“Looks like your plans are about as useful as mine,” Herb said. He glanced at the window dubiously. They were a long way from ground level, but if the vampires did venture up the building, they would be able to break in with ease now that the shutters were out of action. Besides which, he thought, there’s the small matter of the one that’s already in the building…
Staying might get them killed.
So might running.
Herb thought about the decisions that had led him to the dark apartment; the wrong choices he seemed to have continually made. At every turn, he had acted on his instincts, and people had died as a result.
“I guess we stay until they give us a reason not to,” he said uncertainly. “They might not even come up here.”
Dan coughed and shook his head, drawing all eyes in the room back to him.
“I tried to tell you, at the hospital,” he said, his voice little more than a rattling croak. “When I was inside the vampire’s head, I…wasn’t alone. There was something there. Something…looking back at me.”
Herb frowned.
“A vampire?”
Dan shook his head. “I don’t think so. Something else. More like something the vampires worship. Like their version of God. It…guides them, I think. Communicates with them. The black river…”
“Okay,” Herb said, lifting a hand in a stop right there gesture. “I’m not following.”
Dan shook his head like a dog, trying to clear it out.
“Whatever it is, it knows where I am, Herb. Or: it knows where I was when I killed myself.” He flushed. “Uh, when I killed the vampire.”
Herb stared at him, confused. “The hospital?”
Dan nodded.
“They’re all headed in this direction,” he said quietly. “Every last one of them; following the black river. I think they’re coming for me.”
*
Dan watched their moonlit faces carefully as he delivered the news. Everyone in the room looked at him with a fearful expression that he knew was only half the product of him telling them that the immediate vicinity would likely soon be swarming with vampires.
The rest of their fear, well, that was reserved for Dan himself. It was plainly written on their faces—even Herb. They were all scared of him.
And shouldn’t they be?
Dan focused his gaze on Mancini.
Was I really going to kill him?
The big American glanced at him furtively, and looked away. Dan knew why. For a moment there, he had been Leon Mancini, and a moment had been long enough to peer around in the dusty cupboards of the man’s mind. Mancini had killed dozens in the name of country and money, and more than once for little reason at all. A mercenary.
Mancini didn’t want to be in London; he was there, incredibly, to appease a woman he hated and loved in equal measure, and his fear at the events unfolding around the city hadn’t quite broken his resolve to bring the prize that she demanded back to America.
Me, Dan thought bleakly. I’m the prize.
A surge of bitter resentment rose in his gut.
This will never end. If it’s not Herb or Mancini, it will be someone else. Or the vampires.
Or the river.
He stared at the stocky American.
“Jennifer Craven,” Dan said absently, and Mancini looked at him with wide, fearful eyes.
Herb glanced at Dan, surprised.
“Craven? What about her? And how do you even know that name?”
“From inside his head.” Dan pointed at Mancini. “His name’s Leon.”
Herb’s jaw dropped, and he stared at Mancini, who in turn focused furiously on the window.
“Jesus Christ,” Herb said, his voice soft with wonder, “…uh, stay out of my head, Dan, okay?”
“Jennifer Craven wants me,” Dan said, through a rattling wheeze. “She’s the one that sent Mancini. The head of the Order in America. She’s a murderer.”
Herb chuckled.
“Aren’t we all?” he waved an arm around the room. “Well, maybe except Conny and her kid.”
Conny kept her eyes on the floor.
“Yeah, maybe,” Dan said, “but Leon over there thinks Craven enjoys it. Don’t you, Leon?”
Mancini glared at him, his face a mixture of revulsion and barely-contained fury.
“He’s afraid of her,” Dan said, and began to cough violently.
Herb’s brow furrowed. “When Craven starts to matter, we’ll figure it out. First, we have to live that long. The hospital is right around the corner. If they start searching this whole area…if they find us? We won’t survive the night in here without the shutters. Not up against all of them.”
Dan felt the ripple of tension as it ran around the room at Herb’s words. They all knew it, Dan thought, but hearing somebody say it was a whole different matter. We won’t survive the night.
“How many more times do you reckon you can do your little X-men trick?” Herb said.
Dan shook his head.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s me doing it. But each time it happens, I feel like a little less of me comes back. I’m not entirely sure that I’ll…come back at all.”
“Okay,” Herb said, “We have to figure this out, you’re right, but now isn’t the time—”
It is, Dan thought, and blistering pulse of white-hot rage coursed through him. It’s exactly the time. In fact, it’s long fucking overdue.
I’m not anybody’s fucking prize.
The strength of the emotion which rolled through Dan took him by surprise. Like all who live in fear, he had dreamed all-too often about asserting himself and taking charge of his own destiny, yet even in his dreams, the crippling anxiety had always been there, lurking in the background like a shadow.
Now, it was absent.
In its place; seething, boiling outrage.
Determination.
“Mancini,” Dan said, his voice gritty. Mancini turned his head, but refused to meet Dan’s gaze directly. “Jennifer Craven doesn’t want to kill me, does she?”
