Adrift 3: Rising (Adrift Series) (23 page)

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.

“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.