Herb felt his irritation rising. It was exactly the same sort of argument that he had heard countless times back at the compound. Devout belief in a bunch of ancient artefacts which claimed that the vampires were gods and that servitude was the only option. Nobody would listen to Herb when he tried to tell them that something being written a long time ago didn’t necessarily make it true, and that recent history was full of lies concocted by the Order, which made it likely that ancient history was as well. It seemed that only he was able to countenance the idea that the ancient clay and stone tablets which formed the bulk of the Order’s knowledge might be inscribed with lies.
“And what if he’s not one of a kind? What if there are thousands like him? Millions? What if it’s something to do with his genes, or his upbringing, or the fact he eats Tasty Wheat for breakfast? Dan was one of three thousand on the ship. What if those are the odds? If one in every three thousand people can resist them, there’s an army. I mean, how many of these things can there possibly be out there? Why all this trouble just to feed three? Doesn’t that suggest that there are a lot less vampires out there than the texts claim?”
Jeremy shook his head firmly.
“If anyone had found evidence—any evidence at all—that there were ever any other Dan Bellamys out there, we would know.”
“Would we really? You think my father would have shared that information with the rest of the Order?”
Jeremy said nothing.
The more Herb thought about it, the more certain he felt. His father would have killed Dan Bellamy at best, or handed him over to the vampires at worst. Anything to preserve the status quo.
“Do you know that virtually all historians agree that the Great Fire of London only killed five people?” he asked.
Jeremy stared at him, puzzled. He did know plenty about the Great Fire of 1666, of course. It was an event that was branded onto the mind of everybody who lived at the Rennick compound, the exact date celebrated annually like a twisted Christmas.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it,” Herb continued, “how the truth can get twisted until it no longer exists? By 1667 my family was wealthy beyond all measure, fattened by meat plucked from the bones of a burning city. It’s the same story all over the world, everywhere the Order exists. They get fed, we get rich. We become people of influence and wealth. We get to shape history. I wonder, if a Dan Bellamy had been walking around London in 1666, whether my ancestors would have viewed his existence as a good thing? For all we know, other families have stumbled across people just like Dan, and have buried that particular truth along with all the others.”
He focused on the horizon.
They were travelling east at full speed, heading toward the sun that had not yet risen.
“I wonder what else is a lie,” Herb continued softly. “According to the texts, the vampires were super-predators, and they killed us so relentlessly that we were at the point of extinction. That’s why they chose to stay underground, because the alternative was to feed themselves out of existence right along with us. They sleep in order to give their crops time to grow.”
“And?”
Herb flinched, so lost in his thoughts and the dark, rolling waves that for a moment he had forgotten that Jeremy was standing next to him.
“And there were only three to feed. During the Great Fire, it was just two. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
He glanced at Jeremy. The older man’s expression was pitched somewhere between confusion and concern.
“Wonder what?”
“Whether they buried themselves out of our reach because they were killing too many of us…or because we were killing too many of them.”
For a long time, Jeremy said nothing, and the two men stared out at the dark horizon in silence. Herb thought he knew what the older man was thinking: exactly the same question that burned in his own mind.
The texts—every scrap of information uncovered by the Order, right across the planet—all agreed on one thing: that the vampires would rise to punish a failed sacrifice. Entire civilizations had supposedly been wiped out as a result of their failure to satisfy the creatures’ demand for blood. What if that, too, was a lie? For all Herb knew, there were no other vampires in England. Maybe the entirety of the English nest had already been killed in the mid-Atlantic.
“They’re going to come for you, you know.”
Herb blinked, and switched his gaze to Jeremy.
“The vampires? Yeah, I’ve heard all the prophesies of doom. Bloodlines that fail them are erased from history—”
“Not just the vampires. The rest of the Order. We were supposed to sail north and broadcast a fake distress signal, remember? The Oceanus will be discovered sooner rather than later, and that means that this boat is full of loose threads, Herb. You should know enough about what happens to loose threads in situations like this.”
Herb shrugged.
“We’re in the age of information now, Jeremy. It’s time the world knew everything.”
“And a lot of people will die as a result.”
“A lot of people have already died, and all because we believed these things were gods. But they’re not immortal. We can fight them, whether Dan Bellamy is a one-off or not. While they have been sleeping, the human race has spent centuries perfecting the art of killing. We have weapons these things can only dream of.”
Jeremy’s shoulders slumped.
“Guns and bombs and tanks. I doubt you are the first to consider such a course of action. But what good are those weapons if we have no idea where to point them? What effect can a man holding a gun have, when they can take his mind before he can pull the trigger?”
Herb returned his gaze to the horizon.
“I guess we’ll find out, one way or another. Assuming that there are any other vampires out there.”
“And if you’re wrong about all of this?”
“Then I’ll be wrong. It won’t be the first time.”
“And you’re willing to gamble your life?”
Herb shrugged.
“I’m meant to be dead already, remember?”
Jeremy sighed wearily, and began to make his way back toward the wheelhouse. After a few paces, he paused.
