The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River

by K. R. Griffiths

  Suddenly, for the first time ever, she thought about how the passengers must look from the outside; beacons of light in the darkness, lit up like a bloody Christmas tree.

  So vulnerable.

  She shuddered.

  Edged a little closer to the glass.

  Holding her breath.

  Did I see something out there? Something in the blackness? Some darker shadow?

  Is it looking at me right now?

  Petra’s heart pounded, and she leaned in further, until her nose was only inches away from the window. When the breath in her lungs began to feel like a serrated blade, she let it out softly, and it fogged the glass in front of her face.

  She wiped at the pane, half expecting to reveal a face pressed up against the other side of the glass, something hideous and twisted and demonic; maybe some crazy cannibals that lived in the tunnels, like in those silly old movies her boyfriend loved.

  Nothing.

  Just darkness and delays on the Central Line. Everything oh-so ordinary. The strange banging was probably just the engine imploding. Most of the transport system in London needed replacing yesterday, if not four decades earlier. Most likely, the noises were just parts of the train dying at last, and ensuring that her journey would be slower, and just a little more hellish than it ought to be.

  Stifling a nervous chuckle, Petra turned away from the door and faced the carriage once more.

  Squuuueeeeeeeeeaaaaaallllllllllllllllllllll.

  The noise stopped everyone in the carriage like a freeze frame. It sounded like a rusting nail being scraped across glass. An obscene shrieking that made shoulders hunch and teeth grit.

  Somewhere, a passenger whimpered.

  Might have been Petra herself.

  With the lights blazing inside the train, the windows were little better than mirrors, but through the distorted reflections of themselves, everyone in the carriage saw it.

  Attached only to empty darkness; somehow all the more terrifying for being disembodied by the light spilling from inside the carriage.

  A hand.

  A single, terrifying hand.

  It looked like it belonged to some enormous bird, or some prehistoric creature; long, thin fingers that ended in wicked talons.

  The hand ran along the length of the carriage, scratching a line through the middle of each pane of glass, and the noise was dreadful and hypnotic. Petra watched, unable to look away, as the claw slowly drew closer to her position by the doors. Its movement was almost leisurely, like whatever unseen horror was attached to the fearsome talons was enjoying every second, and wanted to draw it out as much as possible.

  The squealing stopped.

  And then the lights went out.

  For several moments, the darkness was so complete that Petra thought something had blinded her.

  She listened to her breath, rattling like rusted chains, still hearing that all-consuming screech of the terrible claws on the glass, and let out a trembling yelp when emergency lighting kicked into life, bathing the carriage in a soft, orange glow. Suddenly, it was possible for her to see what the grotesque hand was attached to: a creature that she couldn’t even have conjured in her worst nightmares was standing right outside the window.

  More than one.

  Monsters.

  Petra saw them for only the briefest of moments, for barely a second—just a fleeting, chilling glimpse—before the windows imploded, and something—some things—hurtled into the carriage.

  And the crowded space filled with the sound of screaming.

  *

  Conny secured the platform with the help of Remy and the two bruised security staff, guiding the small crowd of witnesses out to the bottom of the escalators which led up to the ticketing hall, explaining that medical assistance was on the way and that they would all be required to provide statements.

  Almost as soon as she had shepherded the commuters away from the platform, she saw the first of the reinforcements arriving, clattering down the stopped escalator in single file, evenly spaced.

  Her eyes widened in surprise.

  Kevlar body armour. Assault rifles. Protective visors.

  An armed response unit.

  What the hell?

  The first group of officers made directly for the tunnel that led to the platform without even looking in Conny and Remy’s direction. A second group followed, and made their way straight toward her.

  “You have been ordered to evacuate the station,” a man wearing an Inspector’s uniform said loudly, addressing the group. “Please leave in a calm and orderly fashion.”

  As if perfectly planned, the up escalator began to move again. Armed officers began to guide the shaken commuters toward the exit, telling them that they would be taken care of upstairs.

  “Sir,” Conny said, “these people are witnesses to a murder. There is an ambulance—”

  “That will have to wait.”

  Conny blinked.

  Murder will have to wait?

  “The ticketing area has been cleared,” the Inspector continued. “You’ll need to go up to the main hall and speak to the CS.”

  “Chief Superintendent?” Conny repeated, surprised. “Here, at the station?”

  He nodded.

  “Everybody is here or headed this way. All hands on deck. Didn’t you hear on the radio?”

  Conny flushed. Her radio had been crackling during Remy’s scuffle with Adam Trent. With all the noise of the man screaming and the dog snarling, she hadn’t been able to pay attention to it.

  She shook her head.

  “Well, get upstairs.” He looked down at Remy, who was still staring back toward the entrance to the platform. “I’m sure they will want you both up there.”

  The last of the commuters had disappeared from sight, and the Inspector gestured for his group to make for the northbound platform.

  “Hey,” Conny called, “it didn’t happen in there, it was the southbound line.”

  The Inspector shook his head and grimaced behind his visor.

  “It’s all the lines.”

  17

  Herb’s pulse thundered in his ears as he gripped one side of the table which he had placed across the kitchen door as a barricade. Dan held the other side, and when he nodded, they lifted together, moving the table aside as quietly as possible.

