Adrift 3: Rising (Adrift Series) (11 page)

The answer formed in his mind immediately.

“Because they would be exterminating their food source. These things are smart. They want to cripple this country, not obliterate it.”

“Are you
sure
, Dan? Because five minutes ago you were pretty sure that they wouldn’t do anything at all until sundown, and that they would come for you first.” Conny’s voice was full of vitriol.

Dan shrugged.

“They are intelligent. I’ve no doubt they want to destroy what humans have built. What better way to beat us? But killing off the creatures they feed on by poisoning them with radiation...that doesn’t exactly sound like them, does it?”

Conny waved an arm at the dark television screens.

“So why do
that
?”

Dan shook his head. “A warning shot, maybe? A way to cull a large part of the population instantly so they can focus on the rest? A way to throw the country into a panic and keep us from organising to fight back? I don’t know. But they are predators, and they like to play with their food. They want to get their hands dirty. We might not know much about them, but we do know
that
. Killing us all in one clean strike wouldn’t be...fun for them. It’s not their style.”

Conny shot a poison-tipped stare across the table at Herb, searching for his support.

Herb shrugged. “He’s right, Conny. Especially about the fact that we don’t know enough about them.”

Dan turned to face Andrew Lloyd. The Grand Cleric was sitting with his head in his hands. It didn’t look like he was paying much attention to what was going on around him.

He’s in shock
, Dan thought, and almost laughed. A couple of days earlier, he had been much the same. Now, after encountering the vampires on more than one occasion, he knew that there wasn’t time for shock. Seconds spent paralysed by fear were seconds that could get you killed.

Seconds that had got Elaine killed
.

He pushed the thought back.

“This place in the mountains,” Dan said, “how many people can it hold? Andrew! How many people can it hold?”

Andrew shook his head and sat upright, sucking in a deep breath. “There’s room for everybody, but…” he paused, and Dan got the impression he was trying to select his next words carefully. “It’s like a doomsday bunker: there’s food and fresh water. It was designed to be self-sufficient, but not for a large number of people—just those Craven would need if things turned bad. The supplies won’t last more than a few months if we take everybody.”

Dan nodded.

“We won’t need a few months. At the rate the vampires are moving, we’ll know how this is going to end in a few days, one way or another. What about power? And weapons?”

“It has isolated generators, and there are plenty of weapons. It’s secure. It’s where Craven keeps...kept all her information on the vampires. The artifacts her family collected.” Andrew waved a hand. “It’s secure,” he repeated.

“Good,” Dan replied. “Get your people to the bunker.
All
of them. Lock the doors. Mancini?”

Mancini looked up.

“Can you round up some people who can fight?”

“Some, maybe.”

“Do it,” Dan said. “As quick as you can.”

To his surprise, Mancini didn’t offer up any protest. He simply nodded.

Holy shit
, Dan thought.
I really am in charge, now
. The notion that he might be the one that Herb and the others looked to had occurred to him briefly back in England, and at that time, it had terrified and amused him in equal measure.
Dan Bellamy, commander-in-chief
. Nothing could sound more ridiculous. And yet here he was, giving the orders. Because somebody had to, and everybody else was lost in their terror.

Words that he had spoken to Katie, the petrified security officer aboard the Oceanus, came back to him.
Me and panic go way back
. It was like the unrelenting torture of the past two years had been preparing him, slowly desensitizing him to terror, and enabling him to carry on operating regardless of the fear he felt. When your entire life was an anxiety attack, panic’s edge somehow blunted. Fear
was
becoming like an old friend. He almost felt like he was starting to thrive on it.

Just like the vampires do.

Reality shifted.

The table in the meeting room blurred, the faces around it started to swim.

Burning red eyes reflected in a dark window.

My eyes.

“What are you doing, Dan?” Herb’s wide eyes were fixed on him.

Dan shuddered a little at the remembered nightmare, and the room abruptly popped back into focus.

