The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  The entire Rennick family was a part of a global cult which Herb referred to as the Order. A network of families which had existed for thousands of years, keeping the existence of vampires secret; feeding them when they awoke from ‘hibernation’ and covering up the catastrophic results. His father’s next move, Herb said confidently, would be to throw himself at the mercy of the rest of the vampires, to beg forgiveness for the sacrifice that had gone so disastrously wrong. More souls might have to be offered—perhaps a lot more—and the Order would find some way to bury it. They always had.

  It can’t be allowed, Herb had snarled. We have to stop it, he said, over and over. The world has to know. We can fight them.

  Dan said nothing.

  None of it mattered. What mattered was gone, and dwelling on the reasons for the loss—or even dreaming up implausible ways to avenge it—was a raw, scraping sort of pain. When he allowed himself to think about her—about that beautiful, terrified face in the darkness—it felt like a part of his mind was being taken from him; peeling away like the burnt flesh on Herb’s injured arm.

  Better to focus on nothing.

  He counted his breaths, trying to tune out Herb’s incessant muttering.

  In, out. In, out.

  He wondered how many more he had left to take.

  In, out.

  In.

  Out.

  Finally, even Herb fell silent, and Dan knew the reason why: the air in the container felt like it was getting thicker. His breaths were becoming shallower, he realised. More rapid, like each inhalation couldn’t quite deliver the required amount of oxygen to his bloodstream.

  Not long now.

  He shut his eyes in the darkness and did his best to think of nothing, letting his final minutes slip away.

  And then the damn doors opened, and scraps of fading moonlight illuminated the interior of the container as a chill wind blasted fresh oxygen into Dan’s lungs. Cold, grey rain fell outside—the tail end of the storm that had ripped the sky apart for several hours—and even before he stepped wearily from the container, Dan recognised the rolling steel of the Atlantic Ocean in the distance.

  He was on another ship.

  Still alive.

  And there would be no peace.

  *

  Herb was already outside the container, snarling at somebody that Dan could not see. He followed the bigger man out in a daze, stepping onto the deck of a boat that was much smaller than the one he had left hours earlier.

  He shivered at the cold; the rain soaked through his clothes in an instant. He was still wearing shorts and a faded T-shirt; what he had jokingly called his honeymoon outfit less than twenty four hours earlier, when there had been somebody to laugh at his lame gags. When he had been capable of making them.

  Now, his honeymoon outfit was bloodstained; the thin fabric reeked of death and did nothing to keep the biting wind at bay.

  Yet, despite the searing cold, Dan felt his internal temperature rising inexorably; the emotions that he had tried so hard to suppress spiralling beyond his control in an instant.

  Herb pointed a gun at a broad-shouldered man who looked to be in his early sixties. The older man knelt on the deck, his head bowed.

  “I’m not going to kill you, Dad,” Herb said. “I couldn’t. You’re family. Blood. To some of us, that actually means something. I wish I could kill you, but I can’t.” He turned and tossed the pistol toward Dan, who caught it instinctively. It felt remarkably heavy in his hands.

  “That guy can, though.”

  For a moment, Dan just stood there, stupefied. He was dimly aware that there were several people clustered somewhere behind him on the deck. Their hostility when he caught the weapon was an invisible hand that pressed into his back, but he could not focus on them; only on the man kneeling on the deck before him, his piercing grey eyes wide and trained on the gun that Dan clutched in uncertain fingers.

  This, then, was the servant of darkness that Herb had ranted about in the container. Dear old Dad. Charles Rennick, the man who had sentenced the three thousand souls aboard the Oceanus to death.

  The one who was responsible for—

  Dan saw her face in his mind again, twisted by animal panic; dying alone.

  He dropped his gaze to the weapon, watching it tremble in his grip.

  His first instinct was to use the gun on himself; to grant himself the oblivion that had been so cruelly snatched from him at the last. Once, he had thought he could go through with killing himself; had believed that suicide was the only way to stop the terrible pain that buzzed in his head incessantly. But he had made a promise that he would never go through with it.

