Adrift 2: Sundown

by K. R. Griffiths

  The place looked completely deserted.

  The bridge, crossed by the rail line that led toward central London to the north, was a regular meeting spot for Morden’s fast-growing homeless population, and Sam would have expected to see someone there at midday. At the very least, there should have been one person under the bridge: the one Sam was supposed to be meeting.

  He saw nobody, and checked his watch. The face was cracked, but it still kept time. When he’d checked it five minutes earlier, it had informed him that he was late. It still said the same thing.

  So where the hell is he?

  The bridge was wide, spanning a patch of wasteland and a couple of derelict buildings. The space beneath was wreathed in shadows, but it was immediately obvious that there was no one at all waiting for him.

  Dammit.

  Sam frowned and slowed his steps a little as his thoughts raced ahead.

  He travelled to the bridge a couple of times a week, usually to pick up heroin. The guy who he had been buying off recently—a white-haired ex-rocker for whom the seventies had never really ended—called his product Brain Damage, but Sam was under no illusions. It wasn’t high-grade stuff: anyone who bought beneath the bridge knew that going in. What Sam got from the bridge was always the same. Not mind-blowing; not poison. When you had a habit to maintain, the not-poison part quickly became important. Far more than any desire for quality, at any rate. Quality drugs were for those people who still had jobs.

  Sam had a job, of sorts.

  Well, he had a way to earn money.

  And now that he had some to spend, Brain Damage-guy was nowhere to be seen.

  Fucking drug dealers. Untrustworthy bastards, every last one of—

  Sam’s heart fluttered. If there was nobody under the bridge to sell to him, he only had one other option. A man by the name of Trev, who never went anywhere near the bridge, and who had promised a few months back that if he ever set eyes on him again, Sam would regret it big time.

  Sam had believed him. Trev wasn’t a guy for making jokes.

  Shit.

  He quickened his pace, moving across a strip of patchy grass behind a supermarket car park. It was lunchtime, and the store was busy. Several shoppers glared at him as they loaded groceries into their cars. His clothes were a dead giveaway: filthy and tattered, hanging off a frame that had nudged the needle from slim up to unhealthy in recent months. They probably thought he was planning to steal a car or mug them.

  His cheeks burned, and he looked away, forcing himself not to acknowledge their stares.

  Moved quicker still.

  By the time he reached the bridge, he was running unsteadily, panting heavily. He hadn’t exercised in a long time, but it wasn’t his lack of fitness that made him gasp for air. It was the growing need in his body; the anxiety which spiked at the thought that there was nobody to buy from.

  Sam hadn’t taken a hit in a couple of days, and the churning in his gut was quickly becoming intolerable. If he had to wait too much longer, the growing tension in his nerves threatened to blossom, becoming an insufferable agony. He jogged into the shadows beneath the bridge, and when his eyes adjusted to the sudden change in light, he saw that it wasn’t deserted at all, and his train of thought derailed.

  He hit the brakes so hard that he fell on his arse, jarring the breath from his lungs.

  Yeah, bad things happened to homeless people.

  But not like this.

  The area beneath the bridge, next to a skeletal building, looked like a slaughterhouse. There had been several people taking shelter from the rain there by the look of it.

  And something had ripped them apart.

  It was a massacre.

  Sam figured there had to be at least seven or eight bodies on the ground, each and every one missing significant pieces, as though they had been set upon by some pack of wild animals.

  I’m the first on the scene, Sam thought dumbly and, for a moment, he was so struck by the ridiculousness of the situation that he was sure he was hallucinating. Withdrawal symptoms beginning to kick in.

  That had to be it.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath.

  When he reopened them, the bodies were still there. It was like a scene from a damn zombie movie. Sam couldn’t even begin to understand what had torn the homeless people apart, but he didn’t need to. This was not a place to hang around asking questions.

  He glanced around, feeling his skin prickle. His eyes hadn’t deceived him: he was definitely alone. The building in front of him was no more than a shell; he could clearly see that it was empty.

