Adrift
Author: K.R. Griffiths
Date: 2014-11-21 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Vampires; Paranormal; Thriller; Fiction; Suspense; Mystery; Fantasy; Apocalyptic; Supernatural
Description: For artist Dan Bellamy and his new bride Elaine, a trip on the world's biggest, newest cruise ship represents more than just the honeymoon of a lifetime: it is also a celebration of the progress Dan has made toward beating the agoraphobia that has plagued him since he suffered a horrific knife attack two years earlier. The ship is a perfect floating paradise, but when Dan spots what he thinks is a body being thrown overboard, he begins to suspect that not everybody aboard the Oceanus is there for a vacation. Soon, Dan will discover that there are some things worse than murder, and the body he

Copyright © 2016 by K.R. Griffiths

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Table of contents

Also by K.R. Griffiths

Wildfire Chronicles series:

Panic

Shock

Psychosis

Mutation

Trauma

Reaction

Other novels:

Survivor: A horror thriller

Last Resort

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1

Faster.

If Jenna Hess had any time to think, she might have idly wondered when she had last been forced to run for anything.

The answer might have been a bus; yeah, probably a bus, though as she had settled into her role at the office and realised that the bored, married men who shared the tedious space with her weren't going to complain about intermittent tardiness, even missed buses hadn't prompted Jenna to break into anything more strenuous than a trot in years. Hell, running was for kids; something you left behind at school, like acne.

She was running now, though.

Jenna burst through the doorway into the dark, wet alley at full tilt and heard a burbling sort of shriek pouring from her mouth. With each pace, the fearsome noise rose in pitch.

Screaming. Actual screaming.

If she'd had any time to wonder about that, Jenna might have concluded that she couldn't ever remember screaming. She had let out cries of surprise or fright, of course, while watching horror movies with her off-on boyfriend, or whenever she saw a spider skittering along the floor in her London apartment, but that wasn't screaming.

What Jenna was doing as she ran; that was screaming.

The scream was a ragged, painful roar that seemed to have a mind of its own. It tore itself free of her throat, leaving no room for the oxygen that she desperately needed to be heading in the other direction. The scream had to be free; it wasn't a choice she made. Wasn't even a cry for help, really; just an explosion of terrified sound. As if her body had slipped into autopilot, detaching from the processes of her mind somehow.

The scream was an animal noise.

Those were the things that Jenna might have pondered, if she had time.

Instead, her thoughts focused entirely on a solitary word that flickered in her mind like a strobe light. The word was what was left when everything else had been boiled away. When the bullshit that constituted everyday life had been evaporated by the heat of her terror, the word was the residue. The everything.

Just one word.

Faster.

Faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, fas-

Beyond the door that had provided her with an escape route from the horror in the building, the alley was unlit, and the stink of it as she bolted into the gloom almost rocked her head back. Writhing around beneath the expected stench of piss and stale alcohol, Jenna's nose detected something else: a dark undercurrent.

Blood.

Her trembling scream lifted a half-octave.

Faster.

The alley stretched out to her left and right, and the darkness offered up no indication that taking either direction would be preferable.

Some part of her mind—the part that cowered in the shadows and whimpered while it let animal instinct pilot her burning limbs—registered the fact that she did not recognise her surroundings. That part of Jenna's brain had important information, she thought, but none of it seemed helpful right then. None of it added extra strength to her muscles or allowed her lungs to take in more of the precious oxygen.

None of it made her move faster.

On a whim, Jenna turned right and shot through the refuse and detritus that lurked in the shadows, streaking forward blindly, oblivious to the danger that might lie ahead. Nothing seemed as important as the danger that lurked behind. Nothing could be.

She made it about thirty yards before she felt broken glass beneath her bare left foot, and her mind had a fraction of a second to warn her what was coming.

It wasn’t enough.

The right foot dropped before she was able to decipher what was happening, and then crippling pain lanced through Jenna's feet, and the trembling shriek became a guttural roar. Jenna went down hard, crunching into the corner of something that felt like a dumpster and slamming her temple into the ground. When her right shoulder popped with a muted crack that she heard rather than felt, the dreadful noise knocked something loose in her mind.

For a moment, as she came to rest on the unforgiving ground, the world seemed to draw in a deep, shuddering breath, and the crack of her bones ricocheted around the alley. A sound like wet wood popping on an open fire.

Such a permanent sound, Jenna thought blearily as the huge, dark shape of the dumpster began to swim in her vision. Something about the snapping of her bones seemed to underline a certainty that welled inside her. A terrible finality.

I'm not going to survive this.

Jenna felt dumbly surprised. Even when she had awoken to find herself naked and locked in a dark, unfamiliar room, some part of her had assumed that she would not actually die. How the fuck could that happen? How was it possible that one moment you're sitting at a bar exchanging slurred banter with a man who definitely has potential and wondering if you had already missed the last train back to London, and the next you're getting ready to die? That sort of thing just didn't happen anywhere other than on television.

It had to be a nightmare. Some sort of psychosis. A mental break.

Had to be.

Even when the door to her surely-not-real cell had opened, and the strange man had dragged her, screaming and struggling vainly to break his iron grip on her hair, to the other room; the one that held something terrible behind a grimy black door, Jenna hadn't believed that she could actually die.

She believed it now.

Lying on the slick alley floor, feeling shards of glass pushing almost apologetically into her flesh, it was all too obvious that the pain was real. And if the pain was real, everything else had to be, too.

The pain was receding, though, fading away to nothing, and that realisation made something inside Jenna shriek in horror.

Somewhere in the sickly darkness, she heard a door opening; heard footsteps approaching at a methodical, even pace, and she turned her head feebly toward the sound. Her lips were moving, and sound was emerging, but the words that formed in Jenna's mind—all the emphatic pleas; all the begging and cajoling—were just deformed slurs when they fell from her mouth.

"That hurt."

A man's voice. He sounded regretful rather than angry or pained, and hearing the detached neutrality of his tone, Jenna wanted more than anything to scream fuck you. Couldn't.

"I told you it would be worse if you struggled," the man said.

Jenna tried to focus on the man, and realised that her sight had changed somehow. In the left eye, where the corner of the dumpster had connected like an angry heavyweight, there was now just impenetrable darkness. With an effort, she raised her right eye and dimly made out a figure standing over her in the gathering darkness. This, presumably, was the man that she had bitten; the one that had released his grip on her hair when she ripped a lump of meat from the soft flesh around his thumb.

The one that she had been drinking with only a couple of hours earlier, wondering how a man so attractive could possibly be single.

The bite had given her an opportunity to run, and Jenna had taken it, and for a while there, she had thought it was all going to work out.

My big escape plan.

If it hadn't felt like doing so might split her skull in two, Jenna might have laughed at the absurdity of it.

She felt strong hands clamping around her ankles, and suddenly her legs were in the air and the dark world was moving, scraping past her vision slowly.

A swell of nausea that sloshed messily around her mind anaesthetised the agony she knew she should be feeling as her body was dragged across the broken glass. There wasn't any pain, just pressure: like feeling a dentist's drill eating its way into enamel. Jenna prayed for unconsciousness, clawed for it mentally, but the darkness denied her entry.

The man dragging Jenna toward her death had been right.

She had struggled, and it was worse.

He's taking me back to the room. Taking me back to...it.

Images flashed across her mind, diseased and wet. Memories of something only half-seen in the gloomy room beyond the terrible black door; something that panted eagerly and stank of rotting meat and incalculable age, and Jenna's mind finally snapped.

When the man dragged her to the black door and threw it open once more, fully this time, so she could clearly see the horror that awaited her, Jenna's bowels and bladder evacuated themselves. She didn't even notice.

Unconsciousness would have been great, but Jenna's last thought as her psyche dissolved gratefully into a seething pit of destructive chaos was that insanity wasn't such a bad alternative to oblivion. Not so bad at all.

When Jenna Hess died, she did so slowly, in dreadful increments, chewed apart almost thoughtfully in the stinking dark by a foul presence that even her all-consuming madness shrank away from. She was entirely unaware of her fingers pulling a shard of glass from her thigh and using it to cut away chunks of her own flesh, knowing only that she needed to pass the meat to the creature.

That it wanted the meat.

It took the thing almost twenty minutes to finally demand to eat a part of Jenna that was vital enough to end the torment, and she reached into her ruined, weeping gut and tore out something that popped and sent her spinning, at last, into the welcoming darkness.

Twenty minutes that lasted lifetimes.

Jenna had giggled and screamed the entire time.

*

It was done.

It had cost him a large chunk of his thumb, but the man thought that if he got away from Brighton having lost only that, he could call the night a success.

The man glanced at the creature from the corner of his eyes, trying not to stare at it directly, and looked away quickly. He remained in the doorway, separated from the abomination by the ruined corpse of the woman.

He hadn't been able to watch as she ripped the flesh from her legs and torso and passed the dripping pieces of herself to the creature, and he found he couldn't look at the smeared, oozing result that remained on the floor either. He kept his gaze on the wall, staring straight through it and doing his best not to see anything.

"We have your message, and now you've had your payment," the man said flatly. "Tell your...brothers that it shall be done. They will be summoned when it is prepared."

His voice faltered a little at the last; the creature had growled murky displeasure at the word summoned. The noise it made seemed to ripple through the air, tainting it. Making it toxic.

The man didn't wait for a reply. He turned and strode away quickly, but not too fast; determined not to show weakness. The thing beyond the black door had a code of conduct to stick to, but the man suspected that if he appeared weak and afraid, the creature may not be able to resist the gravitational pull of its twisted nature.

When the black door had closed behind him, and he was standing out in the dark alley once more, the man sucked in a huge lungful of air and vomited so violently that the muscles in his torso would ache for almost a week.

Two months later

2

Crowds made Dan Bellamy nervous, and he defined crowd as any gathering of people that numbered greater than two.

That meant his current location induced more than a little anxiety in him. Hell, what he felt as he stood in the terminus, waiting to board the ship, was something closer to all-out terror.

Dan was surrounded by hundreds—no, thousands—of people, and he felt his nerves hum and his cheeks burn, certain somehow that they were all looking at him. He fussed at his mop of hair incessantly, checking that it covered the scar on his forehead, and kept his eyes down, scanning promotional literature more thoroughly than anybody had ever scanned promotional literature. He counted out the seconds, trying to keep his breathing even.

His therapist had told him that the trip might be happening too early into his recovery, that it might be overwhelming and terrifying to him after a couple of years spent battling acute agoraphobia and debilitating panic attacks. Maybe it would even set him back. Too much, too soon.

Dan had listened and understood, but he remained determined to go through with the trip; more determined than he had ever been about anything in his entire life. Elaine had stood by him resolutely through the illness, and Dan would be damned if he would let his condition ruin their honeymoon.

Dan thought it was a miracle that Elaine had gone through with the wedding at all; hitching herself to a virtual shut-in was, he thought, an act of either extreme bravery or extreme foolishness.

Or maybe an act of extreme love; there was no accounting for that.

Whatever the case, Dan had promised Elaine a honeymoon to remember, and the anxiety he felt as the day approached merely cemented his resolve. His new bride deserved better. If better meant Dan standing in a seething whirlpool of people in a vast space like the terminus and furiously reading about the facilities on the ship over and over while his nerves blazed, so be it.

"Well, hello there, Mr Bellamy."

Dan looked up from the pamphlet he had been scrutinising and smiled widely in relief.

"Hello yourself, Mrs Bellamy."

Elaine giggled as she approached the spot at which her husband waited with the luggage. In the twenty-odd hours since the wedding ceremony, she had taken every opportunity to call Dan Mr Bellamy, and her face lit up every time he responded. Some part of Dan knew the novelty was bound to wear off soon, and so he tried to commit the delight in her smile to memory.

The ceremony itself had been modest, and had gone off without a hitch, despite Dan's lurching terror at the prospect of the occasion.

Elaine had happily taken over the bulk of the organisation, but had catered for Dan's nervousness, and ended up producing something more like a party than a formal event. Dan's guests numbered only a handful—close family and a few old university friends, all of whom knew about his condition and took turns on Dan watch, helping him to get through the day without freaking out.

Elaine's family and network of friends was far more extensive, and bumped the total number of guests up to a figure that brought Dan out in a clammy sweat, but in the end, the day had gone better than he could have wished for.

Getting through the wedding day itself was yet another sign that Dan was slowly conquering his anxiety, crawling along the path to good health, and with every such milestone that passed, he felt that he grew a little more comfortable with the world. Months earlier, he hadn't even been able to leave the house.

Genuine progress. The wedding had been a terrifying prospect, but wound up being another part of the healing process.

Dan could barely remember the end of the night: by six in the evening, he had been sinking shots of tequila at the bar with his new father in law; revelling in the nebulous confidence the alcohol provided.

From there, the night became one long, glorious blur: dancing with his new bride, offering his slurred thanks to what felt like a million well-wishers. At the end of the night, fuelled by the booze, he had a vague recollection of teaching Elaine's grandmother to dance like a robot to a thumping techno tune. He had a feeling that particular memory would make him smile for the rest of his days. Good food, good company; the most beautiful girl he had ever seen calling him husband, and signs everywhere that the person he had been before everything turned bad was coming back.

Dan had wanted the night to go on forever.

When the guests finally departed, Dan rode an adrenaline high and joked about what he called the acrobatics he was going to put Elaine through when they got back to their hotel room; in the end, when they finally made it to bed, both of them passed out—fully clothed—almost immediately.

Getting married, it turned out, was a tiring business. In the movies, the husband carried his bride across the threshold; in real life, after hours spent celebrating and drinking, Dan had enough trouble carrying himself.

The next morning, they had set off from London at an obscenely early hour, and made it to Portsmouth on the south coast, hungover and happy, around an hour before their honeymoon was due to officially begin.

The alcohol-inspired confidence had worn off by the time they reached the port, but Dan clung to the memory of it as the familiar anxiety resurfaced, and ran through all the coping mechanisms his therapist had taught him. Breathing exercises and meditative techniques. Little tricks to deceive the mind into calming down. After all, it was just a vacation. People took them all the damn time. Everything would be fine.

"Everything okay with the tickets?" Dan asked, and Elaine nodded vigorously.

She held up two tickets, and showed him the stamped mark put on them by the check-in assistants.

"We are ready to board, Captain." Elaine grinned, and delivered a mock salute.

"Captain? I like the sound of that. You want to go with that as a nickname, I'm all for it."

"Pfft." Elaine stuck her tongue out. "Tell you what, as long as you keep providing cruises, I'll keep calling you Captain. Deal?"

Dan chuckled.

"Guess I'd better enjoy it while it lasts, then."

The cruise was far beyond the means of the newlyweds, and made possible only by generous wedding gifts made by both sets of parents, along with an almost-certainly reckless decision by Dan and Elaine to max out their credit cards.

They had agonised over that choice for a long time, until Dan had finally overcome Elaine's resistance to the idea. Elaine was the sensible one, the one that was good with figures and planning.

Dan had made good money selling his artwork, but the funds they had only stretched so far. He hadn’t painted in two years, now. Not since it happened.

Yet when he told Elaine that he would work again; that the blank canvases and dry brushes were not permanent, she believed it, perhaps more than he did himself.

In the end, Dan's persuasion had proved successful: the honeymoon was a once-in-a-lifetime deal after all, and it coincided with another opportunity that would never come around again: tickets for the maiden voyage of the world's biggest, newest cruise ship.

"You know," Dan said, "I've been reading up on the Oceanus." He gestured at the fistful of pamphlets he had been scanning while Elaine got them checked in. "It turns out there's actually some debate about whether it is the biggest ship in the world after all."

"Oh?"

Dan nodded.

"Apparently there's one with twenty decks out in the Middle East somewhere. That one's longer, too."

Elaine frowned.

"So how is there debate? That one's bigger. Are you telling me that our once-in-a-lifetime honeymoon on the world's biggest ship is actually just a common-or-garden trip on the world's second biggest ship, Captain?"

She grinned.

"Ha! Want to get our money back?" Dan chuckled. "The Oceanus is much wider, apparently, so it is still considered the biggest in terms of 'available deck area' or something like that."

"So," Elaine said. "It's sort of a length or girth thing?"

Dan rolled his eyes.

"There you go again, bringing everything back to sex."

Elaine punched him playfully on the arm.

"You set me up to say that."

Dan shook his head soberly.

"Obsessed," he said. "When we get back to dry land, I'm booking you into a clinic. Sex addiction is an illness, you know."

"Oh?" Elaine arched an eyebrow. "When we get back to dry land? Whatever will you do in the meantime?"

Dan affected a serious expression.

"Well…I doubt they have the means to treat you on the ship. And I hear going cold turkey can be pretty rough…"

Elaine laughed.

"Deal," she said. "And don't worry about the ship, even if it is the second biggest after all. Size doesn't matter to me. You know that."

Elaine turned and walked toward the main passenger exit of the terminus, heading for the giant sign that read boarding. She didn't look back, but Dan could tell from her shuddering shoulders that she was giggling helplessly at her own joke.

He stood for a moment, smiling happily and looking around the rest of the crowded building barely able to believe that after years of self-imposed isolation, he was standing among so much bustling activity and not suffering a panic attack.

The atmosphere in the place was electric. Most of the passengers looked to be middle-aged—after all, cruises were expensive, and younger holidaymakers tended to opt for the heaving beaches and sweaty nightclubs of resorts in the Mediterranean. Still, Dan saw a few younger people milling around, waiting to pass through security or heading toward the boarding exit. Some families with young children who ran laps around their parents, their faces lit with excitement.

He saw several young couples, and a few of them wore the same dopily-happy expression that he imagined was plastered across his own face. Honeymooners, most likely. Setting off for three weeks of luxury and relaxation, and leaving the land—and all the problems and anxieties that went with it—behind.

It was, Dan thought, going to be the best three weeks of his life, as long as he didn’t let his illness get in the way.

He took a moment to breathe deeply and tried to savour every little detail of the vast terminus, and to memorise the fact that he had stood there, alone in the crowd, and nothing bad had happened to him, and then he hefted the suitcases, and broke into a trot to catch up with his giggling bride.

3

The waiting was the worst part: rocking incessantly in the gloomy rear of the van; rolling around in the vehicle’s metal belly like an ache. Stuck with the bags and the tools and the dust, unable to even see the road ahead, it felt to Herbert Rennick like being transported in a large metal coffin.

He tried not to think about just how apt that might be.

Herb cast a glance around the van. In the back, where the light diffused through a layer of grime on the windscreen, he thought he could almost see the tension hanging on the air like confetti.

The four men inside the vehicle had travelled for several minutes under a smothering blanket of silence, each apparently more preoccupied with their own thoughts than chatter. Maybe, Herb thought, it was always like that when men headed off toward what might be their deaths. That sickly silence. Herb didn't know: he had no frame of reference for a thing like this. Nobody did.

What he did know for sure, was that the silence was getting under Edgar's skin. Even in the gloomy half-light, Herb could see that Ed's face had become home to two twitching, darting eyes.

Edgar was the oldest of the four Rennick brothers, and the de facto leader. If anyone was going to break the silence, it would be Ed. It was always Ed.

Herb dropped his gaze as Edgar's penetrating eyes locked onto him, and he let the floor of the van become his sole focus. The floor and his thoughts.

This is actually happening. We're going through with it, right now.

Herb could hardly believe it. The trip in the van with his three brothers was the endgame, the culmination of a lifetime of preparation, and Herb hadn't ever believed it would actually happen. Now that the time for action had arrived, it felt like he was stumbling through someone else's bad dream.

In the end, the day of reckoning seemed to come so fast, and Herb's attempts to persuade his family to deviate from the course they followed had proved as brittle as dead leaves. He always thought he'd have more time to talk some sense into his brothers, but it turned out that assumption had an expiry date.

Because here they were.

Edgar was still staring at him.

"Are you ready?" Edgar said gruffly, breaking the silence for the first time since Seb had turned over the van's engine.

Herb looked up at Edgar sharply, through eyes that felt almost painfully wide. The question hit him like an electric shock.

Edgar had insisted on riding in the back with Herb, letting Phil and Seb—the middle two brothers; twins who formed their own strange little team within a team—take the front of the vehicle. That insistence, Herb was certain, was borne of Edgar’s need to keep a close eye on his youngest brother.

Got to make sure I'm not going to do anything crazy, right? Herb thought darkly. Little late for that, bro. We're all in the middle of a whole lot of crazy right now.

"Am I ready?" Herb repeated. He couldn't quite keep his disbelief at Edgar's question out of his tone.

Phil and Seb were stoic, steady types, and they generally followed Edgar's lead without hesitation. Seb, particularly, idolised Edgar, and wherever Seb went, Phil followed. The middle two brothers were a package deal, and had spent their entire lives following orders and causing no fuss.

Perfect little Rennick boys.

Herb knew that Edgar had aimed the question only at him, and it found its mark. He felt his temper flare.

"How can I be ready for something like this, Ed?" Herb snapped in a tone that came out disappointingly high-pitched. "Ready? What fucking kind of a question is that?"

Edgar nodded, as if the fraught response was exactly what he had expected, and dropped his eyes to the floor of the van, apparently lost in thought. Herb followed his big brother's piercing gaze, and saw the dust skittering around their feet, refusing to settle. Seb was driving too fast.

Edgar drilled his gaze into the back of Seb's head for a moment, before returning his stare to Herb. Edgar was tall, athletic. Good-looking where Herb was plain. Of the four brothers, only Edgar had inherited their father's extraordinary piercing grey eyes. He exuded charisma and confidence, and he was born to lead. It came naturally to him.

None of that meant Edgar was right about what they were doing. About any of it.

"None of this goes bad as long as we don't draw attention to ourselves, Herb," Edgar said, with what Herb thought was an admirable attempt at a patient tone.

"You be ready," Edgar continued, stabbing a thick finger in Herb's direction, "we all be ready, by preparing ourselves thoroughly, and by making sure none of us fuck this up by freaking out. We've all trained for this, so just relax, okay? Seb!"

Edgar roared that last word, making everyone in the van flinch.

"Slow the fuck down," Edgar hissed. "We're expected. Everything is arranged. Nobody will give us a second glance, as long as you stop driving like the fucking wheels are on fire."

Seb grunted a response, and Herb felt the van slow a little. After a moment, the dust in the rear settled back onto the floor as if the life had been stolen from it.

Everything is arranged, Herb thought darkly. It was amazing what wealth could arrange; the doors that his father's money could open.

They were close now. Herb thought he could almost smell the excitement of the passengers crowding at the terminus mingling with the salty aroma of the English Channel. In the distance, somewhere beyond the wheezing rattle of the van's ancient engine, Herb heard the ship's horn split the afternoon air. It was no more than a toot, really, but the size of the damn thing made it sound like a warning blasted from celestial trumpets.

Wasn't that the sound that was meant to herald the beginning of the Rapture?

Herb had caught one of those self-appointed prophets on TV once; some charismatic lunatic who loudly proclaimed that the End of Days would definitely fall on some date that Herb had long since forgotten. Needless to say, the supposed last day on Earth had passed without incident, and the prophet had simply blustered his way to another date, further off in the future. The world was actually going to end in another few years. A simple mistake; anyone could make it.

Just another bullshit artist.

At the time, Herb had wondered what type of person you had to be to fall for that routine. Damaged, he guessed; looking to paper over the cracks that ran like canyons cut deep into your psyche. Following a doomsday prophet, Herb thought, meant you had a hole in your soul; one you'd gladly fill with just about anything.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Herb's father had imparted that wisdom once, gathering his sons together and delivering the impassioned speech that Herb could still remember word-for-word. Herb had been six at the time; Edgar the oldest at nine.

Herb couldn't remember anything else about being six years old, but he remembered that day with extraordinary clarity. Couldn't forget it.

There is a world beneath…

Herb shook away the memory before it sank in teeth. Thinking about how it all began wouldn't help him now. It never had.

Silence had fallen on the van again, and it thickened as Seb slowed the vehicle to a crawl. There was no mistaking the smooth braking. They had left the public roads, and Seb was guiding the van around the vast concrete wilderness of the port.

Arrival.

Showtime.

Herb caught Edgar's eyes once more, and detected a fat vein of eager anticipation running through his big brother's perma-confidence.

The expression on Edgar's face unsettled Herb, but it didn't much surprise him.

Herb thought the duty that he and his three brothers had inherited was a curse; he always had. When their father had blustered at great length about lineage and birthright and the precious gift of their bloodline, Herb had seen only murky insanity.

Edgar, though, took their duty in his stride, and never questioned their father’s crazy story, or the bizarre homeschooling that he and his brothers underwent. To Edgar, the duty that fell to the Rennick boys was more than a job that needed to be done; it was a calling.

Sometimes, Edgar ranted about all the people out there who didn't know the truth, going about their daily lives oblivious to what the world really was. They lacked clarity, Edgar said. They drifted aimlessly, circling like insects trapped in a jar until eventually their air just ran out.

The rest of the world, Ed maintained, lived without a duty; without a calling, and so they lived without a point.

Herb thought that what Edgar described so negatively sounded a lot like freedom, but he couldn't really fault Edgar for not seeing it the same way. After all, Ed had been indoctrinated from a young age, and for whatever reason, he hadn't resisted that programming in the same way as Herb.

Maybe that was because Edgar was the oldest. The leader. His father's right-hand man. It didn't much matter.

Not anymore.

As if reading Herb's troubled thoughts, Edgar reached out an arm and patted his little brother reassuringly on the shoulder. It was an awkward gesture, and out of character enough that it didn't calm Herb in the slightest.

"It will be fine," Edgar said gruffly. "We just need to stay cool. Follow my lead, right?"

Herb nodded glumly and felt his last chance to talk some sense into his big brother slipping away. The atmosphere in the van was charged with tension. Trying to shake Edgar's convictions now would be futile. Just as it always had been.

The van creaked to a halt and the sound of the engine died slowly. The atmosphere inside felt swollen; ready to burst. The four brothers sat in the pregnant silence for a long, tense moment, until Edgar stood, stooping awkwardly in the low space.

He drew in a deep breath, and raised his right wrist, showing them all his watch.

"I make it one seventeen, and thirty-six seconds...thirty-seven, thirty-eight—"

Edgar continued to count as Herb, Seb and Phil held up their own watches, nodding confirmation that their times matched Edgar's.

"Set the countdown for nine hours," he said, and stared around the van pointedly. "Our window for extraction closes at 10:30pm, and we are not going to miss it. Right?"

Murmurs of agreement.

Edgar twisted the winder on his watch, setting a countdown on a smaller dial at the bottom of the face, and watched from the corner of his eye as Herb followed suit.

Herb twisted the tiny dial, and felt his intestines twisting right along with it.

This is it, he thought. Once we board that ship, there will be no turning back.

Herb studied Edgar carefully. For a moment, the oldest of the Rennick brothers stood in silence, and Herb tried vainly to read some doubt in his eyes. Edgar rubbed absently at his injured thumb. It had been weeks since the nightmare in Brighton, and the wound there still hadn't healed properly.

"Nine hours," Edgar repeated, and threw open the rear door, flooding the dusty interior of the van with cold, grey sunlight. He stepped out, squinting as his eyes adjusted, and flinched a little at the coastal wind that speared through his uniform.

Two hundred yards away, a hulking shape blocked out much of the weak early afternoon light; a gargantuan shadow that seemed determined to fill the horizon.

The Oceanus.

Herb stared at it impassively as he reached back into the van and grabbed his bag, wincing a little at the metallic clanging from within as he hoisted it over his shoulder.

The ship had been impressive the first time the brothers had laid eyes upon it, during one of the several reconnaissance missions they had undertaken over the previous few weeks. It didn't fill Herb with awe now, though. It filled him with something darker.

When the four brothers were out of the van, each carrying an identical bag, Edgar nodded once at them, a single sharp gesture designed both to encourage them and to keep them all focused, and led them away silently.

Toward the ship.

4

The Oceanus was grand on the outside; vast and awe-inspiring, but on the inside, Dan immediately saw that grand didn't do the vessel justice. Not even close.

After passing through a final ticket inspection at the exit of the terminus, he caught up to Elaine as they walked up a huge ramp that transported the passengers onto the waiting ship.

At the top of the ramp, beneath a large welcome aboard sign, stood a wide entrance that opened out into a cavernous lobby area, filled with glamorous reception staff sitting behind plush mahogany desks. The queue of passengers moved relatively quickly, showing their tickets at reception and picking up keycards to the cabins that would be their home for the next three weeks, and as Elaine and Dan shuffled toward the desks, Dan looked around with interest.

Everything in the lobby seemed to be reflective; from the polished floors to the gleaming wood of the desks. Even the enormous, welcoming smiles of the reception staff revealed teeth that seemed to shine. Warm light bounced and reflected in the huge space, lending the lobby the feel of a high-end Las Vegas casino.

Dan glanced down at his clothing, and felt a faint flush of embarrassment sting his cheeks. Elaine wore a summer dress and looked great, of course, but Dan's clothes—a faded Oasis t-shirt and a tattered pair of shorts that had seen better days a long time ago—made him feel more than a little out of place.

That was one of the things about agoraphobia: purchasing new clothes got bumped way down the list of priorities.

The other passengers in the queue were all classily-dressed in what looked like expensive summer clothes, and Dan made a mental note to update his wardrobe when the honeymoon was over. Maybe, he thought, one of the shops aboard the ship might even kit him out in something more appropriate.

All of a sudden, he was acutely aware that while he had been stuck in self-imposed exile, the rest of the world had carried on spinning without him. He felt out of place, sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb, and the familiar anxiety began to tug at his nerves.

He leaned into Elaine, and whispered in her ear.

"I think you were right about these clothes."

Elaine laughed and hugged him reassuringly, nuzzling into his neck.

"I did warn you," she said with a smile. "We're probably the only people on this ship who don't live on a country estate or drive a Ferrari."

"Yeah, but we're on holiday," Dan said with a mock-pout. "People are meant to relax on holiday, aren't they? Even wealthy people?"

Elaine pecked him on the cheek.

"Awww," she said with mock-sarcasm. "You're an artist, remember? Artists are meant to be scruffy."

Dan looked dubious. He hadn’t sold a painting in two years, not since before the attack and the subsequent illness. It was starting to feel like his career was a sham, or a once-only, never-to-be-repeated sort of deal.

"Not sure I can call myself an artist at the moment. You know, until I actually paint something else."

Elaine rolled her eyes.

"You will," she said brightly, "and it will be a masterpiece."

"Yeah, maybe," Dan said dubiously. "That's not going to help me right now, though. I look like a tramp in the middle of this crowd."

Elaine laughed, and pulled a handkerchief from her shoulder bag. She passed it to him, and laughed again at his confused expression.

"What's this for?" Dan said.

"That's to help you feel less conspicuous," she replied. "If you feel like people are staring at you, just, y'know, polish something."

Elaine's eyes sparkled with mischief, and she let out a squeal that drew all eyes to her when Dan responded by affectionately slapping her backside.

"Newlyweds?"

Dan turned in surprise at the voice, and saw one of the staff moving along the line of people toward them. She carried a tray of champagne glasses, and offered it with a smile. Dan and Elaine both grabbed a glass, and Dan drained most of his in one gulp.

Dutch courage, he told himself, and then immediately followed that thought with a bout of self-recrimination. Making small talk with a young woman whose job it was to be friendly should not feel as nerve-shredding as waiting for an important job interview to begin.

He breathed deeply.

You can do this, Dan. Just talk to her like a normal human being.

"Uh...thanks," Dan said. "Yeah, married yesterday."

"Oh, congratulations!" the young woman said cheerfully. "If you mention that at reception, we'll have a bottle of champagne sent to your cabin. Are you in one of our honeymoon suites?"

Dan shook his head.

"A little beyond our means, I'm afraid."

The receptionist glanced at Dan's clothes and nodded, and Dan felt Elaine, who had wrapped her arm around him, begin to shake with suppressed laughter once more.

The receptionist leaned in close and whispered conspiratorially.

"I know, right? This ship is expensive. I think they'd charge for the air if they could get away with it."

She winked, and Dan felt himself relax a little.

"The only way I could ever get aboard is by serving the drinks! Not to worry though, the regular cabins are pretty amazing. I'm sure you'll have a great time."

"Thanks," Dan said. "I'm sure we—"

He stopped short when the floor began to shake.

His eyes widened in surprise.

"Don't worry," the young woman said. "That's just the engine heating up. We're setting off."

Dan looked confused.

"I thought I read that the Oceanus was so big the passengers couldn't even tell they were at sea," he said.

"Oh, that's right. This is the worst part: they have to use a lot of power to get us moving, and that pushes the water against the harbour wall and creates a sort of tidal effect," the young woman said. "So I'm told."

She rolled her eyes and smiled, placing a reassuring hand lightly on Dan’s arm.

"Things feel a little choppy for the first few minutes, but once we're underway, you won't feel a thing. It was lovely to meet you both. Enjoy your trip."

The young woman smiled broadly, moving down the line to hand out more glasses of champagne. Dan tuned out her cheerful chatter with the passengers waiting behind him.

"She was totally checking you out, husband," Elaine whispered.

Dan opened his mouth to protest, and closed it again when he saw the mischievous twinkle in Elaine's eyes.

"You're right," he said in a mock-serious tone. "Can't blame her, really. I mean: these clothes, my obvious excitement at the prospect of free champagne. She probably figures I've sneaked aboard. Probably thinks I'm some sexy stowaway, you know? All the ladies love a bad boy, right?"

He dropped his eyes sadly.

"It's just a pity I've got the old ball-and-chain with me."

"Oh, the 'old ball-and-chain,' am I? Just for that, you can get us checked in."

Elaine thrust the tickets into Dan's hand, and walked away, turning back after a few steps to poke her tongue out at her husband.

Dan laughed, and shuffled the suitcases at his feet toward the nearest reception desk, summoning up his courage to speak to yet another stranger.

*

Elaine watched for a moment as Dan headed toward the check-in desk, and told herself for the hundredth time not to worry about him.

Dan's anxiety meant that he found it difficult to deal with people, and strangers especially. Ordinarily, if small talk with a stranger was necessary, Dan let Elaine do the talking while he hovered in the background looking uncomfortable.

He had been improving, though; getting better with each passing month since he started therapy, and Elaine had taken to pushing him gently to deal with situations that other people navigated through without blinking, but which Dan had found overwhelming for the past couple of years.

A year ago, he would have baulked at the prospect of a cruise, even with Elaine by his side for moral support. But things were looking up: he had actually started sitting in his studio again instead of just talking about it, and on a couple of occasions recently he had surprised her with gifts. Just little tokens of his affection, but Elaine knew how enormous the gifts truly were, because Dan had ventured out into the world alone to buy them. The gesture was, for him, monumental.

Dan liked to joke that Elaine was his strength; that she was the reason he was slowly beginning to feel better, but Elaine wouldn't accept it. She had started the ball rolling, maybe, had given him that first motivational shove, but it was Dan that kept pushing.

She smiled as she saw him reach the desk and begin to shuffle on the spot a little awkwardly, fussing with his hair. The assistant greeted him warmly, and even at this distance, Elaine saw Dan's shoulders relax a little. He would be fine. Elaine turned to check out the rest of the lobby.

Beyond the array of reception desks, Elaine saw several glass elevator doors, opening and closing like hungry mouths to swallow the passengers and deliver them to their cabins on the upper decks.

And beyond the elevators was a balcony that drew Elaine toward it like a magnet.

Dan had been digging up trivia about the ship ever since they had finally agreed to book tickets; data mined from the depths of the internet. Most of the nuggets of information he unearthed had leaked away from Elaine's memory, but one fact had stuck, memorable because it seemed so damn bizarre: the Oceanus had its own park.

When Dan had relayed that piece of information, breathless with excitement, Elaine had tried to visualise what the words meant, but hadn't been able to conjure up an image to match Dan's description. Most likely, she had decided, what the Oceanus' sleek website had labelled a park was in actual fact an area dedicated to a few potted plants, and maybe some tacky plastic water feature.

When she left Dan at the reception area, the distant park was the first thing Elaine saw, and the sight of it stole her breath away. She walked slowly toward the balcony, moving as though in a dream, focused on the incredible sight beyond. She wasn't even really aware of moving, but suddenly she was leaning over the railing, and her eyes widened in astonishment as the scale of the Oceanus fully revealed itself.

The entire centre of the ship seemed to have been hollowed out, and an honest-to-God strip of parkland had been inserted into the resulting space. Elaine saw fully grown trees and small, perfectly manicured gardens, something that looked like a small bandstand; a row of gift shops and restaurants clustered under a sign that read Park Avenue. Toward the rear of the ship, far to Elaine's right, she saw a small fairground area, with a smattering of rides and carnival games.

The tiny water feature she had expected to see turned out to be a small pond, criss-crossed with wooden bridges and walkways, and just large enough to hold a tiny pedal boat that Elaine immediately decided she wanted to try out. The pond was complete with actual ducks.

All around the incredible splash of greenery, towering over the park, loomed the passenger decks. The ship had seventeen decks in total; twelve accommodating the passengers. For a ship claiming to be the largest in the world, twelve decks hadn't sounded to Elaine like a particularly huge number, but now that she could see just how vast each deck was, twelve seemed like plenty. From where she stood, she saw three of the top levels bustling with activity: balconies that led into what looked like plush apartments, and people getting settled in. The rest of the decks that she could see were dedicated to a dizzying array of entertainment areas.

The vastness of the ship was amplified by the people she saw: for the first part of its journey, the Oceanus was only carrying a half-load: another three thousand passengers would board when the ship docked in Miami to bring the full complement to six thousand for the main part of the cruise around the Caribbean.

The result was a sparsely-populated spaciousness that made the ship seem even more gigantic. From her vantage point, Elaine saw parts of the Oceanus that looked unused, almost abandoned: the less popular areas, she supposed. She had no doubt that once another three thousand passengers were added to the mix, even those places would feel crowded.

Elaine had grown up in an almost-middle class suburb on the outskirts of London, with parents who worked hard and spent every penny on trying to live a life just beyond their means. When she graduated university, she worked as veterinary assistant, before working her way up to be a partner in a veterinary surgery at the edge of the city.

The job was all she had ever dreamed of, and she couldn't be happier with the work, but it wasn't the type that paid well. At twenty-eight, she was still struggling under the weight of her student loans, and wondering if she would ever move beyond making ends meet.

She had only ever been abroad once—on a holiday with her girlfriends to Greece when she was eighteen—and had spent most of those two weeks drunk and dancing.

Elaine had never seen anything like the opulence that dripped from every surface of the Oceanus, and the first sight of the ship's interior was incredible and awe-inspiring.

She stood there for a while, watching the tiny stick-figures scurrying about on the other side of the ship, and thinking that she already wished she could stay on board forever.

"I wonder why they don't fly away."

Elaine had been so lost in studying the ship that she hadn't noticed Dan moving alongside her at the balcony.

She looked at him inquisitively.

"The ducks," Dan said, and pointed at the distant pond. "What's to stop them just flying off?"

"Take a look at this place," Elaine said in a voice light with breathless wonder. "Would you fly off?"

Dan grinned.

"You have a point, there, Mrs Bellamy. Now, let's go and find our cabin." He held up an electronic keycard with the number 217 stamped on it. "And then I think it might be time to try treating that addiction of yours."

Dan exaggerated a wink, and Elaine giggled helplessly.

5

Security hadn't been a problem, despite Herb secretly hoping that the guards who waved them through the staff entrance and onto the ramp that boarded the ship might become suspicious.

In the end, the guards had given a cursory inspection to the Rennick brothers' bags, and only one item piqued their interest: a small silver satchel that Edgar carried inside his larger workbag, and which the x-ray scanners had trouble with.

The satchel was important to the mission; beyond vital, but when the guards opened it up they saw only safety goggles and a radio; nothing that looked out of place among the other tools and mechanical supplies that filled the brothers' bags.

The Rennicks were dressed as engineering staff, after all, and bags full of tools were to be expected. Safety goggles and a radio probably didn't look suspicious in the slightest. Maybe, Herb thought, if their IDs hadn't checked out, the guards would have taken more than a glance at those tools, and might have spent a little time wondering just why that small silver satchel wouldn't scan properly, but Edgar had been right.

Nobody gave the Rennick brothers a second glance.

After all, their names and faces were on the list, and if the computer didn't have a problem with their presence, then why should anybody else?

Extraordinary wealth gave Herb's father incredible reach: inserting four people who shouldn't be there into the database of a cruise ship was as easy as snapping his fingers and writing a cheque.

They made it aboard, and Edgar led them directly to the target location, while Herb's faint hope that fate would intervene and somehow prevent them from boarding withered up and died.

*

The Climate Control Centre on deck three was just a large metal box; far less impressive than its name suggested. Lots of pipes, lots of exposed metal. Compared to the rest of the expensively-appointed ship, the control centre looked like a wound; like someone had peeled back the Oceanus’ perfect skin to reveal the steel skeleton underneath.

All around the main room, metal veins snaked away, large and small. Vents that disappeared into the walls, delivering the purified, warm air to other parts of the ship.

Even those who were familiar with the ship could get lost in the metal maze that comprised the Climate Control Centre, but Edgar had memorised the turns he needed to take to reach a secluded part of the deck, and he led the way unerringly.

The target location had been Edgar's call, and Herb had to admit it was probably the right one. Remaining undiscovered on a ship like the Oceanus was difficult, but not impossible. The air conditioning system was the closest thing the ship possessed to a dead zone.

Deep in one of the labyrinthine maintenance areas that clustered around the engine room like arterial fat, the spot Edgar had picked out, after many hours spent poring over blueprints and schematics, represented their best chance of avoiding people for long enough to get the job done.

The job, Herb thought bitterly. It sounded so mundane. So ordinary. A job was exactly what Edgar thought of it as. The duty. Their oath. As necessary as breathing and eating.

Yet Herb couldn't see beyond the horror of what they were about to do. It wasn't a fucking job. It was a life sentence. It seemed that Edgar was confident they'd get away clean, but Herb thought that even if they did escape the Oceanus after their work was done, none of them would ever be clean again.

Edgar's choice of venue proved astute. After dropping into the guts of the ship following the security check, the brothers encountered very few staff, and when they reached climate control, it was so deserted that it was almost possible to believe they were the only people on the ship.

Air con was one of those systems that people only paid attention to when it stopped working. There would be checks, but they would be infrequent. All the brothers knew the staffing patterns by heart, and the first routine check of the Climate Control Centre was scheduled for twelve hours after departure.

By twelve hours in, Herb thought darkly, air conditioning would be the last thing on anyone's mind.

The spot Edgar had picked was a junction room connecting several of the ducts that spread out like a web throughout the ship. The room itself was almost featureless, save for the air con control units that dominated one wall. The room was small; Herb guessed it was probably no more than twelve by twelve, and the ceiling had to be six foot, max. Herb was the only one of the brothers that didn't have to stoop, but even at five-ten, he felt his hair grazing the ceiling when he stood up straight.

Edgar nodded at the others, and slung his bag from his shoulder, beginning to unpack. Herb followed suit, but removing the bag from his shoulders didn't make him feel any less heavy.

The weight of guilt, he thought. Or fear.

Both.

Getting aboard the ship—and then reaching the target location—had been the part of the mission that filled the brothers with the most apprehension, and now that they had made it, Herb felt the tension in his brothers dissipate, even as it continued to grow inside his own thoughts like a tumour.

Edgar wore a satisfied expression, and Herb knew his brother was focused only on the completion of the task. The work began as soon as they slung the bags from their shoulders.

This part, the team of brothers was good at; beyond professional. They had rehearsed the construction of the device a hundred times, maybe more. Their record for completion had been five hours, twenty-four minutes. It hadn’t taken them more than seven hours in their last thirty attempts, and the brothers had started to joke that they could build the damn thing with their eyes closed.

Edgar was the lead in the construction of the device, just as he was the lead in everything else, but each of the brothers had their own set of tasks to complete.

Herb's main job was to construct the detonator. Wiring and soldering work that required steady hands. Not for the first time, he considered deliberately making errors; dooming the device and the whole goddamned plan from the outset, but Edgar was thorough, and he would check every part of Herb’s work, just as he had on their trial runs. If Herb made mistakes, it would simply slow them down, and that could not be allowed.

Nine hours.

After that, device or no device, there would be trouble.

The four men worked quietly for several minutes, unpacking the contents of their bags and laying them out across the floor, carefully arranging the tools and mechanical components around Edgar, until finally he stood at the centre of huge blueprint.

Edgar looked down, surveying their work, and nodded in satisfaction. The steps he needed to take were laid out at his feet, left to right. Everything in its place. What had looked like a random collection of tools and engineering supplies to the guards who had checked the bags at the gate would shortly look like something very different indeed.

He reached into his own bag and pulled out a welding torch.

Step one.

Herb felt the words tumbling out of his mouth unbidden.

"Are you sure about this, Ed?"

Edgar stared at him coldly, and heaved out a weary sigh of resignation.

"Always the same, Herb. Ever since we were kids. Always objecting when it's too late. Don't you think it's a little late to ask if I'm sure?"

Herb felt anger scorch his cheeks.

"No shit it's too late," he snapped. "But I'm talking about the extraction, Ed. We both know nobody has ever been extracted before."

Edgar gritted his teeth and rubbed at his temples.

"Nobody has done this for over a century, Herb. The technology for extraction didn't exist. It wasn't even remotely feasible, for fuck's sake. Of course nobody has been extracted before. We're capable of it now, the resources are there, and this has all been planned out. What possible reason would he have not to come and get us?"

"You act like you don’t even remember who we’re talking about," Herb said in a voice that dripped with sarcasm. "Sure, it’s Dad. Of course he’ll come and extract us. It's not like he's some fucking sociopath or something. Not like he cares more about his books and his theories than his own damn flesh and blood."

Herb rolled his eyes.

Edgar shook his head bitterly.

"I’m not going through this with you again, Herb. Trust Dad, or trust me. Whether the chopper waits for us or not, I’m not fucking dying on this ship, you understand?" He grabbed Herb’s shoulders and stared into his eyes. "So you don’t need to worry about extraction. You just need to stick with me. One way or another, I'll get you off this ship. Right?"

Herb searched desperately for a response; for some way to talk Edgar out of proceeding. Some way to persuade him that their father might just be a raving madman.

But Edgar had always had a very different relationship with their father. Hell, all the others had. Only Herb had ever voiced opposition.

He let his eyes drop to the floor.

"Good," Edgar said. "So let’s get this thing built, eh? We beat our record and then we get out of here. The sooner, the better."

Edgar reached into his bag and carefully pulled out one final item. The most important of all. The silver satchel. It was about the size of a large hardcover book, sleek and reflective. The satchel looked almost as if it was constructed from the same material as the suits astronauts wore to complete space walks. He placed it on a ledge that ran around the wall to his left gently, making sure there was no chance that it might fall, and flipped down the protective visor on his helmet.

"It's not too late, Ed," Herb said quietly, almost to himself. "We could steal a lifeboat. We could warn the crew, get the ship turned around. Fuck it: we could swim. It's not too late; not yet."

Edgar paused, but he didn't lift the visor.

Didn't respond.

Moments later the air in the control room hissed like a startled cat as the welding torch fizzed into life, and the room filled with flickering light.

*

The brothers had been working for a couple of minutes when Herb felt the rumbling, shaking his bones like a distant earthquake. The Oceanus wasn't just big; it was fast: powered by a unique engine that delivered something close to two hundred and fifty thousand horsepower to six enormous propellers that were capable of rotating fully three hundred and sixty degrees beneath the hull.

The result was a system that offered unparalleled maneuverability for a ship the size of the Oceanus; it moved almost like a gigantic hovercraft.

The sheer power the engine produced made cruises such as the one the ship was about to take—right across the Atlantic from the UK to Florida, and then on to the Caribbean—more viable than any previous vessel. The journey time to cross the ocean had been cut almost in half by the engineers that developed the Oceanus' revolutionary propulsion system.

With a dull roar, the ship eased away from the land, and for a moment, as the engines hummed at full power to build some momentum, Herb stopped his work and focused on his balance. After a few seconds, when the ship had pulled clear of the choppy waters its own enormous propellers had created, he felt the floor begin to settle beneath him. It didn't take long for the violent rocking to cease, and it once more became difficult to believe that they were on a ship at all.

He cast a glance around his brothers. All wore ashen expressions, and Herb thought he knew what was going through their minds.

Edgar, Phil and Seb believed implicitly in what they were doing, but even they looked like they were suffering a moment of doubt. There was little they could do once they were out in the open sea, even if they did change their minds about the mission. The roaring of the engine was the sound of the Rennick boys passing the point of no return.

6

Patrick Smith had lucked out, and the stroke of fortune felt like it had been a long time coming.

He had always hoped to join the police, but having repeatedly failed the entrance exams, Patrick had finally given up and accepted a job in private security, figuring that maybe he could work his way up to becoming a bodyguard for a high-profile VIP. Maybe, one day, he would be Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard.

But private security turned out to be anything but exciting, and five years into his career he hadn't even graduated to guarding people, let alone Very Important ones.

Instead of the heady rush of being a cop patrolling the streets, dreaming of one day being the kind of officer that had actual cases to deal with—maybe even murder cases, Patrick had found himself spending his nights walking the perimeter of a tiny storage facility. Instead of carrying a badge and a gun, he carried a torch that he used on every shift and a baton that never once left its holster.

Round and round he went, patrolling the endless route, circling aimlessly like a goldfish. The money was decent, but job satisfaction turned out to be two words that definitely did not belong together.

He had spent five years drowning in that tedium when the opportunity to provide security for a newly-built cruise ship had come up. An old friend had worked on designing the ship, and one night over a reunion beer that friend had off-handedly told Patrick to apply. Patrick had nodded politely, assuming it was just one of those things people said when alcohol loosened their tongues. The offer, of course, wouldn't extend beyond last orders at the bar.

And yet, something had persuaded Patrick that he should just go for it, and so he applied for the job, and namedropping the designer got his foot in the door.

Getting the job was like winning the lottery. In the end, the woman that hired him told him that she was impressed by his dedication, and his loyalty to his position at the lock-up. She knew full-well how boring it was to guard such a place, she said, and the fact that he had stayed for so long showed just the level of dedication that she wanted on what she called my ship.

Patrick didn’t mention that he had applied for dozens of other jobs over those five years, and had been rejected on every occasion.

So it was that Patrick went from guarding the most boring place in the world to perhaps the most exciting, and he suddenly didn't regret one minute of that time spent traipsing around the dull lock-up facility. It all led here, to the Oceanus.

It wasn't exactly Patrick's first day on the job, but it sure felt like it: this was the first time the ship would be carrying passengers, the first time it would head out onto the open sea. Patrick could barely contain his excitement.

His shift wasn't supposed to start for hours, but Patrick was unable to wait and determined to make a good impression, and so he began his patrol early. He was one of several security personnel whose duty it was to ensure that the lower decks, which comprised the engine room and maintenance areas, didn't receive visitors who weren't supposed to be there. Mostly, he had been assured, the only time he would have to actually turn people away would be if drunken passengers got lost on the enormous ship and somehow found their way down to the engineering decks.

Of course, the chances of anybody being there at that moment were slim: most of the passengers were still getting checked in and making their way to their cabins, and the crew was mostly preparing the upper decks, ensuring that the passengers were dazzled by their first impression of the enormous ship.

That was why Patrick’s rotation wasn't even due to start for a couple of hours: his sector of the Oceanus was deserted.

He had almost completed a full circuit of his zone when he heard the strange noise emanating from a vent set high in the wall, an odd sort of mechanical hissing that he could not quite identify. It brought to Patrick's mind long-forgotten memories of visits to fireworks displays as a kid, listening to the fiery hiss of a catherine wheel. It was probably nothing, Patrick thought, but he was determined to be the best security officer on the whole boat, and that meant investigating. If he found something that needed to be found, some engineering issue, perhaps—especially when he technically wasn't even meant to have started his shift yet—it could only bode well for his career prospects.

He cocked an ear and listened.

A strange fizzing, popping sound.

Something in the air con system was making a noise. Probably just some technical hiccup—the ship settling like an old building—but the noise was strange enough to pique Patrick's interest.

With a mental shrug, Patrick started toward the Climate Control Centre.

*

"What are you guys doing down here?"

Herb froze.

Lost in their individual tasks, working at maximum speed and concentration, none of the brothers had even noticed the approach of the man who stood in the doorway.

Herb looked up, and felt his heartbeat stutter. The man who had spoken wore a security uniform. Nobody was supposed to be patrolling the area for several hours yet, but fate had intervened. Herb knew that Edgar would consider it bad luck, but Herb felt differently.

Maybe he'll detain us, Herb thought. Or have the ship turned around. Maybe we'll get out clean after all.

Edgar flipped off the welding torch, and silence fell on the room as the echo of the hiss receded.

Herb looked at the guard, and then shifted his gaze to Edgar.

And felt his stomach lurch when he noticed Edgar's fingers clenching around the handle of a large screwdriver.

Oh no, Herb thought weakly. He wouldn't...

Herb's mind raced, searching for a way to defuse the situation before it got out of hand. Judging by the icy look on Edgar’s face, if it was left to him to resolve the problem of the guard’s appearance, blood would be spilled.

Herb had to intervene, and fast. The best place to hide a lie was behind the truth, wasn't it?

"Just building a bomb, mate," Herb blurted out, surprising himself. "You know, we're gonna set it off before they begin what they are calling the entertainment."

He aimed for an ironic grin.

The security guard snorted.

"No kidding," he said. "Guess I can't blame you for that. I heard they dragged that boyband out of retirement, and they're gonna croon out all their 'hits' on a nightly basis. God help us all."

Herb nodded enthusiastically, and for a brief second started to believe that the security guard might allow himself to be distracted.

"Seriously, though," the guard said, the polite smile fading away, "what are you guys doi—"

The security guard's eyes widened in shock, and he took a half-step backwards. The question died on his lips as Edgar sprang forward like a striking snake, roaring as he drove the point of the screwdriver deep enough into the guard's throat that Herb saw the skin on the other side of the man's neck stretch and split before the tip of the tool reemerged.

Blood flecked the pristine metal wall behind him, and for a moment the guard just stood there, staring at Edgar in dumb shock, gurgling pathetically as a river of blood pumped out onto his chest.

He fell slowly; an incremental collapse that reminded Herb of demolition charges bringing buildings to the end of their lives.

The guard's eyes never left Edgar, not even when the light behind them flicked off. He died with an accusatory, confused look on his face.

And the air in the room itself seemed to take a breath.

For several seconds in that bloated silence, the four brothers stared at the corpse splayed across the floor.

Herb squeezed his eyes shut, feeling despair welling up.

"Oh, Ed," he said quietly. "What the fuck have you just done?"

When Herb opened his eyes, he found Edgar staring at him, and the face that had been as familiar to Herb as daylight suddenly belonged to a man he did not recognise. Edgar's eyes were wild.

"He knew," Edgar spat.

Herb surprised himself by roaring a response. Surprised Edgar, too, judging by the way he backed up in shock.

"He didn't fucking know anything, Edgar. He was asking," Herb yelled. "There are a hundred different ways we could have answered him. Killing him wouldn't have been in my top fucking fifty."

Edgar stared at Herb blankly for a moment before seeming to recover his senses.

"What does it matter, Herb? He was going to be dead in—"

"It matters to me," Herb roared, "and it should matter to you because we're not murderers. How does that," Herb jabbed a finger at the leaking corpse, "tally with your spiel about us being the good guys and doing what is necessary, huh?"

Edgar's cheeks flushed a dangerous crimson.

"Watch your tone, little brother," he said in a low voice.

"Or what?" Herb growled. "You'll stab me, too? That's how we do things now?"

Edgar had two handfuls of Herb's collar before the final syllable even left his mouth. He pulled Herb close, and whispered in a dangerously low voice.

"You weren't there in Brighton, little brother. You haven't seen them. What they can do. If you had, you'd know that I just did that poor bastard a favour. If we're not murderers, it's only because nobody has a word for what we're about to do. Murderer doesn't begin to cover it, really, does it?"

Edgar released Herb's collar and pushed him away. Herb felt his foot slip on the blood pooling on the floor, and his gorge rose.

"We could have aborted the mission," Herb said weakly. "We could have—"

"No," Edgar thundered. "Running away from this is a fantasy, Herb. And even you must understand that, because you're here. If you wanted to run away, you left it a little fucking late."

Herb stared at Edgar and felt tears welling up in his eyes. He blinked them away angrily.

"I'm here for you, Ed. For all of us. I'm here because I won't believe it's too late until we push the button."

Edgar grimaced and turned away from Herb.

"We all know the routine," he said. "Security checks in every thirty minutes. I don't know why this bastard was down here, but I do know he won't be checking in any time soon."

Edgar drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes. Herb couldn't be sure, but he thought his big brother was counting to ten, trying to calm himself enough to calculate the best route forward.

He's losing it, Herb thought. We all are.

"Okay," Edgar said finally. "What's done is done. Someone's going to miss our leaking friend here, and sooner or later they're going to start searching for him. We have to be ready when that happens, or we have to be gone. Yes?"

No response from Phil or Seb. Herb kept his lips clamped shut and stared mutinously at Edgar.

"Yes?" Edgar roared. His raised voice bounced and echoed off the thin metallic walls, making Herb flinch.

Seb and Phil mumbled their agreement.

"You two," Edgar said, jabbing a finger at them. "Get rid of the body. Herb, clean up the damn blood."

He picked up the welding torch, and flicked it back into life.

"Uh...get rid of it how, Ed?" Phil said warily. "You want us to stash it somewhere?"

Edgar grimaced.

"The ship's moving, isn't it Phil? So no, I don't want you to stash it somewhere. Weight it down and toss the fucking thing overboard."

Herb couldn't look as Phil and Seb hoisted the body from the room, searching for something to wrap it in.

He retrieved some rags from his bag, and focused on scooping up the worst of the blood, and cleaning the tools that were now drenched in gore.

He studiously avoided looking at Edgar as he worked.

What's done is done, he thought.

7

Dan woke up still feeling a little tired, but happy. Happier than he could ever remember being. When he and Elaine had finally located their cabin—after a lengthy search through narrow, identical-looking corridors, they had made their way to the bedroom by unspoken agreement and, after making love for the first time as man and wife, had let the exhaustion of the previous day's activities overwhelm them.

Elaine had put up mild resistance, insisting that they should get dressed and start exploring the ship, not waste time sleeping, but she had delivered the plea with a yawn, and had fallen asleep before Dan.

When he awoke, she was still snoring softly.

Warm light filtered in through the window. Not the cold, grey light that had washed around the terminus in Portsmouth. This light was a brilliant orange, and when Dan slid from the bed and stepped to the window, he saw the last embers of a dazzling sunset bleeding across the horizon to the west.

The window was small, a far cry from some of the vast offerings in the penthouse suites, no doubt, but the sea view was breathtaking, and for a moment, Dan simply stood and took it in, letting himself feel relaxed and happy for what felt like the first time in two years.

Two damn years.

The attack had come out of nowhere. One of those random acts of violence that you heard about on the news, and which made you tut at the state of the world these days. It was the sort of thing that happened to other people, those that lived on the other side of the TV screen, or in the pages of newspapers.

Until it happened to Dan.

Until he found himself standing at a cashpoint one minute, withdrawing ten pounds to pick up some milk, and lying on the floor the next, blinking at the handle of the blade that protruded from just above his eye socket. Stabbed in the head for a pittance that would barely cover a six-pack of beer.

That was another thing that wasn't supposed to happen to ordinary people: Dan had seen pictures on the internet of crazy injuries that people somehow survived, so he knew it was possible to have a knife embedded in your brain and keep on ticking, but it didn't happen to people like Dan. Couldn't.

The physical damage took months to recover from, and the doctors warned that Dan would always be prone to seizures and occasional memory loss, but the mental scarring ran far deeper. Dan suffered catastrophic blackouts that followed intense panic attacks. Each and every time, he thought that he would die.

Gradually, he learned to spot the indications that an attack was impending: the rushing sensation that felt like he was being carried along by a mighty river; the dry mouth, the shaking and sweating. The dark certainty that his heart was going to rupture as it beat like it had received a huge injection of adrenaline.

After a while, the terrible river became a reality in his mind. He could actually see it, and when he did, he knew an attack was imminent, but he was powerless to stop it. Carried along by the awful current.

When he was finally allowed to leave the hospital, Dan made his way to the safety of his home and his young fiancé. He hadn't intended to cordon off the rest of the world—not consciously, anyway—but that's how it turned out. Stepping beyond his front door became an exercise in cold, all-consuming terror, because all of a sudden Dan knew that the world was full of ordinary people; that everyone was ordinary, and terrible things happened all the same.

He didn't leave the house once for a full fourteen months, and only when the concern on Elaine's face became heartbreakingly obvious did he agree to attend therapy.

The therapist who treated Dan taught him how to withstand the attacks, and eventually how to recognise situations that could cause panic, along with techniques to defuse his anxiety before it overwhelmed him. Slowly, the sessions moved toward the subject of Dan’s reintegration into society.

After spending the better part of a year in regular therapy, Dan had mastered small trips to the local shops and, though crowds and talking to strangers still terrified him, he hadn't seen the black river in his mind for months.

And now here he was, miles away from home, in the middle of the ocean and in the middle of a sea of people that he didn't know.

Staring out of the window, and thinking about just how far he was from the safety of his home, Dan became aware of his nerves jangling, and he forced himself to breathe deeply and evenly until it passed.

When he felt calmer, he moved back to the bed and threw on some clothes, fishing in a bag for his medication and dry-swallowing two tablets, grimacing at the chemical punch they delivered to the back of his throat.

He glanced at his watch. It looked like he and Elaine had been asleep for around three hours, and he wondered if he should wake his wife up, but decided against it. She looked so peaceful there in the bed, and the wedding must have taken more out of her than anyone.

Let her rest awhile longer.

Dan stepped out of the bedroom and into the main living area. The cabin was on the small side, which Dan figured was to be expected from the second-cheapest option the Oceanus offered, but it was plush.

When they had first entered, a flatscreen TV on the wall had burst to life, and a recorded message delivered by a smiling woman informed them that everything in the room worked by voice control. Lights, curtains, entertainment; even the kitchen appliances were patiently awaiting instruction.

"Coffee," Dan said quietly, and marvelled as the machine on the tiny kitchen counter began to drizzle dark liquid into a pot, and the cabin filled with the aroma of what smelled like an exotic blend. When the machine finished its duty with a hiss, Dan retrieved the pot and poured himself out a cup, blowing off the steam and taking a sip.

The rich smell hadn't deceived him: the Oceanus didn't skimp on the quality of the coffee. It was delicious.

He took the cup with him, and stepped past the small living room and through a pair of sliding glass doors that offered an incredible view of the Atlantic, moving out onto the narrow balcony.

Immediately the roaring of the ocean and the stinging cold wind hit him, and for a moment Dan simply stood there, letting other senses drink in the moment, and trying to commit the feel of being there to memory.

That was something he had been doing ever since he was a kid; maybe a habit that all artists indulged in; storing up visual memories that would help to fill the canvases of the future. Dan couldn't be sure about that, but it had always worked for him in the past, before the fear and the subsequent inability to paint.

Committing moments to memory, taking mental notes that he could refer back to when he was sitting in his studio; the technique hadn’t helped him to paint a single stroke in the two years since the attack, but it would work again. It had to.

At least he had started to sit in the studio once more, even if the canvas in front of him remained stubbornly blank.

He sipped at the coffee and scanned the sky. Dark clouds were gathering overhead, preparing to squash out the last remnants of the sunset. It looked like the weather was about to turn, and maybe Dan would get a chance to see just how the Oceanus really dealt with choppy waters after all.

He dropped his eyes, watching the rolling waves of the sea far below him.

And froze.

What is that?

Dan squinted. The cabin he stood in was on one of the upper decks, a long way from the sea, but as he looked down he saw something else; something that emerged from the ship directly below him, many decks down.

The object was bright orange, and looked like something wrapped in a tarp.

Something that was being slowly pushed out from the hull.

Pushed through a window.

What the hell is it?

When the object was far enough out, and almost entirely visible, Dan saw exactly what it was.

A body.

Being ejected from the Oceanus like waste material and dropping into the freezing water of the Atlantic with an inaudible splash.

Any doubts Dan might have had were dispelled instantly as he watched the object tumbling, and saw a crooked leg popping out of the tarp as it hit the water. A human leg.

Dan watched in mute astonishment, and saw the back of someone's head poking out of the space the tarp had been expelled from, staring down at the body just as Dan did; watching until it sank beneath the waves and disappeared from sight.

And then the head disappeared, pulled back inside the ship, and Dan stood still for a long time, unaware of the coffee going cold in his hands, his muscles locked in place and his mind racing under gathering storm clouds.

8

Mark Ledger leaned on the rail and stared down at the sea tenderly kissing the vast hull of the Oceanus far below him. Down there, at sea level, and even at deck level, everything looked tiny and sort of serene. For Mark, things were a little more...turbulent.

He was standing on the highest point of the Oceanus, a narrow maintenance walkway that wrapped tightly around one of the gigantic twin funnels that vented the engine exhaust hundreds of feet up into the sky. Mark knew from experience that when you got a certain height above the deck of any ship, the wind became a savage monster that howled and buffeted relentlessly.

The wind made the walkway a terrible place to take a cigarette break, but the complete lack of Steven Vega made it perfect, and worth the long climb up the ladder and the difficulty in keeping his lighter flame alive for more than a half-second.

Vega was in charge of security on the Oceanus, and it was a job the ex-marine took very seriously indeed. He was Mark's boss, well, his immediate boss at least, and Vega clearly revelled in the role of commanding officer.

Vega was fresh out of the military; new to cruise ship security, and Mark had clashed with him immediately. Every time Vega barked orders like he was some drill sergeant preparing his troops for war, Mark felt an irresistible compulsion to either openly mock the man, or dissolve into a fit of giggles.

The simmering feud between the men might not have escalated, if it hadn’t been for Vega insisting that behaviour in the crew bar on deck four be nothing less than exemplary. Any sign of misconduct among his team would, Vega insisted, be a disciplinary offence. That appalled many of the staff, and Mark more than most. What happened in the crew bar stayed in the crew bar. Everyone knew that. It had been the same on every ship Mark had ever worked on, and he let Vega know it.

Let him know, too, that maybe the sizeable stick up Vega's arse would fall right out if he'd just join the party and indulge in some less than exemplary behaviour himself.

In hindsight, Mark thought he probably shouldn't have said that in front of the whole staff.

Vega, by way of response to what he called Mark's attitude problem, had clearly vowed to make Mark's life hell, and to land him with every shit job the Oceanus had to offer.

That was exactly why Mark was standing alone, far above the deck and out of Vega's reach, rather than reporting for duty in the security suite.

Mark drew in the last lungful of smoke the cigarette had to offer, and lit another. Chain smoking made him feel a little queasy, but the prospect of finding out what Steven Vega had in store for him made him feel a whole lot worse.

The ship had been travelling for three or four hours, Mark figured, putting them somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. He saw nothing but featureless ocean for miles in every direction and dropped his gaze to the crowds of people milling about on the deck far below.

Most of the passengers, having settled in to their cabins, were venturing out to see what entertainment the Oceanus had to offer, and discovering that the answer to that question was plenty.

In addition to all the shops and eateries, there were numerous ways to idle away time on the ship; everything from movies and theatre shows to rock climbing and surfing on a huge artificial wave machine. A handful of celebrity entertainers had been booked for the maiden voyage, and when dusk fell, the Oceanus came alive: bars, casino and nightclub drawing the passengers in and ensuring that there was no chance of getting bored on the journey.

Unless Steven Vega was calling the shots.

Mark's first shift—predictably—had been standing guard outside one of the busier men's toilets. Mark had asked what could possibly need guarding, of course, and Vega had simply smiled serenely and asked if Mark was disobeying a direct order.

The guy thought he was still in fucking Fallujah, or something. It wasn't Mark with the damn attitude problem.

Still, Mark was forced to comply. He had a feeling that Vega would jump at any excuse to have him fired, and a job working security on the Oceanus was too good a gig to throw away—even if it did come with a built-in problem like Vega.

Mark inhaled deeply, letting the anger at the memory of Vega's smug smile build as the smoke filled his lungs, and the combination of the two made him feel a little sick.

He tossed the half-smoked Marlboro away just as the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt crackled loudly.

"Ledger. Where the fuck are you? Over."

The man himself.

Mark couldn't help but grin at the sound of the disembodied voice that rattled from the walkie-talkie. Somewhere far below, deep in the ship, it sounded like Steven Vega was working himself up into a frothing rage at Mark's unscheduled absence.

Mark depressed the button on his walkie-talkie.

"On my way now, Steve-O. Just stopped for a smoke."

He lifted his thumb off the button and smiled at the lack of an immediate response.

Right now, Steven Vega would be riding a bubbling wave of repressed rage, and Mark knew the head of security would be struggling to decide which was the greater crime: the unscheduled cigarette break, the use of the hated nickname Steve-O, or Mark's continued refusal to end communications with the word over.

The walkie crackled again.

"Get back here pronto, Ledger. Vega out."

Vega out, Mark thought, as he clipped the walkie back to his belt. Fucking ridiculous.

He made his way to the ladder that would take him back down to deck level, and sighed. The new chief hadn't yet worked out that being part of cruise ship's 'security' never got much more demanding than shepherding drunk passengers back to their cabins or dealing with the occasional petty theft.

Cruise ships were like floating gated communities; stuffed with the wealthy and the complacent, and working security on a ship like the Oceanus was practically a vacation in itself. It wasn't often, in Mark's experience, that life threw you a situation that it was so easy to make the best of.

Nothing would go wrong on the Oceanus. Nothing could.

Steven Vega needed to lighten up.

*

The security personnel on the Oceanus were neatly divided in two. The more junior of the staff had designated areas to patrol, and mostly their job was to check cabins or maintenance areas and ensure that there were no problems among the passengers. They were the beat cops, trudging endless circles around one part of the ship or another.

The senior staff—numbering just twelve, with only six on duty at any one time—reported to directly to Steven Vega, and he had decided that they needed to be micromanaged.

On all of the other vessels that Mark had worked, the security officials knew what their roles were and they just did them. By contrast, Vega insisted that his senior staff check in with him constantly, inserting himself into their day every couple of hours with meaningless instructions and abrupt changes of duty.

It was a farce, and Mark thought it existed purely so that Steven Vega felt like he had something to actually do. Already the other senior members of the team were taking bets on how long Vega would last in his role. The guy seemed incapable of relaxing, and relaxing pretty much summed up the entire job. Mark thought the new security chief would drive himself mad within the first three voyages. Maybe sooner.

As Mark sauntered into the security suite, he saw Vega glowering delightfully, while the remaining five members of security waited behind him.

Four men; one woman, which made for a better ratio than every other ship Mark had worked on. Better still for the fact that Katie was attractive and single. Mark had already manufactured a couple of reasons to talk to her, and the conversations had been easy and fun.

He winked at her as he walked in, and she smiled.

Mark chalked that smile up as one more reason to talk to Katie when he got the chance.

"Where the fuck have you been?" Vega snarled in a tone that Mark thought was just begging to punctuate the sentence with the word soldier.

"Cigarette break, Steve," Mark responded amiably.

"Shift breaks are scheduled, Ledger," Vega growled dangerously. "One every three hours. You know that just as well as—"

"Won't happen again, Steve," Mark interrupted with a contrite smile.

Steven Vega's face flushed a dangerous purple, and for a moment Mark wondered if it was possible to push the man so far that he might suffer a heart attack. Mark hoped not. Vega dying would ruin all the fun.

From the look on Steven Vega's beet-coloured face, Mark guessed that the head of security was busy breathing deeply and quite possibly counting to ten before he spoke again. Vega hated being called Steve. He had made it perfectly clear on his first day aboard the Oceanus that he answered to Mr Vega or, preferably, boss. Mark had immediately resolved to never use either monicker.

"You're a fucking smartarse, Ledger," Vega spat at last.

As comebacks went, Mark thought it was a little uninspired, if not exactly unexpected.

"No surprise you can't hold down a job for more than five minutes with an attitude like yours, is it?"

Mark blinked in surprise. Steven Vega took protocol extremely seriously, and his words had breached the confidentiality of the personnel reports that only he was privy to. Breaking the rules, even in such a half-hearted manner, had to mean that Vega was close to boiling point.

Mark didn't much care about the dig at his employment record. Most of the other staff knew he had trouble staying in any one job for more than six months. They probably figured that his mouth got him in trouble sooner or later; usually sooner.

The truth was that his mouth did have a role to play, but most ships had parted company with Mark Ledger because of his continuing determination to fraternise with the passengers. Cruise ships generally frowned on that, so Mark frowned on them.

"What can I say?" Mark said with an ambivalent shrug. "I guess I haven't found my calling yet."

"Your calling?" Vega repeated with a sneer. "What, you think you're a fucking poet or something, soldier?"

Mark's eyes widened.

Soldier. Vega had actually gone and said it. Gone full-on 'Nam flashback or some shit. Jackpot, Mark thought as a faint ripple of suppressed laughter washed through the room.

Vega flushed again, brighter this time, and turned without a word and strode from the main room into the smaller adjacent room that served as his private office.

Katie sidled up to Mark.

"What do you think he's doing in there?" she asked with a grin.

Mark smiled.

"My money is on meditating. Or putting the finishing touches to a voodoo doll that looks suspiciously like me."

Katie snorted a laugh.

"Speaking of which, you do know we're running a sweepstake on when he's finally going to snap and do you actual harm, don't you Mark?"

"Oh? What sort of harm?"

Katie giggled.

"The options are many. Everything from firing you to murdering you in your sleep. We've got one vote for Vega losing his mind completely and making you walk the plank."

Katie tried to get the last few words out without dissolving into giggles once more, and failed spectacularly.

Mark laughed.

"Just trying to get him to lighten up, that's all. For his own good. Guy thinks we're in the middle of a fucking war or something."

Katie nodded sagely.

"Yeah, this is just like war," she said with heavy irony. "I hear that on the frontlines it's nothing but sunbathing and champagne and dips in the jacuzzi."

Mark opened his mouth to respond, thinking that taking the conversation toward the topic of dips in the jacuzzi could only be a good thing, and shut it again promptly when Steven Vega reappeared. Whatever meditative measures the man had undertaken in the privacy of his office must have worked, because the angry red colour in his face was gone, replaced by a serene smile.

Mark felt his stomach twist. He'd only known Vega for a couple of weeks, but already he felt that he knew that smile well. It was the smile Steven Vega wore when he had come up with another awful task to hand out to Mark.

Wait for it, Mark thought.

"I've had a report that there may be a security issue in the ventilation system," Vega said. "Looks like I'll need someone to go down to Climate Control and check it out manually. Now, let's see..."

Vega made a show of looking around the group gathered before him, as though he couldn't quite make up his mind which of his team was the best fit for the job.

It was pure pantomime, and Mark knew it. Checking the ventilation system would mean hours spent crawling through hot metal pipes, and almost certainly getting lost in the process. A shit job. There was only one person Vega would choose to do it.

"Hmmm. Ledger, I think you'd be perfect. Go and check it out. Thoroughly. And I would like you to check in with me every twenty minutes, yes?"

Mark sighed.

"Can I ask what sort of security leak we could possibly have in the air-conditioning system, Steve?"

"Of course, Mark. The kind of leak that I need you to go and check out thoroughly. I hope that answers your question?"

Vega smiled beatifically as Mark rolled his eyes.

"It's nothing too life-threatening Ledger, no need to worry that you'll have to do some actual work. It looks like one of our junior staff in engineering has gone AWOL," Vega said. "Hasn't reported for duty, last seen near Climate Control. Probably just some slacker, but for the moment we have to treat him as missing. I figure you've got plenty of experience with goofing off, so you're the perfect man to find him."

"Shit," Mark said, "the guy probably just got lost down there, it hardly seems like a security—"

"Then you'll find him, and lead him back to safety," Vega snapped. "Make sure you pick up a flashlight on your way out, Mr Ledger. It's dark down there. I expect a report from you in twenty minutes."

Vega's smile widened, and Mark felt his shoulders slump.

This was going to be a long trip.

9

Edgar stretched his back with a grunt and sighed as his bones clicked in protest at the hours he had spent hunched over the welding torch.

He slipped the visor from his face and shuddered a little when he saw the blood that stained his chest. He could still feel it on his hands, where it had splashed when he drove the screwdriver into the guard's throat.

So warm.

Herb hadn't said a word to Edgar since the killing, and Edgar felt confusion and anger at Herb's attitude knotting his stomach.

Edgar hadn't wanted to kill the man. He didn't want to kill anybody, and yet here they were, sentencing thousands of people to death. There was no choice.

That was Herb's problem. He still thought he had a choice; still thought the duty that fell to the Rennick brothers at the moment of their birth was something that they could debate. Something they could walk away from.

He hadn't been there in Brighton; hadn't seen the creature in the room beyond the black door. Hadn't felt its foul presence in his mind; that terrible weight, dragging his thoughts down into the darkness.

Edgar had doubted his father’s word at times, of course. It was impossible not to question a story so incredible. Yet his father had research to back his claims up. He had evidence. And even with the truth weighing down on him, Edgar had still considered Herb’s point of view. He had tried to find another way.

Right up until he saw the truth with his own damn eyes.

After Brighton, Edgar questioned none of it.

What their father had told them was a reality and, like it or not, it was up to Edgar, Seb, Phil and Herb to ensure the outcome that did the most to minimise the casualties. Edgar tried to picture a future in which the creature behind the black door and its ilk decided that hiding was no longer necessary. It was a world of torture and pain and endless horror.

Brighton.

Memories that made Edgar shudder; images that had haunted his dreams every night for two months.

If Herb had been there; if he had seen what the thing had done to the poor bitch that Edgar had delivered to it—what it had forced her to do to herself—Edgar thought his little brother might hold a different opinion about their duty and their lack of options.

At the very least, he would surely have stopped complaining.

Edgar shook his head angrily, clearing his thoughts. Herb had a way of getting under his skin, and setting him thinking in a way that was not constructive. All that mattered now was getting it done, and getting the fuck out before all hell broke loose.

The time for moral arguments was long gone.

He checked his watch.

Four hours and forty minutes had passed. The device only needed a few finishing touches now; the components that Phil and Seb had been working on, the detonator that Herb had completed minutes earlier. The bulk of it was built already, and what was left was akin to a Lego project: just a matter of attaching the final parts to the requisite slots.

Edgar checked over the work his brothers had done. Everything was in order.

There was nothing for Edgar to do for the next few minutes, while his brothers finished up, other than wait. He wiped his sweat-drenched brow, and made his way over to the silver satchel he had carefully placed on the low ledge hours earlier.

He opened it, and performed one final check. Inside, there were just five items: four pairs of goggles and a radio, exactly as security had discovered. He tested them all to ensure they worked, and then carefully sealed the satchel, making sure it was absolutely airtight.

"How long, guys?" Edgar asked.

"Less than ten minutes," Seb said.

"Looks like we're breaking our record, then," Edgar said with a weary grin.

"Yeah," Herb said bitterly. "It's amazing how motivating sheer terror can be."

*

Dan was lost.

After watching the body tumbling into the water, he had been rooted to the spot for what felt like a long time, locked in a fierce debate with himself.

One part of him—the louder, more persuasive and familiar part—wanted nothing more than to return to his bed and cuddle up to his sleeping wife, and to try to forget that he had seen anything at all. Yet as he stood there, lost in thought, another voice in Dan's mind gained some traction.

It was, he thought, the voice of the man he had been before.

He had to do something; had to report what he had seen at the very least. Someone had been killed. There was a murderer on the ship, and the authorities had to be informed.

The idea that he should be the one to do that caused a wave of anxiety to wash through him.

He thought about waking Elaine up, and felt pathetic. Elaine was exhausted, and this would be a terrible start to the honeymoon. It would probably taint the whole trip. It was far better for Dan to find someone in security and report what he had seen, and let that be the end of it. No need to ruin Elaine's day.

Except that reporting the incident to security meant venturing out into the ship by himself.

He battled against the fear for a long time, summoning up the courage to leave, only to find that his nerves betrayed him each time he approached the cabin door. He began to shake and sweat, and then finally, after several seconds spent bitterly rebuking himself for being so feeble, Dan remembered that he had stood alone in the terminus and nothing bad had happened, and he told his nerves to shut the hell up and stepped out into the corridor, letting the electronic door shut smoothly behind him.

And then he got lost.

He had left a map of the Oceanus back in the cabin. He thought he had memorised the quickest route to the section he had spotted that was marked security and enquiries, but almost as soon as he left the cabin the featureless labyrinth of corridors got the better of him. One of the ship's few compromises on practicality versus luxury: where the entertainment decks were wide and expansive, the cabins were part of a rabbit warren of identical narrow hallways. Most didn't even have windows.

Soon, he was so turned around, he didn't even know the way back to his own cabin, and following the numbers on the doors made no difference as anxiety began to affect his ability to think straight. In the end, he followed a sign that promised him a direct route to the nearest swimming pool, and figured that if he could get out into the open air, he would be able to get catch his bearings again. Or his breath.

At the very least, he decided, a member of staff would be able to point him in the right direction, though he was no longer sure whether he would be asking for help to reach the security and enquiries section of the ship, or for directions to return to the safety of his own cabin.

After a few more bewildering turns in the featureless hallways, he heard squealing and splashing ahead of him, and knew that he was close to the central part of the ship.

When he exited at a large swimming pool, the open air helped him breathe a little easier. He took a moment to look at the bathers and the people reclining in loungers with books. None of them were looking at him; nobody was staring at the crazy guy. No one muttering jokes about the weirdo. It was just as his therapist always said: people have their own lives and their own worries. The only person thinking about you is you.

Dan plucked at the mop of hair that covered his scarred forehead, and after taking a few calming breaths, he noticed a sign emblazoned with arrows pointing out the path to various attractions and facilities.

He scanned the sign until he saw Security and enquiries, and set off in the direction marked, impressed with his determination to continue his mission and lost in thought about how to impart the news that there was a murderer on board.

Wondering whether anybody would believe him.

*

The ventilation system wasn't quite as bad as Mark had feared.

It was stiflingly hot in some areas—so hot that just touching the surface of some of the vents that he crawled through made him wince, but there was more room in the pipes than he had expected. Enough that, in certain parts of the metal maze, he was almost able to stand upright.

Doubtless, Steven Vega had assumed that checking through the air con system would be a horrible job; maybe the head of security had hoped that Mark would get stuck in a vent somewhere and starve to death, or get sucked into a fan and diced, like a character in some bad action movie.

Mark grinned a little at the thought. It wasn't so bad down there once you got used to the heat. In fact, the vents offered the same benefit as the walkway high above the ship did: Mark was far away from Vega's watchful gaze and incessant interfering.

He stopped at a junction, and checked the air con schematics he had stuffed into his pocket to ensure that he did not get lost in the network of vents and pipes. As far as he could tell, he was getting close to the central control room; making far quicker work of checking through the system than he had anticipated.

That wouldn't do at all. Finishing early would mean reporting back to Vega, and discovering what other awful jobs the man could conjure up for him. Mark thought that Vega would soon drop the pretence of 'maintaining security' altogether, and would order him to start cleaning toilets.

Better slow this down, Mark thought, and sat on the warm metal, fishing out his pack of Marlboro's. Smoking inside the ship was strictly forbidden of course, but then...who would ever know?

With a satisfied sigh, Mark lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply.

And the smoke caught in his throat when he heard voices.

Mark frowned, and strained to hear what was being said. Something about being terrified?

He breathed out the smoke slowly, and the cigarette burned away between his fingers, forgotten.

Hearing people in the Climate Control Centre was not, in itself, unusual. There was every chance that someone had asked for the air conditioning in some part of the ship to be turned up or down, and there could be maintenance staff nearby for any number of reasons.

Yet something about the voices made Mark pause. It was the tone, he decided. Clipped, almost...fraught. The muffled words were part of a tense exchange, and from the lowered sound of the voices, the men speaking did not want to be overheard.

Mark had worked in cruise ship security for several years, hopping from ship to ship, usually getting out of one job before his 'attitude problem' got him fired, and moving on to the next. It was an easy life: only once had Mark ever needed to involve himself in anything approaching violence—when two drunken passengers had started a fistfight that ended up turning into a miniature bar brawl.

In general, cruise ship security just meant...being there. Being visible, and getting paid.

Once upon a time, not long after he had first started out in the security business, Mark rode shotgun in an armoured truck, delivering eye-watering bundles of money to cash machines in and around Birmingham. That job had required him to undergo some formal training, and he had spent his time in the truck on a state of high alert, scanning for the potential robbery that never came.

He hadn't lasted long in that role. The constant state of watchfulness he was required to maintain was draining and nerve-wracking at the same time.

Still, a faint echo of that training returned to him now; rusted over after so many years without use but still apparently functional. Something about the tone of the men's voices he had heard in the ventilation system made his nerves jangle, and he felt that sense of high alert, just as he had when he had been transporting cash.

Something in the way the men spoke suggested that whoever they were, they weren't supposed to be there.

Mark stubbed out the cigarette, and listened intently.

*

"You saw a body being thrown overboard."

Dan gritted his teeth in frustration at the obvious disbelief in the big man's tone.

When he had finally found his way to the security suite, Dan had told his story to a man in a dark grey uniform who nodded at him, distracted and clearly not listening, before hurriedly passing him on to 'the boss.'

The boss wore an identical—though much larger—uniform, and introduced himself as Mr Steven Vega, and he spoke to Dan with a puffed-out chest and a raised jaw that reminded Dan of watching old World War Two films with his father when he was a kid.

In those movies, the British officers always seemed to be stiff-upper-lip types who delivered words like machine gun fire. The kind of guys that expected to have their orders followed immediately and without question.

As a young boy, Dan had loved those old movies, and the stories his father had told him about how Grandfather Brian had helped to bring Hitler to his knees.

Brian had passed on years earlier, having discovered that cancer was a battle that bullets and bravado could not win. He didn’t talk about the war much, but he had always maintained that it was nothing like the movies. The officers, Brian had once assured his rapt grandson, were as shit-scared as everybody else, unless they were they types that sat miles behind the front line and handed out the orders.

Those sort of guys, Brian said, ceased to be important the minute they were out of earshot.

Steven Vega looked just like one of those movie-officers, though, and Dan felt sure that the man had either been in the military, or had spent a long time watching those same old movies to perfect the look and the attitude.

Vega's bristling confidence made Dan nervous, but he tried to shrug it off. After all, everybody made Dan nervous.

"That's right," Dan said, trying to summon up an authoritative tone. "A body wrapped in an orange tarp."

"So...you didn't actually see a body. You saw a tarp."

Dan sighed. He had expected a certain level of disbelief, but had hoped also to encounter someone professional enough to at least investigate his claims. From the dubious expression on Mr Vega's face, Dan thought that was looking increasingly like a forlorn hope.

"Did Ledger put you up to this?"

Dan frowned.

"Uh, I don't know who that is. Look, I didn't see a body exactly, but I saw somebody throwing something overboard. It was body-sized and body-shaped. When it hit the water, I'm positive I saw a human leg. It could well be nothing, but I thought I should bring it to the attention of the security personnel. I figured that the man in charge would at least take it serio—"

"Calm down there, son," Vega growled, and the steel in the man's tone made Dan's words catch in his throat. For a minute there, he had been working himself up toward some righteous indignation, and had almost forgotten that talking to strangers was meant to flat-out terrify him.

Vega stared at him thoughtfully, and Dan suddenly saw something beyond the starchy exterior the man presented. Something that made Dan suspect that the man wasn't just pretending to have been a soldier.

"What's your cabin number?" Vega rumbled.

"217."

Vega turned and looked at a huge schematic of the ship that dominated the wall behind his desk.

"Hmm. You have any idea how many decks down the object you saw being tossed overboard was?"

Dan frowned as he tried to recall.

"Not really," he said. "A long way down, I think. It must have been one of the lowest decks."

Vega stood abruptly, making Dan flinch.

"Follow me, son," Vega said without emotion. "And if it turns out that Ledger put you up to this, I'll throw you overboard myself."

"I already told you, I don't—"

"Yeah, I heard you," Vega snapped. "And I've been around long enough to know that if something smells like bullshit, that's exactly what it usually is."

Dan blinked. The conversation wasn't going as he had envisioned at all, and the security chief's constant references to someone called Ledger just left him feeling confused and nervous.

"Look," Dan said. "I've done my bit, and I've reported what I saw. I think now I'd like to go back to my—"

"You'll be released in short order, Mr Bellamy. For now, I'd like you to follow me, please. This way."

Dan stared at Vega, open mouthed, as the big man made his way around the desk and moved to the office door, gesturing for Dan to follow. After a moment, Dan traipsed after the head of security, keeping his eyes pointed at the floor. His mind was filled with a single, utterly confusing and worrying thought.

Released?

10

Mark pointed his flashlight up each of the four ventilation ducts that connected to the junction he had stopped at to smoke, and he frowned.

The beam of light revealed nothing, of course, but instinct made Mark look anyway, as though he expected to find the owner of the voice he had heard crouched in the shadows waiting for him.

Get a grip, Mark. There's nobody here but you.

Mark held his breath, straining his ears to catch a sound. The voices—assuming Mark hadn't imagined them in the first place—had fallen silent, but he thought he could hear something else. A sort of tapping. A scrape. Something metallic.

Someone was close by, Mark was sure of it. If the missing security guard he was supposed to find actually existed and was down in the ventilation system, it didn't sound like he was alone.

Maybe maintenance got called in. Maybe there's a problem with the air con. Sure, that's it. Has to be.

So why are the air con staff talking about being terrified?

Vega was right, Mark thought abruptly. He was a smartarse. Even the voice in his head was a sarcastic bastard. All of a sudden, Mark felt a tiny surge of sympathy for his boss. Just a little one, though.

That thought struck Mark as funny, and he might have chuckled, but for the growing suspicion that maybe Vega hadn't sent him on a wild goose chase after all.

That couldn't be true. Mark thought it very unlikely that Vega would send him to deal with an actual security threat. No way in hell he'd send him alone. No, Vega would send somebody he trusted to deal with something like that.

Given that Mark wasn't sure that the ex-marine trusted anybody, he thought that if there was a genuine threat on the Oceanus that needed investigating, the man would do it himself.

He would never send Mark.

Whoever the men in the air con system were, Vega surely didn't know about them.

So what the fuck is going on?

For a brief instant Mark wondered if maybe Vega was playing some trick on him, but he dismissed the idea. That would have suggested a level of friendly banter that just didn't exist between the two men. Besides, Vega was hardly the type for humour.

Mark listened intently, and heard nothing.

The noises he had heard must have been his imagination, he decided. Maybe the previous night's hard drinking had addled his mind more than he realised.

Clang.

Mark jumped.

The noise was loud, like somebody dropping a hammer onto a metal floor. Mark thought he heard a muffled curse as the metallic sound echoed away to silence.

No fucking way I imagined that.

Mark slipped his radio from his belt and depressed the button. He whispered into it.

"Steve, it's Mark. Uh...is there actually a threat in the air con system? Because I thought you were just trying to piss me off, you know, but...uh..."

Mark frowned, unsure what to say next. Any possibility he came up with made him sound either crazy or afraid, and both would be like red rags to Vega's charging bull.

"Look," Mark said. "I think there is something weird going on down here; I just wanted to know what you know about it, okay?"

Mark released the button, and was met only with silence. He waited a few moments, and then let out a soft, weary sigh and rolled his eyes.

He depressed the button again.

"Over," he whispered.

Still nothing but silence.

Mark waited for as long as thirty seconds before he decided that Steven Vega was definitely not going to answer him, and he turned his mind to what he should do next.

You're part of the security team, right? Investigating potential threats? So do some damn investigating.

Mark grimaced, and swept his flashlight around the four ducts that led away from his position, trying to figure out which one he should take.

As if in response, he heard low muttering; at least two voices, maybe three, and trained the beam of light on the duct to his left.

That way.

*

Did I take my pills?

Dan grimaced. His short term memory frequently played devious tricks on him, and when his anxiety reached a certain level, he found it difficult to catch the thoughts in his mind. They slipped from his grasp effortlessly, like he was trying to catch fish with his bare hands.

He thought he had taken his pills, but he also thought that dealing with the strange head of security was bewildering and terrifying, and so had to concede the possibility that his spiking anxiety might mean that he needed to take his medication.

Yet he thought he had taken his pills. In fact, he was sure of it. That's right. Dry-swallowed them after waking up. Can still taste a little of that sour chemical flavour at the back of my throat.

Only one possibility remained: Oceanus Head of Security Mr Steven Vega was a scary guy to begin with, and Dan's medication was having trouble keeping the big man's intimidating air at bay.

Just gotta stay calm, Dan. This will all be over soon. Right?

Dan trotted after the security chief, nervously trying to keep pace with Vega's long, loping stride.

"Uh...Mr Vega? Did you say released?"

Vega didn't respond; didn't even blink, and Dan fell back a little, frowning at the floor as his cheeks flushed a furious crimson. Somehow over the past couple of years, during which he had only conversed with Elaine and a kindly therapist, he had all but forgotten how to make conversation with people. The idea of demanding answers from a guy like Vega made his head swim and a stinging cold sweat broke out across his forehead.

The anxiety worked like that; in cycles. Let one damn thought put down roots and a physiological response was inevitable. Sometimes it was sweating, sometimes shaking or stuttering.

Once the physical effects manifested, Dan began to focus on how strange his behaviour must appear; how abnormal, and that merely fed the anxiety.

He felt himself locking into one of those cycles now, and knew where they usually ended up.

Panic attacks.

All-encompassing; paralysing and humiliating.

Familiar sensation.

Crawling up my neck.

Spreading like poisonous gas in the basement of my mind.

Unsafe. Get away.

Must get away.

Adrift on the terrible black river, surging and boiling; carrying me toward something awful. Something unstoppable, and—

"Here," Vega barked, and thumped the base of a clenched fist into a solid-looking white door three times. The noise jolted Dan, and he peeled himself away from his thoughts, and focused on breathing, just as the therapist had instructed.

You have to learn to focus on your feelings. You have to be mindful of how illogical they are. Separate yourself from the anxiety. Look in on it from a distance and realise how unhelpful those feelings are, and how you don't have to let them control you. Breathe. Count. Breathe.

In, out, in...out.

The feeling that his heart was trying to hammer its way through his ribs abated a little as the door opened, and a bored-looking young woman stepped aside to let Vega in. Just having Vega's attention diverted to somebody else for a moment helped to ease the pressure building in Dan's mind.

"Mr Vega?"

The woman looked at Vega and Dan inquisitively. She was young and attractive, and Dan felt a surge of embarrassment at how he must look to her: sweat dripped down his brow, and no amount of wiping it away with his palm seemed to staunch the flow.

He was shaking, he realised, despite the warmth of the air on the Oceanus.

"He's with me," Vega said, and stepped into the gloomy room beyond the doorway. Once inside, he turned and beckoned Dan in.

"Show me what you saw," Vega said as Dan neared the doorway. Inside the room, he saw a bank of monitors casting a dim glow over a desk and a not-comfortable-enough looking chair.

"This ship is carrying almost as many CCTV cameras as passengers," Vega said, motioning to the monitors. "If what you saw is real, Katie here will find it."

Dan stepped inside, and stared at the array of monitors in wonder, his anxiety suddenly forgotten. He saw sixteen small television screens, cycling through images every few seconds. As he watched, he saw the pools, the casino and nightclub, the park and gift shops and dining areas. From almost every conceivable angle, he saw a different part of the ship, and not once did he notice an image repeating.

Vega wasn't kidding. There had to be a lot of cameras on the ship, but Dan hadn't noticed any. Surveillance wrapped in a velvet curtain of luxury. He tried not to wonder just how much of the interior of the cabins might be covered. Failed.

"Jesus Christ," he breathed.

"How long ago?" Vega barked.

Dan frowned. He'd looked at his watch, hadn't he? He dropped his eyes to the glowing digits at his wrist.

"I got lost on the way here," he said a little apologetically, "so I make it something like twenty-seven minutes, give or take."

Dan looked up at Vega, and saw the big man's eyebrows rise, just a little. Vega had thought Dan was bullshitting, for whatever reason—Dan didn't much care anymore—and had clearly expected Dan's response to be vague and noncommittal.

Starting to believe me, huh?

Vega closed the door behind him, and stepped closer to the screens to get a better viewing angle. He watched the cycling images thoughtfully.

"Katie, Mr Bellamy here thinks he saw a body being dumped overboard. Twenty seven minutes ago, directly below his cabin."

Katie arched an eyebrow in surprise, but said nothing, and slipped into the single seat before the bank of monitors. Her fingers danced over a small keyboard, and the images on the screens began to move backwards.

"What is your cabin number?" she asked.

"217."

"Cheap seats," Katie said, and grinned.

"Not cheap enough," Dan said, and felt himself ease up a little at her friendly demeanour. Compared to the bluster and intimidation that radiated off the head of security, talking to Katie seemed like a walk in the park. Even if she had looked curiously at the beads of sweat running down Dan’s face.

"Starboard side," Katie said, and flicked at a couple more keys. "How far down from where you were standing, would you say?"

"Near the ocean. One of the lowest decks. Below the passenger decks, I think."

Katie jabbed at the controls again and suddenly only fourteen of the monitors displayed pictures. Dan straightened, and examined them closely.

"These are the main public areas covered directly beneath cabin 217, on decks 1-5," Katie said.

"It won't be the first deck," Dan said softly. "The body fell for a second or two before hitting the water. It was a little way up."

When Katie hit the keys once more, the screens went dark for a moment, and were replaced by sixteen images once more.

"That helps," Katie said. "Okay. This is every camera we have in the common parts on decks three to five. We'll start there."

"The common parts?"

"Hallways, mostly," Katie explained. "If we need to go into any of the cabins we can, but this should—"

She trailed off, and when Dan followed her gaze to the bottom left screen in the array of blinking monitors, he drew in a sharp breath.

The image was a little blurry, and colourless, but there was no mistaking what it displayed. Two men, dragging something large down a narrow hallway before opening a window and pushing the object out. When they were done, one of the men stopped to clean something dark from the window frame. Something that could only have been blood.

"Well, holy shit," Steven Vega said.

11

Steven Vega strode out of the CCTV room like a man reborn. He knew what the other staff thought of him; knew it full well, but he didn't need to be liked to do his job. He needed to lead, and so he led, in the only way he knew how.

It was damned difficult, though; so different to what he had experienced before. Leading a security team on the Oceanus felt like leading an army with no enemy, and no war to fight, and it frustrated the hell out of him. The salary was good—no, way better than good; virtually obscene—but he was already feeling restless and it was still technically his first day of active duty.

Not his first day on the boat, though. He had been cooped up on the Oceanus for a couple of weeks already, getting used to his role and surroundings while the ship was docked and preparing for the big launch.

The Oceanus was huge, there was no denying that, but somehow it already felt small to Vega, like a too-tight sweater that clung to his throat and made breathing difficult. He had a feeling that anywhere he went might feel the same, after years spent out in the endless desert, but on the ship, the feeling of being trapped had come to feel pervasive almost immediately.

His discomfort was deepened by the fact that there was so little for him to do. The rest of the security staff seemed perfectly happy in their lethargy; to them, the time spent on the ship was as much a holiday as it was for the passengers.

That wasn’t Steven Vega’s style: he had joined the forces as soon as he left school, and had fallen deeply in love with the military lifestyle precisely because it was so ordered. He didn’t sign up for glory or for the thrill of action, but for purpose.

He hadn’t ever wanted to leave the military. He foresaw the life of an officer when his time in combat was up.

And then the recession hit, and the government began to make cuts. The British military haemorrhaged numbers even as the politicians’ foreign policy continued to alienate half the planet and create new enemies for them to fight. Wars were ongoing, and Vega doubted they would ever truly end, but increasingly they would be fought by computers and drones.

Boots on the ground were expensive. Dead soldiers  were bad publicity.

Vega had been cast aside at the age of thirty five. Abandoned by the career that he loved; told to piss off and find a job in the private sector.

Most of the men and women in his position would have envied him, he thought. They would probably think he had landed on his feet. A nice, relaxing job that paid better than the military ever could.

Yet it brought Vega no joy, and no satisfaction. He barely slept, and on several days recently he had found himself locked into depressive moods that had never afflicted him once when he went to work with a gun in his hand and a target on his back.

Increasingly, he began to run into conflict with colleagues; men like Ledger, whose blasé attitude would have been stripped out of him in five minutes at Basic Training. Once, the kind of surly, juvenile demeanour that Ledger displayed would not have affected Vega in the slightest. Yet now, with so little else to focus on, the running conflict with the man dominated his thoughts.

That was the trouble with having no enemy, Vega thought. It left too much time to construct some in your head to make up for the lack of real adversaries, and the enemies built in the mind were always far more difficult to fight. Working in security on the ship was a great job, but increasingly, as it became more and more obvious that security guards on the Oceanus were just glorified scarecrows, not required to do anything other than be visible, Steven Vega began to realise that it wasn't a great job for him.

But that had all changed.

Because all of a sudden there was an enemy, and Steven Vega had something to fucking do at last.

He strode back to his small, sparse office and tapped a four-digit code into a keypad on the wall behind his desk, which popped open a discreet cupboard.

Reaching inside, Vega pulled out a pistol and holster. He shrugged the holster over his shoulders, and almost sighed in relief. Carrying a weapon again felt so damned right. So natural. He hadn't realised just how much he had missed it.

He snatched up the walkie-talkie he had left on his desk, and flipped it to the open channel, barking into the small microphone.

"Saunders, Phillips, Ferguson," he said. "I want you in my office, right now. Over."

The radio fizzed for a moment.

"Yes, Mr Vega. Over."

With a satisfied nod, Vega moved to tuck the radio into his belt, and sighed before lifting it back to his lips, flipping it to another channel.

"Ledger, get the fuck away from that deck and do it quietly. We have hostiles on board, and they are somewhere in your vicinity. Vega out."

Vega flicked the walkie off and strode out of his office to wait for his team to arrive. Saunders, Phillips and Ferguson were a far cry from the well-trained men and women he had fought with over the previous twelve years in active service, but Steven Vega generally had a good nose for people, and how useful they might be if the shit hit the fan. The three he'd chosen were the best he was going to get; the few who hadn't worked cruise security so long that they became complacent.

Vega doubted that Phillips, Saunders or Ferguson had ever seen any meaningful action during their careers, and if things went sour down on deck three, they would probably be little help. He would have to direct them every step of the way.

Still, they would have to suffice. Even if this turned out to be nothing, Vega would need backup. The ship logged every opening of the weapons locker, and there would be paperwork, and questions asked.

The weapons locker in his office held three more pistols identical to the one he now wore like a glove at his ribs. The pistols represented the sum total of the firearms aboard the Oceanus.

Vega felt a trill of excitement coursing through him. As soon as the team arrived, all four weapons would be making their way down to deck three.

To enemy territory.

Just like old times.

*

"Uh, it's Katie, right? Do you know what's going on? Can I leave?"

Katie glanced at Dan and shook her head slightly, before returning her attention to Steven Vega’s office, and Dan flushed.

Just go, for fuck's sake, he thought. Stop asking for permission like a child.

Dan stood rooted to the spot. His feet, apparently, were having ideas of their own, and refused to respond to his increasingly frantic pleas that they should transport him away from the security suite as fast as possible.

He followed Katie's gaze, and saw Mr Vega striding to the doorway of his office. Dan's eyes immediately fell on the gun.

Oh.

Shit.

"You stay here, Mr Bellamy. We're not done."

Vega's words felt like a clenched fist driven into Dan's stomach.

"Katie, make sure Mr Bellamy does not leave before I return. We'll need a statement from him."

Dan turned to stare at Katie, wide-eyed. He saw his own surprise and confusion mirrored in her gaze.

"Uh, Mr Vega? What's going on?" Katie asked hesitantly.

"You saw the tape," Vega said flatly. "We've got hostiles on board."

Hostiles? Dan thought. Vega had a way of choosing words that set off all sorts of alarms in his head.

Katie opened her mouth to say something—which Dan hoped was going to be can't we all just calm down for a moment?—but before she could utter a word, the door to their left opened and three men wearing security uniforms walked in. Vega immediately told the men to arm themselves, and Dan and Katie watched in mute astonishment as the group stepped into Vega's office and pulled on holsters identical to the one Vega wore so proudly.

"We've got a situation on deck three," Vega said brusquely. "Potential murder, and at least two hostiles. Could be armed, so stay behind me, and follow my lead, got it?"

The three men looked like they wanted to ask questions, but the expression on Steven Vega's face said he wouldn't be answering. He turned on his heel and strode to the door that exited to the passenger areas, and the three armed men followed him silently, exchanging glances that Dan thought clearly said what the fuck?

The door swung closed behind them, leaving Dan standing in a dull office space that suddenly felt vacuum-packed and airless.

"Okay," he said finally, concerned to hear the trembling in his tone. "I think I'm going to go back to my cabin now. You know where to find me, and—"

Katie placed a hand on Dan's chest, and he flinched visibly. He felt his cheeks redden.

"Just stay here, Mr Bellamy," Katie said. "I don't know what's happening, but I can tell you one thing: right here is the safest place on the ship right now. I'm sure this will all be sorted out before you know it."

Dan blinked at her.

"Right here hasn't felt safe since the minute I first walked through the doors," he said.

Katie smiled politely, and said nothing.

She must have thought he was joking.

*

The security suite was at the base of the superstructure toward the Oceanus' expansive fore, several decks directly below the bridge, and a couple of levels above the park that was the natural landmark by which to navigate around the ship.

Twelve elevator shafts ran down through the ship like pillars, each glass-fronted and offering a spectacular view of the park as they descended down past the decks that held the cabins. The two decks that rose immediately above the park consisted mainly of dining areas: the Oceanus catered to virtually every taste, and no less than twenty restaurants offered everything from hot dogs and pizza to Michelin-starred haute cuisine.

Below the decks, below the park, the elevator would drop past the ice rink, the casino and nightclub; the health spa, the video arcade and aquatheatre. On those decks the glass walls of the elevator were a little less impressive, mainly offering a view of corridors and distant entertainment areas. To counter that, the lift moved very slowly, giving the occupants ample time to see what was available on each deck.

The decks around the park teemed with life, despite the fact that the ship was only at half-capacity. As the last of the sun's light filtered through the gathering clouds overhead, the Oceanus became a neon playground, a floating city of warm lights and heady excitement. The entertainment would be starting soon: a range of live comedy and music, theatre productions and the latest movies on show at the cinema on the lowest of the passenger decks.

Steven Vega ignored the view beyond the glass as the elevator dropped agonisingly slowly. All his senses were focused inward, on the frantic thrumming of his nerves.

Alongside him, Saunders, Phillips and Ferguson stood in uncomfortable silence. He had briefed them on what they were walking into, and had once more repeated that they should follow his lead before turning his mind to concentrating on the task ahead.

There were at least two killers on board. Quite possibly armed.

Vega felt a distant pang of guilt when he realised that he sort of hoped they would be armed.

He was oblivious to the discomfort of the three men travelling with him. Oblivious to the way they registered the eager excitement that radiated from every pore in Vega's body, and did their best to focus impassively on the windows, and the slowly descending view.

Outside, the park was still just about visible. The elevator—plush and accommodating—was not built for responding to an emergency.

There were a couple of service elevators toward the middle of the ship, and Vega cursed himself for not walking to them. Those elevators were all about function rather than style: wide boxes of metal that ferried staff from deck to deck with far greater speed than their glass counterparts.

He hadn't wanted to walk through the throngs of passengers while armed, and so had commandeered the closest of the public elevators. In his haste to see some action, he hadn't thought through the options.

As he watched the view scrolling past the glass inch by inch, he found himself cursing the decision.

A sign, Vega supposed, that he was getting rusty; that the boredom of civilian life was grinding something away from him. Less than a year since he'd been in active service, and already some of his sharpness felt like it had been worn smooth. He would have considered all the options out in the desert, because failure to do so would very likely get him and his team killed.

At least, he thought, choosing the wrong elevator simply meant moving more slowly, not people ending up dead. After all, there was virtually no chance of that happening on a cruise ship.

12

"Is it ready?"

"Yep. Are you?"

"Shut up, Herb."

Mark was lying flat on his belly, listening to the words of a group of men—at least three, maybe more—who were gathered in one of the larger junction boxes that connected the various parts of the Climate Control Centre. He couldn't see them; not quite, but a vent a few feet ahead of him would offer him a view.

He crawled toward it, sliding on his belly like a snake, doing his best to make no noise. Occasionally the thin metal beneath him creaked a little, but in the abdomen of the ship, the engine was much louder than on the passenger decks, and he thought the ever-present rumble would cover any low-level noise he made.

He inched forward, listening intently.

His pulse thundered in his ears. The hunch he'd had, that the men were not supposed to be there, was feeling more and more like accurate intuition with each passing second.

Who the fuck are these guys?

"Phil? Seb?"

"Yeah. Yeah, everything looks ready, Ed."

"What time do you all make it?"

Three voices answered almost simultaneously.

"Seven twenty-seven."

"Sun's setting. There will still be light for another half hour or so."

"Not much, though."

"So...shall we do it now, Ed? We're in international waters. Have been for a least a couple of hours."

"Just hold on. I'm thinking."

"Thinking that maybe this is all a terrible idea?"

"Shut up, Herb."

Mark slithered forward, and finally a little of the room beyond the vent hovered into view.

He saw four men, all wearing maintenance uniforms that he recognised as belonging aboard the Oceanus. Engineering staff, he thought, though he couldn't be absolutely sure. Most of the uniforms the staff aboard the ship wore were nearly identical, with only small insignias on the chest and tiny variations in colour differentiating between officers or maintenance or entertainment staff.

There was something off about the men, though, and it took Mark a few seconds to work out what it was: they all looked alike; their facial features similar enough that Mark was certain they had to be related, and were most probably brothers.

Mark didn't know all the people who worked on the ship, not even close, but he thought he would have been aware of four brothers working among the staff. It was the kind of odd detail that stuck in the mind.

What was really strange, though, was what the men were doing: the four of them were sweaty and oil-stained, and surrounded by tools that were casually strewn across the floor around their feet. Through the narrow slit in the vent, Mark saw wrenches and screwdrivers, and even something that appeared to be a welding torch. It looked like they had been hard at work on building something. That something, Mark thought, could only be the strange device that sat on the floor between them.

It was metallic, roughly the size of a large suitcase, and Mark didn't have the first idea what it was. What he did know was that despite its mechanical appearance, it was not part of the Climate Control Centre. The air conditioning unit behind the men looked untouched. Judging by the tools and the dishevelled, weary state of the four men, the strange object looked like something that they had only just constructed.

He waited a moment, until one of the men moved aside and gave him a clearer view. Mark focused on the device, and felt clammy fear grip his mind.

A large cylinder formed the bulk of the machine, surrounded by lots of exposed wiring and circuitry, wrapped in a skeletal metallic casing that looked to have been hastily welded together. It was ugly and functional; definitely not in keeping with the Oceanus. There was only one thing it could possibly be.

A bomb.

Mark hadn't seen a bomb in his life, but he'd seen plenty of them in the movies, and the exposed wires particularly brought back memories of frantic races to cut the correct wire before the timer ticked to zero and killed the star. Mark couldn't see a timer, but once he saw the wires, bomb was all he could see.

In a world gripped by fear of terrorism, there was no way to get such a device aboard a cruise ship. The days of minimal security were long gone, even on a boat that expected to play host to wealthy people who planned only to spend weeks lazing by a pool and drinking champagne.

The men had circumvented the security checks at the terminus by building the bomb once the Oceanus was at sea.

Terrorists, Mark thought dimly.

His mind raced. He carried no weapon other than the heavy flashlight, and all of the men looked physically imposing. All were surrounded by tools that could easily become weapons if the need arose.

Fighting the men was not an option, yet still it was the urge that came to Mark’s mind first, despite the fact that he had not inherited what his father called the Ledger family’s talent for violence.

His father had taught Mark never to run; never to back down from a confrontation, and that virtually any problem could be solved by swinging fists at it until it went away. But then, Mark’s father had been a violent drunkard, living on faded memories of his time as a semi-successful boxer. The only useful lesson he had ever taught Mark was how to throw a punch, but Mark could never forget the disappointment in Paul the hammer Ledger’s eyes when it became clear that learning how to step into a swing, how to drive from the hips to increase power and how to follow an uppercut with a well-timed hook held no interest for his only son.

Still, some relic of those days spent in his father’s garage as a kid, working the heavy bag with his puny arms and trying to stave off endless boredom came back to him; a genetically-coded response to threat. Somehow, the old bastard's programming was still in him somewhere; the urge to fight.

Mark dismissed the idea. In a four-to-one battle in a confined space, he would have no chance.

That left only one option. The one Mark’s father would never have taken. Mark had to get the hell out of there. Get back to the security suite and somehow persuade Steven Vega that there were terrorists aboard.

He just had to hope that the words he had heard the men speaking meant that they were not planning to detonate the bomb immediately.

They said half an hour, didn't they? That's plenty of time to reach Vega and get some backup.

And some firepower.

Mark reasoned that there had to be a timer, and that the men had to plan to escape the Oceanus somehow before they detonated the weapon.

Unless they're suicide bombers.

Suddenly, the fact that the four men were obviously related terrified Mark. He imagined a group of children being raised by some monster, their young lives darkened and poisoned until they were capable of carrying out unspeakable atrocities. Capable, even, of sacrificing themselves in the name of some twisted cause that Mark would never understand.

Get the fuck out of here.

Wincing at the soft creaking of the metal beneath him, Mark began to awkwardly shift himself backwards in the vent, grateful that the distant rumbling of the engine drowned out the noise he was making.

The men wouldn't hear him, and as he eased away from the vent and back into the shadows, he knew they wouldn't be able to see him, either.

No problem. Just move fast, and move quiet.

Mark shuffled back a little further, until the men disappeared from his sight. Once he was clear of the vent, he began to move through the duct a little more quickly, confident that even if the men heard the noise he was making, they would not be able to see him and would most likely assume it was mechanical.

It would be okay. The bomb wasn't attached to anything that Mark could see. If worst came to worst, it could be tossed overboard and the Captain could be informed that he should gun the engine and get as far away as possible.

Mark began to think that despite the sudden, frightening turn his day had taken, everything might just be okay. He had stumbled across the danger with time to defuse it. Hell, even Steven Vega would be proud of him.

And then the blood in his veins turned to ice as the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt shattered the silence. Static blared, and Vega's voice rang out like an alarm.

"Ledger, get the fuck away from that deck, and do it—"

Panicked, Mark fumbled at the radio, finally locating the volume dial, and twisting the noise away into pulsing silence.

For a heartbeat, he remained frozen in the thick, quiet air, straining his ears and praying that he would hear nothing; praying that the engine was loud enough.

"Where the fuck did that come from?"

A whispered hiss reached Mark's ears, floating through the air and into the vent like toxic gas.

"There's someone here. In the vents."

Mark grimaced.

Fuck.

*

"I'll go," Herb yelled.

Edgar wanted to stop it, but it happened too quickly. If he had been able to react in time, he would have grabbed Herb's collar and physically restrained him; would have yelled at his little brother that their work was done, and the authorities finding out that they had intruders on the ship wasn't going to matter now.

Let whoever was in the vents listen. Let them run for help. By the time it arrived, it would be far too late. The Rennick boys had done the hard part. All that remained now was to push the button and get to the extraction point. They just had to stick to the damned plan.

But Herb had panicked, and for reasons Edgar didn't think he could possibly understand, had charged from the room, snarling about catching whoever was watching them. Before Edgar could react, Herb was gone, and Phil and Seb were staring at him uncertainly.

Fucking Herb.

What Edgar wanted to do—what he absolutely knew that he should do—was arm the device and be done with it. Let Herb pay for his recklessness and his inability to keep a level head. Let him stumble around out there, lost like all the others would be.

Edgar even found himself reaching for the button, reaching for the moment that had become the whole purpose of his life, the reason they were all there.

He couldn't press it.

Herb was blood.

"Fuck," Edgar roared. "Phil, go after him. Bring him back."

"What about whoever was in the vents?"

"Fuck them," Edgar snapped. "They don't matter. In five minutes, I'm setting the damn thing off. If you haven't found Herb in three, get yourself back here. Got it?"

Phil nodded, his face stricken, and charged from the room, following the chaotic clatter of Herb's footsteps.

Edgar watched another brother leave, and clenched his jaw in anger. They were so close. He felt rising fury at Herb for throwing a spanner into the works, but the true reservoir of anger pooled around himself. Herb was unstable, and bringing him was a risk. His skill with electronics far outmatched that of his brothers, and Edgar had insisted that Herb be a part of the team despite his doubts, purely because Herb being there would mean the device would get built more quickly.

Edgar dropped his eyes to the device, and wondered if he had it in him to set it off if Phil didn't manage to bring Herb back. If doing so meant losing Herb, would Edgar be able to live with himself?

Can I live with myself if I don't set it off?

Frustration seethed in Edgar's mind. Despite the promise he had made to Herb in the back of the van, Edgar knew that doing his duty was the only thing that mattered. Getting off the ship was secondary. There was simply too much at stake.

He'd set the device off.

If it meant losing Herb.

If it meant dying himself.

The alternative was too terrible to contemplate: a disaster of epic proportions that would affect the entire world. Edgar wouldn't be the one responsible for that. For the betrayal of centuries of blood spilled to maintain the peace.

He glanced down at his watch, staring at the second hand as it ticked slowly, like a failing heartbeat. Phil had been gone for almost a minute.

Edgar fixed the doorway with a blank stare, and ignored Seb's gaze as it burned into him.

Phil had four minutes left.

13

It was plainly obvious to Mark that, as long as he remained in the ventilation system, the man pursuing him would have a difficult time tracking his position. The ducts took unpredictable turns, deviating away from the corridors in some places; returning to run parallel to them in others.

Several times, Mark heard running footsteps draw near only to fade away again. A couple of times, he thought he heard more than one man running out there.

Yet they could not locate him.

It would have been easy to wriggle deeper into the vent system; to hide, safe in the knowledge that the men chasing him would almost certainly never find him. Mark considered it, he really did.

But there was the matter of the bomb.

Even if Mark was doomed to discover that playing the role of hero was beyond him; even if he couldn't prevent the men from detonating the weapon, he was certain of one thing: he had to get out into the open air at the very least. If it came to it, he could launch himself from one of the lower decks and take his chances in the Atlantic.

Some part of Mark's mind reprimanded him for his foolishness. The Oceanus was in the middle of the world's second biggest ocean, a long way from the nearest land, and night was falling. The water would be freezing, and survival would be extremely unlikely even if he could get far enough away from the ship to escape the blast that he knew was coming.

It didn't matter. A choice between the bomb and the freezing waves was no choice at all. At least the sea offered him a chance.

Hiding in the ducts was not an option, and so, when he reached a vent, and couldn't hear footsteps in the space beyond, he launched himself from the duct, propelling himself into the corridor outside it like a bullet. He landed awkwardly, twisting as he fell. Something popped in his ankle, sending a brief pulse of pain through his mind.

Just a sprain, he thought as the pain dipped back to a bearable level. Nothing serious. Get the hell out of here.

Worse than the sprain was the noise he had made: almost immediately he heard footsteps headed in his direction.

Mark was fairly athletic, but he was far from being a big guy; certainly, he was nowhere near the towering wall of sinew that Steven Vega was. Speed was Mark's best physical attribute, but in the cramped confines of the vent system, any advantage his pace might have given him had been eradicated. It was impossible to move through the vents quickly.

He had put all his energy into getting out into the open, where he could put his head down and run, and he would have backed himself in a foot race, but he had exited the vents too hastily, and the pain in his ankle from the fall slowed his progress considerably.

He bit down on the simmering pain in his ankle and charged forward, moving as fast as he could.

With each stride that Mark took, he heard the footsteps of the man—no, men—who were chasing him growing louder.

Gaining on him.

As he ran, Mark looked to his left and right, trying to get his bearings. He had been aiming to leave the system of ducts where he entered it, next to the service elevator that would take him back to the park level and the security suite, but somehow he had turned himself around, and it took him a moment to realise where he was.

Close to the fuel tanks.

The wrong side of the ship entirely.

Mark wanted to scream in frustration, but the footsteps were close now, and he could hear one of the men shouting the other's name. Herb. The one that sounded like he was pissing the others off.

The temptation to run blindly was almost overpowering, but Mark forced himself to pause and mentally run through a map of the ship.

He knew the layout of the Oceanus fairly well, but hadn't had a chance to get to know every corner of it as he had the previous ships he had worked on. That knowledge came with time. Usually, by the third or fourth voyage on a vessel, Mark knew every hallway, every stairwell and corner, and could calculate the quickest route to the nearest bar almost instantly.

He hardly ever bothered learning the layout of the engine rooms in the vessels he served on, though. There was simply no need; no pressing reason for senior security staff to venture into that part of a ship. Even if he had cared to study the engine room, it would take a long time to memorise the layout on the Oceanus: the engine room was actually a network of dozens of rooms spread across the three lowest decks, and running almost the entire length of the ship.

He had taken a wrong turn.

He thought he had to double back from his current position. Somewhere nearby, there was a door that would take him to a flight of steps that would lead up to the deck that housed the nightclub. From there, Mark would be able to navigate just fine. The nightclub was one of the locations that he had programmed into his mental GPS as soon as he got the job on the Oceanus. Whether Vega forbade mixing with the passengers or not, Mark fully intended to spend most nights getting drunk there.

He set off at a light jog, wincing at the pain in his ankle, but grateful to find that it seemed to be receding a little. No real damage done.

As he ran, he silently cursed Steven Vega for his pettiness, and for sending him down to deck three on a bullshit mission that had become something far more dangerous than he could have imagined. Yet even as he cursed Vega, he found himself wishing that the ex-marine would pop into existence right in front of him. God knew, Vega's macho bullshit would come in handy right now.

He considered trying the walkie-talkie again, and all of a sudden his hand was slipping the radio from its holster on his belt almost by itself, like his mind had finally had enough of trying to piece together the right course of action, and had decided that he needed to do something.

Still running, he depressed the button, and drew in a breath to yell at Vega to get the hell down to deck three.

The words never came.

The breath exploded from Mark's lungs as he collided with something solid moving in the opposite direction. He had been so focused on the radio, he hadn’t even seen the man coming around the corner in front of him.

That, Mark thought, as he toppled backwards and saw the walkie-talkie flying from his grasp and disappearing into the shadows beneath a mountain of pipes, must be Herb.

Mark hit the floor hard and rolled instinctively.

And time slowed to a crawl.

For a moment, as the world froze around him, Mark was back in his father’s garage, listening to his father drone on about the Ledger family talent for violence; promising his pre-teen son that the love of the fight would come some day, and that in the meantime he should train.

According to Paul the hammer Ledger, a man needed to be a blunt instrument if he was to survive in the world; needed to be ready to knock down the obstacles that stood in his way. Becoming a boxer was more than just having a profession; more than survival. It was about becoming a man.

Growing up on one of the roughest estates in Birmingham, a place that even the police only ever visited with significant backup, meant fighting to survive in every sense of the phrase. Fighting for jobs, fighting for money and food, and just plain old fighting. Almost every house on the Weyford Estate got broken into frequently, and muggings were as common as autumn showers. It paid to toughen up.

Mark's house was only ever broken into once. Once was all it took for the neighbourhood to realise that his father was the same Paul Ledger who had once been a moderately successful middleweight boxer.

Mark's father had little time for the police, and so the two men that broke in one night, brandishing cricket bats and demanding money and jewelry had to face a different sort of justice.

The hammer left them alive—barely—and when he was done with them, and he had hauled them out onto the street and left them in pools of their own blood, Paul Ledger walked back into the house and came face to face with his nine year old son.

You saw all that? he had asked gruffly.

Mark would never forget that he had been unable to speak, his tongue locked in place by a cocktail of fear and excitement. He forced a nod.

Good. That's how you take care of yourself, son. I won't always be around to help you, and you can be damn sure no one else will. When life knocks you down, you hit back, and you hit back hard, you hear me?

After all these years, maybe it turned out that the old man had a point after all.

Mark pushed himself up from the floor, roaring an incomprehensible bellow of pure rage, and he shoulder charged Herb, tackling him around the waist and lifting him clear off his feet, driving the man back into a metal valve.

Mark heard the cracking of the man's spine, and knew immediately that the fight he expected was over before it had begun. He watched in satisfaction as Herb crumpled to the ground, his face creased in agony.

Mark gave silent thanks to his dead father for a moment. The old bastard had been a terrible dad in most ways, but he had raised a scrapper, using the poverty and relentless violence of the Weyford Estate to harden his son. That upbringing had been outdated and useless for the most part.

Until he needed it.

Mark bunched his fists and leaned over Herb, ready for anything the fallen man might throw at him.

Anything, that is, except the look of fear and surrender on the man’s face.

"Listen," Herb said weakly. "I’m not here to fight. You have to call for help. Right now, before it's too late. Get the captain to send out a distress call. Broadcast the ship’s position."

Mark stared down at Herb in confusion.

"What?"

"Everyone on the ship is in danger," Herb coughed.  "Call for help. You don't have much time."

Mark's mind raced. Herb's words had to be lies, but they were delivered with sincerity. The confusion that Mark had felt when he first heard voices in the air con system suddenly ratcheted up several notches. The terrorist had chased him to warn him?

"Help?" Mark asked. "Help with what? The bomb that you and your terrorist buddies are planning to—"

The words were knocked back down his throat by a wrench that caught Mark in the temple, ringing his skull like a bell and toppling him to the floor. A suckerpunch he didn’t see coming, and he had time to curse himself for forgetting that he had heard a second set of footsteps following him, and the world went dark.

*

"You wouldn't actually do it while they're still out there, would you?"

Edgar sighed impatiently and glared at Seb.

Seb was the second eldest of the four brothers, beating his twin by around five minutes, and he was also the brother that Edgar trusted most to have his back in any given situation. He was a quiet, thoughtful sort of guy. The type of person that faded into the background and occasionally piped up with some profound statement that could alter the course of a conversation in an instant.

It was the same question that Edgar was asking himself, over and over.

Can I really do this to my own flesh and blood?

"If I have to," Edgar snapped. "You know what's at stake here."

Seb rolled his eyes.

"Yeah, bro, I know what's at stake. How could I not? We've all had this shit drilled into us since we were munching on rusks. One day, the time may come and yadda-yadda-yadda. Neither you nor Dad have ever given us a chance to forget what's at stake. Well, what's at stake right now is the lives of two of our brothers, and Dad’s not here. This is down to you. So I'll ask again. You wouldn't actually set that thing off while they're out there? You know they'd never find their way back."

Edgar grimaced, and tried to keep a lid on his mounting frustration. He didn't do a great job of it.

"You act like I'm signing their death warrants, Seb. But what if they don't come back? What if, instead of Herb and Phil, we see a security detail walking through that door? What then?"

Seb stared at him blankly, but Edgar saw a flicker of emotion fizz across his brother's eyes, and abruptly realised that Seb was working really hard to hold his shit together. Behind the implacable facade, an inferno of doubt raged.

Edgar heaved in a deep breath.

"Look," he said finally. "I get it. I really do. You think I don't struggle with it, too? One way or another, we are signing death warrants. Best case scenario is three thousand. Worst case...well, I don't even want to think about what the worst case could be. We all came into this with open eyes. We all knew there was a chance we'd never see land again, right?"

Seb nodded morosely.

"And the reason I've been acting like a prick," Edgar continued, "is because I don't want that to be the way things end up. We had to all stay in line; all had to read from the same script, you know?"

"And you didn't think that would be impossible for Herb?" Seb said. "You know what the guy's like."

Edgar nodded.

"Unstable. And if I could have left him at home I would have. But you know the crazy part? I think if that had been an option, Herb would have demanded to tag along. Because he knows that Dad isn't lying about what's coming. He knows that I'm not lying about what happened in Brighton. He knows they exist. He just doesn't believe that they can do the things I've seen them do."

Seb said nothing.

"Herb would have tagged along—with all the bitching and whining fully intact—because deep down he knows that this," Edgar pointed at the device, "is just about the most valuable item on the planet right now. Setting it off is all that matters, even if it means we don’t make it. I should have done it instantly."

Edgar shook his head wearily.

"I just didn't want to do it while there was still daylight. Didn't want to leave anything to chance. I just wanted a moment to think."

Seb grimaced, and Edgar clapped his hands on his brother's shoulders.

"We all knew we might not make it back," Edgar said again.

Seb didn't speak, but Edgar saw the resigned look in his brother’s eyes and knew that he had his agreement. He breathed a sigh of relief. Despite everything he had said, and everything he knew, some part of him wasn't sure that he could have proceeded without Seb's backing.

Edgar glanced at his watch.

"It's been over six minutes," he said. The words hung in the air.

Seb nodded, and without a word, strode over to the small silver satchel that remained where Edgar had placed it when they first arrived.

"Is it sealed?" Edgar asked.

"Yeah," Seb said. "You think it will work?"

He looked at Edgar dubiously.

"Dad assures me it will, and everything I've read suggests he’s right. I don't know if it's actually been proven, though. I guess you'd have to ask someone in the military, but I doubt they'd answer. Probably throw you in a deep hole just for asking."

Seb snorted.

"So I guess we just have to have faith," he said glumly. "Just have to pray that the bag works, or we're as far up shit creek as everybody else is."

Edgar shrugged.

"Under the circumstances," he replied, "I'd say praying is probably pretty apt right now, wouldn't you?"

Seb nodded.

"I guess so," he said, and checked his own watch. Seven minutes. Closer to eight. He stared at his big brother evenly.

"So do it," Seb said.

Edgar took the silver satchel from his brother and clutched it tightly under one arm, moving in front of the device that they had built in record time.

Too fast, he thought. Had they taken a half hour longer, Herb and Phil would still be standing alongside him, darkness would already have fallen, and there would be no problem.

Or whoever was in the vent would have come back with a fucking army.

Edgar lifted a trembling hand.

He didn’t have a choice. This moment was his calling. His duty. The point of everything. All of Edgar’s life had led to this decision, and he had been taught not to let anything stand in the way of his doing what was necessary when the time came. Not the potential loss of his brothers. Not even the possibility of his own death.

The device they had built didn't have a timer. No way could they have trusted that. Someone had to be there, right alongside it. Someone had to set it off. Had to know for sure.

He returned Seb's stare, and saw a droplet of sweat trickling down his brother's brow.

They do exist. And I've seen what they can do.

"Fuck it," Edgar snarled.

And hit the button.

*

Bing!

The doors opened on deck five, and Steven Vega bit back the almost irresistible urge to scream at the passengers waiting beyond that this particular elevator was out of fucking service.

Two elderly women blinked at the four armed men as the doors opened, and Vega manufactured a smile with some difficulty.

"I'm very sorry, ladies," he said through clenched teeth. "This lift is going down to the engineering decks. If you'll just wait here a moment—"

"Nonsense, boy," one of the women said, and shouldered her way into the space between Vega and Saunders. "Lifts go up and down, haven't you heard? Come on, Edith."

The second old woman nodded at her more forthright friend, and stepped inside the elevator.

Just smile, Vega thought to himself. Get off on deck three and let them carry on their journey. The passengers are paramount.

That was the Captain's phrase. The passengers are paramount. Vega didn't necessarily disagree, but the way the man had turned it into some sort of catchphrase, to be repeated at every opportunity, made Vega's teeth itch.

Ferrying the old women down toward potential danger was not an option, whether the money they had paid to be there made them paramount or not. When it came to safety on the Oceanus, Steven Vega had rank, and his word was law.

"Out!" he roared, and the wrinkled faces froze in surprise. When it became clear that the women were too stunned to respond, Vega drew in a deep breath, and roared again.

"I said get out!"

The women hurried from the elevator, and Vega heard them mumbling vague, shaky threats about taking the matter up with Vega's superiors.

He stabbed the button to close the doors, glaring at the pensioners until the lift began to descend once more, erasing them from his sight. It seemed as though it was moving even slower than it had before.

He felt the tension growing among the team.

Vega watched as the digital readout meandered from five to four.

And then the lights went out.

And the lift stopped moving.

They were between floors, and the glass offered no view of anything other than metallic walls. No light penetrated the lift, and he heard the men around him gasp in surprise as they were plunged into absolute darkness.

"What the fuck?"

Ferguson's voice.

"It's just the lift," Vega snarled. "Any of you bring a flashlight?"

His question was met by silence, and Steven Vega ground his teeth when he realised that the idiots he was travelling with were almost certainly shaking their heads in the darkness.

He cursed himself for not bringing a flashlight, and then remembered that his phone had a flashlight app that would serve almost as well. He fished it from his pocket and frowned.

The phone was dark, too, and no amount of fiddling with the infuriating touchscreen would coerce it back into life.

This was not going to plan.

"One of you, hand me your phone," he said gruffly, and heard rustling as the men checked their pockets.

"My phone's dead," a voice said.

Vega felt something in his gut then, a rolling queasiness he hadn't felt for a long time. A feeling like something bad was happening; something he didn't quite understand.

"Mine too, Ste...Mr Vega."

"And mine. And there's something else, as well. Where is the emergency lighting? In the event of a loss of power, there is a backup source that provides lighting to crucial parts of the ship. Including the elevators."

Steven Vega grimaced even as a part of him congratulated Phillips for at least reading the security manual he'd been given when he got the job. He doubted many of the other security staff had bothered.

Phillips was right. A loss of power to the elevator—hell, to all the elevators—was something Vega could have dismissed as a technical glitch. But a loss of power that extended to their personal devices was a clear sign that something on the ship was very, very wrong.

There was only one explanation he could think of. It made no sense on the Oceanus, but...

He felt at his wrist, locating the buttons on his wristwatch. One of them provided a soft blue glow behind the display so that the wearer could check the time at night.

He pressed it.

No response.

It can't be.

It's unthinkable.

Why in God's name would this happen to a cruise ship?

"My radio's dead, too," a voice said warily. Vega thought it was probably Saunders, but he wasn't paying attention. Too lost in his own thoughts, in trying to understand.

The Oceanus was in the middle of the Atlantic, for fuck's sake. A long way from dangerous waters.

It can't be.

And yet it is.

"What's going on here, Mr Vega?"

Vega scratched at his chin thoughtfully, and suddenly found himself wondering if four firearms was remotely enough to defend a ship like the Oceanus.

"I think," he said finally, "that we've just been hit by an EMP."

14

Elaine awoke in darkness so total, that for a moment she wasn't even sure she had opened her eyes.

She stretched out, shaking the sleep from her muscles, and frowned. She knew she should have insisted that they not take a nap. Judging by how dark it was, they had slept far longer than an hour or two. They had probably missed the evening's entertainments already, and had maybe even slept through the opening hours of the Oceanus' three fine-dining restaurants.

Elaine hadn't ever experienced fine dining. Even the meal served at the wedding had been the budget option. From a list of exotic-sounding dishes, she had been compelled to opt for chicken. When you were serving more than a hundred people, the difference in cost between Roasted chicken and Foie Gras quickly became substantial.

The notion that she had missed out on the chance to sample haute cuisine—even if only for one night—irritated her, and she chastised herself for napping for so long. She and Dan only had twenty-one evenings to enjoy on the ship, and they had paid a hefty price to do so. Sleeping through one of those expensive evenings seemed like a terrible waste.

She glanced at the window to her right, barely able to make it out. Night was falling fast, and it looked like it brought heavy cloud cover with it. There was no light from the moon and stars, and coupled with the darkness of the bedroom, it almost felt like she had awoken in an isolation chamber.

She remembered that most things in the cabin operated on voice control.

"Lights," she said tentatively, feeling a little foolish. Voice control sounded great in principle but, just like talking to her smartphone, it made her feel awkward. Once the novelty had worn off, she had disabled the option to ask her phone to do things for her. It just felt too damn weird.

The lights didn't respond.

"Lights," she repeated, a little louder. "Uh...lights on?"

Nothing.

Great, she thought. We got the moody voice control.

She fumbled to her left, finding a small shelf set into the wall that served as a bedside table. After a moment of searching the unfamiliar surface with her fingers, she located the small bedside lamp, and switched it on manually.

Darkness prevailed.

A power cut?

Is that even possible?

Elaine sat up in bed, and reached out to wake Dan.

And found an empty space. Cold sheets.

For a moment, Elaine sat there, frozen, her palm in the space where Dan should be. Dark flickers of concern flashed through the back of her mind. Dan's behaviour had always had a certain...predictability to it, even before his illness made him retreat into his shell and refuse to come out. She loved that about him; the dependability. It was part of the reason she had fallen for him in the first place.

So where is he?

Elaine pushed herself up from the bed and found her summer dress on the floor. She slipped it on and shivered a little.

Should I be cold?

The thought popped into her mind from nowhere, but once it was there, it dominated. The air in the cabin felt freezing, as though the air conditioning had been out of action for a while.

How long has the power been out? How long have I been asleep?

Elaine didn't wear a watch: her phone was her timepiece. She tried to remember where she had dropped her bag when she entered the cabin, but couldn't recall, and the darkness offered no clues.

With the aid of the faint light coming through the window, she could just about make out the open doorway that led to the bathroom and the lounge and kitchen area. She moved forward cautiously, unsure of the layout, and stepped out into the living room.

The reason for the cold became obvious immediately: the balcony door was wide open, letting the biting Atlantic wind rush into the cabin. Elaine stepped toward it, stubbing her toe on the low coffee table that was all but invisible in the darkness, and biting back a curse of pain.

She hobbled out onto the balcony.

No Dan.

The concern that had been teasing her thoughts finally erupted.

Dan had been suicidal, once; an awful period that had lasted for several weeks after he was discharged from the hospital. That had been a dreadful time for them both: Dan’s panic attacks were frequent and severe, and he became moody and unresponsive. At night, Elaine would lie awake in bed and listen to the man she loved being tormented by what sounded like terrible nightmares.

Sometimes he would talk in his sleep, mumbling about the terrible black river; screaming that he was falling, or that something was coming for him. She asked him many times to talk to her about the dreams, but Dan point-blank refused. When once she asked him specifically about the black river, his eyes widened with remembered horror, and he had a panic attack so severe that it forced him to return to hospital for several days.

For months, doctors had advised Elaine to keep an eye on her husband’s mood. They talked about post-traumatic stress. They talked about the possibility that if things worsened, Dan might need round-the-clock supervision. Maybe he would need to be in a place that could care for him, just for a while.

They talked about suicide.

Elaine refused to even consider the idea that Dan might need to be institutionalized. If Dan needed twenty-four hour supervision, it would be Elaine who provided it, not some stranger.

Dan’s mood remained bleak for months, and more than once that terrible word popped into Elaine’s mind like an unwelcome guest.

Suicide.

