Adrift 2: Sundown

by K. R. Griffiths

  But it wasn’t nothing. Barry knew that on a fundamental level, like some long-forgotten animal instinct had suddenly awoken and screamed for his attention. The darkness felt wrong. Dangerous.

  He took a couple of steps toward the distant farmhouse, set on fetching the shotgun and a powerful flashlight, and his breath caught in his throat.

  He heard it.

  Above the rain.

  A sound that Barry abruptly realised had been ongoing for several seconds before he became conscious of it. A noise that twisted around the howl of the wind, as though trying to conceal itself.

  Screaming.

  At the house.

  Sara normally woke an hour after him, the kids around seven, depending on how hungry they were. But someone was awake early, and they were screaming; pouring everything they had into bellowing out a noise that made Barry’s soul wither.

  He ran for the house without thinking, sprinting blindly through the storm, careering across a nightmare that made his mind and muscles feel oddly sluggish. Another scream cleaved the dark morning air, worse even than the first.

  A different voice, Barry’s mind tried to think, scrabbling for clarity. A male voice. My boy...

  With each passing yard, his sense of dislocation from reality increased.

  Time stretching taut; threatening to snap.

  It took him mere seconds to return to the farmhouse; each one felt like a lifetime. When he burst through the front door, the screaming became a deafening symphony that drowned out the storm outside. The noise echoed off the walls, making the air itself vibrate. It sounded like the screaming was coming from everywhere all at once, but for Barry, there was no mistaking the source of the awful noise.

  Upstairs.

  The bedrooms.

  Acting on autopilot, he yanked open the cupboard next to the front door, and pulled out his shotgun: an old, double-barrelled affair that would persuade any intruders that they needed to rethink their life choices. He took the stairs three at a time, inserting shells as he went, his thoughts a shapeless roar. When he reached the top of the stairs, he had a direct line of sight to the bedroom his two youngest daughters shared.

  He stopped.

  Tried to process it.

  Couldn’t.

  Sara was in the bedroom with the twins. He recognised the shape of his wife immediately, even in the dark; the lines his eyes had traced lovingly for more than twenty years.

  And he recognised another shape: one that was spread across the floor in ruins. Barry’s teenage son. Josh had been ripped apart like wet paper; human form reduced to a slick pile of steaming meat.

  Sara didn’t seem to see Barry; she cowered back toward a wall, attempting to position her body as a shield in front of her young twin daughters. Trying to protect them from...

  ...from...

  Barry had no word for it.

  The creature in the room with his family was tall and impossible, a sneering, seething mass of teeth and claws. Something that Barry’s mind tried to assimilate and couldn’t. As he watched in stunned horror, paralysed by the sight of the thing, the creature drove its right arm forward, plunging it into Sara’s chest with a sickeningly moist snap.

  When it withdrew its hand from her ribcage, it clutched Sara’s heart.

  Popped the glistening muscle into its hideous mouth like a piece of candy.

  And Barry was screaming along with his daughters.

  Lifting the shotgun.

  Aiming it at the hateful demon that had crawled from the earth to take his family.

  Squeezing the trigger, and—

  It looked right at him.

  Right into him.

  Eyes like claws.

  Reaching into his thoughts, sinking into the surface of his mind like meathooks.

  Twisting and tearing.

  The shotgun blast that was supposed to tear the abomination in two never came, as if somehow the finger that cradled the trigger no longer belonged to Barry at all.

  Somewhere, buried deep in the basement of Barry’s mind, there existed a part of him that clung to sanity, but it finally began to collapse when his arms moved of their own volition, aiming the shotgun at his young daughters as they huddled together in abject terror.

  Screaming.

  Staring at him with fear and confusion that made his soul whimper.

  No—

  The creature allowed Barry to imbibe the last of his family’s fear for a dreadful, eternal moment, before the finger that was no longer his squeezed the trigger at last.

  And he saw it all through eyes that he was powerless to shut.

  A liquid explosion.

  Painting the wall.

  Chunks of grey flesh impacting against stone with a barely audible thud as the echoing blast of the shotgun faded.

  Small, precious bodies falling together; a twisted, unrecognisable mass of shredded flesh.

  And the creature chuckled. A mirthless, rasping noise like metal grinding on metal. The soundtrack to a maniac’s fevered nightmares.

  The abyss of insanity finally swallowed Barry whole.

  He dropped the gun.

  Fell to his knees in the blood.

  And the entire world was teeth.

  5

  Darkness.

  Pain.

  He broke the surface.

  Gulped down a lungful of air that scorched like napalm.

  Screamed.

  And the black river pulled him back under, thrashing him in its jaws like a predator. Shaking his senses apart; breaking and remaking him over and over.

  Carrying him toward something terrible.

  And below the boiling black surface, down in the stinking undercurrent where light barely existed, he realised with horror that he was not alone.

  There are hands down there; oh dear Christ, arms in the darkness. Reaching for me.

  Grasping.