  He stared at Dan. One minute the guy was having seizures on the floor, and the next, he was smoothly taking over as Herb’s own courage began to desert him. At any moment, Herb half-expected him to collapse and start screaming, but Dan remained focused only on moving the table without making a sound. His head was bowed in concentration, his mop of hair matted with sweat. Herb noticed for the first time that he had a scar that began an inch or so above his right eyebrow, running up into his tangled hair. A surgical scar.

  Before Herb could ponder the significance of that scar any further, Dan began to lower the table. Herb focused on making sure the legs didn’t make a sound as they made contact with the tiles, and when he looked up again, Dan had already brushed his hair back over his forehead, and was moving to the door and pressing his ear against it.

  After a moment, he shook his head.

  Now, he mouthed, and Herb nodded, picking up the two guns from the counter and gripping them in palms that trembled wildly.

  Dan began to turn the heavy iron key.

  Slowly.

  Quietly.

  Wincing as he eased the ancient tumblers to the unlocked position.

  Finally, after what felt like an eternity to Herb, Dan began to twist the handle.

  And the door flew open, smashing him aside like a ragdoll.

  He crashed across the table they had moved moments earlier, slamming into a cabinet. Going down hard, and disappearing from sight.

  The vampire came in without hesitation, and Herb turned and fled blindly, throwing himself behind a counter.

  The world became chaos.

  The creature shrieking; the hideous noise echoing off the tiled walls,
reverberating and multiplying until it seemed endless.

  Glass breaking.

  Lights winking out.

  The sound of flesh tearing.

  A strangled yelp.

  Herb flipped onto his back as the room plunged into near-total darkness, and fired several rounds from the pistols wildly, aiming at nothing and everything in his terror.

  One of the guns clicked.

  Empty, Herb thought, and he tossed the weapon aside and put the barrel of the other against his temple, gasping at the searing heat of the metal on his skin.

  It had been a desperate plan. Trying to trick a vampire like it was a child. Desperate…and doomed. Herb’s command of what remained of the Order had lasted a matter of hours, and he had led them directly into disaster, making every wrong decision it was possible to make. All were dead, save for handful, and the man he had sworn he was going to save was instead going to die. Again.

  I’m no leader, he thought, and his finger curled around the trigger.

  He squeezed his eyes shut.

  No hero.

  *

  Shreds of light bled through from the outside world, squirming around the edges of the shuttered windows, bouncing off chrome surfaces.

  Half-illuminating the abomination as it moved with appalling purpose.

  The creature charged into the centre of the room, raking its talons through the gut of one of Herb’s followers. Jay, Dan thought, oddly detached from the unfolding horror. I remembered his name, after all.

  The vampire leapt away from Jay’s still-standing corpse as gunfire ricocheted through the kitchen: a deafening thunder that made Dan’s ears ring. Muzzle flashes that threw bright, fleeting light on Jay as he began to fall, spilling something heavy and liquid from the gaping hole torn across his abdomen.

  And it began.

  As familiar anxiety at first; fear which hit him like an oncoming train, before twisting into something darker and less familiar.

  With a roar, Dan hauled himself to his feet, striding forward and batting a gun from Herb’s hand as he placed it against his own temple.

  “Eyes shut,” he snarled, his mouth delivering the command his brain hadn’t been aware of, and he leapt for the knife rack, his fingers closing around a cold steel handle.

  A cleaver.

  Of course. That made sense.

  Because the nightmare which had begun on the Oceanus wasn’t over. He was still there, in the thick of it, thrashing; trying to break free of the madness. Locked inside a mind that was slowly crumbling to pieces as it tried to withstand the insanity of the world.

  He turned, and saw the vampire attached to the ceiling like a dreadful, enormous insect, untroubled by gravity. It held another of Herb’s followers by the neck, his feet dangling at least four feet above the ground, and before Dan could move a muscle, the monster sliced through the man’s throat like ripe fruit. His body fell, an obscene torrent of dark blood pumping from the space where his head had been moments earlier.

  The abomination snorted out something that might have been a laugh as it tossed the cleric’s head aside.

  And drilled its eyes into Dan.

  He felt a sickening sensation erupt in his mind; a terrible sort of pulling, as if the creature had hooked invisible claws into his brain and was trying to wrench it from his skull. As Dan watched, transfixed, the creature’s eyes seemed to glow, becoming strangely hypnotic, and the awful pulling in his head grew stronger, until Dan felt sure that his skull was about to explode.

  The vampire dropped down onto the tiled floor.

  Took a step toward him.

  Click.

  *

  Herb watched it happen as an orbiting satellite might observe the destruction of the planet: detached and distant; separated from the insanity somehow. He couldn’t persuade his muscles to move, couldn’t even draw a breath into lungs that burned with the desire to power a scream.

  Dan Bellamy wasn’t special at all.

  The vampire stalked toward him casually, and Dan just…stood there. Staring at it; a huge cleaver dangling from limp fingers, his jaw slack; his eyes wide.

