Adrift 2: Sundown (14 page)

This time, the agreement was louder, almost a cheer.

Jesus
, Conny thought,
this is all for show. Puffing up the troops before sending them into battle. What the fuck
is
this?

The Lieutenant who had handed out the guns began to wave officers toward the escalator leading down to the platforms. Conny fell into line behind the others, scanning the faces around her and seeing her own anxiety reflected in them.

And for the first time since Adam Trent had died, she felt tension on Remy’s leash.

She looked down at the German Shepherd, and frowned.

The fearless dog was dragging his weight, his eyes focused intently on the
down
escalator, as if he was reluctant to approach it.

Like he was afraid of what might be waiting for him down there.

Leon Mancini wasn’t a religious man, not like most of the freaks back at the ranch in Colorado. If Jennifer Craven had ever harboured ideas about changing that fact—about
converting
him—she had wisely decided not to follow through on them.
There were some people that even she understood that you couldn’t just throw in a dark room and dose with acid and expect obedience.

Mancini was one of those people. He had been running operations in Force Recon when Craven was trying on her first training bra; there was no form of torture he hadn’t been trained to withstand.

So Craven made him love her.

As it turned out, the torture would have been preferable.

Craven was sharp and dangerous; a knife sheathed in an expensive dress suit. Mancini didn’t trust her an inch, and never would, but she had broken him in a way that military training could never have prepared him for.

For a long time, he told himself that he was working for the money the Craven family offered, and that was certainly true while Jennifer’s old man had been running the show. As soon as Jennifer took charge and began aggressively expanding the Order, he began to harbour doubts. The threat to his life if he chose to leave the ranch was obvious, but Mancini had no problem with that. He’d lived most of his life under threat of one sort or another, and he knew when he signed up that his predecessor had met an ‘untimely’ end.

That didn’t matter. If he left, and the Cravens came after him, they’d discover that he was pretty hard to kill, and they wouldn’t be the first.

Just as he was preparing to get out, Jennifer came to him, and found a way to make him stay.

That had been years ago, and he still couldn’t bring himself to leave, not even after she had rejected him so brutally.

Yeah, love was the worst torture of all.

Their affair lasted only a year. Not by his choosing.

When it was over, Mancini remained professional, and told himself that as long as Jennifer played it straight with him and paid well, things would go just fine between them, just like they had with her old man. The rest of the freaks at the ranch could carry on with their weird rituals and worship of their
buried gods
; Christ, they could dance naked under the moon waving severed cocks in the air for all he cared.

Old man Craven had told him the truth—or at least as much of it as Mancini cared to know—before Jennifer had taken over. The Cravens believed in vampires; that the monsters lived underground in hibernation, and occasionally a few popped up to the surface to eat some folks. They had turned their ranch into a twisted Disneyworld, and were slowly growing their cult by attracting vulnerable youngsters who didn’t know better and
re-educating
them.

As far as Mancini was concerned, the Craven family’s religion was no more bizarre than any of the others—and no less steeped in blood. And, much the same as every other religion out there, the people at the top rolled about in a seemingly endless pit of money, and were more than happy to spend some on having men like Mancini around to make them feel safe.

The rituals—the overtly, almost cartoonish devotion to a sort of Satanism—were mostly for show, but the show worked. A steady stream of miserable teenagers made their way to the ranch, either of their own volition or as a result of active recruitment, and numbers grew until the place more closely resembled a small town.

Mostly, Mancini’s twenty years as an employee of the Craven family had seen him keeping peace at the ranch, and keeping unwanted visitors out. At times, he had been required to kidnap and ultimately murder scientists across a multitude of disciplines, everything from astrophysicists to botanists, as Jennifer Craven focused on hunting down the truth about the grave she had ‘discovered’ sixteen years earlier and the creatures that she had been born to serve.

At other times, on occasions when new initiates escaped the ranch and ran, either losing their minds or finally coming to their senses, Mancini and his team hunted them down.

One way or another, nobody left the ranch.

Over recent years, informed, no doubt, by the internet, a surprising number of desperate parents had found their way to Colorado’s perfect middle-of-nowhere, searching for the children they believed they still had some claim to.

They didn’t get to leave either.

Only once had the secrecy of the ranch been truly compromised on Mancini’s watch; two years earlier, by a tiny documentary crew whose dream of headlines had blinded them to the fact that they weren’t dealing with some two-bit religious wackos. Had the idiots in question restricted themselves to long-range surveillance, they might even had succeeded in making their little movie, but they just hadn’t been able to resist getting closer for the perfect shot.

When that incident was finally resolved, Mancini watched the recordings they had managed to get. It was a little like watching one of those tired
found footage
horror movies that seemed to be everywhere in recent years. Just like those movies, the filmmakers’ story ended in blood; in bones scattered across the plains.

It wasn’t noble or glorious, but it was a job, and for twenty years, it had been a good one. Better to Mancini than the military had ever been.

He couldn’t help but feel that England was going to change that.

Because it was almost dark already.

He wondered if he had an English counterpart. Maybe the Rennick family had their own Leon Mancini.

Maybe he, too, was scanning the countryside around the Rennick mansion through a rifle scope at that very moment, trying to spot some threatening movement in the last scraps of the afternoon light.

*

The Gulfstream which Jennifer had provided for Mancini and his team had touched down at a private airfield south of London almost an hour earlier. From there, they took a van southwest, driving for around thirty minutes to reach the land owned by the Rennick family.

There was a single overgrown road leading through thick woodland to the compound itself; there was no way they could take the van through there. If the Rennick compound was set up anything like the Craven Ranch—and based on what Craven had told him, Mancini was certain that it would be—the road would be under constant surveillance, and most likely rigged with automated defensive measures.

