The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River

by K. R. Griffiths

  They moved in silence, like watchful ghosts. Each and every one of them had been a part of missions in terrain that was far worse than anything the English countryside could throw at them, and they made quick progress through the forest.

  After around ten minutes, during which period even Burnley and Montero had managed to stay silent, the compound loomed before them, huge and dark. Several smaller buildings gathered around a vast mansion that looked like something out of a TV show; one of those achingly dull period dramas that the Brits loved to produce.

  Mancini scanned the compound through the M24’s powerful scope, and felt the hair on the back of his neck rising.

  Steel shutters looked to have been drawn across all the windows of the main mansion building, but the front door stood wide open, gaping like a hungry mouth.

  According to Jennifer Craven, the Rennick compound was home to a total of more than fifty people, yet there was no sign of movement anywhere.

  “What do you think, Mancini?”

  He ignored Braxton’s question for a moment, concentrating on trying to focus his scope on the interior of the mansion beyond the doors. He thought he could see something in there, but the light was no good.

  He lowered the rifle and sighed.

  “I think whatever happened here, we missed it. But we have to be sure.”

  Braxton looked dubious.

  “Yeah, sure. But we’re gonna find some bad shit in that house. You know that, right?”

  Mancini nodded. He knew it, all right. The combination of the closed shutters and the open door could only mean one thing: somebody had tried to hide from something, and they had failed. He would be leading his team into either a trap, or—if the Craven family was right about vampires after all—the scene of a massacre. There was no way around it. This was where Herbert Rennick had been headed, and Mancini had no other leads to follow up. If the Hermetic wasn’t here, the team would be heading home empty-handed, and Jennifer Craven’s rage would be fucking biblical.

  “Didn’t come all this way for nothing,” he said grimly. “Tell the others we’re moving in.”

  *

  Mancini’s team was the best of those available at the ranch, which made them damn near as lethal as most any military unit in the world. Braxton and Montero had been SEALS, Rushmer had spent a decade in Delta Force, and Burnley’s work in the Special Activities Division of the CIA was so classified that even she had no idea what any of her missions had been about. Or so she claimed.

  The team was rounded off by its only member with a non-military background: Ed Bricknall, who was one of only a handful of westerners to have ever been invited to Shaolin Temple to study with the monks, if his tales were to be believed. The guy was practically a fucking ninja, with the fastest pair of hands Mancini had ever seen and an apparent inability to feel pain. He couldn’t even imagine where Jennifer had dug that guy up.

  They were badass all right, every last one of them.

  Their presence should have made him feel safe.

  Yet as he stopped at the threshold of the Rennick mansion, safe turned out to be the last thing Leon Mancini felt.

  Jennifer’s warning about what he could expect to face ran through his mind repeatedly, and though he didn’t believe her, not really, her dire words had been delivered so earnestly that they had managed to burrow under his skin.

  If you engage the vampires, you will die. Trust me. Stay in the light.

  The power was out in the mansion, or the lights had been smashed, and with daylight quickly fading and the shutters down, the interior of the house melted into darkness within a few feet of the front door. Standing in the main doorway, Mancini pulled out a flashlight, and began to sweep it around a huge, ornate room that looked like the lobby of a fine hotel.

  The beam made the shadows dance jerkily, and picked out sights worse than anything he’d seen in his long military career; an atrocity that was beyond his comprehension. Bodies smashed and broken like children’s toys, organs strewn about the vast room like grisly confetti.

  He shouldered the rifle and pulled out an MP5.

  And all of the vampire bullshit which he had listened to from the Craven family for years came back to him. Creatures that couldn’t be killed. Creatures that ripped your mind away from you and made you their puppets. Sadistic monsters that revelled in terror and pain. Evil fucking incarnate.

  It was all true. Craven wasn’t taking impressionable kids and brainwashing them to believe in some satanic nonsense. She was brainwashing them with the truth.