  Pulling me down and—

  6

  Dan awoke with a scream that emptied out of his throat like acid, and for a moment his vision swam dangerously, as if the noxious sleep was trying to take him back, like it was outraged that he had escaped its clutches, its

  —hands in the darkness—

  He shuddered at the blank space filling his mind. He was unable to recall anything beyond fear and shadows that seemed to cling to him, draped across him like a veil. Even his own name escaped him for several aching seconds.

  When his vision cleared, he found that he was lying on his back, staring up at a ceiling of featureless metal, and all around him there was a roaring thunder. The entire world seemed to be lurching, rocking crazily, and for a moment Dan was back in the nightmare which had felt endless; back in the raging torrent. No longer sure whether he was awake or dreaming.

  He sat upright, squeezing his eyes shut and gasping for air as the corrosive memories returned to him.

  “Thank fuck for that,” a voice said.

  Dan flinched. He wasn’t alone in the large, gloomy room. He didn’t recognise the man’s face, but he knew the voice perfectly well. He had heard it plenty.

  “You’ve been screaming for the past ten minutes. Figured maybe that meant you were coming round. Or dying.”

  Herb leaned casually against the wall to Dan’s right, his arms folded across his chest. He grinned broadly as Dan met his gaze.

  “It’s Herb, from the container. You remember the container?”

  Dan began to nod, and it felt like something in his skull was loose, rolling around queasily, driving a spear of pain into the back of his head. He pressed his palms to his temples, breathing deeply and evenly, and waited for it to pass.

  As he had guessed in the pitch black container, Herb was young—he would have said the guy was early-twenties, no more—and a good few inches taller than Dan himself. He was stocky, with a severe haircut that made him look like he’d just joined the military. Overall, it was a look that Dan thought he should have found intrinsically threatening, but Herb’s easy grin belied his forbidding appearanc
e.

  “Yeah, I remember. How long have I been unconscious?”

  “About eight hours, give or take. It’ll be midday soon. Thought you were never gonna speak again,” Herb said.

  Dan swallowed. His throat felt dry and raw.

  “I killed a man.”

  It wasn’t an appropriate response—far from it—but it was what Dan’s mind threw up. He had killed a man, right before the seizure had swept him away. And not just killed him; he had executed him on his knees.

  The world tilted suddenly, lurching like a drunk, and his gut cramped. If he’d had anything left in his belly after a night spent witnessing horrors that would have turned even the strongest of stomachs, he was sure he would have puked.

  The psychotic break he had always feared had finally happened. A dark corner of his mind had been reserved for the certainty that he would someday wake to find that he had done something terrible while in the grip of his illness, and here it was at last. A fragmented image of the event surfaced in his thoughts; the memory of the body of Charles Rennick twitching like a marionette as he poured bullets into it.

  His therapist had warned him that he might not be ready for something as tense as a cruise. She hadn’t known the half of it.

  I’m a murderer.

  The world bucked beneath him once more, and this time he did retch, and a thin string of painfully acidic bile trickled from his lips.

  For a moment, all he could do was cough and gasp for air as Herb stared at him quizzically.

  When the nausea passed, Dan wiped at his mouth with his wrist and scanned the room properly. It looked like he had been placed in a large steel box; he could almost have believed it was another—even larger—shipping container, but for the light spilling through a single narrow window near the ceiling.

  “Where am I?”

  “We’re still on the trawler.” Herb’s brow furrowed in apparent concern. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Dan spat and shook his head, and suddenly, incredibly, a bitter laugh spilled from his mouth. It was the exact question he had always feared, the very reason that he had spent two years locked in his London apartment. The overwhelming certainty that strangers would be able to see straight through him, right to his broken core. To the wrongness. Once, being confronted by that question would have filled him with a paralysing anxiety—maybe even severe enough to induce a full-blown panic attack.

  “I’m not normal,” Dan said through gritted teeth, biting down on the hysteria that wanted to burst from him. “That’s what’s wrong with me. What the fuck’s wrong with you? Daddy issues?”

  Herb’s expression hardened, and Dan’s eyes widened in shock.

  Did I really just say that?

  “Not anymore,” Herb said sourly. He threw a bundle of material at Dan. “Some fresh clothes. We are leaving soon, so get ready.”

  We? Dan thought ominously as he examined the clothes. A heavy sweater and jeans. He looked up at Herb.

  “Leave to go where?”

  “I live on a…compound of sorts. Thanks to my father’s obsession, it’s probably the safest place we can go until we figure out our next step.”

  There it was again. We.

  Our.

  “Safest?”

  “Steel shutters, thick walls. UV lights in the grounds. When the place is on lockdown, it’s practically a fortress. And if there is any information in the texts about people who are able to resist vampires, that’s where we’ll find it. In my father’s library. Best thing we can do is get there fast, and seal ourselves in before we run out of daylight. Hope you’re not afraid of flying.”

  “Flying?”

  Dan’s mouth asked that last one on autopilot, and he rebuked himself bitterly. He sounded pathetic, timidly batting Herb’s words back as feeble questions. He began to shake his head firmly. The conversation was heading down a path that could only lead to a very bad place. He had to get a grip on it, fast.

