Adrift 3: Rising (Adrift Series) (10 page)

He saw Shelley jabbing a finger at his forgotten bicycle, some thirty yards away, and made for it, yanking it upright and mounting it in a single, panicked motion. His feet were pedalling before his mind had even given the command, and he weaved through civilians, his duty as a police officer forgotten. There was no keeping the peace now. No maintaining safety. There was only survival; only those who were going to make it off the dam, and those who weren’t.

Up ahead, clear of the surging throng of people that engulfed Chris, he saw Shelley spin her own bike around and pedal hard.

Another crack: less deafening than the first, yet far more terrible. This time, Chris heard the aftershocks; the distant cascade of rubble as chunks of stone were punched out of the Hoover Dam like rivets, raining down onto the valley.

He pedalled.

His legs a blur, his muscles on fire, his breath turned to acid in his lungs. Chris didn’t feel any of it. His consciousness was reduced to a single, howling imperative.

Faster!

He crashed into a middle-aged woman, sending her tumbling to the treacherous ground as it rocked and lurched beneath his wheels, and didn’t slow for a second; didn’t look back. Chris Greer’s days as a police officer were over.
To serve and protect
was now just a hollow memory. The only thing that mattered was the rotation of the pedals, and the ground the wheels beneath him could eat up before the inevitable happened. He gripped the handlebars in iron fists, leaning over them, desperate to eke out every last drop of momentum.

Lurching forward, veering crazily, his thoughts lost, his existence reduced to pure, animal instinct.

Chris was still pedalling when the Hoover Dam collapsed and a billion tons of water crashed over him, blasting the bike away, catching his legs in the frame and snapping his knees like dry twigs.

Almost made it
, he thought, and the force of the water and the bike that ensnared him tore his body apart, scattering the pieces across the gigantic wave of water and rubble that rushed south, destroying everything in its path.

*

At the nuclear power plant in Clinton, Illinois, Ross Carney’s work was done, and his hands had locked and barricaded the door, leaving him alone with the muted shouts of his increasingly desperate colleagues.

It was too late for them.

For everybody.

He had started a fire that nobody could extinguish. The power plant was a runaway train now, and all anybody could do was try to get the hell out of the way.

But not Ross.

His body slumped against the door, and passed the time by digging its fingernails into the flesh that had once been his own, tearing it off in ragged strips and popping it into his mouth.

Chewing.

Deep down, imprisoned in his own mind, Ross tasted himself, but couldn’t even force his stomach to vomit. Somewhere else in his mind, the creature that had taken control
enjoyed
the taste. It relished every morsel.

When finally the self-inflicted wounds began to take their toll, and his body began to fail, the intruder in Ross’ mind played the cruellest trick of all.

It let him go.

Gave him time to really see—and
feel
—what his hands had done to his torso.

And what they had done to the power plant.

Ross’ clawing fingers had torn out his tongue, and he could no longer speak, but his throat could still produce a moaning, liquid scream, and so it did. His voice joined the urgent whine of the power plant’s warning sirens, and he got a front row seat for the beginning of the end.

The plant in Clinton was the first to go up, but not the last. The majority of nuclear power was located on the eastern half of the United States, and though the vampires hadn’t taken them all, they had taken
some
, all dotted around the northeast of the country.

Many humans would die in the disaster that would unfold in the coming minutes: the air itself would become a killer in large swathes of the countryside, but not for the vampires. Not for the creatures whose flesh did not burn, who thrived in fire and death.

Across the continental United States, the gut of the country was being punctured repeatedly: hundreds of tiny cuts; a latticework of suffering. The country might have withstood each tear individually, but there was no way to respond to all; no way to stop the bleeding once it began. Even as emergency services tried to close one wound, another opened, and another. The vampires focused on electricity, taking apart the transmission grid with ruthless efficiency. By the time night came, very few human settlements would be able to hold off the darkness.

They struck at most major cities, killing and moving, killing and moving. Disabling vital infrastructure wherever they could find it.

They struck in small towns and counties.

They struck
everywhere
.

