He tossed the barely-smoked cigarette, and began to walk forward, his right hand settling on the gun at his hip.
Despite the warm morning, he suddenly felt cold, and some part of his subconscious nagged at him. With each step he took, the sound of the birds receded, almost as though all avian life had declared this part of the woods a no-fly zone.
Ian had seen combat, and he had served President Berman personally for six years. He had seen plenty of horrors, and his life had been in direct danger on more than one occasion. Still, he couldn’t remember a time when he had felt so hesitant, like his nerves were aware of something that his mind was missing. He briefly considered returning to the lodge, getting some of the guards beyond the front door to accompany him, and almost snorted a nervous laugh. Ice-cold Miller calling for backup to investigate the wind rustling some leaves. He would be a laughing stock.
He shook his head.
Wondered when he had unholstered his weapon, and why it was now clutched at his side, in fingers whose knuckles were slowly turning white. Years of training had hard-wired his DNA to respond to threat, and his intuition had served him well more times than he could count. He didn’t believe in the supernatural, didn’t believe it was possible to possess some psychic awareness, but he did believe that a human being’s senses could be highly tuned enough to pick up warning signs that others might miss. Even if his eyes couldn’t see it, his nerves felt it. There was something in the trees.
Threat.
Setting his jaw, Ian marched forward into deep shadows, scanning the trees, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the sudden change in light.
After twenty paces, he saw it.
A hole in the ground, roughly three feet in diameter.
He frowned, lifting his weapon a little, feeling his nerves begin to race uncontrollably. It almost looked like someone had been digging a grave.
Ian walked to the edge of the hole, glancing around to make sure nothing was creeping up on him while he was distracted, and peered inside.
Something peered right back. Something that had been sitting in the hole; waiting like a spider on a web. Waiting for its prey to come right to it.
Red eyes.
Teeth.
A hideous, twisted grin.
He felt a brief stab of fear, overwhelming and paralysing, and then his mind simply melted away. A lifetime of training dissolved in an instant; thousands of hours aimed at teaching him to maintain control of his emotions in the face of danger, and it was all wasted. No amount of preparation could have readied him for this. This all-consuming terror.
His legs started walking, as though being controlled remotely, while the conscious part of Ian Miller’s mind fractured and dissolved, reduced to screaming in a dark corner as he watched through his own eyes; felt the staggering, alien malevolence bubbling up within him.
He marched briskly back to the lodge, past the guards on the front door who nodded at him once more and looked vaguely puzzled when he blanked them.
Back to the hallway outside the silent room.
Ignoring the equally puzzled stares of Walters and Rudd.
His hand reached for the handle.
“What’s up, Ian?”
Walters’ words.
Ian heard them, but they were muffled; a shout dulled by thick walls until its message was lost entirely. Before Walters could say anything more, Ian watched his hand push the door open, and saw the famous faces in the room turn toward him in surprise.
And then, all by itself, his right hand raised his firearm, steady as a steam train.
Took aim.
And opened fire.
*
In Florida, around one thousand miles south of Camp David, long-distance trucker Jamie Lester had only pulled his rig into Mama’s truck stop and grill to take a leak—though the pictures of fat steaks in the window did look good—but found his skull emptying before his bladder would get the chance.
He froze in the parking lot, gaping in surprise as a patch of grassy land next to his rig spat out a chunk of earth, like the ground coughing up a wad of chewed tobacco. He peered into the resulting hole for several long seconds before walking stiffly back to his tanker and pulling open the driver’s side door.
His haul—eight thousand gallons of gasoline—became a slow-moving missile the moment the fingers he no longer controlled turned the key in the ignition.
Jamie would drive for just a couple more minutes, his unblinking eyes seeing only the road ahead, his fingers clenched tightly around the wheel. The drivers who saw him in their rear view mirrors either had the awareness to move out of his way, or the massive front grille of the truck made that decision for them, shunting them aside, swatting their vehicles away like flies.
Jamie’s long-forgotten aching bladder finally voided itself when control of his mind was cruelly handed back to him at the very last second before impact. He had time to feel the warm wetness in his crotch, and to notice something in his wing mirror: a hulking creature of some sort, launching itself from the roof of the tanker and galloping away into the trees lining the road.
And then the missile he drove smashed into the electrical substation that he had been racing toward at seventy miles per hour.
The fireball that consumed the substation killed Jamie instantly, and sent a plume of boiling smoke into the air that was visible from several nearby towns.
All of which lost power immediately.
*
In Rapides Parish, Louisiana, around nine hundred miles west of Jamie Lester’s exploding oil tanker, Private First Class Abel Sanchez had been on gate duty at Camp Beauregard for just a couple of hours when his watchful eyes caught movement among the pines.
In the shadows beneath the forest canopy, just beyond the fence.
After a brief investigation, and after watching in horror as the weapon in his hands executed the three second-class privates who had been at the gate with him, Abel made his way directly to the motor pool, popped open an ammunition box and fed rounds into the Browning M2 50-cal mounted on the rear of the nearest Growler light utility vehicle.
The bullets were armour-piercing. Shrieking shards of fire; they spat from the heavy barrel at a rate of almost six hundred rounds per minute.
