The words caught in Herb’s throat.
The words of his father.
He snapped his mouth shut, and for a moment, a thunderous wave of dark memories crashed through his mind. Lies and broken promises. Threats and coercion and the sacrifice of innocents. Ritual murder on a vast scale. His jaw clenched involuntarily.
I can’t do it.
I won’t.
“She’s right,” he said, staring blankly at his reflection in the dark television screens on the wall, speaking to nobody in particular. “Craven said she had a secure place in the mountains, a place the vampires couldn’t reach. These things are burrowers, but not even they can dig through solid rock. We can’t just let everyone at this ranch die. They are innocent. Anyone who wants to stay and fight should, but the rest should get to safety before it’s too late.”
Conny nodded firmly.
“And I’ll go with them.” she glanced at Logan. “We will. I’m sorry, guys, but the only reason I kept going in London was to make sure I took Logan somewhere safe. To keep him alive. I’m not about to put him in harm’s way again, not if I can help it.”
Logan’s eyes darted to his mother. He looked angry.
“I’m already dying, Mum. Remember? Maybe I could help fight and actually do something useful with whatever is left of my life.”
“It’s not up for debate, Lo. You could live for years, yet. You could have a good life. Maybe even children of your own.”
At that, Logan’s face twisted into a sneer.
“I wouldn’t be that cruel,” he said sharply. “Or that selfish.”
Herb saw tears glittering in Conny’s eyes. He knew that Logan was suffering from Huntington’s Disease—a terminal illness that was hereditary, but far from guaranteed in a child even if a parent carried the genes that caused it—but had figured that most of Logan’s attitude stemmed from the fact he was a typically surly teenager. Yet as he watched Conny and Logan’s conversation heating up, he saw accusation in the boy’s eyes. Logan blamed his mother for his condition, for having a child when she knew the risks.
Conny took a moment to respond, perhaps biting back the angry reply that wanted to spill from her lips.
“Maybe not, Logan. But it’s not your decision. I’m your mother. My job is to keep you safe, whether you like it or not. That means that when you do eventually die, it will be peacefully. Not at the hands of some monster.”
“But—”
“No buts. We’re leaving. As soon as possible.”
“Leaving? I think you might find that you’re safer here.”
Herb flinched. The conversation had become so heated that apparently nobody had heard the lock disengaging behind them. When he turned, he saw a thin man in his mid-fifties entering the room with Mancini at his back.
The thin man wore the all-black attire of the clerics, but with an ornate insignia emblazoned on the chest, just above the heart. Herb squinted, trying to read the spidery lettering, but all he could make out was Sepultus Deos. He thought back to the excruciating Latin lessons his father had put he and his brothers through when they were young.
Something about buried gods, he thought. The order of the buried gods? So that was the name Craven gave her faux-religion.
This, then, was the Grand Cleric.
The robed man walked straight past the four of them sitting at the table, glancing only momentarily at Remy, who had curled up on the floor, and aimed a remote control at the televisions on the wall.
The screens began to hum to life slowly, and Herb fixed his gaze on Mancini. Something about the former soldier’s expression—stunned and fearful now, rather than his default grimace—made Herb’s gut churn wildly.
Something has happened, he thought, and turned his attention back to the TV screens.
All of them were tuned to a rolling news channel.
To the ashen-faced news anchor whose eyes were wide and frightened as she stuttered, “...around two thousand estimated casualties, and…” the anchor pressed a finger to her ear, shaking her head a little. Apparently she was having trouble believing whatever her producer was telling her to say next.
“We are moving away from this story to bring you more breaking news…”
6
In Maryland, around seven hundred miles west of Ross Carney’s power plant in Clinton, Secret Service Agent Ian Miller stood with his hand resting on the grip of his handgun, and contemplated the silence.
He had been guarding the door for almost six hours straight and, for most of his shift, his ears had been assaulted by the chaos in the room beyond it: the heated debates of President Berman and his senior advisors as they tried to understand the disaster that was still unfolding across the Atlantic in England.
Gradually, all talk had whittled away, leaving only the president’s voice, barking questions to which nobody seemed to have answers.
And now, there was just this withered silence.
The lack of talk was worse than all the half-baked theories that had dominated the first few hours; the quiet burrowed under Ian’s skin and made his nerves jangle.
“I guess they don’t think it’s the Muslims anymore.”
The man who had spoken was Secret Service agent Malcolm Rudd. Rudd had been standing guard at the door along with Ian for the past three hours. Rudd nodded at the door. Apparently the silence beyond it was working his nerves, too.
Ian frowned. They were meant to be standing guard, not talking. Still, these were extreme circumstances. He shrugged mentally. Protocol be damned.
“Guess not,” he muttered back. “Didn’t look much like ISIS the last time I saw a news broadcast.”
Rudd nodded.
“How long ago was that?”
Ian dropped his eyes to his wristwatch and calculated.
“Six hours, give or take.”
Rudd blew out a snort.