And in the northeast corner of the country, where Ross Carney and a handful of others like him had worked, the vampires had torn into vital organs. The vast, cataclysmic explosions at five nuclear plants were slightly staggered, not quite simultaneous as had perhaps been planned, but each poured more irradiated clouds of dust and ash into the sky. Each helped to blot out the sun and drop a veil of artificial night across the eastern seaboard.

Darkness fell early in Illinois and Iowa; in Michigan and Penn and New York, and the vampires rose to feed and slaughter in earnest.

The fall of America had begun.

Helen Specter’s face was famous.

It was the face of
CNN
, the face that lit up a thousand billboards across the country, the face that had appeared on magazine covers almost as often as it had in front of a camera. Helen’s face was currency, and she knew how to use it for maximum effect. Despite the expectations her striking appearance brought with it—invariably that she was some airhead—Helen’s star as a serious reporter of the news was in the ascendancy. She knew how to work that magnetic face around every news story: when to be light-hearted, when to be serious. Her professionalism had never once slipped.

Until now.

Now, Helen’s famous face was a mask of shock, her delicate jaw slack.

Minutes earlier, she had reported the death of President Robert Berman at Camp David—apparently assassinated, along with several of his most senior staff, by one of his own Secret Service detail. It was the sort of breaking news that made or broke careers, and she had handled it with typically efficient aplomb, fully aware that her part in the coverage would be pored over for years to come by internet blowhards seeking out signs of conspiracy. That prospect hadn’t phased her at all; she welcomed it, in fact. A big breaking story was where potential fame lived for rolling news journalists. It was the elixir of life.

And breaking news didn’t get any bigger than the assassination of a sitting president.

Until it did.

A distinctly unprofessional frown had momentarily crossed Helen’s face when her producer had whispered in her earpiece that they were pulling away from the report of the assassination for more breaking news.

That can’t be right
, Helen had thought behind that frown.
What breaking story could possibly warrant interrupting
this?

She soon found out.

The Hoover Dam.

LAX.

Attacks on cities all over the country, some claiming the lives of dozens; some thousands. Large-scale destruction had been wrought in virtually every state across the eastern half of the country, and in many to the west, too.

And it just kept coming. Story after story. Disaster after disaster. Military bases had been hit in more than a dozen states. A US Navy destroyer in the waters off the coast of California had attempted to fire on the vessels around it without warning, and had then turned its sights on San Francisco before being sunk, killing more than four hundred crew members. There were reports of gunmen opening fire in major cities, but these weren’t the isolated incidents that America had sadly become all-too used to seeing in recent years. It was happening
everywhere
. There was barely time to report the details of one monstrosity before another surpassed it.

Finally, Helen whispered the news that a nuclear power plant had suffered a devastating explosion in Clinton, Illinois, and that everybody within a thirty mile radius had been advised to take shelter or flee for their lives. A total meltdown was inevitable. It would make Chernobyl look like a firecracker.

And it wasn’t the only one.

News of other attacks on nuclear sites was trickling in: plants in Iowa and Michigan had already suffered catastrophic explosions, and two more plants in neighbouring states were said to be the scene of outright warfare, with security forces trying to blast their way inside, to prevent staff who had apparently lost their minds from triggering further meltdowns.

With prevailing winds, the entire northeast of the country would suffer a blast of radiation that would kill either instantly or—worse—slowly. Residents from Iowa to New York City were being advised to stay in their homes, to seal windows and doors as best they could, to get underground if possible.

It was surreal, a broadcast beamed directly from a newsroom in Hell. More like a sick joke than reality: if Helen didn’t know better she might even have believed that she was the victim of some office prank, words planted on a teleprompter screen that couldn’t possibly be true.

As she had recited the details of disaster after disaster—large and small, spread across the entire country—some part of Helen knew that her spin of the wheel of fame would amount to nothing. The cameras were still rolling, but the news she was reporting made it likely that the concept of fame itself would be meaningless in a few hours. This wasn’t the peak of her career, it was the end of it. The end, perhaps, of everything. The speed of the collapse was breathtaking; awe-inspiring.