  It has taken his mind, Herb thought in dull terror. Edgar was wrong. I was wrong. And now we’re all going to die.

  Click.

  Click.

  The vampire took another couple of steps forward on those hideous, angular legs.

  And it stopped.

  For a moment, Herb gaped, bewildered, as the vampire and Dan stared into each other’s eyes.

  And then Dan screamed.

  Lifted the cleaver high above his head.

  And charged.

  *

  His timing was off.

  The creature whipped to the right as he swung the cleaver, and the blade landed only a glancing blow on the monster’s neck. He switched his grip on the handle, and swung again; a sweeping backhand that a tennis pro would have admired, and a bestial roar erupted from his lungs as the blade carved itself a home in the side of the vampire’s hateful head, lodging so deep in the thing’s cheek that when the vampire began to fall, it was impossible for him to maintain his grip on the weapon.

  Shattering pain erupted in Dan’s belly.

  He stared down, blinking stupidly.

  Tried to process the sight of the three wicked talons buried in his stomach, and the awful tearing sensation as the creature’s weight dragged the hideous weapons away from his flesh.

  A spatter of blood hit the tiles.

  My blood.

  So much—

  And then Dan, too, began to fall.

  The darkness took him before he landed.

  *

  Herb watched in a daze as both Dan and the vampire crashed to the floor. The room looked more like an abattoir now than a kitchen; bodies and blood and death piled in every corner.

  The remaining three clerics—Lawrence, Scott and Adrian—stared at the twitching monster in horrified fascination, watching as it reached up a hand with a snort, gripping the handle of the cleaver that had split its skull almost in two, and tried to pull the blade out.

  It screamed, and thick, black blood oozed from the wound like treacle.

  It took Herb a moment to realise that the creature wasn’t dying, or if it was, it was doing so slowly.

  That moment was long enough.

  Adrian picked up a large carving knife from a counter and took a step toward the convulsing abomination, his face twisted in terror as he stared down at it.

  “No!” Herb screamed. “Don’t look at it!”

  Too late.

  Adrian lifted the wicked blade high.

  Drove the business end into the side of his own head.

  Herb looked away in despair as the cleric dropped to the floor, and the vampire began to roll toward the rear of the kitchen, still clutching at the steel that had penetrated its skull. It scrambled out of sight behind the island in the centre of the room, melting into the thick shadows.

  “Get Bellamy!” he hollered, loud enough to shake Lawrence and Scott from their stupor, and he sprinted across the slick tiles to Dan’s inert body.

  You can’t die. You can’t.

  There was no time to check Dan’s injuries; to determine whether it was safe to move him. It certainly wasn’t safe not to.

  Herb grabbed a handful of Dan’s thick sweater, trying not to notice how heavy and sticky with the man’s blood it was, and began to heave, his feet slipping. Despite his slim frame, Bellamy was dead weight, and Herb made little headway until Lawrence appeared in front of him and grabbed the unconscious man’s ankles.

  Somewhere in the shadows to the rear of the kitchen, the injured vampire shrieked. In the metal-and-tile kitchen, the noise was impossibly loud, otherworldly.

  It might have been a sound born of pain.

  Might have been determination or murderous desire or rage.

  Herb didn’t want to find out.

  “We have to go,” he roared.

  18

  When Conny reached Euston Statio
n’s main hall, her jaw dropped.

  The hall was filling up with police officers: a dizzying vortex of uniforms representing a myriad of units and boroughs. She couldn’t guess at exactly how many of her colleagues there were gathering below the departure boards, but it had to be north of two hundred.

  This is a lot bigger than some guy going nuts with a length of rebar.

  Yet it wasn’t just the sheer number of police present that made her skin prickle: the atmosphere in the room itself was rotten with tension. As she moved away from the escalators, toward the bulk of the gathering force, Conny caught the eye of several officers and shot them a quizzical glance. Each time she received only an abrupt head shake in return. By the look of the confused expressions on the faces Conny saw, no one had much more of a clue about why they were there than she did.

  Remy’s chain hung slackly in her left hand. The dog should have been alert in the presence of so many police officers—curious at the very least—but Remy simply hovered at Conny’s side, staring back at the escalator that led down toward the distant crime scene. His behaviour was unnatural, almost like he had been struck by some sudden illness. She couldn’t remember ever seeing the dog so subdued.

  Conny began to move toward the crowd and scanned the room, hoping to spot either somebody that she knew, or the Chief Superintendent that the Inspector heading to the platform had mentioned, but it was her ears that grabbed her attention, not her eyes.

  A nearby constable, who looked like he’d only been on the job a year at most, muttered ominously that his brother worked out of Scotland Yard, and had told him that the army had been called in.

  Someone else said they had heard of incidents in other cities.

  “It started in Morden,” Conny heard another voice whispering quietly. “The guy with the knife, you heard about that?”

  Conny frowned. The spree killing at the South London supermarket a couple of hours earlier was a big deal, of course, and she was certain that the tragedy would dominate the national headlines for days to come, but she wasn’t sure why that incident would prompt the Metropolitan Police to send such a large group of officers to the London Underground. Morden was the very last stop on the Northern Line, way out in zone six. Far away from Euston.