“I need to get into the head of a vampire. Maybe then, I can find out exactly where their nest is located. Find the black river and kill it. I might be wrong, but I believe it’s our only chance of stopping this before the vampires send us all back to the Dark Ages.”

Herb nodded cautiously, his brow furrowed.

“I won’t accomplish any of that by hiding out in some cave,” Dan continued. “I’ve been doing
that
for the past two years, and look where it has got me. If this place in the mountains really is secure, then we need to get everybody there. By the look of that news footage, it might be the only safe place left before too much longer, and we’ll need it if we’re going to survive. But
I
won’t hide, not anymore. If the vampires won’t come to me, I’ll go to them.”

Before Herb could reply, the air in the room was split by a loud, fearsome growl.

All eyes fell on Remy.

The German Shepherd was still pressed up against the window, his massive body tensed and rigid, his snout almost touching the glass; lips pulled back to reveal sharp teeth. His brown eyes were trained on the world outside, unblinking.

“Oh, shit,” Conny breathed.

Remy’s growl deepened.

And outside, the ranch crackled to the sound of automatic gunfire.

“Weapons,” Herb snarled as he leapt from his chair, sending it clattering to the floor. “Mancini?
Weapons
!”

“This way,” Mancini roared, charging through the door, hoisting his submachine gun as he left the meeting room and entered the corridor beyond at a gallop. He swung the weapon left, then right. “Clear!”

Mancini disappeared from sight to the left, followed a second later by Herb.

Dan started to go after them, pausing at the doorway to glance back at Conny. She was standing, frozen, alongside Remy, staring fearfully at the window. Outside, the chattering sound of distant gunfire multiplied.

“Conny?” Dan barked, jabbing a finger at Andrew Lloyd when Conny turned to face him. “Get
him
moving. Get as many people as you can to this bunker. Seal yourselves in, and don’t open the door for anybody. Not even us. Not unless you’re sure it really
is
us, okay?”

Conny nodded, her wide eyes darting to Andrew, and Dan sprinted from the room without another word, turning left. A few yards farther down the corridor, he saw Mancini yanking open a door and reaching inside to pull out a rifle. He tossed it to Herb, and followed it up with a handgun. Herb caught both easily. He slipped the pistol into his waistband and hefted the rifle, nodding appreciatively as he examined it.

Mancini slung the strap of his submachine gun over his shoulder and pulled out another rifle for himself. He began to pass out magazines to Herb. When Dan approached, he held out a third rifle.

Dan lifted his hands, shaking his head.

“I don’t know how to use it.”

“Then fucking
learn
!”

Dan came to a stop in front of the open door. It led to a shallow closet stuffed with weaponry. He wondered briefly how many such weapons lockers there were dotted around the place. Mancini had mentioned that the American police were reluctant to move on the ranch. He could see why.

“I’d probably just end up killing myself with it, Mancini,” Dan snarled, pushing the gun away and scanning the closet. “Or you.” His gaze landed on a large machete hanging from a rack inside the cupboard. “I’ll take that.”

Mancini rubbed at his forehead as Dan snatched up the machete, testing its weight.

“Fine,” he growled. “But you’ll take this, too. If you don’t want to use it, that’s your business, but you’ll fucking
take it.
”

Mancini pressed a handgun into Dan’s palm. He briefly considered refusing it, before deciding that his carrying a firearm would probably make Mancini and Herb feel better, even if he knew that his chances of actually hitting anything if it came to shooting were virtually zero. Hell, he hadn’t ever even been any good at ‘shoot ‘em up’ videogames; it hardly seemed likely that using the real thing would produce better results. The one and only time he had fired a gun, it had been at point-blank range, and the act of pulling the trigger had given him a seizure.

It didn’t hurt to carry it though, he decided.
Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

The weapon was surprisingly hefty: just carrying it made him feel a little unbalanced. And
powerful.

He was reminded of watching a television show about army recruits in basic training. They were forced to undertake long hikes while weighed down by fifty pounds or more of equipment to acclimate their bodies to movement under a heavy load.
And I feel weird just carrying this one little gun.

