Adrift 2: Sundown

by K. R. Griffiths

Before Herb could reach out a hand to silence him, Lawrence broke from cover with a yelp and bolted toward the opposite side of the roof.

  He’s going for the river, he thought, and, though he was certain the cleric would not make it, Herb felt a rush of adrenaline powering through his veins, almost like watching some era-defining sprinter trying to break a world record. He wanted to yell and cheer Lawrence on, but settled for clenching a fist until his nails began to dig into the flesh of his palm.

  The cleric was fast.

  He rocketed along the edge of the roof, covering half the distance before the vampire even had time to react; building up speed for what Herb knew would have to be the jump of the man’s life.

  Lawrence reached the edge of the roof and hurled himself forward into the night air—

  And let out a sickening cry as the vampire hurtled after him, closing the gap between them in an instant and snatching him right out of the sky.

  It smashed the cleric back onto the roof, and Herb heard something snapping. Lawrence’s back, perhaps. The young man let out a bloodcurdling scream, howling pathetically for his mother, and the vampire buried its face deep in his gut, sending a spurt of blood shooting up into the air. It pulled back with something meaty clamped between its jaws.

  Lawrence was still screaming, and continued to do so for a lifetime as the vampire ate him alive.

  Behind the helicopter, Herb was paralysed by the sight. He prayed that the others would stay quiet, but with each passing second he knew that the dreadful noise of Lawrence’s slow death would be lighting up their minds like fireworks. The others, he was sure, felt the same impulse as him: to dash for the door leading into the hospital while the vampire was distracted.

  Herb finally persuaded his arm to move, and he rested a hand on Conny’s shoulder, shaking his head almost imperceptibly.

  The door was temptation.

  The door was death.

  Maybe, Herb thought, as the cleric finally stopped screaming, the distraction that Lawrence had provided would persuade the vampire that there was nobody else on the roof.

  Except Dan.

  The creature tossed Lawrence’s ripped remains aside, apparently bored now that the cleric had stopped convulsing, and made its way back toward Dan. It crawled directly over the unconscious man on all-fours, staring down at him with something like curiosity on its fearsome face. Thick blood dripped from its maw, spilling over Dan; running across his cheek like tears.

  And it stopped.

  Began to back away.

  Herb’s brow creased, and he felt Conny grip his arm tightly. He flashed a glance at her, and saw the confusion and terror wracking his own mind reflected on her face. Alongside her, Logan looked very sick, like he might pass out at any moment.

  Herb aimed for a look which might reassure them, but he could tell from their expressions that he missed the mark by a distance.

  Out on the roof, the vampire retreated a few steps, moving away from Dan. It stood upright, its hideous gaze still fixed on him.

  And, as Herb watched in mute astonishment, Dan opened his eyes and rose unsteadily to his feet, staring directly at the creature, just as he had back in the mansion’s gore-drenched kitchen.

  Except this time, Herb thought dimly, he has no weapon. No way to fight.

  He watched in horror as the vampire began to lift its sinewy arms, flexing out fingers like blades.

  Dan took a step forward.

  Toward the creature.

  His eyes never leaving it.

  And Herb’s mouth dropped open as the vampire drove those wicked talons deep into the side of its own neck, and tore out its throat, pulling away a stripof flesh and tossing it aside. The monster’s feverish red eyes were wide with something that Herb thought might—incredibly; impossibly—be fear, as it drove the talons into its body once more. Deeper, this time; twisting and gouging; ripping its life away in messy chunks.

  Somewhere in Herb’s mind, beyond the layers of fear and revulsion, there was revelation. Dan Bellamy wasn’t just able to resist the psychic onslaught of the vampires; he wasn’t just immune to their particular type of poison. It was far more than that.

  He can do what they do.

  Dan fell to his knees, coughing violently.

