The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  This felt like that. He was losing control, piece by piece, and if he was honest with himself, it was nothing to do with his lack of medication, and probably little to do with regret at the mistakes he had made.

  It was the presence of the river in his mind, and the growing suspicion that it might be beyond his reach.

  Occupying the cleric’s mind for a few seconds—being inside his skull right up until the moment that the vampire’s talons had ripped it open like a ripe melon, had done something to him. Torn off another strip of the man he had been before. Soon enough, he feared, there would be nothing left to take.

  He felt...rickety.

  Unstable.

  Erratic.

  Parts of Dan were slowly slipping away, being replaced by something new. In certain circumstances, the new Dan Bellamy was useful—preferable, even. The new Dan didn’t cower around strangers, he didn’t piss his pants in terror at nothing every five minutes.

  He had spent two years dreaming about casting the shadow of fear from his life, but now that he had done it, he didn’t feel better. He felt worse. Fear had been replaced by something far more toxic: the unquenchable thirst for vengeance.

  Fury.

  Incredibly, his mind ran back to the numerous occasions that he had woken, sweat-soaked and gasping, from a nightmare, to find Elaine there to comfort him, and he felt a surge of longing.

  He’d give anything to be back there. The fear in those nightmares had been worse than anything the real world could ever have thrown at him, but now, he thought he would gladly endure any nightmare; any amount of anxiety and agoraphobia.

  But Elaine was gone. The old Dan was gone.

  And the new version had a job to do. Miles to cover. One journey left to make.

  An inhuman mind to take.

  Maybe it would be the last mind he took. Perhaps it would be the one that finally erased the old Dan Bellamy forever. In some ways, he welcomed that prospect. Losing his sanity, the occurrence he had feared so much for two years, might not turn out to be such a bad thing. The whole world was insanity now, after all.

  And memories only brought him pain. Let them dissolve in madness.

  Bring it on.

  Dan gritted his teeth, fighting to bring his thoughts back under control.

  For all his irritatingly abrupt answers, Mancini was right. No pilot was the same as having no plane. Dan hadn’t ever seen the pilot who had ferried them across the Atlantic; he hadn’t even thought about it at the time. The cockpit door had not opened once during the entire time he was aboard the Gulfstream jet. Whoever had been at the controls had probably made their way back to the ranch. If not, and if the pilot had any sense, he was already long gone. He might even have taken the jet with him, pointed it at somewhere uninhabited and not looked back.

  Dan turned to Herb. Before he could even ask the question, Herb had his response ready. He lifted his palms. “Helicopters are about as far as I go, Dan. And last time I flew one of those, I landed it in a damn building.”

  A bright flare of frustration arced across Dan’s mind. He felt like he wanted to scream, but it struck him that if he took the reins off the emotions bubbling in his head, he might never get them under control again. He’d had his shot at a vampire, and he hadn’t been able to take it. Now, while the whole world was burning, the problem that seemed to have beaten him was as mundane as it was insurmountable. Distance. Travel time. There was no way to get to another of the monsters before night gave them the advantage.

  His chin dropped.

  “What’s the nearest big city?”

  Mancini stroked his chin. “Depends on your definition of big. Denver’s closest. Half a million people, give or take.”

  “Anything there the vampires would consider a high-value target?”

  Mancini shrugged.

  “The airport, maybe.”

  Dan nodded. He’d read all about Denver airport, during the months when his only access to the world outside his apartment had been the internet. Denver International was the focus of a far-fetched conspiracy theory that placed the site as the location of a secret headquarters for the New World Order. The airport, the theory went, had been built atop a massive underground base. According to the lunatics who believed it, the entire place was deliberately built in the shape of a swastika seen from the air, and riddled with artwork and coded messages that dangled ‘the truth’ in front of commuters’ eyes every day.

  The irony that Conny had just made her way to a secret underground base of sorts wasn’t lost on him. It wasn’t the new world order the paranoid folks on the internet should have been worried about. It was the old world order. The one humanity had buried somewhere beneath its collective subconscious.

  “Then I suppose we go to Denver,” Dan said glumly, “and just hope that we’re headed in the right direction.”

  Mancini shrugged.

  Herb shook his head suddenly, waving a frustrated arm.

  “We’re going about this all wrong, Dan,” he said. “There’s only three of us. Only one of you.”

  “And?”

  “And, I don’t think the vampire that attacked the ranch was even here for you. It’s like you already said: if they wanted you dead so badly, they would have sent numbers here. Hell, it sounds like there are hundreds of the fucking things out there. If they knew about you, what was to stop them all coming here? We wouldn’t have been able to stop them. You might have killed a couple, but they would have got to you.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  Herb scratched at his jaw.

  “I can’t be certain, but I think the vampire that came here was doing the same job as the vampire that killed the people at my family’s compound. It was here to tie up loose ends, to kill off everyone who knew what these things are. Knowledge is power, right? That’s why they have been in hibernation all this time. To let humans forget they ever existed.”

  “And so that humans forgot Hermetics existed, too,” Mancini offered.

