The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River

by K. R. Griffiths

  Because it can see just fine, Elaine thought abruptly, and she knew it was true. Knew it deep in her gut. Plenty of animals had excellent night vision. It was one area where the human body was sorely lacking. Evolution hadn't given mankind the ability to see in the dark, because it hadn't needed to. Humans had enough advantages; they were at the top of the food chain as it was.

  Or at least, they were supposed to be.

  Elaine's breath came in ragged, shallow gasps, and her feet began to move more quickly despite her inability to see.

  Panic was taking over, she realised. Dulling her ability to think and forcing her to move quicker and quicker despite her blindness.

  She was just about to give in to the overwhelming fear and sprint forward when she saw another flash of lightning illuminating the hallway up ahead. There had to be a window nearby, and that meant she was close to the exterior of the ship once more. Close to the cabins that might offer her a place to hide. She committed the scene in front of her to memory as the light faded: about twenty yards forward, then left.

  And then she ran.

  29

  Katie was still clutching Dan's hand, though she was no longer tugging him along impatiently. Movement now was a matter of balancing speed and terror, and the latter was winning. When they crept from the closet, they moved with aching slowness, and stopped dead every few yards when they heard distant screaming.

  It sounded like the creatures were moving through the decks, massacring what remained of the passengers.

  At one point, Katie froze and squeezed Dan’s hand in a crushing grip when screams drifted down from directly above them: a cacophony of confusion and pain and horror.

  "It's in the bridge," she whispered.

  Dan tried not to picture the strange creature erupting into the mass of bodies gathered in the bridge.

  Almost managed it.

  They hurried their steps a little, putting the shrieks of agony behind them, moving around the edge of the park warily until Katie pulled Dan to the left, entering a mall area. Dan was grateful to put some walls around himself again: out in the open he had felt horribly exposed. Almost as blind as he had been in the supply closet, but knowing that there was open space all around him; that something could be lurking just yards away and he would not see it until it was far too late.

  With each step they had taken around the park, he had expected to feel sharp claws tearing into his flesh at any moment. The smell hadn’t helped: although he couldn’t see the ruined corpses that littered the park, the metallic stink of blood was heavy in the air, and the images his mind conjured up were probably even worse than the reality. Beneath his feet, the floor was wet and slippery.

  He tried vainly to persuade himself that was just the rain.

  They were both soaked by the time they entered the shopping area that bordered the park.

  The mall was a part of Park Avenue, which stretched right around one side of the ship, selling designer clothes mainly, along with gifts. The section that Katie aimed for contained a half-dozen shops and a couple of tiny water fountains that had been stilled when the power died.

  Once they were inside the mall, Katie paused, and they both listened intently. It sounded quiet, but not quite silent.

  Somewhere up ahead, Dan heard heavy breathing. A bubbling choke.

  A moan of pain split the darkness, and made them both jump.

  "Somebody's injured," Katie whispered.

  Dan was amazed to find himself thinking that other people's injuries were none of his business, and that every second they dallied in the mall was another chance to run into one of the creatures that had massacred the passengers.

  Did it really take only minutes to become a callous, heartless bastard? At what point did fear of people become misanthropy?

  "We have to help them," Katie said, and Dan grunted softly, still debating in his mind whether he had the confidence to tell Katie that the injured person was none of his concern.

  He let her lead him along until the debate became moot. They followed the noise, until it sounded like they were only a few feet away, and Katie hissed into the darkness.

  "Hey, are you okay?"

  A man's voice whimpered in response.

  "Over here," Katie said, and took a few paces forward.

  Dan felt the blood under his feet almost immediately, and when he stepped on a leg, he muttered an apology before realising that the injured man was still a couple of paces away. He felt around with his foot.

  Definitely a leg.

  Just not attached to a body.

  Dan's stomach heaved, and he was glad of the darkness as he clapped a hand over his mouth and choked down the urge to vomit.

  Katie let go of his hand.

  "Oh shit," she breathed.

  "It's bad," the injured man stammered. It wasn't a question. "It ripped me open. I can still feel it inside me. I can feel it in my head."

  The man laughed, and Dan’s fear ramped up to a whole new level.

  "We can't move him," Katie said firmly, and Dan felt despair well up inside him. Callous or not, he had a feeling that this might not be the only injured person they would come across. He pictured stumbling across dozens of injured passengers, all of them needing help; all of them unmovable.

  All of them standing between him and Elaine.

  This is hopeless. We have to leave him.

  "Kill me, please," the man half-whimpered, half-giggled. "You have to kill me; you have to make it stop."

  "You can't think like that—" Katie started to say, but the man interrupted her, snapping with surprising conviction.

  "You don't understand," he growled. "It's inside my head. You have to kill me. Or give me something I can use; I'll do it myself."

  The man snarled the last in a tone that Dan thought almost sounded like eagerness, before lapsing back into shallow, wet wheezing.

  Dan had taken a couple of steps backwards, stunned at the sudden ferocity in the injured man's tone. When Katie grabbed him, he let out a small yelp. The bravado he'd felt in the cupboard; the adrenaline rush of surviving the encounter with the creature, seemed to be fading away rapidly, leaving him feeling weak and dizzy.