  The vampire fell more slowly, its neck in ruins, eyes wide and blinking stupidly. Thick, black blood oozed from the enormous hole it had torn in itself, and when it hit the roof with a thud, it continued to scrape away feebly at itself, pulling away wet pieces of its life almost absentmindedly.

  Weakening with each grisly furrow it carved into its body.

  It took almost a full minute for it to finally die. Herb didn’t think he managed to breathe for the entire time.

  When the vampire’s chest rose and fell for the last time, Herb exploded into motion, running to Dan’s side, his mind trying to frame a question—any question—and coming up way short.

  Blood leaked from Dan’s eyes like he was crying, and when he coughed again, he spat out a large mouthful of the red stuff. He looked ill, Herb thought. Really ill, like the people that he had seen on news footage, suffering the effects of some terrible illness or poison. Dan swayed, his eyes rolling in their sockets. Blood vessels had burst in each.

  He looked like he was going to die.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  Herb jumped. He was so focused on Dan that he hadn’t even noticed the others approaching him. He glanced up to see Conny staring at him in confusion.

  “He’s not normal,” Herb replied absently, remembering Dan’s own answer to that same question.

  Dan coughed again. More blood on the wet rooftop.

  “Fuck you, Herb,” he whispered weakly.

  Herb grinned broadly.

  “He’s important…”

  *

  He couldn’t remember waking. All he knew was that when the lights in his mind flicked back on abruptly, he was standing upright, and he was outside somewhere. Cold rain. Biting wind.

  And a vampire standing in front of him, trying to push itself into his mind.

  Before Dan could even understand what was happening, instinct had taken over: fear at the attempted intrusion and rage hot enough to melt steel, and he pushed back.

  It felt as he imagined it might feel to drive his thumbs through a person’s eyeballs, burying them to the knuckles in the wetness.

  The creature barely resisted at all.

  When he took the vampire’s mind, Dan felt an intangible pop in his skull, and all of a sudden he was the monster. Looking at himself. Taking a couple of steps backwards; tearing out flesh that felt like it belonged to him.

  Adrift on the terrible black river.

  Staring up at himselfas he fell; feeling his hideous body dying as black blood spilled slowly.

  Staring down at himself.

  Up at himself.

  I’m dying.

  It’s dying.

  What am I?

  Lost in shrieking madness.

  Until, after a howling torment which lasted seconds and lifetimes, the presence in his head was gone. He was on his knees, and the world was a dark, spinning blur. It took several full rotations for him to remember his name.

  Dan.

  Dan Bellamy.

  Dan stared down at the monster in front of him, coughing up blood and trying not to scream at the savage pain that arced through his skull as the roaring river in his mind retreated.

  He almost laughed when he heard a sound which, in hindsight, he should have expected to hear.

  Herbert Rennick’s voice.

  *

  “…and he knows it.”

  Herb turned to face Dan, beaming proudly.

  “Don’t you? You believe you’re special now, right? You see why I have to keep you safe?”

  Dan coughed and wiped at his mouth, staring without emotion at the blood that stained his hand.

  “You’re doing a great job,” he said weakly. “Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

&nbs
p; Herb laughed, and Dan couldn’t help but warm to him a little. It was as if Herb had no ego, or he simply recognised his flaws and accepted them for what they were. He had the self-confidence to let a jibe like that wash right off him. Dan felt a stab of envy.

  “Hey, you’re still alive, right?” Herb said with a grin.

  “Barely.”

  Dan glanced around Herb’s companions. Somewhere along the way, he had lost several clerics and gained a policewoman, a dog and a teenage boy with a surly expression. It looked like the Rennick family cult was a thing of the past.

  “What do you remember?” Herb asked.

  Dan tried to piece his memories together.

  “The mansion. The pile of bodies. Screaming—”

  “Uh huh. There was a vampire inside.”

  Dan’s eyed fogged up.

  “The kitchen,” he said softly. “Yeah, I remember. Did I…kill it?”

