What if the next rising occurred in her own homeland? What if—God forbid—the Great Nest rumoured to be buried deep beneath Yellowstone was next? North America hadn’t seen an awakening for more than five hundred years; as far as Jennifer was concerned, that meant the country was overdue, in the same way scientists claimed that Earth was overdue a massive asteroid strike. Not a matter of if, but when.
It was just a matter of time, and the possibility that Hermetics might once have existed was not important. The only thing that mattered was accepting that the true—global—vampire rising was as inevitable as the onset of winter, and figuring out how to twist that fact to her advantage.
Hermetics or not, vampires could die.
What she needed was an army. The Order remained as small as possible in other countries, trying to conceal its importance, but if Jennifer was right, and the next vampire awakening was the equivalent of The Big One, secrecy would no longer matter. Strength would.
Shortly after the turn of the millennium and the passing of her father, Jennifer began to build the American arm of the Order into the world’s largest underground religion. The huge Colorado ranch which served as her base of operations had been expanded several times, and was now home to almost fifteen-hundred people. New initiates were young, of course, and subjected to anything up to a year of psychological and physical abuse, coupled with enormous quantities of LSD, before their loyalty was tested to determine their readiness to learn the truth and ascend to the position of cleric.
The test itself was simple and, so far, infallible. Two initiates, one knife. It was an equation that always equalled one devout believer. The only way to join the Order was to walk through a storm of blood, and nothing guaranteed a person’s obedience quite like making them kill.
Jennifer’s army grew slowly, and she waited.
For sixteen long years.
Until her phone rang, and an anxious-sounding British man introduced himself as Jeremy Pruitt, and said he needed her help.
*
Jennifer stared at the now-silent phone for a long time, running through Pruitt’s words in her head over and over, until their ramifications began to solidify in her thoughts. She already knew that vampires could be killed, of course, but now they actually had been. She hadn’t truly expected to witness such an event within her lifetime, and certainly not to discover that when it happened, it wasn’t even the headline news.
A living Hermetic had been discovered, and had survived the encounter with the vampires. Even better, the English Order already had its hands on him.
The potential ramifications of that refused to settle properly; they sloshed around her skull, full of messy possibility, lighting her up with anticipation.
Judging by what Pruitt had told her, the Order was finished in the UK: now led by an emotional boy who sounded like he suffered from some sort of hero complex—or simply wanted to die. Charles Rennick and his immediate successors were dead, and Herbert Rennick had no idea what he might be transporting, how important this man Dan Bellamy could be. Rennick was heading back to England, apparently following some ill-considered notion of blowing the whistle and letting the world know that vampires existed. He was, Pruitt said, determined to rally the world to fight them.
The boy was a fool. Killing vampires had already ensured that—at a minimum—the remainder of the English nest would rise to retaliate. England was one of the most heavily-surveilled countries on the planet. The secret was out, all right. The world just hadn’t noticed it yet. But it would, and there would be fighting. For survival.
It was only a matter of time.
According to Pruitt, the remaining vampires in England had expected their kin to be returned to them before dawn; the deadline had long since passed. The vampires would not act in daylight, of course, which meant that Jennifer had around seven or eight hours to play with—and it would take at least six of those to actually get a team across the Atlantic. There was every chance that—even with a Gulfstream jet to make the journey—she would not be able to get a team to the UK before darkness began to fall.
She had to act fast.
She nodded to herself and picked up the phone, dialling a four-digit internal number.
Her call was answered immediately.
“Get a team together, Mr Mancini,” Jennifer said. “The best we have.”
“Elimination or extraction?”
“A little of each, I think.”
Mancini grunted.
“Where are we going?”
“You are going to the UK. To England.”
“You’re not coming with us?”
He sounded surprised. Jennifer had always enjoyed what Mancini sardonically labelled field trips before.
“Not this time. The world is about to catch fire, Mr Mancini. I’ll be putting the ranch into lockdown as soon as you leave.”
Another grunt. He sounded pissed off at her insistence on addressing him so formally. Given their history, that wasn’t so surprising. Pissing him off was, after all, the reason that she did it in the first place.
“How long?” he snapped.
Jennifer checked her watch.
“I want your wheels up in thirty minutes, tops, and, Mr Mancini?”
He sighed heavily.
“Yeah?”
“I want you to understand this up front: there’s a very good chance you’ll be…uh, going in hot, okay?”
Mancini paused just long enough for Jennifer to hear the vague concern that lurked behind his silence. She knew full well that Mancini wasn’t a true believer in the existence of vampires, and it hadn’t ever mattered before: he was a hired gun who had no problem following orders which might lead to morally dubious outcomes, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut. That was more than enough to help with keeping the clerics and initiates at the ranch in line.
Yet this was different; belief mattered now. She trusted in Mancini and his combat expertise implicitly, but she knew that no amount of battlefield experience could have prepared either him or his men for what they might be faced with if they were still on English soil when night fell.
