Adrift 3: Rising (Adrift Series) (9 page)

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 s
omething
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.