Logan nodded, his expression suddenly serious, and moved away. He would be okay.
Conny turned to Andrew Lloyd, dropping her voice.
“Which way?”
“To the archives?” Andrew waved an arm down a long, curved tunnel. “Down there. Quite a way to go, yet. Jennifer kept the archives as separate from the rest of the facility as she could. She’d be mortified if she knew there were initiates in here, pawing over her family’s treasure.”
Conny waited until she was far enough away from the dining area to respond.
“You’re going to cut that shit out, Andrew,” she said, keeping her tone even.
Andrew blinked.
“It’s like I said back at the ranch, you’re not the Grand Cleric anymore. You’re a middle-aged guy wearing a dress. I didn’t bring you here—I didn’t save your life—so that you could just start abusing these kids again.”
“Abusing? I wouldn’t touch—”
“There’s more than one kind of abuse,” Conny interrupted, cutting through his indignant bluster. “I’ve only seen a handful of people over the age of twenty since I arrived in this nuthouse you call a life. I don’t know what you and Craven did with the other adults, and I don’t want to know, but I do know that you didn’t accumulate all these kids by putting out invitations on Facebook. These are vulnerable children, and they ended up in a place worse than they could have anticipated, and probably worse than most of them even realised. But things have changed, and we’re all in this together. Equally. No more Grand Clerics. No more clerics at all. No more initiates. Just a bunch of people hiding out in a mountain trying to survive. Nobody is going to bow to you in here, Andrew. Not as long as I’m around.”
Andrew’s eyes flashed dangerously, and for the first time, Conny thought she got a glimpse of the real man behind the facade. Put a coward in a position of power, she thought, and you’ll have a bully before too long.
Not on my watch, Conny thought.
“You don’t have the right—”
Conny stopped abruptly, planting her hands on her hips and heaving a sigh.
“I’m doing you a favour here, Andrew. If it isn’t me questioning your leadership, it will be one of them.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the distant dining area. “Your little robes-and-rituals routine: how long do you really think it will last down here? You’re buried in a hole with a bunch of injured and terrified teenagers, half of whom are carrying automatic weapons.”
Andrew stared at her, and something flickered in his eyes. A dim sort of understanding.
“Yeah. Do the math.” Conny couldn’t resist the little jibe, affecting a mild mockery of Andrew’s thick accent.
Andrew nodded weakly.
“Once I’ve seen this researcher of yours, and once we’ve made sure that every single corner of this rabbit warren is safe, we’re going to gather everybody together and figure out how things are going to work down here. And it won’t involve anybody kissing your arse.”
23
Something was playing with Bravo Team.
Tracking them.
Jerome had suspected as much back in the suite, when he had maybe-heard-maybe-imagined something tapping on the outside of the window, but as he led his team down the service stairs, his suspicions slowly became certainty. The four remaining members of the 190th Chemical Recon Detachment were a ball of yarn, being batted around by vast claws that he could not see.
But he could feel it.
The constant attacks by civilians were too regular, too convenient. On virtually every floor, the exit door would burst open moments before they reached it, and an attacker would charge out into the stairwell, brandishing a rudimentary weapon of one sort or another.
None of the attacks had much of an effect beyond horrifying Jerome, but killing Bravo didn’t seem to be the point.
It was slowing their progress, expending their ammo. Making them sweat. Pushing a splinter of fear deeper and deeper into their minds.
The pattern wasn’t random. There was no way for all these civilians to even know that Bravo were there, and despite how quickly Jerome wanted the team to move, he had also kept them quiet. Yet something was observing their progress and throwing obstacles in their way.
After they had descended fifteen floors, he conjured up that ball of yarn image.
After twenty five, he conjured another. A sadistic child, pulling the limbs from an insect one by one.
What would happen when there were no limbs left to pull?
He kept an eye on the narrow windows in the stairwell as they descended, searching for a sign of movement, but never caught anything other than in the corner of his eye. But increasingly, he was certain that there was something out there watching them, communicating with something else on the inside of the building.
Toying with us.
The game being played was, in some ways, more terrible than the violence they had initially encountered. It hinted at arrogance and superiority, at an enemy that believed—perhaps correctly—that it had almost godlike control over the situation.
But what enemy?
Monsters?
Jerome couldn’t bring himself to believe it.
Not until he checked the dial on his watch, and saw one. Reflected in the glass, moving past the window a floor above them.
His pace faltered, just a little.
Don’t let it know.
He suppressed the urge to spin around and fire up the stairwell. The creature had only been in his sight for a moment; it would already be gone. He had no target, but at least now, at last, he had a little intel.
What was it?
The creature was unlike anything Jerome had seen before. If he had to guess, he would have said it was an animal, all angular limbs and teeth beneath fierce red eyes. Yet the monster was clearly intelligent, capable of strategy. Capable of pulling the limbs off the entire human race.
He continued forward and down, readying himself for the next service exit to spit out another horror.
It didn’t disappoint.
On the tenth floor of the Bellagio, it was a child. A pudgy little boy who looked about ten years old at most. The boy skipped out into the stairwell just a few feet ahead of Jerome, holding an enormous knife in one hand and a woman’s severed head in the other.
