Adrift 2: Sundown (12 page)

More than one.

Monsters.

Petra saw them for only the briefest of moments, for barely a second—just a fleeting, chilling glimpse—before the windows imploded, and something—some
things
—hurtled into the carriage.

And the crowded space filled with the sound of screaming.

*

Conny
secured the platform
with the help of Remy and the two bruised security staff, guiding the small crowd of witnesses out to the bottom of the escalators which led up to the ticketing hall, explaining that medical assistance was on the way and that they would all be required to provide statements.

Almost as soon as she had shepherded the commuters away from the platform, she saw the first of the reinforcements arriving, clattering down the stopped escalator in single file, evenly spaced.

Her eyes widened in surprise.

Kevlar body armour. Assault rifles. Protective visors.

An armed response unit.

What the hell?

The first group of officers made directly for the tunnel that led to the platform without even looking in Conny and Remy’s direction. A second group followed, and made their way straight toward her.

“You have been ordered to evacuate the station,” a man wearing an Inspector’s uniform said loudly, addressing the group. “Please leave in a calm and orderly fashion.”

As if perfectly planned, the
up
escalator began to move again. Armed officers began to guide the shaken commuters toward the exit, telling them that they would be taken care of upstairs.

“Sir,” Conny said, “these people are witnesses to a murder. There is an ambulance—”

“That will have to wait.”

Conny blinked.

Murder will have to wait?

“The ticketing area has been cleared,” the Inspector continued. “You’ll need to go up to the main hall and speak to the CS.”

“Chief Superintendent?” Conny repeated, surprised. “Here, at the station?”

He nodded.

“
Everybody
is here or headed this way. All hands on deck. Didn’t you hear on the radio?”

Conny flushed. Her radio had been crackling during Remy’s scuffle with Adam Trent. With all the noise of the man screaming and the dog snarling, she hadn’t been able to pay attention to it.

She shook her head.

“Well, get upstairs.” He looked down at Remy, who was still staring back toward the entrance to the platform. “I’m sure they will want you both up there.”

The last of the commuters had disappeared from sight, and the Inspector gestured for his group to make for the northbound platform.

“Hey,” Conny called, “it didn’t happen in there, it was the southbound line.”

The Inspector shook his head and grimaced behind his visor.

“It’s
all
the lines.”

Herb’s pulse thundered in his ears as he gripped one side of the table which he had placed across the kitchen door as a barricade. Dan held the other side, and when he nodded, they lifted together, moving the table aside as quietly as possible.

He stared at Dan. One minute the guy was having seizures on the floor, and the next, he was smoothly taking over as Herb’s own courage began to desert him. At any moment, Herb half-expected him to collapse and start screaming, but Dan remained focused only on moving the table without making a sound. His head was bowed in concentration, his mop of hair matted with sweat. Herb noticed for the first time that he had a scar that began an inch or so above his right eyebrow, running up into his tangled hair. A surgical scar.

Before Herb could ponder the significance of that scar any further, Dan began to lower the table. Herb focused on making sure the legs didn’t make a sound as they made contact with the tiles, and when he looked up again, Dan had already brushed his hair back over his forehead, and was moving to the door and pressing his ear against it.

After a moment, he shook his head.

Now
, he mouthed, and Herb nodded, picking up the two guns from the counter and gripping them in palms that trembled wildly.

Dan began to turn the heavy iron key.

Slowly.

Quietly.

Wincing as he eased the ancient tumblers to the
unlocked
position.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity to Herb, Dan began to twist the handle.

And the door flew open, smashing him aside like a ragdoll.

He crashed across the table they had moved moments earlier, slamming into a cabinet. Going down hard, and disappearing from sight.

The vampire came in without hesitation, and Herb turned and fled blindly, throwing himself behind a counter.

The world became chaos.

The creature shrieking; the hideous noise echoing off the tiled walls, reverberating and multiplying until it seemed endless.

Glass breaking.

Lights winking out.

The sound of flesh tearing.

A strangled yelp.

Herb flipped onto his back as the room plunged into near-total darkness, and fired several rounds from the pistols wildly, aiming at nothing and everything in his terror.

One of the guns clicked.

Empty
, Herb thought, and he tossed the weapon aside and put the barrel of the other against his temple, gasping at the searing heat of the metal on his skin.

It had been a desperate plan. Trying to trick a vampire like it was a child. Desperate…and doomed. Herb’s command of what remained of the Order had lasted a matter of hours, and he had led them directly into disaster, making every wrong decision it was possible to make. All were dead, save for handful, and the man he had sworn he was going to save was instead going to die. Again.

I’m no leader
, he thought, and his finger curled around the trigger.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

No hero.

*

Shreds of light bled through from the outside world, squirming around the edges of the shuttered windows, bouncing off chrome surfaces.

Half-illuminating the abomination as it moved with appalling purpose.

The creature charged into the centre of the room, raking its talons through the gut of one of Herb’s followers.
Jay
, Dan thought, oddly detached from the unfolding horror.
I remembered his name, after all
.

The vampire leapt away from Jay’s still-standing corpse as gunfire ricocheted through the kitchen: a deafening thunder that made Dan’s ears ring. Muzzle flashes that threw bright, fleeting light on Jay as he began to fall, spilling something heavy and liquid from the gaping hole torn across his abdomen.

