The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River

by K. R. Griffiths

  He cast the thought aside, and headed straight to the bar and began to search through the crates and boxes stored behind it.

  The glow sticks were scale model affairs, too: not much bigger than drinking straws. They wouldn't emit much light, but as things stood, they were a step up on the lighter and the seemingly endless darkness. He snapped one and shook it until soft blue light flooded the bar and nodded, satisfied.

  Mark stuffed a fistful of the glow sticks into a pocket and slid the box along the bar to Herb, who took a few and nodded, before returning his focus to the bottle of Jack Daniel's he was trying to open. When the cap came off the bottle, he took a long slug and offered it to Mark.

  Mark shook his head.

  "You sure?" Herb said. "You know, there's every chance this will be the last drink you ever get to take. And I don't know about you, but my nerves could use a little calming."

  Mark shook his head again.

  "I think it's better if I keep a clear head," he said curtly. "Besides, I'm an angry drunk."

  Herb snorted and rubbed at his jaw.

  "You're not that much fun sober."

  Mark grinned despite himself.

  "You asked for it," he said. "Wailing like a damn baby."

  Herb grunted, and twisted the cap off a bottle of tequila, taking a swallow and grimacing.

  "You planning to get shitfaced?" Mark said. "Because I'm not sure that's such a good—"

  "No," Herb interrupted with a chuckle. "Just figure it's a waste to open all these bottles and not take a sip."

  "All?"

  Mark arched an eyebrow.

  "Molotov's," Herb explained as he twisted the cap off a bottle of vodka. "I've got a feeling the fuel tanks on this beast are going to be pretty difficult to set off. If I'm right, these will do as backup."

  "Backup for what?"

  "For burning this ship to the ground," Herb said, knocking back a mouthful of vodka and blinking as the liquid seared his throat. "Well, the sea. Whatever. You know what I mean."

  Herb smiled, and for the first time Mark noticed how young the guy was. He put him early twenties; almost certainly not a day over twenty-five. He definitely didn't look like a terrorist, though Mark would have been hard pressed to say what a terrorist should look like. Herb just looked like a kid with a penchant for telling tall tales.

  Or maybe not.

  If what Herb had said was true, he hadn't had much say in his upbringing, or in the way he ended up on the ship. Maybe, in some ways, his presence there was every bit as fucked up as Mark's.

  Hell, Mark hadn't pursued a career in cruise ship security; he doubted that anyone chased that particular dream. Mark had ended up on the Oceanus because his father had been determined to raise a boxer in his own image, and hadn't ever left room for what Mark himself might want.

  To sixteen-year-old Mark, it hadn't seemed that there were a great many career options for someone whose greatest talent was the ability to throw a not-quite-professional punch. Of the options that were open to him, precious few were legal.

  So he paid his dues in the security business, and after fifteen years of endless bullshit, he ended up on cruise ships. Fifteen years to claw together a job that could be described as decent at best, and utterly pointless at worst.

  And now, it didn't even look decent; not at all. It looked increasingly like a job that was going to get him killed.

  Maybe Herb had the right idea after all.

  "Here," Mark said, and held out his hand for the vodka. Herb slid the bottle along the bar, and Mark scooped it up smoothly and raised it in a toast.

  "To family," he said with more than a trace of bitterness.

  Herb stared at him quizzically for a moment before lifting another bottle of Jack Daniel's to his lips, and he drank with a dark chuckle.

  35

  Edgar stared at the sobbing man in frustration, and cast a frantic glance along the hallway at the top of the stairs.

  He couldn't help but notice the spots of blood on the steps, and knew that they meant only one thing: one of the creatures had been in this part of the ship. Maybe was even still here. It was not safe; definitely not a place to take a seat and start having some sort of mental breakdown.

  Ferrying Dan Bellamy about the Oceanus was a waste of time. Edgar was sure of that. The likelihood of his wife still being alive seemed slim, and even if she had somehow survived the initial attack, she would surely be holed up somewhere and impossible to find.