By the time the bewildered soldiers at the base finally subdued Abel, he had killed thirty-four men and women, and had caused massive destruction to a swathe of nearby vehicles and structures.
When the corporal who had ended Abel’s killing spree with a three-round burst from his carbine turned away from his body, his confused eyes filling with hot, furious tears, he noticed movement in the corner of his eye immediately.
In the shadows beneath the forest canopy, just beyond the fence.
*
Eighteen hundred miles farther west of Camp Beauregard, at Los Angeles International Airport, Trey Brookes crushed out a cigarette and made his way from the designated smoking area toward the small private hangar that held what he considered to be his jet.
Trey liked to think of himself as the pilot to the stars: most of his contract work came from the movie studios, who used Trey—and the Lear jet he flew—to ferry important actors from one side of the country to the other. Mostly, Trey flew LA to New York and back; often enough that the route bored him. It was like whoever wrote movies didn’t realise that there were other cities in between. As far as Trey was concerned, if Times Square never appeared on film again, it would be just fine by him.
It was a good job, though, and it gave Trey enough stories—and enough selfies—to fill a lifetime of bar conversation.
“This is me with Tom.”
“This is me with Christian.”
“This is me with Bradley.”
Matt. Dwayne. Hugh. Channing. The list was endless, and Trey’s cellphone contained pictures of him grinning alongside every last one of them. He always used their first names when he flashed pictures of himself hanging out with the stars, and the drunk girls at the bars almost always joined the exact dots
he wanted them to join.
Not a bad life, all in all.
Today, he was scheduled to ferry Scarlett to—you guessed it—New York, for a meeting with some director ahead of the latest superhero movie. Trey rarely ever bothered to learn the directors’ names. Only a handful impressed the girls at the bars, and they very rarely flew with Trey. Hell, they had their own damn jets.
When he arrived at the hangar, he was unfazed to discover that the lights were out. Scarlett wasn’t due for another couple of hours at least, and takeoff would be a half hour after her arrival. Plenty of time for him to call for an engineer to fix up the hangar, and then retire to the cockpit for a nap.
He made his way to the rear of the hangar, to the fuse box, pulling out his phone as he walked, but found something else sitting in the shadows, waiting for him.
A minute later, Trey sat in the cockpit, his ears no longer hearing as the radio wailed warnings that he had not been cleared for takeoff, and that he needed to get off runway four immediately.
The warnings didn’t matter and the jet didn’t take off; not really. The wheels were less than ten feet from the ground when Trey’s hands yanked hard on the control stick, pulling the nose sharply toward the terminal, aiming the enormous steel bullet that the plane had become at the vast crowds of people gathered inside, arcing toward the screams at almost two hundred miles per hour.
*
Three hundred miles north east of the disaster at LAX, Chris Greer leant his bike against the railing and sucked in a few deep breaths.
He hadn’t been pedalling especially fast: he was up top today, on relatively flat ground, ensuring that visitors to the Hoover Dam were staying safe, and answering the occasional question. He liked patrolling the top: it made him feel like a tour guide rather than a cop, and the exercise was good without being exhausting. He usually stayed on his bike most of the day, completing slow, easy circuits.
His breathlessness was more to do with the weather: it was late in the year, but still oppressively hot, and the air felt still and heavy, like the world was waiting for a storm to break. He snapped his water bottle from its holster on the bike’s frame and slugged back a large mouthful, taking in the scenery. Even after a couple of years stationed at the dam, the vista laid out before him could still take his breath away.
He often got a chance to enjoy it, too: the dam was critical infrastructure for the country, and so full-time police were required to be on the lookout for trouble—terrorism, mostly—but Chris’ two years in the job had been quiet; serene enough that it was possible for him to sometimes forget that he was even there to keep the peace. Most of the visitors to the dam were too busy being awestruck by the vastness of it to even think about causing trouble.
It was a good assignment. When he had first graduated from the academy, he had dreamed of policing one of the big cities: Vegas, perhaps, or Denver. Somewhere close enough to his family, but still offering plenty of potential for excitement. Yet, after a few years dealing with crime in the small town of Flagstaff, before relocating to the smaller-still Boulder City, just south of Vegas, he had come to realise that excitement was overrated. Sure, policing in Vegas itself would have been more thrilling, but it also might have killed him. Once he had started a family of his own, staying alive seemed way more important.
Thus far, there was little chance of danger at the dam, and there were probably thousands of cops out there in the bigger cities who would gladly trade with him.
Besides, Vegas offered up some spectacular sights, but nothing quite like this.
Behind Chris, the force of the mighty Colorado River was corralled by the gigantic stone slab that was the dam. In front of him, hundreds of feet below, the river re-emerged as a thin trickle. He could see for miles.
Screams weren’t unusual at the dam, but they were almost always screams of delight, usually drawn from children seeing the vast structure for the first time. A couple of times over the previous two years, Chris had heard cries of pain while on patrol: on each occasion the source had turned out to be a visitor suffering a heart attack.
When the scream rang out through the thick mid-morning air, and Chris froze with his water bottle still tilted to his lips, he knew it was different immediately.
