Adrift 3: Rising (Adrift Series) (14 page)

He considered moving out of cover. If the vampire was hiding in one of the buildings, would it attempt to break into his mind? Would it know that it would lose that fight, as others had before it?

Dan’s heart pounded.

If he stepped out, and the vampire was sitting in a building with a human under its control, he would be dead in moments. No amount of bizarre psychic power could stop a bullet if it came his way.

No, it can’t be me.

He turned away from Mancini, and came face-to-face with one of the four clerics, whose painfully wide eyes and fearful expression suggested that he was seriously considering flinging his weapon aside and fleeing after the departing crowd, taking his chances with the hail of bullets that might be unleashed in his direction if he dared to break cover.

Judging by the looks on their faces, the rest of them were almost certainly considering the same thing.

Heavy silence fell over the ranch; tension fell like rain. The air itself felt bloated, like it was waiting to see who would make the next move.

We have to fight fire with fire
, Dan thought.
We have to become monsters just like them.

I have to
.

He took a deep breath.

Because nobody else can.

Dan cleared his mind of everything but the rumbling background hum of the black river.

Focused.

And he drilled his gaze deep into the terrified cleric’s eyes.

*

Mancini flinched when the cleric appeared alongside him.

“Get the fuck
down,
” he started to hiss, but the words died in his mouth. The cleric wasn’t
creeping
forward to get a better view. He was walking upright, almost nonchalantly, strolling out toward the centre of the garden like he didn’t have a care in the world. He didn’t even have his weapon raised.

A puppet
, Mancini thought, his mind reeling in horror.

He turned, and saw Dan on his knees behind him with his eyes rolled back in his skull and blood beginning to leak from his nose. His gaze switched to Herb, who was apparently joining the dots at roughly the exact same time.

Dan was in the cleric’s mind.

Herb shook his head in dismay, and started to reach for Dan’s shoulder, but Mancini grabbed his hand.

“No,” he whispered.

“He’s going to get that kid kill—”

“It’s too
late
, Rennick. It’s
done
.”

Herb flushed angrily, and opened his mouth to spit out a response that would almost certainly be too loud, and would draw the wrong sort of attention.

Mancini fixed him with a meaningful stare.

“Bellyache about it
later
, Rennick. If you’re still alive. Right now, keep your sights trained on that kid,” he pointed at the cleric, who strolled casually toward the garden of corpses. “Watch for movement.”

Herb’s eyes were filled with impotent fury.

Mancini
got
it: what Bellamy had just done was obscene; inhuman. But right now, there was nowhere for Herb’s anger to go. He either swallowed it down like bad medicine, or he lost his shit and wound up dead.

Mancini held Herb’s gaze a fraction of a second longer.

Herb’s eyes flickered, and Mancini knew that
he
got it, too. Dan was out in front again, acting alone, following a strategy only he could see. Killing indiscriminately.

Without another word, Mancini turned away, aiming his rifle at the cleric that Dan had just chosen to offer to the vampire.

And waited.

*

Dan walked in the terrified cleric’s shoes, feeling every step. He tried to keep the young man’s movements natural, hoping that the vampire wouldn’t detect the ruse until it was too late.

When the remote-controlled teenager reached the garden, he began to stalk around the perimeter, moving from building to building, leaning into each doorway and checking inside.

The first couple of buildings were empty, but he fired the rifle anyway, pouring a short burst of bullets into the bare walls; making noise. Drawing attention.

Somewhere inside the head that Dan had borrowed, the real cleric’s mind was shrieking in fear.

Dan felt it too, that all-encompassing fear, despite the fact that it wasn’t his body in harm’s way: fifty yards back from the cleric’s position, his own pulse was racing, and he heard it like an echo running alongside the frantic kick drum-pound of the cleric’s heart.

With each passing moment, he felt more and more like he was the cleric, and that Dan Bellamy was a distant dream.

He kicked open a third door.

Nothing.

Once more, he unleashed some rounds before moving on to the next building.

