The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy)

by K. R. Griffiths

  The shape.

  Jerome was still running forward when the thing appeared out of nowhere, and the sudden movement caused him to twist away, losing his footing on the marble-and-blood floor. His backside hit the deck hard, sending a hot current of pain crackling up his spine.

  He and the others were a good twenty yards behind Baker when he fell, but even as he twisted, trying to scrabble back to his feet, he saw the shape clearly, framed against the flickering light of the fire outside. Seven feet tall, at least: a deformed body that rippled with twisted muscles. A face that belonged in a demented nightmare.

  Burning red eyes that fixed on Baker, who cowered on the floor, staring up at the creature, apparently unable to tear his eyes off it.

  For a beat, the monster in the revolving door just stood there, regarding the shrieking soldier at its feet.

  It grinned.

  Without a moment of hesitation, Baker tucked the barrel of his M4A1 under his chin, and pulled the trigger. His head disappeared in a red cloud, evaporated by the searing heat of a three-round burst at point-blank range.

  An enormous quantity of blood and skull fragments splashed across the interior of the revolving door, running down the glass toward the floor like melting wax.

  “Back!” Jerome shrieked.

  He turned away from the madness, slipping, almost losing his footing once more.

  And then suddenly he was upright.

  Running.

  27

  “So...you’re saying these things, these...creatures, have been in hibernation for hundreds of years. Underground. And nobody in the world knew about it?”

  General Tom Armitage’s eyebrows were raised, his expression half-dubious, half-amused.

  “You guys didn’t force your way in here to see the flying saucers and the little green men, did you?”

  Dan sighed. He hadn’t even told the general what these things were called, yet. That was the clincher. As soon as he said ‘vampire,’ the man tasked with running the North American Aerospace Defense Command— NORAD—would probably have them escorted off the premises. If he followed that up by informing the guy that the vampires were being instructed on how and where to attack America psychically—by an ancient consciousness that took the form of a black river—Armitage would likely have them shot.

  Even now, when half the country was in flaming ruins, the vampires’ propaganda still worked for them. Nobody believed until they saw—and seeing was generally their last act as a living human being.

  So far, Cheyenne Mountain wasn’t working out as hoped, and General Armitage was proving to be a problem.

  Once the massive steel door in the mountain had eased open, Dan, Herb and Mancini had been hustled out of the jeep at gunpoint and taken on a long, cold walk to a featureless holding cell.

  The bunker wasn’t quite what Dan had expected. In his head, he had pictured winding tunnels and futuristic structures cut directly into the earth, stern-faced storm trooper types scurrying about in elaborate hazmat suits, maybe even the advanced weapons tech the US military was supposed to be keeping a secret.

  Instead, the place looked like any other military base, save for the fact that the sky was made of granite. The base itself was made up of regular old buildings: typically featureless grey steel boxes. The biggest surprise was that all appeared to be freestanding, rather than incorporated into the mountain itself.

  As they walked, Mancini had acted as tour guide, reciting some more facts that he apparently believed made Cheyenne Mountain impressive: buildings perched on gigantic shock-absorbing springs, five reservoirs and an underground stream providing constant running water. A fire department, a hospital, a chapel, an isolated power supply that could keep the place ticking, independent of the outside world, for a couple of months without breaking sweat. It was a city parked in a cavernous stone garage.

  It was singularly underwhelming.

  Even more so when, after a little more than five frustrating minutes, the soldiers returned to the holding cell to escort the three interlopers, as Armitage referred to them, to the promisingly-named Command and Control Facility.

  That, at least, Dan had thought, would be a futuristic, bridge-of-a-spaceship style location befitting America’s giant underground defence bunker.

  Instead, it was just a small room, not much bigger than the average diner, stuffed with grey computer desks loaded with keyboards and monitors, and a wall full of screens that didn’t look much larger than the average domestic LCD television.

