Feeding.
He wondered if, even now, glowing red eyes were observing the humans who had dropped from the sky into Vegas; watching their progress with inhuman hunger.
The Rangers converged on his position silently, communicating with gestures. Dan didn’t understand most of it, but when they started scampering through a field of corpses toward an open doorway to the left of the fountains, he understood enough. He exchanged a glance with Herb, and set off after them.
The soldiers regrouped at the top of a flight of steps inside a long, curving corridor which acted as an overpass. Full of walkways and now-dormant escalators, the corridor had allowed pedestrians to cross the sculpted Bellagio gardens below and head into the hotel itself. More importantly, it got the group of soldiers out of the open, and away from prying eyes.
The Rangers looked spooked by the level of carnage they had encountered on landing, and Dan felt a stab of sympathy for them. The destruction of a city like Las Vegas, just hours after the initial attacks, had to be especially bewildering to those who still had little or no idea what had happened to their country. During the flight aboard the C-160, he had caught a few fragments of whispered conversations; a few muttered words like monster or creature, but the general consensus still seemed to be that the United States had suffered some sort of chemical or biological attack which had driven the population mad. One Ranger had even used the word zombie, and had immediately been shut down by the others. People weren’t eating each other; they weren’t becoming mindless animals. It was more like something was turning every mind in America psychopathic.
For the moment, in the cover of the hallway piled with bodies, the small group of Rangers seemed safe, and Dan considered telling them what they were really up against.
There wasn’t time.
They wouldn’t even believe it. General Armitage hadn’t, even after one of his own soldiers had relayed a message about demons. The only reason Armitage had agreed to Dan and the others tagging along on the mission to Vegas was that he was desperate, and had nothing at all to lose.
“Twenty minutes until extraction” Captain Smalling said, checking his watch. “As far as we know, our target is somewhere in the basement of the Bellagio. If we haven’t located him in fifteen, we bug out. Move.”
The captain shuttled off without another word, and the other five Rangers immediately fell into line behind him, moving whisper-quiet through the carpet of the dead.
Too quiet, Dan thought. If the mission continued as efficiently as it had begun, they would be in and out of Vegas before the real target had even been sighted. The extraction point was a Greyhound bus terminal on the outskirts of the city centre where, in twenty minutes, a Black Hawk helicopter would be waiting to pick up the team. Ten minutes after that, General Armitage’s AC-130s and F-22 Raptors would arrive over Las Vegas, and he would begin to make good on his promise of levelling the city.
Dan’s brow furrowed.
He hadn’t expected this to be the problem. As it stood, he might find himself left with the choice of leaving Vegas without seeing a single one of the monsters, or staying to have bombs rain down on his head.
He gritted his teeth, following the fast-moving Rangers, and fell into step with Herb and Mancini.
“Have you seen anything?”
Both of the larger men shook their heads.
“Shit.”
Mancini gave a low chuckle. “Gotta be the only asshole in the world who wants to see one of those fuckers, Bellamy.”
Dan grimaced.
And hoped the situation would improve—or perhaps deteriorate—once he got inside the casino.
*
When he jogged into the Bellagio’s grand lobby, Herb’s stomach took an urgent trip toward his throat. Inside the building, the carnage was even worse than out on the streets; more intimate somehow. There were a lot of bodies out on the Strip, but most looked to have died either from gunshot wounds, explosions, or impacts with fast-moving vehicles.
Inside, however, he got his first glimpse at what was definitely vampire handiwork.
He pushed through a revolving door, glancing at another identical door alongside it that was jammed by the weight of a dead soldier who had clearly blown his own head off, and saw bodies everywhere that had been ripped and torn. Some that looked like they had been chewed.
But it was eerily quiet.
That should have been a cause for celebration, but as he glanced at Dan, and saw the thin artist lost in thought, he felt a stab of uncertainty.
What, he thought, would Dan do if they didn’t encounter vampires?
32
“Wait!”
Andrew Lloyd’s voice found Conny’s ears, but she paid it no heed. The robed man was too old; too slow.
Too much of a coward.
She left Lloyd and Frank Mather behind, sprinting back into the giant supply cavern with Remy at her heels, and thunder in her mind.
Someone had opened the front door after Andrew had locked it. It could mean anything, but deep down, Conny knew that it could only mean one thing.
She veered away from the mountains of food and supplies, pausing only when her gaze flicked across a crate loaded with flashlights. She almost continued on, running right past it, but a nagging voice in her head stopped her.
Power to these rooms ran off a separate generator to the rest of the complex, according to Frank. The lights were still on here, but if her instincts were correct, and the worst had happened in the levels above...
If the worst has happened, Conny thought bitterly. The worst has always happened.
She angrily told the voice in her mind to shut up. Thinking about the worst and just what it might be wouldn’t help anybody. It wouldn’t help Logan.
She snatched up a flashlight, flicking it on to check the batteries, and charged away once more, her pace faltering a little when she spotted the empty food cans on the floor. She slowed enough to savagely rebuke herself for letting Logan out of her sight, and for staying away from him for far too long.