  Dan and Herb both shot glances at the bigger man. Somewhere at the back of Dan’s mind, a lightbulb threatened to blaze into life. Hermetics. Jennifer Craven had used that odd word back at the runway. He hadn’t had time to wonder what it meant.

  “Wait...forgot what existed?” Herb said.

  “Hermetics,” Mancini said simply, with a shrug. “That’s what Craven called people like Bellamy.”

  “People like Bellamy?” Herb’s voice was soft with wonder. “I thought she only found out about Dan when Jeremy Pruitt called her. After the Oceanus?”

  Mancini’s eyes narrowed. “Sure. That’s when she heard about him. But her family had been looking for someone like him for a long time. That shit was all she ever talked about. Just like her dad.”

  Herb exchanged a stunned glance with Dan.

  “Craven had a theory,” Mancini continued, “that when the vampires were out in the open, thousands of years ago, fighting against humans, they ran across Hermetics more and more. Only way to know you’re a Hermetic is to face a vampire, see? To live through the fight. The more the human population grew, the more Hermetics there were out there. The vampires figured it was a fight they were destined to lose. So they went underground. Hid away and let all that knowledge just disappear.”

  Dan’s jaw dropped. He shook his head, as though trying to clear debris from his skull.

  “People...like me?”

  Mancini nodded slowly, his eyes widening as realisation dawned.

  “You didn’t know.”

  “I...people like...did she have proof? Evidence of others?”

  “Sure. Well, at least one that Craven knew of. Found his remains buried up in Kentucky years back. But she believed there were more like him, once. Even if there were still Hermetics around, the only way to find them would be to put them up against vampires, but the Order was all about making sure the odds were stacked in favour of the vampires, so she didn’t really believe she would live to see one in the flesh. Guess she was wrong about th
at. Sorta.”

  Dan’s mind reeled.

  “But that would mean...”

  He couldn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t begin to calm the torrent of thoughts raging through his mind enough to understand them.

  “That would mean that your connection with the vampires is nothing to do with you getting stabbed in the head at all,” Herb finished tentatively. “It’s genetic.”

  “Stabbed in the head?” Mancini looked confused.

  He missed that part of the conversation, Dan thought.

  “Long story,” Herb said, staring at Dan. “And apparently not as important as Dan thought. If what you’re saying is true, the ability to resist the vampires is...what? A genetic trait? It’s hereditary?”

  “Sure,” Mancini said. “That was Craven’s theory, anyway. She figured this Hermetic gene had to have been present—in a tiny percentage of people, obviously. But enough that when the human population kept on expanding, the vampires saw their defeat as inevitable. Simple mathematics. That’s why they couldn’t carry on fighting in the open. They needed us to forget, or they faced extinction. Yeah, it’s genetic.” Mancini shrugged. “Maybe. I didn’t buy any of it, not until I met him.”

  He nodded toward Dan.

  Who couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The knife wound—the catastrophic event that he believed had changed the course of his life forever—might be no more than a trigger. It was the emotion the knife attack had provoked in him that was the key. The anxiety; the uncontrollable dread, the moments of sheer, blinding panic. It was his fear that had first allowed him to see the black river. It was a connection forged by terror, not by a blade physically reshuffling parts of his brain.

  Now he saw it.

  All of a sudden, it was obvious.

  He wasn’t special after all, not in the way that Herb had always claimed he was. He wasn’t some sort of messianic figure. There might be thousands of people out there in the world, just like him. Unaware that they, too, had the ability to fight back. Unaware because that was exactly how the vampires wanted them. The damn creatures had engineered their enemies’ oblivion by fading from sight for a thousand human lifetimes, rising in secret only to feed. Letting those who could kill them forget.

  It wasn’t only the knowledge of vampires’ existence that had been submerged beneath the waves of history.

  It was the knowledge that certain humans could hunt them down.

  “A tiny percentage of people,” he repeated, his eyes widening. “There are seven billion people in the world now. Even if these Hermetics make up a fraction of one percent…”

  “...they probably outnumber the vampires,” Herb finished. “That’s why they are engaging in wholesale slaughter. That’s why they are happy to kill off vast sections of the population with nuclear blasts and radiation, or by crashing planes and destroying dams. That’s why they are attacking everywhere, all at once. They’re thinning the herd before humanity realises they can be beaten. The great lie was always their most efficient weapon. And that means that information is ours. Knowledge is how humans survive this. Knowledge of what they really are; how to fight them. How not to fight them.”

  Herb was becoming more animated. Taking his ideas and running with them.

  “You might be right about this black river of yours, Dan, but we can’t keep stumbling around from one guess to the next. We only made it this far through blind luck. Right now, we need to get the word out. People need to know what they are up against.”

  Dan’s mind was a dust storm.

  “How?” he said.

  “Not by us three idiots charging headlong into a battle we can’t win alone,” Herb said. “Not by running from city to city and hoping to track down a vampire.” Herb paused, his brow furrowing. “We need to get in touch with the military somehow. Make them understand what they are fighting. Give them whatever knowledge we have. We need to find more Hermetics.”

  Mancini snorted.

  “The military, huh? Then I know exactly where we should go,” he said. “And we can be there in less than an hour.”