And it began.

As familiar anxiety at first; fear which hit him like an oncoming train, before twisting into something darker and less familiar.

With a roar, Dan hauled himself to his feet, striding forward and batting a gun from Herb’s hand as he placed it against his own temple.

“Eyes
shut
,” he snarled, his mouth delivering the command his brain hadn’t been aware of, and he leapt for the knife rack, his fingers closing around a cold steel handle.

A cleaver.

Of course. That made sense.

Because the nightmare which had begun on the Oceanus wasn’t over. He was still there, in the thick of it, thrashing; trying to break free of the madness. Locked inside a mind that was slowly crumbling to pieces as it tried to withstand the insanity of the world.

He turned, and saw the vampire attached to the ceiling like a dreadful, enormous insect, untroubled by gravity. It held another of Herb’s followers by the neck, his feet dangling at least four feet above the ground, and before Dan could move a muscle, the monster sliced through the man’s throat like ripe fruit. His body fell, an obscene torrent of dark blood pumping from the space where his head had been moments earlier.

The abomination snorted out something that might have been a laugh as it tossed the cleric’s head aside.

And drilled its eyes into Dan.

He felt a sickening sensation erupt in his mind; a terrible sort of pulling, as if the creature had hooked invisible claws into his brain and was trying to wrench it from his skull. As Dan watched, transfixed, the creature’s eyes seemed to glow, becoming strangely hypnotic, and the awful pulling in his head grew stronger, until Dan felt sure that his skull was about to explode.

The vampire dropped down onto the tiled floor.

Took a step toward him.

Click.

*

Herb watched it happen as an orbiting satellite might observe the destruction of the planet: detached and distant; separated from the insanity somehow. He couldn’t persuade his muscles to move, couldn’t even draw a breath into lungs that burned with the desire to power a scream.

Dan Bellamy wasn’t special at all.

The vampire stalked toward him casually, and Dan just…stood there. Staring at it; a huge cleaver dangling from limp fingers, his jaw slack; his eyes wide.

It has taken his mind
, Herb thought in dull terror.
Edgar was wrong.
I
was wrong. And now we’re all going to die.

Click.

Click.

The vampire took another couple of steps forward on those hideous, angular legs.

And it
stopped.

For a moment, Herb gaped, bewildered, as the vampire and Dan stared into each other’s eyes.

And then Dan screamed.

Lifted the cleaver high above his head.

And
charged
.

*

His timing was off.

The creature whipped to the right as he swung the cleaver, and the blade landed only a glancing blow on the monster’s neck. He switched his grip on the handle, and swung again; a sweeping backhand that a tennis pro would have admired, and a bestial roar erupted from his lungs as the blade carved itself a home in the side of the vampire’s hateful head, lodging so deep in the thing’s cheek that when the vampire began to fall, it was impossible for him to maintain his grip on the weapon.

Shattering pain erupted in Dan’s belly.

He stared down, blinking stupidly.

Tried to process the sight of the three wicked talons buried in his stomach, and the awful tearing sensation as the creature’s weight dragged the hideous weapons away from his flesh.

A spatter of blood hit the tiles.

My blood.

So much—

And then Dan, too, began to fall.

The darkness took him before he landed.

*

Herb watched in a daze as both Dan and the vampire crashed to the floor. The room looked more like an abattoir now than a kitchen; bodies and blood and death piled in every corner.

The remaining three clerics—Lawrence, Scott and Adrian—stared at the twitching monster in horrified fascination, watching as it reached up a hand with a snort, gripping the handle of the cleaver that had split its skull almost in two, and tried to pull the blade out.

It screamed, and thick, black blood oozed from the wound like treacle.

It took Herb a moment to realise that the creature wasn’t dying, or if it was, it was doing so slowly.

That moment was long enough.

Adrian picked up a large carving knife from a counter and took a step toward the convulsing abomination, his face twisted in terror as he stared down at it.

“No!” Herb screamed. “Don’t look at it!”

Too late.

Adrian lifted the wicked blade high.

Drove the business end into the side of his own head.

Herb looked away in despair as the cleric dropped to the floor, and the vampire began to roll toward the rear of the kitchen, still clutching at the steel that had penetrated its skull. It scrambled out of sight behind the island in the centre of the room, melting into the thick shadows.

“Get Bellamy!” he hollered, loud enough to shake Lawrence and Scott from their stupor, and he sprinted across the slick tiles to Dan’s inert body.

You can’t die. You can’t.

There was no time to check Dan’s injuries; to determine whether it was safe to move him. It certainly wasn’t safe
not
to.

Herb grabbed a handful of Dan’s thick sweater, trying not to notice how heavy and sticky with the man’s blood it was, and began to heave, his feet slipping. Despite his slim frame, Bellamy was dead weight, and Herb made little headway until Lawrence appeared in front of him and grabbed the unconscious man’s ankles.

Somewhere in the shadows to the rear of the kitchen, the injured vampire shrieked. In the metal-and-tile kitchen, the noise was impossibly loud, otherworldly.

It might have been a sound born of pain.

Might have been determination or murderous desire or rage.

Herb didn’t want to find out.

“We have to
go
,” he roared.