Time began to stretch out, and Dan began to wonder what the range on his ability was. Could he reach the far side of the vast garden and still maintain the connection?

He kicked open the fourth door.

And knew immediately.

The smell hit him.

A solid wall of it. Blood and ripped organs. Whoever had been in this building hadn’t died of gunshots, like all the others outside. They had been torn ap—

Red eyes.

Bursting through the shadowy interior, appearing right in front of the cleric.

Trying to burn their way into his mind.

And finding that it was already occupied.

Dan watched those fearsome red eyes widen in understanding and something like fear, and then he saw the long, curved talons racing toward the cleric’s face—

—
my face
—

He opened his mouth to scream...

—
Not
my
face. The cleric
—

...felt the bright star of pain explode as the vampire’s razor-sharp talons pierced his cheek, carving easily through his eye socket, drilling down into...

The connection severed.

Dan gasped out a ragged breath as his mind was returned abruptly to his own body. He had brought the pain back with him: the spearing, savage agony that had been the cleric’s final experience.

The world pulsed; reality threatening to shift once more, promising to send him tumbling into a world of endless nightmares.

I’m Dan.

Dan Mancini.

No…

Bellamy?

Darkness pulled at him with oily, insistent fingers. The river, begging him to return to it; to stay there and lose himself in its embrace. Singing a siren’s song. Offering sweet oblivion.

Dan Bellamy
.

Dan resisted the lure of the river, biting down hard on his tongue, letting the sharp pain—the
real
pain—guide him back into the real world.

In the real world, Dan was back inside his own body once more, and he was staring at the distant wooden building that he now knew the vampire was hiding inside.
Trapped
inside.

“It’s in there!” he roared, lurching to his feet, pointing at the building.

And he set off at a sprint.

“Straight ahead,” Conny yelled, pointing through the ranch house’s front door. “Then take a right. Look for the stairs leading down. Follow the others. Keep
moving
.”

She stood on the wide front porch of the main house, repeating the words over and over like a mantra, her voice rising to do battle with Andrew Lloyd’s recorded message, which still played on a loop through speakers dotted around the compound. So far, she estimated that she had guided somewhere north of three hundred clerics and initiates in the right direction. By the time the kids reached her, none questioned who she was nor what she was telling them. They were propelled forward by sheer panic. She could probably have pointed them at the waiting jaws of an alligator and they would have sped right toward it.

There were so
many
of them. So many children who Craven had taken advantage of.

She squinted toward the distant gate which led toward the clerics’ area. There were still bodies streaming through it, but many now were covered in blood, and some were clearly carrying injuries. Those ones must have been out there near the perimeter wall when the attack started.

Soon, the numbers would surely thin.

There was no sign yet of Herb, Dan and Mancini.

Conny dropped her eyes to the radio that Herb had given her for a moment. It was quiet, the green
on
light blinking, waiting to receive word.

Come on, Herb
, Conny thought, waving the population of the ranch toward safety
.

Come on.

*

“It’s inside,” Dan whispered.

Herb didn’t like it one bit.

He stared at Dan dubiously, and couldn’t help but wonder if the guy would happily take his mind, too; if and when it suited him. If he would walk Herb’s body toward certain death and shrug it off like it was nothing.

“Are you sure?” he breathed, trying to keep the anger he felt out of his voice.

Dan nodded. He had come to a stop around fifteen yards short of a building that looked like a large storage shed. It was a single level, strictly functional. Four wooden walls and a roof, with a single doorway. No windows. The door stood open, and beyond the shaft of light that spilled through it, the space inside was wreathed in deep shadows.

Herb took it in at a glance, and looked away quickly, afraid of what his eyes might find in the gloom.

“I’m sure,” Dan muttered, never taking his eyes off the doorway. He
wanted
to see red eyes in that darkness, Herb thought, and he shuddered. “It tried to take control of the cleric,” Dan continued. “But you can’t control a mind that’s already taken.”

