Adrift 3: Rising (Adrift Series) (16 page)

Laughter. Perhaps it could only ever be a memory now, Conny thought.

Because as her brain ticked back into gear, she knew exactly what that thudding noise had to be, and the realisation made her skin crawl. The scratching and thudding was the sound of a vampire lifting a chunk of rock, and tossing it aside.

Digging.

With a grunt, Conny hauled herself to her feet, looping the comatose girl’s arm around her neck, and set off down the dark tunnel, moving away from the noise, reaching out with one hand to brush the tunnel wall.

In the distance, far ahead of her, she thought she could just about make out the echoing noise of footsteps: the kids she had helped to save at the ranch, still running. Moving away from her at pace.

Keep running
, she thought.
Don’t slow down.

She moved as fast as the pain in her back and the weight of the girl on her shoulder would allow.

And with each step, she pictured the vampire punching through the wall of rubble in the dark behind her, and braced herself to hear the clicking of talons closing in.

Herb ran without thought for the slippery carpet of blood beneath his boots, without care for the vampire that might still be moving farther below him, twisting through the ground.

As he ran, his mind obsessively turned over one simple fact again and again.

One vampire.

Just one.

And that one vampire hadn’t even been there to kill Dan Bellamy. If that had been its goal, it could simply have taken the mind of a cleric and walked him calmly into the meeting room before opening fire. What had happened at the ranch wasn’t an assassination attempt. It was an extermination.

The vampires had sent one of their number to wipe out the people who had served them in America, just as they had sent one vampire to dispatch everybody at the Rennick compound back in England. The monster hadn’t been there for Dan at all. When it had realised that there was a mind at the ranch that it couldn’t take—the mind of the cleric, already under Dan’s control—it had fled.

We were wrong about everything
.

In London, the vampires—or Dan’s black river—had only been able to pinpoint his location when he had taken a
vampire
mind. In doing so, he must have inserted himself into some sort of hive consciousness, allowing the vampire ‘god’ he had described to see him clearly.

Taking human minds didn’t have the same effect at all. Dan had believed that breaking into Leon Mancini’s head back at the runway would alert the black river to his presence, but that hadn’t been the case. The vampires were rising in America because their kin had been killed, and the ancient pact had been broken, not because Dan Bellamy was in town.

One had been sent to the ranch because that’s what they
did
. It was carrying out standing orders to rip apart all traces of the bloodline that had served the creatures.

Wiping out knowledge
.

The creatures didn’t kill those who served them out of some petty need for vengeance, he realised. Their motive was far more circumspect than that. They were simply killing off those who knew of their existence; those who might have some idea how to fight back. The destruction of the ranch had nothing to do with Dan, it was strategic; just another shot fired in the war which had broken out across America.

We don’t know enough about them
.

Herb’s own words rang in his ears. He and the others were still lurching along a path they could not see nor understand; attempting to combat an enemy they knew precious little about. Even now, he was making half-educated guesses, trying to join dots that he couldn’t quite see or understand.

Know your enemy
, he thought. His father had encouraged Herb and his brothers to study
The Art of War
as a child. The central premise of Sun Tzu’s ancient guide on warfare was that in order to defeat an enemy, you must first understand it.

The most important thing he and the others could do now, he thought, was to survive. To pass on whatever knowledge they had gathered to others. He began to think about the armed forces out there, trying to fight when they knew nothing at all.

We need to get word to the military somehow. We need to start building a picture of our enemy. Understanding the way they operate. Future generations will need to know
—

Herb almost lost his footing on something that squished beneath his feet in a way that made his stomach attempt to perform a backflip.

He tried to focus.

Yet, the vampire’s behaviour at the ranch stuck in his mind like a splinter; knowledge that hovered at the edge of his consciousness, teasing his thoughts forward.

The creature had
fled
. It had the opportunity to meet Dan face-to-face, and it had chosen to run. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, Dan’s theory about the black river was correct. Maybe the creature had known that it couldn’t prevent him from taking its mind, and had been aware that letting him do so would prove to be a costly error for its entire hellish species. Maybe it had fled to protect its master’s location.

Perhaps the monster had even taken the tunnel that led away from the ranch, leaving the ranch altogether. Herb doubted it. Not when there were so many potential victims still to be ripped apart. It might not wish to face Dan directly, but it had surely heard the Grand Cleric’s recorded announcement: if it had been tasked with eradicating all life at the ranch, it would likely be making its way toward the centre.

Exactly where everybody else had gone.

He heard footsteps closing in behind him. Mancini. As Herb had bolted from the supply shed, he had heard a muffled explosion, followed almost immediately by another. Mancini had sealed the tunnels with grenades before leaving. A few paces later, Herb had heard another crash, and had glanced back over his shoulder to see the entire shed collapsing in upon itself.

“Rennick, slow down!”

Gasping for air, Herb shook his head and poured every ounce of energy into his thigh muscles, pumping them like pistons. Running like he had a vampire snapping right at his heels.

Conny hadn’t responded to his radio message. He wouldn’t slow down. He
couldn’t
.

He tore through the gate, leaving the Outer Ring behind and moving into the much smaller clerics’ area. There was no sign of movement now, other than the twitching of some of the bodies scattered on the ground. Herb’s eyes fell on one that looked different to the others: where almost all had been punctured by bullets, one cleric lay almost in pieces, her body opened up from groin to throat by something sharp.

Talons.

Herb caught a glimpse of ruined organs, and pulled his eyes away. To the right of the sundered cleric’s body, he saw a hole in the ground, roughly three feet in diameter.
That’s where the vampire surfaced
, he thought.
Spat up out of the ground like a fucking geyser
.