For letting herself believe for even a moment that there was such a thing as safety in the world now.
She had been determined to give him his independence, to prove that she understood his pain. To earn his trust and his friendship.
She had forgotten her own words. It wasn’t her duty to make him like her. It was her duty to keep him alive. The rock walls and the solid steel door had lulled her into a false sense of security. She had believed the bunker was safe.
It was a mistake that might already have cost her beloved boy his life.
The exit from the supply cavern was a long, narrow tunnel which inclined sharply. Conny hit the slope without breaking her stride, making her way toward a set of rough-hewn rock steps at the far end, which led up at a right angle toward the next chamber.
When she reached the steps, her legs locked up.
At the top of them, the next tunnel was dark.
Pitch black.
Because the power was out.
Her nerves sizzled, fear imploring her not to take one more step, begging her to turn around and make her way back to the safety of the light.
There is no safety, she thought again. Light didn’t stop the vampires. It barely slowed them down. If she wanted to reach Logan, she was just going to have to deal with the darkness, to adapt to it and use it just as the vampires did. She dropped her eyes to Remy, who looked up at her inquisitively. He wasn’t growling.
Yet.
The bunker was massive. There could be anything waiting for her on the levels above, out of Remy’s reach. In the dark.
Conny set her jaw and flicked on the flashlight, pointing the beam up the tunnel.
“Come on, Rem.”
*
The darkness was cold and unending, the silence broken only by Remy’s panting and Conny’s own rapid exhalations.
Her legs ached: each rocky passage now took her up, the perpetual ascent working muscles that had been wildly overused in the past twenty-four h
ours.
Despite the pain, she didn’t slow, trusting that if she neared trouble, Remy would alert her long before she actually saw it. She moved at top speed through the small chambers and connecting tunnels. When she hit dead ends, she retraced her steps, finding another way; always moving up.
And finally, as she had known he would, Remy emitted that low, distinctive growl.
She slowed immediately, and put her hand over the flashlight, blocking most of the beam and hoping that the faint light spilling between her fingers would not give away her position to something she couldn’t see. She crouched next to Remy, searching in his eyes. She saw fear there. When she stood, to continue her ascent more cautiously, she found her right leg locked in place.
Remy held her trousers between his teeth, pulling her back, sending her an urgent message.
Don’t go any farther.
Remy’s big brown eyes were fixed on hers, and she saw pleading in them. She crouched again, looping an arm around the German Shepherd’s thick torso, and put her lips to his ear.
“We have to find Logan, Rem. Find Logan.”
She stood, and Remy reluctantly released his grip.
She pointed at the darkness ahead. “Find Logan,” she whispered once more.
Remy let out something like a soft whimper of complaint, but he began to move forward, his head bowed. If Logan was still alive, Remy’s nose was her best shot at finding him. The dog was no specialist tracker, but scentwork was in his genes, and he knew the smell of Logan well. One way or another, she was certain that Remy would lead her to her son.
Whether he was alive or dead.
“Good boy, Rem,” Conny whispered, following the dog’s steady progress, reining in her itching desire to break into a sprint once more. “Good boy.”
33
Herb’s heart hammered as the Rangers led the way through the nightmarish Bellagio. He had seen destruction like this, more than once, but he didn’t think he could ever build up a tolerance for looking on what vampires did when they had time to indulge in fun.
The monsters posed their victims like deranged serial killers, making a mockery of the human body in sickening ways too numerous to comprehend. What Herb saw, in the casino, was the interior of a lunatic’s mind: artwork daubed in blood on the walls of a demented psyche.
The Rangers filed forward near-silently: the only sound to be heard in the casino was the soft rustling of their clothing as they carved out a path through the mess the vampires had left behind. It was dark inside, lit only by the flashlights attached to the soldiers’ weapons, and everywhere their beams fell, Herb saw new, gut-wrenching nightmares.
But no vampires.
He was certain that if they had landed a helicopter outside the Bellagio, they would already be engaged in a battle, but their quiet insertion into the town, at a spot that the vampires had already scrubbed clean of life, gave them a shot at getting in and out without encountering the enemy.
Herb’s stomach roiled as he tried to decide whether that was a good thing or not. Dan clearly still believed in the idea of the black river, and it seemed like there was some evidence to support it, but it was all circumstantial. Was it really worth risking the lives of these men on a dream?
Herb’s brow furrowed as he ran.
Even without the black river, didn’t they have a chance now at fighting the vampires, no matter how slim? He and Dan had left written notes in the C-160 for General Armitage, detailing the creatures’ strengths and weaknesses—or, at least, the conclusions that their half-educated guesses seemed to support. If the military still had access to unmanned drones, that could be the way to search out and attack the monsters, by removing human eyes from the equation altogether. Perhaps the military could even develop a system where soldiers entered the battlefield wearing blindfolds and cameras, their movements directed by operators watching on screen from a secure location.
Difficult, but perhaps not impossible—assuming Armitage actually believed any of it.
