Adrift 2: Sundown (7 page)

It felt terrifyingly like anticipation; a thread of something like
eagerness
that ran through his nerves.

He knew then what the loose sensation in his head was. Something had changed, and he had woken up
different
in some way he couldn’t yet fathom; altered irrevocably.

As he started after Herb, he couldn’t help but wonder if
different
meant
better.

Or worse.

*

Jeremy watched Dan Bellamy follow Herb up onto the deck, and when both men were out of sight, he stepped into the freezer hold, easing the sliding door shut and wincing as the rusting metal runners squealed softly.

He’d always felt a connection with Herb. His father had never forgiven the kid for killing his mother as he entered the world, and the wrong side of Charles Rennick was a bad place to be for anybody, let alone a young child. Herb grew to be an isolated character at the compound, tolerated by his brothers and despised by his father; unable to form any sort of friendship with the initiates of the Order who worshipped his blood like it ran through a king’s veins.

But the boy
was
reckless. Charles had been right about that, though even he might have been surprised to learn just
how
right. Charles’ primary concern had been that Herb would
run
; that without him the EMP device would not get built and the operation would be a failure before the Oceanus even entered international waters.
That
was supposed to be the worst-case scenario, not that Herb would return to the Sea Shanty with no vampires and a bullet with his father’s name etched on it.

The operation had been a complete disaster, and now Herb seemed intent on making the situation worse.

Jeremy had hated lying to him.

He crossed the hold, kneeling at a low ventilation grate, and prised it open.

Reaching inside, he pulled out the satellite phone that he had hidden immediately following Charles’ execution. Thanks to Herb’s insistence on placing Bellamy in the hold and locking the door, Jeremy hadn’t been able to retrieve the phone for several frustrating hours.

So much time already wasted.

He paused for a moment, listening carefully to make sure there were no footsteps headed in his direction. After a few seconds, he switched the phone on and punched a number into the keypad.

The compound needed to be warned, but not just about the possibility that the nest in southern England might rise in a matter of hours. They also needed to be warned that Herb had taken charge; that he needed to be controlled before he threw a light on the Order for the whole world to see.

The phone rang.

And rang.

Jeremy frowned.

Hung up.

Dialled again.

Still no answer.

It could mean only one thing. There was no way a ringing phone at the compound would go unanswered, not on this of all days. Not unless they
couldn’t
answer.

The vampires had risen already. Jeremy knew it was the truth as soon as the thought occurred; felt it squirming in his gut like a tapeworm.

How could that be possible? How could the vampires know that their kin had died? The creatures had psychic abilities far beyond Jeremy’s understanding, but could they really communicate with each other over such vast distances?

Jeremy terminated the call again, and for a few moments, he just stood there, staring at the wall and seeing a dark future written in the dull, dented metal.

There was nothing else for it. Herb wanted to rally humanity to fight the monsters, but there was no way his story would be believed. Not until the vampires rose and splattered the truth across the TV news. By then, it would be too late.

He gritted his teeth. It was daylight back in the UK now. If the vampires had surfaced in the night, they would surely have retreated underground until nightfall. Just a matter of hours. Everything was moving too fast, and Herb was dangerously volatile. Matters had to be taken out of his hands.

He dropped his gaze to the keypad once more, punching in a different number. This time, the phone rang just once before a voice answered in a rich American accent.

“Yes?”

Sorry, Herb.

“I need to speak to Jennifer Craven,” Jeremy said.

Jennifer Craven terminated the unexpected call and felt a thrill coursing through her body like nothing she had experienced in sixteen long years; not since she first peered into a hole in the ground in northern Kentucky and saw the truth staring back at her.

The British man on the other end of the line had sounded scared, as well he might, but more importantly, what he had told her confirmed as fact something that she had long suspected: none of the other families that the Order comprised really
did
have any idea that the vampires could be killed, or that there might once have existed humans who were able to resist their will.

Jeremy Pruitt had sounded shocked and uncertain as he informed her that the Rennick nest in England had demanded sacrifice, and that the sacrifice had failed in the most spectacular way possible. The discovery that the buried gods were mortal had come as a monumental surprise to the English; that much was clear from the man’s tone.

Jennifer had fabricated a little surprise of her own for his benefit.