Elaine didn't know if he could have gone through with it, but she knew from his dark moods and comments what was going on in his head. The thought that she might wake one day to find he had done it terrified her, and the memory of how that worry felt was something that she didn't think would ever wash out of her mind.

He wouldn't...

Elaine told herself to snap out of it. Those days were long gone. Dan was better, or getting better, at any rate. He was happy, if not quite yet whole. The panic attacks had almost stopped entirely. The therapy had a huge positive effect. Every day, she saw improvement, despite knowing the journey toward health was not at its end.

He hadn't jumped off the balcony. No way.

Elaine frowned.

Her agoraphobic husband, alone in a strange place that she knew scared him half to death, had apparently gone for a walk.

That can't be right.

She wondered if she had underestimated just how much better Dan was feeling. It didn't seem possible. She knew the whole reason that Dan had navigated her directly to the bedroom and the inevitable nap was so that he could have time to process being in a strange place. It was a little like retreating to a safe nest, recovering from the ordeal of boarding the ship before he could summon up the courage to venture out among strangers once more.

Elaine got it. The ship made him anxious. She had no doubt about it. He wouldn't just go out alone.

And yet, apparently, that was exactly what he had done.

Elaine stepped back inside the cabin, and made her way carefully around the coffee table, heading toward the part of the opposite wall that she thought held the cabin door, moving with her palms out in front of her.

The door would be shut, she thought. It was electronic. If Dan had somehow decided to leave the cabin, he would surely have shut the door behind him. Come to think of it, Elaine thought that it shut automatically, like an elevator door. It needed the keycard to open it, right?

Elaine nodded to herself absently, and felt along the wall until she found the doorway.

The door was open.

The power cut, Elaine thought. The doors must open in response to loss of power. That made sense. A power cut on the ship's maiden voyage was bad enough, but subsequently turning all the cabins into electronic prison cells was something else entirely. She could imagine the jokes at the Oceanus' expense. The glitzy launch of the cruise ship would be a laughing stock.

Some poor bastard was going to get fired for this, she thought, and felt a pang of sympathy at the idea that someone would have to take the fall for the technical hiccup, but it departed quickly: trampled aside by a far more compelling thought.

We might get a partial refund for this.

Elaine felt a surge of hope in her gut. Despite the cost, she didn't regret the choice of honeymoon, not one bit. It had seemed so utterly right. So perfect that it had been Dan's suggestion, and Dan who drove the idea forward until it became reality.

Dan, who had barely been able to leave the house. The honeymoon wasn't just a celebration of their marriage, it was a sign that her Dan was coming back to her. She wouldn't change a thing.

Despite that, the Oceanus was expensive, and she couldn't help but feel a little dismay at the belt-tightening they'd have to do to pay it off. Any reimbursement, no matter how small, would help keep the credit card companies off their backs for a while. The power cut might be a blessing.

She stepped out into the dark corridor, and immediately slowed to a stop. Without the feeble light offered by the windows, even her darkness-adjusted eyes could see nothing.

Nothing at all. The corridor that she knew was there, simply did not exist. There was only darkness.

And somewhere beyond it, somewhere through it, Elaine heard distant screaming.

*

The whole ship seemed to be screaming.

Not screams of pain or horror, but of surprise, Dan thought. Mixed in with that, he heard mocking jeers. It was the response of a class of schoolchildren to the teacher falling on their arse. Dan imagined that there were plenty of people out there at that very moment, stumbling into each other; tripping over their own feet.

The sudden plunge into darkness had a very different effect on him.

He froze, and felt the hair on his arms standing up.

Too many coincidences, Dan thought. There was too much weird shit happening for it to be unrelated. The body being thrown overboard, Mr Vega's bizarre armed response.

The lights going out.

The fact that he had even left the cabin in the first place.

What the hell was I thinking?

He was still standing just inside the security suite, still remonstrating with Katie, who was clearly becoming increasingly irritated with him, when the world went dark. It was almost like being struck blind. The walls and desks that he was surrounded by—and even Katie, standing just a few feet away from him—melted into the blackness.

For a moment, he thought the darkness was in his mind; like the stress of the strange afternoon had caused something inside to finally snap.

"Uh...Katie?"

He flushed in the dark. He called out her name, with some part of him knowing that of course she was there, standing exactly where she had been a moment before. Still, he had to check.

"I'm here," she said, and Dan let out an explosive sigh of relief. Katie sounded distracted. He heard her fumbling with something, knocking something to the floor.

"What was that?" Dan said, and was unnerved to hear the anxiety clearly evident in his voice.

"I'm just...looking for...aha!"

"What?"

"Flashlights," Katie said.

Dan heard a click.

And another.

Silence.

Darkness.

Two more clicks.

"That's strange," Katie said.

"What?"

"The flashlights don't work."

"Flashlights? Plural?"

"Not a single one."

Silence.

"Uh...do they have—"

"Yes, they have batteries in them," Katie snapped. "They were tested a few hours ago. They all work."

"So...what does that mean?"

"I'm thinking."

Silence.

"There's no emergency lighting either," Katie said softly. "We should have emergency lighting right now. It runs off a separate power source."

Dan could almost hear her frowning.

"There's no way both systems should be down."

Katie sounded like she was thinking aloud. Dan had, for the time being, run out of thoughts of his own, and so he let her continue.

He heard fabric rustling.

"And my phone doesn't work. Does yours?"

"I don't have it on me," Dan said. He bit off the rest of the sentence which begged to be said. Because mobile phones tend to be useful only for people who occasionally leave the house.

"I think we've been hit by an electromagnetic pulse," Katie said in a clipped tone, and Dan's mouth dropped open.

Silence.

Until Dan realised that Katie couldn't see how visibly stunned he was. He made a mental note to verbalise everything.

"What?" he asked weakly.

"An electromagnetic pulse, it's—"

"I know what it is," Dan snapped, surprising himself. "I spend the better part of my life on the internet. What do you mean we've been hit?"

"Can you think of any other reason why we’d lose power? To portable devices as well as the ship?"

Dan had no answer to that.

"Okay," he said. "Say you’re right. How have we been hit? Like...by a solar storm?"

Silence.

"Are you shrugging?"

Katie coughed awkwardly.

"I don't know. I guess. That's how they happen, right?"

Dan rubbed his forehead. It felt like a headache was gathering momentum behind his eyes. Once more, he wondered if he had taken his pills, and once more he reminded himself that he had.

"That's how they happen in the movies, yes," he said finally. "I’m not sure the science actually supports—"

"Or a bomb in the atmosphere," Katie interrupted. "A nuclear bomb, right?"

Dan snorted.

"Conspiracy theory," Dan said. "Every third website tells you that. A pulse from a nuke wouldn't be strong enough. The effect would be minimal unless you were directly underneath it."

"Every third website?" Katie said. "Any particular reason you believe every third one and not the others?"

Dan ignored her, and tried to remember the hours he'd sat at his desk, trawling the internet as his only connection to the world outside. He'd read plenty about EMP attacks. The internet was full of them. One of the great dangers of modern times. According to some, a massive EMP would essentially reboot civilization.

Dan got the impression a lot of those folks were secretly praying that it would happen.

Other websites blinded him with science, but from his recollections, the greatest dangers posed by EMP stemmed from the likelihood that people would build them, and use them at close quarters.

As a close-range weapon, Dan thought an EMP would be fairly devastating. There had to be a reason he kept reading about the military funding research into the devices.

Dan shook his head irritably in the darkness. There was nothing to be gained from getting into a debate about the accuracy of facts unearthed on the internet. How an EMP might have been triggered didn't really matter.

The real question was why?

"Oh," he said softly, and blew out a long breath.

"What?"

"Think about it. A solar storm is pretty damn unlikely. And if someone was going to set off nukes in the atmosphere, why do it above the middle of the Atlantic? That would kind of defeat the point of it, right? Doing it where there are no electrics for it to disable?"

"Right," Katie agreed, sounding uncertain. "So?"

"So the only other option is that somebody has set off an EMP bomb close by. Really close by. Like, on board this ship."

The words tumbled out of Dan's mouth as his mind raced, his anxiety momentarily forgotten. His thoughts followed a dark path to a logical destination.

And then the anxiety came right back, and it brought reinforcements.

"The ship is the target," he said.

15

Mark woke, and immediately wished he hadn't. His head felt like someone had repeatedly run a truck over it.

And then there was the darkness.

Jesus fucking Christ, am I blind?

It came back to him all at once. The ‘fight’ with Herb. The sucker punch that had knocked out his lights.

He was lying awkwardly on the floor, one arm pinned beneath him. He waved the other hand inches from his face, and saw movement.

Not blind, he thought. Just no light.

That was strange, of course, and worthy of further investigation, but Mark decided immediately that the questions crowding in his aching head needed to be prioritised.

For the moment, one question took natural precedence: who can I hear breathing?

Mark held his own breath, listening to the sound of someone nearby panting in the dark; the noise accompanied by the relentless pounding of his own heart.

"He fucking did it."

The voice made Mark flinch. He didn't think whoever was speaking was addressing him. If anything, he thought it was the sort of tone one used when they were talking to themselves.

Whoever was sharing the darkness with him, they were close.

"I can't believe the fucker actually did it with us still out here. Fucking prick. Herb! Wake the fuck up, can you hear me?"

A slurred moan in the darkness. Herb wasn’t out cold. Just, apparently, in a lot of pain. Mark remembered the cracking sound that came from the guy’s back as he tackled him, and it dawned on him suddenly that he himself had only been knocked out for a few moments, like the electrics in his mind had shorted.

Oh shit, Mark thought. Usually getting knocked unconscious meant the end of a fight, but apparently a power cut had called a time out. He was still in the engine room. Still with Herb and whoever-the-fuck had driven the wrench into his temple.

He felt a surge of anger; the instinctive rage that comes with being blindsided. His father’s words came back to him.

When someone hits you, you hit back harder.

Any thoughts about talking his way out of the situation dispersed on a wave of fury. The guy who’d swung the wrench could easily have killed him. Could have done real damage.

There was only one appropriate response.

Mark rolled to his left slowly, freeing his arm, and levered himself to his feet inch by inch, half-expecting that at any moment the blow he’d taken to the head would force him back down to his knees.

"I can hear you moving," the voice snarled in the darkness. "You really think I can't hear you?"

Mark said nothing. He slowly extended his arms, focusing his every thought on the feeling of the air that his fingertips broke like the bow of a slow moving boat. Scrutinising the feeling and waiting...

And waiting...

The fingertips on his left hand brushed against something warm. Fleshy. Head height.

Mark was glad it was the left. His father's favorite punch in the ring had been a right uppercut—what he called his meal ticket—and it turned out that maybe it was genetic after all.

Mark twisted from the hip, lightning fast, rising up with the punch and feeling it connect with something hard that made the bones in his fist sing. He was no boxer; not even remotely skilled enough to possess a knockout blow, but Paul Ledger hadn't ever intended to raise a one-punch wonder.

If one punch doesn’t do the job—and it won't—be prepared to throw more, boy, you understand? Be ready. The fight’s over when the other guy stops moving. Not a moment sooner.

He followed up the uppercut with a flurry of well-timed jabs. If he'd been sparring with his father in the filthy garage on the Weyford Estate, he'd be on his arse seeing stars already, but most of the jabs landed at least a glancing blow.

When he threw one that found only air, Mark knew his opponent had gone down even before he heard the crumple as the guy hit the floor.

Mark felt around with his foot, and delivered a couple of kicks for good measure. The man didn't even grunt by way of response. Unconscious, then.

Or dead.

Fuck it.

As the violent mist that had descended upon him cleared from his mind, Mark became aware of ragged breathing in the darkness, and it didn't come from the man snoozing at his feet.

Oh, yeah. Herb.

Mark felt in his pockets, and drew out his lighter. He flicked it into life. The flame offered pitiful illumination, but it was enough for Mark to make out the shapes of the machines around him, the valves and pipes that snaked toward the engine that was the Oceanus' beating heart.

A heart that was currently silent.

That was especially troubling. A loss of power to the lights shouldn't automatically mean a loss of power to the engine. The two systems could survive independently of each other.

After a moment, Mark shrugged and pulled out a cigarette, lighting it and inhaling deeply while he organised his thoughts.

The power had been cut. To the lights, the engines. Everything. That was the device that the men had built, he guessed. He exhaled the smoke with a sigh of relief.

Not a bomb, then, he thought. That's something, at least.

He inhaled again, and his eyes fell on the shape at the very edge of the glow cast by the tiny flickering flame.

"Now then," Mark said, stepping toward the shape. "You're coming with me. Got a few questions to ask. Up."

He aimed a half-hearted kick at Herb's prone body.

Herb grunted in agony.

"I...I can't," he wheezed pitifully. "My back. It's agony. I can't move. Please, I just need a minute to—"

"That's a shame," Mark said, and he popped the cigarette into his mouth, clamping it between his teeth. "For you, at least."

With that, Mark placed his hands under Herb's armpits, and half-lifted him, dragging him in the direction that he thought led to the stairs.

In the dark, stopping occasionally to survey his position with the lighter, it felt like it took him a long time to find the exit.

Mark figured that Herb wasn't lying about the pain in his back.

Herb screamed until he passed out.

*

For several beats, Edgar and Seb stood in the darkness and remained silent.

Edgar couldn't hear anything, not the thrumming of the Oceanus' massive engine, nor the shrieks of surprise and fright that he expected were currently rippling through the passengers above.

It worked.

Part one of Edgar's mission—the important part—was done. Only two components remained for him to call the day a success: he had to call it in, and he had to gather his brothers together and get to the extraction point on the top deck.

And he had to do it fast.

He took the silver satchel from under his arm, and fumbled with the locking mechanism in the dark until it popped open.

The moment of truth.

The bag was their lifeline; the only hope they had of getting away from the Oceanus now that the device had been triggered. The material the bag was constructed from was reflective, and it looked garish and cheap, like something snatched up from a discount store.

It was anything but cheap.

Constructed from the same material that astronauts wore on space walks, the bag was designed to work like a Faraday cage; to shield the contents from radioactivity. And electromagnetic pulses. Apparently, it also caused X-ray scanners some trouble.

The material had been EMP-tested, but Edgar still felt a surge of anxiety as he opened the satchel. He doubted the tests had involved a device like the one he and his brothers had built a hundred times; a device with the power to disable a ship as large as the Oceanus.

As he reached into the bag, his fingers trembled a little, and he felt clammy sweat coursing down his back.

Inside, just as the guards who'd examined the bag at the terminus had discovered, were four pairs of what looked like protective goggles and a shortwave radio.

Edgar fumbled at the goggles, and pulled a pair awkwardly over his head.

When he pressed the discreet button located on the side, the world was suddenly lit in green.

Nightvision. The goggles had cost Edgar's father a fortune: a clear sign that the old man didn't want his sons to die aboard the ship as Herb foolishly believed.

Edgar let out a sigh of relief.

The EMP had fried the circuits of just about everything on board the ship, but the bag had protected its contents exactly as predicted.

"Here," Edgar said, passing a pair of goggles to Seb, who clutched blindly at the darkness until his fingers closed around them.

"They work. The bag worked."

"Holy shit," Seb whispered. "I wasn't sure, you know? Guess Herb got under my skin a little."

"Yeah," Edgar said. "He does that. But Dad was never going to leave us here to rot, not unless he could help it. Herb should have known that. Family means everything to Dad. After all, without it—without us—who is there to carry on this work when he's gone? Our cousins?"

Edgar snorted derisively.

"Herb never could see the big picture."

Edgar watched as Seb pulled on the goggles, his shoulders visibly slumping in relief when he found them working, and then Edgar pulled the final item from the bag.

There was nothing expensive about that item: there didn't need to be. A simple radio transmitter, with decent range.

He depressed the button, and the room filled with a blare of static.

"It's done," he said slowly. "The whale is beached."

He released the button and waited for a long, tense moment for the reply.

A tinny voice crackled from the small speaker.

"Roger that. Extraction in twenty minutes."

Edgar grimaced.

"We've been split up," he said. "I need more time to get everyone together."

There was a long pause before the radio crackled again.

"There isn't any more time," the disembodied voice replied. "Package is awake and en route. Twenty minutes. Be ready. Out."

"Fuck," Edgar whispered through gritted teeth. Even with the aid of the nightvision goggles, twenty minutes was nowhere near enough time to find Herb, not unless he was right outside the room. It barely left them enough time to get up to the extraction point.

He slipped the radio and remaining two pairs of goggles into his pockets.

"Let's go," he barked, and set off at a jog before Seb could reply.

*

Steven Vega could hear the muffled screams, but with the elevator stuck halfway between two floors, he couldn't see anything. The glass should have afforded a view of something at least—even if that something was just a featureless corridor—but the darkness beyond it was total.

An EMP strike. It had to have been detonated locally.

Military?

Vega dismissed the idea. The military, and in particular the US and UK militaries, were the likeliest source of a mobile EMP blast, but he could think of no logical reason for either government to deploy such measures against a civilian vessel.

That left terrorists as the only viable option. Vega was quite sure that there were people out there determined to build working EMPs ad use them; maybe even people who already had, but even if that were the case, why attack the Oceanus? And why do it so far out at sea? Terrorists generally wanted to wreak maximum devastation, for maximum exposure. Crippling a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, where nobody would even see it, well, it just didn't seem to fit the profile.

Unless an EMP is just step one.

Vega felt his blood run cold.

"We have to get out of here," he said flatly at the men he couldn't see in the darkness.

Murmurs of agreement.

"What do you think is going on here, Boss?"

Vega did a double take. That, he suspected, was the first time any of his staff had addressed him as boss. Maybe there was hope for them yet.

"I don't think the EMP is the end of this...whatever this is. It's the start. The ship has been disabled, and we're dead in the water. I can only assume that all comms are down, and that means only one thing. We are currently a very easy target."

"Uh, a target for what, Boss?"

The truth was that Vega had no idea. Any of the enemies that he thought might strike a cruise ship wouldn't have the capability to launch an attack in the middle of the Atlantic. That took money; a lot of money, and would almost certainly rule out terrorists or pirates.

Pirates, he thought with a sneer. The very notion was ridiculous.

"I don't know, and right now I don't need to," Vega replied. "What matters now is that this ship has a grand total of four handguns for defence and, as of this moment, all four are trapped in a lift and worth less than pea-shooters. We have to get out of here."

With a grunt, Vega delivered a heavy kick to the glass near the floor. If his memory of the moments before the lights went out was accurate, there was a large enough gap there that, if they could smash their way out of the elevator, they'd be able to drop down onto the fourth deck.

The glass held firm.

Far above the elevator, the muffled screams of surprise seemed to have died down a little. Vega was grateful for that. He'd been on holiday in New York once during a city-wide power cut, and he knew the panic that darkness could cause. Most of the cries he had heard so far would have been caused by shock, and he could imagine there were plenty of minor injuries that would need patching up, but at least it didn't sound like the situation out there had devolved any further.

Whatever part two of the plan to attack the Oceanus might be, it didn't sound like it had happened yet.

He kicked again, and once more the glass refused to yield.

"Shit," he grunted.

There was only one thing for it. He slipped the pistol from the holster at his ribs and crouched, feeling along the floor of the elevator until he was certain that he had located the curved glass that overlooked the fourth deck.

This has the potential to go very badly, he thought. He conjured up images of blasting through the glass and killing some unfortunate passenger who happened to be stumbling around in the dark out there.

At the very least, discharging his firearm was going to result in a lot of questions and paperwork. If he was wrong about the EMP, and if this was simply some loss of power that he did not understand, firing the weapon would cost him his job.

Fuck it, he thought. It's a shitty job, anyway.

He kicked the glass twice more, just to be certain. The glass didn't budge.

"Stand clear!"

Vega aimed the weapon down at the patch of blackness that he knew contained the glass.

"Cover your ears," he growled. "This is going to be loud."

He gave the others a half-second to comply, and then he opened fire. The roar of the gun in the enclosed space was deafening; loud enough to make his teeth rattle.

The glass finally gave up its stubborn resistance, and he kicked the remaining shards out, creating a gap that he thought would be just wide enough to accommodate his bulk. The others were smaller; they would fit through just fine.

"I'll go first," Vega said a little too loudly, when the roaring in his ears began to fade. "When I give the all-clear, you follow. One at a time. Got it?"

"Yeah, Boss."

Vega smiled grimly. There it was again. Boss. Funny how people decided that they needed leadership after all when the shit was hitting the fan.

He tucked the pistol back into the holster, and dropped to his belly, sliding through the hole and dropping several feet to the safety of the fourth deck.

And froze.

"Wait," he hissed.

What is that?

Vega crouched back against the wall, and dropped his hand to the butt of the gun once more. In the darkness to his right, he saw something moving toward him. A ghostly light that seemed to dance in the air at head-height.

He stared at the tiny flame, transfixed, as it moved closer. His eyes struggled to adjust.

And then he heard the sounds. A strange scraping. A grunting.

He began to ease the pistol from its holster, though to fire it at what, he had no idea.

And then when the dancing light moved close enough for Vega to see what it was, his mouth dropped open in astonishment.

"Hey, Steve-O. Little help?"

Ledger.

16

"We have to get to the bridge," Katie said.

"What about the rest of the security?"

"The rest of the security is either out patrolling the ship, or they just took all the guns and fucked off. Right now, I'm the security. And in case you hadn't noticed, my job is to sit and watch monitors to ensure nobody gets so drunk they fall overboard. Frankly, dealing with this shit is a little out of my comfort zone."

Dan frowned into the darkness.

"Okay," he said finally. "You go to the bridge. I have to get back to my wife. She's—"

"In your cabin, I know," Katie snapped. "You did mention it. But I'm telling you we're going to the bridge, and we're going to tell the captain what you just said. Then I'll take you back to your cabin myself. If it’s safe to do so."

Dan squeezed his eyes shut in exasperation.

"Unless you think you can find your way back in the dark by yourself?"

Dan's shoulders dropped.

"Fine," he said miserably.

"Sorry," Katie said softly. "This is just...getting to me, that's all. Listen, we'll be okay, just stay where you are for a minute."

Dan couldn't be sure, but it sounded like Katie was trying to convince herself rather than him. He flinched in surprise when he felt her fingers brush against his arm.

"Give me your hand," Katie said. She grasped his fingers in a surprisingly firm grip. "Follow me."

Katie led him forward at a slow, steady pace, until Dan heard her opening a door, and felt cool air wash across him.

"There are stairs here somewhere," Katie said in an exasperated tone. "We go up four flights. I think. Maybe five. That will take us to the bridge. The captain will know what to do."

Dan grunted acknowledgment, and hoped she was right. He had felt like things were spiralling out of his control from the moment he stepped into the security suite, and the sudden loss of power lent an edge of genuine fear to the familiar anxiety.

What was meant to be a wonderful honeymoon and a huge, positive step on his road to recovery was starting to feel like something dangerous and unstable. Something that was full of the dark potential to drag him backwards.

At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to hand the situation over to someone in authority, and to cower in his cabin with Elaine until whatever the hell was happening on the ship was finished, and someone informed them that it was safe to come out.

Safe?

The notion struck him as crazy. Barely an hour earlier Dan had been napping blissfully and now, here he was, questioning whether or not his life might be in actual danger.

What the hell could be happening to the ship?

As Katie tried to locate the stairs, Dan let himself be tugged along while he searched his mind for answers. The best he could come up with was pirates: the TV news had mentioned several times in recent years that pirates routinely attacked vessels in the seas around Africa, but he had never heard of it happening in the Atlantic. Still, he supposed, the Oceanus—with all the blazing publicity around its launch—could well have attracted the attention of criminals. The boat itself was worth a fortune, and then there were the passengers. Most—virtually all—were people of significant wealth. They had to be just to afford the tickets.

Sickly thoughts about hijackers and ransom demands popped into his head. The people, like himself, who had mortgaged their lives to the hilt to take the trip would be caught in the crossfire.

His nerves rattled painfully.

"Here," Katie hissed triumphantly, and tugged on Dan's limp hand. He allowed himself to be led a few steps forward, and followed Katie up the stairs in the darkness, moving carefully and testing out each step before he took it.

The bridge was four flights up after all, and when Katie pushed open the door, Dan heard the bustling chaos inside the wide, flat room immediately. A lot of raised voices talking over each other. A lot of people panicking as the instruments they relied on completely failed them.

We're drifting, Dan thought, and a new and unsettling possibility entered his head. What if the power never came back? The Oceanus would be at the mercy of the sea, dragged toward who knew where. What if the ship was dashed against rocks? Would the vast hull survive such a collision?

What if the ship—dark and surely all-but invisible on the sea—smashed into another vessel?

Did anyone on the Oceanus even have the means to call for help?

He forced himself to stop thinking about it, and concentrated on following Katie, who pushed her way into the bridge through the milling bodies.

There was light enough to see in the bridge—barely—with the floor-to-ceiling wraparound windows admitting the barest illumination from outside, but still Dan could only make out dark shapes. Lots of people, all moving around, bumping into each other and muttering muffled curses.

"Captain?" Katie yelled suddenly, making him jump.

There was no response other than the chaotic mess of indistinct voices.

Dan felt Katie's grip on his fingers relax, and then disappear entirely, leaving him alone in the dark and the confusion. He was reminded of standing among the crowds back at the terminus. There, the anxiety he felt had been familiar and expected, almost comforting in a strange way. He found himself wishing he could feel that fear once more. The current, heightened version was far worse.

Moments later, he heard Katie's voice again, and guessed that she had grabbed someone else.

"Where is the captain?" he heard her say.

"Went to the engine room," a voice responded grimly. "For all the good it will do."

"Does he know what's happening?"

Katie's voice again. Somehow, the irritation in her voice, which had already been clipped and abrupt, seemed to have increased exponentially.

"What do you think?" the voice responded. "Nobody knows what's fucking happening. Lost all power, but that's about all we know. The captain seems to think it's the electrics. There's an electrical storm building outside, maybe something to do with that, I don't know. I guess he thinks they can get the engine restarted manually, but if you ask me, the ship's fucked. We can't even call for help."

"Has anyone sent up flares?" Katie asked.

"Not yet," the voice responded. "Captain didn't want to, not until he had some idea about what's happened. Said it would be a PR catastrophe if we have to get rescued by some trawler on our maiden voyage."

"PR? Great," Katie said bitterly. "Sounds like the captain's got his fucking priorities straight."

"What do you mean?"

"The ship's under attack," Katie replied. "EMP strike, and most likely it was detonated on board. We’ve already had one murder, and Steven Vega has taken all the guns and disappeared. PR be damned: the time to call for help is right now, and if what turns up is a trawler or a fucking pedal boat we should be grateful."

Dan felt his skin prickle. He'd only really been thinking aloud about the possibilities, but hearing Katie repeat his own words made them sound somehow far more real, and far more disturbing. He had hoped that going to the bridge would give him a sense that the situation was in hand, but it turned out that the people up there hadn't even joined the dots that he and Katie had. At least, not yet.

The man responded with a vague groan, and for a moment Dan thought Katie had given up talking to him in frustration, but after a few seconds, he heard her voice snapping once more.

"What is it?" she said.

The man coughed.

"I was monitoring the radar just before it went down," the man replied. "I thought the readings were screwy..."

"Screwy how?"

"Uh...I was getting a reading, right at the edge of radar range. It was coming and going, and I thought it was a malfunction. I was going to tell the captain as soon as I got the ch—"

"A reading," Katie interrupted flatly. "Just outside of radar range."

"Yeah."

"For how long?"

"I picked it up for...maybe an hour or so. Off and on."

The man sounded apologetic.

Dan yelped in fright as he felt Katie's fingers clutching at his t-shirt, and she began to pull him back toward the stairs.

"What is it?" Dan said, as she burst through the doors, leaving the chaos in the bridge behind.

"We've got flare guns in security," Katie replied. "I don't think they have any electronic components. They should work."

Dan felt himself getting irritated, and pulled his arm out of Katie's grip.

"Just…wait," he snapped.

Is that my voice?

Dan couldn't remember when he had last spoken with such authority.

"Flare guns for what? What's going on?"

"He had a reading," Katie said quietly. "Something that sounds like it was right at the edge of radar range."

"Yeah, I heard. So?"

"So that sounds to me like we're not alone out here, Mr Bellamy. It sounds like there's another ship out there."

Dan swallowed painfully.

"Isn't that a good thing?"

"Not if they've been following us for an hour. Not if it wasn't just radar range they were trying to stay out of."

"EMP range," Dan said weakly.

"Exactly."

Dan felt Katie's fingers grab his arm once more, and he let himself be led down the stairs, moving a little quicker than seemed safe. With his free hand, he clutched at the banister to maintain his balance.

It didn't stop him from feeling like he was falling.

*

Elaine walked straight into a wall and cursed.

As she had moved into the ship, away from the cabins that lined the exterior of the hull, she entered a network of corridors that contained no light whatsoever; cabins without windows. They represented the very cheapest accommodation the Oceanus had to offer, and Elaine had argued long and hard that they should take one, but Dan had insisted their honeymoon would not be a matter of choosing all the cheapest possible options.

She deserved better, he said.

The memory of it made her smile, but she brushed it away.

Of far more importance right now was the absolute lack of light, which made her progress difficult, bordering-on-impossible. Having already turned several corners, she had no idea how to even navigate a course back to her own cabin.

Why the hell wasn't the power coming back on?

The surprised screaming she'd heard had been followed immediately by another noise: footsteps receding. Elaine figured at least one other person was stumbling around the corridors in the darkness, trying to find their way out to the park, where the other passengers would surely gather in the event of a power cut.

She stopped for a moment and took stock, trying to recall the warren of corridors she and Dan had walked through earlier. It was hopeless. In their excitement, they had rushed to find the cabin, and had even joked about leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way back to the central part of the ship. Without light, she was running blind, and she had to concede that there was a good chance she was walking in circles.

Furious at herself for leaving the cabin, and trying to suppress her irritation that of all the times her husband could have chosen to decide he felt like going for a walk, he'd picked this one, Elaine turned on the spot and tried to retrace her steps.

She had definitely taken a left turn a few moments earlier, hadn't she?

She stepped forward cautiously, and found the corner she expected.

Maybe this would work after all. All she had to do was take it slow, and search for the lights of the cabins that had sea-facing windows. All the doors were open, so if there was a break in the clouds, a little light should flood the corridor.

She just had to make sure she was in the right place to see it.

She frowned as she tried to remember the route she'd taken before that left turn.

A right turn?

That seemed correct.

Elaine felt her way forward, and found another corner, right where it should be.

She breathed a sigh of relief, and stepped forward confidently.

And then she was tumbling down a set of stairs, smashing into them painfully, and when she reached the bottom, her head crashed into the floor and a different sort of darkness claimed her.

17

"Oh, shit. I see Phil."

"Where?" Edgar snapped. By his estimation, he and Seb had already been searching through the area surrounding the Climate Control Centre for more than four minutes. It had felt like four lifetimes, and it was definitely taking too long.

On several occasions, they had been forced to pause when they heard mumbling or footsteps nearby. Voices in the dark. Maintenance staff who were stumbling around, oblivious to the two men with nightvision goggles, but each time Edgar and Seb were forced to wait for them to move on, vital seconds ticked away.

There was no sign of Herb or Phil, and Edgar had been almost ready to give up the search for his brothers when Seb spoke.

"Ahead and left, between those pipes," Seb said. He pointed, and Edgar followed the direction indicated by Seb's ghostly green arm.

It was Phil all right, and as Edgar approached, he saw instantly that his brother had taken a beating. Even with the blurred view offered up by the goggles, he could see the split lip, and the dark stain of blood that bloomed beneath Phil's nose. One of Phil's eyes was swollen almost completely shut.

He wasn't moving.

Edgar dropped into a low crouch next to Phil's prone body, and put an ear to his brother's face. He heard breathing; a wet rattling that told him that Phil's mouth was full of blood, or maybe his nose was broken.

He shook Phil gently, and was just wondering if he had it in him to slap his comatose brother when Phil's good eye blinked open and he flinched.

It took Edgar a moment to understand that Phil couldn't see him.

"It's Ed," he said softly. "And Seb. Can you move?"

"You did it. You fucking set it off." Phil tried to spit the words out venomously, but they dissolved into a low moan. He coughed and spat out a mouthful of blood onto the floor next to him, and Edgar thought he heard a couple of teeth rattling out with it.

"I told you to come back in five minutes," Edgar said stiffly. "You didn't."

"I was trying to get our brother, you fucking prick."

Edgar flinched in surprise. Phil didn't talk much; never had. He couldn't remember when he had last heard Phil raise his voice in anger; maybe never.

Edgar felt his blood temperature rising, but he forced himself to let it go. Losing his temper with Herb had led to serious problems, and there just wasn't time to go through it with Phil.

"And where is he? What the hell happened, Phil?"

Phil shook his head miserably.

"There was a guy," he said. "Dressed in a security uniform. He had Herb down on the floor when I found him. I was dealing with the situation. Right up until the fucking lights went out."

"And what happened then?" Edgar asked.

"Take a look at my face, bro. That's what happened then. Herb's on the floor somewhere behind me. Propped up against one of the pipes."

Edgar waved at Seb to go and check the direction Phil pointed out, and he pulled out a pair of goggles, placing them into Phil's hand.

"They work," Edgar said. "Can you move?"

Phil grunted and held out a hand. Edgar grabbed it and pulled him to his feet. Phil stood for a moment, wobbling a little, and then slipped on the goggles, wincing at the pain as the plastic hit the bridge of his nose.

"I can walk," he said. "My pride took the biggest beating. Little guy, but he sure could throw a punch."

"Good," Edgar said. "The package is being delivered right now. We have to get to the top deck in fifteen minutes, at most."

"Great," Phil said miserably. "Remind me never to take a cruise with you again, Ed."

Ed chuckled grimly, and turned to face Seb.

"Got a problem," Seb said.

Edgar grimaced.

"Herb's not there," he said. It wasn't a question. Of course Herb wasn't there.

"You got it," Seb replied. "I guess this security guy took him."

A swollen silence fell over the three brothers. Edgar knew what they were all thinking; and knew that he would be the only one to say it. He had to play the bad guy, same as always.

"Then we leave him," Edgar said, biting back on the tremble he heard in his own voice. His little brother, little pain-in-the-arse Herb.

He would never see him again.

"Ed, we can't—"

"We will," Edgar snapped, "because we have to. I told Herb to stick with me. I told him I'd get us out. He fucking blew it. He could be anywhere on this ship by now. There's no chance of us finding him, and our ride is leaving in fifteen minutes. You both know what happens if we miss our window."

Edgar let the words settle for a moment, giving his brothers ample time to picture the result of them not getting to the extraction point in time. He played the images in his own mind, letting his imagination run all the way back to the room behind the black door in Brighton, and he shuddered involuntarily.

"Shit," Phil spat bitterly. "So much for us getting out of this clean."

Edgar barked a harsh laugh.

"Is that what you guys were hoping for? No wonder you've all been so damn jumpy. You came into this with unrealistic expectations. Getting out at all is a victory. Getting out clean was never an option."

The words echoed in the darkness for a brief moment, until Edgar turned for the exit, and the stairs beyond.

They had to travel up over a dozen decks. Most of it could be navigated via a single winding stairway, but when they reached deck twelve, they would have to move out among the passengers until they found another staircase that could take them up to the top of the ship. They would be like ghosts in the darkness, flitting between the frightened people unseen.

Soon, the Oceanus would be full of ghosts, but Edgar would be damned if he was sticking around to see it. He'd already seen enough.

Herb knew what he was getting himself into, and Herb was gone. Edgar loved his little brother, and he could feel the wave of grief washing around inside him, but there was no time to indulge himself in it. Not yet. He had to play the bad guy a little longer, or risk losing two more brothers.

"Let's go," he said in a brittle tone, and strode towards the exit.

*

Steven Vega kicked open the door to what he thought was one of the Oceanus' two small conference rooms on the deck below the park and paused for a moment until he was sure that the room was empty.

"Inside," he growled, and held the door open while the men followed Ledger's lighter into the dark room. Saunders and Ferguson brought up the rear, hauling the comatose man that Ledger had been dragging when he had stumbled across Vega and the others.

When they were all inside, Vega closed the doors behind them and, after a moment's consideration, slipped the barrel of his pistol through the door handles to form a rudimentary deadbolt. Any passengers stumbling into the room would doubtless come up with questions that Vega thought would be very difficult to answer.

In the dark space, the faces of the group of men gathered into a circle around the unconscious body. They almost looked spectral in the tiny sphere of light cast by the lighter.

"Turn that off," Vega said. "No point wasting the fuel."

After a moment, Ledger complied, and plunged the room into total darkness. Vega thought it might just have been the first time that Mark Ledger had done exactly as Vega had asked without kicking up a fuss.

"I think you'd better start explaining yourself, Ledger," Vega said. "You can start with why you're dragging an unconscious man around."

"Not exactly the hero's welcome I was expecting," Ledger said sardonically, and Vega sighed. For a moment there, he'd almost let himself believe that the situation developing on the Oceanus might have persuaded Mark Ledger to stop acting like a prick.

"Turns out there was a security issue down in Climate Control," Ledger said amiably. "Though, of course you knew that, right Steve?"

Vega said nothing.

"Anyway. Four men, dressed in engineering uniforms, hiding out in the vent system. It looked to me like they were building a device, and that device looked very much like a bomb."

Ledger paused, as though he expected Vega to snort his disbelief.

"Carry on," Vega said stiffly.

"I got out of there, and two of them came after me. I disabled them, and then the lights went out. I'm sure you've noticed."

Vega ignored the jibe.

"You disabled them? How?"

"With my fists."

Vega heard smugness in Ledger's tone, but also something else: a slight trembling as he spoke the words. He wasn't lying. Despite himself, Vega felt impressed, and was glad the suffocating darkness hid his face.

"What about the other two?"

"Didn't see them," Ledger said. "They weren't chasing. Figure they stayed back to make sure the bomb went off."

"EMP," Vega corrected.

"Yeah, that's what I figured. Can't think why, though. So I brought our sleeping friend along. I'm guessing he's got the answers. Before he passed out, he seemed willing to talk. Said I had to warn the captain and get him to send out a mayday. I’m guessing maybe it’s too late for that now."

Vega grunted. It was good work; exactly what he would have done in the same situation, though he could scarcely believe that Ledger had attacked and disabled two men. Didn't think he had it in him. There was no way in hell he was going to let Ledger know that, though.

"Any particular reason you didn't radio this in at the first sign of trouble?"

"I did," Ledger snapped. "You didn't respond."

Vega was about to call Ledger on that particular line of bullshit, when he remembered that he had left his radio in the office while he was in the CCTV monitoring room. He snapped his mouth shut.

He was about to suggest that they wake the man up and start asking questions when he heard it.

"You guys hear that?"

Ferguson's voice.

Vega didn't say anything for a moment. He tilted his head and focused on listening. Somewhere below the thundering of the blood in his veins and the breathing of the group of men in the conference room, he could hear another noise.

A noise that defied logic, and made a mockery of the fact that an EMP had been set off only moments earlier.

An engine.

Approaching fast.

18

Dan exited the security suite, dragged along by Katie's iron grip, and felt his head spinning.

What the hell am I doing here?

It had taken several minutes for Katie to locate the cupboard that she assured him held a number of flare guns. The distress signals were, she said, a matter of last resort. Outdated technology, given that the Oceanus had satellite phones and wifi.

When Dan asked her why she planned to send the flares up if there was another ship out there—a ship that she clearly believed carried people with hostile intentions, her answer chilled him.

"Because I need to be sure."

"Sure of what?"

"Sure that we’re not alone out here."

The security suite had an outer door that opened onto the deck at the bow of the ship, a narrow ledge behind a railing which constituted one of the few areas that it was impossible for the passengers to get to.

It was, she informed him, where the security staff took their coffee breaks, and some took lunch out there.

When the night air hit Dan, he crashed into the back of Katie, who had apparently stopped almost as soon as she stepped outside.

He didn't blame her.

It had been dark in the ship, of course, but there had nonetheless been some reassurance that at least he was in familiar surroundings. Safely encircled by walls and a ceiling. In a way, being inside the ship had been no different to waking up at night in a darkened room.

But when he saw the world outside the ship, Dan felt genome-deep paranoia clutching at him; a swirling, dizzying panic that made his stomach lurch.

With cloud cover blotting out the moon and stars, and the light that had spilled from the ship snuffed out, the darkness of the sea appeared almost supernatural.

Overhead, the sky rumbled loudly, making them both jump. The clouds had thickened, and from the sound of it, the storm that was brewing was going to erupt right over their heads.

For the moment, there was no lightning splitting the dark sky, and the result was that Dan could see nothing. Not a goddamned thing. Just inky blackness that made him feel disorientated and terrified. He froze in place as his lizard brain took control, ordering his muscles to seize. For several long moments, Dan stood like that, staring into a void that seemed to form just inches in front of his eyes.

Suddenly, it occurred to him just how very far away from safety he was, and how much he had taken the sea for granted. Humans, he thought, as he stared into the vast nothing, weren't supposed to be in a place like this.

Without the knowledge that there were walls around him, and mindful of the fact that somewhere very close there was a railing and a long drop to the freezing sea below, he felt paralysed by the darkness once more.

"Careful," Katie said in a breathless whisper, and the note of naked fear he heard in her words unnerved him almost as much as the vast emptiness.

"I can't see a damn thing," he said miserably, and felt a twinge of irritation at the whining tone of his own voice. Katie was frightened, too; he could hear it in her tone. No longer did Dan have a monopoly on fear. All of a sudden he felt embarrassed by his petulance. Something scary was happening on the Oceanus; something actually scary, not just oh-no-Dan's-afraid-to-talk-to-strangers scary. The young woman at his side was doing a great job of keeping a lid on her fear, presumably because she was a member of staff and he was a passenger. Her job demanded that she keep him safe.

He felt a stab of sympathy for her, and resolved to try to be less of a pain in Katie's butt. When it came to fear, after all, Dan outranked just about everybody. He should be able to help, not be a burden to her.

Katie was dragging him from place to place ostensibly because she wanted to keep him safe, but the truth, he suddenly realised, was that she did not want to be alone in the darkness, and for that he could not blame her.

What harm would it do to offer her some moral support? Elaine is safely locked in the cabin, and you'll be with her before you know it. She's probably still asleep.

Dan clamped his lips shut, and strained his eyes to see anything. He had never experienced such darkness in his entire life.

"Put your hands on my back," Katie said, and Dan frowned.

"What? Why?"

"Because I'm about to let this flare off, and I want to make damn sure you're not standing in front of me when I do."

Dan gulped, and stumbled forward with his arms outstretched until he felt Katie's shoulders. He rested his hands lightly on them, and felt a burning, squirming awkwardness at the oddly intimate contact.

"That's fine," Katie said. "Stay there. And squint. When I fire this, it's going to get real bright here for a second."

Katie wasn't kidding.

Moments later, the air around Dan hissed into brilliant, searing life as the flare rocketed up into the darkness, scorching a line against the black sky. Dan watched it fly, trying to catch his bearings a little at the brief sight of clouds tinged crimson.

The flare hung in the air for several long seconds before sputtering into darkness.

Dan squinted at the dying light, and saw nothing as it faded into darkness once more. Nothing except...

His eyes narrowed.

What was that?

Katie sighed impatiently.

"There’s nothing," she said, sounding almost disappointed. "Maybe the radar was just acting up after all."

"No, wait," Dan said. "Fire again. Same direction, but lower."

"You saw something?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe. Could just be my eyes playing tricks on me."

"Hmm."

Dan heard a click as Katie reloaded the flare gun, and his skin began to crawl. He had seen something. He was sure of it. With each passing second he became more certain that there had been a shape out there on the waves.

The air hissed again.

This time, the flare spat out low and flat across the ocean, and Dan watched the burning light reflected on the onyx waves as it passed over them, and then, as his eyes followed the burning trail of light, he saw it.

His eyes widened.

"Holy crap," Katie breathed as the flare's light died away.

"You saw it too," Dan said.

"A ship. Running without lights." The fear in her voice seemed to have been amplified.

"Maybe it got hit by the EMP, too," Dan said. "Maybe it's a solar storm after all?"

"I don't think so," Katie said. "From what the guy on the bridge told us, there was a vessel out there, but it was at the edge of radar range. For them to close the gap this quickly, they'd have to have power."

Dan felt like his head was beginning to ache from repeated attempts to understand problems that were beyond him.

"So what does that mean?"

Katie grabbed his arm, and he felt her nails digging into his flesh painfully. She dragged him back toward the open doorway that led back into the security suite.

"It means they don't want to be seen," she said, and Dan felt his stomach twist in fear.

They were just inside the security suite, and about to close the door on the darkness outside when suddenly that darkness disappeared, and was replaced by a single point of light.

Dan and Katie turned and stared at it. It was distant, and impossible to make out.

Until it rose into the sky and headed toward them.

After a few seconds, the sound of the engine was impossible to miss, and the source of the light could only be one thing.

A helicopter.

Incoming.

"Oh, shit," Katie whispered.

19

"Wake him up," Vega said, and Mark rolled his eyes in the darkness.

"Sure," he said sarcastically. "Pass me the smelling salts and—"

He was interrupted by a sharp crack that sounded like gunfire in the darkness, and it took him a moment to realise that somebody—maybe even Vega himself—had just slapped the comatose man hard enough to make his teeth rattle.

After a moment, he heard another slap.

No response from Herb.

"Does that ever work?" Mark asked with a grin that nobody could see, but he was sure they could all hear.

"Who knows?" Vega spat back. "I could try and slap some sense into you if you'd like? Call it a scientific test."

Mark's grin widened.

"I think you're starting to like me, Steve-O."

Vega didn't respond.

"Get some water," he said. "There's a bathroom here somewhere. Maybe dunking him will wake him up."

"Or he could drown," Mark said affably.

"Ledger, shut the fuck up. One of you, get that bastard awake by the time I get back."

"Back?" Mark said sharply. "Back from where?"

"I'm going to the park," Vega replied. "That engine you can hear? That's a helicopter, and it's close. And getting closer every second. It could be here to help us, but I've got a bad feeling it isn't."

Mark bit down on the sarcastic response that formed in his mind when he heard the urgency in Steven Vega's tone. The unmistakable note of concern.

"Ledger, give me your lighter," Vega said, and Mark fished it from his pocket without question. He flicked the flame to life for a moment and held it out until he saw Vega's hand reaching for it.

For a moment, as their eyes met across the flame, Mark thought he saw a flicker of something pass across Steven Vega's gaze. He couldn't be sure, but he thought it might have been gratitude. Not for the lighter, he realised, but for the fact that he was handing it over without being an arsehole about it.

He nodded at Vega, and let the flame die as he dropped the lighter into the man's meaty palm.

"Wait for me here," Vega said. "If he wakes up, get him to talk."

"Uh, get him to talk how?" Mark asked.

"However you can," Vega said, and with that, he turned away from the group of men and strode to the door.

Mark heard him retrieve the pistol from the door handle, and a faint swish as he pushed the door open.

And then he was gone.

For a moment, silence reigned, and Mark realised that all the remaining members of the security team were waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

"Okay," he said finally. "You heard the man. Let's get some water and wake this guy up, and then let's get some fucking answers."

*

Vega made it to the park just as the first bolt of lightning sheared the sky, providing a brief moment of illumination for the grateful passengers who had managed to make their way to the Oceanus' central space in the thick darkness.

For that moment, as the lightning took a snapshot of the ship with a pale blue flashbulb, Vega saw that, for the most part, the passengers were wrestling with confusion and disorientation rather than outright fear.

The jeering and surprised laughter had died away, and Vega had an idea that many of the passengers had already looked at their mobile phones and discovered that they were as dead as everything else.

As he moved through a huge decorative archway into the park itself, he heard muttered conversation about the storm; passengers wondering if maybe the ship had been struck by lightning, causing a power surge.

From more than one group of people, he heard EMP, and knew that fear would replace the confusion soon enough. For the time being though, most of the faces he saw in the park before the darkness returned were all focused on one thing; the same thing that Vega himself concentrated on: the distant light in the sky that approached, and the hum of the engine that got louder with each passing second.

He squinted at the approaching light, trying in vain to make out the shape behind it. From the sound of the engine, the chopper was large, but Vega didn't think it could possibly be large enough to carry the requisite amount of fuel for a trip to the middle of the Atlantic. The chopper hailed from a ship, he was certain of it. Only one question remained.

Friendly or unfriendly?

Vega had holstered his pistol before he stepped into the park, keenly aware that if any of the passengers realized that there was a man carrying a firearm in their midst—even one wearing a security uniform—it might spook them even more than they already were. He knew only too well that darkness could breed panic quickly, and that panic was likely to be the single greatest danger the passengers on the ship faced.

Unless that helicopter was as unfriendly as the squirming in his gut said it could be.

The men that had set off the EMP device didn't trouble him as much as they had earlier: if Ledger had successfully put down two, Vega guessed that they were unarmed. It stood to reason that if you wanted to hunt down a witness before he could escape, you'd send guns after him—if you had any.

If he was right, that meant that the men who had crippled the boat were tasked only with cutting the power and leaving the Oceanus vulnerable. The real danger would come later.

Vega had hoped that 'later' would be much later; enough time to give him a chance to prepare the staff, though he had no idea what he might be preparing them for.

Yet there had been virtually no delay between the EMP strike and the arrival of the chopper. It couldn't be coincidence. Whatever the terrorists had hobbled the ship for, it was going to happen quickly, before the staff and passengers could respond.

The spotlight on the front of the chopper flooded the park, blinding the people below and making it impossible to see anything other than the vehicle's dark silhouette.

Vega saw immediately that his guess had been wrong. The chopper was much bigger than he had anticipated. Judging by the hulking size of the silhouette, it was almost big enough to be a twin-rotor.

His nerves began to jangle as the wind generated by the spinning blades whipped through the park.

Such a chopper could easily be carrying a fully armed squad of men. He'd ridden inside helicopters himself which comfortably held twelve soldiers, and he knew all too well that a single chopper could drop a world of pain onto whatever was unfortunate enough to be directly below it. A force like that landing on the Oceanus would mean instant failure for Vega. Whatever the people attacking the ship wanted, they were organised and they were efficient, and that struck him as very bad news indeed.

So you've decided, then. They are attackers.

Vega cast the thought aside, and slipped the pistol from the holster as the chopper hovered directly over the centre of the park. Being in the marines had long ago taught him to expect the worst. Hell, that was practically lesson number fucking one.

Any minute now, he thought, I'm going to see men rappelling down.

He lifted the pistol, sighting it, all thoughts of panicking the passengers forgotten.

And then the helicopter released its cargo.

And the screaming started.

*

Edgar led his brothers into the night air, breathless from pounding up more than a dozen flights of stairs, just as the chopper moved directly over the park.

It was, he thought, perfect timing, though the word perfect seemed like a bad fit for the situation.

Nothing on the Oceanus was perfect. None of it brought Edgar the satisfaction he had expected.

He had done his duty; fulfilled his destiny, and somehow it just left a hollow ache in his stomach.

Edgar's duty had cost him his youngest brother, and almost certainly the trust of the two brothers that remained. He didn't doubt that Herb would have said it had also cost him his soul.

He watched the helicopter drop its payload onto the centre of the park, and dark thoughts gathered in his mind as the screaming began. He brushed them away. Only one thing mattered.

Get to the extraction point.

20

It dropped with a crash that sounded like the walls of Hell collapsing, and the screams that followed were pure horror and pain; a far cry from the jeering hoots of surprise that Vega had heard when the lights went out.

This was the screaming that, in a different life, he had heard from wounded marines; from dying marines. The terrible noise that humans made when they understood that death had sunk its claws into them and had no plans to let go.

The helicopter had not dropped a team of armed men into the midst of the passengers.

Instead, as Vega watched in stunned astonishment, the vehicle dropped what looked like a large shipping container. A heavy steel box which smashed into and partway through the deck, crushing several of the passengers that stood directly below it.

Some would be dead, Vega thought, and felt oddly detached from the notion. Clearly, some were also alive and injured, judging by the anguished howls of agony: he could well imagine the arms and legs pinned beneath the container; limbs turned instantly into sliced ham.

The night air filled with the screams of those that were close enough to see the devastation wrought by the dropped container, but still Vega stood rooted to the spot, the gun in his hand forgotten.

He'd seen plenty of combat; plenty of frantic firefights, and the presence of death had lost the power to stun him a long time ago. What held Vega in stasis was utter confusion. He could make no sense of what was happening in front of him.

His mind made several passes at possible scenarios: terrorism, pirates, hijackers. None of it seemed to tally.

He broke out of his paralysis only when he saw the chopper move to the left, soaring above his head, to hover over the small sports court on the top deck.

It paused there for a moment, and Vega squinted, just about able to make out a ladder tumbling down from the belly of the vehicle, and a dark figure beginning to climb. And then another. Another. Three small silhouettes, climbing quickly toward the waiting chopper.

The other men that Ledger had mentioned. The ones that had set off the EMP.

They were getting away.

With a roar, Vega raised the pistol and opened fire.

*

The rope ladder was hard enough to hold onto; blown chaotically by the wind that was kicking up further with each passing moment as the storm above intensified. The bullets made the task of clinging to the wildly swinging rope all the more difficult.

Edgar was so focused on the climb and on resisting the howling wind that it took him a moment to realise that the cracking noise he heard below was gunfire.

He almost lost his grip entirely when the bullet tore through his right thigh, and he bellowed as white-hot agony erupted. It took all of his concentration to loop an elbow over the next rung and cling on.

He had almost made it as far as the waiting chopper when the blast of the gun reached his ears, a microsecond after the flesh of his leg parted to allow the hot metal through. Dropping from the ladder back to the deck would almost certainly result in serious injury, and maybe even death. With both of his brothers also on the ladder below him, Edgar falling might mean all the Rennicks losing their grip.

He gritted his teeth, biting back on the pain, and for a moment it felt like his mind was shorting out.

When his senses cleared, he stared down at the park furiously, and saw another muzzle flash.

This bullet passed close to his head; close enough that he heard—and maybe even felt—the air rippling as it passed.

The Oceanus had an extremely modest supply of firearms, which were kept in a locked weapons cupboard in the security suite, with the staff fully expecting that they would never need to use them. Edgar had no idea how anybody would have had time to respond to the blackout; time to retrieve the firearms, but it didn't matter. Someone down there had put two and two together and decided a gun was necessary, and now they were shooting. Even worse, they were shooting accurately.

Another crack, and Edgar heard an explosive shriek from the ladder below him. He looked down, and saw Seb falling, and the gaping hole that had been torn in his brother's chest.

For a long, terrible moment, Edgar's eyes connected with Seb's as he fell. Seb looked confused, like he wanted desperately to ask Ed what was happening, right up until the moment that the deck met his torso and answered all questions with brutal finality.

Another crack.

Another.

Edgar grunted, hauling himself up with his three uninjured limbs as quickly as possible, opening his mouth to roar that the chopper needed to get the hell out of there, but the words proved unnecessary.

He saw a hole punched into the flank of the chopper, still several feet above him, and then the world began to tilt and sway crazily as the pilot decided that the VIPs he had been instructed to pick up weren't that important after all.

The chopper began to veer away from the Oceanus sharply, and Edgar heard a distant scream below him and knew that Phil, too, had lost his grip on the ladder; knew it even before looking. When Edgar did look down he saw his brother’s broken body splayed across a row of sun recliners. It almost looked as if he was peaceful down there, just stretching out and relaxing.

Except for the fact that one of his legs was extended at an impossible angle, pulled up behind his back.

Phil wasn’t moving.

Another brother lost.

A storm of fury erupted in Edgar's mind, and he wrapped himself around the rope ladder as tightly as possible, trying desperately to maintain his grip.

Two more tiny insignificant pings, sharp and metallic, told Edgar that the chopper had been hit again, and he had a moment to hope that the pilot wouldn't respond with panic before the helicopter leapt up into the night like a wounded animal, tearing the ladder from his grasp, and all that was left for Edgar was rage.

And falling.

*

Vega felt a certain grim satisfaction as he emptied the entire clip at the departing chopper. He doubted the last few rounds had come anywhere close to the target as it soared crazily away from the Oceanus, but enough of the bullets had done damage. Two of the men trying to escape the ship had definitely fallen from the ladder, and Vega thought he had hit the third.

Not bad.

He squeezed the trigger until it clicked apologetically at the retreating chopper and then returned the pistol to its holster. There was more ammunition back in the weapons locker, but even if there hadn't been, Vega would have kept the gun. He always rolled his eyes at those dumb action movies in which actors emptied their weapons and then tossed them aside as if they were suddenly useless.

Guns were never useless. Even an empty pistol carried a certain sort of power. It wasn't the type of thing that you separated yourself from willingly; not when there was trouble in the air.

And there was trouble. A whole fucking heap of it.

What did they just drop on the ship?

Vega turned away from the departing chopper and focused his gaze on the centre of the park. Several small flames, which he presumed came from cigarette lighters just like the one he had taken from Ledger, illuminated the area near the small pond.

The area that held the strange container and the screaming.

Vega jogged toward the lights, stumbling into several panicked bodies in the darkness. Many of the people in the park were fleeing blindly, and Vega figured that was probably as much to do with him shooting as the bizarre appearance of the helicopter.

"Security," he barked as the crowds around the shipping container began to thicken. "Let me through."

Some of the mass of bodies parted for him, but as he neared the devastation at the centre of the park, he found he had to push his way through.

He did so unapologetically, barging onlookers aside until he stood inside the feeble glow cast by a dozen lighters.

There was blood everywhere.

Vega guessed that more than a handful of people had been killed outright when the container dropped like an anvil on top of them. He saw several others pinned in the wreckage. The container was heavy enough to have punched halfway through the deck, and the middle of the park looked like a warzone. Some of those pinned were screaming in horror as they surveyed what had become of their limbs; others just stared numbly. Some looked unconscious, or had possibly already succumbed to massive blood loss.

"Back," Vega shouted. "Security, get back!"

The words had little effect on those who he presumed were related to the injured and the dead, but the crowd around the container—mostly people trying to help, he guessed, though he wasn't sure what could be done without serious medical intervention—retreated a few steps.

"Are there any doctors here?" he yelled, and saw a woman and a man nodding, ashen-faced. They were already tending to the injured, and Vega left them to it. He had no medical experience, and there was only one thing on his mind, far more important than injuries.

The container.

He stepped over the prone bodies carefully, walking around the huge box until he located the doors. They looked securely shut, and almost unremarkable, aside from one small addition. Something that Vega thought didn't belong on such a container at all.

He pulled Ledger's lighter from his pocket and lit it, leaning closer to the object.

It looked like a locking mechanism placed across the heavy steel doors, but Vega saw immediately that it was no ordinary lock.

A tiny array of lights blinked on the device, below a featureless panel.

He felt around it with his fingers until he found a catch, and he flicked it aside.

The panel fell open to reveal a digital display.

Vega stared at it for a second in shock, but his gut had already recognised the device for what it was, and his stomach lurched painfully.

The display read 01.17.

01.16.

01.15.

A timer. Counting down.

Just over a minute remaining.

Oh, shit.

Vega turned away and screamed at the gathering of people behind him.

"Run!"

Vega felt the people in the park backing away slowly, though the injured and their loved ones remained. There was no way to get them to move, and so he didn't even try. Still, at least some seemed to have heeded his warning, and he felt the darkness at his back emptying a little. Yet they moved slowly, tranquilised by their confusion. Very few were running.

He thought about running himself, but found his feet locked in place. The confusion had him in its clutches, too, he supposed. The need to know just what the hell was happening on his boat.

The first thought that crossed his mind when he saw the timer ticking down was bomb, but with each passing second he suspected that could not be the case. The men that had attacked the Oceanus had already smuggled a bomb aboard somehow, and the intention when they set it off hadn't been to destroy the ship, but to ready it for the arrival of the container.

There would be little point in going through all the work of disabling the Oceanus just to have a chopper drop a bomb on top of it. They could have done that at any time.

No, the container was something else, and Vega needed to see what it was; felt his mind tugged toward the object almost of its own volition.

His instincts raged at him to flee, but curiosity had a say in matters. Vega began to move backwards, but very slowly, creeping away from the container inch by inch, keeping his eyes trained on the blinking lights. On the countdown.

He pulled out the empty pistol, and raised it. If there were armed men in that container, confronting them with a weapon drawn might at least make them pause.

But there weren't armed men. Of course there weren't. If it had been men inside, they would have been injured in the fall. Whatever was inside that container, it wasn't men. Wasn't a bomb, either.

He tried to judge how long he had been standing there, trying to work through the problem in his mind. Forty seconds? Sixty?

He had no idea.

Until the locking device on the container doors bleeped loudly and fell away, landing on the ruined park with a soft thud.

A couple of the injured people around the container yelped in fright, but Vega didn't hear them. He focused only on the doors, sighting them at the barrel of the empty gun, waiting for them to...

The doors swung open, and for a moment all Vega could see was the dark space inside the container; too dark to make out anything. Empty?

No, not quite, he thought. Movement.

Another bolt of lightning scorched the sky, and for a moment the park, the container and the ruined bodies around and underneath it were brilliantly lit, almost as though God wanted Vega to see, and to understand.

He saw.

21

Herb awoke in darkness to an insistent pain in his lower back that felt like someone had driven a serrated knife between his bones, and was trying to pry out his intervertebral discs one by one.

He drew in a sharp breath, and the pain simply worsened.

Shallow breaths, he thought bleakly. Gradually, the pain began to ease up a little.

"Ed?" he croaked.

There was no response, but Herb knew he wasn't alone in the darkness. He could feel the presence of others there with him; more than one. He heard their breathing and felt faces pointed in his direction.

"Ed," a man's voice said finally. "Is that one of your terrorist buddies?"

Herb squeezed his eyes shut as the terrible truth hit him, and the memories returned. Before he had lost consciousness, the man he had tried to catch—the man that Herb had foolishly thought he could save—had been dragging him along the floor, and each inch travelled had felt like his legs were trying to separate from his spine.

Not Ed, he thought miserably.

Edgar was gone. He had to be. The fucker had done exactly as Herb had always feared he would: he'd abandoned his brother—his own damned flesh and blood—in pursuit of his beloved duty.

Their father was an expert manipulator, and had been brainwashing his own children since they took their first breath. Only Herb had been able to see it.

Still, Herb had hoped that if they ever reached the moment of truth, Edgar might come to his senses. Herb held out little hope for Phil or Seb; those two were like brainless automatons. They did as they were told and no more, but Herb knew that there was a sharp mind inside Edgar's head, and he had hoped right up to the last moment that Ed would turn away from the dark path their father had set them on.

Yet Edgar hadn't even waited for Herb to return before setting the EMP off. And now Herb was gripped by pain, and trapped on the dark ship with a bunch of people that thought him a terrorist.

His sense of betrayal was monumental, but there was no time to focus on it. How long had he been unconscious? How long would his father wait before sending the chopper across to the Oceanus?

If Herb was the only son missing, he doubted that his father would wait at all. What better way to rid himself of the troublesome one, the only one that ever answered back? The only one that questioned whether there might be Another Way, and whether the Rennick family calling was actually a family curse.

I should have run, Herb thought sadly. He had wanted to run for years; had wanted to put the Rennick family and all the crazy bullshit that went with being a part of it behind him and never turn back. In the weeks leading up to the boarding of the Oceanus, he had thought about running constantly, just packing a bag and getting the fuck out.

In the end, Herb hadn't been able to turn his back on his brothers. Some part of him had still believed, right up until the last moment, that the Rennick boys might escape from their duty and have some sort of a life beyond the Oceanus.

He could never abandon his family.

Ironic.

"I'm not a terrorist," he said glumly. "Or at least, I’m not what you think of as a terrorist. There's no word for what I am."

"And what is that?"

Herb ignored the question.

"How long has it been since the lights went out?" he asked.

His answer was the muffled crack of gunfire, and an eruption of screams. The air in the dark conference room sizzled with tension.

"Never mind," Herb said miserably. "It's already too late."

*

Mark felt his nerves blaze as the muffled shots rang out. The blasting of the gun seemed to go on forever. He counted sixteen shots.

Vega, he thought dumbly. Vega just emptied his entire clip at something.

Mark's mind went blank. Vega was a starchy, uptight bastard, and in many ways Mark loathed him. Yet there was no way that Mark thought Steven Vega was the type of guy to panic over anything without good reason. He certainly wouldn't open fire in the middle of the park unless something truly terrible was going down.

A wave of anxiety washed through Mark, turning quickly to anger.

"All right," he said, feeling around in the darkness until he found the collar of the man lying at his feet. He dragged Herb up to his knees, ignoring the man's cry of pain. "Enough of this bullshit. I'm tired of being kept in the dark, so start talking."

Herb grunted.

"Or what? You'll torture me? That sounds pretty extreme for cruise ship secu—"

Mark punched him squarely in the jaw; not hard enough to risk him losing consciousness again, but plenty hard enough to let Herb know that he wasn't dealing with cruise ship security any longer.

"You can forget the fucking uniforms," Mark spat. "Try to focus on the fact that I'm scared and desperate, and I wasn’t that dedicated to my job in the first place. Understand?"

Herb chuckled and spat in the darkness.

"Now you're talking," he said. "So I will, too. There's no need for torture. I'll tell you everything, on one condition."

Mark considered hitting him again, but reined his anger in just in time.

"What condition?"

"You've got guns?" Herb asked.

"Damn right we've got guns." Ferguson's voice made Mark flinch. The combination of his own fury and the cloying darkness had led him to forget the other men were even there.

"Good," Herb said. "When I'm done talking, I want you to shoot me. Once. In the head. Make it quick. Deal?"

Mark released his grip on Herb's collar, letting the man slump back to the floor.

What the fuck?

"And if you want a piece of advice," Herb said. "Save some bullets for yourself."

Mark's thoughts tumbled. He tried to catch one.

"What's happening out there?" he whispered finally, and the trembling sigh that constituted Herb's response chilled the blood in his veins.

"There's something on the ship," Herb said. "Something that just arrived. It was waiting for us to cut the power."

"What sort of something?" Mark hissed.

For a moment, there was only silence in the dark room.

"You won't believe me," Herb said quietly.

*

Steven Vega's mind went blank with terror.

The creature that stepped from the container was a twisted mockery of the human form, like an artist’s impression daubed by a maniac. It was tall, skeletal-thin with limbs that looked like they’d been stretched. Dark, leathery skin wrapped tightly around rippling, sinewy muscles. Long, bony fingers that became wicked-looking talons.

The worst part, though, was the way it moved. Almost like an insect, darting from the container and pausing abruptly as if to take in its surroundings. It reminded Vega of the way spiders scurried, and his skin crawled.

Just when he thought the creature that emerged from the container could not possibly appear more hideous, it grinned, revealing a set of large, sharp teeth that looked like they would have been at home in the mouth of a shark.

Something about that grin; the almost human expression twisting the utterly inhuman face, made Vega’s bladder loosen. He searched the hideous face, trying to make sense of it, and saw crimson eyes that seemed to glow in the darkness, oozing malevolence.

Intelligent eyes.

Calculating.

It looked like something that had recently escaped from the lowest level of hell.

It wasn't alone.

Another flash of lightning gave Vega a brief glimpse of the interior of the container, and he saw more of those thin, angled limbs, more of that terrible staccato movement. More blazing red eyes. More teeth.

Vega backed away slowly, and saw the first creature fall on a woman whose leg had been pinned beneath the shipping container.

It drove its face down sharply, burying those terrible teeth in the woman's neck, and tore her throat out with a wet pop.

She hadn't even had time to scream.

Click.

Click.

Vega hadn't been aware of his hand lifting the useless gun and pointing it at the creature. He squeezed the trigger repeatedly, though some part of his mind knew that the clip was empty.

It didn't seem to matter.

The creature lifted its maw from the ruined neck of the woman and stared directly at Vega for a single, brief moment, before swinging its neck away.

Evil, he thought dumbly. Pure evil.

Vega had seen no sign of pupils in the fearsome eyes. Just two pools of blood-red emptiness that drilled into his head, and in that single sickening second, he felt the thing's terrible gaze piercing his mind like a needle; felt his thoughts giving themselves to the creature, plucked away from him like a stray hair.

He was certain that if the creature had held its gaze upon him a moment longer, his mind would have snapped like a dry twig. Even that split second felt like it had left poison swilling around his skull.

It's in my head, oh God, I can feel it inside my—

Click.

Click.

Click.

Vega's forefinger was still squeezing the useless trigger, but now the barrel of the gun was pressed against his own temple.

He hadn't been aware of his hand moving.

He dropped the weapon, astonished and horrified, and scrambled backward, whimpering like a new recruit dropped into the middle of a firefight. He wasn’t conscious of taking the decision to retreat. Maybe because it wasn’t a decision at all. It was a biological imperative, like flinching away from fire or pulling back from a steep drop before falling over it. A response that formed in his genes, not in his thoughts.

The creature sprayed its horrific gaze around the park, stabbing deep into the minds of the terrified crowd, and it laughed,: a low, sickly rumble that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and Steven Vega, who to the best of his knowledge hadn't fled from a confrontation in decades, turned tail and ran like his life depended on it.

As he ran, he tried to process the scene that unfolded around him.

Couldn't.

He was no stranger to violence and bloodshed; Christ, Vega was no stranger to death. He'd seen it plenty.

Yet what was happening in the park wasn't just death. It was something else.

Everywhere he looked, as the lightning lit the boat at arrhythmic intervals, he saw horrors that made his mind shrivel. The terrible creatures—he counted three, though there might easily have been more—surged through the fleeing crowds, killing at will.

Insanity spreading everywhere they pointed those glowing red eyes.

Vega saw one of the creatures lopping the head off a middle-aged man who tried to run; saw the headless body take a couple more steps before crashing to the ground in a dizzying dark fountain of blood.

Saw another ripping a glistening mess from the chest of a young woman and holding it aloft, roaring in triumph. It took Vega a moment to realise that it was the woman’s heart; another half-second to notice that it was still beating, and that the sight had caused something in his mind to feel like it had suddenly gone rotten.

He felt the creature that had stared at him in his brain; felt it grasping at him as he fled. The feeling was fading, receding with each yard he put between himself and the horrors that had spilled from the shipping container, but Vega knew that others were not so fortunate.

Screaming, all around him.

The violence built in intensity like the gathering storm; a sickening, dizzying vortex of horror. In the darkness, with people running in all directions, and with screaming everywhere, Vega felt that there was nowhere safe, nowhere to run to, and a solid lump of despair settled in his gut.

Somewhere behind him, he heard a child screaming for its mother, the voice so high-pitched with terror that he couldn't tell if it came from a boy or a girl.

The scream ended so abruptly that for a moment Vega thought it must have been emanating from a television, and someone had just hit the off button.

His mind was slipping. He felt it, deep inside. Like some toxin that had been injected into his bloodstream, and which was working its way steadily through his system, dealing out damage as it found a home in the darkest corner of his thoughts.

The screams seemed to multiply around him. And worse than the screams: the sickening sound of flesh being ripped; the grunting, snarling of the creatures. The heavy splatter of the blood that fell on the park like a warm rain.

All those sounds; all that noise, somehow amplified and worsened by the darkness.

Vega backpedalled in what he thought was the direction he had approached the park from initially, his only thought to get back to the deck below; to the others, and to their firearms.

The screaming seemed to be following him, getting louder with each step, but when he finally turned to face the attack that he was certain was coming at any moment, Vega found himself confronted by only darkness, and knew that the screaming had come from his own throat.

Lightning split the sky again, and the roar of thunder that followed it was almost immediate. The Oceanus was in the eye of the storm.

As the flash faded, Vega saw a man smashing his head into the ground repeatedly, trying to purge it of the poison within; his face already a ruinous catastrophe of gristle and bone. Smashing and smashing until what was left didn't even look human.

Vega had seen, and now he understood. Death had come to the Oceanus. It circled the ship like a vulture.

The sky cracked once more, and then all thoughts fled.

And there was only running.

22

"Vampires," Mark repeated in disbelief. "Are you fucking kidding me? That's your story? Fucking vampires?"

He let out a chuckle and surprised himself with how shaky his voice sounded. The combination of darkness, distant gunfire and Herb’s oddly placid demeanour had wormed its way under his skin. He wasn’t sure what he thought Herb’s story was going to be, but he was damn sure he hadn’t expected vampires.

Herb sighed heavily.

"That's right," he said. "Vampires. We gonna do the I don't believe this shit dance for a while now? Because believe me, friend, our time is fucking short, and that dance can last a long time. Trust me. I know."

Something about the steely note in the man's voice made Mark swallow the sarcastic response that had been gathering in his mind. He searched his thoughts for a question that seemed appropriate and came up empty. What was the protocol when someone—an apparently dangerous someone; maybe even a terrorist—told you that vampires existed, and they were likely hunting you at that very moment?

None of the questions that popped into his mind felt anything less than ridiculous, but it was obvious from the silence in the conference room that nobody else planned on speaking.

"How?" Mark finally said.

"How?" Herb barked a laugh that made Mark's nerves sizzle. "That's your question?"

Herb's laughter dissolved into coughing and a sharp intake of breath.

"I don't know how," he said. "I know what and I know why. The 'what' is a creature that has existed since before our species discovered fire. Something fucking old, man, you understand? Something you haven't seen before."

Mark snorted.

"And you have?"

Herb laughed again.

"No," he said. "I haven't seen anything personally. I didn't even believe this shit myself until a few weeks ago; not really. But according to those who do believe, the reason we haven't seen them is because they don't come around all that often. Sometimes there are gaps of decades without activity. Sometimes, centuries. They live a long time; they hibernate, understand? We're not talking about Dracula or fucking Twilight here, right? No swooning women, no tortured love story, no nibbling on people's necks. These things aren't like us. They were never like us. They are something else. Animals that we don’t understand. An apex predator."

"This is bullshit," Ferguson snapped, and Mark flinched. For a while there, listening to Herb speak, the darkness had once more fooled him into thinking they were alone in the conference room.

"You guys are not actually listening to this, are you?" Ferguson growled.

Mark said nothing. The sound of Steven Vega's gun firing until the bullets ran out dominated his thoughts. Vega was ninety percent arsehole, but the other ten percent didn't strike Mark as the type of guy to start shooting in a public area unless he absolutely had to. Yet it hadn't sounded to Mark like a gunfight. More liked panicked fire from a single weapon. A whole clip emptied at something that didn't shoot back.

Vega had to have been scared by something.

This can't possibly be true.

Can it?

"Say we believe you," Mark said cautiously. "What's your role in this? Why disable the ship?"

Herb drew in a breath. Mark couldn't see the man's face, but he got the impression that Herb was searching for the right way to say something that he knew they would find it difficult to believe.

"There is a world...beneath our world," Herb began in a faltering tone that sounded to Mark like he was trying to remember a memorised speech, and then he tutted, apparently at himself.

"Look, I only know what I've been taught," Herb said. "What I've had to listen to since I was a kid. Trust me, I understand what this sounds like. The story goes that these things live underground, mostly, and only come to the surface to feed. Once, their existence was common knowledge, but that has been eroded away. There are secrets that have been kept from the general population for centuries. Since before the damn printing press was invented, right? Information that has been allowed to slowly dissolve over time."

Mark frowned when Herb fell silent.

"Go on," he said.

"What you need to understand is that vampire is just a word, right? What you're thinking of when I say that word is a myth built on faded memories; told and retold until it becomes meaningless. A Chinese whisper. The creature that the word refers to might more appropriately be labelled a demon. Or a monster. It doesn't matter. 'Vampire' works because much of the whole vampire myth as we know it, if you trace it backwards, has its roots in the existence of this creature, but only one element of the vampire story as you know it is wholly true."

Mark realised he was holding his breath. Herb's words—as incredible as they were—were delivered with utter sincerity that made something in Mark's gut squirm.

"Which is?"

"They consume humans. Throughout history, when there have been mass disappearances—if you believe my father's version of events—that is down to people like me serving up sacrifices to keep these things at bay."

"And nobody has noticed this happening," Mark said dubiously.

"There are no survivors," Herb replied. "Never have been. That's part of the deal."

Mark snorted.

"There's, what, three thousand people on this boat?" he said. "If that number of people went missing anywhere in the world somebody would notice."

"Yeah," Herb said. "There hasn't been a sacrifice on this scale in centuries. Maybe millennia, if my father is to be believed. Not since the Incas. He says it's because there are a lot more of us now, so the price is steeper, but that's probably just another of his bullshit theories. Whatever it is these things want; however they think, it won't be as logical as that."

Herb took a deep breath, and when the silence didn't crack, he carried on.

"Since I was born, I've been prepared by my father, just as all my ancestors have been prepared, to be ready to make a sacrifice if they call for it. They haven't called on my family in generations, so until very recently, as far as I was concerned, I was raised by the family from hell, and I was the only one that wasn’t batshit-crazy. It turns out they were right, and after all this time, it's the Rennick family's turn to make an offering. Nice deal for me."

He spat those last words out like they were rotten.

"A little over two months ago, my father received contact, and demands were made. A large sacrifice. The Oceanus was the perfect choice: a large number of people in a confined space. Easy to cut communications. The ability to do it all at sea, where there was no chance of them coming into contact with the general population. The vampires agreed."

"If any of that is true," Mark said, "you and your family have got to be just about the most evil motherfuckers on Earth."

Herb snorted.

"Funny," he said. "When I first found out what was expected of me, I told my father the exact same thing. I asked him what was stopping us from just dropping these bastards into the sea instead of putting them on the ship. You know what he said?"

Herb paused a moment, until he was certain that no reply would be forthcoming.

"He said that if we didn't fulfil our duty, many thousands more would die. The entire vampire species would retaliate, and nobody knows for sure how many of them there are. Maybe millions. Nobody would be living in comfortable oblivion any more, watching TV and going to work and having safe, happy children. Instead, they'd be fighting, and they'd be dying."

Herb grimaced, as though remembering the taste of something sour.

"My father always said that our role is to offer sacrifices in isolated places, to maintain the ancient peace between the species, whether we like it or not. We keep the vampires away from humans, and we keep the knowledge of their existence secret. The world gets to keep turning."

Herb chuckled darkly, and when he next spoke, his tone dripped with bitterness and regret.

"He said we're the good guys."

Mark opened his mouth, though he wasn't entirely sure what the next words to spill from his lips might be, and then he snapped it shut again when the door to the conference room burst open and Steven Vega hurtled inside, panting for breath.

"Barricade the doors," Vega roared, and Mark's blood ran cold.

23

The moment stretched out, until it felt to Dan like the air around him was ready to snap. When the helicopter had roared over the ship, Katie grabbed his hand once more, and dragged him back through the security suite and out onto the balcony that overlooked the park two levels below their current position.

It all seemed to happen so quickly. At one moment, Dan's mind had been equally divided between apprehension and confusion, but when the chopper dropped the huge box directly onto the people gathered below it, and the screaming and the gunshots started, he realised that the confusion part no longer mattered.

All that mattered was that the worst had happened. Hell, worse than the worst. Dan had been preoccupied with the thought of hijackers, but what unfolded in the park below them, lit sporadically by bolts of lightning, was far beyond anything his mind had been able to conjure up.

The Oceanus wasn't the target of hijackers, or even terrorists, but something else. Something that he caught glimpses of in the fractured light, but which his mind refused to accept.

If he had been pushed, the best word Dan could have come up with to describe the creatures that fanned out through the park was monsters.

They looked like nothing he had ever seen before: bigger than the average person, and vaguely humanoid in shape, but also somehow insectile in their movements. They were fast, but there was also order in the way they moved, an unmistakable intelligence. The creatures were operating like a well-drilled team, spreading out from the epicentre that was the shipping container uniformly.

A rampaging wave of teeth and death.

Dan saw only three, but they killed with extraordinary, machine-like efficiency. Every movement seemed calculated to cause maximum damage; each swing of the gangly arms tearing flesh apart like wet paper.

Dan and Katie stood, rooted to the spot, for what felt like an eternity, watching the massacre unfold in brilliantly-lit snapshots like a grisly slideshow. Every few seconds, lightning split the sky, and the pile of bodies in the park seemed to grow exponentially.

Dan's mind raced to understand. The creatures were killing at will, but the sheer number of bodies just didn't tally. It seemed like the creatures moved through a space and left insanity in their wake.

Many of the people down there, Dan realised, weren't being torn apart by the monsters.

They were killing themselves.

Lightning forked across the sky, and Dan saw a woman standing in front of one of the park's perfectly manicured trees.

Smashing her head against the trunk until she collapsed to the floor, unmoving.

He saw a man smash a wine bottle and savagely drive the broken neck into his own throat, ripping his life away with a single, terrible swipe.

Other passengers leapt for the railings at the edge of the deck, hurling themselves into the sea, and the screams of relief that emanated from them as they plunged toward the freezing waves made Dan think that they hadn't jumped because they wanted to escape.

They wanted to die.

The air was ripe with fear. It reached out invisible fingers and clutched at Dan's muscles, paralysing him.

Forcing him to watch.

The park became a killing field, and it happened so fast. Already the three creatures had disappeared from his sight. Those left alive in the park tried to bludgeon themselves to death with whatever was close to hand.

Dan saw a woman upend a chair and fall upon it, driving the leg through her eye and into her skull like a spear, and he dropped his gaze, unable to look on the insanity anymore, trying to focus only on not letting the terror he felt cause him to black out.

And he saw something below him that drove all other considerations from his mind in an instant.

One of the hideous creatures barrelled into the ship's interior, two floors directly below his position.

Run, Dan thought, but his limbs would not comply. He stared, transfixed, at the darkness below, waiting for the next flash of lightning to illuminate the ruined corpses that decorated the park.

Hoping to see that the creature had turned back; that it wasn’t at that very moment heading straight toward him.

You have to run.

Dan almost shrieked when Katie grabbed his arm firmly, and dragged him toward the nearest doorway.

The fear caught in his throat.

Someone else was screaming, and they sounded terrifyingly close. The scream became a gurgle, and Dan heard wet smacking sounds as Katie closed the door gently. A half-second later, he felt her breath in his ear. The words hissed from her lips, hot and trembling.

"It's on the stairs."

If Dan had yelped in surprise when Katie grabbed him, he would almost certainly have drawn the creature straight to them. The realisation made his bladder loosen with terror. He tried to breathe evenly, but he wasn't sure he could manage even that without crying out, and so he settled for holding his breath.

The darkness in the room was absolute, but Dan didn't think Katie had pulled him back into the security suite. Even without visual cues to aid him, he sensed that they were standing in a much smaller space. Some office, perhaps, or...

Dan reached out a hand carefully, and brushed his hand against a wooden pole. He realised it was the handle of a broom, and that Katie had pulled him into a storage closet, even as the broom fell in the darkness, clattering into other cleaning supplies. The noise sounded impossibly loud.

Dan froze.

No way out.

For several seconds, he and Katie stood unmoving in the silence, and Dan desperately prayed that the noise he had made had gone unheard.

Silence prevailed for what felt to Dan like a lifetime.

Click.

Click, click, click.

Outside the door, the thunderous silence gave way to heavy footfalls, each one allied to the strange clicking noise. It took Dan a moment to understand that what he heard must be the sound of claws on the polished floor.

Or talons.

Katie's hand found Dan's face in the dark, and clamped firmly over his mouth.

She didn't whisper in his ear this time; no need to tell him to be quiet. Even if Dan had wanted to speak, he doubted he could have formed the words. He had a feeling that at that moment, his mouth was only good for screaming.

Through the thin wooden door, the footsteps approached fast, and Dan heard heavy, ragged panting. Up close, the thing sounded huge: each breath an explosive grunt that made Dan think there was a bear in the hallway beyond the door.

It's right outside.

Time slowed to a desperate crawl, and for a moment, Dan was back there on that innocuous London street, clutching his wallet dumbly and wondering how the handle of a knife came to be growing from his forehead. Tumbling helplessly on a black current of terror that soon became as familiar to him as breathing.

The sound of something falling to the floor right outside the supply closet snapped him back to the present. Whatever had fallen, it had landed with a wet slap that reminded Dan of owning a dog as a kid, and his mother tossing the fat she had trimmed from steaks onto the kitchen floor for the happy mutt to devour.

Meat.

Flesh.

Food.

Dan's fingernails buried themselves into his palms painfully, and Katie's iron grip on his jaw tightened until his cheeks ached, but he could not move, and the pain seemed terribly unimportant. Nothing mattered except the door, and Dan's certainty that at any moment it would burst open to reveal the snapping jaws of the monstrous creature that had decimated the passengers gathered in the park.

Dan's pulse hammered in his veins, and he wanted desperately to kick open the door and flee blindly. This was a nightmare; it had to be. He was still asleep next to his wife, warm and safe. The events of the hours since he had awoken were all so twisted, so unreal. Dan almost felt like laughing. Of course it was a dream. Dan should have known, from the moment he left the cabin and ventured out alone into an ocean of strangers.

That wasn't just out of character: it was impossible.

Dan felt his muscles relax a little.

He hadn't taken his medication after all, and the resulting chemical imbalance in his brain was making him crazy.

Time to wake up, now, he thought to himself, and squeezed his eyes shut, praying that when he reopened them he would see the walls of the cabin, and Elaine snoring softly next to him.

But there was only darkness and terror and a strange young woman's hand clamped over his mouth. The trembling of her body next to his; the sour stench of sweat and fear.

Something thumped against the door, and Dan knew that he had just moments left to live, and suddenly the fear of the world; the crippling anxiety and the isolation he had imposed upon himself for two years made him furious.

Such a waste, he thought. It's a wonder Elaine even stayed, let alone agreed to marry me.

He offered a silent prayer, despite not having a religious bone in his body; a promise to God that if He would allow Dan to live through the madness unfurling aboard the Oceanus, Dan wouldn't let anxiety dominate another moment of his life. He would take Elaine dancing; Christ, he'd dance right along the streets with her, oblivious to the stares of strangers that had crippled him for so long and—

Outside the door, someone screamed.

Footsteps, fleeing.

And that terrible clacking of talons, following them.

Moving away.

Dan let out a breath that had become a raging inferno in his lungs, and became aware that somewhere during those terrifying few moments he had pissed himself. Ordinarily, such an occurrence in public would have resulted in all-consuming humiliation, and would most likely have meant another year of Dan refusing to leave the house.

Yet at that precise moment, as he felt the warm wetness at his crotch, he didn't give a damn. Fear of humiliation was suddenly outranked by something far worse.

Somewhere outside, he heard a door opening with a crash, and more screaming,

"I think it's in the security suite," Katie breathed into his ear, making him jump. She took her hand away from his mouth, and Dan worked his jaw, feeling it click into place.

"I'm so sorry," Katie whispered, and there was an odd note of embarrassment in her voice that suddenly made her sound very young. "I think I peed myself."

She sounded mortified.

Dan blinked into the darkness, and forced himself to swallow back the hysterical laughter that threatened to consume him.

24

Steven Vega's terror was infectious. Mark felt it coiling around his nerves and squeezing, and the combination of darkness and Vega's fear made him tremble.

That, and the screams that followed Vega into the dark conference room.

Outside the room, the clamour that Mark had already become used to hearing—the murmurs of confusion from the passengers, the occasional yelp of surprise; all the sounds made by people stumbling around an unfamiliar place in the dark—had given way to screams of a very different sort.

Mark tried not to hear it; did everything he could to ignore the noise that floated to his ears, but it was impossible. Again and again, he heard howls of terror, some of which dissolved into cries of pain and disbelief, others which cut off abruptly.

Mixed in with the human noises, another sound; a shrill shriek that sounded almost like an animal call. Answered by similar shrieks in the distance. Whatever was out there, there was more than one, and they communicated in voices that made Mark’s courage wither.

The terrible wall of noise beyond the conference room doors wasn't close, but it was headed that way.

Our time is fucking short.

Mark tried not to think about what Herb's words meant, but his mind ran to dark destinations of its own accord.

Hearing the screams, no one in the conference room questioned Vega's desperate command. Instead, the four stunned members of the security team searched for anything they could use to help him barricade the door.

The tables and chairs in the conference room were lightweight, and so they piled them high and wide in a silent blur of furious activity. Vega threaded the wooden legs of a chair through the door handles, apparently unwilling to sacrifice his gun to the task once more. In the dark it was impossible to tell just how secure the barricade was; most likely, Mark thought, anything that broke the makeshift deadbolt and came through the door would simply brush the flimsy furniture aside. Still, the act of creating the barricade seemed to calm Vega a little, and Mark thought that was vital.

Hearing the big man's whimpering fear was almost worse than the screams outside. Vega wasn't the type of guy to panic about anything, and Mark was sure that he would have done his level best to avoid showing any weakness or fear in front of his troops. The fact that Vega clearly didn't care about appearing terrified and weak made dry panic surge in Mark's throat.

And made him wonder again about Herb's story.

Surely it couldn't be true?

"What's out there, Steve?" Mark said finally, when there was no more furniture left to move. "What did you see?"

Vega's response was a trembling sigh that made Mark's nerves dance.

"I've got no fucking idea," Vega said at last. His voice sounded weak and distant; preoccupied somehow. "The chopper we heard dropped a shipping container right onto the middle of the park. Time-locked doors. The things that came out...they're killing everyone. It was a bomb, after all. Just not the type that explodes. A living bomb."

Vega sounded like he was carrying on parts of a conversation that Mark had not been privy to, and so Mark picked out the word that seemed most important and focused on it.

"Things?" Mark said sharply. Judging by Vega's voice, the ex-marine's confidence had been punctured, and it seemed like a fatal wound. He didn't sound pissed off at Mark addressing him by his first name; didn't even sound like he realised he was speaking to Mark at all. Mark thought the big man sounded like he was deflating inexorably.

Like he was beyond terrified and had no idea how to deal with it.

"Killing themselves," Vega mumbled absently. "Because they got into their heads. Making them kill themselves. I wanted to—"

"Vega," Mark snapped. "Steve. Steve. Focus."

Vega whimpered into silence.

"You said there were things out there," Mark said. "What things?"

"Things," Vega repeated in a faraway tone. "I don't know. Creatures. Monsters."

"Vampires," Herb said in the darkness. "And you bastards promised you'd shoot me."

"Will you shut the fuck up about vampires?" Mark hissed.

"Didn't look like any vampires I've ever heard of," Vega said softly. "Looked like...I don't know. Insects? Like someone mixed up humans and insects and added a fuckload of teeth to the result. The things I saw...they're not out there sucking blood. They're tearing people to fucking pieces."

"Yeah, that's right. Vampires," Herb spat sullenly. "Just like I said."

Mark rubbed his temples, and tried to keep a grip on reality, but it felt evasive, like oil slipping through his fingers. Vega's words made about as much sense as Herb's.

Maybe they're both telling the truth.

Whatever the case, Steven Vega sounded like he had just about checked out. The hard-nosed marine bark was gone, replaced by a feeble, jittery whine that set Mark's teeth on edge. What good was the man, if the one time you needed his macho-bullshit army-man persona, he went to pieces?

"You were shooting," Mark said finally. "At these creatures? Did you kill any?"

"No," Vega said quietly. "I emptied the gun before I saw 'em. Shot the guys who set this up, the ones who set off the EMP. Trying to board the chopper. Got two, at least."

Mark heard a sharp intake of breath. Herb.

"One got away?" Herb asked cautiously.

Vega didn't respond, but the silence apparently told Herb everything he needed to know.

"I know which fucking one that will be," Herb said to no one in particular.

For several long moments, awkward silence descended on the group. The members of the security team were, Mark realised, waiting for Vega to tell them what to do next. Himself included.

Yet it didn't sound like Vega had the slightest idea what to do next. Didn't sound, in fact, like he wanted to do anything other than hide. Mark suddenly had the notion that if Vega had been alone, the big man would have quite happily dissolved into hysterical sobbing.

Not helpful.

Mark searched his mind, irritated that he had no idea which questions to ask, and no concept of what should be done next.

The stories that Herb and Vega were telling were incredible; too farfetched to believe, and yet both men clearly did believe what they were saying. Herb could well be a liar or a lunatic or both, but Steven Vega had been singularly unimaginative and bullish when he left the room, and a broken shell when he returned. He’d seen something out there. Something terrible. He wasn’t lying about that.

Mark felt paralysed by doubt, and each attempt he made to decide what to do next foundered on the rocks in his mind.

One step at a time, he thought.

"Are you three armed?" he asked finally, and got grunts of acknowledgement from Phillips, Ferguson and Saunders.

Herb chuckled.

"Guns won't help," he said.

Mark felt a fire of anger erupt in his gut, and gave serious consideration to locating Herb's face and punching it again.

"Fine," he snapped. "Vampires. How the fuck do we fight them, then?"

"You don't," Herb said. "Don't you get it? You, me, everybody on this boat; we've been sacrificed. We aren't supposed to survive. We can't. Even if you could kill them, in doing so you'd be breaking a truce that has existed for thousands of years. Starting a war with an enemy that cannot be defeated. We're all going to die, right here. Tonight."

Mark clenched a fist.

"Bullshit," he growled. "I'm not going down without a fight, you hear?"

Herb laughed bitterly.

"It will be a lot worse if you resist," he said. "And in the end, it won't change a damn thing. There are three thousand people on this ship. Way more than they need. They aren't just here to feed."

Mark's muscles ached with the constant tension. Whatever was happening on the Oceanus, it was way beyond his experience and know-how. He was starting to feel fatigued just trying to gather all the questions that needed asking in his mind. And worse, he was starting to believe Herb. After all, the guy wanted to be executed. He wanted a quick death.

As opposed to what? Mark thought darkly.

"You want a quick death," Mark said finally. "You can have it. But first, you're going to tell me how to fight these things. People must have fought them before. How?"

"Nobody knows, for sure," Herb said. Mark thought his tone suddenly sounded eager and hopeful.

He really does want to die.

"All the knowledge I have comes from books, and even that is second hand stuff. I know what my father told me, and it's worth you bearing in mind that my father is a fucking sociopath."

Outside the barricaded door, a bloodcurdling scream ended in a snap. The noise sounded terrifyingly close.

Close enough that further conversation suddenly seemed like it might result in bloodshed. The room fell into silence, and Mark counted out the beats of his heart, waiting for a sound that might confirm they were in immediate danger. He counted to ten.

No further noise beyond the door.

"Get to the point," Mark hissed.

"Forget all the vampire stuff that you think you know," Herb said. "Garlic, holy water, crosses. These creatures are older than religion, none of that stuff will work. There are some accounts that being staked through the heart works, but that's just hearsay. The one thing all sources agree on is that these creatures have an effect on the human mind, something that makes attacking them directly impossible. So even if staking them did work, getting close enough to stick something in 'em is unlikely."

"What sort of effect?" Mark asked.

"I don't know," Herb said. "Supposedly it's like a sickness. My brother saw one. He said they made a girl...do things. To herself. Like she was on fucking remote control or something."

"The eyes," Vega said weakly. "When you look into their eyes, you can feel them. In your head. In my head."

Vega trailed off, and his words hung on the air like smoke.

"They don't like light," Herb said, breaking the thick silence. "That's one reason why we had to disable the ship's electrics. I don't know if sunlight kills them, but I really doubt it. But they don't like being seen. They're parasites, you understand? Like your friend over there said. Insects. If they can, they'll stick to the shadows. They'll kill everyone on board before sunrise."

"And what if they don't? Can we just find somewhere to hide until the light comes and drives them away?"

"You could," Herb said. "If they were going to leave on their own terms. But they're not. They will be picked up, in exactly the same way that they were dropped off. And then this ship will be sunk. You see? Even if you survive the vampires, you won't survive the ship. Nobody can be allowed to know about the arrangement we have with them. All evidence has to be disposed of."

"Because if people knew, we'd find people like you and tear them apart," Mark hissed.

"Because if the knowledge that these things exist got out, the whole fucking world would collapse," Herb snapped. "And the deal would be off. Truce finished. Millions would die."

"What else?" Mark said.

"That's all I know," Herb said. "And most of that is probably wrong. Remember, I didn't believe in any of this shit either until a few months ago."

"But these things aren't immortal? They can be killed?"

"As far as I know," Herb sniffed. "They're not magic, they're not undead. They're just creatures. Can they be killed? Yeah, sure. Probably. Can you kill them? I doubt it. And even if you could, would you? Knowing that if you kill them and somehow get off this ship, you'll almost certainly be starting a war that could cost millions of lives?"

"As opposed to surrendering, and fucking feeding people to these creatures by the thousands?" Mark said bitterly. "Yeah, I think I'd prefer war to that. I'll take a fight over that shit anytime."

"Do whatever the fuck you want," Herb said sharply. "It's not going to matter to me, is it? I've told you everything I know, and we have a deal. I'm not letting those bastards get into my head. They're evil, you understand? Sadistic. They're not just here to feed. They're here to play. So get your gun out, and make it quick."

Mark stared at the oppressive darkness for a moment. Even with his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he couldn't make out Herb at all.

"Yeah, the deal," Mark said. "Turns out you're not worth a bullet. Deal's off."

25

For a moment, the darkness confused the hell out of Elaine. She had woken with a headache, but that in itself wasn't unusual: she occasionally suffered migraines that wore her like a pair of old boots for a few hours before subsiding.

But it was damn dark. There were streetlights right outside the bedroom window—a source of much irritation over the four years that she and Dan had occupied the flat in South Wimbledon—but she saw no sign of their amber glow tonight, and without it, the darkness of the bedroom was almost impenetrable.

She stretched out a hand, scrabbling for the phone that she kept on the bedside table.

And drove her arm painfully into a wall that had no business being there instead.

What the hell?

I’m not at home. Not in bed.

It all came back at once. The honeymoon. Dan's disappearance. The power cut and the crazy minutes spent stumbling through the dark. Distant screaming.

Falling.

Elaine winced and lifted her fingers to her forehead. They came away slick.

Judging by the hard edges currently wedged into her back, she had fallen down a narrow staircase.

Drawing in a breath as sharp pain lanced through her back, she levered herself upright, and checked her head thoroughly. She discovered a deep gash on her right temple, but it felt no bigger than an inch across. Not bleeding too badly.

It hurt like hell when her fingers found it, though.

And it's still dark.

Elaine squinted into the darkness, trying to figure out where she was, but it was if the light had been sucked away completely.

No windows, she remembered. She was still in the maze of corridors that ran through the passenger cabins, probably somewhere close to the centre of the ship. The park shouldn't be too far away. Easy to reach, as long as she could find an exit from the dark labyrinth.

As long as I stop throwing myself down staircases.

Elaine hauled herself upright with a grunt and checked the rest of her body for injuries. Aside from the gnawing pain at the base of her spine, she seemed to have come off lightly.

At least I landed on my head, she thought. No vital damage done.

Dan would have laughed at that.

The thought of her missing husband made her mood darken to match her surroundings. Elaine had no idea how long she had been unconscious at the foot of the stairs, but it definitely felt like time had passed. So where the hell was Dan? And why had nobody sorted the lights out and found the unconscious passenger sprawled across the stairs?

A flash of light, somewhere ahead of her.

Weak; barely-there and then gone in an instant, but Elaine knew she had seen it. Straight ahead, and coming from somewhere to the left.

A crash of thunder made her flinch. Storms had long ago lost their power to frighten her, but Elaine wasn't sure she had ever heard thunder so close. So loud it made her aching head ring.

She shook her head groggily and started forward, keeping her arms outstretched to run her fingers along both walls. When she had taken thirty steps, she paused, waiting for the storm to light her way once more.

She didn't have to wait for long. This time, she was much closer to that left-hand turn, and she saw the flash of light clearly. She made for it quickly, and reached the turn before the light faded and left her blind once more. Once she rounded the corner, she saw that, up ahead, the corridor widened out onto one of the balcony areas that overlooked the park.

She set off as the light faded to nothing, keeping her steps aimed straight forward.

And stopped dead when she heard something in front of her. A strange, unidentifiable noise.

What is that?

The noise was heavy and wet, strangely rhythmic. Like a machine leaking oil at regular intervals.

A voice at the back of Elaine’s mind implored her to turn back, but she ignored it. Going back meant returning to the dark maze of corridors and getting lost all over again, and quite possibly tumbling down another set of steps.

She began to edge forward, toward the noise, and with each step she wondered both what the noise could be, and why she was instinctively holding her breath; trying to make as little noise as possible.

Because you don’t want it to hear you, silly.

It?

Feeling the wall with her arms, Elaine came to a stop, somehow afraid to take another step and see what waited for her in the darkness.

You’re being ridiculous, Elaine. There’s something wrong with the ship, that’s all.

Setting her jaw firmly, she took another handful of steps forward and stopped once more.

Directly ahead of her, Elaine could now see a rectangle of the gloomy light that diffused through the clouds. She was close enough to the balcony that she could just about make out the space beyond.

Another step.

Another pause.

There was something else; another shape that deformed the rectangle of half-light ahead of her. An odd shape that made no sense. For a moment she thought it looked like a pile of bags, and wondered if someone had forgotten to take their luggage into their cabin.

Another step.

Another pause.

Elaine's nerves fired a warning shot to her brain.

The luggage was moving.

Another crash of thunder overhead almost made her scream, and she froze on the spot, waiting for the deafening noise to subside.

But the noise rolled on and on.

Elaine frowned into the darkness.

The noise she was hearing now didn't sound like thunder; not exactly. A low rumbling sound.

Growling. Ragged panting. Like an animal. Like a large animal.

All of a sudden, Elaine's muscles, which had been locked in place, wanted very much to move.

She began to back up slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible, without even knowing why she had to be quiet, just that it was imperative that she do nothing that might draw attention to her.

Attention of what?

Elaine's muscles flooded with adrenaline, pleading with her to use every ounce of energy they offered to get the fuck out of there fast, but she forced herself to creep backwards slowly. Quietly.

Somewhere behind her was a set of dark stairs that might as well be invisible, and which had already proven to be treacherous in the total darkness. Somewhere ahead of her, something was close enough that she could smell it, and bile surged at the back of her throat.

A foul, musty stink which reminded her of the basement in the house that she grew up in; an ancient place that her parents barely ever used. The smell of rot and damp and decay, mixed with a much fresher, and more troubling scent.

Rusting metal.

Blood.

Her heel hit the first step, and she began to back up them slowly.

And then the lightning lit the corridor once more in brilliant white light and she saw it, and Elaine froze, unwilling to let her foot drop on the step for fear that even the tiniest noise would alert the thing she saw. Crouched in the doorway straight ahead of her, in a spot she had almost stumbled to blindly in the darkness, was a creature that Elaine hadn’t ever seen before; large and angular, a muscular, dark body that seemed to glisten in the temporary light, as though it had been covered in liquid.

The creature was hunched over something, and it took Elaine a moment to understand what she was seeing. The top half of a corpse that had been ripped in two; legs nowhere to be seen. What remained of the person pinned beneath the creature was almost unidentifiable; torn into hideous strips; a human being reduced to nothing but lumps of gore and a dark pool of liquid.

The thing was eating the corpse, casually tearing away chunks of flesh and popping them into its mouth like snacks.

Suddenly, Elaine realised what the rhythmic noise she had heard moments earlier was: not something mechanical. Not even close.

Something chewing. The sound of a human body being steadily consumed.

The dark liquid that covered the creature’s hideous body stopped being a mystery immediately. Human blood. It looked like more blood than one person’s body could possibly contain.

The creature tossed a chunk of flesh aside, as though it couldn’t stomach another bite, and alarms began to sound in Elaine’s mind.

You have to move!

She took another step backwards; another step up the stairs toward the dark corridors that she had been so desperate to escape only moments earlier, and as the last of the illumination from the lightning faded, she saw the creature rising up to its full height, its meal forgotten.

And turning toward her as the darkness returned.

26

A distant scream rattled Dan's nerves, and he felt that familiar rushing sensation; the panic gathering momentum inside, slowly ripping his thoughts away from him.

Adrift on the terrible black river, tumbling endlessly toward danger...

He shook his head, trying to force his attention back to the present. If he let the old anxiety submerge him now, he had a feeling that he might never resurface.

The creature that had been outside the closet door was now inside the superstructure, and by the sound of the screaming, it had made its way up from the empty security suite, and was heading toward the bridge.

All those people, rushing around in the dark bridge, desperately trying to get their dead instruments working. Focused only on solving the mystery of the sudden loss of power. Dan doubted they even knew what was happening on the ship, let alone what was, at that very moment, headed straight for them. Even if they had known, he didn’t think they would believe it. He wasn’t sure he could believe what he had seen with his own eyes.

But the terrible creature was coming straight for them, ready or not.

It would be a massacre.

"We have to get out of here before it comes back," he breathed.

Katie didn't respond, and Dan slowly became aware of her breathing. Laboured. Frantic. It sounded like she couldn't draw in enough air to speak.

"Katie?"

She panted and choked, and suddenly Dan realised that he was on the other side of an experience that he had endured all too often.

In the darkness, he reached out until he found Katie's shoulder and moved his hands up, clasping them against her cheeks.

He leaned in close, as though moving in for a kiss, until their foreheads met.

"It's a panic attack," he whispered. "That's all. I know it feels like your heart will explode, but it will pass. You just need to concentrate on breathing, okay? Breathe with me. In."

He sucked in a deep breath, gratified to hear Katie following suit.

"Out. In. Out."

He repeated the slow breaths for several moments, until he felt Katie's shaking subside a little, and her breathing eased up.

"I thought...I was having a heart attack," she gasped weakly.

"I know," Dan said. "It's terrifying, but you sort of get used to it."

"You’ve had panic attacks?"

"Heh. Me and panic go way back. You’ll be okay. Just keep breathing, try to stay calm."

Dan remembered hearing those very words spoken to him. Remembered, too, how feeble and ineffective they had been when he suffered his first panic attack.

There were some situations where words just weren't enough.

He pulled Katie into an awkward hug. She stiffened for a moment, and then relaxed into his embrace before pulling away.

"What was that thing?" she whispered.

"I don't know. Nothing I've ever seen before. And there's more than one of them on board. I saw at least three in the park..."

He trailed off.

The park.

The memories of the images glimpsed in the park lingered like a scar on the surface of his mind. People being torn apart by inhuman monsters. Other people killing themselves in horrific ways, or throwing themselves overboard to die in the sea. It was a scene from a nightmare, and Dan didn't think the images seared onto his mind would ever fade.

I have to find Elaine.

"Listen," he whispered. "We can't stay here. That thing sounds like it's headed for the bridge, and once it’s done there it will come right back this way. I don't know about you, but I want to be somewhere else when that happens."

Silence.

"Are you nodding?" Dan said, and Katie choked out a soft laugh.

"Yeah, sorry. Thanks for...you know, calming me down."

"You're welcome," Dan said. "Can't have you checking out on me. You're my guide. Now, come on, let's get out of here."

"Okay," Katie said. She sounded uncertain. "And go where?"

"We have to find somewhere safe," Dan said. "Maybe find your friends with the guns, but first, I'm going to cabin number 217. I have to, you understand? Are you with me?"

Dan figured that the resulting silence was Katie nodding again, and he grinned despite himself. He reached out in the darkness and found the handle of the door and eased it open a crack, peering through and seeing nothing. He knew that straight ahead was the balcony that overlooked the park. To the right, stairs leading down. To the left, the balcony wound around toward the centre of the ship, passing the door to the security suite.

He couldn't see anything.

He closed the door again.

"It's too dark," he said grimly. "We're going to need some light, somehow. Any ideas?"

"There are flares. In Security."

"Fuck that. Anywhere else?"

"I...I'm not sure. Maybe, but it would be a gamble trying to find them in the dark."

"Shit," Dan said.

"There's a restaurant a couple of decks above the park, not far from here," Katie said. "Fine dining."

"I don't think this is the time to—"

"Candles, on the tables," Katie interrupted. "At least, I think there are. That's the only light I can think of. We'd have to drop down to the park and head left, then back up two decks."

The park. Dan didn't want to go anywhere near it, but he guessed that was an impossible dream. All stairways and corridors on the ship flowed to the park like rivers to the ocean. There was no avoiding it.

Two decks up, Dan thought. It sounded like nothing at all, but in the darkness, and with the creature so close, it became a forbidding task. Yet light was a necessity. The prospect of stumbling through the dark, right across the ship to the cabins, was unappealing to say the least.

"Okay," he said. "Candles are a good idea. That’s step one. Where would we have to go from there?"

"Once we get to the restaurant, we can stay on that deck for a while; circle around the ship. If we can get past the restaurant area, it’s a short run to the cabins," Katie said. "As long as the route is clear."

Dan sighed heavily.

As long as the route is clear. He knew exactly what Katie meant, and tried not to think about it, but his mind had ideas of its own. He was certain that he had seen three of the creatures barrelling through the park, massacring everything in their path, but there could have been more. Either way, they knew where one was.

The others could be anywhere.

One problem at a time, he thought. Get to Elaine, and take it from there.

He picked up one of the brooms and hefted it. It would make a pathetic weapon, but holding it somehow made him feel a little more secure.

"Okay," he said. "Let's go."

27

It felt like the walls of the conference room were closing in, suffocating Mark; wrapping around his neck like a noose.

Herb hadn't taken it well. He roared about betrayal and humans deserving to die, creating a racket that made the atmosphere in the conference room hiss with tension until Mark found the man’s flapping jaw in the darkness and popped him with a couple of sharp jabs.

Silence fell on the group once more.

Herb was conscious, but for the moment he was apparently focused only on trying to stop his brain rattling in his skull. Vega was whimpering somewhere in the darkness, and Phillips, Saunders and Ferguson seemed good for precisely fuck all.

This is on me, Mark thought, and the notion scared him witless. He was working in cruise ship security precisely because he didn't have the faintest idea how to respond to conflict in any way other than the method his father had taught him. The Oceanus wasn't meant to involve life-or-death situations, for fuck's sake. It wasn’t supposed to involve conflict at all.

He was no leader; hell, he could barely keep a job for more than a few months because people, in general, took a dislike to him.

He considered finding Vega's jaw and popping him a couple of times too, just to see if he could snap the big man out of it, but there was no time.

When he had finally managed to shut Herb up, the man's enraged wailing had resulted in an altogether more pressing problem.

The silence that fell after he jabbed Herb didn’t remain in place for long.

Click.

Click, click, click.

Click.

Clawed feet in the hallway outside the conference room door.

There was a pause, and the men huddled inside the room held their breath in unison.

And let it out as one synchronised explosion of sound when something heavy charged the doors, the noise of the brutal impact almost as loud as the thunder that intermittently ripped the sky apart overhead.

The doors held, but the aftershock of the impact rippled through the piled-up chairs and tables that had become their makeshift barricade.

It all sounded so terribly fragile.

It wasn't going to hold for long.

Vega wailed in abject terror. The sound was pitiful; somehow worse than anything Mark had heard thus far.

Mark headed for the dreadful, piercing noise and clutched at Vega's clothes, half-hauling the big man to his feet.

"My lighter," he snarled. Vega made no response save for a pathetic sob, so Mark frisked him, and found the lighter in the man's left hip pocket. He sparked it, and moved quickly around the walls of the conference room, searching for some means of escape. A doorway led to the bathrooms, but Mark knew there were no windows there. No other way out, aside from the single large window that stood at the far end of the room, overlooking the sheer drop into the freezing ocean.

Outside the conference room, the creature at the door shrieked and charged again.

This time, Mark thought he heard something cracking. A dry, brittle sound that made his nerves howl.

His mind raced, and he ran to the window. It was a single, large pane that didn't open, but could be smashed easily enough. He pressed his nose against the glass. The deck below was wider by a few inches than this one. If they were careful—if they were lucky—he thought they might be able to drop a deck and catch the railing below as they fell.

Insane, he thought, and it was.

It was also the only option.

"Okay," he said. "We're going out of the window. We can drop to the next deck."

"W-what?" a terrified voice said. Mark thought it was Phillips; couldn't be sure. "That's crazy."

The thing charged the door again, shrieking.

"No," Mark said, "That's crazy. This is our only chance. I'm going. Feel free to stay, if that's want you want."

He let the words hang on the air a moment.

"No, wait," Vega said abruptly, and Mark arched an eyebrow in surprise. Suddenly, Vega's voice was clear and confident, the pathetic whimpering gone. He sounded like he knew exactly what to do.

Maybe, Mark thought, when things really started to fall apart, the big man had found the strength to pull himself together; perhaps all that boot-camp bullshit had come back to him just at the right time. That would be very good news indeed: let Vega deal with leading the others and fighting whatever was on the ship. That would leave Mark free to focus on running. Getting to a lifeboat and getting the fuck out of Dodge.

"Give me your gun," Vega said, and Mark heard shuffling as one of the other men unholstered their firearm. "I know what to do. Quickly, now."

"Here, boss," Phillips said thickly.

Mark's mind wasn't quick enough. By the time he pieced it together, it was already too late.

The room flashed once and a roar of localised thunder made Mark's ears ring as Steven Vega placed the barrel of the gun under his chin and blew his brains out.

Mark heard pieces of Vega splatter onto the floor, and for a moment the world stopped turning. Even the creature outside seemed to pause before resuming its assault on the door.

"Fuck," Mark yelled, and he scrambled to Vega's corpse, feeling around for the pistol and scooping it up in trembling fingers. The grip of the handgun felt slick, and Mark was glad of the darkness; glad that he couldn't see what was smeared across the weapon.

He aimed the pistol at the door and let off a couple of rounds at the barricade, hoping at the very least to scare whatever was on the other side away, but the thing charged the door almost immediately, and this time there was no mistaking the dry snap of the impact. It was coming through, and it would not take long.

No time to think.

No time to question whether what he was about to attempt was impossible; whether he had only seconds left to live.

Mark turned, and fired another shot, straight at the window, and the room filled with the shrieking Atlantic wind.

"That way," Mark roared, and began to run. He didn't wait for acknowledgement or debate. Let them follow if they wanted; if they weren't persuaded by the cracking of the makeshift barricade or by Steven Vega painting the conference room with his brain, there was nothing more that Mark could do to get them moving.

By the time he reached the broken window and leaned out into the storm, he heard four sets of footsteps behind him, coming fast, and Mark grimaced. He had expected Phillips, Saunders and Ferguson to follow. The fourth set of footsteps told him that Herb, apparently, had swallowed the pain in his back and decided that he wanted to live after all.

*

Herb considered throwing himself straight out into the ocean when he rushed to the broken window, but his legs had other ideas. He cursed himself for a coward, and leaned out into the shrieking wind and rain, staring down.

In the darkness he could just barely make out the deck below, and just like the security guard had said, it bulged a few inches out. They would have to drop something like fifteen or twenty feet, somehow remaining flat against the hull, and catch the railing. There would only be one chance to get it right, and even if they timed it perfectly, the driving rain would make the rail slippery.

Herb tried to remember what was on the deck immediately below, but he came up empty. He had studied the schematics of the ship for almost as many hours as Edgar had, but the information seemed to be locked just beyond his reach now.

It didn't matter in any case. Whatever was happening on the lower decks, it couldn't possibly be as bad as what was happening right outside the door to the room he stood in.

For several long moments, the five men in the conference room huddled in front of the broken window, staring down at the impossibly risky jump they were about to attempt and Herb knew what was going through their minds.

Who goes first?

Herb let out a mirthless laugh, and pushed in front of the other men. If he missed, he missed. So be it. The ocean wouldn't be as quick as the gun, but it would do the job. Anything was better than letting the vampire at the door have him.

"Geronimo," Herb said affably, and stepped out into the storm.

The drop passed in the blink of an eye. Herb thought he would have time to see the rail coming, but it didn't turn out that way. He operated on pure instinct, and only when his fingers were locked firmly around the rail of the deck below and he was hauling himself up did he realise that the fall had been successful. He dropped over the rail onto the deck, gasping for air as his back sent a stab of agony up to his mind, and he scanned his immediate surroundings.

A dark lounge area that offered comfortable sofas and a stunning view of the ocean. A coffee bar. It all looked quiet.

He leaned out, grinning up at the faces that peered down at him.

"All clear," he roared, lifting his voice above the crashing of the waves below.

The man who had developed a fondness for punching Herb in the face went next, and almost lost his grip on the rail entirely. Herb leaned over the rail and grabbed him, heaving him up to safety with a grunt.

"I owe you," the man gasped as he landed on the deck, and Herb nodded, wondering if he had just saved the guy, or if he had condemned him to suffer a death far more terrible than the one that waited in the ocean below.

*

Ferguson went next.

He didn't make it.

Mark knew immediately that he had jumped rather than dropped. He was too far away from the hull from the moment he left the shattered window above, and he shot past Mark's scrabbling hands and fell screaming into the Atlantic.

Mark roared a curse as his fingers closed on air, and he couldn't be sure whether the surge of frustration he felt was down to Ferguson’s unnecessary death, or the fact that he took one of the three remaining guns with him.

Mark peered up, blinking as the rain blinded him, and saw Saunders leaning out of the window, staring down in horror. He screamed at Saunders to move, but the man was rooted to the spot, gripping the frame tightly, and staring down with wide, frightened eyes, shaking his head miserably.

Judging by the look on his face, he wasn’t hearing the words Mark shouted up to him. It sounded like he was listening to a voice in his mind; more persuasive than Mark could hope to be.

"Come on," Mark started to yell, but the words died in his throat.

A level above, Saunders suddenly whipped around and disappeared from view, turning back into the conference room to face something that Mark couldn't see.

And then the screaming started.

28

It hadn't seen Elaine.

Couldn’t have, or it would surely have charged forward and torn her apart instantly.

She backed up the steps quickly, and heard the creature following her along the corridor toward the stairs, but it moved slowly. The progress it made sounded almost leisurely, not like the movement of something that was focused on chasing her.

She reached the top of the staircase, and almost toppled over when the floor behind her suddenly flattened out. Only when she was certain that she had put herself out of sight around the corner did she let herself breathe.

Once more, she extended her arms to the hallway walls, feeling her way along the corridor. The turns she had taken earlier had slipped from her memory completely, but she knew that one of the hallways nearby had open doors: the electric locks that had released just as the one in her own cabin had. There were several cabins close to her, if she could just find the entrance to them.

One of them had to offer a hiding place worth a damn.

As she moved, her mind raced ahead of her, and she tried to figure out just what the hell she had seen in that flash of lightning.

It looked tall, but thin. Definitely not human; an animal of some sort. She had the impression of leathery skin, almost reptilian. Only one detail truly stuck in her mind: the talons that hung from the creature’s oversized hands.

Vicious claws. Weapons designed to kill and maim; they looked to be a couple of inches long at least, and Elaine didn’t think she’d be able to forget the way looking at those talons as they ripped apart human flesh had made her feel; not if she lived past a hundred years old.

It wasn't like any creature she had seen before, but there was no mistaking its intent.

Elaine had loved animals since she could remember, and like so many little girls, when she proudly told her father one day that she wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up, he expected her to outgrow it. Yet she never did. Caring for animals was so much more than a job to her; so much more than a salary.

There were very few animals that scared Elaine and certainly none that a British vet would come across in the course of their everyday work. Other people were scared of spiders or snakes, and Elaine got it; understood that those creatures were creepy, but there was little to be afraid of, and certainly not in the UK where poisonous critters were all but absent.

Elaine reserved her fear for bears and sharks and alligators: creatures whose fearsome reputations were well-earned. They deserved her fear, but having never seen one of those particular killing machines up close, they hardly mattered.

But as she had looked at the gore-stained creature that was now pursuing her, she was reminded of one time that she had been scared; of a family trip to London Zoo when she was a kid, and of staring at a lion lazing in the sun in its enclosure.

At a distance, the big cat had looked almost cute; just an overgrown version of her parents’ own little ball of fluff, really. Until it turned and looked straight at eight-year-old Elaine, and she saw something wild behind its eyes. Something ferocious and calculating. Looking into the predator’s eyes and realising that it was looking right back at her, that hot summer day had suddenly seemed terribly cold.

She felt an echo of that feeling now.

What the creature was didn't matter; not in the slightest. What mattered was that it was a large animal, and it had claws built for killing and a taste for human blood, and that she had to get away fast.

Her right hand suddenly stopped grazing the hallway wall, and she felt air. A corner, leading at a right angle into another dark corridor.

She couldn't be sure if she had been that way earlier, when her mind had been preoccupied with the dark and the disappearance of her husband. Now that she was concerned only with flight, it didn't seem to matter.

Any direction would do, as long as it wasn’t back.

She started up the corridor and paused, listening intently.

The creature behind her was sniffing loudly.

It grunted.

The bottom of the stairs, Elaine thought. It's still coming this way.

She allowed herself a faint flicker of hope. It wasn’t actively chasing her. Maybe she had been lucky, and it really hadn’t seen her at all. Maybe it couldn't see in the dark any better than she could.

The creature snorted out a breath.

"You're bleeding, humannnnn. I can smell your blood. I can smell your fearrrrrr."

The words were raspy and malformed. Spoken as though the mouth that delivered them was not designed to speak words at all.

Terror gripped Elaine, and for a moment she froze on the spot as her mind went blank, save for a single, utterly horrifying thought.

Not an animal.

Go!

She hurried down the pitch-black corridor, forcing herself not to run blindly, scraping her fingers on the wall once more and searching for another corner. If she took enough turns, maybe she had a chance of losing the monstrous creature pursuing her in the maze of hallways.

Somewhere behind her, she heard the clicking of talons as the creature ascended the stairs. It was still moving at what sounded like a leisurely pace, but not with the sort of caution that Elaine had been forced to adopt with her vision compromised by the darkness.

Because it can see just fine, Elaine thought abruptly, and she knew it was true. Knew it deep in her gut. Plenty of animals had excellent night vision. It was one area where the human body was sorely lacking. Evolution hadn't given mankind the ability to see in the dark, because it hadn't needed to. Humans had enough advantages; they were at the top of the food chain as it was.

Or at least, they were supposed to be.

Elaine's breath came in ragged, shallow gasps, and her feet began to move more quickly despite her inability to see.

Panic was taking over, she realised. Dulling her ability to think and forcing her to move quicker and quicker despite her blindness.

She was just about to give in to the overwhelming fear and sprint forward when she saw another flash of lightning illuminating the hallway up ahead. There had to be a window nearby, and that meant she was close to the exterior of the ship once more. Close to the cabins that might offer her a place to hide. She committed the scene in front of her to memory as the light faded: about twenty yards forward, then left.

And then she ran.

29

Katie was still clutching Dan's hand, though she was no longer tugging him along impatiently. Movement now was a matter of balancing speed and terror, and the latter was winning. When they crept from the closet, they moved with aching slowness, and stopped dead every few yards when they heard distant screaming.

It sounded like the creatures were moving through the decks, massacring what remained of the passengers.

At one point, Katie froze and squeezed Dan’s hand in a crushing grip when screams drifted down from directly above them: a cacophony of confusion and pain and horror.

"It's in the bridge," she whispered.

Dan tried not to picture the strange creature erupting into the mass of bodies gathered in the bridge.

Almost managed it.

They hurried their steps a little, putting the shrieks of agony behind them, moving around the edge of the park warily until Katie pulled Dan to the left, entering a mall area. Dan was grateful to put some walls around himself again: out in the open he had felt horribly exposed. Almost as blind as he had been in the supply closet, but knowing that there was open space all around him; that something could be lurking just yards away and he would not see it until it was far too late.

With each step they had taken around the park, he had expected to feel sharp claws tearing into his flesh at any moment. The smell hadn’t helped: although he couldn’t see the ruined corpses that littered the park, the metallic stink of blood was heavy in the air, and the images his mind conjured up were probably even worse than the reality. Beneath his feet, the floor was wet and slippery.

He tried vainly to persuade himself that was just the rain.

They were both soaked by the time they entered the shopping area that bordered the park.

The mall was a part of Park Avenue, which stretched right around one side of the ship, selling designer clothes mainly, along with gifts. The section that Katie aimed for contained a half-dozen shops and a couple of tiny water fountains that had been stilled when the power died.

Once they were inside the mall, Katie paused, and they both listened intently. It sounded quiet, but not quite silent.

Somewhere up ahead, Dan heard heavy breathing. A bubbling choke.

A moan of pain split the darkness, and made them both jump.

"Somebody's injured," Katie whispered.

Dan was amazed to find himself thinking that other people's injuries were none of his business, and that every second they dallied in the mall was another chance to run into one of the creatures that had massacred the passengers.

Did it really take only minutes to become a callous, heartless bastard? At what point did fear of people become misanthropy?

"We have to help them," Katie said, and Dan grunted softly, still debating in his mind whether he had the confidence to tell Katie that the injured person was none of his concern.

He let her lead him along until the debate became moot. They followed the noise, until it sounded like they were only a few feet away, and Katie hissed into the darkness.

"Hey, are you okay?"

A man's voice whimpered in response.

"Over here," Katie said, and took a few paces forward.

Dan felt the blood under his feet almost immediately, and when he stepped on a leg, he muttered an apology before realising that the injured man was still a couple of paces away. He felt around with his foot.

Definitely a leg.

Just not attached to a body.

Dan's stomach heaved, and he was glad of the darkness as he clapped a hand over his mouth and choked down the urge to vomit.

Katie let go of his hand.

"Oh shit," she breathed.

"It's bad," the injured man stammered. It wasn't a question. "It ripped me open. I can still feel it inside me. I can feel it in my head."

The man laughed, and Dan’s fear ramped up to a whole new level.

"We can't move him," Katie said firmly, and Dan felt despair well up inside him. Callous or not, he had a feeling that this might not be the only injured person they would come across. He pictured stumbling across dozens of injured passengers, all of them needing help; all of them unmovable.

All of them standing between him and Elaine.

This is hopeless. We have to leave him.

"Kill me, please," the man half-whimpered, half-giggled. "You have to kill me; you have to make it stop."

"You can't think like that—" Katie started to say, but the man interrupted her, snapping with surprising conviction.

"You don't understand," he growled. "It's inside my head. You have to kill me. Or give me something I can use; I'll do it myself."

The man snarled the last in a tone that Dan thought almost sounded like eagerness, before lapsing back into shallow, wet wheezing.

Dan had taken a couple of steps backwards, stunned at the sudden ferocity in the injured man's tone. When Katie grabbed him, he let out a small yelp. The bravado he'd felt in the cupboard; the adrenaline rush of surviving the encounter with the creature, seemed to be fading away rapidly, leaving him feeling weak and dizzy.

"We can't help him," Dan said in a faltering voice. "We can't even see what his injuries are."

"So…what?" Katie snapped, "We kill him?"

"I can't kill anybody," Dan moaned. "Look, I get that you have to do your job. If you need to stay and help him—"

"Don't give me that shit," Katie said hotly. "I'm pretty sure my job is finished. This is nothing to do with that. This about the fact that we are human beings, and there is a guy in agony here that needs our help."

"What would you have us—"

"Just fucking kill me," the injured man roared. The words twisted into a hideous scream, and Dan's nerves crawled with terror.

"Shut up," he hissed frantically. "They'll hear you, shut up."

The injured man sucked in a lungful of air and screamed again; a shriek that became a high-pitched giggle. Dan thought it was the sound of madness; the sound of a mind snapping. Maybe the pain, or the horror of what had been done to him. It didn't matter. The bastard was wailing like a siren, and Dan didn't think it would be long before he drew the wrong sort of attention.

He moved on autopilot.

Lifting the broom.

Swinging it at the noise the man made.

Feeling the crunching impact.

Wincing in disgust at the way it felt.

Swinging it again.

And again.

Until the screaming stopped.

When it was done, Dan let the broom fall from trembling fingers. He wasn't a violent guy; never had been. Even when he was a kid at school, fighting was something he studiously avoided. He got picked on sometimes, as the kids who generally had their heads stuck in books sometimes did, but he endured the mockery and the occasional shove in the playground with a smile. He couldn't remember hitting anyone in his entire life.

And now he had killed a man on the first day of his honeymoon.

Not for the first time, Dan cursed his decision to ever leave the safety of his house. The world outside had terrified him before; all that had changed in the two years he had spent hiding away from it was that now he knew that his fear of the world had been justified.

"You killed him," Katie started to say in an accusatory tone, but the words dried up when another shriek split the night.

A noise that could not possibly have come from a human throat. It sounded almost like the whine of a circular saw, powering up to an ear shattering howl before fading away again.

The silence the shriek left behind felt different than it had before. Darker, somehow.

And then they were moving again, Katie pulling Dan along by his limp hand as his thoughts tossed and roiled on the dark river that ran through his mind. As they entered the ship, and Dan felt the huge space around him narrowing to a small corridor, he heard a wheezing choke somewhere behind him and knew that what he had done to the man had been far worse than murder.

The broom had been lightweight, after all. Not a weapon to kill a man with; even an already injured one.

He was still alive.

Dan had stumbled up one flight of stairs and was halfway up the next when he heard the man scream once more in the distance.

Just once.

*

The Les Aventure restaurant seated a hundred diners in the finest luxury imaginable. It was one of a handful of eateries on the Oceanus that required booking to be made in advance, and no passengers were allowed to eat there two nights in a row, in order to ensure that everybody had a chance to sample the world class cuisine served up by a chef who'd had a brief stint on television several years earlier.

Dan smelled the blood as soon as Katie led him inside. There were other smells; exotic spices and meats that made his mouth water and left him with an overpowering urge to vomit. Somehow, despite everything that had happened, his stomach was craving food.

Just biology, carrying on as though nothing was amiss.

He couldn't help it. The journey through the park and the encounter with the injured man had already left him queasy. The smell of food, mixed right in with the stink of death, finally overcame his resistance, and he retched loudly. When he finally came up for air, after spitting out a thin string of acidic bile, he was struck by the notion that he had taken a young lady to a fancy restaurant, and had pissed himself and thrown up in the process.

Terrible date, he thought, and he giggled.

Actually giggled.

The sound of it in the darkness was almost more terrifying than all the other dreadful noises he had already heard. That giggle was the sound of madness, cracking open his mind with a crowbar and trying to force its way in.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and focused on his breathing, just as he had with Katie. He tried to picture himself standing in the terminus, breathing in and out, controlling his anxiety.

It all seemed laughably far away now; the fears that had crippled him for so long rendered petty and irrelevant. He had lived in fear for such a long time, almost growing used to it; wearing it like a comfortable shirt, yet the things that had terrified him meant nothing; not when there was real fear out there in the world. Real fear that came complete with talons and the coppery stench of blood.

A semblance of calm returned, and he opened his eyes.

And saw Katie, bathed in the glow of a candle.

"Matches behind the bar," she said, as if an explanation for the sudden appearance of light were required.

Dan looked at her face, and saw the terror he had been feeling mirrored there. Katie’s pretty features were pale and tear-streaked, her eyes wide and a little unfocused. He guessed that maybe she was having the same sort of trouble he had been: trying to keep the catastrophic images branded onto her brain at bay.

Katie’s face was etched with concern as she looked at him, and Dan knew that was because of the bizarre giggle that had escaped his lips. He met her eyes and nodded reassuringly, hoping that the gesture conveyed that he was okay; uncertain whether it was a lie or not.

The light helped, a little. Just having something to focus on, something other than darkness, made Dan feel better and helped him to banish thoughts of blood and violence to the back of his mind. Being able to see again was like dropping an anchor into reality.

Yet as soon as he saw the warm glow of the candle, he knew that they needed more.

"We're going to need more than light," he said suddenly, surprising himself again with how confident he sounded. How clear and purposeful.

Katie's brow furrowed.

"I don't know what the hell is happening on this ship," Dan continued, "but as long as those things are aboard, all we're going to do is keep running in circles until they pick us off."

"What about your wife?"

"We'll go to the cabins," Dan said with a firm nod. "But first, this place has to have a kitchen, right?"

"Sure," Katie said uncertainly.

"Good. We'll go there first. We're going to need weapons. Knives; anything. We can't outrun this, and I'm not sure we can hide, either. At some point, I think we’re going to have to fight."

Dan couldn't believe it was his own voice that he heard.

Maybe I did just lose my mind after all. Maybe I puked it right out.

"We're going to have to fight," he said again, firming up his tone a little so that it didn’t sound quite so obvious that he was trying to persuade himself.

"Smart," a man’s voice said quietly, making Dan jump. "And yet, very stupid at the same time."

Dan turned in the direction of the voice, and squinted, trying to see beyond the feeble glow of the candle held in Katie's trembling hands.

"Who's there?" Dan said, trying to bolster his tone with a little steel and failing miserably.

The man who had spoken shuffled toward them slowly, limping heavily. In the half-light, Dan saw a dark blood stain that covered his right thigh.

"Edgar Rennick," the man said with a nod. "I guess I'm here to help you fight some vampires."

*

"Fuck," Mark spat as the screams died above him. The three security men were Vega's guys; probably the closest thing the ex-marine had on the Oceanus to friends, and Mark wouldn't miss them in the slightest, but their departure had left him with only one gun, and he'd already wasted three of the bullets.

And Vega had wasted another.

"Thirteen rounds left," he muttered to himself, checking that the gun was still safely tucked into his waistband.

"Just make sure you save two," Herb said darkly, and Mark felt a surge of impatience that just kept on rising until it reached a dizzying crescendo. It all hit him at once, Vega blowing his own head off, the death of a man that predictably came with trying to drop from one deck of the ship to another in perilous conditions; Herb's ridiculous vampire story, the thing that had tried relentlessly to break into the conference room, the endless darkness. The storm. The damn ship itself.

This wasn't how things were meant to be going. Right now, Mark was supposed to be ending his shift and heading to one of the bars where, if he was lucky, he'd find some young single women who appreciated a man in uniform. Hell, maybe he would even have asked Katie to join him for a drink, and maybe she would have agreed.

The worst thing he was supposed to face on the Oceanus was a stern rebuke for socialising in the out-of-bounds passenger areas.

Instead he was soaked and terrified, in the company of a terrorist or a lunatic or both; carrying a dead man's gun and blindly running from something that couldn't possibly exist. It all swilled around in his mind until the noise of it deafened his thoughts and left him trembling with anger.

"Enough," he roared. "Enough of your bullshit, and your cryptic comments. I plan to get off this ship, and you're going to help me do it, or so help me God, I'll..."

"Kill me?" Herb finished in an amused tone. "Already gave you the chance to do that, and you refused, remember?"

Mark sucked in a deep breath, and forced himself to calm down when he realised that he had bunched both fists and was preparing to start swinging. He didn't understand what was happening on the Oceanus—not one single fucking bit of it—but he could not shake the feeling that Herb was his ticket off the ship. At the very least, Herb was the man who would help him understand, and understanding was surely the first step.

"Why did you try to warn me, then?" Mark snarled. "Back in climate control. Why try to help me if this situation is so fucked?"

Herb didn't respond for a moment.

"I don't know," he said finally. "I wanted to do something good. To save someone, maybe even stop it all somehow. It's too late now. It doesn't matter."

The resignation in Herb's voice somehow made Mark even angrier, but the impulse that he felt, the genetically hard-wired urge to start throwing punches, would not help. He let the anger leak away, sucking in deep, calming breaths, and tried to think clearly.

"What if we take a lifeboat?" Mark said suddenly. He couldn't believe he hadn't thought of it before. The Oceanus held enough lifeboats to carry thousands of passengers to safety, each large enough in its own right to withstand the waves of the Atlantic until help arrived.

"No survivors, remember? Herb said. "No witnesses. My father's ship is out there. It's not a warship, exactly, but he's done his best to turn it into one, and his best involves a lot of money. He'll fire on anyone trying to leave the Oceanus, and he is fully prepared to search for survivors when this is done and ensure that word of what happened here never reaches dry land."

Mark seethed in frustration as another idea crashed and burned.

"So what's your plan?" he barked.

"My plan?" Herb said. His tone suggested he hadn't thought about it. "My plans are toppling like dominoes. Plan A was to try and stop all this madness before it even started. Plan B was to be on that chopper if Plan A failed. Plan C involved you putting a bullet in my head."

Herb grunted amusement at his own words.

"I'm not sure my plans are worth all that much."

"Then what's your plan now, huh?" Mark snarled. "Wander around this ship with me until one of your damn vampires turns up and kills you? Keep pissing me off until I decide you're worth a bullet after all? Huh?"

Herb didn't respond for several seconds.

"I don't know," he said quietly. "Running and hiding will get us nowhere, and one way or another we'll be dead by dawn no matter what happens. Unless..."

Mark waited patiently for Herb to finish the thought, and seriously considered punching him again when it appeared that the man considered that a good moment to stop talking.

"Unless what?" Mark hissed.

"Unless we sink the ship ourselves," Herb said brightly, and Mark's mouth dropped open in astonishment.

"Are you insane?"

"I'm starting to think I might be."

"Look, if you're that set on suicide, why don't you go back there and throw yourself overboard? Go on, I won't stop you."

"Believe me, I've considered it. But I'm not talking about suicide. I'm talking about sinking the ship."

"And how is that any different?"

"It's different because the people out there are under strict instructions to allow no harm to come to the vampires. That's rule number one. No matter what happens, they get off the ship in one piece. So if we sink the Oceanus before dawn, there'll be a lot of panicking on my father's ship, and a whole lot of debate, but the cavalry will come. They'll have to."

"To save the vampires."

"That's right."

"But not us."

"No."

"So, that helps us how?"

"It doesn't help us particularly. But there will be a helicopter here, and maybe boats, too. And you've got a gun, haven't you? Sinking the ship might not help us at all, but it will give us a chance, which is more than we have right now."

Mark felt his shoulders slump. The guy was insane. He had to be. If it hadn't been for the look he had seen in Steven Vega's eyes before the head of security killed himself, Mark would have believed that Herb's story was lunacy, nothing more.

But he had seen Vega's eyes in the soft glow of the lighter's tiny flame. He'd seen the haunted, broken expression in them, and Mark knew that no matter what, whether they were called vampires or something else entirely, something was on the ship, and it was killing everybody.

"Sink the ship," he said slowly. "Have you got any idea how difficult that is? How impossible? This thing is the size of a goddamned skyscraper. It's not like I can shoot a few holes in the hull and down we go."

"True," Herb said. "But the ship's got fuel tanks, hasn't it?"

"Yeah."

"And you've got a lighter, haven't you?"

30

Edgar had been watching the man and woman for several minutes, from the moment that he first noticed them approaching the restaurant. The benefit of the nightvision goggles: where they stumbled blindly in the dark, Edgar was able to move silently and accurately past ruined bodies and toppled furniture.

At least, as accurately as his damaged leg would allow.

His right leg had become a searing, white-hot lance driven into his hip, the already-considerable pain left by the bullet that had torn through his thigh now twinned with a newer, even more belligerent brother.

When he had lost his grip on the ladder, he had expected the long fall, and the icy waves, and even as he felt the rope slip from his grasp he had resigned himself to his death, comforted in the knowledge that at least he had done his duty.