  If this was where the last vestiges of the American military machine were holed up, Herb’s confidence that humanity could mount a counterattack against the vampires was surely misplaced.

  “Underground,” Armitage repeated ruefully, shaking his head. “This place was built to monitor the skies. Guess we were looking in the wrong direction, huh?”

  The question was rhetorical.

  Sarcastic.

  Testing.

  Dan watched the general carefully. His amiable gruff-old-geezer routine was just that—a routine. Beneath his thick greying eyebrows, Armitage’s eyes were shrewd and piercing. He was, in his own way, measuring up the three men who had appeared on his doorstep claiming to be able to fix the broken world outside.

  Armitage was probably pushing sixty, but he looked fit and strong: short and barrel-chested, but with taught, weathered skin stretched over muscles that bulged at his uniform, like they were trying to engineer an escape. His eyebrows constituted the only hair on his head: clearly, when confronted with the prospect of advancing years taking his hair, the general had decided to meet the problem head-on.

  That was the sort of guy he appeared to be, to Dan. A man who ran straight at problems and tackled them to the ground.

  That, doubtless, was how he got the four stars on his uniform.

  And it was also the reason that Armitage was losing the fight against the vampires.

  The general was perched on one of the desks, with the three interlopers sitting on uncomfortable chairs in front of him and the screen-wall behind. Dan saw three primary screens: on the right, an active radar glowed green, sweeping constantly. On the left, the screen cycled through images of static, occasionally replaying hours-old news footage from around the world. The central screen, the largest, showed a tactical map of the United States, with what Dan assumed were areas of interest highlighted in red.

  There was a lot of red on the map.

  If the nation was a clock face, then the hours of midnight to four were a single, solid red block. That, Dan thought, was where the nuclear power stations had been attacked. Areas that had been lost immediately. The rest of the country was pockmarked, riddled with livid red acne. Up and down the eastern and western coastline, large swathes of America were highlighted. In the centre, at the point of the map marked NORAD, the areas of interest were more sporadic.

  Because those places have a less dense population, Dan thought. More empty space. The vampires haven’t even begun to focus on those yet.

  The general sighed.

  “Look, I’ll be straight with you. The only reason you got in here at all is because of what’s going on out there. And because facial recognition tells us this guy,” he jerked a thumb at Mancini, “used to be Force Recon.”

  Mancini grunted.

  “Any other circumstances, and you would have been stopped the minute you destroyed my goddamned gate. Now, if you have any useful intel, I’m all ears. If all you got is this...nonsense, well, I’m afraid my hospitality is gonna dry up real quick.”

  Dan shot a glance at Herb, who stared back meaningfully.

  Show him, Herb’s gaze said. Show him what you can do. Then he’ll believe.

  Dan suppressed a shudder. The aftershocks of taking the mind of the cleric had only just stopped, and it was clear to him now that they became more severe with each mind he took. Last time, he had slipped into a fugue state in the back of the car, and vomited blood. According to Herb, his eyes had been pointed inward for a good ha
lf-hour. Taking another mind so soon might have drastic consequences.

  He gave a slight shake of his head, trying to communicate to Herb that that was a last resort.

  The general snapped his fingers.

  “You two might wanna stop making eyes at each other and start talking. In case you hadn’t noticed, the country is under attack, and—”

  “You’re losing,” Dan finished. “Losing badly.”

  The general snapped his mouth shut and stared at Dan suspiciously.

  “You’ve sent in ground troops, and you’ve either lost contact with all of them, or they’ve started shooting at each other. You’re probably considering bombing your own cities right about now, figuring that collateral damage is better than total loss. Depending on your intel, some part of you is wondering how all these attacks, spread out across the whole country, are so...joined up. So synchronised. Maybe you’re even starting to think there is some overarching strategy here that you can’t see. If things were different, you’d probably suspect that the entire thing is being orchestrated by a foreign power. Russia, perhaps. But Russia’s gone. They probably think it’s you.”