  A promise.

  Tears filled his eyes; blurred his vision.

  He lifted the gun unsteadily.

  Kill him.

  For her.

  He choked back a sob as grief and despair overwhelmed him, and aimed the gun at the old man’s face.

  Kill them all.

  The thought erupted into his shattered mind so easily; so naturally. Kill them all. Just like that. He pictured himself pulling the trigger again and again, could almost see the perforated bodies dropping around him. The blood. His mind pitched alarmingly; a feeling like a rollercoaster cresting a huge drop and plummeting toward the ground. A wave of dizziness and nausea washed through him.

  Dan’s hands shook wildly, and the air around him congealed. Suddenly, his chest felt like it was being crushed in a vice, and each attempt to draw in a breath lodged white-hot razors in his throat.

  Familiar sensation.

  Crawling up my neck.

  Unsafe. Get away.

  Must get away.

  Adrift on the terrible black river, surging and boiling; carrying me toward something awful. Something unstoppable, and—

  His head felt like it was cracking open; as though the contents were seeping out, expelled like toxic waste.

  She’s dead...

  Dan blinked, and suddenly he wasn’t seeing an old man kneeling in front of him anymore; wasn’t seeing the ship and the falling rain. He wasn’t even seeing the face of his dead wife. All were gone, torn away like a band-aid; reality submerged beneath a terrifying vision of cascading dark water.

  The black river roared, and the dam that he had sought to build with medication and therapy finally crumbled.

  Dan’s mind began to flood.

  Somewhere through the tears and the blackness that ringed his vision, spreading like a cancer, he vaguely understood that Charles Rennick was rising to his feet, grasping for the gun frantically.

  Dan squeezed the trigger, and the back of Rennick’s head exploded. He died instantly, but when his body collapsed to the deck in the blood and the rain, Dan stood over the corpse and fired again.

  Again.

  Again.

  And with each bullet fired, the corpse at his feet twitched, and the darkness in Dan’s mind intensified.

  After the fourth shot—which took out most of Charles Rennick’s jaw—Dan felt the gun slipping from numb fingers that no longer seemed to belong to him, clattering to a deck which he could no longer see.

  The world tumbled and spun as the boiling black tide swept away his thoughts.

  Foul water in my mouth—

  Can’t breathe—

  Dan bent double and retched as a flare went up in his mind; white-hot pain that lanced across the back of his skull. His jaw clenched involuntarily and he bit deeply into the soft flesh of his cheek as his neck began to spasm.

  Tasted blood.

  And the river took him.

  The last thought that went through his mind before the seizure snatched away his consciousness and he collapsed to the deck was that there was, at least, a fair chance that he might never wake up.

  2

  A stunned silence fell on the deck of the trawler, and for a moment even the ocean seemed to hold its breath.

  Herb watched in open-mouthed astonishment as Dan Bellamy collapsed.

  The guy hadn’t s
poken a word in hours, and Herb might even have assumed that he had lapsed into unconsciousness in the container, if it weren’t for the occasional low moan of despair or soft grunt of pain. In that heavy darkness, Herb got the distinct impression that he was sharing the space with a broken, tortured man.

  Herb’s oldest brother had given his life so that Dan would live, because Dan was the only man in recorded history who had killed a vampire. That made him important, but as earnest and certain as Edgar had been that Dan might hold the key to resisting the vampires, Herb had a hard time believing it, especially now that he could actually see the guy properly for the first time.

  Dan was slim—almost scrawny—and of average height, with dark eyes almost buried under a mop of hair that made him look younger than he probably was. He didn’t look like a fighter. What he looked was either scared out of his wits, or crazy. Perhaps both.