The human pact with the vampires would hold. The sacrifice had been made. Once the night of terror was finished, the vampires would return to their metal cage, and would be delivered back from whence they came; back into the bowels of the Earth. It might be centuries before another sacrifice was demanded of anybody, let alone the Rennick family. Edgar had died to save millions. A hero.

He had that, at least. That, and the knowledge that the crippling guilt he felt about leaving Herb, and about watching Seb and Phil fall to their deaths, would be mercifully short-lived.

But the fall hadn’t been long, and it hadn’t terminated in the freezing Atlantic.

Instead, he had landed heavily on the rail that ran around the Oceanus’ top deck, driving that right leg into the implacable metal.

It wasn’t broken; at least, he didn’t think it was, but he had to concede there was a possibility that he had dislocated his hip.

It took him several minutes to pluck up the courage to unwrap the twisted limb from the railing, and he damn near bit his tongue off as the agony blossomed in his mind, but once he was upright, he discovered that he could walk. Just.

Nothing broken, and probably nothing dislocated, either. An onlooker might have said he had been lucky, but nothing about finding himself back aboard the Oceanus struck Edgar as fortunate.

In the distance, he heard screaming, a great chorus of wails that echoed and multiplied throughout the ship.

The feeding frenzy.

He still had the radio and the spare pair of goggles he had stuffed into his pockets, and he tried the former vainly, begging the static and the silence to send the chopper back for him.

His father was listening, Edgar was sure of it. He was also sure that Charles Rennick was a man of his word. The chopper would return at sunrise, and it would return for the sated vampires alone. Nothing else would be considered, not even Charles’ own sons. The pact was too important.

Edgar was on his own.

He considered suicide, of course.

Didn’t have it in him.

He even considered offering himself up to the vampires, while they were still satisfying their centuries-old hunger. They might even give him a quick death.

Not an option.

For once in his life, Edgar Rennick, the born leader, the man of singular purpose who always knew what to do next, drifted aimlessly around the top deck of the dark ship, wracked by indecision. Only when it dawned on him that Herb might still be alive down there somewhere, locked up in the security suite, maybe, did Edgar decide that he had a purpose after all.

He would find his little brother.

Hell, maybe Herb would know what to do next.

If it hadn’t been for the inferno blazing in his right leg, Edgar thought he might have laughed at that.

He descended toward the park warily, occasionally stepping into the deep shadows to let some runners rush by him. Escapees from the massacre at the park, fleeing to find somewhere to hide.

They were merely prolonging their agony. Better to encounter a hungry vampire than a satisfied one. The satisfied ones, well, they tended to pursue their darker urges.

When he reached the restaurant level, Edgar made his way to the kitchen of Les Aventure, one of the Oceanus’ more pompous dining areas, and sought out blades, though he held little hope of being able to defend himself. The only way to deal with the vampires was to evade them. If you got close enough to swing a knife, they had almost certainly already shredded your mind.

There was every chance Edgar would end up using the knives on himself, instructed to mutilate his own body, just as the woman in Brighton had been. It didn’t matter. Holding a weapon was better than the alternative. And if he ran into security—the man who fired so accurately at the chopper, perhaps—he might be grateful that he was carrying a knife or two.

He was still in the restaurant when he noticed the man and the woman heading toward him uncertainly, and it seemed like maybe Edgar had received some good fortune, after all. The woman wore a security uniform, which made her his best chance of finding Herb.

So Edgar watched, and waited, until finally the time came to speak to them.

He ran through a number of options; different stories he could fabricate to get their help, each one escalating in implausibility.

In the end, he settled on the truth.

After all, revealing the great secret to these people would hardly matter. Not when their life expectancy could be measured in hours at most.

*

In the end, Dan simply went along with it because he was too damn weary and frightened to ask the questions that crowded in his mind.

Vampires. Sure. So what? It made as much sense as any other explanation he could conjure up. The truth was that it didn't matter what the creatures stalking the ship were. It might matter later, but for now the only thing that mattered to Dan was getting to Elaine and the limping man—whether he had answers or not—was getting in the way.

They had moved through the restaurant quickly, and that was mainly down to Edgar's intervention. The candles, it turned out, were largely unnecessary. Edgar was wearing a pair of nightvision goggles, and he had a spare.

That raised a whole lot more questions in Dan's mind, not least about the design of the goggles: they didn't look anything like the bulky, straight-from-a-secret agent-movie versions that he'd seen on television. The goggles that Edgar passed to Dan looked more like they were designed for swimming. Just regular old safety glasses to keep the chlorinated water out of your eyes.

Yet the picture they delivered was clear. Bathed in shades of green, Dan suddenly saw the restaurant as if it were lit by floodlights.

Dan had heard that the military had access to technology that could be decades in advance of the stuff available to the average consumer. Which would make Edgar a government official of some sort. Maybe he was a secret agent, and this is what spy equipment actually looked like.

More questions, and no time to ask them.

The goggles were a huge help, but actually being able to see...well, in some ways Dan could have lived without that after all.

The restaurant had been turned into a slaughterhouse. Strewn across the tables and piled on the floor he saw chunks of meat that had very little to do with the ex-TV chef whose name was above the door. Not unless the guy's specialty involved matted hair and teeth.

Dan guessed that the restaurant had been full, and nobody had made it out. The floor was slick and dark with blood, and the parts of bodies that he was able to recognise indicated that a lot of people had died there.

Some of them—the ones whose bodies were still mostly intact—looked like they had killed themselves. Dan saw a ghostly green image of a smartly dressed elderly lady, who appeared to be sitting quietly at her table, with a plate of food undisturbed in front of her. From Dan's viewpoint she looked unharmed, and for a moment he thought that maybe she had survived somehow, and was sitting there in shock.

When he moved in front of her, he saw the cutlery that she had buried deep into her own eye sockets. The handle of an ornate fork, plunged so far into her head that Dan thought the tines were probably embedded in the back of her skull.

His stomach wanted to retch again, but there was nothing left in there to bring up.

They left the dining room and entered the kitchen, which featured the same bloodstains, but little in the way of actual bodies. Just a single severed head, sitting in a frying pan, as if it had been deliberately placed there. Some sort of twisted joke.

Dan snatched up a hefty-looking cleaver from a magnetic chrome rack that held numerous blades, and headed back out into the dining room, carefully avoiding looking at the obscenity in the pan.

Edgar and Katie followed him seconds later, both brandishing huge knives, and they picked their way across the corpses littering the dining room in silence.

He was glad when they left the restaurant, heading out into a wide corridor lined with expensive-looking artwork. Even the hallways on the Oceanus had been given luxurious purpose: this one had been turned into a gallery of sorts.

It was, thankfully, almost devoid of bodies.

They paused there for a moment, Katie clutching a trembling candle to stave off the darkness, while Dan and Edgar used the goggles to see further afield.

"All clear," Dan said.

He watched for a moment as Edgar pushed a bench up against the doors they had just used to exit the restaurant.

"We need a plan," Edgar said, when he was satisfied that nothing could attack them from behind, and he sat heavily on the bench, clutching at his injured leg.

"We have a plan," Dan said. "I’m going to find my wife."

Edgar nodded.

"I’m here to find my brother," he said, and turned to Katie. "Did you see him in the security suite? A little shorter than me, rarely shuts up. Goes by the name of Herb?"

Katie shook her head.

"We were the only people left in security," she said.

Edgar’s shoulders slumped.

"Then we have to go to the engine room," Edgar said. "There’s a good chance he’ll still be there."

"I said I'm going to find my wife," Dan said stubbornly, and was surprised to find he meant it. Edgar was far larger than Dan, and even while the big man was sitting down, Dan felt like Edgar towered over him somehow. He looked athletic, and exuded the sort of confidence that had always made Dan shrivel, but apparently not anymore. More than anything, what Edgar represented, was an obstacle.

"Your wife is dead," Edgar said flatly.

Dan balled up a fist, and wondered if he had it in him to swing it. Almost.

"You don't know that," he barked.

Edgar sighed.

"You're right," he said. "There is every chance she is still alive, but she won't be for long. You've noticed how the screaming has stopped?"

Dan nodded.

"That's because the vampires have cleared the park, and probably the decks around it, too. There will be a few people left, hiding, but right now those things are moving through the ship and tearing through everything they find. They'll be in the cabins, or in the lower decks. There will be plenty of screaming going on down there, I think. Once they are done with that, the fun will begin for them. Hunting down the stragglers. Like us."

Edgar paused, letting his words settle for a moment.

"Things are going to get a lot fucking worse when they've finished feeding," he said. "They've been in hibernation for a long time. Got to wake up starving from that, I'd say. So, step one would be feeding, right? Step two, well, I'm thinking that might be entertainment."

Dan hated that word as it left Edgar's lips; despised it for the way it managed to open up a new well of horror and fear inside him.

"I'm just letting you know the reality of the situation," Edgar said with a shrug. "My brother is here somewhere. Same as your wife. But look around you. This is far worse than I imagined. It might be for the best if they are both already dead. Because the ones left alive won't get quick deaths, not when these things have got full bellies."

Dan stared at Edgar, and said nothing, but his mind was full of the sudden certainty that Edgar was hiding something. The conviction in the man’s words, which hadn’t shaken once when he talked about vampires existing, wobbled, just a little, and Dan caught it.

Edgar was not a man to be trusted.

"We can't fight them," Edgar said in a low voice. "So how can we possibly save anybody?"

"Bullshit," Dan said quietly. "These things are animals. You can call them vampires, but I'm betting if they catch something like this," he hefted the cleaver, "in the neck, they'll die just like anything else."

Jesus Dan, would you listen to yourself? Have you lost your mind?

"Maybe," Edgar said with a thin smile. "If you could get close enough. But there is a lot more at stake here than you know. Getting off the ship is one thing, but if we actually harm any of the vampires, well...it could have severe repercussions. For the whole world."

Dan shook his head slowly. Edgar was talking in riddles, and eating up valuable time.

"I don't care about the world," Dan said bitterly. "The world stabbed me in the fucking head for the price of a Burger King. The world doesn't need me. My wife does. I'm going to her."

Edgar's brow creased in confusion, and he shrugged.

"And if it's the wrong move?"

"Then I'll be wrong," Dan snarled. "It won't be the first time."

"Might be the last."

Dan waved a dismissive gesture with his free hand and turned to Katie.

"I still need a guide," he said quietly. "Are you still with me?"

Katie nodded, her eyes wide, and Dan smiled gratefully.

"Then it's settled," Dan said. "Edgar, thanks for your help, and if you're here to save the world or to find your brother, then good luck to you. We're going to the cabins, and you're welcome to come along. We get Elaine, and I'll give you all the help you need to find your brother, no questions asked. Deal?"

Edgar stared at Dan for several seconds, and chuckled. He stood with a wince, and began to limp forward.

"We're headed in the same direction, for now. So, sure, why not? Let's see how you feel by the time we reach the stairs."

31

It knows I'm in here, Elaine thought. She wouldn’t have believed that five words could possibly be so terrifying, but the realisation that the creature pursuing her was searching the cabins left her feeling dizzy and disorientated.

She had run for what felt like an eternity; blind in the darkness, but the entire sprint had probably only totalled fifty paces. Panic made the seconds stretch out like chewed gum, until each one became an ordeal that she had to endure. With every step, her head filled with gruesome images of the creature giving chase, tearing those terrible talons into her flesh.

When she saw the faint light throbbing through the open doorways of a hallway of cabins that had sea-facing windows, she bolted down it, and halted halfway.

If she kept going, she would hit another darkened hallway, moving away from the exterior of the ship and the feeble light streaming through the windows. As much as her fear implored her to keep running, some part of Elaine understood that the darkness would be her downfall, and so she darted into the third cabin along the hallway, wishing desperately that she could close the door behind her, and cursing the ship.

Everything these days had to be technological in some way, everything had to be smart. Even the damn cabin doors. Motion activated, electronic and utterly useless if you needed to shut one while being chased by a murderous animal during a power cut.

Not an animal.

Elaine crouched down behind the sofa in the living room, and hoped to hear the creature continue straight past the cabin.

It hadn't happened.

Instead, the creature was methodically entering the cabins, one by one, searching for her.

It knows I'm in here.

Elaine felt like she was losing her mind. Maybe, she thought, she was still unconscious at the foot of the stairs. Maybe the fall had done serious damage to her brain.

She almost hoped it was true.

The cabin she had taken refuge in was virtually identical to her own: a wide living room with a kitchenette at one side, bedroom and bathroom through a doorway to her left.

Nothing else.

None of the cupboards lining the kitchenette were big enough for her to squeeze into, leaving her with a stark choice of hiding places: squashed beneath the bed in the tiny bedroom, or hunkered down behind the couch.

She had chosen the latter, despite how exposed it made her feel, because the bedroom felt like a death trap. The bedroom window was tiny, meaning that once she went in there, the narrow door would be her only possible means of escape. If the creature blocked the doorway, she would be as good as dead.

At least behind the living room couch, she reasoned, there was a faint chance that she could leap out and run if necessary.

Run where? She thought bleakly, though she didn't want to think about the answer to that particular question.

The truth was that the dark corridors seemed to offer no chance of escape.

The creature, whatever it was, could smell her blood. It was tracking her like a hunting dog. All she could do was wait, and hope that its nose would not prove as accurate.

So far, so good. If the creature could smell her, its nose was not apparently sharp enough to tell it exactly where she was, and it did not make its way directly to her hiding spot.

Instead, it began to search the cabins.

Not so good after all.

She heard a crash, muffled, but close. It sounded like it came from a couple of cabins further down the hall. Something heavy toppled, and some part of Elaine knew that it was the sound of a couch being overturned.

A couch identical to the one she currently crouched behind.

Cold dread washed through her.

When the creature entered her cabin, it would find her immediately. It wouldn't have to turn the place upside down; just the couch would do. Her mind raced.

Weapons?

Elaine dismissed the thought immediately. She doubted any of the knives in the kitchen would do any more than piss the creature off, and she couldn't imagine herself using one anyway. The creature was large, its wiry body packed with muscle. It had a savage blade at the tip of each finger. If the fight was to take place at such close quarters, it was surely already over.

Listen to yourself, Elaine. The fight. Are you really thinking about confronting this thing? Because if you are, you might as well throw yourself off the balcony right now.

Elaine's eyes widened, and she turned from the couch, staring at the sliding glass door that led to the balcony. Outside, the clouds seemed to be clearing a little, and she could just about make out the railing beyond the glass.

She moved quickly, almost screaming when she heard a much louder crash that had to mean the creature was in the cabin right next door to hers, and rushed to the glass door, sliding it open quietly.

When she peeked out, she almost lost her mind with fright.

It was right there, standing on the adjacent cabin’s balcony, no more than six feet away from her.

Looking in the other direction.

Elaine stared at it, stunned, trying to understand the hideous form that she saw in the barely-there light. Sinewy, rippling muscles wrapped around an elongated skeleton. Huge, bearlike hands that looked almost human, save for the long fingers that ended in those wicked-looking talons.

Opposable thumbs, she thought. That was the vet’s training that was drilled deep into her mind, picking up on a detail that was out of place. Yet all it accomplished was to terrify her more. The creature spoke, it walked upright. Opposable thumbs were just one more indication that the horror on the next balcony was closer to human than animal.

And humans didn’t just kill for food.

They killed for fun.

She broke out of her paralysis when the creature’s head started to turn in her direction, and she stepped quickly back into the cabin, holding her breath until her lungs ached.

Eventually, she heard it move back inside the next cabin once more. It sounded like it was in the bedroom, separated from the room in which she stood by a thin wall that she imagined the creature could punch straight through if it decided to.

Another crash. The bed being upended.

Now or never.

Elaine sucked in a deep breath and stepped back out onto the balcony, carefully sliding the glass door shut behind her.

She tried not to look down.

Failed.

From the balcony, many decks up, Elaine couldn't even see the ocean below. The darkness claimed all visibility just a couple of decks down.

But she knew the drop was there.

Elaine didn't consider herself to be afraid of heights, but she wasn't exactly comfortable with them either. She approached heights with innate practicality: they weren't terrifying, but they were dangerous, and so they were generally to be avoided. She wasn't one of those thrill seekers that would enjoy bungee jumping or parachuting.

She certainly wasn't the type of person who would attempt to leap across the six-foot gap between two balconies that sat over a hundred feet of nothing, in darkness and driving rain.

Well, not until now.

She risked a glance back inside the cabin.

No sign of the creature.

The jump had to be timed just right. If she went too early, there was every chance the creature would see her landing and return to the balcony it had already checked.

If I land at all, she thought, and risked another glance at the sheer drop.

Stop that.

The jump had to be perfect: ideally when the creature was in the dark hallway, moving between the cabins. She had to be ready to go as soon as she judged that it had left the cabin in front of her.

Gripping the wet balcony rail tightly, Elaine climbed up to perch atop it, crouched down low on her haunches until her hamstrings began to complain. Coiled into a ball, her hands still gripping the rail beside her bare feet, she adopted a pose like a swimmer preparing to start a race.

No hesitation, she thought. Put everything into the jump.

The adjacent balcony suddenly looked very far away indeed. An impossible leap. She would never make it.

Her confidence faltered, and she thought once more about running, about scampering back through the glass doors and taking off down the dark corridor.

It was too late.

Somewhere behind her, beyond the glass door, she heard a thump.

Inside the cabin.

It would see her at any moment.

No time.

She jumped.

32

They moved like the dawn, pushing forward through the shadows at a slow and steady pace, not letting themselves pause for a moment.

Pausing meant thinking, and there seemed to be an unspoken agreement between the three of them that thinking about their surroundings was the worst thing they could possibly do.

Thinking led to madness.

Beyond the art gallery, the deck opened out into a food court; the type of place that sold burgers and pizza rather than the expensive fare served up down the hall.

Unlike the gallery, the food court hadn't been deserted when it happened. Quite the opposite.

Of course, Dan thought. It happened at dinner time. Kind of fitting, really.

The weak pun almost made him laugh aloud, and he caught himself just in time.

The creeping hysteria he felt was, he supposed, another sign that he was cracking under the pressure: laughing at the dreadful sight laid out before him was definitely not the appropriate response.

Not that Dan had any idea what an appropriate response might be. Not to this.

There were bodies everywhere.

Dan forced himself not to look, and reached out, grabbing Katie's arm. She flinched, making him feel guilty. They had the goggles and candlelight now: there was no need to keep scrabbling in the dark to get each other’s attention.

"Sorry," he whispered. "Which way?"

Katie frowned thoughtfully, and Dan shot a glance at Edgar. He was close by, listening intently, but he kept his gaze focused firmly on his surroundings, scanning the areas ahead that had become tangled webs of tables and chairs and corpses. Much of the food court comprised a general seating area. It looked to have been packed with diners when death arrived.

Katie pointed at a doorway about fifty yards ahead on the left. Past the Los Grasa Bandito restaurant; right on the other side of the adjacent Eastern Spice.

Dan nodded, and checked to see that Edgar was paying attention.

"Okay," Dan said, and started to pick his way forward, trying to make sure he trod on nothing worse than blood. Blood, he was getting used to: it was starting to feel as though he had no choice about slipping on the thick liquid that had spilled everywhere. However, he didn't think he could ever get used to standing on the pieces of people that crunched or squelched. There were, he thought, some things that you really didn't want to build up a tolerance for.

He felt a hand grab his arm, and stopped dead.

Edgar.

"The bodies," Edgar whispered; his voice barely audible. He pointed forward. "Look at the bodies."

Dan peered ahead. The goggles didn't give great range, but he could see maybe fifty feet before the world became an indistinct green smear. He saw a lot of bodies. None that looked particularly significant.

"Yeah, so, what about them?" Dan said.

So blasé. Holy shit, when did that happen?

"Twitchers," Edgar growled, and jabbed a finger. "There, there and...there. Several of these people aren't dead yet."

Don't say it, Dan thought. Shit, don't say i—

"There's one close by," Edgar hissed. "Quiet."

Katie extinguished the candle she carried instantly.

Edgar pointed forward and set off, limping heavily and leading the way at a glacial pace. Dan saw him ready the two knives he carried, and he swallowed painfully.

He made it about ten feet.

Stopped.

Retreated.

"It's at the other end of the food court," Edgar breathed. "Feeding. We have to go back."

Dan started to shake his head, though he knew in his heart that Edgar was right. Even so, going back felt a lot like giving up on Elaine. He felt despair welling inside as it dawned on him that getting to cabin number 217 might be completely out of his hands. If the creatures blocked the path, what chance was there?

For the first time he considered the possibility that the vampires had already worked their way through the cabins, and that he would find only pieces of his wife. Maybe, and somehow this prospect was even worse: she too would be a twitcher. Dying in front of him, with no way for him to help her. Final proof that she had married a loser. He imagined Elaine dying with an accusation in her eyes, and his heart sickened a little.

Dan's head continued to shake miserably of its own accord.

Katie shook her head more firmly. She pointed to their left, at the entrance to the Los Grasa Bandito, the restaurant closest to them. She mouthed, we can go through the kitchen and out the back.

It would mean heading toward the creature, but Dan saw immediately what Katie meant: once out of sight in the restaurant, they could move through it and the adjacent Eastern Spice unseen, reaching the exit that led from the food court without ever entering the creature's line of sight.

Edgar nodded and set off immediately, moving at a quicker pace, apparently willing to push through the pain in his leg. Dan and Katie had reversed roles, and now he took her hand and led her through the darkness, guiding her past the bodies with aid of the view offered up by the goggles. They followed Edgar slowly, faltering a little as they slipped on the smeared remains of the diners, and entered the restaurant, moving swiftly through the small interior dining area.

The kitchen, just as it had been at Les Aventure, was mercifully lean in the corpse department. Dan figured most of the staff would have rushed outside when they heard the screaming, hurtling obliviously toward their deaths.

The kitchen was long and narrow; just wide enough for them to comfortably move in single file. The entire room seemed to be made of stainless steel; as if the pots and pans that Dan saw were somehow growing out of the worktops and hobs.

Katie's plan looked better and better: the kitchen was a single space that served both the Mexican restaurant and the Indian restaurant alongside it.

At the far end of the narrow space, beyond the part of  the kitchen that served Eastern Spice, Dan saw a doorway.

As they eased their way forward through the kitchen, Dan saw nachos and a pot of still-steaming chilli give way to curried chicken and a dizzying array of spices. Bathed in the green of the nightvision, it all looked alien, somehow. Threatening and off-kilter.

When they were directly behind Eastern Spice, Dan heard distant snapping, crunching sounds faintly, getting a little louder with each step forward. The sound of feeding.

He felt like his nerves were slowly fraying; coming apart at the seams. Walking towards the terrible noise made every instinct shriek at him to turn back.

Katie pointed at a dark doorway dead ahead, and made a through there and left gesture. Dan nodded, gritted his teeth in tension, and started forward. Turn left, he thought. Once we turn left we're moving away from it again. Putting distance between ourselves and the creature. Just turn le—

The world skidded to a halt as his arm knocked the ladle perched atop the skillet he hadn't seen on the counter next to him. Dan watched, horrified, as it fell in slow motion, tumbling toward the floor. He reached out his free hand in grasping panic.

Caught it.

Lost it.

The ladle hit the floor with a clatter that sounded like the gates of Hell rattling.

Shit.

Dan, Katie and Edgar's feet locked to the floor. Somewhere outside, the awful sound of the creature chewing on flesh halted abruptly.

A grunt.

Dan's heart thumped twice, and then something outside thumped in response. The noise was followed immediately by another sound; far more terrible. Rhythmic clicking. Talons.

Coming straight for them.

Despite the darkness, Katie was the first to move, sliding around the kitchen counter and heading toward the front of the Indian restaurant behind outstretched palms.

Like Los Grasa Bandito, Eastern Spice featured a small interior dining room, with a handful of tables for those who wanted a more intimate dining experience than the al fresco-style food court outside offered.

The restaurant had also offered death to the diners inside, who were splayed across the tables like grisly ornaments, but what it definitely did not seem to offer, was any place that could conceivably be called a hiding spot.

The clicking was much louder now. It paused every few seconds, and Dan thought of the way the creatures had moved in the park. Strange insectile scuttling interspersed by brief pauses, as though they needed to stop and think for a moment before continuing.

Click, click, click.

Pause.

Dan followed Katie into the dining area, hoping to God that she had some sort of plan.

She didn't. Dan watched, open mouthed, as she marched directly to the far corner of the room, stumbling in the darkness, and crouched low behind an upturned table.

When she was flat against the floor, Katie pulled the nearest corpse over her like a blanket, draping the arms across her face.

Click, click, click.

Not much of a plan at all, Dan thought, but even as the words crossed his mind, he was already dropping to his knees, pulling the still-warm corpse of a middle-aged man across himself. When he noticed Edgar following suit, Dan's mind felt close to screaming insanity.

Edgar had given Dan the impression that he knew what was happening on the Oceanus, and he exuded an air of confidence. Like he could handle himself. Seeing Edgar follow Dan and Katie's pathetic attempts to hide, Dan realised suddenly that Edgar was as terrified as everybody else.

Click.

And about as much help.

In the kitchen, beyond the flimsy swinging doors that separated the cooks from the diners, something crashed, and Dan heard it again, just as he had in the supply closet.

The terrible ragged panting, riding the rhythm of the clicking talons. Approaching fast.

Click click click click click cl—

He held his breath, and tried to make himself as small as possible, retreating against the wall behind the corpse. Blood leaked onto his neck, and Dan's terror hitched up to a level far beyond his capacity to endure.

He felt his thoughts begin to drift and let it happen; couldn’t even concentrate on the steady breathing that had steered him through numerous panic attacks during the previous two years, and his mind tumbled helplessly on the terrible black river.

He was going to black out; doomed to suffer a full-blown panic attack.

There was no avoiding it.

Maybe, he thought, as the black river tugged him under, it would be for the best.

*

It came in fast.

Edgar had prayed that the vampire would search the kitchen area, find nothing, and return to finish its meal, but almost as soon as the talons clicked on the metal floor of the kitchen, he heard them pick up pace.

The thing moved with dreadful purpose.

It burst into the room already swinging, hurtling toward the corner opposite the one that Edgar cowered in, scooping up the corpse that Katie hid under, and flicking a nonchalant talon across her abdomen before she could even flinch.

A spray of blood painted the floor, and Edgar saw the organs quivering inside Katie's torso. And worse: he watched Katie's eyes widen in horror as she looked down and saw her own insides laid bare in the darkness. A flesh wound, Edgar thought, of the most horrific kind. Katie's evisceration would have made a surgeon proud. Layers of skin and fat peeled away expertly to reveal the glistening human engine that purred beneath.

Katie opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. The vampire loomed over her, panting—oh fucking hell, is it laughing?—and finally ended Katie's torment with a single talon slashed across her throat.

A ghastly grin opened beneath Katie's jaw, and Edgar saw exposed bone as the terrible wound widened. Her head lolled backward, almost sheared off entirely. It looked as though gravity wanted to finish the job the vampire's talons had started, but the remaining flesh of her neck clung on tightly.

She died without making a sound, and Edgar couldn't help but replay the words he had spoken to Dan only minutes earlier.

At least she died quick. Katie was one of the lucky ones.

Seeing her ruined corpse made a mockery of that sentiment.

The vampire turned and stared directly at Dan, cowering against the wall about fifteen feet from Edgar's hiding spot. Judging by the sound that Dan was making, Edgar thought he was having a heart attack; gasping for air and choking, clutching at his chest.

The vampire watched Dan twitching and writhing, and it chuckled mirthlessly, a vicious sound that seemed to darken the air in the room.

And then it switched its gaze to Edgar.

He tried not to look.

Failed.

His eyes met the vampire's.

Even as Edgar's mind shrivelled in abject terror, his muscles began to move of their own accord, pushing away the corpse that he had so feebly attempted to hide beneath.

And he began to crawl toward the creature.

His mind—the part that still belonged to him—filled with the horror of Brighton. With what the abomination behind the black door had forced the woman to do to herself. The poor woman who Edgar had charmed in a bar a couple of hours earlier, before drugging her and throwing her into the back of his van. She had been nice. Giggly. He had liked her immediately, and almost wished that he had time to pick somebody else; to find somebody who might be more deserving of the terrible fate that he had in store for them.

But there had been no time, and Edgar had delivered the poor woman to the messenger, and she had fed herself to it piece by piece.

Over the course of twenty sickening minutes.

The terror was a swollen abscess that burst in his mind. It leaked poison throughout as he crawled to the vampire's legs, until his face was directly above the hideous clawed feet, and it felt like his soul was shrieking in horror.

The world was reduced to incomprehensible stimuli as Edgar's senses tried to force some order into the seething chaos of his mind. Sights and sounds and smells with no frame of reference, unclipping his thoughts from reality and dropping them into an abyss of madness.

The sight of blood, dripping onto the floor from those dreadful talons. The fearsome sound of the vampire breathing: a deep growl like an idling truck.

The smell; an ancient stink; the fetid stench of a thousand deaths that stained the creature's leathery skin. Rot and decay.

And worst of all, a sense that was entirely new to Edgar. A feeling like cold, dead fingers reaching into his brain, clutching his thoughts and twisting them into shrieking insanity.

He drank it all in, unwilling or unable to close his eyes to the horror.

On his knees in the blood.

Worshipping the abomination like a twisted god.

Please just do it quick.

A scream reverberated around the enclosed space, but the part of Edgar that still had the ability to think knew that it hadn't been the vampire that shattered the silence. It was a human noise, and strangely, it was not the terror he would have expected to hear from a human. This wasn't fear; it was rage and panic and disbelief.

Dan.

Suddenly Edgar's thoughts and muscles were his own again, returned to him so abruptly that he gasped and fell backwards. He scrambled away from the vampire, and his eyes widened in astonishment.

The creature staggered backwards, stinking black blood spurting from its throat.

Where Dan had driven the cleaver into its flesh.

Edgar wanted to move; couldn't. He watched, stunned, as Dan swung again, carving another deep gash in the creature’s hateful skin. And again; shearing off the taloned fingers it held up to defend itself.

The cleaver lodged deep into the vampire's collarbone, and it went down. Hard.

It will heal, Edgar thought weakly as he watched Dan tear the blade free and swing again. The vampire had gone down in surprise. It was the only feasible explanation. Humans weren't meant to attack it; hell, it wasn't even supposed to be possible. In the presence of the monsters, humans were meant to collapse into paralysed terror and subordination, exactly as Edgar himself did.

Blades weren’t meant to stop the creatures. Not knives, but…

Oh shit.

Not metal. Wood.

Edgar had no idea if the legends written in his father's books were accurate. No concept of whether being staked through the heart was enough to finish one of the horrors off.

But it didn't hurt to try.

With a roar, he leapt to his feet, snapping a leg off the nearest chair.

He drove the ruined end into the creature's chest, praying that it had its heart located in roughly the same spot that humans did.

The dreadful eyes widened, boring into Edgar's skull as he leaned over the creature, using all his weight to drive the stake down into the creature's ancient flesh. He felt that terrifying pull in his mind for a moment; the creature entering his head once more. But this time it was screaming, lashing out blindly. Enraged and bewildered. Preoccupied with its own terror.

With its death.

And suddenly the sickening insanity that had poisoned Edgar's mind was gone, and he collapsed.

33

Mark didn't dare to turn his lighter on. He was trying to remember what was on the deck immediately below the conference room, but his brain wasn't cooperating. He and Herb had exited the coffee lounge and they found themselves in a small, featureless hallway that led to another, larger door.

It occurred to Mark that he had no idea what lay beyond the doorway.

The ice rink?

The Oceanus boasted a small ice rink that was a big selling point to families with young children, and Mark thought they were close to it. He couldn't be sure, but the thought of using his lighter in such a large, open space made him nervous. All the feeble light would do in that situation was paint a target on him.

On the plus side, the deck on which they now stood seemed quiet. Almost eerily so, in fact. Maybe the creatures were still up on the park level, or had already passed through this area.

There was only one way to find out for sure. He pushed open the door, and felt cold air immediately. It had to be the ice rink, and if he was right, they had just received a huge slice of luck. On the other side of the sheet of ice stood the Apollo, the ship’s only nightclub, which catered mainly to the younger passengers who weren't interested in the nightly cabaret shows that were hosted in the main ballroom. The nightclub was Mark's territory. From there, he could orient himself properly.

He took a step forward, and felt his foot slide a little beneath him. When he bent down, he felt the frozen surface, and nodded to himself in satisfaction.

He went over the layout of the ship in his mind. The ice rink was almost dead centre, and the fuel tanks were toward the rear. They would have to cross the ice, and the nightclub beyond, before they reached narrower hallways that wound around spiral staircases leading up and down. When they hit that maze, navigation was going to become a problem, and Mark wasn't sure that a single sputtering lighter would be much use.

"We're going to need more light," Mark whispered. "We’re at the ice rink. Beyond it is the nightclub. Once we get through there, we'll be close to a stairway that can take us down toward the engine room and the fuel tanks, but it will be a rabbit warren down there. No way that I can remember how to get through it in the dark, and if this lighter runs out of fuel we're fucked."

"I guess our only option is to create torches," Herb said. "The nightclub will have plenty of alcohol, right? Soak a few rags and light 'em up."

Mark nodded in the darkness, and wondered why the thought hadn't occurred to him. Maybe, he decided, because creating torches like some sort of medieval explorer was a fucking crazy way to spend a Sunday night, and it took an equally crazy person to come up with the idea in the first place.

Torches would work, but the idea troubled Mark. If using the lighter felt like painting a target on his chest, carrying a burning torch with no way to easily extinguish the flame would do far worse.

"Could make some Molotov's while we're at it," Herb said.

Molotov's, Mark thought. Jesus fucking Christ. Herb made it all sound so straightforward, and ever since Mark had refused to execute the man, Herb's attitude had changed. He had become reckless, and showed complete disregard for his own safety. He had been first one out of the broken window, and had dropped out to what could have been his death without pausing for a moment.

Geronimo.

Trying to survive in the company of a man who didn’t care if he died as long as it happened quickly was more than a little disconcerting.

"Will fire kill these vampires?" he said.

"I don't know," Herb replied. "Not for sure, anyway. But it wouldn't hurt to have the option, right? Most things aren’t that keen on fire. But according to my father these things heal fast. That's why staking through the heart is supposed to be the best option. If their heart is still beating, their body will heal. A stake stops it beating long enough that their bodies eventually die. Supposedly."

"Great," Mark said bitterly. "Vague, as always."

"You asked," Herb said with a sniff. "The truth is that I doubt anyone knows for sure. All we have is ancient texts and knowledge handed down through generations. Any amount of it could have been embellished. For all I know, they don’t heal at all; hell, maybe you could just shoot them and be done with it. But enough of what my father said has turned out to be true for me to doubt that."

Mark grunted.

None of Herb’s words had helped him solve the problem of the darkness. What he needed was light that he could control; light that he could turn on when he needed it. And, preferably, light that neither Mark nor the maniac travelling with him could wind up killing themselves with.

Glow sticks.

The idea arrived fully-formed. The kind of idea a not-crazy person came up with.

The nightclub had glow sticks located somewhere behind the bar, he was sure of it. A feeble attempt to replicate the atmosphere in the superclubs that dotted the Mediterranean: lots of young dancers gyrating with glow sticks would make a great picture gallery for the Oceanus' website.

Mark doubted that the glow sticks would be that effective, but they contained no electrical components: just snap and shake, and hey, presto: light. Not the best solution, but at least it would give him the option to move in the dark if he needed to. And if he thought they had company, he could toss a glow stick and run in the opposite direction.

As plans went, Mark thought that one was pretty shaky, but it barely mattered. One step at a time, he reminded himself, and step one is getting to the nightclub.

"Come on," Mark said, and flinched when he heard a thump somewhere in the distance behind them.

Followed by a shriek.

"It followed us down," Herb whispered in an awed tone, and Mark's stomach dropped.

*

Elaine's fingers closed on metal, and she felt a scream of triumph building in her lungs.

She didn't let it out.

She'd caught the very bottom of the adjacent balcony, and her fingers had somehow locked around the wet metal. For a moment she dangled helplessly over a hundred feet of nothing, buffeted by the howling wind.

A bleak fire began to build in her biceps, and she cursed herself for not spending more time at the gym. She had membership, but like so many of her friends, she had simply stopped going after the first few visits, when motivation evaporated in the glare of reality. Going to the gym was hard, tedious work, and the gym membership card quickly found itself lost in the darkest corner of her purse.

She wished she had spent a little more time there now, though.

She had to move quickly. Every second that she spent hanging from the balcony meant her muscles weakening, and worse: if the creature hunting her was as thorough as it appeared to be, it would check the balcony she had just jumped from at any moment. There was no way it could miss her hanging there.

She gritted her teeth, and heaved, until the fire in her arms became a raging inferno. Inch by inch, she hauled herself up, knowing that if she allowed herself to pause for a moment, the pain in her arms would become too much for her to bear.

It's just a pull-up, Elaine, she told herself, and tried to forget that during those first few optimistic sessions at the gym, when she had somehow allowed herself to be talked into paying for sessions with a personal instructor, she hadn’t managed to complete a single pull-up. Not once.

Her motivation was a little different now, though. No barking instructor could possibly be as effective as the prospect of dying if she failed.

Forget the balcony and the drop, forget the storm and the monster chasing you. It's just a pull up.

So fucking pull.

She nearly screamed in relief when she was able to push her chest over the top rail and let her ribcage take some of the strain. With a final heave, she rolled over the top, and landed heavily on the balcony floor, gasping for air.

Behind her, she heard glass breaking. In a matter of moments, the creature would emerge onto the balcony that she had just jumped from.

Move.

Now!

Elaine scuttled into the cabin on all-fours, almost colliding with the upended couch, and didn't dare breathe for fear that the monster in the next room would hear her.

Even in the almost-total darkness, she could see that the room had been ruined: furniture tossed about like confetti until the once pristine cabin looked like a tornado had passed through it. The central part of the lounge was the worst-hit, with the upended chairs and coffee table joined by items tossed from the kitchen and the large flatscreen television that had hung on the wall. Elaine recalled the TV in her own cabin; the way it had buzzed into life to greet Dan and her when they had entered. The smiling, almost robotic face of the woman whose recorded welcome message had listed the entertainments and facilities on offer aboard the Oceanus.

That could have been no more than six hours earlier, before Elaine took a nap and awoke to find herself locked in a nightmare.

It didn’t feel real, and if it hadn’t been for the gash on her forehead where she had fallen down the stairs, she might have believed that she was dreaming.

But the pain was real, and that meant the bizarre creature currently destroying the cabin she had hidden in until a few moments ago had to be real as well.

She heard another crash, slightly more distant, and judged that the creature must have moved on to the next cabin down the hall.

Real, but not too smart, she thought with a slight grin, and she hunkered down among the debris, safe in the knowledge that this cabin had already been searched. It would have no reason to return.

"This is fun, humannnn. But the real fun hasn’t even begun for yooooou."

Elaine’s muscles went rigid with fright.

It was a couple of cabins away now, and had been moving further from her, and yet still it talked to her as if she was right there, so certain that its words were being heard.

It's just trying to frighten me, that’s all. Trying to get me to reveal myself. It doesn’t know that I’m here. It can’t.

Elaine told herself again that there would be no reason for the creature to double back to rooms it had already searched, and that it would surely assume that she had carried on running through the dark hallways. Maybe it would even accept that it had lost her and move on.

No reason for it to stay in this area.

Except…

The gash on my forehead.

Elaine felt a shiver coursing down her back that had nothing to do with her clothes being soaked by the freezing rain. The creature smelled her; it knew she was still close.

How long will it keep searching?

As if in response to her thoughts, the awful rasping voice filled the darkness once more.

"Going to find yooooou."

Elaine shook her head, trying desperately to deny the truth that unfurled in her mind. The creature sounded amused, not frustrated.

It’s playing with me.

And I’m just hiding here, waiting for it to come back.

I can't hide.

I have to run.

Elaine knew it was true; knew it because it terrified her completely. If she stayed where she was, and if the creature outside remained determined to find her, it would only be a matter of time before it returned, and she didn’t think she’d be lucky with the balcony trick again.

Definitely didn’t think she could manage another pull up.

She ran through her options quickly, and found that there was only one: heading back toward the pitch-black staircase that had already injured her once. The creature now blocked the route deeper into the network of cabins, and in some ways that was a good thing, since she was certain that she would get lost in the darkness anyway, and equally certain that she wouldn’t be able to shake her pursuer.

She heard a thump. It sounded like it came from further down the corridor.

Maybe the balcony trick had worked after all: it had allowed her to circle around the creature, leaving the path back to the stairs clear. Her blood was on the stairs already, along with the half-eaten corpse just beyond. If she could just get past that body, the creature would surely lose the scent of her blood.

Elaine rose into a half-crouch, and listened intently.

After a moment, she heard another thump that sounded even more distant. Judging by the noise, the creature had moved even further away from her, presumably into another empty cabin.

The time to go is now.

It took Elaine a moment to persuade her legs that fleeing was the best course of action, and then she exploded into motion, running through the layout of the dark corridors that she had already travelled through more than once even as her legs began to propel her forward. She was certain that she could find her way, even moving at speed. She had to.

She burst into the corridor and heard a sickly chuckle.

"I seeeeee yooooou."

Elaine let out a yelp and shot a glance over her shoulder.

The thing was standing in the corridor, no more than ten feet away, tossing small pieces of furniture down the dark hallway.

The distant thumps she had heard.

The creature hadn’t been moving away from her. It had been drawing her out.

Elaine saw the glowing red eyes in the darkness, and felt something catastrophic enter her mind. A level of fear that she hadn’t thought possible. An endless despair that made her soul shriek.

She tore her gaze away, and began to run, heedless of the lack of light, pounding her feet hard.

She made it five steps.

Just far enough for terrible hope to blossom in her mind.

I might actually make it.

And then something sharp raked down her back and Elaine went down hard with a scream, and then the entire world was filled with pain and inhuman shrieking.

34

It didn't feel like it had happened to him; in truth, Dan barely remembered it, as though it began to slip from his mind even as it was happening. It felt like he had been watching through someone else's eyes. Fuzzy and vague.

Launching himself toward the creature. Attacking.

It was an impossible event that had been blotted onto his memory. It couldn't possibly have actually happened.

It seemed that it took an eternity for the thundering of his pulse to slow enough that he could think clearly, and when he did, he was still gripping the cleaver in white-knuckled hands. Still drenched in the foul black gore that had splashed from the creature's wounds.

Still panting for air.

And Edgar was still staring at him from the floor, wide-eyed. Terrified. Dan saw the man's eyes drop to the cleaver for a moment.

He thinks I'd hurt him. Thinks I've lost my mind.

Have I?

Dan dropped the cleaver.

*

They walked away from the food court without speaking; a solid sort of silence that felt like it might require a hammer to put a crack in it.

Dan's mind tumbled.

He thought about Katie. The way she had been picked apart. The creature's hideous, mocking laughter as it disembowelled her and sheared her head almost clean off with a nonchalant flick of its wrist. Like a bored child plucking the wings off an insect.

Thought about the way he himself had acted, almost as if somebody else had been piloting his body.

Dan had retrieved the cleaver once Edgar was satisfied that it wasn't going to be used on him, and he cleaned the gore from the blade as best he could, wiping it on his filthy shorts. He stared at it in wonder as he walked.

Did I really do that?

He had to speak.

"You pissed yourself."

"What?"

Edgar flushed and examined himself. The stain on the front of his trousers was clearly visible.

When he looked at Dan once more, the eyes behind his goggles were filled with anger and shame.

Dan held his hands up.

"Me too," he said, and pointed to the dark stain at his crotch.

Somehow, incredibly, Edgar snorted a laugh.

"So...I guess you really do believe they are vampires, then." Dan said softly. "I mean...a stake through the heart, right?"

Edgar paused, lost in thought.

"It's not a question of believing," Edgar said at last. "Knowing. I was raised to know that these things exist. I know because I was born to know."

"So, what?" Dan said. "You're a vampire hunter or something?"

"Or something," Edgar said sharply, and Dan judged from his tone that the subject was closed.

"I don't know where the hell we're going," Dan whispered. "Katie was taking me to the cabins. I couldn't find my way around this ship even when the lights worked."

"We keep going straight," Edgar said. "Past the Ocean lounge, past the casino, then find a staircase. Most of the cabins are above."

"You know the ship pretty well," Dan said dubiously.

"Not well enough to get the hell off when I had the chance."

Dan zipped his lips and frowned in frustration. He was riding the giddy adrenaline high of battling the creature, trying to persuade his brain to accept that it had actually happened, that he had acted so...courageously? Psychotically?

Yet Edgar seemed to have lapsed into a mood as dark as the ship itself. The confidence that oozed from the man when they first met seemed to have departed entirely, leaving him brooding. Almost fearful.

Dan's nerves sizzled. He needed to talk. Had to find some way to let the energy building inside him dissipate.

"I wonder how many of them are on board," he said. "I wonder if we could kill—"

"We weren't supposed to be able to kill that one," Edgar snapped. He sounded angry, and Dan took a step back in surprise. "Nobody is supposed to be able to kill them. So how did you do it?"

"Uh, well, technically you—"

"I didn't do anything," Edgar interrupted bitterly. "I finished it off, no more than that. I was ready to let the thing carve me up. It was in my head and there wasn't a damn thing I could do to stop it. That's the deal with these things. It's why we can't fight them. So how did you attack it?"

Dan shrugged. A useless gesture that Edgar didn't see. The big man's eyes were focused firmly on the path ahead.

"I have no idea," Dan said. "I'll be honest with you: I haven't got the first fucking clue about anything that's going on here. I guess that makes one of us, since you seem to know so much. So why don't you tell me?"

Edgar snorted, but his eyebrows arched, as though something had only just occurred to him. He stopped walking, and turned to face Dan.

"What I know is looking more and more like a lie every fucking minute," he said. "Wait."

Dan froze, and scanned left and right nervously.

"What is it?"

"Just wait," Edgar said, and fished a small walkie-talkie from his pocket. Dan wanted to remind him that the ship had been hit by an EMP; that the radio wouldn't work, but he caught himself.

The goggles do work.

It hadn't even occurred to Dan until that moment that the man was in possession of what appeared to be the only electronic items on the entire ship that still worked. Dan stared at him, his eyes narrowing in suspicion, as Edgar pressed the radio to his lips.

Static crackled in the darkness.

"It's Edgar. I'm still on the Oceanus. Respond."

He released the button and waited for so long that Dan began to suspect there was nobody listening.

The radio hissed.

"No names. Extraction is too dangerous before dawn," a disembodied voice said. "You were fully aware of this before you went in."

"Fuck your extraction, and fuck no names, too," Edgar barked in a voice loud enough that Dan cast a worried glance around the dark deck, expecting to see something rushing toward him. "I'm standing here with a man who just killed one of them, you understand? One of The Three is dead."

The radio crackled and fell silent.

Dan thought about reiterating that it was Edgar who'd struck the killing blow, but the big man's eyes flashed dangerously behind the goggles. He let it drop.

Edgar waited again, and this time there was only silence.

He lifted the radio to his lips once more.

"Tell my father that if I get off this ship, I've got some fucking questions for him, understand? Over and fucking out."

Edgar slipped the radio back into his pocket, and started forward once more.

Dan trotted after him, moving past an ornate signpost that was emblazoned with directions to the Ocean lounge, the casino.

And the cabins.

They were getting close.

"Three," Dan said quietly. "The Three. That's what you said on the radio. You're a part of this, aren't you?"

Edgar grimaced.

"Not anymore," he growled. "Enough questions. We find your wife, we find my brother, and then we find a way to get off this ship, or we die in the attempt. If you've still got questions after that, I'll personally introduce you to the man with the answers. There."

Edgar pointed at a doorway beneath a small sign that read Cabins 149 - 250 and limped toward it without looking at Dan.

They walked to the doorway in silence, but inside Dan's mind, the noise was cacophonous. Questions crowded his head, bubbling away like boiling fat as a fire of anger and doubt burned underneath them. Edgar's appearance was no fluke. Hadn't he said that he'd had the chance to leave the ship?

That meant he knew what had been coming, just like he knew exactly how many of the creatures there were on board. Like he knew to call them vampires.

Dan tried to put the pieces together, but the picture they formed made no sense. It almost sounded like the Oceanus had been set up to be attacked by the vampires. Hell, someone had even cut the power for them. Was that someone Edgar?

When they entered the hallway, Dan stopped immediately, and his thoughts leaked away.

There was a set of stairs leading up to the several decks of cabins above, but it was the door at the far end of the hallway that caught his attention and sent his mind spinning.

It hadn't been printed on the signpost they had just passed; or maybe he had missed it. Maybe his mind had employed some sort of self-defence mechanism, refusing to allow him to see the words.

He saw them now.

Brightly coloured, printed in a cheerful comic font and decorated with smiley faces and flowers.

Nursery and Children's Play area.

The door was ajar. Propped open by a tiny arm that Dan could see was drenched in blood.

He felt his knees buckle underneath him as he imagined the scene beyond the door. When he had stood in the terminus, several hours and a lifetime ago, he hadn't seen that many children—most of the passengers had looked middle-aged—but he remembered a few. Scampering about in excitement like they were in the grip of the world's biggest sugar rush.

The scene in front of him became fuzzy, and it took Dan a moment to realise that the goggles he wore were misting with tears that rolled down his cheeks unnoticed.

"Oh," he said feebly. "Oh, no..."

Edgar's arm on his shoulder made him flinch.

"Don't look," Edgar said gruffly. "Don't think about it. There's nothing you can do. Focus on your wife."

Dan nodded, and allowed Edgar to guide him to the stairs as sobs began to wrack his body. He'd been riding on adrenaline, surfing a wave of euphoria that came with banishing the stale anxiety that had plagued him for years to the back of his mind. Even watching Katie being gutted hadn't quite pulled him back to his senses.

But that arm did.

Tiny and frail; propping open the door, as if the child it belonged to had been trying to escape, and had almost made it.

Halfway up the stairs, Dan shook his head as though answering a question that nobody had asked, and he sat down heavily, forgetting the ever-present danger for just a moment, and he let the tears flow.

*

There was no mistaking the sound. A crash that clearly emanated from the coffee lounge that Mark and Herb had departed moments earlier.

Mark tried to come up with a logical reason for the creature to risk jumping from the deck above in the same manner he and Herb had, but only two options presented themselves: either the thing was far more physically able than its human counterparts, or it was utterly determined not to let its quarry escape.

Neither possibility made Mark feel any better.

The coffee lounge had three exits: to the left and right, parallel to the hull, or dead ahead to the ice rink. There was a chance that it would pick the wrong direction, of course, but chance was starting to look increasingly like it wasn't on Mark's side.

So he ran.

At least, he tried to run, and almost immediately lost his footing on the ice, landing hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. He bounced back up instantly, ignoring the pain that tried to limit his breathing, and settled for an approximation of skating; sliding forward on the soles of his shoes awkwardly. It wasn't as fast as running, but it had the advantage of being quieter.

He heard Herb fall heavily, spitting a low curse about the pain in his back, before he also apparently decided that less speed meant more haste.

The vampire was somewhere behind them, but judging by the shrieking they had heard, it wasn't close, and it didn't sound like it had heard them. Another shriek split the silence; slightly more distant than the first, and a lot of crashing, as if furniture was being tossed around.

Mark figured it was thoroughly searching the coffee lounge before it decided which exit to take. That gave the two fleeing men a few precious seconds to put as much distance as they could between themselves that the creature.

If the vampire decided the coffee lounge was empty, and if it picked the correct exit, it would surely see them instantly: most of the deck was split between the ice rink and the nightclub, and the former was a wide open space that offered nowhere to hide. There was no way it would miss them out there on the ice, assuming it could see in the dark better than Mark or Herb could.

There was no time to ask Herb about that—or any of the myriad other questions that Mark still needed answers to, and so he assumed the worst. After all, if Herb was to be believed, these were creatures of darkness. It stood to reason that they would not be as disabled by a lack of light as humans were.

It felt like crossing the ice took forever. When they reached what Mark guessed was the centre of the rink, he felt his panic chasing him. Never in his life had he felt so exposed. It was like he was standing in the middle of an open park, and someone had just informed him that there was a sniper out there somewhere.

With each passing second, he expected to hear the creature behind him; the crunching of claws biting into the ice. He desperately wanted to move faster.

He crashed into the low barrier that surrounded the ice without warning, and only as he toppled over it did he realise that he hadn't been out in the centre of the rink at all, but had crossed it. The darkness playing tricks on him.

He opened his mouth to whisper a warning to Herb, and the air was blasted out of his lungs again as the man landed heavily on top of him. He shoved Herb off without a word, afraid that the sound of them falling had been more than loud enough to draw attention, but when he cocked an ear, he heard only eerie silence.

That's because it did hear something, and it's listening, just like you are.

Mark held his breath and waited a few seconds, until he was as sure as he could be that nothing else was out there on the ice, and slipped the lighter from his pocket, casting a glow that extended no more than a few feet.

It was enough. To his right, he saw the changing area where people could exchange their shoes for ice skates. A few tables set up around a sandwich bar and a soft drinks machine for those who weren't brave enough to step onto the ice themselves.

And the exit.

Mark knew the way from there. Outside the ice arena, there was another small lounge area decorated with stunning floor-to-ceiling tropical fish tanks—one of many such rest areas dotted around the ship, offering passengers a chance to catch their breath before moving on to the next attraction.

When the nightclub opened its doors, the lounge was intended to double as a chill out zone. Three words that Mark thought were destined to never belong together again.

They were close to the nightclub doors now, and Mark extinguished the lighter flame, confident that he could find his way in the dark.

"Let's go," he whispered, and hauled himself upright, moving toward the exit carefully. Herb followed a moment later, close enough that Mark could almost feel the man's breath on the back of his neck.

He moved through the lounge area carefully, and felt his way along the wall until he found what he was looking for: the door to the Apollo nightclub was framed by faux tiki torches. He found them easily, and pushed the door open, blinking as the sharp smell of disinfectant washed over him.

The nightclub opened at 11pm, and judging by the smell, it was still being readied for action when the ship went dark.

Mark was suddenly struck by the time: he estimated it could be no later than ten o'clock. Only a matter of hours since they had been docked in Portsmouth, and Mark's biggest problem had been the possibility that Steven Vega would somehow prevent him from heading to the nightclub to party when his shift was over.

Now, Vega's brains were splattered over the conference room wall, and Mark was running for his life from a mythological creature.

If he hadn't been so steeped in terror, Mark thought he would have found the situation funny.

"In here," he said in a low voice, and flicked on the lighter for a second to direct Herb. As he stepped inside, Mark reached out and plucked a tiki torch from its bracket.

It was flimsy, but it would serve as a temporary deadbolt, and would deter anything that wasn't determined to get in. He was, however, under no illusions that the flimsy plastic would withstand a barrage similar to the one the creature had unleashed on the conference room doors.

He pulled the door shut and slipped the torch between the handles. After a moment's pause, in which he heard only silence and Herb's panicked, shallow breaths, he flicked on the lighter once more.

The Apollo was small: like the ice rink it was designed to be a scale model representation of the real thing. The Oceanus didn't expect to play host to too many younger people; those for whom evenings and alcohol inevitably led to thumping beats and crowded dance floors. Mark had hoped differently, of course, but the prospect of getting drunk and finding young, single women to dance with suddenly seemed very distant indeed.

He cast the thought aside, and headed straight to the bar and began to search through the crates and boxes stored behind it.

The glow sticks were scale model affairs, too: not much bigger than drinking straws. They wouldn't emit much light, but as things stood, they were a step up on the lighter and the seemingly endless darkness. He snapped one and shook it until soft blue light flooded the bar and nodded, satisfied.

Mark stuffed a fistful of the glow sticks into a pocket and slid the box along the bar to Herb, who took a few and nodded, before returning his focus to the bottle of Jack Daniel's he was trying to open. When the cap came off the bottle, he took a long slug and offered it to Mark.

Mark shook his head.

"You sure?" Herb said. "You know, there's every chance this will be the last drink you ever get to take. And I don't know about you, but my nerves could use a little calming."

Mark shook his head again.

"I think it's better if I keep a clear head," he said curtly. "Besides, I'm an angry drunk."

Herb snorted and rubbed at his jaw.

"You're not that much fun sober."

Mark grinned despite himself.

"You asked for it," he said. "Wailing like a damn baby."

Herb grunted, and twisted the cap off a bottle of tequila, taking a swallow and grimacing.

"You planning to get shitfaced?" Mark said. "Because I'm not sure that's such a good—"

"No," Herb interrupted with a chuckle. "Just figure it's a waste to open all these bottles and not take a sip."

"All?"

Mark arched an eyebrow.

"Molotov's," Herb explained as he twisted the cap off a bottle of vodka. "I've got a feeling the fuel tanks on this beast are going to be pretty difficult to set off. If I'm right, these will do as backup."

"Backup for what?"

"For burning this ship to the ground," Herb said, knocking back a mouthful of vodka and blinking as the liquid seared his throat. "Well, the sea. Whatever. You know what I mean."

Herb smiled, and for the first time Mark noticed how young the guy was. He put him early twenties; almost certainly not a day over twenty-five. He definitely didn't look like a terrorist, though Mark would have been hard pressed to say what a terrorist should look like. Herb just looked like a kid with a penchant for telling tall tales.

Or maybe not.

If what Herb had said was true, he hadn't had much say in his upbringing, or in the way he ended up on the ship. Maybe, in some ways, his presence there was every bit as fucked up as Mark's.

Hell, Mark hadn't pursued a career in cruise ship security; he doubted that anyone chased that particular dream. Mark had ended up on the Oceanus because his father had been determined to raise a boxer in his own image, and hadn't ever left room for what Mark himself might want.

To sixteen-year-old Mark, it hadn't seemed that there were a great many career options for someone whose greatest talent was the ability to throw a not-quite-professional punch. Of the options that were open to him, precious few were legal.

So he paid his dues in the security business, and after fifteen years of endless bullshit, he ended up on cruise ships. Fifteen years to claw together a job that could be described as decent at best, and utterly pointless at worst.

And now, it didn't even look decent; not at all. It looked increasingly like a job that was going to get him killed.

Maybe Herb had the right idea after all.

"Here," Mark said, and held out his hand for the vodka. Herb slid the bottle along the bar, and Mark scooped it up smoothly and raised it in a toast.

"To family," he said with more than a trace of bitterness.

Herb stared at him quizzically for a moment before lifting another bottle of Jack Daniel's to his lips, and he drank with a dark chuckle.

35

Edgar stared at the sobbing man in frustration, and cast a frantic glance along the hallway at the top of the stairs.

He couldn't help but notice the spots of blood on the steps, and knew that they meant only one thing: one of the creatures had been in this part of the ship. Maybe was even still here. It was not safe; definitely not a place to take a seat and start having some sort of mental breakdown.

Ferrying Dan Bellamy about the Oceanus was a waste of time. Edgar was sure of that. The likelihood of his wife still being alive seemed slim, and even if she had somehow survived the initial attack, she would surely be holed up somewhere and impossible to find.

Edgar had planned on leaving the man and the now-dead woman in the security uniform when they reached the stairs. His own search for Herb was likely to prove equally futile, but at least Herb knew what he was dealing with. There was a slim chance that he might have found a place to hide before it all started, and if that was the case, Edgar was certain that Herb would be somewhere down in the engine room.

There was a good chance that the vampires hadn't descended that far into the ship yet. For them, there would be no need; nothing to draw them down there for a while. Most of the meat on the ship was located on the passenger decks.

Meat.

Edgar shuddered when he thought about how close he had come to being no more than meat himself. He could still feel an echo of the dead vampire's toxic presence in his mind, like it had stained his thoughts. He forced his attention back to Dan, desperately trying not to focus on the sickly feeling in his head.

Dan was still sobbing; still in the middle of some sort of episode.

The prospect of leaving Dan to fend for himself hadn't bothered Edgar in the slightest. For as long as the guy tallied along, Edgar thought he could be useful, even if only as a means of distracting any vampires they happened across.

But then everything had changed, and all of a sudden Dan seemed terribly important. So much that Edgar was even willing to waste time finding the man's cabin and his almost-certainly-dead wife.

But time was short, and the detour toward the cabins was taking too damn long. The other vampires would descend through the ship; that might even be what the two remaining monsters were doing at that very moment. If Herb was still down there somewhere in engineering, his time was running out.

Just leave him, Edgar thought, but he knew he could not. The sobbing man had effectively disproved a part of the ancient texts that Edgar's father had always maintained was not up for debate. In the presence of the vampires, humans turned to terrified mush, their minds paralysed by the very sight of the creatures. Edgar had felt it himself.

Crawling toward the vampire in the Indian restaurant, only a tiny fraction of Edgar's mind had remained his own; the rest was in thrall to the hideous creature, and Edgar was fully aware that he was crawling to certain death, and equally aware that he was powerless to stop it.

The man on the stairs was different somehow. Unaffected by the crippling terror the vampires instilled in humans. Leaving him felt like it could be a huge mistake.

Besides that, Edgar thought, you might need him if you run into another vampire yourself.

The thought chilled Edgar as much as it baffled him. The guy sitting on the stairs in the ragged shorts and t-shirt was no fighter, that much was obvious. He was scrawny; weak. A tear-streaked face under a childish mop of hair. And yet somehow he had charged directly at the creature that was preparing to kill Edgar while he cowered on the floor pissing his pants, and he had damn near beheaded the thing with a cleaver.

That made Dan Bellamy valuable, but only if he could get his shit together.

"Come on," Edgar said, retreating half way down the steps and hauling the man upright by his armpits. "You're not going to find your wife if you sit here cry—"

The scream ripped Edgar's words in two.

It was loud, close and very definitely human, but it wasn't the scream itself that silenced Edgar.

It was Dan Bellamy's reaction to it.

Dan went stiff with what Edgar assumed was fright, but Edgar saw something other than fear in the man's eyes. Shock, yes, but...something else.

Recognition?

Before Edgar could move a muscle in response, Dan turned and charged up the remaining steps and disappeared out of sight along the dark hallway at a sprint.

In the distance, the human scream dissolved into another noise; similar and yet twisted almost beyond recognition. A vampire shriek.

For a second, Edgar stood there, stunned, and then he too was running, trying to tell the rising panic in his mind to shut the hell up.

It didn't work.

The fear built with every step.

Because he was sprinting toward the dreadful noise.

*

Dan rocketed around the corner and slammed to a halt.

The hallway had no windows; it was as dark as the grave, but the goggles allowed him to see perfectly and his mind took in every hideous detail, lingering on the horrific sight in front of him like a slow motion zoom.

His beautiful wife, face down on the floor, her back stained by an ocean of blood as the vampire raked its fearsome talons down her spine, opening her up like a ziploc bag.

Dan let loose a bestial shriek. No words, just emotion. Rage and horror and denial.

The vampire looked up sharply.

And laughed.

"Oh, dear," it rasped. "I think she must be yoursssss." It cackled, and pulled Elaine's head up from the floor to face Dan.

"She's mine nooooow."

Dan stared at Elaine's face, and felt a feeble flicker of hope. She was still alive; her eyes rolled up in their sockets and a thin line of bloody drool leaked from her lips. Elaine gave no indication that she knew Dan was there.

Too dark for her to see me, he thought, and he felt his heart breaking.

"Please—" he began to say, but the word twisted into something unrecognisable as the vampire hooked its claws under Elaine's jaw and tore her head away from her shoulders like a piece of rotten fruit.

Elaine's head landed somewhere behind the vampire with a wet crunch.

The creature grinned, and drilled its eyes into Dan.

He felt a vague prickling at the back of his mind, and some part of him understood that it was the vampire's attempt to instil the fear in him that Edgar had spoken of. The strange mind control.

It didn't work.

Dan's mind had already slipped, collapsing in on itself with searing familiarity, and at last he understood. The panic attacks. The strange blackout episodes.

It wasn't fear. Fear was what he felt every minute of every day; it was little wonder that the terror the vampires provoked barely registered as little more than a blip. The panic attacks were something else. Something darker. Something that took over Dan's mind when fear was no longer enough.

The terrible black river in his mind was rage, suppressed for too long, awe-inducing in its intensity.

For a second, all Dan could do was stare right back at the creature as his mind tried to process the fragmented images that his eyes delivered.

Blood.

Hideous, twisted muscles.

Teeth.

Elaine's eyes. Wide with terror, unfocused. Unable to see her husband in the pitch-black hallway, standing right in front of her, ten feet and a lifetime away. His beautiful wife, the only thing that had anchored him to the real world for two years, frightened and alone in the darkness, dying at the hands of a monster that had crawled out from a maniac's nightmare.

And all because Dan had been too slow to reach her. Because he had let the horror of the world overcome him.

While Elaine was falling beneath the vampire, Dan had been so close, but was lost in tears and self-pity.

He could have saved her.

The images that flashed in Dan's mind were overpowering, burying him beneath an avalanche of emotion. He saw everything and nothing as his world blurred and stretched, breaking and remaking itself as an endless abyss of despair.

It felt like the darkness was claiming him, smothering him, until he could only see one thing.

Red eyes.

Dan saw those evil, glowing red eyes clearly. Saw them widening in astonishment as he charged forward, swinging the cleaver in a wide arc at the vampire's head, putting every ounce of his strength into the blow and unleashing a hoarse roar of rage that he would never have believed could have originated in his own throat.

*

Mark held a Molotov cocktail in each hand, and found himself simultaneously wishing both that he could carry more, and that he could set them aside and never think about picking them up again.

The bottles felt heavy, and dangerous. Even without setting a flame to the flimsy napkins he and Herb had stuffed into the necks of the bottles, Mark couldn't help but feel like they might explode in his hand at any second.

He remembered a kid at school turning up in class after a long absence. Everyone knew what had happened to Tommy Addison: the rumours swept around the school like wildfire. Sometimes the details changed a little: nobody seemed to know for sure what type of firework he had been holding, but everyone knew that he had still been gripping it tightly when it went off.

Mark would never forget the sight of Tommy's hand when he finally did return to school: fingers gone, leaving only mangled stumps, and flesh on his palm that looked to have melted. Tommy's left hand was red, as if it had been bestowed upon him by some demon, and it was sickeningly shiny. It didn't look like human flesh at all.

Mark had been afraid of fire and what it could do to the human body ever since. He didn't consider that a phobia. More like good common sense.

And now he was about to set a ship alight, while he was standing on it.

"Uh, are you sure that sinking this ship will bring help?" Mark asked feebly.

"Sure?" Herb said breezily. "Not even remotely. But I'm not letting them get their talons on me, that I am sure of. But if you want an educated guess? Yeah, my father won't allow any harm to come to the vampires. It would be a total failure. I don't even think he would much care about the prospect of their retaliation. More about the disgrace, and the failure of his boys to fulfil their destiny."

Herb spat the last word out, and lifted aloft a book of matches that he had taken from behind the bar. He struck one.

"Wait," Mark said weakly, unsure what he could say next, but certain in the knowledge that once Herb lit that match, matters would move swiftly beyond his control. Beyond anybody's.

Herb looked at Mark quizzically as the flame sputtered to life.

And his eyes widened as something heavy crashed into the door, rattling the flimsy tiki torch barring the handles like a toothpick.

Mark glanced at the door, and his stomach knotted itself in fear.

It had been all too easy to believe that they were safe in the locked room. Easy, almost, to forget that the vampire was out there searching for them.

Maybe they had been making too much noise, Mark thought, and he cursed himself for letting his guard drop even a little.

The thing beyond the door charged again immediately, and Mark heard that terrible sound once more. Dry snapping. A makeshift deadbolt giving up its feeble resistance.

"No time for waiting," Herb said. "No time for much of anything, really. Can't guarantee we can blow the fuel tanks, but there's a hell of a lot of alcohol in this place, and alcohol burns just fine. Better get to the exit."

Mark rushed to the rear exit of the nightclub in a dream.

This can't be happening, he thought as he pulled the door open and glanced quickly at the empty darkness beyond. He held a Molotov in each hand, and started to struggle with them, trying to transfer both to his left hand while he fished in his pocket for a glow stick with the right.

He needn't have bothered.

Behind him, Herb tossed a flaming Molotov at the bar, and suddenly there was light everywhere.

Herb followed Mark into the hallway, grabbing for his arm, but Mark found himself rooted to the spot, unable to tear his gaze away.

In the nightclub, the flame quickly became a swirling vortex, hungrily devouring the alcohol. The bottles lined behind the bar burst like microwave popcorn, feeding the growing ball of fire until the entire club was filled with it; a roaring, writhing beast. The fire was a living creature; a devouring monster in its own right.

And in the middle of the blaze: a dark shape, approaching smoothly.

It can't be possible.

"You humans and your fire. Still sooooo proud of it."

The vampire chuckled, and Mark felt insanity tearing at his mind as he stared at it. This was the first time he had laid eyes on one of the creatures, and he knew immediately, as he met its dreadful gaze, that everything that Herb had said was true. Every last incredible word of it.

The creature was a walking inferno: flames washed around its sinewy body, covering every inch of the leathery flesh.

Yet the creature seemed unaffected. It kept walking, heading toward Mark and Herb at a leisurely pace, as if the fire were nothing more threatening than a light rain.

Hell is coming, Mark thought, and he shook his head in miserable disbelief, his eyes widening in horror.

And the vampire laughed.

36

The vampire screeched as the cleaver bit deeply into its neck, but it didn't fall.

Instead, it whipped up a hand that Dan did not see, aiming its talons at his belly in a savage swing that would almost certainly have disembowelled him if it connected properly. Only the fact that Dan was already falling, unbalanced by the enormous effort he'd thrown into the swing, saved him. The vicious claws raked his belly, and he felt a fire erupt across his torso, but the wound was only skin deep.

Not a patch on having a knife driven into his skull.

I've had worse, Dan thought, and hysteria bubbled in his mind.

Fuelled by overwhelming rage, he ripped the cleaver from the hateful flesh, and swung again, and again, driving the blade deep into the creature in a furious crescendo of motion. The vampire's resistance was weak and disorganised, as though it struggled to believe what was being done to it.

Dan kept swinging.

Even when the vampire fell away from him, and its head separated entirely from its neck, rolling down the hallway with a liquid thump, Dan kept driving the blade forward, shredding the creature's lean torso until the strength leaked from his arms and the cleaver became too heavy for him to hold any longer.

It fell from nerveless fingers with a clatter that Dan did not hear.

The world came back slowly, riding the pain in his belly and the ache in his arms, until he stood, blinking down at the smear of gore that the vampire had become. None of it felt real.

Dan had always been terrified of losing his mind. Ever since the knife attack had punctured his skull and his spirit, he had become acutely aware of the fragility of sanity. The everyday things that frightened him: everything from the phone ringing unexpectedly to the notion of stepping outside his front door alone, without Elaine to hide behind, revealed fragments of a darkness inside that he feared could claim him at any moment. The mind was weak and pliable. Easy to break.

Ever since the knife attack, his mind had felt like it might break at any moment.

He had always harboured a dark concern that one day he would come to his senses after one of his  strange blackouts, to discover that while his mind had been tumbling helplessly on that awful black river, terrible events had unfolded in the real world.

Maybe, one day, he would regain consciousness to find that Elaine was long gone, and that he had spent years in isolation and incomprehensible madness. Maybe he would wake to discover that his body had done something terrible while his mind took a vacation. For a moment, as he stared down at the lake of gore at his feet, Dan's worst nightmares were realised. His mind had snapped, and he had done something terrible.

Blood everywhere.

And Elaine was gone.

He collapsed to his knees in the blood and torn flesh, and felt that terrible rushing sensation once more, like he was falling, and as he began to scream in despair he wasn't sure that it would ever stop.

*

"Holy shit," Edgar breathed in an awed tone. He had watched, stupefied, as Dan launched himself toward what had to be certain death. Edgar's mind had only just caught up to the notion that the screaming woman on the floor had to be Dan's missing wife when the man himself started swinging the cleaver.

He took the vampire apart in a brutal display of insane rage and power, wildly throwing the blade around and cutting at everything that stood in his way.

It was impossible.

It defied everything Edgar's father had told him.

And yet here it was, happening right in front of Edgar's eyes. One man, attacking a vampire with nothing more than a blade, and tearing it to pieces. Stinking black blood erupting in fountains as the vampire fell to the ferocious attack, almost as though it couldn't quite believe it was happening.

They can be killed.

Not staked through the heart or burned by sunlight. Nothing supernatural required. They could be killed just like anything else.

It can't be true.

When Dan dropped the cleaver and collapsed to his knees, Edgar stared suspiciously at the remains of the vampire. Dan had painted the walls with the thing; had taken its head clean off, but some part of Edgar still expected the creature to heal itself somehow; to regrow its lost pieces and retaliate.

It had to. These were creatures of the night, for fuck's sake. Creatures of ancient darkness. Demons from the world beneath the world.

The only thing that could kill them—the only fucking thing—was a stake through the heart, and Edgar had even been dubious about that until only minutes earlier. Everything Edgar had been taught suggested that fighting the creatures was impossible.

That was why the selected families around the globe who had protected humans for millennia had to sacrifice people in their hundreds or thousands. It was Edgar's duty; his calling. The entire point of his whole existence.

It was a pack of lies.

Edgar saw it now, saw the naked truth, stripped down and smeared across the walls; hideous gobs of it that dripped from the ceiling like a foul rain.

He hadn't been born to protect an ancient truce.

The secret that Edgar and his family kept had nothing to do with paying a regrettable price to maintain peace for the greater good of humanity.

What the Rennick family protected was not a truce at all.

It was a surrender.

Confusion and anger boiled in Edgar's mind. He had already lost two brothers, maybe three. He had murdered an innocent man with his own hands; had condemned thousands more to die, and all because he was certain that the vampires were an adversary that could not be faced. A supernatural force that man could only drop to his knees in front of and pray to for a merciful death.

The truth was a black stain that pooled around Edgar's feet.

If this man could fight them; could somehow resist the paralysis that the vampires used as their primary weapon, then others surely could too.

His father's words came back to him abruptly, so often repeated.

It's for the greater good, Edgar. We do what we have to do to keep the human race safe, no matter how distasteful our actions might seem. We're the good guys.

A dark needle of suspicion lanced into his thoughts.

Did his father know? Had he brainwashed his sons when they were young and vulnerable, filling their heads with the terrible lie?

Or had his father himself been brainwashed? Was the lie that ran through his family, passed down across the generations, so old that the truth didn't even exist anymore?

Were the noble families who had been tasked with 'protecting' the human race actually just butchers, delivering meat to the vampires on a platter?

Are we their familiars?

Every question led to dark answers, and every answer led back to the terrible black door in Brighton, and the woman who had chatted happily to Edgar in a bar, and who had clearly liked him. The woman he had let the vampire tear apart. He felt a surge of nausea wash through him.

He had to find Herb; had to let him know that he had been right all along and that Edgar should have listened. Had to get his little brother off the ship.

Edgar opened his mouth to speak, though he had no idea what he was about to say to the man who had just demonstrated that Edgar's entire existence had been a lie.

And suddenly the silence was split by thunder, but Edgar knew immediately that it wasn't the storm returning. Felt it in the trembling of the ship under his feet. The ship that could crash through even the mightiest waves without unbalancing a single passenger shuddered and rocked. Edgar put out a hand, steadying himself against the wall.

Somewhere on the Oceanus, several decks below judging by the noise, there had just been a mighty explosion.

And another.

This time, the ship did more than rock. It began to keel, and Edgar's mind raced to understand what was happening.

The answer was as obvious as the lie smeared around his feet.

Dad.

37

The vampire was only a few yards away from them, strolling casually through the fire that did not seem to burn its flesh, when the nightclub went up like a box of fireworks, and the enormous concussive blast lifted Mark and Herb off their feet.

Herb felt his forehead connect heavily with the floor, and he rolled onto his back, seeing stars, and watched dumbly as a wave of fire licked the ceiling of the hallway above him before burning itself out. The fire moved like an animal, its flickering, fluid progress every bit as alien as the gait of the vampire stalking through the burning nightclub.

The blast was beyond unexpected: Herb had assumed the fire would take hold slowly, and would spread throughout the ship at a steady pace, fuelled by the alcohol.

He thought they would have plenty of time to get away. Hell, he thought they would have to toss the Molotov's liberally around the ship to ensure that it burned.

Instead, the bar area had erupted in an enormous fireball that tore a hole in the side of the ship, letting the savage wind in.

Even worse was the crater blown into the floor. The entire nightclub seemed to be collapsing in on itself, slowly melting through the floor toward the deck below.

Herb smelled burning hair and sizzling meat, and realised dimly that his arm was on fire.

His first thought was to roll, but then he noticed the flames licking at the bottle he still clutched in numb fingers. With a yelp, he tossed the Molotov away before it became a bomb in his hand.

He started to roll as the bottle smashed, and another wave of fire rolled through the hallway.

In ordinary circumstances, the sprinkler system would have kicked into life immediately: the company that had built the Oceanus knew all too well the dangers of fire spreading on a ship, and had placed sprinklers everywhere.

Nothing.

That, Herb realised, was his doing, too. Well, partly: the EMP must have crippled the safety systems on the ship along with everything else. No sprinklers, no alarm. Just howling wind that turned the fire into a raging beast that rampaged through the ship with horrifying speed.

Herb hauled himself to his feet with a grunt, crying out in dismay when he saw that the fire had fused his jacket to the flesh of his arm. It didn't hurt—not much, anyway, but Herb knew that was very bad indeed. The fire had burned up the nerves in his arm. No pain; huge damage. Second degree, at least.

But at least he was still alive.

He turned back toward the nightclub and watched in open-mouthed astonishment as the vampire, still ablaze but now missing its left arm, took a step towards him.

And the floor collapsed, and the monster fell from sight with a hideous shriek.

Herb stood, immobilised, as confusion tore through his mind. It wasn't possible that a Molotov cocktail could cause so much damage, not unless he had thrown it directly into the fuel tanks.

What the fuck happened?

As if in response, another explosion tore through the ship, close enough to dump Herb on his backside once more. He felt the floor sway dangerously, and when it failed to right itself Herb had his answer.

The Oceanus was sinking.

Was being sunk.

His father had given the order, and right now, the Russian black market missiles that he had installed on the Rennick's trawler—the absurdly-named Sea Shanty—were being unleashed.

With the vampires still aboard.

There was no way his father would break his beloved pact. He'd sacrifice every Rennick—including himself—before he let that happen.

It made no sense to Herb, but it didn't have to.

Whatever the explanation, it was happening, right now. In the distance, Herb heard another explosion, though this one sounded different: muffled; heavier somehow.

That one landed below the waterline, he guessed. The fatal blow. The Oceanus would go down fast.

Time had run out. If Herb was going to survive, he had to get off the ship. Now.

His determination surprised him a little. He had been so resigned to dying that he only cared about ensuring that he got the best death possible. The quickest; the most painless. But once he came up with the plan to blow the ship, an ember of hope burned inside him.

The realisation that his father had fired upon the ship confused the hell out of Herb, but it fed a little oxygen to that flickering hope. Somehow, all the plans made by the Rennick family had been derailed. In the ensuing chaos, there might just be a chance for Herb to escape with his life.

He searched left and right, trying to locate the security guard, and finally spotted him further down the corridor. It looked like the initial blast had lifted him clear off his feet and deposited him fifteen feet away from the burning nightclub.

Herb thought that was a good thing. By the look of it, the bottles the man held had smashed, dousing him with liquor. The slightest spark would have made a human torch of him.

When Herb took a step toward the man, he froze in fear as he felt the floor cracking and buckling beneath him. The deck had taken catastrophic damage, and it felt like the whole thing was coming down.

At least, Herb thought, we don't have to worry about trying to blow the fuel tanks.

He could almost have laughed at that, if he hadn't been so focused on moving lightly, and trying not to put his full weight down with each step. The deck felt like wet sponge beneath his feet, and Herb tried to remember what was below him. The cinema level, perhaps. If the deck collapsed, it would be a long fall, and the fire was probably claiming the cinema at that very moment.

And the vampire, Herb. Don't forget that.

If the floor collapsed, death would follow swiftly.

He reached the security guard's prone body and didn't hesitate. There wasn't time to check whether the guard was badly injured. He wasn't conscious, and Herb thought that there was a good chance that being catapulted down a hallway had done spinal damage. Moving him might only make the man's injuries worse, but it was the only option.

Herb hauled him up, throwing him over his shoulder in a fireman's lift with a grunt. The guy was smaller than Herb; light enough that he could just about carry him, but he was also soaked in alcohol. The stench of it was overpowering.

With fire pulsing all around him, carrying the man was like carrying a bomb.

Herb grimaced.

He seemed to be making a habit of carrying things that could get him killed. The sensible thing to do—the Rennick thing to do—was to drop the comatose security guard and leave him to burn.

But then, the Rennicks were crazy bastards, and Herb had spent a lifetime doing what was expected of a Rennick.

No more.

Wincing at the way his jacket pulled on his melted flesh; feeling like at any moment it might tear his skin off, Herb started away from the burning nightclub fighting for each step as the floor bucked and crumbled beneath him.

The ship was lurching backwards, dunking its expensive arse into the sea, and with each passing second the floor became a steeper gradient, threatening to send Herb sliding backwards into the fire.

It took a few seconds to reach the distant doorway, and the network of staircases beyond. Once there, Herb grasped the banister for balance and sucked in a deep breath, coughing out a cloud of burning smoke.

Somewhere nearby, something cracked and splintered, and the Oceanus groaned like a wounded animal.

No time left.

Herb hefted the security guard and began to pull himself up the stairs, using his free hand to claw at the banister and defy the gravity that wanted to pull him down.

In his mind, he had envisioned setting fire to the Oceanus to be a straightforward task and one that would leave him plenty of time to consider his options for escape.

In practice, it was nothing like that. The ship was sinking fast, breaking up more and more with each missile strike, and when the fire reached the fuel tanks, Herb wasn't sure the ship would even get the chance to sink. It would explode first.

At least, he thought, the darkness wasn't a problem anymore; there was light everywhere.

Light and clarity. No more confusion, no more worrying about the best way to proceed. Suddenly, the life of Herb Rennick was simple; more straightforward than he could ever remember it being.

He had to go up.

*

"We have to go down."

Edgar spoke the words aloud, but he didn't believe them; not really. The first explosion had been followed by another, and then another, and with each blast Edgar's sense of betrayal and abandonment had deepened.

This was Charles Rennick's response to Edgar's radio message, and to the news that a vampire had been harmed. It had taken him all of five minutes to decide that the best course of action was to sink the Oceanus and hope the truth went down with it.

The presence of his sons on the ship apparently didn't matter; not at all. Edgar didn't doubt for a second that even as his father gave the order to sink the ship, he reassured himself that he was doing the right thing. Still trying to avert the war, unaware that it had been lost centuries earlier.

Or aware, but indifferent.

How much Edgar wanted to get his hands on his father, and to shake the truth out of him. To discover whether the Rennick family was a willing servant of darkness; whether Charles Rennick even believed the good guys brainwashing that he had unleashed on his sons as soon as they were old enough to think. The need to hurl his father to the ground and let him know what terror really felt like was overwhelming, but even as rage and revenge clouded Edgar's thoughts, one need rose above all the others.

Herb had been right about their father all along. More than anything, Edgar wanted to find Herb and to beg his forgiveness, but if Herb was even still alive, he had to be somewhere far below Edgar's current position. Down there with the fire.

Edgar found an open cabin door, leading into a room that looked like it had been tossed by a whole team of vandals, and leaned over the balcony.

Flames everywhere, and great, gaping wounds torn into the Oceanus' flank. As he watched, Edgar saw tracer fire incoming from the boat that he couldn't see out there on the dark waves. Another missile, punching a terrible hole to the rear of the boat, near the waterline.

The ship rocked, recoiling like a frightened animal.

Going down, as much as Edgar wanted it to be, was not an option. If Herb was alive, Edgar had failed him, just as he had failed all his brothers. Led them to their deaths on the back of a lie that he had believed implicitly.

The death of thousands on his hands, as unnecessary as it was horrific. Another issue that Herb had called right: the mission had cost Edgar his soul.

Edgar thought once more about jumping, and letting the Atlantic have him. Bottomless despair made him shrivel inside.

Suicide was too easy; not the Rennick way.

He deserved to burn.

But there was one man who did not, and ensuring his survival might be the one thing that could wash the blood from Edgar's soul. Maybe, somehow, Edgar's life would have some purpose after all.

He returned to Dan, still kneeling in the corridor with his dead wife, all the energy for screaming having left him, along with the light in his eyes. He didn't look up as Edgar approached, slipping on the black blood that stained the floor.

The black blood.

Edgar stared at it, and then at Dan once more.

War was inevitable, and if the texts were to be believed, Dan Bellamy was the only person in history who had been able to kill a vampire.

"You have to survive," Edgar whispered in a voice that trembled. "You have something the world needs, you hear me?"

Dan didn't respond. Didn't even blink.

Edgar searched his mind furiously, desperate to come up with some means of getting the broken man off the ship.

The idea arrived like a bolt of lightning, striking Edgar and electrifying him. Maybe, just maybe, there was a way to survive the destruction of the Oceanus. A chance at least, but it required Dan to leave his dead wife behind and get moving.

Edgar didn't think he could persuade Dan to move, no matter what direction he suggested. The man knelt in the pool of gore that spread through the dark hallway, paralysed among the remains of his wife and the creature that had killed her. He looked resigned, like he had chosen to meet his end right there.

Dan stared straight ahead; seeing nothing and apparently unable to hear Edgar shouting at him to get the fuck up.

Edgar grunted, and grabbed Dan's collar, hauling him to his feet. When he started to drag Dan away from his wife's corpse, Dan suddenly came to life, thrashing and struggling, desperately trying to break Edgar's grip.

Edgar released him for a moment, and swung a heavy fist into Dan's jaw, knocking him into pliant unconsciousness, and threw him over his shoulder like an old rug.

He set off, as fast as the shaking floor and his injured right leg allowed, making the only play he had available to him, and over and over in his mind he repeated a mantra until he even started to believe it. Just a little.

This isn't how it ends.

38

Pain.

He hadn't experienced it in so long that he had forgotten what it felt like. Had almost forgotten that it existed at all.

Everything was fire, but that concerned him little. His kind didn't burn. Some speculated that the fact that they were impervious to fire meant they had been born in what the humans called Hell, but it was no more than speculation. There was some knowledge so old that even his ancient species could not access it.

He hauled himself up from the debris that had threatened to bury him, and examined the source of the pain. His left arm was gone, torn away by the concussive blast of the human weapons.

He shrieked, but there was no response, and when he calmed his thoughts and reached out with his mind, he understood why.

He was the only vampire left on the ship.

Two brothers dead.

The loss felt deeply, like a part of his mind had crumbled to dust. The presences that had walked alongside him throughout the endless centuries snatched away.

Was the ship a trap all along?

He could scarcely believe that. After centuries, the humans had been domesticated entirely, serving his kind without question. It made no sense for them to ensnare him in a floating trap and execute him. They had too much to lose.

And yet here he was, pulling himself from the rubble with his remaining arm, weakening as thick blood oozed slowly from the stump where the other had been. His blood moved like treacle, powered by a heart that beat rarely, but the end result of the steady flow was unmistakable. Unavoidable.

He was dying.

The humans had reneged.

But why? Why now?

The world lurched and tilted dangerously as distant explosions rocked the vessel, and he had trouble balancing himself, but he made his way up through the collapsing floors quickly, following the scent of blood.

Vampire blood.

When he discovered his brother's fallen body, his first instinct was to laugh at the stake protruding from his dead kin's chest. The humans, apparently, still believed in their archaic fairytales.

When the initial surprise settled, though, he saw the stake for what it was; for what it represented.

A human being had stood in front of a vampire, and had struck it down.

There was an Hermetic in their midst. As far as he was aware, there hadn’t been one of those in centuries. Not for so long that their existence had become a myth amongst his people. He thought that was a little ironic under the circumstances, but more importantly, it changed everything.

Was that why they now fired their weapons at the ship? Had the discovery of one who could resist lent them such confidence?

Surely not; the humans had carried out the sacrifice exactly as instructed. They had let his brothers and himself feed until they could stomach no more. Thousands had died.

The presence of the Hermetic was an accident of fate. The humans probably had no idea that one among the passengers on the vessel was so important. It was nothing more than chance.

Divine intervention.

He sneered, and pulled the wooden stake from his brother's heart, tossing it aside. He felt no sadness, really. Quite the opposite: the loss of his brothers was an outrage that would be met with brutal retaliation.

War.

His ancient lips twisted into a grin, revealing rows of teeth stained red with human blood. There had been war with the humans in his youth, and his kind had been endangered.

So few of us, so many of them. Always more and more; growing exponentially. Short lives and frantic breeding.

The creatures were pathetic; utterly oblivious to the futility of their existence. Their lives nothing more than whispers in the darkness. If they had the intelligence to understand what they were, humans would be grateful that something out there deigned them important enough to be labelled food.

The truce had made his people strong. Prepared. There hadn't been a vampire death in millennia, and they too had expanded their numbers while the humans let their very presence become a myth. Wreathed in shadows and lies, his people had spread to every corner of the world.

War, he thought, could be fun. He wished he could live to see it.

He could still serve his people, though. One final act before his injuries claimed him. His dead brothers had been caught off-guard, and it had cost them. Centuries of complacency had made them soft and vulnerable.

But he would not be caught out.

The Hermetic was out there somewhere, stained by the blood of two vampires. His death was paramount.

He sniffed at the body of his brother one last time, and then rose to his full height, the intriguing pain of his missing limb forgotten.

One more role to play before his blood finally leaked away.

He let out a shriek that was part-rage and part-challenge.

And then he set off, moving as fast as his injuries and the crumbling ship allowed, determined to use what little time he had left for a greater purpose.

For the hunt.

39

It felt like Herb's entire body was screaming. He was physically fit: that was another requirement of being a Rennick, but carrying the security guard up the shuddering stairwell on his aching back made his strength leak away at an alarming speed.

More than anything, he wanted to set the man down on the stairs and take a seat; to catch his breath for a moment, but the heat he felt beneath his feet drove him on. When he risked a glance behind him, he saw that the level below had become a lake of fire.

The flames followed him up the stairs relentlessly, tearing through the plush wooden decor at a frightening clip.

The world was reduced to the next step. Lifting his aching thighs and planting his feet. Once the monumental task was accomplished, the next step awaited.

Sweat poured from Herb's brow, and he felt his body beginning to shake with the exertion. As the ship itself continued to writhe beneath him, the steps were becoming almost vertical. Each one a brutal wall of agony that began at his calves, and raced up to his shoulders, where the weight of the unconscious man threatened to topple him backwards.

Four more steps.

Three.

By the time Herb felt the floor level out beneath his feet, a scream of triumph had built in his chest and he let it out, gasping for air.

The heat was scorching his lungs, making every breath difficult, but with the fire behind him for the moment, the air tasted like cool, sweet water, and he drank it in gratefully.

One more flight of stairs to go, he thought, and he would reach the park level. From there, he hoped that he would be able to spot a part of the ship that wasn't burning. Maybe even spot a route to the lifeboats.

After that, Herb's fate would be in the lap of the gods. If his father scoured the wreckage for survivors and eliminated them all, the struggle would all be for nothing.

Far easier to give up. After all, Herb had been prepared to die, hadn't he? Barely an hour earlier, he would have gratefully eaten a bullet.

It's the hope that kills us, Herb thought grimly, and he set off again, heaving the guard along behind him, searching for the next staircase, smiling a little at the thought that it hadn't been so long ago that it was Herb who was being dragged.

I owe you, the security guard had said when Herb prevented him from falling into the Atlantic.

He didn't know the half of it.

*

Edgar limped into the park with Dan Bellamy slung across his left shoulder, and his jaw dropped in astonishment.

The park had become the eye of a catastrophic storm. All around it, smoke poured from the passenger decks, and Edgar saw flames creeping up through the levels. In the distance, he heard groaning and creaking as the Oceanus began to break apart.

Seeing the scale of the devastation, he felt a well of despair open in his gut. His idea for getting off the ship had seemed like a stroke of genius, but as he stood at the centre of a fire a thousand feet long, Edgar had serious doubts that it would work. How could anything possibly survive this?

Somewhere to his right, toward the rear of the ship, something exploded, and sent a towering plume of fire into the sky.

The entire rear of the ship was burning.

The fuel tanks will go next, Edgar thought bleakly. The rear of the ship was a gigantic bomb now, primed to go off at any moment.

Edgar's plan would work.

It had to.

With a grunt, Edgar hefted the unconscious man once more, and headed for the middle of the park, where it all began, and where it would all end.

One way or another.

*

Herb almost sobbed in relief when he emerged into the open space at the centre of the ship, but when he laid eyes on the park, he knew immediately that his hopes of finding a way off the Oceanus were nothing more than a dream.

The park was an island in an ocean of fire. Everywhere Herb turned, he saw a towering inferno, stretching up through the passenger decks and lighting the dark sky like a beacon.

Even the rain had stopped, as though God, too, had turned his back on the passengers aboard the Oceanus, and was content to let them burn. The fire raged unchecked, whipped by the wind and spreading fast.

Smaller explosions rocked the decks continually.

Toward the rear of the ship, a vast column of fire rose far into the night, and Herb knew it wouldn't be long before the fuel tanks went up.

He was going to get the death he had wished for, but it wouldn't be quick, and it wouldn't be painless.

He stumbled out into the park, exhausting the last of his energy, and collapsed heavily to the floor, spilling the unconscious man onto the grass alongside him. At least the grass felt cool.

For the moment.

"Sorry, buddy," Herb wheezed, and the words dissolved into an agonising coughing fit that felt like his lungs might force themselves out through his mouth. "Thought I could save you, but I think we’ve reached the end of the road."

Herb let his head roll to the side, and focused on the guard.

His eyes widened.

The guard's head lolled at an impossible angle. A broken neck. He must have died when the explosion in the nightclub blasted him off his feet. Herb had been trying to rescue a corpse; hauling it up those stairs in agony.

He had been trying to save that bastard from the moment he chased after him in the vents, and it had all been for nothing.

The laughter surprised Herb, and once it started he found he couldn't stop it. He leaned back on the wet grass and screamed with laughter until his ribs ached and tears rolled down his face.

When the laughter stopped, the tears continued.

Herb's eyes came to rest on the pistol still tucked into the guard's belt, and he choked out a wheezing sob.

"Glad you saved those bullets," he croaked. "At least I can make it quick after all."

He reached out and plucked the pistol from the man's belt.

Pressed the barrel into his temple.

Curled his forefinger around the trigger and squeezed his eyes shut.

"I don't think you've got it in you, Herb. Not really the Rennick way, is it?"

Herb's eyes flared open.

A hallucination.

Not possible.

Edgar loomed over him, smiling wearily, his hand outstretched.

"Like I said," Edgar grinned, "stick with me if you want to get off this ship."

"What about Seb?" Herb croaked. "And Phil?"

The smile fell from Edgar's lips, and he shook his head grimly.

*

"Heard you laughing," Edgar said as he led Herb away from the corpse. "Not sure what's funny, though."

"I don't think you'd understand, Ed."

"You're probably right, little brother. I don't think I ever did."

Herb tried to laugh, and dissolved into a coughing fit.

"Not much time left for understanding anything, now. Fuel tanks will go up any minute."

Edgar nodded.

"Then we'd better speed this up."

"Speed what up? Where are you going, Ed?"

Edgar pointed straight ahead, at the centre of the park.

"The container," he said. "That's your way out."

Herb shook his head.

"I don't understand."

"It might not work," Edgar said. "But that container is tempered steel. Airtight. If it survives the blast, you'll have air. Not sure how long for, but it might be long enough. You know the first thing Dad will do is retrieve that container."

"Why do you keep saying you?" Herb said.

"It locks from the outside, Herb. Someone's going to have to go down with the ship."

Herb shook his head violently, and his eyes filled with tears.

"And that someone is you? No, no way. There must be another way. A lifeboat, or—"

"You said it yourself, Herb. There's no time. Besides, you wanted to save somebody, remember? Now you have your chance: there's someone in that container that I need you to save. Someone important. Call it me paying off a little of the debt I owe the world."

"What?" Herb snapped. "Who?"

The container was a few feet away, and the prone body inside was visible, lit in flickering crimson. Herb stared at it.

"His name's Dan Bellamy," Edgar said. "He killed two vampires. Saved my life. I owe him."

"Killed?" Herb repeated, astonished.

"With a fucking cleaver," Edgar said, and he grinned a little at the memory.

"I don't understand, Ed."

"It was all lies, Herb. Everything Dad taught us. These things aren't gods. The truce is a lie. We've been feeding people to these monsters for centuries when we could have been fighting. When we should have been fighting. We're not the good guys. We never were."

Herb stared at Edgar, open mouthed.

"Does Dad know?"

Edgar grimaced.

"About the truce? I don't know. But he knows about the dead vampires. I radioed the Sea Shanty myself. The missiles are his response."

"He knows you're aboard? And he still fired on the ship?"

"As far as he's concerned, we're all still on board, Herb. Judging from all this," Edgar waved a hand at the burning ship, "I'd say he doesn't much care. I guess you were right about that, too."

Herb squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.

"I'm sorry, Herb. For everything. I should have listened."

Tears flowed freely down Herb's face, and he shook his head firmly.

"We can try the lifeboats," he said. "If you're with us, Dad won't—"

Herb's words died as a shriek filled the air.

Edgar looked over Herb's shoulder, and sighed wearily.

"We’ve got company. Time's up, Herb."

"No!" Herb cried. "If they can be killed we can—"

Edgar shook his head once, and shoved Herb into the container. His little brother stumbled over the unconscious man who would be his travelling companion. Maybe, Edgar thought darkly, Dan would be his company in a watery grave.

But Herb had a chance, and if Dan Bellamy survived, maybe the world did, too. It was all Edgar could manage. It would have to do.

The last thing Edgar saw as he swung the container door shut and attached the locking device was Herb's eyes, wide with despair that turned to terror as he saw what was looming behind his big brother.

Edgar didn't turn around. There was no need. He knew what was coming, and looking upon it would not help.

The lock was engaged, and his brother was safe.

He closed his eyes, and waited for the talons with a serene smile on his face.

He wouldn't let the creature get in his head. Not again. Wouldn't permit himself to be further tainted by the terrible fear the creatures exuded.

It was a small victory.

40

Dan awoke in darkness, and smiled.

A dream, he thought. A nightmare, more like. He must have missed taking his medication. Not surprising, really, what with the wedding going on. It had been a big day, a crazy day. Hardly surprising that he might forget to take his pills.

What a nightmare, though.

Dan shuddered.

"Elaine?"

There was no answer for a moment, and Dan smiled again. Elaine hadn't ever been a fan of getting up early, and had affected a mock-pout when Dan told her that they'd have to be up at five in order to make their way down to Portsmouth for the start of their honeymoon.

"Elaine?" he started to say again, but the word died in his throat.

"I'm afraid not, Mr Bellamy."

A man's voice.

It all came back at once, crushing Dan beneath the weight of its enormity.

Vampires.

Darkness.

I'm still on the ship.

"Who's there?" he asked weakly.

"My name is Herbert Rennick, Mr Bellamy. I think we've got a lot to talk about."

Dan didn't want to talk. Didn't want anything other than for oblivion to reclaim him.

"Assuming that we survive, of course."

Dan squeezed his eyes shut in despair.

"What do you mean?"

His answer was a roar that sounded like a god screaming. An enormous explosion that seemed to rattle the cells in his body. Another explosion followed it.

Another.

"That'll be the fuel tanks," Herbert Rennick said. "Things are about to get—"

Dan didn't hear anymore.

Suddenly the entire world was roaring, and everything was tumbling, endless darkness.

Epilogue

"A tragic accident. An explosion. I lost four of my sons."

"You think that will work?"

"If you mean do I think they’ll take pity on me, Jeremy, then no. I don’t think that will fucking work. We’ll have to offer to make amends. A bigger sacrifice; soon. Much bigger."

"And that should appease them?"

Charles Rennick threw the mug of half-drunk brandy down onto the deck. Metal mugs were only sensible if you were planning a trip to the mid-Atlantic, but the fact they didn’t smash when thrown in anger just added to his rising fury.

"Who fucking knows?" he snarled. "These things don’t think like us. There’s every chance they’ll rip our fucking heads off just for having the audacity to make the offer. Our only hope is that they believe their brothers died in an accident. Maybe even caused the explosion themselves. If they think for a second that one of their kind was killed by one of us, it won’t matter how many souls we offer them. They’ll take them all. That was the bargain. It has always been the bargain."

Jeremy dropped his gaze to the deck, watching the metal mug rolling across the floor as the waves pummelled the ship.

He didn’t know what to say. Charles Rennick was unpredictable at the best of times. There was every chance that the wrong word would mean Jeremy leaving the cabin with more holes than he went in with.

He eyed the pistol on Charles’ waist, and took a long gulp of the brandy, letting the pleasant fire burn his throat.

And let out a quiet sigh of relief when there was a knock at the door.

"Yes?" Charles barked.

A young man walked in, eyes wide, gasping for air.

"We’ve located the container, Sir. We’re winching it up right now."

Charles nodded, and fixed the man with his piercing grey eyes. It had been four hours since the fuel tanks on the Oceanus blew. He had started to suspect that they would never locate the container.

At least part of him had hoped that would prove to be the case.

"How long?"

"We’ll have it on board in five minutes, Sir."

*

The dark green shipping container had taken a battering: Charles guessed that the explosion that finally tore the Oceanus apart had done most of the damage, but the seabed had almost certainly done its share, too.

The thing was covered in dents, but the structure had remained intact. Bent out of shape, but still in one piece.

That might have been good news. Until the doors opened, it was impossible to tell.

"The lock’s set for two hundred hours, Sir."

Charles nodded.

"Then pry it off."

Prying it off turned out to be too much for even the strongest among the men on board. Eventually when it became clear that the twisted lock didn't want to give up without a fight, Charles called for someone to fetch a torch, and the cutting began.

The container was right back where it had started its journey, chained to the narrow deck of the Sea Shanty. The trawler was modest in size, and between the container and the chopper, space on board was at a premium. Still, most of the twelve members of the extended Rennick family on the trawler would have had plenty of space to gather in front when the doors finally opened.

Only one man chose to stand directly in front, though. The rest crowded to the sides of the container, and did their best to look elsewhere.

Just being in the presence of the vampires was terrifying: they exuded fear like a pheromone, and left a sickly feeling in the mind that lingered like an aftertaste. But looking at them...well, nobody in their right mind wanted to do that. Not when there was a chance that they might look right back.

When the lock finally fell to the deck with a heavy clunk, Charles nodded at the young man holding the cutting torch, whose face lit up with relief as he scampered away without looking back.

Charles stood alone and stared at the doors, waiting for them to open. Wondering how many of the creatures he would find inside.

If it were any less than three, he expected to die in short order. It had to be three vampires, or the container had to be empty. Anything in between would mean the end of everything.

Something inside the container thumped, and the heavy door shivered.

Charles Rennick drew in a deep breath, and wondered if it was to be his last.

When the door began to open, Charles lowered his eyes and knelt, bowing his head as if in prayer. He stared at the deck, and only when he saw a pair of scuffed boots in front of him did he dare to look up.

His mouth dropped open in astonishment.

"Hi, Dad."

Charles’ gaze flitted to the pistol that his last remaining son aimed at his head.

"Herbert? What happened?"

"Dead vampires, Dad. Who’d have guessed huh? Oh, and dead brothers as well, let’s not forget that."

He lifted his voice to a roar.

"Let’s not forget that I’m supposed to be dead too, right?"

Herb took a step closer, until the barrel of the gun was pressed into the wrinkled flesh of his father’s forehead.

"Y-You killed vampires?" Charles stuttered. "That's imposs—"

Herb took a step back, but didn’t lower the gun.

"Not me, Dad. Him."

Charles shot a glance at the container and saw a young man stepping out. Late twenties. Unshaven, with a mop of dark hair plastered to his forehead. A scrawny body wrapped in old clothes. Unremarkable in every way.

"I don't understand. Son, what do you—"

"Son," Herb snapped caustically. "Bit late for that, father."

Charles Rennick's eyes clouded with anger.

"You’ve started a war."

"We’ve terminated a surrender. Not happy with the terms," Herb said.

Charles barked a laugh.

"And now what? You’re going to kill me? Then who’ll be the head of the Rennick family? You?"

Herb lowered the gun and shook his head.

"I’m not going to kill you, Dad. I couldn’t. You’re family. Blood. To some of us that actually means something. I wish I could kill you, but I can’t."

He turned, and tossed the gun away.

*

Dan Bellamy caught the gun, and stared down at it. It felt surprisingly heavy in his hands.

"That guy can, though," Herb said.

Dan looked at Herb, and lifted the gun in trembling hands.

At the end of the barrel, he saw Elaine’s smiling face; saw her standing there in her wedding dress, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

Saw her on the floor, pinned beneath a monster as it tore out her throat. Dying alone in the darkness.

He felt the familiar pounding of his heart, and he aimed the gun at Charles Rennick’s face.

And rode the black river.

Prologue

Northern Kentucky, USA, 1999

Frank Mather straightened, massaging his aching back with one hand and mopping at his brow with the other. He’d been on plenty of digs in Kentucky over the past few years and, one way or another, had always found some reason to curse the weather, which veered crazily between boiling and freezing on his every visit. This time, northern Kentucky had been baking for two weeks at over a hundred degrees. It was the kind of heat that made you feel like you’d pass out if you got off your chair, but the searing temperature hadn’t slowed Frank and his team all day.

Not since they first uncovered it.

Since that moment, when the site of what was supposed to be just another Native American burial mound had spat up something extraordinary, they had worked feverishly; tirelessly, until Frank’s muscles protested loudly and his head began to pound from dehydration.

He climbed from the hole and made his way to the shade of the trees, where the team had stowed its gear, took a plastic bottle from his pack and drained a pint of warm, clear water without pausing. It was the last of his stock, and he was supposed to be rationing it out. Nobody had expected to remain at the site this long, and they hadn’t brought adequate supplies for a dig that had already stretched into the early evening.

He shrugged to himself. They’d be back in the nearby town of Ashland in a couple of hours, once they lost the last of the light. He’d just have to go thirsty until then.

“You slacking there, Professor?”

He looked up and smiled when he saw Nicole walking toward him, wiping her own brow and leaving a trail of dirt across her forehead which somehow managed to make her even more beautiful. Not for the first time, Frank thought that she was far too attractive to pursue a career in archaeology, of all things.

He tried not to stare, and Nicole tried not to smile flirtatiously when she noticed.

Neither quite succeeded.

Nicole crouched and rifled through her pack, retrieving her own bottle of water. Instinctively, Frank lifted his bottle to his lips once more, momentarily forgetting that it was empty.

He already felt parched.

Damn Kentucky.

“Any thoughts yet?” Nicole  asked, taking a deliberately dainty sip and looking at his dry bottle with teasing eyes. He dropped it on the ground next to his pack.

It was the same question they had all been asking all day, one way or another.

What is it?

He shook his head. “I’ve got no idea. I called Princeton, and they’ve got no idea. In fact, I’m pretty sure they think I’m trying to stage something here.”

“They’re idiots.” She rolled her eyes.

Frank scratched at his chin. “They’re worried. I can understand why. The work we’re doing has the potential to prove that we have been teaching our own history wrong. It might not sound like much, but it would ruffle some feathers.”

Nicole snorted.

“Feathers get ruffled in the faculty if someone orders a new brand of coffee.”

Frank ignored her depressingly accurate jibe.

“And then,” he continued, “on top of that, I call them with this? Hell, there’s even a part of me that thinks this has to be a hoax. Or I’m dreaming, or something.”

Nicole cast a quick glance around to make sure the others could not see them, stepped forward, and kissed him lightly. It was the first time she had done any more than flirt with him, and the unexpected contact left him dizzy.

“Does it feel like you’re dreaming?”

“Right now? Yeah, kinda,” he grinned.

She laughed and pulled away from him.

“So, what did you actually tell them? Princeton?”

Frank’s grin faded.

“The truth. A Native American burial mound erected in the middle of a copse of white oaks which were deliberately planted to mirror a European-style Neolithic henge. They pretty much started laughing right there. Then, I told them the mound contains two bodies: one human and one…uh…not. I described the anatomy of our unidentified friend, and it felt kinda like I was handing in my resignation.”

Nicole snickered.

“Did they ask for an estimate?”

“Yeah. I told them circa one-thousand B.C., based on the racial features of the human skeleton. Most likely one of the Adena people.”

“And the…other skeleton?”

“I haven’t got the faintest idea what to tell them. I’d say it looks older. A lot older, but that would be impossible. As far as I know, there’s nothing like it on record.”

“What do you think it is? You must have a theory? Something. Don’t hold out on me.”

Frank frowned, willing his mind to come up with a response. Nicole, incredibly, was a young, beautiful woman who actually seemed to be interested in his theories about pre-Columbus America being settled by Europeans who had subsequently disappeared. He was not supposed to engage in inappropriate behaviour with students, of course, but their little flirtations were harmless—at least until that kiss—and by God he did get a thrill out of impressing her.

He wished he could conjure up some exotic theory that might blow Nicole’s mind, but his own thoughts were muddled and scattershot. As things stood, Bigfoot was as plausible an explanation for the thing buried in the mound as any other he could dream up.

He shook his head and walked back to the edge of the dig site. He still had two students down there, working diligently at the remains with soft brushes; easing away the earth by inches.

The more of the bones they revealed, the more mystified Frank felt.

He could see all but the thing’s left arm and leg now: it had been a huge creature, bipedal, but with multi-jointed arms and legs of a type that he had never seen before. Upright, Frank figured it would have been well north of seven feet in height. A densely packed ribcage: each rib almost fusing to the next to form a protective carapace, like a beetle. Its hands were long and thin, three many-knuckled fingers topped with talons that made Frank think of birds of prey. Yet it had opposable thumbs, a trait found only in humans and certain primates.

And its skull…

Those teeth…

“Well, it’s not human. It can’t be. Not even some genetic anomaly. These bones aren’t the product of some sickness or mutation. Whatever it was, I think it was supposed to look like this. But as far as I know, nothing even remotely like it has ever been recorded before.”

“You’re thinking alien, right?”

Nicole’s eyes sparkled, and Frank chuckled. It wasn’t the first time that day that she had brought up ET as a potential explanation for the bizarre remains, and he doubted it would be the last.

“I’m sure it’s not an alien, Nicole. As much as I know you want it to be, it’s not.”

Nicolemock-pouted as another voice joined the conversation, floating up from the base of the dig.

“He’s right, Nic. But I can tell you one thing about it.”

Frank looked down at the woman who’d spoken. Bella was the polar opposite of Nicole: all work and no play, but she was damn good at her job. While Frank, Nicole and Dirk—the final member of the team—had focused on the bizarre skeleton, unable to tear themselves away from it, Bella had worked alone; concentrating only on unearthing the human remains.

“What?”

“Whatever it is,” Bella said, “it was murdered,” she pointed at the smaller, human skeleton, “by this guy.”

Frank frowned.

“I think our human friend here was buried holding a hatchet of some sort,” Bella continued. “Handle’s gone—rotted, most likely—but this was the blade.” She waved a hand at a flat, smooth piece of stone a foot or so away from the human skeleton’s right hand. “Can’t be sure without tests, of course, but I’m willing to bet that this hatchet matches the wound on the side of El Diablo over there’s skull.”

Frank peered at the stone and nodded.

El Diablo. In a way, that seemed to fit.

They had already surmised that the unidentified creature had died as a result of head trauma, and now they had both murderer and murder weapon, but still the facts did not present a clear picture in Frank’s mind. Some ancient people had buried a man right next to something that he had killed; the two skeletons arranged ceremoniously next to each other, almost like a couple sleeping peacefully. But why?

His gaze was drawn back to the huge skeleton once more, as if the bones and teeth and talons exerted some magnetic pull. So many questions, all of them orbiting around a single, vast conundrum.

What the hell were you?

*

The team continued to carefully brush dirt away from bone for another hour, until the gathering dusk began to thwart their efforts. It wouldn’t do to stumble around blindly in the dark, perhaps missing or destroying something vital, and so Frank told the others to wrap it up and head back to their hotel in one of the team’s two cars. Frank would sleep in the other vehicle overnight. No way he was going to leave the site unattended; not yet.

With weary smiles and groans, Nicole, Bella and Dirk began to gather their things.

And all froze as one, rooted to the spot by the sudden noise that split the late evening air.

At first Frank thought it was the sound of distant thunder, the stifling weather breaking at last, perhaps, but as the noise drew closer, he realised what it was. Engines. More than one, approaching fast.

The team squinted up into the gloomy sky as one, and Frank gaped in astonishment when he saw three fat, dark helicopters roar overhead, flying so low that their metal bellies barely cleared the trees. For a moment, bright spotlights bleached the colour from the dig site, and he shaded his eyes until the light was pulled away abruptly.

The choppers disappeared from sight, but the noise of their engines remained ear-splittingly loud. They were circling nearby, Frank realised, searching for a place to land.

A voice on a loudspeaker boomed through the trees, shattering the tension and making Frank flinch.

“This is a restricted area. Remain where you are.”

He glanced at the rest of the team. Nicole, Dirk and Bella were all looking at him with wide eyes, their expressions almost comically baffled. Nicole arched a quizzical eyebrow.

Frank held his hands up.

“I’ve got no more clue about this than you do.”

“Princeton?” Nicole looked like she knew the answer even as she asked the question.

He shook his head, his expression dubious.

“They’re the only ones I called. But this? This isn’t Princeton. This is something else.”

“Police, then?”

“Must be.”

Nicole opened her mouth to reply.

Snapped it shut again, and turned to face the murky forest.

In the distance, Frank heard raised voices and heavy footsteps trampling toward them through the trees. Beyond that, the roaring of the engines was slowly fading. He felt a surge of anxiety, and told himself to stay calm. They had done nothing wrong. If the police were looking for somebody, it clearly wasn’t them, and they were digging with a permit. It had to be a mistake.

Still, some part of him wanted to turn and flee into the woods.

“Frank?”

Dirk’s voice. He sounded as nervous as Frank felt.

“It’s okay, Dirk. Let me deal with this. It has to be some misunderstan—”

The words died in Frank’s throat as he saw the first of them charging through the trees, and knew that the picture was wrong immediately.

Not police.

More than a dozen heavily armed men burst into the clearing, none wearing anything which identified them as law enforcement. They were all dressed in plain black paramilitary uniforms; all wore balaclavas; all had the same unsettlingly cold edge to their gaze.

More questions erupted in Frank’s mind, these ones even more troubling: the government? Men in black? Is Nicole right?

Aliens?

The notion was surely ridiculous.

Frank began to lift his hands in surrender as the men surrounded the dig team and hefted assault rifles, aiming them directly at him.

“Th-there must be a mistake,” he stammered, flushing, before adding a feeble “we have a permit.”

“Not for this, Professor Mather.” A woman’s voice. “Step aside, please.”

The woman, who spoke in a smooth southern drawl, wasn’t dressed like the others. She emerged from the trees behind the armed men, wearing a plain suit and a gun holster that immediately made Frank think CIA. When he moved aside, the woman walked past him and made straight for the dig site. She was young, he realised; mid-twenties at most. Surely too young to be a government agent.

For several seconds, she stood at the edge of the dig, looking down silently.

Frank divided his time between staring at the back of the woman’s head and glancing fearfully at the barrel of the nearest rifle. The tension in the air was intolerable; the air of menace the woman and her people carried like a naked blade. He had to speak.

Had to say something.

“Uh…are you with the government? Because—”

She laughed.

“My name is Jennifer Craven.” She turned to face Frank with genuine mirth in her eyes. “Don’t worry; you haven’t heard of me. I hadn’t heard of you, either; not until a couple of hours ago. Maybe it’s fate that we meet. You believe in fate, Professor?”

Frank searched for words.

Found none.

“You’ve discovered something which my family has been searching for for a very long time, Professor. So long, in fact, that we didn’t really believe it could even exist. When you’re dealing with myths, after all, it’s hard to know which ones to believe.”

Frank’s brow creased.

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course not. That one, that one and…that one.” Jennifer Craven pointed at Dirk, Bella and Nicole, and before Frank could process what was happening, the air in the clearing erupted with rifle fire. He watched in horror as his young team dropped in a storm of blood. They were all dead before they hit the ground. Before the cry of shock could even gather in Frank’s throat.

He stared fearfully at Craven, and at the ruined bodies on the dry soil, and tears stung his eyes. He shook his head and let out a low moan.

Craven motioned at her men to lower their weapons.

“Now, Professor, you have a choice. You can die right now…”

She pointed at the bodies leaking on the floor and nodded encouragingly at Frank.

“O-Or?” Frank breathed, staring with terrible fascination at the ragged holes in Nicole’s long, graceful neck.

So much blood.

“Or: you can give me the honest truth about that hole you’ve been digging over there. And maybe, just maybe…you won’t have to die at all.”

Frank shook his head.

“I don’t under—”

He bit down on the word as Craven took her pistol from its holster and stared at him evenly. She gripped the gun casually, not aiming it at him. There was no need. Frank couldn’t take his eyes off it.

“We got here this morning,” he said, the words tumbling from his mouth chaotically. “We’ve been digging, and—”

He snapped his mouth shut abruptly, aware that he was babbling and it was likely to get him killed.

Taking a deep breath, he started over.

“What do you want to know?”

Craven’s eyes narrowed.

“Who have you told about your work here?”

Frank swallowed painfully, and thought about lying.

“Princeton,” he said weakly. “I called a colleague at Princeton.”

She’ll kill me now.

Craven nodded curtly, almost as though somehow she had expected to hear that.

“Who else?”

Frank’s eyes widened.

“Nobody, I swear to you. Nobody at all. I don’t even know what I’d say. We don’t even know what it is—”

“It’s a vampire, Professor Mather. More pertinently, it’s a dead vampire, and that makes it very interesting indeed. Tell me, Professor,” Craven said, grabbing Frank’s elbow in surprisingly strong fingers and guiding him to the edge of the hole, “the way these skeletons are positioned…do you think it was deliberate?”

Frank stared down at the bones.

“Yes,” he said nervously. “That was our assumption.”

“And would you say that the position of the bodies indicates that the human killed the vampire?”

Frank’s brow furrowed.

Vampires? Is she actually serious?

The woman was clearly a lunatic, but Frank thought better of telling her as much.

“Bella thinks…” He felt a lump forming in his throat, and coughed. “Bella thought so. She was working on the human remains. She thought the human was buried holding some sort of hatchet.”

He pointed at the sharp stone near the bones.

“Thank you, Professor. Very helpful.”

She raised the pistol, aiming it at him, and Frank stared down the barrel of the weapon in horror.

“B-but…you said if I helped you, I wouldn’t have to die!”

Jennifer Craven grinned, and he saw the detached cruelty in her eyes clearly then, and knew exactly what it meant for him.

“Everything dies, Professor Mather.”

1

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Dan Bellamy shut his eyes, searching for some sort of calm, but memories lurked in the darkness, waiting for him like a starving predator.

Stalking him like wounded prey.

*

“Are you sure that you want to go through with this? You don’t have to, you know; not for me. I’d be happy to spend our honeymoon right here, as long as we’re together.”

Elaine smiled, and he was struck by her beauty for the thousandth time; the way her eyes lit up when she looked at him. She was telling the truth, he knew. She would be happy with that, and she wouldn’t resent him for letting his illness taint what was supposed to be the best vacation of their lives.

“I’m sure. You deserve it, and I need to give it to you. A proper honeymoon, I mean.” He rolled his eyes and chuckled when Elaine arched a salacious eyebrow. “Defuse those eyebrows immediately,” he said in a mock-stern tone, and they both laughed.

“I’m serious,” he said earnestly, leaning forward and taking his fiancé’s hand. “I know it’s scary, and I know it’s a big step—”

“A ‘big step’ for an agoraphobic is picking up milk from the nearest store,” Elaine said, and the smile faded from her lips, just a little. “You’re talking about taking a cruise! Three weeks trapped in a giant floating box with thousands of other people, and no way for you to escape from it; no way to get home. That’s far more of a giant leap than a big step, and you know it.”

He nodded.

“You’re right. But I have to do this, El. Not just for you; for me, too. I have to beat this. Normal people go on honeymoons; they take cruises without a second thought. All I want is to be normal again.”

“We’ve talked about the N word,” Elaine said sternly, and gave him a playful punch on the shoulder.

“Okay, okay,” he said, mock-flinching away from her. “Not normal, then. Healthy. Better?”

Elaine surprised him by darting forward again, this time planting a kiss on his lips.

“Much better,” she said. “I have my doubts about you doing this, but—”

“So does my therapist,” he interrupted with a grin.

Elaine ignored him.

“—but, if you’re determined, then I believe you can get through it. You know I do.”

She left a little extra emphasis on those last two words, her eyes sparkling with excitement, and he felt his heart swell with happiness.

Elaine had protested when he first raised the idea, reeling off all of the perfectly rational reasons why a man with his condition absolutely should not book a cruise, but he knew as he looked into her eyes that, deep down, she wanted to say ‘yes,’ and that she was just being cautious; protecting him. That was the way it had been, ever since the attack: every decision, no matter how small, had to take how Dan might react under consideration. His illness had done that to her—to them both—but he could see the excitement in her eyes now; the flicker of hope. Of course she wanted to take a cruise.

And, as much as the prospect of actually going through with it unnerved him, he found to his surprise that on some level, he wanted to as well. The more he thought about it, the more right it felt. Scary, sure, but in a good way. Different to the terror that had crushed him for too long; this was a fear that felt healthy and positive and, yes, even conquerable.

He’d endured over a year of therapy, and had sampled more medications than he could count. Klonopin and Zopiclone and Mirtazapine and Fluoxetine and others whose names he couldn’t even recall. One by one, the doctors took him through the drugs, searching for the elusive combination that would quiet the shrieking in his mind. The process of trial and error, they informed him, was regrettable but necessary. It was, after all, impossible to predict how any one individual brain might react to treatment.

As a result of the search, his mood had oscillated wildly between despairing numbness and a hyper-alert state of anxiety. The only constant amid the chemical chaos had been the fear; insidious and resilient, the cockroach of the emotions. For two years, it was as though his fight or flight response had been permanently engaged, constantly yelling at him to pay attention to the fact that he was unsafe. Eventually, submerged by a tsunami of modern and alternative medicine, even the iron grip of that clammy dread had started to weaken.

Progress. Real and tangible.

It had been more than six months since his last seizure, and on more than one occasion in recent weeks he had left the house all by himself, venturing out into the world for a few giddy moments.

Above all he was feeling a little better. Maybe enough that he was ready to take that giant leap forward. Ready to finally overcome the crippling condition that had shaped his life ever since a street thug buried a knife into his skull. All that was left was for him to actually do it. Take action; get back out into the world and live again.

“Earth to Dan. Come in, Dan. Over.”

Elaine waved at him and grinned. He had been lost in his thoughts for several seconds. He blinked, and returned her smile.

“I am determined,” he said. “This won’t set me back, I promise you. This will help fix me. Besides, have you seen the brochure? The ship is massive. I’m sure that if I get too freaked out, there will be plenty of places for me to hide away from the normal folks.”

He smiled as Elaine pursed her lips. The N word again.

“I’ll be like the hunchback of the Oceanus,” he said with a laugh. “Lurking in the shadows, scaring the normal passengers.”

He pulled a face, and Elaine giggled despite herself. She always admonished him for making jokes at his own expense, but in the end, she always giggled.

“Come on, El,” he said brightly. “Let’s book the tickets. It’s just a cruise, right? I mean, how scary could it possibly be?”

She threw her arms around him and hugged so fiercely that he feared for his ribs, and he knew then that the debate was over. Cost be damned, fear be damned. It would be the honeymoon of a lifetime. The one this wonderful woman deserved.

And it would fix him.

He hugged her tightly, burying his face in her hair and breathing in her scent.

No.

Not her scent.

Blood.

He pulled away from her, and saw Elaine’s once-beautiful, sparkling eyes fixed and glassy. Her mouth hanging open in a silent, terrified scream.

And the creature hulking behind her, its hideous talons hooked underneath her jawbone, beginning to pull, and—

*

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

His eyes flared open, his mind retreating from the once-joyous memory as it became toxic.

Back to the nightmare of reality.

Somewhere, the shipping container had sprung a leak. Just a little one, by the sound of it, but it would be enough. The air in the dark space was finite, and each drop of water that forced its way through the battered steel walls merely accelerated the end.

For Dan, it couldn’t come soon enough.

He wished over and over that he had died on the ship; that he had been torn apart in a single, merciful instant when the Oceanus finally exploded. Because when it came down to it, a choice between a moment of pain and a lifetime of it wasn’t much of a choice at all.

And pain was all that Dan had left.

His body was wracked by it: in addition to the bright chasms of fire that a taloned hand had ripped across his chest, his body felt like it was covered in bruises. When the container had been thrown clear of the blast, Dan had tumbled around inside like a ragdoll, crashing into the metal walls and colliding solidly with the man who shared the dark, sinking prison with him.

Herbert Rennick.

Herb was a talker, and apparently hadn’t considered the fact that every word he uttered used up more of the container’s dwindling oxygen. Or maybe he didn’t care either. He sounded young—certainly younger than Dan’s twenty-nine—and terribly afraid. Maybe that was why he kept talking. Maybe to Herb, the silence was the scariest thing of all.

Dan didn’t want to talk.

Didn’t want to listen.

The darkness in the container was absolute, like being buried alive, and when he tried to tune out Herb’s incessant chatter, he found that the only thing his eyes had to look at was the past. Yet, no matter which happy memory he tried to conjure up for his mind to retreat to for these final minutes of his life, what he saw was Elaine’s face as it had been in her own final moments; her absolute terror when she realised that she was about to die, alone, at the hands of a creature whose very existence was an impossibility.

I could have saved her.

You were busy crying and falling apart; busy being Pathetic Dan. You should have saved her.

He grimaced.

Didn’t want to think, either.

All he wanted was to wait for the end in peace.

He tried to clear his head. According to his therapist, it was possible for a person to remove themselves from their thoughts and feelings, to become no more than an impartial observer in their own mind, and, through that detachment, to find some respite from emotions that might otherwise overwhelm or paralyse. The trick was simply to focus only on the physical world, on physical sensation: the texture of a coin in your hand, perhaps, or the taste of a breath mint. To concentrate on anything that wasn’t torturous introspection.

In a therapeutic setting, the technique—mindfulness—had yielded some modest rewards for Dan. In the container, things worked out differently.

That was, perhaps, due to the smell. It was difficult to focus on clearing his mind when every breath he took delivered the sickly-sweet odour of charred meat.

Herb’s arm.

Shortly after Herb had first started to talk, he had explained to Dan that his arm had caught fire back on the Oceanus, and that he couldn’t even feel it.

“No pain. I think that means the nerves are all burned away, right? Second- or third-degree burns, must be,” Herb had proclaimed. He had almost sounded proud of it. “Guess I’ll need a skin graft. Do me a favour and call me an ambulance, mate?”

Herb had laughed at that, before descending into a violent coughing fit. The fire—and the smoke—had apparently damaged more than just Herb’s skin.

Dan didn’t respond.

The minutes wore on.

He remained impassive as Herb ranted about his father and about what he called The Great Lie. How his dear old Dad was responsible for the deaths of thousands. Charles Rennick, Herb said, was a servant of darkness.

The entire Rennick family was a part of a global cult which Herb referred to as the Order. A network of families which had existed for thousands of years, keeping the existence of vampires secret; feeding them when they awoke from ‘hibernation’ and covering up the catastrophic results. His father’s next move, Herb said confidently, would be to throw himself at the mercy of the rest of the vampires, to beg forgiveness for the sacrifice that had gone so disastrously wrong. More souls might have to be offered—perhaps a lot more—and the Order would find some way to bury it. They always had.

It can’t be allowed, Herb had snarled. We have to stop it, he said, over and over. The world has to know. We can fight them.

Dan said nothing.

None of it mattered. What mattered was gone, and dwelling on the reasons for the loss—or even dreaming up implausible ways to avenge it—was a raw, scraping sort of pain. When he allowed himself to think about her—about that beautiful, terrified face in the darkness—it felt like a part of his mind was being taken from him; peeling away like the burnt flesh on Herb’s injured arm.

Better to focus on nothing.

He counted his breaths, trying to tune out Herb’s incessant muttering.

In, out. In, out.

He wondered how many more he had left to take.

In, out.

In.

Out.

Finally, even Herb fell silent, and Dan knew the reason why: the air in the container felt like it was getting thicker. His breaths were becoming shallower, he realised. More rapid, like each inhalation couldn’t quite deliver the required amount of oxygen to his bloodstream.

Not long now.

He shut his eyes in the darkness and did his best to think of nothing, letting his final minutes slip away.

And then the damn doors opened, and scraps of fading moonlight illuminated the interior of the container as a chill wind blasted fresh oxygen into Dan’s lungs. Cold, grey rain fell outside—the tail end of the storm that had ripped the sky apart for several hours—and even before he stepped wearily from the container, Dan recognised the rolling steel of the Atlantic Ocean in the distance.

He was on another ship.

Still alive.

And there would be no peace.

*

Herb was already outside the container, snarling at somebody that Dan could not see. He followed the bigger man out in a daze, stepping onto the deck of a boat that was much smaller than the one he had left hours earlier.

He shivered at the cold; the rain soaked through his clothes in an instant. He was still wearing shorts and a faded T-shirt; what he had jokingly called his honeymoon outfit less than twenty four hours earlier, when there had been somebody to laugh at his lame gags. When he had been capable of making them.

Now, his honeymoon outfit was bloodstained; the thin fabric reeked of death and did nothing to keep the biting wind at bay.

Yet, despite the searing cold, Dan felt his internal temperature rising inexorably; the emotions that he had tried so hard to suppress spiralling beyond his control in an instant.

Herb pointed a gun at a broad-shouldered man who looked to be in his early sixties. The older man knelt on the deck, his head bowed.

“I’m not going to kill you, Dad,” Herb said. “I couldn’t. You’re family. Blood. To some of us, that actually means something. I wish I could kill you, but I can’t.” He turned and tossed the pistol toward Dan, who caught it instinctively. It felt remarkably heavy in his hands.

“That guy can, though.”

For a moment, Dan just stood there, stupefied. He was dimly aware that there were several people clustered somewhere behind him on the deck. Their hostility when he caught the weapon was an invisible hand that pressed into his back, but he could not focus on them; only on the man kneeling on the deck before him, his piercing grey eyes wide and trained on the gun that Dan clutched in uncertain fingers.

This, then, was the servant of darkness that Herb had ranted about in the container. Dear old Dad. Charles Rennick, the man who had sentenced the three thousand souls aboard the Oceanus to death.

The one who was responsible for—

Dan saw her face in his mind again, twisted by animal panic; dying alone.

He dropped his gaze to the weapon, watching it tremble in his grip.

His first instinct was to use the gun on himself; to grant himself the oblivion that had been so cruelly snatched from him at the last. Once, he had thought he could go through with killing himself; had believed that suicide was the only way to stop the terrible pain that buzzed in his head incessantly. But he had made a promise that he would never go through with it.

A promise.

Tears filled his eyes; blurred his vision.

He lifted the gun unsteadily.

Kill him.

For her.

He choked back a sob as grief and despair overwhelmed him, and aimed the gun at the old man’s face.

Kill them all.

The thought erupted into his shattered mind so easily; so naturally. Kill them all. Just like that. He pictured himself pulling the trigger again and again, could almost see the perforated bodies dropping around him. The blood. His mind pitched alarmingly; a feeling like a rollercoaster cresting a huge drop and plummeting toward the ground. A wave of dizziness and nausea washed through him.

Dan’s hands shook wildly, and the air around him congealed. Suddenly, his chest felt like it was being crushed in a vice, and each attempt to draw in a breath lodged white-hot razors in his throat.

Familiar sensation.

Crawling up my neck.

Unsafe. Get away.

Must get away.

Adrift on the terrible black river, surging and boiling; carrying me toward something awful. Something unstoppable, and—

His head felt like it was cracking open; as though the contents were seeping out, expelled like toxic waste.

She’s dead...

Dan blinked, and suddenly he wasn’t seeing an old man kneeling in front of him anymore; wasn’t seeing the ship and the falling rain. He wasn’t even seeing the face of his dead wife. All were gone, torn away like a band-aid; reality submerged beneath a terrifying vision of cascading dark water.

The black river roared, and the dam that he had sought to build with medication and therapy finally crumbled.

Dan’s mind began to flood.

Somewhere through the tears and the blackness that ringed his vision, spreading like a cancer, he vaguely understood that Charles Rennick was rising to his feet, grasping for the gun frantically.

Dan squeezed the trigger, and the back of Rennick’s head exploded. He died instantly, but when his body collapsed to the deck in the blood and the rain, Dan stood over the corpse and fired again.

Again.

Again.

And with each bullet fired, the corpse at his feet twitched, and the darkness in Dan’s mind intensified.

After the fourth shot—which took out most of Charles Rennick’s jaw—Dan felt the gun slipping from numb fingers that no longer seemed to belong to him, clattering to a deck which he could no longer see.

The world tumbled and spun as the boiling black tide swept away his thoughts.

Foul water in my mouth—

Can’t breathe—

Dan bent double and retched as a flare went up in his mind; white-hot pain that lanced across the back of his skull. His jaw clenched involuntarily and he bit deeply into the soft flesh of his cheek as his neck began to spasm.

Tasted blood.

And the river took him.

The last thought that went through his mind before the seizure snatched away his consciousness and he collapsed to the deck was that there was, at least, a fair chance that he might never wake up.

2

A stunned silence fell on the deck of the trawler, and for a moment even the ocean seemed to hold its breath.

Herb watched in open-mouthed astonishment as Dan Bellamy collapsed.

The guy hadn’t spoken a word in hours, and Herb might even have assumed that he had lapsed into unconsciousness in the container, if it weren’t for the occasional low moan of despair or soft grunt of pain. In that heavy darkness, Herb got the distinct impression that he was sharing the space with a broken, tortured man.

Herb’s oldest brother had given his life so that Dan would live, because Dan was the only man in recorded history who had killed a vampire. That made him important, but as earnest and certain as Edgar had been that Dan might hold the key to resisting the vampires, Herb had a hard time believing it, especially now that he could actually see the guy properly for the first time.

Dan was slim—almost scrawny—and of average height, with dark eyes almost buried under a mop of hair that made him look younger than he probably was. He didn’t look like a fighter. What he looked was either scared out of his wits, or crazy. Perhaps both.

The fit—seizure; whatever it was—only served to reinforce the notion that events on the Oceanus must have fractured the poor guy’s mind. Herb wouldn’t have thought it were possible for a man’s muscles to spasm so violently, but when Dan hit the deck, his limbs jerked hard enough that Herb expected to hear the snapping of bone at any moment. Dan’s collapse was, in a way, even more violent and shocking than his father’s execution.

Every member of the trawler’s small crew watched in amazement, unable to tear their gaze away until Dan finally stopped thrashing and lost consciousness.

And the ocean finally exhaled.

Herb turned his attention to his father’s ruined corpse.

Furious, trembling hours spent in the container, dreaming up the harsh truths he was going to deliver to Charles Rennick, but as soon as he saw the old bastard’s face, the rage had just been too much. He had no idea what would happen when he tossed the gun to Dan, but Herb had spent his entire life listening to his father preach about fate this and destiny that.

So Herb let fate decide, figuring that maybe for his father, fate—if such a thing even existed—might look exactly like Dan Bellamy.

So it proved.

And it felt infuriatingly like Charles Rennick got off easy.

Herb took a couple of steps forward, stooping to retrieve the pistol which Dan had dropped. Four more paces, and he was staring down directly on the punctured, leaking remains of his father. He knelt and retrieved a second gun from the dead man’s waistband. That had been the only gun permitted on the trawler: even with his followers comprehensively brainwashed, Charles would not allow anyone else to carry a firearm. Too much potential for trouble, he had said.

Herb grimaced. The old bastard had been right about that, at least. He stood and tucked both guns into his belt, turning to face the rest of the crew.

They regarded him with fear, but also with reverence and loyalty that made his nerves quiver. His father’s words came back to him, laced with contempt.

You’re going to kill me? Then who’ll be the head of the Rennick family? You?

According to custom, Herb was the head of the family now, though he was the last actual Rennick left. The rest of Charles Rennick’s people weren’t blood, but families who had attached themselves to the Rennicks over the generations; people for whom the vampires had become gods to worship. Herb’s duty now was to take his father’s position as the leader of those people, to represent the Order and—above all else—to keep the oath; protect the ancient truce.

To feed the vampires.

Custom.

Duty.

Tradition.

Destiny.

Herb drew in a deep, shuddering breath.

I’m in charge now.

The crew looked at him like machines awaiting the input of their next command, and the corpse on the deck stared at him reproachfully, making his emotions tumble.

With a grunt, Herb grabbed a fistful of his dead father’s coat, and dragged the steaming corpse to the low rail that ran around the deck.

When he tossed the body overboard, Herb stared down at it for several moments as it refused to sink; bobbing stubbornly on the dark water. What was left of his father’s eyes seemed to point accusingly at him, no matter which way the waves rolled.

Herb turned away.

“Turn this boat around,” he said in a flat tone to nobody in particular. “We’re going home.”

*

The Sea Shanty had been a factory fishing trawler in a previous life. At a little over one hundred and twenty feet, it would have looked like a toy alongside the cruise ship its black-market weaponry had sunk hours earlier, but in its heyday the Shanty had been just about the largest dragger money could buy.

Two huge freezer holds—once piled floor-to-ceiling with squirming life plucked from the Atlantic—devoured the majority of the space on the boat. The engine room took up most of the rest. What was left over was all about compromise: humans were afforded very little space to live and work in, no more than skinny corridors connecting a few anaemic rooms which were barely big enough for the average man to stand up straight in.

The deck area, when the Shanty had been a working vessel, had been a complicated network of potential death traps which tested the awareness of the boat’s crew continually, underlining that people and their comfort were strictly a secondary concern. After all, it was the fish in the Shanty’s belly that truly mattered.

The larger of the two holds was reliving its glory days; once more it carried precious cargo.

Herb had two of the crew place Dan inside, atop a pile of rags and filthy blankets. All of Herb’s attempts to wake the man—up to and including delivering a slap that made his palm sing—had failed. Whatever was wrong with the guy was far beyond the medical knowledge of anyone on the trawler. If he had a role to play in destiny, Herb thought sourly, Dan Bellamy would have to come through whatever was ailing him of his own accord.

He padlocked the hold, slipping the key into his pocket, and made his way back out onto the deck, his head bowed against the wind and rain until he reached the wheelhouse. Three of the crew were in there, watching him nervously, but Herb moved right past them, stepping into a smaller room to the rear which his father had turned into a sort of private office.