  Evil lurked in the Rennick mansion. Mancini could feel it, radiating from the shadows in waves, rolling around him like dry ice. He had felt fear plenty; being an elite member of the military wasn’t about not feeling fear, it was about not letting that fear slow you down for a second. Acknowledging it and having the courage to press forward regardless.

  He hadn’t ever felt fear like this.

  Mancini had courage enough to take on most any objective, but he knew as he felt that evil washing over him, that taking another step inside the mansion would not be bravery. It would be stupidity.

  Jennifer Craven, he thought, was not worth this.

  “Back,” he whispered urgently, “there’s nothing here.”

  But there was.

  His wavering light caught movement in the centre of the gigantic room, and for a split second he saw it clearly, rising from the pile of corpses on unsteady legs, a walking nightmare with the handle of a blade protruding from its cheek and a ragged strip of human flesh hanging from its hideous jaws.

  Feeding, Mancini thought in horror.

  With a screech, the vampire leapt vertically, disappearing into the shadows at the top of the room.

  It didn’t come back down.

  Don’t look up.

  “Run!” he hollered, turning away and leaving the mansion behind at a sprint. He heard footsteps running with him, but they were quickly drowned out by gunfire. Mancini glanced over his shoulder and saw Rushmer emptying his whole clip into Ed Bricknall’s gut, ripping the ninja to shreds, all his years of intense training and dedication punched out of him in seconds by large calibre bullets.

  Rushmer’s eyes were wide and horrified as he executed Bricknall, and Mancini knew exactly what his expression meant; knew it in his gut as sure as he knew his own name. The vampire had Rushmer’s mind, just like Jennifer Craven said. It was Rushmer.

  “Go,” he snarled at the others, “before he can reload. Don’t look back.”

  He aimed for the trees, tossing his heavy sniper rifle aside and pouring every ounce of energy he had into pumping his legs. A hundred yards. Fifty. He saw Burnley disappear into the trees first—damn, she was fast—just ahead of Braxton and Montero. Both of the younger men were pulling away from him steadily.

  Behind him, he heard the distant crack of automatic fire, and the distinctive whine of bullets fizzing around his head.

  He leapt the last few feet, hitting the deck inside the tree line and rolling, inhaling a mouthful of wet dirt and leaves.

  When he scrambled to his feet, spitting and gasping for air, he saw Braxton and Montero taking up defensive positions, readying their weapons.

  “Are you insane?” Mancini snarled, running deeper into the trees. “They’re gone; there’s nothing we can do for them, understand? Get to the van. Go!”

  “What about the mission?”

  Mancini slowed, glaring at Braxton, and ducking instinctively when he heard distant rifle fire split the night once more. It didn’t sound like it was close, but it wasn’t worth taking the risk.

  “If Herbert Rennick came back, he isn’t in there,” Mancini snapped, and turned to run.

  “You’re right,” an unfamiliar voice said, and Mancini whipped his body toward it, lifting the submachine gun. “You just missed him. But I can tell you where he’s going.”

  The man who had spoken stepped out from the trees, his hands held above his head. A big man, with a hard stare; Mancini thought he had th
e look of someone who knew how to handle himself, but he didn’t appear to be carrying a weapon.

  Mancini lowered the MP5.

  “Jeremy Pruitt,” the big man said. “I believe I may have spoken to your boss on the phone.”

  20

  The tunnel stank of age; damp and rust and decay.

  And fear.

  Conny walked, as instructed, at the rear of the large group of armed police, listening to the soft shuffling of boots ahead of her. She figured there had to be more than forty of them in total, creeping along the southbound line.

  No one spoke.

  And with each step forward, the mood among the officers became a little more toxic, the apprehension ripening inside them just that little bit more evident. It didn’t matter which unit the officers came from, she thought, or what experience they had. This was about as far from standard operating procedure as it was possible to get. They were all afraid.