For a brief moment, Dan’s mind lingered on the fact that virtually all of
his
knowledge of the world had been gleaned either from watching the television or by poring over dubiously-sourced articles on the internet. Very little of it had come by way of
actual
experience, at least not until the last couple of days.

Now, he knew what it felt like to actually carry a gun; the subtle ways in which it altered your balance, the way just possessing the weapon stirred up nebulous sensations of invincibility.

He now knew what it meant to truly flee for your life.

He knew what it felt like to murder somebody; to be the monster.

Red eyes reflected in a dark window…

He grimaced, and tucked the gun into his waistband, at the small of his back.

Given the way the vampires had so efficiently disabled first Britain, and now America, it looked like the days of learning from television screens might soon be over. Soon enough, knowledge might be the prize that people won when—
if
—they survived.

The notion chilled him to his core. He had spat out that line about the Dark Ages without thinking, simply to emphasize a point, but suddenly it struck him as a very real possibility. If the vampires brought about the collapse of civilization, if they culled the majority of the planet’s human population, the knowledge that would be lost could be the most grievous casualty of all.

His mind lingered for a second on a future in which pockets of humanity remained after a war with the vampires, trying to rebuild over generations. On the possibility of the monsters retreating back into the ground and allowing themselves to become a myth once more.

How many times has that already happened?
Dan thought.
Once? More than once?

It couldn’t be allowed to happen again.

The machete came with a sheath that was really no more than a leather holster and clip wrapped around the short handle. Dan attached it to his belt, and found that it, too, was surprisingly heavy. Running with the cumbersome weight of the weapons would be awkward.

Mancini was still stuffing magazines into the pockets of his combat trousers. He, apparently, had no trouble with the idea of carrying a heavy load.

Herb pointed into the weapons locker, at a shelf loaded with pocket radios.

“What’s the range on those?”

Mancini shrugged.

“Never had to find out. Few miles, maybe more.”

Herb glared at him, but swept up a radio and slipped it into a pocket. He took another and raced back to the meeting room with it. Dan heard him yelling at Conny to
stay in touch
, and moments later, Herb returned.

“More shooting outside,” he gasped. “Lots more.”

Mancini grunted. He seemed more interested in deciding whether or not the item he had just retrieved from the cupboard was worth taking. Apparently it was: he slung it over his shoulder.

Jesus
, Dan thought,
are those
grenades?
The final item Mancini had picked up looked like a heavy duty sash loaded with munitions; something a
Miss World
hopeful might wear if she expected the judges to start shooting at the contestants.

“Which way, Mancini?” Herb said.

Mancini jabbed a finger down the corridor.

“Stairs at the end lead down. We’re on the third floor. Whoever is shooting, they don’t sound close. Maybe out near the perimeter wall, in the Outer Ring.”

“You think it’s a vampire?”

Mancini grimaced. “What else?”

He thumbed a lever on his rifle and checked down the sights.
Was that a safety?
Dan thought.
Does the one he gave me have a safety?

Before he could ask, Mancini turned away from the cupboard full of weapons.

“Move,” he growled.

*

Mancini was the heaviest of the three men, but he was also moving the quickest, despite being older than either Herb or Dan by at least twenty years, and despite being weighed down by enough ordnance to make
Rambo
blush. By the time they reached the first floor of the ranch house, the American had already opened up a three-yard gap on Herb, and Dan trailed even farther behind.

Herb divided his attention between keeping his footing in the unfamiliar house and keeping an eye on Dan. The former artist wasn’t just slender, he was frail and unfit to boot. That, Herb supposed, was the inevitable result of hiding out in an apartment for a couple of years: when the time came to start running, the combination of withered, unused muscles and panic could only do so much.

Herb, by contrast, was fit and strong. He had been trained rigorously by his father from the moment he had taken his first steps: he could run for hours, and he could fight with a moderate degree of skill. He was a good shot, though no marksman. In every respect, he had no doubt that Mancini outclassed him, not that he would ever admit as much out loud.