  The general stared at Dan, open-mouthed, for several long, quiet seconds, and then he darted forward with surprising speed, wrapped two fists in Dan’s collar and hauled him out of his seat.

  “You tell me what you fucking know, boy,” the general hissed in a low, dangerous whisper.

  He was close enough that Dan could taste the older man’s breath. Stale coffee and desperation.

  “Uh, General,” Mancini said, “I wouldn’t do that. He’s...uh…”

  Dan lifted a reassuring palm toward Mancini.

  “Don’t worry, Mancini. I’m not going to hurt him.”

  The general’s bushy eyebrows darted up, and he dropped Dan back into his chair.

  “You ain’t gonna hurt me?” the general said, his tone ripe with disbelief. “Boy, you gotta weigh a hundred pounds wet. You ain’t gonna hurt me?”

  Dan adjusted his collar.

  “They’re vampires, General. Or at least, they are where we get the word ‘vampire’ from. They control minds, which is why your troops on the ground are dying faster than you can send in reinforcements. You might have some luck with bombing runs, but the vampires move underground. Even if you do manage to catch a couple with bombs, the rest will simply stay out of the way. You can level every town in this country, and you probably won’t kill more than a handful.

  “We were in London,” Dan continued. “We’ve seen these things up close. Trust me, if you keep sending troops in, you’re going to run out of troops.”

  The general stared at him a moment, and then laughed.

  Laughed.

  The sound was curt. Dismissive.

  Dan felt a bleak fire building inside his gut, the flames stoking higher.

  He took a deep breath.

  Stay calm. Don’t let rage take over.

  “I’ve heard enough,” the general said. “He waved over Dan’s shoulder, at one of the guards standing by the door. “Get ‘em outta here.”

  Dan gritted his teeth, enamel grinding hard on enamel. If his jaw clenched any harder, he felt certain that he would hear bone cracking. Who the fuck was this old bastard, hiding out in a hole in the ground with his neatly pressed uniform and his smirking eyes? What the fuck did he know about what the world really was?

  He closed his eyes.

  Felt his temperature rising steadily. Implacably.

  Rising.

  Rising.

  A strong hand landed on his left shoulder, fingers digging painfully into his flesh, hauling him from his seat.

  And Dan’s eyes flared open.

  28

  Through an airy lounge and into the botanical gardens, moving like a driverless train. No stops, no brakes. Nothing to do now but hit the throttle and hope it was enough.

  Jerome ran.

  Breath detonating in his lungs, pouring from his lips in ragged gasps.

  Feet barely touching the floor; slipping and sliding on the broken and torn bodies, threatening to dump him on his ass and end his life at any moment.

  He moved like a frightened rabbit, barely taking in his surroundings, only dimly aware that Watts and Baldwin were behind him. All thoughts of being a soldier, of being part of a team, were forgotten; washed away by terror. There was no fighting the creature that had done that to Eddie Baker.

  No fighting, and no team. The two men running at his heel were as likely to shoot at Jerome as they were to stand alongside him.

  This is what it feels like when your mind starts to disintegrate.

  Jerome ran with a scream lurking in his lungs. He didn’t dare let it out.

  The botanical gardens were an indoor feature: Japanese-themed and overly busy to the eye. There were densely packed flowers everywhere, their colours deep, oversaturated, lending the room the feel of a hallucinogenic nightmare even before the corpses scattered on the floor were taken into account.

  Incongruously, at the centre of the long room, beneath a glass ceiling that allowed in the last of the daylight, there stood a single—resolutely non-Japanese—marble obelisk. A giant, twelve-foot-high solid needle, rising from the highly decorative floor like a spear.

  Someone had been impaled on the top of it. Of course they had. The strange creatures who had attacked Las Vegas—and which had gleefully tormented Bravo Team all the way through the hotel—didn’t seem to ever pass up the opportunity to make dramatic visual statements. The thick stone column had almost split the body of a concierge into two entirely separate, sickening parts, dividing him right down the middle.