“I don’t honestly know,” Mancini admitted with a sigh. “But I’d guess whatever she had in mind involved your death somewhere down the line, yeah.”
“Hmmm,” Dan grunted. “I suppose I’ll just have to see if I can change her mind about that. So do what she pays you for, Mr Mancini. Extract us. Take me to Colorado. Take all of us.”
“Sure,” Mancini said sourly. “No problem. Other than the skyscraper without power that we’re at the top of, and the city full of vampires, and your friend Rennick over there pointing my own gun at me. I’ll get right on it.”
Dan stared at Mancini for several long seconds, before finally nodding.
“Let him have his gun back, Herb,” he said.
Herb looked dubious.
“What are you doing, Dan?”
“It’s like you said. Home doesn’t exist for me anymore. How could it? Where else should I go now? I’ve been running and hiding for the last two years. No more.”
Herb’s brow furrowed.
“It’s okay,” Dan said with a weak smile. “Let him have his gun. Leon won’t get any funny ideas, will you, Leon?”
Herb stared at Dan for a moment, and then at Mancini. Finally, he shrugged and slid the machine gun across the floor to the American.
“Funny ideas like killing Rennick, you mean?” Mancini said as he picked the weapon up. “Nah. I’ll gladly take him to Colorado. Craven will just love him.”
Dan barked a sour laugh, and coughed violently.
More blood.
“Everyone got their dicks in a row?” Conny said abruptly from the window.
Nobody had an answer, other than her son’s almost-stifled chuckle.
“Good,” she continued, turning to face the room, “then maybe we can focus on getting out of here?”
“Without power? Without elevators?” Mancini said. “Good luck with that. You geniuses brought a vampire in with you, remember? And more on the way. There are probably ha
lf a dozen in here already, going floor by floor. Want to tell me how we’re going to find our way out of here without stumbling into that?”
“Sure,” Conny said, and she pointed at the dog sitting by her side. “We follow him.”
37
The fear was like hands pressing on her back, squeezing her ribs until it became difficult to breathe. In darkness, the huge, sleek skyscraper felt like it might conceal threats in every gloomy corner.
The hallways in the residential levels were wide and straight, the floors lined with plush carpet which made the noise of the group’s movement almost inaudible as they began to descend through the building. Conny was grateful for that, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that the carpet would muffle more than just human footsteps.
The clicking noise the creatures made was certainly hideous—a sound that she was sure she’d hear in her nightmares if she lived to be a hundred—but at least it offered some advance warning that one of the creatures was close by.
In the corridors of the Shard, there would be no such warning. The apartments which the group passed were locked, and the hallways themselves offered little in the way of hiding places. Too much glass and wide open space. If she turned a corner and ran straight into a vampire, there would be nowhere to hide. Their only hope then would be Herb’s strange friend, Dan—and his presence spiked Conny’s anxiety almost as much as a vampire’s might.
She walked in a half-crouch at the front of the group, resting her left hand lightly on Remy’s powerful shoulders, waiting nervously to feel his muscles tense. On each floor, she led Remy to a stairwell and waited, gauging by his reaction whether it was safe to proceed further.
For his part, Remy seemed content enough, sniffing curiously at the doorways they passed, but showing no indication that there was any threat in the immediate vicinity.
So far, they had descended only three floors; not yet even getting clear of the residential levels. The Shard had been touted as a vertical city upon opening: residences at the top, a luxury hotel and restaurants below them; all of it sitting atop levels upon levels of offices and retail areas. While it didn’t quite manage the scale that vertical city implied, it came pretty close. With only a couple of flashlights between the whole group, and the cloudy night making the moonlight that streamed through the windows weak and intermittent, progress was already painfully slow.
With the elevators out of action, each floor offered a couple of ways down: the main stairway, and a smaller version designed as a fire escape. When they tried the first of those smaller stairways, they found it to be windowless and pitch black, and worse: there was no way to be certain that if they took the fire escape, they would actually be able to re-enter the main part of the building itself.
Herb had immediately ruled out using the fire escape, arguing that there was every chance they would end up trapped in there with no way to flee.
Nobody seemed to want to debate it.
Conny thought it would take them the best part of an hour to reach the ground level on foot—and that was without taking into account the possibility that they might need to hide or fight for their lives at any moment. She gripped the pistol that she had taken from Burnley, running her thumb over the cool metal grip. This time, carrying a gun didn’t give her any sense of power; not at all. It made her feel afraid.
Her mind wanted to run back to Robert Nelson’s face; his sightless eyes fixed on the tunnel roof; grief and remorse tried to clutch at her throat.
She blinked firmly, trying to clear her thoughts, refocusing only on what she could see as she paused at a railing which overlooked another set of steps leading down, to yet another residential area. Each level contained less than a handful of vast apartments, much of their interiors half-visible through the gleaming glass walls.