The vice president had taken control of the country following the death of Robert Berman, and his first executive order had been to deploy the US military on home soil. The National Guard had been called out. Someone in the newsroom had half-joked that the vice president’s next order would be to deploy the
NRA
, and Helen had felt a chill run down her spine. It wasn’t a joke: it was the truth. It seemed that in every town in America, war was breaking out. In some towns, there was already nobody left to fight.

Helen and her colleagues had spent hours of airtime through the night debating the destruction of the UK in elaborate detail, secretly thrilled at the scope of the news story, and now it was here, right on her doorstep.

It wasn’t thrilling anymore.

Helen was
in
New York City. On the thirtieth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. By the time she reached the ground, stepping outside might already be the equivalent of stepping on a landmine. The skies were bloating with radiation; the wind was pushing it steadily in her direction. Perhaps it had already arrived. The news had washed up at her door even as she read it.

When she had finished delivering the revelation that the north eastern quadrant of America was about to become an irradiated wasteland, her producer whispered in her ear again, and informed her that reports of attacks were pouring in from France, from Australia, from Japan and South Africa. That all communications with Russia and Eastern Europe had been lost. That there were entire
cities
ablaze in China.

It wasn’t just America that was bleeding.

It was the entire world.

Helen finally pulled out her earpiece and placed it on the desk in front of her. She stared blankly into the lens of camera one, and said nothing. There was nothing left to say.

Nobody out there was watching her famous face delivering the news anymore.

They were living it.

Everywhere.

How could I have been so wrong?

At the ranch in Colorado, Dan watched the news footage with a growing sense of horror, unable to tear his eyes from the screen until, finally, the anchor’s words just ran out and her statuesque features set in shock. The ticker running across the bottom of the screen continued to scroll. A roll call of the dead and dying:

...Meltdown at plant in Illinois...attacks in Europe, Asia and Africa reported...Vice President Simpson urges population to remain indoors...

Before Dan got a chance to discover what would emerge next from the perfect
o
that the newsreader’s mouth had become, the image of the newsroom vanished entirely, replaced with an
emergency broadcast system
splashscreen.

Seconds later that, too, disappeared, leaving only hissing static.

The Grand Cleric was still holding the remote control. He began to jab at the buttons, cycling through the channels. Static on every one. After a few stunned seconds, he dropped the remote onto the huge table and slumped into a chair with a vacant expression on his face.

“What just happened?” Conny whispered. Her voice was almost reverent with awe.

For a moment, Conny’s words echoed in Dan’s mind, repeating over and over until they became a background hum.

What just happened?

He almost felt like laughing at the absurdity of it. Each time he had believed that he had the vampires figured out, they did something to show him just how little he—how little
all
humans—really knew about them.

The ancient enemy of mankind had waged a sophisticated war of propaganda thousands of years ago, while humanity was still fighting with knives and sharp sticks. Even the people who had agreed to feed the vampires had known next to nothing about the creatures they served. While the vampire myth propagated, and people forgot that once there had been a fearsome—real—foe at the root of it, the monsters had slowly grown in strength.

And now, when they had perceived a threat to their kind once more, they were rising as one. Not to kill by the hundreds or the thousands, but by the millions. Their greatest weapon had been the lie; it had
always
been the lie. Humans, in their blissful oblivion, had no way to fight creatures they couldn’t believe in. No human weapon had ever been developed with the intention of being aimed at a
vampire.
Vampires weren’t supposed to exist. They were fairy tales. Box office and bumper stickers.

Not teeth and talons.

Not global slaughter on a scale that could set human civilization back thousands of years.

An urgent pressure was building in Dan’s skull. It felt like his mind was about to implode.

The attack on London had led him in the wrong direction. He had believed Herb’s estimate that there were only two-dozen or so vampires in England, and he believed it still. It certainly seemed to tally with the way the destruction had spread across the city. That relatively small number had led him to a severe—perhaps fatal—miscalculation: he had assumed that there simply weren’t that many vampires in the world. America would likely have more than Britain by dint of the sheer difference in landmass, but he had reasoned that it couldn’t be
much
more. Maybe fifty.