Herb blinked, remembering what had happened back at the Shard in London. The vampires had sent an ordinary man to kill Dan alongside a luxury swimming pool, and Dan had been powerless to defend himself as blows had rained down on him. The vampire had already been inside the attacker’s head; there was no room in there for Dan, too. It had been a lesson learned while dangling on a cliff edge; the only way they seemed to ever learn anything
real
about the vampires.

Herb’s thoughts darkened. Sooner or later, as they lurched from one confrontation to the next, never really knowing enough about their enemy, constantly being surprised, their luck was bound to run out.

Maybe it will be this time
, he thought, glancing at the shadowy building once more.

There was no sign of movement inside.

“Well, fuck it,” Mancini snarled. He pulled a grenade from the sash looped over his shoulder, but Dan shot a hand out to stop him.

“No,” he hissed. “I need it alive. I need its mind.”

Mancini looked confused.

He missed all that stuff about the river
, Herb thought, and his eyes flicked back to Dan. Was he right about the river? He’d been wrong about most other things, but on that one issue he had been
so
certain. Could it be true? A creature which controlled the vampires across the entire world?

It seemed farfetched, but what other choice did he have but to hope that Dan was right?

Time was already slipping by too fast. If things were bad now in America, they would get a whole lot worse in just a few hours, when the sun dipped below the horizon.

Once that happened, the vampires wouldn’t need to cower in gloomy buildings like the one in front of Herb now. They would be out on the streets, stalking the land, spreading death with every step. A thousand horsemen of the apocalypse.

Destroying Dan’s black river could well be the key to humanity’s survival. Assuming it wasn’t a product of his imagination.

Assuming he’s not insane.

Herb frowned.

Is he?

“Is there any other way out of that building?” Dan whispered, snapping Herb’s focus back into the moment.

Mancini shook his head, aiming his weapon at the door. Herb saw the barrel trembling.

“That’s the only one. It’s just a supply shed. It’s where they keep tools for the garden.”

Dan unsheathed his machete.

“I’m going in,” he said quietly. “If you don’t hear from me in twenty seconds, throw in a grenade.
All
the grenades. If anything comes through that door that
isn’t
me, don’t look directly at it. Just run.”

Dan didn’t give them time to respond.

He marched toward the open door, brandishing the machete like a sword.

And disappeared into the dark room beyond.

Twenty seconds, Herb thought, and he began to count.

One.

Two.

We don’t know enough about them,
he thought. His mind lingered on the conversation they’d had back in the meeting room; on all the assumptions—some correct, many incorrect—that had led them to that very spot.

There was something wrong with their understanding of the creatures right now, Herb decided. He could feel it, ringing in his mind like a distant, barely heard alarm.
One vampire? If they knew Dan was here at the ranch, why only send one?

Yet another damn puzzle. More guesswork.

Three.

Four.

Herb’s nerves began to sizzle. The supply shed looked relatively large, but it shouldn’t take long to ascertain that there was a damn vampire sitting inside it. What the hell was taking Dan so long?

Five.

Six.

Was Dan in the vampire’s head at that very moment? Sitting there in the dark, drooling? Losing whatever was left of his mind?

Seven.

Eight.

Sitting in the dark,
Herb thought dimly, and a faint awareness teased at the corner of his mind. The rest of the garden area was sunny. It was afternoon in Colorado, now. Late October, and the sun burned a rich shade of amber, but the garden was brightly lit. The vampire was sitting in one of the few places without light.

Hmm.

Nine.

Te
—

They’re not afraid of the light
.

Conny’s words popped back into his mind suddenly, and Herb’s jaw dropped as his mind finally solved a
different
puzzle. One he hadn’t even really been aware of struggling with until that very moment.

Light didn’t kill vampires. They weren’t afraid of it. It didn’t seem to affect them in any meaningful way that Herb could see, and yet they
always
clung to the shadows. Back at the hospital in London, he had seen first-hand how a vampire had chosen to take out the building’s lighting before it chewed its way through a group of sickly patients who had surely posed no threat to it at all. Why had it bothered?