Inside, there was a small desk and a couple of chairs and not much else, other than a half-empty bottle of brandy which was rolling slowly from one side of the room to the other with each wave that buffeted the hull. Herb snatched up the liquor and slumped into one of the chairs, and for a while he focused on nothing other than the pleasant burning sensation in his throat as he took large gulps.

Through the gathering fog which the alcohol lowered across his thoughts, the question came, as he knew it would.

What am I doing?

Herb knew what he ought to be doing, and that was running; pointing the Shanty at some remote island somewhere and never looking back. He had always wanted to run, to just pick a direction and get as far away from the fanaticism of the compound on which he had been raised as he possibly could. In the end, he told himself that he stayed for his brothers, but would have readily conceded that it was more likely a simple matter of cowardice. Even if he had managed to flee, his father would have come after him. Rennick blood, after all, came with a sacred obligation.

Even if Charles Rennick had let his youngest son go, some other part of the Order would have hunted him relentlessly, until they were certain that he was dead—along with everything he knew.

He had failed.

Failed to run.

Failed to persuade his brothers that mass murder would cost them all their souls if not their lives, that they were far from the good guys with a noble burden that their father had always maintained.

And, even while Herb was aboard the Oceanus, surrounded by death and madness, he had tried to save a man—just one man; to do one thing that was good amongst all the horror…

…and that man was dead.

Corrosive memories flooded back to Herb, crystal clear and debilitating: the wall of fire and the hideous monster that strolled through it nonchalantly, laughing as it prepared to devour him; the security officer blowing his own head off rather than face the abomination on the other side of a barricaded door. Edgar, pushing Herb inside the shipping container and locking the doors, turning to face the monster that he knew was behind him.

And screaming right outside those doors as the last of the Three tore him to pieces. That had been an armour-piercing sound, and hearing it had cast a sickly pall of grief and anger over Herb’s thoughts which he doubted would ever truly lift.

He shook his head thickly, and a groan escaped his lips. He had to occupy his mind with something. Reliving the nightmare would drive him mad.

He took another large swallow of the brandy and began to rifle through the desk drawers, finally finding what he was looking for in the lowest of them: a first-aid tin which looked like it hadn’t been opened in decades. He pried off the lid and surveyed the predictably disappointing contents. A single half-empty bottle of antiseptic; a box of painkillers that had to be years out of date; a faded yellow bandage.

He set the open tin on the desk in front of him.

Took another drink.

Gritted his teeth as he peeled off his jacket and removed what felt like most of his left arm along with it.

Wincing more out of revulsion than pain, Herb dropped his gaze to the burned limb. His pale flesh had been painted a livid red and was covered with weeping blisters. Along the forearm, where the fire had really taken hold, Herb saw that his skin was pockmarked by wide, shallow craters: layers of meat and fat that had melted away to leave revolting indentations. The arm smelled sweet and cloying and sickly, like a plate of pork and apple sauce that had been left to rot in the sun.

Herb choked back the urge to retch and dumped his jacket on the floor before prising the crusty cap off the ancient bottle of antiseptic. When he poured the clear liquid across his wounds, he was grateful that he still felt no pain, but the sight of his own dead flesh being sluiced away was its own kind of torment.

Once the small bottle was empty, he wrapped the arm tightly in the old bandage, uncertain whether a burn should be covered or left to breathe, and ultimately deciding not to risk leaving his skin exposed.

When he was done, he took another long drink.

Set the brandy down on the desk.

And dropped his head into his hands as the tears came at last.

3

Herb was still staring at his feet, sniffling softly and trying to sift through the chaos in his mind, when the door opened and footsteps made their way toward him. He knew there was only one man on the Shanty who would dare to follow him into the cabin and, in the end, he was surprised it had taken that man so long.

“Hi, Jeremy,” Herb said without lifting his gaze. “Thought you’d come sooner.”

“Had to weigh up the odds of you shooting me. There’s a lot of dying going on, after all.”

Herb snorted.

“Crew’s a little nervous, Herb. I don’t mind admitting that includes me.”

He glanced up and saw genuine concern etched on Jeremy Pruitt’s face. Pruitt was the older man of the two by far, getting ready to wave a sour goodbye to his late-fifties and sporting a balding pate that made him look like he belonged in a monastery somewhere; an impression that was undone somewhat by his hulking physique.

Jeremy had been a part of the family since before Herb was born, filling an ill-defined but necessary role at Charles Rennick’s side as adviser, bodyguard and, Herb had long suspected, occasional assassin. There had been times through the years when the Rennick family secret had come close to being revealed. On those occasions, it was Jeremy who ensured silence, one way or another.

Despite his murky, violent past, the big man was one of the few at the compound that didn’t treat Herb like a live grenade, and he considered Jeremy the closest thing he had to a friend. They had even talked openly at times about the oath, and about Herb’s unswerving belief that the creatures his family was sworn to protect—and the whole secret history of the world that went along with that duty—could not possibly exist. Jeremy disagreed of course, but while he was certainly a believer, he was no fanatic.

Unlike the rest of them.

When Herb had been preoccupied with the fantasy of running away, it was Jeremy that had dominated his thoughts. The older man would, in all probability, help Herb with the practicalities of fleeing the compound, and then immediately be tasked with hunting him down, and perhaps even killing him. Knowing Jeremy, if Charles Rennick had given such an order, he would have carried it out, friendship or no friendship. What Jeremy would do now—now that the man who had been his personal dictator for decades was dead, Herb had no idea.

But he was glad that he was the one with the guns.

Jeremy slumped heavily into the chair opposite Herb’s.

“Do I have a mutiny on my hands?” Herb smiled thinly and offered the older man the brandy. Jeremy waved the bottle away.

“Please,” he said. “Loyalty isn’t a problem; you know that. At least, not for those people.”

He gave a knowing stare, and Herb felt his mood darken.

“He deserved to die.”

Herb infused those four words with venom; poisonous enough that Jeremy couldn’t possibly miss the fact that his father’s death was not up for debate.

Jeremy held his calloused hands up in an apologetic gesture.

“Just saying. These people have been a part of your family for generations. They don’t serve the Order. They serve the Rennicks. You are the Order.”

Herb grunted, but said nothing.

After a moment’s pause, Jeremy cleared his throat a little awkwardly.

“I’m sorry, about your brothers.”

Herb’s eyes clouded, and he pointed them at the floor.

“I tried to stop it, right from the start. They wouldn’t listen. Nobody ever listened. Maybe my father had the right idea. Perhaps the only way to make sure your point gets noticed is to underline it with blood.”

“Yeah, that sounds like something he would have said. Never thought I’d hear it from you, though.”

Herb shook his head angrily, and for a few moments a dark silence settled on the small room. He wanted desperately to change the subject, but it appeared that all subjects were currently soaked in violence, one way or another.

“When was the last time you were in contact with the compound?”

Jeremy’s expression hardened.

“Not since the Oceanus was sunk. Your father was unwilling to accept his failure, not until he saw it for himself. He wanted to find the container before he called home.”

“We need to warn them,” Herb replied, “tell them that the rest of the nest may rise.”

Jeremy shook his head.

“Impossible.”

Herb’s eyes narrowed.

“Why?”

Jeremy sighed.

“Your father had the satellite phone in his pocket. I wish you’d checked before you decided to throw him overboard.”

Herb squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his jaw, and silence fell once more. It was Jeremy that broke it.

“The guy who pulled the trigger, what’s his story?”

“According to Edgar, he killed two of the Three with a cleaver.”

Jeremy arched an eyebrow.

“That guy?”

Herb snorted a laugh.

“I know, right? But Edgar was very definite. He thought Dan Bellamy was important. I imagine, at the end, my father thought so, too.”

He grimaced.

“Dan Bellamy,” Jeremy repeated softly, as though the name might mean something to him. Apparently not. “Did he talk, in the container?”

“He called out for somebody, once. His wife, I think. Don’t think he knew exactly where he was. Once he realised, though? No; not a word. I guess he’s in shock.”

Jeremy looked dubious.

“Never seen shock do that to a person before.”

Herb had no response to that.

“Did Edgar say anything else?”

“Just that he had told Dad about the vampires dying, and that Dad’s response was to fucking kill us all.”

“He hoped to cast this as an accident, I think. Maybe even claim that it was the vampires who caused the explosion and hope that the rest of the nest wouldn’t retaliate. Losing his own sons added a certain…authenticity to his story.”

Jeremy delivered the words without emotion. Herb tried to receive them in a similar fashion. Failed by a wide margin.

“‘Authenticity,’” he spat bitterly, and snatched up the almost-empty brandy bottle. He took a mouthful. “That sounds about right. Lies piled on top of lies; that’s the Rennick way. Tell me, Jeremy, did he know, before all this? Did he ever give you any indication that there might be people out there who the vampires can’t control?”

“No. There’s nothing in the texts, Herb, nothing that—”

“The texts,” Herb snarled. “More lies.”

Jeremy blinked at the ferocity in Herb’s tone. “Even if that’s true, nobody has found any evidence to contradict them. Think about it, Herb. Your own family has searched for information on the vampires for centuries, and what have you found? Nothing. The Order exists in more than thirty countries; families just like yours, all of them searching for exactly the same thing. Christ, the entire Order has devoted itself to uncovering the truth, and all they have discovered is evidence that these things can’t be resisted.”

He sighed.

“So maybe your friend Dan Bellamy is one of a kind. Good for him. But what use is that to anybody? The vampires have nests across the entire planet, probably including many that we don’t even know about. We’d need an army of Dan Bellamys to fight them.”

Herb felt his irritation rising. It was exactly the same sort of argument that he had heard countless times back at the compound. Devout belief in a bunch of ancient artefacts which claimed that the vampires were gods and that servitude was the only option. Nobody would listen to Herb when he tried to tell them that something being written a long time ago didn’t necessarily make it true, and that recent history was full of lies concocted by the Order, which made it likely that ancient history was as well. It seemed that only he was able to countenance the idea that the ancient clay and stone tablets which formed the bulk of the Order’s knowledge might be inscribed with lies.

“And what if he’s not one of a kind? What if there are thousands like him? Millions? What if it’s something to do with his genes, or his upbringing, or the fact he eats Tasty Wheat for breakfast? Dan was one of three thousand on the ship. What if those are the odds? If one in every three thousand people can resist them, there’s an army. I mean, how many of these things can there possibly be out there? Why all this trouble just to feed three? Doesn’t that suggest that there are a lot less vampires out there than the texts claim?”

Jeremy shook his head firmly.

“If anyone had found evidence—any evidence at all—that there were ever any other Dan Bellamys out there, we would know.”

“Would we really? You think my father would have shared that information with the rest of the Order?”

Jeremy said nothing.

The more Herb thought about it, the more certain he felt. His father would have killed Dan Bellamy at best, or handed him over to the vampires at worst. Anything to preserve the status quo.

“Do you know that virtually all historians agree that the Great Fire of London only killed five people?” he asked.

Jeremy stared at him, puzzled. He did know plenty about the Great Fire of 1666, of course. It was an event that was branded onto the mind of everybody who lived at the Rennick compound, the exact date celebrated annually like a twisted Christmas.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it,” Herb continued, “how the truth can get twisted until it no longer exists? By 1667 my family was wealthy beyond all measure, fattened by meat plucked from the bones of a burning city. It’s the same story all over the world, everywhere the Order exists. They get fed, we get rich. We become people of influence and wealth. We get to shape history. I wonder, if a Dan Bellamy had been walking around London in 1666, whether my ancestors would have viewed his existence as a good thing? For all we know, other families have stumbled across people just like Dan, and have buried that particular truth along with all the others.”

He focused on the horizon.

They were travelling east at full speed, heading toward the sun that had not yet risen.

“I wonder what else is a lie,” Herb continued softly. “According to the texts, the vampires were super-predators, and they killed us so relentlessly that we were at the point of extinction. That’s why they chose to stay underground, because the alternative was to feed themselves out of existence right along with us. They sleep in order to give their crops time to grow.”

“And?”

Herb flinched, so lost in his thoughts and the dark, rolling waves that for a moment he had forgotten that Jeremy was standing next to him.

“And there were only three to feed. During the Great Fire, it was just two. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

He glanced at Jeremy. The older man’s expression was pitched somewhere between confusion and concern.

“Wonder what?”

“Whether they buried themselves out of our reach because they were killing too many of us…or because we were killing too many of them.”

For a long time, Jeremy said nothing, and the two men stared out at the dark horizon in silence. Herb thought he knew what the older man was thinking: exactly the same question that burned in his own mind.

The texts—every scrap of information uncovered by the Order, right across the planet—all agreed on one thing: that the vampires would rise to punish a failed sacrifice. Entire civilizations had supposedly been wiped out as a result of their failure to satisfy the creatures’ demand for blood. What if that, too, was a lie? For all Herb knew, there were no other vampires in England. Maybe the entirety of the English nest had already been killed in the mid-Atlantic.

“They’re going to come for you, you know.”

Herb blinked, and switched his gaze to Jeremy.

“The vampires? Yeah, I’ve heard all the prophesies of doom. Bloodlines that fail them are erased from history—”

“Not just the vampires. The rest of the Order. We were supposed to sail north and broadcast a fake distress signal, remember? The Oceanus will be discovered sooner rather than later, and that means that this boat is full of loose threads, Herb. You should know enough about what happens to loose threads in situations like this.”

Herb shrugged.

“We’re in the age of information now, Jeremy. It’s time the world knew everything.”

“And a lot of people will die as a result.”

“A lot of people have already died, and all because we believed these things were gods. But they’re not immortal. We can fight them, whether Dan Bellamy is a one-off or not. While they have been sleeping, the human race has spent centuries perfecting the art of killing. We have weapons these things can only dream of.”

Jeremy’s shoulders slumped.

“Guns and bombs and tanks. I doubt you are the first to consider such a course of action. But what good are those weapons if we have no idea where to point them? What effect can a man holding a gun have, when they can take his mind before he can pull the trigger?”

Herb returned his gaze to the horizon.

“I guess we’ll find out, one way or another. Assuming that there are any other vampires out there.”

“And if you’re wrong about all of this?”

“Then I’ll be wrong. It won’t be the first time.”

“And you’re willing to gamble your life?”

Herb shrugged.

“I’m meant to be dead already, remember?”

Jeremy sighed wearily, and began to make his way back toward the wheelhouse. After a few paces, he paused.

“You know,” he said, “your father always said you were reckless. Never one to think things through.”

“And now he’s dead,” Herb growled in a low, dangerous tone.

Jeremy nodded.

“For my part, I always thought you were both more alike than either of you ever realised.”

Jeremy left the deck, leaving Herb alone with his racing thoughts.

He checked his watch. Almost five in the morning. It was late in the year, and dawn wouldn’t break over England for a couple of hours yet. Sunrise had been their final deadline for returning the Three to the earth, where more of their kind were supposedly hibernating. If that were true, by the time light washed across the land, the rest of the nest would surely realise that their kin were not coming back.

Herb was sure that they would not attack the surface in daylight. The texts weren’t lying about that part: the vampires had demanded total darkness aboard the Oceanus, and had been sealed in the shipping container to avoid all light during their transportation. The notion that sunlight might actually kill them was fanciful; just another part of the false mythology that had been allowed to spring up around the vampires over the centuries, but they avoided light nonetheless.

If there were more vampires out there, ready to rise and avenge the death of their kind, he figured he had around twelve hours of daylight to figure out how to deal with them; twelve hours to unwrap the riddle of Dan Bellamy.

Twelve hours.

4

Click.

Barry Reid shut the front door to the farmhouse softly behind him, and his face twisted into a sour grimace.

Rain again.

He stepped out into the still-dark morning with a sinking heart, and felt the downpour plaster his prematurely greying hair to his forehead in seconds. The weather forecasts had been right: a storm had blown in from the Atlantic overnight. Just like every other damn night.

The year was shaping up to be the wettest on record; a hard-won accolade in the UK. Winter lurked around the corner, and the sun had barely shown all summer. Instead, there was the endless rain. In some low-lying coastal areas, that had meant flooding, and vaguely hysterical responses from a government that did all but declare it was going to be tough on weather and tough on the causes of weather.

Barry’s farm, a few miles inland from the coastal town of Brighton, had not flooded, but the inclement weather had a profound effect nonetheless. Most people probably assumed that drought was a farmer’s worst enemy, and they weren’t exactly wrong, but wet day after wet day could be just as troublesome.

Amazing how something as simple as an extended period of rain—as damn arbitrary—could put a man’s livelihood at risk. The silage crop had suffered a near-fatal blow from the lack of anything like a summer. Without silage stocks, Barry was forced to resort to buying in animal feed to get the cows through the winter, and the price of the stuff just kept on going up. Meanwhile, the supermarkets continued to drive the price of milk down, and Barry found himself caught in the middle, slowly having the life squeezed out of his business.

Getting up at four every morning was starting to feel a lot like drowning, and every hour spent tending to the farm as it haemorrhaged a little more money had become a dreadful burden that squatted heavily on Barry’s soul. He could almost see the pennies draining away in front of his eyes, minute by minute. Now, each morning when Barry left the farmhouse and headed for the tractor to begin his first circuit of the land, he carried a vague sense of dread with him which lasted all day.

And he got soaked, of course. There was always that.

Barry broke into a trot as a fork of lightning gave the darkness an early taste of the daylight to come. For a moment, his land lit up around him, bright and bleached of colour, but he paid it no attention. His surroundings were as familiar to him as oxygen; he could have navigated the farm wearing a blindfold.

The house behind him, garage to his right. Outbuildings to the left—mostly containing tools and supplies, along with a few chickens. A small barn directly ahead that was a prelude to the much larger version further down the dirt track that led to the heart of his two hundred acres. He usually parked the tractor in the larger barn, but had been so tired the previous evening that he hadn’t bothered, instead leaving it close to the house. He was glad of that now; less distance to run in the storm.

He reached the tractor and yanked open the door, and had hauled himself into the seat with a grunt before his mind processed the image his eyes had seen properly, the odd detail that had lurked in his peripheral vision as he ran from the house.

He froze, his hand still on the open door, his arm getting soaked, but all of a sudden, he didn’t notice the rain at all.

What the hell was that?

Just for a moment there, during that monochrome snapshot taken by the storm, he could have sworn he saw something moving beyond the main barn a few hundred feet ahead of him. Something big. He might have dismissed it as an animal, maybe even one of his own, but for the fact that in that brief instant, Barry was certain that whatever he had seen was walking upright.

Like a man.

Righteous anger sparked deep in his gut. It wasn’t just the rain and the silage that had ruined his year; it was the sickness in the animals: a relentless tide of poor health that no vet seemed able to stem nor adequately explain, and which slowly ate away at the cows and sheep. Way more deaths among the sheep, particularly, than at any other time that Barry could recall. And all in the same year that he received several offers for his land from the wealthy bastards who owned the land adjacent to his own.

Strange folks, the Rennicks, no doubt about that. When a sheep had once broken through the fence and ended up on Rennick land, Barry caught a glimpse of the house, which seemed almost deliberately hidden by trees, and could have sworn he saw people dressed in robes, like monks. Local rumour had it that the Rennicks ran some sort of commune out there in the woods. When the locals had taken a few drinks, those rumours darkened: the Rennick family was involved in strange rituals, they said. Occult practices, they said. Satanism.

There were a lot of them, Barry was sure of that. Maybe they wanted his land to expand their…whatever the hell it was.

Too bad for them.

The Reid family farm had been handed down through the generations, and it didn’t matter if the Rennicks added a couple of zeroes to their offer. What mattered was that Barry’s father had charged him with maintaining the farm and passing it on to his own son someday, and there was no way he could sell it. It simply was not possible. When an agent representing the Rennicks turned up at Barry’s doorstep with an offer, he told them exactly that.

And then the animals started to get sick.

Barry was no fool; it was impossible for him not to put that particular two-plus-two together, but he had never had any concrete evidence.

So far.

Someone had been poisoning his livestock for months, Barry was sure of it, slowly tightening the financial noose around his neck. And now he had seen the bastard, right there on his property; had caught him red handed as he skulked around in the pre-dawn.

Barry squinted into the darkness, searching for movement and seeing none, and thought about the old shotgun he kept back at the farmhouse, and which he had never found a use for beyond firing a blast in the general direction of foxes.

Bad idea, Barry. You might just get angry enough to fire that weapon.

He felt adrenaline coursing through him like rocket fuel, and gritted his teeth.

Besides, you don’t need no gun for this.

He climbed down from the tractor cab with a grunt, balling up his fists, and headed purposefully toward the distant barn. By the time he reached it, Barry was almost sprinting, working himself up into a thrumming mess of fury. He burst into the dark building, drawing in a breath to holler a wordless roar of attack as he charged at the intruder like some marauding Viking, and stopped abruptly, surprised.

It looked empty.

Barry frowned, and unclenched his fists. Flicking on the overhead fluorescents, he bathed the barn in a cold, white light, and blinked as his eyes adjusted and the shadows evaporated.

Nothing.

The barn looked empty, because it was empty. Of people, at any rate. Yet there was one significant addition to the old building’s interior, and Barry’s eyes fell upon it immediately.

Right in the centre of the barn, somebody had dug a large hole. A good three feet in diameter, at least.

What the hell?

Barry stepped forward slowly, and his jaw slackened. Even from several yards away, it was impossible to miss the truth: the hole hadn’t been dug at all. Tell-tale furrows were cut into the dirt floor, as if the hole had been created by fingers or paws, not by a shovel. It looked more like something had tunnelled its way out of the earth.

Like a mole the size of a damn horse, Barry thought, and let out a nervous snort.

He fished his keys from his pocket. His keyring held a penlight, and he flicked it on and leaned into the hole slowly, half-afraid that something would leap out at him. He held his breath as the light played over a passage that appeared endless, swallowed entirely by the blackness beyond the feeble illumination provided by the tiny bulb.

For several long seconds, Barry’s mind played devious tricks on him, and he felt a crawling certainty that something was lurking there, just beyond the cone of light, watching him hungrily; something that would at any moment streak toward him on all fours, snarling and—

There was nothing.

No movement in the strange tunnel beyond the shivering shadows cast by the light Barry held in fingers which had begun to tremble, as if they possessed some knowledge of the situation that his slow-moving mind did not.

Barry grimaced, and told his raging nerves sternly to calm the hell down.

Whatever the tunnel had been created by, it was clearly empty now.

Because it’s already out there, you idiot. It tunnelled out of the ground, and now it’s out there in the darkness, watching you; getting closer…

Barry’s brow knitted as his thoughts began to race forward, taking on a lurching life of their own.

It?

That was a troubling development: Barry was not a man given to flights of fancy. When his mind suddenly conjured up images of bizarre creatures rising from the ground like zombies; like some bad horror movie had been made real in the ground beneath his property, he felt a nervous laugh building. The notion was ridiculous, of course.

Yet he had caught a glimpse of something out there in the rain, just for a moment. Something that walked upright, like a man.

He suddenly felt terribly exposed in the middle of the barn, and he spun to face the open door, tensing his muscles in readiness, certain that whatever he had seen out there would be charging toward him; some horror that had crawled out of the earth…

Beyond the gaping barn door, all he saw was darkness and rain.

He stepped outside warily, leaving the lights in the barn blazing, and swept his penlight in a wide arc. The farm buildings looked still, but the light wasn’t powerful enough to be certain. Barry forced himself to focus, concentrating on listening, trying to sift through the ceaseless sound of the rain falling and the incessant whine of the wind. For a moment, he thought he heard footsteps coming toward him, and he sighed in relief when he realised it was the sound of his own pulse, hammering in his ears.

In the distant darkness, he heard a faint thud.

The front door?

Did I lock it?

Barry’s muscles called a time out, and he stood there for several moments, frozen. He tried to tell himself that he was alone; just him and the rain. His tired mind was playing tricks on him, that was all. It was nothing.

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 appearance.

“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.

Afraid of flying, he thought, and his face twisted into a rueful grimace. He was supposed to be afraid of just about everything, but now the fear that had been a constant in his life ever since the knife attack felt…unstable somehow, like the fury that had descended on him aboard the Oceanus had unbalanced it. He still felt a flicker of the old anxiety: apprehension at being trapped on the boat with a group of strangers who were apparently insane, but there was something else, too, right down there in that broken core. Something new.

It felt terrifyingly like anticipation; a thread of something like eagerness that ran through his nerves.

He knew then what the loose sensation in his head was. Something had changed, and he had woken up different in some way he couldn’t yet fathom; altered irrevocably.

As he started after Herb, he couldn’t help but wonder if different meant better.

Or worse.

*

Jeremy watched Dan Bellamy follow Herb up onto the deck, and when both men were out of sight, he stepped into the freezer hold, easing the sliding door shut and wincing as the rusting metal runners squealed softly.

He’d always felt a connection with Herb. His father had never forgiven the kid for killing his mother as he entered the world, and the wrong side of Charles Rennick was a bad place to be for anybody, let alone a young child. Herb grew to be an isolated character at the compound, tolerated by his brothers and despised by his father; unable to form any sort of friendship with the initiates of the Order who worshipped his blood like it ran through a king’s veins.

But the boy was reckless. Charles had been right about that, though even he might have been surprised to learn just how right. Charles’ primary concern had been that Herb would run; that without him the EMP device would not get built and the operation would be a failure before the Oceanus even entered international waters. That was supposed to be the worst-case scenario, not that Herb would return to the Sea Shanty with no vampires and a bullet with his father’s name etched on it.

The operation had been a complete disaster, and now Herb seemed intent on making the situation worse.

Jeremy had hated lying to him.

He crossed the hold, kneeling at a low ventilation grate, and prised it open.

Reaching inside, he pulled out the satellite phone that he had hidden immediately following Charles’ execution. Thanks to Herb’s insistence on placing Bellamy in the hold and locking the door, Jeremy hadn’t been able to retrieve the phone for several frustrating hours.

So much time already wasted.

He paused for a moment, listening carefully to make sure there were no footsteps headed in his direction. After a few seconds, he switched the phone on and punched a number into the keypad.

The compound needed to be warned, but not just about the possibility that the nest in southern England might rise in a matter of hours. They also needed to be warned that Herb had taken charge; that he needed to be controlled before he threw a light on the Order for the whole world to see.

The phone rang.

And rang.

Jeremy frowned.

Hung up.

Dialled again.

Still no answer.

It could mean only one thing. There was no way a ringing phone at the compound would go unanswered, not on this of all days. Not unless they couldn’t answer.

The vampires had risen already. Jeremy knew it was the truth as soon as the thought occurred; felt it squirming in his gut like a tapeworm.

How could that be possible? How could the vampires know that their kin had died? The creatures had psychic abilities far beyond Jeremy’s understanding, but could they really communicate with each other over such vast distances?

Jeremy terminated the call again, and for a few moments, he just stood there, staring at the wall and seeing a dark future written in the dull, dented metal.

There was nothing else for it. Herb wanted to rally humanity to fight the monsters, but there was no way his story would be believed. Not until the vampires rose and splattered the truth across the TV news. By then, it would be too late.

He gritted his teeth. It was daylight back in the UK now. If the vampires had surfaced in the night, they would surely have retreated underground until nightfall. Just a matter of hours. Everything was moving too fast, and Herb was dangerously volatile. Matters had to be taken out of his hands.

He dropped his gaze to the keypad once more, punching in a different number. This time, the phone rang just once before a voice answered in a rich American accent.

“Yes?”

Sorry, Herb.

“I need to speak to Jennifer Craven,” Jeremy said.

7

Jennifer Craven terminated the unexpected call and felt a thrill coursing through her body like nothing she had experienced in sixteen long years; not since she first peered into a hole in the ground in northern Kentucky and saw the truth staring back at her.

The British man on the other end of the line had sounded scared, as well he might, but more importantly, what he had told her confirmed as fact something that she had long suspected: none of the other families that the Order comprised really did have any idea that the vampires could be killed, or that there might once have existed humans who were able to resist their will.

Jeremy Pruitt had sounded shocked and uncertain as he informed her that the Rennick nest in England had demanded sacrifice, and that the sacrifice had failed in the most spectacular way possible. The discovery that the buried gods were mortal had come as a monumental surprise to the English; that much was clear from the man’s tone.

Jennifer had fabricated a little surprise of her own for his benefit.

Unlike the Rennicks, the Craven family had nurtured suspicions about the vampires that stretched back centuries, ever since one of Jennifer’s distant ancestors had discovered a clay tablet buried in northern Africa. That tablet, which appeared to depict a human striking down a vampire beneath a word which translated roughly into English as hermetic, was assumed for a long time by her forebears to be simply a product of hope; just some poor barely-evolved bastard doodling a daydream before the monsters took him. Yet, when Jennifer’s own father had the tablet carbon dated back in the eighties, the scientist he had persuaded to carry out the test reported that the clay had definitely been buried at around 5,000 B.C.

Such a discovery would have made the scientific community at large take a keen interest in the tablet, had the scientist who collected the data been permitted to live long enough to share it. The earliest known etchings on clay were dated at around 3,000 B.C., and current academic thinking on the first human civilizations would have been turned on its head in an instant by the discovery that recorded history was at least two thousand years wide of the mark.

More importantly, as far as the Craven family was concerned, that carbon dating test had confirmed that the tablet was the earliest known written record of the vampires by a distance. No part of the Order claimed to possess any artefact more than five thousand years old, though of course they would keep such a discovery to themselves. After all, there was a slim chance that any object which was that old might even contain something close to the truth.

The word hermetic didn’t appear anywhere else in the known texts, and its meaning remained shrouded in mystery. No matter how thoroughly the Craven family searched for anything that might corroborate the story the clay tablet wanted to tell, nothing had ever been discovered.

Until a Princeton professor made an ill-advised phonecall from Kentucky, and Jennifer Craven herself saw the bones.

It was all the confirmation that she required.

Vampires could be struck down by humans, just as that ancient tablet had suggested, and for some reason, some ancient civilization had buried a man who actually did just that right alongside his monstrous victim. Perhaps the man had died of injuries sustained in the battle with the vampire, and the burial had been a celebration; perhaps that ancient people had wanted to warn future generations of something, who knew.

Who cared?

For a man to kill a vampire with a hatchet could only mean one thing: the vampires had not been able to control him in the way they did everyone else. He was the Hermetic. The word literally meant ‘sealed off,’ and that’s exactly what the ancient vampire slayer must have been: his mind sealed away from the vampires’ grasp; untouchable.

The trouble was that there had been no record of any such person having existed in the past seven thousand years. Maybe the hatchet-man was part of a race that had long since died out, his genes containing some treasure that extinction had buried, never to be found again.

Finding out whether that was true or not would have been all but impossible, given that the only way to know whether a person could resist the psychic assault of a vampire was to put them in front of one.

Jennifer had long ago filed away her curiosity about the possibility that Hermetics might actually have existed, because there was another, more pressing problem.

She was barren. The sole remaining Craven. A long time ago, she had attempted to conceive with several of the men at the ranch, but her efforts were for nothing. Finally, a doctor revealed the terrible truth: she would never have children. Her name would die with her, and some other bloodline would take control of the Order in America.

Unable to further her line, Jennifer’s thoughts turned to her legacy. The legacy of the entire Craven family; a crushing burden on her shoulders. Despite being only thirty-eight, she thought about her remaining years constantly; how to imprint her name onto the Order so that it would never fade from history.

The rest of the Order was so focused on the past that it rarely thought to look to its future. But Jennifer did, and she saw trouble on the horizon, approaching like twister season.

As far as she was aware, there hadn’t been a vampire rising anywhere in the world for more than a century, and in that time, the world had changed greatly.

Way back in 1999, Jennifer’s father had seen the future, and he predicted that it was a cellphone in every pocket and a camera on every street corner. He hadn’t lived to see just how right he had been. By 2015, there was a camera in every pocket, and the world had become obsessed with filming itself and sharing the result indiscriminately.

The days of keeping the existence of vampires a secret were coming to an end, one way or another. Unless the next rising took place in some extremely remote part of the world, the chances of any one family successfully covering it up were very slim.

The last recorded rising had taken place in rural Russia, consuming an entire village; leaving a ghost town. If something like that happened in the modern era of always on and rolling news, the truth would travel around the world like wildfire. If it happened in a densely-populated area like northern Europe or parts of Asia, the next rising would probably be streaming live on Youtube within minutes.

What if the next rising occurred in her own homeland? What if—God forbid—the Great Nest rumoured to be buried deep beneath Yellowstone was next? North America hadn’t seen an awakening for more than five hundred years; as far as Jennifer was concerned, that meant the country was overdue, in the same way scientists claimed that Earth was overdue a massive asteroid strike. Not a matter of if, but when.

It was just a matter of time, and the possibility that Hermetics might once have existed was not important. The only thing that mattered was accepting that the true—global—vampire rising was as inevitable as the onset of winter, and figuring out how to twist that fact to her advantage.

Hermetics or not, vampires could die.

What she needed was an army. The Order remained as small as possible in other countries, trying to conceal its importance, but if Jennifer was right, and the next vampire awakening was the equivalent of The Big One, secrecy would no longer matter. Strength would.

Shortly after the turn of the millennium and the passing of her father, Jennifer began to build the American arm of the Order into the world’s largest underground religion. The huge Colorado ranch which served as her base of operations had been expanded several times, and was now home to almost fifteen-hundred people. New initiates were young, of course, and subjected to anything up to a year of psychological and physical abuse, coupled with enormous quantities of LSD, before their loyalty was tested to determine their readiness to learn the truth and ascend to the position of cleric.

The test itself was simple and, so far, infallible. Two initiates, one knife. It was an equation that always equalled one devout believer. The only way to join the Order was to walk through a storm of blood, and nothing guaranteed a person’s obedience quite like making them kill.

Jennifer’s army grew slowly, and she waited.

For sixteen long years.

Until her phone rang, and an anxious-sounding British man introduced himself as Jeremy Pruitt, and said he needed her help.

*

Jennifer stared at the now-silent phone for a long time, running through Pruitt’s words in her head over and over, until their ramifications began to solidify in her thoughts. She already knew that vampires could be killed, of course, but now they actually had been. She hadn’t truly expected to witness such an event within her lifetime, and certainly not to discover that when it happened, it wasn’t even the headline news.

A living Hermetic had been discovered, and had survived the encounter with the vampires. Even better, the English Order already had its hands on him.

The potential ramifications of that refused to settle properly; they sloshed around her skull, full of messy possibility, lighting her up with anticipation.

Judging by what Pruitt had told her, the Order was finished in the UK: now led by an emotional boy who sounded like he suffered from some sort of hero complex—or simply wanted to die. Charles Rennick and his immediate successors were dead, and Herbert Rennick had no idea what he might be transporting, how important this man Dan Bellamy could be. Rennick was heading back to England, apparently following some ill-considered notion of blowing the whistle and letting the world know that vampires existed. He was, Pruitt said, determined to rally the world to fight them.

The boy was a fool. Killing vampires had already ensured that—at a minimum—the remainder of the English nest would rise to retaliate. England was one of the most heavily-surveilled countries on the planet. The secret was out, all right. The world just hadn’t noticed it yet. But it would, and there would be fighting. For survival.

It was only a matter of time.

According to Pruitt, the remaining vampires in England had expected their kin to be returned to them before dawn; the deadline had long since passed. The vampires would not act in daylight, of course, which meant that Jennifer had around seven or eight hours to play with—and it would take at least six of those to actually get a team across the Atlantic. There was every chance that—even with a Gulfstream jet to make the journey—she would not be able to get a team to the UK before darkness began to fall.

She had to act fast.

She nodded to herself and picked up the phone, dialling a four-digit internal number.

Her call was answered immediately.

“Get a team together, Mr Mancini,” Jennifer said. “The best we have.”

“Elimination or extraction?”

“A little of each, I think.”

Mancini grunted.

“Where are we going?”

“You are going to the UK. To England.”

“You’re not coming with us?”

He sounded surprised. Jennifer had always enjoyed what Mancini sardonically labelled field trips before.

“Not this time. The world is about to catch fire, Mr Mancini. I’ll be putting the ranch into lockdown as soon as you leave.”

Another grunt. He sounded pissed off at her insistence on addressing him so formally. Given their history, that wasn’t so surprising. Pissing him off was, after all, the reason that she did it in the first place.

“How long?” he snapped.

Jennifer checked her watch.

“I want your wheels up in thirty minutes, tops, and, Mr Mancini?”

He sighed heavily.

“Yeah?”

“I want you to understand this up front: there’s a very good chance you’ll be…uh, going in hot, okay?”

Mancini paused just long enough for Jennifer to hear the vague concern that lurked behind his silence. She knew full well that Mancini wasn’t a true believer in the existence of vampires, and it hadn’t ever mattered before: he was a hired gun who had no problem following orders which might lead to morally dubious outcomes, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut. That was more than enough to help with keeping the clerics and initiates at the ranch in line.

Yet this was different; belief mattered now. She trusted in Mancini and his combat expertise implicitly, but she knew that no amount of battlefield experience could have prepared either him or his men for what they might be faced with if they were still on English soil when night fell.

Bravado and training wouldn’t save him, not then. Belief might—if it helped Mancini to understand that there were some situations in which fleeing wasn’t just the best option; it was the only option.

“Going in hot,” Mancini repeated, sounding dubious.

“There is a very strong possibility that England will suffer a full-scale vampire rising in around seven hours. I need you to find and extract a man before that happens, and I don’t expect it will be easy. I know what you believe, but you need to believe this: if you engage the vampires, you will die. Trust me. Stay in the light.”

Mancini coughed.

“Yeah, all right. Understood. Who’s the target?”

8

Bad things happened to homeless people all the time.

Sam Thompson understood that depressingly obvious fact only too well, but even from a distance, when he looked at the bridge, some dark instinct tugged at him and he felt a twinge of alarm.

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.

He didn’t know whether to believe Herb’s tale of a nest of vampires rising to avenge their dead at sunset or not, but the notion of finding some way to escape, only to end up stumbling around the forest, lost and alone in the gathering dark, made a shudder course through him.

Like it or not, with daylight fading quickly, the only way forward was to go into the house, but he had no intention of staying a minute longer than he had to. He told himself that at the first opportunity, he would slip away—presuming that neither Herb nor his strange band of followers decided to physically restrain him—and find a way to get home. It was all that mattered now: retreating to the apartment, taking his pills, praying that the medicine would somehow knit together the yawning chasms forming in his head before he lost his sanity entirely.

“Circle it again,” Jeremy barked suddenly. It was the first time the older man had spoken. During the helicopter ride, Dan thought Jeremy had looked increasingly agitated, and he had tried to avoid meeting his gaze as much as possible.

“What? Why?” Herb lifted his voice from the co-pilot’s seat.

“We need to know that it’s clear, Herb. We have more than enough time for that. It won’t be dark for at least an hour.”

Herb looked like he wanted to argue the point, but decided against it.

“Fine,” he said, staring at Jeremy quizzically. “Go around again, and then take us down.”

*

The chopper touched down on a small helipad set alongside a long, flat building which looked like an enormous garage, a hundred yards or so away from the main house. As the engine began to wind down, a pensive silence settled over the men gathered inside.

The Rennick compound looked deserted.

Dan watched as Herb dropped his eyes to his wrist.

“Almost three-thirty,” he said without emotion. “We have around seventy minutes until sundown. Maybe less.”

He squinted up at the gloomy sky.

Seventy minutes, Dan thought bleakly. It was like there was a timer in everybody’s head, counting down toward the moment when darkness would arrive and bring the monsters. Yet despite that terrible ticking, nobody moved a muscle.

They all just sat in the helicopter, staring at the distant house.

Dan followed their gaze.

“What’s wrong?”

Herb scratched at his jaw, his expression thoughtful.

“What’s wrong is that there are around forty people in that house, and all of them should be pretty frantic about not hearing from us.”

“And?”

“And a helicopter just landed on their front lawn,” Herb said, “but I don’t see a single person at the windows.”

Dan studied the enormous main house. Herb was right: it was eerily quiet. The tension in the chopper became a bloated, terrible presence, and it suddenly struck him that the vehicle carried an exclusively male crew. Based on what Herb had told him about the make-up of the people who lived at the compound, at that very moment the others were all thinking about their wives and sisters and daughters and mothers.

All wondering.

And in the distance, through the rain and below the darkening afternoon sky, the mansion waited.

11

It was the smell which hit Herb first, the unmistakable odour that washed across him immediately as he pushed on the front door of the mansion, and it swung open easily.

Metallic, thick; hanging on the air like a threat.

The stink of blood.

Herb could almost taste it.

The rest of the group paused behind him. The smell was an invisible boundary: it worked on a genetic level, like the stench of so much human blood conveyed a simple biological message which triggered an automatic muscular response.

Stop.

The mansion’s main reception area was huge, a cavernous space stretching back more than sixty feet to meet twin staircases at the back of the room which wound their way up to the east and west wings of the mansion.

At ground level, the walls of the reception room were lined with bookcases and display cabinets that stood below huge canvases in ornate frames. Several plush leather couches were dotted around the centre of the space, beneath a vast chandelier that caught the grey light diffusing through the windows and sparkled like a diamond.

The fragmented light it reflected illuminated a nightmare.

There was blood everywhere.

And in the centre of the room, directly beneath the chandelier, was a sight that made Herb’s blood run cold.

Bodies.

Tangled and torn, stacked chaotically in a gruesome pile; a dripping pyramid of death.

Somewhere behind him, Herb heard someone gasping in horror.

Someone else collapsing to the floor and emitting a low moan of despair.

And all he could do was stare at it.

It wasn’t a massacre; it was a message. It had to be. These people didn’t even look like they had been fed upon—just killed to erect the gruesome monument in the middle of the mansion.

This must be for me, he thought. For anyone who came back from the Oceanus.

Behind Herb, someone vomited loudly, and he snapped out of the daze that threatened to overwhelm him.

“They’ve been here,” he said softly, his voice laced with wonder, “they’re on the surface already. How is that possible? How could they have known about the Oceanus before dawn?”

“They could still be here,” a gravelly voice hissed, and Herb turned to see Jeremy, hanging several yards back from the doorway and taking slow steps backwards toward the distant chopper. He was the only one among them—aside from Dan—who couldn’t fly the helicopter, but judging by the look on his face, he wanted to learn fast.

Herb shook his head and pointed at a large panel on the wall just inside the doorway. Inside it, a range of switches controlled the mansion’s steel shutters, and UV floodlights which covered the grounds entirely for several hundred yards.

“The shutters aren’t down. If they were in here, why wouldn’t they block out the light?”

“Uh, gee, I don’t know. Maybe because they’re monsters who don’t understand your damn alarm system?” Dan said.

Herb glanced at him, and Dan clamped his lips shut and looked away abruptly.

“Maybe not,” Herb replied. “But the people living here did, and as soon as the vampires took one of their minds, they’d understand it just fine. That’s the way these things are supposed to work, isn’t it, Jeremy?”

Herb lifted his voice a little.

“They take us, and they know what we know, right?”

The group flinched as Herb raised his voice further still. He paused and listened intently. There was no sound from the interior of the house; nothing at all.

“Unless the texts got that part wrong, too.”

Herb watched Jeremy carefully. Something had been off about the older man on the trawler, and now his behaviour was even stranger. He had spent the helicopter ride sitting behind Herb in tense silence, refusing to engage in any discussion.

Now that Herb came to think about it, what Jeremy had looked, back on the chopper, was scared. Almost like he knew they were heading straight for a bad place.

Jeremy continued to back away slowly, his eyes fixed on the doorway, a look of horror on his face. A couple of the clerics began to follow him, and then stopped when they noticed Herb standing firm.

“We need to get out of here, Herb,” he said, shaking his head.

“And go where? It will be dark in a little over an hour—”

“Anywhere,” Jeremy snarled. “You can’t seriously be considering going in there.”

Herb returned his gaze to the reception room, trying not to focus on the monstrosity at its centre. The room was brightly lit by the huge windows, just as the rest of the house would be. He couldn’t imagine the vampires staying in a place like that, not unless they were hiding in cupboards.

Indecision tore through him. His father owned an apartment in London that was rarely used, but it boasted few of the defensive capabilities that the mansion would once it was locked down. The apartment had been fitted with the same steel shutters as the buildings on the compound, but it lacked UV lights and, more importantly, thick stone walls.

Beyond the apartment in the city, he couldn’t think where else he could possibly go. Fleeing blindly into the coming night without a safe destination would be asking for trouble.

“Anybody here?”

Herb yelled the words almost without realising he was doing it; bellowing them into the echoing silence of the mansion. He had to do something. The uncertainty was killing him.

He strained his ears to catch some response; any sound which might indicate that there was a presence in the house.

Nothing.

He turned to the group.

Opened his mouth with no clear idea how he was going to tell them that he thought they should go inside.

He didn’t get the chance.

Somewhere behind him, a woman’s voice broke the silence inside the mansion.

Crying.

Calling for help.

12

Dan heard the woman crying, but he no longer saw the vast reception room spread out before him, or the grisly mountain of bodies.

Instead, he saw the face of the woman he loved, lit in the ghostly green of nightvision goggles. Her eyes wide and terrified as the talons hooked under her jaw and began to pull—

And then suddenly he was running forward on autopilot, following the sound of pitiful crying blindly, and his mind felt like it was short-circuiting, neurons igniting in all directions; a fireworks display in his skull.

He ran without looking back, without waiting to see if the others would follow.

He had forgotten they were even there.

He turned left into a large dining room, and the sound of the crying got louder.

He ran.

And the black river crashed over him.

*

For a moment, the only thing Herb could do was stare in amazement as Dan Bellamy bolted, tearing through the reception room without even pausing to glance at the pile of corpses, following the woman’s scream for help.

Dan had already veered to the left, and out of his sight, through an archway that led to the main dining room, before Herb managed to persuade his own feet that they should follow.

He pulled out the two guns he had acquired on the trawler, wondering what good they would do him if he was actually required to use them, snarled at the others to follow, and chased after Dan. When he glanced back, he saw that they were all terrified, but all were following—with the exception of Jeremy. It looked like the older man hadn’t even entered the mansion.

Herb hadn’t picked him for a coward.

He reached the entrance to the dining room just as Dan disappeared through a doorway at the far end, running like his life depended on it. In the distance, Herb heard the crying get a little louder. The survivor—whoever she was—had to be in the main part of the kitchen. Herb led the group at a sprint, his heart hammering, following Dan through the doorway.

He slammed to a halt.

Bellamy was standing a few feet in front of him, shaking his head and blinking slowly, as though he had just woken from a deep sleep. Beyond him, sitting on the island in the centre of the huge steel-and-stone kitchen, Herb saw the survivor.

Her name was Zoe, he remembered. Zoe Yates. Her family had married into the Order generations ago. She was a few years older than Herb and, when he was a teenager, he’d developed a fearsome crush on her which had lasted for an excruciating couple of months.

Despite that, it took him a moment to place her exactly.

With all the blood.

Zoe sat on the island alongside a knife rack, clutching a blade in each hand.

Sawing.

Slowly cutting her own legs off.

For a moment, Herb’s thoughts drained away, his mind unable to cope with the horror his eyes served up. He stared at Zoe’s face, and crawling dread made his throat constrict. In her eyes, he saw a terrible awareness. She knew exactly what she was doing, he realised; she could feel every furrow that her hands were carving into her own flesh.

She just can’t stop it.

Herb’s jaw dropped.

And his mind snapped into action.

“There’s still one here,” he snarled, his muscles tensing involuntarily, preparing for the attack he was certain was incoming.

Before anyone could react, the house began to rumble around them, and the steel shutters started to close.

Someone had activated the lockdown.

No. Something.

It was under the bodies, Herb thought in dull terror. Playing a damn game with us. We walked right past it.

The light began to fade as the shutters rolled down.

It’s sealing us inside.

In the dark.

His eyes widened. “Turn on the lights,” he roared, and he ran from the kitchen back out into the corridor that connected to the dining room, flicking on the light just as the shutters closed, plunging the rest of the mansion into darkness.

Herb threw himself back into the kitchen and slammed the door behind him, locking it with an ancient iron key that had almost rusted into the lock, and flicked the nearest light switch on. With a faint buzz, fluorescent strips hummed into life overhead, flooding the centre of the kitchen with cold, white light.

The kitchen comprised several smaller rooms, and when Herb jabbed a finger at them, the stunned clerics fanned out quickly and lit the whole place up. There were two other doors into the kitchen: one leading down to the extensive wine cellar, and another that opened onto a narrow service stairwell which led up to a first-floor lounge and bar area.

He dragged a table across the door, jamming it into the wood, praying that it would hold, and motioned at the clerics to lock the remaining two doors. Outside, he heard the faint smashing of glass and knew immediately that the vampire had taken out the lights that he had just turned on in the corridor. The kitchen was an oasis of light in the mansion.

All exits and windows locked down, a vampire at the door.

No way out.

“It’s okay,” Herb said in a voice that came out high-pitched and tremulous. “It can’t get in.”

As if in response, the vampire charged at the door, impacting on it with a thunderous crash. Herb saw the table that he had used for a barricade wobble a little, and realised that if he didn’t believe in his own words, he couldn’t expect anyone else to, either.

“It can’t get in,” he repeated firmly.

Outside the heavy kitchen door, there was only silence. The vampire had charged it once, testing its strength, but now…

What the hell is it doing now?

Herb’s heart hammered painfully, and he picked up the two handguns once more, and set them down again on a counter almost immediately. They weren’t the weapons he needed. Where the hell was the weapon he needed?

He scanned the kitchen. Dan Bellamy had collapsed to his knees in a large walk-in pantry, and was gasping for air, with his hands gripping the sides of his skull. He looked like he was about to have another seizure, or perhaps even a heart attack.

Edgar was wrong about him.

Suddenly, the unmistakeable truth rolled out in front of Herb, and he saw it clearly. Even if Dan Bellamy was somehow special, it didn’t matter. The guy couldn’t actually fight the vampires. He was terrified and broken. Weak. His survival on the Oceanus had been a fluke, and Bellamy was coming apart at the seams because of it. So what if they couldn’t take his mind? They would just tear apart his body while he cowered and whimpered.

Herb felt like a lawyer who’d built an entire defence on a gross miscalculation, and only realised his error when the judge began to laugh in his face. He had followed his heart, determined to do something, to fight back somehow—and his determination to act on impulse would end up killing them all.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and saw his father’s face, twisted into a sardonic grin.

Who’ll be the head of the Rennick family?

You?

Dan gurgled and choked, gasping for breath like he was drowning, and despair washed over Herb. He turned away.

Just in time to see Zoe throw herself from the kitchen island and drive a knife deep into the chest of the nearest cleric. Stephen gasped as the blade lodged between his ribs, and he staggered forward a couple of steps, passing Zoe on like a virus. She hurled herself off him and drove the other knife into Christian’s neck, sending an arterial spurt across two other clerics before anybody could move.

When Christian crashed, gurgling, to the floor, Zoe went down with him as the legs that she had mutilated beyond comprehension buckled beneath her. She barely seemed to notice the fall. Upon landing, she instantly shot out a blood-soaked hand like a striking viper, plucking the knife from Christian’s neck. It came free, and the blood came with it; a crimson fountain that finally put an end to the cleric’s ragged panting.

Zoe began to drag herself toward the others, smearing a trail of gore across the tiles behind her. With every staccato lurch forward, she swung the knife with her left hand, each wide arc spraying thick crimson droplets across the room.

The attack took only seconds, and the sudden savagery of it rooted Herb to the spot. He watched in dumb fascination as the clerics retreated from the swinging blade, shrieking in terror. Only when one of them unlocked the door to the wine cellar, and they began to flee from the kitchen, did Herb finally snap out of his stupor.

“No!” he yelled, and he sprinted around Zoe, hurdling over the blade that she swung in his direction.

Already, two of the clerics had fled from the room, blind panic setting in and making them lose their minds. A third—Scott—was halfway through the door when Herb grabbed his shirt and pulled him back into the kitchen.

He slammed the door shut and locked it.

“That’s what it wants,” Herb snarled at the cleric, and he turned to face Zoe.

She was only feet away.

Still coming; still clutching the knife.

Still crying.

Herb wanted more than anything to turn and flee from the hideous sight, but he grimaced and darted forward, skipping around the knife and stooping to catch her arm. His fingers closed on her wrist and he twisted it violently. The knife fell to the tiles with a metallic clatter, but Herb didn’t even hear it landing.

His entire focus was taken up by Zoe’s eyes: wide and pleading, so terribly aware.

She’s still in there somewhere, he thought, and felt a scream gathering in his lungs. She’s living every second of it.

He pushed Zoe away and rose to his feet, taking a step backwards and kicking the knife away from her grasping fingers.

Zoe’s eyes dropped to her hands in despair, and she whimpered as they began to drag her back toward the distant knife rack.

She won’t stop, Herb thought. It won’t let her. It will use her until she is dead…or we are.

Zoe’s commandeered body was reaching up, straining for the knife rack on the kitchen island when Herb picked up one of the guns he had left on the counter and put a bullet in the back of her head, slamming her into the floor.

Doing what was necessary.

Just like Dad.

Herb gritted his teeth, and shook away the grinning image of his father.

At his feet, Zoe’s body was motionless at last, her eyes fixed and empty.

And as the echoing blast of the gun in the enclosed kitchen faded, and Herb tried to process the insanity of what she had been forced to do—what he had been forced to do—the vampire outside the kitchen door began to chuckle.

The sound coiled around Herb’s nerves like razor wire, but even as his instincts howled at him, his mind was calling his attention to something else. A very important detail. The rest of the house remained quiet. The two clerics that had fled through the wine cellar in a panic hadn’t even started to scream. Not yet.

Because it has been busy with us.

There’s only one here, he thought.

Could it be that there was only one more vampire? According to the texts, the English nest was small, but was thought to number in the dozens.

Maybe that was a lie, too.

It made sense, didn’t it? That the creatures who had decided to erase their existence from human history might exaggerate their own strength? They weren’t immortal, that was for sure.

Herb frowned, and in the distance, he began to hear the shrieking of the two clerics, exactly as he had known he would. A flurry of terrified yells which cut off abruptly, until there was only one voice left.

And his screams were long, and slow.

Herb tried to tune out the horror of the noise and think.

One vampire.

If there are more out there, where the hell are they?

13

The absence of light made the noise all the more terrifying; a high-pitched scream that shredded Adam Trent’s nerves like a hacksaw.

He froze, the wrench in his hand forgotten, and stared into the blackness. The cone of illumination cast by the light mounted on his hat dissolved after a few feet. Beyond it, the darkness was an abyss.

Sometimes the tunnels could play tricks on you—especially when you were working near an active line. The shriek of metal on metal could sound otherworldly in the dark, and most of the staff working the lines had let their nerves get the better of them at least once. It took some getting used to, working down there in the pitch black, tending to the roots of the city. The darkness and the isolation; the musty air and the dislocation from reality. It all took its toll, especially on those who were new to the job.

Yet Adam had been working maintenance on the London Underground system for ten years and counting. He was no rookie.

And that isn’t metal-on-metal.

The noise which Adam heard, ricocheting around the cavernous tunnel, was a twisted fusion of terror and pain. Definitely not mechanical; it was unmistakably the sound of someone screaming. It rang out clearly over the clanging noise of Roni hammering at a stubborn section of the rusting track a few feet to his left.

It sounded like it came from a distance down the tracks, somewhere around the curve of the tunnel. Even if there had been light in that direction, Adam doubted that he would have been able to see what had caused the noise, and maybe, he thought, that was a good thing.

The scream spoke to him on an animal level, and his senses shifted into a state of high alert.

It lasted for maybe five seconds, rising in pitch.

Ending suddenly.

And then there was thunderous silence.

The two-man sub-team’s work—routine repairs on a section of the Northern Line—ceased immediately.

Adam turned to face Roni, and flooded his colleague with light.

“You heard that?”

Roni nodded slowly, but both question and response were unnecessary: Adam knew that he hadn’t imagined the noise as soon as he saw Roni’s eyes; painfully wide, darting with incomprehension. He looked as unnerved as Adam felt.

Adam took a hefty flashlight from his belt, and aimed it down the tunnel. The other sub-team—Colin and Tarpey; good guys, whose easy banter generally made the long hours pass quicker—were a few hundred feet further down the line, working their way back towards Adam’s position.

The scream had come from their direction.

It had to have been one of the two men that screamed, but Adam had no idea what could prompt a man to make such a noise.

Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure he even wanted to know.

He tried not to notice the beam of light jerking as his hand trembled wildly. The flashlight’s bulb was a good deal more powerful than the one attached to his hat, but it, too, was eaten by the void before it revealed anything out of the ordinary.

He saw nothing.

Heard nothing.

“You think one of them is hurt?” Roni hissed, and Adam flinched at the sudden break in the oppressive silence.

As it happened, yeah, Adam did think either Colin or Tarpey was hurt. Maybe even worse than hurt. He couldn’t see how a man could scream like that and not be in terrible agony. Men had been injured in the tunnels before, plenty of times, and Adam had rushed to their aid without hesitation, tending to injuries that ranged from concussion to electrocution to—on one particularly horrible occasion—dismemberment. It was, he thought, part of the job description. He imagined that it had to be the same whenever people worked in places that were so inherently dangerous. You developed a bond, even with the colleagues you didn’t much like. An unspoken code. Look after each other down there.

Further down the tunnel, it sounded like somebody needed looking after, all right, but this time, Adam found his feet unwilling to move and his skin prickling. Suddenly, he felt terribly afraid at the prospect of calling out to see if everything was okay. Frightened that he would draw the attention of something; some awful creature out there, sharing the shadows with them.

He wondered if he should shut off the light, and hope whatever was out there could not see him.

Sweat beaded on Adam’s forehead as his mind ran to dark destinations. Whatever was out there, it had surely killed Colin and Tarpey, and it was crawling toward him at that very moment, unseen in the dark, licking its lips…

He willed his legs to move.

And then the whimpering started up; faint, but audible. The soft, gurgling cries of a man suffering terrible pain. The sound was somehow even worse than the screaming.

“We have to help him.”

Roni’s words.

High-pitched and breathless; the voice of a man out of his mind with fear.

Adam swallowed hard and nodded almost absently, his eyes fixed on the section of tunnel that he could not see. Someone was still alive, and they were hurt. He had to help. He lifted the wrench above his head, brandishing it like a club. Roni acknowledged the gesture, but there was no question in his eyes, and Adam knew, then.

It wasn’t just him. Not his imagination. Roni felt it, too: the air in the tunnel, suddenly thick and syrupy; laced with danger. A nagging certainty that there was another presence in the tunnel with them, something foul and dangerous.

Adam advanced slowly, his heart hammering painfully, the wrench raised.

Ready.

Click.

He froze again, and this time the message his nerves tried to send was run, but fear had tangled the wiring in his brain. He felt like he was standing in quicksand.

He remembered listening to Tarpey talking about the time when he had seen a train heading straight for him in a tunnel which he had believed was inactive, and about the grey area between fight or flight; that rabbit-in-the-headlights paralysis.

Tarpey had called it fight, flight or shite.

It had been funny. Adam had laughed.

Click, click.

He swallowed painfully.

The noise was heading toward him, getting louder. Advancing a little and pausing. It sounded to Adam like the cautious movement of an animal. But there weren’t any animals in the London Underground, not really. Rats, of course; maybe the odd stray dog. Yet the sound he heard wasn’t made by any rat or dog. It skittered and tapped, and struck Adam as more like the noise an insect might make.

Yet for the noise to be that loud, it would have to be huge.

Or very close.

He felt his heartbeat ratchet up in intensity until he was sure his chest would burst open.

The shuddering beam of light gave up nothing. He frowned, and felt a dry panic squeezing his bladder. The noise sounded close enough that he was sure he should be able to see something.

Click, click, click, cli—

So loud, Adam thought. Like it’s right on top of us.

Oh.

Shit.

Adam knew that it would be there even before he jerked his jaw up and illuminated the roof above his head with ghostly light. Some crazy intuition told him before he saw it.

Bursting from the shadows toward the two paralysed men, bewildering and obscene.

A creature born in a fevered nightmare.

It came at them fast, scuttling along the ceiling like some horrific spider; humanoid in shape and yet somehow insectile at the same time. Glistening skin that seemed to absorb the light. Angular limbs whirring in furious motion, eating up the distance at extraordinary speed.

Glowing red eyes.

Teeth.

It shrieked as the light spilled across it, and launched itself down onto Roni before he could react, opening up his body from shoulder to groin as it fell, cleaving him in two almost casually with a talon as long as a pocket knife.

Adam heard a tragic, surprised gasp followed by a wet splat, impossibly loud in the enclosed space, and realised with numb horror that the noise was Roni’s blood. It sounded like there was so much of it, raining down heavily on the ground. A grisly downpour that fell not from storm clouds, but from an unfolding nightmare.

Blood, Adam decided distantly, made a horrible sound. It was a noise no human being should ever have to endure.

Roni’s eyes flickered with piercing awareness for an instant as his guts began to slide from his abdomen. The oozing dark mass of innards looked almost alive in the bleak light, and the awful sight of his colleague’s pulsing organs made the last functioning part of Adam Trent’s mind shriek loud enough to break the spell.

Go!

The creature began to turn to face Adam even as he turned away, pounding his legs forward.

He only managed to take a couple of frantic strides before something impacted heavily on his back.

Searing pain.

Falling.

Adam crashed into the ground, and the air blasted from his lungs.

The light on his helmet smashed, plunging him into pitch-black darkness.

He rolled over onto his back, feeling something flapping around the base of his spine, and realised in horror that it was his own flesh, drawn apart like curtains. He gagged.

Hauled himself to his feet.

Heard guttural breathing in the void.

He tensed, trying to ready himself for the next attack.

It came from his left, delivering another tearing blow, and this time Adam was conscious of the fact that he was sailing through the air moments before he clattered into a wall with a dry and terrible slap. His skull rang, and for a moment he just laid there, with his eyes shut and his head spinning, waiting helplessly for the end.

Waiting.

Nothing.

His left side felt like it was on fire, and he dropped a hand to find that a sticky chasm had opened up in his love handle, a hole that felt gigantic to his probing fingers.

Again, he rose to his feet and began to stumble away, and again he felt the talons raking him, lifting him and tossing him away like rotten meat. Another hole. Another leak.

Another pause.

It was during that pause that Adam slipped into a dreamlike trance, and thought about his neighbour’s cat; about the way he had once watched it idly batting a mouse around the garden, letting the poor creature believe it had a chance to escape, only to drag it back for another round of fun with claws and teeth at the last moment.

It’s playing with me.

This time, Adam couldn’t even bring himself to stand. He rolled onto his back and heard it moving toward him slowly, like it was savouring the moment.

“Please,” Adam slurred, a bubble of blood and saliva popping on his lips, “please…just kill me…”

The thing laughed, and Adam let his head drop against the ground. He closed his eyes.

Prayed for oblivion.

And felt it crawl directly over him.

Tasted the rotten stink of its hot breath; blood and ancient decay.

He opened his eyes, and found the hideous face just inches from his own, terrible eyes burning like torches in the darkness.

Adam stared directly at those sickening crimson pools and felt something in his head snap; something that made his skull ring with a dull and nauseating permanence.

His sanity began to evaporate, making room in his mind for something else; worse than the pain had been; than any pain could possibly be.

The creature took what was left of Adam Trent’s mind then, and in his final moment, he understood the terrible truth.

It wasn’t going to kill him at all.

14

Growling.

Increasing in intensity.

Filling the dark space like the sound of idling American muscle.

Cornelia Stokes glanced at the rear view mirror and saw light brown eyes staring directly back at her. The rising growl became a bark.

Conny grinned and returned her eyes to the road, steering the van along Mornington Crescent toward Euston. Her day had been mapped out, and it was supposed to provide little in the way of drama: she and Remy had spent the early part of the afternoon in Regent’s Park—keeping an eye on a rain-soaked and peaceful protest which certainly didn’t look like it might turn nasty—when she got the call to respond to an emergency at the train station.

Remy barked again, louder.

To anyone who didn’t know better, it might have sounded like the dog in the rear of the van was going crazy; growling and barking at nothing. But Conny had been Remy’s handler for four years—most of her career with the British Transport Police’s Dog Unit—and knew him better than she knew herself. The chaotic noise was his routine; his own way of preparing himself for the work he knew was to come. When he was placed in the van and the sirens began to wail, that meant only one thing for Remy. Time to put on his game face.

Time for action.

Conny couldn’t have silenced him even if she had wanted to.

Remy’s specialty was crowd control. Controlled aggression was his purpose, and he was the best police dog that Conny had ever seen, let alone worked with. Smart and obedient and completely harmless…ninety percent of the time.

The other ten percent of the time Remy was a snarling weapon, and on each and every occasion that the German Shepherd was called into action, Conny found herself astonished at the impact his bristling presence could have on a crowd of people. Even those who were armed themselves shrivelled in fear at the sight of him. A weapon with teeth, she concluded, reached right into the primitive part of a person’s brain in a way that no knife or firearm ever could.

Remy represented a primal fear that could not be ignored, and often merely the sight of him—eighty-five pounds of coiled muscle, propping up snapping jaws full of sharp trouble—was enough to calm even the most aggressive of suspects. Conny had a long-standing love affair with firearms, but once Remy had given her his complete, unquestioning loyalty and trust, she wouldn’t have traded the dog for a full-auto assault rifle. Guns jammed; they got misplaced or ran out of ammunition. Remy never did.

She swung the small police van onto Hampstead Road, nodding acknowledgment at the afternoon drivers who pulled aside to let her through, and Euston Station loomed ahead of her. She stepped on the accelerator.

Conny and Remy had been asked to provide backup to the security staff at the station: to help break up a scuffle which had broken out among several commuters waiting at one of the Underground platforms. In Conny’s experience, most fights broke up as soon as Remy started to bark, and she expected that this occasion would be no different.

Her day could have been a lot worse, she thought. She could have been one of the poor bastards dealing with the massacre which had taken place in south London just a few hours earlier: a junkie who’d gone berserk in a supermarket, killing three people and wounding two others before taking his own life. When local police had responded to the incident, they had discovered the bodies of a further nine homeless people torn to pieces under a nearby bridge.

There was no weapon to deal with something like that, no shield that could keep the damage at bay, either. Sometimes, the world just erupted into madness and violence that was impossible to comprehend, and somebody out there had to face it.

This would be nothing like that terrible incident, though. The fight at Euston was almost certainly nothing more than a few commuters getting steamed up over having to wait too long for a train and lashing out. A typical London flashpoint. It would probably all be over in less than thirty seconds.

She glanced in the mirror again as she pulled the van to a halt outside the station’s main entrance and killed the siren.

Remy was now dead silent, staring at her calmly with expectant, hopeful eyes. The siren had stopped wailing. The time for preparation was over.

Conny opened the door and began to step out of the van when she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. She pulled it out, and a dreadful sickening sensation unfurled in her stomach. She sat back down heavily, staring at the unlock screen. Afraid to swipe her thumb across it. As much as possible, she tried to compartmentalise her life; to leave the personal stuff at home and focus only on the job when she was on shift. Anything else would be failing in her duty as a police officer. She rarely carried her phone with her while she was in uniform.

Today was different, of course.

The screen on her phone glowed for a moment before falling dark.

You haven’t got time to just sit here, Con.

She unlocked the screen, and felt a scream building inside her, desperate to be free.

A text from Logan. The text. Just two words, steeped in bitterness which punched her in the gut like a professional boxer. No matter how much she had tried to prepare herself for seeing them, the words inflicted damage that she already knew would never heal.

Confirmed. Huntington’s.

Conny placed the phone gently on the dashboard, face down, and stared through the rain-flecked windscreen at the exterior of Euston Station for several long moments, until Remy huffed impatiently.

You’re on duty.

She blinked away the tears that gathered in her eyes, and set her mouth in a firm line. Remy was right.

Time for action.

*

At ground level, Euston Station was a huge, functional square space lined with overpriced shops, and a bar in which unoccupied seats were as rare as reasonable rent. Toward the front of the building, where the departure boards displayed the latest information for each of the eighteen platforms, a few hundred passengers clustered, waiting for the signal to board the trains that would take them toward the north of England.

Conny headed left, aiming for the escalators that would transport her down to Euston’s separate Underground station, and glanced down at Remy. The dog remained silent and focused, his watchful eyes scanning, ears pricked up. She gripped his heavy chain leash tightly, as her own training dictated, but she would have been confident in unleashing him, knowing that he would have kept pace without the restraint.

Below ground level, the short escalator led to a small area filled with ticket machines and electronic barriers which barred the path to the subterranean platforms that were yet another level further down. There was no sign of a disturbance in the ticketing hall, but the tension in the space was palpable. The barriers to the platforms had been closed by staff, and the resulting crowd which formed simmered with uneasy frustration at yet another delay on the Tube.

Conny heard a loud voice informing passengers that there was a ‘security issue’ down on the platforms, and that delays of around fifteen minutes were expected.

Not if Remy has anything to do with it, she thought, and headed toward the barriers, letting Remy carve a path between groups of commuters who parted silently to let them pass. When she reached the barriers, a portly and stressed-looking security guard waved her through with a nod, gazing warily at Remy.

The dog ignored him, his gaze focused on the next escalator. Much larger than the first; it speared down into the earth, providing access to the Northern Line’s north and south platforms.

He growled softly.

Conny nodded, and quickened her pace. They were close enough now that Remy could probably hear whatever was happening down on the platform. Maybe he could smell blood and danger on the air.

The escalator had been switched off, so Conny and Remy took the steep metal steps leading down at a brisk pace.

When she was halfway down to the next level, she could hear the shouting at last, and Remy finally began to strain at his leash.

*

The fight looked like it was still ongoing.

Conny stepped onto the platform that served southbound trains, moving past some onlookers who had retreated to a safe distance, but couldn’t bring themselves to actually leave and miss the excitement. Far to her right, at the very end of the platform, she saw a mass of bodies milling around, a couple of whom wore the distinctive hi-vis yellow jackets which marked them out as staff.

She broke into a trot, reaching the perimeter of the fracas in a few seconds.

Remy’s growl grew louder; a rumbling thunder that cut cleanly through the noise of the scuffle. Several faces turned toward Conny and her partner, their eyes widening.

Once she had pushed past a few gawkers, Conny saw that there were a couple of people on the platform lying face down, unmoving. At least one of them was bleeding heavily, and both were either unconscious or dead.

She hesitated.

It looked a little more serious than just some fight.

Several other people had staggering away from the tussle, nursing minor injuries, and the two staff were struggling with a man who screamed and thrashed, resisting their attempts to pin him to the floor. Conny watched the man shrug off one of the staff and swing at him with what looked like a length of rebar, and decided she had seen enough.

She unhooked Remy’s leash and pointed at the weapon.

“Go.”

Remy approached steadily, barking furiously, and the two staff rolled away from the thrashing man, their eyes wide and fixed on the dog. Isolated with Remy, the man leapt to his feet, and Conny expected that he would immediately drop the weapon and either attempt to flee or surrender.

Instead, the man—who Conny noticed in surprise was also wearing a torn hi-vis jacket, its bright colour dulled by dirt and bloodstains—took a step toward the dog and lashed out, swinging the heavy metal in a savage arc.

Conny’s breath caught in her throat as Remy took matters into his own hands, darting underneath the intended blow. He struck before his attacker had even finished swinging, leaping forward and clamping his teeth onto the guy’s forearm.

Twisting.

The rebar hit the floor with a clatter.

And Conny’s mouth dropped open in amazement as the man lined up a punch with his free hand, striking Remy in the neck. The dog clearly decided that enough was enough. It pulled hard on the man’s forearm, twisting its thick neck violently to unbalance him, and brought him down hard onto the platform. He hit the floor face-first with a sharp snap that Conny thought had to be his nose valiantly attempting to cushion his fall.

Yet still he struggled.

Conny had never seen anything like it. Remy had brought plenty of people down over the years, and not once had anyone even tried to get up when the dog was looming over them.

The stricken man heaved himself back to his feet with the German Shepherd still attached to his arm—blood flowing freely around Remy’s powerful jaws—and he began to stagger to his left.

Conny recognised what was happening immediately. The man—maybe drugged, who knew—clearly wasn’t feeling the pain of Remy’s teeth as he should be, and was using his superior weight to drag the dog across the platform.

Toward the tracks.

The live line, Conny thought in horror.

“Remy, release,” she yelled sternly, and Remy obeyed instantly, glancing back at her with something like chagrin in his eyes.

When Remy withdrew his teeth from the man’s forearm, he lost all balance. He might have fallen onto the tracks anyway, carried there by his momentum, but as Conny watched the man in the torn hi-vis jacket dive off the platform onto the deadly waiting track with a wince, she couldn’t help but think that it looked, for just a fleeting moment, like he wanted his life to end.

Had he continued to struggle with Remy because he wanted the dog to kill him?

For several long seconds, a pregnant hush descended on the small crowd of people gathered on the platform, and Conny stared down at Remy, seeing her own confusion reflected in his big brown eyes.

15

Familiar sensation

Crawling up the back of—

“Dan…Dan? BELLAMY! Snap out of it!”

Dan coughed violently and sucked in a deep breath, trying to calm the raging vibrations in his head. The air stank of blood and shit and death, and it felt like his skull was fracturing.

Herb, he thought. That’s Herb. Focus on his voice.

“Oh, fucking hell…Dan? Can you hear me?”

He took another breath.

Let it out slow.

And the world began to swim into focus.

Herb was standing over him, his face twisted in concern.

“It’s okay, we’re safe,” Herb said. “For now, anyway. It can’t get in.”

Dan pulled himself to his feet, and his eyes widened when he saw the kitchen. The large group of men he expected to see suddenly wasn’t so large at all. Two of Herb’s followers were lying on the floor, one panting out rattling breaths and clutching at his bloody chest; the other was motionless, with a towel draped over his face. Still others looked to have disappeared altogether.

“What happened?”

Herb’s brow creased.

“You didn’t see?”

Dan coughed, spitting out the foul-tasting air.

“I get…blackouts. Panic attacks.”

“Panic attacks?” Herb stared at him, bewildered. “Jesus Christ. How the hell did you survive on that ship?”

Dan glared back at him for a moment, and felt dark emotions bubbling, clutching at him; trying to pull him under.

—hands in the darkness—

He scowled. “Just bad luck, I guess. I tried to tell you. I’m not what you think I am. Not special. Not some sort of vampire slayer.”

Dan’s words came out harsh, tainted with bitter sarcasm.

“No shit,” Herb muttered. “I guessed that much when you decided to have a fucking breakdown instead of help—”

Dan punched him.

Actually punched him.

His right arm shot out of its own accord, fingers clenching into a bony fist, and he drove Herb’s words straight back down his throat.

It was, as far as Dan could recall, the first punch he had thrown in his life. He doubted it was powerful enough to hurt; certainly as he threw it, his arm felt loose and elastic rather than taut, but the blow snapped Herb’s jaw sideways, and a moment later the bigger man was sitting on the floor, staring up at him in surprise.

Dan stared back.

Stunned.

Mortified.

And Herb laughed.

He rubbed his jaw ruefully as he stood up, and he grinned at Dan, who could do nothing but gape at him.

“Well, all right, then,” Herb said. “I guess that’s more like it.”

Dan had no response. At least, none that he could vocalize.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

“There are eight of us left,” Herb said, and paused, staring at one of the bodies on the floor. The man with the bloody chest was no longer drawing in those rattling breaths. He sighed heavily. “Make that seven.” He glanced at his watch. “I’d say we have about half an hour before it gets dark outside. We need a way out.”

“A way out? Aren’t we safe in here? I thought you said it couldn’t get in.”

Herb nodded.

“It can’t get in right now. But once it gets dark outside, it will have no reason to leave those down.”

He pointed at the shuttered windows.

Dan felt his stomach lurch. Herb was right. It was the vampire that had sealed them in. When the shutters were no longer required to keep the daylight at bay, it could simply reopen them and come through a window.

“Does this place have a cellar?”

“Yeah,” Herb said grimly, and he pointed at a door to the rear of the kitchen. “Through there. The others went that way; made a run for the front door, I think. They didn’t make it.”

Dan searched Herb’s eyes and saw the remembered nightmare the younger man was trying to conceal. He must have heard them screaming, he thought, and for a moment Dan was back on the deck of the Oceanus, listening to a symphony of destruction being played out in the darkness. Cries of fear and pain and horror, all punctuated by the otherworldly shriek of the vampires.

“How long was I, uh, out for?”

“About ten minutes. At least this time you weren’t screaming.” Herb offered a watery smile.

No, Dan thought. That part is still to come.

“Ten minutes,” he said absently. “An hour until sundown.”

“Yeah. Ish.” Herb nodded.

“How many exits are there?”

“From the kitchen? Three. But they all lead to open plan areas. It would run us down in no time.”

Dan frowned. He couldn’t see how they could possibly escape without further loss of life. Even if they could successfully leave the kitchen and somehow lose the vampire in the vast house, the place was locked down. The only exit that mattered was the one the vampire itself had blocked; the mansion’s front door.

They could try to run, maybe, turning lights on as they went; try to lock themselves in another room, perhaps, one which might offer some means of escape he couldn’t imagine.

It would be suicide.

“Maybe if we split up, we could—” Dan said, and fell silent when Herb stared at him, aghast.

“Split up? I take it you’ve never seen any horror movie, ever?”

He had a point. Besides which, Dan thought, he was the only one who didn’t know the layout of the Rennick mansion. If it came down to fleeing blindly, he would surely be the first to die.

“Then we have to kill it,” he said uncertainly.

“Yeah,” Herb replied. “Why didn’t I think of that?” he rolled his eyes. “Killing them is where you’re supposed to come in, Dan. If you’ve got some grand idea on how to go about doing that, I’m all ears.”

Dan searched his thoughts.

He had been lucky to survive his encounters with the creatures on the Oceanus. On both occasions, he had killed vampires that were preoccupied with murdering somebody else. It was like they were complacent, so sure that no human would dare attack them that they had let their guard down. He had landed sucker punches, no more than that. He remembered the moment of hesitation on the twisted features of the one that had killed Elaine; the way it almost seemed that the vampire couldn’t actually believe what was happening as Dan attacked it with a cleaver.

But that had been in the swirling storm of chaos on board the cruise ship. Here, where the vampire was focused only on hunting the tiny group of men that had sealed themselves away from it, he didn’t think that luck would hold.

“What do you actually know about these things?”

Herb opened his mouth to respond, but Dan cut in.

“And if you say anything about ancient fucking texts, I may have to punch you again.”

Dan smiled weakly. A joke.

Isn’t it?

“I can only tell you what is supposed to be true,” Herb said. “They claim to be immortal; they live below ground. They sleep for centuries. They feed on humans. In their presence, humans lose their minds. We are powerless to resist them. They don’t like light. Oh, and they don’t burn. That wasn’t in the texts. I saw that one myself.” Herb rubbed absently at his bandaged arm. “I don’t see how any of that can help us now, especially since any or all of it could be lies.”

They don’t burn, Dan thought. He stored that piece of information, and then irritably told himself that he didn’t want that knowledge taking up space in his brain. If he could just get away from the mansion—away from the monsters; away from Herb and his rapidly diminishing group of followers—he would flee and gladly hand himself over to the police and confess to the murder he had committed in the Atlantic. He could spend the rest of his days in the safety of a cell, and he wouldn’t ever have to think about the creatures that Herbert Rennick called vampires ever again.

He stared at the locked door.

Behind it, he heard soft snuffling sounds; wet smacking. It was a noise he had heard before. The vampire was sitting outside the kitchen. Feeding. Waiting.

Listening.

They are intelligent, Dan thought, not mindless monsters. We know that much for sure. They can speak. They can understand.

He clutched at Herb’s arm, and pulled the younger man close, breathing into his ear softly.

“It’s listening. We need to draw it away, up to the top floor, and make a run for the front door, you understand?”

Herb nodded, but he looked dubious.

He mouthed how?

Dan stared around the kitchen in mounting frustration. He saw counters, racks of crockery and pans, various foodstuffs. Some wine bottles. No way out. Nothing that might serve as a distraction.

His mind raced.

“Where does that dumb waiter lead?” he said loudly, and pointed at a patch of bare wall.

Herb followed his gaze and then stared at Dan, puzzled. There was no dumb waiter.

Dan mouthed play along.

Herb’s confused expression softened, and he nodded vigorously.

“It stops off at all five floors,” he replied, making sure that his voice was loud enough to carry. Trying to ensure that he wasn’t being too obvious.

Dan nodded.

“If we can get to the top floor…is there a way we can access the roof?”

Herb grinned and shook his head.

“Yeah,” he said. “A skylight in the attic.”

Dan could tell from Herb’s wide smile that there was no skylight; maybe even no attic.

“Then we’ll go up,” Dan said. “Quietly. If we make any noise once we’ve left this room, it will hear. Once we get to the roof, we run. Can any of you fly the helicopter?”

He expected them to shake their heads. Instead, all of them nodded—even Herb.

“The benefits of a Rennick home-schooling,” Herb said with a crooked grin. “I can build an EMP bomb; I can strip and reassemble most any firearm you can imagine; I can fly a helicopter. I can’t function as a normal part of society. That’s the trade-off.”

“Okay,” Dan said, “so it’s agreed?”

He looked around the small group of terrified men.

When did I end up being the one in charge?

The thought sent a thrill of dizzying anxiety coursing through him. He breathed deeply and forced it back before it put down roots. This was definitely not the time. If Herb was right, they might have only a matter of minutes before the sun started to dip below the horizon. If they didn’t make it out of the mansion, their only option would be to lock themselves in one of the kitchen’s windowless store rooms and pray.

If it came to that, Dan didn’t think he would ever see daylight again.

I can be terrified later.

“Agreed,” Herb said quietly, and he reached out to a nearby cupboard, sliding open the door loudly enough for the noise to carry beyond the kitchen.

A nice touch, Dan thought, and he tilted his head and listened.

Outside the kitchen, the faint, sickening sound of the vampire feeding had stopped.

Silence.

16

Remy sat and watched Conny with a slightly puzzled expression, his head tilted a little to the right.

He huffed.

Right back at you, Rem, Conny thought. What the hell was all that about?

She leaned over the platform edge, staring down at the prone body on the tracks.

Her brow furrowed.

Now that she had a chance to look at it properly, she saw that the dead man’s hi-vis jacket was very similar to the ones worn by the staff at Euston. A blood-spattered I.D. tag was pinned to his chest. She squinted at it, just able to make the lettering out.

Adam Trent, senior engineer

Conny’s frown deepened.

One of the staff?

“He...he came from the tunnel.” A young woman’s voice, her tone high-pitched and tremulous.

Conny turned to see a number of stunned commuters staring at her. Frightened, shocked faces. The woman who’d spoken took a step forward, jabbing her finger first at the distant tunnel and then at the bodies on the platform.

“He killed them.”

Conny glanced at Remy. The young woman’s aggressive gesture had his attention. Remy didn’t discriminate when he was on duty. There was either threat or no threat. He growled softly.

“Easy, Rem,” Conny said, and waved a stop gesture at the young woman. “What’s your name, Miss?”

“Deanne.” Her lower lip was quivering, her eyes wide. Remy relaxed a little at her tone. “I was standing right there...he was screaming. He came out of the tunnel, screaming like there was something chasing him, and then he...he just...”

Deanne’s eyes filled with tears and she pointed again at the two bodies on the floor.

“Deanne, I’m going to ask you to step back, okay?” Conny lifted her voice. “I need everyone to step back, please.”

The crowd shuffled backward a few steps, and Conny turned to examine the bodies on the floor. She could tell immediately that the nearest was dead; a middle-aged man in a suit whose face had been pulped, presumably by the rebar. It would have taken more than one blow to do the sort of damage Conny saw. The second victim, a young woman who looked roughly Deanne’s age, appeared less seriously injured. Conny walked over and knelt at her side. She pressed a finger into the prone woman’s neck, searching for a pulse, and nodded. Faint, but there.

She hit the button on her radio and called for an ambulance, before alerting her CO that Euston Station required the presence of a little more than a single dog handler, and then returned her attention to Deanne.

“Did he say anything?”

Deanne shook her head, and the tears began to roll down her cheeks.

“We brought him down when he attacked the girl,” a man’s voice said. Conny glanced at the speaker. A young man in a hoodie gestured to a small, disparate group of men around him. “We tried to hold him on the ground until the security guys got here. He...just kept swinging. He didn’t say a word. He was…screaming. Like she said.”

Conny nodded over her shoulder at the tunnel.

“And you saw him come from that direction, too?”

“Yeah. Sounded like a fucking train coming at first,” he said, letting out a nervy laugh.

Conny returned her gaze to the tunnel, distracted by the buzz of her radio.

“Copy that,” a crackling voice said. Conny’s CO. “Hold your position, Stokes. We’ve got reinforcements en route. Secure the platform and await further orders.”

Conny turned back to study the carnage that Adam Trent had caused. Several injured, at least one victim dead, but the platform was secure. She had just reported that very fact. Trent was dead.

Secure the platform from what?

Behind her, Deanne was talking again, softly; tearfully, but Conny wasn’t listening. She was staring at Remy.

The German Shepherd had apparently decided that Conny was in no immediate danger, and was no longer watching his handler. Instead, Remy was staring at the distant entrance to the tunnel.

And whining softly.

Remy didn’t whine; Conny doubted that he had since he had been a puppy.

Squinting, she moved to Remy’s side and squatted, following the angle of his gaze. She saw nothing. The entrance to the tunnel yawned; an impenetrable abyss.

“What is it, Rem?”

Remy’s response was a low growl, and for the first time ever, Conny thought she detected a different note in the familiar noise, something that sounded a little like fear.

She gazed at the tunnel.

Saw nothing.

Couldn’t quite suppress a shudder.

*

The London Underground Central Line was generally the most overcrowded on the rail network; hardly surprising given the easy access it offered to many of London’s most popular tourist spots, and the fact that it passed through the shoppers’ Mecca that was Oxford Circus. Travelling at rush hour on the Central Line was the last resort of the desperate and the crazy, in Petra Duran’s opinion, which was precisely why she stepped onto one of the dreaded trains at around four in the afternoon, an hour before the offices of the city would spit out tens of thousands of weary commuters.

Even at that time, in what should have been a quiet period, the train still felt crowded, and it still stank of sweat…and she still didn’t get a seat.

She clung onto one of the handrails for balance as she travelled from Notting Hill Gate toward Liverpool Street, where she was due to catch an overground train that would take her out of the city towards Norfolk, and a family reunion that she was dreading. The whole journey would be a slow descent into eventual Hell, and it all began with the damn Central Line.

Petra figured she was something like three stops away from getting out of the Underground and heading to somewhere that might offer some actual fresh air, when her train began to slow down between stations for no good reason.

The old, familiar sinking feeling as the brakes squealed. It was the first of what would probably be many delays in her journey. The train crept along for a few hundred yards. She sighed.

Somehow, Petra decided, the train moving so slowly—surely at one mile per hour or less—was even more irritating than if it just came to a full stop.

Of course, as soon as that thought popped into her mind, the train did stop completely.

She peered at one of the tube maps which hung over the scratched, dirty windows that mocked passengers with a view of nothing other than pitch-black darkness. The train had halted somewhere between Chancery Lane and St. Paul’s.

She checked her watch.

If the delay swallowed up more than ten minutes, she ran the risk of missing her connection at Liverpool Street. Petra cursed herself for leaving the house so late. That was the trouble with journeys you didn’t want to make: you tended to eke out every last second before finally leaving home only when you absolutely had to, leaving no margin for error.

She began to daydream idly about calling her mother, and saying that she had missed her train.

There’s no way I can get there now, Mum. I’ll just have to meet your twenty-five-year-old boyfriend some other time. Such a shame…

Even if Petra had made that call, she knew her mother would have insisted that she find alternate transport. She hadn’t been home in nearly two years, and that, as far as her mother was concerned, bordered on being a personal insult.

Still, it was nice to at least think about calling it off. Nice to linger on prospect of just turning around and returning to her studio apartment, spending the rest of the day reading a book and eating chocolate. It would be so—

BANG.

Petra jumped as a loud thump ricocheted around the carriage, snapping her back to reality.

A couple of passengers murmured and peered around in interest. Those, Petra figured, had to be tourists. True Londoners knew that the only place to point your eyes while on a tube train was the floor, or—at a push—the maps above the windows. Eye contact was a definite no-no.

BANG.

The second thump was louder—way louder—and it sent a ripple of tension rolling through the carriage.

Train protocol abandoned, Petra found herself staring straight into the eyes of an old man sitting near the middle of the carriage when a third thump rocked it; saw those eyes widening with a growing apprehension that she felt uncoiling in her own gut.

That third bang sounded much closer, and somehow heavy with intent.

The tube was grimy and slow and overcrowded and shit, but mostly it was predictable. Yet the thumps that Petra heard were entirely new to her. It didn’t sound like an engine malfunction or even the wheels on the tracks. It didn’t sound like anything she had heard on a Tube train before.

In fact, it almost sounded like somebody was walking alongside the train, banging their fists against the exterior, or perhaps swinging a baseball bat at it. But that couldn’t be possible.

Another thump, though this one far more distant. A carriage or two further down the train.

Whatever was causing that noise, it was definitely moving.

Now, almost everybody in the carriage was peering around at each other nervously, each perhaps hoping to see a face that wasn’t riddled with concern staring back at them.

Petra glanced at the door to her right, focusing her gaze on the strips of glass that were little more than pitch-black rectangles.

Suddenly, for the first time ever, she thought about how the passengers must look from the outside; beacons of light in the darkness, lit up like a bloody Christmas tree.

So vulnerable.

She shuddered.

Edged a little closer to the glass.

Holding her breath.

Did I see something out there? Something in the blackness? Some darker shadow?

Is it looking at me right now?

Petra’s heart pounded, and she leaned in further, until her nose was only inches away from the window. When the breath in her lungs began to feel like a serrated blade, she let it out softly, and it fogged the glass in front of her face.

She wiped at the pane, half expecting to reveal a face pressed up against the other side of the glass, something hideous and twisted and demonic; maybe some crazy cannibals that lived in the tunnels, like in those silly old movies her boyfriend loved.

Nothing.

Just darkness and delays on the Central Line. Everything oh-so ordinary. The strange banging was probably just the engine imploding. Most of the transport system in London needed replacing yesterday, if not four decades earlier. Most likely, the noises were just parts of the train dying at last, and ensuring that her journey would be slower, and just a little more hellish than it ought to be.

Stifling a nervous chuckle, Petra turned away from the door and faced the carriage once more.

Squuuueeeeeeeeeaaaaaallllllllllllllllllllll.

The noise stopped everyone in the carriage like a freeze frame. It sounded like a rusting nail being scraped across glass. An obscene shrieking that made shoulders hunch and teeth grit.

Somewhere, a passenger whimpered.

Might have been Petra herself.

With the lights blazing inside the train, the windows were little better than mirrors, but through the distorted reflections of themselves, everyone in the carriage saw it.

Attached only to empty darkness; somehow all the more terrifying for being disembodied by the light spilling from inside the carriage.

A hand.

A single, terrifying hand.

It looked like it belonged to some enormous bird, or some prehistoric creature; long, thin fingers that ended in wicked talons.

The hand ran along the length of the carriage, scratching a line through the middle of each pane of glass, and the noise was dreadful and hypnotic. Petra watched, unable to look away, as the claw slowly drew closer to her position by the doors. Its movement was almost leisurely, like whatever unseen horror was attached to the fearsome talons was enjoying every second, and wanted to draw it out as much as possible.

The squealing stopped.

And then the lights went out.

For several moments, the darkness was so complete that Petra thought something had blinded her.

She listened to her breath, rattling like rusted chains, still hearing that all-consuming screech of the terrible claws on the glass, and let out a trembling yelp when emergency lighting kicked into life, bathing the carriage in a soft, orange glow. Suddenly, it was possible for her to see what the grotesque hand was attached to: a creature that she couldn’t even have conjured in her worst nightmares was standing right outside the window.

More than one.

Monsters.

Petra saw them for only the briefest of moments, for barely a second—just a fleeting, chilling glimpse—before the windows imploded, and something—some things—hurtled into the carriage.

And the crowded space filled with the sound of screaming.

*

Conny secured the platform with the help of Remy and the two bruised security staff, guiding the small crowd of witnesses out to the bottom of the escalators which led up to the ticketing hall, explaining that medical assistance was on the way and that they would all be required to provide statements.

Almost as soon as she had shepherded the commuters away from the platform, she saw the first of the reinforcements arriving, clattering down the stopped escalator in single file, evenly spaced.

Her eyes widened in surprise.

Kevlar body armour. Assault rifles. Protective visors.

An armed response unit.

What the hell?

The first group of officers made directly for the tunnel that led to the platform without even looking in Conny and Remy’s direction. A second group followed, and made their way straight toward her.

“You have been ordered to evacuate the station,” a man wearing an Inspector’s uniform said loudly, addressing the group. “Please leave in a calm and orderly fashion.”

As if perfectly planned, the up escalator began to move again. Armed officers began to guide the shaken commuters toward the exit, telling them that they would be taken care of upstairs.

“Sir,” Conny said, “these people are witnesses to a murder. There is an ambulance—”

“That will have to wait.”

Conny blinked.

Murder will have to wait?

“The ticketing area has been cleared,” the Inspector continued. “You’ll need to go up to the main hall and speak to the CS.”

“Chief Superintendent?” Conny repeated, surprised. “Here, at the station?”

He nodded.

“Everybody is here or headed this way. All hands on deck. Didn’t you hear on the radio?”

Conny flushed. Her radio had been crackling during Remy’s scuffle with Adam Trent. With all the noise of the man screaming and the dog snarling, she hadn’t been able to pay attention to it.

She shook her head.

“Well, get upstairs.” He looked down at Remy, who was still staring back toward the entrance to the platform. “I’m sure they will want you both up there.”

The last of the commuters had disappeared from sight, and the Inspector gestured for his group to make for the northbound platform.

“Hey,” Conny called, “it didn’t happen in there, it was the southbound line.”

The Inspector shook his head and grimaced behind his visor.

“It’s all the lines.”

17

Herb’s pulse thundered in his ears as he gripped one side of the table which he had placed across the kitchen door as a barricade. Dan held the other side, and when he nodded, they lifted together, moving the table aside as quietly as possible.

He stared at Dan. One minute the guy was having seizures on the floor, and the next, he was smoothly taking over as Herb’s own courage began to desert him. At any moment, Herb half-expected him to collapse and start screaming, but Dan remained focused only on moving the table without making a sound. His head was bowed in concentration, his mop of hair matted with sweat. Herb noticed for the first time that he had a scar that began an inch or so above his right eyebrow, running up into his tangled hair. A surgical scar.

Before Herb could ponder the significance of that scar any further, Dan began to lower the table. Herb focused on making sure the legs didn’t make a sound as they made contact with the tiles, and when he looked up again, Dan had already brushed his hair back over his forehead, and was moving to the door and pressing his ear against it.

After a moment, he shook his head.

Now, he mouthed, and Herb nodded, picking up the two guns from the counter and gripping them in palms that trembled wildly.

Dan began to turn the heavy iron key.

Slowly.

Quietly.

Wincing as he eased the ancient tumblers to the unlocked position.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity to Herb, Dan began to twist the handle.

And the door flew open, smashing him aside like a ragdoll.

He crashed across the table they had moved moments earlier, slamming into a cabinet. Going down hard, and disappearing from sight.

The vampire came in without hesitation, and Herb turned and fled blindly, throwing himself behind a counter.

The world became chaos.

The creature shrieking; the hideous noise echoing off the tiled walls, reverberating and multiplying until it seemed endless.

Glass breaking.

Lights winking out.

The sound of flesh tearing.

A strangled yelp.

Herb flipped onto his back as the room plunged into near-total darkness, and fired several rounds from the pistols wildly, aiming at nothing and everything in his terror.

One of the guns clicked.

Empty, Herb thought, and he tossed the weapon aside and put the barrel of the other against his temple, gasping at the searing heat of the metal on his skin.

It had been a desperate plan. Trying to trick a vampire like it was a child. Desperate…and doomed. Herb’s command of what remained of the Order had lasted a matter of hours, and he had led them directly into disaster, making every wrong decision it was possible to make. All were dead, save for handful, and the man he had sworn he was going to save was instead going to die. Again.

I’m no leader, he thought, and his finger curled around the trigger.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

No hero.

*

Shreds of light bled through from the outside world, squirming around the edges of the shuttered windows, bouncing off chrome surfaces.

Half-illuminating the abomination as it moved with appalling purpose.

The creature charged into the centre of the room, raking its talons through the gut of one of Herb’s followers. Jay, Dan thought, oddly detached from the unfolding horror. I remembered his name, after all.

The vampire leapt away from Jay’s still-standing corpse as gunfire ricocheted through the kitchen: a deafening thunder that made Dan’s ears ring. Muzzle flashes that threw bright, fleeting light on Jay as he began to fall, spilling something heavy and liquid from the gaping hole torn across his abdomen.

And it began.

As familiar anxiety at first; fear which hit him like an oncoming train, before twisting into something darker and less familiar.

With a roar, Dan hauled himself to his feet, striding forward and batting a gun from Herb’s hand as he placed it against his own temple.

“Eyes shut,” he snarled, his mouth delivering the command his brain hadn’t been aware of, and he leapt for the knife rack, his fingers closing around a cold steel handle.

A cleaver.

Of course. That made sense.

Because the nightmare which had begun on the Oceanus wasn’t over. He was still there, in the thick of it, thrashing; trying to break free of the madness. Locked inside a mind that was slowly crumbling to pieces as it tried to withstand the insanity of the world.

He turned, and saw the vampire attached to the ceiling like a dreadful, enormous insect, untroubled by gravity. It held another of Herb’s followers by the neck, his feet dangling at least four feet above the ground, and before Dan could move a muscle, the monster sliced through the man’s throat like ripe fruit. His body fell, an obscene torrent of dark blood pumping from the space where his head had been moments earlier.

The abomination snorted out something that might have been a laugh as it tossed the cleric’s head aside.

And drilled its eyes into Dan.

He felt a sickening sensation erupt in his mind; a terrible sort of pulling, as if the creature had hooked invisible claws into his brain and was trying to wrench it from his skull. As Dan watched, transfixed, the creature’s eyes seemed to glow, becoming strangely hypnotic, and the awful pulling in his head grew stronger, until Dan felt sure that his skull was about to explode.

The vampire dropped down onto the tiled floor.

Took a step toward him.

Click.

*

Herb watched it happen as an orbiting satellite might observe the destruction of the planet: detached and distant; separated from the insanity somehow. He couldn’t persuade his muscles to move, couldn’t even draw a breath into lungs that burned with the desire to power a scream.

Dan Bellamy wasn’t special at all.

The vampire stalked toward him casually, and Dan just…stood there. Staring at it; a huge cleaver dangling from limp fingers, his jaw slack; his eyes wide.

It has taken his mind, Herb thought in dull terror. Edgar was wrong. I was wrong. And now we’re all going to die.

Click.

Click.

The vampire took another couple of steps forward on those hideous, angular legs.

And it stopped.

For a moment, Herb gaped, bewildered, as the vampire and Dan stared into each other’s eyes.

And then Dan screamed.

Lifted the cleaver high above his head.

And charged.

*

His timing was off.

The creature whipped to the right as he swung the cleaver, and the blade landed only a glancing blow on the monster’s neck. He switched his grip on the handle, and swung again; a sweeping backhand that a tennis pro would have admired, and a bestial roar erupted from his lungs as the blade carved itself a home in the side of the vampire’s hateful head, lodging so deep in the thing’s cheek that when the vampire began to fall, it was impossible for him to maintain his grip on the weapon.

Shattering pain erupted in Dan’s belly.

He stared down, blinking stupidly.

Tried to process the sight of the three wicked talons buried in his stomach, and the awful tearing sensation as the creature’s weight dragged the hideous weapons away from his flesh.

A spatter of blood hit the tiles.

My blood.

So much—

And then Dan, too, began to fall.

The darkness took him before he landed.

*

Herb watched in a daze as both Dan and the vampire crashed to the floor. The room looked more like an abattoir now than a kitchen; bodies and blood and death piled in every corner.

The remaining three clerics—Lawrence, Scott and Adrian—stared at the twitching monster in horrified fascination, watching as it reached up a hand with a snort, gripping the handle of the cleaver that had split its skull almost in two, and tried to pull the blade out.

It screamed, and thick, black blood oozed from the wound like treacle.

It took Herb a moment to realise that the creature wasn’t dying, or if it was, it was doing so slowly.

That moment was long enough.

Adrian picked up a large carving knife from a counter and took a step toward the convulsing abomination, his face twisted in terror as he stared down at it.

“No!” Herb screamed. “Don’t look at it!”

Too late.

Adrian lifted the wicked blade high.

Drove the business end into the side of his own head.

Herb looked away in despair as the cleric dropped to the floor, and the vampire began to roll toward the rear of the kitchen, still clutching at the steel that had penetrated its skull. It scrambled out of sight behind the island in the centre of the room, melting into the thick shadows.

“Get Bellamy!” he hollered, loud enough to shake Lawrence and Scott from their stupor, and he sprinted across the slick tiles to Dan’s inert body.

You can’t die. You can’t.

There was no time to check Dan’s injuries; to determine whether it was safe to move him. It certainly wasn’t safe not to.

Herb grabbed a handful of Dan’s thick sweater, trying not to notice how heavy and sticky with the man’s blood it was, and began to heave, his feet slipping. Despite his slim frame, Bellamy was dead weight, and Herb made little headway until Lawrence appeared in front of him and grabbed the unconscious man’s ankles.

Somewhere in the shadows to the rear of the kitchen, the injured vampire shrieked. In the metal-and-tile kitchen, the noise was impossibly loud, otherworldly.

It might have been a sound born of pain.

Might have been determination or murderous desire or rage.

Herb didn’t want to find out.

“We have to go,” he roared.

18

When Conny reached Euston Station’s main hall, her jaw dropped.

The hall was filling up with police officers: a dizzying vortex of uniforms representing a myriad of units and boroughs. She couldn’t guess at exactly how many of her colleagues there were gathering below the departure boards, but it had to be north of two hundred.

This is a lot bigger than some guy going nuts with a length of rebar.

Yet it wasn’t just the sheer number of police present that made her skin prickle: the atmosphere in the room itself was rotten with tension. As she moved away from the escalators, toward the bulk of the gathering force, Conny caught the eye of several officers and shot them a quizzical glance. Each time she received only an abrupt head shake in return. By the look of the confused expressions on the faces Conny saw, no one had much more of a clue about why they were there than she did.

Remy’s chain hung slackly in her left hand. The dog should have been alert in the presence of so many police officers—curious at the very least—but Remy simply hovered at Conny’s side, staring back at the escalator that led down toward the distant crime scene. His behaviour was unnatural, almost like he had been struck by some sudden illness. She couldn’t remember ever seeing the dog so subdued.

Conny began to move toward the crowd and scanned the room, hoping to spot either somebody that she knew, or the Chief Superintendent that the Inspector heading to the platform had mentioned, but it was her ears that grabbed her attention, not her eyes.

A nearby constable, who looked like he’d only been on the job a year at most, muttered ominously that his brother worked out of Scotland Yard, and had told him that the army had been called in.

Someone else said they had heard of incidents in other cities.

“It started in Morden,” Conny heard another voice whispering quietly. “The guy with the knife, you heard about that?”

Conny frowned. The spree killing at the South London supermarket a couple of hours earlier was a big deal, of course, and she was certain that the tragedy would dominate the national headlines for days to come, but she wasn’t sure why that incident would prompt the Metropolitan Police to send such a large group of officers to the London Underground. Morden was the very last stop on the Northern Line, way out in zone six. Far away from Euston.

“He was the start. I heard there have been other incidents. And the news is talking about a cruise ship being attacked. Blown up. It’s terrorists...”

A cruise ship? Conny hadn’t heard anything over the radio about it.

She glanced up. Above the departure boards, a large television screen displayed the latest news. There was no volume, but there was indeed a stone-faced newscaster sitting in front of a picture of a huge cruise ship. Along the bottom of the screen, a headline read Tragedy in the Atlantic.

What the hell would that have to do with this?

A murmur rippled through a group of officers standing to her left, catching her attention, and when she tore her gaze away from the TV screen, she finally spotted some senior uniforms in the distance. Before she could move toward them, Conny saw the group exchanging troubled glances and quickly exiting the hall. They stood outside in the rain, talking animatedly in hushed tones. Lots of gesticulating.

The tension in the hall jacked up a notch.

Far to her right, Conny heard a loud bark and searched through the bodies, finally catching sight of the dog. His name was Jackson, and Conny knew his handler, Robert Nelson. Several weeks earlier, Nelson had asked Conny if she would like to go to dinner, and she had rejected him more bluntly than she had intended. He seemed like a nice guy, but he had terrible timing.

A conversation between them would be awkward. Conny sighed. Dogs were so much easier than people. She made a mental note to keep it brief, and she pushed through the crowd with Remy trotting along behind her, apparently happy to be on the move once more.

Robert looked like he was having trouble keeping Jackson calm. The dog was a German Shepherd, just like Remy, but noticeably smaller. Jackson’s specialty was his nose: he was one of the best sniffers on the Force.

Robert looked up as Conny approached, and his face crumbled into a weak grin.

“Uh, hi, Cornelia. How are you?”

“Robert,” she nodded. “Do you know what’s going on?”

His smile faded. “Probably no more than you, but whatever it is, it’s big. And this isn’t the only station involved. All available officers, right?”

Conny stared at him, baffled, and he frowned.

“You didn’t hear it on the radio?”

“I was…busy.”

“Well, you didn’t miss much. All I know is that people have been going missing on the—”

A loud murmur passed through the crowd, cutting him off, and Conny turned to see the senior officers striding back into the room wearing stricken expressions. A man with a beard, who was wearing what Conny thought was a Chief Superintendent’s uniform, gestured to somebody that she couldn’t see.

A moment later, the murmuring of the crowd became a loud chatter.

Someone was handing out firearms, pulling them from a secure crate and distributing them to men and women who looked equal-parts horrified and excited at the prospect of arming themselves.

And all Conny could do was stare.

Heckler and Koch G36. Assault rifle. Thirty-round magazines. Five-point-Five-Six Calibre. Able to switch between semi- and full-automatic. A work of art.

MP5SF. Submachine gun. Capable of firing seven-fucking-hundred silenced nine-mil rounds per minute. Single, burst or continuous fire. The MP5 was a stubby, hissing snake of a weapon, and Conny thought it was perhaps the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

Some of the firearms were held casually, with the easy grip of familiarity. Others were clutched in hands that shook, just a little. Guns were not routine for British police, not even in the country’s capital city. There would be plenty of anxious men and women there, Conny thought, facing the prospect of their first firefight.

Including me.

Many of the more senior police officers in the main hall took an assault rifle, and being surrounded by all that firepower made her feel dizzy with longing.

She blinked in surprise when a man wearing a Lieutenant’s uniform stepped directly in front of her and pressed a Glock 17 into her palm.

She stared at it, open-mouthed.

Moulded polymer casing. Seventeen nine-millimetre parabolic rounds. Under-barrel tac-light.

It was heavy; solid.

So beautiful.

The gun fit into Conny’s palm like it had been custom-made for her.

“Have you been trained with automatic weapons?”

Conny shook her head slowly, her eyes distant; focused only on the Glock. She had developed a parent-troubling love of guns and weaponry at around the time that girls were supposed to be dreaming of owning ponies, and had fired automatic weapons on ranges on several occasions, but had never carried a firearm in the line of duty. Once, carrying that sort of firepower regularly had been her ultimate goal, but that was before she had been partnered with Remy, and had seen what a thinking weapon was capable of.

And now, here she was, being handed a pistol in the middle of a real-life situation that she had no grasp of whatsoever.

Damn, though, the gun did feel powerful. Intoxicating.

“Constable. Constable?”

Conny blinked and looked at the Lieutenant.

“You stay at the rear, you understand? The ideal scenario here is you handing that weapon back to me fully loaded.”

She nodded.

The Lieutenant dropped his gaze to Remy.

“He a sniffer?”

“Crowd control, Sir.”

“Hmm. Well, that might prove just as useful.”

He began to move away.

“Sir,” Conny said, blurting out the word before she had even realised she was about to speak. “What’s happening?”

The Lieutenant arched an eyebrow and glanced back at her. She saw impatience in his eyes, and something else, too. Uncertainty, maybe.

“You didn’t hear on the radio?”

Conny shook her head.

“We were dealing with a violent—”

The Lieutenant interrupted her with an irritated gesture. He nodded toward the front of the hall, and the group of senior officers gathering beneath the departure boards.

“Eyes front,” he said. “Briefing any second, now.”

He turned away before Conny nodded, and slipped into the crowd, searching for any other unarmed officers.

Moments later, a voice called out.

“Quiet!”

The excited chatter which had filled the hall as the weapons were being handed out died away immediately.

Conny moved forward and lifted to her tiptoes, peering over the heads of those in front of her. A bearded man of around forty-five with a grave expression held his left hand aloft. It was the man she had seen moments earlier giving the order to pass out the guns.

“Chief Superintendent Porter,” the bearded man said. “Some of you know me. For the rest of you, I’m sorry we’re meeting under these circumstances.” He took a deep breath. “In the last hour, deaths have been reported at a number of Underground stations. Maintenance staff, working in the tunnels, have not returned from their shifts. At present, there are at least sixteen people unaccounted for. Three of the missing members of staff did return, and none of them have lived longer than a couple of minutes. All have committed suicide, usually after attempting—and in a couple of cases succeeding—to take the lives of others first.”

Just like Adam Trent, Conny thought.

Porter finally dropped his hand, apparently concluding that he had everybody’s complete attention. He lowered his voice a little.

“You’ve all heard about what happened in Morden earlier today. It looks like it was not an isolated incident.”

There was an audible intake of breath around the hall.

“Most of the outer parts of the rail network have already been closed and evacuated. We have started moving toward the centre of London, shutting stations as we go. At this moment, there are more than twenty Underground stations out there full of officers just like yourselves, hearing this exact same information.”

Porter drew in a breath and scanned the hall from left to right.

“In the past ten minutes, several trains have gone dark.”

He paused for a moment, as if to give that information a chance to settle on everyone’s mind.

Trains lost in the tunnels, Conny thought. Civilians. Dear God, the Chief Superintendent was telling them that virtually the entire London police force had been called out. Even himself. Was the Commissioner of the entire bloody Met out there somewhere, standing in an Underground station, delivering an identical speech and handing out guns?

“At this moment, we have to assume the worst.”

Porter lifted his chin, staring around the faces that were fixed upon him.

“There is something in the tunnels; we don’t know what. According to the powers that be, we had no prior intelligence suggesting that a terrorist attack on the transport system was imminent, but we must assume that we are dealing with a large, multi-cellular threat, here. Quite possibly, a citywide attack. I’m not going to lie to you, we’re going into this blind, and our numbers are stretched across half of London. Our primary focus here is to find those trains and all civilians, and to secure these tunnels. To ensure that the stations are safe, and that whatever is happening down there does not spill out onto the streets. Engaging with any threat is strictly secondary until we know more about what we are dealing with, is that understood?”

A ripple of agreement passed through the crowd.

“We have a lot of ground to cover,” the Chief Superintendent continued, and Conny thought she heard in his voice an echo of the sentiment she had detected in the eyes of the Lieutenant who had armed her. A wavering uncertainty. “You will divide equally between the Northern Line and the Victoria Line, and you’ll split further to cover the northbound and southbound tunnels. There are already armed response teams waiting on each platform, and they are the tip of the spear, understand?”

The gathered crowd mumbled its acknowledgment of the order. Porter sucked in a lungful of air and continued.

“When the tunnels split, you will divide into groups of no fewer than seven. If you see anything that looks like a device—anything—you are to inform either your immediate CO or myself, and we all fall back and wait for the bomb squad. Your radios won’t work once we’re inside the tunnels, but these,”—he held up an oddly cheerful-looking walkie-talkie—”will give us limited range. We don’t have enough for every one of you, but I want each group to be carrying at least three. I expect constant radio contact, and I mean constant. I can’t stress this enough: if any of you deviate from these orders in any way, I’ll have your arse in front of an inquiry before you can say sacked. I expect you all to come back here without a scratch on you, now do I make myself fucking clear?”

This time, the agreement was louder, almost a cheer.

Jesus, Conny thought, this is all for show. Puffing up the troops before sending them into battle. What the fuck is this?

The Lieutenant who had handed out the guns began to wave officers toward the escalator leading down to the platforms. Conny fell into line behind the others, scanning the faces around her and seeing her own anxiety reflected in them.

And for the first time since Adam Trent had died, she felt tension on Remy’s leash.

She looked down at the German Shepherd, and frowned.

The fearless dog was dragging his weight, his eyes focused intently on the down escalator, as if he was reluctant to approach it.

Like he was afraid of what might be waiting for him down there.

19

Leon Mancini wasn’t a religious man, not like most of the freaks back at the ranch in Colorado. If Jennifer Craven had ever harboured ideas about changing that fact—about converting him—she had wisely decided not to follow through on them. There were some people that even she understood that you couldn’t just throw in a dark room and dose with acid and expect obedience.

Mancini was one of those people. He had been running operations in Force Recon when Craven was trying on her first training bra; there was no form of torture he hadn’t been trained to withstand.

So Craven made him love her.

As it turned out, the torture would have been preferable.

Craven was sharp and dangerous; a knife sheathed in an expensive dress suit. Mancini didn’t trust her an inch, and never would, but she had broken him in a way that military training could never have prepared him for.

For a long time, he told himself that he was working for the money the Craven family offered, and that was certainly true while Jennifer’s old man had been running the show. As soon as Jennifer took charge and began aggressively expanding the Order, he began to harbour doubts. The threat to his life if he chose to leave the ranch was obvious, but Mancini had no problem with that. He’d lived most of his life under threat of one sort or another, and he knew when he signed up that his predecessor had met an ‘untimely’ end.

That didn’t matter. If he left, and the Cravens came after him, they’d discover that he was pretty hard to kill, and they wouldn’t be the first.

Just as he was preparing to get out, Jennifer came to him, and found a way to make him stay.

That had been years ago, and he still couldn’t bring himself to leave, not even after she had rejected him so brutally.

Yeah, love was the worst torture of all.

Their affair lasted only a year. Not by his choosing.

When it was over, Mancini remained professional, and told himself that as long as Jennifer played it straight with him and paid well, things would go just fine between them, just like they had with her old man. The rest of the freaks at the ranch could carry on with their weird rituals and worship of their buried gods; Christ, they could dance naked under the moon waving severed cocks in the air for all he cared.

Old man Craven had told him the truth—or at least as much of it as Mancini cared to know—before Jennifer had taken over. The Cravens believed in vampires; that the monsters lived underground in hibernation, and occasionally a few popped up to the surface to eat some folks. They had turned their ranch into a twisted Disneyworld, and were slowly growing their cult by attracting vulnerable youngsters who didn’t know better and re-educating them.

As far as Mancini was concerned, the Craven family’s religion was no more bizarre than any of the others—and no less steeped in blood. And, much the same as every other religion out there, the people at the top rolled about in a seemingly endless pit of money, and were more than happy to spend some on having men like Mancini around to make them feel safe.

The rituals—the overtly, almost cartoonish devotion to a sort of Satanism—were mostly for show, but the show worked. A steady stream of miserable teenagers made their way to the ranch, either of their own volition or as a result of active recruitment, and numbers grew until the place more closely resembled a small town.

Mostly, Mancini’s twenty years as an employee of the Craven family had seen him keeping peace at the ranch, and keeping unwanted visitors out. At times, he had been required to kidnap and ultimately murder scientists across a multitude of disciplines, everything from astrophysicists to botanists, as Jennifer Craven focused on hunting down the truth about the grave she had ‘discovered’ sixteen years earlier and the creatures that she had been born to serve.

At other times, on occasions when new initiates escaped the ranch and ran, either losing their minds or finally coming to their senses, Mancini and his team hunted them down.

One way or another, nobody left the ranch.

Over recent years, informed, no doubt, by the internet, a surprising number of desperate parents had found their way to Colorado’s perfect middle-of-nowhere, searching for the children they believed they still had some claim to.

They didn’t get to leave either.

Only once had the secrecy of the ranch been truly compromised on Mancini’s watch; two years earlier, by a tiny documentary crew whose dream of headlines had blinded them to the fact that they weren’t dealing with some two-bit religious wackos. Had the idiots in question restricted themselves to long-range surveillance, they might even had succeeded in making their little movie, but they just hadn’t been able to resist getting closer for the perfect shot.

When that incident was finally resolved, Mancini watched the recordings they had managed to get. It was a little like watching one of those tired found footage horror movies that seemed to be everywhere in recent years. Just like those movies, the filmmakers’ story ended in blood; in bones scattered across the plains.

It wasn’t noble or glorious, but it was a job, and for twenty years, it had been a good one. Better to Mancini than the military had ever been.

He couldn’t help but feel that England was going to change that.

Because it was almost dark already.

He wondered if he had an English counterpart. Maybe the Rennick family had their own Leon Mancini.

Maybe he, too, was scanning the countryside around the Rennick mansion through a rifle scope at that very moment, trying to spot some threatening movement in the last scraps of the afternoon light.

*

The Gulfstream which Jennifer had provided for Mancini and his team had touched down at a private airfield south of London almost an hour earlier. From there, they took a van southwest, driving for around thirty minutes to reach the land owned by the Rennick family.

There was a single overgrown road leading through thick woodland to the compound itself; there was no way they could take the van through there. If the Rennick compound was set up anything like the Craven Ranch—and based on what Craven had told him, Mancini was certain that it would be—the road would be under constant surveillance, and most likely rigged with automated defensive measures.

He parked a couple of miles back from the road, and led his team the rest of the way through the trees on foot, keeping a wary eye out for bear traps and tripwires.

They moved in silence, like watchful ghosts. Each and every one of them had been a part of missions in terrain that was far worse than anything the English countryside could throw at them, and they made quick progress through the forest.

After around ten minutes, during which period even Burnley and Montero had managed to stay silent, the compound loomed before them, huge and dark. Several smaller buildings gathered around a vast mansion that looked like something out of a TV show; one of those achingly dull period dramas that the Brits loved to produce.

Mancini scanned the compound through the M24’s powerful scope, and felt the hair on the back of his neck rising.

Steel shutters looked to have been drawn across all the windows of the main mansion building, but the front door stood wide open, gaping like a hungry mouth.

According to Jennifer Craven, the Rennick compound was home to a total of more than fifty people, yet there was no sign of movement anywhere.

“What do you think, Mancini?”

He ignored Braxton’s question for a moment, concentrating on trying to focus his scope on the interior of the mansion beyond the doors. He thought he could see something in there, but the light was no good.

He lowered the rifle and sighed.

“I think whatever happened here, we missed it. But we have to be sure.”

Braxton looked dubious.

“Yeah, sure. But we’re gonna find some bad shit in that house. You know that, right?”

Mancini nodded. He knew it, all right. The combination of the closed shutters and the open door could only mean one thing: somebody had tried to hide from something, and they had failed. He would be leading his team into either a trap, or—if the Craven family was right about vampires after all—the scene of a massacre. There was no way around it. This was where Herbert Rennick had been headed, and Mancini had no other leads to follow up. If the Hermetic wasn’t here, the team would be heading home empty-handed, and Jennifer Craven’s rage would be fucking biblical.

“Didn’t come all this way for nothing,” he said grimly. “Tell the others we’re moving in.”

*

Mancini’s team was the best of those available at the ranch, which made them damn near as lethal as most any military unit in the world. Braxton and Montero had been SEALS, Rushmer had spent a decade in Delta Force, and Burnley’s work in the Special Activities Division of the CIA was so classified that even she had no idea what any of her missions had been about. Or so she claimed.

The team was rounded off by its only member with a non-military background: Ed Bricknall, who was one of only a handful of westerners to have ever been invited to Shaolin Temple to study with the monks, if his tales were to be believed. The guy was practically a fucking ninja, with the fastest pair of hands Mancini had ever seen and an apparent inability to feel pain. He couldn’t even imagine where Jennifer had dug that guy up.

They were badass all right, every last one of them.

Their presence should have made him feel safe.

Yet as he stopped at the threshold of the Rennick mansion, safe turned out to be the last thing Leon Mancini felt.

Jennifer’s warning about what he could expect to face ran through his mind repeatedly, and though he didn’t believe her, not really, her dire words had been delivered so earnestly that they had managed to burrow under his skin.

If you engage the vampires, you will die. Trust me. Stay in the light.

The power was out in the mansion, or the lights had been smashed, and with daylight quickly fading and the shutters down, the interior of the house melted into darkness within a few feet of the front door. Standing in the main doorway, Mancini pulled out a flashlight, and began to sweep it around a huge, ornate room that looked like the lobby of a fine hotel.

The beam made the shadows dance jerkily, and picked out sights worse than anything he’d seen in his long military career; an atrocity that was beyond his comprehension. Bodies smashed and broken like children’s toys, organs strewn about the vast room like grisly confetti.

He shouldered the rifle and pulled out an MP5.

And all of the vampire bullshit which he had listened to from the Craven family for years came back to him. Creatures that couldn’t be killed. Creatures that ripped your mind away from you and made you their puppets. Sadistic monsters that revelled in terror and pain. Evil fucking incarnate.

It was all true. Craven wasn’t taking impressionable kids and brainwashing them to believe in some satanic nonsense. She was brainwashing them with the truth.

Evil lurked in the Rennick mansion. Mancini could feel it, radiating from the shadows in waves, rolling around him like dry ice. He had felt fear plenty; being an elite member of the military wasn’t about not feeling fear, it was about not letting that fear slow you down for a second. Acknowledging it and having the courage to press forward regardless.

He hadn’t ever felt fear like this.

Mancini had courage enough to take on most any objective, but he knew as he felt that evil washing over him, that taking another step inside the mansion would not be bravery. It would be stupidity.

Jennifer Craven, he thought, was not worth this.

“Back,” he whispered urgently, “there’s nothing here.”

But there was.

His wavering light caught movement in the centre of the gigantic room, and for a split second he saw it clearly, rising from the pile of corpses on unsteady legs, a walking nightmare with the handle of a blade protruding from its cheek and a ragged strip of human flesh hanging from its hideous jaws.

Feeding, Mancini thought in horror.

With a screech, the vampire leapt vertically, disappearing into the shadows at the top of the room.

It didn’t come back down.

Don’t look up.

“Run!” he hollered, turning away and leaving the mansion behind at a sprint. He heard footsteps running with him, but they were quickly drowned out by gunfire. Mancini glanced over his shoulder and saw Rushmer emptying his whole clip into Ed Bricknall’s gut, ripping the ninja to shreds, all his years of intense training and dedication punched out of him in seconds by large calibre bullets.

Rushmer’s eyes were wide and horrified as he executed Bricknall, and Mancini knew exactly what his expression meant; knew it in his gut as sure as he knew his own name. The vampire had Rushmer’s mind, just like Jennifer Craven said. It was Rushmer.

“Go,” he snarled at the others, “before he can reload. Don’t look back.”

He aimed for the trees, tossing his heavy sniper rifle aside and pouring every ounce of energy he had into pumping his legs. A hundred yards. Fifty. He saw Burnley disappear into the trees first—damn, she was fast—just ahead of Braxton and Montero. Both of the younger men were pulling away from him steadily.

Behind him, he heard the distant crack of automatic fire, and the distinctive whine of bullets fizzing around his head.

He leapt the last few feet, hitting the deck inside the tree line and rolling, inhaling a mouthful of wet dirt and leaves.

When he scrambled to his feet, spitting and gasping for air, he saw Braxton and Montero taking up defensive positions, readying their weapons.

“Are you insane?” Mancini snarled, running deeper into the trees. “They’re gone; there’s nothing we can do for them, understand? Get to the van. Go!”

“What about the mission?”

Mancini slowed, glaring at Braxton, and ducking instinctively when he heard distant rifle fire split the night once more. It didn’t sound like it was close, but it wasn’t worth taking the risk.

“If Herbert Rennick came back, he isn’t in there,” Mancini snapped, and turned to run.

“You’re right,” an unfamiliar voice said, and Mancini whipped his body toward it, lifting the submachine gun. “You just missed him. But I can tell you where he’s going.”

The man who had spoken stepped out from the trees, his hands held above his head. A big man, with a hard stare; Mancini thought he had the look of someone who knew how to handle himself, but he didn’t appear to be carrying a weapon.

Mancini lowered the MP5.

“Jeremy Pruitt,” the big man said. “I believe I may have spoken to your boss on the phone.”

20

The tunnel stank of age; damp and rust and decay.

And fear.

Conny walked, as instructed, at the rear of the large group of armed police, listening to the soft shuffling of boots ahead of her. She figured there had to be more than forty of them in total, creeping along the southbound line.

No one spoke.

And with each step forward, the mood among the officers became a little more toxic, the apprehension ripening inside them just that little bit more evident. It didn’t matter which unit the officers came from, she thought, or what experience they had. This was about as far from standard operating procedure as it was possible to get. They were all afraid.

We’re going in blind, Chief Superintendent Porter had said, and it turned out he was being both literal and figurative. Most of the officers carried flashlights—either in their hands or affixed to their weapons—but the beams looked fragile in the suffocating darkness; they only lit so much. Wherever the flashlights were not pointing, the darkness became an impossible void. Shadows surged and retreated. As soon as the platform lights of Euston Station disappeared, just a few hundred yards into the tunnel system, Conny became painfully aware that the abyss was at her back; that all lights including her own were pointing forward. It felt like the blackness was chasing her, waiting for an opportunity to swallow her whole.

The tension in the group was palpable. It poisoned her mind, and grim fantasies began to unspool: killers closing in on her from behind, all-but invisible in the darkness. Drawing nearer with knives in their hands and psychotic grins splitting their faces. Or maybe the shadows were home to explosive devices that the police could not see, buried charges which would detonate and bring the tunnel roof down onto her head, crushing her bones and slowly suffocating the life from her...

A sensation which Conny hadn’t experienced in more than thirty years came back to her suddenly and vividly. She remembered sitting up in her small bed, staring at the closet in her bedroom, certain that the door was opening…slowly…

…and that something monstrous waited inside.

Her grip on the Glock tightened until her knuckles ached.

It was just her mind playing tricks on her. The tunnel hadn’t even split yet, and the only way anyone could be behind her was if they came from the same platform that she and forty-plus other armed police had used.

It was, Conny mused, incredible how quickly all the training and all the resolve just drained away when confronted with unknown danger and a lack of light. Some responses were primal; instinctive and unstoppable.

And the darkness was the most complete that she had ever known. In the pitch black, with all her colleagues wearing dark uniforms, the world was reduced to floating points of light and half-stifled, fearful exhalations.

A bead of cold sweat ran down her back, making her flinch, and she tried to shake the dread settling over her away. She had been in plenty of threatening situations in her career; life-threatening on more than one occasion, but the tunnel was getting to her, crawling under her skin.

And that wasn’t just the darkness’ doing, she realised. It was Logan. Her poor boy, who needed her now more than ever, no matter how much he might deny it. Logan was going to require her support desperately in the coming months and years, just as his father had. As much as she tried to put her personal life aside when she was at work, there were some situations in which it simply wasn’t possible. She was walking headlong into an unknown danger that made her stomach churn while her son was in the hospital, struggling to comprehend a terminal diagnosis. While she was all that he had.

If any harm comes to me, it will be Logan that suffers, she thought bleakly, and flinched when the group of police in front of her abruptly halted.

Conny craned her neck to see what their lights were trained on, and her stomach lurched.

The tunnel split into four directly ahead of them, and the Chief Superintendent was busy dividing them into smaller groups and pointing at each tunnel in turn.

As the fractured wall of light that had been ahead of her began to break apart, and the smaller groups moved away into the tunnels, Conny couldn’t help but think that things had been bad moments earlier, but now they were so much worse.

Eventually, only her small group was left, led by CS Porter himself. Along with Conny and Remy were half a dozen officers who looked like they really wanted to turn and run back through the tunnel, and a handful from the armed response units she had seen earlier. The tip of the spear.

The AR officers took the lead, moving down the far left tunnel with their assault rifles tucked against their collarbones, each weapon sending a beam of light thirty metres ahead of them. Behind them, Porter led the rest. He kept a Glock pointed at the floor in his left hand; a walkie-talkie in his right. For the moment, all Conny could hear was rustling and faint static, along with the occasional mumbled word, all rasping from the tinny speaker at a barely-audible volume.

The group pressed forward into the smaller tunnel with just a dozen flashlights, and the darkness that had felt dangerous when it was at her back embraced her like a live thing; a creature that swallowed up the lights cast into it with ravenous hunger.

She followed the Chief Superintendent, trying not to think about her son, and about how he would cope if she did not make it back, and her growing anxiety slowly boiled all her thoughts away, until just one was left.

Please, God, let this tunnel be empty.

*

Remy strained at his leash continually, trying to pull her back toward the platform at Euston, and Conny slowly began to fall behind. As a gap opened up between herself and the rest of the group, her nerves began to dance uncontrollably. There was no way she could allow herself to get separated from the others.

“Heel, Rem,” she hissed, jerking on the leash, irritated at the note of panic she heard in her voice.

He continued to pull, turning every step into a battle, until finally Conny stopped. “Fine,” she muttered, “if you want to go back, go back.”

She glanced down the tunnel fearfully. Already the lights of the rest of the group were disappearing around a bend, threatening to leave her alone in the dark with only the Glock’s tiny flashlight attachment to guide her. She had to let Remy go.

She loosened her grip on the chain, and Remy whined, but he didn’t move. He didn’t want to run away, she realised. Remy was far too loyal to leave her side.

He’s trying to get me to run away.

A shudder rippled through her.

Remy whined again, very quietly, almost as though he was afraid of being heard.

She knelt in front of the dog and whispered sternly, “Remy. We’re on duty. Heel.”

Remy lowered his nose miserably, accepting defeat.

Conny straightened and broke into a trot, closing the gap that had grown between herself and the flashlights of her colleagues.

Closing it too quickly.

Why have they stopped?

Her pace faltered, and she felt Remy give another hopeful tug on the leash.

The others were gathered around the Chief Superintendent, their expressions tense, all eyes pointed at the radio he held in his right hand. She jogged toward them and opened her mouth, drawing in a breath to ask what was happening, and Porter silenced her with a stare.

The radio hissed faintly, and a disembodied voice whispered, “I don’t see anything. You?”

Another voice responded, “No, but I hear it. Don’t you hear—”

The words dissolved in a meaningless blast of static that cut open the darkness in the tunnel like a blade.

Conny lifted her confused gaze to meet Porter’s eyes. The bearded man was staring at the radio in open-mouthed horror.

Not static, she realised. Gunfire.

It lasted only a few seconds, but that was long enough for Conny to grind her teeth as she realised that what she was hearing was fully automatic, unsuppressed fire. The big guns.

In one of the nearby tunnels, a group of policemen had been forced to engage, and from the sound of it, they had emptied their entire weapons at something.

The clatter of shooting was followed by a sound all the worse; a sound that made Conny grip Remy’s leash so tightly that the metal pressed painfully into the flesh of her palm.

Silence.

No one calling it in. No one shouting at their colleagues to get the cuffs, or to head this way or that way. No suspect’s rights being recited.

Not even any groans of pain.

Just…silence.

It was the Chief Superintendent that finally broke it.

“Who fired?” Porter hissed into the radio. “Respond! Fitz? Stevens? Preston?”

A disembodied voice floated in the darkness, tinny and low.

“Not us, Sir.”

It was followed swiftly by another; a voice that shook audibly.

“Clear here, Sir.”

A beat.

Another.

“Dammit, Stevens,” Porter snarled. “Respond. Stevens?”

For several long seconds the air in the tunnel was compressed by the awful silence, until the weight of it made Conny want to clap her hands over her ears. She squeezed her eyes shut and drew in a deep breath.

Let it out slowly.

This can’t be happening.

Not today.

“Rendezvous back at the tunnel split,” she heard Porter say, and when she opened her eyes, the lights of the group had already turned around, the others heading back the way they had come at speed. Moving in a daze, Conny turned to sprint after them.

And slammed to a halt as Remy tugged forcefully on the leash.

“Remy!” she yelled, and there was more than a note of panic in her tone now. Her voice was soaked in it. The damn dog had wanted to go back minutes earlier, and now he was trying to drag her deeper into the tunnel?

With a curse of frustration, Conny dropped the leash and took a step forward, trusting that Remy would follow.

And she let out a surprised yelp when she felt sharp teeth sinking into her flesh.

She stared down at her right calf in amazement. He wasn’t playing—Remy almost never played, and certainly not when he was on duty—this was a bite, strong enough to break the skin.

She felt a stab of pain and let out a grunt, stooping to retrieve Remy’s leash.

The dog began to pull on her leg and the pain spiked high enough to make her gasp.

“What the fuck, Remy?”

Remy whined and opened his jaws, the sudden release almost dumping Conny on her butt. He bumped his nose into her leg a couple of times and then bit again, gently this time, but persuasively, trying to pull her in the opposite direction to the one that Porter and the others had taken.

She focused on the distant group of flashlights. The others already looked far away, moving at a sprint. They would be around the bend and out of sight in moments. She wasn’t one of the officers carrying a walkie-talkie. If she got separated from the group and somehow her flashlight failed…

She patted at her pockets.

She’d left her phone on the dashboard of the van.

Dammit, Remy!

Once more, she reached down to grab Remy’s leash, intending to haul him along on his belly if necessary, and the tunnel behind her echoed to a sound that made her blood chill in her veins.

A hideous screech; a sound no human throat could possibly produce.

That’s not terrorists, Conny thought bleakly. It’s something else.

In the distance, Chief Superintendent Porter opened fire.

They all did.

The roaring guns spat gobs of light onto the tunnel walls, and Remy’s plaintive whining became a frantic growl. He grabbed the cuff of her trousers firmly and yanked hard, but for a moment, all Conny could do was stand and stare numbly at the distant firefight. She saw no sign of return fire; just a group of police officers emptying their weapons into the darkness.

For several seconds, the thunder of the guns ricocheted from the tunnel walls, and then, in the distant, swirling pool cast by a half-dozen flashlights, she caught a glimpse of something; heard a dreadful skittering.

It moved fast, galloping along the underside of the fucking ceiling and launching itself at Porter.

Cutting through him like his body was made of smoke.

Conny watched the distant figure of the Chief Superintendent fall, and the tunnel filled with the noise of screaming; of wet ripping. She saw another figure collapse. Yet another—incredibly; impossibly—appeared to stuff the barrel of his G36 into his mouth and pepper the wall behind him with the contents of his own skull.

All of a sudden, Conny felt the pressure of Remy’s jaws on her calf ease, and she knew what that meant. The dog had done his best to persuade her to run, but had decided the time had come for him to flee or die. He ran with a pitiful, apologetic whine.

More gunfire behind her. It looked like there were only five of them left now, and a couple were shooting wildly; hitting nothing. A hideous scream rattled along the tunnel, and another of Conny’s colleagues went down hard, slammed into the ground by something that exited the shadows only for an instant.

It was all happening too fast.

I’m going to die down here.

With a glance at the Glock that now seemed tiny and insignificant in her hand, Conny took the only option available. She couldn’t die. Not before Logan did.

She turned away from the horror, following Remy’s lead.

Running for her life.

21

It wasn’t following.

Either it was too busy tearing the rest of the police apart, or it hadn’t noticed Conny and Remy hanging back further down the tunnel. Maybe it just didn’t care. Perhaps it already had more than enough meat, and saw no pressing reason to chase after one retreating human and her dog.

Coward.

The word burned hot in Conny’s mind. Her decision to flee had been instinctive, but that simply made it all the worse. It meant that despite all her years of training and experience, there had always been a danger threshold at which she would just turn and run, abandoning her duty. She had never been afraid of anything, not like this. When the creature had appeared, she hadn’t thought about the safety of her colleagues or her oath as a police officer; only her certainty that her own death was imminent, and that her obligation to her dying son outweighed all others.

She ran without thought even for her direction, focusing only on maintaining her balance on the uneven tunnel floor; on putting one foot in front of the other and opening up as much distance between her and that thing as possible.

What the fuck was it?

An animal?

If so, it moved like no animal that Conny had ever seen. In the brief glimpse she had managed to catch of the creature, it had clung to the ceiling like some gigantic spider, yet when it had dropped among the police officers, scattering them like a bomb threat, she was sure she had also seen it walking upright, just like a human. The brief snapshots her eyes had taken made no sense. Something as large as a bear, but wiry. Something that seemed to be made of teeth and claws.

Her mind ran to old horror movie scenarios. Maybe someone had dumped toxic waste into the sewer system, and some ordinary critter had been mutated into a hideous monster. London’s very own Godzilla; crawling through the city’s ancient basement, killing all who came across it.

Even in her heightened state of fear and confusion, that didn’t ring true to Conny. If there were some dangerous animal living in the Underground, surely it would have been discovered years ago. But if it had successfully avoided discovery, why suddenly start killing people en masse now?

And how could this impossible creature have taken people from multiple stations in such a short space of time?

Because there is more than one. Maybe a lot more.

The answer uncoiled in Conny’s mind, and she knew there was truth in it instinctively.

She slowed a little and hissed at Remy to stop. The dog looked back at her, wide-eyed, with an expression that Conny thought clearly conveyed are you fucking crazy, human?

The thought of fleeing, only to run headlong into more of the creatures was too terrifying to contemplate. Remy had sensed the thing long before it had appeared—either through its scent or the awful skittering noise it made as it moved—and it seemed unlikely that he would lead her straight into trouble, but panic was beginning to sink its claws into Conny’s mind, muddying her thoughts. She found it hard to think of much beyond the fact that the dark tunnels could be teeming with monsters, and the only light she had was the tiny, hopelessly inadequate bulb mounted beneath the barrel of the Glock.

Every time she took the weak spotlight off Remy to ensure that she wasn’t about to trip over some piece of debris or loose cable, she feared that he would continue to run, leaving her alone with the menacing shadows.

“Remy,” she whispered, more sternly this time, and he pulled up with a soft grunt.

His willingness to stop had to be a good sign, at least. If there were more of the monsters in the Underground system, they couldn’t be nearby. He trotted back and prodded her with his nose again, but Conny shook her head and put her hands on her knees, panting for air.

With adrenaline coursing through her, she had run faster and further than she thought possible. The pause gave birth to a raging inferno in her hamstrings, and suddenly she could feel the pain in her calf where Remy had bitten her.

“I need a minute, Rem.”

Remy tilted his head inquisitively, but seemed content enough to hold their position.