  The fit—seizure; whatever it was—only served to reinforce the notion that events on the Oceanus must have fractured the poor guy’s mind. Herb wouldn’t have thought it were possible for a man’s muscles to spasm so violently, but when Dan hit the deck, his limbs jerked hard enough that Herb expected to hear the snapping of bone at any moment. Dan’s collapse was, in a way, even more violent and shocking than his father’s execution.

  Every member of the trawler’s small crew watched in amazement, unable to tear their gaze away until Dan finally stopped thrashing and lost consciousness.

  And the ocean finally exhaled.

  Herb turned his attention to his father’s ruined corpse.

  Furious, trembling hours spent in the container, dreaming up the harsh truths he was going to deliver to Charles Rennick, but as soon as he saw the old bastard’s face, the rage had just been too much. He had no idea what would happen when he tossed the gun to Dan, but Herb had spent his entire life listening to his father preach about fate this and destiny that.

  So Herb let fate decide, figuring that maybe for his father, fate—if such a thing even existed—might look exactly like Dan Bellamy.

  So it proved.

  And it felt infuriatingly like Charles Rennick got off easy.

  Herb took a couple of steps forward, stooping to retrieve the pistol which Dan had dropped. Four more paces, and he was staring down directly on the punctured, leaking remains of his father. He knelt and retrieved a second gun from the dead man’s waistband. That had been the only gun permitted on the trawler: even with his followers comprehensively brainwashed, Charles would not allow anyone else to carry a firearm. Too much potential for trouble, he had said.

  Herb grimaced. The old bastard had been right about that, at least. He stood and tucked both guns into his belt, turning to face the rest of the crew.

  They regarded him with fear, but also with reverence and loyalty that made his nerves quiver. His father’s words came back to him, laced with contempt.

  You’re going to kill me? Then who’ll be the head of the Rennick family? You?

  According to custom, Herb was the head of the family now, though he was the last actual Rennick left. The rest of Charles Rennick’s people weren’t blood, but families who had attached themselves to the Rennicks over the generations; people for whom the vampires had become gods to worship. Herb’s duty now was to take his father’s position as the leader of those people, to represent the Order and—above all else—to keep the oath; protect the ancient truce.

  To feed the vampires.

  Custom.

  Duty.

  Tradition.

  Destiny.

  Herb drew in a deep, shuddering breath.

  I’m in charge now.

  The crew looked at him like machines awaiting the input of their next command, and the corpse on the deck stared at him reproachfully, making his emotions tumble.

  With a grunt, Herb grabbed a fistful of his dead father’s coat, and dragged the steaming corpse to the low rail that ran around the deck.

  When he tossed the body overboard, Herb stared down at it for several moments as it refused to sink; bobbing stubbornly on the dark water. What was left of his father’s eyes seemed to point accusingly at him, no matter which way the waves rolled.

  Herb turned away.

  “Turn this boat around,” he said in a flat tone to nobody in particular. “We’re going home.”

  *

  The Sea Shanty had been a factory fishing trawler in a previous life. At a little over one hundred and twenty feet, it would have looked like a toy alongside the cruise ship its black-market weaponry had sunk hours earlier, but in its heyday the Shanty had been just about the largest dragger money could buy.

  Two huge freezer holds—once piled floor-to-ceiling with squirming life plucked from the Atlantic—devoured the majority of the space on the boat. The engine room took up most of the rest. What was left over was all about compromise: humans were afforded very little space to live and work in, no more than skinny corridors connecting a few anaemic rooms which were barely big enough for the average man to stand up straight in.

  The deck area, when the Shanty had been a working vessel, had been a complicated network of potential death traps which tested the awareness of the boat’s crew continually, underlining that people and their comfort were strictly a secondary concern. After all, it was the fish in the Shanty’s belly that truly mattered.

  The larger of the two holds was reliving its glory days; once more it carried precious cargo.

  Herb had two of the crew place Dan inside, atop a pile of rags and filthy blankets. All of Herb’s attempts to wake the man—up to and including delivering a slap that made his palm sing—had failed. Whatever was wrong with the guy was far beyond the medical knowledge of anyone on the trawler. If he had a role to play in destiny, Herb thought sourly, Dan Bellamy would have to come through whatever was ailing him of his own accord.