Not for the first time, Conny was struck by the sheer decadence of the place. In Herb’s apartment, she had peered into a small bathroom, and noticed that the entire wall alongside the toilet was a window. There was no curtain to draw across; no need for privacy. The Shard loomed so far above everything else in London that the residents could shit right in front of the people far below and not worry about being seen. The notion had struck her as both oddly comical, and strangely sad. A bizarre thing to aspire to, she had decided; accumulating enough wealth that you could wipe your arse while staring down at an entire city from a glass box in the sky.
She glanced at Logan.
He still refused to meet her eye, but his sulk had mostly evaporated; boiled away by the terror of seeing the monsters up close. It was funny how quickly the sight of a vampire reorganised one’s priorities. Logan was confused and scared enough without throwing giant carnivorous insects into the mix as well.
“You see anything, Lo?”
Logan stood alongside her at the railing, surveying the level below. Two huge apartments took up almost the entire floor. As far as Conny could see, they were empty.
“No, nothing,” Logan mumbled.
She glanced at him in surprise. She hadn’t expected an actual response.
Logan kept his gaze firmly on the level below, and Conny nodded to herself. Best to let him have time. He’d come around eventually.
She gestured at the others, filing along behind her toward the viewing platform, to follow her lead, and moved on, quashing her desire to hurry.
There were around a dozen of the creatures in London, if Herb’s theory had been correct. If he was right about the power stations, any others that were hunting Dan Bellamy would take a long time to get there from other parts of the country. There was little point worrying about them—not as long as Remy continued to make good time.
A dozen, Conny thought. Even if they were all inside the Shard, there was a good chance that they wouldn’t run into the vampires. The building was large enough to get lost inside for days, and once they were beyond the residential levels, there would be a lot more places to hide.
She made her way down to the next level, allowing her confidence to rise, just a little.
*
They were on the fifty-fifth floor, almost clear of the residential levels, when Remy growled softly for the first time.
Conny froze immediately, holding up a hand to halt the others behind her. She knelt next to Remy, listening to his breathing, feeling the thrumming of his heart against her palm. He seemed anxious about something, but not in the same fraught way he had been back in the tunnels of the Underground.
Conny frowned, scratching the back of his neck, and listened for the sound of movement.
Nothing.
Herb shuffled alongside her.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” Conny shook her head. “When he ran into the vampires before, he was terrified. Now…I’m not sure. He seems more intrigued.”
“Maybe he heard something else,” Herb offered, “there could still be people here who refused to evacuate, hiding out in their apartments?”
Conny focused her eyes on the distant stairwell which led down to the next floor.
“Maybe,” she agreed uncertainly. “Have the others wait here for a moment. I’ll check it out. Remy, stay.”
Remy took a seat alongside Herb as Conny crept forward.
At the stairs, she paused. The level below was almost pitch black as clouds raced across the moon outside the windows, but she thought she detected something in the distance, making its way toward her. A shadow, which seemed to move among the others with purpose.
She squinted.
What is it?
For several tense seconds, Conny’s eyes did battle with the low light as she scanned the wide corridor below. When she had almost decided that it was simply her imagination playing tricks on her, her eyes finally won.
A glint of light from the centre of the corridor, as if the weak moonlight had briefly caught something reflective.
Whatever it was, it was only about fifty yards away, moving toward the stairs at a slow, steady pace.
She gritted her teeth, praying for a break in the clouds; for some moonlight.
And her prayers were answered. A shaft of pale light illuminated the level below for just a second, but it was long enough for Conny to see.
Not a vampire.
A man.
One man, alone; stumbling along the hallway as though in a daze.
She retreated as far as Remy and Herb. The others were lined up along the wall, but she didn’t dare lift her voice enough to speak to them all. Instead, she pulled Herb close, breathing directly into his ear.
“There’s a man down there. Heading this way. Walking like he’s drunk, or drugged or something.”
Herb fixed his gaze on the carpet, his eyes widening.
“It’s one of them,” he said breathlessly, “using a human to search for us. Hoping we’ll give ourselves away.”
“Herb,” Conny said, “he’s coming straight for us. We have to go back up—”
“We’d just be cornering ourselves,” Herb muttered. “We have to get out of the residential levels. Get down to the hotel and restaurants. We’re sitting ducks in these damn corridors.”
Conny nodded.
“Sure, so what do you suggest?”
Herb grimaced.
“We have to kill him.”
38
Herb gestured at the group to follow, and led them back to the next set of stairs which led back up toward his father’s apartment. The guy approaching them was moving slowly, according to Conny, but Herb needed more time to think.
Killing the man outright would bring the vampire that had control of him; there was no doubt in Herb’s mind about that. Worse, the creature had to be close, maybe only a handful of floors away.
He felt frustration rising inside him. The Infinity Pool was only a couple of levels below, and it served as the ‘roof’ of the Shangri La hotel, which occupied the next eighteen floors. If they could reach the hotel, he was sure they would have more options: more rooms, more stairways; anything.
He flashed a glance at a door marked fire exit, which stood around halfway down the corridor.
Adrift 2: Sundown Page 24