He parked a couple of miles back from the road, and led his team the rest of the way through the trees on foot, keeping a wary eye out for bear traps and tripwires.

They moved in silence, like watchful ghosts. Each and every one of them had been a part of missions in terrain that was far worse than anything the English countryside could throw at them, and they made quick progress through the forest.

After around ten minutes, during which period even Burnley and Montero had managed to stay silent, the compound loomed before them, huge and dark. Several smaller buildings gathered around a vast mansion that looked like something out of a TV show; one of those achingly dull period dramas that the Brits loved to produce.

Mancini scanned the compound through the M24’s powerful scope, and felt the hair on the back of his neck rising.

Steel shutters looked to have been drawn across all the windows of the main mansion building, but the front door stood wide open, gaping like a hungry mouth.

According to Jennifer Craven, the Rennick compound was home to a total of more than fifty people, yet there was no sign of movement anywhere.

“What do you think, Mancini?”

He ignored Braxton’s question for a moment, concentrating on trying to focus his scope on the interior of the mansion beyond the doors. He thought he could see
something
in there, but the light was no good.

He lowered the rifle and sighed.

“I think whatever happened here, we missed it. But we have to be sure.”

Braxton looked dubious.

“Yeah, sure. But we’re gonna find some bad shit in that house. You know that, right?”

Mancini nodded. He knew it, all right. The combination of the closed shutters and the open door could only mean one thing: somebody had tried to hide from
something
, and they had failed. He would be leading his team into either a trap, or—if the Craven family was right about vampires after all—the scene of a massacre. There was no way around it. This was where Herbert Rennick had been headed, and Mancini had no other leads to follow up. If the Hermetic wasn’t here, the team would be heading home empty-handed, and Jennifer Craven’s rage would be fucking
biblical.

“Didn’t come all this way for nothing,” he said grimly. “Tell the others we’re moving in.”

*

Mancini’s team was the best of those available at the ranch, which made them damn near as lethal as most any military unit in the world. Braxton and Montero had been SEALS, Rushmer had spent a decade in Delta Force, and Burnley’s work in the Special Activities Division of the CIA was so classified that even she had no idea what any of her missions had been about. Or so she claimed.

The team was rounded off by its only member with a non-military background: Ed Bricknall, who was one of only a handful of westerners to have ever been invited to Shaolin Temple to study with the monks, if his tales were to be believed. The guy was practically a fucking
ninja
, with the fastest pair of hands Mancini had ever seen and an apparent inability to feel pain. He couldn’t even imagine where Jennifer had dug
that
guy up.

They were badass all right, every last one of them.

Their presence should have made him feel safe.

Yet as he stopped at the threshold of the Rennick mansion,
safe
turned out to be the last thing Leon Mancini felt.

Jennifer’s warning about what he could expect to face ran through his mind repeatedly, and though he didn’t believe her, not
really
, her dire words had been delivered so earnestly that they had managed to burrow under his skin.

If you engage the vampires, you
will
die. Trust me. Stay in the light.

The power was out in the mansion, or the lights had been smashed, and with daylight quickly fading and the shutters down, the interior of the house melted into darkness within a few feet of the front door. Standing in the main doorway, Mancini pulled out a flashlight, and began to sweep it around a huge, ornate room that looked like the lobby of a fine hotel.

The beam made the shadows dance jerkily, and picked out sights worse than anything he’d seen in his long military career; an atrocity that was beyond his comprehension. Bodies smashed and broken like children’s toys, organs strewn about the vast room like grisly confetti.

He shouldered the rifle and pulled out an MP5.

And all of the vampire bullshit which he had listened to from the Craven family for years came back to him. Creatures that couldn’t be killed. Creatures that ripped your mind away from you and made you their puppets. Sadistic monsters that revelled in terror and pain. Evil fucking incarnate.

It was all true. Craven wasn’t taking impressionable kids and brainwashing them to believe in some satanic nonsense. She was brainwashing them with the
truth
.

Evil lurked in the Rennick mansion. Mancini could feel it, radiating from the shadows in waves, rolling around him like dry ice. He had felt fear plenty; being an elite member of the military wasn’t about not feeling fear, it was about not letting that fear slow you down for a second. Acknowledging it and having the courage to press forward regardless.

He hadn’t ever felt fear like this.

Mancini had courage enough to take on most any objective, but he knew as he felt that evil washing over him, that taking another step inside the mansion would not be bravery. It would be stupidity.

Jennifer Craven, he thought, was not worth
this
.

“Back,” he whispered urgently, “there’s nothing here.”

But there was.

His wavering light caught movement in the centre of the gigantic room, and for a split second he saw it clearly, rising from the pile of corpses on unsteady legs, a walking nightmare with the handle of a blade protruding from its cheek and a ragged strip of human flesh hanging from its hideous jaws.

Feeding
, Mancini thought in horror.

With a screech, the vampire leapt vertically, disappearing into the shadows at the top of the room.

It didn’t come back down.

Don’t look up.

“Run!” he hollered, turning away and leaving the mansion behind at a sprint. He heard footsteps running with him, but they were quickly drowned out by gunfire. Mancini glanced over his shoulder and saw Rushmer emptying his whole clip into Ed Bricknall’s gut, ripping the
ninja
to shreds, all his years of intense training and dedication punched out of him in seconds by large calibre bullets.

Rushmer’s eyes were wide and horrified as he executed Bricknall, and Mancini knew exactly what his expression meant; knew it in his gut as sure as he knew his own name. The vampire had Rushmer’s mind, just like Jennifer Craven said. It
was
Rushmer.