The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  Chris’ breath returned, exploding painfully in his throat, and he scrambled to his feet.

  The monster had surely thrown itself to its death, seven hundred feet below. There wasn’t time to try and comprehend the why of it. All Chris’ mind wanted to do was to see. To try, somehow, to understand. He sprinted back across the road, slamming into the guard rail, and leaned over.

  What he saw took his breath away.

  The creature wasn’t falling.

  It was still running.

  Charging down the near-vertical wall, picking up pace as gravity assisted it. The thing was moving like a goddamn guided missile.

  Heading toward—

  Chris’ thoughts became thick and foggy. He watched, open-mouthed, as the creature rapidly became a tiny speck, moving at impossible speed.

  Saw it crash into the power station at the base of the dam at full tilt and disappear from sight.

  Oh, shit, this is bad—

  A fresh wave of panic surged through Chris, tearing the words from his mind as, moments later, the keening howl of a siren broke the stunned silence over the Hoover Dam. The noise was urgent; plaintive. The sort of anguished howl that came with a deep wound. With serious damage.

  Far below, the power plant was bleeding.

  Seconds passed, raked away painfully, and without his even being aware of doing it, Chris found that he had retrieved his radio, and he was barking into it, his words lost beneath the rushing of blood in his ears. When the fog in his mind lifted, it took him several moments to understand that the radio was talking back to him.

  “A...monster?”

  Chris’ fingers tightened around the radio, until his knuckles ached and he felt sure the plastic casing would crack. He replayed the words his mouth had spoken of its own volition in his mind. I need backup at the Hoover Dam. We’re under attack from...a monster. At least one casualty—

  “Say again? Monster?”

  The tinny, disembodied voice in the radio was heavy with sarcasm or disbelief. Clearly, the dispatch officer thought Chris was pranking her. In retrospect, he probably shouldn’t have used the word ‘monster,’ but...how else could he have described the creature which was, at that very moment, tearing apart the power plant seven hundred feet below? It wasn’t an animal—at least, none that Chris had ever seen or heard of before—and it damn sure wasn’t a man. Yet in the fleeting glimpse Chris had got of the thing, he had been struck by a very definite sense that it was intelligent. It was impossible to say quite why: perhaps because the creature had been so singular of purpose: it hadn’t been distracted by the vehicles, or the people milling about atop the dam. This was no dog chasing a butterfly. No, it had been on a mission. It had a target.

  Still; it was a monster. One that Chris thought he would see every time he found himself alone on a dark highway. Maybe even every time he closed his eyes to sleep: even now, the hideous image of the thing throwing a lump of something that had been a human being moments earlier over the railing of the intake tower and into the water was replaying itself somewhere behind his eyes.

  “People are dying, goddammit,” Chris snarled into the radio. “Believe it or don’t, but I want fucking backup here now, you understand me? Or every single death is gonna be on your fucking—”

  The words were still spilling from Chris’ lips on autopilot, fuelled by his rising frustration. The next word might have been head; might have been hands. He didn’t get a chance to find out. Whether the dispatcher’s suspicion was going to cost her job or her soul suddenly seemed not to matter, as far below, an enormous explosion rocked the power plant, sending a towering column of smoke into the air. Chris watched, stunned, as debris rained across the valley below.

  All at once, the purpose of the creature revealed itself to Chris, and he felt his stomach contract painfully, threatening to expel the eggs he’d eaten at breakfast. The monster wasn’t at the Hoover Dam to kill...it was there to destroy.

  Jesus Christ.

  Another—smaller—explosion rocked the plant far below, and a secondary alarm began to ring out, setting up a mournful duet with its louder co-star. Halfway up the dam, Chris saw a puff of dust jetting out from the wall of stone. Small, barely noticeable. Insignificant next to the destruction of the power plant further down, but Chris knew what it meant, and his mind began to shriek.

  A crack. In the dam itself.

  A third explosion rocked the air; the loudest yet.

  He began to run; aimlessly at first, attaching the radio to his belt and ignoring whatever the dispatcher’s response was.

  “Get off the dam,” he screamed, waving his arms frantically. The bystanders who had started to run at the appearance of the monster had halted their steps when it launched itself off the dam. Most were now either gawping or filming, no doubt composing the status updates they were going to post on social media, perhaps wondering if the footage they were taking was going to make them rich, or at least famous for fifteen seconds. Only a few now seemed concerned with getting away. With so much distance between themselves and the creature, they clearly thought they were safe.

  Chris was still screaming at them, making little impact, when he saw a uniform that matched his own through the crowd of bodies. Shelley Winston, approaching at pace on her bike. As she neared, Chris saw her lifting her right arm, pointing her service revolver at the sky.

  Doing exactly what I should have done, Chris thought.

  Shelley fired, and the crack of the handgun broke the spell. Once more, the people on the dam began to scatter, just as the enormous stone edifice they were all standing upon shuddered violently for the first time.

  Chris staggered, almost falling to his knees.

  Pressure was building irrevocably.