“You know,” he said, “your father always said you were reckless. Never one to think things through.”
“And now he’s dead,” Herb growled in a low, dangerous tone.
Jeremy nodded.
“For my part, I always thought you were both more alike than either of you ever realised.”
Jeremy left the deck, leaving Herb alone with his racing thoughts.
He checked his watch. Almost five in the morning. It was late in the year, and dawn wouldn’t break over England for a couple of hours yet. Sunrise had been their final deadline for returning the Three to the earth, where more of their kind were supposedly hibernating. If that were true, by the time light washed across the land, the rest of the nest would surely realise that their kin were not coming back.
Herb was sure that they would not attack the surface in daylight. The texts weren’t lying about that part: the vampires had demanded total darkness aboard the Oceanus, and had been sealed in the shipping container to avoid all light during their transportation. The notion that sunlight might actually kill them was fanciful; just another part of the false mythology that had been allowed to spring up around the vampires over the centuries, but they avoided light nonetheless.
If there were more vampires out there, ready to rise and avenge the death of their kind, he figured he had around twelve hours of daylight to figure out how to deal with them; twelve hours to unwrap the riddle of Dan Bellamy.
Twelve hours.
4
Click.
Barry Reid shut the front door to the farmhouse softly behind him, and his face twisted into a sour grimace.
Rain again.
He stepped out into the still-dark morning with a sinking heart, and felt the downpour plaster his prematurely greying hair to his
forehead in seconds. The weather forecasts had been right: a storm had blown in from the Atlantic overnight. Just like every other damn night.
The year was shaping up to be the wettest on record; a hard-won accolade in the UK. Winter lurked around the corner, and the sun had barely shown all summer. Instead, there was the endless rain. In some low-lying coastal areas, that had meant flooding, and vaguely hysterical responses from a government that did all but declare it was going to be tough on weather and tough on the causes of weather.
Barry’s farm, a few miles inland from the coastal town of Brighton, had not flooded, but the inclement weather had a profound effect nonetheless. Most people probably assumed that drought was a farmer’s worst enemy, and they weren’t exactly wrong, but wet day after wet day could be just as troublesome.
Amazing how something as simple as an extended period of rain—as damn arbitrary—could put a man’s livelihood at risk. The silage crop had suffered a near-fatal blow from the lack of anything like a summer. Without silage stocks, Barry was forced to resort to buying in animal feed to get the cows through the winter, and the price of the stuff just kept on going up. Meanwhile, the supermarkets continued to drive the price of milk down, and Barry found himself caught in the middle, slowly having the life squeezed out of his business.
Getting up at four every morning was starting to feel a lot like drowning, and every hour spent tending to the farm as it haemorrhaged a little more money had become a dreadful burden that squatted heavily on Barry’s soul. He could almost see the pennies draining away in front of his eyes, minute by minute. Now, each morning when Barry left the farmhouse and headed for the tractor to begin his first circuit of the land, he carried a vague sense of dread with him which lasted all day.
And he got soaked, of course. There was always that.
Barry broke into a trot as a fork of lightning gave the darkness an early taste of the daylight to come. For a moment, his land lit up around him, bright and bleached of colour, but he paid it no attention. His surroundings were as familiar to him as oxygen; he could have navigated the farm wearing a blindfold.
The house behind him, garage to his right. Outbuildings to the left—mostly containing tools and supplies, along with a few chickens. A small barn directly ahead that was a prelude to the much larger version further down the dirt track that led to the heart of his two hundred acres. He usually parked the tractor in the larger barn, but had been so tired the previous evening that he hadn’t bothered, instead leaving it close to the house. He was glad of that now; less distance to run in the storm.
He reached the tractor and yanked open the door, and had hauled himself into the seat with a grunt before his mind processed the image his eyes had seen properly, the odd detail that had lurked in his peripheral vision as he ran from the house.
He froze, his hand still on the open door, his arm getting soaked, but all of a sudden, he didn’t notice the rain at all.
What the hell was that?
Just for a moment there, during that monochrome snapshot taken by the storm, he could have sworn he saw something moving beyond the main barn a few hundred feet ahead of him. Something big. He might have dismissed it as an animal, maybe even one of his own, but for the fact that in that brief instant, Barry was certain that whatever he had seen was walking upright.
Like a man.
Righteous anger sparked deep in his gut. It wasn’t just the rain and the silage that had ruined his year; it was the sickness in the animals: a relentless tide of poor health that no vet seemed able to stem nor adequately explain, and which slowly ate away at the cows and sheep. Way more deaths among the sheep, particularly, than at any other time that Barry could recall. And all in the same year that he received several offers for his land from the wealthy bastards who owned the land adjacent to his own.
Strange folks, the Rennicks, no doubt about that. When a sheep had once broken through the fence and ended up on Rennick land, Barry caught a glimpse of the house, which seemed almost deliberately hidden by trees, and could have sworn he saw people dressed in robes, like monks. Local rumour had it that the Rennicks ran some sort of commune out there in the woods. When the locals had taken a few drinks, those rumours darkened: the Rennick family was involved in strange rituals, they said. Occult practices, they said. Satanism.