Unlike the Rennicks, the Craven family had nurtured suspicions about the vampires that stretched back centuries, ever since one of Jennifer’s distant ancestors had discovered a clay tablet buried in northern Africa. That tablet, which appeared to depict a human striking down a vampire beneath a word which translated roughly into English as
hermetic
, was assumed for a long time by her forebears to be simply a product of hope; just some poor barely-evolved bastard doodling a daydream before the monsters took him. Yet, when Jennifer’s own father had the tablet carbon dated back in the eighties, the scientist he had
persuaded
to carry out the test reported that the clay had definitely been buried at around 5,000 B.C.

Such a discovery would have made the scientific community at large take a keen interest in the tablet, had the scientist who collected the data been permitted to live long enough to share it. The earliest known etchings on clay were dated at around 3,000 B.C., and current academic thinking on the first human civilizations would have been turned on its head in an instant by the discovery that recorded history was at least two thousand years wide of the mark.

More importantly, as far as the Craven family was concerned, that carbon dating test had confirmed that the tablet was the earliest known written record of the vampires by a distance. No part of the Order claimed to possess any artefact more than five thousand years old, though of course they would keep such a discovery to themselves. After all, there was a slim chance that any object which was that old might even contain something close to the
truth
.

The word
hermetic
didn’t appear anywhere else in the known texts, and its meaning remained shrouded in mystery. No matter how thoroughly the Craven family searched for
anything
that might corroborate the story the clay tablet wanted to tell, nothing had ever been discovered.

Until a Princeton professor made an ill-advised phonecall from Kentucky, and Jennifer Craven herself saw the bones.

It was all the confirmation that she required.

Vampires
could
be struck down by humans, just as that ancient tablet had suggested, and for some reason, some ancient civilization had buried a man who actually did just that right alongside his monstrous victim. Perhaps the man had died of injuries sustained in the battle with the vampire, and the burial had been a celebration; perhaps that ancient people had wanted to warn future generations of something, who knew.

Who
cared?

For a man to kill a vampire with a
hatchet
could only mean one thing: the vampires had not been able to control him in the way they did everyone else.
He
was the Hermetic. The word literally meant ‘sealed off,’ and that’s exactly what the ancient vampire slayer must have been: his mind sealed away from the vampires’ grasp; untouchable.

The trouble was that there had been no record of any such person having existed in the past seven thousand years. Maybe the hatchet-man was part of a race that had long since died out, his genes containing some treasure that extinction had buried, never to be found again.

Finding out whether that was true or not would have been all but impossible, given that the only way to know whether a person could resist the psychic assault of a vampire was to put them in front of one.

Jennifer had long ago filed away her curiosity about the possibility that Hermetics might actually have existed, because there was another, more pressing problem.

She was barren. The sole remaining Craven. A long time ago, she had attempted to conceive with several of the men at the ranch, but her efforts were for nothing. Finally, a doctor revealed the terrible truth: she would never have children. Her name would die with her, and some other bloodline would take control of the Order in America.

Unable to further her line, Jennifer’s thoughts turned to her legacy. The legacy of the entire Craven family; a crushing burden on her shoulders. Despite being only thirty-eight, she thought about her remaining years constantly; how to imprint her name onto the Order so that it would
never
fade from history.

The rest of the Order was so focused on the past that it rarely thought to look to its future. But Jennifer did, and she saw trouble on the horizon, approaching like twister season.

As far as she was aware, there hadn’t been a vampire rising anywhere in the world for more than a centur
y,
and in that time, the world had changed greatly.

Way back in 1999, Jennifer’s father had seen the future, and he predicted that it was a cellphone in every pocket and a camera on every street corner. He hadn’t lived to see just how right he had been. By 2015, there was a
camera
in every pocket, and the world had become obsessed with filming itself and sharing the result indiscriminately.

The days of keeping the existence of vampires a secret were coming to an end, one way or another. Unless the next rising took place in some extremely remote part of the world, the chances of any one family successfully covering it up were very slim.

The last recorded rising had taken place in rural Russia, consuming an entire village; leaving a ghost town. If something like that happened in the modern era of
always on
and
rolling news
, the truth would travel around the world like wildfire. If it happened in a densely-populated area like northern Europe or parts of Asia, the next rising would probably be streaming live on
Youtube
within minutes.

What if the next rising occurred in her own homeland? What if—God forbid—the Great Nest rumoured to be buried deep beneath Yellowstone was next? North America hadn’t seen an awakening for more than five hundred years; as far as Jennifer was concerned, that meant the country was overdue, in the same way scientists claimed that Earth was overdue a massive asteroid strike. Not a matter of
if
, but
when.

It was just a matter of time, and the possibility that Hermetics might once have existed was not important. The only thing that mattered was accepting that the true—global—vampire rising was as inevitable as the onset of winter, and figuring out how to twist that fact to her advantage.