“Long time. Yeah, it ain’t ISIS.”
Ian arched an eyebrow. News of the attack on London had first emerged around twelve hours earlier, and the first assumptions—both in the newsrooms and among the men and women charged with running the United States—had been that terrorism had once again reared its ugly head in Europe. Over those first few hours, the conversation had been dominated by America’s own security, and the possibility of a simultaneous attack on American soil. Extremism had become an ever-present threat across Europe in the past few years, and co-ordinated, multi-site attacks were the current modus operandi for those who wanted to attack the West.
President Berman had immediately raised the threat level to somewhere north of biblical, and had ordered all security services—and just about anybody who possessed a gun—to move to a state of high alert.
The terrorism theory only really held water for the first hour or two, as far as Ian was concerned. There had been no new footage from London in hours, but back when the news teams had still been reporting, it had been abundantly clear that this wasn’t just an attack. London was being systematically destroyed on a massive scale. There was no known terrorist network capable of bringing a city the size of London to its knees so rapidly. Whatever was happening in southeast England, it was something nobody had seen before.
Yet it wasn’t just the scale of the destruction that chilled American nerves: it was the manner of it. London’s citizens appeared to have turned on each other: all across the city, pockets of frenzied bloodlust had broken out, each claiming scores or hundreds of lives, before seeming to cease, and then starting up again elsewhere. To Ian’s mind, that meant someone or something was moving around the city, inciting brutality before moving on, but President Berman had, for too long, been locked on threats like ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Ian had stood guard and listened as the educated voices in the room beyond the door talked about chemical warfare. Some sort of dirty bomb detonation, perhaps, something which had driven the citizens of the UK mad, like something out of some zombie movie. The fictional rage virus made real.
Berman, ever the campaigner,
had spoken about how he should respond; what the voters would want him to do to help resolve the crisis. American boots should be on the ground in England, he said, helping to quell the chaos and provide security for the UK government’s efforts to recover when the violence had settled down.
But it didn't settle.
It escalated.
The British military entered London after a couple of hours, and a full-scale war broke out. A war that, at last count, everybody seemed to be losing.
When the scale of the disaster became clear, the president began to speak about aid, about helping one of the nation’s most steadfast allies. The full might of the American military might be required to restore order to the United Kingdom. The president took strategic advice from senior military personnel on how much of the armed forces could be spared without fatally weakening the US’ own security.
The answers, apparently, displeased him. Berman—a moderate man who had been elected primarily because of his dry charm and his economic expertise—roared curses until finally, the only thing that Ian could hear was the silence.
The most powerful man in the world, along with his most senior advisors was, Ian realised, reduced to watching the news just like everybody else. Watching the breathless reports of the destruction which was taking place in England. Just watching.
Silent.
Impotent.
Curiosity was getting the better of him. Rudd had a look on his face that suggested he knew more than Ian—a smug, almost childish expression. Like a five-year-old boy cradling the most important secret in the world.
“What was the last thing you saw?” Ian said at last. Rudd had probably been planted in front of a TV screen right up to the last second before his shift started.
“The Brits caught something on camera,” Rudd said in a conspiratorial tone. “Not long after it first started. Nobody even noticed it at first. The looney-tunes on the web spotted it.”
Ian stared at Rudd expectantly, but the younger man apparently wanted Ian to draw it out of him.
Ian sighed. “Caught what on camera?”
Rudd grinned, and pulled out his iPhone, jabbing at the screen and holding the device out toward Ian.
Ian grimaced. Bad enough if someone caught them chatting when they were supposed to be guarding what was probably the most important room in the world at that moment, but if someone—especially the president—found them poring over a damn smartphone like a couple of teenagers, they’d have strips torn right off them. Most likely, it would be the last time they would ever protect the president.
Ian started to shake his head, but his eyes couldn’t resist the lure of the tiny screen. He reached out and took it without a word. The screen was showing BBC news footage which, according to the timestamp, had been taken several hours earlier. It was dusk in the footage, and Ian knew that things had worsened dramatically in London once darkness had fallen. Under cover of night, the city had become fire and chaos, and the footage caught by news crews had dried up fast.
This must be when it all started, Ian thought. His eyes were fixed on the tiny screen now, all thoughts of being discovered by the president forgotten.
The headline at the bottom of the screen read: unknown creatures?
Ian watched the footage as it rolled on. It had been taken from a helicopter, which swung across the city, until the detached eye of the camera fell on a large green area. Hyde Park, according to the information scrolling across the screen. It had been the site of a Red Hot Chili Peppers gig right up until the moment when it became the site of a massacre instead. The camera panned across a crowd of people as they began to scatter in all directions. Amidst the madness, the moving camera glimpsed something for just a couple of seconds. A few blurry frames caught at the bottom corner of the picture.
It looked like there was a single figure on the ground, and some creature—at least the size of a bear, but gangly, wiry and sharp somehow—looming over him, its face right in his.
