Adrift (Book 1) (16 page)

He saw.

Herb awoke in darkness to an insistent pain in his lower back that felt like someone had driven a serrated knife between his bones, and was trying to pry out his intervertebral discs one by one.

He drew in a sharp breath, and the pain simply worsened.

Shallow breaths
, he thought bleakly. Gradually, the pain began to ease up a little.

"Ed?" he croaked.

There was no response, but Herb knew he wasn't alone in the darkness. He could feel the presence of others there with him; more than one. He heard their breathing and felt faces pointed in his direction.

"Ed," a man's voice said finally. "Is that one of your terrorist buddies?"

Herb squeezed his eyes shut as the terrible truth hit him, and the memories returned. Before he had lost consciousness, the man he had tried to catch—the man that Herb had foolishly thought he could
save
—had been dragging him along the floor, and each inch travelled had felt like his legs were trying to separate from his spine.

Not Ed
, he thought miserably.

Edgar was gone. He had to be. The fucker had done exactly as Herb had always feared he would: he'd abandoned his brother—his own damned flesh and blood—in pursuit of his beloved duty.

Their father was an expert manipulator, and had been brainwashing his own children since they took their first breath. Only Herb had been able to see it.

Still, Herb had hoped that if they ever reached the moment of truth, Edgar might come to his senses. Herb held out little hope for Phil or Seb; those two were like brainless automatons. They did as they were told and no more, but Herb knew that there was a sharp mind inside Edgar's head, and he had hoped right up to the last moment that Ed would turn away from the dark path their father had set them on.

Yet Edgar hadn't even waited for Herb to return before setting the EMP off. And now Herb was gripped by pain, and trapped on the dark ship with a bunch of people that thought him a terrorist.

His sense of betrayal was monumental, but there was no time to focus on it. How long had he been unconscious? How long would his father wait before sending the chopper across to the Oceanus?

If Herb was the only son missing, he doubted that his father would wait at all. What better way to rid himself of the troublesome one, the only one that ever answered back? The only one that questioned whether there might be Another Way, and whether the Rennick family
calling
was actually a family curse.

I should have run
, Herb thought sadly. He had wanted to run for years; had wanted to put the Rennick family and all the crazy bullshit that went with being a part of it behind him and never turn back. In the weeks leading up to the boarding of the Oceanus, he had thought about running constantly, just packing a bag and getting the fuck out.

In the end, Herb hadn't been able to turn his back on his brothers. Some part of him had still believed, right up until the last moment, that the Rennick boys might escape from their duty and have some sort of a life beyond the Oceanus.

He could never abandon his family.

Ironic.

"I'm not a terrorist," he said glumly. "Or at least, I’m not what you think of as a terrorist. There's no word for what I am."

"And what is that?"

Herb ignored the question.

"How long has it been since the lights went out?" he asked.

His answer was the muffled crack of gunfire, and an eruption of screams. The air in the dark conference room sizzled with tension.

"Never mind," Herb said miserably. "It's already too late."

*

Mark felt his nerves blaze as the muffled shots rang out. The blasting of the gun seemed to go on forever. He counted sixteen shots.

Vega
, he thought dumbly.
Vega just emptied his entire clip at something
.

Mark's mind went blank. Vega was a starchy, uptight bastard, and in many ways Mark loathed him. Yet there was no way that Mark thought Steven Vega was the type of guy to panic over anything without good reason. He certainly wouldn't open fire in the middle of the park unless something truly terrible was going down.

A wave of anxiety washed through Mark, turning quickly to anger.

"All right," he said, feeling around in the darkness until he found the collar of the man lying at his feet. He dragged Herb up to his knees, ignoring the man's cry of pain. "Enough of this bullshit. I'm tired of being kept in the dark, so start talking."

Herb grunted.

"Or what? You'll torture me? That sounds pretty extreme for cruise ship secu—"

Mark punched him squarely in the jaw; not hard enough to risk him losing consciousness again, but plenty hard enough to let Herb know that he wasn't dealing with cruise ship security any longer.

"You can forget the fucking uniforms," Mark spat. "Try to focus on the fact that I'm scared and desperate, and I wasn’t that dedicated to my job in the first place. Understand?"

Herb chuckled and spat in the darkness.

"Now you're talking," he said. "So I will, too. There's no need for torture. I'll tell you everything, on one condition."

Mark considered hitting him again, but reined his anger in just in time.

"What condition?"

"You've got guns?" Herb asked.

"Damn right we've got guns." Ferguson's voice made Mark flinch. The combination of his own fury and the cloying darkness had led him to forget the other men were even there.

"Good," Herb said. "When I'm done talking, I want you to shoot me. Once. In the head. Make it quick. Deal?"

Mark released his grip on Herb's collar, letting the man slump back to the floor.

What the fuck?

"And if you want a piece of advice," Herb said. "Save some bullets for yourself."

Mark's thoughts tumbled. He tried to catch one.

"What's happening out there?" he whispered finally, and the trembling sigh that constituted Herb's response chilled the blood in his veins.

"There's something on the ship," Herb said. "Something that just arrived. It was waiting for us to cut the power."

"What sort of something?" Mark hissed.

For a moment, there was only silence in the dark room.

"You won't believe me," Herb said quietly.

*

Steven Vega's mind went blank with terror.