Stopping didn’t just give Conny time to feel pain and fatigue. It also afforded her an opportunity to think, but all her mind threw at her was guilt. She had stood and watched her colleagues being butchered, and then had fled, leaving the rest to die. She tried to tell herself that there was nothing she could have done; that most of the group were carrying weapons far more powerful than her handgun, and those weapons hadn’t made a blind bit of difference.

I could have tried. Should have done something.

And then I’d be dead, too.

The remorse building inside her made Conny feel like screaming at herself in rage, and she gritted her teeth and swallowed back the urge. The time for self-recrimination was later. Right now, she had more pressing concerns.

Like, where the hell am I?

She summoned up a mental map of the tube system. After departing Euston, it should not have taken this long for her to reach the next station, King’s Cross St Pancras. Those two weren’t far apart. In fact, now that she came to think about it, she judged that she should have been damn close to St Pancras while Porter and the others had still been alive, yet she had run for several minutes without seeing a sign of either lights or platforms.

No sound of gunfire, either, she thought. That’s the good news.

The bad news was that she was almost certainly in a service tunnel, or one that was not in regular use. There were plenty of abandoned tunnels all over the network; even some entire stations that had been left to gather dust. At that moment, even the sight of one of those so-called ghost stations would have been welcome. Anything would be better than the clammy claustrophobia of the tunnels.

I’m lost.

Instinctively, Conny began to play the Glock’s light around her in a wide arc, hoping some sign or other means of identifying her location might have been helpfully left in the tunnel. There was nothing, save for featureless steel doors set into the wall at regular intervals.

The doors had to lead to maintenance areas, she guessed. Maybe even access points that would offer a route to the surface? Perhaps she could find a stairway leading up; hell, even a ladder would do. If necessary, she would find some way to carry Remy. All that mattered now was getting out of the tunnels quickly, and warning whoever was in charge at ground level that they needed to pull out of the Underground system; making sure that whatever was happening, it stayed below the surface, as far away from London Bridge Hospital—and from Logan—as possible.

She tried the radio clipped to her shoulder, but received no reply beyond a meaningless blast of static that sounded impossibly loud. Porter hadn’t been kidding: this far underground, the radio was useless.

She paused for a moment, listening intently. Could she hear something screeching in the distance, the noise muted by thick stone walls? Had whatever was out there heard her trying her radio?

If so, maybe it, too, was holding its breath; listening. She could hear only silence.

Conny grimaced. She felt hopelessly exposed in the tunnel, especially whenever she flicked on the under-barrel light on the gun. The doors had to offer a better option.

“Come on, Rem. We need to find a way out.”

Remy huffed softly.

*

The first door she tried was locked, but the second swung open at her touch.

Her heart sank.

It was just a junction room, no more than that. One of many meeting places for the thousands of miles of heavy cable that ran below the city like a vast spiderweb. The room was empty, and there was no other exit. There was no deadbolt on the door, but she saw a few lengths of rebar just like the one Adam Trent had crushed skulls with. She could wedge one of them against the door, and at least she would have a place to hunker down and feel safe for a while.

Coward.

She headed back into the tunnel.

Froze.

This time she definitely did hear screeching, and it sounded like it was in the same tunnel. Distant, but sharing a space with her.

It has finished with the others.

Now, it is hunting me down.

She flicked off the light immediately, and began to slide along the wall, feeling for the metal doors; listening to the pounding of her heart and praying it was the only thing she would hear.

Remy began to tug on the leash, urging her to move quicker.

She reached the third door.

Locked.

As was the fourth.

When she was halfway to the fifth door, the thing in the tunnel screeched again, and Conny almost screamed an answer. It was closer. Much closer.

She gritted her teeth, terrified of falling in the darkness, knowing that if she turned on the light she would paint a target on herself.

Click…click, click.

Blank terror soaked through Conny’s mind, and she might have broken down altogether had her hand not found the door handle.

She twisted and felt tears of relief sting her eyes.

It wasn’t locked.

Unable to breathe, she hurtled through the door behind Remy, closing it quietly.

She felt around for a deadbolt, and again found none. If there was something in the room for her to use to blockade the door, she didn’t dare turn on her light to see it.

How well could the monster see in the dark? The question ripped through Conny’s mind like shrapnel. If the things lived beneath ground level, it stood to reason that they would be able to see pretty well in the dark. But how well?

If it saw me…

Conny pressed her ear to the door, and heard the strange tapping sound the creature made as it approached. It moved forward and then paused, almost like it was searching for something, before moving on again.

If it had seen her, her chance of survival would be determined by her physical strength; whether she could hold the door shut if the thing in the tunnel began to push from the other side. That did not seem likely.

Click.

Her eyes widened.

Right outside.

Click.

Conny clamped a hand over her mouth, praying that Remy would not make a sound. She didn’t dare to look down at the dog. Didn’t dare to move a muscle, afraid that even the slightest noise would give away her position.

For a sickening eternity, Conny stood at the door, listening.

And the clicking began again, growing fainter. Moving further away.

After a long time, Conny allowed herself to breathe again, and she flicked her light on, glancing at Remy. He stared up at her with wide, frightened eyes, visibly trembling. She scratched reassuringly at his ears, wishing there was someone who might scratch hers.

She swept the light from right to left and took in her surroundings: the room wasn’t really a room at all; just the entrance to a small service corridor which she figured probably connected two of the main tunnels. The corridor ended at a short set of steps leading up to another door.

She peered at it uncertainly. On the one hand, putting another door between herself and the clicking thing in the tunnel seemed like the best idea anyone could ever possibly have; on the other, the corridor looked very old and little-used. There was every chance it would lead her even further away from civilization.

“What do you think, Rem? Is this a way out?”

Remy didn’t appear to hear her.

He was staring back at the door that Conny had just shut.

Conny’s jaw clenched, and she knelt next to the dog, placing her hand on his powerful shoulders. Remy’s heart was pumping like a jackhammer.

“What do you hear?” Conny lowered her voice to a whisper.

Remy tilted his head, ears twitching.

And then he began to back away from the steel door.

It was all the persuasion that Conny required.

“Come on, Rem, let’s go.”

*

It didn’t take long to cross the corridor; certainly not long enough for Conny to believe it could possibly offer a way out of the tunnels. She prayed that the steel door at the far end would not be locked, trying not to picture the result if it was: trapped in a dead-end corridor, with only the tunnel she had just fled from as an exit.

When she reached the door, she flicked off her light once more and put a calming hand on the back of Remy’s neck. Wincing, she grabbed the cool steel handle and twisted gently, letting out a soft sigh of relief as the door opened, and stale air washed over her.

And not just air.

To her right, the impenetrable darkness melted away, and was replaced by a soft orange glow.

Light.

It was one of the missing Tube trains, sitting silently on the track like some eerie museum exhibit. The typical surgical-white lighting of the carriages was gone, and in its place there was what she guessed were emergency lights. The train must have suffered some sort of mechanical failure.

She dropped her eyes to Remy.

He was staring at the train curiously, but he looked relaxed enough.

Conny headed toward the train, keeping her gun levelled, scanning for movement. Approaching from the front, she had a long time to stare at the smashed front windows, and the torn corpse draped across them. A vast dark stain blossomed beneath the prone body of the driver, almost covering the nose of the train.

When she drew parallel with the front of the train, she peeked through the open door. The driver’s controls had been smashed in, and the cab was a tangled web of ripped cabling and smashed circuit boards. It almost looked like the work of one of the creatures; a frenzied, animal attack. But why?

To disable the lights?

It made no sense. The things were animals, weren’t they? Or monsters? She had no trouble believing that the creatures could have smashed their way into the train and killed the driver, but how would they know how to cut the lights…and why would they even bother? Without the driver, the passengers were sitting ducks, lights or no lights. If a group of armed police couldn’t fight one of them, a bunch of terrified commuters trapped inside a stopped train would have stood no chance.

Despite that certainty, Conny’s attempts to steel herself for what the rest of the train might contain fell short.

Way short.

A glimpse through the smashed windows of the first carriage was enough for Conny to truly grasp that what was happening in the tunnels below London really was far above her paygrade. Shit, it had to be above everybody’s.

The passengers inside had been slaughtered—no, shredded—by something. What was left in the carriage, pooled on seats and splashed up walls, looked more like a grisly stew than human bodies. Conny’s eye fell on a dismembered foot here, an exposed jawbone there. Something sitting on a seat, which looked for all the world like a severed head with a human heart stuffed into its final scream.

Conny tore her eyes away and gulped for air, felt her stomach heaving, and then finally, when she drank in a breath and tasted the meat hanging on the air, she gave up the fight and let her breakfast out onto the track, loudly.

She heaved twice.

Spat.

Click.

Gasped for air.

Spat.

Click, click, click.

Conny froze.

Somewhere behind me.

Too late to run.

This is it.

She straightened, her nausea forgotten, and aimed her gun at the darkness, squinting; wishing that the light spilling from the train would just turn the hell off for a moment. The weapon shook wildly, and she figured her chances of actually hitting anything were around zero.

The clicking kept coming.

Closer.

Closer.

Conny loosed off her entire magazine, and the report of the Glock was deafening in the tunnel. When the echo of the gunshots faded, Conny lowered the weapon, drawing in a tremulous breath.

Click, click.

The shape emerged from the darkness slowly.

“Don’t shoot.”

The shape rasped out a wheezing chuckle.

Conny’s jaw dropped. Robert Nelson shuffled toward her, his own gun held in listless fingers, pointed at his feet. He was pulling the trigger, over and over again. Click, click, click. In his other hand, Robert clutched Jackson’s leash.

It looked like there were still parts of Jackson attached to it.

Robert stared straight through Conny, his eyes filled with tears that made his wide grin all the more unsettling.

“Don’t...shoot,” he gurgled again, thickly, and collapsed to the ground.

He was still pulling the trigger of the empty gun repeatedly, and when Conny knelt next to him and plucked the weapon away, his finger just...carried on. Firing the phantom gun that his mind still held.

Robert’s eyes fixed on the roof of the tunnel, wide with fright and shock, and Conny knew as she looked into them that the roof would be the last thing Nelson saw. He was bleeding badly; choking out thick mouthfuls of blood.

Conny ran the light down across his body, expecting to see savage tears; half-certain that she would see his innards hanging out, just like the driver of the train.

What she saw was far worse.

A single bullet hole, punched into the base of Robert Nelson’s throat.

Blood spurted from the wound at an obscene rate, and when Conny shrugged off her jacket and pressed it to the awful chasm in his neck, the heavy fabric soaked through almost immediately. She tossed it away and pressed her palm into that slippery, ruined throat, praying that she might hold his life inside him through sheer will.

She felt the pumping; the dreadful throbbing of blood.

Ebbing.

Slowing.

Stopping.

When Robert Nelson died, Conny couldn’t help but let out a scream of despair. For that moment, the fearsome creature and the tunnel and the train of torn bodies ceased to exist, and there was only the fact that she had messed up everything, and it had cost a man his life. She screamed because she had to. Because there was no choice.

And somewhere in the darkness, something answered her.

The shriek that echoed through the tunnel ripped a gasp of horror from Conny’s lungs. It was close. Jesus, in the silent darkness, the noise sounded terrifyingly loud.

She stumbled to her feet, and for a moment her legs just wanted to start running again, but she caught herself in time. The front of the train was almost certainly blocking the thing’s view of her—but judging by how close the creature sounded that would only remain the case for a matter of seconds.

Have to get out of sight.

Conny stared about her frantically, and saw only two options: under the train, or in the train.

She could drape the bodies over herself, maybe; camouflage herself beneath the horror.

The prospect of lying in that lake of gore was numbing; something beyond terrifying, but there was no time to consider just how grim it might be. Right now there was only survival. Only those two options.

In the distance she heard it coming fast.

The hideous clicking.

Charging toward her.

Under the train.

Or in the train.

Conny grabbed Remy’s collar firmly.

And made her choice.

22

It didn’t run along the ceiling this time.

Conny saw the clawed feet approaching, and her blood froze. She and Remy were wedged beneath the train, and most of her view of the tunnel was cut off by the tracks and the undercarriage.

But she saw the feet, and the sight of them dropped the temperature of her blood to zero. Each toe ended in a talon that looked like it belonged to some prehistoric predator.

Alongside her, Remy’s body had gone alarmingly slack, like the dog was so scared it had slipped into a state of shock. She kept a palm pressed over his mouth, though it didn’t seem likely that he would make a sound and give away their position, and she craned her neck.

The creature paused near the front of the train, and Conny’s eyes widened with alarm as her mind tossed up a horrific possibility for the first time.

Can it smell us?

The creature took two quick strides toward Conny, and she almost screamed, certain that it would reach a clawed hand beneath the train, but suddenly, those terrifying feet were gone.

A thump above her made the carriage shudder.

It was inside the train.

She heard its clacking footsteps move from one side of the carriage to the other, and several quieter thumps, like the monster was tossing body parts around. Searching methodically.

Looking for someone hiding among the bodies, Conny thought, and she felt like vomiting again when she realised how close she had come to hiding beneath the corpses herself.

Above her, the creature continued to hunt.

They weren’t just animals, she realised. They were intelligent; capable of considering their prey’s thought process. It was surely just a matter of time before the thing decided to check underneath the train.

Run?

She felt despair well inside her. Just crawling out from beneath the train would surely make enough noise to alert the monster to her presence. And even if she did make it out, where was there to run to?

And what about Remy?

She couldn’t run.

All she could do was wait, and pray.

Glass breaking.

Another thump; further away.

It went into the next carriage!

Conny felt a surge of hope rush through her. Was it possible that she could be so lucky twice? To have the creature right on top of her a second time, only for it to head off in the wrong direction once more?

She tensed her muscles, and listened. If the thing moved even further down the train, she might get a chance to run after all.

It would mean leaving Remy behind. It had to: there was no way she could carry him quietly, and he was lying on his side, staring at her with abject, wide eyes; barely breathing. She doubted he could stand, let alone run.

She clenched her jaw.

It would break her heart to leave him.

It would break her heart not to.

She heard another series of thumps, even fainter still.

Now, or never.

She willed her muscles to move.

Wanted to reassure Remy; to whisper that she would come back for him.

She didn’t dare.

Couldn’t make a sound.

She stared into Remy’s panicked eyes, her vision blurring, and turned away.

Just in time to see clawed feet landing heavily on the ground barely a yard in front of her face. She almost let out a yelp of surprise, and her muscles went rigid. She was too terrified even to shrink back into the shadows beneath the train.

Definitely more than one of them.

Another pair of feet appeared out of nowhere, just barely illuminated by the faint emergency lighting.

And then another. Another.

A lot more.

The creatures were making plenty of noise. Conny figured that she was at greater risk of being spotted than heard, and quietly eased herself alongside Remy, listening as the creatures—there had to be a dozen of them—leapt up into the carriage.

And began to feed noisily.

The horror of the sound was incomprehensible; meat being torn and chewed. Bones being snapped like breadsticks. Human beings.

On more than one occasion, the carriage erupted in sudden grunts and shrieking, and Conny recalled nature show footage: animals feeding alongside each other suddenly going on the attack. With each shriek and each crash, her fear intensified until it almost felt unreal. The world began to spin around her, and she shut her eyes.

Perhaps I have gone mad.

Maybe I’m still sitting in the van.

Staring at my phone.

Those two words.

Huntington’s Disease.

Incurable. Unstoppable. It killed usually within a couple of decades. Conny knew the disease and its cruel symptoms all too well. She’d known all about it even before Logan had been born, and she had prayed, every day since, that the hateful condition which had taken her husband would spare her son.

But prayers had a tendency to go unanswered. Logan had exhibited symptoms so young. He had been born to die, and she wasn’t going to be around to make it right, and—

Her eyes flared open as she heard the carriage above erupt with a new noise. It sounded like the creatures were shrieking in unison, over and over. If it hadn’t been a sound that could only have existed in Hell, Conny could have sworn that it was some sort of language, like a chant or prayer. Twisted and demented and terrifying.

She felt Remy begin to quiver alongside her, and reached out a hand gently to reassure him, stopping dead when she heard the creatures bellow a final shriek that shook the walls, and then there was silence for a moment, before they came crashing out of the train, their clawed feet once more slamming into the ground right in front of her.

The creatures charged away down the tunnel without pausing, almost as if answering some urgent rallying cry that she could not hear. When the thunderous clacking of their movement dissolved into silence, Conny remained frozen in place for a long time, her palm hovering above Remy’s belly, her mouth open.

Still alive.

23

The London Eye was on its final rotation of the day. The vast Ferris wheel built at the turn of the century offered a magnificent, panoramic view of London from its slow-moving passenger pods, but to Hideo Kagome, the view had already been boring for at least twenty minutes.

Hideo’s parents still seemed enthralled, though that didn’t mean a great deal; Hideo thought they were enthralled by pretty much everything in London. It was, after all, the vacation the Kagome family had been waiting to take for several years, combining a visit to Hideo’s older, UK-based brother Kasamo, with an opportunity to take in some of the most famous tourist spots in the world.

And it was all so boring.

Kasamo had barely been able to get any time off work, and so only saw them in the evenings when he was tired, and London? London was dusty old buildings and people with angry faces. Places where someone supposedly important had lived or died, like, hundreds of years earlier. Museums that took all day to trample around. Who cared?

At least the Eye had been an exciting prospect, like a giant fairground ride. It had even looked cool from a distance, sitting right on the south bank of the Thames, soaring high above the nearby buildings, all lit up like Christmas as dusk began to settle over the city.

But it was so slow. The egg-shaped pods, each large enough to hold twenty-five people—and which you couldn’t even lean out of—sealed up for the duration of the ride, and that was it for the next forty minutes: crawling up into the sky inch by boring inch until the city was laid out below…and then crawling back down. Hideo’s time would have been far better spent on his PS4, no doubt about that.

At least it was nearly over. He pressed his face to the curved glass, trying to look straight down. The pod was, he guessed, still at least a hundred feet above the ground. Far below, the queuing area was a functional square of concrete, spattered with token splashes of greenery. It was almost empty, most of the tourists having moved on.

Suddenly, his attention was taken by movement to his right. Something on the water. He glanced toward it, expecting to see yet another slow-moving riverboat, and frowned.

Nothing there.

He squinted into the last rays of the sunset, certain that he had seen something out there.

And movement erupted directly below him.

Hideo’s mouth dropped open, his boredom forgotten.

So fast.

The thing—a dark shape that he could not even begin to identify—leapt from the water up onto the path that ran alongside the river with ease, landing with a fluid motion like an uncoiling snake. It took a couple of loping strides forward and then launched itself onto all-fours, galloping like a cat toward a small knot of people sitting outside a coffee shop which overlooked the river.

It barrelled into them at full speed, oblivious to their fearful screams…

…scattering tables and chairs like matchsticks…

…and began to tear them apart.

Hideo’s eyes widened painfully as he saw an enormous splatter of blood—dark in the failing light—arcing across the pale concrete below. And then another. It looked like somebody had been ripped in two at the waist, the obscene pieces that they became tossed aside like garbage.

He screamed then, his mouth making the noise all by itself, and he stumbled backwards, away from the window, colliding with his stunned mother and sending her crashing to the floor.

He didn’t even hear his father yelling at him as he helped her back to her feet. For a moment, all Hideo could hear was the noise of that distant splatter; inaudible and deafening at the same time. His eyes glazed over.

Somewhere below, a loud thump jolted him back to the present.

The thump became a shatter.

Glass breaking, Hideo thought in horror, and he scrambled to press his face to the window once more. The pod was closer to ground level now, ninety feet or less, and suddenly the giant fucking wheel was moving far too fast.

It’s gonna deliver us right to it.

He searched, panicked, for some sign of the terrible creature, but all he saw was the bodies it had left behind. Maybe, he thought, just maybe, it had already moved away from the Eye. Jumped back into the river, perhaps. Or it was in the pod at the bottom of the giant wheel, tearing the passengers to pieces…

Hideo gagged as he stared at the remains of the group of people who’d been enjoying their last ever cup of coffee, and began to offer silent thanks that he hadn’t been down there when the monster had leapt out of the Thames.

His relief withered and died as the creature erupted from one of the pods directly below his, swinging easily on the frame of the Ferris wheel with long, gangling limbs, as comfortable climbing up the steel lattice of the structure as a primate.

Oh, no, Hideo thought. Oh, no, please don’t—

With a screech, the creature swung up to the next pod, smashing the thick glass with a single blow and leaping inside, out of sight once more.

Distant, muted screaming.

Hideo turned to face his mother and father, and saw his terror reflected in their eyes. They, too, had seen it. He wasn’t going crazy; the monster wasn’t a product of his imagination. It wasn’t what his mother would smile and label teenage hormones running amok.

It was real.

They were all about to die.

He opened his mouth to say something, though he wasn’t sure what that might be. My final words, he thought numbly. How could a sullen fourteen-year-old boy possibly conjure up the right ones?

“Mother,” he began to say, and the window behind him imploded.

The words, whatever they might have been, remained unsaid; there was just no room for them as the air thickened with terror. Suddenly, in the slow-moving pod, there was only enough room for screaming.

And dying.

*

Harold Birch patted at the air for a moment before his fingers landed on the cool, rough wood.

He gripped the bench and levered himself down onto it with a sigh, setting his stick against his right leg.

With his left hand, he reached out and ruffled the back of Brody’s neck.

“Good boy. Take a break, Bro.”

A moment later, Harold heard the soft whump as the dog’s generous backside hit the ground.

Harold breathed in deeply, listening to the sounds of Hyde Park. He used to love taking Brody to walk there, and each time they visited, Harold would try to navigate to the very centre of the vast green expanse, judging that he was close to it when the sounds of the city—the background pollution that never truly dispersed—was at its quietest.

The middle of Hyde Park was the only place in central London, in Harold’s opinion, where you could go and almost forget that you were in the city at all.

Increasingly, though, the park hosted noisy events; on most nights it seemed that there was some band or other performing there now. Even at times when the park should have been quiet, the relentless noise of London invaded. Kids playing godawful music through tinny speakers, or people chattering loudly—and constantly—on their mobile phones. The various pings, whistles and buzzes of information hitting the electronic devices the whole world now carried everywhere. Everything so damn connected. No way to escape any of it and just be.

Tonight, there was a rock band playing, and so Harold didn’t make for the centre of the park. He skirted the edge of it for a while, just long enough to give Brody some exercise, and rested a while before heading back home. He could hear the music in the distance, the excitable murmur of the crowd.

The music itself was muddy and indistinct: it didn’t travel well across the park; becoming little more than a dirge at distance. Harold didn’t recognise the tune, though that didn’t surprise him. Despite the winter chill in the air, it was still early, just late afternoon, and the stage would be home to a warm-up act at this time of the day. The crowds would gather in greater numbers for the main act in two or three hours. He probably wouldn’t have recognised their music, either.

His ears were well-tuned, though: far closer, he heard the soft swishing of bicycles passing; there were always the fitness freaks lapping the park. Groups of joggers and cyclists, mostly. Occasionally, the heavier clatter of skateboards or rollerblades. The edge of the park was constantly shifting; home to those people for whom stillness and silence were reasons for discomfort.

The benches were set a way back from the wide path, and in the summer they bathed in the scent of flowers. During the warm months, the one that he usually sat on would be surrounded by the hum of insects, and Harold liked listening to their quiet little symphony being played out. Yet the park was so much busier in the summer, so much noisier.

In the distance, the crowd erupted in a loud scream, and Harold blinked into the unending darkness, surprised. The main act must have taken to the stage already.

At his left foot, Brody whined, and Harold tilted his head.

“What’s up, Bro?”

The dog whined again; louder.

Harold frowned. Brody’s communication skills were a minor miracle, but this was a noise that Harold hadn’t ever heard the dog make before. A frantic, fearful noise, like Brody had seen something that terrified him.

Harold listened intently.

The bicycles had passed thirty seconds earlier, and he had heard nothing in his immediate vicinity since. As best he could tell, he and Brody were alone.

He reached out to pat Brody, and paused.

In the distance, the screaming intensified, but it sounded odd to Harold now, different in a way he couldn’t place immediately. It took him a moment to figure it out.

The crowd was still screaming.

But the music had stopped.

Brody whined again, once, and then took off.

Harold had been holding Brody’s leash in slack fingers—an unnecessary gesture since the dog was as obedient and even-tempered as a mutt could get—and he was too slow to react when he felt the cold leather slipping across his palm. By the time he closed his fist, the leash was gone.

And he heard Brody sprinting away.

“Brody!”

Harold stood uncertainly, stricken by a sudden anxiety. His stick clattered to the ground. Brody didn’t slow at his call. If anything, it sounded like the dog was picking up pace.

And in the distance, the screaming seemed to be getting louder.

No, Harold realised. Getting closer.

Before the patter of Brody’s fast-receding paws had faded, Harold heard another sound, like rippling thunder.

Footsteps, he realised, and felt a shard of icy fear lance his heart. Lots of people, all running frantically. All screaming, heading straight for me.

He crouched and patted the ground until he located his stick. Something bad was happening in the park, something that Harold couldn’t even begin to understand. Without his sight, he relied heavily on his hearing, but right now his ears were filling with a dreadful, incomprehensible cacophony.

Someone rocketed past him.

Screaming the whole way.

Harold turned away from the noise of approaching footsteps, following the direction Brody had taken.

And suddenly, the air was knocked from his chest as someone barrelled into him at full pace. Harold went down hard, slamming a shoulder painfully into the bench he had sat on peacefully only moments earlier. Whoever had knocked him down didn’t stay to see if he was all right; they didn’t even speak. Harold listened in astonishment as they clambered to their feet with a whimper and took off again.

And then a wave of chaos broke around him.

Over him.

Feet running everywhere, trampling him, knocking him back down when he tried to get up. A million glancing blows that landed on his limbs as a tide of people broke around him. Screaming, all of them; wordless shrieks that sounded like panicked, primal terror.

Harold tried to get up one final time, and when a foot caught him on the side of the face, he gave up the struggle and curled up in a ball, hands held protectively around his head, and prayed for the madness to stop.

Somewhere beneath the thundering of feet and the piercing yells of fear, Harold heard another noise. Something that sounded like thick paper ripping. A sound that he thought was like branches being snapped, but slightly muffled somehow.

Bones, he thought, and his terror ratcheted up a notch. That’s the sound of bones breaking. And the ripping…it must be…

Suddenly, the thunder of fleeing feet began to fade, and Harold lifted his head in amazement.

Whatever had happened, whatever terrible event had just unfolded in Hyde Park, it seemed to have flowed right past him. He heard some screams; perhaps people who had fallen like himself, but whose injuries were more severe.

The sound of fleeing people continued to move away.

They’re gone, Harold thought, and let out a long, explosive sigh of relief.

Click.

Harold frowned at the noise. It almost sounded like a dog’s claws tapping on a linoleum floor.

“Bro? That you?”

Click, click, click.

An animal of some sort exhaled loudly nearby; a snort that sounded far too big to have been made by a dog.

Harold froze, and the dreadful truth of his situation unwound in his mind. Suddenly, it was like he could see again; like the thick veil that had been draped over his eyes for more than thirty years had lifted abruptly.

The people who were running were gone.

Escaped.

The thing that scared them is still here.

Click.

Click, click.

Harold swallowed; his throat felt like it was filling with broken glass.

It’s right in front of—

Something large and heavy breathed onto Harold’s face: a warm, moist wave of air that reeked of meat and blood. The creature grunted, and Harold thought the terrible noise, mere inches away from him, sounded almost like confusion.

He reached out gingerly, feeling the air in front of him.

And whatever was lurking out there in the syrupy darkness, beyond the reach of Harold’s ruined eyes, laughed.

His mouth dropped open, and he had no idea whether the breath he drew in was intended to fuel words or a scream.

It didn’t matter.

Harold’s lungs were still inflating when something sharp punctured his chest. Huge; it felt like someone had just steered a train into his ribcage. He felt and heard the cracking of his bones, and then the terrible pulling sensation as something began to furiously rearrange his internal organs, before—finally—a new sort of darkness claimed him.

*

On the crowded, slow-moving streets of Camden, the lights were blinking on and the stream of daytime shoppers was slowly preparing to hand over ownership of the streets to the night-time revellers. Much of the expansive market was shutting for the day, the stalls trying to shift a few last items before the sun went down.

The vampire erupted near a railway bridge, spearing up from the ground into a crowd of people who were determined to spend the last few minutes of daylight sitting in a beer garden at the rear of one of Camden’s most popular pubs.

It emerged from the dirt already swinging.

Its first victim didn’t even have time to scream.

But others did.

*

In Oxford Circus, the traffic had slowed to a crawl as the evening rush hour began. Tourists moved in almost aimless herds, winding their way from one pedestrian-crossing to another, waiting patiently for the traffic to ease, or simply walking out in front of it and delaying the whole process still further.

The vampire rocketed from a manhole in the middle of the road, leaping onto the roof of a bus under the gathering darkness, and shrieked as it clawed a courier from his bicycle, sweeping him up and tearing him apart in a dull explosion of blood that spattered across windscreens and stunned faces.

In the distance, others answered.

With a roar, the vampire charged toward a group of stunned pedestrians, impacting upon them like a speeding combine harvester, chewing up muscle and sinew as it carved through them before smashing into the window of a large department store.

*

They came from the river; from the soft ground beneath parks and gardens. From the tunnels and stations of the Underground; scattered across the city, but rising as one.

Blood flowed across London.

And the last scraps of weak daylight dissolved.

Sundown.

24

Stay in the light.

Jennifer Craven’s warning rattled in Leon Mancini’s head like small arms fire as the van headed toward London.

It would be full-dark by the time the van reached the city, despite the fact that it was only around six in the evening, and it felt like reaching England’s capital was taking forever. The roads around the south of the country were nothing like those back home: no wide, fast-moving highways here; instead, single-lane traffic crawled at infuriatingly slow speed through village after village.

And then there were the ‘roundabouts.’ Navigating them was logical enough, but the behaviour of the other drivers made each one a little hair-raising.

And slowed them down even more.

If Mancini had been able to speak to a local, they would have reassured him that the van was actually making short work of the trip to the capital; he wouldn’t have believed them.

Still, the journey did give Mancini plenty of time to absorb the story that Jeremy Pruitt told. The Rennick family had attempted to satisfy a vampire rising on a massive scale, unleashing the creatures on a cruise ship and then sinking it to bury the evidence.

Not a bad plan, all things considered, but somewhere along the way, one of the ship’s passengers had begun murdering the monsters, and what was left of the UK arm of the Order when the dust settled was Herbert Rennick, an idealist in his twenties with more balls than sense, and a group of young clerics, most of whom, Jeremy said, had entered the mansion, but had never come back out.

But Dan Bellamy had, and Herbert Rennick had bundled him into a chopper, fleeing to the north just minutes before Mancini and his team arrived at the compound. According to Pruitt, the Rennicks owned an apartment in the city. It was there that Herb would head, the Brit was sure of it.

In a way, Pruitt’s certainty made Mancini’s heart sink. If Bellamy and Rennick had really disappeared; if they were on the wind, never to be seen again, he wouldn’t now be heading toward the epicentre of the apocalypse.

Braxton drove, navigating the winding roads with only the occasional curse, and when Pruitt finished filling them in, Mancini held up a hand to silence him and pulled out his cellphone. He was only supposed to break radio silence in extraordinary circumstances.

He figured this counted, and punched in a number.

Jennifer Craven answered immediately.

“We’re too late,” Mancini said. “The vampires are already on the surface. By the look of things, they have been for a while. The Rennick compound is gone.”

For a moment, Craven said nothing, and he wondered if she was suppressing a smirk at his sudden acceptance of the fact that vampires did exist after all.

“What about the Hermetic?” she asked finally.

Mancini was sitting in the front passenger seat alongside Braxton. He glanced through the windshield at the sky ahead. Smoke was gathering over London, and several small fires lit up the skyline from east to west.

“Looks like he’s in London.”

“You know where?”

“Maybe. But London ain’t looking so healthy right now.”

“Yes. I’m watching the news. Tragic. Do you know where the Hermetic is?”

Mancini gritted his teeth.

“We ran into the guy who called you. Pruitt. He thinks he knows where Rennick took him.”

“So what’s the problem? Go get him.”

“Half the team’s already dead, Jennifer. I damn near died myself, and that was only coming up against one of them—”

“You saw one? What happened?”

“Some people died, some people ran. Defeat, Jennifer. That’s what happened. Comprehensive fucking defeat. And now you want us to go into a city full of these things?”

Craven snorted.

“Like I said, I’m watching the news. They don’t know what they are dealing with yet: reports are talking about sudden bouts of mass hysteria; people attacking each other or killing themselves. But they do know how widespread it is. So far, eight separate incidents have been reported across London. Which means eight vampires.”

“Yeah,” Mancini hissed, “eight so far. I doubt this is all playing out in front of the cameras, Jennifer. We have no idea how many—”

“It’s a big city, Mr Mancini. I’m sure a man with your qualifications should be able to grab one civilian and get out in one piece. That is what I pay you for. No?”

Mancini pulled the phone away from his face for a moment, fighting back the urge to throw it out of the window. When he pressed it back against his ear, Craven was still talking.

“…chances of us stumbling across another Hermetic in this or any other lifetime are virtually zero. You do realise that understanding this Dan Bellamy could be the key to stopping the vampires once and for all? To understanding how they are able to live for so long? Their abilities? War is coming, Mr Mancini. The secret is out. In a few hours, there won’t be anyone left on the planet who doesn’t know about vampires, and humans tend to respond badly to threats. It doesn’t matter whether the vampires come after us, or we go after them. The end result will be the same. We’ll need to be able to defend ourselves with something other than walls. He is the key.”

“Great,” Mancini said. “And what if I can’t get him?”

Craven paused.

“Then don’t bother coming back. And pray for a quick death.”

She hung up, and Mancini gripped the phone so tightly that he felt the plastic casing beginning to buckle.

He sucked in a deep breath, and focused on the burning city ahead.

Braxton shot a glance at him.

“Mancini? What’d she say?”

He slipped the phone back into his pocket.

“We go on,” Mancini growled. “But at the first sign of trouble—the first fucking sign—we’re turning this piece of crap around and hightailing it outta here. I don’t give a fuck what Craven says.  I’ll take her Gulfstream as severance pay. Fucking gladly.”

Braxton glanced at him again, his eyes widening when he saw the anger written on Mancini’s face, and apparently thought better of asking any more questions.

When the furious silence became too much to bear, Mancini leaned forward and flicked on the van’s ancient radio, twisting the dial until he heard a breathless news reporter reeling off facts that they clearly had trouble believing.

There had been outbreaks of ‘unexpected violence’ across the centre of the city, and large parts of London to the north of the river were burning. All residents of the city were advised to evacuate immediately or to barricade themselves in their homes until the all clear was given. The military had been called in to restore order…

In the rear of the van, Montero and Burnley were bickering quietly, just as they had for most of the flight across the Atlantic.

Jeremy Pruitt just sat there, frowning at the floor, muttering to himself.

Mancini tuned it all out, and tried to persuade himself that Jennifer Craven wasn’t worth it; that she hadn’t been for a very long time. That the only rational thing to do was turn the van around and get the hell out of England immediately; find some way to disappear.

He said nothing, glaring at the road ahead, watching the miles creep by.

His gut told him that his entire world was about to be reduced to a single imperative.

Stay in the light.

25

Conny only rolled out from beneath the train when Remy finally began to struggle. She released her grip on him, and he scampered out into the tunnel. It was the best indication she could get that it was truly safe for her to move.

She hauled herself to her feet, a little unnerved at how shaky her legs felt beneath her.

Remy was busy peeing. He glanced at her apologetically, and Conny almost laughed. She had damn-near pissed herself beneath the train. Under the circumstances, she thought he’d done pretty well to hold it in.

She left her flashlight switched off, seeing only by the soft glow of the train’s emergency lights. Twisting her head left and right, trying not to look at Robert Nelson’s body and failing miserably, she saw only darkness in either direction.

“Which way, Rem?”

Remy finished his business and trotted toward her, turning to face the left. The opposite direction to the one the monsters had taken. He looked up at her, tongue lolling out, and seemed relatively like himself for the first time in a couple of hours.

“Left it is,” Conny said quietly, and smiled.

She detached Remy’s chain leash from his collar, afraid of the noise it might make. She would travel in complete darkness, she decided, sticking to one tunnel and using her light only occasionally, if she needed to get her bearings. Ideally, she wanted to travel completely silently, too. She placed the chain gently on the ground, and Remy gave it a look of disdain.

“Now, stick by my side, right, Rem? No running off and leaving me down here, okay?”

Remy tilted his head and sighed indignantly.

Conny shot a final, despairing glance at Robert Nelson’s body, and set off.

She moved slowly, listening to every sound. The soft whisper of her boots as she crept through the tunnel; Remy’s claws, clacking occasionally on the concrete floor, making her heart leap. Something dripping somewhere. After around ten minutes, she heard faint scratching that made her pull up in alarm, until she realised it was probably just a rat. That was a good sign, she decided. Rats tended to flee from predators.

Like cowards.

Conny shook the thought away with a grimace.

She pressed on.

*

The light hurt her eyes, even before she rounded the bend and saw the distant platforms and the signs, and finally knew exactly where she was.

Monument Station, on the north bank of the Thames.

It was one of London’s less-busy stations, and by the look of the platforms, it had been evacuated and secured: the cavernous space was flooded with the same soft orange light that she had seen in the ghastly train carriages. The amber glow made the instantly-recognisable walls of the station otherworldly and threatening, barely keeping the shadows at bay.

She reached for the radio clipped to her shoulder, and thought better of it. She’d made it this far by moving silently, and she’d be damned if she was going to blow that at the last minute, when the exit was almost in sight.

Monument was very close to London Bridge Hospital. Once she reached the safety of the surface, she thought, she could radio for help and head directly to Logan. Get him out of the city entirely, if necessary.

She approached the light carefully, keeping a watchful eye on Remy, ready to turn and run if he so much as blinked. He trotted beside her as if there were nothing out of the ordinary, and she allowed herself to relax a little. When she reached the platform, she lifted Remy up onto it before clambering up herself. The station remained silent, and she glanced up at the CCTV cameras dotted along the platform, wondering if they were still operational and, if so, whether there was anybody monitoring them.

Probably not. The Chief Superintendent had said they were shutting down the whole rail network: Monument Station would have been completely evacuated like all the others, security staff included.

She groaned inwardly when she realised that if Monument was totally empty, the gates to the station would surely be shut. She and Remy would be locked in.

She quickened her pace, heading up the still escalator and into the small ticketing hall.

Dammit!

There were two sets of heavy iron gates at Monument: one in the ticketing hall itself, and another at the top of steps that led up to the street-level exit.

Both were locked.

She tested the inner gate. It looked like it had been locked electronically. There was some give in it, but there was no way she could open it manually.

Remy pushed his nose between the bars, sniffing at the fresh air, and looked up at her hopefully.

“Working on it, Rem.”

She glanced back at the escalator, half expecting to see one of the hideous creatures following her. Nothing.

To the right of the escalator, she spotted a door marked staff only, and she headed for it, clenching her fist in triumph when it opened at her touch.

Beyond the door, a narrow corridor opened out into a small control room and a couple of offices and storage rooms. Somewhere in those rooms, she would find the button that would open those gates, she was certain of it. She waved Remy inside and closed the door quietly behind her, heading for the control room.

Inside, she saw four blinking monitors delivering the monochrome CCTV feed from the cameras dotted around the station, and a control panel.

She ran her fingers across the buttons until she spotted what she was looking for.

Inner Gate.

Outer Gate.

She hit them both, and sighed in relief when she heard the hum of the motor revving up out in the ticketing hall. Turning to the CCTV monitors, she saw the inner gate opening.

“Time to go, Rem,” she said.

And she flinched.

Had she just caught movement on another monitor in the corner of her eye?

Something on the platform that she had walked across minutes earlier?

“Time to go!”

She ran, figuring she had thirty seconds, maybe less.

Burst out into the ticketing hall with Remy at her side.

Through the inner gate while it was half-open, up the tunnel toward the steps and—

The outer gate was padlocked.

The electronic mechanism had lifted the outer gate open a little way; less than a foot, she guessed, but further progress was prevented by a heavy chain and a sturdy-looking lock.

Remy scampered through the narrow gap easily.

Conny slammed into the unforgiving metal, jamming herself into the opening that was almost big enough to accommodate her. She pushed with her legs, wedging herself between the gate and the floor.

She wasn’t going to make it.

She screamed in frustration, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. Terror and grief and guilt; pouring out of her lungs until she felt sure she could never stop.

“Hey, hey, calm down. We’ll get you out of there. Calm down, it’ll be okay.”

Her eyes flared open  at the sound of the voice. Standing in front of the gate, with Remy at his side, she saw a British Army soldier wearing full tactical gear.

“It’s behind me,” she snarled, unnerved at the note of primal terror in her voice.

He lifted a flashlight, pointing it through the gate.

“There’s nothing behind you.”

Conny twisted, craning her neck to look back through the iron bars. He was right. The steps that led down to the ticketing hall were empty.

I’m losing my mind.

“Hang on,” the soldier said. “We’ll get you out.”

He waved a hurry up gesture at someone that Conny couldn’t see, and moments later she heard keys rattling.

When the gate opened, Conny fell out, collapsing to the ground, and began to scrabble away from Monument Station. The soldier who had spoken began to help her to her feet, and she heard another behind her, re-locking the gate.

“There are things in the tunnels,” Conny gasped, “creatures—”

“Not anymore,” the soldier said grimly, and he pointed up.

To the west, above the city’s skyline, the night glowed amber.

London was burning.

“They’re on the surface?” she asked weakly, already knowing what the answer must be.

He nodded, and took her arm, leading her away from the entrance to the station.

“First reported sighting was in Hyde Park around thirty minutes ago. There have been multiple sightings since then, all over the centre of the city. Nothing confirmed, but it’s chaos out there. Lots of casualties.”

“Thirty minutes,” Conny repeated absently. “You guys got here quick.”

“We were already on our way.”

Conny stared at him, puzzled.

“The military was called in when we lost the police.”

“Lost,” Conny repeated slowly. “But that would mean…”

“You’re the only one that has come back, yeah. As far as I know, anyway.” His stern expression crumbled a little.

Conny’s mind began to creak. It was just too much to process.

Somewhere in the distance, an explosion rocked the evening, and moments later a helicopter roared overhead, flying low.

“We’re quarantining central London,” the soldier said. “You need to evacuate.”

She nodded at him numbly.

“The nearest evac point is across the bridge,” he pointed at the Thames, “London Bridge Hospital. We have people there who will get you to safety. You know where it is?”

London Bridge Hospital.

Conny knew where it was.

Intimately.

26

Conny jogged across London Bridge with Remy keeping pace easily at her side, each stride setting off tiny detonations in her wounded calf. She paused around halfway across the river when a formation of jets streaked across the sky, heading for the centre of the city.

She turned to watch as the aircraft passed overhead, half-expecting that they were about to open fire on the city. Surely the situation hadn’t become so bad in thirty minutes that the military were under orders to bomb the capital?

Apparently not: the jets continued north for several seconds and then banked left, disappearing from sight to the west.

A reconnaissance mission, then.

Now that she was able to see more of the skyline, Conny could see that the most severe of several fires raging in the city was two or three miles to the west, along the Thames. Knightsbridge, perhaps, or Kensington.

Above the city, she saw the spotlights of several helicopters surveying the streets below.

It would be a disaster zone in the most densely crowded areas, she thought, picturing the murderous creatures tearing through Trafalgar Square and Oxford Circus and Camden. The panic alone would injure many; it was, she guessed, probably the cause of the fires that she saw. There were likely a thousand car crashes occurring in the city centre at that very moment. Even without direct contact with the creatures, the chaos of the burning city would claim many casualties.

The southern bank of the river, by comparison, looked far quieter: no sign of fire, no helicopters.

She began to breathe a little easier. If the trouble—which Conny subconsciously labelled the infestation—was confined to the north of the river, then Logan was safe, and the army had already secured the hospital. He might even have been evacuated already.

The worst of it was over.

She turned her back on the burning centre of London and pressed forward, biting down on the pain in her leg and increasing her pace.

*

The area outside the hospital was awash with light and people. There were three buses parked outside, engines running, and a group of soldiers were guiding a steady stream of patients and visitors toward them.

As Conny neared, two large military-looking trucks pulled up alongside the buses, and armed troops began to spill out of them. Around sixty in total, she guessed. They began to make their way to London Bridge, hauling pieces of equipment and sandbags. It looked for all the world like they were planning to set up machine gun emplacements on the bridge.

Quarantining the city with bullets.

She pushed through a crowd of bodies toward the hospital, flinching when a soldier grabbed her elbow.

“Hospital’s being evacuated, Ma’am.”

“My son is in there,” she snapped, and shook away his hand.

He looked her in the eye for a moment, his expression impatient, and nodded, stepping aside to let her pass.

She moved through the entrance and into the reception area.

London Bridge Hospital offered private healthcare only, and was small by the standards of most modern hospitals, with a little over a hundred rooms for patients. The reception area itself was plush, but cramped: a cosy waiting area and front desk opened out into a corridor containing elevators which transported patients and visitors to the treatment areas upstairs. The neutral decor was clearly meant to lend the place a cool, calming atmosphere.

It wasn’t working.

The interior of the hospital was in chaos, and Conny’s progress was slowed almost as soon as she entered the building.

The walls reverberated to the sounds of human anguish: cries of grief and disbelief; moans of pain and despair. The UK very rarely experienced natural disasters of the scale seen in other parts of the world: earthquakes were infrequent and lacked strength, and the weather almost never unleashed itself on the country with the sort of savagery experienced by those for whom tornadoes or tsunamis were simple facts of life.

The people streaming out of the hospital did not have disaster preparedness drilled into them, and it showed in the shock and confusion on their faces.

Two men in army uniforms holding exquisite M27s were trying to hold the tide of people back, in a futile attempt to keep the evacuation of the hospital orderly, and were failing pretty spectacularly.

Remy cut through the crowd like a hot knife, and Conny followed, making her way to the nearest of the soldiers. He looked stressed and afraid, almost like he was considering whether a short burst from his rifle might get everyone to just shut up and listen.

She glanced back at the hospital exit. At the rate that things were going, there would be a crush in the doorway.

This is going to get ugly, she thought.

“Wrong way, Ma’am.”

She blinked, and turned to face the soldier. He nodded at the exit, and Conny shook her head firmly.

“My son is a patient. I need to find—”

The soldier waved a hand for her to stop.

“I don’t know anything about the patients, Ma’am. We’re just here to make sure everybody gets out. Your boy might be in there. Bottom three floors of the hospital have been cleared, I know that much. We have choppers en route for those who are too sick to get on the trucks and buses. ETA twenty-five minutes. Once they’re gone, we’re pulling back, got it?”

He met her eyes, ensuring that she understood.

Conny nodded her thanks, and turned away, guiding Remy toward the distant elevators. If the bottom three floors of the hospital had already been cleared, then Logan might still be in there somewhere. His room was on the top floor.

Twenty-five minutes, she thought.

She had plenty of time.

*

A bank of four elevators was located in the corridor behind the reception desk, but Conny moved straight past them: all were in use, of course, and likely there were people on the top two floors stabbing the call button repeatedly.

She made for the stairs. They were narrow, and a trickle of those who weren’t willing to wait for the elevators flowed down from the upper parts of the hospital.

Conny took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the ache in her muscles.

When she and Remy made it to the top floor, she stepped into tension so thick it almost knocked her backwards. The people who were already there—the top floor had to be still half-full of patients at least—were all clustered around the windows which faced the river, staring out quietly.

The silence in the place was putrid, and Remy huffed softly at her side, apparently coming to the conclusion that things might be better if they moved on.

“It’s okay, Rem,” she whispered, and she moved closer to the windows, unable to tear her gaze away from them.

Matters outside were deteriorating quickly.

The London skyline looked like a warzone of the sort that Conny had only ever seen previously on TV; the backdrop to a solemn news presenter reciting facts that were virtually impossible to comprehend. Tracer fire arced from the dark clouds, spat down onto the city from an aircraft that she could not see. At ground level, the fire seemed to be everywhere now, and pulses of light seared her eyes at regular intervals as small explosions rocked the city.

Her jaw dropped.

Without that newsreader to provide a reassuringly detached soundtrack, their place taken by the soft whump of the distant explosions, the sight of what was happening to London was mesmerising and terrifying beyond all reason.

How could things have fallen apart so fast that airborne attacks on the city had already been sanctioned? What next? Missiles?

Nukes?

The disastrous view from the hospital window meant only one thing.

We’re losing.

The army had been called in and, just like the police, they were dying.

There wasn’t time to consider how that was possible; how a bunch of creatures that killed with claws and teeth might be able to defeat one of the most advanced military forces in the world.  Screw waiting for the military; she’d evacuate her son herself. Commandeer a car, point it south and just drive.

She began to move from room to room, searching for Logan. Typically, he was in the last room on the floor, near the fire exit. He was staring out of the window in shock, and didn’t see his mother approaching.

Conny ran into the room, grabbing his arm.

“Logan, we have to go.”

He didn’t respond.

And when Conny followed his gaze, she saw why.

A helicopter.

Approaching fast.

Too fast, Conny thought, as she stared at the incoming vehicle in horror.

The chopper was big, but it was flying as though buffeted by the wind like a frail insect, veering crazily and lurching down toward the hospital. As it neared, Conny saw the blades stuttering.

It’s out of fuel.

It was heading right for them.

“Get down!”

Conny wasn’t even aware that she was shouting. She hit the deck, grabbing a handful of Logan’s hospital-issue nightgown and pulling him down beside her. The chopper roared toward the windows, and the top floor of the hospital filled with screaming…

…and it disappeared from sight.

Moments later, a crash shook the building, rattling the windows in their frames. Conny could clearly hear a loud, metallic squeal as the downed helicopter scraped to a halt on the roof.

Fine dust rained from the ceiling.

Remy sneezed.

Conny stumbled to her feet, helping Logan up. She clasped his cheeks in her palms, and couldn’t keep the tears at bay.

“Are you okay?”

Logan flinched away, his lip curling.

“Not really. I’m dying, didn’t you hear?”

Conny recoiled at the bitterness in her boy’s voice. She hadn’t told him about the disease that had claimed his father, nor the possibility that Logan might inherit it, not until three weeks earlier.

When he had woken up one morning to find that he could barely move his left hand.

He had hardly spoken to his mother since she told him that Huntington’s might be a possibility. For those three weeks, he retreated into his shell and refused to come out, speaking monosyllabically and keeping his eyes pointed at the floor. When the option to spend three nights at London Bridge Hospital while he underwent tests had been offered, Logan had jumped at it, and Conny knew it was because he couldn’t stand the sight of her.

It broke her heart.

“Logan, I—”

A crash somewhere behind Conny cut her off, the noise followed immediately by screams of surprise. Conny spun around, her nerves blazing; expecting to see that one of the monsters had smashed its way into the building.

She blinked.

The crash had been the noise of someone kicking open a door labelled roof access. The someone was actually four men: two, who looked no older than twenty, carried a third—who appeared to be unconscious—draped across their shoulders. The last of the four men brandished a pistol as he moved out in front of the others.

“Looking for a doctor,” he growled, waving people back from the exit and moving inside the hospital.

Remy immediately began to snarl when he saw the firearm, and a space opened up around Conny as the people crowding into the corridor moved away anxiously, their eyes fixed on the gun. She grabbed the dog’s collar with her right hand, holding him back, and held her left arm protectively across Logan’s chest.

The man with the gun stared down at the growling dog, surprised.

“Remy, hold,” she said firmly. She glanced up at the man with the gun. “I could let him go,” she said evenly. “He’s dealt with firearms before. He’s fast. I’d rather it didn’t come to that, because people might get hurt. I need you to place that weapon on the floor. Now.”

The man with the gun lifted his gaze to Conny.

“And what? You’ll arrest me? You do know what’s happening out there, right? In fact, fuck it, throw me in jail. A steel cage would probably be the safest place to go right around now, anyway.”

Conny frowned, confused, and felt her cheeks burn. In a way, he had a point. Was she even a police officer anymore? After abandoning several of her colleagues to die—and then killing another herself?

I should be the one in prison.

“We’re not here to hurt anybody,” he continued. “I absolutely do not want to have to shoot your dog. Please, I’ve had a rough couple of days. Don’t make me do that.”

Conny’s eyes narrowed.

“Then why are you here?”

The man lowered the gun a little and beamed at her.

“To save the world, of course.”

27

It was the burning bus that did it.

One of those distinctive London double-deckers, painted a bright and cheerful red. It rolled along slowly, almost of its own accord, with fire and thick black smoke pouring out of the windows.

Mancini stared at it, transfixed by the incredible spectacle and the grisly narrative it threatened to tell.

Was it full of people when the flames took hold; all of them now just meat cooked in a giant metal oven? Were the blistered remains of the driver still hunched over the wheel, his charred foot still pressing the gas pedal?

Mancini couldn’t suppress the shudder that ran through his body at the sight.

And he couldn’t stop watching.

That was the trouble.

If it hadn’t been for the almost hypnotic sight of the burning bus—if they had been just thirty seconds earlier or later; if they’d taken a different turn as they approached the River Thames—none of it might have happened.

What did happen, in the first instance, was that everybody in the van was so transfixed by the eerie sight ahead of them that nobody saw the truck coming from their right, and they had time only to turn their heads at the last moment as it smashed into the side of the van.

The world span like someone had dropped it into a washing machine.

Inside the rolling van, Mancini heard someone yelling, and someone else loose a round from their weapon, before a lamp post abruptly killed their forward momentum.

Along with Braxton.

The van came to a rest on its roof, all windows smashed and most of the right side of the vehicle caved in. The driver’s seat had been all-but obliterated as the solid stone post drove half of the engine backwards into the cab. Most of Braxton wasn’t visible. He was smeared across the exposed engine like red paint.

Mancini looked away from the dead driver and checked himself for injuries. His head was bleeding, and he was pretty sure the seatbelt had cracked a rib or two, but he’d been lucky. He unclipped the belt, grunting as pain arced through his chest, and fell out of his seat. He twisted awkwardly to see into the back of the van.

“Everybody okay?”

“Burnley fucking shot me,” Montero snarled.

“Grazed you,” Burnley muttered. “Sheesh. And I didn’t shoot; the gun went off. If I’d ‘shot’ you, you’d be dead.”

“Yeah, whatever, Burn—”

“Keep your damn voices down!” Mancini hissed. “Pruitt?”

The Brit hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt; he was crumpled at the rear of the van, looking pretty beaten up.

“I’m fine,” Pruitt grunted. “The worst part is having to listen to Laurel and fucking Hardy back here.”

Mancini grimaced.

“Yeah? Try spending six hours on a plane with ‘em.”

“Fuck you, Mancini,” Montero said. He lifted his voice. “Hey, nice driving, Braxton.”

“Braxton’s dead,” Mancini said flatly. “Like the rest of us, if you don’t quit hollering.”

He squatted low, peering out of the windows. The street outside the van looked quiet. In the distance, the fiery bus had come to a stop at last, crashing sedately into the side of a building and setting it alight.

“I think we’re okay,” he whispered.

“Tell that to Braxton.”

Mancini flicked his eyes to Montero, letting his gaze burn some silence into the man. “We have to move,” he said, not breaking eye contact. “Quietly.”

He reached into the rear of the van, helping Jeremy clamber over into the passenger seat as the others fumbled at their seatbelts, and crawled out onto the road through the side window.

In the distance, he heard heavy weaponry being fired; a sound he hadn’t heard since his days in the military: helicopter gunships raining death down onto the city. No wonder a single gunshot hadn’t drawn much attention. Somewhere overhead, a jet engine shrieked, crossing the city in seconds. Mancini couldn’t see it.

Jeremy hauled himself out of the window with a grunt, and pulled himself to his feet, refusing Mancini’s offered hand. Almost as soon as the Brit was out of the way, Burnley slipped through the window smoothly.

Somewhere in the van, Montero let out a muffled curse.

“I only grazed him.” Burnley shrugged.

Mancini ignored her, turning to Jeremy.

“How far away are we from Rennick’s apartment?”

Jeremy scanned the streets, his expression thoughtful.

“We’re not far from the London Eye,” he said, “so it’s just a couple of miles east, along the river. Maybe less.”

“You know the way?”

“More or less.” Jeremy glanced around fearfully. “It’s a good thing it’s quiet on this side of the riv—”

He fell silent as an unearthly shriek split the night.

Mancini span toward the direction of the noise. Somewhere near the giant Ferris wheel, he thought.

Not only on the south side of the river, but probably in the next damn street.

Montero finally hauled himself through the van’s broken window, still muttering curses. Mancini clamped a hand over his mouth and hauled him to his feet.

He stared at Jeremy.

Jeremy stared back blankly, his face twitching in terror.

“Which way?” Mancini breathed, and Jeremy blinked, pointing down a dark street.

“See that building?”

He pointed at a skyscraper which loomed far above the nearby buildings.

Mancini nodded. At least they would be moving away from the creature, he thought, and finally released his grip on Montero’s flapping jaw.

“Move,” Mancini hissed. “Eyes open. Quiet.”

Without another word, he turned and set off for the street which Jeremy had pointed out. It looked dark and quiet, but with each stride forward, Mancini felt his nerves tightening. The others fell into line behind him, moving single-file, and even Montero looked focused.

After about three hundred yards, Mancini stopped, hunkering down next to a parked van.

“Which way?” he glanced at Jeremy.

“Straight ahead.”

Mancini gritted his teeth. They would be crossing a wide intersection, bathed in the glow of streetlights. Completely exposed. He scanned left and right, and then turned to shoot a glance behind. There was a vampire in that direction somewhere, but he saw no sign that it was following them. The road to the right would take them south, back in the direction they had just travelled, and though Mancini desperately wanted to head that way, it wasn’t an option. The road to the left headed toward a distant bridge.

The British Army would almost certainly try to establish a beachhead along the river, but it wouldn’t do any good. At least one of the vampires was already south of the Thames.

There was nothing for it. Going forward was the only option.

Mancini waved a beckoning hand at the others and set off at a controlled run, cradling the MP5, his eyes open and alert for any movement. He was halfway across the intersection when he heard screaming to his left and he spun, raising his weapon.

A small group of people were fleeing from the direction of the river, chased by another: a man wearing a peace is love T-shirt and brandishing a huge knife.

Mancini lowered his weapon a little, gawping as the guy with the knife ran down a middle-aged woman, leaping onto her back and driving the knife into her head. Before Mancini could react, heavy gunfire rained down from above, and the guy with the knife damn near exploded.

With a deafening roar, a large chopper swung low overhead, turning back toward the other side of the river and heading back into the city.

Jesus, Mancini thought, they don’t even know what they’re fighting against. They think people are doing this.

The vampires weren’t even showing up for the fight. They were staying in the shadows, turning humans on each other, revelling in the chaos. To the authorities, it probably looked like half of the city’s population had gone completely berserk. Throw in some far-fetched sightings of monstrous creatures, he thought, and you have a recipe for madness, and bad decisions.

The British military was doing the work of the vampires for them, killing the wrong species indiscriminately. Yet every time they mowed down some poor bastard with a knife, the real enemy would simply take control of another puppet, and the wheel of insanity would continue to turn.

He blinked as his thoughts reached a troubling destination.

If one of the monsters’ puppets had been that close; no more than fifty yards away…

“Move!” Mancini hissed, and took off at a panicked sprint.

He had taken no more than five steps forward when he heard a shriek split the night behind him.

28

Darkness.

Pain.

The hands in the darkness have him.

They carry him along helplessly, tossing and thrashing him.

The whole world is cascading black water.

Seeping through his skin.

Poisoning his soul.

And when it roars, he hears it clearly, and understands that it is not the sound of a river at all.

It is the sound of a voice.

Bellowing in the void, vast and incomprehensible.

Beckoning him forward.

29

The journey in the helicopter had become bloated with pounding anxiety almost as soon as the vehicle reached the outskirts of London and the fuel low light began to flash.

Herb had taken the pilot’s seat, not trusting either Lawrence or Scott with the task, and his rusty skill with the controls had made the journey interesting even before the fuel began to run out.

When the warning light caught his attention, he had instinctively searched for a place to set down, but the city below seemed to be made of darkness and fire. Any landing could put them in immediate danger, and at the very least would mean that they would have to travel the rest of the way on foot. He had considered the prospect of carrying a comatose man through territory that was quickly becoming vampire country and dismissed the idea of landing. He didn’t fancy their chances of surviving long down on the streets. They would make it to the hospital; they had to.

Besides, if the chopper was anything like a car, he thought, the fuel warning probably wasn’t urgent. The tank probably still had plenty of miles left in it.

Apparently not.

Their destination was in sight, silhouetted against the burning city to the north of the river, when the engine began to wheeze out its last breaths, and setting the chopper down became a matter of crashing rather than landing. The final descent, as the rotor blades began to stutter, had been steeped in fear that should have made his soul shrivel, but he had remained oddly calm. Herb had decided, as the roof of the hospital lurched toward him like an uppercut, that you knew you were having a bad day when crashing a helicopter into a building was only the second most frightening thing to happen.

Or was it the third?

He couldn’t be sure anymore.

Now that he was safely inside the hospital, with a doctor checking Dan, the adrenaline which had kept him upright for more than thirty-six hours steadily leaked away, and a wall of fatigue collapsed on top of him. It felt like he had been terrified forever, and the constant, draining fear and lack of sleep was making his thoughts unstable and skittish.

He hadn’t eaten either, he realised, not since before boarding the Oceanus. Increasingly, he was finding it hard to think straight.

He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, trying to focus on what the woman who had examined Dan was saying.

“It’s not his injuries,” the doctor said.

Herb blinked slowly, switching his gaze from Dan to her.

“Not,” he repeated dumbly.

“That’s right. He has a lot of bruises and lacerations, and the wounds to his abdomen are deep, but not life-threatening. Not serious enough to render him comatose. I’ve stitched him up, though it was a rush job. He’ll need to get to another hospital in the next day or two to get his wounds redressed, and—”

“Wait…it’s not his injuries? Then why isn’t he waking up?”

She shook her head, looking a little irritated.

“He is in shock, perhaps. A fugue state. Or he has a pre-existing psychological condition that I am not aware of. Look, I really—”

“You don’t have his medical records?”

The doctor shook her head impatiently. “I’d have to request them from his current doctor. That tends to take a few days when the world isn’t falling apart. He’s not dying, but he’s not waking up, either. I’m sorry, that’s the best I can do. Do you need me to take a look at your arm?”

Herb blinked, and stared down at his bandaged arm. He’d forgotten all about it.

“No, it’s nothing. You’re sure it’s not his injuries?”

The doctor nodded curtly.

“Quite certain. Now, please, I have other patients that I need to prepare for the evacuation…”

Herb nodded absently, returning his gaze to Dan as the doctor left the room.

Out cold yet again, he thought, and felt a stab of envy.

He was so tired.

He rubbed at his eyes once more. It felt like his eyelids were made of grit.

Lack of sleep. An empty stomach.

As problems went, they were so ordinary; so mundane.

Yet, despite his exhaustion, Herb wasn’t sure he could ever sleep again. Certainly, if he had been forced to kill the police officer’s fucking dog on top of everything else, he was sure he wouldn’t sleep well. No, sleep was out of the question.

But at least he could eat.

He turned to leave Dan’s room, and flinched in surprise when he saw the policewoman leaning on the doorframe with her arms folded across her chest. The dog sat at her feet, regarding Dan’s inert body with an expression that struck Herb as cautious interest.

“Who is he?” she asked, as Herb made his way out into the corridor and headed for a vending machine a few rooms away. When he passed by her, she turned and followed. A moment later, the dog did likewise.

“Nobody,” Herb said ruefully, “according to him, anyway.”

He chuckled when he reached the vending machine, patting at his pockets. “No cash,” he said with a weary smile. “Would you believe I didn’t think I’d have to stop for snacks? Sorry about this.”

The police officer frowned, and then her eyes widened in surprise as Herb pulled the gun from his waistband and blew a hole in the glass front of the machine.

Somewhere further down the hallway, someone screamed, and Herb yelled an apology.

He reached inside the vending machine and began to pluck out chocolate bars and tiny bags of peanuts. He ripped a pack of nuts open, pouring the entire contents into his mouth, and smiled happily at the policewoman as he chewed.

And chewed.

“Herb Rennick,” he said finally, swallowing the last of the nuts and tearing the wrapper off a Snickers. He took a large bite and stuck out his right hand.

She shook it uncertainly, apparently disoriented by the sudden, formal gesture.

“Cornelia Stokes. Conny,” she said. “You know what’s going on out there, don’t you?” Her eyes narrowed. “I can see it on your face.”

“You must be a good cop, to get that just from looking at me,” Herb said with a chuckle as he reached back into the smashed vending machine to pluck out a juice box. He popped the straw and sucked on it noisily, nodding his head at the smashed glass. “You gonna arrest me for stealing?”

“And vandalism, and threatening behaviour, and discharging a firearm in a public place, and being a shit pilot,” Conny said. “Yeah, maybe later. For now I’ll settle for knowing what you know.”

Herb drained the juice box and grabbed another, offering it to Conny. She started to wave the offer away, but apparently thought better of it. She took the drink with a nod of thanks.

At her feet, Remy huffed softly, and Conny pointed at the vending machine.

“Grab some of that jerky, too. For Remy.”

Herb grunted, raiding the machine once more and dropping his eyes to the dog.

“Hey, Remy. This jerky makes you an accessory to the crime, right? Or guilty of receiving stolen goods. Either way, we’re on the same team now, buddy. No teeth, understand?”

Remy tilted his head, his eyes wide and alert as Herb tore open a pack of jerky and held it out. The German Shepherd looked up at Conny pleadingly, and she nodded.

Within seconds, the jerky was gone.

Herb began to open another pack, and returned his gaze to Conny.

“I can tell you the truth—or as much as I know of it at any rate. But in my experience, people have a hard time believing it. In fact, those people I do tell generally seem to end up punching me. Hmmm.”

Conny glared at him.

“Just tell me.”

“The city is being overrun by vampires,” Herb said breezily, heading back toward Dan’s room, dangling a piece of jerky from his hand for Remy to follow. “This is the part where you say ‘vampires? Are you crazy?’”

“Do you always talk so much without actually saying anything?”

Herb paused for a moment at the entrance to Dan’s room, and his face split in a wide grin.

“Yeah, I think there are people who’d agree that was accurate.”

He walked inside and sat heavily on the edge of Dan’s bed, trying not to think about how much he, too, wanted to lie down.

“They’re not vampires like you see on TV,” he said. “The vampire myth is a fabrication; disinformation that the passage of time has given a veneer of truth, understand? Different civilizations have different interpretations, but they all have some version of the vampire myth, and it is all built on the same memories: creatures that live in darkness, and feed on humans. That’s where the truth ends and the myth begins. The vampires hibernate underground for centuries, for so long that their very existence becomes a fairytale. When the time comes for a nest to rise, the humans who serve them offer up a sacrifice, and then erase the whole event from history.”

“And how do you know all this?”

Herb took another bite of chocolate and chewed slowly, staring thoughtfully at Conny.

“Is that your kid in the other room?”

She looked surprised at the sudden change of subject.

“Logan, my son, yes,” she nodded.

“He looks like he’s pissed off with the world.”

Conny’s gaze hardened.

“He’s…angry. Confused.” She lowered her voice a little. “He found out today that he is dying.” Her jaw dropped a little, as if she couldn’t quite believe she had offered that information so freely to a complete stranger.

Herb snorted.

“So did a lot of people,” he said around a mouthful of chocolate.

She stared at him evenly.

“You didn’t answer my question. How is it that you know so much about these vampires?”

“I don’t know enough.” He returned her gaze without blinking. “I’m one of the people that served them the Oceanus.”

He popped the last of the chocolate into his mouth.

Conny frowned, as if the word was familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it for a moment. Her eyes widened. “The cruise ship?”

Herb nodded.

“The deal with these things is that they are meant to be immortal. Our choice was to do what they say or risk an entire nest rising—maybe even all the nests—and wiping us out.”

“‘Was?’”

Herb arched an eyebrow. The police officer seemed no more perturbed about the existence of vampires than if he had just informed her that it was raining outside. She picked up on the vital part of the information he was attempting to convey almost instantly.

He pointed at Dan Bellamy.

“He killed at least two of them. They die, all right.”

Conny’s gaze settled on Dan for a moment.

“How many are there?” she met his eye. “How many vampires?”

Herb’s eyes narrowed.

“Gotta say, you’re taking the news that vampires exist pretty well.”

Conny shrugged.

“I saw them. In the Underground. Vampire isn’t the word I would choose, but it serves just as well as monster, I suppose.”

“You saw them? And survived? How?”

“I ran.”

“You were lucky.”

“Luckier than the rest of the police. You’re avoiding the question. Again. How many vampires are there?”

Herb frowned.

“In total? Nobody knows for sure. According to records we have, which have proved to be…unreliable, each nest is structured so that there are several females for every male. Best estimate for that ratio is around nine to one. But even if that is true, we don’t know how many males there are in any given nest, and we don’t know how many nests there are out there; not for certain.”

“Like lions,” Conny said thoughtfully.

“Huh?”

“A pride of lions is matriarchal,” Conny said. “Usually, around three or four females for every male. Males are for hunting and breeding. They don’t tend to last as long as the females.”

Herb stared at her, his eyes widening slowly as realisation dawned.

The Three.

The question of why only three vampires had been sent to feed had nagged at him for hours. The vampires which had been unleashed upon the Oceanus were males. They had to be. They had even looked a little different from the vampire he had seen at the mansion; slightly bigger, their bodies more heavily packed with sinewy muscle. Males. Why else would a bunch of creatures that had slept for centuries only send up three of its kind to feed?

Because the Oceanus wasn’t about satisfying hunger. Well; not entirely. It was about something else.

The revelation banished all thoughts of fatigue, and Herb felt adrenaline beginning to course through him once more. Could the Three have been sent to the surface to feed because they were about to enter a breeding cycle? What other explanation could there be? It was so simple and so glaringly obvious that the truth hit him like a slap.

The vampires lived for thousands of years. If their breeding cycle was anything at all like that of people, the creatures would be everywhere; it would be they who ruled the surface of the planet, not humans. But the vampires weren’t everywhere. In fact, it seemed that there were comparatively few of them for a species which claimed immortality. As far as the Order had been able to estimate, there were likely no more than a few thousand across the globe.

And suddenly, Herb knew why.

Their ability to procreate had to be severely limited. Maybe they could only breed every few hundred—or thousand—years. When the time came, the nest sent its males to feed, to gather the strength they needed to service the needs of the females and create the next generation.

If it was true, it meant that the Order had spent centuries helping the vampire species grow stronger. Feeding and nurturing an enemy whose number would eventually grow to the point where wholesale slaughter of humans was inevitable.

“Twenty-seven,” Herb said softly.

Conny frowned.

“If the information my family has is correct—and that’s a big if—that’s how many there are out there. Twenty-seven. At least.”

He strode to the nearest window and stared out across the river, lost in thought.

“That doesn’t sound like many,” Conny replied. “And if your friend managed to kill two, I’m sure the army will be able to deal with the rest.”

Herb shook his head grimly.

“These creatures are smart,” he said, “of at least equal intelligence to us. They won’t just offer themselves up to be shot at. They move underground, they stay out of sight. They know how to remain undetected. That’s the one thing I am sure of.”

Conny frowned.

“I spoke to a soldier who told me there had been multiple sightings in the centre of the city. They obviously don’t care that much about being seen.”

Herb lifted his gaze to the London skyline, lit by raging flames.

The vampires didn’t burn, he knew that much for certain, but the fire spreading across central London meant light. A lot of light.

“They came from the Underground system,” Conny continued. “In fact, this all started because they were letting people go. It’s more like they wanted attention. They drew the entire Metropolitan Police Force down into the tunnels.”

Conny’s voice cracked a little on those final few words. Herb didn’t ask for details on what had happened to the police. There was no need. The answer was written in Cornelia Stokes’ clouded eyes, as plain as day. She ran. The rest of the police didn’t get the chance.

It’s more like they wanted attention.

Some slippery awareness nagged at Herb’s subconscious, clamouring for his consideration.

Multiple sightings.

“How many do you think there were?” he asked distantly. “In the Underground, I mean?”

Conny shrugged.

“Around a dozen, I think.”

“Attacking the most visible part of the country that they possibly could,” Herb muttered, almost to himself. “The middle of the city; all that light. They knew they would be seen. That’s what they wanted.”

“But why?”

Herb shook his head.

“I don’t know. But if there are only a dozen in London, it’s because they want our focus here. As for where the rest are? I have no idea, but wherever they are and whatever they are doing, it won’t be good for us.”

Before Conny could respond, right on cue, the night erupted to the sound of gunfire.

30

Conny sprinted back to Logan’s room, reaching it before the first rattle of gunfire had faded.

Logan kept his eyes deliberately averted from hers; a typical teenage sulk with a heart-wrenching undertone of finality. Her son’s rejection felt like broken glass lodged deep in her chest, tearing into her flesh with every breath she took, but she refused to acknowledge it. Logan could hate her when they were both safe. For now, Conny needed to know where the danger was located.

“Did you see who fired?”

No response.

“Logan! Who fired, dammit? Was it the soldiers on the bridge?”

Logan looked shocked at the sudden vitriol in his mother’s tone. He gave an affirmative grunt, and Conny focused her gaze on the bridge as Herb jogged into the room behind her.

“It didn’t come from the south, as far as I can tell,” he said.

Conny turned around, nodding, and pointed at the window.

“Logan saw it. It came from the bridge. Think they were shooting at vampires?”

At the mention of vampires, Logan looked like he really wanted to speak, but the rage and grief and confusion that twisted inside Conny’s boy kept his lips clamped shut. Her heart ached, and she switched her gaze back to Herb.

“I doubt it,” he said, and moved closer to the window.

“Then what were they firing at?”

“I don’t know, but they’re not firing now. I heard one gun, that’s all. If they were shooting at a vampire, I have a feeling there would be more than one person shooting.”

Conny nodded slowly, remembering the response of Chief Superintendent Porter and the others to the appearance of the creature in the tunnels. They had opened fire in a blind panic, shooting indiscriminately; wildly.

Just as I did.

That same fraught, instinctive response to the presence of vampires had cost Robert Nelson his life back in the tunnels. The memory was like a thorn in her soul. She tried to shake it away, and almost succeeded. There wasn’t time to wallow in her remorse; not yet, but the grief was there, lurking somewhere in her rear view mirror, gradually closing in on her.

She focused on the dark bridge.

The soldiers might be more prepared for combat than the police had been, but Herb’s words had a ring of truth: she couldn’t imagine a group of armed men idly standing by while one of their number opened fire on a monster. After all, the creatures were beyond terrifying in appearance. Anybody holding a gun when one appeared, she thought, would either start shooting or start running.

The soldiers were little more than stick figures at this distance, but Conny could clearly see that they were having a heated discussion about something, one of them waving his arms and jabbing a finger at the other side of the bridge.

She tried to make out what he was pointing at.

On the far side of the bridge, she saw a single person walking steadily toward the soldiers. Whoever it was, they seemed to be in no rush to reach the apparent safety of the south bank of the Thames. Judging from the way they strolled forward casually, they weren’t afraid at all.

She pointed, drawing Herb’s attention.

“See that guy?”

As Herb squinted, Conny noticed the soldiers on the bridge raising their weapons, pointing them at the approaching man.

“Shit,” Herb growled. “I think he has a knife.” He turned to face Conny, his eyes wide. “We have to get out of here, right now.”

“What? Why?”

“The vampires. They take minds; control people like puppets.”

He returned his horrified gaze to the window.

“They’re using people as weapons.”

The man on the bridge suddenly broke into a sprint, heading straight for the soldiers. Conny watched them take a couple of uncertain steps backwards, aiming their weapons, and then finally, one opened fire and put the sprinting man down with a short burst of automatic fire. Before she could even begin to frame a question that might make sense of what Herb had just told her, she saw it.

And her nerves howled.

It had been crawling along the underside of the bridge: a dark, wiry shape that crept up behind the soldiers, who were focused only on the body of the man in front of them.

“A decoy,” Herb said in an awestruck whisper.

As Conny watched, unable to blink, the creature reached the first of the soldiers, grabbing him and spinning him around to face it. Moments later, the man hoisted his weapon and began to execute his brothers in arms.

And the vampire was already gone, back over the side of the bridge, melting back into the shadows.

The ‘execution’ deteriorated quickly, becoming a messy, panicked firefight. When it was over, there were just three soldiers left standing. One dropped to his knees with his head in his hands, bellowing out a roar of despair that carried through the night almost as clearly as the chatter of the guns.

He doesn’t even know what happened, Conny thought, and she shuddered.

But she couldn’t turn away.

This time, when the vampire leapt from the underside of the bridge, it closed in fast, swinging its arms, and the remaining three soldiers exploded in a storm of blood. They didn’t even get off a shot.

Didn’t even see it coming.

When the last of them fell, his body ripped almost in two at his midriff, the monster on the bridge turned toward the south bank of the Thames.

And headed straight toward London Bridge Hospital.

Shit!

She grabbed Logan’s arm firmly, ignoring his cry of irritation and surprise.

“Get your things,” she snarled. “Now!”

Logan stared at her for a fleeting moment, apparently considering whether to make a big deal of her request or not, but when he finally looked her in the eye, she saw him register the fear his mother felt. He nodded, and began to slip on a pair of jeans, and Conny turned away.

Herb was already gone.

When Conny peeked out of the door, giving Logan a moment of privacy, she saw that the strange guy was back in the room with the unconscious man, holding an empty bottle of water from the vending machine over his sleeping friend’s head. Tipping out the last few drops. It didn’t appear that throwing water on him had worked, and it looked almost like Herb was debating whether or not slapping his friend might wake him.

“Scott, Lawrence,” Herb barked. “Time to move.”

Herb’s other two companions, both of whom had sat in the corridor with a shell-shocked look on their faces ever since they had arrived, leapt to their feet on Herb’s command, and ran to the big man’s side. Together, the three of them hoisted the unconscious man from his bed.

And froze.

More frantic gunfire, right outside the hospital, followed by a rising chorus of horrific screams.

Inside.

*

The screaming came from the ground floor and was muted by the hospital’s five storeys, but it was no less terrifying for its lack of volume. All of a sudden, the fatigue which had threatened to overwhelm Herb evaporated, boiled away by the heat of an all-too familiar dread.

It’s in the building.

Was there a fire escape leading down the exterior of the building from the roof?

He tried to remember the hospital roof as he had seen it from the cockpit of the helicopter, but the building was just a dark smear. He hadn’t been landing. He’d been crashing. There hadn’t been time to take in his surroundings.

If there’s no way down from the roof, he thought, we’re all dead.

Lawrence and Scott looped Dan’s arms around their necks once more, carrying him like a drunk. Herb winced when he thought about the damage they might be doing to the guy. The stitches in his belly were a temporary fix, and the last thing Herb needed was for Dan to start bleeding again. The helicopter’s interior had been drenched in the guy’s blood; Herb doubted that Dan had all that much left to lose.

There had to be a fire escape. Had to be. Even if there was just a ladder leading down from the roof, they would be able to come up with something. If necessary, Herb would find some way to haul Dan down himself.

If it comes to that.

He listened intently, trying to gauge whether the monster was making its way up through the building. London Bridge Hospital was all-but empty according to Conny, its patients and staff evacuated almost entirely. If the vampire planned to search the hospital, it wouldn’t take long before it found its way past the deserted floors below.

Or it might just decide that the building is empty and move on.

He ran back out into the corridor, just as Conny and her son exited their room and began to head for the stairs.

“We won’t be able to sneak past it,” he said, waving at them to turn around. “Go for the roof, and listen,” he grabbed Conny’s elbow, making sure he had her full attention, “these things are like Medusa, right? You know the story of Medusa?”

Herb glanced from Conny to Logan. Both were nodding.

“Don’t look directly at them. If you lock eyes with one of these things, your mind is gone, understand? Kill yourselves before you let that happen.”

He tightened his grip on Conny’s arm until she flinched.

“I’m serious. These things like to play with their food when they aren’t hungry, and I’m betting they’re pretty well fed right now. Head for the roof, look for a fire escape. I’ll be right behind you. I have a place nearby. If we can get to it, we’ll be safe.”

He released Conny’s elbow.

“Well, safe-ish.”

He wished he could tell her more; explain that if she needed to, she should take her son and run without looking back, but there just wasn’t time. He sprinted to the double-doors which led to the stairs and elevators, and recoiled in horror.

Glass.

He hadn’t even thought to check. The doors to the stairwell were two panes of thick, floor-to-ceiling glass. He could bar the handles, but that trick had barely worked once before. And then the door had been made of sturdy wood.

Gently, he pushed the left door open, prodding it with a shaking finger.

He heard it immediately.

The clicking of talons on the marble floor somewhere below him.

It was in the stairwell, and it sounded like it was coming up, moving floor by floor.

With a strangled yelp, Herb slammed the door and searched desperately for something to put through the handles. His eyes landed on a forearm crutch, and he snatched it up, his heart sinking in disappointment at how lightweight it felt. Flimsy aluminium; even as he slipped it between the door handles, he knew that it would not hold for long.

Somewhere at the back of his mind a faint, nagging voice muttered that if his best plans always amounted to makeshift deadbolts, he would eventually run out of doors altogether. He ignored it, and scanned the rooms. Many were glass-walled, and he could see that there were still patients in several of them; those whose poor health made fleeing a virtual impossibility. There were a handful of fearful doctors and nurses, too, all of them staring at Herb like he was holding a bomb.

There was no time to explain.

“It’s coming. Run,” he snarled, and he took off toward the roof exit, not pausing to check whether anyone had heeded his warning. He had done all he could.

The lock on the roof exit was smashed beyond repair where Herb had kicked it to get into the building. There was no way to seal or barricade the door from the outside. If there was no other way off the roof, he and the others would be faced with a stark choice: jump to their deaths, or be torn apart.

Or taken.

A violent shudder ran through him. Back on the Oceanus, he had been fully prepared to take his own life rather than let one of the monsters break into his mind, but that had been before he met Dan Bellamy. Now, Herb wasn’t sure he had it in him to jump from the roof if the vampire cornered him. There was too much at stake.

Outside the broken door, three steps led up to the small helipad which Herb’s chopper had briefly ‘landed’ on before ploughing across the roof and finally coming to a halt only when it collided messily with the low wall which ran around the perimeter.

He searched for the others frantically, and for a moment, when he couldn’t see them, his hopes rose a fraction. Maybe they had found a fire escape, and were already heading down to street level.

He sprinted to the nearest edge, peering over it. The hospital overlooked the river, but it was a five storey drop, and the wide path below meant that even if they did jump, hitting the water was extremely unlikely. He turned away, and headed for the other side of the roof.

And that faint flicker of hope crumbled.

Conny’s voice, calling to him from the other side of the ruined helicopter toward the rear of the building.

“There’s no way down,” she yelled.

Herb paled, and sprinted toward her. Lawrence and Scott were standing alongside Conny’s kid, propping up Dan with fear plastered on their faces. Remy was staring up at Conny with an incredulous look in his eyes, like he was wondering how his human had managed to lead them to such a disastrous bolt-hole.

Conny pointed toward the chopper, and after a moment, Herb saw it.

The wall that he had crashed into had been home to a black metal ladder.

A ladder which now rested where it had fallen on the street far below, mocking him.

No way down.

31

Stay in the light!

Mancini rocketed away from the intersection, aiming for the intermittent glow of streetlights, too afraid to look back. He trusted his ears to tell him whether the monster was gaining on them.

His ears were full of bad news.

Judging by the thunderous sound of the pursuit, he was trying to outrun a creature that could move like a damn cheetah. The team had a significant head start, but it sounded like it was eroding by the second.

The vampire shrieked, the sound making Mancini’s blood freeze in his veins. The noise was an attempt to draw attention, he knew; the creature’s bid to get the fleeing humans to look in its direction.

No chance.

“This way,” he snarled, unwilling to turn to check whether the others had heard him, and he loosed a short burst from the MP5, shattering the front window of a restaurant which occupied a corner plot dead ahead. Inside, the lights were blazing cheerfully over empty tables and booths. It all looked so normal.

Mancini pumped his legs, running like he was a teenager again, and when he was close enough, he threw himself forward, vaulting over the waist-high window sill and crashing across a table and into the warmly-lit dining area. His momentum carried him on.

With a grunt, he rolled into a chair, and saw stars as one wooden leg impacted on his ribs. He gasped the pain away and hauled himself to his feet, throwing the flimsy furniture aside.

As Burnley threw herself into the restaurant behind him, Mancini took off again.

The lights of the restaurant might slow the vampire down. They wouldn’t stop it.

He charged through the dining area into the kitchen to the rear of the building, slamming into a fire exit that led back outside.

Kept running.

Further ahead, across a narrow side street, he saw a car dealership. More lights, reflecting off the polished surfaces of eye-wateringly expensive sports cars. He fired the MP5 again, making straight for the shattering window, grimacing as he heard gunfire behind him. It sounded like someone—Montero, most likely—was laying down some covering fire, probably trying to dissuade the creature from following.

He was wasting his time, and his bullets.

Their only hope was to find somewhere that offered a sturdy wall to hide behind.

He burst into the showroom, darting around a black Ferrari, and blasted out the next window. Beyond it, he saw something that gave him faint hope: an old church, standing at odds with the sleek glass skyscrapers that had sprung up around it. The church had to be several hundred years old; its walls looked like thick, solid stone. Even better, the ground-level windows looked narrow—maybe even too narrow for a vampire to squeeze through.

Burnley shot past him. With a clear run, she was the fastest by far.

“The church,” Mancini panted as she passed, moving with a smooth fluidity. If anyone was going to make it, Mancini thought, it would be Burnley. He cursed his bulk, and tried to ignore the fire slowly building in his muscles.

“On it,” Burnley yelled, and tore away from him, eating up the ground. Somewhere further back, Montero was still shooting, and Mancini risked a glance behind, his eyes landing first on Jeremy Pruitt, struggling to keep his sprint going. Behind Pruitt, Montero was firing wildly back through the car dealership, peppering the showroom with automatic fire. Maybe, Mancini thought, he was trying to hit one of the car’s fuel tanks and trigger an explosion, like in the movies.

But this wasn’t a movie.

Mancini didn’t glance at Pruitt as he huffed by him.

“Get in the church,” Mancini muttered absently, his gaze fixed on the roof of the car dealership. He could have sworn he saw movement up there in the darkne—

The vampire launched itself down onto Montero with a shriek.

While Montero had been attempting to slow it down, the monster had simply scaled the building, traversing it in a matter of seconds. Montero was shooting at nothing.

Mancini turned away as the creature landed on the man and the gunfire stopped abruptly.

He didn’t wait to see the former SEAL die.

He was already running.

Fifty yards to the church entrance.

He saw Burnley holding the heavy wooden door open, waving at him frantically.

Forty yards.

Saw Jeremy Pruitt disappear inside.

Thirty yards.

Saw Burnley’s eyes widening in horror as she began to close the door.

Twenty yards.

“No!” Mancini shrieked, and he emptied the submachine gun blindly over his own shoulder, praying that he might slow the monster which he knew was bearing down on him, closing with every stride.

Ten yards.

Click, click, click, click clickclickclickcli—

With a desperate scream, Mancini hurled himself forward, aiming for the narrow gap as Burnley finally threw the door shut.

His hip glanced off the wood painfully, and he landed heavily on a cold stone floor as Burnley barred the door and something heavy crunched into the other side a fraction of a second later.

Mancini rolled onto his back, still screaming, slammed another magazine into the MP5 and scattered bullets at the inside of the door until the weapon clicked apologetically.

When he released the trigger, and the echo of gunfire receded, he heard only silence.

Mancini leapt to his feet, reloading and scanning the interior of the church.

“Vampires, right?” Burnley said in a shaky voice. “They…uh…can’t go inside churches…right?”

Jeremy Pruitt snorted.

“Don’t bet on it,” Mancini replied, casting a glance around the huge interior of the church. The stained-glass windows looked too narrow for one of the vampires, but…

The glass shattered as he looked at it, and he had the briefest impression of a dark shape and glowing red eyes peering in before he tore his gaze away.

“Don’t look at it,” he roared, and ran for the back of the church. “Keep moving!”

He felt the monster’s deadly gaze burning into his back the whole way.

The church—or maybe cathedral was more accurate—was huge, much bigger than it had looked from the outside. Far above, delicate arches propped up a decorative ceiling, and there had to be seating for five hundred, at least. Lots of fabulously intricate and expensive ornamentation lined the walls, images depicting violence and bloodshed and reverence. In some ways, it wasn’t so different to the ranch back in Colorado. Different gods, same worship.

Mancini led the others down the centre aisle, panting for air.

To the rear of the building, there was a raised altar beneath a huge wall, filled with carved statues representing various bishops and saints. To either side of that were two wooden doors. Mancini slammed into the one on the right. Some sort of private chamber; a place for the bishop to relax between sermons, perhaps. More importantly, there was no way out. He turned, barging past Pruitt, and made for the opposite door. It opened onto a narrow corridor, with several smaller rooms and hallways branching from it, at least one of which looked to lead up to a bell tower.

Mancini grimaced. It wouldn’t be long before the vampire made its way up there, and found a route into the church. He slammed the door to the base of the tower shut, searching for a key to lock it.

Nothing.

“Keep moving,” he snarled again, and ran through the gloomy corridors, searching for an alternative exit. He ran frantically from room to room, his fear increasing with each door that he tried. There surely had to be another way out.

Somewhere above him, muted by thick stone walls, he heard the bell in the tower clanging, and adrenaline flooded his system. In a panic, he burst through several featureless doors blindly, until at last one spat him out into the night.

And headlong into the site of another atrocity.

He was standing across the street from the main entrance of a hospital, and there were corpses everywhere, chewed up and scattered across the street. Some wore uniforms marking them out as healthcare staff; others were clearly patients. Still others wore military clothing. The British Army, clearly, was having no more success when confronting the vampires than Mancini himself.

The scale of the slaughter was almost incomprehensible. Mancini’s mind wanted to recoil in horror at the sight of so many torn bodies; to retreat to some warm, safe place and pretend that Hell wasn’t opening up all around him, but his instincts drove him on. He charged forward, feeling the terrible burning ache caused by the extended sprint beginning to weaken his thighs, and made straight for the hospital, with Burnley and Pruitt behind him.

And a monster somewhere behind them.

Beyond the hospital, he saw the building which Pruitt had pointed out as their destination looming. The Rennick apartment. Just a few hundred yards away.

If they were lucky, Mancini thought as he streaked across the bloody road, the vampire might take a wrong turn in the church’s narrow labyrinth of stone corridors. Maybe it wouldn’t even be aware that they had found an exit, and would waste time searching the building, giving them enough time to lose it on the streets.

If they were lucky.

Mancini sprinted through the bloodbath with his jaw clenched, trying not to look at the corpses that littered the ground.

Luck looked to be in short supply in London tonight.

32

Herb heard a soft thump somewhere behind him, and knew instinctively that the noise had been caused by Scott and Lawrence dropping Dan’s comatose body onto the flat roof.

He could hardly blame them, really.

He didn’t turn to check whether Dan was okay. His entire focus was taken by the doorway, and the steps leading down to the corridor beyond. He couldn’t see as far as the glass doors which he had barricaded, but the top floor of the hospital looked—and sounded—quiet. Those who remained—the most severely ill patients in their rooms and a handful of doctors and nurses—were apparently unharmed.

So far, at least, there was no screaming.

Herb turned away and scanned the rooftop again in growing frustration, hoping that he might see an adjacent roof that they might be able to jump to. There was nothing.

“We have to go back inside,” he snapped at the others. “Find some other way down. Maybe the elevators—”

“Too late,” Conny said.

Herb turned to face her. The policewoman had one arm wrapped tightly around her son—who looked like he desperately wanted to struggle away from her—and pointed at Remy with the other.

“Remy can sense them, or hear them. I don’t know. But it’s close. Getting closer.”

Herb dropped his eyes to the dog. Remy stood at Conny’s feet; muscles tensed, startled eyes fixed on the same open doorway that Herb had studied moments earlier. As Herb watched, Remy began to edge backwards, and shot a pleading glance up at his master.

The dog knew something was close, all right. The mutt looked as terrified as he thought it was possible for a dog to look.

“Found a drainpipe!”

Herb flinched as Scott hollered from the other side of the roof. When he turned to face the cleric, he saw that Scott was already swinging a leg over the low wall.

There was, he supposed, little point in remaining quiet now.

“We can’t get Bellamy down a fucking drainpipe,” Herb roared, but Scott simply shook his head and kept on climbing down. Herb could see Scott’s intention written across his face, and he didn’t hold it against him. The cleric simply wasn’t prepared to die for Dan Bellamy. Why should he be? The brainwashing that all those who were inducted into the Order underwent clearly wasn’t comprehensive enough. When faced with imminent death at the hands of one of the creatures they were supposed to worship, all that manufactured belief and loyalty just…crumbled away.

His father would have been mortified at just how quickly the tiny empire he had built up had fallen apart. At any other time, that thought might have made Herb smile.

Not now.

Seething in frustration, Herb turned away and sprinted back to the roof access door, peering back down into the hospital. It still seemed quiet. The vampire hadn’t come through yet. Was it possible that the glass was strong enough to stop it?

Why was nobody screaming?

He crept halfway down the steps, and stopped dead, his heart hammering.

At the far end of the corridor, the doctor who had stitched up Dan’s belly was walking toward the glass doors slowly, her arms outstretched, moving unsteadily, as though in a daze.

Oh no, Herb thought, don’t do that—

The doctor slid the aluminium crutch out from between the handles obligingly, and pulled the door open.

Welcoming the monster like an old friend.

She was still holding the door handle for a second or two, even after her innards had been lanced like an abscess; punched out through her back and splattered across the wall behind her in an instant.

Herb felt his own stomach do a backflip.

The doctor collapsed to her knees, and fell forward onto what was left of her stomach, and then the other patients and staff started to scream.

Herb gaped, and watched it unfolding in a terrifying sort of slow motion; his brain mulling over the twisted images that reached it, and telling him in no uncertain terms that he should be running or screaming or both. For a long moment, all he could do was stare.

The sound of breaking glass.

The light above the doctor’s head winking out of existence as a fire extinguisher flew into the corridor and crashed into it, plunging the far end of the top floor into semi-darkness.

An impression of a large shape hurtling from left to right, crossing the hallway in a flash and disappearing into one of the rooms.

Another light cut out.

Another.

It was moving toward him, room by room, killing as it went.

At last, Herb tore himself away and fled back up the steps, pulling the broken door shut behind him and praying that the creature might overlook it.

If not…

There weren’t many potential victims on the top floor of the hospital. Nothing much to slow the vampire down. If it was coming, it would be on the roof in a minute. Maybe less.

No time.

He caught Conny’s eye as he burst back onto the roof.

She shook her head grimly, opening up a well of despair in Herb’s gut. He didn’t even need to ask; it was obvious from Conny’s expression that they had found no other way down. Even if they could all clamber down the drainpipe and carry Dan somehow, their progress would be too slow. Too loud. As soon as the vampire reached the roof, their presence on the drainpipe would be unmissable.

He flicked his gaze to Dan, still unconscious on his back in the middle of the roof.

I can’t leave him behind.

I won’t.

Somewhere behind Conny, at the far end of the building, Herb heard a loud crack, followed by a surprised scream which ended with a sound like a gunshot, and he realised the flimsy option of fleeing had been removed altogether. At the edge of the roof, he saw Lawrence hauling himself back up over the wall, flushing and petrified. Apparently he, too, had decided that the drainpipe was the best option, and it hadn’t been able to take both his and Scott’s weight.

Lawrence gasped as he pulled himself upright, and peered behind him, leaning out over the street far below. When he turned away from the sheer drop, Lawrence’s eyes were wide, his expression sickly, and Herb knew what the cleric had seen splattered on the ground, five storeys down. The drainpipe wasn’t the best option anymore. It never had been.

It was hopeless.

All they could do was hide, like frightened children whimpering beneath their blankets, waiting for the monster to come for them.

“Get behind the helicopter,” Herb hissed, “out of sight. If it comes for us, don’t look at it. Jump if you have to. At least you’ll get a quick death.”

His eyes landed on Logan. The kid looked at his mother with fearful, disbelieving eyes, but Conny kept her gaze firmly on Herb. She nodded, her own eyes clear and focused, and Herb knew the message had got through. Conny’s boy might be dying, but not at the hands of a monster. Not today. She would do what was necessary.

Will I?

Herb ran to the chopper, reaching it just after Lawrence, and hunkered down behind the ruined vehicle as best he could, pulling Conny and Logan down alongside him. Conny began to call for Remy.

Herb clamped a hand over her mouth as his eye caught movement beyond the broken door.

Remy charged from one side of the roof to the other in a frenzy; running to the edge and peering over it, desperate to jump. Finally, he howled mournfully, and settled down on his belly in plain sight, not far from Dan. The dog was too terrified to think, Herb realised. It had given up all hope of survival, and opted to simply wait for the end. Maybe it was hoping for mercy, or it believed that if it offered no threat, the vampire might not bother to attack.

Herb shifted his attention to Dan Bellamy. Comatose in the middle of the roof. Maybe the vampire would assume he was already dead.

Unlikely.

Lying on his back in the cold evening air, Herb clearly saw Dan’s breath pluming; his chest rising and falling. The vampire would see it, too. Dan would die without ever waking up, and his death would be the stark result of the latest in a series of Herb’s bad decisions. Bellamy was important. Far too important to be left in the care of someone like Herbert Rennick.

Herb squeezed his eyes shut, feeling despair wash through him.

I led him into this. I led them all here.

To the place where we die.

33

The vampire crept out onto the roof slowly, swivelling its terrible red eyes until it spotted Dan lying on his back.

Herb watched it through the debris of the crashed helicopter. He wanted to look away, to block out the terrible sight of the abomination stalking toward the unconscious man, but he was transfixed; the fear knotting his stomach and deadening his muscles like a powerful narcotic. Almost impossible to resist.

The vampire paused, staring nonchalantly at Remy. Judging by how disinterested the creature seemed, and how still Remy remained under its gaze, Herb figured the dog must have finally passed out in sheer terror.

He risked a glance at the vampire from the corner of his eye, and saw its head swivel toward Dan. His fingers tightened around the grip of the gun, and he wondered how many bullets he had left. He hadn’t thought to check since crashing on the roof minutes earlier. It was all happening too fast. No time to think. For all he knew, the gun might even be empty already.

Maybe I fired the last bullet at a vending machine.

An idiot, just like Dad always said.

If he did have ammunition, Herb thought he would get one shot, if he was lucky. If he could somehow aim the weapon without attracting the creature’s attention, it would have to be an instant kill. The head? Herb had no idea where the creature’s heart might be located—if it possessed such a thing. A perfect headshot was surely the only option, but Herb wasn’t sure even that would be enough, given how hard their skin was, and how slowly they seemed to bleed.

In any case, Herb was a decent shot, but he didn’t think he was that good. An image flashed in front of his eyes: lurching out from cover and trying to line up a headshot, only to hear the click of an empty weapon.

Knowing that it would be the last thing he ever heard.

He wanted to scream in frustration.

The vampire hadn’t noticed the small group cowering behind the crashed helicopter yet—or it knew they were there, but didn’t care. Herb began to lift his gun, but it felt so terribly heavy in his hands, and aiming it would mean looking directly at the horror approaching Dan’s position. If the creature swung its eyes toward him, Herb knew that his mind would be lost in an instant. He would probably wind up executing the others himself.

Alongside Herb, Lawrence whimpered. It was a plaintive noise; an animal noise, and Herb knew exactly what it meant. The cleric had reached his breaking point.

Before Herb could reach out a hand to silence him, Lawrence broke from cover with a yelp and bolted toward the opposite side of the roof.

He’s going for the river, he thought, and, though he was certain the cleric would not make it, Herb felt a rush of adrenaline powering through his veins, almost like watching some era-defining sprinter trying to break a world record. He wanted to yell and cheer Lawrence on, but settled for clenching a fist until his nails began to dig into the flesh of his palm.

The cleric was fast.

He rocketed along the edge of the roof, covering half the distance before the vampire even had time to react; building up speed for what Herb knew would have to be the jump of the man’s life.

Lawrence reached the edge of the roof and hurled himself forward into the night air—

And let out a sickening cry as the vampire hurtled after him, closing the gap between them in an instant and snatching him right out of the sky.

It smashed the cleric back onto the roof, and Herb heard something snapping. Lawrence’s back, perhaps. The young man let out a bloodcurdling scream, howling pathetically for his mother, and the vampire buried its face deep in his gut, sending a spurt of blood shooting up into the air. It pulled back with something meaty clamped between its jaws.

Lawrence was still screaming, and continued to do so for a lifetime as the vampire ate him alive.

Behind the helicopter, Herb was paralysed by the sight. He prayed that the others would stay quiet, but with each passing second he knew that the dreadful noise of Lawrence’s slow death would be lighting up their minds like fireworks. The others, he was sure, felt the same impulse as him: to dash for the door leading into the hospital while the vampire was distracted.

Herb finally persuaded his arm to move, and he rested a hand on Conny’s shoulder, shaking his head almost imperceptibly.

The door was temptation.

The door was death.

Maybe, Herb thought, as the cleric finally stopped screaming, the distraction that Lawrence had provided would persuade the vampire that there was nobody else on the roof.

Except Dan.

The creature tossed Lawrence’s ripped remains aside, apparently bored now that the cleric had stopped convulsing, and made its way back toward Dan. It crawled directly over the unconscious man on all-fours, staring down at him with something like curiosity on its fearsome face. Thick blood dripped from its maw, spilling over Dan; running across his cheek like tears.

And it stopped.

Began to back away.

Herb’s brow creased, and he felt Conny grip his arm tightly. He flashed a glance at her, and saw the confusion and terror wracking his own mind reflected on her face. Alongside her, Logan looked very sick, like he might pass out at any moment.

Herb aimed for a look which might reassure them, but he could tell from their expressions that he missed the mark by a distance.

Out on the roof, the vampire retreated a few steps, moving away from Dan. It stood upright, its hideous gaze still fixed on him.

And, as Herb watched in mute astonishment, Dan opened his eyes and rose unsteadily to his feet, staring directly at the creature, just as he had back in the mansion’s gore-drenched kitchen.

Except this time, Herb thought dimly, he has no weapon. No way to fight.

He watched in horror as the vampire began to lift its sinewy arms, flexing out fingers like blades.

Dan took a step forward.

Toward the creature.

His eyes never leaving it.

And Herb’s mouth dropped open as the vampire drove those wicked talons deep into the side of its ownneck, and tore out its throat, pulling away a strip  of flesh and tossing it aside. The monster’s feverish red eyes were wide with something that Herb thought might—incredibly; impossibly—be fear, as it drove the talons into its body once more. Deeper, this time; twisting and gouging; ripping its life away in messy chunks.

Somewhere in Herb’s mind, beyond the layers of fear and revulsion, there was revelation. Dan Bellamy wasn’t just able to resist the psychic onslaught of the vampires; he wasn’t just immune to their particular type of poison. It was far more than that.

He can do what they do.

Dan fell to his knees, coughing violently.

The vampire fell more slowly, its neck in ruins, eyes wide and blinking stupidly. Thick, black blood oozed from the enormous hole it had torn in itself, and when it hit the roof with a thud, it continued to scrape away feebly at itself, pulling away wet pieces of its life almost absentmindedly.

Weakening with each grisly furrow it carved into its body.

It took almost a full minute for it to finally die. Herb didn’t think he managed to breathe for the entire time.

When the vampire’s chest rose and fell for the last time, Herb exploded into motion, running to Dan’s side, his mind trying to frame a question—any question—and coming up way short.

Blood leaked from Dan’s eyes like he was crying, and when he coughed again, he spat out a large mouthful of the red stuff. He looked ill, Herb thought. Really ill, like the people that he had seen on news footage, suffering the effects of some terrible illness or poison. Dan swayed, his eyes rolling in their sockets. Blood vessels had burst in each.

He looked like he was going to die.

“What’s wrong with him?”

Herb jumped. He was so focused on Dan that he hadn’t even noticed the others approaching him. He glanced up to see Conny staring at him in confusion.

“He’s not normal,” Herb replied absently, remembering Dan’s own answer to that same question.

Dan coughed again. More blood on the wet rooftop.

“Fuck you, Herb,” he whispered weakly.

Herb grinned broadly.

“He’s important…”

*

He couldn’t remember waking. All he knew was that when the lights in his mind flicked back on abruptly, he was standing upright, and he was outside somewhere. Cold rain. Biting wind.

And a vampire standing in front of him, trying to push itself into his mind.

Before Dan could even understand what was happening, instinct had taken over: fear at the attempted intrusion and rage hot enough to melt steel, and he pushed back.

It felt as he imagined it might feel to drive his thumbs through a person’s eyeballs, burying them to the knuckles in the wetness.

The creature barely resisted at all.

When he took the vampire’s mind, Dan felt an intangible pop in his skull, and all of a sudden he was the monster. Looking at himself. Taking a couple of steps backwards; tearing out flesh that felt like it belonged to him.

Adrift on the terrible black river.

Staring up at himself  as he fell; feeling his hideous body dying as black blood spilled slowly.

Staring down at himself.

Up at himself.

I’m dying.

It’s dying.

What am I?

Lost in shrieking madness.

Until, after a howling torment which lasted seconds and lifetimes, the presence in his head was gone. He was on his knees, and the world was a dark, spinning blur. It took several full rotations for him to remember his name.

Dan.

Dan Bellamy.

Dan stared down at the monster in front of him, coughing up blood and trying not to scream at the savage pain that arced through his skull as the roaring river in his mind retreated.

He almost laughed when he heard a sound which, in hindsight, he should have expected to hear.

Herbert Rennick’s voice.

*

“…and he knows it.”

Herb turned to face Dan, beaming proudly.

“Don’t you? You believe you’re special now, right? You see why I have to keep you safe?”

Dan coughed and wiped at his mouth, staring without emotion at the blood that stained his hand.

“You’re doing a great job,” he said weakly. “Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

Herb laughed, and Dan couldn’t help but warm to him a little. It was as if Herb had no ego, or he simply recognised his flaws and accepted them for what they were. He had the self-confidence to let a jibe like that wash right off him. Dan felt a stab of envy.

“Hey, you’re still alive, right?” Herb said with a grin.

“Barely.”

Dan glanced around Herb’s companions. Somewhere along the way, he had lost several clerics and gained a policewoman, a dog and a teenage boy with a surly expression. It looked like the Rennick family cult was a thing of the past.

“What do you remember?” Herb asked.

Dan tried to piece his memories together.

“The mansion. The pile of bodies. Screaming—”

“Uh huh. There was a vampire inside.”

Dan’s eyed fogged up.

“The kitchen,” he said softly. “Yeah, I remember. Did I…kill it?”

“Almost. You made it hesitate. Put a blade in its face.” He pointed at Dan’s belly. “Took a blow yourself.”

Dan lifted his sweater and saw a thick bandage wrapped tightly around his abdomen.

“You have some stitches under there,” Herb said. “Temporary. Better try and avoid ripping them out, if you can. The doc—”

Herb paused, his eyes suddenly foggy and distant, like he was looking at some terrible memory.

“The doctor said your injuries aren’t life threatening, but I’d say she wasn’t taking into account the possibility that you’d start bleeding from every orifice. Can you walk?”

Herb reached out a hand, and Dan hauled himself shakily up to his feet. He nodded.

“I can walk. But if I have to run, I’m not sure it will end well. Listen, Herb, while I was…with the vampire…I, uh—”

Herb grimaced, lifting a hand to stop Dan as gunfire sounded in the distance.

Followed by shrieking.

“We can’t stay here,” Herb said. “We have to move, now.” He switched his gaze to the policewoman. “You’re welcome to come with us, Conny. My father’s apartment is close.”

“How close?”

It was the first time the policewoman—Conny—had spoken since Dan’s world stopped spinning. She had been studying him carefully; warily.

Just like the dog at her feet.

“A few hundred yards.”

“I don’t suppose it happens to be a fortress?”

“Not exactly. But it will be a hell of a lot safer than the streets.”

Herb pointed up into the night sky.

“And it’s got a hell of a view.”

34

Herb led the others down the stairs with Conny at his side, and Remy walking a yard ahead. The dog could sense the presence of vampires—Conny had been very clear about that—and Herb decided he’d be a fool not to listen. As far as he was aware, nothing in the texts had indicated that dogs—or any other animals—had any extrasensory perception when it came to vampires, but that didn’t surprise him. More and more, the texts were looking like millennia-old propaganda. Of course the vampires wouldn’t publicize their weaknesses.

As they made their way past the empty floors of the hospital, Conny kept dropping her eyes to Remy, and Herb watched her carefully. She was, apparently, satisfied that the dog sensed no immediate threat.

Herb wished he could say the same of himself. To him, the hospital was alive with threat, and death lurked around every corner.

The fourth and fifth floors were barren and stark; they looked almost as though nothing had happened there at all, save for a few beds which had been overturned, presumably as a result of the creature checking that nobody was attempting to hide beneath them. Those floors had been empty, according to Conny, with most of the hospital’s patients either having already been evacuated, or making their way down to the ground floor to await transport.

Herb paused at each level as he descended, staring beyond the thick glass doors which led to consulting rooms and operating theatres, until he was satisfied that they were as quiet as they appeared.

With each pause, he felt his tension increasing. It already felt like they were taking too long.

Down on the third floor, the blood began to appear.

Streaky spatters of it, winding up the stairs to meet them.

Herb gestured at the others to halt.

He peered over the rail, scanning the small section of the ground floor that he could see. Somewhere below, one weak light still flickered. The rest of the ground floor stood in darkness. Yet that one light was enough for Herb to see: it looked like there had been plenty of people down there when the vampire came through.

It was exactly the same as it had been at the mansion: manmade light appeared to slow the creatures a little, but it didn’t stop them entirely—and they were intelligent enough to disable lights as a priority. The hospital’s reception area would surely have been brightly lit, but the vampire had come in regardless. Most likely, Herb thought, it had taken the lights out first, and then hurled itself into the crowd, ripping and clawing—

His nerves jangled, and he pulled Conny close, breathing into her ear.

“It’s a massacre down there. And it’s dark. You sure we can trust the dog on this?”

Conny glanced at Remy, who sniffed at the smeared blood on the floor nonchalantly.

“We can trust him.”

Herb nodded, and lifted his voice a little for the others to hear.

“Okay, we’re headed toward London Bridge Station. Once we get past it, we’ll be right at my father’s apartment. These things are burrowers. I’m hoping they won’t want to stray too far above ground level, and with any luck we can hold up there until morning. Just follow me, okay? And stay quiet. If we get separated, find somewhere to barricade yourself in. If you survive until sunrise, get the fuck out of London and keep running. Above all: don’t look at them. Got it?”

They all nodded, their expressions fearful as they considered Herb’s words.

If you survive.

Herb decided that it was better not to let them dwell on that, and began to creep down the last couple of flights of stairs.

Eyes straining at the stubborn shadows.

Certain that he would see something looking right back at him.

When he reached the ground floor, he got to see the catastrophic results of a vampire bursting into a crowded room up close, and was perturbed by how quickly he was getting used to the sight of human bodies which had been torn to pieces. He did his best not to look at the corpses littering the floor, focusing only on the exit. The hospital’s front door was propped open by the gore piled in the entryway, and Herb approached it in a half-crouch, gazing intently at the street.

Beyond the slaughter outside the entrance, he saw no sign of army evacuation trucks, though he did see a few military uniforms dotted around the lake of blood and gristle. Perhaps other soldiers were, at that very moment, on their way back to the hospital to pick up another load of people, but Herb knew he didn’t have the patience to wait and see. Much of the hospital was glass and large, open rooms. No good hiding places.

If his father’s apartment had been far, he might have suggested trying to find a secure room in which to lock themselves—maybe the hospital even had a basement—but they were only a few hundred yards away from a place that offered a real shot at safety. They had to keep moving.

He stepped outside, his neck twisting left and right.

In the distance to the right, somewhere in the direction of Southwark Cathedral, he heard screeching. He set off to the left at a fast trot, desperate to break into a run, but certain that if Dan Bellamy exerted himself too much more, the guy would surely pass out again—or worse.

He aimed for London Bridge Station—one of the city’s busiest, and usually heaving with people; now just a hulking dark shape on the horizon.

And rising above it—rising above everything—his destination loomed.

*

The Shard, Dan thought wryly, as he tried to keep pace with the others. Why am I not surprised?

Herb was making straight for London’s tallest building. It figured that a family with the sort of wealth the Rennicks had accrued would opt for just about the most expensive apartment that money could buy, and not even bother to use it.

He was falling behind the others as anxiety turned their trot into a jog, and then a run. He stumbled after them with every muscle in his body howling in agony.

The Shard dominated the skyline; an arrowhead which rose more than a thousand feet above the ground to pierce the clouds that routinely hung low over the city. It wasn’t just the tallest building in London; it was one of the tallest buildings in the world. Dan recalled that he had read some piece of trivia which claimed that the smattering of apartments near the top of the Shard were the highest human living space in western Europe, as far away from the ground as it was possible to get.

He wondered if it would be far enough.

He tasted blood in his mouth again, and spat it out between gasps for air, feeling his vision start to swim.

And suddenly, he wasn’t running after the others. He was chasing them. Desperate to taste their blood; to rip apart their pitifully weak bodies. To let them know what the top of the food chain really looked like. He sprinted after them, shrieking, lifting a hand, ready to tear at their flesh.

Kill them all.

The urge to tear human flesh was so strong in his mind that for a moment, Dan felt his consciousness flicker. He wasn’t aware that he was falling until he hit the ground hard, rolling into something solid that stopped him painfully and sent stars shooting across his vision. He felt a wrenching sensation in his gut, and knew immediately that he had reopened his wounds.

All of them.

His head felt like it was on fire, vast areas of his mind reduced to charred embers. His brain pulsed with a fizzing, unstoppable energy which he hadn’t felt since the months immediately following the knife attack. The black river, surging more ferociously than ever, as though it was trying to pull him to pieces. A sensation like endless falling.

“I’ve got him.”

Reality snapped back into place.

Herb’s voice.

Of course.

He felt strong arms lifting him; someone throwing him over a broad shoulder and setting off at pace.

Carrying him toward something terrible.

*

Dan Bellamy must have weighed roughly the same as the average teenage boy. Herb threw him over his shoulder with surprising ease, and caught up with the others as they reached the base of the Shard.

The front entrance of the enormous building was all glass; lit like a diamond commercial. Herb had been there once or twice with Edgar, but mostly the city apartment was viewed by the Rennicks as a place to retreat if the need arose, and as a place to meet and conduct business with representatives of the Order.

He remembered the way well enough.

“Call the elevator,” he grunted, as he pushed through the revolving glass door, following the others into the lobby. Conny’s son obliged, and by the time Herb arrived, the elevator was almost there.

He turned to scan the street outside. Everything still looked dark and quiet.

We might just get away with this.

The elevator was on the tenth floor, descending smoothly. It hadn’t quite reached the ninth when Herb noticed movement in the corner of his eye. A dark shape approaching the front of the building.

Shit, shit, shit.

The vampire out front threw itself into the glass wall of the Shard, and a spiderweb of cracks formed across it.

The glass wouldn’t take another blow.

Bing!

Herb let out a yell of relief when the elevator doors slid open. The others threw themselves inside.

“Thirty-three!” Herb yelled, and heard a cheerful beep as someone pushed the button.

The monster crashed into the lobby.

Herb stepped into the elevator, unable to turn around; knowing that the vampire was charging toward him, praying that the doors would close before the snapping jaws reached him.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

And then, when Herb expected to feel talons puncture his back, tearing at his innards…soft, soothing music began to pipe into the elevator, and the ceiling—a huge display screen—started to cycle through pleasant, relaxing images of lakes and clouds and beautiful summer days.

Conny let out an explosive gasp, and bent double, clutching her knees. Her son’s face was red with fear, and what Herb thought looked like shame. Doubtless, he’d pissed himself. Herb couldn’t blame him.

“Everybody all right?” Conny said. “Nobody looked at it, right?”

Everyone in the elevator shook their heads.

She glanced at Herb, who still had Dan slung over his shoulder.

“This apartment of yours. It’s on thirty-three?”

Herb shook his head. “Thirty-three is where you have to cross over to one of the upper elevators. Once we get there, call them all. Soon as the first one arrives, someone hit sixty-three. We can lose it when we switch elevators. I hope.”

With a grunt, he heaved Dan from his shoulder, setting him down on unsteady legs. “You okay, Dan?”

Dan nodded shakily, but kept his eyes fixed on the floor and said nothing.

“Nearly there, buddy.” Herb turned back to Conny. “It will want to keep coming, but this is a big building. Gotta be a thousand locked doors in here. Even if it does find us, the apartment is secure. It will hold until sunrise.”

He checked the elevator readout. Just approaching level thirty.

The vampires were fast, and verticality didn’t trouble them. The only question in Herb’s mind was how fast? The elevator moved quickly—surely too quickly for any living creature to keep pace—but still, as the readout ticked around to thirty-three, he expected the doors to open and reveal fangs stained crimson and eyes that would melt his soul.

Bing!

Herb’s heart hammered.

The doors slid open.

Empty.

He let out a gasp of relief.

“Go!” he hissed, and hit the button for the twenty-fifth floor, sending the elevator back down. With any luck, he thought, the vampire wouldn’t even realise that there was another set of elevators servicing the top half of the building. Maybe it would assume they got out on twenty-five. Maybe.

The thirty-third floor was home to a lavish Chinese restaurant and a bar area, but also served as a junction between the upper and lower parts of the building. An artist’s depiction of the River Thames was painted on the floor, and it led around a corner to the next set of elevators. By the time Herb got there, Conny’s son was already inside the nearest of them, holding the chrome doors open and waiting impatiently to hit the button marked 63. He waved Herb and Dan inside, and stabbed the button with a relieved sigh.

It took around three seconds for the door to close.

Each one felt like a lifetime.

The elevator lifted away serenely from the thirty-third floor, and Herb allowed himself to breathe easily at last. The apartment wasn’t the stronghold that the mansion was—or was supposed to be—but the windows and door had been fitted with the exact same electronically operated steel shutters as the mansion. Except that this time, there wouldn’t be a vampire inside with its hands on the controls.

I hope.

When the elevator announced its arrival with a cheerful bing once more, Herb stepped outside and hurried the others out. Once it was clear, he reached inside, and sent it back down to thirty-three.

“This way,” he said, and led them to the right, along a wide glass-walled corridor, to a door which nestled alongside the exterior of the building, offering an incredible view across Canary Wharf and, on a clear day, as far as the east coast of England. Herb paid the dark panorama laid out before him no attention, and turned to face the apartment’s front door. He flipped open a panel next to it, revealing a palm scanner, and placed his left hand against it.

The scanner was coded only to accept senior members of the Rennick household.

Like Jeremy Pruitt, who Herb saw standing in the apartment when the door swung open.

Behind a large man with a hard, bloodstained face, who aimed a stubby submachine gun directly at Herb’s forehead.

35

“Inside,” Mancini growled, shooting an anxious glance down the hallway toward a distant door marked stairs. He kept the gun trained squarely on Herbert Rennick’s forehead, and stepped aside, waving the small group at the door into the apartment with his free hand.

Somewhere behind him, he heard a click. Burnley readying her weapon.

Rennick was travelling with a woman wearing a police officer’s uniform, and what Mancini guessed was a police dog, along with a teenage boy and a man who looked like he’d just undergone a savage round of chemotherapy. Dan Bellamy wasn’t what Mancini expected at all; he looked frail and sick, his eyes ringed with blood. He didn’t look up; didn’t even seem to notice Mancini or the gun he held at all. It was like Dan Bellamy’s eyes were somewhere else, staring at some horizon that only he could see.

He kept a watchful eye on the dog as the disparate group filed into the apartment, but the animal didn’t look like it would give him trouble; it seemed focused on the distant stairwell, just as Mancini himself had been.

He closed the door and locked it.

“Hi Jeremy,” Rennick said amiably.

Jeremy Pruitt sighed heavily.

“Hi, Herb.”

“Better put the place on lockdown,” Herb said. “There’s one in the building.”

Mancini felt the blood draining from his face, and glanced at Jeremy. “Do it,” he growled, keeping his eyes on Herb.

“Weapons on the floor,” he said. “All of you.”

Herb slipped a handgun from his belt and tossed it at Mancini’s feet.

Mancini stared down at it, confused.

“That’s it? One gun?”

“Yeah,” Herb said with a smile. “Not even sure it has any bullets, but do feel free to check. Oh, and hey: who the fuck are you?”

“I called the Americans, Herb,” Jeremy said heavily, and he popped open a panel near the door, punching a code into a keypad. Moments later, steel shutters began to descend, covering the interior of the windows and the apartment’s front door, erasing the view of the burning city.

“Yeah,” Herb snapped bitterly. “Still working for Dad, huh?”

Jeremy shook his head and started to reply, but Mancini had heard enough. He gestured at the couches in the open-plan living room, glaring at Pruitt until he closed his mouth.

“Take a seat, Rennick. The rest of you, too. Burnley, keep your gun on Rennick. If you decide his mouth is too smart, do feel free to shut it for him.”

Burnley nodded, her eyes never leaving Herb.

“You don’t need to do that—” Jeremy said, but Mancini waved a hand to silence him, and stepped back to the front door. He put his ear against the metal which now covered it, listening intently.

Nothing.

The sheet of steel which had fallen over the apartment looked thin, but he didn’t doubt that it would hold. The vampires were strong and resourceful, but punching through tempered steel was a stretch, even for them. For the first time since he had arrived at the Rennick apartment—barely two minutes before Rennick himself did—Mancini allowed himself to relax. The vampires couldn’t get in. The only way harm could come to those inside was if the monsters found some way to take down the entire building. It didn’t seem likely.

Mancini checked his watch.

Still several hours until sunrise.

He lost himself in thought. Craven only wanted Bellamy, and she would have no problem with him killing Rennick if he deemed it necessary. Hell, she’d probably applaud it.

He shot a glance at Rennick. The guy looked like he was just itching to start talking again.

Firing a weapon with a vampire somewhere in the building was asking for trouble—steel shutters or not. If Rennick was determined to cause problems, Mancini would have to find quiet solutions.

Knifework, then.

He glanced toward the distant kitchen.

“Okay,” Herb said brightly, clapping his hands together and rising from the couch. “Who wants cocktails?”

The policewoman grabbed his shirt, and hauled him back down into his seat, keeping her other hand firmly on the mutt’s collar.

“Smart lady,” Mancini said, making his way into the living room. “I’m not here for you, Rennick, but I have no problem killing you, if that’s what you want. When you’re running your mouth, all you’re doing is making me change my mind about how I’m going to kill you. Capiche?”

“I recommend slightly overfeeding me and ultimately inducing a fatal heart attack,” Herb said with a serene smile. “Should only take about forty years, and the police will never catch on. I eat plenty of junk food alrea—”

Mancini darted forward quickly and swung a left hook, connecting firmly with Rennick’s flapping jaw, and the kid finally shut up.

Mancini kept walking, his nerves racing, heading for the apartment’s plush kitchen.

And the knives.

He selected a large carving knife from a rack, and turned back toward the living room, coming face to face with Jeremy.

“You don’t need to do that,” the Brit said. “He’s a good kid.”

Mancini shrugged.

“Sure. They all are. But I have a job to do, and I’ve already lost most of my team getting this far.”

“So, take Bellamy!” Jeremy thundered. “He’s what you’re really here for.”

Mancini strode back into the living room, pointing the knife at Herb.

“He’s a loose end, Pruitt. Come to think of it, there are an awful lot of loose ends in this room. Like you said, I only need Bellamy.”

He lifted the knife, and Jeremy faltered, taking a half-step backwards. For a moment, the room bathed in tension, the air crackling with the threat of impending violence.

“I just wanted to go home.”

Mancini blinked at Dan Bellamy’s small voice. He glanced at him and laughed bitterly.

“Yeah, good luck with that, buddy. Where I’m taking you, you’re going to be a long way from home.”

“I have a condition.”

Mancini frowned.

“I’m sick. Getting worse all the time. I just needed to go home and take my medication. Not even sure I’m…me anymore.”

Dan kept his eyes pointed at the floor, and spoke in a soft monotone. Mancini couldn’t even be sure that the guy was actually talking to him. He didn’t even look like he knew exactly where he was.

Mancini walked around the couch, trying to attract Bellamy’s attention. The scrawny guy just kept staring at the floor, his face buried beneath a mop of hair.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asked dubiously, looking at Herb.

Rennick just stared back mutinously.

Dan giggled. “That’s the funniest thing,” he said. “I used to wonder the same thing myself. Now, I’m not sure it was ever me. It’s the world. The question is: what’s wrong with everybody else? Why don’t you all hear it? The river?”

Dan lifted his chin and met Mancini’s gaze.

Burning eyes.

A scream caught in Mancini’s throat as invisible thorns punctured his mind, putting down roots. Taking away control.

His world became a tunnel, and all he could see was Dan Bellamy’s searing pupils, ringed by blood, boring into his soul.

He hoisted the MP5, pressing the cold barrel into the side of his own head.

Bellamy rose from the couch, his eyes blazing, and Mancini dropped to his knees in front of him.

Worshipping him like a god.

His finger began to curl around the trigger.

And suddenly, the world was plunged into darkness.

The presence in his mind was gone, releasing him like an unclenching fist. Mancini fell forward, gasping for air, clutching at his throat.

“What happened?” a woman’s voice snarled. Not Burnley; the policewoman.

Mancini heard a low rumble fill the room, and moonlight began to wash into the apartment. The steel shutters were opening.

“Power cut,” Herbert Rennick said, with a rueful chuckle. “Lockdown didn’t last long.”

“They cut the power to the whole damn building?”

“Take a look outside, Conny. They cut the power to the whole damn city.”

Mancini squeezed his eyes shut.

Should have run when I had the chance.

36

Herb strode over to the choking American and scooped up the machine gun which he had dropped on the floor. He checked the magazine, and nodded to himself. It was full.

The American woman—Burnley—still had a pistol trained on Herb, but she looked uncertain. Probably, Herb thought, Burnley was thinking about how close she just came to being the last one standing, and what the hell she was supposed to do next.

Join the fucking club, lady.

“I think we’ve got bigger issues right now, don’t you?” Herb said amiably, gesturing at the American woman’s gun. She nodded slowly, lowering her weapon.

“Conny,” Herb said, “would you mind taking her gun? And any others she might be carrying.”

Conny nodded, and headed for Burnley, who gave her weapon up with a sigh and opened her jacket to show that she wasn’t otherwise armed. Conny turned the gun over in her hands, gazing at it intently as she moved back to the window.

Herb offered a hand to the man gasping on the floor in front of the couch.

“You never did tell me who the fuck you are.”

The American glanced up at him, his eyes wide and angry.

“Mancini,” he growled, staring at the gun in Herb’s left hand. After a moment, he lifted his gaze to Herb’s eyes and nodded, taking the hand that was offered and hauling himself to his feet. “What did he do to me?”

Herb grinned.

“He does what they do, Mr Mancini,” he said, and struck out with a solid right, connecting sharply with Mancini’s jaw and knocking him straight back onto the floor. “That makes us even. I’d prefer it if we could stay that way for a little while. Capiche?”

Mancini wiped at his lip and grunted.

Herb left him on the floor and strode over to the window, moving to stand alongside Conny and her son.

Far below, the city of London was a dark stain, lit only by fire and headlights.

“I don’t get it,” Conny said. “How could they cut the power to the whole city?”

Herb frowned.

“They cut the lights as a matter of priority,” he said absently. “I should’ve guessed. But at least we know where the rest of them were, now. Power stations. London isn’t served by just one. The city draws energy from several, all over the south of England. You don’t just pull a plug and cut the power to a city of this size. While the whole world is looking at London, the vampires have been busy disabling the whole country. A few here to attract attention, the rest spread around Britain, dismantling our infrastructure. Taking out power stations, and who knows what else. They won’t even have to engage with the military. They can pick us off at their leisure, and let our reliance on electricity do the rest. Without power, they own the night.”

Conny shook her head in despair.

“I thought if I could get Logan out of London, things would be fine…” she trailed off, gazing out across the dark city.

Herb glanced at the terrified boy, and his expression hardened.

“We’re gonna have to get him a little further than that,” he said.

Conny smiled weakly.

“We?” she said. “You’re going to help? I’ve got pretty serious doubts about you getting out of this room alive, let alone out of the city.”

“You and me, both,” Herb said with a wink, and he turned away.

“Hey, Captain America? What was your extraction plan? Please tell me you had an extraction plan.”

Mancini glowered at him.

“We have a Gulfstream waiting at an airfield south of the city.”

“Sounds good. Any firm ideas on how to get there?”

“Yeah, just one: wait here until sunrise,” Mancini spat bitterly.

“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 half 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.

The group had ruled out using the fire stairs for fear that once they entered what was in effect a maintenance stairwell, they might not be able to get back into the central part of the building itself, but it was the only place they could hide. If they didn’t use it, the man searching for them would simply herd them all the way back up the Shard, right back to the apartment.

In the distance, at the far end of the corridor, Herb saw movement, and ducked back into cover.

“We can’t just kill the guy,” Conny whispered.

Herb grimaced.

“Not sure we have any choice.”

“We could take the fire exit.”

“And if we get stuck in there? We’d be putting ourselves in a place with only one way in and one way out.”

“Like right here,” Conny said pointedly. “We can’t kill him.”

“It’s not ‘him’ anymore,” Herb said. “Whoever that guy was, he’s gone now. Just an empty shell. If there’s any part of him still in there, he’d probably thank us for putting him out of his misery. We’d be doing him a favour.”

Conny pursed her lips.

“Some favour.”

Mancini hustled forward.

“What’s the problem?”

In the distance, Herb heard a strange, soft clunk, and risked a peek around the corner.

The vampire’s puppet had made it halfway along the corridor, and was checking the fire door.

Shit.

In around a minute, the group would be forced to retreat back up to the next level. And then the next.

Trapped.

Waiting to be discovered; waiting to die.

Even if we do kill him, we’ll just bring his master down on our heads. No way of knowing how far away the vampire is. Could only be a level or two.

“We need a distraction,” Herb whispered, focusing on Mancini. “We can hide on the fire escape, but he’s checking the doors on each level. We need to find a way to get him to move right past without checking. Something to draw him away.”

“Something like a cellphone ringing?” Mancini said, slipping a small black phone from his pocket and holding it up.

Herb frowned. He knew exactly what Mancini was suggesting—that he could run up a level or two and set the alarm on his phone. Maybe, if it trilled at just the right moment, it would persuade the approaching man to hurry past the next fire door without checking it.

Another desperate plan, he thought. He didn’t dare risk another look around the corner. He nodded at Mancini.

“Go,” he said, “quickly. The further up the building you get, the more time we’ll have to run. Once you drop the phone, take the fire exit back down to us. We’ll keep the door open for you.”

“Run?” Mancini repeated, his eyes wide with doubt.

“Yeah, run. I’ve tried fooling these things before, and they are far from gullible. If it takes the bait, we won’t be safe for long. I’m betting it will know straightaway that we have slipped past it. We’ll have to make a run for the hotel. It’s only a couple of floors down from here. We’ll be able to lose them in there. I hope.”

“Running will be noisy.”

Herb nodded.

“Yeah. But it’s all we have. Go.”

Mancini turned without a word, and jogged lightly up the stairs, his footsteps inaudible. He might have time, Herb thought, to carry the phone up a couple of levels at most. It would have to be enough. Once he dropped the phone, he could enter the fire escape and make his way back down to meet them.

Herb waved at the others to follow, and made his way back up the stairs, following Mancini slowly, and quietly.

On the next level, when he reached the fire door, Herb pressed on the bar and eased it open quietly. They would all fit into the fire escape, of course, but there would be nowhere to hide once they were in there. If the puppet opened the door, the game would be up.

He waved the others inside, and waited.

He figured Mancini had around thirty seconds. He closed the door, stopping just before the lock engaged, and left a crack through which to peer. Outside, the hallway was still empty, but only for a few moments. He saw movement in the darkness by the stairs, shuffling toward him slowly.

His heart began to pound loud enough that he felt sure it would give them away, and he winced when he heard a fire door opening above. It sounded like Mancini had made it up a couple of storeys.

The man outside approached the fire door, and a cold sweat broke out on Herb’s brow. If Mancini’s alarm didn’t go off…

The figure in the hallway was barely five yards away. Herb was desperate to keep the door open a crack to see, but he didn’t dare. He closed it until he felt the lock trying to engage, and stared at it furiously, waiting for the man outside to push it open.

He didn’t have to wait long.

Pressure on the door.

Starting to push.

This is it, Herb thought, and felt energy begin to fizz through him. The plan had failed. Running blindly was going to be the only option.

The door opened a crack.

And somewhere above, a loud, cheerful tune rang out, splitting the silence.

The pressure on the door lifted abruptly, and Herb heard footsteps departing in a hurry.

He felt Conny at his back.

“Shouldn’t we make a move?” she whispered.

Herb grimaced, and shook his head.

“Wait,” he said.

After a moment, he heard it. Clicking on the main stairs. Coming up fast. When it reached the hallway, the carpet muffled its approach a little, but the vampire was moving quickly, oblivious to the noise it was making. It thundered past the fire door, and Herb waited until he heard it clicking up the next stairway to the floor above.

“Move,” Herb whispered. “Quietly. When it comes—and it will—just run.”

He pushed the fire door open, and burst out into the dark hallway, breaking into a near-silent trot.

He had made it as far as the steps leading down to the next level when he heard the screech a couple of floors above, and knew that the ruse had been discovered. The monsters weren’t stupid—far from it—and he was certain that the creature would immediately realise that it needed to descend.

Before the screech had receded into silence, Herb growled run in a seething whisper, and began to sprint.

And somewhere above, the vampire followed.

39

The Infinity Pool represented the top floor of the eighteen-storey Shangri-La hotel. The pool itself was small, set alongside a fully equipped gym and fitness centre. At any other time, the sight of the pool, nestling alongside a huge window which offered an extraordinary view of the city below, might have taken Dan’s breath away.

If he had any left.

The others were pulling away from him, and with each stride, he felt pain shooting across his abdomen as he tore more stitches out of his wounds. Another screech somewhere behind and above him told him that running was an option with a severely limited shelf-life. He was just too weak to keep going, and the vampire sounded like it was closing fast.

There was nothing else for it. He felt weak and sick; unsure even whether he could repeat the trick that he had pulled on the hospital roof, but knowing he had no option other than to try.

He came to a stop alongside the pool and turned around, waiting for the monster to appear.

“Dan!”

Herb’s whispered call barely made an impression on Dan’s mind. He was already looking inwards, searching for the river, wondering if this was to be the last time he ever saw it.

Some part of him hoped that was true.

He took in a deep breath, focusing on the entrance to the pool, and flinched in surprise when the doors burst open and a man charged through.

The man from the hallway, he thought bleakly. He focused his eyes on the approaching man—a middle-aged guy in a business suit with a loosened tie and an untucked shirt who looked like he had probably slept through the evacuation of the building. Most likely, the man had awoken to find a nightmare looming over him, and had known terror for an instant before his mind was plucked away.

Dan focused on the man’s eyes.

Nothing.

His mind is already taken.

Dan stumbled backwards, making it only a few steps before the businessman tackled him heavily around the waist and slammed him down onto the tiled floor surrounding the pool. For a moment, his vision blurred as the pain in his abdomen became a howling agony. Breath exploded from his lungs, and before he could suck in more oxygen, the businessman drove a solid fist into his jaw.

Dan’s head ricocheted off the floor, and for a moment the world went dark.

Can fight vampires.

Can’t fight people.

Still a pathetic, feeble weakling.

He lifted a hand, trying vainly to block the next blow, and suddenly the weight of the businessman pinning him to the floor was lifted.

Dan’s head rolled weakly to the side, and he saw Herb hauling the businessman off him and swinging a savage flurry of punches. The man in the suit collapsed backwards, falling into the pool with a loud splash.

And Herb dropped to his knees.

His mouth opening in a silent scream.

The vampire had arrived at last.

It stalked into the room almost warily, as though unsure of exactly what it might face.

A good job Herb doesn’t still have the gun, Dan thought dimly, or we’d all be dead already.

Sickly despair washed over him as he watched Herb pivot at the waist and drive his forehead into the tiled floor with a loud smack. The big man lifted himself up, his forehead dark with blood, and drove himself down again.

And, finally, the river crashed through Dan’s mind, the rushing torrent of rage and fear and disgust, and suddenly his injuries were forgotten; the pain wracking his body a distant, faded memory.

He rose to his feet, still aware. Still conscious.

Not blacking out this time.

“It’s me you want,” he screamed, unnerved by how unlike his voice the words sounded.

The vampire whipped around to face him, and the terrible red eyes fell upon Dan. Herb dropped to the floor, lying still, like some kid’s toy which had its batteries removed abruptly.

The vampire’s attempt to take his mind was weak; water breaking against a vast dam. He batted it aside and took a step toward the monster, drilling his gaze into it, ripping whatever it called a soul to shreds.

And suddenly, he was the vampire.

Staring back at himself, and the group of people cowering behind him.

Dan’s face broke into a wicked grin.

“I think,” he said, watching himself speak through the monster’s eyes, “that I’m getting the hang of this.”

*

Herb’s head felt like it was about to explode. The pain was one thing, but the presence of the vampire in his mind, like the residue of some terrible toxin, was something else entirely. It had only been in his mind for a couple of seconds, but felt like the inside of his skull was bruised and bleeding.

Groaning, he twisted his neck, levering his eyes open through the thick blood which stuck the lids together like glue, and saw the vampire take off at a sprint, charging past Dan, heading for the window which ran alongside the pool.

“Dan! No!” Herb tried to yell. The words emerged as a weak croak.

Dan turned to face him, his expression curious, and the vampire skidded to a halt. It remained still, like a freeze frame, a few yards from the window which Dan had been about to make it jump through.

Herb struggled to his feet, shaking his head in a vain attempt to stop the world spinning.

“How long can you control it?” he gasped.

Dan looked dubious.

“I don’t know. Not long. Why?”

“The others,” Herb grunted. “They’ll be coming.” He focused his gaze on the vampire once more. “We can use this one.”

*

The window on the east side of the fifty-second floor of the Shard exploded, and the monster hurtled out.

But not to its death.

It clung to the exterior of the building like a spider, racing up past the residential levels. At the sixty-fourth floor, it passed the public viewing gallery, and kept going. The top fifteen levels of the building were dedicated to utilities: a heat rejection system and power plants. It raced past them, making for the spire at the very top of London’s tallest structure.