  We’re going in blind, Chief Superintendent Porter had said, and it turned out he was being both literal and figurative. Most of the officers carried flashlights—either in their hands or affixed to their weapons—but the beams looked fragile in the suffocating darkness; they only lit so much. Wherever the flashlights were not pointing, the darkness became an impossible void. Shadows surged and retreated. As soon as the platform lights of Euston Station disappeared, just a few hundred yards into the tunnel system, Conny became painfully aware that the abyss was at her back; that all lights including her own were pointing forward. It felt like the blackness was chasing her, waiting for an opportunity to swallow her whole.

  The tension in the group was palpable. It poisoned her mind, and grim fantasies began to unspool: killers closing in on her from behind, all-but invisible in the darkness. Drawing nearer with knives in their hands and psychotic grins splitting their faces. Or maybe the shadows were home to explosive devices that the police could not see, buried charges which would detonate and bring the tunnel roof down onto her head, crushing her bones and slowly suffocating the life from her...

  A sensation which Conny hadn’t experienced in more than thirty years came back to her suddenly and vividly. She remembered sitting up in her small bed, staring at the closet in her bedroom, certain that the door was opening…slowly…

  …and that something monstrous waited inside.

  Her grip on the Glock tightened until her knuckles ached.

  It was just her mind playing tricks on her. The tunnel hadn’t even split yet, and the only way anyone could be behind her was if they came from the same platform that she and forty-plus other armed police had used.

  It was, Conny mused, incredible how quickly all the training and all the resolve just drained away when confronted with unknown danger and a lack of light. Some responses were primal; instinctive and unstoppable.

  And the darkness was the most complete that she had ever known. In the pitch black, with all her colleagues wearing dark uniforms, the world was reduced to floating points of light and half-stifled, fearful exhalations.

  A bead of cold sweat ran down her back, making her flinch, and she tried to shake the dread settling over her away. She had been in plenty of threatening situations in her career; life-threatening on more than one occasion, but the tunnel was getting to her, crawling under her skin.

  And that wasn’t just the darkness’ doing, she realised. It was Logan. Her poor boy, who needed her now more than ever, no matter how much he might deny it. Logan was going to require her support desperately in the coming months and years, just as his father had. As much as she tried to put her personal life aside when she was at work, there were some situations in which it simply wasn’t possible. She was walking headlong into an unknown danger that made her stomach churn while her son was in the hospital, struggling to comprehend a terminal diagnosis. While she was all that he had.

  If any harm comes to me, it will be Logan that suffers, she thought bleakly, and flinched when the group of police in front of her abruptly halted.

  Conny craned her neck to see what their lights were trained on, and her stomach lurched.

  The tunnel split into four directly ahead of them, and the Chief Superintendent was busy dividing them into smaller groups and pointing at each tunnel in turn.

  As the fractured wall of light that had been ahead of her began to break apart, and the smaller groups moved away into the tunnels, Conny couldn’t help but think that things had been bad moments earlier, but now they were so much worse.

  Eventually, only her small group was left, led by CS Porter himself. Along with Conny and Remy were half a dozen officers who looked like they really wanted to turn and run back through the tunnel, and a handful from the armed response units she had seen earlier. The tip of the spear.

  The AR officers took the lead, moving down the far left tunnel with their assault rifles tucked against their collarbones, each weapon sending a beam of light thirty metres ahead of them. Behind them, Porter led the rest. He kept a Glock pointed at the floor in his left hand; a walkie-talkie in his right. For the moment, all Conny could hear was rustling and faint static, along with the occasional mumbled word, all rasping from the tinny speaker at a barely-audible volume.

  The group pressed forward into the smaller tunnel with just a dozen flashlights, and the darkness that had felt dangerous when it was at her back embraced her like a live thing; a creature that swallowed up the lights cast into it with ravenous hunger.

  She followed the Chief Superintendent, trying not to think about her son, and about how he would cope if she did not make it back, and her growing anxiety slowly boiled all her thoughts away, until just one was left.