Instead, there had to be hundreds. Maybe
thousands
.

Thus far, the numbers he and Herb had encountered had been small precisely because they had involved just one single nest—and that nest was located in a country which might have been First World, but which was near insignificant in actual size. Three vampires aboard the Oceanus, twenty-something in London. A small-scale operation, yet disrupting it had roused something far larger.

Something gigantic and unstoppable.

No matter what he had believed, it was obvious now that Dan was no
threat
to the vampires; he was, at best, an irritant. A fly to be swatted at if and when it buzzed too close.

Unimportant.

Instead of attacking Colorado en masse to get to him, the vampires had set about dismantling the entire country in a single, savage blitz attack. They had probably spent hours moving into position—perhaps they had already been on the move when the Oceanus had been sunk, approximately thirty-six hours earlier—and when they were all in place, they had struck simultaneously. America had fallen before it even knew there was a fight to be had.

When the Gulfstream jet had touched down on American soil, Dan had believed he was ahead of the game. But he was several steps behind. His arrival in the US hadn’t awoken the vampires. They were already on the move long before he got there.

Nuclear power stations?
Dan thought, and his soul felt like weeping. He had been
so
wrong.

The vampires’ attack wasn’t mindless and reactionary; it wasn’t born of blind rage. It was calculated, surgical. The monsters were taking the human species apart with jaw-dropping efficiency. They knew how to attack. Where to attack. They had sliced the head off the American political body, and by the time the rest of the country’s bureaucratic leadership had time to recover, there would be nothing left to lead.

They had attacked military bases, they had attacked the power supply, they had struck at vital infrastructure to cause maximum carnage. They had spread themselves across seemingly every major city, knowing that even a military as mighty as America’s could not cope with a simultaneous assault on numerous targets inside its own borders.

They probably didn’t know it yet, Dan thought, but the US military was now a resistance movement. Within hours, as their numbers dwindled, they would begin to understand that they were losing a fight against an enemy they could not see, just as the British military had.

Dan tried to picture the soldiers and police out there, attempting to fight back while their command structure tried to comprehend
where
they should aim their weapons. And everywhere they turned, they would find civilians attacking them. Fellow soldiers attacking them. And something else lurking unseen in the shadows, picking them off when they were at their weakest.

This wasn’t war in the traditional sense; there was no
front
to speak of. America’s best chance at defeating the vampires now might be to drop nuclear bombs, but the vampires had made that impossible: the vice president—if he remained alive and in charge for more than a few hours—would have to sanction strikes all over his own country. He would have to sign off on Armageddon.

“They disabled the electrical grid,” Mancini said softly, gesturing at the television. “They cut communications. The first rules of war. Disrupt enemy comms. Cut the supply chain.”

Dan felt a rush of furious anger building inside him. Directed at himself, and at his hubris.

“We were wrong,” Herb said bitterly. “They’re not coming here; not coming for Dan at all. They’re going everywhere else. It’s like my father said. We started a war. This is what war with the vampires looks like.”

Herb drained the rest of the rum from the decanter and slammed it down on the side-table. He stalked back to his chair and sat down heavily.

“Yeah,” Mancini said grimly. “Why go where they know they can be hurt? If they take out the rest of the country—the rest of the world—what can one man do? Kill ‘em all yourself?” Mancini turned toward Dan, glaring.

That was the plan
, Dan thought.
Half-baked and misinformed and doomed to fail before it began.

“But,” he said, cringing a little at how lost and small his voice suddenly sounded in his own ears, “I thought they were
drawn
to me. In London…”

“Maybe they are. But they aren’t mindless animals, are they? They aren’t moths and you aren’t a flame. They
think
. They
plan
. In London, you were a target of opportunity,” Mancini said. “But destroying the city was the objective. That was their revenge for you killing a couple of them.
This
is their revenge for you killing more. Your presence in the city wasn’t the reason they turned up in London. It was what you had already done on the damn ship. They don’t
need
to kill you. They can kill everybody else. Then what good are you?”