  He struggled to his feet, choking back the urge to retch again when he saw a severed head staring right at him, the skin flayed away to reveal the muscle and tendon beneath, and he recognised the wispy white hair, now matted and darkened by streaks of gore.

  It looked like Brain Damage-guy was smiling at him, his ruined face split in a horrific grin, but the worst part was the eyes, oh dear, sweet Jesus, his eyes…

  Sam had never seen eyes so wide, so marked by naked terror. Brain Damage-guy had been so scared when he died that it looked like his face hadn’t even been capable of registering the pain.

  Sam turned to run for the distant supermarket.

  And suddenly his legs just…refused to move.

  You can still get what you came for.

  The voice of his addiction, unspooling in his mind. Crooning a siren’s song that he was powerless to resist.

  He turned back to face the atrocity, gritting his teeth and biting back the urge to retch again.

  Brain Damage-guy’s head is there. So where are his legs? Where are his pockets?

  Sam saw a lot of legs tangled on the ground, and the prospect of rifling through clothes caked in human offal made his stomach twist. Some distant alarm began to sound in his head, like his soul was shrieking at him not to allow himself to sink to this new low. That it would lead only to darkness.

  I could just check a couple of bodies.

  He scanned the hideous mess.

  Maybe the ones to the right, which looked almost intact. Even if none of those limbs belonged to Brain Damage-guy, there was still a chance he’d find something. Perhaps some meth. Hell, even some fucking weed would take the jagged edge off the sickness he felt growing inside him.

  No one will know. Just check their pockets and get the hell out of here. Two minutes, tops.

  For a moment, he felt like he couldn’t move, torn between the almost overwhelming desire to run from the horror under the bridge and the surging narcotic need lighting him up like a cigarette; burning through him steadily.

  If there was a bag of Brain Damage just…sitting there, it would be a criminal waste to leave it. It’s not like the poor bastards torn apart in the shadows needed it, and when the police discovered the carnage, they would destroy any drugs they found without a second thought. Or ‘confiscate’ them as ‘evidence.’

  Sam shot another glance at the distant supermarket.

  If you’re going to do it, do it now, you idiot. Don’t just stand here gawping. Waiting to get caught.

  He took an uncertain step toward the nearest body.

  Tried to visualise himself actually rooting around in the wet remains. What kind of person could fumble around the exposed innards of other human beings? How low could a person possibly sink in their need for a fix?

  He tried to picture himself doing what he knew he should do; running as fast as he could. Never looking back.

  Pictured a fat bag of powder instead.

  And suddenly he was walking forward quickly on autopilot, the decision taken. The addiction won. It always did.

  The bridge was high, the underside laced by struts. The walls offered a series of alcoves - prime real estate for the homeless people who sheltered there overnight. Those were always the first spots to be taken. Sam studied them cautiously as he moved, imagining that some demented killer was lurking there in the shadows, impossible for him to see.
/>   Watching him approach.

  There was no movement, of course. He was alone beneath the bridge.

  Do this quickly, he thought, and he ran to the nearest body, patting down a pair of trousers which were soaked through and sticky to the touch. Empty. He moved on quickly to the next body, kneeling on something slippery and soft, gagging as he tried not to think about what it might have been.

  Again he searched through pockets and again, he found them empty.

  His pulse raced almost painfully. Every second he spent among the bodies felt like he was taking a bigger and bigger risk; each body searched, another round in a game of Russian roulette.

  This is crazy, Sam. Get the fuck out of here. Do you know what will happen if the cops turn up and find you here?

  He patted the next couple of bodies down quickly—too quickly, almost, to be certain their pockets were empty—and shot another glance at the distant supermarket.

  And a bomb detonated in his central nervous system.

  Movement in his peripheral vision.

  Close.

  He looked up into the shadows, certain that he had seen something moving toward him. Moving above him.