  This is actually going to happen, Chris thought, the words distant and somehow dislocated in his mind. The fucking thing is going to—

  A second crack split the air, but this was no handgun report. This was the booming of thunder; the sound of the gates of Hell blasting open: a vast and terrifying noise that crushed all thought, all reason. A chorus of screams went up on the dam. Every pair of legs was engaged in a flat-out sprint at last.

  Including Chris’ own.

  He saw Shelley jabbing a finger at his forgotten bicycle, some thirty yards away, and made for it, yanking it upright and mounting it in a single, panicked motion. His feet were pedalling before his mind had even given the command, and he weaved through civilians, his duty as a police officer forgotten. There was no keeping the peace now. No maintaining safety. There was only survival; only those who were going to make it off the dam, and those who weren’t.

  Up ahead, clear of the surging throng of people that engulfed Chris, he saw Shelley spin her own bike around and pedal hard.

  Another crack: less deafening than the first, yet far more terrible. This time, Chris heard the aftershocks; the distant cascade of rubble as chunks of stone were punched out of the Hoover Dam like rivets, raining down onto the valley.

  He pedalled.

  His legs a blur, his muscles on fire, his breath turned to acid in his lungs. Chris didn’t feel any of it. His consciousness was reduced to a single, howling imperative.

  Faster!

  He crashed into a middle-aged woman, sending her tumbling to the treacherous ground as it rocked and lurched beneath his wheels, and didn’t slow for a second; didn’t look back. Chris Greer’s days as a police officer were over. To serve and protect was now just a hollow memory. The only thing that mattered was the rotation of the pedals, and the ground the wheels beneath him could eat up before the inevitable happened. He gripped the handlebars in iron fists, leaning over them, desperate to eke out every last drop of momentum.

  Lurching forward, veering crazily, his thoughts lost, his existence reduced to pure, animal instinct.

  Chris was still pedalling when the Hoover Dam collapsed and a billion tons of water crashed over him, blasting the bike away, catching his legs in the frame and snapping his knees like dry t
wigs.

  Almost made it, he thought, and the force of the water and the bike that ensnared him tore his body apart, scattering the pieces across the gigantic wave of water and rubble that rushed south, destroying everything in its path.

  *

  At the nuclear power plant in Clinton, Illinois, Ross Carney’s work was done, and his hands had locked and barricaded the door, leaving him alone with the muted shouts of his increasingly desperate colleagues.

  It was too late for them.

  For everybody.

  He had started a fire that nobody could extinguish. The power plant was a runaway train now, and all anybody could do was try to get the hell out of the way.

  But not Ross.

  His body slumped against the door, and passed the time by digging its fingernails into the flesh that had once been his own, tearing it off in ragged strips and popping it into his mouth.

  Chewing.

  Deep down, imprisoned in his own mind, Ross tasted himself, but couldn’t even force his stomach to vomit. Somewhere else in his mind, the creature that had taken control enjoyed the taste. It relished every morsel.

  When finally the self-inflicted wounds began to take their toll, and his body began to fail, the intruder in Ross’ mind played the cruellest trick of all.

  It let him go.

  Gave him time to really see—and feel—what his hands had done to his torso.

  And what they had done to the power plant.

  Ross’ clawing fingers had torn out his tongue, and he could no longer speak, but his throat could still produce a moaning, liquid scream, and so it did. His voice joined the urgent whine of the power plant’s warning sirens, and he got a front row seat for the beginning of the end.

  The plant in Clinton was the first to go up, but not the last. The majority of nuclear power was located on the eastern half of the United States, and though the vampires hadn’t taken them all, they had taken some, all dotted around the northeast of the country.

  Many humans would die in the disaster that would unfold in the coming minutes: the air itself would become a killer in large swathes of the countryside, but not for the vampires. Not for the creatures whose flesh did not burn, who thrived in fire and death.

  Across the continental United States, the gut of the country was being punctured repeatedly: hundreds of tiny cuts; a latticework of suffering. The country might have withstood each tear individually, but there was no way to respond to all; no way to stop the bleeding once it began. Even as emergency services tried to close one wound, another opened, and another. The vampires focused on electricity, taking apart the transmission grid with ruthless efficiency. By the time night came, very few human settlements would be able to hold off the darkness.

  They struck at most major cities, killing and moving, killing and moving. Disabling vital infrastructure wherever they could find it.

  They struck in small towns and counties.

  They struck everywhere.

  And in the northeast corner of the country, where Ross Carney and a handful of others like him had worked, the vampires had torn into vital organs. The vast, cataclysmic explosions at five nuclear plants were slightly staggered, not quite simultaneous as had perhaps been planned, but each poured more irradiated clouds of dust and ash into the sky. Each helped to blot out the sun and drop a veil of artificial night across the eastern seaboard.

  Darkness fell early in Illinois and Iowa; in Michigan and Penn and New York, and the vampires rose to feed and slaughter in earnest.

  The fall of America had begun.

  7

  Helen Specter’s face was famous.

  It was the face of CNN, the face that lit up a thousand billboards across the country, the face that had appeared on magazine covers almost as often as it had in front of a camera. Helen’s face was currency, and she knew how to use it for maximum effect. Despite the expectations her striking appearance brought with it—invariably that she was some airhead—Helen’s star as a serious reporter of the news was in the ascendancy. She knew how to work that magnetic face around every news story: when to be light-hearted, when to be serious. Her professionalism had never once slipped.