  Edgar had planned on leaving the man and the now-dead woman in the security uniform when they reached the stairs. His own search for Herb was likely to prove equally futile, but at least Herb knew what he was dealing with. There was a slim chance that he might have found a place to hide before it all started, and if that was the case, Edgar was certain that Herb would be somewhere down in the engine room.

  There was a good chance that the vampires hadn't descended that far into the ship yet. For them, there would be no need; nothing to draw them down there for a while. Most of the meat on the ship was located on the passenger decks.

  Meat.

  Edgar shuddered when he thought about how close he had come to being no more than meat himself. He could still feel an echo of the dead vampire's toxic presence in his mind, like it had stained his thoughts. He forced his attention back to Dan, desperately trying not to focus on the sickly feeling in his head.

  Dan was still sobbing; still in the middle of some sort of episode.

  The prospect of leaving Dan to fend for himself hadn't bothered Edgar in the slightest. For as long as the guy tallied along, Edgar thought he could be useful, even if only as a means of distracting any vampires they happened across.

  But then everything had changed, and all of a sudden Dan seemed terribly important. So much that Edgar was even willing to waste time finding the man's cabin and his almost-certainly-dead wife.

  But time was short, and the detour toward the cabins was taking too damn long. The other vampires would descend through the ship; that might even be what the two remaining monsters were doing at that very moment. If Herb was still down there somewhere in engineering, his time was running out.

  Just leave him, Edgar thought, but he knew he could not. The sobbing man had effectively disproved a part of the ancient texts that Edgar's father had always maintained was not up for debate. In the presence of the vampires, humans turned to terrified mush, their minds paralysed by the very sight of the creatures. Edgar had felt it himself.

  Crawling toward the vampire in the Indian restaurant, only a tiny fraction of Edgar's mind had remained his own; the rest was in thrall to the hideous creature, and Edgar was fully aware that he was crawling to certain death, and equally aware that he was powerless to stop it.

  The man on the stairs was different somehow. Unaffected by the crippling terror the vampires instilled in humans. Leaving him felt like it could be a huge mistake.

  Besides that, Edgar thought, you might need him if you run into another vampire yourself.

  The thought chilled Edgar as much as it baffled him. The guy sitting on the stairs in the ragged shorts and t-shirt was no fighter, that much was obvious. He was scrawny; weak. A tear-streaked face under a childish mop of hair. And yet somehow he had charged directly at the creature that was preparing to kill Edgar while he cowered on the floor pissing his pants, and he had damn near beheaded the thing with a cleaver.

  That made Dan Bellamy valuable, but only if he could get his shit together.

  "Come on," Edgar said, retreating half way down the steps and hauling the man upright by his armpits. "You're not going to find your wife if you sit here cry—"

  The scream ripped Edgar's words in two.

  It was loud, close and very definitely human, but it wasn't the scream itself that silenced Edgar.

  It was Dan Bellamy's reaction to it.

  Dan went stiff with what Edgar assumed was fright, but Edgar saw something other than fear in the man's eyes. Shock, yes, but...something else.

>   Recognition?

  Before Edgar could move a muscle in response, Dan turned and charged up the remaining steps and disappeared out of sight along the dark hallway at a sprint.

  In the distance, the human scream dissolved into another noise; similar and yet twisted almost beyond recognition. A vampire shriek.

  For a second, Edgar stood there, stunned, and then he too was running, trying to tell the rising panic in his mind to shut the hell up.

  It didn't work.

  The fear built with every step.

  Because he was sprinting toward the dreadful noise.

  *

  Dan rocketed around the corner and slammed to a halt.

  The hallway had no windows; it was as dark as the grave, but the goggles allowed him to see perfectly and his mind took in every hideous detail, lingering on the horrific sight in front of him like a slow motion zoom.

  His beautiful wife, face down on the floor, her back stained by an ocean of blood as the vampire raked its fearsome talons down her spine, opening her up like a ziploc bag.

