Adrift 3: Rising (Adrift Series) (8 page)

Or not coming: as far as Ian was aware, all contact with the UK had ceased hours earlier. The ramifications of
that
were dizzying.

Better not to think about it.

Focus on Berman. Let the rest take care of itself, for now.

Once he got outside, the peaceful forest setting made the events in London seem detached and unreal. The morning sun was filtering through the trees, casting deep, peaceful shadows. The birds were chirping. Everything was normal. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, lit one, and breathed deeply, sighing a little as the smoke wound around his lungs.

He froze.

Had he just caught movement from the corner of his eye? Somewhere off in the trees to his right?

He peered through the thick foliage, squinting. The contrast between the bright light overhead and the gloom beneath the trees made it difficult to pull any detail from the landscape, but there was no reason for any of the security personnel to be over there. All had been ordered to stay close to the lodges.

His eyes widened.

There it was again.

A hint of movement, something which may have been branches swaying in the wind, but which to Ian looked purposeful somehow, almost beckoning him forward.

He tossed the barely-smoked cigarette, and began to walk forward, his right hand settling on the gun at his hip.

Despite the warm morning, he suddenly felt cold, and some part of his subconscious nagged at him. With each step he took, the sound of the birds receded, almost as though all avian life had declared this part of the woods a no-fly zone.

Ian had seen combat, and he had served President Berman personally for six years. He had seen plenty of horrors, and his life had been in direct danger on more than one occasion. Still, he couldn’t remember a time when he had felt so hesitant, like his nerves were aware of something that his mind was missing. He briefly considered returning to the lodge, getting some of the guards beyond the front door to accompany him, and almost snorted a nervous laugh.
Ice-cold Miller
calling for backup to investigate the wind rustling some leaves. He would be a laughing stock.

He shook his head.

Wondered
when
he had unholstered his weapon, and why it was now clutched at his side, in fingers whose knuckles were slowly turning white. Years of training had hard-wired his DNA to respond to threat, and his intuition had served him well more times than he could count. He didn’t believe in the supernatural, didn’t believe it was possible to possess some psychic awareness, but he
did
believe that a human being’s senses could be highly tuned enough to pick up warning signs that others might miss. Even if his eyes couldn’t see it, his nerves
felt
it. There
was
something in the trees.

Threat.

Setting his jaw, Ian marched forward into deep shadows, scanning the trees, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the sudden change in light.

After twenty paces, he saw it.

A hole in the ground, roughly three feet in diameter.

He frowned, lifting his weapon a little, feeling his nerves begin to race uncontrollably. It almost looked like someone had been digging a grave.

Ian walked to the edge of the hole, glancing around to make sure nothing was creeping up on him while he was distracted, and peered inside.

Something peered right back. Something that had been sitting in the hole; waiting like a spider on a web. Waiting for its prey to come right to it.

Red eyes.

Teeth.

A hideous, twisted grin.

He felt a brief stab of fear, overwhelming and paralysing, and then his mind simply melted away. A lifetime of training dissolved in an instant; thousands of hours aimed at teaching him to maintain control of his emotions in the face of danger, and it was all wasted. No amount of preparation could have readied him for
this.
This all-consuming terror.

His legs started walking, as though being controlled remotely, while the conscious part of Ian Miller’s mind fractured and dissolved, reduced to screaming in a dark corner as he watched through his own eyes; felt the staggering, alien malevolence bubbling up within him.

He marched briskly back to the lodge, past the guards on the front door who nodded at him once more and looked vaguely puzzled when he blanked them.

Back to the hallway outside the silent room.

Ignoring the equally puzzled stares of Walters and Rudd.

His hand reached for the handle.

“What’s up, Ian?”

Walters’ words.

Ian heard them, but they were muffled; a shout dulled by thick walls until its message was lost entirely. Before Walters could say anything more, Ian watched his hand push the door open, and saw the famous faces in the room turn toward him in surprise.

And then, all by itself, his right hand raised his firearm, steady as a steam train.

Took aim.

And opened fire.

*

In Florida, around one thousand miles south of Camp David, long-distance trucker Jamie Lester had only pulled his rig into
Mama’s truck stop and grill
to take a leak—though the pictures of fat steaks in the window
did
look good—but found his skull emptying before his bladder would get the chance.

He froze in the parking lot, gaping in surprise as a patch of grassy land next to his rig spat out a chunk of earth, like the ground coughing up a wad of chewed tobacco. He peered into the resulting hole for several long seconds before walking stiffly back to his tanker and pulling open the driver’s side door.

His haul—eight thousand gallons of gasoline—became a slow-moving missile the moment the fingers he no longer controlled turned the key in the ignition.

Jamie would drive for just a couple more minutes, his unblinking eyes seeing only the road ahead, his fingers clenched tightly around the wheel. The drivers who saw him in their rear view mirrors either had the awareness to move out of his way, or the massive front grille of the truck made that decision for them, shunting them aside, swatting their vehicles away like flies.

Jamie’s long-forgotten aching bladder finally voided itself when control of his mind was cruelly handed back to him at the very last second before impact. He had time to feel the warm wetness in his crotch, and to notice something in his wing mirror: a hulking creature of some sort, launching itself from the roof of the tanker and galloping away into the trees lining the road.

