The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

He could never abandon his family.

  Ironic.

  "I'm not a terrorist," he said glumly. "Or at least, I’m not what you think of as a terrorist. There's no word for what I am."

  "And what is that?"

  Herb ignored the question.

  "How long has it been since the lights went out?" he asked.

  His answer was the muffled crack of gunfire, and an eruption of screams. The air in the dark conference room sizzled with tension.

  "Never mind," Herb said miserably. "It's already too late."

  *

  Mark felt his nerves blaze as the muffled shots rang out. The blasting of the gun seemed to go on forever. He counted sixteen shots.

  Vega, he thought dumbly. Vega just emptied his entire clip at something.

  Mark's mind went blank. Vega was a starchy, uptight bastard, and in many ways Mark loathed him. Yet there was no way that Mark thought Steven Vega was the type of guy to panic over anything without good reason. He certainly wouldn't open fire in the middle of the park unless something truly terrible was going down.

  A wave of anxiety washed through Mark, turning quickly to anger.

  "All right," he said, feeling around in the darkness until he found the collar of the man lying at his feet. He dragged Herb up to his knees, ignoring the man's cry of pain. "Enough of this bullshit. I'm tired of being kept in the dark, so start talking."

  Herb grunted.

  "Or what? You'll torture me? That sounds pretty extreme for cruise ship secu—"

  Mark punched him squarely in the jaw; not hard enough to risk him losing consciousness again, but plenty hard enough to let Herb know that he wasn't dealing with cruise ship security any longer.

  "You can forget the fucking uniforms," Mark spat. "Try to focus on the fact that I'm scared and desperate, and I wasn’t that dedicated to my job in the first place. Understand?"

  Herb chuckled and spat in the darkness.

  "Now you're talking," he said. "So I will, too. There's no need for torture. I'll tell you everything, on one condition."

  Mark considered hitting him again, but reined his anger in just in time.

  "What condition?"

  "You've got guns?" Herb asked.

  "Damn right we've got guns." Ferguson's voice made Mark flinch. The combination of his own fury and the cloying darkness had led him to forget the other men were even there.

  "Good," Herb said. "When I'm done talking, I want you to shoot me. Once. In the head. Make it quick. Deal?"

  Mark released his grip on Herb's collar, letting the man slump back to the floor.

  What the fuck?

  "And if you want a piece of advice," Herb said. "Save some bullets for yourself."

  Mark's thoughts tumbled. He tried to catch one.

  "What's happening out there?" he whispered finally, and the trembling sigh that constituted Herb's response chilled the blood in his veins.

  "There's something on the ship," Herb said. "Something that just arrived. It was waiting for us to cut the power."

  "What sort of something?" Mark hissed.

  For a moment, there was only silence in the dark room.

  "You won't believe me," Herb said quietly.

  *

  Steven Vega's mind went blank with terror.

  The creature that stepped from the container was a twisted mockery of the human form, like an artist’s impression daubed by a maniac. It was tall, skeletal-thin with limbs that looked like they’d been stretched. Dark, leathery skin wrapped tightly around rippling, sinewy muscles. Long, bony fingers that became wicked-looking talons.

  The worst part, though, was the way it moved. Almost like an insect, darting from the container and pausing abruptly as if to take in its surroundings. It reminded Vega of the way spiders scurried, and his skin crawled.

  Just when he thought the creature that emerged from the container could not possibly appear more hideous, it grinned, revealing a set of large, sharp teeth that looked like they would have been at home in the mouth of a shark.

  Something about that grin; the almost human expression twisting the utterly inhuman face, made Vega’s bladder loosen. He searched the hideous face, trying to make sense of it, and saw crimson eyes that seemed to glow in the darkness, oozing malevolence.

  Intelligent eyes.

  Calculating.

  It looked like something that had recently escaped from the lowest level of hell.

  It wasn't alone.

  Another flash of lightning gave Vega a brief glimpse of the interior of the container, and he saw more of those thin, angled limbs, more of that terrible staccato movement. More blazing red eyes. More teeth.

  Vega backed away slowly, and saw the first creature fall on a woman whose leg had been pinned beneath the shipping container.

  It drove its face down sharply, burying those terrible teeth in the woman's neck, and tore her throat out with a wet pop.

  She hadn't even had time to scream.

  Click.

  Click.

  Vega hadn't been aware of his hand lifting the useless gun and pointing it at the creature. He squeezed the trigger repeatedly, though some part of his mind knew that the clip was empty.

  It didn't seem to matter.

  The creature lifted its maw from the ruined neck of the woman and stared directly at Vega for a single, brief moment, before swinging its neck away.

  Evil, he thought dumbly. Pure evil.

  Vega had seen no sign of pupils in the fearsome eyes. Just two pools of blood-red emptiness that drilled into his head, and in that single sickening second, he felt the thing's terrible gaze piercing his mind like a needle; felt his thoughts giving themselves to the creature, plucked away from him like a stray hair.

  He was certain that if the creature had held its gaze upon him a moment longer, his mind would have snapped like a dry twig. Even that split second felt like it had left poison swilling around his skull.