  What the fu—

  Sam’s eyes widened even as his left hand closed around a promising lump in a sickeningly moist pocket; a small bag of something that had been so important only moments earlier.

  There was something up there, clinging to the struts beneath the bridge, hanging in the shadows like a bat.

  Something big.

  Watching him intently.

  Sam squinted.

  Saw it clearly.

  Should have run, he thought, and his sanity began to dissolve, melted by the heat of terrible eyes which glowed a furious crimson in the gloom, puncturing his soul like scalding needles.

  Taking him.

  *

  Sam’s body walked away from the bridge at a casual pace. By the time his feet reached the entrance of the busy supermarket and his left hand pulled out the small flick-knife he always carried for emergencies, Sam was long gone; broken and banished to a shrieking cell in the deepest recess of his mind.

  Still, his body carried on, piloted by another; muscles moved by something dark and terrible and unfathomable.

  It wanted to play.

  9

  One day, you will remember how to enjoy new experiences.

  The words of Dan’s therapist came back to him as Herb led the way onto the deck of the trawler. Twenty-four hours after his first cruise began, and around seven hours after he had committed his first murder, Dan was about to experience yet another first: a helicopter ride, in the company of disciples of an insane cult which genuinely believed that the world was about to end at the hands of vampires, and which had, to all intents and purposes, kidnapped him.

  Maybe that counted as two firsts. Even three.

  Either way, his therapist had been dead wrong.

  He stepped out onto the deck, blinking at the grey sunlight filtering through the clouds, and did his best to remain invisible. It didn’t work; he felt the eyes of every man on the boat boring into him. The crew—most of whom looked bizarrely young; some even younger than Herb himself—regarded him with open hostility and more than a little fear.

  Herb led him past the battered container to the helicopter which took up the remainder of the foredeck. He waved half-hearted introductory gestures at the crew as he passed by them, reeling off names, but Dan didn’t try to commit them to memory. There was a Jay, a Stephen, a Christian, a Lawrence, but he couldn’t have put a face to any of those names if asked. He didn’t want to.

  “And that’s Jeremy,” Herb said finally, pointing at a man standing at the bow, who was by a distance the oldest person on the trawler. Jeremy didn’t speak or acknowledge Herb’s gesture. He stared at Dan across the deck, studying him as a surgeon might study a patient’s wounds, as though trying somehow to solve him.

  Dan stared back for a moment, but it was he who blinked first. Jeremy looked twice his age, but he was large and appeared physically fit, with stern eyes under a heavy brow. Staring down a man like that…well, it just wasn’t in his repertoire.

  He turned away, taking a deep breath, and gazed out across the ocean. For a moment, watching the hypnotic rolling grey waves of the Atlantic, he almost became convinced that he was hallucinating, and he rubbed at the wounds on his chest, trying to wake himself up; suddenly certain that he was actually lying in a hospital bed back in London, and that Elaine was at his bedside, waiting anxiously for him to wake from his latest seizure-induced coma.

  Almost.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it. Herb was somewhere behind him and was still talking, of course, but Dan had lost the thread of whatever he was saying. He glanced around the crew again, counting, before returning his gaze to the ocean.

  He frowned.

  There were a dozen men on the boat in total, including himself. A further four of the strange extended Rennick family had already perished, either at the hands of the vampires, or Dan himself. Judging by what Herb said, there were even more waiting for his return back at ‘the compound.’ How was it possible that all of these people shared the same delusion?

  He tried to get a handle on the bizarre relationship that the crew had with Herb, but could not fathom it. The people he saw on the trawler were young—with that one exception—and looked uniformly nervous. Yet it was almost as if they subverted their fear in deference to Herb. They looked at him as Dan imagined a peasant might have looked upon royalty back in the Middle Ages. When Herb approached them, Dan saw the men that he referred to as ‘clerics’ straighten their slumped shoulders, trying vainly to conceal their obvious fear.