This was no scream of surprise, nor even of pain: it was a bestial shriek of pure terror. A male voice, Chris thought, though he couldn’t be entirely sure as it ripped up through the octaves, clawing at his nerves. Adrenaline began to pump through his system, sending his senses into a state of hyper-alert. Whoever had unleashed the awful noise wasn’t nearby, but they were close enough for the sound to carry easily to his ears in the soupy air. The background hum of the dam—the murmuring of sightseers and the purring engines of vehicles moving slowly—seemed to halt instantly.
He lowered the water bottle and scanned the people and traffic scattered across the dam. It wasn’t busy; certainly not as crowded as it usually was, perhaps because a lot of folks had stayed home, glued to the news reports of the disaster in England.
Chris saw immediately that those on foot were as confused as he was: they peered about inquisitively, searching for the source of the noise. None of the handful of cars and buses crossing the dam were moving erratically; it wasn’t likely that the yell had emanated from a vehicle. Whoever had screamed, it didn’t appear to have been a member of the visiting public.
That just leaves…
Chris frowned, and gazed out across the water at the intake towers.
Perhaps one of the maintenance staff?
He began to wheel his bike across the dam, lifting a hand to acknowledge the driver of a Prius who braked for him, keeping his eyes fixed on the nearest towers. He made it halfway before he saw it, and his footsteps slowed.
Movement.
He flicked his eyes to meet it.
On the farthest of the intake towers, a metal door opened, and a man wearing a maintenance uniform rocketed out into the light, making it all of two steps before something that Chris couldn’t see jerked him violently backward, yanking him back into the tower and out of sight.
He had only glimpsed the man for a second, just a heartbeat, but it had been long enough for Chris to recognize that the guy’s dirty white boilersuit had been stained red across the chest. Long enough for him to understand that something terrible was happening at the Hoover Dam.
He heard another scream. This time there was unmistakable pain in the yell, and this time, the scream ended abruptly, like someone had just pulled the plug that powered it.
Chris’ heart hammered, and he scurried across the road, throwing his bike to the ground and pulling out his radio. He depressed the button, preparing to call the incident in and request backup.
The words didn’t have time to leave his mouth.
Chris watched, the soft buzzing static of the radio in his hand unheard, as a creature born in a nightmare emerged from the intake tower. In a single, fluid motion, the creature tossed an object out across the railing toward the river: a misshapen red lump of something that Chris’ mind took a moment to recognize—Oh, dear God, no—and he had time to identify a single limb that was still attached to the lump—a dangling leg—before it disappeared from his sight, leaving an arc of blood looping through the air behind it like tracer fire.
What was left of the maintenance worker entered the water with a faint, apologetic plop.
With a shriek, the creature turned toward the dam itself, leaping easily to the adjacent intake tower, covering a distance that had to be thirty feet or more in a single, horrific movement. When it landed, it leapt again without pause, onto the walkway leading to the dam itself, and began to gallop on all fours.
Straight toward Chris.
Move!
The world began to congeal around him.
With a strangled yelp, Chris fell backward, his mind reeling at the horror of the creature: like a huge insect, plated with armour that caught the daylight and glistened. His overriding impression of the creature was that it wa
s sharp, a blur of angles; teeth and claws and—
Those teeth.
Chris landed heavily on the sidewalk, blasting the air from his lungs and losing his grip on the radio. All around him, he heard screams erupting as pedestrians scattered in all directions, propelled by pure, unadulterated terror. Somewhere to his left, a metallic bang split the air as someone rear-ended the car in front. To his right, he heard a screech of tyres, an engine accelerating away suddenly, the speed limit forgotten.
And then, as Chris feebly lifted his arms to protect his face, the thing was above him, travelling at bewildering speed, clearing his prone, helpless body like a low-flying jet.
Chris hardly dared look.
Couldn’t bear not to.
And, for a moment, time seemed to stretch out as he took in the terrifying detail.
Glistening black skin, pulled taut across rippling muscles, like a freakish bodybuilder reflected in a circus mirror in Hell. A shape that was almost human, and yet utterly inhuman at the same time. Rows of teeth crammed inside a massive jaw that looked wide enough to encompass a whole human skull easily and—
It was gone.
Galloping onward, its footfalls producing a thunderous tapping sound as the scythe-like talons attached to its feet drummed on the concrete.
Clickclickclickclickclickclick—
Chris wrenched his head to the side, following the monster with his eyes, certain that he would see it tear into the fleeing civilians on the dam, swing those terrible limbs, and rip their bodies apart.
Instead, it continued forward, apparently unconcerned by the people trying to flee from it, crossed the road in a handful of bounding strides...and launched itself off the edge of the dam with a shriek that sounded bizarrely like triumph.
Chris’ breath returned, exploding painfully in his throat, and he scrambled to his feet.
The monster had surely thrown itself to its death, seven hundred feet below. There wasn’t time to try and comprehend the why of it. All Chris’ mind wanted to do was to see. To try, somehow, to understand. He sprinted back across the road, slamming into the guard rail, and leaned over.
The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River Page 61