Bravado and training wouldn’t save him, not then. Belief might—if it helped Mancini to understand that there were some situations in which fleeing wasn’t just the best option; it was the only option.
“Going in hot,” Mancini repeated, sounding dubious.
“There is a very strong possibility that England will suffer a full-scale vampire rising in around seven hours. I need you to find and extract a man before that happens, and I don’t expect it will be easy. I know what you believe, but you need to believe this: if you engage the vampires, you will die. Trust me. Stay in the light.”
Mancini coughed.
“Yeah, all right. Understood. Who’s the target?”
8
Bad things happened to homeless people all the time.
Sam Thompson understood that depressingly obvious fact only too well, but even from a distance, when he looked at the bridge, some dark instinct tugged at him and he felt a twinge of alarm.
The place looked completely deserted.
The bridge, crossed by the rail line that led toward central London to the north, was a regular meeting spot for Morden’s fast-growing homeless population, and Sam would have expected to see someone there at midday. At the very least, there should have been one person under the bridge: the one Sam was supposed to be meeting.
He saw nobody, and checked his watch. The face was cracked, but it still kept time. When he’d checked it five minutes earlier, it had informed him that he was late. It still said the same thing.
So where the hell is he?
The bridge was wide, spanning a patch of wasteland and a couple of derelict buildings. The space beneath was wreathed in shadows, but it was immediately obvious that there was no one at all waiting for him.
Dammit.
Sam frowned and slowed his steps a little as his thoughts raced ahead.
He travelled to the bridge a c
ouple of times a week, usually to pick up heroin. The guy who he had been buying off recently—a white-haired ex-rocker for whom the seventies had never really ended—called his product Brain Damage, but Sam was under no illusions. It wasn’t high-grade stuff: anyone who bought beneath the bridge knew that going in. What Sam got from the bridge was always the same. Not mind-blowing; not poison. When you had a habit to maintain, the not-poison part quickly became important. Far more than any desire for quality, at any rate. Quality drugs were for those people who still had jobs.
Sam had a job, of sorts.
Well, he had a way to earn money.
And now that he had some to spend, Brain Damage-guy was nowhere to be seen.
Fucking drug dealers. Untrustworthy bastards, every last one of—
Sam’s heart fluttered. If there was nobody under the bridge to sell to him, he only had one other option. A man by the name of Trev, who never went anywhere near the bridge, and who had promised a few months back that if he ever set eyes on him again, Sam would regret it big time.
Sam had believed him. Trev wasn’t a guy for making jokes.
Shit.
He quickened his pace, moving across a strip of patchy grass behind a supermarket car park. It was lunchtime, and the store was busy. Several shoppers glared at him as they loaded groceries into their cars. His clothes were a dead giveaway: filthy and tattered, hanging off a frame that had nudged the needle from slim up to unhealthy in recent months. They probably thought he was planning to steal a car or mug them.
His cheeks burned, and he looked away, forcing himself not to acknowledge their stares.
Moved quicker still.
By the time he reached the bridge, he was running unsteadily, panting heavily. He hadn’t exercised in a long time, but it wasn’t his lack of fitness that made him gasp for air. It was the growing need in his body; the anxiety which spiked at the thought that there was nobody to buy from.
Sam hadn’t taken a hit in a couple of days, and the churning in his gut was quickly becoming intolerable. If he had to wait too much longer, the growing tension in his nerves threatened to blossom, becoming an insufferable agony. He jogged into the shadows beneath the bridge, and when his eyes adjusted to the sudden change in light, he saw that it wasn’t deserted at all, and his train of thought derailed.
He hit the brakes so hard that he fell on his arse, jarring the breath from his lungs.
Yeah, bad things happened to homeless people.
But not like this.
The area beneath the bridge, next to a skeletal building, looked like a slaughterhouse. There had been several people taking shelter from the rain there by the look of it.
And something had ripped them apart.
It was a massacre.
Sam figured there had to be at least seven or eight bodies on the ground, each and every one missing significant pieces, as though they had been set upon by some pack of wild animals.
I’m the first on the scene, Sam thought dumbly and, for a moment, he was so struck by the ridiculousness of the situation that he was sure he was hallucinating. Withdrawal symptoms beginning to kick in.
That had to be it.
He squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath.
When he reopened them, the bodies were still there. It was like a scene from a damn zombie movie. Sam couldn’t even begin to understand what had torn the homeless people apart, but he didn’t need to. This was not a place to hang around asking questions.
He glanced around, feeling his skin prickle. His eyes hadn’t deceived him: he was definitely alone. The building in front of him was no more than a shell; he could clearly see that it was empty.
He struggled to his feet, choking back the urge to retch again when he saw a severed head staring right at him, the skin flayed away to reveal the muscle and tendon beneath, and he recognised the wispy white hair, now matted and darkened by streaks of gore.