  “Yeah,” Herb said. “Trawler’s too slow. As soon as we’re close enough, we’ll take the chopper—”

  “There is no we,” Dan interrupted, surprising himself with the authority in his tone. “I’m going home, and then probably to prison, unless you people plan to kill me. Whatever it is you want to do, I want no part of it.”

  Herb looked surprised, as though he hadn’t even considered what Dan might want.

  “Yeah,” Dan continued, “I was listening in the container. Vampires rising, ancient oaths, Hell on earth and human sacrifice. Insane; every last bit of it. I don’t know who or what you think I am, but I assure you, I’m not it. I just want to go home.”

  Herb blinked.

  “You can’t go home,” he said softly. “Don’t you get it? You’re special. Important. You killed two vampires. You don’t just do that and go home. Home no longer exists for you. How could it?”

  Dan clenched his fists in frustration.

  “I got lucky, don’t you get it? Those things weren’t expecting me to attack them and they hesitated. That’s all there was to it.”

  “Except that they don’t hesitate,” Herb snapped, “and in records stretching back thousands of years, nobody has ever got lucky; not once. So what’s special about you, huh?”

  “The only thing that was special about me had her fucking head torn off right in front of my face. If I’m special, how come I couldn’t stop that?”

  Herb shook his head.

  “It doesn’t matter. Whatever your life was before—it’s over now. The others will come for you, and one way or another, they’ll find you. You’re too important.”

  “Others?”

  Another pathetic question.

  Dammit!

  Herb stared at him thoughtfully for a moment before responding.

  “This is a lot bigger than my family. There are nests across the world, families just like mine. Our ancestors realised the value of cooperation a long time ago. The Order is the product of that realisation. They—we—have people everywhere. Resources you can’t begin to understand, and when they find out about the Oceanus, they’ll be coming. Going home and pretending this isn’t happening is not an option.”

  Dan stared at him dubiously. “So it’s a global conspiracy, then? A vast secret which hundreds of people are keeping? Or is it thousands?”

  He made no effort to conceal the disbelief in his tone. Dan had spent two years locked in his apartment, and that equalled plenty of time spent on the internet. The web was full of conspiracy theories; it was almost impossible to avoid them. He didn’t necessarily disbelieve them all, but still, he had serious doubts that a secret such as the one Herb described could be kept for so long, by so many people. It just wasn’t possible. Maybe it had been centuries earlier, but now, when information was so freely available?

  Herb caught the sarcasm. “You think being tasked with killing thousands of people doesn’t offer opportunities? Families like mine have been around for centuries, benefitting from their relationship with the vampires. People keep secrets for two reasons. One: keeping the secret is advantageous to them personally. Two: they fear the consequences if their silence is not maintained. If both of those statements are true, who wouldn’t hold their tongue?”

  Herb shrugged, as if there was nothing more to say on the matter.

  Dan shook his head. “What possible benefit could there be to what you people do?”

  “Money. Power. You know how many politicians were given complementary tickets for the Oceanus? How many heads of corporations? Celebrities? Even a member of the royal family. If you want to murder someone important, what better way than to put them at the scene of some tragic disaster? Then they are just another poor victim of circumstance.”

  Dan rubbed at his forehead.

  “I’m not following.”

  “This is how things have always been done,” Herb said with an impatient sigh. “You know all those wacko theories about the people lurking in the shadows, controlling the world?”

  “Sure,” Dan said wryly. �
��The Illuminati.”

  Herb snorted. “Call it whatever you want. Whatever label you come up with will be about as accurate as the word vampire. We refer to ourselves as the Order precisely because the word is meaningless. Virtually every family within the Order has accrued wealth and influence you can’t imagine. Old money. Power handed down for generations. When the vampires rise, the families under their control rise right along with them. My father called it a truce; our family’s tragic duty. I call it an alliance, and I want no fucking part of it.”

  Herb took a deep breath and paused, apparently aware that he was beginning to rant.

  “But we haven’t got time for this, not now. I have to get you somewhere safe before it gets dark.”

  Dan spread his arms wide and gestured at the hull of the trawler.

  “Seems like I’m safe right here, if what you say is true.”

  “Here’s fine,” Herb said with a grin, “though you might not think so when you start to get hungry. Besides, search and rescue will be headed in our direction soon enough, along with just about every news outlet on the planet, and I doubt even the Order has enough influence to cover up what they’re gonna find. The Oceanus was probably declared missing hours ago. We were supposed to draw the authorities in the wrong direction once it was done,” he shrugged, “but the days of the Rennick family keeping secrets are over.”

  Dan shook his head wearily. Herb had sounded crazy in the container, but now that he was out and apparently running the show, he sounded even crazier.

  He thought about replying that he needed his medication; that he had a condition, dammit; that he had to go home and seal himself up in the only place he felt safe before he hurt himself or anybody else, but he clamped his lips shut. There was nothing to gain from going through it now, when he was trapped at sea.

  Play along, he thought. Just until you get your feet on dry land.

  And then, run.

  “Follow me,” Herb said, and he turned, striding away from the freezer hold, leaving the door open.

  Dan watched him go, and slipped on the sweater and a one-size-too-big pair of jeans, Herb’s words running through his mind like a fever.