Abruptly, Remy’s growl dried up, replaced by a soft whine, and an ice-cold spear lodged in Conny’s gut. Remy wasn’t a whiner.
The vampire was close.
Conny dropped to one knee alongside the dog again.
“Which way, Rem?”
She was standing in a chamber that connected three tunnels. One behind, leading back down toward the research lab, and two ahead.
She aimed her flashlight at them quickly, and then switched it off, afraid that the light would travel farther than she realised, giving her position away.
“Which way?”
Conny remained in a half-crouch that enabled her to hold Remy’s collar, allowing the dog to lead her forward. He picked the tunnel to the right, and seemed to want to pick up the pace, but Conny kept her hand on his neck to relax him. Making too much noise now would not be a good idea.
Because somewhere close by, she heard something else.
Clicking.
“Down, Rem,” she hissed, right into the dog’s ear, and planted herself low against the wall of the tunnel, squeezing into the rock, praying that a slight outcrop was sufficient to obscure the sight of her from the chamber she had just left.
Click, click.
Conny held her breath, blind in the darkness. Even Remy seemed to have stopped breathing.
Click, click.
She frowned.
The sound was clear now, not muffled at all. The vampire had reached the chamber that she had just exited, and it had stopped.
Why?
Could it hear her or Remy?
Smell them?
Click.
A single footstep.
It’s deciding which way to go, Conny thought, her mind howling in fright. Whether to take that tunnel.
Or this one.
Click, click, click, click, click—
The vampire’s footsteps receded. It was still making its way down, heading toward the bottom of the bunker.
Conny waited until she could no longer hear its movement, and then she pulled herself upright and started to move forward and up, faster now.
There were only two victims in the lower levels: an old coward and an even older man, who looked frail enough that he might die of natural causes before the vampire even reached him. The lighting on the basement level might slow the creature down, just a little, but it would be heading back up toward the more populated areas soon enough.
There wasn’t much time.
She dared to flick on her flashlight once more, and charged forward, following Remy, bracing herself for whatever nightmarish sights awaited her in the tunnels ahead.
*
“Get them back,” Dan growled, glancing at Herb and then nodding at the Rangers who were erupting out of the Bellagio. “Get them out of sight, into cover. If the vampires see men with guns, they’ll want to play with them first. Let them come to me.”
Herb stared back at Dan, and his mind raced.
“And if they suspect it’s a trap?”
Dan shrugged.
“Tell Captain Smalling to shut his eyes and shoot.”
Goddammit, Dan.
Herb wanted to say more, though he didn’t know what, but there wasn’t time. Another shriek split the burning night, much closer this time. He started to back away, dropping his gaze to the hopelessly inadequate kitchen knife that Dan held.
He’s going to get himself killed.
There was nothing to be done for him. Herb raced away from Dan, charging toward Captain Smalling, waving his hands at the entrance to the overpass the Rangers had used for cover earlier.
There was hesitation on Smalling’s face for the first time as he heard the distant shrieking.
“What the fuck is that?” the captain hissed.
“Monsters,” Herb growled back. “Get into the overpass. Get out of sight. Hide.”
Smalling looked like he was wracked by indecision. Clearly, for a man like him, hiding wasn’t a strategy that made any tactical sense.
“What about him?” Smalling said, gesturing toward Dan.
Herb shot a glance back at Dan, standing in the middle of the small lake with the knife raised.
“He’s one of them.”
*
The dining area was bloated with bodies.
None were moving.
Conny fought back the despair that threatened to open up her throat and eject a scream that she thought might never stop.
Remy had led her right here, still following her command to find Logan, and he picked his way through the human wreckage, his nose low to the ground.
Please, God, no.
Conny followed the German Shepherd, falling several yards behind him as her will faltered, playing her light across the bodies of children who had died with abject terror written on their faces, and her heart broke.
I thought I’d saved them.
Tears filled her eyes as Remy started to slow near the centre of the dining area, and looked back at her. He wasn’t searching anymore.
He had stopped near a mound of corpses. When Conny’s light fell on it, she could barely recognise the shapes she saw as human. Black-red parts glistened wherever the beam fell. She saw exposed bone; ripped meat.
And a fire began to build inside her.
I’ll find it, she thought. No more running and hiding. I’ll find it and make it pay.
Her fingers tightened around the gun until her knuckles ached.
She walked forward slowly toward Remy, in a daze, like stumbling through a half-remembered dream.
Remy turned in a tight circle, and looked back toward her, his head cocked to the side. He’d done his job, and some part of Conny hated him for it.
Hated herself.
How could I have left him alone?
Logan had died alone, in desperate fear; in terrible pain. The thought of it made her want to forget all about living; to place the barrel of the M4 under her chin and end the suffering once and for all.
She reached Remy, and dropped her eyes reluctantly, unwilling to look on her son’s body, unable not to. Forcing herself to focus, she drank in the horror at her feet.
And her eyes widened.
Logan wasn’t there.
35
Momentum gathering.
Tension building.
