The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  When he was done, he took another long drink.

  Set the brandy down on the desk.

  And dropped his head into his hands as the tears came at last.

  3

  Herb was still staring at his feet, sniffling softly and trying to sift through the chaos in his mind, when the door opened and footsteps made their way toward him. He knew there was only one man on the Shanty who would dare to follow him into the cabin and, in the end, he was surprised it had taken that man so long.

  “Hi, Jeremy,” Herb said without lifting his gaze. “Thought you’d come sooner.”

  “Had to weigh up the odds of you shooting me. There’s a lot of dying going on, after all.”

  Herb snorted.

  “Crew’s a little nervous, Herb. I don’t mind admitting that includes me.”

  He glanced up and saw genuine concern etched on Jeremy Pruitt’s face. Pruitt was the older man of the two by far, getting ready to wave a sour goodbye to his late-fifties and sporting a balding pate that made him look like he belonged in a monastery somewhere; an impression that was undone somewhat by his hulking physique.

  Jeremy had been a part of the family since before Herb was born, filling an ill-defined but necessary role at Charles Rennick’s side as adviser, bodyguard and, Herb had long suspected, occasional assassin. There had been times through the years when the Rennick family secret had come close to being revealed. On those occasions, it was Jeremy who ensured silence, one way or another.

  Despite his murky, violent past, the big man was one of the few at the compound that didn’t treat Herb like a live grenade, and he considered Jeremy the closest thing he had to a friend. They had even talked openly at times about the oath, and about Herb’s unswerving belief that the creatures his family was sworn to protect—and the whole secret history of the world that went along with that duty—could not possibly exist. Jeremy disagreed of course, but while he was certainly a believer, he was no fanatic.

  Unlike the rest of them.

  When Herb had been preoccupied with the fantasy of running away, it was Jeremy that had dominated his thoughts. The older man would, in all probability, help Herb with the practicalities of fleeing the compound, and then immediately be tasked with hunting him down, and perhaps even killing him. Knowing Jeremy, if Charles Rennick had given such an order, he would have carried it out, friendship or no friendship. What Jeremy would do now—now that the man who had been his personal dictator for decades was dead, Herb had no idea.

  But he was glad that he was the one with the guns.

  Jeremy slumped heavily into the chair opposite Herb’s.

  “Do I have a mutiny on my hands?” Herb smiled thinly and offered the older man the brandy. Jeremy waved the bottle away.

  “Please,” he said. “Loyalty isn’t a problem; you know that. At least, not for those people.”

  He gave a knowing stare, and Herb felt his mood darken.

  “He deserved to die.”

  Herb infused those four words with venom; poisonous enough that Jeremy couldn’t possibly miss the fact that his father’s death was not up for debate.

  Jeremy held his calloused hands up in an apologetic gesture.

  “Just saying. These people have been a part of your family for generations. They don’t serve the Order. They serve the Rennicks. You are the Order.”

  Herb grunted, but said nothing.

  After a moment’s pause, Jeremy cleared his throat a little awkwardly.

  “I’m sorry, about your brothers.”

  Herb’s eyes clouded, and he pointed them at the floor.

  “I tried to stop it, right from the start. They wouldn’t listen. Nobody ever listened. Maybe my father had the right idea. Perhaps the only way to make sure your point gets noticed is to underline it with blood.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like something he would have said. Never thought I’d hear it from you, though.”

  Herb shook his head angrily, and for a few moments a dark silence settled on the small room. He wanted desperately to change the subject, but it appeared that all subjects were currently soaked in violence, one way or another.

  “When was the last time you were in contact with the compound?”

  Jeremy’s expression hardened.

  “Not since the Oceanus was sunk. Your father was unwilling to accept his failure, not until he saw it for himself. He wanted to find the container before he called home.”

  “We need to warn them,” Herb replied, “tell them that the rest of the nest may rise.”

  Jeremy shook his head.

  “Impossible.”

  Herb’s eyes narrowed.

  “Why?”

  Jeremy sighed.

  “Your father had the satellite phone in his pocket. I wish you’d checked before you decided to throw him overboard.”

  Herb squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his jaw, and silence fell once more. It was Jeremy that broke it.

  “The guy who pulled the trigger, what’s his story?”

  “According to Edgar, he killed two of the Three with a cleaver.”

  Jeremy arched an eyebrow.

  “That guy?”

  Herb snorted a laugh.

  “I know, right? But Edgar was very definite. He thought Dan Bellamy was important. I imagine, at the end, my father thought so, too.”

  He grimaced.

  “Dan Bellamy,” Jeremy repeated softly, as though the name might mean something to him. Apparently not. “Did he talk, in the container?”

  “He called out for somebody, once. His wife, I think. Don’t think he knew exactly where he was. Once he realised, though? No; not a word. I guess he’s in shock.”

  Jeremy looked dubious.

  “Never seen shock do that to a person before.”

  Herb had no response to that.

  “Did Edgar say anything else?”

  “Just that he had told Dad about the vampires dying, and that Dad’s response was to fucking kill us all.”

