Adrift 2: Sundown (22 page)

The revelation banished all thoughts of fatigue, and Herb felt adrenaline beginning to course through him once more. Could the Three have been sent to the surface to feed because they were about to enter a breeding cycle? What other explanation could there be? It was so simple and so glaringly obvious that the truth hit him like a slap.

The vampires lived for thousands of years. If their breeding cycle was anything at all like that of people, the creatures would be
everywhere
; it would be they who ruled the surface of the planet, not humans. But the vampires
weren’t
everywhere. In fact, it seemed that there were comparatively few of them for a species which claimed immortality. As far as the Order had been able to estimate, there were likely no more than a few thousand across the globe.

And suddenly, Herb knew why.

Their ability to procreate had to be severely limited. Maybe they could only breed every few hundred—or thousand—years. When the time came, the nest sent its males to feed, to gather the strength they needed to service the needs of the females and create the next generation.

If it was true, it meant that the Order had spent centuries helping the vampire species grow
stronger
. Feeding and nurturing an enemy whose number would eventually grow to the point where wholesale slaughter of humans was inevitable.

“Twenty-seven,” Herb said softly.

Conny frowned.

“If the information my family has is correct—and that’s a big
if—
that’s how many there are out there. Twenty-seven. At least.”

He strode to the nearest window and stared out across the river, lost in thought.

“That doesn’t sound like many,” Conny replied. “And if your friend managed to kill two, I’m sure the army will be able to deal with the rest.”

Herb shook his head grimly.

“These creatures are smart,” he said, “of at least equal intelligence to us. They won’t just offer themselves up to be shot at. They move underground, they stay out of sight. They know how to remain undetected. That’s the one thing I
am
sure of.”

Conny frowned.

“I spoke to a soldier who told me there had been multiple sightings in the centre of the city. They obviously don’t care
that
much about being seen.”

Herb lifted his gaze to the London skyline, lit by raging flames.

The vampires didn’t burn, he knew that much for certain, but the fire spreading across central London meant light. A lot of light.

“They came from the Underground system,” Conny continued. “In fact, this all started because they were letting people
go
. It’s more like they wanted attention. They drew the entire Metropolitan Police Force down into the tunnels.”

Conny’s voice cracked a little on those final few words. Herb didn’t ask for details on what had happened to the police. There was no need. The answer was written in Cornelia Stokes’ clouded eyes, as plain as day. She ran. The rest of the police didn’t get the chance.

It’s more like they wanted attention.

Some slippery awareness nagged at Herb’s subconscious, clamouring for his consideration.

Multiple sightings.

“How many do you think there were?” he asked distantly. “In the Underground, I mean?”

Conny shrugged.

“Around a dozen, I think.”

“Attacking the most visible part of the country that they possibly could,” Herb muttered, almost to himself. “The middle of the city; all that light. They knew they would be seen. That’s what they wanted.”

“But
why
?”

Herb shook his head.

“I don’t know. But if there
are
only a dozen in London, it’s because they want our focus here. As for where the rest are? I have no idea, but wherever they are and whatever they are doing, it won’t be good for us.”

Before Conny could respond, right on cue, the night erupted to the sound of gunfire.

Conny sprinted back to Logan’s room, reaching it before the first rattle of gunfire had faded.

Logan kept his eyes deliberately averted from hers; a typical teenage sulk with a heart-wrenching undertone of finality. Her son’s rejection felt like broken glass lodged deep in her chest, tearing into her flesh with every breath she took, but she refused to acknowledge it. Logan could hate her when they were both safe. For now, Conny needed to know where the danger was located.

“Did you see who fired?”

No response.

“
Logan!
Who fired, dammit? Was it the soldiers on the bridge?”

Logan looked shocked at the sudden vitriol in his mother’s tone. He gave an affirmative grunt, and Conny focused her gaze on the bridge as Herb jogged into the room behind her.

“It didn’t come from the south, as far as I can tell,” he said.

Conny turned around, nodding, and pointed at the window.

“Logan saw it. It came from the bridge. Think they were shooting at vampires?”

At the mention of vampires, Logan looked like he
really
wanted to speak, but the rage and grief and confusion that twisted inside Conny’s boy kept his lips clamped shut. Her heart ached, and she switched her gaze back to Herb.

“I doubt it,” he said, and moved closer to the window.

“Then what were they firing at?”

“I don’t know, but they’re not firing now. I heard one gun, that’s all. If they were shooting at a vampire, I have a feeling there would be more than one person shooting.”