That detail had stuck in his mind like a thorn, and it had seemed important at the time, though he hadn’t known why.

Now, he did, and the truth, when it hit him square between the eyes, was unmistakable.

Light didn’t affect them in any way that Herb could
see
. It affected them in a way he
couldn’t.

Their psychic ability
, he thought.
They can only take minds if they are in the shadows
. That’s why
they disable lights as a matter of priority. Because without darkness, they are just teeth and claws.

That’s why the vampire on the Oceanus
talked
to me rather than just taking my mind and snapping it in two. Because the room was lit up by fire. Because it
couldn’t
take me
.

Things were obviously different for Dan, whose human eyes had already taken minds in broad daylight more than once, but as the revelations rolled through Herb’s mind, he knew they were true; knew it down in his marrow. The vampires hadn’t disabled America’s electrical grid just to destabilise the country. They had done it because
light
was the way to defeat them. To take away their greatest power and level the playing field. In the shadows, they were kings. Virtually untouchable. Their inhuman eyes somehow required the darkness; it enabled them to use their most deadly weapon.

Light.

As the vampire myth had been twisted, told and retold across the centuries until the creatures within no longer bore any resemblance to fact, one constant had remained: the vampires came out at night. In the myths, of course, vampires were said to be afraid of sunlight; eventually it even became the means to kill them. But the truth was that vampires didn’t fear the light, they just had no use for it. They came out at night because they could use the darkness.

That’s why they struck the Underground system in London first. That’s why virtually every daylight attack we’ve heard about so far has been carried out by puppets. They are hiding out in dark places, taking minds and using them out in the open because that’s all they
can
do for now.

Because in the light, they are vulnerable.

He blinked, and focused on the building ahead. He had been so lost in his thoughts that he had forgotten to keep counting. How long had Dan been inside the building now?

His gaze switched to Mancini, who was just about to pull the pin on a grenade.

Herb opened his mouth to say something, though he had no idea what it might be, but there was no need.

A frustrated shout came from inside the supply shed.

Dan’s voice, loud and clear.

“Shit,” he yelled. “It’s clear!”

*

Herb stepped across the threshold cautiously, and almost lost his balance as his foot slipped on the gore inside the building.

There must have been at least half a dozen people in the supply shed, and the vampire had dealt with them
explosively
. It was near-impossible to separate where one set of remains ended and another began.

The bodies that confronted Herb as he entered had been torn to pieces: limbs and organs tossed around the room like confetti. Blood spattered up the walls; stringy flaps of skin and meat clung to the ceiling, dropping a slow red rain down on his and Mancini’s heads. Herb doubted the place would have looked much different if Mancini
had
tossed a grenade inside.

The walls were lined with racks of garden tools: pickaxes and pitchforks; trowels and shovels. Herb’s gaze hovered on a pitchfork with something that looked very much like a piece of a human brain impaled on the tines, and a wave of nausea rolled through him.

He felt the world tilt a little, and he tried not to breathe in the stink of the room for a moment, holding his breath to keep the metallic stench of blood at bay as he attempted to compose himself.

Hold it together, Herb
, he thought, blinking hard.

He glanced across the room at Mancini, who appeared to be having an equally difficult time keeping his last meal down. Mancini had seen war; he must have seen plenty of death in his time. The worst shit that humanity had to offer. He had almost certainly never seen anything quite like
this
. Most of the room was gone, buried beneath wet human wallpaper.

It was almost like standing inside something organic, rather than a man-made structure.

Like opening up a body and climbing right inside.

Herb couldn’t hold his breath any longer.

He inflated his lungs.

Drew in the smell.

Bending double, he retched violently, tasting the liquor he’d downed back in the meeting room.

He gasped at the pain as his empty stomach tried to evacuate food that had long ago been fully digested. He’d eaten no more than a few chocolate bars and some peanuts in the past couple of days.

He would, he decided, never eat again. Not
ever
.