Herb could feel it. The air was ripe with it. The whole world felt like a swollen abscess, ready to burst and spit out its poison.
He crouched alongside Mancini, at the base of one of the stairwells in the overpass, joined by Captain Smalling and another of the Rangers. The other four were at the top of the stairs, facing away, pointing their weapons down the long, gently curving corridor that arched over the gardens toward South Las Vegas Boulevard.
It was the best the eight men could do: setting themselves up so they could only be attacked from two directions, while Jerome Mills sat on the stairs between the two groups, his mind apparently dissolved by terror, whimpering softly.
It felt like a last stand.
Herb risked a glance out of a narrow, slit-like window that overlooked the gardens, watching Dan intently.
“If they come in here,” he growled, just loud enough for the Rangers at the top of the stairs to hear, “don’t look at them. You’ll hear clicking—that’s the sound of them moving. Shut your eyes, fire blind. Pray. But don’t fucking look at them, understand?”
None of the Rangers responded.
Outside, movement took Herb’s eyes away from Dan. Something was streaking along the street beyond the fountain, running along the side of a burnt-out restaurant before leaping down onto the street itself and charging on all-fours.
Herb held his breath.
Dan wasn’t moving, almost like he hadn’t even seen it coming.
Shit.
The vampire was moving so fast that Herb doubted Dan could stop it even if he did get a good look at its eyes.
The creature leapt into the fountain, landing with an enormous splash, still charging.
Do something, Dan. Do some—
The vampire barrelled into Dan in an explosion of water, and both figures fell from Herb’s sight.
Only the vampire rose.
Herb’s mind shrieked in despair, and he aimed his weapon through the narrow window, lining up the creature in his sights. It was a ridiculous shot to take, two hundred feet at least, in the dark at a moving target. All he would do was give away the position of the eight men hiding in the overpass.
His jaw clenched.
He could just about make out Dan’s body, floating almost peacefully in the water.
The vampire broke into a charge, vaulting back out of the pool, heading away from the Bellagio. Herb followed it with his eyes, his jaw dropping.
Two more of the creatures were coming along the street, sprinting forward.
The first vampire ran right at them, swinging its arms.
Tearing into them.
Dan.
For a moment, Herb’s mind went blank, his thoughts becoming sludgy.
Dan wasn’t dead. He was in the head of the vampire. Using it as a weapon. The three vampires went down to the ground in a haze of writhing violence, spraying black blood across the street, finally falling still.
No, not quite still. One of the creatures was moving, pulling itself away slowly from the bodies of the others, leaving a dark trail of gore on the road behind it.
Herb turned his attention back to Dan.
Who rose from the water on unsteady legs, wavered a moment, and then crashed back down.
Herb rose up.
“He’s injured,” he said softly. “We have to go—”
His words were obliterated by the deafening clatter of gunshots as the soldiers at the top of the stairs opened fire, pouring bullets down the hallway at something that Herb could not see.
“We have to go!” he roared.
*
Conny searched the dining area frantically, pulling aside corpses to see what was pinned beneath them, terrified that she would see Logan’s face looking back at her. She paused frequently, whenever her mind conjured up the sound of distant clicking, to peer fearfully at the exit tunnel.
Logan wasn’t there.
She glanced at Remy, who watched her with his head cocked, confused.
“You brought me right back to where you remembered Logan being, didn’t you, Rem?” she muttered.
Remy huffed.
Conny knew she was on the right track. Remy had a good nose, of course, but he was no specialist tracker. When she had ordered him to find Logan, he took her back to where he believed the boy would be, but now he was as stumped as she herself was.
Logan must have heard screaming and gunfire, and he must have put two and two together quickly, realising that he had no chance of survival against a vampire. He had fled from the dining room, maybe found somewhere to hide.
But where?
The exit?
Conny’s heart leapt in her chest. If Logan had somehow stayed out of sight while the vampire passed through, it might have occurred to him to head to the front door and try to escape from the bunker altogether. It wasn’t far from the dining room, and he had been right alongside her when the Grand Cleric had punched the code into the panel that locked the steel door.
Smart boy, Conny thought, and she rushed back to Remy, mentally retracing the route to the bunker’s entrance in her head. Just a few tunnels and then I’m back at that hub, she thought.
She paused a moment, cocking her head just like Remy, listening to the silence. Other than the soft patter of blood dripping in the dining area, she heard nothing. Hopefully the vampire was still far away, at the bottom of the whole complex, searching through the empty tunnels, hunting for any food that might remain in the mountain. If so, it would be a while yet before it made it all the way back up to the front door.
“Come on, Rem,” she said. “I know the way from here.”
She left the dining area behind, following the winding tunnels, praying that she was on the right track.
*
Herb raced through the shallow water, throwing himself to his knees beside Dan.
A large, ugly wound had been opened up across Dan’s belly. He was losing a lot of blood, fast.
“Yellowstone,” Dan slurred, his eyes rolling in their sockets, unable to focus properly on Herb. “We have to go to Yellowstone. The river…”
Herb exchanged a glance with Mancini and gritted his teeth. Behind him, Captain Smalling was approaching fast, with the other Ranger who had been with them at the foot of the stairs farther back, moving more slowly with the weight of Jerome Mills looped over his shoulder.