  Please, God, let this tunnel be empty.

  *

  Remy strained at his leash continually, trying to pull her back toward the platform at Euston, and Conny slowly began to fall behind. As a gap opened up between herself and the rest of the group, her nerves began to dance uncontrollably. There was no way she could allow herself to get separated from the others.

  “Heel, Rem,” she hissed, jerking on the leash, irritated at the note of panic she heard in her voice.

  He continued to pull, turning every step into a battle, until finally Conny stopped. “Fine,” she muttered, “if you want to go back, go back.”

  She glanced down the tunnel fearfully. Already the lights of the rest of the group were disappearing around a bend, threatening to leave her alone in the dark with only the Glock’s tiny flashlight attachment to guide her. She had to let Remy go.

  She loosened her grip on the chain, and Remy whined, but he didn’t move. He didn’t want to run away, she realised. Remy was far too loyal to leave her side.

  He’s trying to get me to run away.

  A shudder rippled through her.

  Remy whined again, very quietly, almost as though he was afraid of being heard.

  She knelt in front of the dog and whispered sternly, “Remy. We’re on duty. Heel.”

  Remy lowered his nose miserably, accepting defeat.

  Conny straightened and broke into a trot, closing the gap that had grown between herself and the flashlights of her colleagues.

  Closing it too quickly.

  Why have they stopped?

  Her pace faltered, and she felt Remy give another hopeful tug on the leash.

  The others were gathered around the Chief Superintendent, their expressions tense, all eyes pointed at the radio he held in his right hand. She jogged toward them and opened her mouth, drawing in a breath to ask what was happening, and Porter silenced her with a stare.

  The radio hissed faintly, and a disembodied voice whispered, “I don’t see anything. You?”

  Another voice responded, “No, but I hear it. Don’t you hear—”

  The words dissolved in a meaningless blast of static that cut open the darkness in the tunnel like a blade.

  Conny lifted her confused gaze to meet Porter’s eyes. The bearded man was staring at the radio in open-mouthed horror.

  Not static, she r
ealised. Gunfire.

  It lasted only a few seconds, but that was long enough for Conny to grind her teeth as she realised that what she was hearing was fully automatic, unsuppressed fire. The big guns.

  In one of the nearby tunnels, a group of policemen had been forced to engage, and from the sound of it, they had emptied their entire weapons at something.

  The clatter of shooting was followed by a sound all the worse; a sound that made Conny grip Remy’s leash so tightly that the metal pressed painfully into the flesh of her palm.

  Silence.

  No one calling it in. No one shouting at their colleagues to get the cuffs, or to head this way or that way. No suspect’s rights being recited.

  Not even any groans of pain.

  Just…silence.

  It was the Chief Superintendent that finally broke it.

  “Who fired?” Porter hissed into the radio. “Respond! Fitz? Stevens? Preston?”

  A disembodied voice floated in the darkness, tinny and low.

  “Not us, Sir.”

  It was followed swiftly by another; a voice that shook audibly.

  “Clear here, Sir.”

  A beat.

  Another.

  “Dammit, Stevens,” Porter snarled. “Respond. Stevens?”

  For several long seconds the air in the tunnel was compressed by the awful silence, until the weight of it made Conny want to clap her hands over her ears. She squeezed her eyes shut and drew in a deep breath.

  Let it out slowly.

  This can’t be happening.

  Not today.

  “Rendezvous back at the tunnel split,” she heard Porter say, and when she opened her eyes, the lights of the group had already turned around, the others heading back the way they had come at speed. Moving in a daze, Conny turned to sprint after them.

  And slammed to a halt as Remy tugged forcefully on the leash.

  “Remy!” she yelled, and there was more than a note of panic in her tone now. Her voice was soaked in it. The damn dog had wanted to go back minutes earlier, and now he was trying to drag her deeper into the tunnel?