Conny nodded slowly, remembering the response of Chief Superintendent Porter and the others to the appearance of the creature in the tunnels. They had opened fire in a blind panic, shooting indiscriminately;
wildly.

Just as I did
.

That same fraught, instinctive response to the presence of vampires had cost Robert Nelson his life back in the tunnels. The memory was like a thorn in her soul. She tried to shake it away, and almost succeeded. There wasn’t time to wallow in her remorse; not yet, but the grief was there, lurking somewhere in her rear view mirror, gradually closing in on her.

She focused on the dark bridge.

The soldiers might be more prepared for combat than the police had been, but Herb’s words had a ring of truth: she couldn’t imagine a group of armed men idly standing by while one of their number opened fire on a monster. After all, the creatures were beyond terrifying in appearance. Anybody holding a gun when one appeared, she thought, would either start shooting or start running.

The soldiers were little more than stick figures at this distance, but Conny could clearly see that they were having a heated discussion about something, one of them waving his arms and jabbing a finger at the other side of the bridge.

She tried to make out what he was pointing at.

On the far side of the bridge, she saw a single person walking steadily toward the soldiers. Whoever it was, they seemed to be in no rush to reach the apparent safety of the south bank of the Thames. Judging from the way they strolled forward casually, they weren’t afraid at all.

She pointed, drawing Herb’s attention.

“See that guy?”

As Herb squinted, Conny noticed the soldiers on the bridge raising their weapons, pointing them at the approaching man.

“Shit,” Herb growled. “I think he has a knife.” He turned to face Conny, his eyes wide. “We have to get out of here, right now.”

“What? Why?”

“The vampires. They take minds; control people like puppets.”

He returned his horrified gaze to the window.

“They’re using people as weapons.”

The man on the bridge suddenly broke into a sprint, heading straight for the soldiers. Conny watched them take a couple of uncertain steps backwards, aiming their weapons, and then finally, one opened fire and put the sprinting man down with a short burst of automatic fire. Before she could even begin to frame a question that might make sense of what Herb had just told her, she saw it.

And her nerves howled.

It had been crawling along the underside of the bridge: a dark, wiry shape that crept up behind the soldiers, who were focused only on the body of the man in front of them.

“A decoy,” Herb said in an awestruck whisper.

As Conny watched, unable to blink, the creature reached the first of the soldiers, grabbing him and spinning him around to face it. Moments later, the man hoisted his weapon and began to execute his brothers in arms.

And the vampire was already gone, back over the side of the bridge, melting back into the shadows.

The ‘execution’ deteriorated quickly, becoming a messy, panicked firefight. When it was over, there were just three soldiers left standing. One dropped to his knees with his head in his hands, bellowing out a roar of despair that carried through the night almost as clearly as the chatter of the guns.

He doesn’t even know what happened
, Conny thought, and she shuddered.

But she couldn’t turn away.

This time, when the vampire leapt from the underside of the bridge, it closed in fast, swinging its arms, and the remaining three soldiers exploded in a storm of blood. They didn’t even get off a shot.

Didn’t even see it coming.

When the last of them fell, his body ripped almost in two at his midriff, the monster on the bridge turned toward the south bank of the Thames.

And headed straight toward London Bridge Hospital.

Shit!

She grabbed Logan’s arm firmly, ignoring his cry of irritation and surprise.

“Get your things,” she snarled. “
Now!
”

Logan stared at her for a fleeting moment, apparently considering whether to make a big deal of her request or not, but when he finally looked her in the eye, she saw him register the fear his mother felt. He nodded, and began to slip on a pair of jeans, and Conny turned away.

Herb was already gone.

When Conny peeked out of the door, giving Logan a moment of privacy, she saw that the strange guy was back in the room with the unconscious man, holding an empty bottle of water from the vending machine over his sleeping friend’s head. Tipping out the last few drops. It didn’t appear that throwing water on him had worked, and it looked almost like Herb was debating whether or not slapping his friend might wake him.

“Scott, Lawrence,” Herb barked. “Time to move.”

Herb’s other two companions, both of whom had sat in the corridor with a shell-shocked look on their faces ever since they had arrived, leapt to their feet on Herb’s command, and ran to the big man’s side. Together, the three of them hoisted the unconscious man from his bed.

And froze.

More frantic gunfire, right outside the hospital, followed by a rising chorus of horrific screams.

Inside.

*

The screaming came from the ground floor and was muted by the hospital’s five storeys, but it was no less terrifying for its lack of volume. All of a sudden, the fatigue which had threatened to overwhelm Herb evaporated, boiled away by the heat of an all-too familiar dread.

It’s in the building
.