The air around the fountain fizzed with the sound of gunfire, and in the distance, Herb heard more screeching. More enraged vampires, incoming, and no way that Dan could possibly face them. He looked like he could barely stand.
“The extraction point?” Herb snarled, glaring at Smalling. The captain nodded, pointing across Herb’s shoulder, down South Las Vegas Boulevard.
Herb returned his gaze to Dan, who coughed out a mouthful of blood. Herb couldn’t be sure whether that was due to the injury to his belly or the—perhaps even more serious—wounds in his mind.
“Sorry, Dan, this is gonna hurt,” Herb said, and without hesitating, he reached beneath Dan’s body, hauling him up out of the water and throwing him over his shoulder.
It wasn’t the first time he had carried Dan like this. The first time, he had been surprised at just how light the artist’s body had been.
It felt even lighter now.
Dan was wasting away.
Leaking away.
Herb charged off in the direction that Smalling had indicated, trying to hold Dan’s weight steady, afraid that he would feel the man’s innards slide across his shoulder at any moment.
The others followed, pausing occasionally to send covering fire back across the burning street.
Herb didn’t turn.
Didn’t look back.
He veered through the bodies and the burnt-out vehicles, slowing a little only when he reached the spot at which Dan had forced the three vampires to turn on each other.
One was still crawling away feebly, barely moving.
Herb pulled out the handgun that Mancini had given him back at the ranch and unloaded it into the creature’s back, slamming it down onto the tarmac.
The vampire let out something like a wheeze, and fell still with thick, viscous blood slowly oozing from a dozen new exits that Herb had punched into its body.
They were not immortal.
Just twisted flesh and black blood.
Damn, he thought, that felt fucking good.
He set his jaw, and sprinted away through the burning streets.
*
Logan!
Conny’s heart almost burst through her chest when she reached the five-way hub near the front door and saw her boy.
Alive.
Logan was sitting at the top of the entrance tunnel with his back pressed against the steel door, curled into a tight ball with his head in his hands.
He was covered in blood.
“Logan,” Conny breathed, flinching when he pointed the gun at her in hands that shook wildly. “Logan, it’s me.”
“Mum?”
Logan stared at her like she was an apparition, and finally lowered the weapon she had given him, bursting into tears.
Conny rushed forward, dropping to the ground alongside her son, gathering him up in a crushing embrace.
“Are you okay?” she gasped, pulling away to check his body. “Is this your blood?”
Logan shook his head, and a fresh flood of tears traced a course through the blood that plastered its face.
“I..I..I...hid,” he bawled. “Under the bodies...I...I—”
“Shhh.” Conny pulled him close. “You did good, Lo. I’m proud of you. It’s okay.”
Logan’s entire body shuddered as he let out huge, wracking sobs.
Conny thought about the fear that must have all-but obliterated Lo
gan’s mind in the dining room. The horror of hiding in the warm guts of the children the vampire had murdered all around him. The all-consuming terror of knowing that a slavering monster was just inches away, and that it would surely turn its loathsome eyes to him at any moment.
She shuddered. She’d been right there herself. It was a sensation that she could never forget, as long as she lived.
But there wasn’t time for grief or shock now. The monster was still there somewhere, in the dark labyrinth. Maybe heading right toward them at that very moment.
“Come on, Lo,” she whispered. “Let’s get out of here.”
Logan shook his head despairingly.
“We can’t,” he said, and let out another huge sob.
“What? Why not?”
Logan pointed up, and when Conny aimed her flashlight in the direction he indicated, her heart clenched painfully in her chest.
The panel on the wall.
The door locking mechanism.
It had been smashed to pieces.
*
The Black Hawk was landing as Herb reached the wide parking area outside the Greyhound bus terminal.
He forged ahead, pushing through the blast of air from the screaming rotors, painfully aware that the noise of the vehicle was going to bring them company.
Only six men had made it out of Vegas.
Maybe five, if Herb was carrying another man who turned out to be a corpse. Dan’s eyes had closed a minute or two earlier. As he ran frantically, Herb couldn’t tell whether or not the guy was dead.
No time to stop.
He leapt into the belly of the chopper and turned to see Mancini piling in behind him. The big American turned immediately, putting covering fire over the heads of Captain Smalling and the other Ranger, who were both now carrying the master sergeant who had somehow lived through the fall of Las Vegas.
Herb couldn’t see what Mancini was shooting at, just shadows. Maybe there was nothing out there at all, but the bullets weren’t wasted.
They bought time.
“Come on,” Herb shrieked, waving at Smalling to hurry it up.
The captain nodded, sweating profusely as he made it to the chopper and pushed Jerome Mills aboard. The master sergeant rolled into the vehicle, still whimpering. Herb doubted that he had any clue what was happening; his eyes were still elsewhere; seeing something that nobody else could.
The Black River (The Complete Adrift Trilogy) Page 80