  It's in my head, oh God, I can feel it inside my—

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  Vega's forefinger was still squeezing the useless trigger, but now the barrel of the gun was pressed against his own temple.

  He hadn't been aware of his hand moving.

  He dropped the weapon, astonished and horrified, and scrambled backward, whimpering like a new recruit dropped into the middle of a firefight. He wasn’t conscious of taking the decision to retreat. Maybe because it wasn’t a decision at all. It was a biological imperative, like flinching away from fire or pulling back from a steep drop before falling over it. A response that formed in his genes, not in his thoughts.

  The creature sprayed its horrific gaze around the park, stabbing deep into the minds of the terrified crowd, and it laughed,: a low, sickly rumble that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and Steven Vega, who to the best of his knowledge hadn't fled from a confrontation in decades, turned tail and ran like his life depended on it.

  As he ran, he tried to process the scene that unfolded around him.

  Couldn't.

  He was no stranger to violence and bloodshed; Christ, Vega was no stranger to death. He'd seen it plenty.

  Yet what was happening in the park wasn't just death. It was something else.

  Everywhere he looked, as the lightning lit the boat at arrhythmic intervals, he saw horrors that made his mind shrivel. The terrible creatures—he counted three, though there might easily have been more—surged through the fleeing crowds, killing at will.

  Insanity spreading everywhere they pointed those glowing red eyes.

  Vega saw one of the creatures lopping the head off a middle-aged man who tried to run; saw the headless body take a couple more steps before crashing to the ground in a dizzying dark fountain of blood.

  Saw another ripping a glistening mess from the chest of a young woman and holding it aloft, roaring in triumph. It took Vega a moment to realise that it was the woman’s heart; another half-second to notice that it was still beating, and tha
t the sight had caused something in his mind to feel like it had suddenly gone rotten.

  He felt the creature that had stared at him in his brain; felt it grasping at him as he fled. The feeling was fading, receding with each yard he put between himself and the horrors that had spilled from the shipping container, but Vega knew that others were not so fortunate.

  Screaming, all around him.

  The violence built in intensity like the gathering storm; a sickening, dizzying vortex of horror. In the darkness, with people running in all directions, and with screaming everywhere, Vega felt that there was nowhere safe, nowhere to run to, and a solid lump of despair settled in his gut.

  Somewhere behind him, he heard a child screaming for its mother, the voice so high-pitched with terror that he couldn't tell if it came from a boy or a girl.

  The scream ended so abruptly that for a moment Vega thought it must have been emanating from a television, and someone had just hit the off button.

  His mind was slipping. He felt it, deep inside. Like some toxin that had been injected into his bloodstream, and which was working its way steadily through his system, dealing out damage as it found a home in the darkest corner of his thoughts.

  The screams seemed to multiply around him. And worse than the screams: the sickening sound of flesh being ripped; the grunting, snarling of the creatures. The heavy splatter of the blood that fell on the park like a warm rain.

  All those sounds; all that noise, somehow amplified and worsened by the darkness.

  Vega backpedalled in what he thought was the direction he had approached the park from initially, his only thought to get back to the deck below; to the others, and to their firearms.

  The screaming seemed to be following him, getting louder with each step, but when he finally turned to face the attack that he was certain was coming at any moment, Vega found himself confronted by only darkness, and knew that the screaming had come from his own throat.

  Lightning split the sky again, and the roar of thunder that followed it was almost immediate. The Oceanus was in the eye of the storm.

  As the flash faded, Vega saw a man smashing his head into the ground repeatedly, trying to purge it of the poison within; his face already a ruinous catastrophe of gristle and bone. Smashing and smashing until what was left didn't even look human.

  Vega had seen, and now he understood. Death had come to the Oceanus. It circled the ship like a vulture.

  The sky cracked once more, and then all thoughts fled.

  And there was only running.

  22

  "Vampires," Mark repeated in disbelief. "Are you fucking kidding me? That's your story? Fucking vampires?"

  He let out a chuckle and surprised himself with how shaky his voice sounded. The combination of darkness, distant gunfire and Herb’s oddly placid demeanour had wormed its way under his skin. He wasn’t sure what he thought Herb’s story was going to be, but he was damn sure he hadn’t expected vampires.

  Herb sighed heavily.

  "That's right," he said. "Vampires. We gonna do the I don't believe this shit dance for a while now? Because believe me, friend, our time is fucking short, and that dance can last a long time. Trust me. I know."

  Something about the steely note in the man's voice made Mark swallow the sarcastic response that had been gathering in his mind. He searched his thoughts for a question that seemed appropriate and came up empty. What was the protocol when someone—an apparently dangerous someone; maybe even a terrorist—told you that vampires existed, and they were likely hunting you at that very moment?

  None of the questions that popped into his mind felt anything less than ridiculous, but it was obvious from the silence in the conference room that nobody else planned on speaking.

  "How?" Mark finally said.

  "How?" Herb barked a laugh that made Mark's nerves sizzle. "That's your question?"

  Herb's laughter dissolved into coughing and a sharp intake of breath.

  "I don't know how," he said. "I know what and I know why. The 'what' is a creature that has existed since before our species discovered fire. Something fucking old, man, you understand? Something you haven't seen before."

