Adrift (Book 3): Rising Read online

  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.