  16

  Master Sergeant Jerome Mills rappelled from the belly of the hovering Black Hawk smoothly, bending his knees a little to absorb the crunching impact, and brought his weapon up beneath his chin immediately on landing, sweeping it in a wide arc.

  “Clear!”

  He scuttled forward, getting out of the way of the rest of the descending Bravo Team, and scanned the roof for any sign of hostiles. He had an unbroken line of sight across the entire building: there was no sign of movement other than that at the southern end, where members of Alpha Team were currently descending from an identical helo.

  “Northern LZ is secure,” he said, and received crackling confirmation from Captain Figueroa over the comms a moment later that the southern side of the building was as quiet as it appeared. He glanced over his shoulder as the remaining members of Bravo touched down. The expressions on their faces matched his own emotions. They looked stunned, apprehensive. There was none of the pumped-up bravado that usually accompanied deployment to a warzone.

  Warzone, he thought. Mary, mother of God. How has it come to this?

  Jerome could scarcely believe where he was standing. The two teams had touched down at opposite ends of the curved roof of one of the most recognizable buildings in downtown Las Vegas, maybe in the whole of America: the Bellagio Resort and Casino.

  The distinctively curved front of the building offered panoramic views across the city beyond the Bellagio’s iconic fountains. Directly north of his position, Jerome saw some of the other monolithic structures that had cleaned out the bank accounts and dashed the hopes of millions: Caesar’s Palace; the Mirage; the Intercontinental.

  Beneath the gloom of the heavy smoke clouds overhead, all were now dark, their rooftops illuminated only by the spotlights of the Black Hawks that hovered over each and every one.

  Dropping soldiers into the mouth of Hell.

  Jerome was one of fifteen members of the 190th Chemical Recon Detachment, and had been deployed out of Draper, Utah with the other battalions of the 19th Special Forces Group shortly after the collapse of the Hoover Dam, making their way to Vegas.

  Power to the city had been cut when the dam was destroyed, along with nearby electrical substations, in what was a co-ordinated attack by an enemy that nobody had yet lived to describe in any meaningful detail.

  There were spotty reports of ‘monsters,’ none of which came from reliable sources, and none of which Jerome believed. Far more concrete were the descriptions of violence perpetrated by people. What nobody could understand was why staggering atrocities were being committed by otherwise ordinary American citizens. The people spilling blood weren’t criminals or terrorists; they were school teachers, bank tellers, store clerks. An insane army of average Joes.

  Almost as soon as the power failed in Vegas, local police had started getting reports of violence in the casinos, and things had started to domino from there. When the police moved in to restore order, the shooting started in earnest. The cops hadn’t restored anything. They had joined in with the madness.

  Nobody understood what was happening, but nobody had called it war at that point. Not yet.

  Panicked locals and tourists—those who were seemingly unaffected—flooded out onto the streets to escape the vortex of bloodshed, but the attempted exodus from the city was immediately halted by a hundred fender benders clogging up the streets and the fast-moving rumours that something bad had happened out at the airport.

  Jerome’s chopper had flown almost directly over McCarran en route to the city. Something bad had happened, all right: several of the passenger jets on the runways—as well as the terminal itself—were ablaze.

  Nobody was leaving the city by car; nobody was leaving the state on an airplane.

  At the rate that deaths were being reported, nobody was leaving Las Vegas at all.

  Intel continued to be incomplete and disturbingly fluid; ever-changing as the
two helos had made their way to the city.

  The bulk of the chaos was supposedly located indoors, but kept spilling out onto the streets. The people of the city of sin were apparently tearing themselves apart in a repeat of the massacre that Jerome had seen on the overnight TV broadcasts out of England. Nobody knew what was making ordinary Americans turn on themselves with such ferocity, but it was clear that civilian authorities were outmatched immediately. The military had been mobilised.

  Jerome’s orders included the chilling recommendation that anyone he encountered on the ground—anyone—should be treated as hostile until they proved otherwise. Everybody with a pulse was a potential murderer.

  Nobody knew why.

  Chemical warfare was a possibility, and gathering intel had been the initial priority, but even as the choppers transporting the 190th had arrived in town, the parameters of the mission had changed dramatically.

  It wasn’t just happening in Vegas.

  It was happening everywhere.

  Similar mayhem had broken out across the entire nation, and it was spreading like an out of control forest fire. All of a sudden, intel was secondary. Jerome’s orders changed as the Bellagio hovered into view.

  Not recon; direct action.

  Secure Las Vegas, by any means necessary.

  Engage at will.

  He could barely believe them, but those were his orders.

  Now that they had arrived, Jerome could see why.

  Above his head, the Black Hawk banked away from the roof of the Bellagio, its engine howling. Jerome didn’t even glance in its direction.

  He couldn’t tear his eyes off the city.

  From thirty-six floors up, he got a breathtaking, almost incomprehensible glimpse of what was happening to Las Vegas: the hallucinogenic neon that ordinarily speckled the streets even during daylight hours was gone. Far below his position, the streets of Las Vegas were lit only in amber now. Half of the city was on fire.