The creature that stepped from the container was a twisted mockery of the human form, like an artist’s impression daubed by a maniac. It was tall, skeletal-thin with limbs that looked like they’d been stretched. Dark, leathery skin wrapped tightly around rippling, sinewy muscles. Long, bony fingers that became wicked-looking talons.

The worst part, though, was the way it moved. Almost like an insect, darting from the container and pausing abruptly as if to take in its surroundings. It reminded Vega of the way spiders scurried, and his skin crawled.

Just when he thought the creature that emerged from the container could not possibly appear more hideous, it grinned, revealing a set of large, sharp teeth that looked like they would have been at home in the mouth of a shark.

Something about that grin; the almost human expression twisting the utterly inhuman face, made Vega’s bladder loosen. He searched the hideous face, trying to make sense of it, and saw crimson eyes that seemed to glow in the darkness, oozing malevolence.

Intelligent eyes.

Calculating.

It looked like something that had recently escaped from the lowest level of hell.

It wasn't alone.

Another flash of lightning gave Vega a brief glimpse of the interior of the container, and he saw more of those thin, angled limbs, more of that terrible staccato movement. More blazing red eyes. More teeth.

Vega backed away slowly, and saw the first creature fall on a woman whose leg had been pinned beneath the shipping container.

It drove its face down sharply, burying those terrible teeth in the woman's neck, and tore her throat out with a wet pop.

She hadn't even had time to scream.

Click.

Click.

Vega hadn't been aware of his hand lifting the useless gun and pointing it at the creature. He squeezed the trigger repeatedly, though some part of his mind knew that the clip was empty.

It didn't seem to matter.

The creature lifted its maw from the ruined neck of the woman and stared directly at Vega for a single, brief moment, before swinging its neck away.

Evil
, he thought dumbly.
Pure evil
.

Vega had seen no sign of pupils in the fearsome eyes. Just two pools of blood-red emptiness that drilled into his head, and in that single sickening second, he felt the thing's terrible gaze piercing his mind like a needle; felt his thoughts giving themselves to the creature, plucked away from him like a stray hair.

He was certain that if the creature had held its gaze upon him a moment longer, his mind would have snapped like a dry twig. Even that split second felt like it had left poison swilling around his skull.

It's in my head, oh God, I can feel it inside my—

Click.

Click.

Click.

Vega's forefinger was still squeezing the useless trigger, but now the barrel of the gun was pressed against his own temple.

He hadn't been aware of his hand moving.

He dropped the weapon, astonished and horrified, and scrambled backward, whimpering like a new recruit dropped into the middle of a firefight. He wasn’t conscious of taking the decision to retreat. Maybe because it wasn’t a decision at all. It was a biological imperative, like flinching away from fire or pulling back from a steep drop before falling over it. A response that formed in his genes, not in his thoughts.

The creature sprayed its horrific gaze around the park, stabbing deep into the minds of the terrified crowd, and it
laughed
,: a low, sickly rumble that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and Steven Vega, who to the best of his knowledge hadn't fled from a confrontation in decades, turned tail and ran like his life depended on it.

As he ran, he tried to process the scene that unfolded around him.

Couldn't.

He was no stranger to violence and bloodshed; Christ, Vega was no stranger to
death
. He'd seen it plenty.

Yet what was happening in the park wasn't just death. It was something else.

Everywhere he looked, as the lightning lit the boat at arrhythmic intervals, he saw horrors that made his mind shrivel. The terrible creatures—he counted three, though there might easily have been more—surged through the fleeing crowds, killing at will.

Insanity spreading everywhere they pointed those glowing red eyes.

Vega saw one of the creatures lopping the head off a middle-aged man who tried to run; saw the headless body take a couple more steps before crashing to the ground in a dizzying dark fountain of blood.

Saw another ripping a glistening mess from the chest of a young woman and holding it aloft, roaring in triumph. It took Vega a moment to realise that it was the woman’s heart; another half-second to notice that it was still beating, and that the sight had caused something in his mind to feel like it had suddenly gone rotten.

He felt the creature that had stared at him in his brain; felt it grasping at him as he fled. The feeling was fading, receding with each yard he put between himself and the horrors that had spilled from the shipping container, but Vega knew that others were not so fortunate.

Screaming, all around him.

The violence built in intensity like the gathering storm; a sickening, dizzying vortex of horror. In the darkness, with people running in all directions, and with screaming everywhere, Vega felt that there was nowhere safe, nowhere to run to, and a solid lump of despair settled in his gut.

Somewhere behind him, he heard a child screaming for its mother, the voice so high-pitched with terror that he couldn't tell if it came from a boy or a girl.

The scream ended so abruptly that for a moment Vega thought it must have been emanating from a television, and someone had just hit the
off
button.

His mind was slipping. He felt it, deep inside. Like some toxin that had been injected into his bloodstream, and which was working its way steadily through his system, dealing out damage as it found a home in the darkest corner of his thoughts.

The screams seemed to multiply around him. And worse than the screams: the sickening sound of flesh being ripped; the grunting, snarling of the creatures. The heavy splatter of the blood that fell on the park like a warm rain.

All those sounds; all that noise, somehow amplified and worsened by the darkness.

Vega backpedalled in what he thought was the direction he had approached the park from initially, his only thought to get back to the deck below; to the others, and to their firearms.