  “Almost. You made it hesitate. Put a blade in its face.” He pointed at Dan’s belly. “Took a blow yourself.”

  Dan lifted his sweater and saw a thick bandage wrapped tightly around his abdomen.

  “You have some stitches under there,” Herb said. “Temporary. Better try and avoid ripping them out, if you can. The doc—”

  Herb paused, his eyes suddenly foggy and distant, like he was looking at some terrible memory.

  “The doctor said your injuries aren’t life threatening, but I’d say she wasn’t taking into account the possibility that you’d start bleeding from every orifice. Can you walk?”

  Herb reached out a hand, and Dan hauled himself shakily up to his feet. He nodded.

  “I can walk. But if I have to run, I’m not sure it will end well. Listen, Herb, while I was…with the vampire…I, uh—”

  Herb grimaced, lifting a hand to stop Dan as gunfire sounded in the distance.

  Followed by shrieking.

  “We can’t stay here,” Herb said. “We have to move, now.” He switched his gaze to the policewoman. “You’re welcome to come with us, Conny. My father’s apartment is close.”

  “How close?”

  It was the first time the policewoman—Conny—had spoken since Dan’s world stopped spinning. She had been studying him carefully; warily.

  Just like the dog at her feet.

  “A few hundred yards.”

  “I don’t suppose it happens to be a fortress?”

  “Not exactly. But it will be a hell of a lot safer than the streets.”

  Herb pointed up into the night sky.

  “And it’s got a hell of a view.”

  34

  Herb led the others down the stairs with Conny at his side, and Remy walking a yard ahead. The dog could sense the presence of vampires—Conny had been very clear about that—and Herb decided he’d be a fool not to listen. As far as he was aware, nothing in the texts had indicated that dogs—or any other animals—had any extrasensory perception when it came to vampires, but that didn’t surprise him. More and more, the texts were looking like millennia-old propaganda. Of course the vampires wouldn’t publicize their weaknesses.

  As they made their way past the empty floors of the hospital, Conny kept dropping her eyes to Remy, and Herb watched her carefully. She was, apparently, satisfied that the dog sensed no immediate threat.

  Herb wished he could say the same of himself. To him, the hospital was alive with threat, and death lurked around every corner.

  The fourth and fifth floors were barren and stark; they looked almost as though nothing had happened there at all, save for a few beds which had been overturned, presumably as a result of the creature checking that nobody was attempting to hide beneath them. Those floors had been empty, according to Conny, with most of the hospital’s patients either having already been evacuated, or making their way down to the ground floor to await transport.

  Herb paused at each level as he descended, staring beyond the thick glass doors which led to consulting rooms and operating theatres, until he was satisfied that they were as quiet as they appeared.

  With each pause, he felt his tension increasing. It already felt like they were taking too long.

  Down on the third floor, the blood began to appear.

  Streaky spatters of it, winding up the stairs to meet them.

  Herb gestured at the others to halt.

  He peered over the rail, scanning the small section of the ground floor that he could see. Somewhere below, one weak light still flickered. The rest of the ground floor stood in darkness. Yet that one light was enough for Herb to see: it looked like there had been plenty of people down there when the vampire came through.

  It was exactly the same as it had been at the mansion: manmade light appeared to slow the creatures a little, but it didn’t stop them entirely—and they were intelligent enough to disable lights as a priority. The hospital’s reception area would surely have been brightly lit, but the vampire had come in regardless. Most likely, Herb thought, it had taken the lights out first, and then hurled itself into the crowd, ripping and clawing—

  His nerves jangled, and he pulled Conny close, breathing into her ear.

  “It’s a massacre down there. And it’s dark. You sure we can trust the dog on this?”

  Conny glanced at Remy, who sniffed at the smeared blood on the floor nonchalantly.

  “We can trust him.”

  Herb nodded, and lifted his voice a little for the others to hear.