It looked like Brain Damage-guy was smiling at him, his ruined face split in a horrific grin, but the worst part was the eyes, oh dear, sweet Jesus, his eyes…
Sam had never seen eyes so wide, so marked by naked terror. Brain Damage-guy had been so scared when he died that it looked like his face hadn’t even been capable of registering the pain.
Sam turned to run for the distant supermarket.
And suddenly his legs just…refused to move.
You can still get what you came for.
The voice of his addiction, unspooling in his mind. Crooning a siren’s song that he was powerless to resist.
He turned back to face the atrocity, gritting his teeth and biting back the urge to retch again.
Brain Damage-guy’s head is there. So where are his legs? Where are his pockets?
Sam saw a lot of legs tangled on the ground, and the prospect of rifling through clothes caked in human offal made his stomach twist. Some distant alarm began to sound in his head, like his soul was shrieking at him not to allow himself to sink to this new low. That it would lead only to darkness.
I could just check a couple of bodies.
He scanned the hideous mess.
Maybe the ones to the right, which looked almost intact. Even if none of those limbs belonged to Brain Damage-guy, there was still a chance he’d find something. Perhaps some meth. Hell, even some fucking weed would take the jagged edge off the sickness he felt growing inside him.
No one will know. Just check their pockets and get the hell out of here. Two minutes, tops.
For a moment, he felt like he couldn’t move, torn between the almost overwhelming desire to run from the horror under the bridge and the surging narcotic need lighting him up like a cigarette; burning through him steadily.
If there was a bag of Brain Damage just…sitting there, it would be a criminal waste to leave it. It’s not like the poor bastards torn apart in the shadows needed it, and when the police discovered the carnage, they would destroy any drugs they found without a second thought. Or ‘confiscate’ them as ‘evidence.’
Sam shot another glance at the distant supermarket.
If you’re going to do it, do it now, you idiot. Don’t just stand here gawping. Waiting to get caught.
He took an uncertain step toward the nearest body.
Tried to visualise himself actually rooting around in the wet remains. What kind of person could fumble around the exposed innards of other human beings? How low could a person possibly sink in their need for a fix?
He tried to picture himself doing what he knew he should do; running as fast as he could. Never looking back.
Pictured a fat bag of powder instead.
And suddenly he was walking forward quickly on autopilot, the decision taken. The addiction won. It always did.
The bridge was high, the underside laced by struts. The walls offered a series of alcoves - prime real estate for the homeless people who sheltered there overnight. Those were always the first spots to be taken. Sam studied them cautiously as he moved, imagining that some demented killer was lurking there in the shadows, impossible for him to see.
Watching him approach.
There was no movement, of course. He was alone beneath the bridge.
Do this quickly, he thought, and he ran to the nearest body, patting down a pair of trousers which were soaked through and sticky to the touch. Empty. He moved on quickly to the next body, kneeling on something slippery and soft, gagging as he tried not to think about what it might have been.
Again he searched through pockets and again, he found them empty.
His pulse raced almost painfully. Every second he spent among the bodies felt like he was taking a bigger and bigger risk; each body searched, another round in a game of Russian roulette.
This is crazy, Sam. Get the fuck out of here. Do you know what will happen if the cops turn up and find you here?
He patted the next couple of bodies down quickly—too quickly, almost, to be certain their pockets were empty—and shot another glance at the distant supermarket.
&nbs
p; And a bomb detonated in his central nervous system.
Movement in his peripheral vision.
Close.
He looked up into the shadows, certain that he had seen something moving toward him. Moving above him.
What the fu—
Sam’s eyes widened even as his left hand closed around a promising lump in a sickeningly moist pocket; a small bag of something that had been so important only moments earlier.
There was something up there, clinging to the struts beneath the bridge, hanging in the shadows like a bat.
Something big.
Watching him intently.
Sam squinted.
Saw it clearly.
Should have run, he thought, and his sanity began to dissolve, melted by the heat of terrible eyes which glowed a furious crimson in the gloom, puncturing his soul like scalding needles.
Taking him.
*
Sam’s body walked away from the bridge at a casual pace. By the time his feet reached the entrance of the busy supermarket and his left hand pulled out the small flick-knife he always carried for emergencies, Sam was long gone; broken and banished to a shrieking cell in the deepest recess of his mind.
Still, his body carried on, piloted by another; muscles moved by something dark and terrible and unfathomable.
It wanted to play.
9
One day, you will remember how to enjoy new experiences.
The words of Dan’s therapist came back to him as Herb led the way onto the deck of the trawler. Twenty-four hours after his first cruise began, and around seven hours after he had committed his first murder, Dan was about to experience yet another first: a helicopter ride, in the company of disciples of an insane cult which genuinely believed that the world was about to end at the hands of vampires, and which had, to all intents and purposes, kidnapped him.
The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River Page 33