Order—charged from the building below her, moving at speed toward a high wall that encircled the main ranch house and the buildings closest to it, separating them from the rest of the ranch. Mancini was out in front, moving with a practiced ease, checking corners and waving at the others to follow. Conny watched, her nerves racing, until they disappeared from view.
At least whatever was happening out there—and it was a vampire attack, of course it was—was happening on the other side of that wall. Yet Conny had seen one of the creatures run up the near-vertical side of the Shard building without slowing a fraction. No wall would stop them, no matter how tall.
Maybe nothing can stop them, she thought, and dropped her eyes to her side. Remy was her only guide now, the closest thing she had to a radar. If his growl intensified, she knew the shit they were standing in was about to get deeper.
Remaining still was no longer an option.
“Good boy, Rem,” she muttered, darting away from the window and wrapping her hands in Andrew Lloyd’s ludicrous Halloween-costume robes. She yanked him from his seat, pulling his face just inches from her own.
“Time to snap out of it, Andrew. This is where you either start moving, or start dying. Do you hear me?”
Andrew nodded, his eyes wide and fearful.
“Good. Do you have some means of broadcasting to the whole ranch?”
“Y-yes. A loudspeaker system. We use it to announce—”
“Don’t care. You’re going to use it to announce that everybody here needs to run, got it? How many exits does this place have?”
Andrew’s eyes flickered before he responded.
“One. The main gate.”
“I was a police officer, Andrew.” Conny’s grip on the former Grand Cleric’s collar tightened. “I recognise the smell of bullshit. How many exits?”
“T-two. There’s one in the basement of this house. A tunnel. It leads out underneath the wall, toward the mountains.”
“Let me guess: Craven’s personal escape route, for her to use if the shit ever hit the fan in here.”
Andrew nodded, and Conny released her grip on him.
“We’re going to get to wherever you broadcast from, and you’re going to tell everyone at this ranch to head here immediately, got it? Everyone is using that tunnel, and we’re all going to the mountain.”
“Initiates aren’t permitted in the—,” Andrew began to splutter, but Conny silenced him with a look.
“One more word, and I let Remy do my talking for me. He hasn’t eaten since yesterday.”
Andrew dropped his eyes to Remy, who glared back at him, teeth bared. A throaty rumble still spilled from the dog’s lips, but so far he hadn’t given any indication that the trouble outside was moving any closer.
So far.
“We can b-broadcast from the ground floor,” Andrew said in a voice that shook wildly.
“Good,” Conny said. “Show me.”
Conny pushed Andrew out into the hallway and turned to face her son. His expression was still mutinous, still so resentful, but now his anger at her was mixed with fear.
It was the fear on Logan’s face that made her heart ache.
His safety was all that had ever mattered. Conny had raced through and below the burning streets of London with Remy, directly facing the vampires more than once, and all so that she could reach Logan at London Bridge Hospital; so she could ensure that he was safe.
And here they were.
The security of the ranch had only ever been a fleeting illusion, and it had been ripped away from her before she had even brought it fully into focus. Listening to the distant sound of gunfire, Conny could scarcely remember many times in her life when she had felt less secure.
Well, a couple.
Back in the tunnels.
Under the train carriage, waiting for them to see me and—
Remy pressed against Conny’s leg, snapping her back into the present. She blinked away the terrifying memory and dropped a hand onto his neck. The German Shepherd’s huge brown eyes flicked up to her for a moment, full of doubt, full of fear. He wouldn’t—or couldn’t—stop growling.
Remy had been utilised for crowd control back when the Metropolitan Police Force had existed; before it had been ripped apart in the dark tunnels of the London Underground system. Of all of them, the dog had probably been the least concerned about the sudden sound of gunfire and distant screaming. For him, that was par for the course. He wasn’t growling because he sensed violence in the air: he was growling because he sensed something far worse.
Conny scratched at his ears, the gesture as much to reassure herself as Remy. As long as she had the dog at her side, it felt like she still had a shot at keeping Logan alive.
Remy had saved her own life more than once—and his ability to sense the presence of vampires nearby was the reason any of the passengers who’d flown through the night on the Gulfstream had made it out of London’s Shard building in one piece. Without Remy’s intervention, Conny would have died when she had first encountered the vampires. It was the dog that had saved them, and now Conny had led both Remy and Logan out of the frying pan and right into a bloody volcano.
I should never have allowed myself to get tangled up in this madness. We should never have ended up here.
Conny grimaced, pulling herself away from an abyss of self-recrimination. She had to get moving.
She focused on Logan once more. The teenager clearly didn’t want to, but in his fear, he still looked to his mother for guidance, and was still willing to accept that she remained in charge.
He still needs me.
Some part of Conny was thrilled at that revelation; ecstatic even, but it was the selfish part. The part which for weeks had wanted Logan to let her back in, to stop blaming her for the terminal disease which was corrupting his cells. According to the initial diagnoses, Logan might still have ten good years of pain-free life left, but even if he had ten days or ten hours, Conny’s determination would not have wavered. Her son would not die at the hands of a bunch of brainwashed teenagers wielding rifles. He would not wind up being torn apart by the talons of a hideous monster which was supposed to exist only in some dumb horror movie.
She grabbed Logan’s hand, and for a brief, fleeting moment, a bright memory lit up her mind: the first time she had felt his fingers curl around hers, all those years earlier, at the hospital where she had given birth to him. The surprising strength with which his tiny digits had encircled her forefinger.
At that moment, she had understood that her only duty—her only point as a human being—was to keep this tiny person safe from harm.
He didn’t return her grip tightly now. Maybe his teenage pride wouldn’t let him. But he didn’t pull his hand away, either.
“Come on, Lo. We have to get out of here.”
Adrift (Book 3): Rising Page 11