Adrift 3: Rising (Adrift Series) (18 page)

“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.”

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.