When it reached it, clinging to the narrow glass spike a thousand feet above the city, it bellowed out a screech.

Calling its kin.

40

“Will they fall for it?”

Dan tried to focus on Herb, but it was getting more difficult with each passing second. He felt his grip on the vampire’s mind weakening; his grip on reality beginning to break as he struggled to occupy two minds at once.

He was staring at Herb, and seeing a dark city spread out far below him simultaneously; screeching in a language he couldn’t understand and trying to form words in one that he did.

He felt a warm wetness running down his cheek, and knew that he was crying blood again.

“I…think so,” he mumbled. “I think they’re heading up to the top. But I can’t hold it much longer. When I lose it, the game’s up, Herb. They’ll all know exactly where we are.”

He felt the same warm wetness spring from his ear, and in his mind, the tumbling river became a cascading waterfall, threatening to tear his mind to pieces.

“I…”

He grunted, bending at the waist as an avalanche of pain crashed over him.

“I’ll hold it as long as I can…think I’ll pass out—”

He began to wobble on his feet.

“Get away from the windows,” Dan slurred, “they’re coming up the outside of the buil—”

He collapsed, and felt strong arms catch him.

“Gotcha,” Herb grunted, and turned to face the others. “You heard him. Get down, get away from the windows. When they pass, we start running, everybody got it?”

None of the others spoke, but they scattered at Herb’s words, moving away from the Infinity Pool’s huge window and ducking down behind exercise machines and a small drinks bar.

Herb dragged Dan to a huge cross-trainer, ducking down behind the machine, praying that he was out of sight.

Moments later, he saw the first of them, thundering up the exterior of the building. It was followed by another. Another. Herb counted eight in total. Judging by the speed they were moving at, it wouldn’t take them long to reach the top of the Shard.

When he was sure that there were no more coming, Herb lurched to his feet, throwing Dan over his shoulder once more.

“Go,” he roared at the others. “Run!”

He broke into a sprint, barely slowed at all by Dan’s weight, making for the stairs. Taking them three at a time; almost falling down them. Almost immediately, Burnley hurtled past him, the American woman running like a seasoned sprinter. A few seconds later, Conny’s son also overtook him, his speed born of youth and terror.

Herb glanced over his shoulder.

The others were following: Conny and Remy close behind, the dog clearly matching its pace to that of its master. Behind them, struggling to keep up, he saw Mancini, and Jeremy even further back.

Dan moaned; a low, sickly sound.

“Hold on, Dan,” Herb yelled, “just hold it for as long as you can.”

Dan coughed a mouthful of blood across Herb’s bandaged arm, painting it red.

*

At the top of the building, the first of the vampires arrived, shrieking in confusion at the one which had called it. There was no sign of the humans; no sign of the Hermetic.

The others arrived, circling warily, staring at their kin with naked suspicion.

And the creature at the top of the spire hurled itself at the nearest of them, driving it clean off the side of the building, its momentum carrying them both out into the night. The two vampires plummeted toward their deaths and, half a building below, Dan Bellamy’s mind, too, fell a thousand feet, and landed in darkness.

*

Herb felt Dan’s body go limp as he passed a sign which read 29th floor.

“They’re coming,” he roared. He could no longer see Mancini’s partner or Logan in front of him; he figured at the speed they were travelling they might even be two or three levels below already. Conny and Remy had also passed Herb a couple of floors back. He hoped the policewoman, at least, could still hear him. “Find a vehicle,” he yelled, “get the engine running!”

28th floor.

Herb felt dismay rising with each stride, and when he heard a muffled screech, he knew.

Not gonna make it.

There was a good chance that the two women and the teenager would reach the ground floor, he thought, and maybe if he hadn’t been carrying Dan, he might have had a shot himself, but though the guy was light, carrying him down near-pitch black stairwells was slowing Herb down too much. As for Mancini and Jeremy, well, the two older men were both a little larger than Herb, both a little heavier and a lot slower. Neither of them would reach the ground floor.

Leave them.

Let them slow the vampires down for you.

Herb gritted his teeth, and even as the thought raced across his mind, he knew that he didn’t have it in him, no matter that Mancini had been prepared to kill him barely half an hour earlier, or that Jeremy had lied to him and called in the Americans in the first place.

Soft, his father had called him, more than once. Too concerned with the wellbeing of others; too willing to let feelings stand in the way of his sacred duty.

His run began to slow even before he was aware that he had made the only decision he could make. For the men, outrunning the vampires on the stairs looked all-but impossible, but he could buy Conny some time to escape.

He stopped, listening intently, and heard footsteps approaching fast. Mancini.

The big American almost barrelled right into him in the dark.

“Why have you stopped?” Mancini gasped.

Another shriek somewhere above—somewhere far too damn close—provided a better answer than Herb ever could.

“We won’t make it like this,” Herb panted, “not fast enough.”

“Where’s Burnley? And the police officer?”

“I lost sight of them about ten floors back. They’re fast. They might make it if we can draw the vampires away.”

“Draw them away how?”

“We’ve got almost thirty floors of office and retail space to lose them in. We can’t keep running in a straight line.”

Mancini grimaced in the dark, but he nodded.

“What about Jeremy?”

Mancini sucked in a lungful of air. “I don’t know. He fell behind,” he shook his head. “He’s too slow.”

Herb hoisted Dan on his shoulders, redistributing the weight of his limp body.

“We need to wait for him,” he said, but the words had barely spilled from his lips when he heard a man screaming just a couple of floors above. The sound was terrifyingly close.

“Too late,” Mancini said, and he kicked open a door which led into a wide, open-plan office space.

With a stifled curse, Herb took off after the American, leaving the main stairs behind, and leaving the door wide open for the vampires to follow.

He ran, pouring everything he had into the sprint.

Praying that when Conny and the others reached the ground floor, they would wait for him.

41

Jeremy was a shower man; he hated taking baths.

He couldn’t remember getting in this particular one—nor could he remember falling asleep—but he must have, because the water was freezing. He supposed it was time to get out.

But he was so tired. It would be so much easier to just lie in the cold water and snooze a little longer.

He shuddered at the temperature, and groaned.

Better get moving.

Strangely, he found that it was difficult to open his eyes. He must have been asleep for a long time, he thought distantly. His eyes were glued together by sleep. Even stranger, he found that when he tried to lift his hands to find the edge of the tub, they were almost impossible to move.

Come to think of it, he couldn’t seem to move any part of his body.

And since when do I take baths?

His eyes flared open, and for a moment he saw only darkness, and felt the freezing bathwater chilling him all over.

Got to get out, or I’ll catch a cold.

He tried to lift his arms again. This time, there was a little movement, but also a strange pulling sensation, like the water didn’t want to let him go.

What the hell?

With an effort, Jeremy lifted his head, peering down the tub toward his feet.

No tub.

No feet.

The darkness didn’t quite reveal the full horror, but it revealed enough.

Jeremy’s muscles were not cold because he was lying in a bath of freezing water. They were cold because the skin which normally kept them warm had been peeled away. His body had been opened up like a ripe orange, revealing the glistening pulp beneath.

He saw his own exposed ribs; pulsing organs beneath. It looked like a surgeon had expertly carved his torso from throat to groin.

Was I in an accident?

Why is the hospital so dark?

Where are my fucking legs?

Both of Jeremy’s legs were sheared off at the knees, like he’d been in some terrible car accident. Once, he had seen a motorcycle plough head-on into a car coming around a blind bend: the bonnet of the car had popped even as the bike rider flew over his handlebars, and the thin sheet of metal had cut his body cleanly in two. The biker hadn’t survived.

He tried to summon up a memory, anything that might offer some indication as to what had happened, but his mind felt spongey and unresponsive.

Come to think of it, his mind felt cold, too. How the hell was that possible?

He rolled his eyes up in their sockets, hoping to spot a doctor, wanting to scream that the anaesthetic he had been given wasn’t nearly powerful enough.

I’m awake, he tried to shout, but no words emerged from his mouth. In fact, he couldn’t even feel his jaw moving. It was almost like he didn’t have a jaw.

Maybe the doctors had wired it shut.

What kind of fucking hospital is this?

His head lolled back, the effort of keeping it lifted suddenly too much for him.

And he saw.

Not a doctor.

A nightmarish creature stood behind him, its fearsome red eyes narrowed in something that looked almost like concentration as it pulled back a long, sinewy arm. In its hand, a flash of something red and white; a terrifyingly enormous piece of bone, clutched between fingers that ended in long, curved blades.

That’s my skull, Jeremy thought, and he had the strange, almost irresistible urge to laugh.

The vision in his left eye suddenly just…switched off. Like someone had pointed a remote control at it and put it on standby.

Jeremy’s one remaining eye worked long enough for him to see those wicked talons reaching for the top of his head once more, pulling on something grey and soft.

Finally, as he saw the hideous monster’s maw opening—rows and rows of wicked teeth, worse than any shark—the darkness claimed him.

*

We’re going to make it!

Conny rocketed down the last set of stairs and onto the ground floor of the Shard, just in time to see Logan pushing on a revolving door which spat him out into the night. She wanted him to wait for her; wanted to scream at him that it might not be safe out there, but she caught herself in time. Whatever was outside the Shard couldn’t possibly be any worse than what was inside.

At the sight of the outside world, Remy picked up pace, pulling away from her easily.

She barrelled into the revolving door a few seconds after the German Shepherd reached it, and together they pushed themselves out into the cold night air.

The American woman whose gun Conny had taken was already outside, her hands on her knees, drawing in a deep breath.

“Where are the others?” she panted.

Conny turned back to the revolving door, breathing equally heavily, and shook her head.

“I don’t know. I thought they were right behind me.”

She gestured at Logan to move closer, and took hold of his arm, unwilling to ever let it go again. Her boy was dying, but he wouldn’t die tonight. Not if she had anything to say about it.

“I heard Herb shouting to find a vehicle,” Logan said through rapid, shallow gasps for air. “They’re slower than us, that’s all.”

Conny’s heart almost burst with joy at hearing her son speak. It was the first time she had heard anything other than the odd grunted word from him in weeks.

And all it took was the end of the world.

She almost burst out laughing.

“Okay,” Conny said, casting her gaze around the street until she spotted a large black SUV, “anybody know how to hotwire a car?”

“I do.”

Conny’s jaw dropped as Logan spoke, keeping his eyes pointed guiltily at the ground.

We’re gonna have to have a little chat about that, she thought, but she was already pointing at the SUV. “Go,” she said. “Get the engine running, bring the car over to the front entrance.”

“Are you crazy?”

Conny turned to face Burnley.

“You want to wait for them?” Burnley snarled. “They’re probably dead already. Do you have any idea how fast these things move? We have to get in the car and go.”

In the distance, Conny heard glass breaking. Logan, her innocent little boy, stealing a car.

She shook her head.

“Feel free to leave,” she said, “but if you want to ride with us, you’re going to wait. I don’t care how fast these things move. I’m damn sure they can’t outrun a car. We’ll wait until the last minute. If we see them, we go. Otherwise, we wait, understand?”

The American dropped her eyes to the gun which Conny still gripped in her right hand.

“Try it,” Conny said, as the SUV’s engine roared to life.

Burnley looked away, clenching her jaw in frustration.

Conny turned back to face the entrance to the Shard, peering through the glass into the gloom beyond as Logan brought the SUV over. When he pulled up, she gestured at him to move to the passenger seat, and took the wheel, her eyes never leaving the revolving door leading back into the building. Remy jumped onto Logan’s lap, and the boy hugged him fiercely.

Inside the vehicle, the radio was on at a barely audible volume, repeating a looped message. It took a few moments for Conny’s brain to pick up on one vital phrase.

“…twenty minute warning…”

Keeping her eyes firmly on the windows, scanning for any sign of movement on the street, she reached down and inched the volume up.

And felt her stomach drop.

The recorded message was warning that the military had pulled out of London, and that in twenty minutes, the air force was going to employ what it hoped was a last resort.

Dropping napalm onto the streets of London.

She fixed her gaze on the entrance to the Shard, willing the revolving door to spin.

Come on, Herb. Where the hell are you?

42

Sweat dripped into Herb’s eyes, making them sting, blurring his vision. The vampires had taken the bait, following the fleeing men into the office levels. Judging by the sound of the creatures tearing the rooms apart above, they were only a couple of floors behind, and were obliterating every possible hiding spot.

And still closing on the fleeing men.

Herb forced himself to creep along quietly, aware that if he made any noise that carried, his death would soon follow. He glanced at Mancini, and saw from the big American’s expression that he, too, knew that the plan to try and lose the vampires in the maze of offices was failing. They were simply moving too slowly, and there were too many vampires. Even with the creatures tearing the building apart as they went, it sounded like they were gaining ground.

On each level, Herb searched in vain for something that might serve as a hiding spot, but so much of the Shard was glass that it seemed impossible. He passed numerous offices and meeting rooms—many of which offered furniture that they could hide behind, or even supply closets which they could lock themselves in—but it sounded like the vampires were leaving no stone unturned. The Shard suffered the curse of most modern architecture: flimsy walls, style over substance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, whoever had designed the building hadn’t foreseen that there might come a time when people needed to use the skyscraper to hide from monsters which had crawled out of the lowest level of Hell.

“Maybe we could get back out onto the main stairs?” Mancini whispered.

Herb grimaced. That thought had occurred to him, too, but he had a nagging feeling that there would be one of them out there, blocking the main stairwell, just waiting for the humans to attempt to flee again.

“Too risky.”

He hoisted Dan on his shoulders again, redistributing his weight. Despite how light the guy was, carrying him for an extended period of time was beginning to sap Herb’s energy alarmingly.

Mancini scowled. “They’re catching us, Rennick. We’ve still got more than twenty floors to go, and it doesn’t sound like hiding is an option. Got any bright ideas?”

Herb shook his head grimly, and kept pushing forward, increasing his pace as much as he dared, wishing that the office levels were furnished with the same deep, soft carpet as the residential levels had been.

His mind ran back to the Oceanus; to carrying another man up, trying to flee the raging inferno spreading throughout the ship. He had carried that man until his muscles shrieked in agony, never realising that he was already dead. And now, here he was, trying to save someone else, and seeing failure looming before him.

He felt a scream of frustration gathering in his throat.

Didn’t let it out.

They were moving through the offices of what looked like a finance company. Judging by some party hats and half-finished glasses of wine, the people working there had been busy celebrating something when the world began to fall apart.

He snatched up a glass of white wine with his free hand, draining it in a single gulp, never breaking stride, and placed the glass quietly on the edge of a desk, blinking at the warm sensation spreading through his chest.

That, he thought, could well be my last drink.

Above, the still air in the skyscraper erupted to the sound of screaming. Human screaming. It sounded like there had been somebody hiding somewhere in the offices, and Herb had led the vampires right to them. He flushed guiltily as it occurred to him that whoever was dying up there might just slow the vampires down a little.

The scream ended abruptly.

Or maybe not.

He hurried toward the next set of stairs, and a sign which read 23rd floor.

And stopped.

To the right of the stairs, there was a large glass-walled boardroom, home to an enormous table. That room looked to have been the central point of the party the workers at the finance company had been having. A huge tablecloth was draped across the table, topped with plates of sandwiches and canapés.

He grabbed Mancini’s arm, halting the big man as he made for the stairs.

Mancini flinched, looking at him with wide eyes.

“The elevators,” Herb whispered. “We won’t make it on foot. We need to get down fast.”

Mancini frowned, casting a glance back along the offices. By the sound of it, the vampires were a couple of minutes behind them, maybe less.

“The elevators? The elevators are out of order, Renni—”

“But the elevator cables aren’t.”  Herb pointed at the huge tablecloth draped over the boardroom table. “You know how to improvise a harness?”

“A harness?” Mancini’s eyes widened. “You can’t be serious.”

Herb just stared at him.

“It’s more than twenty floors, Rennick. And you’re carrying an unconscious man on your fucking back.”

“Exactly why we need to take the direct route,” Herb whispered, and made for the boardroom without waiting for a response. After a second, Mancini followed, as Herb knew he would. Herb’s idea was beyond risky, and might well end up killing them all, but it was the only idea either of the men had.

At least it will be a quick death.

He shrugged Dan off his shoulders and placed him on the floor before quickly scooping up the plates of snacks from the table and whipping off the huge white cloth. The material was thin, but if he tore it into strips and platted it, he thought it would take his weight—even with Dan on his back.

He began to rip the cloth, wincing at the noise of the fabric tearing, and nodded when he saw Mancini move to help him.

“We’ll tie Dan’s arms around my neck,” Herb whispered, “I’m gonna need both hands for this.”

Mancini shook his head.

“You really are crazy. Even if we can climb down the cable, we’ll be leaving the elevator doors wide open. As soon as they reach this level, they’ll know exactly where we went. I don’t think they’ll have any problems following us down.”

“We’re not going to climb,” Herb replied with an easy grin, “we’re going to slide.”

*

It took around thirty seconds for Mancini to secure Dan on Herb’s back, and probably another thirty for the two men to loop the improvised harnesses around their wrists. With each passing second, the noise of the vampires above increased in volume. They were almost certainly on the next floor now, Herb thought, tearing the offices apart.

He tied off the makeshift harness on his right wrist, leaving the other side loose.

“We’ll have to jump for the cable. Once you get a hold of it, loop the harness around your other hand,” Herb said. “Don’t tie it. I don’t think you’ll have time to untie it when we reach the bottom.”

“And pray,” Mancini muttered bitterly.

“Sure, if it helps. Come on, we have to move.”

Herb ran for the nearest elevator, keeping his steps as light as possible, choking a little as Dan’s weight settled around his throat.

It was all so familiar.

Except that this time, I won’t let him die.

He grabbed the left elevator door, and nodded as Mancini grabbed the right. The two men heaved, muscles straining, and the doors opened a crack.

“That will do,” Herb whispered, almost screaming when he heard a crash that sounded almost loud enough to come from the same level that they were standing on. “If we’re lucky, they won’t fit.”

“They’ll just open the doors themselves,” Mancini whispered softly. “All this will do is slow them down for a second or two.”

Herb nodded.

“It might be enough.”

He leaned into the elevator shaft, peering down, and immediately wished he hadn’t. It was too dark—and probably too far—for him to see the bottom of the shaft, but he could see enough. Looking at the drop made him feel dizzy, but there was no time to dwell on it. The decision had been made. The vampires were almost certainly just a matter of seconds away from reaching the twenty-third floor.

The cable was thick steel, and it would require a long jump just to reach it.

It would be so easy to miss.

The image of his fingers grazing the cable but failing to find purchase popped into Herb’s mind, and a wave of nausea rolled through him as he imagined the fall that would inevitably follow. He would have several seconds to contemplate the ground as it rushed up to meet him. Time enough to contemplate his death, and all the terrible decisions which had led to it.

He grimaced, and shook the thought away, taking a few steps back to give himself a run-up, and checking that the bonds holding Dan on his back were secure.

Mancini watched him, a stunned expression on his face, as though he couldn’t quite believe that matters had reached such a desperate climax.

“Geronimo,” Herb whispered, and he ran, throwing himself into the shaft.

Fingers stretching.

Grasping.

Closing around thick, cool steel.

Herb gripped the cable tightly in both hands as gravity began to drag him down, burning the flesh of his palms until he felt like screaming. He fell a couple of floors before he managed to slow his descent enough to loop the tablecloth harness around the cable, and then around his left wrist.

The cable lurched as Mancini latched onto it above him.

Herb didn’t look up.

He could only look down as he pulled the harness as tight as possible, desperately trying to slow the descent to a manageable speed.

It sort of worked.

When he saw the ground floor rushing up to meet him, he couldn’t help but scream.

So fast.

He pulled on the harness with all his might, his muscles straining until it felt like they were tearing apart.

And the bottom of the elevator shaft gave him a brutal welcome, snapping his legs back, sending bright bursts of white light shooting across his vision. For a moment, the entire world was pain, and he thought he would surely pass out.

A fraction of a second after he reached the bottom, Mancini barrelled into him, knocking the air from his lungs before he had even had a chance to fully draw it in.

Far above, echoing against the metallic walls of the shaft, he heard screeching, and the sound of moving metal.

The vampires forcing open the elevator doors.

Clickclickclickclickclick—

The noise of their approach was thunderous. No need for them to worry about cables or harnesses. The monsters were sprinting down the metallic walls, eating up the distance.

Herb groaned, lifting himself up onto legs which felt like they were made of fire, and grabbed at the doors, hauling them open with a strength borne of sheer terror, and bursting out onto the ground floor of the Shard.

He heard Mancini crying out in pain behind him, but it sounded like the American had also survived the fall mostly intact. He crashed after Herb, running wildly.

Herb heard the first of the vampires erupting from the elevator as he reached the revolving doors and barrelled through them, out into the night air.

He almost screamed in joy when he saw the SUV waiting for them, its rear doors open. He threw himself into the vehicle with Dan still on his back, the pair of them landing heavily on Burnley’s lap, and a moment later, he felt Mancini land on top of him once more.

Outside, the night filled with the sound of screeching.

Vampires.

All of them.

Coming fast.

The engine roared as Conny stamped on the accelerator.

The SUV lurched forward, the rear door still open, Mancini’s legs still dangling in the night air. Herb reached out a hand, pulling the American inside, just as something heavy charged into the side of the car.

In the driver’s seat, Conny let out a horrified shriek and spun the wheel as the vehicle lifted up onto two wheels, threatening to tip…

…before crashing back down onto the tarmac, tires squealing, rocketing forward.

“Don’t look back,” Conny screamed, swerving as Herb tried to haul himself upright, dumping him back onto Burnley’s lap once more. He heard the car door shut behind him. Mancini had made it.

The engine howled as Conny kept the accelerator pressed to the floor, the heavy vehicle picking up speed slowly…slowly.

The rear window imploded, and suddenly Herb’s face was covered in blood. He blinked it away, glancing up in shock. Burnley was still sitting in the back seat, but her head was gone, torn away by the vampire racing along right behind the car.

Herb ducked down, waiting to feel the talons rending his own flesh.

Waiting.

“We’re clear,” Conny yelled, “they’re falling behind.”

The car speared through streets lined with bodies, past burning buildings, swerving wildly.

“Take it easy!” Herb yelled, “they won’t catch us now.”

“No time!” Conny roared back. “They’re bombing the city.”

She continued to increase speed, until the SUV was comfortably topping a hundred miles per hour. Outside the windows, the narrow London streets rocketed by in a terrifying blur.

“When?” Herb gasped.

Conny didn’t answer. There was no need. Somewhere far above, the night air was split by manmade thunder as aircraft speared across the sky, and a shattering explosion boomed on the north bank of the Thames.

And suddenly, the whole world was fire.

43

I believe you can get through it. You know I do.

Dan smiled, reaching out for his beautiful wife, but his fingers closed only on a memory.

His eyes flared open, and he found that he was sitting on an aircraft, with his hands tied in front of him. Awakening in yet another unfamiliar place. It was becoming a habit.

He looked to his left.

Across the aisle, he saw the face he expected to see, split by a broad grin.

Dan smiled wearily.

“Hi, Herb. Why do my legs hurt?”

Herb flushed.

“You…uh…sorta fell twenty storeys.”

Dan just laughed.

“And my hands?”

He lifted his hands, tied together with plastic cord. The bonds weren’t tight or uncomfortable.

“Mancini,” Herb explained. “He thinks Jennifer Craven might be more amenable to…er…not killing us if it looks like we’re his prisoners.”

Herb lifted his own wrists. Identically tied.

Dan nodded.

“Where are we?”

“We took off a few minutes ago.”

“The others?”

“Conny, Remy and Logan are a few rows ahead. Mancini tried to put a leash on Remy.” Herb chuckled. “It’s a shame you missed that.”

“What else did I miss?”

“Take a look out the window.”

Dan turned his head to the right, peering through the thick glass. Far below, the land was a dark ocean surrounding an island of fire.

He turned back to Herb, alarmed.

“The military dropped napalm on the city,” Herb explained. “Last resort.”

“But…I thought you said vampires don’t burn.”

“They don’t. All they’ve done is hand London over to the vampires. Probably killing millions in the process.”

“Doing the vampires’ job for them,” Dan said absently.

Herb nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s just how they like it.”

He settled back into his seat with a sigh, closing his eyes. After a moment, he was snoring softly.

Dan stared out of the window for a long time, his face expressionless.

Watching the world burn.

Epilogue

The Gulfstream touched down on a wide, flat strip of dirt in the middle of nowhere, and when Herb stepped out of the plane, he walked into a wall of heat that almost knocked him backwards, making him feel suddenly dizzy. He blinked at the blinding sun washing over him. It was morning in America.

Another morning, he thought. He hadn’t been sure he would ever see another dawn; certainly, he hadn’t expected to see the sun rising over the United States.

In the distance, he saw a large group of people waiting, watching the passengers disembark. Standing at the front of the group, he noticed an attractive blonde woman, dressed like a high-powered business executive. Her features were statuesque, but the beauty the woman’s face projected was cold; undone by her hard expression.

She made her way toward the dirt runway, apparently in no rush.

“Well, here goes,” Herb muttered, nudging Dan with his elbow. “This was your call, Dan. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Dan barked a bitter laugh.

“You wanted to fight the vampires, right? Well, that wasn’t going so well in Britain. We’ll see how it goes over here, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Herb replied. “Except that vampires aren’t rising over here.”

Dan just shrugged.

“More likely,” Herb continued, “that woman is going to put you in some laboratory and test you until she understands who…or what you are.”

Dan set his mouth in a firm line, and said nothing.

Conny, Logan and Remy were the last to disembark the plane, and the dog charged around the dusty ground, barking excitedly, sniffing at every unfamiliar stone. Even Logan’s perma-scowl had been replaced by an intrigued expression.

“So, this is safety,” Conny said quietly, catching Herb’s attention, “though they don’t exactly look friendly.”

She nodded at the group of people approaching the runway. There looked to be more than twenty in total, and several of those marching behind the blonde woman were clearly carrying powerful firearms.

“Yeah, I’m not exactly expecting a warm welcome myself,” Herb replied. Now that she was closer, he could see a cold, calculating look in Jennifer Craven’s eyes and he wished, not for the first time, that Dan hadn’t insisted that he give Mancini his weapon back.

Mancini marched past Herb, heading to the front of the group, waving a greeting at Craven. She didn’t acknowledge the gesture.

“The rest of the team?” Craven asked evenly, when she finally came to a stop, just a few yards from the plane.

“It’s just me,” Mancini said grimly.

“Hmm. Well, at least you brought back what I sent you for. And not just that. Who are all these people?”

Mancini gestured around the group.

“Herbert Rennick,” he said, and Craven’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “This is Cornelia Stokes, her son Logan, and her dog.”

Craven nodded, but her disinterest was obvious.

“Which must make you Dan Bellamy,” she said, turning to the only person that Mancini hadn’t introduced. “The Hermetic.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Dan said quietly, and Craven laughed. A harsh, bitter sound.

“Nor, exactly, do I,” she said with a chilling smile, “but I will, soon enough.”

She returned her gaze to Mancini.

“You were only supposed to bring the Hermetic, Mr Mancini. I’m not sure what use you think I have for the rest of them, though I suppose the boy could be trained as an initiate. He is the right age.”

“The boy’s name is Logan,” Conny said hotly, “and if you want to train him, you’re going to have to go through me to do it.”

She fixed Craven with a penetrating gaze.

The American woman laughed, nodding pointedly at Conny’s bound wrists.

“I have two dozen armed men behind me, sweetheart. And fifteen hundred more back at the ranch, all of them devout servants of the Order. You? Well, you have a dog. Trust me: your threats are worse than useless here.”

Conny stared at her mutinously, but made no effort to respond.

“Fifteen hundred,” Dan said absently, and all eyes turned to him. “Sounds like an army.”

“Yes, Mr Bellamy,” Craven said. “An army is exactly what it is. Unlike the rest of the Order, I was able to recognise that a full-scale vampire rising was inevitable and that we needed to prepare. The world is too small now, you see. Too difficult to keep a secret these days. At least it happened in another country, and we were able to get you out.”

Dan nodded.

“I’ve been building my army for more than fifteen years,” Craven continued with a hint of pride. “And the ranch is damn-near impregnable. If it should come under threat, we have a place in the mountains, buried in a million tons of solid rock. No way for anybody—or anything—to get in.”

“A good job,” Dan said. “The vampires will be rising at nightfall.”

Craven blinked.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“No,” Dan replied evenly. “I don’t suppose you do. I’m only just starting to understand, myself. But as soon as I do…what I can do, they’ll know I’m here. They’ll be coming.”

Craven just stared at him, perplexed.

“What you…can do?”

“Hey, Mancini,” Dan said.

The big man turned to look at him, meeting his gaze.

His eyes widening.

Jaw slackening.

Arms moving of their own accord.

Mancini hoisted the MP5, and unloaded the entire magazine into Jennifer Craven’s face.

Dan watched without emotion as the top half of the woman’s body became a fine red mist, painting the desert red across several yards. When her ruined body collapsed onto the dusty ground, Mancini kept the gun aimed at her, his finger still curled around the trigger.

Stunned silence fell across the group of people gathered around the plane. The troops who had served as Craven’s personal escort gaped in astonishment at Mancini. Apparently, without their leader, they were as terrified and rudderless as Herb’s own people had been.

“I’m nobody’s science experiment,” Dan said absently, staring down at Craven’s body. “Nobody’s fucking prize. And I’m done with running and hiding. Done with being afraid.”

Herb stared at him, aghast.

“You planned to do this,” he said weakly. “You wanted him to have the gun—”

“The river knows I’m here, now,” Dan interrupted. “You wanted to fight them, Herb? Now you have your army. After all, these people do serve the Order. And now, that means you.”

Herb shook his head.

“I’m no leader, Dan. I’ve demonstrated that plenty. And I’m not like you; I can’t fight the vampires. What do you expect me to do?”

Dan glanced at the sun. It was still rising into the morning sky, but it would not be long before it began its steady descent to the western horizon. Sand trickling through an hourglass. A countdown to darkness and destruction.

To sundown.

He returned his gaze to Herb, who was staring at him, still waiting for an answer. Dan gave him the only one he had.

“Kill them all.”

Prologue

Northwest Wyoming, USA, 1992

The mouth of the cave was unassuming, little more than a stifled yawn in the earth, and, for a while, the space beyond it appeared equally underwhelming. Only when they stumbled across the fissure did Steve Kendrick begin to suspect that the journey to Yellowstone could turn out to be something truly special.

The cave system was new; undiscovered country. The mouth had been revealed by a flash flood the previous year, and the Wyoming rancher who owned the land had done no more than point a flashlight inside before fencing it off to protect his cattle. One of Steve’s old university buddies had worked the rancher’s fields through the summer, and had casually mentioned the discovery of the new cave system over some reunion beers. Nobody had been inside, he’d said, and he’d had Steve’s full attention immediately. There were a lot of good spots for spelunking around Yellowstone: taking a week off work and getting away from the hustle of New York for a camping trip was a good idea, even if this new cave turned out to be a dud.

And at first, dud was exactly how the newly-revealed cave had appeared. It was deep, but for a while—before the fissure appeared—it was just that one cavern. Large, sure, and impressive for anyone who hadn't spent several years burrowing into the ground across America at every opportunity, but it was nothing for someone as experienced as Steve to write home about.

Before the fissure appeared.

If Steve had known what the fissure would lead to, and just how unique the system truly was, he would have dropped his equipment on the spot and fled. He would have found the rancher on whose land he had trespassed and begged him to seal the cave entrance up with something far sturdier than two-by-fours and chicken wire. He would have got himself as far away from Wyoming as possible, and he would never have returned.

But he didn’t know.

“Steve, you cool, bro?” Dusty’s voice floated down the shaft. He was about thirty yards above, rappelling down slowly on his own line. Steve craned his neck. He could just about make out Dusty’s silhouette, framed against the swivelling light from his headlamp.

“Frosty, you?”

“Ice, ice, baby.”

Steve snorted a laugh, and returned his focus to his own drop, easing up the tension on his descender and sliding down another few feet smoothly.

His little brother could be a primo dork, but he had always shared Steve’s appetite for adventure. Dusty generally preferred his thrills to be more immediate: bungees; parachutes, fast-moving vehicles. Short, sharp shocks were his thing, but when Steve had suggested mapping a cave system that was apparently uncharted, Dusty’s response had been typical. Where do I sign, bro?

Remembering Dusty’s unchecked excitement, Steve smiled into the darkness beyond his headlamp’s cone of light. The two brothers hadn’t found much time to spend together since Dusty took a job in San Diego, and the trip to Yellowstone would have been fun no matter what they found, but discovering the fissure made it potentially great. To think, they had nearly missed it, nestling in the shadows, almost entirely obscured by a rocky outcrop. Hidden, almost as if the land didn’t want it to be found.

The fissure turned out to be the entrance to a narrow corridor which had led them west for a little over fifty yards and which was tight enough that even Steve, who was rope-thin, had to suck in his gut a couple of times. Just when he thought they might have to turn back, the fissure had suddenly opened, spitting the brothers out into a low, wide chamber.

And in the centre of that chamber, Steve saw the hole.

The true entrance.

As his light had first revealed it, the sight of the hole had made Steve’s knees weaken. This wasn't some shallow pit; it was a fucking abyss. When he leaned over and dropped a small rock into it, he counted to five before he heard the sharp rap of it hitting the bottom. Three hundred feet, at least.

They began to descend.

One shaft led to another.

This time, when Steve dropped a rock, he counted to seven. The farther they went, the bigger the network of caverns seemed to get. Steve and Dusty hadn't stumbled onto just any old cave system: this was the mother lode.

About halfway down the second shaft, it started to dawn on Steve that they didn't have the equipment or the supplies for an extended dive like this one. They would need to go back up to ground level before long; stock up and return to map the entire system before some other bastards beat them to it. The place would be named for them, and it was gigantic: they had already been travelling down into the earth for almost four hours all told, and it still felt like they had barely scratched the surface. One of the most impressive systems in Yellowstone, and its discovery belonged to the Kendrick brothers. Lewis and Clark, eat your damn hearts out.

“How much farther, you figure?” Dusty’s voice floated down.

Steve locked his descender and dropped his chin, pointing the light from his headlamp downward. They were in the heart of the abyss now, dropping straight down. Steve had reluctantly passed by several openings that he was certain led out into other, branching caverns, maybe even other shafts. There would be time to explore those later. Right now, he wanted to see how deep their current course would take them.

“I think I see the bottom!”

“Good, this harness is starting to fuse to my nutsack!”

Steve laughed and opened up the descender, dropping a little too fast and too far, almost cackling as adrenaline flooded through him. His boots crunched into the ground at the bottom of the shaft, the jarring impact rolling up through his body deliciously. He let out an explosive gasp. Stars danced across his vision.

Damn, he thought. I love this shit.

Rubbing his knees, he stood upright, unclipped his harness from the line, and peered around. A fresh burst of energy exploded in his gut. At the bottom, the main shaft gave birth to a cavern that looked big enough to house a goddamn 747. When he swept his light around it, the darkness ate the beam hungrily.

He couldn’t see the wall in any direction.

Jesus, this place is huge.

“You gotta see this, Dust! Holy shit, man. This place is gonna make us famous!”

Somewhere above Steve, Dusty whooped.

Smiling, Steve pulled out a flask from a holster on his hip and tilted it to his lips, chugging back a long swallow of warm water, grimacing as the flask ran dry. Down in the shadows it was getting hot; oppressively so. The air down here hadn't moved much in years. Decades. The thought both thrilled and disappointed him: they hadn’t brought enough water with them, not nearly. Steve had a couple more bottles of water in his backpack, but he’d need that just to get back up to the surface. They’d have to turn back pretty soon.

He sat heavily, taking the weight off his aching legs, and waited for Dusty to complete his descent.

Just as Steve had, Dusty dropped from a little too high, but landed far more gracefully, spreading his arms wide and clicking his heels together like some preening Olympic gymnast.

“Five-point-seven for the landing,” Steve said with a laugh.

Dusty pouted.

“Harsh, bro.”

“You lost points for having that goofy look on your face.”

Dusty opened his mouth to protest, but Steve raised a hand to silence him.

“Judge’s decision is final.”

Dusty guffawed sarcastically, and twisted his neck left and right, sweeping the cavern with his own light. He let out a long, low whistle. “Whoa. You believe the size of this place?”

Steve held up his flask, tilting it up and watching a single drop of water spill out.

“Too big,” he said, shaking his head ruefully and twisting the cap back onto the flask. “We need to get more supplies. Maybe, come back with sleeping bags, spend the night here. I have a feeling this cavern isn’t the end of it. Not even close.”

Dusty looked crestfallen.

“Turn back already?”

He stuck out his bottom lip. Steve couldn’t help but laugh, but he shook his head nonetheless.

“Gotta be sensible about this, Dust. This place is plenty big enough to get lost in. If we run out of water and we can’t get back…” he shrugged. “I’d prefer that they name this place after us because we discovered it, not because we’re the idiots who died down here.”

“Kendrick’s Rest,” Dusty said. “I dunno, I kinda think it has a ring to it.”

Steve arched a dubious eyebrow.

Smiling, Dusty pulled out his own flask, took a drink, and nodded. He was an adrenaline junkie, but they had both been raised by a father who knew a thing or two about exploring. Failure to prepare is preparing to fail. Both brothers had that old cliché drilled into them from the moment they had been taken on their first hike. It had kept them safe ever since, and it would again: they had prepared for a small cave or two, not a sprawling metropolis of shadows. They could fetch what they needed, get some rest, come back tomorrow armed for an extensive trip. The cave would still be there, waiting.

Dusty opened his mouth to say something more, but cocked his head for a moment, his brow creasing.

“You hear that?”

Steve listened intently. He was still breathing heavily from the descent, his heart still thumping with excitement, but once he focused, he heard it.

Somewhere nearby.

The sound of running water.

Dusty whooped again.

“Might not have to turn back just yet, bro.”

Steve grinned. Dusty’s enthusiasm was infectious as smallpox, but he was also right. With a supply of fresh water, they could maybe eke out another hour or two in the caves. The climb back to the surface would be punishing, but as long as they had hydration, they could afford to rest their muscles a while in the dark before beginning the arduous ascent. He nodded to himself, satisfied. An underground river could be a godsend. If the system was as big as he suspected, it would be the perfect place to set up camp when they returned for a longer expedition tomorrow.

“Can you tell where it’s coming from?” he said.

Dusty took a few steps left and right, his expression puzzled.

“Hard to say. It’s close, though.”

He began to walk away, a little too quickly.

“Careful, Dust. Eyes on your feet.”

Dusty slowed a little, nodding. Perhaps he had just conjured the same mental image as Steve: walking off an unseen cliff, tumbling down an underground waterfall. Snapping bones and perforated flesh. It paid to be cautious.

“Here,” Dusty said. “This way.”

Steve hauled himself to his feet and shrugged off his backpack. Reaching inside, he pulled out a glow stick and snapped it, dropping it on the ground beneath the entrance to the shaft that would lead them back to the surface. It cast a pale green glow over a five-yard radius: nowhere near bright enough to illuminate the massive cavern, but an adequate beacon to guide them back to the shaft.

He followed in Dusty’s footsteps, and it quickly became apparent that his little brother was moving in the right direction. With each yard gained, the sound of trickling water grew a little louder. After about forty yards, he saw that Dusty had come to a stop, and was staring down toward his feet. Steve moved to stand alongside him, adding the light from his headlamp to Dusty’s.

Illuminating the river.

It was wide, and strangely slow-moving. If it hadn’t been for the giveaway sound of running water, Steve might even have thought it was a lake. Even when his headlamp connected with the surface, the water looked so dark, so thick somehow, that it appeared to be stagnant.

Yet it was moving. Oozing, almost.

A shudder ran through Steve.

Looking at the water made him feel unbalanced in a way he couldn't quite put his finger on; out of kilter somehow. Like listening to an off-key melody being played a beat too fast. Yet he couldn't take his eyes off it. The water didn't just look black in the gloom, it was black. Like oil.

Holy shit, did we find a river of oil?

The strange motion of the river was hypnotic. Mesmerising.

Dropping to his haunches, Steve reached out to touch it.

“Steve, wait. There's something wrong with it.”

“What do you mean?” Steve shook his head. Dusty was crazy. The black river was the most oddly beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“I don't know, bro. It just...feels wrong.”

Steve shot a curious glance at his little brother. Beneath the layer of grime and sweat on his face, Dusty was frowning. He looked like he was searching for a memory that had slipped just beyond his reach.

“It's...I don't know,” Dusty said again, his tone frustrated. He scanned the rocky bank of the river, as though the answer to the questions in his head might be scrawled upon it.

After a moment he, too, squatted low, and pulled something from his pocket. Steve’s headlamp caught it, reflecting a shard of light around the cavern.

A coin.

Dusty set it on its edge on a flat slab of rock, and watched as it rolled a few inches before falling on its side. He picked the coin up and repeated the procedure. Same result. He stood up quickly, falling backward a pace, looking first at the river, and then at Steve, his eyes widening.

“It's flowing uphill.”

Steve’s hand was still hovering a few inches above the water.

“Steve, don’t touch it. Seriously, bro. I’m telling you: there’s something wrong with it.”

A note of distant panic underpinned Dusty’s words, and Steve stood, staring down at the inky water. It felt oddly like it was swallowing him up, just by the act of looking at it. Like it wanted him.

He shook his head thickly, and suddenly felt like he had been drinking. Intoxicated.

The air is bad down here, he thought. The river, whatever it was made of, had to be pumping some sort of gas into the cavern, making him feel giddy. He began to walk along the bank, nodding vaguely when Dusty again said something about being careful. All of a sudden, the only thing that mattered in Steve’s mind was finding the source of the river. Trying to understand what it was.

After walking for a minute or two, he found it: the river emerged from a thin crack in the wall, but it didn’t pour from the rock like water. It seeped.

Like blood.

And when it met the ground, it began its unnatural journey across the huge cavern, moving uphill.

Steve shook his head again. He felt queasy, now, like he might vomit. Dusty was right. This was all wrong.

He opened his mouth to tell Dusty that they needed to go, but no words came out. Suddenly, he was standing right in front of the crack in the wall, without ever being aware of moving his feet. Somewhere behind him, yards and a million miles away, Dusty was saying something, but his words were lost. The trickling of the oily water had become a bewildering roar, like listening to Niagara Falls. It filled Steve’s mind, pushing everything else aside. There was only the river. The river and…

Steve’s jaw dropped.

Right in front of his nose, the crack in the wall seemed to be widening, opening like a hungry mouth. He blinked, trying to slur out a question, dimly aware that his lips couldn’t form the words; that his tongue no longer felt like his own.

There was something there, in the crack. Moving through the water toward him, growing larger by the second, getting closer.

No, Steve’s mind tried to say, that’s not possible. It was some visual trick, like an Escher painting, or one of those irritating Magic Eye posters. Like a disconnect between his eyes and his mind.

He tried to stumble backward, but his feet felt like they had been planted in concrete.

And still the thing in the black river loomed.

Closer.

Closer.

And Steve’s mind finally understood.

It wasn’t coming through the water toward him. It was the water, taking on an impossibly solid form. Becoming something right in front of his eyes; right inside his mind. A hulking mass that seemed to absorb the light from his headlamp, swallowing it up.

Becoming.

The river became a twisted abomination, a shifting, shimmering monstrosity that bleached Steve’s thoughts, dipping them in acid. Making them burn.

It reached out for him with liquid arms.

With fingers that ended in talons as long as kitchen knives and—

*

Crash!

Dusty staggered backward in surprise at the sound of glass breaking. He had been trying to tear his eyes away from the river, trying to persuade himself that it didn’t actually want him to move closer; to lean down and run his fingers through it, when the noise broke the strange stupefaction that had gripped his mind. When he looked toward the spot where his brother had been standing, his eyes found only darkness.

The broken glass had to have belonged to Steve’s headlamp. He must have fallen.

“Steve? Bro?”

No response.

Panicked, Dusty rushed along the bank of the river, sweeping the light mounted on his helmet left and right, seeing only empty space.

“Steve? Shit, bro, this ain’t fun—”

The word died in Dusty’s mouth. He had reached the wall of the cavern; the source of the strange black river.

And he had found Steve.

Bobbing along like flotsam.

Face down.

His head separated from his torso, pulled away by the dark current, making its own profane journey. For a moment, Dusty stared dumbly at the obscenity that only seconds earlier had been his big brother. No matter how hard he blinked, he couldn’t get his eyes to erase the image, couldn’t get his mind to put it together in a way that made sense.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

It was a hallucination of some sort. Had to be.

Opened them.

Steve’s head was farther from his body now, twisting slowly in the current. Dusty’s light fell briefly on his brother’s face, and his nerves howled. Steve had died with pure, unadulterated terror in his eyes.

Not a hallucination.

There’s something else in this cavern with us.

With me.

The sudden realisation that he was alone—and not alone—jolted something loose in Dusty’s head, breaking him from the stunned paralysis that the sight of his dead brother had plunged him into. He turned away from the strange, sickening river; from the hideous sight of Steve’s torn body, and started to run, stumbling over the uneven ground, the light from his headlamp swinging crazily, illuminating rocks that seemed determined to make him fall.

When inevitably he did fall, the darkness and the panic conspired to prevent him from realising he had lost his balance until it was too late: he crashed face-first into the unforgiving ground without so much as lifting an arm to protect himself.

The pain, as his nose cracked across his face—spilling a gout of warm, thick blood into his mouth—was terrible, but far worse was the breaking of that other thing; more vital, in this place, than any bone.

Dusty’s headlamp gave up with a single, apologetic crack, and the darkness around him became absolute. Delirious with fear, he scrambled for the flashlight he was certain was attached to his belt.

Couldn’t find it.

He had a spare headlamp somewhere in his backpack. Flashlights. Glow sticks. Matches.

No time.

His thoughts began to shriek.

Dusty lurched to his feet, spinning wildly.

And saw pale green salvation.

In the distance, the fast-dimming light of the glow stick Steve had dropped by the entrance was an oasis in a sea of black insanity. He focused only on the faint light, ignoring the unfamiliar ground that wanted to trip his feet, ignoring the inescapable certainty that something terrible was following him, closing in on him in the dark.

Just get to the glow stick. Get to the rope and climb.

RUN—

Ahead of him, perhaps thirty yards away, the green light suddenly winked out, plunging the cavern into an endless, empty darkness.

Dusty froze.

No. Not empty.

Heart hammering, the noise like thunder in his head.

Lost and alone in the dark.

Unsure which way to turn.

Not alone.

It’s in here with me.

Where?

A whimper rippled through the silence in the cavern; a noise that chilled Dusty’s blood all the more for the sudden realisation that it had spilled from his own lips.

He sucked in a breath, trying to find some semblance of calm, trying to fend off the wave of terror which threatened to wash away his sanity. Madness, he realised, was a lurking shadow, separated from the human mind by a paper-thin membrane. All that was required to let insanity tear through was darkness and threat. Dusty’s mind began to collapse, breaking apart as though made of matchsticks.

And he heard it laugh.

The horror in the shadows.

Click.

Click.

The sound of its footsteps. Moving toward him slowly. Casually.

No, not casually, Dusty’s mind shrieked. Playfully.

The thing in the cavern had no need to rush; it wanted to enjoy the moment. It relished drawing out the hunt.

Dusty let out a strangled yelp, and began to run blindly. No thought for direction anymore; his internal compass was broken, smashed beyond repair. No idea that he might find some means of escape. No hope, even, that he would survive. All that was left now was terror, and running. His body switched to autopilot, undeterred by the fact that he had nowhere to run to. The sudden sprint was a genetic response, pre-programmed and futile as the twitching of a corpse.

He ran.

And somewhere behind him in the eternal darkness, it followed.

Unhurried.

The sound of its movement like the ticking of some dreadful timer, counting down the seconds that Dusty had left.

Claws on rock, echoing in the void.

Click.

Click.

Click.

1

Dan Bellamy awoke screaming.

The terrible noise tore itself from his throat like a violent cough, ripping his back upright and leaving him gasping for air that seemed almost reluctant to enter his lungs. It felt like his mind had short-circuited; his thoughts caught in the middle of some system reboot. It took him a moment to realise where he was.

Darkness.

Reality.

Emerging from the recurrent nightmare was like climbing out of a pit of razor wire; returning to the real world was a journey that left terrible scars, no matter how many times he made it. For a moment, he simply let himself exist, hoping that the horror of sleep would fade quickly.

His skin was freezing as the air in the bedroom washed over it, despite the fact that it was a warm late summer night. Freezing, that is, aside from a small area of his chest, just above his heart: the part of his body where his fiancé’s hand rested lightly. It was a gesture of reassurance that was as familiar and futile as Dan’s own nightly prayers that for once—just once—he might enjoy a dreamless sleep.

He searched out Elaine’s hand in the darkness, lifting it away from his sweat-slick chest, and squeezed.

“Are you okay?”

Elaine’s voice was weak, sagging under the weight of her concern. Thanks to the blackout curtains they had installed to block the streetlight right outside the bedroom window, he couldn’t see her face, but he knew that her eyes would be wide with compassion; with her growing anxiety.

He gasped out another ragged breath and grunted acknowledgment as he collapsed back onto the bed, flinching as his skin found cotton. His pillow felt like it had spent several minutes in a freezer: it was soaked through yet again. Wincing, he flipped it over and found the underside relatively dry.

“You were talking about it again, babe,” Elaine whispered hesitantly. “The black river.”

Dan nodded into the darkness, aware that she would be unable to see the gesture, hoping that she wouldn’t press him for a response. He had dreamed of the black river every night for the past six months, ever since a mugger had driven the blade of a stubby knife into his skull. He had spent weeks comatose following the attack and, when he awoke, the nightmares began in earnest.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Dan sighed softly. What, exactly, could he say? That the river felt every bit as real as the wet pillow beneath his head? That he felt a growing certainty that he would one day wake to discover that he had left his sanity behind? That he feared that the river was reality, and Elaine was the dream?

Before he could gather a response, he heard a soft click.

Warm light spilled from the small lamp on Elaine’s side of the bed.

He squinted; waiting for his eyes to adjust, and shook his head. When he dared to look, he saw Elaine’s beautiful face marked by something that ran a lot deeper than mere concern. She looked scared. He wondered how long she had been listening to him sleep; what he might have unconsciously mumbled as the terror of the nightmare overwhelmed him.

“Talking won’t help,” he said at last.

“It might.”

He shook his head again, more firmly this time.

“I just want to forget it, El. It will get better with time, I know it will—”

“Seems like it’s getting worse with time, Dan, not better,” Elaine interrupted, her tone hardening.

Dan snapped his mouth shut. Elaine didn’t often deal in bullshit. She had a way of cutting straight to the heart of a problem, and judging by her tone, his repeated claims that things would ‘settle down’ with time weren’t going to wash anymore. He felt a surge of anxiety, deep in his chest. Ever since waking in the hospital, he had wanted to run from the mental instability he felt; to hide from the world. Hell, he hadn’t even left the apartment in the six months since the attack.

Elaine had supported him in retreating from the world because he had told her that he was getting better slowly, but the constant nightmares were making him a liar, throwing an unforgiving spotlight on his words. It was starting to feel like he might never leave the safety of their home ever again. If Elaine’s stern expression was anything to go by, she had decided that enough was enough: the time had come for her fiancé to confront his problems head-on.

That idea petrified him.

Tears stung his eyes.

“The doctors said it would take time for my medication to—” he began to say weakly, but Elaine cut him short with a look.

“Two months, babe,” she said, clearly making an effort to blunt the cutting edge of her words. “They said it could take two months for the medication to start working fully. It’s been six.”

He nodded miserably, and felt a treacherous tear spill across his cheek.

“I’m worried about you.” She rubbed the tear away gently with her thumb. “I love you.”

Dan sniffed. The sudden kindness in her tone made him feel like sobbing uncontrollably.

Elaine grabbed his shoulders, pulling him into a fierce hug.

“It’s okay, babe,” she whispered. “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere, no matter what. We’ll get through this together, okay? I promise. I know you can do it.”

Dan returned her embrace, burying his face in her hair, and nodded.

Elaine pulled back, looking directly into his eyes.

“Will you talk to someone? Please? If not me, then…”

Elaine trailed off. She didn’t need to say it aloud.

Therapy.

It wasn’t the first time Elaine had floated the idea, but her tone was firmer now. More insistent.

Dan had received some counselling immediately following the attack; six free sessions provided by the National Health Service, with an overworked therapist who had reluctantly agreed to home visits. Those sessions had been a blur, and had been focused on general methods for coping with post-traumatic stress. Dan had nodded and mumbled his way through them, and hadn’t ever mentioned that his mind felt like it was slowly coming apart. He hadn’t mentioned the black river. The last thing he had wanted to do—then or now—was to face it.

He searched for a response, but found none. The agoraphobia which had claimed him since the attack had left Elaine as his only link to the world outside, and though he knew she wouldn’t ever want to abandon him, the stress his condition was putting her through was taking its toll. She looked exhausted most of the time, she was losing weight. Dan thought she was probably suffering from depression herself, though she did her best never to let it show.

No matter how much she loved him, how much she wanted to help, hiding from the problem would cost Dan his relationship with her eventually, and then he would be truly alone. Just me and these four walls, and the black river. The prospect of it scared him more than he could put into words.

I have to, he thought. For her.

He nodded again, and his heart ached when he saw hope flickering in Elaine’s eyes.

“I will,” he said quietly, his tone faltering, his voice barely-there. “I’ll start looking for someone.”

“I already did,” Elaine said, smiling sweetly. “I’ve narrowed it down to a couple. They’re local, and highly recommended. We could call one tomorrow, make an appoint—”

Tomorrow?

Elaine’s words dissolved, buried beneath the thunderous hammering of his heart. After six stagnant months, things were suddenly moving way too fast. Anxiety stabbed into him once more, deeper this time, and he felt it: the sensation that he dreaded more than anything else. Like a crack in his mind was slowly widening, tectonic plates in his soul shifting; pulling apart. Letting something terrible come through.

Elaine’s face began to blur in front of his eyes, slowly obliterated by the growing darkness ringing Dan’s vision.

Familiar sensation.

Crawling up my neck.

Spreading like poisonous gas in the basement of my mind.

Unsafe. Get away.

Must get away.

Adrift on the terrible black river, surging and boiling; carrying me toward something awful. Something unstoppable, and—

“Dan? Dan!”

His vision swam back into focus.

Elaine’s hands were on his cheeks, her wide eyes just inches from his own. She looked terrified.

Dan exhaled violently, releasing a breath he had been unaware of holding, and a violent shudder ripped through him. He buried his face in Elaine’s hair once more, his body becoming limp and feeble.

Pathetic.

He choked out a sob.

“Shhh,” Elaine whispered, stroking his matted hair. “Shhh, it’s okay. We won’t do it tomorrow; we’ll...build up to it, okay? One step at a time. We can just check out local therapists online for now, do some more research. We’ll make an appointment when you’re ready. Okay?”

Dan just held her tightly, waiting for the panic attack to subside, trying to regulate his breathing as he attempted to clear his mind. He and Elaine stayed there for what might have been minutes or hours, until she finally peeled herself away and told him that she would fetch him a drink of water and one of his pills.

He nodded slowly as she left the bedroom, staring vacantly at the wall. After the peak, there was always the trough: the numbing of the emotions that had run wild, the yawning depression as his mind returned to an even keel on a flat ocean of despair.

He would try. He would get therapy, for Elaine’s sake. But some part of him suspected that talking would solve nothing. His mind was broken, both physically and emotionally. Therapy and medication would be no more than flimsy Band-Aids: they could never fully staunch the bleeding in his soul. They could not heal the crack in his mind, nor prevent the advance of whatever waited hungrily on the other side.

He felt his eyes welling up again, and shook dark thoughts of the future away, glancing at the doorway.

He was still alone.

Their home was small. The kitchen stood at the opposite end of the apartment to the bedroom, but it should still only take a matter of seconds for Elaine to get a glass of water and return.

Dan’s brow furrowed.

It felt like she had been gone for minutes, not seconds.

“El?”

Dan lifted his voice just a little; there was no need to yell. In the silence of the small hours, sound travelled easily through the building’s too-thin walls.

Elaine didn’t respond.

Dan waited a beat.

Two.

“El? You okay?”

Louder this time. There was no way she couldn’t hear him. Yet still the apartment remained silent. Dan felt something tugging at his heart, some deep awareness rising.

Something’s wrong.

He slipped from the bed, and stumbled to the door, peering down the dark hallway which ran the length of the apartment. Everything looked normal: the coat rack near the front door, the low bookshelf lined with Elaine’s brightly-coloured romance novels, the small table atop which sat the landline telephone they never used. Everything exactly as it should be. Normal, and yet somehow suddenly threatening.

Why isn’t she answering?

“Elaine?”

It was a full yell this time; a plaintive, pathetic holler, like an injured child screaming for its mother.

The only response was thundering silence, heavy and oppressive, like pausing for breath in the middle of a vicious argument. Like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Dan’s pulse began to quicken. Something had happened—was happening—he could feel it in his gut, could taste the truth of it between his gritted teeth. He stepped forward, darting to the entrance to the bathroom, and peered inside. Dark, and still.

Normal.

He swallowed, and it felt like shards of glass tumbling down his throat.

Farther along the corridor, a wide archway opened out into a surprisingly large living space; the apartment’s best feature, and the main reason they had opted to rent it. The living room was large enough that they had been able to cordon off a corner for use as Dan’s studio, though he hadn’t painted a stroke since the attack, and felt bleakly certain that he never would again.

He swept his eyes across the gloomy space. There was no sign of Elaine.

Which left only the kitchen.

Exactly where she had said she would be, of course.

So why isn’t she answering?

Dan padded forward, toward the entrance to the kitchen, each step feeling heavier, as though his feet were sinking into wet sand.

And with each yard he travelled, he felt worse.

Because now he could hear it.

A barely-audible whimpering.

It was the kind of sound someone made almost unwittingly, a low keening emitted through teeth that were trying to bite down on terrible pain.

No!

Sheer panic propelled him forward: not the type of panic that gripped him when the nightmares came, but something more real; tangible.

If I lose Elaine, I have nothing—

He was running by the time he reached the kitchen, but his mind was still mired in that wet sand, struggling to catch up, unable to piece together what he saw in the dark room, dimly lit by a sliver of light spilling from the cracked fridge door.

Elaine was sitting cross-legged on the tiles, with a knife rack emptied onto the floor around her. She held the largest of the knives in her right hand, using it to slowly—almost surgically—cut away her own face.

Her eyes were pointed right at him.

Right through him.

Wide, blank pools of terror.

He screamed.

The darkness behind Elaine chuckled.

And she sliced away what remained of her cheek, peeling away the dripping flesh with her left hand, pulling the knife away with her right…

…and driving the blade deep into her own throat, ripping out her life in a single, savage cut.

Dan was still screaming as he fell to his knees, distantly aware of the red eyes in the shadows behind Elaine, and a different sort of darkness began to rush up inside him, overwhelming him; threatening to submerge him forever.

Elaine collapsed sideways onto the tiled floor, the knife in her right hand still working feebly at her throat, her last drops of energy devoted only to the cutting.

The creature standing behind her made her do this, Dan thought, the words a belligerent howl in his mind. The thing with the red eyes.

Poisonous, all-consuming rage erupted inside him.

He hauled himself back to his feet, ready to throw himself bodily at the monster that had taken his fiancé, to tear it apart with his bare hands.

Still screaming.

Until he took a couple of steps forward and the scream caught in his throat.

There was no monster in the darkness.

Just Dan’s own reflection, a dark shape painted on the kitchen window.

Standing over the ruined body.

Her body.

His own eyes burning crimson.

Dan screamed again, and finally, mercifully, the river in his mind washed over his consciousness; the darkness swallowing him whole.

Spitting him back out somewhere else.

Somewhere worse.

*

Reality.

Reality wasn’t a kitchen in a small South Wimbledon apartment. Reality wasn’t Elaine, not anymore. Elaine was gone. Everything was gone. Only death and pain and the desire for vengeance remained.

Reality was Dan standing on a strip of dusty ground in Colorado, a barren area which was used as a private airfield for a woman who had wanted to cut him open and see what secrets his biology held. A woman who had just been executed on Dan’s own command, the deed itself carried out by a man that he controlled with his mind, like a feral dog on an invisible leash.

Someone was shaking his shoulders roughly, hissing his name. Calling him back from the river’s edge. Beckoning him to leave that horror; to trade it for another.

Slowly, the world shifted into focus, and his eyes dropped to the ground.

To the blood at his feet.

This, then, was the real world, every bit as terrible as the nightmare.

And, just like the nightmare—like all the nightmares—the killing wasn’t over.

Far from it.

2

An uneasy hush settled over the flat strip of dust which served as a runway for the American arm of the Order. Even the whining roar of the Gulfstream’s engine seemed to quieten momentarily.

All eyes were on Leon Mancini; on the perforated body at his feet. Jennifer Craven had been torn apart when Mancini emptied his weapon into her at point-blank range, though he was hardly responsible. It had been Mancini’s finger curled around the trigger but, well, Herbert Rennick guessed you could say the big American hadn’t been himself lately.

Herb’s were perhaps the only eyes that weren’t fixed on the steaming corpse. He stared, unblinking, at the man who was truly responsible for the murder.

No, the execution.

His second in two days, Herb thought. Something dark began to uncoil in his gut as he studied Dan Bellamy. When he had first encountered him, the guy had seemed like one of life’s victims: a quiet, shy type; scared of his own shadow, desperate only to run away from the trouble he had somehow become wrapped up in.

Now?

Now, Herb wasn’t exactly sure what Dan was. But for the first time since they had met aboard the doomed cruise ship Oceanus, Herb began to wonder if he should fear him.

“Kill them all,” he said flatly, repeating the words that Dan had spoken to him moments earlier. “Are you talking about the vampires, Dan?” he gestured at Craven’s body, spattered across several yards of Colorado dirt, “or just whoever happens to be standing in your way?”

Dan didn’t say anything; he appeared not to have heard. His eyes flickered, unfocused, levelled at the body of Jennifer Craven but apparently not really seeing it. A thin trickle of blood leaked from the young artist’s nose, coursing down toward slack lips and two-day-old stubble.

Herb had seen that look before. Twenty-four hours earlier, right after Dan’s first execution, and right before the scrawny guy had collapsed, convulsing violently and falling into a coma which had lasted for several hours. Each time since, when Dan had taken a mind, he had started to bleed from his eyes, his nose, his ears. This time was no different: it was like something was draining Dan away, right in front of Herb’s face.

It’s the exertion of controlling Mancini, Herb thought, alarmed, and he shot a fearful glance at the ex-military man.

Mancini was swaying on the spot, his own expression as vacant as Dan’s, like someone had whipped his batteries out.

Herb’s jaw clenched involuntarily.

When Dan had taken the mind of a vampire back in London, his life—all of their lives—had depended on him using the incredible ability that he had just discovered. This time, however, his actions were premeditated; planned hours earlier. It was Dan who had armed Leon Mancini, way back in England, letting the man believe that he was in charge, when in fact he was no more than a living weapon. Dan had always intended to use Mancini like this if the need arose, and he hadn’t bothered to fill Herb or anyone else in on his plan.

The dark emotions running through Herb pulsed. He had been lied to and manipulated since birth, and he’d never learned to like it. Still, there wasn’t time to confront Dan about his methods, not now.

The air tingled with threat.

Jennifer Craven hadn’t been alone on the runway: she had been at the head of a large group of armed men, all presumably residents of the ranch that she had called home. When Herb lifted his eyes to them, he saw that most of Craven’s entourage were now staring hesitantly at Mancini. They looked a little scared and a lot confused, as though they were waiting for the man who had just murdered their leader to tell them what to do next.

Mancini must be a big deal at the ranch, Herb thought, and then: if Dan kills him—or passes out—none of us are getting out of here alive.

He studied Craven’s backup: all were young—many looked barely out of their teens—and all were dressed in identical black, paramilitary-style uniforms. Clerics of the Order, Herb guessed, not so different to the ones he had grown up with at his family’s compound in England; not so different to himself, really. Like Herb, and the three brothers he had lost aboard the cruise ship, these men had been taken young and brainwashed to believe the ancient lie. Indoctrinated; weaponised just like Mancini, in their own way.

They’re just kids, Herb thought. They don’t know what to do next.

Craven hadn’t brought more experienced backup, he realised, because she probably didn’t have any. Moments before she inhaled a full clip from Mancini’s gun, Craven had boasted about the rapid expansion of her operation in Colorado; the army she was building. These, then, were her troops. Most likely, Craven’s ‘expansion’ had involved sweeping up America’s lost youth: runaways, junkies. The ones that nobody would miss. They probably hadn’t known what they were getting into when someone just like Mancini drafted them with promises of food in their bellies and a roof over their heads. It was no wonder they were hesitant.

Yet, even as Herb watched, the caution on some of the young faces seemed to be melting away: expressions hardening; confusion and doubt replaced by aggression. Most of the clerics cradled a rifle in their arms; some looked to be debating whether or not they should use them.

The situation was about to head downhill rapidly. Somebody had to do something, and as far as Herb could see, only one person could.

“Dan,” Herb hissed, grabbing the guy’s narrow shoulders and shaking him roughly. “Dan! Let Mancini go or we’re all fucked. Let him go now. Can you hear me? Dan?”

One of the clerics lifted his rifle, half-aiming it at Mancini, then at Herb, before lowering it again, his brow furrowing.

“Dan!”

Dan blinked, and his eyes rolled queasily in their sockets before finally settling on Herb. His massively dilated pupils contracted sharply.

Several yards behind him, Mancini collapsed to his knees, gasping for air, as though he had just been released from a chokehold. The abrupt movement sent another current of doubt through the clerics gathered on the runway, and several took a faltering step backward.

Mancini shook his head and spat out a cough. He stared at Jennifer Craven’s body for a moment, apparently coming to terms with what his hands had done when someone else had been at the controls. With a grunt, he staggered to his feet, releasing the empty magazine from his submachine gun and slamming in a replacement.

Herb’s lungs stopped working. He watched Mancini, his heart pounding, unsure whether the man would turn his gun on Dan; on Herb; maybe even on himself.

After several long, painful seconds had passed, Mancini raised his voice. He spoke with an audible tremor.

“She was…a traitor, and...she got what she had coming.” He lifted his chin defiantly. “Any of you have a problem with that, best speak up now.” He hoisted the gun, aiming it at the sky. “Well? Anyone?”

Mancini stared down the group of clerics for several seconds. None of them responded.

“Good,” he barked. “Now, get your asses back to your vehicles, and head back to the ranch, pronto. We’re taking these VIPs straight to the Grand Cleric. Radio fucking silence until we get there, got it?”

Herb watched the clerics disperse, heading back toward three trucks which waited in the distance, and finally allowed himself to breathe.

“Rennick,” Mancini growled, approaching on unsteady legs. “Get your people together, and follow me. Keep your mouths shut until I say otherwise. Oh, and Bellamy?”

Dan turned to face the American, just in time to catch a meaty left hook which lifted him off his feet and deposited him on the bloody ground.

Mancini leaned over him, his voice dropping to a steely whisper.

“You ever find your way into my head again, boy, you’d better fuckin’ kill me, capiche?”

Mancini stalked away without waiting for a reply, waving an angry gesture for Herb to follow. Herb grunted acknowledgment, and stooped to help Dan back to his feet.

“You okay?” he said, hooking a hand under Dan’s right arm and lifting.

Dan winced, rubbing at his jaw.

“I’ll live.”

Something about the tone of Dan’s voice—the almost rueful way he said those two words—set Herb’s teeth on edge. He forced a chuckle.

“Yeah, I guess I thought that was touch-and-go there for a minute. I didn’t expect him to take you…uh, using him like that so well.”

Dan stared thoughtfully after Mancini.

“He wanted to kill me,” he replied. “He loved Craven almost as much as he hated her. If anyone was going to kill her, I think he wanted it to be him. He certainly wanted to be…uh, present for it. I thought he might, once I let him go. Kill me, I mean. I wasn’t sure.”

Dan shook his head, as if aware that he was beginning to ramble. He looked even paler than usual. Sickly, like he was recovering from a surgical procedure.

Herb scratched at his chin. Dan had mentioned back in London that when he broke into a person’s mind, he could root around in their thoughts, flicking through their memories like the pages of an old newspaper. It was the same ability the vampires themselves were supposed to possess: the reason they knew how to talk, how to use or avoid human weapons. He thought back to his own confrontation with a vampire, back on the Oceanus, in a room lit by fire. He recalled the way the creature had spoken, using the English language as if it had discovered the words for the first time, and he shuddered. Hell, he didn’t like examining the contents of his own head. The notion of letting someone—or something—else poke around in there was just too damn unsettling.

“I wonder why he didn’t, then.”

Dan started walking, a little unsteadily, trudging after Mancini toward the waiting trucks.

“I’m not sure. Perhaps because he could see a little of what’s in my mind,” he said over his shoulder. “A little of what’s really out there.”

“And what’s that?”

Dan didn’t answer.

Herb ground his teeth in frustration and watched Dan go, flinching when he felt a light touch on his arm. For a moment, he had almost forgotten that there had been other passengers on the jet.

Conny Stokes regarded him with an expression that was part anger, part concern. Behind Conny, her teenage son, Logan, stood, his wide eyes fixed on the gruesome remains of Jennifer Craven. The kid almost looked like the sudden outbreak of violence had put him in a trance.

“Is he okay?” Herb said, nodding at Logan. Conny shot a glance at her son, and when she returned her gaze to Herb, her eyes were full of confusion.

“He’s in shock,” she said. “That’s what happens to normal people when somebody gets executed right in front of them.”

Herb grunted.

“Did you know?” Conny said in a brittle voice.

Herb shook his head. “That he was going to kill Craven? No. I had no idea.”

Conny grimaced.

“Great. What do we do now?”

Herb returned his eyes to Dan, still walking away on shaky legs without looking back, and apparently still determined to keep his thoughts to himself.

Suddenly, Herb wished more than anything that he was back on the jet, still in the air. For those few hours, as the Gulfstream crossed the Atlantic, he had felt some semblance of peace, and some faint hope that the nightmare might be over. He felt like he had let those precious minutes of safety slip through his fingers without really enjoying them. Hell, he had slept for most of the time that the jet was airborne.

What a waste.

He glanced back at the aircraft wistfully, and shook his head. The ground held nothing but trouble, no matter which side of the ocean he was on.

He scanned the countryside. Other than the dirt runway, and a ramshackle building that presumably served as a hangar for the jet, there was nothing else to be seen for miles.

“What choice do we have? We’re going to Craven’s ranch.”

Conny held up her hands, still bound at the wrists.

“As prisoners,” she said sourly.

Herb shrugged.

“At least we’re alive.”

He started to walk toward the trucks.

“Yeah,” Conny said behind him, her tone bitter. “For now.”

*

The trucks were battered old flatbeds, their original colour long ago faded to scrapyard-grey; the vehicles appeared to be held together by muttered prayers and rust.

By the time Herb reached them, the first two trucks were already pulling away, engines coughing, heaving under the weight of the clerics perched on their backs. Only a couple of the black-clad youngsters remained, flanking Mancini and watching the approach of the prisoners—and in particular Conny’s huge German Shepherd, Remy—with wary expressions and fingers curled around the triggers of their weapons.

Dan was already aboard the remaining truck, his hands still tied. A black hood had been draped over his head, tightened around his neck with a length of rope.

Herb arched an eyebrow as Mancini held out an identical hood for him to wear.

“Really?”

“Yeah, Rennick. Really.”

Mancini’s tone was low and dangerous, and Herb thought better of saying any more. Mancini had been looking for reasons to kill him back in London, and the bond that had formed between the two men as they fled for their lives was strained at best. Herb wanted to inform Mancini that worrying about anybody giving away the location of the ranch was pretty futile when you considered that it would likely be levelled by vampires at nightfall, but now, he decided, probably wasn’t the time to be a smartass.

He lowered his head, sighing audibly as the hood fell over his eyes, blocking out the light. A rope collar found its way around his throat, securing the hood in place and making him cough as it was tightened a little too roughly. That, he guessed, was Mancini’s doing. He could well imagine the grim satisfaction on the bastard’s craggy face.

Moments later, he felt a sudden tug at the plastic binding his wrists, almost pulling him off balance, and allowed himself to be led onto the truck. Once he was aboard, strong hands spun him around and shoved him down into a sitting position alongside Dan. He listened as first Conny and then Logan were given similar treatment, and grinned when he heard growling, followed by Mancini telling somebody to just tie the fucking dog to the railing.

The growling increased in intensity, until Conny spoke firmly, her voice now slightly muffled.

“Down, Remy. Relax.”

Remy grunted, managing to sound both obedient and thoroughly pissed off simultaneously. The dog had been Conny’s partner in the—now extinct—Metropolitan Police Force, and her command of him was total. Even in the presence of the vampires, when Remy had clearly been terrified beyond reason, he had remained steadfast in his loyalty. Even better, Remy seemed to possess a keen sense for the proximity of vampires, acting almost like an early warning system. Whether that was simply due to his superior canine hearing and sense of smell, or something unique to Remy alone, Herb had no idea. He hoped he would never have to find out.

After a few moments of silence, Herb heard the tailgate slam shut and the truck rattled into life. Somewhere near his feet, Remy began to growl once more, almost as loud as the engine.

“Shhh, Rem, it’s okay.”

This time Conny spoke in a smooth, reassuring tone.

But it’s not, Herb thought, as Remy fell silent and the truck began to move away from the runway, transporting them all to the very place the vampires would be headed come sundown.

It’s not okay at all.

3

In the impenetrable darkness beneath the hood, disconnected from the world around him, Dan’s mind floated, taken by the current.

It felt like the black river was everywhere now, tumbling through and beneath his every thought. What had once been intermittent torture was now a constant. No longer a dark sort of punctuation that the words of his life revolved around; it ran right through him like a vein.

The river had changed. He had changed it somehow, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible had awoken. Something that he was convinced was not vampire, and definitely not human. It was the entity that he had sensed for years, each time he had suffered a panic attack; the presence which had haunted his nightmares. The horror in the shadows.

It happened in London, he thought. At the hospital.

In those brief moments, on the roof of London Bridge Hospital, when his mind became one with the shrieking insanity lurking in the head of the vampire, Dan thought he had glimpsed something like structure in the swirling madness. During those fleeting, terrifying seconds when he had been the vampire, he had known that the monsters obeyed the whims of something greater.

Herb—perhaps the entire Order—had always believed that the vampires existed in discrete nests; distinct cells spread out across the world, each existing and acting in isolation, but Dan knew now that wasn’t exactly true. There was something that connected them all. Ruled them all.

He shuddered at the memory. For a while, after he had forced the vampire atop the hospital to rip out its own throat, he had felt echoes of the creature in his mind, lingering like smoke. It made him feel...grainy, somehow. Sullied.

Yet, the information he had gathered, even in that brief encounter, was more than the Order had apparently accrued in thousands of years of servitude. The vampires might well be stationed above humans on the food chain, but they didn’t sit at the very top. The black river did.

If the creatures possessed a language of their own, it was far beyond Dan’s comprehension, but he understood the emotion boiling in the vampire’s head when it, too, had heard the roar of the river in its mind. The monster had been meek. Subservient. Afraid.

The black river wasn’t some abstract concept; it wasn’t a hallucination that belonged to Dan alone. It wasn’t a product of the psychosis he feared so much.

It was real.

Out there somewhere.

And louder now, much louder. Closer.

Whatever the black river truly was, it was buried somewhere on this continent, and when he had taken the mind of a vampire, he had made a connection with it that he did not understand, waking it from a slumber that had spanned millennia. He thought of it as the vampire god, but knew instinctively that the creature was beyond naming, beyond human comprehension. It was a vessel of pure evil. It was fear itself.

And I’m going to kill it.

Dan felt a jolt of surprise. He had been following a path laid for him by fate or chaos or both, and hadn’t really been aware of a goal forming in his mind, but now it blazed in his thoughts like a collapsing star. When Elaine had died, and he had resigned himself to joining her, he hadn’t really thought that it was possible for him to ever want anything again. He had yearned only for oblivion.

The sudden realisation that he had a reason to live; that he was determined to live—for a while, at least—was dizzying. Overwhelming. He hadn’t ever been one of those folks who burned with ambition: even before he became Pathetic Dan, after the knife attack, he had lived his days as they came, never motivated by the distant targets that seemed to spur other people on. More than one schoolteacher had labelled him ‘passive,’ and one had even written on a report card that if Dan was any more laid back, he’d be horizontal. He had taken that as a compliment.

In some ways he had always envied the will of others: the sporting stars who burned with the need to be number one, the office drones who somehow found the desire to ensure they worked their balls off every day for little or no reward. Some people just seemed to have been born with an innate hunger that drove them forward. He envied it, yet it was a trait he had never associated with himself.

Until now.

He didn’t yet know how, but he would find the black river, and he would make it pay. Despite his words to Herb back at the runway, he knew he couldn’t kill all the vampires. He had to assume their nests were spread out across the entire world. Much as he might have wanted to, he couldn’t possibly run through them all one at a time with a bloody cleaver.

But he could do to them what they had done to him. He could take the thing they loved. The thing that gave them purpose.

If destroying their leader somehow gave humanity the upper hand in the battle with the vampires, and gave Herb the chance to win the war his family had started, so much the better.

Dan’s chaotic thoughts slowly began to distil. The first step was to find the river. He hoped it would be wherever the American nest was located. Maybe someone at the ranch would have some clue where the creatures they served lived, though he doubted that.

If not, when the vampires attacked the ranch, when they came for Dan just as they had in England, he would crack one of the monsters’ minds open and see what secrets it held.

Herb had estimated that there were a little over two-dozen vampires in England. There would surely be at least that many in America, and if they came for Dan en masse, as they had back at the Shard building in London, he might get a chance to kill several—maybe even all—before heading to wherever their ruler was located.

Many of the clerics at the ranch would die, but the black river was the only thing that mattered.

Purpose.

Vengeance.

Once he had revenge, once he had satisfied the dark need burning in his gut, then he could die. He would welcome it. Maybe, he could even find something like peace when oblivion came for him at last.

“Mancini, are you there?” Herb’s muffled voice dragged Dan back from the bleak chasm opening up in his mind. The truck had been on the move for, he guessed, no more than a couple of minutes. Unless he was sleeping, that was about as long as Herb could generally manage without speaking.

After a moment’s pause, Dan heard a cough.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Good. I was starting to think we weren’t friends anymo—”

“Can it, Rennick. You got something to say, say it. Or quit flapping your jaw.”

“You want to fill us in here? Why the hoods?”

“You should be grateful. The longer I spend looking at your face, the more I feel like punching it.”

“That’s funny. You’re funny, Mancini. Picked the wrong line of work.”

“Jesus Christ,” Conny’s voice cut in. Her tone was pitched somewhere between frustration and despair, presumably at having to listen to the two men continue to bicker, as they had from the first moment they had met.

Dan smiled beneath his hood. In some ways, Conny reminded him a little of his mother: no nonsense; straight-talking and occasionally fearsome.

The smile faded rapidly. The last time he had seen his mother, it had been at his wedding. She had stood next to his dad, waving them off as the wedding car pulled away, taking Dan and Elaine to the hotel where they would spend the night before starting their honeymoon. His mum had had tears in her eyes and a proud, happy smile.

He wondered bleakly if she was already dead, and felt oily darkness welling inside him, threatening to take over. He pushed it back down. It was better not to think about it; not now. There was nothing he could do now to help his mother—or anybody else in England—and dwelling on the possible loss of his parents on top of the loss of Elaine could tear him apart.

He tuned back in to the conversation evolving around him on the truck. In the pitch-black, the disembodied voices sounded like actors playing roles in some bizarre radio production.

Conny was still talking.

“Maybe we could just cut the macho bullshit and try to all get on the same page here? I was trying to get Logan to safety, and I have to say, Mancini, I’m feeling pretty bloody far from safe right now. So are you going to tell us what’s going on? Or am I more likely to get some sense out of Remy?”

Remy huffed indignantly, and Dan almost laughed aloud.

Mancini heaved a dramatic sigh. “The hoods are for show. This is all for show, all right? For the clerics. Not many people at the ranch knew about my mission, and even less about my objective, but you can be damn sure they are expecting me to bring back captives, and so that’s what I’m giving them. Anything else, and they start asking questions I don’t have the answers to, understand?”

A rueful laugh. Herb. “Shit, Mancini, we haven’t got time for games. Didn’t you hear what Dan said back there? The vampires will be here by sundown.”

“You ain’t gonna make it that far unless you play along, Rennick. No matter how much she might have deserved it, killing Craven was a bad move. This place was on a knife edge already, and she was what kept it from tipping. The only reason you’re alive now is that they think I killed her, and that confuses them. These religious freaks can’t make decisions for themselves, they gotta be told what to do next. So they’re taking us in—to someone who they think can do just that.”

“And who is that?”

“That’s the problem. The Order is all about bloodlines, right? But Craven didn’t have an heir. Which leaves us with the Grand Cleric.”

“Grand Cleric,” Herb repeated. He sounded like he was rolling the words around in his mouth, trying to figure out how they tasted. “We didn’t have one of those back home.”

“No kidding. I saw your little operation. Or what was left of it. Figure you had, what, a hundred people at your compound, tops?”

“Give or take, yeah. So?”

“So, what Craven said back at the runway wasn’t just some empty boast. She was growing this place aggressively. Close to fifteen hundred folks at the ranch, now, and most of that number arrived in the last few years. She put in place a structure to keep ‘em all in line. She spent a lot of time studying successful cults, and decided she needed a daddy-figure to head it all up. Be the face of her little fake religion.”

“The Grand Cleric,” Conny said.

“Bingo.”

“So?” Conny sounded confused. “This Grand Cleric will be in charge. What’s the problem?”

“Problem is that the guy is a puppet. A figurehead, I guess. Just for show, like the hoods. Craven pulled his strings and he danced. He can’t actually run the place. The guy’s a certified coward: he’d take a fall in a round of shadow boxing. You assholes go in there running your mouths, telling him actual vampires are coming to his door at sunset, and he’ll have everyone drinking kool-aid for lunch.”

Dan frowned beneath his hood, but said nothing.

“And what about you, Mancini?” Conny said. “They seemed to listen to you back there. If this Grand Cleric isn’t up to the job, why don’t you just take over?”

Mancini let out a caustic laugh. “I’m not much of a people person.”

“No shit.”

“Fuck you, Rennick.”

“Just saying.”

“Yeah, you’re always just saying something. Ever thought about just not saying something?”

A pause.

“I just thought about it. I don’t think it’s the way to go.”

Mancini sighed heavily, and Dan thought he heard a stifled snigger. He couldn’t tell exactly who it came from, but if he had to guess, he would have opted for Logan. Conny’s boy was quiet, surly even, but he seemed to appreciate Herb’s brand of sarcasm.

For a few moments, silence fell on the back of the truck.

Dan listened to the roaring wind, the growling engine, his thoughts racing.

“I was just the head of security,” Mancini said at last. “I didn’t have much to do with all the mumbo-jumbo Craven was peddling, and that was just how I liked it. I don’t have no pull with clerics. Even if I had all of my guys, we couldn’t control the numbers at the ranch, not if things turned ugly. And, in case you hadn’t noticed, most of my guys aren’t around anymore.”

Mancini didn’t need to expand on that point. Dan figured that everyone on the truck knew exactly where the rest of Mancini’s ‘guys’ were. Back in London. In pieces.

“I can’t run the place. And if you’re thinking Rennick can do it just because his daddy was a part of the Order, think again. Like I said, this place was expanding fast, which means a lot of new initiates, and they don’t even know about the vampires. Nobody gets to hear the truth until they’ve been here at least a year, maybe two. Until they prove their loyalty and ascend to full cleric status. Rennick’s surname don’t give him the means to take over a situation like this. Plus, he’s an asshole.”

Herb snorted a laugh. He sounded genuinely amused. “The truth,” he said. “Craven’s version of it, you mean.”

“Whatever, Rennick. I didn’t give a shit about it before, and I don’t now. I stayed at the ranch because the money was good.”

“You’re a mercenary,” Conny said. Her tone suggested she disapproved.

“A soldier,” Mancini corrected acidly. “The ones who work for free are called extremists.”

The truck hit a rough patch of road, and for several moments the conversation ceased. Dan supposed that everybody other than Mancini was engaged, as he was, in trying to maintain their balance while their hands were tied in front of them.

“The point is,” Mancini said abruptly, “that not everyone at the ranch knows. It’s not like this is some obedient little army of drones that you can just walk in and take over. Not unless Bellamy can mindfuck ‘em all at once?”

Dan didn’t respond.

“Yeah, thought not.”

For several seconds, nobody spoke. Dan thought he knew what was unravelling in all their minds. At Mancini’s mention of his ability, questions were forming. What, exactly, was it? What is Dan Bellamy really capable of?

He didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want them thinking about it.

“It sounds like this Grand Cleric is our best bet, then,” Dan said, joining the conversation at last.

“I already told you, he’s just—”

“Craven’s puppet,” Dan finished. “I heard. And now, he can be ours.”

“What, you gonna spend the whole day in his head, Bellamy? Because I gotta say, ten seconds in mine and you looked like you’d just had a bad round of chemo.”

“That won’t be necessary. If he is as weak as you say, intimidation will work just fine. Fists have been convincing people to fall in line for thousands of years.”

Mancini chuckled.

“I hate to break it to you, but your little David Blaine routine aside, you ain’t exactly the intimidating type. And your buddy here is irritating, not frightening. Conny scares me a whole lot more than either of you two jerks.”

“No, I’m not intimidating. But you are.”

“And what makes you think I’m gonna do your dirty work for you? Think you’re gonna get in my head again? Go ahead, try it. I fucking double-dare you.”

Dan smiled thinly.

“I couldn’t even if I wanted to, Mancini. Not with this hood on, anyway. I don’t know how...it works, exactly, but I do know I need my eyes to do it. Same for the vampires, I suppose. That’s why they can’t just take the minds of people they can’t see; they need to look you in the eyes to break your mind. But you’re right: I can’t spend all day controlling anyone. Each time I...do it, I feel like I lose a little piece of myself, like a little less of me comes back…” he trailed off. He was rambling, and heading for territory he didn’t want to enter. “It doesn’t matter: you’ll help anyway.”

“Because I like you assholes so much?” Mancini sneered.

“You’ll help because you know it is the right thing to do. Not morally. I think we both know you don’t possess much in the way of morals. Tactically. You’re a military man, and you know it’s the right thing to do if you want to live through this. Maybe the only way you survive. The vampires are going to rise, and I don’t see why it will be any different here to how it was in London. They’ll come for me. If we’re lucky, all of them. Everyone at the ranch is going to have to fight. It will be in everybody’s best interests to pull together. They need someone to give them orders. You said so yourself.”

“If we’re lucky?” Mancini sounded incredulous.

“Yeah,” Dan replied. “This might be our only chance to predict where they will be before they turn up, and we have a few hours of sunlight to prepare. If we miss this opportunity, if they move on to attacking other parts of the country, you might find it’s too late to fight at all.”

Mancini didn’t respond. Dan figured he was probably weighing up the argument and coming to the conclusion that, as much as he disliked it, he was right.

“So, what’s the deal with this ranch of yours?” Dan continued. “Can it be defended?”

Mancini paused a moment more before replying.

“Similar deal to what Rennick’s compound looked like,” he said at last. His tone was filled with heavy resignation. “Steel shutters, UV lights. Cameras, motion sensors. Plenty of weapons. But it’s a lot bigger. And sections of it are walled off, separating new initiates from ascended clerics. There’s a high wall running around the entire perimeter—”

“To keep vampires out?” Dan interrupted. “That won’t be worth a damn.”

“Naw, to keep initiates in,” Mancini said. It sounded like he was grinning now. “And to keep... others out. We’ve had people trying to document what happens at the ranch. And the government is interested, of course, but they have kept their distance so far. It’s not like they can just send the cops in. Not without starting a small war. But they’ve been trying to put the ranch under surveillance for years. Hasn’t got them anywhere.”

He sounded proud. That, Dan guessed, had been one of Mancini’s primary roles at the ranch. He was head of security, after all. It was probably his main duty to ensure prying—human—eyes stayed out. No wonder he had seemed so unequipped to deal with vampires. Judging by the way Mancini had acted since meeting Dan, he hadn’t even believed the creatures existed until he came face-to-face with one.

“What about explosives?” Herb said.

“Sure, Rennick, we got plenty of stuff that goes bang. Why?”

Herb paused a beat, apparently letting his train of thought run on.

“We can rig the ranch. Lead them into a trap. We have the right bait, after all.”

“Thanks, Herb.” Dan said, smiling into the hood.

“You’re welcome. It might work, though,” Herb continued. He seemed to be warming to the idea. “Fire won’t kill them, but when I was aboard the ship, I saw an explosion hit one. The blast ripped its arm clean off. It was bleeding.”

Dan considered Herb’s words. It was a desperate plan, but it was a plan. No matter how many people there were at the ranch, fighting the vampires with small arms would end only one way, even if everybody was prepared. But if he could somehow draw them all toward him and blow them up...

We’ll kill some, he thought. Maybe a lot. But not the river. The river might be the only way to affect them all at once. And if we do blow them all up, I might never find it.

Dan pondered that for a while. How much did the vampires rely on the control of the river? If this was some Hollywood movie, killing their leader might win the war at a single stroke before it began. Maybe, without their god, all the vampires would just keel over and die.

Yeah, right, Dan thought. If this was a Hollywood movie. But it’s not.

For what felt like a long time, nobody spoke. The truck had been travelling for around twenty minutes, Dan estimated. They surely weren’t far from their destination, now.

It was Conny who finally broke the pensive silence.

“You’re all forgetting something. The first attack in London happened around midday. Some kid at a supermarket. We all thought it was terrorism, or just some lunatic running amok with a knife. By mid-afternoon, people were dying on the underground. By the time the sun went down, the entire police force was already dead.”

“Yeah,” Mancini said, “What’s your point?”

“The point is that they didn’t just wait for nightfall. They don’t just come out at night. You should all understand that by now. They might prefer the darkness for whatever reason, but they’re not afraid of the light. It doesn’t stop them operating. You can make plans all you want, hoping they wait until sundown to strike, but if the vampires are rising in America, it’s probably already happening. Right now.”

4

In Clinton, Illinois, a thousand miles east of the ranch in Colorado and around a hundred and sixty miles south of Chicago, Ross Carney was about five paces away from his Toyota when he realised he’d left his ID card on the passenger seat.

Ross muttered a curse—he was already late for work, a fact that his supervisor, Fred Darnell would not let pass without comment—and turned back, disengaging the central locking.

Click.

Click, click.

He was just reaching for the door handle when the strange noise broke the silence and stopped him in his tracks. He cast a curious glance over his shoulder. He was alone, of course, yet just for a moment there he’d had the distinct impression—reinforced by that odd, distant clicking sound—of a presence somewhere behind him.

He scanned the large, empty parking lot. The shadows gave up nothing. No hint of company. After a moment he returned his attention to his car, pulling the door open. There was no sign of his ID card on the seat.

Dammit.

He’d definitely had the card in his hands just minutes earlier. He’d flashed it at the armed guards on the front gate, receiving typically blank stares by way of response. If he had somehow lost his security pass, arriving for work a few minutes late would be the least of his problems. Fred Darnell would take great delight in issuing a formal warning, and Ross would have to figure some way to swallow it without giving in to the urge to wrap his hands around the bastard’s jowly neck and squeeze.

Cursing again, he leaned into the car, patting at the shadows around and below the seat and letting out a relieved grunt when his fingers finally closed on plastic.

Click.

Ross frowned.

There it was again. Still distant, but perhaps a little closer than before? Someone moving toward him?

Straightening, he turned, putting his back to his vehicle and slipping his ID into his pants pocket. He peered out across the lot intently.

“Hello?”

No response.

Which was exactly the response that Ross had expected. After all, his was one of only a handful of cars in the vast underground lot: the plant was on downtime for routine maintenance, and there was only a skeleton staff on duty. For Ross, though, downtime didn’t really exist: he was part of the cleaning crew, and in any nuclear power plant, the cleaning process never truly stopped. The giant structures were built with reinforced concrete that could withstand a direct impact from a passenger jet, but inside, in the building’s soft, vulnerable gut, even a grain of dirt getting into the generators could provoke a total shutdown. The cleaning crew painted walls and scrubbed at floors continuously, on a loop, fighting an eternal battle against a microscopic foe.

He glanced around the lot once more. Empty.

Ross shook his head and slammed the Toyota’s passenger door shut, far harder than was necessary. The car rocked in protest.

Beep.

Engaging the central locking, he started the short walk toward the distant stairwell that would take him from the third subterranean parking lot up to the surface, his mind dreaming up pithy retorts to Fred Darnell’s inevitable better things to do today, Carney?

Damn, he hated that bastard.

Click.

Click, click.

Ross froze, and felt a sudden surge of anxiety as his mind jolted him back to his surroundings. The bizarre clicking noise definitely sounded like it was moving.

“Is someone there?”

No response, but this time the silence was unmistakably ominous. Heavy somehow, as if it hinted at some subtext that Ross was aware of, but could not decipher. He glanced back at his car, half-tempted to jump back inside it and lock the doors. To wait until some other folks showed up to keep him company.

You’re being ridiculous, Carney.

The voice in Ross’ head had a point. If someone had made it past the power plant’s formidable front-gate security with the intention of doing harm to either the company or its employees, why would they be waiting on the third basement level of the parking lot? And if there was someone out there who wished to do Ross himself harm—some unlikely assassin who specialised in hunting down life’s awkward nobodies—how could they possibly have known that he would show up to work late? Or that he would even park down here?

Click…click.

It sounded farther away this time.

Ross blew out a long, slow breath and forced his tense shoulders to relax. The noise had to be mechanical or structural. Pipes, perhaps. Air-conditioning; whatever. The sort of noise the building made routinely, but which nobody would even notice when the lot was full of cars and people. Ross smiled to himself. That had to be it. He hadn’t slept well the previous night, and tiredness was making him paranoid, that was all. Making him perceive threat where there was none.

You really are an asshole, Carney.

He snorted out a quiet laugh, and started walking.

The underground parking lot was creepy, though, he decided. He had never really noticed before just how creepy. The company had installed motion sensors to control the lights, ensuring that only those that were strictly necessary were ever in use—part of the company’s Greener Thinking initiative; a series of half-assed directives that were supposed to somehow offset the fact that it was a fucking power plant.

Right now, Greener Thinking meant that the only part of the huge space which was currently lit was that which Ross himself had driven right under on his way in. A snake of illumination led straight to his car, the lights near the entrance ramp beginning to dim even now as they sensed no further movement. The rest of the lot outside that ghostly line of light was wreathed in shadows, and if Ross stood still too long, he would find himself in pitch-black darkness in a minute or two.

There could be anyone out there. Unseen. Watching me—

His skin prickled.

Except that if there were somebody moving in the darkness, they would set off the lights.

And who the fuck would want to sit down here and watch you, anyhow? Fred Darnell? Some secret admirer?

You ain’t that pretty, Carney.

Ross grinned to himself. He was being stupid; panicking for no reason. If there were some assailant out there in the gloom, the lights would flick on the moment they moved. The darkness wasn’t his enemy, it was his ally; it existed because he was alone.

The strange clicking noise?

It was nothing.

Ross marched to the double-doors which opened into the stairwell, and threw them wide open. A head-height bulb on the wall to his right pinged on to welcome him, flooding his immediate vicinity with cold, sterile light. The stairs wound up through three flights toward the ground level, itself currently lost in thick shadows.

Ross started to climb. The lights above would flare to life as he neared them.

CLICK.

He froze with his left foot between stairs, unbalanced.

Holy shit.

The clicking noise was loud in here, and somehow purposeful. It wasn’t muffled; didn’t sound like it emanated from the walls. Not structural, not mechanical. Whatever it was, it skittered. It responded.

There’s something in here with me.

The thought erupted into Ross’ mind, singular and massive, like a voice bellowing directly into his ear, and he felt a cold bead of sweat pop on his forehead. He didn’t think to examine the fact that in his mind, the who in the shadows had become the it in the shadows.

He glanced up, through the winding steps which would take him past the next two sublevels. It was full-dark up there, but had he just seen movement? Some solid shadow moving in the gloom?

How could that be? Unless whatever is up there is clinging to the damn ceiling, the motion sensors should pick up—

The thought froze in his head.

CRASH.

Another noise. One that made all doubts collapse and the hair on Ross’ neck stand up.

Glass smashing.

He heard shards of it raining lightly down the stairwell, tinkling on the bare concrete steps; playing a dreadful melody that made his throat constrict.

Whatever was up there had just taken out the lights on one of the levels above. A distant part of Ross’ brain shrieked at him to move, to turn and flee back toward his car, but his muscles refused to cooperate.

It can move freely now—

Click, click, click, CRASH.

Another light broken.

It’s coming down. Coming straight for me—

Click, click, click.

—and I won’t even be able to see it until it’s right on top of—

Click, click,clickclickCLICKCLICK—

Ross finally lost his balance, beginning to tumble backward a fraction of a second before something large and heavy hit him like a train, knocking him back down toward the pool of light at the bottom of the stairs. He hit the concrete floor, and two things happened simultaneously: a spear of pain lanced into his lower back at the impact, and the sound of glass smashing repeated once more as the thing in the stairwell took out the remaining light, plunging the space into bottomless darkness.

Despite the searing pain, Ross knew instinctively that the darkness was worse than the fall. What it meant.

Laying on his back, trying to draw in a breath which felt like a hot knife in his throat, Ross felt rather than saw something huge looming over him; some enormous presence. When he opened his eyes at last, his curiosity briefly overcoming his fear, he saw that there was some light in the stairwell after all.

A faint crimson glow.

Illumination cast by the two red eyes which hovered directly over his own, the terrifying stare which seemed to pierce down through him, lodging itself deep into his brain like a needle. The force of the stare, drilling down into him, felt like it pulverised a vast part of his mind, smearing it across the inside of his skull like putty.

Ross opened his mouth to scream.

Almost managed it.

Whatever was left of Ross’ mind braced itself for the tearing of those terrible teeth, praying that death would come quickly.

But it wouldn’t.

Instead, Ross’ body rose, and began to robotically climb the stairwell. He was no more than a passenger as his legs carried him into the power plant, past the banks of ancient equipment that ran the place, looking like a bad set from an old Star Trek episode.

He walked right past Fred Darnell, who glanced knowingly at his wristwatch.

“Better things to do today, Carney?”

Ross wanted to say something. Anything.

Couldn’t.

Without a word, his expression not even registering the contemptuous, baffled look his supervisor shot his way, Ross’ body made its way toward the generators; toward their fragile innards. Externally, the power plant was a tank. Inside, a delicate flower. A fine balance that had to be maintained at all times.

A balance that Ross Carney’s hands would work furiously to disrupt, while somewhere inside his head, locked away behind invisible bars, his soul screamed endlessly.

5

The Craven ranch was a blemish on the barren Colorado landscape; a human stain on nature’s perfect canvas.

Set against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains, with the dense foliage of the White River National Park nestling against its northern perimeter, the ranch existed in near-total isolation, with no sign of civilization apparent for thirty miles in any direction. Only a single winding track—only the most charitable observer could label it a road—offered any indication at all that there might be something to see in this part of the country. Yet the track was little more than a scratch in the dirt, really, and only those few who knew to search for it would ever truly see it. Fewer still would even consider attempting to steer a vehicle along its treacherous length.

Where the Rennick family had been forced to carve out a hiding spot for their compound at the heart of a thick forest in the overcrowded south east of England, the Cravens had encountered no such difficulty. The vastness of America handed them obscurity on a plate.

Hundreds of years earlier, the Craven compound had begun life as a single large ranch house surrounded by smaller farm buildings, growing slowly over time until recent years, when it had swelled up like an out-of-control infection.

Roughly circular in shape, and with a high wall that ran around the entire circumference, the ranch was comprised of three main areas. The largest, the initiates’ area, was at the edge of the circle.

There, widely-spaced, single-level buildings provided a home for the new recruits, as well as training and recreation areas. The initiates’ area, which those at the ranch called the Outer Ring, was the newest part, and it was still a work-in-progress, always building. One of Jennifer Craven’s key methods for instilling loyalty was to put new faces to work on constructing their own homes and infrastructure. Making them feel invested in their new home. It made the eventual realisation that they were serving a strange new religion all the easier to take.

Beyond the Outer Ring, the road led to another wall, and to the clerics’ area. Only those who had passed the Ascension Test—murdering one of their fellow initiates in a grim re-enactment of a medieval duel—lived in that part of the ranch; all wore the tell-tale black robes that marked them out as true believers. Yet even they didn’t know the whole story, not even close. The truth—or, at least, what Craven and her forebears had believed to be the truth—was reserved only for those in the inner circle, who lived in or around the old ranch house, at the heart of the settlement.

Dan saw none of it, of course. The hood was still firmly on his head when Mancini hollered at somebody to open the gate, and the trucks rumbled inside. He listened intently, and heard the distant chorus of many voices, the background chatter of scattered crowds of people. It sounded like there were a lot of them, and overwhelmingly, the voices that he heard sounded young. Children; not nearly the hardened army of fanatics he had anticipated.

Anxiety shivered in his gut as he considered for the first time that, maybe, the newfound confidence and assurance he had discovered might have led him in the wrong direction.

The trucks continued on.

Transporting Dan and the others toward the middle of the great circle drawn in the Colorado wilderness.

Toward the centre of the bullseye.

*

Dan blinked as the hood was whipped from his head and harsh sunlight hit his eyes for the first time in an hour.

He was sitting at a huge table in what looked bizarrely like a corporate boardroom, lit by a single window at the far side of the room. Through it, he got his first glimpse of the ranch, and felt a rush of surprise.

Ranch in Colorado had conjured images in his mind straight out of old cowboy movies: he had half-expected to see rickety wooden buildings and horses, leather chaps and six-shooters, maybe even saloon-style doors. Instead, the low buildings he saw beyond the window were functional brick constructions, apparently erected with no consideration for aesthetics. Most were a single storey in height; none boasted anything in the way of decoration.

He was instantly reminded of the Rennick compound back in south eastern England. There, the main house—a huge gothic mansion—had also been orbited by similar, newer structures, presumably built to accommodate the slowly growing population.

Here, though, the effect was magnified: the rapid expansion of the place that Mancini had described had prompted Craven to create something like a fast-growing shanty town. The overall effect—completed by the series of high walls he could see in the distance, dividing the place into distinct, secure segments—gave the place the feel of a military base, or one of those giant American superprisons. The only thing missing was watchtowers.

Which would, he thought, probably come in handy right about now.

He lifted his gaze to the sky above the buildings. The sun was high now, and strong. He guessed it was already around midday. Time was slipping away, darkness approaching unnoticed.

He turned his attention to the room itself. The walls were made of old, dark panelled wood; bare aside from three large LCD televisions which sat at head-height, their screens dark. Other than the dormant TVs and the huge table, Dan saw only one other feature in the room: a single side-table with a few decanters of liquor and some upturned glasses sitting atop it.

The main table had seating for twelve, but for the moment, only four of the chairs had been taken. The British prisoners were still alone with Mancini.

The American pulled a knife from his belt and slashed away the plastic cuffs that had bound Dan’s hands together since they had landed.

Dan winced, rubbing at the sore flesh on his wrists, watching as Mancini freed the others in turn and removed their hoods. When it was done, only Remy remained shackled—leashed to one of the huge table’s sturdy legs by a length of rope. The dog looked distinctly unhappy about that, and peered up at Conny, as if silently asking for her permission to begin chewing through it.

Conny scratched Remy’s ears, and he dropped his nose, chagrined.

Mancini tossed the hoods into the centre of the table.

“Nice place, Mancini. Decor needs a little work. Splash of colour would really make the place pop, you know? Hey, is that whiskey I see?”

Mancini sighed heavily, and Dan chuckled to himself. Herb was just relentless.

“I’ll be back with the Grand Cleric in a few minutes,” Mancini said gruffly. Apparently, he had decided that the best way to deal with Herb was to flatly ignore him. Dan didn’t think that would last long. “If anyone else enters this room while I’m gone, keep your mouths shut.”

Mancini stared balefully at Herb for a moment and then, without another word, he stalked away. Moments later, Dan heard a door slam behind him and a lock engaged with a soft snick. Silence fell upon the room.

“Alone at last,” Herb said, heaving a mock-sigh. He stood, making his way to the side-table and picked up a decanter, taking a large swig directly from it.

“Rum,” he said grimly, wrinkling his nose. “Who keeps rum in a decanter?”

He held out the drink, offering it around the table. No one responded.

“What do we do now?” Conny said.

“Now,” Herb replied, shrugging and taking another hit from the decanter, “we listen, and Dan talks.”

Dan blinked in surprise as Herb turned toward him and met his eyes with a piercing stare. “You can start with the black river.”

At the mention of the river, Dan felt a jolt of the old anxiety lancing his chest. Talking about it was the one thing he had avoided. For years.

“You first mentioned it back in London,” Herb said. “It didn’t seem to me like something that had just occurred to you. It seemed important, and I’ve had a gut full of people keeping important information from me. So I want to know what it is, Dan. Right now. No more keeping us in the dark. If you know something, I...” he glanced at Conny, “we want to know it.”

Herb sat back in his chair, folding his arms, and glared at Dan expectantly.

Conny nodded, and her eyes, too, fell on Dan.

Dan’s shoulders slumped.

And he sucked in a deep breath.

*

Herb watched Dan’s reaction carefully. At the mention of the black river, his body stiffened momentarily, and his eyes lost their focus. Fear lined his face. It was, Herb thought, an instinctive response, like watching somebody snatching their hand away from a flame.

Dan’s shoulders slumped, and for a second he stared straight through Herb. He looked like he was weighing up some terrible decision, some choice where every alternative was undesirable.

Finally, he cleared his throat.

“Two years ago, I was attacked by a mugger.” Dan reached up to his thick mop of hair, pulling it back from his forehead to reveal an ugly scar that ran down his temple. Herb blinked. He had noticed the scar once before, and had been aware of how keen Dan was to hide it. It was a subject Herb had meant to bring up, before events in London pushed it from his mind.

“He stabbed me in the head,” Dan continued, letting his unruly fringe fall back into place. “I nearly died. Maybe should have died. I was in a coma for weeks. ‘Serious brain damage,’ the doctors said. “I was...lucky to be alive.”

Tears filled Dan’s eyes, and he shook his head suddenly, as though he regretted saying anything. For a moment, his eyes were lost in memories.

“I started to suffer panic attacks. Post-traumatic stress. That’s what the doctors said, and the therapist. It made sense, I suppose, and they told me that what I was going through was perfectly...normal. But each time I had a panic attack, I’d see the same thing. Visions, nightmares, whatever you want to call it. Always the same thing. A river of black water, pouring over me, sweeping me away. And every time I fell into the river, I would feel the same, like the current was dragging me toward something…awful. Death, perhaps. Insanity; I don’t know. Medication helped, a little, but I always knew it was there, bubbling away under the surface, waiting to take me away.”

Herb’s eyes widened. “You think that injury changed you. You think that’s the reason the vampires can’t affect you.”

It wasn’t a question, but it didn’t need to be. Herb saw the answer clearly. It was written plainly across Dan’s face.

Dan remained silent, and stayed that way for what felt like an eternity.

“I saw the river aboard the Oceanus, the first time one of the vampires tried to break into my mind. I saw it again in London, but it was different. When I was in the vampire’s head…” Dan’s voice thickened. He swallowed audibly. “When I was in the vampire’s head, I think it saw the river, too, not just me. I think the river was speaking to it. Not controlling it exactly, but...I don’t know.” he shrugged. “I think the river is real. I think it is…how they communicate.”

He shook his head again, slowly.

“No, that’s not it. It’s more like something that is communicating with them. With all of them.”

Herb frowned.

“I don’t understand.”

Dan snorted a humourless laugh.

“That makes two of us. It’s hard to explain.” He paused, heaving a deep sigh, as though searching for the right words. “You know how ant nests operate?”

Herb’s frown deepened.

“I saw a show about it once,” Dan said, becoming more animated. “The ants have a queen, right? Each nest has a queen. And all the ants, all the soldiers and workers and flying ants, all the different types, they all operate in perfect harmony, because they are all directed by her. They work together, but it is the queen that lays down the rules, the queen who controls the whole nest. She is connected to all the other ants, and all her little footsoldiers are like one huge organism. I think the vampires work the same way. They are like insects. The ones we see are the soldiers, but something out there is commanding them. Organising them.”

“So…each nest of vampires has a queen?”

Dan grunted.

“I think all the nests have one queen. I think the whole world is one nest. All the vampires, all over the planet, they are all in thrall to this one entity. They all swim in the black river. It is the river that directs them, that gives them purpose. The river that organises them; tells them when to wake, when to breed, when to attack.”

“A river,” Herb repeated dubiously. The tale Dan was spinning was incredible, and difficult to believe, but it was abundantly clear that Dan believed it. As far as Herb knew, there was nothing in the history of the Order that suggested the existence of a vampire ruler, but that proved nothing. Virtually everything the Order believed had already turned out to be a lie, or poor guesswork.

Could this really be true?

Dan chuckled darkly.

“I’m sure it’s not a river. That’s just what I see it as. Maybe that is how my mind makes sense of it, I don’t know. I think what I see as the river is the voice of their…leader, their queen, whatever you want to call it. Their god. When it speaks, I can hear it, just like they can.”

“And can you understand it? What it is saying?”

“No. When I see the river, the only thing I understand is that it is terrifying. Beyond my comprehension.” Dan shuddered visibly. “I don’t think the human mind is designed to understand it. But I think if we can kill it, we can affect all the vampires, maybe every single one.”

“Affect how?” Herb said.

Dan shrugged. “I honestly have no idea. I’m making leaps in the dark here.”

Herb snorted. “Yeah, that sounds familiar. Seems like my whole life has been one long leap in the dark, so why change now?”

He grinned, but the humour was forced. Dan believed what he was saying, but Dan had also just got through telling them that he had spent years in therapy. That he suffered from brain damage. He used words like post-traumatic stress and insanity.

“Let’s say this is true,” Herb said. “I guess if there is something that connects them all, it stands to reason that taking out that connection would harm them. But would it stop them? Kill them? That all sounds like movie-logic to me,” Herb’s expression was dubious, “if any of it is even correct. I mean, for all we know, this river really is just a product of your post-traumatic stress, right? No offense.”

Dan smiled wearily. “None taken.”

Silence fell around the table for several long moments.

It was Conny who finally broke it. “How can you possibly know all this, Dan?”

Dan shrugged. “A hunch.”

“Not good enough.”

Dan’s chin fell.

“Back in Herb’s mansion, I sort of...flirted with a vampire’s mind. I didn’t take control of it—I didn’t know I could back then—but I did stop it for a moment. From that point on, I started getting these visions. It was the black river again, but it had changed. This time there were hands in it, reaching out for me. It felt like there was something out there trying to find me. I think when I did fully connect with the vampire on the roof of the hospital, it saw me. I don’t know how else to explain it, but I felt the connection. I felt its intelligence turning toward me.”

Dan shuddered visibly. Clearly, it was a subject he didn’t want to talk any more about.

Conny nodded cautiously.

“When I was in the Underground system, in London, there were a group of them…in a train carriage. I was hiding, but I was this close to them. Inches away.” For a moment, Conny’s eyes fogged at the memory. “They were all…screaming together. Shrieking.”

She shook her head.

“I’m not sure how to describe it. It was like they were all talking to something, all at once. As a group. It put me in mind of religious chanting, like they were reciting a prayer or something. So maybe what you are saying is true, but I’m not sure how any of this helps us. I mean; what do we do about it? They have a leader? Fine. It would make sense that if we can take out that vampire, the others would suffer. Maybe become disorganised. Maybe they would even all drop dead. But even if that were the case, we don’t know where it is.”

“It’s not a vampire,” Dan said firmly. “I know that much. I’ve been in the mind of one of…those. I know exactly what a vampire mind feels like. This is something…” he trailed off, his eyes again taking on a vacant aspect as he searched for the right word, “bigger,” he said finally, shaking his head in frustration at his apparent inability to find the correct word. “Worse.”

Herb rubbed at his forehead.

“Do you have any idea where this river is?”

“No. Not exactly. But it’s here, in America, I’m sure of it. It’s closer now.”

“How could you know that?” Conny asked.

“Because I can feel it all the time now. Before, it was distant. Sporadic. I could tune into it only when I was terrified; when I lost control of my emotions. But now...it’s here, right now. I can feel it in my head, running in the background. Like static. I’m close to it, I’m certain of that, but beyond that…”

He trailed off, and Herb studied his expression closely.

“There’s something you’re not telling us, Dan.”

Dan looked at him sharply, and started to shake his head, but seemed to think better of it.

“I think the only way for me to find out where the black river is, is to get inside the head of another vampire. Try to hold on to the connection as long as possible. When the river looks at me, I need to be able to look back.”

There was guilt in his eyes; a sort of remorse in his tone. As he studied Dan Bellamy, Herb felt a dark revelation begin to unfurl in his mind. Dan wanted to face the vampires again. He was eager for it.

“You don’t think the people at the ranch can fight them at all, do you Dan?”

Dan shook his head.

“But you’re willing to sacrifice them all, just so you can get a shot at coming face-to-face with a vampire.”

“Better it happens here than in a city. It’s like you said all along, Herb: I’m special. Different. They will come for me, I’m sure of it. This way, hundreds die, not millions.”

Conny slammed a fist on the table.

“Fuck you, Dan. You could have stayed back at the runway, as far away from people as possible. You’re leading them here?”

Dan shrugged.

“I can only take one mind at a time, so I can’t take on more than a couple at once. I’ll need numbers to slow them down enough—”

Dan’s words dissolved in Herb’s ears.

“Numbers?” Conny repeated, aghast. “Is that what these people are to you? Cannon fodder?”

“These people brought us here in shackles, Conny,” Dan spat back. “Craven thought she could cut me open to see what makes me different, just ask Mancini about that. And what do you think she would have done with you? All of you?”

“Craven is dead,” Conny snapped. “You heard Mancini: half of the people here don’t know a thing about vampires. They’re just kids, Dan. Not soldiers. You know how these cults operate? How they aggressively expand? They sweep up homeless children, junkies, people the care system has forgotten about. Vulnerable kids who probably ended up here because it offered them a shot at having something like a home.”

Herb watched as Conny’s anger engulfed her, and turned his attention back to Dan, waiting for him to respond, but the thin man seemed to think he had said enough.

Christ, Herb thought. What a mess. He took another long swallow from the rum decanter, shuddering in pleasure as the warmth of the alcohol numbed his senses a little.

“You’re certain they will come for you?”

“Seems like I’m important to them,” Dan replied with a nod. “A threat. So, yeah, I think they’ll come for me.”

“Then we have to make this place ready, however we can,” Herb said, ignoring the feeling of Conny’s eyes burning into him. “Mancini said they have explosives. We can rig this place to blow. If we’re lucky, we take them all out. Or most of them. Let them come for Dan. Draw them in here and blow this place sky-high.”

“And what about all the kids outside, Herb?” Conny snapped, her voice laced with anger. “What about my child? What about all of us? If you two want to become martyrs because Dan had a vision, I’m not about to stop you, but I didn’t sign up for any of this. Neither did Logan. What happened to saving people? What happened to no more blood on your hands?”

“But we would be saving people!” Herb snapped. “If we can corner the vampires here and kill them, wouldn’t it be worth it? Sacrificing a thousand lives to save millio—”

The words caught in Herb’s throat.

The words of his father.

He snapped his mouth shut, and for a moment, a thunderous wave of dark memories crashed through his mind. Lies and broken promises. Threats and coercion and the sacrifice of innocents. Ritual murder on a vast scale. His jaw clenched involuntarily.

I can’t do it.

I won’t.

“She’s right,” he said, staring blankly at his reflection in the dark television screens on the wall, speaking to nobody in particular. “Craven said she had a secure place in the mountains, a place the vampires couldn’t reach. These things are burrowers, but not even they can dig through solid rock. We can’t just let everyone at this ranch die. They are innocent. Anyone who wants to stay and fight should, but the rest should get to safety before it’s too late.”

Conny nodded firmly.

“And I’ll go with them.” she glanced at Logan. “We will. I’m sorry, guys, but the only reason I kept going in London was to make sure I took Logan somewhere safe. To keep him alive. I’m not about to put him in harm’s way again, not if I can help it.”

Logan’s eyes darted to his mother. He looked angry.

“I’m already dying, Mum. Remember? Maybe I could help fight and actually do something useful with whatever is left of my life.”

“It’s not up for debate, Lo. You could live for years, yet. You could have a good life. Maybe even children of your own.”

At that, Logan’s face twisted into a sneer.

“I wouldn’t be that cruel,” he said sharply. “Or that selfish.”

Herb saw tears glittering in Conny’s eyes. He knew that Logan was suffering from Huntington’s Disease—a terminal illness that was hereditary, but far from guaranteed in a child even if a parent carried the genes that caused it—but had figured that most of Logan’s attitude stemmed from the fact he was a typically surly teenager. Yet as he watched Conny and Logan’s conversation heating up, he saw accusation in the boy’s eyes. Logan blamed his mother for his condition, for having a child when she knew the risks.

Conny took a moment to respond, perhaps biting back the angry reply that wanted to spill from her lips.

“Maybe not, Logan. But it’s not your decision. I’m your mother. My job is to keep you safe, whether you like it or not. That means that when you do eventually die, it will be peacefully. Not at the hands of some monster.”

“But—”

“No buts. We’re leaving. As soon as possible.”

“Leaving? I think you might find that you’re safer here.”

Herb flinched. The conversation had become so heated that apparently nobody had heard the lock disengaging behind them. When he turned, he saw a thin man in his mid-fifties entering the room with Mancini at his back.

The thin man wore the all-black attire of the clerics, but with an ornate insignia emblazoned on the chest, just above the heart. Herb squinted, trying to read the spidery lettering, but all he could make out was Sepultus Deos. He thought back to the excruciating Latin lessons his father had put he and his brothers through when they were young.

Something about buried gods, he thought. The order of the buried gods? So that was the name Craven gave her faux-religion.

This, then, was the Grand Cleric.

The robed man walked straight past the four of them sitting at the table, glancing only momentarily at Remy, who had curled up on the floor, and aimed a remote control at the televisions on the wall.

The screens began to hum to life slowly, and Herb fixed his gaze on Mancini. Something about the former soldier’s expression—stunned and fearful now, rather than his default grimace—made Herb’s gut churn wildly.

Something has happened, he thought, and turned his attention back to the TV screens.

All of them were tuned to a rolling news channel.

To the ashen-faced news anchor whose eyes were wide and frightened as she stuttered, “...around two thousand estimated casualties, and…” the anchor pressed a finger to her ear, shaking her head a little. Apparently she was having trouble believing whatever her producer was telling her to say next.

“We are moving away from this story to bring you more breaking news…”

6

In Maryland, around seven hundred miles west of Ross Carney’s power plant in Clinton, Secret Service Agent Ian Miller stood with his hand resting on the grip of his handgun, and contemplated the silence.

He had been guarding the door for almost six hours straight and, for most of his shift, his ears had been assaulted by the chaos in the room beyond it: the heated debates of President Berman and his senior advisors as they tried to understand the disaster that was still unfolding across the Atlantic in England.

Gradually, all talk had whittled away, leaving only the president’s voice, barking questions to which nobody seemed to have answers.

And now, there was just this withered silence.

The lack of talk was worse than all the half-baked theories that had dominated the first few hours; the quiet burrowed under Ian’s skin and made his nerves jangle.

“I guess they don’t think it’s the Muslims anymore.”

The man who had spoken was Secret Service agent Malcolm Rudd. Rudd had been standing guard at the door along with Ian for the past three hours. Rudd nodded at the door. Apparently the silence beyond it was working his nerves, too.

Ian frowned. They were meant to be standing guard, not talking. Still, these were extreme circumstances. He shrugged mentally. Protocol be damned.

“Guess not,” he muttered back. “Didn’t look much like ISIS the last time I saw a news broadcast.”

Rudd nodded.

“How long ago was that?”

Ian dropped his eyes to his wristwatch and calculated.

“Six hours, give or take.”

Rudd blew out a snort.

“Long time. Yeah, it ain’t ISIS.”

Ian arched an eyebrow. News of the attack on London had first emerged around twelve hours earlier, and the first assumptions—both in the newsrooms and among the men and women charged with running the United States—had been that terrorism had once again reared its ugly head in Europe. Over those first few hours, the conversation had been dominated by America’s own security, and the possibility of a simultaneous attack on American soil. Extremism had become an ever-present threat across Europe in the past few years, and co-ordinated, multi-site attacks were the current modus operandi for those who wanted to attack the West.

President Berman had immediately raised the threat level to somewhere north of biblical, and had ordered all security services—and just about anybody who possessed a gun—to move to a state of high alert.

The terrorism theory only really held water for the first hour or two, as far as Ian was concerned. There had been no new footage from London in hours, but back when the news teams had still been reporting, it had been abundantly clear that this wasn’t just an attack. London was being systematically destroyed on a massive scale. There was no known terrorist network capable of bringing a city the size of London to its knees so rapidly. Whatever was happening in southeast England, it was something nobody had seen before.

Yet it wasn’t just the scale of the destruction that chilled American nerves: it was the manner of it. London’s citizens appeared to have turned on each other: all across the city, pockets of frenzied bloodlust had broken out, each claiming scores or hundreds of lives, before seeming to cease, and then starting up again elsewhere. To Ian’s mind, that meant someone or something was moving around the city, inciting brutality before moving on, but President Berman had, for too long, been locked on threats like ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Ian had stood guard and listened as the educated voices in the room beyond the door talked about chemical warfare. Some sort of dirty bomb detonation, perhaps, something which had driven the citizens of the UK mad, like something out of some zombie movie. The fictional rage virus made real.

Berman, ever the campaigner, had spoken about how he should respond; what the voters would want him to do to help resolve the crisis. American boots should be on the ground in England, he said, helping to quell the chaos and provide security for the UK government’s efforts to recover when the violence had settled down.

But it didn't settle.

It escalated.

The British military entered London after a couple of hours, and a full-scale war broke out. A war that, at last count, everybody seemed to be losing.

When the scale of the disaster became clear, the president began to speak about aid, about helping one of the nation’s most steadfast allies. The full might of the American military might be required to restore order to the United Kingdom. The president took strategic advice from senior military personnel on how much of the armed forces could be spared without fatally weakening the US’ own security.

The answers, apparently, displeased him. Berman—a moderate man who had been elected primarily because of his dry charm and his economic expertise—roared curses until finally, the only thing that Ian could hear was the silence.

The most powerful man in the world, along with his most senior advisors was, Ian realised, reduced to watching the news just like everybody else. Watching the breathless reports of the destruction which was taking place in England. Just watching.

Silent.

Impotent.

Curiosity was getting the better of him. Rudd had a look on his face that suggested he knew more than Ian—a smug, almost childish expression. Like a five-year-old boy cradling the most important secret in the world.

“What was the last thing you saw?” Ian said at last. Rudd had probably been planted in front of a TV screen right up to the last second before his shift started.

“The Brits caught something on camera,” Rudd said in a conspiratorial tone. “Not long after it first started. Nobody even noticed it at first. The looney-tunes on the web spotted it.”

Ian stared at Rudd expectantly, but the younger man apparently wanted Ian to draw it out of him.

Ian sighed. “Caught what on camera?”

Rudd grinned, and pulled out his iPhone, jabbing at the screen and holding the device out toward Ian.

Ian grimaced. Bad enough if someone caught them chatting when they were supposed to be guarding what was probably the most important room in the world at that moment, but if someone—especially the president—found them poring over a damn smartphone like a couple of teenagers, they’d have strips torn right off them. Most likely, it would be the last time they would ever protect the president.

Ian started to shake his head, but his eyes couldn’t resist the lure of the tiny screen. He reached out and took it without a word. The screen was showing BBC news footage which, according to the timestamp, had been taken several hours earlier. It was dusk in the footage, and Ian knew that things had worsened dramatically in London once darkness had fallen. Under cover of night, the city had become fire and chaos, and the footage caught by news crews had dried up fast.

This must be when it all started, Ian thought. His eyes were fixed on the tiny screen now, all thoughts of being discovered by the president forgotten.

The headline at the bottom of the screen read: unknown creatures?

Ian watched the footage as it rolled on. It had been taken from a helicopter, which swung across the city, until the detached eye of the camera fell on a large green area. Hyde Park, according to the information scrolling across the screen. It had been the site of a Red Hot Chili Peppers gig right up until the moment when it became the site of a massacre instead. The camera panned across a crowd of people as they began to scatter in all directions. Amidst the madness, the moving camera glimpsed something for just a couple of seconds. A few blurry frames caught at the bottom corner of the picture.

It looked like there was a single figure on the ground, and some creature—at least the size of a bear, but gangly, wiry and sharp somehow—looming over him, its face right in his.

The image was lost as the helicopter continued to swing away, following the crowds as they erupted into the nearby streets.

The image changed suddenly, to a panel of talking heads interviewed by an ashen-faced host, and Ian dared to thumb the volume on the iPhone, until the tinny chatter was just barely audible.

This was, apparently, the only footage caught of the creatures, though numerous eyewitness reports suggested that there were more of them in the city.

The blurry image was a prank, the talking heads said. A hoax.

It was an animal that had escaped from London Zoo.

It was a trick of the light.

No, it was a monster. A military science experiment gone wrong. Aliens.

Ian watched with interest as the tiny screen displayed a frozen, blown up image of the ‘creature.’ The picture was badly pixelated, but he got an impression of a monstrous face, a mouth full of teeth. To his admittedly untrained eye, it didn’t look like the footage had been doctored—and it had been caught by a BBC camera. He couldn’t imagine a serious news organisation like that playing games while London burned.

When the talking heads began to flash up messages from Twitter, presenting them as news, Ian shook his head and handed the phone back to Rudd.

“You saw it?”

Rudd’s face was flushed with anticipation.

“I saw it.”

“You think it’s real?”

Ian’s brow furrowed. The world just wasn’t big enough for a creature like that to exist. If there were some species capable of attacking and destroying a major European city out there, history would have some record of it. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder if the president had people working on enhancing and studying the footage. Maybe that was why the room beyond the door had fallen silent. Maybe the results were in, and President Berman had no fucking clue what to do with them.

Something about that idea rang true in Ian’s mind. Right now, the president should at least be busy organising aid for Britain, maybe even American boots on the ground. Instead, the official US government response to a global crisis, the like of which hadn’t been seen since the end of the Second World War, was paralysis.

For the first time in the president’s six-year tenure, Ian believed that the commander-in-chief had no idea what was happening, nor what was to be done about it. This, he thought, was the inevitable result when a nice-guy banker took the seat behind the most powerful desk in the land. To Ian’s mind, presidents weren’t judged by their policies or their speeches or their ability to shuffle numbers on some spreadsheet. They were judged by the way they responded if and when the shit hit the fan. That was what history remembered.

Berman was the wrong man for the job, but he was the man who had the job, and that meant Ian would protect him until his dying breath.

“I don’t know if it’s real,” Ian said at last. “But I’m sure glad it’s happening over there, and not over here.” He felt heat rising in his cheeks. Did I just say that? Millions are dying, and all I can say is I’m grateful I’m not involved?

“Pffft,” Rudd snorted. “We’re better equipped than the Brits.”

Ian didn’t respond. In a different life, he had fought alongside British troops in the Middle East, before he took up a role as a guard dog. The Brits had been just as well equipped, just as well trained as the Americans. If the British military could fail in a matter of hours, in their own back yard, he doubted the American version would fare much better.

Yeah, he thought. I am grateful it’s safe here.

And it was.

Ian was one of a twenty-strong Secret Service detail tasked with protecting the president while he spent a few days recuperating at Camp David after a minor health scare. He had stood guard outside the camp’s plush wooden lodges plenty of times before, and his pulse has never had cause to tick beyond sedentary. Camp David was secure, but far from the security of the Whitehouse. Hell, Ian would have preferred that the president was safely sitting aboard Air Force One, patrolling the skies where nothing could touch him.

He checked his watch.

Time for a shift change. Time to get away from Malcolm Rudd’s gleeful excitement.

Thank God.

Ian thumbed his radio and called for relief. Even without Rudd’s chatter, standing outside the door listening to the silence was making him feel a little crazy; just getting away from the indecision he sensed in the most important room in the world made him feel grateful.

After a couple of minutes, he saw movement in the corridor, and nodded at Walters, the agent who had appeared to take over guard duty alongside Rudd. Walters nodded back, but didn’t say anything. Ian was grateful for that, too. Sighing wearily, he made his way out of the lodge, passing by several more burly men who were doing their level best not to look spooked by the news coming from England.

Or not coming: as far as Ian was aware, all contact with the UK had ceased hours earlier. The ramifications of that were dizzying.

Better not to think about it.

Focus on Berman. Let the rest take care of itself, for now.

Once he got outside, the peaceful forest setting made the events in London seem detached and unreal. The morning sun was filtering through the trees, casting deep, peaceful shadows. The birds were chirping. Everything was normal. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, lit one, and breathed deeply, sighing a little as the smoke wound around his lungs.

He froze.

Had he just caught movement from the corner of his eye? Somewhere off in the trees to his right?

He peered through the thick foliage, squinting. The contrast between the bright light overhead and the gloom beneath the trees made it difficult to pull any detail from the landscape, but there was no reason for any of the security personnel to be over there. All had been ordered to stay close to the lodges.

His eyes widened.

There it was again.

A hint of movement, something which may have been branches swaying in the wind, but which to Ian looked purposeful somehow, almost beckoning him forward.

He tossed the barely-smoked cigarette, and began to walk forward, his right hand settling on the gun at his hip.

Despite the warm morning, he suddenly felt cold, and some part of his subconscious nagged at him. With each step he took, the sound of the birds receded, almost as though all avian life had declared this part of the woods a no-fly zone.

Ian had seen combat, and he had served President Berman personally for six years. He had seen plenty of horrors, and his life had been in direct danger on more than one occasion. Still, he couldn’t remember a time when he had felt so hesitant, like his nerves were aware of something that his mind was missing. He briefly considered returning to the lodge, getting some of the guards beyond the front door to accompany him, and almost snorted a nervous laugh. Ice-cold Miller calling for backup to investigate the wind rustling some leaves. He would be a laughing stock.

He shook his head.

Wondered when he had unholstered his weapon, and why it was now clutched at his side, in fingers whose knuckles were slowly turning white. Years of training had hard-wired his DNA to respond to threat, and his intuition had served him well more times than he could count. He didn’t believe in the supernatural, didn’t believe it was possible to possess some psychic awareness, but he did believe that a human being’s senses could be highly tuned enough to pick up warning signs that others might miss. Even if his eyes couldn’t see it, his nerves felt it. There was something in the trees.

Threat.

Setting his jaw, Ian marched forward into deep shadows, scanning the trees, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the sudden change in light.

After twenty paces, he saw it.

A hole in the ground, roughly three feet in diameter.

He frowned, lifting his weapon a little, feeling his nerves begin to race uncontrollably. It almost looked like someone had been digging a grave.

Ian walked to the edge of the hole, glancing around to make sure nothing was creeping up on him while he was distracted, and peered inside.

Something peered right back. Something that had been sitting in the hole; waiting like a spider on a web. Waiting for its prey to come right to it.

Red eyes.

Teeth.

A hideous, twisted grin.

He felt a brief stab of fear, overwhelming and paralysing, and then his mind simply melted away. A lifetime of training dissolved in an instant; thousands of hours aimed at teaching him to maintain control of his emotions in the face of danger, and it was all wasted. No amount of preparation could have readied him for this. This all-consuming terror.

His legs started walking, as though being controlled remotely, while the conscious part of Ian Miller’s mind fractured and dissolved, reduced to screaming in a dark corner as he watched through his own eyes; felt the staggering, alien malevolence bubbling up within him.

He marched briskly back to the lodge, past the guards on the front door who nodded at him once more and looked vaguely puzzled when he blanked them.

Back to the hallway outside the silent room.

Ignoring the equally puzzled stares of Walters and Rudd.

His hand reached for the handle.

“What’s up, Ian?”

Walters’ words.

Ian heard them, but they were muffled; a shout dulled by thick walls until its message was lost entirely. Before Walters could say anything more, Ian watched his hand push the door open, and saw the famous faces in the room turn toward him in surprise.

And then, all by itself, his right hand raised his firearm, steady as a steam train.

Took aim.

And opened fire.

*

In Florida, around one thousand miles south of Camp David, long-distance trucker Jamie Lester had only pulled his rig into Mama’s truck stop and grill to take a leak—though the pictures of fat steaks in the window did look good—but found his skull emptying before his bladder would get the chance.

He froze in the parking lot, gaping in surprise as a patch of grassy land next to his rig spat out a chunk of earth, like the ground coughing up a wad of chewed tobacco. He peered into the resulting hole for several long seconds before walking stiffly back to his tanker and pulling open the driver’s side door.

His haul—eight thousand gallons of gasoline—became a slow-moving missile the moment the fingers he no longer controlled turned the key in the ignition.

Jamie would drive for just a couple more minutes, his unblinking eyes seeing only the road ahead, his fingers clenched tightly around the wheel. The drivers who saw him in their rear view mirrors either had the awareness to move out of his way, or the massive front grille of the truck made that decision for them, shunting them aside, swatting their vehicles away like flies.

Jamie’s long-forgotten aching bladder finally voided itself when control of his mind was cruelly handed back to him at the very last second before impact. He had time to feel the warm wetness in his crotch, and to notice something in his wing mirror: a hulking creature of some sort, launching itself from the roof of the tanker and galloping away into the trees lining the road.

And then the missile he drove smashed into the electrical substation that he had been racing toward at seventy miles per hour.

The fireball that consumed the substation killed Jamie instantly, and sent a plume of boiling smoke into the air that was visible from several nearby towns.

All of which lost power immediately.

*

In Rapides Parish, Louisiana, around nine hundred miles west of Jamie Lester’s exploding oil tanker, Private First Class Abel Sanchez had been on gate duty at Camp Beauregard for just a couple of hours when his watchful eyes caught movement among the pines.

In the shadows beneath the forest canopy, just beyond the fence.

After a brief investigation, and after watching in horror as the weapon in his hands executed the three second-class privates who had been at the gate with him, Abel made his way directly to the motor pool, popped open an ammunition box and fed rounds into the Browning M2 50-cal mounted on the rear of the nearest Growler light utility vehicle.

The bullets were armour-piercing. Shrieking shards of fire; they spat from the heavy barrel at a rate of almost six hundred rounds per minute.

By the time the bewildered soldiers at the base finally subdued Abel, he had killed thirty-four men and women, and had caused massive destruction to a swathe of nearby vehicles and structures.

When the corporal who had ended Abel’s killing spree with a three-round burst from his carbine turned away from his body, his confused eyes filling with hot, furious tears, he noticed movement in the corner of his eye immediately.

In the shadows beneath the forest canopy, just beyond the fence.

*

Eighteen hundred miles farther west of Camp Beauregard, at Los Angeles International Airport, Trey Brookes crushed out a cigarette and made his way from the designated smoking area toward the small private hangar that held what he considered to be his jet.

Trey liked to think of himself as the pilot to the stars: most of his contract work came from the movie studios, who used Trey—and the Lear jet he flew—to ferry important actors from one side of the country to the other. Mostly, Trey flew LA to New York and back; often enough that the route bored him. It was like whoever wrote movies didn’t realise that there were other cities in between. As far as Trey was concerned, if Times Square never appeared on film again, it would be just fine by him.

It was a good job, though, and it gave Trey enough stories—and enough selfies—to fill a lifetime of bar conversation.

“This is me with Tom.”

“This is me with Christian.”

“This is me with Bradley.”

Matt. Dwayne. Hugh. Channing. The list was endless, and Trey’s cellphone contained pictures of him grinning alongside every last one of them. He always used their first names when he flashed pictures of himself hanging out with the stars, and the drunk girls at the bars almost always joined the exact dots he wanted them to join.

Not a bad life, all in all.

Today, he was scheduled to ferry Scarlett to—you guessed it—New York, for a meeting with some director ahead of the latest superhero movie. Trey rarely ever bothered to learn the directors’ names. Only a handful impressed the girls at the bars, and they very rarely flew with Trey. Hell, they had their own damn jets.

When he arrived at the hangar, he was unfazed to discover that the lights were out. Scarlett wasn’t due for another couple of hours at least, and takeoff would be a half hour after her arrival. Plenty of time for him to call for an engineer to fix up the hangar, and then retire to the cockpit for a nap.

He made his way to the rear of the hangar, to the fuse box, pulling out his phone as he walked, but found something else sitting in the shadows, waiting for him.

A minute later, Trey sat in the cockpit, his ears no longer hearing as the radio wailed warnings that he had not been cleared for takeoff, and that he needed to get off runway four immediately.

The warnings didn’t matter and the jet didn’t take off; not really. The wheels were less than ten feet from the ground when Trey’s hands yanked hard on the control stick, pulling the nose sharply toward the terminal, aiming the enormous steel bullet that the plane had become at the vast crowds of people gathered inside, arcing toward the screams at almost two hundred miles per hour.

*

Three hundred miles north east of the disaster at LAX, Chris Greer leant his bike against the railing and sucked in a few deep breaths.

He hadn’t been pedalling especially fast: he was up top today, on relatively flat ground, ensuring that visitors to the Hoover Dam were staying safe, and answering the occasional question. He liked patrolling the top: it made him feel like a tour guide rather than a cop, and the exercise was good without being exhausting. He usually stayed on his bike most of the day, completing slow, easy circuits.

His breathlessness was more to do with the weather: it was late in the year, but still oppressively hot, and the air felt still and heavy, like the world was waiting for a storm to break. He snapped his water bottle from its holster on the bike’s frame and slugged back a large mouthful, taking in the scenery. Even after a couple of years stationed at the dam, the vista laid out before him could still take his breath away.

He often got a chance to enjoy it, too: the dam was critical infrastructure for the country, and so full-time police were required to be on the lookout for trouble—terrorism, mostly—but Chris’ two years in the job had been quiet; serene enough that it was possible for him to sometimes forget that he was even there to keep the peace. Most of the visitors to the dam were too busy being awestruck by the vastness of it to even think about causing trouble.