  Jerome only had time to see that abomination for a split-second—and to wonder about the force it must have taken to drive a human being down onto a fat, blunt spike like that—before the gardens were gone, and he rocketed beneath an arch and out into the mall, tearing past boutique windows displaying dresses it would have taken him a lifetime to afford.

  Behind him, someone opened fire, spraying bullets back into the gardens.

  Jerome didn’t look back. Bravo Team weren’t brothers-in-arms anymore, they were terrified animals fleeing from a predator. Jerome felt certain that both Watts and Baldwin were thinking the same thing as him: the slowest member of the panicked herd is the one that gets eaten. Maybe Watts and Baldwin, too, were determined that it wouldn’t be them.

  What was it?

  A monster? A demon?

  What the creature was didn’t seem to matter as much as what it had done to Eddie Baker. Merely the presence of the thing had caused Baker to blow his own head off, and in some murky recess of his mind, Jerome thought he understood why. The creatures that were devouring Las Vegas had surely crawled from the festering belly of Hell itself. Jerome was a God-fearing man, just as Baker had been, and he knew the work of Satan when he saw it. He’d seen evil plenty; he’d never seen malevolence like that which he had seen on the face of the grinning abomination in the revolving door.

  Demons, then.

  Whoever was shooting behind Jerome stopped, and started to scream instead.

  The scream twisted around itself, tightening. Coiling up, like razor wire slowly being twisted around a baseball bat. It was a sound no human throat should have been capable of producing.

  And there was another sound now, far more unsettling; far more terrible.

  Clicking.

  Thunderous clicking.

  The sound of clawed feet racing across polished marble.

  It’s chasing me down, Jerome thought, and he sprayed bullets over his shoulder in a blind panic, no longer caring that Watts or Baldwin might be right behind him.

  He raced on, hearing nothing now but the frantic thudding of his heart, certain that his next step would be his last.

  Movement ahead.

  In the shadows.

  Jerome didn’t look.

  He veered to his left, charging into a door marked staff only, and then he was tumbling down into space, rolling down a n
arrow stairwell, his body ricocheting off bare stone walls.

  Hitting the bottom.

  Rolling forward without pause.

  Running again.

  He risked a glance over his shoulder.

  There was nobody following now. Baldwin and Watts, if they were still alive, were out there on their own.

  Deep in the darkest part of his mind, in the part he would never have allowed anybody to see, Jerome hoped that they were still alive, still running.

  That the monsters were chasing them instead of him.

  He slowed, gasping explosively for air that felt toxic in his lungs.

  He was in a maintenance corridor. Here, all the glitz of the Bellagio was stripped away: the walls and floor were sparse, functional concrete, and the only light to be seen poured not from extravagant chandeliers, but from a couple of garish bare red bulbs mounted on the wall. The emergency lighting, down in the belly of the Bellagio, made the hallway look like a vein.

  There were battered metal doors set into the wall at regular intervals, and up ahead, Jerome could see a couple more stairwells, each presumably leading up to a different area. This was how the Bellagio staff got around the building without getting in the way of paying customers: by shuttling around this blank maze.

  Jerome shut his flashlight off, afraid that the beam would be seen, and padded forward, wincing at the soft shuffle of his boots.

  Somewhere above him, someone screamed.

  He thought it was Baldwin.

  Jerome felt his bladder loosen a little at the sound, and his cheeks burned. He had left his team to die.

  He held his breath, and eased open the nearest of the doors.

  As he had expected, it was a supply closet, stuffed with cleaning products and toiletries for the hotel rooms. He saw rows of miniature soaps and shampoo bottles, larger containers filled with bleaches and detergents. The closet stank overpoweringly of lemon.

  Above, Baldwin screamed again, but only for a moment. The scream ended abruptly, in a manner that could only mean one thing.