“You good?” Herb said, easing up to match Dan’s pace.

Dan gave a single nod by way of response. He seemed to be focusing on his breathing, but the nod alone was enough to give Herb pause. The gesture said that physical exertion might not come naturally to Dan, but he wasn’t about to let that stop him.

There was something...steely in Dan’s eyes now. A resolve that didn’t seem to fit at all with the anxiety-riddled man that Herb had met just a day or so earlier. Herb hadn’t missed how Dan had smoothly taken control back in the meeting room, when everybody else—himself and Mancini included—looked about ready to lose their minds. Dan had shown a flicker of unexpected leadership ability back at Herb’s family mansion, too: taking charge when a vampire had attacked Herb and a handful of his father’s clerics in the dark, enormous kitchen.

Despite his physical—and perhaps his psychological—shortcomings, Dan was the reason that Herb had survived
that
encounter, and the other encounters that had followed. He had been wrong about the vampires concentrating on the ranch, but despite his mistakes he was still in credit as far as Herb was concerned. He had earned some faith.

But is he right about this black river?

Is it all in his head?

There wasn’t time to think about it. Herb returned his attention to the path ahead.

Down at ground level, he saw a few black-clad clerics either frozen in place, wearing stunned expressions, or racing through the large, wood-panelled rooms in a frenzy, apparently uncertain of which direction they should run. A couple carried weapons, and when they saw Mancini, they fell in behind him. Mancini waved an arm at them, silently beckoning them to follow.

Numbers
, Herb thought darkly, remembering Conny’s bristling anger at how casual Dan had seemed about the prospect of young lives being lost.

He wondered if the clerics had any idea what they were running
to
. Probably not. He doubted the people who ran the ranch allowed its population unfettered access to communications with the outside world; that was likely reserved only for rooms on the top floor of the ranch house; for the places where Craven and her advisors had made all the decisions.

The clerics probably didn’t even know what had happened in London, let alone what was unfolding throughout their own country at that very moment. Most likely, the brainwashed kids thought they were rushing to deal with some insurrection among the initiates, maybe even someone attempting an escape.

If they only knew
, he thought,
they would be running in the other direction.

A part of his mind pleaded with him that he, too, should be running away, but he shut it down. His family had started this: the chain of events that led to America being torn apart had been set in motion the moment the Oceanus had been allowed to leave its fancy dock in Portsmouth. Or, maybe, it was later: at the moment when Herb should have followed through on the promises he had made to himself, and refused to build the EMP device which crippled the cruise ship and allowed the monsters to be unleashed.

It was too late to run away now, that was clear. If the news reports he had just watched were correct, there was nowhere to run
to
, not really. The chaos would spread: the vampires would come, for everybody. Hiding out in a mountain fortress might well mean that he got to live out the rest of his days in relative peace, but what sort of days would they be? Isolated from whatever was left of humanity, watching the world disintegrate outside, slowly starving to death?

No, Dan was right.

Mancini knew it, too. Herb could see it written in the gruff American’s hard eyes. Mancini’s demeanour had changed even before the Grand Cleric had turned on those televisions. Maybe, until that point—until he saw that the vampires were killing
everywhere
—Mancini had believed that this was another war he could walk away from.

He knew different now. Their best shot at survival—maybe the human race’s best shot at survival—was to run
toward
the danger; to fight it. To meet it face-to-face and try to finish what they had started before the vampires scoured the Earth and left nothing worth fighting
for
.

Up ahead, Mancini burst through the ranch house’s front doors, swinging his weapon left and right once more.

“Clear,” he yelled. “Move!”

Mancini took off again, rocketing past a flatbed truck that Herb recognised as the one he had clambered aboard with his hands bound just an hour or so earlier. It felt like a lifetime ago already, yet it had been less than forty-eight hours since he had first set foot aboard the Oceanus. It was hard to believe that so much death and destruction could fit inside such a tight space. While running breathlessly for his life, charging from one disaster to the next and making all the wrong decisions, time for Herb had taken on a strange, malleable quality.