Hermetics or not, vampires
could
die.

What she needed was an army. The Order remained as small as possible in other countries, trying to conceal its importance, but if Jennifer was right, and the next vampire awakening was the equivalent of The Big One, secrecy would no longer matter. Strength would.

Shortly after the turn of the millennium and the passing of her father, Jennifer began to build the American arm of the Order into the world’s largest underground religion. The huge Colorado ranch which served as her base of operations had been expanded several times, and was now home to almost fifteen-hundred people. New initiates were young, of course, and subjected to anything up to a year of psychological and physical abuse, coupled with enormous quantities of LSD, before their loyalty was tested to determine their readiness to learn the truth and ascend to the position of cleric.

The test itself was simple and, so far, infallible. Two initiates, one knife. It was an equation that always equalled one devout believer. The only way to join the Order was to walk through a storm of blood, and nothing guaranteed a person’s obedience quite like making them kill.

Jennifer’s army grew slowly, and she waited.

For sixteen long years.

Until her phone rang, and an anxious-sounding British man introduced himself as Jeremy Pruitt, and said he needed her help.

*

Jennifer stared at the now-silent phone for a long time, running through Pruitt’s words in her head over and over, until their ramifications began to solidify in her thoughts. She already knew that vampires could be killed, of course, but now they actually
had been
. She hadn’t truly expected to witness such an event within her lifetime, and certainly not to discover that when it happened, it wasn’t even the headline news.

A
living
Hermetic had been discovered, and had survived the encounter with the vampires. Even better, the English Order already had its hands on him.

The potential ramifications of
that
refused to settle properly; they sloshed around her skull, full of messy possibility, lighting her up with anticipation.

Judging by what Pruitt had told her, the Order was finished in the UK: now led by an emotional boy who sounded like he suffered from some sort of hero complex—or simply wanted to die. Charles Rennick and his immediate successors were dead, and Herbert Rennick had no idea what he might be transporting, how important this man Dan Bellamy could be. Rennick was heading back to England, apparently following some ill-considered notion of blowing the whistle and letting the world know that vampires existed. He was, Pruitt said, determined to rally the world to
fight
them.

The boy was a fool. Killing vampires had already ensured that—at a minimum—the remainder of the English nest would rise to retaliate. England was one of the most heavily-surveilled countries on the planet. The secret was out, all right. The world just hadn’t noticed it yet
.
But it would, and there
would
be fighting. For survival.

It was only a matter of time.

According to Pruitt, the remaining vampires in England had expected their kin to be returned to them before dawn; the deadline had long since passed. The vampires would not act in daylight, of course, which meant that Jennifer had around seven or eight hours to play with—and it would take at least six of those to actually get a team across the Atlantic. There was every chance that—even with a Gulfstream jet to make the journey—she would not be able to get a team to the UK before darkness began to fall.

She had to act fast.

She nodded to herself and picked up the phone, dialling a four-digit internal number.

Her call was answered immediately.

“Get a team together, Mr Mancini,” Jennifer said. “The best we have.”

“Elimination or extraction?”

“A little of each, I think.”

Mancini grunted.

“Where are we going?”

“
You
are going to the UK. To England.”

“You’re not coming with us?”

He sounded surprised. Jennifer had always enjoyed what Mancini sardonically labelled
field trips
before.

“Not this time. The world is about to catch fire, Mr Mancini. I’ll be putting the ranch into lockdown as soon as you leave.”

Another grunt. He sounded pissed off at her insistence on addressing him so formally. Given their history, that wasn’t so surprising. Pissing him off was, after all, the reason that she did it in the first place.

“How long?” he snapped.

Jennifer checked her watch.

“I want your wheels up in thirty minutes, tops, and, Mr Mancini?”

He sighed heavily.

“Yeah?”

“I want you to understand this up front: there’s a very good chance you’ll be…uh,
going in hot
, okay?”

Mancini paused just long enough for Jennifer to hear the vague concern that lurked behind his silence. She knew full well that Mancini wasn’t a true believer in the existence of vampires, and it hadn’t ever mattered before: he was a hired gun who had no problem following orders which might lead to morally dubious outcomes, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut. That was more than enough to help with keeping the clerics and initiates at the ranch in line.

Yet this was different; belief
mattered
now. She trusted in Mancini and his combat expertise implicitly, but she knew that no amount of battlefield experience could have prepared either him or his men for what they might be faced with if they were still on English soil when night fell.