It was a good assignment. When he had first graduated from the academy, he had dreamed of policing one of the big cities: Vegas, perhaps, or Denver. Somewhere close enough to his family, but still offering plenty of potential for excitement. Yet, after a few years dealing with crime in the small town of Flagstaff, before relocating to the smaller-still Boulder City, just south of Vegas, he had come to realise that excitement was overrated. Sure, policing in Vegas itself would have been more thrilling, but it also might have killed him. Once he had started a family of his own, staying alive seemed way more important.

Thus far, there was little chance of danger at the dam, and there were probably thousands of cops out there in the bigger cities who would gladly trade with him.

Besides, Vegas offered up some spectacular sights, but nothing quite like this.

Behind Chris, the force of the mighty Colorado River was corralled by the gigantic stone slab that was the dam. In front of him, hundreds of feet below, the river re-emerged as a thin trickle. He could see for miles.

Screams weren’t unusual at the dam, but they were almost always screams of delight, usually drawn from children seeing the vast structure for the first time. A couple of times over the previous two years, Chris had heard cries of pain while on patrol: on each occasion the source had turned out to be a visitor suffering a heart attack.

When the scream rang out through the thick mid-morning air, and Chris froze with his water bottle still tilted to his lips, he knew it was different immediately.

This was no scream of surprise, nor even of pain: it was a bestial shriek of pure terror. A male voice, Chris thought, though he couldn’t be entirely sure as it ripped up through the octaves, clawing at his nerves. Adrenaline began to pump through his system, sending his senses into a state of hyper-alert. Whoever had unleashed the awful noise wasn’t nearby, but they were close enough for the sound to carry easily to his ears in the soupy air. The background hum of the dam—the murmuring of sightseers and the purring engines of vehicles moving slowly—seemed to halt instantly.

He lowered the water bottle and scanned the people and traffic scattered across the dam. It wasn’t busy; certainly not as crowded as it usually was, perhaps because a lot of folks had stayed home, glued to the news reports of the disaster in England.

Chris saw immediately that those on foot were as confused as he was: they peered about inquisitively, searching for the source of the noise. None of the handful of cars and buses crossing the dam were moving erratically; it wasn’t likely that the yell had emanated from a vehicle. Whoever had screamed, it didn’t appear to have been a member of the visiting public.

That just leaves…

Chris frowned, and gazed out across the water at the intake towers.

Perhaps one of the maintenance staff?

He began to wheel his bike across the dam, lifting a hand to acknowledge the driver of a Prius who braked for him, keeping his eyes fixed on the nearest towers. He made it halfway before he saw it, and his footsteps slowed.

Movement.

He flicked his eyes to meet it.

On the farthest of the intake towers, a metal door opened, and a man wearing a maintenance uniform rocketed out into the light, making it all of two steps before something that Chris couldn’t see jerked him violently backward, yanking him back into the tower and out of sight.

He had only glimpsed the man for a second, just a heartbeat, but it had been long enough for Chris to recognize that the guy’s dirty white boilersuit had been stained red across the chest. Long enough for him to understand that something terrible was happening at the Hoover Dam.

He heard another scream. This time there was unmistakable pain in the yell, and this time, the scream ended abruptly, like someone had just pulled the plug that powered it.

Chris’ heart hammered, and he scurried across the road, throwing his bike to the ground and pulling out his radio. He depressed the button, preparing to call the incident in and request backup.

The words didn’t have time to leave his mouth.

Chris watched, the soft buzzing static of the radio in his hand unheard, as a creature born in a nightmare emerged from the intake tower. In a single, fluid motion, the creature tossed an object out across the railing toward the river: a misshapen red lump of something that Chris’ mind took a moment to recognize—Oh, dear God, no—and he had time to identify a single limb that was still attached to the lump—a dangling leg—before it disappeared from his sight, leaving an arc of blood looping through the air behind it like tracer fire.

What was left of the maintenance worker entered the water with a faint, apologetic plop.

With a shriek, the creature turned toward the dam itself, leaping easily to the adjacent intake tower, covering a distance that had to be thirty feet or more in a single, horrific movement. When it landed, it leapt again without pause, onto the walkway leading to the dam itself, and began to gallop on all fours.

Straight toward Chris.

Move!

The world began to congeal around him.

With a strangled yelp, Chris fell backward, his mind reeling at the horror of the creature: like a huge insect, plated with armour that caught the daylight and glistened. His overriding impression of the creature was that it was sharp, a blur of angles; teeth and claws and—

Those teeth.

Chris landed heavily on the sidewalk, blasting the air from his lungs and losing his grip on the radio. All around him, he heard screams erupting as pedestrians scattered in all directions, propelled by pure, unadulterated terror. Somewhere to his left, a metallic bang split the air as someone rear-ended the car in front. To his right, he heard a screech of tyres, an engine accelerating away suddenly, the speed limit forgotten.

And then, as Chris feebly lifted his arms to protect his face, the thing was above him, travelling at bewildering speed, clearing his prone, helpless body like a low-flying jet.

Chris hardly dared look.

Couldn’t bear not to.

And, for a moment, time seemed to stretch out as he took in the terrifying detail.

Glistening black skin, pulled taut across rippling muscles, like a freakish bodybuilder reflected in a circus mirror in Hell. A shape that was almost human, and yet utterly inhuman at the same time. Rows of teeth crammed inside a massive jaw that looked wide enough to encompass a whole human skull easily and—

It was gone.

Galloping onward, its footfalls producing a thunderous tapping sound as the scythe-like talons attached to its feet drummed on the concrete.

Clickclickclickclickclickclick—

Chris wrenched his head to the side, following the monster with his eyes, certain that he would see it tear into the fleeing civilians on the dam, swing those terrible limbs, and rip their bodies apart.

Instead, it continued forward, apparently unconcerned by the people trying to flee from it, crossed the road in a handful of bounding strides...and launched itself off the edge of the dam with a shriek that sounded bizarrely like triumph.

Chris’ breath returned, exploding painfully in his throat, and he scrambled to his feet.

The monster had surely thrown itself to its death, seven hundred feet below. There wasn’t time to try and comprehend the why of it. All Chris’ mind wanted to do was to see. To try, somehow, to understand. He sprinted back across the road, slamming into the guard rail, and leaned over.

What he saw took his breath away.

The creature wasn’t falling.

It was still running.

Charging down the near-vertical wall, picking up pace as gravity assisted it. The thing was moving like a goddamn guided missile.

Heading toward—

Chris’ thoughts became thick and foggy. He watched, open-mouthed, as the creature rapidly became a tiny speck, moving at impossible speed.

Saw it crash into the power station at the base of the dam at full tilt and disappear from sight.

Oh, shit, this is bad—

A fresh wave of panic surged through Chris, tearing the words from his mind as, moments later, the keening howl of a siren broke the stunned silence over the Hoover Dam. The noise was urgent; plaintive. The sort of anguished howl that came with a deep wound. With serious damage.

Far below, the power plant was bleeding.

Seconds passed, raked away painfully, and without his even being aware of doing it, Chris found that he had retrieved his radio, and he was barking into it, his words lost beneath the rushing of blood in his ears. When the fog in his mind lifted, it took him several moments to understand that the radio was talking back to him.

“A...monster?”

Chris’ fingers tightened around the radio, until his knuckles ached and he felt sure the plastic casing would crack. He replayed the words his mouth had spoken of its own volition in his mind. I need backup at the Hoover Dam. We’re under attack from...a monster. At least one casualty—

“Say again? Monster?”

The tinny, disembodied voice in the radio was heavy with sarcasm or disbelief. Clearly, the dispatch officer thought Chris was pranking her. In retrospect, he probably shouldn’t have used the word ‘monster,’ but...how else could he have described the creature which was, at that very moment, tearing apart the power plant seven hundred feet below? It wasn’t an animal—at least, none that Chris had ever seen or heard of before—and it damn sure wasn’t a man. Yet in the fleeting glimpse Chris had got of the thing, he had been struck by a very definite sense that it was intelligent. It was impossible to say quite why: perhaps because the creature had been so singular of purpose: it hadn’t been distracted by the vehicles, or the people milling about atop the dam. This was no dog chasing a butterfly. No, it had been on a mission. It had a target.

Still; it was a monster. One that Chris thought he would see every time he found himself alone on a dark highway. Maybe even every time he closed his eyes to sleep: even now, the hideous image of the thing throwing a lump of something that had been a human being moments earlier over the railing of the intake tower and into the water was replaying itself somewhere behind his eyes.

“People are dying, goddammit,” Chris snarled into the radio. “Believe it or don’t, but I want fucking backup here now, you understand me? Or every single death is gonna be on your fucking—”

The words were still spilling from Chris’ lips on autopilot, fuelled by his rising frustration. The next word might have been head; might have been hands. He didn’t get a chance to find out. Whether the dispatcher’s suspicion was going to cost her job or her soul suddenly seemed not to matter, as far below, an enormous explosion rocked the power plant, sending a towering column of smoke into the air. Chris watched, stunned, as debris rained across the valley below.

All at once, the purpose of the creature revealed itself to Chris, and he felt his stomach contract painfully, threatening to expel the eggs he’d eaten at breakfast. The monster wasn’t at the Hoover Dam to kill...it was there to destroy.

Jesus Christ.

Another—smaller—explosion rocked the plant far below, and a secondary alarm began to ring out, setting up a mournful duet with its louder co-star. Halfway up the dam, Chris saw a puff of dust jetting out from the wall of stone. Small, barely noticeable. Insignificant next to the destruction of the power plant further down, but Chris knew what it meant, and his mind began to shriek.

A crack. In the dam itself.

A third explosion rocked the air; the loudest yet.

He began to run; aimlessly at first, attaching the radio to his belt and ignoring whatever the dispatcher’s response was.

“Get off the dam,” he screamed, waving his arms frantically. The bystanders who had started to run at the appearance of the monster had halted their steps when it launched itself off the dam. Most were now either gawping or filming, no doubt composing the status updates they were going to post on social media, perhaps wondering if the footage they were taking was going to make them rich, or at least famous for fifteen seconds. Only a few now seemed concerned with getting away. With so much distance between themselves and the creature, they clearly thought they were safe.

Chris was still screaming at them, making little impact, when he saw a uniform that matched his own through the crowd of bodies. Shelley Winston, approaching at pace on her bike. As she neared, Chris saw her lifting her right arm, pointing her service revolver at the sky.

Doing exactly what I should have done, Chris thought.

Shelley fired, and the crack of the handgun broke the spell. Once more, the people on the dam began to scatter, just as the enormous stone edifice they were all standing upon shuddered violently for the first time.

Chris staggered, almost falling to his knees.

Pressure was building irrevocably.

This is actually going to happen, Chris thought, the words distant and somehow dislocated in his mind. The fucking thing is going to—

A second crack split the air, but this was no handgun report. This was the booming of thunder; the sound of the gates of Hell blasting open: a vast and terrifying noise that crushed all thought, all reason. A chorus of screams went up on the dam. Every pair of legs was engaged in a flat-out sprint at last.

Including Chris’ own.

He saw Shelley jabbing a finger at his forgotten bicycle, some thirty yards away, and made for it, yanking it upright and mounting it in a single, panicked motion. His feet were pedalling before his mind had even given the command, and he weaved through civilians, his duty as a police officer forgotten. There was no keeping the peace now. No maintaining safety. There was only survival; only those who were going to make it off the dam, and those who weren’t.

Up ahead, clear of the surging throng of people that engulfed Chris, he saw Shelley spin her own bike around and pedal hard.

Another crack: less deafening than the first, yet far more terrible. This time, Chris heard the aftershocks; the distant cascade of rubble as chunks of stone were punched out of the Hoover Dam like rivets, raining down onto the valley.

He pedalled.

His legs a blur, his muscles on fire, his breath turned to acid in his lungs. Chris didn’t feel any of it. His consciousness was reduced to a single, howling imperative.

Faster!

He crashed into a middle-aged woman, sending her tumbling to the treacherous ground as it rocked and lurched beneath his wheels, and didn’t slow for a second; didn’t look back. Chris Greer’s days as a police officer were over. To serve and protect was now just a hollow memory. The only thing that mattered was the rotation of the pedals, and the ground the wheels beneath him could eat up before the inevitable happened. He gripped the handlebars in iron fists, leaning over them, desperate to eke out every last drop of momentum.

Lurching forward, veering crazily, his thoughts lost, his existence reduced to pure, animal instinct.

Chris was still pedalling when the Hoover Dam collapsed and a billion tons of water crashed over him, blasting the bike away, catching his legs in the frame and snapping his knees like dry twigs.

Almost made it, he thought, and the force of the water and the bike that ensnared him tore his body apart, scattering the pieces across the gigantic wave of water and rubble that rushed south, destroying everything in its path.

*

At the nuclear power plant in Clinton, Illinois, Ross Carney’s work was done, and his hands had locked and barricaded the door, leaving him alone with the muted shouts of his increasingly desperate colleagues.

It was too late for them.

For everybody.

He had started a fire that nobody could extinguish. The power plant was a runaway train now, and all anybody could do was try to get the hell out of the way.

But not Ross.

His body slumped against the door, and passed the time by digging its fingernails into the flesh that had once been his own, tearing it off in ragged strips and popping it into his mouth.

Chewing.

Deep down, imprisoned in his own mind, Ross tasted himself, but couldn’t even force his stomach to vomit. Somewhere else in his mind, the creature that had taken control enjoyed the taste. It relished every morsel.

When finally the self-inflicted wounds began to take their toll, and his body began to fail, the intruder in Ross’ mind played the cruellest trick of all.

It let him go.

Gave him time to really see—and feel—what his hands had done to his torso.

And what they had done to the power plant.

Ross’ clawing fingers had torn out his tongue, and he could no longer speak, but his throat could still produce a moaning, liquid scream, and so it did. His voice joined the urgent whine of the power plant’s warning sirens, and he got a front row seat for the beginning of the end.

The plant in Clinton was the first to go up, but not the last. The majority of nuclear power was located on the eastern half of the United States, and though the vampires hadn’t taken them all, they had taken some, all dotted around the northeast of the country.

Many humans would die in the disaster that would unfold in the coming minutes: the air itself would become a killer in large swathes of the countryside, but not for the vampires. Not for the creatures whose flesh did not burn, who thrived in fire and death.

Across the continental United States, the gut of the country was being punctured repeatedly: hundreds of tiny cuts; a latticework of suffering. The country might have withstood each tear individually, but there was no way to respond to all; no way to stop the bleeding once it began. Even as emergency services tried to close one wound, another opened, and another. The vampires focused on electricity, taking apart the transmission grid with ruthless efficiency. By the time night came, very few human settlements would be able to hold off the darkness.

They struck at most major cities, killing and moving, killing and moving. Disabling vital infrastructure wherever they could find it.

They struck in small towns and counties.

They struck everywhere.

And in the northeast corner of the country, where Ross Carney and a handful of others like him had worked, the vampires had torn into vital organs. The vast, cataclysmic explosions at five nuclear plants were slightly staggered, not quite simultaneous as had perhaps been planned, but each poured more irradiated clouds of dust and ash into the sky. Each helped to blot out the sun and drop a veil of artificial night across the eastern seaboard.

Darkness fell early in Illinois and Iowa; in Michigan and Penn and New York, and the vampires rose to feed and slaughter in earnest.

The fall of America had begun.

7

Helen Specter’s face was famous.

It was the face of CNN, the face that lit up a thousand billboards across the country, the face that had appeared on magazine covers almost as often as it had in front of a camera. Helen’s face was currency, and she knew how to use it for maximum effect. Despite the expectations her striking appearance brought with it—invariably that she was some airhead—Helen’s star as a serious reporter of the news was in the ascendancy. She knew how to work that magnetic face around every news story: when to be light-hearted, when to be serious. Her professionalism had never once slipped.

Until now.

Now, Helen’s famous face was a mask of shock, her delicate jaw slack.

Minutes earlier, she had reported the death of President Robert Berman at Camp David—apparently assassinated, along with several of his most senior staff, by one of his own Secret Service detail. It was the sort of breaking news that made or broke careers, and she had handled it with typically efficient aplomb, fully aware that her part in the coverage would be pored over for years to come by internet blowhards seeking out signs of conspiracy. That prospect hadn’t phased her at all; she welcomed it, in fact. A big breaking story was where potential fame lived for rolling news journalists. It was the elixir of life.

And breaking news didn’t get any bigger than the assassination of a sitting president.

Until it did.

A distinctly unprofessional frown had momentarily crossed Helen’s face when her producer had whispered in her earpiece that they were pulling away from the report of the assassination for more breaking news.

That can’t be right, Helen had thought behind that frown. What breaking story could possibly warrant interrupting this?

She soon found out.

The Hoover Dam.

LAX.

Attacks on cities all over the country, some claiming the lives of dozens; some thousands. Large-scale destruction had been wrought in virtually every state across the eastern half of the country, and in many to the west, too.

And it just kept coming. Story after story. Disaster after disaster. Military bases had been hit in more than a dozen states. A US Navy destroyer in the waters off the coast of California had attempted to fire on the vessels around it without warning, and had then turned its sights on San Francisco before being sunk, killing more than four hundred crew members. There were reports of gunmen opening fire in major cities, but these weren’t the isolated incidents that America had sadly become all-too used to seeing in recent years. It was happening everywhere. There was barely time to report the details of one monstrosity before another surpassed it.

Finally, Helen whispered the news that a nuclear power plant had suffered a devastating explosion in Clinton, Illinois, and that everybody within a thirty mile radius had been advised to take shelter or flee for their lives. A total meltdown was inevitable. It would make Chernobyl look like a firecracker.

And it wasn’t the only one.

News of other attacks on nuclear sites was trickling in: plants in Iowa and Michigan had already suffered catastrophic explosions, and two more plants in neighbouring states were said to be the scene of outright warfare, with security forces trying to blast their way inside, to prevent staff who had apparently lost their minds from triggering further meltdowns.

With prevailing winds, the entire northeast of the country would suffer a blast of radiation that would kill either instantly or—worse—slowly. Residents from Iowa to New York City were being advised to stay in their homes, to seal windows and doors as best they could, to get underground if possible.

It was surreal, a broadcast beamed directly from a newsroom in Hell. More like a sick joke than reality: if Helen didn’t know better she might even have believed that she was the victim of some office prank, words planted on a teleprompter screen that couldn’t possibly be true.

As she had recited the details of disaster after disaster—large and small, spread across the entire country—some part of Helen knew that her spin of the wheel of fame would amount to nothing. The cameras were still rolling, but the news she was reporting made it likely that the concept of fame itself would be meaningless in a few hours. This wasn’t the peak of her career, it was the end of it. The end, perhaps, of everything. The speed of the collapse was breathtaking; awe-inspiring.

The vice president had taken control of the country following the death of Robert Berman, and his first executive order had been to deploy the US military on home soil. The National Guard had been called out. Someone in the newsroom had half-joked that the vice president’s next order would be to deploy the NRA, and Helen had felt a chill run down her spine. It wasn’t a joke: it was the truth. It seemed that in every town in America, war was breaking out. In some towns, there was already nobody left to fight.

Helen and her colleagues had spent hours of airtime through the night debating the destruction of the UK in elaborate detail, secretly thrilled at the scope of the news story, and now it was here, right on her doorstep.

It wasn’t thrilling anymore.

Helen was in New York City. On the thirtieth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. By the time she reached the ground, stepping outside might already be the equivalent of stepping on a landmine. The skies were bloating with radiation; the wind was pushing it steadily in her direction. Perhaps it had already arrived. The news had washed up at her door even as she read it.

When she had finished delivering the revelation that the north eastern quadrant of America was about to become an irradiated wasteland, her producer whispered in her ear again, and informed her that reports of attacks were pouring in from France, from Australia, from Japan and South Africa. That all communications with Russia and Eastern Europe had been lost. That there were entire cities ablaze in China.

It wasn’t just America that was bleeding.

It was the entire world.

Helen finally pulled out her earpiece and placed it on the desk in front of her. She stared blankly into the lens of camera one, and said nothing. There was nothing left to say.

Nobody out there was watching her famous face delivering the news anymore.

They were living it.

Everywhere.

8

How could I have been so wrong?

At the ranch in Colorado, Dan watched the news footage with a growing sense of horror, unable to tear his eyes from the screen until, finally, the anchor’s words just ran out and her statuesque features set in shock. The ticker running across the bottom of the screen continued to scroll. A roll call of the dead and dying:

...Meltdown at plant in Illinois...attacks in Europe, Asia and Africa reported...Vice President Simpson urges population to remain indoors...

Before Dan got a chance to discover what would emerge next from the perfect o that the newsreader’s mouth had become, the image of the newsroom vanished entirely, replaced with an emergency broadcast system splashscreen.

Seconds later that, too, disappeared, leaving only hissing static.

The Grand Cleric was still holding the remote control. He began to jab at the buttons, cycling through the channels. Static on every one. After a few stunned seconds, he dropped the remote onto the huge table and slumped into a chair with a vacant expression on his face.

“What just happened?” Conny whispered. Her voice was almost reverent with awe.

For a moment, Conny’s words echoed in Dan’s mind, repeating over and over until they became a background hum.

What just happened?

He almost felt like laughing at the absurdity of it. Each time he had believed that he had the vampires figured out, they did something to show him just how little he—how little all humans—really knew about them.

The ancient enemy of mankind had waged a sophisticated war of propaganda thousands of years ago, while humanity was still fighting with knives and sharp sticks. Even the people who had agreed to feed the vampires had known next to nothing about the creatures they served. While the vampire myth propagated, and people forgot that once there had been a fearsome—real—foe at the root of it, the monsters had slowly grown in strength.

And now, when they had perceived a threat to their kind once more, they were rising as one. Not to kill by the hundreds or the thousands, but by the millions. Their greatest weapon had been the lie; it had always been the lie. Humans, in their blissful oblivion, had no way to fight creatures they couldn’t believe in. No human weapon had ever been developed with the intention of being aimed at a vampire. Vampires weren’t supposed to exist. They were fairy tales. Box office and bumper stickers.

Not teeth and talons.

Not global slaughter on a scale that could set human civilization back thousands of years.

An urgent pressure was building in Dan’s skull. It felt like his mind was about to implode.

The attack on London had led him in the wrong direction. He had believed Herb’s estimate that there were only two-dozen or so vampires in England, and he believed it still. It certainly seemed to tally with the way the destruction had spread across the city. That relatively small number had led him to a severe—perhaps fatal—miscalculation: he had assumed that there simply weren’t that many vampires in the world. America would likely have more than Britain by dint of the sheer difference in landmass, but he had reasoned that it couldn’t be much more. Maybe fifty.

Instead, there had to be hundreds. Maybe thousands.

Thus far, the numbers he and Herb had encountered had been small precisely because they had involved just one single nest—and that nest was located in a country which might have been First World, but which was near insignificant in actual size. Three vampires aboard the Oceanus, twenty-something in London. A small-scale operation, yet disrupting it had roused something far larger.

Something gigantic and unstoppable.

No matter what he had believed, it was obvious now that Dan was no threat to the vampires; he was, at best, an irritant. A fly to be swatted at if and when it buzzed too close.

Unimportant.

Instead of attacking Colorado en masse to get to him, the vampires had set about dismantling the entire country in a single, savage blitz attack. They had probably spent hours moving into position—perhaps they had already been on the move when the Oceanus had been sunk, approximately thirty-six hours earlier—and when they were all in place, they had struck simultaneously. America had fallen before it even knew there was a fight to be had.

When the Gulfstream jet had touched down on American soil, Dan had believed he was ahead of the game. But he was several steps behind. His arrival in the US hadn’t awoken the vampires. They were already on the move long before he got there.

Nuclear power stations? Dan thought, and his soul felt like weeping. He had been so wrong.

The vampires’ attack wasn’t mindless and reactionary; it wasn’t born of blind rage. It was calculated, surgical. The monsters were taking the human species apart with jaw-dropping efficiency. They knew how to attack. Where to attack. They had sliced the head off the American political body, and by the time the rest of the country’s bureaucratic leadership had time to recover, there would be nothing left to lead.

They had attacked military bases, they had attacked the power supply, they had struck at vital infrastructure to cause maximum carnage. They had spread themselves across seemingly every major city, knowing that even a military as mighty as America’s could not cope with a simultaneous assault on numerous targets inside its own borders.

They probably didn’t know it yet, Dan thought, but the US military was now a resistance movement. Within hours, as their numbers dwindled, they would begin to understand that they were losing a fight against an enemy they could not see, just as the British military had.

Dan tried to picture the soldiers and police out there, attempting to fight back while their command structure tried to comprehend where they should aim their weapons. And everywhere they turned, they would find civilians attacking them. Fellow soldiers attacking them. And something else lurking unseen in the shadows, picking them off when they were at their weakest.

This wasn’t war in the traditional sense; there was no front to speak of. America’s best chance at defeating the vampires now might be to drop nuclear bombs, but the vampires had made that impossible: the vice president—if he remained alive and in charge for more than a few hours—would have to sanction strikes all over his own country. He would have to sign off on Armageddon.

“They disabled the electrical grid,” Mancini said softly, gesturing at the television. “They cut communications. The first rules of war. Disrupt enemy comms. Cut the supply chain.”

Dan felt a rush of furious anger building inside him. Directed at himself, and at his hubris.

“We were wrong,” Herb said bitterly. “They’re not coming here; not coming for Dan at all. They’re going everywhere else. It’s like my father said. We started a war. This is what war with the vampires looks like.”

Herb drained the rest of the rum from the decanter and slammed it down on the side-table. He stalked back to his chair and sat down heavily.

“Yeah,” Mancini said grimly. “Why go where they know they can be hurt? If they take out the rest of the country—the rest of the world—what can one man do? Kill ‘em all yourself?” Mancini turned toward Dan, glaring.

That was the plan, Dan thought. Half-baked and misinformed and doomed to fail before it began.

“But,” he said, cringing a little at how lost and small his voice suddenly sounded in his own ears, “I thought they were drawn to me. In London…”

“Maybe they are. But they aren’t mindless animals, are they? They aren’t moths and you aren’t a flame. They think. They plan. In London, you were a target of opportunity,” Mancini said. “But destroying the city was the objective. That was their revenge for you killing a couple of them. This is their revenge for you killing more. Your presence in the city wasn’t the reason they turned up in London. It was what you had already done on the damn ship. They don’t need to kill you. They can kill everybody else. Then what good are you?”

Silence fell, and the room filled with the soft sound of static fizzing from the televisions. After a moment, Herb reached out, taking the remote and turning them off. “If they are taking out nuclear power stations, we’re all fucked,” he said grimly. “Most of us can’t fight vampires. None of us can fight radiation.”

Conny leapt to her feet and began to pace, pausing only to jab a finger at the Grand Cleric.

“You,” she barked. “What’s your name?”

The Grand Cleric glanced up at her for a moment, apparently befuddled by the question.

“Andrew Lloyd,” he stammered. “I’m the Grand Cleric of—”

“You were the Grand Cleric,” Conny interrupted. “Whatever the hell this place was, it just changed. Your boss is dead, and everyone else here will be, too, unless you pull yourself together. Now, you’re a survivor. Maybe.”

Andrew’s eyes widened, but he said nothing, dropping his chin once more. Conny marched to his seat and snapped her fingers in front of his eyes, making him flinch.

“Hey!”

Andrew looked up again, startled.

“Craven said you people have a place in the mountains? How far?”

“A couple miles,” Andrew mumbled, “maybe three. B-but this place is secure. Once we’re on lockdown—”

“They’re blowing up nuclear power stations!” Conny roared, shaking her head furiously. “Fucking lockdown? Are you serious?" She waved an angry gesture at Andrew and stomped back to her seat, leaning down and yanking at the leash that held Remy. After a couple of tugs, the rope fell away from his collar. He sprang to his feet, instantly alert.

“If anyone tries to tie this dog up again, he has my full permission to rip their damn hands off.” Conny spat the words out like shrapnel, aimed at nobody in particular.

Remy padded over to the window, lifting himself upright, with his two front paws on the sill. He peered out across the ranch, apparently fascinated by the elevated view.

She’s terrified, Dan thought, watching Conny begin to pace once more. He scanned the room, taking in the wide eyes, the slack jaws, the trembling fingers. Everyone was terrified, yet he, who had felt nothing but fear for years, now felt only numb. Numb, and stupid. He had misjudged his enemy badly, forgetting just how intelligent the vampires were.

Mancini’s words echoed darkly in his head.

What good am I?

His thoughts tumbled, visions of boiling black water rushing through his head, but when the familiar anxiety threatened to spike, he found that it was powerless. An echo of fear, nothing more.

“We need to get underground as soon as possible,” Conny snarled, “and pray that they don’t get to a power station close by soon.”

I’m not drowning.

Not adrift.

Dan sucked in a breath. The river was out there, surging around the edge of his consciousness, but it wouldn’t sweep him away, not ever again. Fear was the power that drove the horror in the shadows.

And I’m not afraid.

He let the breath out slow. Controlled. Drew in another.

They’re intelligent, he thought, and his eyes widened.

“They won’t,” he said softly.

“Won’t what?” Conny looked almost delirious with fear, prowling around the room like a caged tiger. She had the air of someone who wanted to just pick a direction and start running; to do something; anything.

“They won’t take out all the power stations. They might disable our power, but they won’t want a nuclear apocalypse.”

“Tell that to New York and Chicago,” Mancini growled.

Dan opened his mouth to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. His mind filled with visions of the densely populated cities in the north of the country. Massive radiation exposure. Peeling skin and festering sores and lungs filled with toxic blood. Death circling like a vulture; inescapable.

Outside the window, the early afternoon skies above Colorado were clear and bright. It was hard to believe that just a few hours north of his position, those same skies were probably scarred by radioactive ash, thick with the sound of screaming as millions died in agony.

“Why, Dan?” Conny snapped. “They’ve taken out more than one power station already. Why will they stop there?”

Dan’s thoughts blazed. If the vampires wanted to subdue humanity, nuclear apocalypse was certainly the fastest way to do it. But it didn’t feel right. He had no explanation for what had happened in the northeast, but the more he thought about it, the more certain he felt that they wouldn’t carry on attacking nuclear sites. If that was what they wanted, why bother to attack LAX or the Hoover Dam? Why attack anywhere that wasn’t a nuclear power station?

The answer formed in his mind immediately.

“Because they would be exterminating their food source. These things are smart. They want to cripple this country, not obliterate it.”

“Are you sure, Dan? Because five minutes ago you were pretty sure that they wouldn’t do anything at all until sundown, and that they would come for you first.” Conny’s voice was full of vitriol.

Dan shrugged.

“They are intelligent. I’ve no doubt they want to destroy what humans have built. What better way to beat us? But killing off the creatures they feed on by poisoning them with radiation...that doesn’t exactly sound like them, does it?”

Conny waved an arm at the dark television screens.

“So why do that?”

Dan shook his head. “A warning shot, maybe? A way to cull a large part of the population instantly so they can focus on the rest? A way to throw the country into a panic and keep us from organising to fight back? I don’t know. But they are predators, and they like to play with their food. They want to get their hands dirty. We might not know much about them, but we do know that. Killing us all in one clean strike wouldn’t be...fun for them. It’s not their style.”

Conny shot a poison-tipped stare across the table at Herb, searching for his support.

Herb shrugged. “He’s right, Conny. Especially about the fact that we don’t know enough about them.”

Dan turned to face Andrew Lloyd. The Grand Cleric was sitting with his head in his hands. It didn’t look like he was paying much attention to what was going on around him.

He’s in shock, Dan thought, and almost laughed. A couple of days earlier, he had been much the same. Now, after encountering the vampires on more than one occasion, he knew that there wasn’t time for shock. Seconds spent paralysed by fear were seconds that could get you killed.

Seconds that had got Elaine killed.

He pushed the thought back.

“This place in the mountains,” Dan said, “how many people can it hold? Andrew! How many people can it hold?”

Andrew shook his head and sat upright, sucking in a deep breath. “There’s room for everybody, but…” he paused, and Dan got the impression he was trying to select his next words carefully. “It’s like a doomsday bunker: there’s food and fresh water. It was designed to be self-sufficient, but not for a large number of people—just those Craven would need if things turned bad. The supplies won’t last more than a few months if we take everybody.”

Dan nodded.

“We won’t need a few months. At the rate the vampires are moving, we’ll know how this is going to end in a few days, one way or another. What about power? And weapons?”

“It has isolated generators, and there are plenty of weapons. It’s secure. It’s where Craven keeps...kept all her information on the vampires. The artifacts her family collected.” Andrew waved a hand. “It’s secure,” he repeated.

“Good,” Dan replied. “Get your people to the bunker. All of them. Lock the doors. Mancini?”

Mancini looked up.

“Can you round up some people who can fight?”

“Some, maybe.”

“Do it,” Dan said. “As quick as you can.”

To his surprise, Mancini didn’t offer up any protest. He simply nodded.

Holy shit, Dan thought. I really am in charge, now. The notion that he might be the one that Herb and the others looked to had occurred to him briefly back in England, and at that time, it had terrified and amused him in equal measure. Dan Bellamy, commander-in-chief. Nothing could sound more ridiculous. And yet here he was, giving the orders. Because somebody had to, and everybody else was lost in their terror.

Words that he had spoken to Katie, the petrified security officer aboard the Oceanus, came back to him. Me and panic go way back. It was like the unrelenting torture of the past two years had been preparing him, slowly desensitizing him to terror, and enabling him to carry on operating regardless of the fear he felt. When your entire life was an anxiety attack, panic’s edge somehow blunted. Fear was becoming like an old friend. He almost felt like he was starting to thrive on it.

Just like the vampires do.

Reality shifted.

The table in the meeting room blurred, the faces around it started to swim.

Burning red eyes reflected in a dark window.

My eyes.

“What are you doing, Dan?” Herb’s wide eyes were fixed on him.

Dan shuddered a little at the remembered nightmare, and the room abruptly popped back into focus.

“I need to get into the head of a vampire. Maybe then, I can find out exactly where their nest is located. Find the black river and kill it. I might be wrong, but I believe it’s our only chance of stopping this before the vampires send us all back to the Dark Ages.”

Herb nodded cautiously, his brow furrowed.

“I won’t accomplish any of that by hiding out in some cave,” Dan continued. “I’ve been doing that for the past two years, and look where it has got me. If this place in the mountains really is secure, then we need to get everybody there. By the look of that news footage, it might be the only safe place left before too much longer, and we’ll need it if we’re going to survive. But I won’t hide, not anymore. If the vampires won’t come to me, I’ll go to them.”

Before Herb could reply, the air in the room was split by a loud, fearsome growl.

All eyes fell on Remy.

The German Shepherd was still pressed up against the window, his massive body tensed and rigid, his snout almost touching the glass; lips pulled back to reveal sharp teeth. His brown eyes were trained on the world outside, unblinking.

“Oh, shit,” Conny breathed.

Remy’s growl deepened.

And outside, the ranch crackled to the sound of automatic gunfire.

9

“Weapons,” Herb snarled as he leapt from his chair, sending it clattering to the floor. “Mancini? Weapons!”

“This way,” Mancini roared, charging through the door, hoisting his submachine gun as he left the meeting room and entered the corridor beyond at a gallop. He swung the weapon left, then right. “Clear!”

Mancini disappeared from sight to the left, followed a second later by Herb.

Dan started to go after them, pausing at the doorway to glance back at Conny. She was standing, frozen, alongside Remy, staring fearfully at the window. Outside, the chattering sound of distant gunfire multiplied.

“Conny?” Dan barked, jabbing a finger at Andrew Lloyd when Conny turned to face him. “Get him moving. Get as many people as you can to this bunker. Seal yourselves in, and don’t open the door for anybody. Not even us. Not unless you’re sure it really is us, okay?”

Conny nodded, her wide eyes darting to Andrew, and Dan sprinted from the room without another word, turning left. A few yards farther down the corridor, he saw Mancini yanking open a door and reaching inside to pull out a rifle. He tossed it to Herb, and followed it up with a handgun. Herb caught both easily. He slipped the pistol into his waistband and hefted the rifle, nodding appreciatively as he examined it.

Mancini slung the strap of his submachine gun over his shoulder and pulled out another rifle for himself. He began to pass out magazines to Herb. When Dan approached, he held out a third rifle.

Dan lifted his hands, shaking his head.

“I don’t know how to use it.”

“Then fucking learn!”

Dan came to a stop in front of the open door. It led to a shallow closet stuffed with weaponry. He wondered briefly how many such weapons lockers there were dotted around the place. Mancini had mentioned that the American police were reluctant to move on the ranch. He could see why.

“I’d probably just end up killing myself with it, Mancini,” Dan snarled, pushing the gun away and scanning the closet. “Or you.” His gaze landed on a large machete hanging from a rack inside the cupboard. “I’ll take that.”

Mancini rubbed at his forehead as Dan snatched up the machete, testing its weight.

“Fine,” he growled. “But you’ll take this, too. If you don’t want to use it, that’s your business, but you’ll fucking take it.”

Mancini pressed a handgun into Dan’s palm. He briefly considered refusing it, before deciding that his carrying a firearm would probably make Mancini and Herb feel better, even if he knew that his chances of actually hitting anything if it came to shooting were virtually zero. Hell, he hadn’t ever even been any good at ‘shoot ‘em up’ videogames; it hardly seemed likely that using the real thing would produce better results. The one and only time he had fired a gun, it had been at point-blank range, and the act of pulling the trigger had given him a seizure.

It didn’t hurt to carry it though, he decided. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

The weapon was surprisingly hefty: just carrying it made him feel a little unbalanced. And powerful.

He was reminded of watching a television show about army recruits in basic training. They were forced to undertake long hikes while weighed down by fifty pounds or more of equipment to acclimate their bodies to movement under a heavy load. And I feel weird just carrying this one little gun.

For a brief moment, Dan’s mind lingered on the fact that virtually all of his knowledge of the world had been gleaned either from watching the television or by poring over dubiously-sourced articles on the internet. Very little of it had come by way of actual experience, at least not until the last couple of days.

Now, he knew what it felt like to actually carry a gun; the subtle ways in which it altered your balance, the way just possessing the weapon stirred up nebulous sensations of invincibility.

He now knew what it meant to truly flee for your life.

He knew what it felt like to murder somebody; to be the monster.

Red eyes reflected in a dark window…

He grimaced, and tucked the gun into his waistband, at the small of his back.

Given the way the vampires had so efficiently disabled first Britain, and now America, it looked like the days of learning from television screens might soon be over. Soon enough, knowledge might be the prize that people won when—if—they survived.

The notion chilled him to his core. He had spat out that line about the Dark Ages without thinking, simply to emphasize a point, but suddenly it struck him as a very real possibility. If the vampires brought about the collapse of civilization, if they culled the majority of the planet’s human population, the knowledge that would be lost could be the most grievous casualty of all.

His mind lingered for a second on a future in which pockets of humanity remained after a war with the vampires, trying to rebuild over generations. On the possibility of the monsters retreating back into the ground and allowing themselves to become a myth once more.

How many times has that already happened? Dan thought. Once? More than once?

It couldn’t be allowed to happen again.

The machete came with a sheath that was really no more than a leather holster and clip wrapped around the short handle. Dan attached it to his belt, and found that it, too, was surprisingly heavy. Running with the cumbersome weight of the weapons would be awkward.

Mancini was still stuffing magazines into the pockets of his combat trousers. He, apparently, had no trouble with the idea of carrying a heavy load.

Herb pointed into the weapons locker, at a shelf loaded with pocket radios.

“What’s the range on those?”

Mancini shrugged.

“Never had to find out. Few miles, maybe more.”

Herb glared at him, but swept up a radio and slipped it into a pocket. He took another and raced back to the meeting room with it. Dan heard him yelling at Conny to stay in touch, and moments later, Herb returned.

“More shooting outside,” he gasped. “Lots more.”

Mancini grunted. He seemed more interested in deciding whether or not the item he had just retrieved from the cupboard was worth taking. Apparently it was: he slung it over his shoulder.

Jesus, Dan thought, are those grenades? The final item Mancini had picked up looked like a heavy duty sash loaded with munitions; something a Miss World hopeful might wear if she expected the judges to start shooting at the contestants.

“Which way, Mancini?” Herb said.

Mancini jabbed a finger down the corridor.

“Stairs at the end lead down. We’re on the third floor. Whoever is shooting, they don’t sound close. Maybe out near the perimeter wall, in the Outer Ring.”

“You think it’s a vampire?”

Mancini grimaced. “What else?”

He thumbed a lever on his rifle and checked down the sights. Was that a safety? Dan thought. Does the one he gave me have a safety?

Before he could ask, Mancini turned away from the cupboard full of weapons.

“Move,” he growled.

*

Mancini was the heaviest of the three men, but he was also moving the quickest, despite being older than either Herb or Dan by at least twenty years, and despite being weighed down by enough ordnance to make Rambo blush. By the time they reached the first floor of the ranch house, the American had already opened up a three-yard gap on Herb, and Dan trailed even farther behind.

Herb divided his attention between keeping his footing in the unfamiliar house and keeping an eye on Dan. The former artist wasn’t just slender, he was frail and unfit to boot. That, Herb supposed, was the inevitable result of hiding out in an apartment for a couple of years: when the time came to start running, the combination of withered, unused muscles and panic could only do so much.

Herb, by contrast, was fit and strong. He had been trained rigorously by his father from the moment he had taken his first steps: he could run for hours, and he could fight with a moderate degree of skill. He was a good shot, though no marksman. In every respect, he had no doubt that Mancini outclassed him, not that he would ever admit as much out loud.

“You good?” Herb said, easing up to match Dan’s pace.

Dan gave a single nod by way of response. He seemed to be focusing on his breathing, but the nod alone was enough to give Herb pause. The gesture said that physical exertion might not come naturally to Dan, but he wasn’t about to let that stop him.

There was something...steely in Dan’s eyes now. A resolve that didn’t seem to fit at all with the anxiety-riddled man that Herb had met just a day or so earlier. Herb hadn’t missed how Dan had smoothly taken control back in the meeting room, when everybody else—himself and Mancini included—looked about ready to lose their minds. Dan had shown a flicker of unexpected leadership ability back at Herb’s family mansion, too: taking charge when a vampire had attacked Herb and a handful of his father’s clerics in the dark, enormous kitchen.

Despite his physical—and perhaps his psychological—shortcomings, Dan was the reason that Herb had survived that encounter, and the other encounters that had followed. He had been wrong about the vampires concentrating on the ranch, but despite his mistakes he was still in credit as far as Herb was concerned. He had earned some faith.

But is he right about this black river?

Is it all in his head?

There wasn’t time to think about it. Herb returned his attention to the path ahead.

Down at ground level, he saw a few black-clad clerics either frozen in place, wearing stunned expressions, or racing through the large, wood-panelled rooms in a frenzy, apparently uncertain of which direction they should run. A couple carried weapons, and when they saw Mancini, they fell in behind him. Mancini waved an arm at them, silently beckoning them to follow.

Numbers, Herb thought darkly, remembering Conny’s bristling anger at how casual Dan had seemed about the prospect of young lives being lost.

He wondered if the clerics had any idea what they were running to. Probably not. He doubted the people who ran the ranch allowed its population unfettered access to communications with the outside world; that was likely reserved only for rooms on the top floor of the ranch house; for the places where Craven and her advisors had made all the decisions.

The clerics probably didn’t even know what had happened in London, let alone what was unfolding throughout their own country at that very moment. Most likely, the brainwashed kids thought they were rushing to deal with some insurrection among the initiates, maybe even someone attempting an escape.

If they only knew, he thought, they would be running in the other direction.

A part of his mind pleaded with him that he, too, should be running away, but he shut it down. His family had started this: the chain of events that led to America being torn apart had been set in motion the moment the Oceanus had been allowed to leave its fancy dock in Portsmouth. Or, maybe, it was later: at the moment when Herb should have followed through on the promises he had made to himself, and refused to build the EMP device which crippled the cruise ship and allowed the monsters to be unleashed.

It was too late to run away now, that was clear. If the news reports he had just watched were correct, there was nowhere to run to, not really. The chaos would spread: the vampires would come, for everybody. Hiding out in a mountain fortress might well mean that he got to live out the rest of his days in relative peace, but what sort of days would they be? Isolated from whatever was left of humanity, watching the world disintegrate outside, slowly starving to death?

No, Dan was right.

Mancini knew it, too. Herb could see it written in the gruff American’s hard eyes. Mancini’s demeanour had changed even before the Grand Cleric had turned on those televisions. Maybe, until that point—until he saw that the vampires were killing everywhere—Mancini had believed that this was another war he could walk away from.

He knew different now. Their best shot at survival—maybe the human race’s best shot at survival—was to run toward the danger; to fight it. To meet it face-to-face and try to finish what they had started before the vampires scoured the Earth and left nothing worth fighting for.

Up ahead, Mancini burst through the ranch house’s front doors, swinging his weapon left and right once more.

“Clear,” he yelled. “Move!”

Mancini took off again, rocketing past a flatbed truck that Herb recognised as the one he had clambered aboard with his hands bound just an hour or so earlier. It felt like a lifetime ago already, yet it had been less than forty-eight hours since he had first set foot aboard the Oceanus. It was hard to believe that so much death and destruction could fit inside such a tight space. While running breathlessly for his life, charging from one disaster to the next and making all the wrong decisions, time for Herb had taken on a strange, malleable quality.

Forty-eight hours, he thought, glancing back at Dan once more.

The end of the world moves fast.

*

Remy was still growling.

Conny stood at the window and watched as a small group of men—some of them wearing the all-black that denoted them as clerics of the Order—charged from the building below her, moving at speed toward a high wall that encircled the main ranch house and the buildings closest to it, separating them from the rest of the ranch. Mancini was out in front, moving with a practiced ease, checking corners and waving at the others to follow. Conny watched, her nerves racing, until they disappeared from view.

At least whatever was happening out there—and it was a vampire attack, of course it was—was happening on the other side of that wall. Yet Conny had seen one of the creatures run up the near-vertical side of the Shard building without slowing a fraction. No wall would stop them, no matter how tall.

Maybe nothing can stop them, she thought, and dropped her eyes to her side. Remy was her only guide now, the closest thing she had to a radar. If his growl intensified, she knew the shit they were standing in was about to get deeper.

Remaining still was no longer an option.

“Good boy, Rem,” she muttered, darting away from the window and wrapping her hands in Andrew Lloyd’s ludicrous Halloween-costume robes. She yanked him from his seat, pulling his face just inches from her own.

“Time to snap out of it, Andrew. This is where you either start moving, or start dying. Do you hear me?”

Andrew nodded, his eyes wide and fearful.

“Good. Do you have some means of broadcasting to the whole ranch?”

“Y-yes. A loudspeaker system. We use it to announce—”

“Don’t care. You’re going to use it to announce that everybody here needs to run, got it? How many exits does this place have?”

Andrew’s eyes flickered before he responded.

“One. The main gate.”

“I was a police officer, Andrew.” Conny’s grip on the former Grand Cleric’s collar tightened. “I recognise the smell of bullshit. How many exits?”

“T-two. There’s one in the basement of this house. A tunnel. It leads out underneath the wall, toward the mountains.”

“Let me guess: Craven’s personal escape route, for her to use if the shit ever hit the fan in here.”

Andrew nodded, and Conny released her grip on him.

“We’re going to get to wherever you broadcast from, and you’re going to tell everyone at this ranch to head here immediately, got it? Everyone is using that tunnel, and we’re all going to the mountain.”

“Initiates aren’t permitted in the—,” Andrew began to splutter, but Conny silenced him with a look.

“One more word, and I let Remy do my talking for me. He hasn’t eaten since yesterday.”

Andrew dropped his eyes to Remy, who glared back at him, teeth bared. A throaty rumble still spilled from the dog’s lips, but so far he hadn’t given any indication that the trouble outside was moving any closer.

So far.

“We can b-broadcast from the ground floor,” Andrew said in a voice that shook wildly.

“Good,” Conny said. “Show me.”

Conny pushed Andrew out into the hallway and turned to face her son. His expression was still mutinous, still so resentful, but now his anger at her was mixed with fear.

It was the fear on Logan’s face that made her heart ache.

His safety was all that had ever mattered. Conny had raced through and below the burning streets of London with Remy, directly facing the vampires more than once, and all so that she could reach Logan at London Bridge Hospital; so she could ensure that he was safe.

And here they were.

The security of the ranch had only ever been a fleeting illusion, and it had been ripped away from her before she had even brought it fully into focus. Listening to the distant sound of gunfire, Conny could scarcely remember many times in her life when she had felt less secure.

Well, a couple.

Back in the tunnels.

Under the train carriage, waiting for them to see me and—

Remy pressed against Conny’s leg, snapping her back into the present. She blinked away the terrifying memory and dropped a hand onto his neck. The German Shepherd’s huge brown eyes flicked up to her for a moment, full of doubt, full of fear. He wouldn’t—or couldn’t—stop growling.

Remy had been utilised for crowd control back when the Metropolitan Police Force had existed; before it had been ripped apart in the dark tunnels of the London Underground system. Of all of them, the dog had probably been the least concerned about the sudden sound of gunfire and distant screaming. For him, that was par for the course. He wasn’t growling because he sensed violence in the air: he was growling because he sensed something far worse.

Conny scratched at his ears, the gesture as much to reassure herself as Remy. As long as she had the dog at her side, it felt like she still had a shot at keeping Logan alive. Remy had saved her own life more than once—and his ability to sense the presence of vampires nearby was the reason any of the passengers who’d flown through the night on the Gulfstream had made it out of London’s Shard building in one piece. Without Remy’s intervention, Conny would have died when she had first encountered the vampires. It was the dog that had saved them, and now Conny had led both Remy and Logan out of the frying pan and right into a bloody volcano.

I should never have allowed myself to get tangled up in this madness. We should never have ended up here.

Conny grimaced, pulling herself away from an abyss of self-recrimination. She had to get moving.

She focused on Logan once more. The teenager clearly didn’t want to, but in his fear, he still looked to his mother for guidance, and was still willing to accept that she remained in charge.

He still needs me.

Some part of Conny was thrilled at that revelation; ecstatic even, but it was the selfish part. The part which for weeks had wanted Logan to let her back in, to stop blaming her for the terminal disease which was corrupting his cells. According to the initial diagnoses, Logan might still have ten good years of pain-free life left, but even if he had ten days or ten hours, Conny’s determination would not have wavered. Her son would not die at the hands of a bunch of brainwashed teenagers wielding rifles. He would not wind up being torn apart by the talons of a hideous monster which was supposed to exist only in some dumb horror movie.

She grabbed Logan’s hand, and for a brief, fleeting moment, a bright memory lit up her mind: the first time she had felt his fingers curl around hers, all those years earlier, at the hospital where she had given birth to him. The surprising strength with which his tiny digits had encircled her forefinger.

At that moment, she had understood that her only duty—her only point as a human being—was to keep this tiny person safe from harm.

He didn’t return her grip tightly now. Maybe his teenage pride wouldn’t let him. But he didn’t pull his hand away, either.

“Come on, Lo. We have to get out of here.”

She pulled her son out of the meeting room, his silence burning in her ears.

Once in the hallway, she spotted a door standing ajar and paused, peering inside. It didn’t lead to another room, as she had expected, but to a shallow closet lined with shelves and racks, laden with guns.

Be still, my beating heart, she thought, and reached inside, pulling out an M4, a Glock, and something that looked for all the world like a damn grenade launcher. Things are looking up.

10

By the time Mancini reached the open gate which led to the Outer Ring, there were already a handful of corpses strewn across the floor. A quick scan revealed that all appeared to have died as a result of gunshot wounds, but it didn’t appear that they had been shot in situ. It looked more like they had managed to get this far before succumbing to injuries sustained farther along the path. A steady breadcrumb-trail of crimson splatters provided grisly decoration to the dirt track ahead, confirming his suspicions.

He pressed forward.

Beyond the open gate, a couple of the figures who laid prone on the ground were still alive, clutching at open wounds, trying to hold their blood inside their bodies with trembling fingers. They stared up desperately as he approached, regarding him with wide, pleading eyes. With medical assistance, he guessed some of them might have been able to survive.

Too bad.

Mancini kept moving, following the trail of blood, but his pace was slower now; more methodical. He kept his rifle tucked against his collarbone, sweeping it across his field of vision continually, his teeth gritted.

Moving against the tide.

A steady avalanche of fleeing initiates had washed over him as he neared the Outer Ring, where the bulk of the freaks at the ranch lived. With the ranch’s main gate shut, and no way to escape other than attempting to scale the high perimeter wall—which he could see in the distance that some had managed, though broken legs probably awaited them when they dropped down on the other side—most of the kids at the ranch had snatched at the only escape route they could see. They charged away from the gun battle raging somewhere up ahead, surging inward, toward the centre of the ranch. Presumably, they believed that putting a wall between themselves and whatever was happening out there would save them.

Either way, the heaving mass of fleeing bodies slowed the group Mancini led down even further, and that was a good thing. Now that they were closer to the epicentre, and the air was crackling with unseen threat, rushing forward in the open would likely just get them killed.

Mancini made for the nearest building, planting his back against it and gesturing for Rennick, Bellamy and the clerics to join him. A total of four clerics had worked up the balls to tag along. Mancini recognised a couple of them as having been a part of Craven’s entourage back at the runway. He didn’t know their names, but if Craven had trusted them that much, they had probably been at the ranch a good deal longer than most. Maybe even long enough to know some part of the truth about why the ranch existed.

At least they look like they know how to handle their weapons, Mancini thought, watching as the clerics backed up against the wall alongside him, cradling their rifles against their chests.

The real question was: what would they be shooting at?

Mancini shut his eyes, trying to block out the visual noise of running teenagers and focus only on his hearing. The chatter of gunfire had a rhythmic pattern to it. It sounded like a single shooter was involved in a battle with superior numbers, yet when the single shooter was taken down, the battle didn’t end. The rhythm died down for a moment, and then started up somewhere else.

He listened a few seconds longer, nodding to himself.

When he opened his eyes, he found Rennick’s face directly in front of his own.

“This is no time for a nap, Mancini.”

Mancini swallowed the sharp retort that wanted to spit from his mouth.

“About two hundred yards that way,” he whispered instead, nodding his head along the nearest thing the ranch had to a main street. On either side, the bloody dirt track was lined by low buildings. “Sounds like the vampires are using puppets. Making clerics their shooters.”

Herb’s eyes widened, but he nodded.

“How many?”

“Hard to say for sure. Gotta get in closer.” Mancini glanced around the others. At the mention of the word vampire, the four clerics who had joined the group exchanged looks of hesitation, maybe disbelief. “No time to explain,” Mancini said, glaring at them. “Follow my lead, or run away with them.” He nodded in the direction of the main ranch house, back along the path they had just travelled. Initiates and clerics were still streaming through the open gate, away from the battle.

None of the four clerics moved.

“Okay, good. Move fast, but steady. From here on, you treat anybody with a weapon as hostile, understand? Shoot first, ask questions later. Stay low, on my six. Don’t break cover unless I do.”

Without another word, Mancini took off at a steady jog, keeping his knees bent and his shoulders hunched. He shuttled from one building to the next, peering along the gaps between them before moving on. He didn’t bother to look back. If Rennick and the others had any sense, they would follow his path carefully. If not, well, at least they might provide a distraction for whatever horror was waiting for them up ahead.

Mancini set his jaw, tightened his grip on his rifle.

And kept moving.

*

“This way.”

Andrew Lloyd had picked up the pace a little as the cries of fear outside the main house grew louder. It sounded like the kids at the ranch were headed in roughly the right direction, but it also sounded like an out-of-control stampede.

They’re running blindly, Conny thought. Running for their lives.

She had observed the same response in panicked crowds during her time as a police officer. In training videos, mostly. As the number of terrorist incidents involving guns had increased over the past few years, police had become used to the way that people in crowds generally reacted. They fled in all directions at first, streaming away from the perceived danger, but then fell to following the people ahead of them, forming a river of moving bodies. As terrorist organisations had become more sophisticated, they had begun to position second shooters strategically. Often, the people who fled from one gun were in danger of running directly into another.

The kids at the ranch might have escaped from the immediate danger, but they needed a safe direction of travel, and she was going to give it to them.

Andrew had led Conny, Logan and Remy down three flights of stairs, to a communications room that looked like it belonged on the bridge of some state-of-the-art battleship rather than in a ranch house out in the middle of nowhere.

After he had punched a four-digit code into a keypad to open the door, Conny stormed inside, still pulling on Logan’s hand.

She was immediately confronted by dozens of blinking monitors displaying closed-circuit camera footage of the compound, along with a bank of computer consoles which she guessed controlled all the facilities. The power was still on at the ranch: Craven had probably insisted on failsafes and redundancies. Backup generators were almost certainly humming in a building somewhere close by. For now.

Conny glanced along the rows of consoles, taking in a dizzying array of controls. On one, she saw a large button labelled lockdown core sequence, which she guessed had been engaged at night, when the Order erroneously believed the vampires were dangerous. Steel shutters and UV lights, she thought grimly, recalling Mancini’s recital of the ranch’s defensive measures. They were woefully inadequate; as useless as the walls that did nothing to stop creatures who happily tunnelled through the ground.

On another console, she spotted a switch marked main gate override. She moved to that one and flicked it to the open position.

Escaping into the Colorado wilderness wasn’t an ideal solution, but if there were any kids trapped out there near the outer wall, unable to make it to the ranch house, at least opening the front gate would give them another option.

For a moment, her gaze locked onto the array of CCTV monitors. Several showed people running, but one in particular caught her attention: it displayed people streaming away from what looked like a massive garden area. As she watched, she saw the muzzle flash of several weapons scarring the image. She stared for a moment longer, attempting vainly to spot a figure that she recognised, and then turned away. There wasn’t time. The chaos outside could be on top of her at any moment.

“Here it is,” Andrew said, motioning to a microphone on the desk in front of them.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Conny shoved him forward. “Do it.”

*

Mancini crouched low at the corner of one of the buildings, his presence almost entirely masked by bushes, his ears ringing to the sound of gunfire. He sucked in a deep breath, braced himself, and leaned out of cover, peering out at the battle that was raging less than fifty yards ahead.

He had brought the group to a halt near one of the huge vegetable gardens that newer initiates tended constantly.

It had become the site of a massacre.

Mancini saw dozens of bodies on the ground among the plants: most dead; some in the process of dying from numerous gunshot wounds. A couple were calling out for help, like they believed an ambulance might show up out of nowhere. One cried desperately for her mother. Mostly though, those who hadn’t yet succumbed to their injuries emitted low, gurgling moans that were punctuated by the flat chatter of automatic fire.

The area in front of him was roughly the size of a football field, bordered on all sides by buildings, many of which were half-built, lending them a skeletal appearance. Mancini’s line of sight was broken by piles of construction materials, and a number of fruit trees and bushes dotted around the garden, but he could see enough to determine that clerics were holed up in some of the buildings around the perimeter, firing out from dark doorways and windows, their guns aimed in all directions.

What a fucking mess.

He ducked back into cover.

Clearly, none of the clerics knew which side anybody was on any more. As things stood, the battle would end only one way: last man standing.

And then the last man gets eaten, Mancini thought. The efficiency of the vampire strategy in situations such as this was almost enviable. In taking the mind of one of its enemies, it had the advantage of being able to launch a surprise attack, spreading instant panic and confusion through the ranks of its enemies.

The monster could sit back in the shadows and watch as the humans tore into each other, without ever revealing itself.

He pictured how it all must have started: with a single cleric apparently losing his mind and opening fire, scattering the rest throughout the garden. When others responded to the threat, and subdued what they had no doubt believed to be a lone shooter, gunfire had erupted elsewhere, and the wheel of insanity had started turning again. And it all led here: to a bunch of terrified teenagers taking potshots at anything that moved.

For the moment, neither the clerics nor the vampire—or vampires—that were out there seemed to have noticed Mancini and the others closing in on the bedlam. He didn’t think that sort of luck would hold for long. He waved a gesture at Bellamy to move alongside him.

“Shooters everywhere,” Mancini hissed, “But which ones are puppets? And where are the vampires?”

Before he could receive an answer, Mancini winced as his ears were assaulted by the shrieking whine of feedback, and the Grand Cleric’s voice flooded the ranch, blaring out at full volume from a hundred concealed speakers.

“Make your way to the inner circle. We are under attack. The way out is at the main ranch house.”

The message began to repeat on a loop, and Mancini stifled a curse.

For a beat, the gunfire abated, and the clerics hiding out in nearby buildings seemed to consider the Grand Cleric’s words. The ranch itself seemed to hold its breath.

And then movement erupted everywhere.

11

“This is it.”

Conny, Logan and Remy were right behind Andrew Lloyd as he ran from the communications room toward a nondescript wooden door on the other side of the ground floor and threw it open.

“Down there. That’s the way out.”

Andrew pointed down a set of steep stone steps. Conny saw another, identical door at the bottom, and nodded.

Outside, the distant sound of screaming had become a tumultuous roar. The last command of the Grand Cleric of the Order was apparently being heard loud and clear. By the sound of it, everybody who lived at the ranch would be piling into the main house before long.

“Go,” Conny snarled, shoving Andrew toward the stairs. Lloyd’s continual hesitation was making her nerves twitch in frustration. The guy had probably been brainwashed long ago, maybe he was even one of Craven’s victims, in his own way, but his apparent reluctance to act without being told what to do at every step made Conny want to consider putting a gun in the old bastard’s hand and informing Remy that he posed a threat.

Andrew grunted, and hurried down the stairs, and Conny followed, still pulling Logan along behind her.

The staircase was narrow and gloomy, illuminated only by discreet floor lighting, but only Remy had trouble with the descent: each step was steep, even for human legs. Toward the bottom, the dog’s chaotic forward momentum meant that his huge body tumbled the last few feet. He almost made it look graceful.

When Conny reached the basement level, Andrew had already pulled the second wooden door open, and what Conny saw beyond it made her heart skip momentarily: the exit was blocked by a featureless sheet of steel.

Andrew seemed unfazed. He pressed his thumb onto the steel, roughly where Conny would expect to find a doorknob, and a small square of the metal lit up. A fraction of a second later, the entire door slid aside noiselessly.

At the sudden motion, more floor lights lit up beyond the doorway, tracing a line through the darkness and faintly illuminating a long, straight tunnel. Every few yards, the rocky passage was braced by metallic ribs, which Conny was certain were there for support, but which lent the tunnel an almost futuristic feel, like a corridor on some Hollywood-imagined spaceship or the lair of a comic book supervillain.

Jesus, Conny thought. I’ve ended up in a bloody James Bond movie.

She shot a glance back up the stairs.

The entrance to the stairwell on the floor above was plain and unremarkable. It was likely that the kids reaching the main ranch house wouldn’t even spot it.

Someone has to go up there and show them the way, she thought.

Me.

There was nobody else. Logan would have to follow Andrew Lloyd to God-only-knew where without her, and she would just have to trust that he would be okay.

Dammit.

Andrew was already gone, puffing his way along the tunnel. She wouldn’t have trusted him to guide the fleeing kids in the right direction anyway. He would have probably sealed the door at the top of the stairs and tried to reprimand any initiates who dared to approach it.

It has to be me.

Conny grabbed Logan’s narrow shoulders, spinning him around to face her. He stared at her, wide-eyed. Not for the first time, terror seemed to have momentarily driven his resentment of her to the back of his mind.

Conny held up the Glock that she had taken from the locker on the third floor.

Logan’s confused eyes fell on it.

“Take it,” Conny said, checking it was loaded and pressing the weapon into her son’s hand. He looked down at her, astonished.

Shit, some part of Conny’s mind thought, when did my little boy grow taller than me?

“It’s loaded,” she said. “There’s no safety. I need to show them the way,” she nodded backward at the stairway, “but I’ll follow you, okay? Don’t wait for me; stick with Andrew. Keep him moving. Use this only if you need it. I trust you, Lo. I will catch up.”

Logan nodded, and pulled Conny into a tearful hug.

For a moment, the world around her just melted away, and it was all worth it. All the running, all the screaming, all the blood. Every last drop; worth it just to have her boy hug her like this one more time.

“Go,” Conny said sharply, pulling herself away, and Logan turned, sprinting after Andrew.

Conny dropped her eyes to Remy, and pointed at her departing son. There was no need for conversation with the dog; his connection to her was almost psychic. He knew that she would follow when she could. He believed it at the core of his being.

With a soft grunt, Remy charged away, closing the gap on Logan with each loping stride.

Conny nodded to herself. If things were to end badly for her, at least Logan would have the best bodyguard a person could have. Remy would follow her last command until his dying breath.

Tears stung her eyes.

And she raced back up the dim stairwell.

Into the light.

*

Bodies everywhere.

A seething mass of flailing limbs burst past the spot where Mancini and the others hid, their own bodies still concealed—for the moment—by shrubbery. Dozens of the kids had apparently opted to hide when the shooting had first started, but at the sound of the recorded message from the guy they believed to be some sort of prophet, they bolted.

And gunfire cut them down.

Mancini watched with gritted teeth, and stayed in cover, peeking out through the branches.

The chaos out in the garden gave him virtually no chance of assessing where the real danger lay from his position. Everywhere he looked, all he could see now was runners. Some made it, fleeing through the gate toward the clerics’ area, making their way toward the salvation of the distant ranch house. Many were chewed apart by bullets, their collapsing bodies causing others to stumble.

Mancini felt an instinctive urge to join the runners as the chorus of panicked shrieks swept him up. He swallowed it back, forcing himself to remain still. There were times, in the heat of battle, when remaining stationary was the best course of action.

He lifted a closed fist—a military wait gesture that he hoped the group of civilians behind him would understand, and silently watched the carnage, barely flinching as bodies riddled by bullets hit the deck just yards away from his position. Gradually, the number of initiates rushing past began to thin a little. Many had made it to safety, for now at least. There was a tunnel under the main ranch house that might even give them a shot at getting away altogether.

Let the situation breathe, he thought, the words of his old drill sergeant echoing in his ears. The guys who rushed headlong toward danger without assessing it first were heroes, and they got their medals posthumously. Heroes don’t win wars. Soldiers do. Those were the words that had pulled Mancini safely through his time in the military. Words that had kept him alive.

He waited a few seconds before he risked leaning out of cover.

There were still stragglers fleeing through the garden, but the skeletal structures that had previously contained armed clerics were now empty. Either they had been torn apart, or they had simply decided that they were fighting a losing battle, and their best shot at survival was to run with the others.

After a few seconds, he spotted a single cleric moving slower than the rest. Her expression almost beatific, she strolled through the trees at the centre of the garden, hip-firing into the receding crowd until her magazine was empty. She tossed the gun aside with something like a shrug, pulled a small knife from her pocket, and casually drove the blade into her right eye.

Almost before her body hit the ground, gunfire started up again, farther away to the left, beyond Mancini’s sight.

He ducked back into cover, his thoughts boiling over.

Walked right into a fucking deathtrap, he thought. Fighting against an enemy I can’t see. Should have run when I had the chance.

He glanced at Bellamy, who crouched right next to him with his eyes shut, and an expression plastered on his face that Mancini would almost have described as serene. He looked like some cheap carnival medium trying to establish an imaginary connection with the spirits.

He’s trying to sense where the vampires are, Mancini realised, and felt a brief flicker of hope ignite in his gut.

It was extinguished almost immediately. After a couple of seconds, Bellamy’s eyes flared open and he shook his head in frustration. “I guess I can’t do that, then,” he mumbled in a matter-of-fact tone that made Mancini want to wring his neck.

What fucking good are you?

Dan Bellamy was good in a direct confrontation with a vampire, at close quarters. But out here, with bullets flying, his psychic abilities were effectively useless. Being able to control the mind of a monster didn’t mean anything if the monster was determined to hide from view and use human puppets and conventional weaponry to fight its battles. Conny’s damn dog would have been more useful. He, at least, seemed to know when vampires were close.

It was the same problem that Mancini had witnessed the British military struggling with in London, the same one that he imagined their US couterparts were currently encountering all over the country: the vampires refused to show up to the fight. They lurked on the periphery, inciting chaos and only wading into the fray themselves when they were certain of their victory. They threw people-shaped missiles at their enemies or they simply moved on, slinking away unseen, always striking where humans were at their weakest.

Mancini shut his eyes once more, trying to block out everything but the sound of battle. There were less and less guns firing now: it didn’t sound like a gun battle. It sounded like a slaughter. Which meant that anyone still shooting was likely being directly controlled by vampires.

How many?

He breathed in.

Out.

In.

Out.

Trying to calm his nerves, to listen to the sound of battle beyond the thundering of his heart.

Two guns firing? he thought.

He waited a beat.

No.

One. One gun.

He gave it a moment, expecting to hear more guns begin to rattle, but it didn’t happen. The remaining clerics with weapons had either died or fled. Any left in the buildings around the garden now were staying out of sight, hoping to ride out the insanity. One active shooter meant one puppet.

One vampire.

Mancini squinted at the garden.

Where?

After a moment, he saw movement, at the opposite end of the garden, but it was headed in his direction. A single cleric, ambling, that same vacant expression on his face that Mancini had seen on the puppet, moments earlier.

The cleric would be on top of Mancini and the others in thirty seconds.

Less.

Dammit.

Mancini was out of options.

He hoisted his rifle, lining up the iron sight with his right eye, scanning the garden. He found the puppet almost immediately, and put the centre of his sight clean on the guy’s forehead.

Squeezed the trigger once.

Blasted the puppet’s brains through the back of his skull.

It was a sixty-yard shot, at least, and though the vampire might have an idea of the general direction of the sound of gunfire, Mancini thought there was a more than decent chance that their hiding spot was still secure.

The next move belonged to the vampire.

Let the situation breathe.

He held up a clenched fist once more.

*

Dan stared at Mancini’s clenched fist.

It was like he could read his mind, without even having to take and control it. The ex-soldier had implicitly believed that a firefight was his specialty, but he had never been in a firefight like this, and now, having led the small group right to the heart of the massacre, he had frozen up.

There was a very real threat out there somewhere, and Mancini’s execution of what looked like the last puppet had almost certainly given their position away. What was needed now was action, but all the American had to offer was that clenched fist.

Mancini clearly didn’t know what to do next.

But Dan did. The only way to discover where that threat was located, was for someone to step out into the open and become live bait. The sort of bait that a vampire couldn’t just assume control of.

He considered moving out of cover. If the vampire was hiding in one of the buildings, would it attempt to break into his mind? Would it know that it would lose that fight, as others had before it?

Dan’s heart pounded.

If he stepped out, and the vampire was sitting in a building with a human under its control, he would be dead in moments. No amount of bizarre psychic power could stop a bullet if it came his way.

No, it can’t be me.

He turned away from Mancini, and came face-to-face with one of the four clerics, whose painfully wide eyes and fearful expression suggested that he was seriously considering flinging his weapon aside and fleeing after the departing crowd, taking his chances with the hail of bullets that might be unleashed in his direction if he dared to break cover.

Judging by the looks on their faces, the rest of them were almost certainly considering the same thing.

Heavy silence fell over the ranch; tension fell like rain. The air itself felt bloated, like it was waiting to see who would make the next move.

We have to fight fire with fire, Dan thought. We have to become monsters just like them.

I have to.

He took a deep breath.

Because nobody else can.

Dan cleared his mind of everything but the rumbling background hum of the black river.

Focused.

And he drilled his gaze deep into the terrified cleric’s eyes.

*

Mancini flinched when the cleric appeared alongside him.

“Get the fuck down,” he started to hiss, but the words died in his mouth. The cleric wasn’t creeping forward to get a better view. He was walking upright, almost nonchalantly, strolling out toward the centre of the garden like he didn’t have a care in the world. He didn’t even have his weapon raised.

A puppet, Mancini thought, his mind reeling in horror.

He turned, and saw Dan on his knees behind him with his eyes rolled back in his skull and blood beginning to leak from his nose. His gaze switched to Herb, who was apparently joining the dots at roughly the exact same time.

Dan was in the cleric’s mind.

Herb shook his head in dismay, and started to reach for Dan’s shoulder, but Mancini grabbed his hand.

“No,” he whispered.

“He’s going to get that kid kill—”

“It’s too late, Rennick. It’s done.”

Herb flushed angrily, and opened his mouth to spit out a response that would almost certainly be too loud, and would draw the wrong sort of attention.

Mancini fixed him with a meaningful stare.

“Bellyache about it later, Rennick. If you’re still alive. Right now, keep your sights trained on that kid,” he pointed at the cleric, who strolled casually toward the garden of corpses. “Watch for movement.”

Herb’s eyes were filled with impotent fury.

Mancini got it: what Bellamy had just done was obscene; inhuman. But right now, there was nowhere for Herb’s anger to go. He either swallowed it down like bad medicine, or he lost his shit and wound up dead.

Mancini held Herb’s gaze a fraction of a second longer.

Herb’s eyes flickered, and Mancini knew that he got it, too. Dan was out in front again, acting alone, following a strategy only he could see. Killing indiscriminately.

Without another word, Mancini turned away, aiming his rifle at the cleric that Dan had just chosen to offer to the vampire.

And waited.

*

Dan walked in the terrified cleric’s shoes, feeling every step. He tried to keep the young man’s movements natural, hoping that the vampire wouldn’t detect the ruse until it was too late.

When the remote-controlled teenager reached the garden, he began to stalk around the perimeter, moving from building to building, leaning into each doorway and checking inside.

The first couple of buildings were empty, but he fired the rifle anyway, pouring a short burst of bullets into the bare walls; making noise. Drawing attention.

Somewhere inside the head that Dan had borrowed, the real cleric’s mind was shrieking in fear.

Dan felt it too, that all-encompassing fear, despite the fact that it wasn’t his body in harm’s way: fifty yards back from the cleric’s position, his own pulse was racing, and he heard it like an echo running alongside the frantic kick drum-pound of the cleric’s heart.

With each passing moment, he felt more and more like he was the cleric, and that Dan Bellamy was a distant dream.

He kicked open a third door.

Nothing.

Once more, he unleashed some rounds before moving on to the next building.

Time began to stretch out, and Dan began to wonder what the range on his ability was. Could he reach the far side of the vast garden and still maintain the connection?

He kicked open the fourth door.

And knew immediately.

The smell hit him.

A solid wall of it. Blood and ripped organs. Whoever had been in this building hadn’t died of gunshots, like all the others outside. They had been torn ap—

Red eyes.

Bursting through the shadowy interior, appearing right in front of the cleric.

Trying to burn their way into his mind.

And finding that it was already occupied.

Dan watched those fearsome red eyes widen in understanding and something like fear, and then he saw the long, curved talons racing toward the cleric’s face—

—my face—

He opened his mouth to scream...

—Not my face. The cleric—

...felt the bright star of pain explode as the vampire’s razor-sharp talons pierced his cheek, carving easily through his eye socket, drilling down into...

The connection severed.

Dan gasped out a ragged breath as his mind was returned abruptly to his own body. He had brought the pain back with him: the spearing, savage agony that had been the cleric’s final experience.

The world pulsed; reality threatening to shift once more, promising to send him tumbling into a world of endless nightmares.

I’m Dan.

Dan Mancini.

No…

Bellamy?

Darkness pulled at him with oily, insistent fingers. The river, begging him to return to it; to stay there and lose himself in its embrace. Singing a siren’s song. Offering sweet oblivion.

Dan Bellamy.

Dan resisted the lure of the river, biting down hard on his tongue, letting the sharp pain—the real pain—guide him back into the real world.

In the real world, Dan was back inside his own body once more, and he was staring at the distant wooden building that he now knew the vampire was hiding inside. Trapped inside.

“It’s in there!” he roared, lurching to his feet, pointing at the building.

And he set off at a sprint.

12

“Straight ahead,” Conny yelled, pointing through the ranch house’s front door. “Then take a right. Look for the stairs leading down. Follow the others. Keep moving.”

She stood on the wide front porch of the main house, repeating the words over and over like a mantra, her voice rising to do battle with Andrew Lloyd’s recorded message, which still played on a loop through speakers dotted around the compound. So far, she estimated that she had guided somewhere north of three hundred clerics and initiates in the right direction. By the time the kids reached her, none questioned who she was nor what she was telling them. They were propelled forward by sheer panic. She could probably have pointed them at the waiting jaws of an alligator and they would have sped right toward it.

There were so many of them. So many children who Craven had taken advantage of.

She squinted toward the distant gate which led toward the clerics’ area. There were still bodies streaming through it, but many now were covered in blood, and some were clearly carrying injuries. Those ones must have been out there near the perimeter wall when the attack started.

Soon, the numbers would surely thin.

There was no sign yet of Herb, Dan and Mancini.

Conny dropped her eyes to the radio that Herb had given her for a moment. It was quiet, the green on light blinking, waiting to receive word.

Come on, Herb, Conny thought, waving the population of the ranch toward safety.

Come on.

*

“It’s inside,” Dan whispered.

Herb didn’t like it one bit.

He stared at Dan dubiously, and couldn’t help but wonder if the guy would happily take his mind, too; if and when it suited him. If he would walk Herb’s body toward certain death and shrug it off like it was nothing.

“Are you sure?” he breathed, trying to keep the anger he felt out of his voice.

Dan nodded. He had come to a stop around fifteen yards short of a building that looked like a large storage shed. It was a single level, strictly functional. Four wooden walls and a roof, with a single doorway. No windows. The door stood open, and beyond the shaft of light that spilled through it, the space inside was wreathed in deep shadows.

Herb took it in at a glance, and looked away quickly, afraid of what his eyes might find in the gloom.

“I’m sure,” Dan muttered, never taking his eyes off the doorway. He wanted to see red eyes in that darkness, Herb thought, and he shuddered. “It tried to take control of the cleric,” Dan continued. “But you can’t control a mind that’s already taken.”

Herb blinked, remembering what had happened back at the Shard in London. The vampires had sent an ordinary man to kill Dan alongside a luxury swimming pool, and Dan had been powerless to defend himself as blows had rained down on him. The vampire had already been inside the attacker’s head; there was no room in there for Dan, too. It had been a lesson learned while dangling on a cliff edge; the only way they seemed to ever learn anything real about the vampires.

Herb’s thoughts darkened. Sooner or later, as they lurched from one confrontation to the next, never really knowing enough about their enemy, constantly being surprised, their luck was bound to run out.

Maybe it will be this time, he thought, glancing at the shadowy building once more.

There was no sign of movement inside.

“Well, fuck it,” Mancini snarled. He pulled a grenade from the sash looped over his shoulder, but Dan shot a hand out to stop him.

“No,” he hissed. “I need it alive. I need its mind.”

Mancini looked confused.

He missed all that stuff about the river, Herb thought, and his eyes flicked back to Dan. Was he right about the river? He’d been wrong about most other things, but on that one issue he had been so certain. Could it be true? A creature which controlled the vampires across the entire world?

It seemed farfetched, but what other choice did he have but to hope that Dan was right?

Time was already slipping by too fast. If things were bad now in America, they would get a whole lot worse in just a few hours, when the sun dipped below the horizon.

Once that happened, the vampires wouldn’t need to cower in gloomy buildings like the one in front of Herb now. They would be out on the streets, stalking the land, spreading death with every step. A thousand horsemen of the apocalypse.

Destroying Dan’s black river could well be the key to humanity’s survival. Assuming it wasn’t a product of his imagination.

Assuming he’s not insane.

Herb frowned.

Is he?

“Is there any other way out of that building?” Dan whispered, snapping Herb’s focus back into the moment.

Mancini shook his head, aiming his weapon at the door. Herb saw the barrel trembling.

“That’s the only one. It’s just a supply shed. It’s where they keep tools for the garden.”

Dan unsheathed his machete.

“I’m going in,” he said quietly. “If you don’t hear from me in twenty seconds, throw in a grenade. All the grenades. If anything comes through that door that isn’t me, don’t look directly at it. Just run.”

Dan didn’t give them time to respond.

He marched toward the open door, brandishing the machete like a sword.

And disappeared into the dark room beyond.

Twenty seconds, Herb thought, and he began to count.

One.

Two.

We don’t know enough about them, he thought. His mind lingered on the conversation they’d had back in the meeting room; on all the assumptions—some correct, many incorrect—that had led them to that very spot.

There was something wrong with their understanding of the creatures right now, Herb decided. He could feel it, ringing in his mind like a distant, barely heard alarm. One vampire? If they knew Dan was here at the ranch, why only send one?

Yet another damn puzzle. More guesswork.

Three.

Four.

Herb’s nerves began to sizzle. The supply shed looked relatively large, but it shouldn’t take long to ascertain that there was a damn vampire sitting inside it. What the hell was taking Dan so long?

Five.

Six.

Was Dan in the vampire’s head at that very moment? Sitting there in the dark, drooling? Losing whatever was left of his mind?

Seven.

Eight.

Sitting in the dark, Herb thought dimly, and a faint awareness teased at the corner of his mind. The rest of the garden area was sunny. It was afternoon in Colorado, now. Late October, and the sun burned a rich shade of amber, but the garden was brightly lit. The vampire was sitting in one of the few places without light.

Hmm.

Nine.

Te—

They’re not afraid of the light.

Conny’s words popped back into his mind suddenly, and Herb’s jaw dropped as his mind finally solved a different puzzle. One he hadn’t even really been aware of struggling with until that very moment.

Light didn’t kill vampires. They weren’t afraid of it. It didn’t seem to affect them in any meaningful way that Herb could see, and yet they always clung to the shadows. Back at the hospital in London, he had seen first-hand how a vampire had chosen to take out the building’s lighting before it chewed its way through a group of sickly patients who had surely posed no threat to it at all. Why had it bothered?

That detail had stuck in his mind like a thorn, and it had seemed important at the time, though he hadn’t known why.

Now, he did, and the truth, when it hit him square between the eyes, was unmistakable.

Light didn’t affect them in any way that Herb could see. It affected them in a way he couldn’t.

Their psychic ability, he thought. They can only take minds if they are in the shadows. That’s why they disable lights as a matter of priority. Because without darkness, they are just teeth and claws.

That’s why the vampire on the Oceanus talked to me rather than just taking my mind and snapping it in two. Because the room was lit up by fire. Because it couldn’t take me.

Things were obviously different for Dan, whose human eyes had already taken minds in broad daylight more than once, but as the revelations rolled through Herb’s mind, he knew they were true; knew it down in his marrow. The vampires hadn’t disabled America’s electrical grid just to destabilise the country. They had done it because light was the way to defeat them. To take away their greatest power and level the playing field. In the shadows, they were kings. Virtually untouchable. Their inhuman eyes somehow required the darkness; it enabled them to use their most deadly weapon.

Light.

As the vampire myth had been twisted, told and retold across the centuries until the creatures within no longer bore any resemblance to fact, one constant had remained: the vampires came out at night. In the myths, of course, vampires were said to be afraid of sunlight; eventually it even became the means to kill them. But the truth was that vampires didn’t fear the light, they just had no use for it. They came out at night because they could use the darkness.

That’s why they struck the Underground system in London first. That’s why virtually every daylight attack we’ve heard about so far has been carried out by puppets. They are hiding out in dark places, taking minds and using them out in the open because that’s all they can do for now.

Because in the light, they are vulnerable.

He blinked, and focused on the building ahead. He had been so lost in his thoughts that he had forgotten to keep counting. How long had Dan been inside the building now?

His gaze switched to Mancini, who was just about to pull the pin on a grenade.

Herb opened his mouth to say something, though he had no idea what it might be, but there was no need.

A frustrated shout came from inside the supply shed.

Dan’s voice, loud and clear.

“Shit,” he yelled. “It’s clear!”

*

Herb stepped across the threshold cautiously, and almost lost his balance as his foot slipped on the gore inside the building.

There must have been at least half a dozen people in the supply shed, and the vampire had dealt with them explosively. It was near-impossible to separate where one set of remains ended and another began.

The bodies that confronted Herb as he entered had been torn to pieces: limbs and organs tossed around the room like confetti. Blood spattered up the walls; stringy flaps of skin and meat clung to the ceiling, dropping a slow red rain down on his and Mancini’s heads. Herb doubted the place would have looked much different if Mancini had tossed a grenade inside.

The walls were lined with racks of garden tools: pickaxes and pitchforks; trowels and shovels. Herb’s gaze hovered on a pitchfork with something that looked very much like a piece of a human brain impaled on the tines, and a wave of nausea rolled through him.

He felt the world tilt a little, and he tried not to breathe in the stink of the room for a moment, holding his breath to keep the metallic stench of blood at bay as he attempted to compose himself.

Hold it together, Herb, he thought, blinking hard.

He glanced across the room at Mancini, who appeared to be having an equally difficult time keeping his last meal down. Mancini had seen war; he must have seen plenty of death in his time. The worst shit that humanity had to offer. He had almost certainly never seen anything quite like this. Most of the room was gone, buried beneath wet human wallpaper.

It was almost like standing inside something organic, rather than a man-made structure.

Like opening up a body and climbing right inside.

Herb couldn’t hold his breath any longer.

He inflated his lungs.

Drew in the smell.

Bending double, he retched violently, tasting the liquor he’d downed back in the meeting room.

He gasped at the pain as his empty stomach tried to evacuate food that had long ago been fully digested. He’d eaten no more than a few chocolate bars and some peanuts in the past couple of days.

He would, he decided, never eat again. Not ever.

He spat out rum and acidic bile and straightened, blinking away hot tears as the stinking gut-room swam back into focus.

Dan was standing in the doorway directly ahead of him, the entrance which led to the second of the supply shed’s two large rooms. His expression was impassive, like he didn’t even see the same horror that Herb and Mancini saw, and for a moment it was all Herb could do not to throttle the guy until he coughed up an explanation of just what the hell was wrong with him.

Herb took a deep breath through his mouth, doing his best to ignore the odour and almost succeeding, and tried to force his mind to think clearly.

There was nothing like this outside, he thought, and his brain finally started to play ball, piecing together the events that had transpired in the supply shed.

Because it didn’t want to go outside. It refused to go out in the light. It couldn’t take minds out there.

The vampire had remained in the shadows offered by the windowless building, taking the minds of those who strayed too close; pulling them in and spitting them back out into the garden to kill for it. Killing those who didn’t carry weapons; who served no strategic purpose.

“It’s...gone,” Dan said, his tone tinged with irritation. He gestured at them to follow him into the adjoining room, and turned away.

Herb glanced behind him. The three remaining clerics were gone. He felt a bitter grin twist the corners of his mouth. He couldn’t blame them for fleeing. He wondered if it was the sight of the supply shed and the prospect of coming face-to-face with a vampire that had spooked them, or whether they had decided to run even before that. Maybe they had taken the chance to flee from Dan before he got a chance to send them to their grisly deaths.

Smart kids, after all, Herb thought, and he set his jaw, refusing to dwell on the nightmare of the room around him any longer. He marched forward, following Dan.

Into the second room.

There was precious little light in there: barely enough to see at all. With no windows, Herb guessed the room had previously been illuminated by overhead electric lights which had, of course, been smashed.

Yet even through the thick shadows, he saw what Dan pointed at immediately: the floor of the entire building was wooden, thick planks elevated a few inches off the ground by stubby stilts. In this room, the wood had been punched through from beneath. The vampire had literally exploded into the building, and had torn apart everybody who had the misfortune to be inside, probably before any of them even had time to react.

Herb leaned over the ruined floor, peering down.

Beneath the vampire’s entry point, he saw a tunnel carved into the soft earth.

“It’s gone,” Dan said again.

Herb nodded. At least this room was relatively clear of blood. This was probably where the initiates had kept seeds and other supplies: he could just about make out the shape of huge sacks lining the walls.

“We need to follow it,” Dan continued.

“What?” Mancini sounded incredulous. “You’re out of your fucking mind, Bellamy. We don’t even have flashlights.”

“But—,” Dan started to say, but Herb held up a hand to stop him.

“Mancini’s right, Dan,” he said. “First time in his life, probably, but he’s right about this. It’s too dangerous.”

Herb leaned deeper into the hole, his nerves racing, trying to look and trying not to look simultaneously. It was almost impossible to see without light, but it appeared that the tunnel below ran off to the left and the right. The supply shed was an intersection.

He saw visions of the monster sitting in the impenetrable darkness of the tunnel, just yards away from his face, and stood upright quickly, shaking his head.

“We don’t even know which direction it went. You really want that thing creeping up behind us in the dark? In a space so tight you can’t even turn around to look at it?”

Dan opened his mouth.

Shut it again.

His shoulders slumped in defeat.

“I need to get into one of their heads, Herb.”

“I know you do. And you will. But not like this. We’ll find another way.”

Herb gestured at Mancini.

“Drop a couple of those grenades down there, Mancini. Seal it up.”

The American started to pull the pin on a grenade, and Herb turned away. Through the open doorway in the supply shed’s front room, he could just about see the roof of the main ranch house in the distance, towering above all the other structures around it.

His heart skipped.

“No, wait!” he cried, whipping back around.

Mancini froze, the pin halfway pulled.

“Christ, Rennick, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

Herb darted back to the hole in the floor and squatted, squinting warily into the tunnel beneath it, trying to judge its general direction.

He looked up at Mancini, his eyes wide, and pointed down.

“That heads straight for the main ranch house.”

Before Mancini could respond, Herb pulled the radio from his pocket and depressed the transmit button. The tiny green on light flickered, casting an unnatural glow on Mancini’s confused face.

“Conny? It’s headed your way. If you’re still at the house, you have a vampire incoming. Get the hell out.”

Herb dropped the radio back into his pocket. There was no time to wait for a response.

“We need to go back,” he roared. “Now!”

13

“Get the hell out!”

Herb’s disembodied voice echoed in her ears, and Conny’s nerves blazed. She was still standing near the expansive porch, still ushering kids through the house toward the basement exit. She had just started to believe that things might turn out okay after all when Herb’s voice had rattled from the radio she had clipped to her belt.

Vampire incoming, she thought numbly. Like a torpedo.

All of a sudden, it felt like her mind was sinking into quicksand. She had sent Remy away. Her early warning system.

Idiot.

Her eyes lifted to the gate, a hundred and fifty yards farther down the main dirt track, at most.

There were still people coming through it, and many of them required Conny’s help. Minutes earlier, she had left her position on the porch itself and had begun to shuttle to and from the house, half-carrying those who had sustained the worst injuries, determined to get them all out. Every last one.

The majority of those she saw approaching were injured now, and their numbers were thinning fast, but if she turned and ran, she would be leaving them to die. Leaving children to die. Most were moving gingerly, pushing forward through the terrible pain of gunshot wounds or cradling limbs that looked to have been broken in the stampede, where their friends had trampled over them in their unbridled terror. Some had collapsed to the ground, reduced to crawling forward. Others were trying to carry their broken friends.

None were moving quickly enough.

Leave them.

You have to.

Conny turned away, sickness rising in her gut, and froze.

She couldn’t flee and leave the exit in the basement open behind her for these kids to use, not if a vampire would follow them down into Craven’s escape tunnel. Andrew Lloyd had said the entrance to the bunker in the mountains was at least three miles away from the ranch. Plenty of room for the monster to chase her down, along with everyone else. Even Andrew, Logan and Remy—the first of those to leave—wouldn’t have the time they needed to reach safety. If she left the steel door downstairs open, they would all die out in the wilderness. Nobody would reach the bunker. It wasn’t an option.

Lock the door and kill these kids, or leave it open and maybe kill everybody.

The scale of the choice she had to make locked her mind in place, like an engine without oil seizing up. Tears blurred her vision.

Only the sudden outbreak of frantic screaming ahead of her kicked her back into motion, and took the decision out of her hands.

Conny watched, aghast, as the vampire erupted through the open gate in the distance like a sinewy missile, lashing out with its fearsome limbs, tearing and rending, carving a path through the stream of fleeing teenagers like a combine harvester. Blood exploded into the air, great gushing fountains of it, and the line of kids heading toward the ranch house shattered apart.

The monster raced after the nearest of them, scooping him up before disappearing behind one of the buildings that lined the right side of dirt track. Conny heard a scream of despair that turned her blood to ice in her veins. The cry ended with a wet snap.

She stumbled backward, into the house.

Unable to take her eyes off the horror unfolding outside, lifting the grenade launcher she had taken from the weapons locker, cradling it in arms that felt sluggish.

Her finger on the trigger felt numb, barely her own at all.

She took aim at the building, praying that the monster was inside, hoping that the kids nearest to the structure would be far enough away from the blast.

Fired.

The grenade fizzed from the barrel with a soft, metallic whump; a noise that under any other circumstances might have been comically underwhelming. A fraction of a second later, the distant building exploded, and there was nothing soft about the noise, now. It was the sound of crashing thunder, loud enough to make Conny’s ears ring even at a hundred yards.

For a moment, time itself seemed to stop as clouds of dust and debris rained across the path.

Did I hit it?

Conny waited a beat.

Another.

And the repulsive shape emerged from the dust cloud, streaking across the path from right to left, galloping on all-fours at bewildering speed before disappearing from her sight once more.

It left torn bodies falling in its wake. Kids’ bodies, spinning like tops, half-seen in the falling dust, staining the clouds crimson.

Conny let out a hoarse cry, and aimed the weapon again, but her hands were trembling wildly now. Each time it appeared, the vampire was closer to the house, and she had put herself squarely in the monster’s sights.

She tucked the launcher under her chin, trying to keep it stable. Peered down her own sights.

Her gaze fell on two girls, just twenty yards away from where she now stood: one trying to walk while half-carrying the other on her shoulder. Sisters, Conny thought. The girls looked alike enough that they could be twins. Neither looked much more than twelve years old, and one of them had clearly sustained a gunshot wound in her thigh; she could barely walk.

As Conny watched in horror, the injured sister fell to the ground, pleading with her companion to run, to go on without her.

She lowered the grenade launcher.

Couldn’t fire it again, even if the vampire stayed still long enough to offer her a target. Couldn’t pull the trigger.

Not without killing innocent children. Dozens of them, maybe.

A scream of frustration built in her lungs.

Behind the two sisters, the vampire was on the move once more, blurring across her field of vision, never standing still, always charging forward, but at an angle, ensuring she had no shot. It veered away to the right, behind another building, out of Conny’s sight, but she knew it was still coming, now. Headed right for her. It had streaked past a handful of the injured kids without pause, without even bothering to kill them.

It’s playing with me.

A game of whack-a-mole played with grenades and teeth.

Where will it pop up next?

The next time the monster appeared, Conny thought, could be the last. It was less than fifty yards from her now. When she next saw it, it might be charging straight at her, and she no longer trusted her trembling fingers to react in time to take a clean shot at a fast-moving target.

She focused on the two girls. The uninjured girl was leaning over her sister, pulling at her arm, tearfully begging her to get up.

I can still save one of them.

Conny ran forward, grabbing the uninjured girl’s frail arm, and yanked her back toward the house, ignoring her cries of surprise and fury. The girl was small and slender; no match for Conny’s strength. When she tried to pull away, shrieking that she couldn’t leave her sister behind, all Conny could do was grimace. The girl would never forgive her, she knew, but she would save her nonetheless. She had to.

She pulled harder, damn near dislocating the girl’s shoulder, and dragged her bodily into the main house, slamming the front door shut behind her.

“No!” the girl screamed, but Conny didn’t listen. She couldn’t hear anything, now: just her own pulse, jackhammering crazily in her ears.

She ran forward, almost carrying the struggling girl, refusing to look back, expecting at any moment to hear the clicking of talons on the hard wood floor. When she made it to the basement stairwell, she almost fell down the steps, reaching the bottom just as she heard a loud crack from the floor above.

The front door shattering off its hinges.

The vampire was in the house.

Above them.

Right behind us.

If it had seen her and the girl on the stairs leading down to the basement, it would be right on top of them in seconds—

Conny shoved the screaming girl through the open steel door, into the tunnel beyond, and turned in a single smooth motion, firing a grenade at the top of the stairs.

Whump.

Boom.

The explosion was deafening in the enclosed space, and had almost certainly missed the target she had hoped to hit, but maybe it had given the vampire a reason to pause; to slow its attack for a few vital seconds.

The girl in the tunnel lifted herself to her feet, trying to dash past Conny, slamming into the older woman’s unyielding body. Still screaming.

Conny pushed her back roughly, sending her to the ground once more, and her eyes fell on the steel door, searching for the mechanism that would close it.

There was nothing.

Just that thumb scanner.

In desperation, Conny placed her own thumb on it, and almost spat out a hysterical laugh when the mechanism predictably glowed red and refused her.

There was only one thing left to do.

Whump.

Boom.

Conny fired at the stairs again, reducing the bottom few steps to rubble. Buying herself a few more seconds.

Somewhere beyond the explosion, the vampire shrieked, and the noise pierced Conny’s mind, threatening to unhinge it. It wasn’t screaming because she’d hit it; it was no cry of pain. If Conny had to guess, she would have said that the shriek was a cry of delight.

The monster was enjoying the game.

Conny tore her gaze away from the cloud of debris that the basement stairwell had become. The young girl she had saved was crying and screaming, yelling obscenities at the woman who had separated her from her sister, throwing her small fists in Conny’s direction.

Conny deflected the blows and grabbed a handful of the screaming girl’s collar, dragging her down the tunnel, away from the steel door. When she had made it twenty paces, a distance she hoped rather than knew would be safe, she turned back.

Heard that now-familiar, terrible clicking noise echoing in the stairwell beyond the door. Rattling toward her, rapid fire.

clickclickclickcli—

She lifted the grenade launcher, knowing that she only had one shot: one chance before the creature would be upon her and her mind would be lost forever.

She took aim at the roof of the tunnel, just inside the doorway.

And fired.

The blast, as the grenade connected with the roof just yards from where she stood, was enough to punch Conny backward, depositing her on the ground hard enough to make her spine sing. Pinpricks of light speckled the edges of her vision. Her lungs filled with dust. She choked out a cough.

Just for a moment there, before the roof of the tunnel had collapsed, she’d had a brief impression of movement on the ruined stairs beyond the steel door.

It had been that close. Another second, and she just might have had a shot at killing the vampire.

Another second, and those fearsome red eyes could have connected with hers, and she might not have had a shot at all.

For a few moments, Conny laid still, letting the pain surging through her back subside a little.

It was pitch-black now.

The explosion and resulting cave-in had taken out the lights in the tunnel, but she could hear the girl she had rescued breathing. Wincing at the pain in her back, Conny reached out, patting around until her palms found warm flesh. The girl didn’t respond.

Unconscious, Conny thought, and felt a flicker of guilt. She had saved the young girl’s life, but she doubted she would ever be thanked for it. In the girl’s eyes, Conny would likely always be the woman who had cost her sister a shot at survival. Maybe, when she woke up, Conny would get a chance to explain that there had been no way to save them both; that her sister’s injuries and inability to run had condemned her to die long before Conny had intervened.

Tap.

Tap.

Scccccraaaaaatch.

Thud.

The strange, muted noises froze Conny’s thoughts. The sudden, complete darkness had stolen away her sense of direction, but she thought she had been blown straight backward by the force of the explosion in the confined space. Which meant she was still facing the tunnel entrance, now—hopefully—entirely blocked by rubble.

The strange noise was coming from directly in front of her.

Scccccccccraaaaaaaaaaaaatch.

THUD.

This time, the thudding noise was loud, like something heavy being dropped onto a solid surface. Conny’s mind absurdly ran back to a mostly disastrous first date she’d had years earlier, when she had let a bowling ball slip from her fingers as she approached the lane, preparing to throw yet another gutter shot. The resulting crash as she had dropped the heavy ball on the floor had made everybody in the bowling alley jump, and then laugh riotously. In the end, it had turned out to be the best part of the date; the only part worth remembering. All that uncontrollable laughter.

Laughter. Perhaps it could only ever be a memory now, Conny thought.

Because as her brain ticked back into gear, she knew exactly what that thudding noise had to be, and the realisation made her skin crawl. The scratching and thudding was the sound of a vampire lifting a chunk of rock, and tossing it aside.

Digging.

With a grunt, Conny hauled herself to her feet, looping the comatose girl’s arm around her neck, and set off down the dark tunnel, moving away from the noise, reaching out with one hand to brush the tunnel wall.

In the distance, far ahead of her, she thought she could just about make out the echoing noise of footsteps: the kids she had helped to save at the ranch, still running. Moving away from her at pace.

Keep running, she thought. Don’t slow down.

She moved as fast as the pain in her back and the weight of the girl on her shoulder would allow.

And with each step, she pictured the vampire punching through the wall of rubble in the dark behind her, and braced herself to hear the clicking of talons closing in.

14

Herb ran without thought for the slippery carpet of blood beneath his boots, without care for the vampire that might still be moving farther below him, twisting through the ground.

As he ran, his mind obsessively turned over one simple fact again and again.

One vampire.

Just one.

And that one vampire hadn’t even been there to kill Dan Bellamy. If that had been its goal, it could simply have taken the mind of a cleric and walked him calmly into the meeting room before opening fire. What had happened at the ranch wasn’t an assassination attempt. It was an extermination.

The vampires had sent one of their number to wipe out the people who had served them in America, just as they had sent one vampire to dispatch everybody at the Rennick compound back in England. The monster hadn’t been there for Dan at all. When it had realised that there was a mind at the ranch that it couldn’t take—the mind of the cleric, already under Dan’s control—it had fled.

We were wrong about everything.

In London, the vampires—or Dan’s black river—had only been able to pinpoint his location when he had taken a vampire mind. In doing so, he must have inserted himself into some sort of hive consciousness, allowing the vampire ‘god’ he had described to see him clearly.

Taking human minds didn’t have the same effect at all. Dan had believed that breaking into Leon Mancini’s head back at the runway would alert the black river to his presence, but that hadn’t been the case. The vampires were rising in America because their kin had been killed, and the ancient pact had been broken, not because Dan Bellamy was in town.

One had been sent to the ranch because that’s what they did. It was carrying out standing orders to rip apart all traces of the bloodline that had served the creatures.

Wiping out knowledge.

The creatures didn’t kill those who served them out of some petty need for vengeance, he realised. Their motive was far more circumspect than that. They were simply killing off those who knew of their existence; those who might have some idea how to fight back. The destruction of the ranch had nothing to do with Dan, it was strategic; just another shot fired in the war which had broken out across America.

We don’t know enough about them.

Herb’s own words rang in his ears. He and the others were still lurching along a path they could not see nor understand; attempting to combat an enemy they knew precious little about. Even now, he was making half-educated guesses, trying to join dots that he couldn’t quite see or understand.

Know your enemy, he thought. His father had encouraged Herb and his brothers to study The Art of War as a child. The central premise of Sun Tzu’s ancient guide on warfare was that in order to defeat an enemy, you must first understand it.

The most important thing he and the others could do now, he thought, was to survive. To pass on whatever knowledge they had gathered to others. He began to think about the armed forces out there, trying to fight when they knew nothing at all.

We need to get word to the military somehow. We need to start building a picture of our enemy. Understanding the way they operate. Future generations will need to know—

Herb almost lost his footing on something that squished beneath his feet in a way that made his stomach attempt to perform a backflip.

He tried to focus.

Yet, the vampire’s behaviour at the ranch stuck in his mind like a splinter; knowledge that hovered at the edge of his consciousness, teasing his thoughts forward.

The creature had fled. It had the opportunity to meet Dan face-to-face, and it had chosen to run. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, Dan’s theory about the black river was correct. Maybe the creature had known that it couldn’t prevent him from taking its mind, and had been aware that letting him do so would prove to be a costly error for its entire hellish species. Maybe it had fled to protect its master’s location.

Perhaps the monster had even taken the tunnel that led away from the ranch, leaving the ranch altogether. Herb doubted it. Not when there were so many potential victims still to be ripped apart. It might not wish to face Dan directly, but it had surely heard the Grand Cleric’s recorded announcement: if it had been tasked with eradicating all life at the ranch, it would likely be making its way toward the centre.

Exactly where everybody else had gone.

He heard footsteps closing in behind him. Mancini. As Herb had bolted from the supply shed, he had heard a muffled explosion, followed almost immediately by another. Mancini had sealed the tunnels with grenades before leaving. A few paces later, Herb had heard another crash, and had glanced back over his shoulder to see the entire shed collapsing in upon itself.

“Rennick, slow down!”

Gasping for air, Herb shook his head and poured every ounce of energy into his thigh muscles, pumping them like pistons. Running like he had a vampire snapping right at his heels.

Conny hadn’t responded to his radio message. He wouldn’t slow down. He couldn’t.

He tore through the gate, leaving the Outer Ring behind and moving into the much smaller clerics’ area. There was no sign of movement now, other than the twitching of some of the bodies scattered on the ground. Herb’s eyes fell on one that looked different to the others: where almost all had been punctured by bullets, one cleric lay almost in pieces, her body opened up from groin to throat by something sharp.

Talons.

Herb caught a glimpse of ruined organs, and pulled his eyes away. To the right of the sundered cleric’s body, he saw a hole in the ground, roughly three feet in diameter. That’s where the vampire surfaced, he thought. Spat up out of the ground like a fucking geyser.

It hadn’t fled from the ranch after coming into contact with Dan. Of course it hadn’t.

He put everything he had into moving forward.

And with each yard he covered, Herb saw new evidence of the vampire’s passage. Increasingly, those bodies he saw on the floor hadn’t died of gunshots at all. They had been torn to pieces.

Herb clenched his teeth.

I’m on the right track, he thought, and he tightened his grip on the rifle, ready to pull the trigger at the first sign of movement, and ran faster than he had ever run in his life.

Through the second gate, out of the clerics’ area and into Jennifer Craven’s inner circle.

Into the madness.

The bloodbath.

The path leading to the main ranch house had been painted red. Everywhere Herb looked, he saw limbs. The vampire had been moving quickly: many of the kids here had suffered terrible injuries, but some were sitting up, crying out in agony. It hadn’t stopped to finish them off, he realised, because it had been chasing after something. He knew instinctively that the something had been Conny. He felt it in his bones.

He slowed up.

The vampire was still here, somewhere. In the house, perhaps.

Herb glanced left and right, searching for movement; trying to think. The monster, if it had followed Conny, would surely be wherever the exit was.

The Grand Cleric’s message was still playing over the loudspeakers: the soundtrack to Hell on Earth; it made his teeth grind together involuntarily. The message said that the way out was at the main house, but where? Inside?

Herb turned, and saw a young girl sitting with her back against the wall of a nearby building, trying to press her intestines back into her stomach.

She looked up at him.

“It doesn’t even hurt,” she whimpered, her eyes bright with shimmering tears. “Shouldn’t it hurt?”

Herb opened his mouth, trying to find a response, but there were no words adequate enough to alleviate the horror of the girl’s situation. Blood was flooding freely from the wound in her belly, spurting through her fingers, staining the ground around her.

He stared at her, his thoughts and body paralysed, and watched the light depart from her eyes.

He felt like screaming.

Like pulling the trigger and firing off every bullet he had.

He turned away from the dead girl, and came face to face with Mancini, who was gasping for air. Over the big American’s shoulder, Herb saw Dan Bellamy, chugging along at his own pace, his face expressionless. The horror splashed across the ranch in every direction barely seemed to matter to him: Herb wasn’t certain that Dan even saw it anymore.

Suddenly, he wanted very much to grab Dan and shake him until his bones ached. To shake some damn humanity back into him.

“Stupid, Rennick,” Mancini wheezed, sucking in a deep breath and spitting it back out. “Running like that? Could’ve got yourself killed.”

Herb stared hateful daggers at the older man, lost in his fury.

“Where’s the bloody exit, Mancini? Where is it?”

Mancini shook his head and spat out a wad of phlegm onto the bloody ground. “In the house,” he gasped, with a nod at the bloodsoaked porch up ahead. “Ground floor, to the right. But, wait, Renn—”

Herb didn’t hear any more.

He was already running.

*

Conny’s mind played devious tricks on her.

She moved through the tunnel in absolute darkness for what felt like a lifetime, certain that at any moment she would feel something sharp puncturing her back, ripping out her spine. She suffered intense, recurring visions of the vampire stalking along behind her, creeping and invisible, matching its footsteps to her own. Looming over her in the perfect dark with an enormous grin on its inhuman face, waiting for the right moment to tear her apart.

It was letting her feel some faint flicker of hope, wasn’t it? Taking delight in letting her believe that she might escape, only to snatch her life away at the last moment.

She coughed.

Tried desperately to shake off her rising terror before it sucked away her ability to think at all.

Tried the radio again.

She had already tried it several times, and received no response. Either the radio didn’t work this deep underground, or Herb and the others were dead. Conny would have given anything to see them right now. Even Dan. Hell, even Mancini.

Conny staggered on until the weight of the weapons she carried and the comatose girl on her shoulders began to take its toll.

Need to stop, she thought.

Can’t stop. Are you insane?

Yeah, could be.

She carried on, her pace slowing with every step, her muscles burning. She was a machine now, fuelled by pain, built only to put one foot in front of the other.

Keep moving, she thought, repeating the words over and over like a prayer. Just. Keep. Moving.

She almost screamed in relief when at last she saw dim light up ahead. The tunnel was curving gently, but she had to be near the exit, at last. The light in the distance was daylight.

Salvation.

No more tunnels, Conny thought, and almost laughed aloud. No more tunnels ever.

When she finally rounded the bend in the rocky passage and exited into the brilliant afternoon light, Conny staggered forward a few more steps before collapsing to the ground.

In the dust, she saw footprints, leading away to the west, and when her eyes followed them, she could just about make out the distant line of clerics and initiates moving away from her; a snake of bodies winding through the emptiness toward the forest, and beyond it, the mountains that were still a couple of miles away.

Walking farther would be torture. It would be agony. But with clear air in her lungs and light on her face, she knew that she could make it.

She threw her head back, drinking in the air, choking out the last of the dust she had inhaled back in the tunnel, and dreamed of water. A single cup of cool, clear water. At that moment, it would have been a treasure to rival any other. She would gladly have traded every weapon she had taken from the closet at the ranch for just one sip.

Her eyes dropped to the M4 carbine slung across her shoulder. A beautiful piece of equipment; a flexible tool of choice for armed forces all over the world.

Well, maybe not every weapon, she thought, and smiled to herself.

It was time to get moving. The longer she sat in the sun, the more she dehydrated, and the farther away the line of distant refugees would get. If she lost sight of them altogether, she would be reduced to stumbling around in a forest blindly, trying to find an entrance that she was damn sure would be well concealed.

She started to haul herself back to her feet, wincing, and froze, her eyes drawn back to the open mouth of the tunnel.

Movement inside?

Had the monster caught up to her?

She squinted, her gut clenching.

The movement was a product of her imagination, wasn’t it? A lingering echo of the fear that had drenched her spirits while she walked blindly in the dark?

Better to be certain.

She grunted, lifting herself fully upright and leaving the comatose girl on the ground, and moved back to the mouth of the tunnel, aiming the grenade launcher. It was a heavy weapon, and she would be glad to be rid of its weight, but she wasn’t about to dump it without it being useful one more time.

The launcher held five more rounds.

Whump-whump-whump-whump-whump.

Conny pumped them all down the long, pitch-black passage, and pressed her lips together in satisfaction as the slightly staggered detonations brought the roof down, sealing it off forever under tons of solid rock.

She tossed the empty launcher aside.

And her radio crackled to life.

*

Herb breathed a huge sigh of relief when Conny answered. He had tried to reach her a half dozen times with no response over the past couple of minutes, and had just about resigned himself to the fact that she was dead.

He wasn’t quite sure why he cared so much, given that there were dead people everywhere, and that virtually everyone he had come into contact with over the past couple of days had been snatched away from him, but the thought of Conny dying made a well of despair open up in his mind.

It wasn’t that he liked her, he knew that, and it was clear that Conny had no romantic feelings for him either. Conny had to be fifteen years older than him at least, and if he had to characterise their relationship it would have been something like weary parent and troublesome child. Maybe that was it. Maybe she was the mother figure he had never really had.

Or maybe it was because Conny, Logan, Remy and Dan were all that was left of home now. Perhaps because she had saved his life, and on more than one occasion had laughed with him, reminding him that there was still light in the world; that there still could be.

Herb was fiercely loyal. He always had been. It was a quality that most would say was admirable, but when you found that most of your life had aligned you with monster-worshipping scumbags, loyalty sometimes proved to be a hindrance.

It was Herb’s loyalty to his brothers—his steadfast refusal to turn his back on them and abandon the mission, no matter how much he had wanted to—that had brought about the destruction of the Oceanus in the first place. His loyalty to a security officer he had briefly bonded with on the ship had seen him almost burned alive as he tried to save the guy, unaware that he was already a corpse.

His loyalty to Dan kept him moving forward, deeper into the madness of battle with the vampires, standing alongside the guy even as he slowly became something else for Herb to be afraid of.

Hell, Herb wouldn’t admit it, but even Mancini had earned his loyalty.

It struck Herb that only his loyalty to Conny did not bring with it a prospect of him getting punched, killed or mindfucked. She was an innocent swept up in the chaos, oblivious to the existence of either the vampires or the Order until a combination of Herb and Dan’s mistakes on the ship and chance had brought her into his orbit.

Herb would be damned if fate pushing Conny into his destructive path would get her killed. Not if he could help it.

“Good to hear your voice, Conny,” Herb said, laughing into the radio.

Static buzzed.

“Back at you, Herb. Thought you were dead.”

“You too. Where are you?”

“Just exited the tunnel. It’s...uh...not a tunnel anymore.”

Herb laughed again. “I see that.”

He was standing, along with Mancini, around halfway down the narrow, half-destroyed stairwell that the American claimed led down into the basement, and a tunnel that Jennifer Craven had built as an escape route for the oldest members of the Order, to use if things at the ranch ever got out of hand.

At the bottom of the steps, the dark stairway terminated in a huge mound of rubble.

Herb glanced back up the ruined stairs. Dan was at the top, standing guard. All three men had agreed that the stairway had the look and feel of a trap, but so far, no vampire or puppet had tried to sneak up on them from behind.

Herb lifted his finger from the transmit button.

“Anything, Dan?”

Dan shook his head.

“No movement. No vampire.”

Somehow, despite the presence of death all around, Dan managed to sound pissed off about that.

Herb hit the button again. “What happened, Conny? Where are you now?”

While he waited for her to answer, Herb’s eyes dropped to the rubble below him, where something had momentarily seemed to reflect the faint light spilling down the basement steps. He squinted.

“You see that, Mancini?” Herb pointed down.

The radio crackled. “The vampire happened, Herb. I had to blow the tunnel.”

Herb watched Mancini. The big American was nodding, his eyes narrowing.

“I’m on the way to the bunker,” Conny continued. “Looks like I have a couple of miles to go yet. We got a lot of people out of there, Herb. We saved a lot of lives.”

Herb took a couple of steps down, toward the rubble.

“Okay, Conny. I’m glad you’re alright. We’re still ticking, but I don’t know yet what our next move is. If you see any sign of vampires, let us know, yeah? Stay in touch.”

“Will do, Herb.”

Herb started to drop the radio back into his pocket, but paused, remembering. He lifted it back to his lips.

“Conny, I think the vampires can’t take minds in the light. It’s just a hunch, but it feels right. They need the shadows. So...stay in the light, okay?”

Mancini shot a sharp glance at Herb, his expression undecipherable.

“Got it, Herb. Be safe.”

“You too. See you soon.”

Herb slipped the radio back into his pocket and took another couple of steps down. He stood right in front of the rubble, peering down intently. After a moment, Mancini squeezed into the narrow space alongside him.

“It’s blood,” Mancini said. “Black blood.”

Herb nodded, crouching down. He reached out gingerly, running a finger through the small, wet stain he had spotted on the rubble. His forefinger came away sticky with thick black residue. It had the consistency of treacle. “Vampire blood,” he said, standing upright and peering at his stained finger, fascinated. “She must have brought the roof down right on top of it, pinned it under the rocks. It’s injured.”

Mancini grunted.

“Not badly enough to hold it here. A few spots of blood. Barely scratched it.”

Herb studied the steps, hoping to see more blood leading up; a trail that they could follow. There was nothing.

“So where is it now?” Mancini continued, apparently reading Herb’s mind.

Herb began to climb back up the steps, his shoulders slumping. The vampire could have forged ahead, digging its way through and into the tunnel; it could have escaped back the way it had come, up into the house.

“No way to know.”

“Until it attacks us.”

Herb had no response to that.

15

They were wasting time, and Dan’s irritation at the delay grew deeper with each passing moment.

It had been a full half hour at least since Herb had found vampire blood in the rubble blocking the basement, and following a fraught and far-too-slow search of the ranch house and its immediate surroundings, they had discovered nothing other than dead teenagers.

Herb and Mancini were continually slowed by the revolting scenes they encountered; the torn bodies and sightless eyes, and Dan wanted to scream at them to just get on with it.

The vampire was gone. Either it had burrowed away and died of its injuries—which didn’t seem likely given how small the pool of blood in the rubble was—or it had fled from the ranch altogether. Either way, it wasn’t attacking—and that meant there was no way for the group to track it down.

Every minute wasted staring at corpses was another step toward darkness.

The three men were standing outside the ranch house. Dan glanced at the sun. It was a bright afternoon, but the October sun was deceptive. It was already dipping fast toward the western horizon, and he figured they had a couple of hours left before the light started to fade fast. Once night crossed America, the carnage that followed would be worse than anything the vampires had mustered so far.

Herb had explained his theory about the vampires use of shadows; the reason they avoided the light, and both Dan and Mancini had agreed that it sounded plausible. Ever since he had discovered the existence of vampires, Dan had been keen to classify them among the planet’s other creatures, seeking out the characteristics that made them similar to certain animals or distinct from others. The creatures, he was certain, were not supernatural. Their behaviours—and even their psychic abilities—had a place in the real world. They were defence mechanisms; they were predatory instincts. The vampires weren’t the immortal gods that the Order had been led to believe all those centuries before. They ate, they slept, they bred. They hunted.

That they used light—or the lack of it—to their advantage wasn’t surprising. They were the planet’s apex nocturnal predator, evolved to bend shadows to their benefit.

All of which meant that delaying so that Herb and Mancini could wring their hands over the kids who’d lost their lives at the ranch was costing them precious minutes of daylight.

At least for now, the vampires were confined to using puppets or attacking fast and falling back. Night would bring them out in force, and electricity had probably been cut off over most of the country by now. Just spotting the creatures in the dark would be a challenge; facing them directly, when they were in their element, would be near-impossible.

“We can’t wait here,” Dan said stiffly. “If it was going to come back, it would have done so already. And if it went after Conny, I think we would have heard about it by now.”

Neither Herb nor Mancini responded. Conny had given them regular updates on her progress via the radio. She hadn’t encountered the vampire.

Herb’s radio crackled again, breaking the confused silence, and he pulled it out.

“Conny?”

“We’re almost at the mountain now, Herb. Still no sign of vampires. I might lose you when I go inside, but keep your radio with you, just in case. We have plenty of injuries to deal with, but everybody here is safe.”

“Got it,” Herb said. “No sign of trouble here, either. I think we’re gonna have to go out looking for some.”

Conny laughed. “Roger that. Be careful.”

“Will do.” Herb dropped the radio back into his pocket, and turned to face Dan. “So...what’s the plan?”

Dan lifted his eyes to the sky once more. It was so peaceful in Colorado.

Because there’s nobody here to kill, he thought. Craven wanted isolation to hide her operation, but all this emptiness isn’t helping us now. We need to be where people are dying. Where the vampires are.

“We need transport,” he said.

Mancini arched an eyebrow.

“To go where?”

Dan thought back to the news broadcast. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since he watched it. He replayed the stories the horrified anchor had relayed, and conjured up a somewhat-fuzzy mental map of the United States. His knowledge of the country’s geography was limited: he had a vague idea where some of the fifty states were, and he could recognise a select few, like California or Texas, by their unusual shape. Beyond that, he knew roughly where the major cities and landmarks that usually appeared in movies or on TV were located, but not much else.

“We know they attacked the Hoover Dam,” he said, staring at Mancini intently. “That’s Nevada, right? Not too far?”

Mancini snorted.

“Sure,” he said sarcastically, “just one state over; no problem. It’s not like Utah is big.” Mancini rolled his eyes. “This ain’t Britain, Bellamy. You can’t just drive across what you guys call counties in thirty minutes here. Vegas from where you’re standing is five hundred miles, easy. Probably closer to six. And that’s as the crow flies.”

Dan swallowed a curse. Mancini was right. On Dan’s mental map, Nevada and Colorado looked close—almost right on top of each other—but he wasn’t taking into account the sheer size of the country. Close was relative.

Six hundred miles? He thought. No chance of making it before nightfall.

“What if we don’t drive? What about the jet?”

“Needs a pilot.”

Dan fought back the urge to reach out and shake Mancini in his frustration. The bigger man probably wouldn’t even feel it, anyway. He’d probably slap Dan to the ground without breaking a sweat. But Mancini wasn’t offering up solutions, just shooting down ideas, and the casual way he was torpedoing Dan’s suggestions and wasting time made anger burn in his gut.

Anger that seemed to have set up a permanent home inside him now.

He took a deep breath.

He couldn’t be sure if it was the three days that had passed since he had last taken his medication, or his growing frustration at his own mistakes, but he seemed to be just one wrong word away from blind rage at any given moment.

During the trial-and-error period of Dan’s treatment after the knife attack, when the doctors had been searching for the correct combination of meds to calm his mind, he had briefly taken a drug called Mirtazapine. One of the side effects had been rage, and Dan had suffered it badly for a short time, before the medication had ultimately been deemed unhelpful to him. It had been incredible to hear the vitriol that had spilled out of his mouth during that period, like he was a completely different person. Even Elaine had taken the brunt of his uncontrollable fury. When he had screamed at her one night over nothing at all, he had known for sure that Mirtazapine wasn’t for him, but the memory of that rage still burned bright.

This felt like that. He was losing control, piece by piece, and if he was honest with himself, it was nothing to do with his lack of medication, and probably little to do with regret at the mistakes he had made.

It was the presence of the river in his mind, and the growing suspicion that it might be beyond his reach.

Occupying the cleric’s mind for a few seconds—being inside his skull right up until the moment that the vampire’s talons had ripped it open like a ripe melon, had done something to him. Torn off another strip of the man he had been before. Soon enough, he feared, there would be nothing left to take.

He felt...rickety.

Unstable.

Erratic.

Parts of Dan were slowly slipping away, being replaced by something new. In certain circumstances, the new Dan Bellamy was useful—preferable, even. The new Dan didn’t cower around strangers, he didn’t piss his pants in terror at nothing every five minutes.

He had spent two years dreaming about casting the shadow of fear from his life, but now that he had done it, he didn’t feel better. He felt worse. Fear had been replaced by something far more toxic: the unquenchable thirst for vengeance.

Fury.

Incredibly, his mind ran back to the numerous occasions that he had woken, sweat-soaked and gasping, from a nightmare, to find Elaine there to comfort him, and he felt a surge of longing.

He’d give anything to be back there. The fear in those nightmares had been worse than anything the real world could ever have thrown at him, but now, he thought he would gladly endure any nightmare; any amount of anxiety and agoraphobia.

But Elaine was gone. The old Dan was gone.

And the new version had a job to do. Miles to cover. One journey left to make.

An inhuman mind to take.

Maybe it would be the last mind he took. Perhaps it would be the one that finally erased the old Dan Bellamy forever. In some ways, he welcomed that prospect. Losing his sanity, the occurrence he had feared so much for two years, might not turn out to be such a bad thing. The whole world was insanity now, after all.

And memories only brought him pain. Let them dissolve in madness.

Bring it on.

Dan gritted his teeth, fighting to bring his thoughts back under control.

For all his irritatingly abrupt answers, Mancini was right. No pilot was the same as having no plane. Dan hadn’t ever seen the pilot who had ferried them across the Atlantic; he hadn’t even thought about it at the time. The cockpit door had not opened once during the entire time he was aboard the Gulfstream jet. Whoever had been at the controls had probably made their way back to the ranch. If not, and if the pilot had any sense, he was already long gone. He might even have taken the jet with him, pointed it at somewhere uninhabited and not looked back.

Dan turned to Herb. Before he could even ask the question, Herb had his response ready. He lifted his palms. “Helicopters are about as far as I go, Dan. And last time I flew one of those, I landed it in a damn building.”

A bright flare of frustration arced across Dan’s mind. He felt like he wanted to scream, but it struck him that if he took the reins off the emotions bubbling in his head, he might never get them under control again. He’d had his shot at a vampire, and he hadn’t been able to take it. Now, while the whole world was burning, the problem that seemed to have beaten him was as mundane as it was insurmountable. Distance. Travel time. There was no way to get to another of the monsters before night gave them the advantage.

His chin dropped.

“What’s the nearest big city?”

Mancini stroked his chin. “Depends on your definition of big. Denver’s closest. Half a million people, give or take.”

“Anything there the vampires would consider a high-value target?”

Mancini shrugged.

“The airport, maybe.”

Dan nodded. He’d read all about Denver airport, during the months when his only access to the world outside his apartment had been the internet. Denver International was the focus of a far-fetched conspiracy theory that placed the site as the location of a secret headquarters for the New World Order. The airport, the theory went, had been built atop a massive underground base. According to the lunatics who believed it, the entire place was deliberately built in the shape of a swastika seen from the air, and riddled with artwork and coded messages that dangled ‘the truth’ in front of commuters’ eyes every day.

The irony that Conny had just made her way to a secret underground base of sorts wasn’t lost on him. It wasn’t the new world order the paranoid folks on the internet should have been worried about. It was the old world order. The one humanity had buried somewhere beneath its collective subconscious.

“Then I suppose we go to Denver,” Dan said glumly, “and just hope that we’re headed in the right direction.”

Mancini shrugged.

Herb shook his head suddenly, waving a frustrated arm.

“We’re going about this all wrong, Dan,” he said. “There’s only three of us. Only one of you.”

“And?”

“And, I don’t think the vampire that attacked the ranch was even here for you. It’s like you already said: if they wanted you dead so badly, they would have sent numbers here. Hell, it sounds like there are hundreds of the fucking things out there. If they knew about you, what was to stop them all coming here? We wouldn’t have been able to stop them. You might have killed a couple, but they would have got to you.”

“What are you getting at?”

Herb scratched at his jaw.

“I can’t be certain, but I think the vampire that came here was doing the same job as the vampire that killed the people at my family’s compound. It was here to tie up loose ends, to kill off everyone who knew what these things are. Knowledge is power, right? That’s why they have been in hibernation all this time. To let humans forget they ever existed.”

“And so that humans forgot Hermetics existed, too,” Mancini offered.

Dan and Herb both shot glances at the bigger man. Somewhere at the back of Dan’s mind, a lightbulb threatened to blaze into life. Hermetics. Jennifer Craven had used that odd word back at the runway. He hadn’t had time to wonder what it meant.

“Wait...forgot what existed?” Herb said.

“Hermetics,” Mancini said simply, with a shrug. “That’s what Craven called people like Bellamy.”

“People like Bellamy?” Herb’s voice was soft with wonder. “I thought she only found out about Dan when Jeremy Pruitt called her. After the Oceanus?”

Mancini’s eyes narrowed. “Sure. That’s when she heard about him. But her family had been looking for someone like him for a long time. That shit was all she ever talked about. Just like her dad.”

Herb exchanged a stunned glance with Dan.

“Craven had a theory,” Mancini continued, “that when the vampires were out in the open, thousands of years ago, fighting against humans, they ran across Hermetics more and more. Only way to know you’re a Hermetic is to face a vampire, see? To live through the fight. The more the human population grew, the more Hermetics there were out there. The vampires figured it was a fight they were destined to lose. So they went underground. Hid away and let all that knowledge just disappear.”

Dan’s jaw dropped. He shook his head, as though trying to clear debris from his skull.

“People...like me?”

Mancini nodded slowly, his eyes widening as realisation dawned.

“You didn’t know.”

“I...people like...did she have proof? Evidence of others?”

“Sure. Well, at least one that Craven knew of. Found his remains buried up in Kentucky years back. But she believed there were more like him, once. Even if there were still Hermetics around, the only way to find them would be to put them up against vampires, but the Order was all about making sure the odds were stacked in favour of the vampires, so she didn’t really believe she would live to see one in the flesh. Guess she was wrong about that. Sorta.”

Dan’s mind reeled.

“But that would mean...”

He couldn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t begin to calm the torrent of thoughts raging through his mind enough to understand them.

“That would mean that your connection with the vampires is nothing to do with you getting stabbed in the head at all,” Herb finished tentatively. “It’s genetic.”

“Stabbed in the head?” Mancini looked confused.

He missed that part of the conversation, Dan thought.

“Long story,” Herb said, staring at Dan. “And apparently not as important as Dan thought. If what you’re saying is true, the ability to resist the vampires is...what? A genetic trait? It’s hereditary?”

“Sure,” Mancini said. “That was Craven’s theory, anyway. She figured this Hermetic gene had to have been present—in a tiny percentage of people, obviously. But enough that when the human population kept on expanding, the vampires saw their defeat as inevitable. Simple mathematics. That’s why they couldn’t carry on fighting in the open. They needed us to forget, or they faced extinction. Yeah, it’s genetic.” Mancini shrugged. “Maybe. I didn’t buy any of it, not until I met him.”

He nodded toward Dan.

Who couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The knife wound—the catastrophic event that he believed had changed the course of his life forever—might be no more than a trigger. It was the emotion the knife attack had provoked in him that was the key. The anxiety; the uncontrollable dread, the moments of sheer, blinding panic. It was his fear that had first allowed him to see the black river. It was a connection forged by terror, not by a blade physically reshuffling parts of his brain.

Now he saw it.

All of a sudden, it was obvious.

He wasn’t special after all, not in the way that Herb had always claimed he was. He wasn’t some sort of messianic figure. There might be thousands of people out there in the world, just like him. Unaware that they, too, had the ability to fight back. Unaware because that was exactly how the vampires wanted them. The damn creatures had engineered their enemies’ oblivion by fading from sight for a thousand human lifetimes, rising in secret only to feed. Letting those who could kill them forget.

It wasn’t only the knowledge of vampires’ existence that had been submerged beneath the waves of history.

It was the knowledge that certain humans could hunt them down.

“A tiny percentage of people,” he repeated, his eyes widening. “There are seven billion people in the world now. Even if these Hermetics make up a fraction of one percent…”

“...they probably outnumber the vampires,” Herb finished. “That’s why they are engaging in wholesale slaughter. That’s why they are happy to kill off vast sections of the population with nuclear blasts and radiation, or by crashing planes and destroying dams. That’s why they are attacking everywhere, all at once. They’re thinning the herd before humanity realises they can be beaten. The great lie was always their most efficient weapon. And that means that information is ours. Knowledge is how humans survive this. Knowledge of what they really are; how to fight them. How not to fight them.”

Herb was becoming more animated. Taking his ideas and running with them.

“You might be right about this black river of yours, Dan, but we can’t keep stumbling around from one guess to the next. We only made it this far through blind luck. Right now, we need to get the word out. People need to know what they are up against.”

Dan’s mind was a dust storm.

“How?” he said.

“Not by us three idiots charging headlong into a battle we can’t win alone,” Herb said. “Not by running from city to city and hoping to track down a vampire.” Herb paused, his brow furrowing. “We need to get in touch with the military somehow. Make them understand what they are fighting. Give them whatever knowledge we have. We need to find more Hermetics.”

Mancini snorted.

“The military, huh? Then I know exactly where we should go,” he said. “And we can be there in less than an hour.”

16

Master Sergeant Jerome Mills rappelled from the belly of the hovering Black Hawk smoothly, bending his knees a little to absorb the crunching impact, and brought his weapon up beneath his chin immediately on landing, sweeping it in a wide arc.

“Clear!”

He scuttled forward, getting out of the way of the rest of the descending Bravo Team, and scanned the roof for any sign of hostiles. He had an unbroken line of sight across the entire building: there was no sign of movement other than that at the southern end, where members of Alpha Team were currently descending from an identical helo.

“Northern LZ is secure,” he said, and received crackling confirmation from Captain Figueroa over the comms a moment later that the southern side of the building was as quiet as it appeared. He glanced over his shoulder as the remaining members of Bravo touched down. The expressions on their faces matched his own emotions. They looked stunned, apprehensive. There was none of the pumped-up bravado that usually accompanied deployment to a warzone.

Warzone, he thought. Mary, mother of God. How has it come to this?

Jerome could scarcely believe where he was standing. The two teams had touched down at opposite ends of the curved roof of one of the most recognizable buildings in downtown Las Vegas, maybe in the whole of America: the Bellagio Resort and Casino.

The distinctively curved front of the building offered panoramic views across the city beyond the Bellagio’s iconic fountains. Directly north of his position, Jerome saw some of the other monolithic structures that had cleaned out the bank accounts and dashed the hopes of millions: Caesar’s Palace; the Mirage; the Intercontinental.

Beneath the gloom of the heavy smoke clouds overhead, all were now dark, their rooftops illuminated only by the spotlights of the Black Hawks that hovered over each and every one.

Dropping soldiers into the mouth of Hell.

Jerome was one of fifteen members of the 190th Chemical Recon Detachment, and had been deployed out of Draper, Utah with the other battalions of the 19th Special Forces Group shortly after the collapse of the Hoover Dam, making their way to Vegas.

Power to the city had been cut when the dam was destroyed, along with nearby electrical substations, in what was a co-ordinated attack by an enemy that nobody had yet lived to describe in any meaningful detail.

There were spotty reports of ‘monsters,’ none of which came from reliable sources, and none of which Jerome believed. Far more concrete were the descriptions of violence perpetrated by people. What nobody could understand was why staggering atrocities were being committed by otherwise ordinary American citizens. The people spilling blood weren’t criminals or terrorists; they were school teachers, bank tellers, store clerks. An insane army of average Joes.

Almost as soon as the power failed in Vegas, local police had started getting reports of violence in the casinos, and things had started to domino from there. When the police moved in to restore order, the shooting started in earnest. The cops hadn’t restored anything. They had joined in with the madness.

Nobody understood what was happening, but nobody had called it war at that point. Not yet.

Panicked locals and tourists—those who were seemingly unaffected—flooded out onto the streets to escape the vortex of bloodshed, but the attempted exodus from the city was immediately halted by a hundred fender benders clogging up the streets and the fast-moving rumours that something bad had happened out at the airport.

Jerome’s chopper had flown almost directly over McCarran en route to the city. Something bad had happened, all right: several of the passenger jets on the runways—as well as the terminal itself—were ablaze.

Nobody was leaving the city by car; nobody was leaving the state on an airplane.

At the rate that deaths were being reported, nobody was leaving Las Vegas at all.

Intel continued to be incomplete and disturbingly fluid; ever-changing as the two helos had made their way to the city.

The bulk of the chaos was supposedly located indoors, but kept spilling out onto the streets. The people of the city of sin were apparently tearing themselves apart in a repeat of the massacre that Jerome had seen on the overnight TV broadcasts out of England. Nobody knew what was making ordinary Americans turn on themselves with such ferocity, but it was clear that civilian authorities were outmatched immediately. The military had been mobilised.

Jerome’s orders included the chilling recommendation that anyone he encountered on the ground—anyone—should be treated as hostile until they proved otherwise. Everybody with a pulse was a potential murderer.

Nobody knew why.

Chemical warfare was a possibility, and gathering intel had been the initial priority, but even as the choppers transporting the 190th had arrived in town, the parameters of the mission had changed dramatically.

It wasn’t just happening in Vegas.

It was happening everywhere.

Similar mayhem had broken out across the entire nation, and it was spreading like an out of control forest fire. All of a sudden, intel was secondary. Jerome’s orders changed as the Bellagio hovered into view.

Not recon; direct action.

Secure Las Vegas, by any means necessary.

Engage at will.

He could barely believe them, but those were his orders.

Now that they had arrived, Jerome could see why.

Above his head, the Black Hawk banked away from the roof of the Bellagio, its engine howling. Jerome didn’t even glance in its direction.

He couldn’t tear his eyes off the city.

From thirty-six floors up, he got a breathtaking, almost incomprehensible glimpse of what was happening to Las Vegas: the hallucinogenic neon that ordinarily speckled the streets even during daylight hours was gone. Far below his position, the streets of Las Vegas were lit only in amber now. Half of the city was on fire.

Thick black smoke rose in boiling columns toward the sky, dropping unnatural shadows over much of the city. It was still afternoon, but it was late in the year. Even so, there were supposed to be a couple of hours of daylight left.

A couple of hours.

After that, natural darkness would take what the city-wide inferno and the blanket of smoke couldn’t.

Jerome turned away from the sizzling cityscape, putting the now-still fountains at his back.

“On me,” he grunted, and the other six members of Bravo gathered close. Mills’ sub-team was highly trained, battle-tested in more than one continent. He knew he could trust each and every one of them with his life.

A voice in a shadowy, cynical corner of his mind whispered that it didn’t mean anything. No amount of training or real world experience could have readied them for this. The mission to Vegas wasn’t planned, it wasn’t prepared. It was a frantic reaction, and though nobody aboard the choppers had said so, it had felt desperate even before the burning city had hovered into view. Mills had no idea what he was fighting. What had initially felt like a terror attack had turned out to be just the opening shot in a far larger battle. Insanity and savage violence had broken out across virtually every state, and as the bloodsoaked minutes passed, contact with other parts of the country was being lost at an alarming rate.

Lives were being lost.

The battle was being lost.

The Bellagio—despite just how goddamned apocalyptic the place looked to Jerome’s eyes—was where the powers that be had declared that the dire situation would begin to turn around.

The sheer scale of the disaster whispered darkly in his mind that the Brass were wrong, but orders were orders, no matter how insane they seemed.

One step at a time, Jerome thought. Focus on the Bellagio.

Captain Figueroa’s voice crackled in his ear again, laying out the strategy that would ultimately secure the casino.

Alpha team were heading straight to ground level, where they would clear and hold the main entrance. Mills would lead Bravo down from the roof at a more cautious pace. They were going to go down floor by floor, clear and secure, clear and secure, and finally meet up with Alpha at the bottom. Slow and methodical was the key to success. Secure the Bellagio and set it up as a base of operations and refugee centre. LZ on the roof for reinforcements. The hotel would be the first step in taking control of the city.

Simple and clean.

On the far side of the roof, Jerome watched Alpha detonate a charge and breach a fire door before moving into the hotel and disappearing from his sight.

He turned away.

And his jaw dropped.

Through the fiery columns of smoke draped across the city, a passenger jet streaked low, its engines ablaze. Jerome had time to wonder if it had taken off from McCarran—if there was anybody aboard other than a deranged pilot—before it cleared his position by what felt like inches, heading south, diving like an under-fire submarine.

He ducked instinctively, and almost lost his balance as the blast of air trailing in the jet’s wake punched him hard. He didn’t take his eyes off the plane, though; not for a second.

It connected with the Monte Carlo, just a few blocks south, at full speed.

The casino became a ball of molten fire, swallowing up the Black Hawks still hovering above it, and when the roar of the blast reached Jerome’s ears a fraction of a second after the light of the explosion scorched his retinas, it sounded like God screaming.