The sight was clearly intended to shock, but the games being played had lost some of their power over Jerome now—now that he knew there was a design behind them. The situation had threatened to unhinge him when he believed that all the horror was purely random. It had made descending past each floor like taking another step down a stairway to Hades.
But this boy, clutching what Jerome presumed was his own mother’s head between gore-drenched fingers? He wasn’t part of the horror. He was part of the game.
The little boy launched the severed head toward Jerome and charged, lifting the knife above his head, shrieking.
He made it a couple of paces before Jerome buried the fire axe in his skull, cleaving his forehead right down the middle, almost splitting his round face in two.
The pudgy boy fell backward, slumping onto the stairs with a moist thump, pulling the handle of the axe from Jerome’s grasp.
He’d already used the axe on several floors, pulling it free of the meat that clenched around the blade on each occasion, but this time, he just couldn’t face it. Let the dead boy have the axe. Jerome had plenty of ammo left, and Bravo was almost at the casino floor.
Where, some part of him knew, the game would end.
24
Memories of blood and delicious suffering.
Dan walked through them, piecing them together. Some said that the human brain was a miracle; that it remembered everything. If we could only access our memories reliably, we would have every minute of our lives recorded for us in ultra-high definition. Every moment, from the mundane to the miraculous, frozen in place, exhibits in an eternal museum.
If that were true, he reasoned, then the time he had spent in the
vampire’s mind—however fleeting—would have shown him much more than he realised.
But there was no logical order to the vampire mind; no chronology, no hierarchy. Just the seething sea of chaotic sensation. Vampire memories weren’t visual in quite the same way that human memories were; they were emotional.
The vampire remembered power.
Triumph.
Fear.
Dan honed in on the fear.
What had the vampire been afraid of?
It had certainly been afraid of the black river, but there was another fear in that hideous mind too; an old, distantly remembered terror.
The fear of extinction.
Dan drank the memory in, tasting it. Smelling it.
Fear of humans.
The vampire had lived long. It had known a time when humanity had been easy prey, when its kind had grown fat on their blood. But evolution had a way of changing the rules of the game.
Over eons, the humans had become larger. Stronger. To the vampire’s eye, they evolved at a frenetic pace, always breeding, always changing. They began to use tools. They began to build. Communication made them stronger. With each iteration, evolution made killing them more difficult—and in some ways more enjoyable. Thrilling, even.
Until one day, a human had found a way to fight back.
A vampire died on the point of a spear.
An aberration.
Until another died with a hatchet buried in its skull. And another. In different times, in different parts of the world.
The black river saw all, it felt each and every death. It fed the news of vampire losses back to its children.
Humans weren’t just prey; not anymore. They had become dangerous. One particular breed could look a vampire right in the eye.
And kill it.
He searched further, prising open the memory, and then, all of a sudden he was looking at it. The river itself. Something like a vampire in shape, but liquid, amorphous. A rippling obscenity; an entity that had crawled from the time before time. An ancient parasite that had survived in the shadows, hiding its power from sight.
It was real.
Dan’s eyes flared open, and he vomited blood onto his lap.
He was in a moving vehicle, sitting in the back seat. A familiar face leaned over the seat in front of him.
Herb.
The younger man stared at Dan with eyes full of concern. Herb was talking, but for a moment, Dan couldn’t hear him over the rushing of blood in his ears.
He vomited again.
Wiped at his mouth, his hand coming away red.
So much blood.
“Dan...Dan? Are you still with us, mate?”
Reality snapped back into place: a sensation that felt to Dan like his ears popping as if he were sitting aboard a plane as it climbed far too steeply.
He shuddered, remembering the dream.
Nodded.
“I’m okay.”
“What happened?”
“I was trying to remember….what it felt like...to be inside the vampire’s head.”
“Why?”
“To see if there was anything I missed.”
“And was there?”
Dan shook his head. It felt like his brain might fall out of his ears at any moment.
“I don’t know. Maybe. I think Mancini is right. There were others, like me. Maybe still are. I think the vampires were afraid of us.”
Herb nodded, his eyes widening a little as Dan coughed out another mouthful of blood.
“Hang in there,” he said. “We’re almost there.”
Dan slumped back in his seat, his head lolling. Each time he wanted to access the ability that the connection with the black river gave him, it got easier, but in the way that an addict might find it easier to take a drug. The effect on his body and his mind was worsening.
He felt fatigued now, old and tired. Sick in his bones.
He focused on the road as Mancini swung the jeep off the highway onto a smaller, private road. Up ahead, a sign read Cheyenne Mountain Complex.
“You think they’ll let us in?” Herb asked.
“Only one way to find out,” Mancini said. “But maybe hold off on the vampire talk until we’re inside, okay?”
Herb gave a noncommittal murmur by way of response.
“Doesn’t look like much,” he said.
“It’s not much, at least, not above ground. Just an entrance. All the action happens underground, behind twenty-five ton steel doors.”
“Uh-huh. So I suppose we need to attract their attention somehow?”
