Fired.
The grenade fizzed from the barrel with a soft, metallic whump; a noise that under any other circumstances might have been comically underwhelming. A fraction of a second later, the distant building exploded, and there was nothing soft about the noise, now. It was the sound of crashing thunder, loud enough to make Conny’s ears ring even at a hundred yards.
For a moment, time itself seemed to stop as clouds of dust and debris rained across the path.
Did I hit it?
Conny waited a beat.
Another.
And the repulsive shape emerged from the dust cloud, streaking across the path from right to left, galloping on all-fours at bewildering speed before disappearing from her sight once more.
It left torn bodies falling in its wake. Kids’ bodies, spinning like tops, half-seen in the falling dust, staining the clouds crimson.
Conny let out a hoarse cry, and aimed the weapon again, but her hands were trembling wildly now. Each time it appeared, the vampire was closer to the house, and she had put herself squarely in the monster’s sights.
She tucked the launcher under her chin, trying to keep it stable. Peered down her own sights.
Her gaze fell on two girls, just twenty yards away from where she now stood: one trying to walk while half-carrying the other on her shoulder. Sisters, Conny thought. The girls looked alike enough that they could be twins. Neither looked much more than twelve years old, and one of them had clearly sustained a gunshot wound in her thigh; she could barely walk.
As Conny watched in horror, the injured sister fell to the ground, pleading with her companion to run, to go on without her.
She lowered the grenade launcher.
Couldn’t fire it again, even if the vampire stayed still long enough to offer her a target. Couldn’t pull the trigger.
Not without killing innocent children. Dozens of them, maybe.
A scream of frustration built in her lungs.
Behind the two sisters, the vampire was on the move once more, blurring across her field of vision, never standing still, always charging forward, but at an angle, ensuring she had no shot. It veered away to the right, behind another building, out of Conny’s sight, but she knew it was still coming, now. Headed right for her. It had streaked past a handful of the injured kids without pause, without even bothering to kill them.
It’s playing with me.
A game of whack-a-mole played with grenades and teeth.
Where will it pop up next?
The next time the monster appeared, Conny thought, could be the last. It was less than fifty yards from her now. When she next saw it, it might be charging straight at her, and she no longer trusted her trembling fingers to react in time to take a clean shot at a fast-moving target.
She focused on the two girls. The uninjured girl was leaning over her sister, pulling at her arm, tearfully begging her to get up.
I can still save one of them.
Conny ran forward, grabbing the uninjured girl’s frail arm, and yanked her back toward the house, ignoring her cries of surprise and fury. The girl was small and slender; no match for Conny’s strength. When she tried to pull away, shrieking that she couldn’t leave her sister behind, all Conny could do was grimace. The girl would never forgive her, she knew, but she would save her nonetheless. She had to.
She pulled harder, damn near dislocating the girl’s shoulder, and dragged her bodily into the main house, slamming the front door shut behind her.
“No!” the girl screamed, but Conny didn’t listen. She couldn’t hear anything, now: just her own pulse, jackhammering crazily in her ears.
She ran forward, almost carrying the struggling girl, refusing to look back, expecting at any moment to hear the clicking of talons on the hard wood floor. When she made it to the basement stairwell, she almost fell down the steps, reaching the bottom just as she heard a loud crack from the floor above.
The front door shattering off its hinges.
The vampire was in the house.
Above them.
Right behind us.
If it had seen her and the girl on the stairs leading down to the basement, it would be right on top of them in seconds—
Conny shoved the screaming girl through the open steel door, into the tunnel beyond, and turned in a single smooth motion, firing a grenade at the top of the stairs.
Whump.
Boom.
The explosion was deafening in the enclosed space, and had almost certainly missed the target she had hoped to hit, but maybe it had given the vampire a reason to pause; to slow its attack for a few vital seconds.
The girl in the tunnel lifted herself to her feet, trying to dash past Conny, slamming into the older woman’s unyielding body. Still screaming.
Conny pushed her back roughly, sending her to the ground once more, and her eyes fell on the steel door, searching for the mechanism that would close it.
There was nothing.
Just that thumb scanner.
In desperation, Conny placed her own thumb on it, and almost spat out a hysterical laugh when the mechanism predictably glowed red and refused her.
There was only one thing left to do.
Whump.
Boom.
Conny fired at the stairs again, reducing the bottom few steps to rubble. Buying herself a few more seconds.
Somewhere beyond the explosion, the vampire shrieked, and the noise pierced Conny’s mind, threatening to unhinge it. It wasn’t screaming because she’d hit it; it was no cry of pain. If Conny had to guess, she would have said that the shriek was a cry of delight.
The monster was enjoying the game.
Conny tore her gaze away from the cloud of debris that the basement stairwell had become. The young girl she had saved was crying and screaming, yelling obscenities at the woman who had separated her from her sister, throwing her small fists in Conny’s direction.
Conny deflected the blows and grabbed a handful of the screaming girl’s collar, dragging her down the tunnel, away from the steel door. When she had made it twenty paces, a distance she hoped rather than knew would be safe, she turned back.
Heard that now-familiar, terrible clicking noise echoing in the stairwell beyond the door. Rattling toward her, rapid fire.
clickclickclickcli—
She lifted the grenade launcher, knowing that she only had one shot: one chance before the creature would be upon her and her mind would be lost forever.
She took aim at the roof of the tunnel, just inside the doorway.
And fired.
The blast, as the grenade connected with the roof just yards from where she stood, was enough to punch Conny backward, depositing her on the ground hard enough to make her spine sing. Pinpricks of light speckled the edges of her vision. Her lungs filled with dust. She choked out a cough.
Just for a moment there, before the roof of the tunnel had collapsed, she’d had a brief impression of movement on the ruined stairs beyond the steel door.
It had been that close. Another second, and she just might have had a shot at killing the vampire.
Another second, and those fearsome red eyes could have connected with hers, and she might not have had a shot at all.
For a few moments, Conny laid still, letting the pain surging through her back subside a little.
It was pitch-black now.
The explosion and resulting cave-in had taken out the lights in the tunnel, but she could hear the girl she had rescued breathing. Wincing at the pain in her back, Conny reached out, patting around until her palms found warm flesh. The girl didn’t respond.
Unconscious, Conny thought, and felt a flicker of guilt. She had saved the young girl’s life, but she doubted she would ever be thanked for it. In the girl’s eyes, Conny would likely always be the woman who had cost her sister a shot at survival. Maybe, when she woke up, Conny would get a chance to explain that there had been no way to save them both; that her sister’s injuries and inability to run had condemned her to di
e long before Conny had intervened.
Tap.
Tap.
Scccccraaaaaatch.
Thud.
The strange, muted noises froze Conny’s thoughts. The sudden, complete darkness had stolen away her sense of direction, but she thought she had been blown straight backward by the force of the explosion in the confined space. Which meant she was still facing the tunnel entrance, now—hopefully—entirely blocked by rubble.
The strange noise was coming from directly in front of her.
Scccccccccraaaaaaaaaaaaatch.
THUD.
This time, the thudding noise was loud, like something heavy being dropped onto a solid surface. Conny’s mind absurdly ran back to a mostly disastrous first date she’d had years earlier, when she had let a bowling ball slip from her fingers as she approached the lane, preparing to throw yet another gutter shot. The resulting crash as she had dropped the heavy ball on the floor had made everybody in the bowling alley jump, and then laugh riotously. In the end, it had turned out to be the best part of the date; the only part worth remembering. All that uncontrollable laughter.
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.
14
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.
The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy) Page 68