  "We can't help him," Dan said in a faltering voice. "We can't even see what his injuries are."

  "So…what?" Katie snapped, "We kill him?"

  "I can't kill anybody," Dan moaned. "Look, I get that you have to do your job. If you need to stay and help him—"

  "Don't give me that shit," Katie said hotly. "I'm pretty sure my job is finished. This is nothing to do with that. This about the fact that we are human beings, and there is a guy in agony here that needs our help."

  "What would you have us—"

  "Just fucking kill me," the injured man roared. The words twisted into a hideous scream, and Dan's nerves crawled with terror.

  "Shut up," he hissed frantically. "They'll hear you, shut up."

  The injured man sucked in a lungful of air and screamed again; a shriek that became a high-pitched giggle. Dan thought it was the sound of madness; the sound of a mind snapping. Maybe the pain, or the horror of what had been done to him. It didn't matter. The bastard was wailing like a siren, and Dan didn't think it would be long before he drew the wrong sort of attention.

  He moved on autopilot.

  Lifting the broom.

  Swinging it at the noise the man made.

  Feeling the crunching impact.

  Wincing in disgust at the way it felt.

  Swinging it again.

  And again.

  Until the screaming stopped.

  When it was done, Dan let the broom fall from trembling fingers. He wasn't a violent guy; never had been. Even when he was a kid at school, fighting was something he studiously avoided. He got picked on sometimes, as the kids who generally had their heads stuck in books sometimes did, but he endured the mockery and the occasional shove in the playground with a smile. He couldn't remember hitting anyone in his entire life.

  And now
he had killed a man on the first day of his honeymoon.

  Not for the first time, Dan cursed his decision to ever leave the safety of his house. The world outside had terrified him before; all that had changed in the two years he had spent hiding away from it was that now he knew that his fear of the world had been justified.

  "You killed him," Katie started to say in an accusatory tone, but the words dried up when another shriek split the night.

  A noise that could not possibly have come from a human throat. It sounded almost like the whine of a circular saw, powering up to an ear shattering howl before fading away again.

  The silence the shriek left behind felt different than it had before. Darker, somehow.

  And then they were moving again, Katie pulling Dan along by his limp hand as his thoughts tossed and roiled on the dark river that ran through his mind. As they entered the ship, and Dan felt the huge space around him narrowing to a small corridor, he heard a wheezing choke somewhere behind him and knew that what he had done to the man had been far worse than murder.

  The broom had been lightweight, after all. Not a weapon to kill a man with; even an already injured one.

  He was still alive.

  Dan had stumbled up one flight of stairs and was halfway up the next when he heard the man scream once more in the distance.

  Just once.

  *

  The Les Aventure restaurant seated a hundred diners in the finest luxury imaginable. It was one of a handful of eateries on the Oceanus that required booking to be made in advance, and no passengers were allowed to eat there two nights in a row, in order to ensure that everybody had a chance to sample the world class cuisine served up by a chef who'd had a brief stint on television several years earlier.

  Dan smelled the blood as soon as Katie led him inside. There were other smells; exotic spices and meats that made his mouth water and left him with an overpowering urge to vomit. Somehow, despite everything that had happened, his stomach was craving food.

  Just biology, carrying on as though nothing was amiss.

  He couldn't help it. The journey through the park and the encounter with the injured man had already left him queasy. The smell of food, mixed right in with the stink of death, finally overcame his resistance, and he retched loudly. When he finally came up for air, after spitting out a thin string of acidic bile, he was struck by the notion that he had taken a young lady to a fancy restaurant, and had pissed himself and thrown up in the process.

  Terrible date, he thought, and he giggled.

  Actually giggled.

  The sound of it in the darkness was almost more terrifying than all the other dreadful noises he had already heard. That giggle was the sound of madness, cracking open his mind with a crowbar and trying to force its way in.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, and focused on his breathing, just as he had with Katie. He tried to picture himself standing in the terminus, breathing in and out, controlling his anxiety.

  It all seemed laughably far away now; the fears that had crippled him for so long rendered petty and irrelevant. He had lived in fear for such a long time, almost growing used to it; wearing it like a comfortable shirt, yet the things that had terrified him meant nothing; not when there was real fear out there in the world. Real fear that came complete with talons and the coppery stench of blood.

  A semblance of calm returned, and he opened his eyes.

  And saw Katie, bathed in the glow of a candle.

  "Matches behind the bar," she said, as if an explanation for the sudden appearance of light were required.

  Dan looked at her face, and saw the terror he had been feeling mirrored there. Katie’s pretty features were pale and tear-streaked, her eyes wide and a little unfocused. He guessed that maybe she was having the same sort of trouble he had been: trying to keep the catastrophic images branded onto her brain at bay.

  Katie’s face was etched with concern as she looked at him, and Dan knew that was because of the bizarre giggle that had escaped his lips. He met her eyes and nodded reassuringly, hoping that the gesture conveyed that he was okay; uncertain whether it was a lie or not.

  The light helped, a little. Just having something to focus on, something other than darkness, made Dan feel better and helped him to banish thoughts of blood and violence to the back of his mind. Being able to see again was like dropping an anchor into reality.