Herb blinked his thoughts away. Up ahead, Captain Smalling was guiding the Rangers through a door marked staff only. Herb filed through it quietly, descending down a set of bare steps, into a maintenance corridor. In the enclosed space, the combined power of all those flashlights more than adequately lit the world around him. Herb breathed out a soft sigh of relief. There was no sign of the massacre down here, and no chance that the light the Rangers were so casually throwing around might be spotted from the floor above.
Despite it all, despite his belief in Dan and perhaps even in the black river, some part of Herb couldn’t help but wish that it stayed like this: that they would find and rescue the missing soldier and get out of Vegas intact. Live to fight another day.
The Rangers began pulling open supply closet doors along the maintenance corridor, and exploded into frantic gestures when they pulled one open around twenty yards ahead of Herb.
Holy shit, he thought, as he watched them pulling out a bemused soldier who barely seemed to be aware that he was being rescued. He’s still alive.
How many others like Master Sergeant Jerome Mills were out there? Hiding in cupboards in cities that appeared to be dead, waiting for the people who should be saving them to drop bombs on their heads instead?
The old guilt ignited in Herb’s gut once more. Much as he wanted to, he couldn’t just sit back and hope the military learned to fight vampires. By the time the people who mattered even believed it, there would be virtually nobody left.
He turned away from the quietly celebrating Rangers to tell Dan that they would find a way to go on; find another way to corner a vampire and get to the black river.
And his stomach dropped like a broken elevator.
Dan wasn’t there.
*
Dan had seen enough.
The Rangers were far too efficient, far too quiet, and he risked leaving Vegas without even getting a shot at completing the real mission. As soon as he saw the soldiers pulling the missing sergeant out of the supply closet, he knew he had to do something.
But what?
His mind had seethed, throwing up desperate plans before settling at last on the strange weight in the small of his back that he had become accustomed to so quickly that he had forgotten what it was. The handgun that Mancini had given him back at the ranch.
He left the maintenance corridor behind at speed, charging back along the same path they had used to get in, slowing only to pull a huge kitchen knife from one of the bodies splayed across the Bellagio’s long reception desk, and burst out into the too-warm evening air.
The only noise he could hear was the sound of cracking, popping wood. The sound of the city burning.
Yet they were out there somewhere, hunting.
What they needed was prey.
Dan pointed the gun at the sky and pulled the trigger again and again, until the weapon clicked apologetically.
The booming crash of the weapon echoed out across the ruins of Vegas and Dan stood alone, framed by the inferno that raged all around him.
And waited for the monsters to come.
*
Herb shot a glance back at the Rangers, who froze, bristling with intensity as the sound of gunfire reached their ears.
He got his first real look at the man they were there to save, and Master Sergeant Jerome Mills looked in bad shape. Nothing physically wrong with him, as far as Herb could tell, but he still required two Rangers to half-carry him out of the hotel. Mills’ eyes were wide, and a strange, euphoric grin was plastered on his face, even as his throat emitted a desperately feeble whimper. He didn’t seem able to see his surroundings; it was like he was looking at something else.
He’s lost his mind, Herb thought.
He wasn’t the only one.
Dammit, Dan.
Herb shot a meaningful glance at Mancini, who nodded, and they raced back up the steps, following the distant crash of the gun.
Dan was outside, back in the Bellagio’s sculpted pool, standing with his arms
wide in a come-and-get-me pose.
The sight of him made Herb’s nerves tingle. Dan’s spindly body was silhouetted in the towering columns of fire that Las Vegas had become. It almost looked like an artist’s depiction of Satan himself, revelling in the city’s suffering.
Herb vaulted the wall, landing in the fountain with a loud splash, and charged through the water toward Dan.
He grabbed the thin man’s shoulder, spinning him around to face him and, for a second, Dan didn’t even seem to recognise him. Herb grabbed at his neck, dragging his gaunt face close.
“What the fuck have you done?” he roared.
“What needed to be done,” Dan said impassively. “We’re not here to save a soldier, remember?”
Herb felt like dynamite was going off in his mind, anger exploding uncontrollably inside him. He wanted to pull back his fist and smash Dan’s placid face, to claw at him and scream that it wasn’t his choice to make, it wasn’t up to him alone to keep beckoning death forward to take them all.
He didn’t get a chance.
In the distance, the sound of gunfire received a response. One that extinguished the furious fires in Herb immediately and replaced them with something far more insidiously destructive.
Shrieking.
34
Remy had led the way unerringly, and after a few minutes, Conny heard the confirmation that she didn’t really need. Someone ahead was screaming, the sound ricocheting through the dark tunnels to reach her ears.
A vampire had found its way inside.
Maybe the vampire. The very one that had chased Conny and Shahana back at the ranch, that she had escaped from by the skin of her teeth.
Conny grimaced.
Would it remember her?
This time, she had no grenade launcher. She had the M4 carbine, and that was it. Even her handgun was gone, now in Logan’s hands. Hopefully he had the sense not to try to use it.
Hide, Lo, she thought. Hide.
The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy) Page 79