And then the missile he drove smashed into the electrical substation that he had been racing toward at seventy miles per hour.

The fireball that consumed the substation killed Jamie instantly, and sent a plume of boiling smoke into the air that was visible from several nearby towns.

All of which lost power immediately.

*

In Rapides Parish, Louisiana, around nine hundred miles west of Jamie Lester’s exploding oil tanker, Private First Class Abel Sanchez had been on gate duty at Camp Beauregard for just a couple of hours when his watchful eyes caught movement among the pines.

In the shadows beneath the forest canopy, just beyond the fence.

After a brief investigation, and after watching in horror as the weapon in his hands executed the three second-class privates who had been at the gate with him, Abel made his way directly to the motor pool, popped open an ammunition box and fed rounds into the Browning M2 50-cal mounted on the rear of the nearest
Growler
light utility vehicle.

The bullets were armour-piercing. Shrieking shards of fire; they spat from the heavy barrel at a rate of almost six hundred rounds per minute.

By the time the bewildered soldiers at the base finally subdued Abel, he had killed thirty-four men and women, and had caused massive destruction to a swathe of nearby vehicles and structures.

When the corporal who had ended Abel’s killing spree with a three-round burst from his carbine turned away from his body, his confused eyes filling with hot, furious tears, he noticed movement in the corner of his eye immediately.

In the shadows beneath the forest canopy, just beyond the fence.

*

Eighteen hundred miles farther west of Camp Beauregard, at Los Angeles International Airport, Trey Brookes crushed out a cigarette and made his way from the designated smoking area toward the small private hangar that held what he considered to be
his
jet.

Trey liked to think of himself as the
pilot to the stars
: most of his contract work came from the movie studios, who used Trey—and the Lear jet he flew—to ferry important actors from one side of the country to the other. Mostly, Trey flew LA to New York and back; often enough that the route bored him. It was like whoever wrote movies didn’t realise that there were other cities in between. As far as Trey was concerned, if Times Square never appeared on film again, it would be just fine by him.

It was a good job, though, and it gave Trey enough stories—and enough selfies—to fill a lifetime of bar conversation.

“This is me with Tom.”

“This is me with Christian.”

“This is me with Bradley.”

Matt. Dwayne. Hugh. Channing. The list was endless, and Trey’s cellphone contained pictures of him grinning alongside every last one of them. He always used their first names when he flashed pictures of himself
hanging out
with the stars, and the drunk girls at the bars almost always joined the exact dots he wanted them to join.

Not a bad life, all in all.

Today, he was scheduled to ferry Scarlett to—you guessed it—New York, for a meeting with some director ahead of the latest superhero movie. Trey rarely ever bothered to learn the directors’ names. Only a handful impressed the girls at the bars, and they very rarely flew with Trey. Hell, they had their own damn jets.

When he arrived at the hangar, he was unfazed to discover that the lights were out. Scarlett wasn’t due for another couple of hours at least, and takeoff would be a half hour after her arrival. Plenty of time for him to call for an engineer to fix up the hangar, and then retire to the cockpit for a nap.

He made his way to the rear of the hangar, to the fuse box, pulling out his phone as he walked, but found something else sitting in the shadows, waiting for him.

A minute later, Trey sat in the cockpit, his ears no longer hearing as the radio wailed warnings that he had not been cleared for takeoff, and that he needed to get off runway four
immediately
.

The warnings didn’t matter and the jet didn’t take off; not really. The wheels were less than ten feet from the ground when Trey’s hands yanked hard on the control stick, pulling the nose sharply toward the terminal, aiming the enormous steel bullet that the plane had become at the vast crowds of people gathered inside, arcing toward the screams at almost two hundred miles per hour.

*

Three hundred miles north east of the disaster at LAX, Chris Greer leant his bike against the railing and sucked in a few deep breaths.

He hadn’t been pedalling especially fast: he was up top today, on relatively flat ground, ensuring that visitors to the Hoover Dam were staying safe, and answering the occasional question. He liked patrolling the top: it made him feel like a tour guide rather than a cop, and the exercise was good without being exhausting. He usually stayed on his bike most of the day, completing slow, easy circuits.

His breathlessness was more to do with the weather: it was late in the year, but still oppressively hot, and the air felt still and heavy, like the world was waiting for a storm to break. He snapped his water bottle from its holster on the bike’s frame and slugged back a large mouthful, taking in the scenery. Even after a couple of years stationed at the dam, the vista laid out before him could still take his breath away.

He often got a chance to enjoy it, too: the dam was critical infrastructure for the country, and so full-time police were required to be on the lookout for trouble—terrorism, mostly—but Chris’ two years in the job had been quiet; serene enough that it was possible for him to sometimes forget that he was even there to keep the peace. Most of the visitors to the dam were too busy being awestruck by the vastness of it to even think about causing trouble.

It was a good assignment. When he had first graduated from the academy, he had dreamed of policing one of the big cities: Vegas, perhaps, or Denver. Somewhere close enough to his family, but still offering plenty of potential for excitement. Yet, after a few years dealing with crime in the small town of Flagstaff, before relocating to the smaller-still Boulder City, just south of Vegas, he had come to realise that excitement was overrated. Sure, policing in Vegas itself would have been more thrilling, but it also might have killed him. Once he had started a family of his own, staying alive seemed way more important.