  Dan let loose a bestial shriek. No words, just emotion. Rage and horror and denial.

  The vampire looked up sharply.

  And laughed.

  "Oh, dear," it rasped. "I think she must be yoursssss." It cackled, and pulled Elaine's head up from the floor to face Dan.

  "She's mine nooooow."

  Dan stared at Elaine's face, and felt a feeble flicker of hope. She was still alive; her eyes rolled up in their sockets and a thin line of bloody drool leaked from her lips. Elaine gave no indication that she knew Dan was there.

  Too dark for her to see me, he thought, and he felt his heart breaking.

  "Please—" he began to say, but the word twisted into something unrecognisable as the vampire hooked its claws under Elaine's jaw and tore her head away from her shoulders like a piece of rotten fruit.

  Elaine's head landed somewhere behind the vampire with a wet crunch.

  The creature grinned, and drilled its eyes into Dan.

  He felt a vague prickling at the back of his mind, and some part of him understood that it was the vampire's attempt to instil the fear in him that Edgar had spoken of. The strange mind control.

  It didn't work.

  Dan's mind had already slipped, collapsing in on itself with searing familiarity, and at last he understood. The panic attacks. The strange blackout episodes.

  It wasn't fear. Fear was what he felt every minute of every day; it was little wonder that the terror the vampires provoked barely registered as little more than a blip. The panic attacks were something else. Something darker. Something that took over Dan's mind when fear was no longer enough.

  The terrible black river in his mind was rage, suppressed for too long, awe-inducing in its intensity.

  For a second, all Dan could do was stare right back at the creature as his mind tried to process the fragmented images that his eyes delivered.

  Blood.

  Hideous, twisted muscles.

  Teeth.

  Elaine's eyes. Wide with terror, unfocused. Unable to see her husband in the pitch-black hallway, standing right in front of her, ten feet and a lifetime away. His beautiful wife, the only thing that had anchored him to the real world for two years, frightened and alone in the darkness, dying at the hands of a monster that had crawled out from a maniac's nightmare.

  And all because Dan had been too slow to reach her. Because he had let the horror of the world overcome him.

  While Elaine was falling beneath the vampire, Dan had been so close, but was lost in tears and self-pity.

  He could have saved her.

  The images that flashed in Dan's mind were overpowering, burying him beneath an avalanche of emotion. He saw everything and nothing as his world blurred and stretched, breaking and remaking itself as an endless abyss of despair.

  It felt like the darkness was claiming him, smothering him, until he could only see one thing.

  Red eyes.

  Dan saw those evil, glowing red eyes clearly. Saw them widening in astonishment as he charged forward, swinging the cleaver in a wide arc at the vampire's head, putting every ounce of his strength into the blow and unleashing a hoarse roar of rage that he would never have believed could have originated in his own throat.

  *

  Mark held a Molotov cocktail in each hand, and found himself simultaneously wishing both that he could carry more, and that he could set them aside and never think about picking them up again.

  The bottles felt heavy, and dangerous. Even without setting a flame to the flimsy napkins he and Herb had stuffed into the necks of the bottles, Mark couldn't help but feel like they might explode in his hand at any second.

  He remembered a kid at school turning up in class after a long absence. Everyone knew what had happened to Tommy Addison: the rumours swept around the school like wildfire. Sometimes the details changed a little: nobody seemed to know for sure what type of firework he had been holding, but everyone knew that he had still been gripping it tightly when it went off.

  Mark would never forget the sight of Tommy's hand when he finally did return to school: fingers gone, leaving only mangled stumps, and flesh on his palm that looked to have melted. Tommy's left hand was red, as if it had been bestowed upon him by some demon, and it was sickeningly shiny. It didn't look like human flesh at all.

  Mark had been afraid of fire and what it could do to the human body ever since. He didn't consider that a phobia. More like good common sense.

  And now he was about to set a ship alight, while he was standing on it.