Simple and clean, he thought numbly.

He turned away from the horror, trying not to think about how many lives had just been incinerated; how many good soldiers were being cooked alive just a few hundred yards away, and gestured at the other members of Bravo to follow him.

“Move it, assholes,” he yelled, trying to inject his voice with enough authority to cover up the shock running through his body. “We ain’t here for sightseeing; we’re here to work!”

Jerome took off at speed, heading for a nearby fire door, preparing to breach and enter the  north side of the hotel.

He would, he thought, feel better once he couldn’t see what was happening across the city.

Things would improve once he got inside.

17

Conny caught up to the line of injured refugees from the ranch just as they reached the entrance to the bunker.

The last part of the journey had taken her into the fringes of a thick forest, where the difficult terrain had enabled her to catch up with the more severely injured, but which dropped a veil of shadows across her, making her nerves tingle.

Relief flooded through her when she heard a ripple of excitement passing through the group of kids up ahead, and she lifted her eyes to see the door itself. The entrance to the bunker was set in a narrow cave that looked like little more than a crack in the rocky base of the mountain.

The final few yards would be an arduous climb up huge boulders that bordered a trickling waterfall. From any angle other than virtually straight-on, the heavy steel door set a few yards inside the cave mouth, elevated above the forest floor, would have been easy to miss.

The girl that Conny had rescued—the last of the refugees to make it out alive—had regained consciousness about fifteen minutes earlier, and when the initial confusion had lifted from her features, she had stared at Conny with lethal venom in her eyes. Conny had managed to get her name—Shahana Akthar—and Shaharun, the name of her sister who Conny had, in Shahana’s words, ‘murdered,’ but not much else.

From the moment that Shahana had been able to stand and walk under her own steam, the girl had kept her distance from Conny, ignoring the older woman’s efforts to explain that Shaharun couldn’t have been saved; that the bullet wound in her leg had been as fatal, in that terrible situation, as a direct shot to the heart. Conny’s words had been met with stiff silence and unblinking hatred.

At least, once she no longer had to carry the girl physically, Conny had been able to increase her pace to catch the others, but she had a feeling that she would carry Shahana’s accusing eyes in her own heart forever. A different, more permanent sort of burden.

Conny would bear it. She carried the weight of many dead people in her heart now.

Her colleagues back on the police force in England, one of whom she had killed herself in a panic, mistakenly believing that he was one of the vampires, coming to kill her in the dark tunnels beneath the city.

Her extended family and friends, scattered around London, now almost certainly dead.

Her husband, who had long ago lost his own battle with the disease that would eventually claim her son.

Logan.

A space in her heart was reserved for Logan. When death inked his name alongside the others, she thought that the burden might finally prove too much for her to bear.

She glanced at Shahana, who kept her tear-filled eyes fixed on her feet, and sighed. There was nothing else Conny could do for her now, other than remove herself from the girl’s presence and give her space to grieve.

She looked away, peering back through the trees one final time at the terrain she had covered, scanning for any sign of movement; of being followed. She saw nothing at all.

There were no roads here; no sign of anything like civilization. Even the ranch couldn’t be seen at this distance, obscured by the edge of the forest and the undulating ground.

She hauled herself up over the rocks, lending a hand to those whose injuries were making the short climb near-impossible, and felt another wave of relief flood through her when she reached the narrow plateau on which the entrance stood, and saw Logan and Remy waiting for her.

At the sight of her, Remy bolted forward, excitedly nuzzling her hand like he hadn’t seen her in years. Conny gazed at her son.

“You okay, Lo?”

Logan nodded. For the moment, the resentment that bubbled inside him seemed to have cooled a little, though Conny didn’t doubt that it would resurface when he had time to think about the disease that was claiming his body inch by inch once more.

Huntington’s was a life sentence, and Logan’s life would be snuffed out completely in around fifteen to twenty years, most likely. The symptoms he had already exhibited: the slight tremor in his fingers and the instability in his mood, would start to worsen. But Conny hadn’t been lying to him earlier: there was a chance that he could live for ten good years yet, and a lot could happen in that time. If not a cure, then maybe at least some form of treatment could be developed; something to help manage his symptoms and prolong his life.

Unless the whole world is destroyed in the meantime.

Conny discarded that idea as soon as it popped into her head. One problem at a time, she thought.

To her surprise, Logan held out the Glock she had given him.

Conny studied his eyes.

He was a man, almost. Still tormented by teenage hormones, still tortured by the knowledge that his own genes were working against him, but despite all of that, he hadn’t yet lost his mind at the collapse of the world. He had held it together admirably where many others—including experienced police officers—had not.

Unspoken words hung in the air between them. From his demeanour over the past few weeks, while he awaited that final confirmation of his illness, Conny had strongly suspected that Logan had been having suicidal thoughts. She could hardly blame him for harbouring grave doubts about the prospect of living on when his future seemed to offer only pain.

Yet he had responded positively to her trusting him with the gun, while her prior attempts to wrap him in cotton wool had only seemed to make matters worse. Suffocating him was driving him away, making him hate her. Maybe, what Logan really needed was to be given a clear sense of purpose and a sense of independence.

“Keep it,” Conny said, surprising herself with the words.

Logan’s eyes were full of hesitation.

“I meant what I said at the ranch, Lo. It’s my job to keep you safe, and I’ll give my last breath for you if that’s what it takes, but the way things are going out there?” Conny shook her head. “You need to make your own decisions, and there might come a time when you need to protect yourself. Or me.”

Logan smiled, just a little, and Conny’s heart skipped.

“Keep it,” she said again, pushing the weapon away. “Just promise you won’t point it at me the next time I piss you off, okay?”

Logan laughed.

A sound that Conny had believed she would never hear again.

“When we get a chance, I’ll show you how to use it properly. Maybe get in some target practice.”

“Okay,” Logan said. His tone was hesitant, but Conny could tell he was holding himself back. The prospect of learning to shoot excited him.

“Deal,” Conny said with a smile. “Trust me, it’s a little more difficult than Grand Theft Auto.”

Logan snorted, but he slipped the Glock back into his waistband, and arched his back, standing upright, puffing out his bony chest, just a little.

“Come on,” Conny said, beckoning at Remy to follow, “let’s go inside and see what these crazy bastards have cooked up for us next, huh?”

18

“Watch your damn shot!"

Jerome hunkered down behind the low wall to reload, and glared at Weapons Sergeant Eddie Baker, who had damn near put a bullet in his own team leader’s back.

Baker offered up wide eyes and an apologetic shrug.

As far as Jerome was concerned, the US Army Special Forces—the green berets—were America’s premier fighting unit. He had no doubt his rivals in the Marines, or even those pussies in the SEALS would disagree, but he was damn sure that no part of the American military was as well-rounded and capable in just about any scenario as the guys in SF. Everything from recon to counterterrorism to direct action fell within their remit, and they were masters of it all. Every single green beret prided themselves on being utterly adaptable, and utterly indefatigable. They didn’t lose. They never lost. If they weren’t currently winning, it was only because they were in the process of finding another way through or around the problem.

They were losing now.

Starting to make mistakes.

Like nearly blowing my fucking head off.

Jerome grimaced, still glaring back at Baker, and then lifted himself from cover, spraying bullets down the dark corridor.

Covering fire, on the thirty-second floor of the damn Bellagio.

Fucking Vegas.

The ‘plan’ to secure the hotel was in ruins before they had even cleared the top three floors. And the first two of those had been fucking empty. As the team had descended down those first levels, checking the eye-wateringly opulent penthouse suites and discovering them devoid of life, Jerome had allowed himself to be lulled into a false sense of security.

It didn’t last long.

Shit, the whole fucking plan died at first contact with the enemy. An enemy that, despite all the hurried briefings, they were totally unprepared to face.

On the third floor down, as he and the six other members of Bravo moved cautiously along the dark corridors, checking the rooms and suites as they passed, Jerome had heard glass breaking and distant screaming up ahead.

He had ordered his team to freeze, certain that the noise had come from one of the suites at the far end of the wide corridor. They needed to proceed with caution.

Yet before he had been able to relay that order to Intelligence Sergeant McKenzie, his second-in-command, the door to the room right in front of Jerome had burst open, and a woman with a goddamned squalling baby strapped to her chest had rushed right at him, brandishing a kitchen knife.

Jerome’s moment of hesitation, as his mind tried to answer the question who brings a fucking baby to Vegas? had almost proved fatal.

The shrieking woman was right on top of him instantly, jabbing at him with the knife, and Jerome had fallen backward instinctively, almost pulling her down onto his chest. There had been no time to react in any way other than the most primal. He squeezed the trigger of his M4A1, unloading most of the carbine’s extended mag directly into the woman’s gut. At such close quarters, his weapon deposited most of her spine on the ceiling.

And most of the baby.

It was the first time Jerome had ever killed a child, and on some level he had known, even as the bullets leapt from his weapon, that no matter what other atrocities Vegas might throw at him, his mind would be scarred forever by that first encounter with the madness gripping the residents of the city.

Tears had stung his eyes, and he had blinked them away furiously, determined that the rest of the team would not see them, wishing that he could crawl away to some quiet corner and bawl his eyes out at what Las Vegas had forced him to do.

But there was no time for bawling. Precious little time for thinking.

As he had rolled out from beneath the remains of the mother and child, McKenzie had let out a yelp behind him, going down to the carpet hard. Another woman with a knife, but this time the attack had come from the side, while the team had been distracted by the horror of what Jerome had just done.

Jerome had let out a bestial roar as he rose to his feet, opening fire on the second woman, but it was too late. McKenzie hadn’t seen her coming, and she had opened up the soldier’s throat like a wet envelope.

McKenzie’s eyelids had still been fluttering, but there was nothing to be done for him: death had already handed him an invitation to the last party. Another member of Bravo, Medical Sergeant Allison Pierce, had tried to press down on the wound, but her hands almost went clean inside. The chasm in McKenzie’s muscular neck was deep enough that the guy’s fucking spinal column was visible.

At that point, they had been in the hotel for a matter of minutes.

On the next floor down, something even stranger—and even worse—had happened, something that Jerome couldn’t wrap his head around at all. Comms Sergeant Jacob Goodman, who had been bringing up the rear, and who was in supposedly the safest position of all of them, closest to the stairs that led to the levels which had already been cleared, had just...disappeared.

Like he had been taken by something. Gone without so much as a whimper.

Yet there had been nothing left on the levels above, after the two maniac women had been dealt with. Nothing at all. Jerome’s team had cleared every single room quickly and efficiently before moving on. They hadn’t missed anything. As FUBAR as the situation was, none of his unit would have made rookie mistakes like that. That sort of shit had been trained right out of them a long time ago by real-world combat experience.

Jerome had struggled to understand. It was almost as if something had crawled up the damn outside of the building before gaining entry to take Goodman from the rear.

Barely a minute after Goodman’s disappearance, while Jerome was still lost in confusion and starting to suspect that Vegas would be his final deployment, the missing soldier had reappeared, walking along the dark corridor toward the others with an odd, unnatural gait. Almost like he was trying to act casual; not quite nailing it.

Goodman hadn’t been responsive to Bravo’s hails, and Jerome’s nerves had begun to tingle.

Goodman opened fire on his own team when he was just thirty yards away, killing Pierce instantly and grazing Baldwin’s shoulder.

And now?

Now, here Jerome Mills was, engaged in a firefight with a member of his own team, ducking behind cover while the soldiers who were supposedly still on his side damn-near took his head off with careless shots from behind.

Baker moved alongside Jerome.

“Sorry, Sarge, thought you was reloading.”

“Yeah,” Jerome snapped back. “Maybe wait for me to clear your line of sight anyhow, huh?”

Baker nodded, and Jerome felt a surge of frustration. The weapons sergeant didn’t need to be told something so basic: the guy had been in active combat arenas on two continents; he had a full decade of experience. If a guy like Eddie Baker was making errors that would make a first-day greenhorn blush, it was because he knew full well that the situation was spiralling out of control, and headed toward a very bad place.

Somewhere down the corridor, Goodman returned fire. He hadn’t responded to any of Bravo team’s frantic yells that he was firing on friendlies: it was like he couldn’t hear them at all.

Bullets peppered the low wall. None penetrated. Goodman would know that they couldn’t, yet still he fired. Wildly; almost gleefully, like a kid with an oversized water pistol.

“What the hell happened to him, Sarge? We only lost him for a minute.”

Less than that, Jerome thought, but he said, “No clue. Same thing that’s happened to everyone else in this fucked-up town. Something made him lose his damn mind.”

But what?

If Goodman had been affected by some airborne chemical or virus, the rest of the team should have been affected, too. It was more like something had got into his head during those seconds when he had been missing.

Not missing, Jerome thought. Jacob Goodman hadn’t just wandered off.

Taken?

Had Goodman been taken by something? There was nothing on the floors above. Bravo Team had fucking cleared them.

Jerome shot a glance around the remaining members of the team. Baker, Baldwin, Watts. All three were fine soldiers. So was Jacob Goodman, right up until he started executing his own.

His gaze flicked to Allison Pierce’s corpse. The medic had taken a couple in the neck, almost severing her head from her body. At least, he thought, she had died instantaneously.

Pierce and Goodman had what Baker had lasciviously labelled a good thing goin’ on. Maybe the speed of her demise had spared her the heartache of thinking about the fact that the guy she sorta-loved-but-definitely-humped had ended her. Maybe.

Gunfire pattered on the other side of the wall again, bullets biting into the brickwork and showering the carpet with dust.

Can’t stay here, Jerome thought. It was surely only a matter of moments before the sound of battle drew unwanted attention from the floors below and caught them in a demented crossfire. Bravo’s crazy Comms Sergeant on one side; more shrieking civilians with knives on the other. More babies.

He shuddered.

One way or another, he had to end it. Had to get down to Figueroa and the rest of Alpha Team and regroup, or at least get out of the damn corridor. They were sitting ducks out here.

He drew up a mental picture of the hallway. Goodman was around thirty yards away, tucked into an alcove that offered him more than decent cover. The solution was as obvious as it was galling.

“Grenade,” Jerome breathed, and the rest of the team nodded, crouching down and putting their fingers in their ears. He waited for the inevitable pause when Goodman ran out of bullets, and then in one smooth motion, uncoiled like a snake, standing upright for the briefest of moments, and tossed the grenade low, rolling it along the plush carpet.

Perfect shot.

The explosion scattered wet, unrecognisable parts of Goodman across the hallway, staining the beige walls a deep shade of red.

Sorry, buddy, Jerome thought numbly.

He focused his gaze on the three remaining members of Bravo Team. They looked badly shaken; flat-out scared in a way they probably hadn’t been since their very first firefight.

“We need to get a grip on this situation.”

No one responded.

Jerome jerked a thumb at the door to the hotel room closest to him.

“In there,” he said. “Secure the door. We regroup, and then proceed.”

Baker, Baldwin and Watts moved immediately, taking up positions to breach the door. Jerome went in first, weapon raised and ready, squinting at the sudden change in light. Inside the hotel room, the window overlooking the burning Strip far below lit the space brightly, in stark contrast to the gloom of the mostly windowless hallway.

Jerome froze.

The room was empty, but he could have sworn, just for a second, that he had caught a glimpse of movement at the window.

Outside.

Like something had been clinging to the exterior wall of the Bellagio, scampering up it like fucking Spider-Man.

He blinked.

Focused on the window as his eyes adjusted to the sudden change in the light. There was nothing there.

He moved forward, gesturing at the team behind him to fan out through the suite and secure the bedroom, bathroom and small kitchen area, and moved to the window.

Outside, the sun was starting to set, painting the skies above Vegas in rich ochre tones.

Below, the city was coloured to match: fires blazed everywhere that Jerome looked. The Strip looked as bad as anything he’d ever seen in Afghanistan or Syria. Worse.

His gaze was immediately drawn to the scaled-down replica of the Eiffel Tower, directly opposite the Bellagio, across the fountain and gardens.

He squinted.

Just for a second there, he’d had the impression of a large, dark figure clinging to the top of the tower like King Kong, surveying the carnage below, much as he himself was. When he focused on it, the figure was gone.

Great. Now I’m seeing things.

His eyes fell to the ground, where dozens of people were running in all directions. He watched, unable to tear his gaze away, as a tiny stick-figure running in a ball of flames charged several yards out into the street and then collapsed, unmoving.

Moments later, a speeding Hummer crunched the burning figure under its wheels, and careered through the front window of a restaurant, spitting yet another explosion out behind it.

The distant patter of gunfire reached his ears. It seemed to be coming from every direction.

Jerome shuddered.

Despite the nightmare on the street, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the real danger was clinging to the wall outside the window, just inches away, out of his view.

Losing my fucking mind, here.

Just like everybody else in this shithole, his subconscious whispered back.

“Clear,” Baker said behind him, the word echoed immediately by Baldwin and Watts. The suite was secure, the door shut. Jerome’s next order would be to barricade the entry with furniture. He needed time to think.

He drew the thick curtains, cutting out almost all of the light, and blocking out the view of the ongoing destruction of Las Vegas.

When he turned away, facing into the room, he could have sworn he heard something rapping on the window behind him softly, almost playfully. The sound barely heard; teasing somehow. Daring him to look out once more.

Click, click...

19

At first glance, the bunker appeared small: just a narrow corridor leading into the mountain; a single tunnel down which dozens of people were moving beneath sterile white lighting that cast sharp shadows on the bare rock walls.

Conny paused just inside the entrance, where a handful of clerics were gathered, along with Andrew Lloyd, waiting for the last of the ranch’s refugees to climb the rocks and make their way inside.

Shahana was the last of them all to enter. She stared hesitantly at the Grand Cleric, and hatefully at Conny, and gasped for air, recovering from the short, strenuous climb.

Once Shahana was safely inside, Andrew pushed hard on the door, swinging its massive bulk slowly. The door looked like steel, at least three inches thick, with a narrow viewing panel made of either glass or acrylic set at head-height, which could also be sealed behind a small metal hatch. It shut with a heavy clang.

Andrew punched a four-digit code into a panel on the wall alongside it, and a lock engaged with a reassuringly solid thud.

Conny had watched carefully as his fingers danced across the control panel.

4853.

She repeated the numbers in her mind several times, committing them to memory. She was willing to accept that there was at least some possibility that she wouldn’t be able to leave the bunker for a while: maybe weeks, maybe months, depending on radiation levels outside, but she would be damned if she would allow herself to be locked in without knowing how to get back out.

Somewhere behind her, Remy cocked a leg against the wall. Making himself right at home.

Conny’s eyes briefly fell on Shahana. Without a word, the girl turned and marched away, heading down a tunnel that seemed to lead to a sort of hub, from which Conny could see much larger tunnels leading away in five directions. This first part of the bunker was narrow and claustrophobic, but each of those five tunnels would surely open out into much larger areas.

She watched as Shahana disappeared down a tunnel to the left with her head bowed, and felt a surge of remorse and pity for the girl. She looked a year or two younger than Logan. Presumably, she and her sister had been without a home, and had found their way to the ranch in the same way most vulnerable kids found their way into the clutches of cults. Now, thanks to Conny, she had nobody.

But she’s alive.

There was nothing else Conny could do for Shahana, or for anyone else, other than to keep Andrew Lloyd on track. It was he that the kids looked to. Even now, the handful of older clerics who orbited the robed Grand Cleric looked to him for guidance.

Andrew, for his part, looked to Conny with a pleading sort of desperation in his eyes.

She thought about Mancini’s first description of the man. He had been dominated by Jennifer Craven, unable to think for himself or to make his own decisions. A mouthpiece, a figurehead. A coward. At first, Conny had assumed that was just typical Mancini bluster—after all, the gruff ex-soldier probably thought everybody he met was a pussy—but the more time she spent with Andrew, the more she realised that the picture Mancini had painted contained more than a hint of truth.

She set her jaw. Andrew was going to have to relocate his balls pretty damn soon. There were hundreds of people relying on his leadership now.

She held his gaze, and nodded at the door.

“Will it protect us?”

Andrew’s brow furrowed. “Against radiation? Yes, we’re shielded here, and the air is filtered. Nobody will get sick as long as we keep the place sealed up. As for anything else…” his voice trailed off.

“Vampires, Andrew,” Conny said. “They’re vampires. Exactly as Jennifer Craven told you. Don’t worry; they can’t punch through solid steel. And if this place really is carved right into the rock, they won’t be able to burrow in.”

Andrew nodded.

“Rock and steel,” he said. “It took Jennifer’s father decades to build this place.”

“I want to see it,” Conny said.

“All of it?”

“Every last corner. If there’s a way in, they’ll find it.”

Andrew’s eyes widened. He pointed at the door.

“That’s the only entrance.”

“They have a way of making their own entrances.” Conny grimaced. “They move like insects. Walls; ceilings. If this place has a weakness, they’ll find it.”

Andrew looked dubious.

“The complex is large. It will take a while to check it all.”

Conny shrugged. “Then we’d better get started. Trust me, a few hours spent ensuring that we really are safe will be worth it. You do not want one of those things getting in here.”

Andrew swallowed audibly, and started to walk down the passage toward the central hub. Conny followed, with Remy at her side and Logan immediately behind her.

“I saw what happened to your country,” Andrew said over his shoulder. “I didn’t really believe, even then. Jennifer had her...views about history, and she spun a believable tale, but...I don’t know. It all seemed so far off. So distant. According to her records, nothing had happened in America for centuries. Not since before the time of Columbus. She believed a rising in America was due, but she didn’t think it would happen for years yet. As a matter of fact, she believed humans would discover the vampires before they showed themselves again. Said humans were spread over every corner of the world, and that no matter where the next rising happened, it would be impossible to keep it a secret. It would be all over the news in minutes, she said. I guess she was right.”

Conny snorted.

“Not exactly. From what I heard, keeping the British rising a secret wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Dan killed some of them, and they didn’t take it well.”

“The Hermetic,” Andrew said with a nod. “For a long time, they were supposed to be a myth.”

Conny blinked at the unfamiliar word.

“They?”

Andrew paused, turning back to face her. He looked confused at the question.

“Dan thinks he is...special because of a brain injury he received a couple of years back,” Conny said. “Somehow that injury...tuned him in to the vampires’ frequency. Made some sort of connection with them. Are you saying there are other people like Dan?”

“Are?” Andrew said. “Well, I don’t know about that. But Jennifer believed there were, once. At least I think that’s what she believed. I wasn’t the one she talked to about such things, not really.”

Conny looked at him sharply.

“Who was?”

“A scientist. A historian who worked on the information she uncovered.”

“And where is this scientist now?”

Andrew looked surprised.

“Here, of course. In the archives, no doubt. That’s where he lives, I believe. Where Jennifer...kept him.”

Conny burned her gaze into Andrew’s eyes.

“I need to speak with him.”

20

Nobody was responding, on any channel. That was bad news for Jerome and Bravo Team but even worse news, he guessed, for Figueroa.

The Captain wasn’t the kind of leader who generally felt the need to micromanage every situation, and Jerome was well-used to the idea that Figueroa wouldn’t be checking in on his every move, but Cap always responded.

Given the dire situation on the top few floors of the Bellagio—and the almost certainly even graver situation down on the ground—Jerome had to consider the possibility that Baker, Watts, Baldwin and himself were the only members of the 190th still breathing.

But perhaps worst of all, even HQ back in Draper hadn’t answered him. It wasn’t an equipment malfunction, not unless it had affected all four members of Bravo at the same time. Something was wrong back in Utah.

Jerome hadn’t told the others that part yet. It was his job to communicate with HQ, not theirs. If they thought they were alone out here, without backup, what little morale they had left was likely to dry up sharply.

They had to get out.

Jerome’s mind raced through fevered scenarios, trying to engineer an exit strategy for them. The roof was easiest, of course: it just meant retracing their steps up four floors. Yet Jerome didn’t trust those floors to be as clear as he thought they were.

Frequently, he shot nervous glances at the window, uncertain whether the feeling that there had been something on the other side had just been a product of his paranoia.

Naw, face it, Jerome, it’s a little more than paranoia. It’s ball-shrivelling fright.

Even if they did make it to the roof, without comms they wouldn’t able to call for extraction. They’d have to send up a flare and just hope somebody came to rescue them. But nobody would see a flare, not when half of the sky itself was made of fire.

He doubted there was air support over the city anyway: too dangerous to fly out there, now, after what had happened above the Monte Carlo.

Too dangerous to just sit in here, too.

He glanced around the rest of Bravo. They had shoved a heavy sofa up against the suite’s front door, and were now huddled together, perched on a coffee table in the centre of the lounge. Each of them faced roughly a different direction, all weapons facing outward, despite the fact that the suite had been cleared and re-cleared. Everybody was expecting to open fire at any moment; nobody knew which direction the next attack might come from.

Like we’re all afraid of ghosts, Jerome thought. Coming out of the damn walls to get us. He wiped sweat from his brow.

Tried the comms again.

Just static.

Sitting in here, waiting to die. The next jet might be pointed straight at that window, coming right at us—

“We need to bug out, Sarge,” Baker said, in a voice that rattled like an old radiator.

Jerome shook his head.

“Sarge,” Baker repeated forcefully.

Jerome met Baker’s eyes. They were wild with concern. Weapons Sergeant Eddie Baker was a deer in fast-moving headlights now, not an experienced combat veteran. He was ready to put his head down, stick his fingers in his ears and run.

Jerome drew in a deep breath.

It’s my job to keep these guys steady. Keep ‘em alive.

He stood, and made his way into the suite’s small kitchen area. At any other time, he might have taken a moment to marvel at the suite itself: all open-plan, dripping with opulence. The enormous window that he had blocked with velvet curtains offered spectacular views for anyone sitting at the fancy dining table located in front of it. Gold trim and sparkling crystal decorated virtually every inch of the furniture. The fridge looked almost big enough for Jerome to park his freaking car inside.

He pulled open the door, peered inside. The fridge was dark, the power long gone, but it was still cold. He spotted prime cuts of meat, an enormous lobster, something dark in a bowl that he guessed was caviar. An entire shelf dedicated to what looked like seriously expensive chocolate, and…

A-ha.

He pulled out a couple of large bottles of Bollinger, and slammed the fridge door shut with his hip. He hated champagne; the fizzy piss nearly always gave him fierce indigestion, and he tried to avoid it unless a glass was pressed into his hand at a wedding or some other formal function. But Bravo needed to calm the hell down. They needed to take a breath.

If Figueroa walked in the door and found them drinking, he’d have them all hauled over the coals until their nuts were overcooked, but Jerome knew deep in his gut that Figueroa wouldn’t be walking anywhere anytime soon.

“Drink,” he said, passing the bottles to Baker and Watts. “Take a fucking minute. That’s an order.”

He waited while Baker and Watts opened the bottles and took long swallows, passing them on to Baldwin and himself. Jerome chugged back a drink that he figured cost north of a grand a bottle, and grimaced.

Give me a Bud over that shit, any day.

He passed the bottle back to Baker.

“I can’t raise headquarters on the radio,” he said simply, hoping the alcohol would sufficiently dull their senses to prevent a panic. It seemed to be working: the other three soldiers just stared at him, open-mouthed. “And I think we all know that Alpha Team is gone.”

Nobody challenged that assumption.

“Take a look out the window,” Jerome continued. “Whatever this is, we already lost it. And it’s happening everywhere. I don’t think securing Las Vegas is an option any more. Do you?”

Only Baker shook his head, but Jerome could read from the expressions of the other two that they were in full agreement.

“We do need to bug out. But I don’t think we’re getting out of here in a helo. So we have to go down, but no more of this floor-by-floor shit. We won’t even make it down to twenty-five at this rate. We go down fast, get the fuck out of this hotel, and then we get out of Vegas. Anybody have a problem with that?”

Nobody did.

“Okay. We’ll go for the service stairs. Once we hit them, we move at speed. And if we see movement in there—if we see Captain Figueroa holding four aces or Jesus Christ himself, I want you to open fire. Got it?”

They nodded.

Somewhere outside the window, an enormous explosion rocked the city, and the entire suite shuddered.

“I don’t think we’re part of the army anymore,” Jerome said, “but we’re still soldiers. So be smart, and be effective. And be fast.”

Baker offered Jerome the half-empty champagne bottle.

He waved it away.

“Eyes open,” he growled. “Let’s move.”

Without another word, he marched to the suite’s front door and shouldered aside the couch they had used to barricade it.

He placed his fingers lightly on the door handle and held his other hand up in front of Bravo’s faces, three fingers extended.

Three.

Two.

One.

Jerome yanked the door open.

And flinched backward as a man in a Bellagio bellhop uniform swung a fire axe directly at his head.

He hit the deck as the axe lodged deep into the wooden door frame, and Watts opened fire, shredding the attacker’s body. The bellhop fell away in a haze of blood and bullets, leaving the axe still buried in the spot where Jerome’s face had been moments earlier.

He stared up at it a moment, his nerves dancing wildly.

“Okay,” he said in a faltering tone. “Now let’s move.”

He stood, ducking under the axe’s handle, and twisted out into the gloomy corridor. For now, the Bellagio’s emergency backup power was still operational, but it did no more than illuminate small squares of the carpet at regular intervals, like runway lights. It was enough to pick out movement, but not much else.

And there was movement.

Up ahead.

Streaking toward Jerome.

He dropped to one knee, taking aim, and rattled off a three-round burst, catching the incoming figure in the upper-chest region and punching them backward. They landed with a gurgle, and went still.

Jerome’s mind asked him a question he didn’t want to think about.

Got enough ammo for this?

He grimaced, pausing a moment to haul the fire axe from the doorway. The weight of the weapon in his hand felt good.

“Save your ammo if you can,” he hissed over his shoulder. “You’re gonna need it.”

With that, he took off at a controlled jog, heading for the green exit sign that glowed softly at the end of the hallway.

21

“Are you sure it will still be there? I mean, what if it’s been attacked?”

Mancini didn’t respond to the question at first. He kept his eyes on the road ahead, weaving through the sparse traffic, rocketing along State Highway 115 at a steady speed of more than a hundred miles per hour. The engine of the ancient jeep that they had taken from the ranch’s surprisingly expansive motor pool shrieked in protest, the body of the vehicle rattling alarmingly, as though the velocity was going to shake something vital loose at any moment.

“It’ll be there. If anywhere is still operational, it’ll be this place.”

Mancini’s eyes didn’t leave the road as he growled the answer to a question that Herb had already asked more than once. The American’s hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles were slowly turning purple.

This, Herb thought, probably wasn’t the time to fire off more questions.

He glanced at the rear view mirror. Dan sat in the back seat, with his eyes closed. He hadn’t spoken since they had set off. Herb wondered if he was trying to search for answers in his own head; trying to commune with the black river, perhaps. Either that, or exhaustion had pulled him into a deep sleep. Herb somehow doubted that: he couldn’t imagine anyone sleeping in their current situation.

Couldn’t imagine himself sleeping ever again.

No, if he had to guess, Dan was going over his own mistakes. All the poor guesses and bad fortune that had led him here. Maybe he, too, was trying to figure out if the black river really existed.

Herb decided to let him be. He slumped back into his shuddering seat, staring out at the horizon. They had been driving at reckless speed for thirty minutes. He hadn’t heard a thing from Conny in that time; she hadn’t responded on either of the two occasions that he had tried to contact her. He hoped that meant she was safely sealed inside the bunker in the foothills of the Rockies. Mancini confirmed that it was likely she was deep enough underground that the radio wouldn’t work, and as the jeep put miles between the three men and the bloody ranch they had left behind, they had probably moved out of range anyway.

Conny was sharp. Brave. And she had Remy. Herb would just have to hope that she would be fine, but some deep part of his brain wondered if he would ever see her again.

He turned his thoughts back to their destination. He, Mancini and Dan were heading to a different bunker buried in the Colorado ground, one that Mancini claimed would be among the last bastions of strength of the US military: the Cheyenne Mountain complex near the town of Colorado Springs.

According to Mancini, Cheyenne Mountain was built to withstand a nuclear blast at close range; it was one of the few places in America that could take an electromagnetic pulse on the chin and keep on ticking. A headquarters for NORAD; a gigantic series of self-sufficient tunnels large enough to hold many thousands of personnel; attached to the nearby Peterson Air Force Base.

When Mancini had reeled off facts about the place, Herb could definitely see how it might be one of the locations where the military could regroup in safety and begin to think about fighting back, but it also felt alarmingly like a bolt hole.

There was something unsettling about the idea that Conny, Logan and Remy had been forced underground, and now Herb, Dan and Mancini were heading for a bunker, too. The vampires were taking the surface of the planet, it seemed, and the parts of humanity that might survive were those who moved in the opposite direction. Down into the earth; into hiding.

“He asleep?”

Mancini broke Herb’s train of thought. The American nodded toward the back seat. Herb half-turned, glancing back over his shoulder.

“Looks like it. Why? Want me to drive so you can go back there and spoon?”

Mancini eased up on the throttle.

The speedometer dropped, the needle holding steady at seventy-five.

“He’s gonna get us killed, Rennick.”

Herb pondered that for a moment.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Maybe.”

“Ain’t no maybe about it.”

Herb checked the rear view mirror again. If Dan was listening, he was doing a good job of not reacting.

“Ain’t just the vampires,” Mancini continued. “Though Christ knows he’s gonna bring them right down on top of us sooner or later. It’s him. He’s…”

The American trailed off, apparently unable to find the words he needed.

“Unstable,” Herb offered.

Mancini nodded.

“More with each passing hour. I could feel him, you know. In my head.”

Herb blinked. He and Mancini had barely ever spoken about anything. They dealt in quips and caustic attacks, not heartfelt emotion. Not discussion.

“It didn’t feel like he was alone in there. Felt like there was something following him. Like a shadow.”

For a moment, Herb twisted his neck to stare at Mancini. The older man kept his eyes firmly on the road ahead.

“He thinks it’s the vampire god. Or their queen,” Herb said. “Something like that. I don’t think he knows for sure.”

“And what do you think?”

Herb frowned, unsure at first how to answer.

“I don’t know. Could be all in his head...uh, no pun intended. He was...damaged before all this started. I think, maybe more damaged than he is letting on. But he believes what he is saying, I’m sure of it. He thinks the vampires have a ruler. Something he can track down and kill. If he’s right, it could be a way to stop them. Or at least slow them down long enough for us to fight back.”

“Hmm. And if he’s wrong? If he’s just some lunatic who happens to have this special blood in his veins?”

“Then we’re on a wild goose chase. But we’re still alive.”

“Maybe we got lucky.”

Herb chuckled. “Do you feel lucky?”

Mancini grimaced. “Luckier than Jennifer Craven. Or just about anybody else Bellamy has come into contact with.”

Herb’s grin faded.

“If he is getting worse each time he takes a mind,” Mancini said, “he’s not gonna last much longer. And he’s gonna get dangerous. When you think about it, he ain’t so different to the vampires.”

“He isn’t killing people for fun. Or for food.”

Mancini grunted.

“I get that you’re in this to be the hero, Rennick. You want to make amends, right? Make up for all the shit your family is responsible for, maybe even stick it to Daddy’s ghost.”

Herb’s cheeks burned.

“But I don’t get the feeling Bellamy is in this to be a hero, do you?”

Herb had no answer.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

Mancini gave another grunt, and stepped on the accelerator once more. The needle jolted up, nudging past a hundred.

Herb returned his gaze to the rear view mirror, and his stomach did a long, slow barrel roll. Dan’s eyes weren’t shut anymore; he definitely wasn’t sleeping.

It didn’t look like he was listening, either.

The thin artist’s eyes were painfully wide, the pupils rolled back into his skull so far that they were barely visible anymore.

Blood was leaking from his nose.

*

In the dream, Dan wasn’t always Dan.

He was sometimes Leon Mancini; sometimes the cleric, whose name he had never been told, but now knew like it was his own. The young man he had walked to his death back at the ranch had been called Peter Everett. A bland name; one that nobody other than Dan would remember.

Sometimes, when he wasn’t himself, peering tearfully at memories of Elaine—alive and well or dying in screaming agony—he wasn’t either of those other men, either. Sometimes, he wasn’t a man at all.

He was something else.

Something that didn’t have a name.

Yet the glimpses of the vampire mind were fleeting and slippery. Like trying to remember the details of a half-heard lecture on a subject he didn’t understand. The vampire’s memories ebbed close, and then fell away when he tried to look at them.

He sifted through the echoes of the minds he had taken.

There were bitter memories of desert combat that belonged to Mancini, along with equally bitter memories of the ranch: most notably the fiery arguments with Jennifer Craven that had dominated Mancini’s life over the past few years. Memories of crossing the Atlantic with her last words to him ringing in his ears: stay in the light.

In Everett’s memories, there were only fractured images: a woman that Everett himself had barely remembered, her face vague, like one of those artist’s sketches of criminals that sometimes popped up on the evening news. The only solid detail that Everett remembered was that the woman had been crying.

A jerky slideshow of Everett running to pull himself aboard one of those seemingly endless trains that hauled cargo across the vastness of America at little more than walking pace.

A single snapshot of life on the streets in a city that Dan didn’t recognise. Everett had been starving; freezing and desperate. Considering taking the only way out that had seemed viable.

Dan cast the memories aside for the useless detritus that they were. If he wanted memories of human suffering, he had more than enough of his own to reflect upon. He refocused, searching inward, peering into the shadows that lurked at the fringes of his understanding.

And sought out the mind of the monster.

The chaos.

The river.

22

“What about the air conditioning? You said the air in here is filtered?”

“Yes,” Andrew Lloyd nodded, fielding yet another of Conny’s questions with weary patience. “We draw in and filter the air from the outside, but I’ve seen the vents. None look any more than six inches in diameter. Big enough for roaches to get in, but not vampires.”

Conny grunted.

She had taken in her initial tour of the bunker’s first few rooms with interest, but had insisted that Andrew should lead her in the general direction of the archives, where the Grand Cleric said that Craven’s researcher would be.

The hub that Conny had seen near the front door did indeed open out into much larger spaces. Large enough to take her breath away. While no single room that she had so far encountered was in itself particularly huge, the general size of the bunker was astonishing: room after room connected by a web of tunnels that seemed to go on forever. The largest rooms, Andrew claimed were buried much farther down: a couple of vast supply caverns filled with tinned and dried food, and the archives. That, he said, was the largest single space in the bunker: a state of the art research lab, library and museum, all rolled into one.

The rest of the bunker was mostly dedicated to storage and living areas, though only a handful that Conny saw boasted much in the way of furniture. The place hadn’t been fitted out to receive hundreds of clerics, and so many would have to sit and sleep on the floor until they improvised better living conditions.

“Water supply?” Conny asked.

“An aquifer, several hundred feet below us. Fresh water is piped up from there, but again, there is no way in for anything larger than a small rat. If anything, given the amount of people here, we will probably wish that the pipes were bigger. It’ll get hot in here with all these bodies, and water won’t be delivered to us as quick as we’d like.”

“Small price to pay,” Conny muttered. “Trust me.”

“I don’t doubt it, but you can stop worrying. The only way they can get in, is with an invitation.”

Andrew smiled broadly, apparently pleased with his little joke.

Conny gave him a baleful glare in return, and Andrew’s smile withered. Now that he considered himself safe, Andrew’s demeanour was changing swiftly. He was becoming petulant, arrogant. Irritating. It wouldn’t be long, she thought, before he decided that he didn’t much need to answer the questions of a woman he didn’t know.

She could see why Mancini had expressed doubts about his ability to take charge of the kids at the ranch. Conny decided Andrew Lloyd would make just about the worst sort of leader she could imagine.

More than once, she had caught his gaze dropping to the rifle she carried, his expression thoughtful. Conny knew what he was thinking: down here, with all the frightened children who already worshipped the idea of him, he had a shot at being a king, and Conny and her weapon stood in the way of that.

He would have to pry the gun from her cold dead fingers, she thought, but even if she hadn’t been carrying firearms, she would remain too powerful for a man like Lloyd. Andrew wasn’t even aware of the most dangerous weapon in her arsenal.

Remy.

Minutes earlier, the robed man had actually leaned over Remy, holding out a hand and mumbling good doggy. Conny had marvelled at Remy’s restraint: the German Shepherd had sniffed disdainfully in Andrew’s direction, and then turned away, paying the Grand Cleric exactly the amount of attention that he deserved. Andrew hadn’t taken the rejection well; he didn’t seem to realise that he was lucky to still own that hand.

Good doggy, Conny thought, and smiled to herself. Remy was a good dog, the best she had ever known, but you had to earn the right to pet him.

They exited a tunnel into a wide, flat room lined with benches and tables, and the smell of soup hit Conny’s nose, making her stomach growl. Dozens of the younger kids were sitting at the tables, cradling mugs and waiting for food. Most had stunned looks on their faces, and she doubted that many of them had much of an appetite, but at least someone among the clerics had the wherewithal to give them something to occupy their minds. To start to make the place feel like a community.

The dining room was mostly silent, with a few murmurs here and there. Nobody much wanted to talk. She didn’t blame them.

“You want some food, Lo?”

Logan had been walking just behind her quietly, listening to her conversation with Andrew. He looked at her like he thought it might be a trick question.

“Uh, sure?” he said, framing his answer as an uncertain question.

“Go on,” Conny said. “Relax. Talk to some people your own age. I won’t be long.”

“You’re leaving me alone?”

“Sure, you’re a big boy, right?” Conny grinned, swallowing back the anxiety she felt at leaving Logan. It was the right thing to do. The way to win his trust. “Just keep that gun close.”

Logan nodded, his expression suddenly serious, and moved away. He would be okay.

Conny turned to Andrew Lloyd, dropping her voice.

“Which way?”

“To the archives?” Andrew waved an arm down a long, curved tunnel. “Down there. Quite a way to go, yet. Jennifer kept the archives as separate from the rest of the facility as she could. She’d be mortified if she knew there were initiates in here, pawing over her family’s treasure.”

Conny waited until she was far enough away from the dining area to respond.

“You’re going to cut that shit out, Andrew,” she said, keeping her tone even.

Andrew blinked.

“It’s like I said back at the ranch, you’re not the Grand Cleric anymore. You’re a middle-aged guy wearing a dress. I didn’t bring you here—I didn’t save your life—so that you could just start abusing these kids again.”

“Abusing? I wouldn’t touch—”

“There’s more than one kind of abuse,” Conny interrupted, cutting through his indignant bluster. “I’ve only seen a handful of people over the age of twenty since I arrived in this nuthouse you call a life. I don’t know what you and Craven did with the other adults, and I don’t want to know, but I do know that you didn’t accumulate all these kids by putting out invitations on Facebook. These are vulnerable children, and they ended up in a place worse than they could have anticipated, and probably worse than most of them even realised. But things have changed, and we’re all in this together. Equally. No more Grand Clerics. No more clerics at all. No more initiates. Just a bunch of people hiding out in a mountain trying to survive. Nobody is going to bow to you in here, Andrew. Not as long as I’m around.”

Andrew’s eyes flashed dangerously, and for the first time, Conny thought she got a glimpse of the real man behind the facade. Put a coward in a position of power, she thought, and you’ll have a bully before too long.

Not on my watch, Conny thought.

“You don’t have the right—”

Conny stopped abruptly, planting her hands on her hips and heaving a sigh.

“I’m doing you a favour here, Andrew. If it isn’t me questioning your leadership, it will be one of them.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the distant dining area. “Your little robes-and-rituals routine: how long do you really think it will last down here? You’re buried in a hole with a bunch of injured and terrified teenagers, half of whom are carrying automatic weapons.”

Andrew stared at her, and something flickered in his eyes. A dim sort of understanding.

“Yeah. Do the math.” Conny couldn’t resist the little jibe, affecting a mild mockery of Andrew’s thick accent.

Andrew nodded weakly.

“Once I’ve seen this researcher of yours, and once we’ve made sure that every single corner of this rabbit warren is safe, we’re going to gather everybody together and figure out how things are going to work down here. And it won’t involve anybody kissing your arse.”

23

Something was playing with Bravo Team.

Tracking them.

Jerome had suspected as much back in the suite, when he had maybe-heard-maybe-imagined something tapping on the outside of the window, but as he led his team down the service stairs, his suspicions slowly became certainty. The four remaining members of the 190th Chemical Recon Detachment were a ball of yarn, being batted around by vast claws that he could not see.

But he could feel it.

The constant attacks by civilians were too regular, too convenient. On virtually every floor, the exit door would burst open moments before they reached it, and an attacker would charge out into the stairwell, brandishing a rudimentary weapon of one sort or another.

None of the attacks had much of an effect beyond horrifying Jerome, but killing Bravo didn’t seem to be the point.

It was slowing their progress, expending their ammo. Making them sweat. Pushing a splinter of fear deeper and deeper into their minds.

The pattern wasn’t random. There was no way for all these civilians to even know that Bravo were there, and despite how quickly Jerome wanted the team to move, he had also kept them quiet. Yet something was observing their progress and throwing obstacles in their way.

After they had descended fifteen floors, he conjured up that ball of yarn image.

After twenty five, he conjured another. A sadistic child, pulling the limbs from an insect one by one.

What would happen when there were no limbs left to pull?

He kept an eye on the narrow windows in the stairwell as they descended, searching for a sign of movement, but never caught anything other than in the corner of his eye. But increasingly, he was certain that there was something out there watching them, communicating with something else on the inside of the building.

Toying with us.

The game being played was, in some ways, more terrible than the violence they had initially encountered. It hinted at arrogance and superiority, at an enemy that believed—perhaps correctly—that it had almost godlike control over the situation.

But what enemy?

Monsters?

Jerome couldn’t bring himself to believe it.

Not until he checked the dial on his watch, and saw one. Reflected in the glass, moving past the window a floor above them.

His pace faltered, just a little.

Don’t let it know.

He suppressed the urge to spin around and fire up the stairwell. The creature had only been in his sight for a moment; it would already be gone. He had no target, but at least now, at last, he had a little intel.

What was it?

The creature was unlike anything Jerome had seen before. If he had to guess, he would have said it was an animal, all angular limbs and teeth beneath fierce red eyes. Yet the monster was clearly intelligent, capable of strategy. Capable of pulling the limbs off the entire human race.

He continued forward and down, readying himself for the next service exit to spit out another horror.

It didn’t disappoint.

On the tenth floor of the Bellagio, it was a child. A pudgy little boy who looked about ten years old at most. The boy skipped out into the stairwell just a few feet ahead of Jerome, holding an enormous knife in one hand and a woman’s severed head in the other.

The sight was clearly intended to shock, but the games being played had lost some of their power over Jerome now—now that he knew there was a design behind them. The situation had threatened to unhinge him when he believed that all the horror was purely random. It had made descending past each floor like taking another step down a stairway to Hades.

But this boy, clutching what Jerome presumed was his own mother’s head between gore-drenched fingers? He wasn’t part of the horror. He was part of the game.

The little boy launched the severed head toward Jerome and charged, lifting the knife above his head, shrieking.

He made it a couple of paces before Jerome buried the fire axe in his skull, cleaving his forehead right down the middle, almost splitting his round face in two.

The pudgy boy fell backward, slumping onto the stairs with a moist thump, pulling the handle of the axe from Jerome’s grasp.

He’d already used the axe on several floors, pulling it free of the meat that clenched around the blade on each occasion, but this time, he just couldn’t face it. Let the dead boy have the axe. Jerome had plenty of ammo left, and Bravo was almost at the casino floor.

Where, some part of him knew, the game would end.

24

Memories of blood and delicious suffering.

Dan walked through them, piecing them together. Some said that the human brain was a miracle; that it remembered everything. If we could only access our memories reliably, we would have every minute of our lives recorded for us in ultra-high definition. Every moment, from the mundane to the miraculous, frozen in place, exhibits in an eternal museum.

If that were true, he reasoned, then the time he had spent in the vampire’s mind—however fleeting—would have shown him much more than he realised.

But there was no logical order to the vampire mind; no chronology, no hierarchy. Just the seething sea of chaotic sensation. Vampire memories weren’t visual in quite the same way that human memories were; they were emotional.

The vampire remembered power.

Triumph.

Fear.

Dan honed in on the fear.

What had the vampire been afraid of?

It had certainly been afraid of the black river, but there was another fear in that hideous mind too; an old, distantly remembered terror.

The fear of extinction.

Dan drank the memory in, tasting it. Smelling it.

Fear of humans.

The vampire had lived long. It had known a time when humanity had been easy prey, when its kind had grown fat on their blood. But evolution had a way of changing the rules of the game.

Over eons, the humans had become larger. Stronger. To the vampire’s eye, they evolved at a frenetic pace, always breeding, always changing. They began to use tools. They began to build. Communication made them stronger. With each iteration, evolution made killing them more difficult—and in some ways more enjoyable. Thrilling, even.

Until one day, a human had found a way to fight back.

A vampire died on the point of a spear.

An aberration.

Until another died with a hatchet buried in its skull. And another. In different times, in different parts of the world.

The black river saw all, it felt each and every death. It fed the news of vampire losses back to its children.

Humans weren’t just prey; not anymore. They had become dangerous. One particular breed could look a vampire right in the eye.

And kill it.

He searched further, prising open the memory, and then, all of a sudden he was looking at it. The river itself. Something like a vampire in shape, but liquid, amorphous. A rippling obscenity; an entity that had crawled from the time before time. An ancient parasite that had survived in the shadows, hiding its power from sight.

It was real.

Dan’s eyes flared open, and he vomited blood onto his lap.

He was in a moving vehicle, sitting in the back seat. A familiar face leaned over the seat in front of him.

Herb.

The younger man stared at Dan with eyes full of concern. Herb was talking, but for a moment, Dan couldn’t hear him over the rushing of blood in his ears.

He vomited again.

Wiped at his mouth, his hand coming away red.

So much blood.

“Dan...Dan? Are you still with us, mate?”

Reality snapped back into place: a sensation that felt to Dan like his ears popping as if he were sitting aboard a plane as it climbed far too steeply.

He shuddered, remembering the dream.

Nodded.

“I’m okay.”

“What happened?”

“I was trying to remember….what it felt like...to be inside the vampire’s head.”

“Why?”

“To see if there was anything I missed.”

“And was there?”

Dan shook his head. It felt like his brain might fall out of his ears at any moment.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I think Mancini is right. There were others, like me. Maybe still are. I think the vampires were afraid of us.”

Herb nodded, his eyes widening a little as Dan coughed out another mouthful of blood.

“Hang in there,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

Dan slumped back in his seat, his head lolling. Each time he wanted to access the ability that the connection with the black river gave him, it got easier, but in the way that an addict might find it easier to take a drug. The effect on his body and his mind was worsening.

He felt fatigued now, old and tired. Sick in his bones.

He focused on the road as Mancini swung the jeep off the highway onto a smaller, private road. Up ahead, a sign read Cheyenne Mountain Complex.

“You think they’ll let us in?” Herb asked.

“Only one way to find out,” Mancini said. “But maybe hold off on the vampire talk until we’re inside, okay?”

Herb gave a noncommittal murmur by way of response.

“Doesn’t look like much,” he said.

“It’s not much, at least, not above ground. Just an entrance. All the action happens underground, behind twenty-five ton steel doors.”

“Uh-huh. So I suppose we need to attract their attention somehow?”

“I doubt it. If the place is operational, they already know we’re here. They knew the minute we left the interstate.”

Mancini steered the jeep along the winding road toward an innocuous-looking security hut alongside a wooden barrier.

“Looks like nobody’s home,” Herb said grimly. The guard hut was empty. Beyond it, past a wire fence, there was no sign of movement.

“Looks that way,” Mancini agreed.

He smashed through the wooden barrier without slowing.

Dan peered around the compound as the jolt of impact ran through the vehicle. He’d read plenty about Cheyenne Mountain, too. It seemed like every part of America had its own attendant conspiracy theory. In this case, the NORAD installation was supposedly a front for an alien coverup. It wasn’t the US military who occupied the giant bunker in the Colorado countryside. It was the Greys. Or the lizard-men, he couldn’t remember.

Right now though, Herb’s initial assessment looked accurate. There were a handful of vehicles on show on the road leading to the main entrance but all looked abandoned. There was no sign of life; alien, human, vampire or otherwise.

Mancini aimed for a gigantic metal mouth carved into the base of Cheyenne Mountain, and suddenly they were powering through a tunnel large enough to accommodate a train. Two-lane blacktop bordered by rough-hewn granite walls.

Mancini steered along it for a hundred yards before it swerved suddenly to the right, and he slammed on the brakes. The jeep screeched to a halt just yards away from the enormous steel door.

Mancini stepped out of the driver’s seat, leaning back in to press on the horn. Three long, loud, echoing blasts.

There was no response.

Dan lifted his eyes to the roof of the tunnel. Far above it, out of sight, the skies were already darkening.

“Shit,” Herb said. “I think it’s time we started talking about what we do now. We’ll have to head back to the ranch. Meet Conny at the bunker. It’ll be dark soon. We can’t do anything without light. We can figure out our next move, come back out in the morning.”

“I doubt there’ll be much left in the morning,” Dan said quietly.

Mancini glared at them both and shook his head.

He leaned on the horn again. A single press.

“Hey!” he roared, screaming at the giant metal door. “We know how to stop them!”

Mancini stood, his head cocked to one side.

Waiting.

Waiting.

And just when it seemed like wasted breath, spotlights above the huge door flared on, and a beeping alarm rang out.

The door began to open.

25

It had taken an almost painfully long time to reach what Andrew Lloyd claimed was the lowest level of the bunker in the Rocky Mountains. The tunnels and cracks in the rock seemed endless, but she had seen no sign of vulnerability as she headed down to the bottom of the complex. By the time the ever-narrowing tunnels finally opened out into a series of huge, flat caverns, even Remy’s head had dropped with exhaustion.

Conny’s back ached, and her feet ached even more, but she was satisfied. She hadn’t quite seen all of the bunker, she was sure, but everything she had seen had backed up Lloyd’s assessment: the walls were solid rock. There was no way in.

Safe at last.

The first of the huge caverns on what Conny thought of as the ground floor contained enough food to make her dizzy. Enormous sacks of rice and dried pasta, nuts and seeds sat alongside seemingly endless stacks of canned goods.

Remy seemed to know what was in those cans. He stared up at Conny with pleading eyes until at last, she laughed, and picked out a can of Campbell’s meatballs with a ring-pull opener.

“Want this one, Rem?”

Remy cocked his head to the side, staring at Conny like she was a crossword puzzle that he almost had the answers to, until she laughed again and deposited the meatballs right onto the rocky ground. Almost as soon they landed, they were gone. Remy devoured the entire contents of the can in a half-dozen enormous bites, and continued to lick the floor clean until Conny opened up another can. Stewed steak.

Remy’s tail wagged uncontrollably.

The steak didn’t last much longer than the meatballs, and Conny left Remy rubbing his face on the floor in happiness, getting the last of the gravy all over himself. She opened a huge bottle of water that was far too big for her to lift, and she tilted it slightly, cupping her palm to catch the falling liquid; alternating between splashing it over her grime-encrusted face and taking long, delicious mouthfuls until she felt like her stomach was going to pop.

When she pulled her hand away and wiped her face, she found Remy’s face directly below the huge bottle, eagerly lapping at the trickling water. She tilted it a little further, splashing his face and making him jump.

“Turned out to be a good day after all, huh, Rem?”

Remy sneezed the water out of his nose and carried on lapping, and Conny wished that her life could be as simple as a dog’s. Right now, Remy was about as happy as any living creature could get. Food and water in his belly, and a chance to take the weight off his feet for a minute. That was all it took.

In fairness, Conny decided, her own satisfaction wasn’t too far behind the German Shepherd’s, despite her reluctance to eat cold meatballs directly off the floor. After all, Logan was safe here. She was safe. One way or another, she had navigated her son halfway around the world while it fell apart all around them, and she had wound up with food and shelter.

Even Andrew Lloyd—after an initial period of sulking about being put in his place—seemed to have relaxed a little. Maybe he had come to the conclusion that Conny wasn’t interested in replacing Jennifer Craven as his personal tormentor.

More importantly, as long as the front door remained shut, she’d never have to look at a vampire ever again. The only thing missing right now was the presence of Herb and Dan, but they knew how to handle themselves out there, better than anyone.

She had her doubts about Dan’s black river theory—hell, she had her doubts about the guy’s sanity—but if it turned out he was correct, and if he succeeded in reaching the vampire ruler that he believed was out there, the next time Conny felt sunlight on her face, it might even all be over.

Andrew Lloyd hovered close by, shuffling a little impatiently.

“The archives are that way,” he said, pointing at a distant tunnel.

Conny nodded, and started to move when her eyes caught a can of sliced peaches in syrup.

She pulled it off the pile and sat, wincing at the pain in her feet.

“It can wait a few minutes,” she said, and she twisted the ring-pull, opening the can with a pop.

Remy’s ears perked up once more.

*

Shahana couldn’t eat.

She’d had walked alone for a while in the gloomy tunnels with her grief roaring in her ears like thunder. In her young life, she had never experienced emotion quite so violent as the despair she felt at being separated from Shaharun.

The two girls were twins—not quite identical in appearance, but identical in virtually every other way. Hana and Runa; two sides of the same coin. Their bond had been almost supernatural, the gift that only those grown together in the same womb seemed to receive. They did more than finish each other’s sentences: Hana could feel her sister’s joy or sadness or pain as if it were her own. The two girls were inseparable.

Until the woman in the British cop’s uniform had separated them.

And left Runa to die.

Violent spasms of emotion had wracked Shahana’s slender body as she drifted through the dark tunnels aimlessly. Until that moment in her life, she hadn’t realised that it was possible for thoughts and feelings to ache like this, to tear and rip at her like serrated blades.

She wanted more than anything to just turn her mind off, to stem the tide of agonising memories that made her want to scream until her lungs burned. If she had a weapon, she thought she would have ended the pain.

But she was too young to carry a firearm.

Shahana and Runa had been new initiates, barely three months at the ranch after being picked up on the streets of Salt Lake City. The plan, when the two girls had fled from their home in Seattle, had been to make it to Las Vegas. Shahana had harboured fuzzy notions of learning to gamble, maybe even getting a job in the casinos when she was old enough. Vegas was the city of fortune, and she and her sister were due a slice of that.

Still, when the clerics from something called the Order had offered the two sisters a home, and they had been hungry and cold enough to accept, it hadn’t seemed like a bad decision. The ranch was devoted to a strange religion, but the people there seemed content. None of them sought to do the things to Hana and Runa that a father should never do.

Now, the ranch was gone.

Runa was gone.

And only pain remained. Blinding, searing, inescapable.

When it felt like she might lose her mind in endless screaming, Shahana had followed the noise of distant voices through the unfamiliar tunnels until she came across a large dining area. She entered, just in time to see the hateful police bitch and her dog leaving the room, and took a seat at one of the long wooden tables.

She couldn’t eat.

But she could listen.

She let the voices of the other initiates and clerics wash over her, allowing the hum of conversation to push her turbulent thoughts aside. She wanted only to be numb.

Company helped.

She sat with her head bowed, staring at her slender fingers, and gradually her mind hushed.

The pain of her loss receded.

She drew in a deep breath.

And her fingers clenched into fists, her jaw dropping.

Runa was still alive. Shahana could feel her out there somewhere. Distant, yet the bond that had held the sisters together since birth wasn’t broken.

Without a glance at the people in the dining area, Shahana scuttled away, following her feelings through a maze of dim tunnels until finally she reached an area that she recognised: the five-way hub just inside the main entrance.

There was nobody around.

Shahana raced up the gently sloping exit tunnel and threw herself at the huge steel door, lifting onto her tiptoes and pulling open the viewing hatch.

She peered through the narrow window.

Outside, day was beginning to turn to dusk. Among the rocks and trees, the shadows were long and deep. Impenetrable.

Shahana squinted.

Someone was moving out there. A small figure, stumbling toward the door as though injured.

The figure stepped out into a shaft of fading sunlight, and Shahana’s breath caught in her throat.

It was Shaharun. Barely able to walk with the gunshot wound in her thigh, and now her T-shirt, too, was stained dark with blood, but she was alive.

“Runa,” Shahana whimpered, and her eyes darted to the control panel next to the door. It had been a four-digit code that the Grand Cleric used, hadn’t it? Like an ATM.

Shahana frowned.

She had watched the door being shut, but hadn’t been paying much attention. Her mind had been filled only with that crippling grief.

She tried to replay the memory in her mind.

8453.

She jabbed at the buttons, and the control panel offered an apologetic beep.

8435.

Beep.

Shahana felt like screaming. She would have to find her way back to the maze; find someone who could open the door and then persuade them that her sister was still alive outside. By the time she managed it, Runa would surely be gone, or dead.

4853.

Ping!

Clunk.

The door unlocked with a sound like a hammer beating on steel and Shahana let out a triumphant gasp. She wrapped her small hands around the handle and heaved, pulling the door with all her might, pressing against the frame with the sole of her boot, putting her entire body weight into it.

The thick steel door opened slowly.

And, at last, Shahana was able to rocket out of the bunker into the cool late-afternoon air.

She clambered down over the rocks next to the waterfall, never taking her eyes off her injured sister, afraid to even blink; certain that, at any moment, Runa would turn out to be a hallucination.

Finally, she threw her arms around her sister.

Not a hallucination.

Real.

Alive.

“Runa,” Shahana cried, unable to do much more than choke out sobs that felt like they were trying to rip her lungs right out of her chest. She felt her sister’s arms wrap around her tightly, pulling her close.

Too tightly.

Pain spiked in Shahana’s back. It felt like Runa was trying to crush her ribcage.

“Runa...what are you...doing?”

Shahana struggled, trying to break free of the vise that her beloved sister’s arms had become.

Runa lowered her head as though moving in for a kiss, and drove her teeth down into the soft meat of Shahana’s throat.

The pain, as Runa’s teeth pierced muscle and tendon, was excruciating, but it was nothing compared to the agony that exploded in Shahana’s mind when her sister’s jaw clenched and she began to pull away slowly, tearing out a chunk of flesh by increments. Pulling and pulling, until finally Shahana’s throat let it go with a sucking, popping sound.

Shahana’s mind howled.

She thrashed, unable to break her sister’s grip.

Watching in horror as her body’s precious red fuel pumped away at an obscene rate, drenching Runa’s impassive face.

Watching Runa chew.

Swallow.

She’s...eating me, Shahana thought, as Runa eased her terrible jaws forward and began to take another bite.

Shahana’s knees liquefied, and she slumped, held upright only by her sister now.

She watched helplessly as Runa devoured her and, finally, when her beautiful sister had taken a fourth large mouthful, ripping off Shahana’s cheek like a slice of cured ham, the world began to flicker and fade, and Runa released her grip.

Shahana tumbled to the rocky ground, and she saw a shape that she didn’t understand, and which had no business being a part of the real world. It was, she decided numbly, a hallucination. Clearly, when some people were on the brink of death, they didn’t see long tunnels and white lights. They saw monsters.

Shahana saw a monster.

A hideous, angular demon made of spikes and barbs, like a giant insect walking on two legs, clambering up the rocks alongside the waterfall.

Making its way toward the door that she had left open.

Almost as soon as she had glimpsed it, the creature was gone, and Shahana’s last sight before death finally took her was Runa’s blank and bloodied face, hovering right above her own, moving in closer.

Jaws widening to chew out her sister’s eyes.

26

The final few floors had been the worst of all for Jerome, but not because they threw new horrors in his direction.

Because they didn’t.

Following the appearance of the pudgy boy carrying the severed head, Jerome had continued to lead Bravo Team down the sparse service stairwell, and for a while the bizarre attacks on each floor had kept coming like clockwork. A maid on the ninth floor, a businessman in a crumpled suit on the eighth. On seven, it had been a hooker, coming at Jerome with a damn stiletto heel for a weapon. It was a sick joke, a waste of precious ammo. The only purpose it served was to keep them moving, and keep their nerves raw.

And then, with a handful of floors still to descend...nothing.

No more attacks.

Jerome felt the confidence that had leaked out of the other three soldiers beginning to return. They picked up the pace again, they moved with purpose. But the sudden stillness of the Bellagio wrapped invisible fingers around Jerome’s heart and squeezed.

The creature—or creatures—that had been playing a game with them weren’t playing anymore. The fun was over.

We need to get the hell out of this building.

Jerome tried to remember the layout of the Bellagio. He’d had a few minutes to pore over schematics on a tablet computer during the helo ride, but the memories were fracturing, pulled apart by the fear and constant violence.

He could only remember vague details.

The ground floor of the hotel contained the casino itself, of course, but there were also large dining areas, the botanical gardens; a small and highly exclusive shopping mall; the enormous hotel lobby.

The frantic battles on the top floors and subsequent bloody descent had him all turned around. If they were lucky, he thought, the narrow stairwell would lead them into the mall or the gardens: areas that might have more than one exit close by. All he wanted to do now was put the claustrophobia of the hotel behind him. Get out into the open air. Out on the streets, Bravo would be able to move much quicker, and they would be able to identify threats before they appeared out of nowhere, right on top of them.

The gardens, he thought hopefully, as he reached the bottom of the winding stairs at last. The gardens, or the mall.

Come on, be lucky.

He pushed open the door at the foot of the stairs, and almost laughed.

Nobody at the Bellagio was ever lucky.

Rows and rows of slot machines greeted him. It was the gaming floor, where windows were few and far between…

...and bodies were everywhere.

Pieces of bodies, to be more accurate.

Countless numbers of people had been massacred on the gaming floor, their bodies ripped to shreds. This devastation wasn’t the work of human hands; it couldn’t be.

The corpses Jerome saw dotted everywhere hadn’t been stabbed or shot; they hadn’t even been sliced into pieces by axe-wielding bellhops. It looked like a pack of wild dogs had been set loose in the Bellagio, and had chewed their way through everything with a pulse.

Jerome stepped into the huge, dark room cautiously, working his way around an unidentifiable hunk of meat, and heard one of his team fighting back the urge to retch behind him.

Jerome had an urge, too: the urge to break into a sprint, to run screaming from the horror and dive through the first window he saw. He suppressed it, and moved to the nearest bank of slot machines, crouching down behind them.

After a moment of stunned paralysis, the three remaining members of Bravo team joined him.

“Eyes on that door,” Jerome whispered to Baldwin, nodding at the door they had just walked through. Baldwin nodded, rubbing at his injured shoulder, his eyes widening in understanding. They were out in the open now, vulnerable on all sides.

“We’re dealing with some kind of creature,” Jerome breathed. “I saw it, back on the stairs, just for a second. I think there’s more than one.” He lifted a palm, staving off the inevitable questions before the others had a chance to voice them. “I didn’t get a good look at it. I think it’s humanoid, but it was moving like an insect, crawling up the outside of the building.”

He watched as Baker and Watts lifted terrified eyes to the ceiling. Baldwin, commendably, kept his gaze fixed on the stairwell door as ordered, but he was trembling visibly, his weapon shaking violently in his hands.

“Yeah,” Jerome said, grimacing. “Gotta check above us. Check every corner. And watch the windows. They know we are here, but I don’t think they know we are aware of them.” He shrugged. It was barely an advantage at all, but it was all they had.

He tried his radio again, in vain hope of hearing Figueroa’s voice—or anybody’s voice.

“This is Master Sergeant Jerome Mills of the 190th out of Draper, Utah. Do you read me?”

He waited for what felt like a lifetime.

There was no response. Just faint, buzzing static. If there was anybody out there who could hear him broadcasting now, they were unable to respond. Or unwilling. Jerome’s mind flashed back to Jacob Goodman, and the way he had turned on his own so suddenly.

Unwilling, he thought again, and gritted his teeth. He didn’t want to think any more about what that meant.

The team had to move. Every second spent out in the open, wondering if something had followed them down the stairs, felt like a bad gamble.

“Go,” he hissed, waving Baker forward. “Check your corners.”

Baker shot Jerome a why-me-first look, but he set off, moving past the bank of slots and out into the first of the wider gaming areas.

Jerome and Watts followed, with Baldwin bringing up the rear. The four men moved back-to-back in a tight, constantly rotating cluster, scanning for movement in all directions, their weapons raised and ready.

Jerome’s heart pounded as it never had before. Each frantic beat felt like a new tear in his chest, as though his pectoral muscles were slowly being pulled apart.

Stretched on a rack of insanity.

The brutality apparent everywhere was mind-boggling; incomprehensible, and yet Jerome saw strange narrative, too. Far across the slot machines, he saw a huge Wheel of Fortune with a headless body affixed to it. The corpse’s hands pointed at the segment of the wheel marked jackpot.

On one of the craps tables, he saw a pair of bloody eyes where he might have expected to see dice.

His flashlight continually played over horrors that seemed to tell a tale of sadistic humour; dark enjoyment. The massacre was as bizarrely playful as it was abhorrent. Whatever did this, Jerome thought, it enjoyed every last seco—

Click, click.

Bravo Team froze as one at an intersection beneath a golden silk awning.

The noise that echoed through the apparently-still casino was soft, but it rattled like gunfire in Jerome’s ears.

It was the sound of company.

Somewhere out there, among the card tables and roulette wheels and bars, something inhuman was moving.

The four men remained locked in place for what felt like an eternity. It was impossible for Jerome to tell which direction the noise had come from.

“Sarge?” Watts whispered. In his terror, the hardened veteran sounded like a lost little boy.

Jerome waited a moment more, and nodded toward a distant doorway, and a sign marked Lobby.

“Go,” he hissed.

The team moved faster now, panic pouring adrenaline into their muscles. By the time they entered the Bellagio’s vast lobby, they were almost sprinting, all thoughts of caution abandoned.

The lobby was a single, huge room: a polished marble floor beneath an ostentatious ceiling made of brightly-coloured glass flowers; a stained-glass window in the church of chance. To the team’s right, the reception desk was a single, fifty-yard slab of gleaming wood, across which numerous bodies were slumped.

Jerome barely saw them.

He doubted the rest of the team did, either, but not because they were becoming desensitised to the horror lurking in every corner.

Because dead ahead stood the way out of the madness: a series of revolving glass doors that allowed the faint glow of the burning city inside.

At the sight of the exit, Baker charged forward wildly.

He rocketed into one of the revolving doors, slamming his body into the sturdy glass and shoving it forward.

The heavy door began to turn…

…and jarred to an abrupt stop when a dark shape dropped down from the exterior of the hotel, stepping into the opposite side of the moving door and stopping it easily.

Baker screamed as he found himself locked in a transparent, triangular cell, separated from the shape by a single pane of glass.

The shape.

Jerome was still running forward when the thing appeared out of nowhere, and the sudden movement caused him to twist away, losing his footing on the marble-and-blood floor. His backside hit the deck hard, sending a hot current of pain crackling up his spine.

He and the others were a good twenty yards behind Baker when he fell, but even as he twisted, trying to scrabble back to his feet, he saw the shape clearly, framed against the flickering light of the fire outside. Seven feet tall, at least: a deformed body that rippled with twisted muscles. A face that belonged in a demented nightmare.

Burning red eyes that fixed on Baker, who cowered on the floor, staring up at the creature, apparently unable to tear his eyes off it.

For a beat, the monster in the revolving door just stood there, regarding the shrieking soldier at its feet.

It grinned.

Without a moment of hesitation, Baker tucked the barrel of his M4A1 under his chin, and pulled the trigger. His head disappeared in a red cloud, evaporated by the searing heat of a three-round burst at point-blank range.

An enormous quantity of blood and skull fragments splashed across the interior of the revolving door, running down the glass toward the floor like melting wax.

“Back!” Jerome shrieked.

He turned away from the madness, slipping, almost losing his footing once more.

And then suddenly he was upright.

Running.

27

“So...you’re saying these things, these...creatures, have been in hibernation for hundreds of years. Underground. And nobody in the world knew about it?”

General Tom Armitage’s eyebrows were raised, his expression half-dubious, half-amused.

“You guys didn’t force your way in here to see the flying saucers and the little green men, did you?”

Dan sighed. He hadn’t even told the general what these things were called, yet. That was the clincher. As soon as he said ‘vampire,’ the man tasked with running the North American Aerospace Defense Command— NORAD—would probably have them escorted off the premises. If he followed that up by informing the guy that the vampires were being instructed on how and where to attack America psychically—by an ancient consciousness that took the form of a black river—Armitage would likely have them shot.

Even now, when half the country was in flaming ruins, the vampires’ propaganda still worked for them. Nobody believed until they saw—and seeing was generally their last act as a living human being.

So far, Cheyenne Mountain wasn’t working out as hoped, and General Armitage was proving to be a problem.

Once the massive steel door in the mountain had eased open, Dan, Herb and Mancini had been hustled out of the jeep at gunpoint and taken on a long, cold walk to a featureless holding cell.

The bunker wasn’t quite what Dan had expected. In his head, he had pictured winding tunnels and futuristic structures cut directly into the earth, stern-faced storm trooper types scurrying about in elaborate hazmat suits, maybe even the advanced weapons tech the US military was supposed to be keeping a secret.

Instead, the place looked like any other military base, save for the fact that the sky was made of granite. The base itself was made up of regular old buildings: typically featureless grey steel boxes. The biggest surprise was that all appeared to be freestanding, rather than incorporated into the mountain itself.

As they walked, Mancini had acted as tour guide, reciting some more facts that he apparently believed made Cheyenne Mountain impressive: buildings perched on gigantic shock-absorbing springs, five reservoirs and an underground stream providing constant running water. A fire department, a hospital, a chapel, an isolated power supply that could keep the place ticking, independent of the outside world, for a couple of months without breaking sweat. It was a city parked in a cavernous stone garage.

It was singularly underwhelming.

Even more so when, after a little more than five frustrating minutes, the soldiers returned to the holding cell to escort the three interlopers, as Armitage referred to them, to the promisingly-named Command and Control Facility.

That, at least, Dan had thought, would be a futuristic, bridge-of-a-spaceship style location befitting America’s giant underground defence bunker.

Instead, it was just a small room, not much bigger than the average diner, stuffed with grey computer desks loaded with keyboards and monitors, and a wall full of screens that didn’t look much larger than the average domestic LCD television.

If this was where the last vestiges of the American military machine were holed up, Herb’s confidence that humanity could mount a counterattack against the vampires was surely misplaced.

“Underground,” Armitage repeated ruefully, shaking his head. “This place was built to monitor the skies. Guess we were looking in the wrong direction, huh?”

The question was rhetorical.

Sarcastic.

Testing.

Dan watched the general carefully. His amiable gruff-old-geezer routine was just that—a routine. Beneath his thick greying eyebrows, Armitage’s eyes were shrewd and piercing. He was, in his own way, measuring up the three men who had appeared on his doorstep claiming to be able to fix the broken world outside.

Armitage was probably pushing sixty, but he looked fit and strong: short and barrel-chested, but with taught, weathered skin stretched over muscles that bulged at his uniform, like they were trying to engineer an escape. His eyebrows constituted the only hair on his head: clearly, when confronted with the prospect of advancing years taking his hair, the general had decided to meet the problem head-on.

That was the sort of guy he appeared to be, to Dan. A man who ran straight at problems and tackled them to the ground.

That, doubtless, was how he got the four stars on his uniform.

And it was also the reason that Armitage was losing the fight against the vampires.

The general was perched on one of the desks, with the three interlopers sitting on uncomfortable chairs in front of him and the screen-wall behind. Dan saw three primary screens: on the right, an active radar glowed green, sweeping constantly. On the left, the screen cycled through images of static, occasionally replaying hours-old news footage from around the world. The central screen, the largest, showed a tactical map of the United States, with what Dan assumed were areas of interest highlighted in red.

There was a lot of red on the map.

If the nation was a clock face, then the hours of midnight to four were a single, solid red block. That, Dan thought, was where the nuclear power stations had been attacked. Areas that had been lost immediately. The rest of the country was pockmarked, riddled with livid red acne. Up and down the eastern and western coastline, large swathes of America were highlighted. In the centre, at the point of the map marked NORAD, the areas of interest were more sporadic.

Because those places have a less dense population, Dan thought. More empty space. The vampires haven’t even begun to focus on those yet.

The general sighed.

“Look, I’ll be straight with you. The only reason you got in here at all is because of what’s going on out there. And because facial recognition tells us this guy,” he jerked a thumb at Mancini, “used to be Force Recon.”

Mancini grunted.

“Any other circumstances, and you would have been stopped the minute you destroyed my goddamned gate. Now, if you have any useful intel, I’m all ears. If all you got is this...nonsense, well, I’m afraid my hospitality is gonna dry up real quick.”

Dan shot a glance at Herb, who stared back meaningfully.

Show him, Herb’s gaze said. Show him what you can do. Then he’ll believe.

Dan suppressed a shudder. The aftershocks of taking the mind of the cleric had only just stopped, and it was clear to him now that they became more severe with each mind he took. Last time, he had slipped into a fugue state in the back of the car, and vomited blood. According to Herb, his eyes had been pointed inward for a good half-hour. Taking another mind so soon might have drastic consequences.

He gave a slight shake of his head, trying to communicate to Herb that that was a last resort.

The general snapped his fingers.

“You two might wanna stop making eyes at each other and start talking. In case you hadn’t noticed, the country is under attack, and—”

“You’re losing,” Dan finished. “Losing badly.”

The general snapped his mouth shut and stared at Dan suspiciously.

“You’ve sent in ground troops, and you’ve either lost contact with all of them, or they’ve started shooting at each other. You’re probably considering bombing your own cities right about now, figuring that collateral damage is better than total loss. Depending on your intel, some part of you is wondering how all these attacks, spread out across the whole country, are so...joined up. So synchronised. Maybe you’re even starting to think there is some overarching strategy here that you can’t see. If things were different, you’d probably suspect that the entire thing is being orchestrated by a foreign power. Russia, perhaps. But Russia’s gone. They probably think it’s you.”

The general stared at Dan, open-mouthed, for several long, quiet seconds, and then he darted forward with surprising speed, wrapped two fists in Dan’s collar and hauled him out of his seat.

“You tell me what you fucking know, boy,” the general hissed in a low, dangerous whisper.

He was close enough that Dan could taste the older man’s breath. Stale coffee and desperation.

“Uh, General,” Mancini said, “I wouldn’t do that. He’s...uh…”

Dan lifted a reassuring palm toward Mancini.

“Don’t worry, Mancini. I’m not going to hurt him.”

The general’s bushy eyebrows darted up, and he dropped Dan back into his chair.

“You ain’t gonna hurt me?” the general said, his tone ripe with disbelief. “Boy, you gotta weigh a hundred pounds wet. You ain’t gonna hurt me?”

Dan adjusted his collar.

“They’re vampires, General. Or at least, they are where we get the word ‘vampire’ from. They control minds, which is why your troops on the ground are dying faster than you can send in reinforcements. You might have some luck with bombing runs, but the vampires move underground. Even if you do manage to catch a couple with bombs, the rest will simply stay out of the way. You can level every town in this country, and you probably won’t kill more than a handful.

“We were in London,” Dan continued. “We’ve seen these things up close. Trust me, if you keep sending troops in, you’re going to run out of troops.”

The general stared at him a moment, and then laughed.

Laughed.

The sound was curt. Dismissive.

Dan felt a bleak fire building inside his gut, the flames stoking higher.

He took a deep breath.

Stay calm. Don’t let rage take over.

“I’ve heard enough,” the general said. “He waved over Dan’s shoulder, at one of the guards standing by the door. “Get ‘em outta here.”

Dan gritted his teeth, enamel grinding hard on enamel. If his jaw clenched any harder, he felt certain that he would hear bone cracking. Who the fuck was this old bastard, hiding out in a hole in the ground with his neatly pressed uniform and his smirking eyes? What the fuck did he know about what the world really was?

He closed his eyes.

Felt his temperature rising steadily. Implacably.

Rising.

Rising.

A strong hand landed on his left shoulder, fingers digging painfully into his flesh, hauling him from his seat.

And Dan’s eyes flared open.

28

Through an airy lounge and into the botanical gardens, moving like a driverless train. No stops, no brakes. Nothing to do now but hit the throttle and hope it was enough.

Jerome ran.

Breath detonating in his lungs, pouring from his lips in ragged gasps.

Feet barely touching the floor; slipping and sliding on the broken and torn bodies, threatening to dump him on his ass and end his life at any moment.

He moved like a frightened rabbit, barely taking in his surroundings, only dimly aware that Watts and Baldwin were behind him. All thoughts of being a soldier, of being part of a team, were forgotten; washed away by terror. There was no fighting the creature that had done that to Eddie Baker.

No fighting, and no team. The two men running at his heel were as likely to shoot at Jerome as they were to stand alongside him.

This is what it feels like when your mind starts to disintegrate.

Jerome ran with a scream lurking in his lungs. He didn’t dare let it out.

The botanical gardens were an indoor feature: Japanese-themed and overly busy to the eye. There were densely packed flowers everywhere, their colours deep, oversaturated, lending the room the feel of a hallucinogenic nightmare even before the corpses scattered on the floor were taken into account.

Incongruously, at the centre of the long room, beneath a glass ceiling that allowed in the last of the daylight, there stood a single—resolutely non-Japanese—marble obelisk. A giant, twelve-foot-high solid needle, rising from the highly decorative floor like a spear.

Someone had been impaled on the top of it. Of course they had. The strange creatures who had attacked Las Vegas—and which had gleefully tormented Bravo Team all the way through the hotel—didn’t seem to ever pass up the opportunity to make dramatic visual statements. The thick stone column had almost split the body of a concierge into two entirely separate, sickening parts, dividing him right down the middle.

Jerome only had time to see that abomination for a split-second—and to wonder about the force it must have taken to drive a human being down onto a fat, blunt spike like that—before the gardens were gone, and he rocketed beneath an arch and out into the mall, tearing past boutique windows displaying dresses it would have taken him a lifetime to afford.

Behind him, someone opened fire, spraying bullets back into the gardens.

Jerome didn’t look back. Bravo Team weren’t brothers-in-arms anymore, they were terrified animals fleeing from a predator. Jerome felt certain that both Watts and Baldwin were thinking the same thing as him: the slowest member of the panicked herd is the one that gets eaten. Maybe Watts and Baldwin, too, were determined that it wouldn’t be them.

What was it?

A monster? A demon?

What the creature was didn’t seem to matter as much as what it had done to Eddie Baker. Merely the presence of the thing had caused Baker to blow his own head off, and in some murky recess of his mind, Jerome thought he understood why. The creatures that were devouring Las Vegas had surely crawled from the festering belly of Hell itself. Jerome was a God-fearing man, just as Baker had been, and he knew the work of Satan when he saw it. He’d seen evil plenty; he’d never seen malevolence like that which he had seen on the face of the grinning abomination in the revolving door.

Demons, then.

Whoever was shooting behind Jerome stopped, and started to scream instead.

The scream twisted around itself, tightening. Coiling up, like razor wire slowly being twisted around a baseball bat. It was a sound no human throat should have been capable of producing.

And there was another sound now, far more unsettling; far more terrible.

Clicking.

Thunderous clicking.

The sound of clawed feet racing across polished marble.

It’s chasing me down, Jerome thought, and he sprayed bullets over his shoulder in a blind panic, no longer caring that Watts or Baldwin might be right behind him.

He raced on, hearing nothing now but the frantic thudding of his heart, certain that his next step would be his last.

Movement ahead.

In the shadows.

Jerome didn’t look.

He veered to his left, charging into a door marked staff only, and then he was tumbling down into space, rolling down a narrow stairwell, his body ricocheting off bare stone walls.

Hitting the bottom.

Rolling forward without pause.

Running again.

He risked a glance over his shoulder.

There was nobody following now. Baldwin and Watts, if they were still alive, were out there on their own.

Deep in the darkest part of his mind, in the part he would never have allowed anybody to see, Jerome hoped that they were still alive, still running.

That the monsters were chasing them instead of him.

He slowed, gasping explosively for air that felt toxic in his lungs.

He was in a maintenance corridor. Here, all the glitz of the Bellagio was stripped away: the walls and floor were sparse, functional concrete, and the only light to be seen poured not from extravagant chandeliers, but from a couple of garish bare red bulbs mounted on the wall. The emergency lighting, down in the belly of the Bellagio, made the hallway look like a vein.

There were battered metal doors set into the wall at regular intervals, and up ahead, Jerome could see a couple more stairwells, each presumably leading up to a different area. This was how the Bellagio staff got around the building without getting in the way of paying customers: by shuttling around this blank maze.

Jerome shut his flashlight off, afraid that the beam would be seen, and padded forward, wincing at the soft shuffle of his boots.

Somewhere above him, someone screamed.

He thought it was Baldwin.

Jerome felt his bladder loosen a little at the sound, and his cheeks burned. He had left his team to die.

He held his breath, and eased open the nearest of the doors.

As he had expected, it was a supply closet, stuffed with cleaning products and toiletries for the hotel rooms. He saw rows of miniature soaps and shampoo bottles, larger containers filled with bleaches and detergents. The closet stank overpoweringly of lemon.

Above, Baldwin screamed again, but only for a moment. The scream ended abruptly, in a manner that could only mean one thing.

I’m next, Jerome thought.

But had the demons in the casino seen which way he headed? Did they even know this network of veins ran beneath the body of the hotel? As far as Jerome could see, there were no bodies down here, no blood.

Maybe I got away, he thought.

And his blood ran cold as he heard clicking on the stairs behind him.

There was no time to think. Jerome slipped into the supply closet and eased the door shut.

Ventilation slats set high in the door let the faint blood-red glow of the emergency lights filter into the closet, and Jerome crouched low, almost kissing the floor. He stared at the square of crimson light filtering through the slats, casting a pattern on the floor right in front of his face.

And he waited.

Click.

Click, click.

Beads of sweat popped on his brow, running down his nose, threatening to drop onto the closet floor. Would the demon outside hear him?

Would it smell him?

Click.

Click.

Click.

The clicking sound of the demon’s claws on the concrete got louder.

Click, click.

Louder.

He held his breath, until it felt like a shrapnel grenade had been deployed in his chest...

Click.

...and the red light spilling through the ventilation slats onto the closet floor was suddenly obscured by a shadow.

It’s right outside the door.

Is it looking in?

Can it see me right now?

Jerome didn’t dare to look up. Didn’t dare to move a muscle for fear that the creature would pick up the sound of tendons stretching and cartilage creaking. With every passing moment he feared that his uniform would brush against the supplies in the closet, knocking over a broom, alerting the demon to his presence.

He stayed frozen; trembling: his eyes fixed only on the floor, his mind pointed at the space where the faint pattern of red light had been; praying that he would live to see it again.

Click. Click. Click.

The demon began to move away slowly.

The shadow lifted.

The patch of red light returned. The demon was continuing on down the hallway, past Jerome’s hiding spot.

His nerves sizzled.

Somewhere on the floor above, an inhuman voice screeched. Jerome thought he heard something that sounded sickeningly like glee in the hideous cry.

Clickclickclickclickclickclickclick—

At the distant shriek, the demon in the maintenance corridor charged away, the sound of its clawed feet receding fast as it raced up one of the nearby sets of steps which led toward the floor above.

And after what felt like a long time, Jerome finally allowed himself to breathe.

He shifted his weight, sitting heavily with his weapon facing the door, his finger curled around the trigger. He wasn’t going to go back outside, now, he decided. The supply closet would be his world, until the real world either righted itself or the fires of Hell scrubbed it clean.

He sat back, leaning on the brooms and mops, and wiped the sweat from his brow before touching the transmit button on his comms.

Sending out a message that nobody would hear.

“This is Master Sergeant Jerome Mills of the 190th Chemical Recon out of Draper, Utah. Coming to you live from a closet under the Bellagio hotel. I think I’m all that’s left. There are demons here, and I don’t think I’m getting out alive. Get away, if you can. Stay away. I repeat: there are demons in Las Vegas.”

29

Dan twisted away from the hand that was digging into his shoulder and started to turn.

Rage bubbled up inside him, spitting like hot oil, filling his mind.

Herb had been right. There was only one way to show the sarcastic old bastard who ran things at NORAD: the hard way.

He had no idea what he would do to the soldier who’d laid hands on him: no thought beyond unleashing the fury inside; getting it out before it burned through him like acid.

He didn’t get a chance to find out. Before he could turn fully to look at the soldier, another hand was on him, equally strong, but not digging into his flesh this time. Herb’s hand cupped Dan’s face gently, almost tenderly, falling over his eyes, blocking out the light.

Before Dan was fully upright, Herb was at his back, wrapping his arms around him and pinning him in a firm embrace.

Defusing me.

Like an active landmine.

“Easy, Dan.” Herb muttered the words in a tone a rider might use to soothe an unbroken horse. “Easy. Not like that.”

For a moment, Dan’s fury spiked and he struggled wildly. Yet it was his mind that was the weapon, not his frail body. His muscles were no match for Herb’s bulk. After a moment of coruscating rage, sense began to return. Dan’s shoulders dropped in defeat, the sudden rush of fury subsiding almost as quickly as it had arisen.

He nodded.

Herb held on for several more seconds, and then released him.

Dan blew out a long breath as Herb’s hand lifted away from his eyes, letting the light in once more.

What was I just about to do?

It was impossible to know. He had been operating on animal instinct, and though he couldn’t bring himself to admit it, it was unlikely that he had been about to put on a show to persuade General Armitage to believe in what he was saying. He didn’t have that level of control. He never had, and with each passing hour, the amount of control he had over his emotions didn’t get better—it got worse.

No, he hadn’t been about to demonstrate his power before Herb stepped in. He was going to spill blood.

A faint aftershock rippled through him.

What have I become?

Red eyes reflected in dark glass.

My eyes.

I’m the monster.

He dropped his eyes to the floor, suddenly afraid to point them at the men in the room with him.

No, he thought. I’m becoming a monster. I’m not a monster yet.

Somehow, that seemed worse. Perhaps because he knew that he couldn’t stop it; perhaps because some part of him suspected that he didn’t even want to.

“What in the hell was that?”

The general’s voice.

“I don’t think you’d believe us if we told you,” Herb said.

“Try me.”

“He can do what the vampires do,” Herb said quietly. “Take a person’s mind. Make them...do things.”

“Huh, is that right?” Armitage sounded unconvinced. “Convenient that you stopped him then, I suppose? Just when he was about to show off this little magic trick of his?”

Dan’s eyes flicked up. He caught the general’s gaze and held it.

“Convenient for you, General,” he said. “I can’t control it. I was probably just about to have your soldier do something that we all might have regretted.”

The general waved a dismissive hand.

“Escort our guests back to the holding cell,” he said to the soldiers who stood behind Dan. “I’ll figure out what to do with them lat—”

The door burst open, cutting off the general’s words mid-sentence, and a young soldier charged breathlessly into the command facility, his expression apologetic.

“Sir, I’m sorry to interrupt, but you asked me to tell you if we received word out of Las Vegas.”

The general’s heavy brow knitted.

“Las Vegas has been silent for the best part of an hour, son.”

“Not anymore, General. We still have men alive in there. A man.”

The soldier raced to one of the computers, jabbing at the keyboard, and moments later the room filled with the sound of a radio message, playing through heavy static.

...Master Sergeant Jerome Mills of the 190th Chemical Recon out of Draper, Utah….closet under the Bellagio...get away, if you can. Stay away…I repeat: there are demons in Las Vegas…

The soldier replayed the message, trying to clear up the words that had been lost in blasts of interference, but shook his head. “That’s the best I can do, sir. I’ll have a tech try to clean it up for you.”

The general waved the soldier’s words away.

“Demons,” he said softly, staring at Dan with interest.

“That word serves just as well as vampires,” Dan said with a shrug. “And I’m sure you don’t want to admit it, but I’m willing to bet you’ve heard the word monster at least once in the last few hours.”

General Armitage turned away, plucking a radio mike from the desk he perched on.

“Tell the raptors to circle around Vegas. No permission to fire yet. Repeat: no permission to fire. Stand by for further orders. Armitage, out.”

He dropped the mike back onto the desk and heaved a sigh, scratching at his chin and staring at Dan, Herb and Mancini thoughtfully.

“Raptors,” Mancini said. “Airstrikes have been sanctioned?”

Armitage glanced at Mancini.

“Why did you leave Force Recon, son?”

“I’m sure you already know why, General. Sure you’ve already seen the files.”

The general nodded.

“In your words,” he said.

“I left for the money,” Mancini said. There was no hint of remorse in his tone. No trace of shame. “Figured killing folks should command a better salary.”

“Yeah,” Armitage replied. “You ain’t the first. Which makes me wonder...why are you here? Ain’t got a heroic bone in your body, Mr Mancini, not from what I heard about you. A capable soldier, but you’re a mercenary, balls to bones. So what are you doing turning up on my doorstep with a tale about vampires? Where’s the money? What’s your angle?”

Mancini held the general’s gaze for a moment.

“Money’s no use if there’s nowhere left to spend it, General.”

Armitage snorted.

“You really believe all this hogwash about vampires. The end of the world is nigh?”

“I’ve seen them,” Mancini said with a shrug. “And I’ve seen what Bellamy can do. You don’t realise it, but Rennick probably just saved your life, General. Bellamy’s dangerous. To vampires, to himself. To everyone in the same room as him. He’s a weapon. If you want my advice, you should use him, before it’s too late.”

General Armitage switched his gaze back to Dan, peering at him intently for a long time.

“Is that right?” he said at last, his tone soft. “So, Dan Bellamy, tell me: if you’re a weapon, how exactly should I use you?”

“Get me to Las Vegas,” Dan said. “Get me face-to-face with a vampire. I’ll do the rest.”

Armitage shook his head and laughed ruefully.

“Didn’t you hear that message, son? Master Sergeant Mills said ‘stay away’.”

Dan grinned.

“I heard.”

Armitage stood.

“I can get you boys there in a C-160, but be aware that you will have a small window to do whatever the hell it is you think you can do before I turn that city to rubble. Go find Master Sergeant Mills, if he is still alive, and get him out if you can. If you can’t, well, it was...interesting, fellas.”

The general didn’t believe their story, Dan thought, but he was desperate enough to try their method anyway.

“You need to know how to fight them, General,” Dan said, standing. “If we die in there, remember one thing. Don’t look at them. Send in drones, send in blind men. Make sure your troops are flooded with light at all times. Light that can’t be easily switched off.”

The general waved a dismissive hand.

“You can record your...uh, intel en route, Mr Bellamy. I’ll take it all under advisement. For now, get moving. Once you get to Vegas, I’m giving you thirty minutes before I turn that shithole into a parking lot, understand?”

Dan nodded.

“We’ll need to land as close to the hotel your soldier mentioned as possible, then.”

“Land?” The general blinked, and then barked a genuine laugh. “Ain’t gonna be landing, son; not in my C-160.”

Dan stared at him, puzzled.

“I hope you’re not afraid of heights,” the general said, waving at the soldiers by the door, who started to usher Dan, Herb and Mancini away from the command facility.

Afraid? he thought, as he allowed himself to be marshalled through the door and out into the cold half-light of the giant cavern. No, General, I’m not afraid. Not anymore.

30

Frank Mather hacked out a cough, and tasted blood.

It had been that way for months and, though he hadn’t ever been afforded the luxury of seeing doctors who might accurately diagnose what was happening in his lungs, Frank knew.

Cancer.

He welcomed the disease for what it was.

A blessing; not even remotely a curse.

Freedom at last.

For the better part of two decades, Frank had been a prisoner at a jail run by the insane. When he had first encountered Jennifer Craven, she had been little more than a girl, but her ruthless cruelty had been full grown. It was Craven herself who had punctured Frank’s body with bullets at a dig site in Kentucky; Craven who had overseen his laughably insufficient ‘treatment’ and recovery. In more than one way, Frank thought it was Craven who had bestowed cancer upon him. His once-strong body—muscles made wiry with the physical exertion of a hundred archaeological digs—was now withered; little more than a husk. Now in his mid-fifties, he looked more like a man of eighty.

He had spent years underground, moving like a ghost among the Craven family’s archives, working. Earning another day of life for a salary.

In that time he had, on occasion, seen others much like himself come and go: scientists who the Craven family had kidnapped and forced into slavery. He had watched them work until their last breath. Some had committed suicide. A couple had tried to escape, and their parting words to Frank—reassurances that they would bring the authorities—had been the last he ever heard of them.

There was no escape from Craven’s labyrinthine underground prison. Certainly not for a man as frail as Frank had been ever since the gun had inflicted such terrible damage on his torso. And so Frank did what Craven had asked of him. He worked.

The work itself was fascinating, of course—and had Frank stumbled on such a treasure trove during the course of his normal life, he would have been ecstatic. Uncovering information like that which he had at his fingertips every day now would have virtually guaranteed him the respect and adoration of the academic peers which he had once sought so fervently. Frank was now privy to the real history of the world; he could fill in the gaps that left the minds of other scholars blank.

Frank knew what had really happened to the Incas. He knew what truly befell the colony at Roanoke. Hell, he even knew where the inhabitants of far-flung Easter Island had gone.

Jennifer Craven and those who preceded her in her apparently hereditary insanity had been devout in their search for information on the creatures that Craven called vampires. The Craven archives contained an astonishing collection of facts scoured from around the globe across recent centuries; the secret history of mankind, and the enemy which it had been unknowingly pitched against for millennia.

A history that would sink back into the shadows when Frank’s shrivelled lungs finally collapsed in on themselves.

A terrible waste of all that knowledge.

He couldn’t fucking wait.

Frank was attempting—not for the first time—to decode a fragile parchment scrawled with an early bastardisation of Latin when he heard footsteps heading toward the research floor, and his heart sank. Nobody had bothered him while he worked in months: Craven was the only one who had ever visited the bunker and even she had given up on her routine checks for updates a long time ago.

Frank had lived in blissful isolation for a long, long time.

The approaching footsteps—more than one set—could only mean trouble.

He mentally braced himself, praying that this was nothing more than the delivery of some newly-discovered artifact; knowing in his weak gut how unlikely that scenario was.

When he caught movement in the corner of his eye, Frank glanced in the direction of the entrance, and arched an eyebrow in surprise when he saw who walked in, even as he felt hatred gathering momentum.

Andrew Lloyd. Craven’s laughably-monickered Grand Cleric. It was a role that Craven had once upon a time earmarked for Frank himself. He had turned it down without pause, despite the tempting promise of human contact. In his previous life, Frank had been an educator, and some part of him would always yearn for the company and energy of young, inquiring minds. But it wasn’t an educator that Craven wanted, not really. It was a brainwasher and a puppet, and Frank would have no part of that.

The real surprise, though, was that Lloyd was not alone. He wasn’t flanked by Jennifer Craven, nor by some armed teenager in ridiculous paramilitary attire, either, but by a woman wearing a torn and bloody British police officer’s uniform, and a huge German Shepherd.

Frank blinked.

Rubbed at his eyes.

The Grand Cleric and his strange companions were still there.

*

“There is barely a culture that has ever existed which didn’t have some variation of the vampire myth,” Frank said quietly. “Mesopotamians, Persians, the ancient Greek and Roman empires. Vampires predate Christianity by a great distance, of course, though the word itself, as far as I have been able to tell, was originally coined some time during the seventeenth century. Still, creatures that feast on human blood—or on human souls—have been talked about for as long as humans have been talking. Of course, that phenomenon was always assumed by the academic community to be a straightforward case of shared subconscious fears. I know now that that is not the case.”

Frank coughed, and wiped hurriedly at his mouth with bony fingers.

Conny sat at Frank’s long, cluttered desk—grateful to be sitting on a chair again—listening to the old man deliver his gravelly history lesson.

She had been taken aback at first by the research lab: unlike the rest of the bunker, which mostly felt like a barely-decorated cave, the lab felt ultra-modern. Machines that looked almost like surgical devices and numerous computers were gathered around a central showpiece: a vast glass display cabinet, inside which sat the skeletal remains of a human.

And a vampire.

Just having the bones of the creature glowering over her made her feel uneasy. Remy felt it, too, she thought: the dog put his back firmly to the display case, but couldn’t resist shooting troubled glances back toward it.

In Frank’s presence, Andrew Lloyd somehow faded into the background. The old man, despite his withered appearance, had a magnetic sort of charisma. When he began to speak, on what appeared to be his favourite topic, it seemed there would be no stopping him.

“What is of greater interest is that—as written history became more reliable following the invention of the printing press—talk of vampires changed,” Frank continued. “No longer were the creatures depicted as monsters or demons, but as people. From the seventeenth century onward, the popular conception of the vampire has been very similar to what we still see today: humans, essentially, who are controlled by their lust for blood, and whose humanity has been stripped away, leaving them as undead.”

Frank waved his hands for theatrical effect, and chuckled.

“I believe that this image of vampires stems more from encounters with the people that the vampires control. Their familiars, if you will. The presence of a vampire does indeed strip away humanity, and those who are in thrall to them do have a lust for blood—or at least, they appear to, to onlookers. All of which means that most of the mythology surrounding the existence of vampires can be summarily dismissed. Whatever grains of truth there might once have been have since been washed away by the passage of time. What is left, here in these archives, is the propaganda that the vampires themselves have peddled, and it, too, must be questioned. In reality, the truth about these creatures is most likely whatever you, Miss Stokes, have seen with your own eyes.”

Conny nodded, though virtually everything that Frank Mather had just said had sailed straight over her head. She hadn’t slept, had barely eaten in days. Despite how much she was enjoying listening to Frank’s soothing voice, this was probably not the right time for a history lesson.

She stifled a yawn, and then smiled.

Bored, she thought. It almost made her feel euphoric. She hadn't thought she could ever feel bored again, and yet here she was, feeling like this wrinkled old professor yammering on about Mesopotamians might put her to sleep.

She could have kissed him, if he hadn't picked that very moment to dissolve into a phlegmy coughing fit.

She dropped her eyes to her feet.

Remy was fast asleep, now.

Lucky bastard, she thought, and checked her mental watch. Logan had been alone for a couple of hours now. Soon, she would have to head back up through the tunnels and find a place for them to sleep.

“What about the people who can resist them?” Conny said, nodding at the display case in the centre of the huge room.

Frank sighed.

“The Hermetics. That is Jennifer’s favourite subject, too.”

“Was,” Conny corrected.

Frank arched an eyebrow.

“Craven’s dead.”

Frank’s face split in a wicked grin. “Couldn't have happened to a nicer person. It hadn't occurred to me that she might have expired. I thought she was the only one who could open the door to this place.”

Conny’s brow furrowed. “You can tell when the door is open from down here?”

Frank nodded. “Oh, it's all very high tech down here, Miss Stokes. Equipment I could only have dreamed about back in my time as a professor. The archives were an obsession of Jennifer's, and of mine too, eventually. Everything is linked by computer, and this part of the facility runs on a separate power source to the rest. She was always worried about losing data.”

Conny nodded absently.

“So, what data do you have on these Hermetics?

“Not much,” Frank said, “and most of what I do have is stored up here.” He tapped his forehead. “The human skeleton you see in that case is completely unremarkable. If the person who rode those bones around had something unique about them, it was located in the soft tissue. What I have is no more than theories, I’m afraid.”

“Such as?”

Frank waited for another coughing fit to pass. “I think the Hermetics were a genetic mutation, specifically a mutation that affected their brain. Their minds were different to those of other humans, and the vampires either would not—or could not—break into their minds as a result.”

“Different how?” Conny said, her interest piqued.

“I suppose to you and me, it would look like a brain disorder of some sort. An illness.”

Conny’s eyes widened.

“Like Huntington’s?”

Frank scratched at his whiskery chin. “Possibly,” he said. “It could have been anything that alters brain chemistry and function. Something like Huntington’s would fit; the high mortality rate would certainly explain why the Hermetic gene hasn't spread to become prevalent throughout all humans. But Hermetics could be suffering with a whole range of conditions; it could be just one in particular; it could be none at all. There's no way to know, of course, not unless you put someone with Huntington’s in a room with a vampire.”

Over my dead body, Conny thought. She stood, waiting politely as another coughing fit ripped through the old man’s body. “Thanks, Professor,” she said. “I’ll let you rest up. If there’s anything you need, I’ll be back soon, okay? You’re not alone in here anymore.”

Frank nodded.

“Thank you, Miss Stokes, though it’s not Professor anymore. Hasn’t been for a very long time. Oh, there is one thing I should mention: when you get up to the surface, be sure to check the front door for me, please.”

Conny frowned. “No need,” she said. “It's shut, I saw Andrew lock it myself when we all came in.”

Frank nodded. “Yes, but it was opened again an hour ago,” he said, gesturing to one of the computer screens on his desk, “and then relocked. It could just be a glitch, but if the outside world is as dangerous as you say, I don’t think the initiates should be taking any more trips outsi—”

Conny didn't hear anymore. She was already running, her heart leaping into her throat, her mind furiously roaring a single word.

No!

31

The whole world was shrieking.

The C-160 was making short work of the trip to Las Vegas, in no small part because it had climbed to its maximum altitude, far above the curving horizon, its engines straining; howling ferociously.

Not cruising speed.

Dropping speed.

When they were close enough, Dan, Herb and Mancini were going to leap out of the plane and fall the rest of the way.

The plane felt huge, despite the presence of half a dozen Army Rangers wearing parachute packs on their backs, along with the three specialists.

All the Rangers aboard the transport jet had stared suspiciously at Dan, Herb and Mancini as they had boarded, but they hadn’t questioned General Armitage when he informed them that three specialists would be dropping into Las Vegas with them to rescue a stranded Special Forces master sergeant from the basement of the Bellagio casino.

At least they hadn’t given voice to their questions, but Dan saw them written clearly in the rangers’ eyes.

Not so much when they looked at Herb or Mancini: both of those men, at least, looked like they fitted the profile physically: either could have passed for a military man, and Mancini in particular, was right at home among soldiers. He almost looked jaded by the prospect of travelling in the C-160.

Yet when they looked at Dan, taking in his too-thin arms and his unruly mop of hair, several of the Rangers aboard the plane looked deeply mystified.

The general hadn’t told them anything about vampires, and he had pulled Dan aside and quietly told him not to say anything, either. Not if he wanted to keep the men on side. This was to be strictly a rescue mission, at least in their eyes. Anything else would throw up questions whose answers might provoke mutiny.

Dan had nodded.

It didn’t matter.

Getting to Vegas and getting into the head of a vampire was the only objective. This Special Forces guy, this Jerome Mills? If he had been stuck in a building with vampires for the hour of flight time it had taken for the C-160 to reach Vegas, he was already long dead.

At the rear of the C-160, the hydraulic cargo door lowered, and the persistent whine of the engines became a deafening howl.

As the plane had sped across the Utah skies toward Nevada, Dan had been taken through a rudimentary crash course in what the Rangers called HALO jumps. High Altitude, Low Opening: the soldiers would drop most of the way like stones, opening their parachutes at the last possible moment to ensure they were visible from the ground for as little of the duration of the fall as possible.

It was, they assured him, easier than it looked. Nothing for him to worry about. Just like falling off a log.

They’d laughed at that one.

“Just follow my lead,” the captain of the group had said. “Do what I say, when I say it and you’ll be fine.”

Captain Smalling was a serious man. He looked to be around Dan’s age, but their lives had clearly taken very different paths. Smalling was all business, all duty, all muscle. He looked unhappy about the prospect of obviously-civilian specialists tagging along for the ride, but was devoted enough to duty and protocol not to say so.

Dan glanced at the captain. Smalling stared straight ahead as the plane’s drop-door opened, his square jaw clenched like a fist, his eyes focused. He looked like he was ticking off a checklist in his head.

Dan followed his gaze.

Outside, he saw the last scraps of daylight slipping over the curved horizon. When they hit the ground in Vegas, it would be evening.

Darkness.

Someone jammed a helmet onto Dan’s head, making him flinch. The helmet was too big; it wobbled crazily around his skull until a grinning Ranger appeared in front of him and tightened the chin strap, locking it in place. The Ranger slapped the side of the helmet, almost knocking Dan over, and moved aside.

Suddenly, he could hear their voices clearly. Fragments of sentences. The soldiers who were preparing to throw themselves out of an aircraft seemed to speak mainly in sharp bullet points.

“Nine jumpers. Ready.”

“Approaching at thirty-thousand feet.”

“Ten seconds.”

“Las Vegas airspace.”

“Looks like something Afghanistan threw up down there.”

Laughter. They didn’t laugh because it was particularly funny, Dan thought, but because it reaffirmed that they were alive. It diffused the horror of the landscape below. It helped keep the fear they surely felt at bay. Not fear of the jump; he was sure they all had plenty of experience of that.

Fear of the landing, and what might await them on the ground.

Mancini appeared right in front of Dan.

“You ready for this?”

“I have to be.”

“Just remember everything you’ve been told. Dive out and away from the plane, drop your head. The fall will do the work for you, just keep your arms and legs splayed. Control your descent.”

Control my descent, Dan thought. Easy as that.

A voice in his ear said, “Five seconds.”

Dan felt a spike of anxiety lodge in his gut, but he pushed it aside. On any other day, in any other life, jumping out of a plane with no more than ten minutes of advice about what a HALO jump was and how he should stay alive through one would have made him fall apart with terror. Hell, it would have unnerved anybody.

But not today.

There was nothing to fear from the fall. Not even death. At least, if he kissed the Earth at terminal velocity, it would be instant, painless. And, unlike the stoic Rangers, Dan felt no fear about the landing, either. His nerves fizzed with anticipation. He couldn’t wait.

The only negative for him was that one of the Rangers had pointed out that if he tried to perform a HALO jump while carrying a machete, he’d be picking it out of his liver about ninety seconds later.

He’d miss the blade.

Didn’t even get a chance to use it.

“Three,” the voice in his ear said. He envisioned the jump going horribly wrong. The chute not opening, the ground rushing up to meet him.

Dying isn’t the scary part.

“Two.”

Living is.

“Jump.”

The Rangers ahead of Dan shuffled forward and leapt out of the C-160. No fuss, no ceremony: they just filed toward the exit like lemmings and dropped out of his sight. There was only a second between each jumper leaving the plane, maybe two.

No more time to think.

A hand shoved him from behind, pushing him forward.

“Geronimo,” a voice said, and another jumper disappeared.

And then, like no time at all had passed, Dan was standing on the edge of the world, looking down at infinity.

Stepping out into the howling void.

The world below lurched crazily as he plummeted away from the C-160, and his body threatened to start somersaulting. He got a view of the plane above, and of the last of the jumpers—Mancini—being fired out the back of it like a cannonball, and had time to think that the plane couldn’t possibly be that far away already, when the ground below zipped back into view.

“Nine jumpers clear,” a voice from the plane said dispassionately.

“Dan, arms out.” This time it was Mancini’s voice in Dan’s ear. That’s the first time he’s called me something other than Bellamy or Asshole, he thought, and he took Mancini’s advice, throwing his arms wide.

The rocking, pulsing world below steadied a little, and, for the first time, he had a chance to really take in the view.

“Good, Dan. You got it.”

Dan couldn’t respond. The panorama laid out below him had stolen his breath away. Las Vegas was an island of fire in a flat sea of darkness. The city looked smaller than he had expected, and not just because he was viewing it from thousands of feet up in the air. It seemed that the entire of Las Vegas gathered close to the city’s centre where, he supposed, the casinos were located. Beyond that spot, the Nevada Desert crept in at the edges of town with surprising speed.

Other than the enormous fires that were raging out of control through the centre of the city, everywhere Dan looked, he saw darkness.

There was nothing else out here for miles.

“Bellamy, pull your chute on my mark, okay?”

Captain Smalling’s voice.

Already? Dan thought. It felt like he had left the plane just seconds earlier.

His fingers found the handle of the ripcord, closing around it.

“Three…two…mark,” a distant voice said.

So serene up here, Dan thought. He shut his eyes for a moment, drinking in the emptiness. Dropping from the sky like a meteor, there was none of the pain and fear that life on the ground had given him. No time to think, to worry, to obsess. There was only the wind slamming into him and the vast, never-ending sky. A rare fragment of peace in a broken world of suffering.

“Now, Dan,” Mancini roared.

Dan’s eyes flared open.

The burning city was rushing up to meet him fast.

He yanked on the cord, and couldn’t help but let out a gleeful yell of triumph as the chute deployed and pulled hard on his harness.

Below him, the chutes of the Rangers who had been first to jump were already open. They traced a graceful line through the night sky, winding down toward the city. In less than fifteen seconds, it would all be over.

Dan counted down, relishing every moment.

Wishing it would never end.

*

He hit the water like a skipping stone, coming in at an angle that was a little too flat; a little too fast, and as soon as the water brushed against his boot, it was all over.

His descent halted suddenly and painfully, the impact jarring up his legs and into his spine. The water made him twist as he landed, it filled his mouth; it wrapped him in paracord.

It pulled him under.

He began to struggle, thrashing against the cord that bound him, tightening and gripping him like quicksand with every effort he made to free himself, and just when he resigned himself to the fact that he was going to die, pathetically, in the only way Pathetic Dan Bellamy could die, strong hands hauled him out of the water, slapping his back and making him cough out a lungful of cold liquid.

Herb stood in front of him with a small knife, cutting away the paracord.

“Now that was a landing,” Herb said, grinning madly. “You sure you never jumped before?”

Dan shook his head, trying to get his brain to stop tumbling and rolling and falling. After a moment, he realised where he had landed. He’d seen this very shot in a hundred movies.

The fountains outside the Bellagio. Right outside the front door.

Bullseye.

Dan shook the fall from his mind, clearing his head, and looked around. Without power, the fountains were just a still pond, now, and beyond the water, he got his first proper look at the famous Las Vegas Strip.

The city belonged to the dead.

He had half-expected to leap into a warzone, but in Vegas at least, the war looked to be already over. There were no minds left for the vampires to take. Perhaps there were still people out there, cowering in buildings, hiding in closets as Master Sergeant Jerome Mills supposedly was, but out on the streets there was no sign of life.

Only signs of death.

If the vampires were still here, they were out hunting. Rounding up the stragglers.

His mind flitted back to the first time he had laid eyes on the creatures, in the incredible man-made park at the centre of the cruise ship. There, the vampires had exploded like a bomb, causing massive damage instantly, and then they had fanned out, determined to hunt down and kill every last soul aboard.

They’re still here, he thought grimly. They have to be. Out there somewhere. Hunting.

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 hours.

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.

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 Logan’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.

Demons, Herb thought.

He held out a hand, and Mancini did likewise, pulling the two remaining Rangers aboard. Captain Smalling slumped to the floor, gasping for air, his eyes wide, his head shaking.

“I never saw anything like…”

“Take off,” Herb roared at the pilot. “Get us to Yellowstone.”

The pilot’s voice crackled through the chopper as it lurched up into the sky.

“That’s a long trip. We won’t have enough fuel to get back.”

Herb dropped down alongside Mancini, and watched as the burning city fell away below the fast-rising chopper.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said quietly, tearing his gaze away from what was left of Las Vegas to focus on Dan. He was still breathing, and Captain Smalling and the other Ranger were busy staunching the flow of blood from his stomach, and applying a large, square dressing to the wound. “Coming back isn’t the objective.”

*

Locked inside a vast, pitch-black maze with a monster.

It was only a matter of time before it found them.

Conny’s thoughts raged through her head, tumbling over each other, becoming a wall of indecipherable noise. She had tried to push the pieces of the door lock back together in her desperation, jabbing pathetically at the broken buttons.

It had been wasted effort. It wasn’t the door to a bunker anymore. It was the door to a cell.

She pulled open the small hatch in the door, peering out through the narrow viewing window. Outside, the world was dark and peaceful; just inches away.

Inches...and a million miles.

She thought she had seen explosives back in the vast supply room at the foot of the complex. Given enough time, she was certain she could blow the door open. Hell, she’d bring down the entire mountain, if necessary.

But there wasn’t time.

Sooner or later, the vampire stalking through the maze would find them.

Hide?

Conny replayed her memories of all the rooms she had passed through while touring the complex with Andrew Lloyd. The vast majority of them weren’t rooms at all; they were caverns. Bare, empty spaces encircled by rock. Very few even had furniture; nothing beyond a few crates for chairs and mattresses tossed on the floor. Not even a bed that she and Logan could hide under and hope the boogeyman wouldn’t see them.

She felt like screaming.

She was so close.

Where was the vampire now? She pondered that question for a moment. There were probably others like Logan; kids who had hidden in the remains of their friends, or who had fled into the dark at the first sign of trouble. There might be dozens of them still out there in the maze, cowering in corners, as Logan had. The vampire would be hunting them down now, picking them off at its leisure. Playing with them. She doubted that it would attempt to find a way out of the bunker until it had scoured every cavern clean of life.

Remy nudged at her leg, apparently keen that they should get moving.

“I know, Rem,” she said through gritted teeth, “I know. I’m trying to th—”

Her eyes fell on Remy. He looked up at her, puzzled, his tongue lolling from his mouth.

That’s it.

Oh Christ, Conny, you really have lost your mind.

She shrugged off her police-issue shirt, stripping down to her vest, and tore a long strip of fabric from it. Kneeling, she tied one end of the fabric around Remy’s collar to create an improvised leash.

Remy glared reproachfully at her.

“Sorry, Rem. I know, buddy, but it’s necessary, okay?”

Remy huffed, looking away. If dogs could pout, she thought, that was exactly what Remy was doing at that very moment.

“What are you doing, Mum?”

“Hang on, Lo.”

Conny tore two more strips from the ruined shirt, and handed one to Logan.

He stared at her, confused.

“It’s a blindfold,” she said. “Put it on. Keep it on, no matter what.”

She wrapped the other length of fabric around her own face, pulling it tight over her eyes, and tying a sturdy knot.

“We’re going hunting.”

36

“Yellowstone is a big place, Dan,” Herb said dubiously.

Dan nodded, wincing. They had apparently been in the air for a long time when light returned to his eyes and he sat up, gasping. His belly felt like a warzone.

Only shattered fragments of the confrontation outside the Bellagio remained in his mind: standing in the shallow pool of water, waiting for the approaching vampire to get close enough, turning to find it was already in the air, launching itself at him.

Even as he had taken its mind, he had felt the monster’s momentum rake a talon through his gut, carving open a wound that Captain Smalling said was eight inches across, easy. Just a scratch, kid.

Dan had resisted the impulse to tell him that they were probably the exact same age.

They had done a good job of taping him up, and had offered him morphine when he awoke, but he refused it. He needed the agony, now. He had a feeling that it was only the constant physical pain that was holding his mind together, ensuring that he still knew his name was Dan Bellamy.

“I’ll know it when I see it,” he said, still nodding at Herb. Aim for a lake by a mountain. I can take it from there.”

Herb glanced inquiringly across the chopper at Captain Smalling and Mancini, who were poring over an enormous map.

“Lot of lakes and mountains in Yellowstone, Bellamy,” Mancini said in a dubious tone.

Dan shut his eyes, calling up the memories that didn’t belong in his head.

“It’s a small lake,” he said. In his mind, he was a vampire standing atop a hill, looking out across the water as it emerged from what he presumed was its nest. “It’s wide at one end, tapering in at the other. It looks kind of like...a heart. Yeah, it’s the same sort of shape as a heart. Not an actual heart. Like a Valentine’s Day heart.”

The two men fell silent for a few moments, searching, before Mancini pointed at a spot on the map and Smalling nodded.

“Lewis Lake,” Smalling said.

Dan shrugged. The vampires didn’t have a name for the body of water. At least, none that he could understand.

“We got enough fuel?” Smalling asked, raising his voice for the pilot to hear.

After a few seconds, the pilot responded, “Barely.”

“Get us there,” Smalling said, fixing his eyes on Dan. “What’s waiting for us in Yellowstone?”

Dan pondered the question.

When he had been in the vampire’s mind, back at the Bellagio, he had sensed the presence of the black river immediately, and for the first time in two years, it wasn’t clawing for him. Wasn’t reaching out to pull him under. It felt like it was trying to pull away. To hide.

The entity remained hidden deep in the bowels of the Earth because it was afraid. Vulnerable.

“The end,” he said.

*

Conny walked slowly, barely moving forward, letting Remy dictate her direction. She clutched the improvised leash tightly in one hand, and the M4 in the other, while Logan kept a tight grip on her vest, at the small of her back.

They had moved that way for what felt like hours, but probably hadn’t descended very far at all into the huge bunker. They had definitely passed through the dining area though, she knew that much. She hadn’t been able to miss the stink of blood filling her nostrils where most of the kids had been massacred. Without fresh air to push the stench away, the room would start to smell like the rotting guts of hell in a few more hours.

They must have looked ridiculous, she thought: two blindfolded idiots shuffling along with a dog in the impenetrable darkness. She stubbed her toe often, and nearly lost her balance just as much, but never allowed so much as a whimper to escape her lips.

Sound was all important, now.

The sound of Remy growling.

The German Shepherd had started to rumble a few moments earlier, straining on the leash. Conny pulled up, reaching out with the M4, using it like a blind person’s stick to try to understand her surroundings. They weren’t in one of the chambers, but in a narrow tunnel.

Good, she thought. It can only come at us from two directions.

Probably just one, in fact: her instincts told her the vampire was somewhere ahead of her, still making its return journey to the surface.

Without her eyes, her other senses seemed to have become hyper-alert. She could smell the stale sweat on her body; the blood that covered her son. She even thought she could still detect a little of that gravy that Remy had wiped all over his face.

But it was her ears that she focused on.

She tried to tune out the sound of her heart pounding, and the soft whisper of her shuffling shoes on the rocky floor.

Listened for the clicking.

Remy’s growl increased, just a fraction, but it hadn’t yet reached the sort of urgent level that he had managed back at the ranch. There the vampire had been, what? four hundred yards away?

She reasoned that Remy’s senses probably weren’t as keen here, where the sound of the vampire’s distant movement was muted by thick rock walls. It could be closer, but it could also be on the other side of one of those walls, moving past them in the dark, in a separate tunnel, oblivious to their presence.

Remy’s growl began to fade.

Damn, she thought. She hoped to encounter the vampire in a narrow space just like this, where she had more chance of hitting it when she opened fire.

There was nothing to do but keep pressing forward, circling around and around in the dark maze.

As she walked, her mind began to replay Frank Mather’s words. His theory that Hermetics had suffered from some sort of brain disorder, and that the sickness in their minds was what made them impervious to vampires.

Could it be possible?

Could Logan be the same as Dan Bellamy? Dan didn’t suffer from Huntington’s, that much was clear, but perhaps it didn’t matter. Maybe the vampires could only take a healthy human mind?

She set her jaw.

Logan was still healthy. He had barely begun to exhibit symptoms. He was years away from his mind starting to disintegrate.

No, she thought, Logan dies down here if I don’t kill it.

Myself.

*

Dan staggered from the helicopter, ducking low despite the fact that the rotor blades cleared his head by a good two feet at least.

They had touched down near a small mountain of rocks in wide, sweeping fields that sloped gently down toward the distant heart-shaped lake.

He’d seen this exact panorama laid out in front of him before, but not through human eyes.

“Here,” Herb said, gesturing to a small cave mouth that had been sealed up with two-by-fours and chicken wire. Herb pulled the wire away with a grunt, and pointed a flashlight inside. “Looks empty,” he said.

Dan smiled thinly, and hobbled toward Herb. Each step felt like it was ripping a new hole in his belly, but Captain Smalling assured him that the dressing was secure; almost wrapped around his body tightly enough to crack ribs.

It didn’t help with the pain, though.

Either physical or mental.

Darkness gathered closely around Dan’s psyche now, surrounding him on all sides. It was, perhaps, just the siren’s song of unconsciousness that he felt, luring him toward the rocks of oblivion, begging him to rest. To heal.

Perhaps.

Dan thought it was something else: the minds of all those that he had taken—human and inhuman alike—pressing down on his mind, slowly crushing it. He had feared for so long that his sanity would collapse, and now it felt like it was on the precipice. If he took his mind off the pain in his gut for a moment, he suspected that he would never be able to grasp his thoughts firmly again. He would be lost, dragged into a shrieking vortex, never to return.

Adrift on the terrible black river forever.

He grimaced, biting down on the pain; relishing the bitter taste, and made his way into the cave.

Herb was right.

It looked empty. Even those who stood inside it might miss the cave’s treasure, but Dan knew exactly where it was. He’d seen it.

The fissure.

He made his way directly toward it, and paused at the entrance.

The others—with the exception of Jerome Mills, who now slept soundly aboard the Black Hawk, dosed up with just enough morphine to stop him whimpering—gathered behind him.

Herb moved in front of Dan. He looked confused.

“Why have you stopped? That’s it, right? The entrance?”

Herb nodded at the fissure.

“Yeah,” Dan said, gasping at the pain in his belly. “That’s it. But this is as far as you go, Herb. I go on alone from here.”

Herb opened his mouth to protest.

“I mean it,” Dan said. “It’s too…” he trailed off, wincing as another wave of pain ebbed through him, threatening to short-circuit his mind. “It’s too dangerous for you to go any farther.”

“Too dangerous for me?” Herb looked astonished. “You can barely stand—”

Dan shook his head and smiled wearily.

“Strength won’t help you where I’m going, Herb. Having your mind in there with me...it’s too dangerous. It can use you against me. Or me against you.”

Realisation seemed to dawn in Herb’s eyes, and he nodded.

Dan could almost have sworn he saw tears on the younger man’s face.

“It’ll be okay. Once this is done, those that are left will be disorganised. You can fight them.”

Herb nodded.

“You’re making it sound like you’re not planning to come back.”

Dan smiled sadly.

“They’ll be coming,” he said, lifting his voice enough for everybody in the cave to hear. “The black river ordered the ones that are closest to come back the minute I looked at it, back in Vegas. They’re on their way here, right now. Coming to save their master. The best thing you can do right now is leave. Get as far away as the helicopter will take you.”

Dan didn’t wait for a response.

He turned away, shuffling through the narrow fissure.

Each pace a new exercise in agony.

Each step burning.

His mind beginning to sizzle.

He didn’t look back.

Just...keep...moving...forward, he thought, and then the world lurched crazily.

And he collapsed.

No, he thought weakly. No…I’m so close.

He felt the cold rock beneath his face, and it was like a silk pillow, urging him to rest, just for a moment.

No…

He threw an arm out feebly, trying to pull himself forward.

And then strong hands slipped underneath him, hauling him up.

*

“I got you, Dan,” Herb grunted.

“Herb,” Dan slurred. “What are you doing?”

Herb grimaced.

“Saving you.”

Dan’s head lolled over Herb’s shoulder, and he slurred out something else, something that Herb couldn’t quite catch.

He thought it was, “Can’t save me.”

“Then maybe I’m saving everybody else,” he muttered.

*

“Okay,” Mancini said, turning away from the fissure and heading for the cave mouth. “You heard the guy. Incoming vampires.”

The remaining Rangers looked at him, startled.

Most likely, Mancini thought, they were thinking about jumping back in that chopper and getting the hell outta Dodge. Leaving all this craziness behind, just like Dan said they should.

Hell, Mancini thought, that’s normally what I’d be thinking myself.

“You know the drill,” he said. “Weapons aimed at that entrance, and if you hear anything coming, shut your damn eyes and start shooting.”

Mancini dropped to one knee, hefting his rifle, checking that the magazine was full.

Rennick was a grade-A asshole.

But Leon Mancini wasn’t going to leave him behind.

*

Someone else had already been there.

Once he made it through the fissure, gasping at the last few feet as the rock closed in on him like pincers, Herb exited gratefully into wide, almost circular cavern.

And in the centre, he saw a hole.

The true entrance.

Most surprising of all, though, was the climbing equipment he saw: pins driven into the rock to secure a line of sturdy nylon cable which dropped down into the abyss. The equipment looked old: covered in dust and spiderwebs, but when Herb tested its strength he thought it would hold.

His mind ran back to the Shard building. There, he had used an old survival technique, improvising a rudimentary descender from a torn length of tablecloth, and the resulting attempt to slide down an elevator cable with Dan on his back had damn-near broken his legs.

At least this time, the climbing line would offer some sort of friction.

There was nothing for it.

He placed Dan on the ground—still conscious, just barely—and slipped off his shirt, looping it around his wrists and knotting it.

And at least this time, he thought, I’m not being chased.

He peered down the hole once more, praying it was not as deep as it looked, and picked Dan back up, balancing him on his shoulder and tensing his muscles to keep him steady.

Here goes nothing.

He swung his legs out over the abyss, and tied off his shirt around the cable, pulling it tight before securing it with his other hand.

His heart began to thump uncontrollably.

In his head, he heard Mancini’s sneering voice, calling him a pussy.

Herb grinned.

And eased out over the void, letting the knots in the shirt take his weight.

He stayed there for a moment, testing the improvised descender’s strength, and then began to rappel down fast.

*

The air in the dark tunnel filled with rumbling thunder; the sound of Remy growling urgently.

It was the third time that Remy had alerted Conny to the close proximity of the vampire, and judging by the frantic manner in which Remy began to tug on his leash, it would be the last.

Sweat had soaked through the blindfold; it threatened to slip from Conny’s eyes at any moment.

Behind her, Logan’s grip on her vest tightened. She wanted to tell him that it would all be okay, that she would keep him safe, but she didn’t dare make a sound.

Didn’t want to lie.

This was a desperate plan, she thought. Hopeless; a hail-Mary thrown in the dark.

Click.

Click, click…

...click.

The vampire had paused somewhere ahead of her. Clearly, it could hear Remy growling, even as the dog’s voice became that plaintive whine instead. Was it sitting there in the dark, wondering what a dog was doing down here in the guts of the Earth? Was its vision so effective in the pitch-black that it could see her and Logan cowering there?

Was it, even now, grinning?

Wait, Conny thought. Wait. Listen.

She would get only one shot. She had to be sure of the direction, had to fire in a wide enough arc and pray that her bullets found the target.

Her finger curled around the trigger.

Wait.

She held her breath.

Clickclickclickclickclickclickclick—

*

Herb was drenched with sweat by the time he had half-rappelled-half-fallen down not one, but two long shafts that speared into the earth. Just when he thought the drop would never end, his feet touched down on something unexpectedly soft.

Not the ground.

A backpack, filled with climbing equipment.

Coulda left that at the fucking top, he thought.

He eased Dan off his shoulder, placing him gently on the ground, and rifled through the pack until he found an old ascender. He started to fix it to the line, flinching when Dan’s eyes flared open and his fingers clutched tightly at Herb’s calf.

“It’s here,” Dan hissed.

Herb shot a confused glance about him. He got the impression that he was standing in a huge space, big enough that when he shone his flashlight, he couldn’t even see the walls. For a moment, he felt bizarrely like was an astronaut on a spacewalk, hovering in endless nothing.

He saw no sign of trouble.

“Go,” Dan said urgently. “Go now. Climb! Shut your eyes and don’t look back.”

The urgency in Dan’s voice made Herb’s nerves quiver.

“Dan, I—”

“Go!” Dan screamed, striking out at Herb weakly. “GO!”

*

Conny shrieked as she pulled the trigger, the recoil of the M4 pushing her back into Logan, her own howl mirrored by Remy’s as she released her grip on his leash and heard him scampering away behind her.

Run, Rem, she thought, and her heart broke as she pictured Remy slowly starving, traipsing endlessly around the dark tunnels, crying by the side of her corpse. Alone.

Behind her, Remy paused, barking, a note of uncontrolled panic in his tone.

Logan’s grip on the back of her vest was gone.

And Conny lost her balance, hitting the deck hard.

Still firing.

*

Dan tore his gaze away from Herb, lost in his rage at last.

It was here.

He could feel its foul presence, close by.

The creature that had torn his life apart. That had torn the whole world apart. The very air stank of it; of age and death and suffering.

He started to crawl away from Herb, and tried to pull himself upright.

Collapsed back down.

And his mind flickered.

Her beautiful face, he thought. Talons reaching under her delicate chin. Starting to pull…

A huge sob ripped through his body, sending white-hot pain crashing into his mind, threatening to tear it apart.

I believe in you, Dan.

Elaine’s words, ringing in his head, cutting through the pain and the avalanche of memories that didn’t belong to him.

I know you can do it.

He clenched his jaw, pushing the agony aside, and pulled himself forward through the dark, leaving a trail of blood behind him.

Leaving the pain behind him.

And at last, he saw it.

It was real.

He was on the bank of the black river.

*

Mancini’s finger began to tremble when he heard the screeching in the night outside.

Jesus, he thought. There must be dozens of them.

Sweat beaded his brow.

His gun held thirty rounds, and he would literally be firing blind.

There was still time to get to the chopper.

Still time.

Every muscle in Mancini’s body tensed.

“Incoming,” he roared, and he shut out the world, listening only for the first sign of talons clicking on hard rock.

*

The vampire roared.

It was a noise that Conny had never heard one of them make before: a guttural cry of pain.

I hit it.

Click.

Conny’s heart almost gave out when she heard it, but it was just the click of the M4’s magazine. Empty.

Her nerves sizzled, but there was no sound other than Remy, still barking furiously, refusing to leave her.

She heard nothing of the vampire.

Did I kill it?

“Logan?” Conny yelled.

He didn’t respond.

“LOGAN!”

Conny let out a roar of her own, ripped from her throat by her frustration.

Logan wasn’t answering.

She couldn’t hear the vampire.

She had to take the blindfold off. Had to know what had happened.

Ripping the wet fabric from her face, she flicked on her flashlight, flooding a narrow passage with light.

And tried to piece together what her mind saw.

The vampire was twenty yards away, sliding toward her slowly on its belly. Bleeding, but still very much alive.

Looking straight at her.

Conny stared into the fearsome red eyes, expecting at any moment to feel her mind crumble, but it didn’t happen. The vampire kept on looking right at her.

She looked right back.

Paralysed by fear and uncertainty.

Until the truth unravelled in front of her. It couldn’t take her mind.

It had already taken another.

Conny turned slowly, by inches, terrified at the prospect of seeing what she knew was behind her.

Her boy.

Her beautiful boy, who had heard his mother fall and hadn’t been able to resist tearing off his blindfold.

Lifting a gun that looked enormous in his hands, cradled in those tiny fingers that had once whispered the meaning of life to her.

Aiming it at her face.

She met Logan’s gaze.

Pleading.

And saw hesitation in his eyes. Doubt.

He’s trying to fight it, Conny thought. He can fight it.

Tears streamed down Logan’s face. If he was able to fight the vampire’s control of his mind, it looked like it was a battle that he was slowly losing.

Something in Logan’s eyes began to crack, and his finger curled around the trigger of the Glock.

“Hold on, Lo,” she roared, fumbling at her M4, ejecting the magazine and jamming her hand into her pocket to retrieve another.

Coming up empty.

There wasn’t another.

*

Clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick—

“Fire!” Mancini roared, and the cave filled with a shattering symphony of gunfire.

He heard the screeches as the bullets hit home.

A human voice, to his right, crying out in terrible pain.

He didn’t dare open his eyes to look.

Didn’t need to.

His gun held thirty bullets, and the vampires were still coming.

He knew how this would end.

At least, he thought, I’m taking some of these bastards to Hell with me.

*

There was a presence to his right. Something forming in the water.

Becoming.

The river was taking on a solid shape, becoming a creature that looked like a prototype for the vampires it had spawned.

For he knew it, now. He understood. This was the wellspring from which the vampire species had sprung. The river wasn’t their ruler. It wasn’t their master.

It was their mother.

Dan hauled himself to his feet, and felt a stretching sensation in his gut. A deeply permanent tearing.

His life began to flicker, a million memories trying to cram into his mind all at once.

One journey left to make, he thought.

And as the liquid-vampire threw itself toward him, trying to claw him away from the oily water, he dropped face-first into the terrible black river.

It was in his skull, in his mind. A creature that had feasted on dinosaurs. If it had a name, it was Extinction. A foul, ancient evil.

An abomination.

Even now, it wanted to control him. It wanted his mind.

Dan gave it freely. All the pain, all the terror. All the rage and suffering. When the river pushed, he pushed back, driving himself down into its abhorrent consciousness like a blade, making it scream.

Making it feel pain. Tearing at it, clawing at it.

Ripping its dark soul apart.

*

The vampires in the cave shrieked as one, a mournful howl of anguish, lifting their voices in unison, like a choir of the damned.

Mancini’s eyes popped open in surprise, and the sight laid out before him made his jaw drop.

The cave was full of the monsters, two dozen at least, and they had all collapsed to the floor simultaneously, clutching at their heads, like their brains were exploding. They writhed in snarling agony, the humans in front of them forgotten.

“Now!” Mancini roared, and he reloaded his weapon.

And began the execution.

*

Conny’s eyes widened as the vampire pressed its hideous hands to its head and began to shriek.

She was still fumbling at her pocket, desperately hoping to find a magazine that didn’t exist, knowing in her heart that whatever strange force had incapacitated the vampire was temporary.

Her window of opportunity would close before she knew it, and she didn’t have a weapon.

But Logan did.

Conny flinched as the Glock roared, right above her head, making her ears ring.

The vampire had released its grip on Logan, unable to quite push itself into his mind before something else had torn its attention away.

Free at last, Logan strode past Conny, still firing. Emptying the gun into the twitching monster’s torso until there were no bullets left.

Even after the beast had fallen still, Logan kept aiming the gun at it. Kept on pulling the trigger.

Click.

Click.

Click.

*

Herb took Mancini’s hand gratefully, and let the big American take his whole weight.

“Jesus, Rennick. Ever thought about dieting?”

Herb was too tired to respond. When Mancini pulled him out of the abyss, he collapsed onto his back, panting.

“He did it,” Mancini said.

“Yeah,” Herb gasped. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

“We killed some,” Mancini said. “Seemed like whatever he did down there made ‘em lose their minds. For a while, at least.”

Herb tried to nod.

“There’s probably a lot of them still out there, though,” Mancini said.

Herb sat upright.

“Dan’s given us a chance. It’s more than we had before.”

“Huh. So what do we do now?”

Herb let that question settle on his mind for a moment.

“We do what they did,” he said. “Head underground; stay safe. Find others who can fight them. Other Hermetics. Learn how to fight them ourselves. We rebuild, and when the time is right to take back the world...we rise.”

Epilogue

Reality.

Dan’s eyes snapped open, drinking in the warm light spilling through the window onto the bed.

He smiled. At the other end of the apartment, he could hear Elaine in the kitchen, trying to mask the sound of her noisy attempts at making breakfast with an even noisier rendition of an old Madonna hit.

He shut his eyes, just listening.

It was all a dream, of course it was. Elaine was gone, and soon, Dan would be, too. He wasn’t in his bed; his body was in a cave somewhere far beneath the surface of Yellowstone, ripped and punctured, slowly dying.

That didn’t matter; he didn’t need it anymore.

His mind floated.

Let death come. He could wait.

In the meantime, he had the dream.

And, for once, it was better than reality.

Also by K.R. Griffiths

Wildfire Chronicles series:

Panic

Shock

Psychosis

Mutation

Trauma

Reaction

Other novels:

Survivor: A horror thriller

Last Resort

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Contents

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Epilogue

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Epilogue

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