  Yet as soon as he saw the warm glow of the candle, he knew that they needed more.

  "We're going to need more than light," he said suddenly, surprising himself again with how confident he sounded. How clear and purposeful.

  Katie's brow furrowed.

  "I don't know what the hell is happening on this ship," Dan continued, "but as long as those things are aboard, all we're going to do is keep running in circles until they pick us off."

  "What about your wife?"

  "We'll go to the cabins," Dan said with a firm nod. "But first, this place has to have a kitchen, right?"

  "Sure," Katie said uncertainly.

  "Good. We'll go there first. We're going to need weapons. Knives; anything. We can't outrun this, and I'm not sure we can hide, either. At some point, I think we’re going to have to fight."

  Dan couldn't believe it was his own voice that he heard.

  Maybe I did just lose my mind after all. Maybe I puked it right out.

  "We're going to have to fight," he said again, firming up his tone a little so that it didn’t sound quite so obvious that he was trying to persuade himself.

  "Smart," a man’s voice said quietly, making Dan jump. "And yet, very stupid at the same time."

  Dan turned in the direction of the voice, and squinted, trying to see beyond the feeble glow of the candle held in Katie's trembling hands.

  "Who's there?" Dan said, trying to bolster his tone with a little steel and failing miserably.

  The man who had spoken shuffled toward them slowly, limping heavily. In the half-light, Dan saw a dark blood stain that covered his right thigh.

  "Edgar Rennick," the man said with a nod. "I guess I'm here to help you fight some vampires."

  *

  "Fuck," Mark spat as the screams died above him. The three security men were Vega's guys; probably the closest thing the ex-marine had on the Oceanus to friends, and Mark wouldn't miss them in the slightest, but their departure had left him with only one gun, and he'd already wasted three of the bullets.

  And Vega had wasted another.

  "Thirteen rounds left," he muttered to himself, checking that the gun was still safely tucked into his waistband.

  "Just make sure you save two," Herb said darkly, and Mark felt a surge of impatience that just kept on rising until it reached a dizzying crescendo. It all hit him at once, Vega blowing his own head off, the death of a man that predictably came with trying to drop from one deck of the ship to another in perilous conditions; Herb's ridiculous vampire story, the thing that had tried relentlessly to break into the conference room, the endless darkness. The storm. The damn ship itself.

  This wasn't how things were meant to be going. Right now, Mark was supposed to be ending his shift and heading to one of the bars where, if he was lucky, he'd find some young single women who appreciated a man in uniform. Hell, maybe he would even have asked Katie to join him for a drink, and maybe she would have agreed.

  The worst thing he was supposed to face on the Oceanus was a stern rebuke for socialising in the out-of-bounds passenger areas.

  Instead he was soaked and terrified, in the company of a terrorist or a lunatic or both; carrying a dead man's gun and blindly running from something that couldn't possibly exist. It all swilled around in his mind until the noise of it deafened his thoughts and left him trembling with anger.

  "Enough," he roared. "Enough of your bullshit, and your cryptic comments. I plan to get off this ship, and you're going to help me do it, or so help me God, I'll..."

  "Kill me?" Herb finished in an amused tone. "Already gave you the chance to do that, and you refused
, remember?"

  Mark sucked in a deep breath, and forced himself to calm down when he realised that he had bunched both fists and was preparing to start swinging. He didn't understand what was happening on the Oceanus—not one single fucking bit of it—but he could not shake the feeling that Herb was his ticket off the ship. At the very least, Herb was the man who would help him understand, and understanding was surely the first step.

  "Why did you try to warn me, then?" Mark snarled. "Back in climate control. Why try to help me if this situation is so fucked?"

  Herb didn't respond for a moment.

  "I don't know," he said finally. "I wanted to do something good. To save someone, maybe even stop it all somehow. It's too late now. It doesn't matter."

  The resignation in Herb's voice somehow made Mark even angrier, but the impulse that he felt, the genetically hard-wired urge to start throwing punches, would not help. He let the anger leak away, sucking in deep, calming breaths, and tried to think clearly.

  "What if we take a lifeboat?" Mark said suddenly. He couldn't believe he hadn't thought of it before. The Oceanus held enough lifeboats to carry thousands of passengers to safety, each large enough in its own right to withstand the waves of the Atlantic until help arrived.

  "No survivors, remember? Herb said. "No witnesses. My father's ship is out there. It's not a warship, exactly, but he's done his best to turn it into one, and his best involves a lot of money. He'll fire on anyone trying to leave the Oceanus, and he is fully prepared to search for survivors when this is done and ensure that word of what happened here never reaches dry land."

  Mark seethed in frustration as another idea crashed and burned.

  "So what's your plan?" he barked.

  "My plan?" Herb said. His tone suggested he hadn't thought about it. "My plans are toppling like dominoes. Plan A was to try and stop all this madness before it even started. Plan B was to be on that chopper if Plan A failed. Plan C involved you putting a bullet in my head."

  Herb grunted amusement at his own words.

  "I'm not sure my plans are worth all that much."