  Mark snorted.

  "And you have?"

  Herb laughed again.

  "No," he said. "I haven't seen anything personally. I didn't even believe this shit myself until a few weeks ago; not really. But according to those who do believe, the reason we haven't seen them is because they don't come around all that often. Sometimes there are gaps of decades without activity. Sometimes, centuries. They live a long time; they hibernate, understand? We're not talking about Dracula or fucking Twilight here, right? No swooning women, no tortured love story, no nibbling on people's necks. These things aren't like us. They were never like us. They are something else. Animals that we don’t understand. An apex predator."

  "This is bullshit," Ferguson snapped, and Mark flinched. For a while there, listening to Herb speak, the darkness had once more fooled him into thinking they were alone in the conference room.

  "You guys are not actually listening to this, are you?" Ferguson growled.

  Mark said nothing. The sound of Steven Vega's gun firing until the bullets ran out dominated his thoughts. Vega was ninety percent arsehole, but the other ten percent didn't strike Mark as the type of guy to start shooting in a public area unless he absolutely had to. Yet it hadn't sounded to Mark like a gunfight. More liked panicked fire from a single weapon. A whole clip emptied at something that didn't shoot back.

  Vega had to have been scared by something.

  This can't possibly be true.

  Can it?

  "Say we believe you," Mark said cautiously. "What's your role in this? Why disable the ship?"

  Herb drew in a breath. Mark couldn't see the man's face, but he got the impression that Herb was searching for the right way to say something that he knew they would find it difficult to believe.

  "There is a world...beneath our world," Herb began in a faltering tone that sounded to Mark like he was trying to remember a memorised speech, and then he tutted, apparently at himself.

  "Look, I only know what I've been taught," Herb said. "What I've had to listen to since I was a kid. Trust me, I understand what this sounds like. The story goes that these things live underground, mostly, and only come to the surface to feed. Once, their existence was common knowledge, but that has been eroded away. There are secrets that have been kept from the general population for centuries. Since before the damn printing press was invented, right? Information that has been allowed to slowly dissolve over time."

  Mark frowned when Herb fell silent.

  "Go on," he said.

  "What you need to understand is that vampire is just a word, right? What you're thinking of when I say that word is a myth built on faded memories; told and retold until it becomes meaningless. A Chinese whisper. The creature that the word refers to might more appropriately be labelled a demon. Or a monster. It doesn't matter. 'Vampire' works because much of the whole vampire myth as we know it, if you trace it backwards, has its roots in the existence of this creature, but only one element of the vampire story as you know it is wholly true."

  Mark realised he was holding his breath. Herb's words—as incredible as they were—were delivered with utter sincerity that made something in Mark's gut squirm.

  "Which is?"

  "They consume humans. Throughout history, when there have been mass disappearances—if you believe my father's version of events—that is down to people like me serving up sacrifices to keep these things at bay."

  "And nobody has noticed this happening," Mark said dubiously.

  "There are no survivors," Herb replied. "Never have been. That's part of the deal."

  Mark snorted.

  "There's, what, three thousand people on this boat?" he said. "If that number of people went missing anywhere in the world somebody would notice."

  "Yeah," Herb said. "There hasn't been a sacrifice on this scale in centu
ries. Maybe millennia, if my father is to be believed. Not since the Incas. He says it's because there are a lot more of us now, so the price is steeper, but that's probably just another of his bullshit theories. Whatever it is these things want; however they think, it won't be as logical as that."

  Herb took a deep breath, and when the silence didn't crack, he carried on.

  "Since I was born, I've been prepared by my father, just as all my ancestors have been prepared, to be ready to make a sacrifice if they call for it. They haven't called on my family in generations, so until very recently, as far as I was concerned, I was raised by the family from hell, and I was the only one that wasn’t batshit-crazy. It turns out they were right, and after all this time, it's the Rennick family's turn to make an offering. Nice deal for me."

  He spat those last words out like they were rotten.

  "A little over two months ago, my father received contact, and demands were made. A large sacrifice. The Oceanus was the perfect choice: a large number of people in a confined space. Easy to cut communications. The ability to do it all at sea, where there was no chance of them coming into contact with the general population. The vampires agreed."

  "If any of that is true," Mark said, "you and your family have got to be just about the most evil motherfuckers on Earth."

  Herb snorted.

  "Funny," he said. "When I first found out what was expected of me, I told my father the exact same thing. I asked him what was stopping us from just dropping these bastards into the sea instead of putting them on the ship. You know what he said?"

  Herb paused a moment, until he was certain that no reply would be forthcoming.

  "He said that if we didn't fulfil our duty, many thousands more would die. The entire vampire species would retaliate, and nobody knows for sure how many of them there are. Maybe millions. Nobody would be living in comfortable oblivion any more, watching TV and going to work and having safe, happy children. Instead, they'd be fighting, and they'd be dying."

  Herb grimaced, as though remembering the taste of something sour.

  "My father always said that our role is to offer sacrifices in isolated places, to maintain the ancient peace between the species, whether we like it or not. We keep the vampires away from humans, and we keep the knowledge of their existence secret. The world gets to keep turning."