“I doubt it. If the place is operational, they already know we’re here. They knew the minute we left the interstate.”
Mancini steered the jeep along the winding road toward an innocuous-looking security hut alongside a wooden barrier.
“Looks like nobody’s home,” Herb said grimly. The guard hut was empty. Beyond it, past a wire fence, there was no sign of movement.
“Looks that way,” Mancini agreed.
He smashed through the wooden barrier without slowing.
Dan peered around the compound as the jolt of impact ran through the vehicle. He’d read plenty about Cheyenne Mountain, too. It seemed like every part of America had its own attendant conspiracy theory. In this case, the NORAD installation was supposedly a front for an alien coverup. It wasn’t the US military who occupied the giant bunker in the Colorado countryside. It was the Greys. Or the lizard-men, he couldn’t remember.
Right now though, Herb’s initial assessment looked accurate. There were a handful of vehicles on show on the road leading to the main entrance but all looked abandoned. There was no sign of life; alien, human, vampire or otherwise.
Mancini aimed for a gigantic metal mouth carved into the base of Cheyenne Mountain, and suddenly they were powering through a tunnel large enough to accommodate a train. Two-lane blacktop bordered by rough-hewn granite walls.
Mancini steered along it for a hundred yards before it swerved suddenly to the right, and he slammed on the brakes. The jeep screeched to a halt just yards away from the enormous steel door.
Mancini stepped out of the driver’s seat, leaning back in to press on the horn. Three long, loud, echoing blasts.
There was no response.
Dan lifted his eyes to the roof of the tunnel. Far above it, out of sight, the skies were already darkening.
“Shit,” Herb said. “I think it’s time we started talking about what we do now. We’ll have to head back to the ranch. Meet Conny at the bunker. It’ll be dark soon. We can’t do anything without light. We can figure out our next move, come back out in the morning.”
“I doubt there’ll be much left in the morning,” Dan said quietly.
Mancini glared at them both and shook his head.
He leaned on the horn again. A single press.
“Hey!” he roared, screaming at the giant metal door. “We know how to stop them!”
Mancini stood, his head cocked to one side.
Waiting.
Waiting.
And just when it seemed like wasted breath, spotlights above the huge door flared on, and a beeping alarm rang out.
The door began to open.
25
It had taken an almost painfully long time to reach what Andrew Lloyd claimed was the lowest level of the bunker in the Rocky Mountains. The tunnels and cracks in the rock seemed endless, but she had seen no sign of vulnerability as she headed down to the bottom of the complex. By the time the ever-narrowing tunnels finally opened out into a series of huge, flat caverns, even Remy’s head had dropped with exhaustion.
Conny’s back ached, and her feet ached even more, but she was satisfied. She hadn’t quite seen all of the bunker, she was sure, but everything she had seen had backed up Lloyd’s assessment: the walls were solid rock. There was no way in.
Safe at last.
The first of the huge caverns on what Conny thought of as the ground floor contained enough food to make her dizzy. Enor
mous sacks of rice and dried pasta, nuts and seeds sat alongside seemingly endless stacks of canned goods.
Remy seemed to know what was in those cans. He stared up at Conny with pleading eyes until at last, she laughed, and picked out a can of Campbell’s meatballs with a ring-pull opener.
“Want this one, Rem?”
Remy cocked his head to the side, staring at Conny like she was a crossword puzzle that he almost had the answers to, until she laughed again and deposited the meatballs right onto the rocky ground. Almost as soon they landed, they were gone. Remy devoured the entire contents of the can in a half-dozen enormous bites, and continued to lick the floor clean until Conny opened up another can. Stewed steak.
Remy’s tail wagged uncontrollably.
The steak didn’t last much longer than the meatballs, and Conny left Remy rubbing his face on the floor in happiness, getting the last of the gravy all over himself. She opened a huge bottle of water that was far too big for her to lift, and she tilted it slightly, cupping her palm to catch the falling liquid; alternating between splashing it over her grime-encrusted face and taking long, delicious mouthfuls until she felt like her stomach was going to pop.
When she pulled her hand away and wiped her face, she found Remy’s face directly below the huge bottle, eagerly lapping at the trickling water. She tilted it a little further, splashing his face and making him jump.
“Turned out to be a good day after all, huh, Rem?”
Remy sneezed the water out of his nose and carried on lapping, and Conny wished that her life could be as simple as a dog’s. Right now, Remy was about as happy as any living creature could get. Food and water in his belly, and a chance to take the weight off his feet for a minute. That was all it took.
In fairness, Conny decided, her own satisfaction wasn’t too far behind the German Shepherd’s, despite her reluctance to eat cold meatballs directly off the floor. After all, Logan was safe here. She was safe. One way or another, she had navigated her son halfway around the world while it fell apart all around them, and she had wound up with food and shelter.
Even Andrew Lloyd—after an initial period of sulking about being put in his place—seemed to have relaxed a little. Maybe he had come to the conclusion that Conny wasn’t interested in replacing Jennifer Craven as his personal tormentor.
The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River Page 74