  “Okay, we’re headed toward London Bridge Station. Once we get past it, we’ll be right at my father’s apartment. These things are burrowers. I’m hoping they won’t want to stray too far above ground level, and with any luck we can hold up there until morning. Just follow me, okay? And stay quiet. If we get separated, find somewhere to barricade yourself in. If you survive until sunrise, get the fuck out of London and keep running. Above all: don’t look at them. Got it?”

  They all nodded, their expressions fearful as they considered Herb’s words.

  If you survive.

  Herb decided that it was better not to let them dwell on that, and began to creep down the last couple of flights of stairs.

  Eyes straining at the stubborn shadows.

  Certain that he would see something looking right back at him.

  When he reached the ground floor, he got to see the catastrophic results of a vampire bursting into a crowded room up close, and was perturbed by how quickly he was getting used to the sight of human bodies which had been torn to pieces. He did his best not to look at the corpses littering the floor, focusing only on the exit. The hospital’s front door was propped open by the gore piled in the entryway, and Herb approached it in a half-crouch, gazing intently at the street.

  Beyond the slaughter outside the entrance, he saw no sign of army evacuation trucks, though he did see a few military uniforms dotted around the lake of blood and gristle. Perhaps other soldiers were, at that very moment, on their way back to the hospital to pick up another load of people, but Herb knew he didn’t have the patience to wait and see. Much of the hospital was glass and large, open rooms. No good hiding places.

  If his father’s apartment had been far, he might have suggested trying to find a secure room in which to lock themselves—maybe the hospital even had a basement—but they were only a few hundred yards away from a place that offered a real shot at safety. They had to keep moving.

  He stepped outside, his neck twisting left and right.

  In the distance to the right, somewhere in the direction of Southwark Cathedral, he heard screeching. He set off to the left at a fast trot, desperate to break into a run, but certain that if Dan Bellamy exerted himself too much more, the guy would surely pass out again—or worse.

  He aimed for London Bridge Station—one of the city’s busiest, and usually heaving with people; now just a hulking dark shape on the horizon.

  And rising above it—rising above everything—his destination loomed.

  *

  The Shard, Dan thought wryly, as he tried to keep pac
e with the others. Why am I not surprised?

  Herb was making straight for London’s tallest building. It figured that a family with the sort of wealth the Rennicks had accrued would opt for just about the most expensive apartment that money could buy, and not even bother to use it.

  He was falling behind the others as anxiety turned their trot into a jog, and then a run. He stumbled after them with every muscle in his body howling in agony.

  The Shard dominated the skyline; an arrowhead which rose more than a thousand feet above the ground to pierce the clouds that routinely hung low over the city. It wasn’t just the tallest building in London; it was one of the tallest buildings in the world. Dan recalled that he had read some piece of trivia which claimed that the smattering of apartments near the top of the Shard were the highest human living space in western Europe, as far away from the ground as it was possible to get.

  He wondered if it would be far enough.

  He tasted blood in his mouth again, and spat it out between gasps for air, feeling his vision start to swim.

  And suddenly, he wasn’t running after the others. He was chasing them. Desperate to taste their blood; to rip apart their pitifully weak bodies. To let them know what the top of the food chain really looked like. He sprinted after them, shrieking, lifting a hand, ready to tear at their flesh.

  Kill them all.

  The urge to tear human flesh was so strong in his mind that for a moment, Dan felt his consciousness flicker. He wasn’t aware that he was falling until he hit the ground hard, rolling into something solid that stopped him painfully and sent stars shooting across his vision. He felt a wrenching sensation in his gut, and knew immediately that he had reopened his wounds.

  All of them.

  His head felt like it was on fire, vast areas of his mind reduced to charred embers. His brain pulsed with a fizzing, unstoppable energy which he hadn’t felt since the months immediately following the knife attack. The black river, surging more ferociously than ever, as though it was trying to pull him to pieces. A sensation like endless falling.

  “I’ve got him.”

  Reality snapped back into place.