Was there a fire escape leading down the exterior of the building from the roof?

He tried to remember the hospital roof as he had seen it from the cockpit of the helicopter, but the building was just a dark smear. He hadn’t been landing. He’d been
crashing
. There hadn’t been time to take in his surroundings.

If there’s no way down from the roof
, he thought,
we’re all dead
.

Lawrence and Scott looped Dan’s arms around their necks once more, carrying him like a drunk. Herb winced when he thought about the damage they might be doing to the guy. The stitches in his belly were a temporary fix, and the last thing Herb needed was for Dan to start bleeding again. The helicopter’s interior had been drenched in the guy’s blood; Herb doubted that Dan had all that much left to lose.

There had to be a fire escape.
Had to be
. Even if there was just a ladder leading down from the roof, they would be able to come up with something. If necessary, Herb would find some way to haul Dan down himself.

If it comes to that.

He listened intently, trying to gauge whether the monster was making its way up through the building. London Bridge Hospital was all-but empty according to Conny, its patients and staff evacuated almost entirely. If the vampire planned to search the hospital, it wouldn’t take long before it found its way past the deserted floors below.

Or it might just decide that the building is empty and move on.

He ran back out into the corridor, just as Conny and her son exited their room and began to head for the stairs.

“We won’t be able to sneak past it,” he said, waving at them to turn around. “Go for the roof, and
listen
,” he grabbed Conny’s elbow, making sure he had her full attention, “these things are like Medusa, right? You know the story of Medusa?”

Herb glanced from Conny to Logan. Both were nodding.

“Don’t look directly at them. If you lock eyes with one of these things, your mind is gone, understand? Kill yourselves before you let that happen.”

He tightened his grip on Conny’s arm until she flinched.

“I’m
serious
. These things like to play with their food when they aren’t hungry, and I’m betting they’re pretty well fed right now. Head for the roof, look for a fire escape. I’ll be right behind you. I have a place nearby. If we can get to it, we’ll be safe.”

He released Conny’s elbow.

“Well, safe-
ish
.”

He wished he could tell her more; explain that if she needed to, she should take her son and run without looking back, but there just wasn’t time. He sprinted to the double-doors which led to the stairs and elevators, and recoiled in horror.

Glass.

He hadn’t even thought to check. The doors to the stairwell were two panes of thick, floor-to-ceiling
glass
. He could bar the handles, but that trick had barely worked once before. And
then
the door had been made of sturdy wood.

Gently, he pushed the left door open, prodding it with a shaking finger.

He heard it immediately.

The clicking of talons on the marble floor somewhere below him.

It was in the stairwell, and it sounded like it was coming up, moving floor by floor.

With a strangled yelp, Herb slammed the door and searched desperately for something to put through the handles. His eyes landed on a forearm crutch, and he snatched it up, his heart sinking in disappointment at how lightweight it felt. Flimsy aluminium; even as he slipped it between the door handles, he knew that it would not hold for long.

Somewhere at the back of his mind a faint, nagging voice muttered that if his best plans always amounted to makeshift deadbolts, he would eventually run out of doors altogether. He ignored it, and scanned the rooms. Many were glass-walled, and he could see that there were still patients in several of them; those whose poor health made fleeing a virtual impossibility. There were a handful of fearful doctors and nurses, too, all of them staring at Herb like he was holding a bomb.

There was no time to explain.

“It’s coming.
Run
,” he snarled, and he took off toward the roof exit, not pausing to check whether anyone had heeded his warning. He had done all he could.

The lock on the roof exit was smashed beyond repair where Herb had kicked it to get into the building. There was no way to seal or barricade the door from the outside. If there was no other way off the roof, he and the others would be faced with a stark choice: jump to their deaths, or be torn apart.

Or
taken
.

A violent shudder ran through him. Back on the Oceanus, he had been fully prepared to take his own life rather than let one of the monsters break into his mind, but that had been before he met Dan Bellamy. Now, Herb wasn’t sure he had it in him to jump from the roof if the vampire cornered him. There was too much at stake.

Outside the broken door, three steps led up to the small helipad which Herb’s chopper had briefly ‘landed’ on before ploughing across the roof and finally coming to a halt only when it collided messily with the low wall which ran around the perimeter.

He searched for the others frantically, and for a moment, when he couldn’t see them, his hopes rose a fraction. Maybe they had found a fire escape, and were already heading down to street level.

He sprinted to the nearest edge, peering over it. The hospital overlooked the river, but it was a five storey drop, and the wide path below meant that even if they did jump, hitting the water was extremely unlikely. He turned away, and headed for the other side of the roof.