  He padlocked the hold, slipping the key into his pocket, and made his way back out onto the deck, his head bowed against the wind and rain until he reached the wheelhouse. Three of the crew were in there, watching him nervously, but Herb moved right past them, stepping into a smaller room to the rear which his father had turned into a sort of private office.

  Inside, there was a small desk and a couple of chairs and not much else, other than a half-empty bottle of brandy which was rolling slowly from one side of the room to the other with each wave that buffeted the hull. Herb snatched up the liquor and slumped into one of the chairs, and for a while he focused on nothing other than the pleasant burning sensation in his throat as he took large gulps.

  Through the gathering fog which the alcohol lowered across his thoughts, the question came, as he knew it would.

  What am I doing?

  Herb knew what he ought to be doing, and that was running; pointing the Shanty at some remote island somewhere and never looking back. He had always wanted to run, to just pick a direction and get as far away from the fanaticism of the compound on which he had been raised as he possibly could. In the end, he told himself that he stayed for his brothers, but would have readily conceded that it was more likely a simple matter of cowardice. Even if he had managed to flee, his father would have come after him. Rennick blood, after all, came with a sacred obligation.

  Even if Charles Rennick had let his youngest son go, some other part of the Order would have hunted him relentlessly, until they were certain that he was dead—along with everything he knew.

  He had failed.

  Failed to run.

  Failed to persuade his brothers that mass murder would cost them all their souls if not their lives, that they were far from the good guys with a noble burden that their father had always maintained.

  And, even while Herb was aboard the Oceanus, surrounded by death and madness, he had tried to save a man—just one man; to do one thing that was good amongst all the horror…

  …and that man was dead.

  Corrosive memories flooded back to Herb, crystal clear and debilitating: the wall of fire and the hideous monster that strolled t
hrough it nonchalantly, laughing as it prepared to devour him; the security officer blowing his own head off rather than face the abomination on the other side of a barricaded door. Edgar, pushing Herb inside the shipping container and locking the doors, turning to face the monster that he knew was behind him.

  And screaming right outside those doors as the last of the Three tore him to pieces. That had been an armour-piercing sound, and hearing it had cast a sickly pall of grief and anger over Herb’s thoughts which he doubted would ever truly lift.

  He shook his head thickly, and a groan escaped his lips. He had to occupy his mind with something. Reliving the nightmare would drive him mad.

  He took another large swallow of the brandy and began to rifle through the desk drawers, finally finding what he was looking for in the lowest of them: a first-aid tin which looked like it hadn’t been opened in decades. He pried off the lid and surveyed the predictably disappointing contents. A single half-empty bottle of antiseptic; a box of painkillers that had to be years out of date; a faded yellow bandage.

  He set the open tin on the desk in front of him.

  Took another drink.

  Gritted his teeth as he peeled off his jacket and removed what felt like most of his left arm along with it.

  Wincing more out of revulsion than pain, Herb dropped his gaze to the burned limb. His pale flesh had been painted a livid red and was covered with weeping blisters. Along the forearm, where the fire had really taken hold, Herb saw that his skin was pockmarked by wide, shallow craters: layers of meat and fat that had melted away to leave revolting indentations. The arm smelled sweet and cloying and sickly, like a plate of pork and apple sauce that had been left to rot in the sun.

  Herb choked back the urge to retch and dumped his jacket on the floor before prising the crusty cap off the ancient bottle of antiseptic. When he poured the clear liquid across his wounds, he was grateful that he still felt no pain, but the sight of his own dead flesh being sluiced away was its own kind of torment.

  Once the small bottle was empty, he wrapped the arm tightly in the old bandage, uncertain whether a burn should be covered or left to breathe, and ultimately deciding not to risk leaving his skin exposed.