  “He hoped to cast this as an accident, I think. Maybe even claim that it was the vampires who caused the explosion and hope that the rest of the nest wouldn’t retaliate. Losing his own sons added a certain…authenticity to his story.”

  Jeremy delivered the words without emotion. Herb tried to receive them in a similar fashion. Failed by a wide margin.

  “‘Authenticity,’” he spat bitterly, and snatched up the almost-empty brandy bottle. He took a mouthful. “That sounds about right. Lies piled on top of lies; that’s the Rennick way. Tell me, Jeremy, did he know, before all this? Did he ever give you any indication that there might be people out there who the vampires can’t control?”

  “No. There’s nothing in the texts, Herb, nothing that—”

  “The texts,” Herb snarled. “More lies.”

  Jeremy blinked at the ferocity in Herb’s tone. “Even if that’s true, nobody has found any evidence to contradict them. Think about it, Herb. Your own family has searched for information on the vampires for centuries, and what have you found? Nothing. The Order exists in more than thirty countries; families just like yours, all of them searching for exactly the same thing. Christ, the entire Order has devoted itself to uncovering the truth, and all they have discovered is evidence that these things can’t be resisted.”

  He sighed.

  “So maybe your friend Dan Bellamy is one of a kind. Good for him. But what use is that to anybody? The vampires have nests across the entire planet, probably including many that we don’t even know about. We’d need an army of Dan Bellamys to fight them.”

  Herb felt his irritation rising. It was exactly the same sort of argument that he had heard countless times back at the compound. Devout belief in a bunch of ancient artefacts which claimed that the vampires were gods and that servitude was the only option. Nobody would listen to Herb when he tried to tell them that something being written a long time ago didn’t necessarily make it true, and that recent history was full of lies concocted by the Order, which made it likely th
at ancient history was as well. It seemed that only he was able to countenance the idea that the ancient clay and stone tablets which formed the bulk of the Order’s knowledge might be inscribed with lies.

  “And what if he’s not one of a kind? What if there are thousands like him? Millions? What if it’s something to do with his genes, or his upbringing, or the fact he eats Tasty Wheat for breakfast? Dan was one of three thousand on the ship. What if those are the odds? If one in every three thousand people can resist them, there’s an army. I mean, how many of these things can there possibly be out there? Why all this trouble just to feed three? Doesn’t that suggest that there are a lot less vampires out there than the texts claim?”

  Jeremy shook his head firmly.

  “If anyone had found evidence—any evidence at all—that there were ever any other Dan Bellamys out there, we would know.”

  “Would we really? You think my father would have shared that information with the rest of the Order?”

  Jeremy said nothing.

  The more Herb thought about it, the more certain he felt. His father would have killed Dan Bellamy at best, or handed him over to the vampires at worst. Anything to preserve the status quo.

  “Do you know that virtually all historians agree that the Great Fire of London only killed five people?” he asked.

  Jeremy stared at him, puzzled. He did know plenty about the Great Fire of 1666, of course. It was an event that was branded onto the mind of everybody who lived at the Rennick compound, the exact date celebrated annually like a twisted Christmas.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it,” Herb continued, “how the truth can get twisted until it no longer exists? By 1667 my family was wealthy beyond all measure, fattened by meat plucked from the bones of a burning city. It’s the same story all over the world, everywhere the Order exists. They get fed, we get rich. We become people of influence and wealth. We get to shape history. I wonder, if a Dan Bellamy had been walking around London in 1666, whether my ancestors would have viewed his existence as a good thing? For all we know, other families have stumbled across people just like Dan, and have buried that particular truth along with all the others.”

  He focused on the horizon.

  They were travelling east at full speed, heading toward the sun that had not yet risen.

  “I wonder what else is a lie,” Herb continued softly. “According to the texts, the vampires were super-predators, and they killed us so relentlessly that we were at the point of extinction. That’s why they chose to stay underground, because the alternative was to feed themselves out of existence right along with us. They sleep in order to give their crops time to grow.”

  “And?”

  Herb flinched, so lost in his thoughts and the dark, rolling waves that for a moment he had forgotten that Jeremy was standing next to him.

  “And there were only three to feed. During the Great Fire, it was just two. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  He glanced at Jeremy. The older man’s expression was pitched somewhere between confusion and concern.

  “Wonder what?”

  “Whether they buried themselves out of our reach because they were killing too many of us…or because we were killing too many of them.”

  For a long time, Jeremy said nothing, and the two men stared out at the dark horizon in silence. Herb thought he knew what the older man was thinking: exactly the same question that burned in his own mind.

  The texts—every scrap of information uncovered by the Order, right across the planet—all agreed on one thing: that the vampires would rise to punish a failed sacrifice. Entire civilizations had supposedly been wiped out as a result of their failure to satisfy the creatures’ demand for blood. What if that, too, was a lie? For all Herb knew, there were no other vampires in England. Maybe the entirety of the English nest had already been killed in the mid-Atlantic.

  “They’re going to come for you, you know.”

  Herb blinked, and switched his gaze to Jeremy.