  Dan could hardly bring himself to believe that it was actually happening. The creatures that had attacked the Oceanus had been bad enough, but the idea that the extraordinary tale of a secret history which first Edgar and then Herb had told him was actually true? Vampires that had been feeding on humans in secret for thousands of years, aided by a global network of cultists?

  It was just too much. It couldn’t be real.

  Couldn’t.

  Yet the look on the faces of Herb’s clerics left him in no doubt that they believed it. And hadn’t Dan seen them with his own eyes? Felt the thick blood washing over his hands as he decapitated one? What else could the monsters be? Did it even matter what Herb called them?

  This, Dan decided, was what insanity really was. Torn equally between two competing beliefs; unable to trust fully in either. Logic told him that he was back in London in that hospital bed with doctors frantically trying to wake him, but his senses told a different story. Logic—no matter how compelling—mattered little when he could taste the sea air and feel the pain of the slashes across his chest. When he could vividly remember the snarling teeth and the talons and the ship of blood—

  He shook the memories that threatened to overwhelm him away. He had been staring at the ocean for a long time. He turned back to face the deck, taking a deep breath.

  Herb was still talking to the crew, apparently declaring that they were within range, and Dan tuned in to what he was saying. They would take the chopper the rest of the way, and plant charges to sink the trawler behind them. Speed was of the essence now, Herb said. Getting the Sea Shanty back to the UK was taking too long. Already it was gone midday, and soon enough the light would be fading. If the vampires were going to rise, Herb continued, it would happen soon.

  “That’s the only thing we know for certain,” Herb said. “We have time, but not enough. So get moving.”

  Dan watched without emotion as the crew began to filter onto the helicopter, obeying without question or hesitation.

  What the hell is wrong with these people?

  Herb gestured at him to board the chopper with a friendly smile that set his teeth on edge. He’s almost acting like I have a choice, Dan thought, and his temperature rose, just a little.

  He took a calming breath through gritted teeth and nodded,
making his way toward the chopper as a kid who looked barely old enough to drive swung himself into the pilot’s seat.

  My first helicopter ride.

  As the vehicle lifted off, leaving a ship primed with C4 behind it, beginning the two-hour-plus trip to the Rennick compound, Dan wondered what his next new experience might be.

  And how much damage it would cause.

  10

  When Herb had said that he lived on a ‘compound,’ Dan had pictured something militaristic: featureless buildings surrounded by an electrified fence, maybe; perhaps even some underground complex, the sort of place a villain in a James Bond movie might call home.

  What he saw, when the chopper finally flew over what Herb called our land, was nothing like that. The Rennick compound was huge, buried deep in a thick forest that Herb said was protected green-belt land: no developer had been permitted to build on it for centuries; nor ever would. Dan hadn’t thought it was possible to find such a wilderness hidden in the crowded south of England.

  The buildings themselves were even more of a surprise: Dan did see several modern-looking pre-fabricated structures, but they were all clustered around a spectacular mansion that had to be three hundred years old at least. As the helicopter swung around it, he thought the house looked more like a castle, or some vast museum: a huge, imposing stone structure liberally sprinkled with Gothic trimmings. Buttresses and delicate arches and sneering gargoyles that had been carved into the walls; they looked like they were leaping from the house, desperately trying to escape the clutches of the stone that birthed them.

  Dan’s heart sank when he saw the place, not because of how oppressive and intimidating it appeared, but because, even from the air, he could tell immediately that it would be very difficult to escape from.

  Once they were travelling over England, the familiarity of the landscape had allowed him to feel a spark of hope; of normality, and he had started to daydream about fleeing the moment the chopper set down. But even if he could somehow slip away from the watchful gaze of Herb and his followers, the compound looked so isolated. There had to be a road leading from the place somewhere but he couldn’t see it through the chopper’s narrow windows. All he could see was trees. If he was going to make a run for it, he would have to do so blindly; fleeing through unfamiliar countryside as night began to fall.