  Until now.

  Now, Helen’s famous face was a mask of shock, her delicate jaw slack.

  Minutes earlier, she had reported the death of President Robert Berman at Camp David—apparently assassinated, along with several of his most senior staff, by one of his own Secret Service detail. It was the sort of breaking news that made or broke careers, and she had handled it with typically efficient aplomb, fully aware that her part in the coverage would be pored over for years to come by internet blowhards seeking out signs of conspiracy. That prospect hadn’t phased her at all; she welcomed it, in fact. A big breaking story was where potential fame lived for rolling news journalists. It was the elixir of life.

  And breaking news didn’t get any bigger than the assassination of a sitting president.

  Until it did.

  A distinctly unprofessional frown had momentarily crossed Helen’s face when her producer had whispered in her earpiece that they were pulling away from the report of the assassination for more breaking news.

  That can’t be right, Helen had thought behind that frown. What breaking story could possibly warrant interrupting this?

  She soon found out.

  The Hoover Dam.

  LAX.

  Attacks on cities all over the country, some claiming the lives of dozens; some thousands. Large-scale destruction had been wrought in virtually every state across the eastern half of the country, and in many to the west, too.

  And it just kept coming. Story after story. Disaster after disaster. Military bases had been hit in more than a dozen states. A US Navy destroyer in the waters off the coast of California had attempted to fire on the vessels around it without warning, and had then turned its sights on San Francisco before being sunk, killing more than four hundred crew members. There were reports of gunmen opening fire in major cities, but these weren’t the isolated incidents that America had sadly become all-too used to seeing in recent years. It was happening everywhere. There was barely time to report the details of one monstrosity before another surpassed it.

  Finally, Helen whispered the news that a nuclear power plant had suffered a devastating explosion in Clinton, Illinois, and that everybody within a thirty mile radius had been advised to take shelter or flee for their lives. A total meltdown was inevitable. It would make Chernobyl look like a firecracker.

  And it wasn’t the only one.

  News of other attacks on nuclear sites was trickling in: plants in Iowa and Michigan had already suffered catastrophic explosions, and two more plants in neighbouring states were said to be the scene of outright warfare, with security forces trying to blast their way inside, to prevent staff who had apparently lost their minds from triggering further meltdowns.

  With prevailing winds, the entire northeast of the country would suffer a blast of radiation that would kill either instantly or—worse—slowly. Residents from Iowa to New York City were being advised to stay in their homes, to seal windows and doors as best they could, to get underground if possible.

  It was surreal, a broadcast beamed directly from a newsroom in Hell. More like a sick joke than reality: if Helen didn’t know better she might even have believed that she was the victim of some office prank, words planted on a teleprompter screen that couldn’t possibly be true.

  As she had recited the details of disaster after disaster—large and small, spread across the entire country—some part of Helen knew that her spin of the wheel of fame would amount to nothing. The cameras were still rolling, but the news she was reporting made it likely that the concept of fame itself would be meaningless in a few hours. This wasn’t the peak of her career, it was the end of it. The end, perhaps, of everything. The speed of the collapse was breathtaking; awe-inspiring.

  The vice president had taken control of the country following the death of Robert Berman, and his firs
t executive order had been to deploy the US military on home soil. The National Guard had been called out. Someone in the newsroom had half-joked that the vice president’s next order would be to deploy the NRA, and Helen had felt a chill run down her spine. It wasn’t a joke: it was the truth. It seemed that in every town in America, war was breaking out. In some towns, there was already nobody left to fight.

  Helen and her colleagues had spent hours of airtime through the night debating the destruction of the UK in elaborate detail, secretly thrilled at the scope of the news story, and now it was here, right on her doorstep.

  It wasn’t thrilling anymore.

  Helen was in New York City. On the thirtieth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. By the time she reached the ground, stepping outside might already be the equivalent of stepping on a landmine. The skies were bloating with radiation; the wind was pushing it steadily in her direction. Perhaps it had already arrived. The news had washed up at her door even as she read it.

  When she had finished delivering the revelation that the north eastern quadrant of America was about to become an irradiated wasteland, her producer whispered in her ear again, and informed her that reports of attacks were pouring in from France, from Australia, from Japan and South Africa. That all communications with Russia and Eastern Europe had been lost. That there were entire cities ablaze in China.

  It wasn’t just America that was bleeding.

  It was the entire world.

  Helen finally pulled out her earpiece and placed it on the desk in front of her. She stared blankly into the lens of camera one, and said nothing. There was nothing left to say.

  Nobody out there was watching her famous face delivering the news anymore.

  They were living it.

  Everywhere.

  8

  How could I have been so wrong?

  At the ranch in Colorado, Dan watched the news footage with a growing sense of horror, unable to tear his eyes from the screen until, finally, the anchor’s words just ran out and her statuesque features set in shock. The ticker running across the bottom of the screen continued to scroll. A roll call of the dead and dying: