Adrift 3: Rising (Adrift Series) (13 page)

“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.