The image was lost as the helicopter continued to swing away, following the crowds as they erupted into the nearby streets.
The image changed suddenly, to a panel of talking heads interviewed by an ashen-faced host, and Ian dared to thumb the volume on the iPhone, until the tinny chatter was just barely audible.
This was, apparently, the only footage caught of the creatures, though numerous eyewitness reports suggested that there were more of them in the city.
The blurry image was a prank, the talking heads said. A hoax.
It was an animal that had escaped from London Zoo.
It was a trick of the light.
No, it was a monster. A military science experiment gone wrong. Aliens.
Ian watched with interest as the tiny screen displayed a frozen, blown up image of the ‘creature.’ The picture was badly pixelated, but he got an impression of a monstrous face, a mouth full of teeth. To his admittedly untrained eye, it didn’t look like the footage had been doctored—and it had been caught by a BBC camera. He couldn’t imagine a serious news organisation like that playing games while London burned.
When the talking heads began to flash up messages from Twitter, presenting them as news, Ian shook his head and handed the phone back to Rudd.
“You saw it?”
Rudd’s face was flushed with anticipation.
“I saw it.”
“You think it’s real?”
Ian’s brow furrowed. The world just wasn’t big enough for a creature like that to exist. If there were some species capable of attacking and destroying a major European city out there, history would have some record of it. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder if the president had people working on enhancing and studying the footage. Maybe that was why the room beyond the door had fallen silent. Maybe the results were in, and President Berman had no fucking clue what to do with them.
Something about that idea rang true in Ian’s mind. Right now, the president should at least be busy organising aid for Britain, maybe even American boots on the ground. Instead, the official US government response to a global crisis, the like of which hadn’t been seen since the end of the Second World War, was paralysis.
For the first time in the president’s six-year tenure, Ian believed that the commander-in-chief had no idea what was happening, nor what was to be done about it. This, he thought, was the inevitable result when a nice-guy banker took the seat behind the most powerful desk in the land. To Ian’s mind, presidents weren’t judged by their policies or their speeches or their ability to shuffle numbers on some spreadsheet. They were judged by the way they responded if and when the shit hit the fan. That was what history remembered.
Berman was the wrong man for the job, but he was the man who had the job, and that meant Ian would protect him until his dying breath.
“I don’t know if it’s real,” Ian said at last. “But I’m sure glad it’s happening over there, and not over here.” He felt heat rising in his cheeks. Did I just say that? Millions are dying, and all I can say is I’m grateful I’m not involved?
“Pffft,” Rudd snorted. “We’re better equipped than the Brits.”
Ian didn’t respond. In a different life, he had fought alongside British troops in the Middle East, before he took up a role as a guard dog. The Brits had been just as well equipped, just as well trained as the Americans. If the British military could fail in a matter of hours, in their own back yard, he doubted the American version would fare much better.
Yeah, he thought. I am grateful it’s safe here.
And it was.
Ian was one of a twenty-strong Secret Service detail tasked with protecting the president while he spent a few days recuperating at Camp David after a minor health scare. He had stood guard outside the camp’s plush wooden lodges plenty of times before, and his pulse has never had cause to tick beyond sedentary. Camp David was secure, but far from the security of the Whitehouse. Hell, Ian would have preferred that the president was safely sitting aboard Air Force One, patrolling the skies w
here nothing could touch him.
He checked his watch.
Time for a shift change. Time to get away from Malcolm Rudd’s gleeful excitement.
Thank God.
Ian thumbed his radio and called for relief. Even without Rudd’s chatter, standing outside the door listening to the silence was making him feel a little crazy; just getting away from the indecision he sensed in the most important room in the world made him feel grateful.
After a couple of minutes, he saw movement in the corridor, and nodded at Walters, the agent who had appeared to take over guard duty alongside Rudd. Walters nodded back, but didn’t say anything. Ian was grateful for that, too. Sighing wearily, he made his way out of the lodge, passing by several more burly men who were doing their level best not to look spooked by the news coming from England.
Or not coming: as far as Ian was aware, all contact with the UK had ceased hours earlier. The ramifications of that were dizzying.
Better not to think about it.
Focus on Berman. Let the rest take care of itself, for now.
Once he got outside, the peaceful forest setting made the events in London seem detached and unreal. The morning sun was filtering through the trees, casting deep, peaceful shadows. The birds were chirping. Everything was normal. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, lit one, and breathed deeply, sighing a little as the smoke wound around his lungs.
He froze.
Had he just caught movement from the corner of his eye? Somewhere off in the trees to his right?
He peered through the thick foliage, squinting. The contrast between the bright light overhead and the gloom beneath the trees made it difficult to pull any detail from the landscape, but there was no reason for any of the security personnel to be over there. All had been ordered to stay close to the lodges.
His eyes widened.
There it was again.
A hint of movement, something which may have been branches swaying in the wind, but which to Ian looked purposeful somehow, almost beckoning him forward.
The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River Page 60