  “The vampires? Yeah, I’ve heard all the prophesies of doom. Bloodlines that fail them are erased from history—”

  “Not just the vampires. The rest of the Order. We were supposed to sail north and broadcast a fake distress signal, remember? The Oceanus will be discovered sooner rather than later, and that means that this boat is full of loose threads, Herb. You should know enough about what happens to loose threads in situations like this.”

  Herb shrugged.

  “We’re in the age of information now, Jeremy. It’s time the world knew everything.”

  “And a lot of people will die as a result.”

  “A lot of people have already died, and all because we believed these things were gods. But they’re not immortal. We can fight them, whether Dan Bellamy is a one-off or not. While they have been sleeping, the human race has spent centuries perfecting the art of killing. We have weapons these things can only dream of.”

  Jeremy’s shoulders slumped.

  “Guns and bombs and tanks. I doubt you are the first to consider such a course of action. But what good are those weapons if we have no idea where to point them? What effect can a man holding a gun have, when they can take his mind before he can pull the trigger?”

  Herb returned his gaze to the horizon.

  “I guess we’ll find out, one way or another. Assuming that there are any other vampires out there.”

  “And if you’re wrong about all of this?”

  “Then I’ll be wrong. It won’t be the first time.”

  “And you’re willing to gamble your life?”

  Herb shrugged.

  “I’m meant to be dead already, remember?”

  Jeremy sighed wearily, and began to make his way back toward the wheelhouse. After a few paces, he paused.

  “You know,” he said, “your father always said you were reckless. Never one to think things through.”

  “And now he’s dead,” Herb growled in a low, dangerous tone.

  Jeremy nodded.

  “For my part, I always thought you were both more alike than either of you ever realised.”

  Jeremy left the deck, leaving Herb alone with his racing thoughts.

  He checked his watch. Almost five in the morning. It was late in the year, and dawn wouldn’t break over England for a couple of hours yet. Sunrise had been their final deadline for returning the Three to the earth, where more of their kind were supposedly hibernating. If that were true, by the time light washed across the land, the rest of the nest would surely realise that their kin were not coming back.

  Herb was sure that they would not attack the surface in daylight. The texts weren’t lying about that part: the vampires had demanded total darkness aboard the Oceanus, and had been sealed in the shipping container to avoid all light during their transportation. The notion that sunlight might actually kill them was fanciful; just another part of the false mythology that had been allowed to spring up around the vampires over the centuries, but they avoided light nonetheless.

  If there were more vampires out there, ready to rise and avenge the death of their kind, he figured he had around twelve hours of daylight to figure out how to deal with them; twelve hours to unwrap the riddle of Dan Bellamy.

  Twelve hours.

  4

  Click.

  Barry Reid shut the front door to the farmhouse softly behind him, and his face twisted into a sour grimace.

  Rain again.

  He stepped out into the still-dark morning with a sinking heart, and felt the downpour plaster his prematurely greying hair to his forehead in seconds. The weather forecasts had been right: a storm had blown in from the Atlantic overnight. Just like every other damn night.

  The year was shaping up to be the wettest on record; a hard-won accolade in the UK. Winter lurked around the corner, and the sun had barely shown all summer. Instead, there was the endless rain. In some low-lying coastal areas, that had meant flooding, and vaguely hysterical responses from a government that did all but declare it was goi
ng to be tough on weather and tough on the causes of weather.

  Barry’s farm, a few miles inland from the coastal town of Brighton, had not flooded, but the inclement weather had a profound effect nonetheless. Most people probably assumed that drought was a farmer’s worst enemy, and they weren’t exactly wrong, but wet day after wet day could be just as troublesome.

  Amazing how something as simple as an extended period of rain—as damn arbitrary—could put a man’s livelihood at risk. The silage crop had suffered a near-fatal blow from the lack of anything like a summer. Without silage stocks, Barry was forced to resort to buying in animal feed to get the cows through the winter, and the price of the stuff just kept on going up. Meanwhile, the supermarkets continued to drive the price of milk down, and Barry found himself caught in the middle, slowly having the life squeezed out of his business.

  Getting up at four every morning was starting to feel a lot like drowning, and every hour spent tending to the farm as it haemorrhaged a little more money had become a dreadful burden that squatted heavily on Barry’s soul. He could almost see the pennies draining away in front of his eyes, minute by minute. Now, each morning when Barry left the farmhouse and headed for the tractor to begin his first circuit of the land, he carried a vague sense of dread with him which lasted all day.

  And he got soaked, of course. There was always that.

  Barry broke into a trot as a fork of lightning gave the darkness an early taste of the daylight to come. For a moment, his land lit up around him, bright and bleached of colour, but he paid it no attention. His surroundings were as familiar to him as oxygen; he could have navigated the farm wearing a blindfold.

  The house behind him, garage to his right. Outbuildings to the left—mostly containing tools and supplies, along with a few chickens. A small barn directly ahead that was a prelude to the much larger version further down the dirt track that led to the heart of his two hundred acres. He usually parked the tractor in the larger barn, but had been so tired the previous evening that he hadn’t bothered, instead leaving it close to the house. He was glad of that now; less distance to run in the storm.