  "Uh, are you sure that sinking this ship will bring help?" Mark asked feebly.

  "Sure?" Herb said breezily. "Not even remotely. But I'm not letting them get their talons on me, that I am sure of. But if you want an educated guess? Yeah, my father won't allow any harm to come to the vampires. It would be a total failure. I don't even think he would much care about the prospect of their retaliation. More about the disgrace, and the failure of his boys to fulfil their destiny."

  Herb spat the last word out, and lifted aloft a book of matches that he had taken from behind the bar. He struck one.

  "Wait," Mark said weakly, unsure what he could say next, but certain in the knowledge that once Herb lit that match, matters would move swiftly beyond his control. Beyond anybody's.

  Herb looked at Mark quizzically as the flame sputtered to life.

  And his eyes widened as something heavy crashed into the door, rattling the flimsy tiki torch barring the handles like a toothpick.

  Mark glanced at the door, and his stomach knotted itself in fear.

  It had been all too easy to believe that they were safe in the locked room. Easy, almost, to forget that the vampire was out there searching for them.

  Maybe they had been making too much noise, Mark thought, and he cursed himself for letting his guard drop even a little.

  The thing beyond the door charged again immediately, and Mark heard that terrible sound once more. Dry snapping. A makeshift deadbolt giving up its feeble resistance.

  "No time for waiting," Herb said. "No time for much of anything, really. Can't guarantee we can blow the fuel tanks, but there's a hell of a lot of alcohol in this place, and alcohol burns just fine. Better get to the exit."

  Mark rushed to the rear exit of the nightclub in a dream.

  This can't be happening, he thought as he pulled the door open and glanced quickly at the empty darkness beyond. He held a Molotov in each hand, and started to struggle with them, trying to transfer both to his left hand while he fished in his pocket for a glow stick with the right.

  He needn't have bothered.

  Behind him, Herb tossed a flaming Molotov at the bar, and suddenly there was light everywhere.

  Herb followed Mark into the hallway, grabbing for his arm, but Mark found himself rooted to the spot, unable to tear his gaze away.

  In the nightclub, the flame quickly became a swirling vortex, hungrily devouring the alcohol. The bo
ttles lined behind the bar burst like microwave popcorn, feeding the growing ball of fire until the entire club was filled with it; a roaring, writhing beast. The fire was a living creature; a devouring monster in its own right.

  And in the middle of the blaze: a dark shape, approaching smoothly.

  It can't be possible.

  "You humans and your fire. Still sooooo proud of it."

  The vampire chuckled, and Mark felt insanity tearing at his mind as he stared at it. This was the first time he had laid eyes on one of the creatures, and he knew immediately, as he met its dreadful gaze, that everything that Herb had said was true. Every last incredible word of it.

  The creature was a walking inferno: flames washed around its sinewy body, covering every inch of the leathery flesh.

  Yet the creature seemed unaffected. It kept walking, heading toward Mark and Herb at a leisurely pace, as if the fire were nothing more threatening than a light rain.

  Hell is coming, Mark thought, and he shook his head in miserable disbelief, his eyes widening in horror.

  And the vampire laughed.

  36

  The vampire screeched as the cleaver bit deeply into its neck, but it didn't fall.

  Instead, it whipped up a hand that Dan did not see, aiming its talons at his belly in a savage swing that would almost certainly have disembowelled him if it connected properly. Only the fact that Dan was already falling, unbalanced by the enormous effort he'd thrown into the swing, saved him. The vicious claws raked his belly, and he felt a fire erupt across his torso, but the wound was only skin deep.

  Not a patch on having a knife driven into his skull.

  I've had worse, Dan thought, and hysteria bubbled in his mind.

  Fuelled by overwhelming rage, he ripped the cleaver from the hateful flesh, and swung again, and again, driving the blade deep into the creature in a furious crescendo of motion. The vampire's resistance was weak and disorganised, as though it struggled to believe what was being done to it.