It hadn’t fled from the ranch after coming into contact with Dan. Of
course
it hadn’t.

He put everything he had into moving forward.

And with each yard he covered, Herb saw new evidence of the vampire’s passage. Increasingly, those bodies he saw on the floor hadn’t died of gunshots at all. They had been torn to pieces.

Herb clenched his teeth.

I’m on the right track
, he thought, and he tightened his grip on the rifle, ready to pull the trigger at the first sign of movement, and ran faster than he had ever run in his life.

Through the second gate, out of the clerics’ area and into Jennifer Craven’s inner circle.

Into the madness.

The bloodbath.

The path leading to the main ranch house had been painted red. Everywhere Herb looked, he saw limbs. The vampire had been moving quickly: many of the kids here had suffered terrible injuries, but some were sitting up, crying out in agony. It hadn’t stopped to finish them off, he realised, because it had been chasing after something. He knew instinctively that the
something
had been Conny. He felt it in his bones.

He slowed up.

The vampire was still here, somewhere. In the house, perhaps.

Herb glanced left and right, searching for movement; trying to think. The monster, if it had followed Conny, would surely be wherever the exit was.

The Grand Cleric’s message was still playing over the loudspeakers: the soundtrack to Hell on Earth; it made his teeth grind together involuntarily. The message said that the way out was at the main house, but where? Inside?

Herb turned, and saw a young girl sitting with her back against the wall of a nearby building, trying to press her intestines back into her stomach.

She looked up at him.

“It doesn’t even hurt,” she whimpered, her eyes bright with shimmering tears. “Shouldn’t it hurt?”

Herb opened his mouth, trying to find a response, but there were no words adequate enough to alleviate the horror of the girl’s situation. Blood was flooding freely from the wound in her belly, spurting through her fingers, staining the ground around her.

He stared at her, his thoughts and body paralysed, and watched the light depart from her eyes.

He felt like screaming.

Like pulling the trigger and firing off every bullet he had.

He turned away from the dead girl, and came face to face with Mancini, who was gasping for air. Over the big American’s shoulder, Herb saw Dan Bellamy, chugging along at his own pace, his face expressionless. The horror splashed across the ranch in every direction barely seemed to matter to him: Herb wasn’t certain that Dan even saw it anymore.

Suddenly, he wanted very much to grab Dan and shake him until his bones ached. To shake some damn humanity back into him.

“Stupid, Rennick,” Mancini wheezed, sucking in a deep breath and spitting it back out. “Running like that? Could’ve got yourself killed.”

Herb stared hateful daggers at the older man, lost in his fury.

“Where’s the bloody exit, Mancini? Where is it?”

Mancini shook his head and spat out a wad of phlegm onto the bloody ground. “In the house,” he gasped, with a nod at the bloodsoaked porch up ahead. “Ground floor, to the right. But, wait, Renn—”

Herb didn’t hear any more.

He was already running.

*

Conny’s mind played devious tricks on her.

She moved through the tunnel in absolute darkness for what felt like a lifetime, certain that at any moment she would feel something sharp puncturing her back, ripping out her spine. She suffered intense, recurring visions of the vampire stalking along behind her, creeping and invisible, matching its footsteps to her own. Looming over her in the perfect dark with an enormous grin on its inhuman face, waiting for the right moment to tear her apart.

It was letting her feel some faint flicker of hope, wasn’t it? Taking delight in letting her believe that she might escape, only to snatch her life away at the last moment.

She coughed.

Tried desperately to shake off her rising terror before it sucked away her ability to think at all.

Tried the radio again.

She had already tried it several times, and received no response. Either the radio didn’t work this deep underground, or Herb and the others were dead. Conny would have given anything to see them right now. Even Dan. Hell, even
Mancini
.

Conny staggered on until the weight of the weapons she carried and the comatose girl on her shoulders began to take its toll.

Need to stop,
she thought
.

Can’t stop. Are you insane?

Yeah, could be.

She carried on, her pace slowing with every step, her muscles burning. She was a machine now, fuelled by pain, built only to put one foot in front of the other.

Keep moving
, she thought, repeating the words over and over like a prayer.
Just. Keep. Moving
.

She almost screamed in relief when at last she saw dim light up ahead. The tunnel was curving gently, but she had to be near the exit, at last. The light in the distance was
daylight
.

Salvation.

No more tunnels
, Conny thought, and almost laughed aloud.
No more tunnels
ever.

When she finally rounded the bend in the rocky passage and exited into the brilliant afternoon light, Conny staggered forward a few more steps before collapsing to the ground.

In the dust, she saw footprints, leading away to the west, and when her eyes followed them, she could just about make out the distant line of clerics and initiates moving away from her; a snake of bodies winding through the emptiness toward the forest, and beyond it, the mountains that were still a couple of miles away.

Walking farther would be torture. It would be agony. But with clear air in her lungs and light on her face, she knew that she could make it.

She threw her head back, drinking in the air, choking out the last of the dust she had inhaled back in the tunnel, and dreamed of water. A single cup of cool, clear water. At that moment, it would have been a treasure to rival any other. She would gladly have traded every weapon she had taken from the closet at the ranch for just one sip.

Her eyes dropped to the M4 carbine slung across her shoulder. A beautiful piece of equipment; a flexible tool of choice for armed forces all over the world.

Well, maybe not
every
weapon
, she thought, and smiled to herself.

It was time to get moving. The longer she sat in the sun, the more she dehydrated, and the farther away the line of distant refugees would get. If she lost sight of them altogether, she would be reduced to stumbling around in a forest blindly, trying to find an entrance that she was damn sure would be well concealed.

She started to haul herself back to her feet, wincing, and froze, her eyes drawn back to the open mouth of the tunnel.