Silence fell, and the room filled with the soft sound of static fizzing from the televisions. After a moment, Herb reached out, taking the remote and turning them off. “If they are taking out nuclear power stations, we’re all fucked,” he said grimly. “Most of us can’t fight vampires. None of us can fight radiation.”

Conny leapt to her feet and began to pace, pausing only to jab a finger at the Grand Cleric.

“You,” she barked. “What’s your name?”

The Grand Cleric glanced up at her for a moment, apparently befuddled by the question.

“Andrew Lloyd,” he stammered. “I’m the Grand Cleric of—”

“You
were
the Grand Cleric,” Conny interrupted. “Whatever the hell this place was, it just changed. Your boss is dead, and everyone else here will be, too, unless you pull yourself together. Now, you’re a survivor.
Maybe
.”

Andrew’s eyes widened, but he said nothing, dropping his chin once more. Conny marched to his seat and snapped her fingers in front of his eyes, making him flinch.

“Hey!”

Andrew looked up again, startled.

“Craven said you people have a place in the mountains? How far?”

“A couple miles,” Andrew mumbled, “maybe three. B-but this place is secure. Once we’re on lockdown—”

“They’re blowing up nuclear power stations!” Conny roared, shaking her head furiously. “Fucking
lockdown?
Are you serious?" She waved an angry gesture at Andrew and stomped back to her seat, leaning down and yanking at the leash that held Remy. After a couple of tugs, the rope fell away from his collar. He sprang to his feet, instantly alert.

“If anyone tries to tie this dog up again, he has my full permission to rip their damn hands off.” Conny spat the words out like shrapnel, aimed at nobody in particular.

Remy padded over to the window, lifting himself upright, with his two front paws on the sill. He peered out across the ranch, apparently fascinated by the elevated view.

She’s terrified
, Dan thought, watching Conny begin to pace once more. He scanned the room, taking in the wide eyes, the slack jaws, the trembling fingers.
Everyone
was terrified, yet he, who had felt nothing but fear for years, now felt only numb. Numb, and stupid. He had misjudged his enemy badly, forgetting just how intelligent the vampires were.

Mancini’s words echoed darkly in his head.

What good am I?

His thoughts tumbled, visions of boiling black water rushing through his head, but when the familiar anxiety threatened to spike, he found that it was powerless. An echo of fear, nothing more.

“We need to get underground as soon as possible,” Conny snarled, “and pray that they don’t get to a power station close by soon.”

I’m not drowning.

Not adrift.

Dan sucked in a breath. The river was out there, surging around the edge of his consciousness, but it wouldn’t sweep him away, not ever again. Fear was the power that drove the horror in the shadows.

And I’m not afraid.

He let the breath out slow. Controlled. Drew in another.

They’re intelligent
, he thought, and his eyes widened.

“They won’t,” he said softly.

“Won’t
what
?” Conny looked almost delirious with fear, prowling around the room like a caged tiger. She had the air of someone who wanted to just pick a direction and start running; to do something; anything.

“They won’t take out all the power stations. They might disable our power, but they won’t want a nuclear apocalypse.”

“Tell that to New York and Chicago,” Mancini growled.

Dan opened his mouth to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. His mind filled with visions of the densely populated cities in the north of the country.
Massive radiation exposure. Peeling skin and festering sores and lungs filled with toxic blood. Death circling like a vulture; inescapable
.

Outside the window, the early afternoon skies above Colorado were clear and bright. It was hard to believe that just a few hours north of his position, those same skies were probably scarred by radioactive ash, thick with the sound of screaming as millions died in agony.

“
Why
, Dan?” Conny snapped. “They’ve taken out more than one power station already. Why will they stop there?”

Dan’s thoughts blazed. If the vampires wanted to subdue humanity, nuclear apocalypse was certainly the fastest way to do it. But it didn’t feel right. He had no explanation for what had happened in the northeast, but the more he thought about it, the more certain he felt that they wouldn’t carry on attacking nuclear sites. If that was what they wanted, why bother to attack LAX or the Hoover Dam? Why attack
anywhere
that wasn’t a nuclear power station?