There were a lot of them, Barry was sure of that. Maybe they wanted his land to expand their…whatever the hell it was.
Too bad for them.
The Reid family farm had been handed down through the generations, and it didn’t matter if the Rennicks added a couple of zeroes to their offer. What mattered was that Barry’s father had charged him with maintaining the farm and passing it on to his own son someday, and there was no way he could sell it. It simply was not possible. When an agent representing the Rennicks turned up at Barry’s doorstep with an offer, he told them exactly that.
And then the animals started to get sick.
Barry was no fool; it was impossible for him not to put that particular two-plus-two together, but he had never had any concrete evidence.
So far.
Someone had been poisoning his livestock for months, Barry was sure of it, slowly tightening the financial noose around his neck. And now he had seen the bastard, right there on his property; had caught him red handed as he skulked around in the pre-dawn.
Barry squinted into the darkness, searching for movement and seeing none, and thought about the old shotgun he kept back at the farmhouse, and which he had never found a use for beyond firing a blast in the general direction of foxes.
Bad idea, Barry. You might just get angry enough to fire that weapon.
He felt adrenaline coursing through him like rocket fuel, and gritted his teeth.
Besides, you don’t need no gun for this.
He climbed down from the tractor cab with a grunt, balling up his fists, and headed purposefully toward the distant barn. By the time he reached it, Barry was almost sprinting, working himself up into a thrumming mess of fury. He burst into the dark building, drawing in a breath to holler a wordless roar of attack as he charged at the intruder like some marauding Viking, and stopped abruptly, surprised.
It looked empty.
Barry frowned, and unclenched his fists. Flicking on the overhead fluorescents, he bathed the barn in a cold, white light, and blinked as his eyes adjusted and the shadows evaporated.
Nothing.
The barn looked empty, because it was empty. Of people, at any rate. Yet there was one significant addition to the old building’s interior, and Barry’s eyes fell upon it immediately.
Right in the centre of the barn, somebody had dug a large hole. A good three feet in diameter, at least.
What the hell?
Barry stepped forward slowly, and his jaw slackened. Even from several yards away, it was impossible to miss the truth: the hole hadn’t been dug at all. Tell-tale furrows were cut into the dirt floor, as if the hole had been created by fingers or paws, not by a shovel. It looked more like something had tunnelled its way out of the earth.
Like a mole the size of a damn horse, Barry thought, and let out a nervous snort.
He fished his keys from his pocket. His keyring held a penlight, and he flicked it on and leaned into the hole slowly, half-afraid that something would leap out at him. He held his breath as the light played over a passage that appeared endless, swallowed entirely by the blackness beyond the feeble illumination provided by the tiny bulb.
For several long seconds, Barry’s mind played devious tricks on him, and he felt a crawling certainty that something was lurking there, just beyond the cone of light, watching him hungrily; something that would at any moment streak toward him on all fours, snarling and—
There was nothing.
No movement in the strange tunnel beyond the shivering shadows cast by the light Barry held in fingers which had begun to tremble, as if they possessed some knowledge of the situation that his slow-moving mind did not.
Barry grimaced, a
nd told his raging nerves sternly to calm the hell down.
Whatever the tunnel had been created by, it was clearly empty now.
Because it’s already out there, you idiot. It tunnelled out of the ground, and now it’s out there in the darkness, watching you; getting closer…
Barry’s brow knitted as his thoughts began to race forward, taking on a lurching life of their own.
It?
That was a troubling development: Barry was not a man given to flights of fancy. When his mind suddenly conjured up images of bizarre creatures rising from the ground like zombies; like some bad horror movie had been made real in the ground beneath his property, he felt a nervous laugh building. The notion was ridiculous, of course.
Yet he had caught a glimpse of something out there in the rain, just for a moment. Something that walked upright, like a man.
He suddenly felt terribly exposed in the middle of the barn, and he spun to face the open door, tensing his muscles in readiness, certain that whatever he had seen out there would be charging toward him; some horror that had crawled out of the earth…
Beyond the gaping barn door, all he saw was darkness and rain.
He stepped outside warily, leaving the lights in the barn blazing, and swept his penlight in a wide arc. The farm buildings looked still, but the light wasn’t powerful enough to be certain. Barry forced himself to focus, concentrating on listening, trying to sift through the ceaseless sound of the rain falling and the incessant whine of the wind. For a moment, he thought he heard footsteps coming toward him, and he sighed in relief when he realised it was the sound of his own pulse, hammering in his ears.
In the distant darkness, he heard a faint thud.
The front door?
Did I lock it?
Barry’s muscles called a time out, and he stood there for several moments, frozen. He tried to tell himself that he was alone; just him and the rain. His tired mind was playing tricks on him, that was all. It was nothing.
Adrift 2: Sundown Page 4