The screaming seemed to be following him, getting louder with each step, but when he finally turned to face the attack that he was certain was coming at any moment, Vega found himself confronted by only darkness, and knew that the screaming had come from his own throat.
Lightning split the sky again, and the roar of thunder that followed it was almost immediate. The Oceanus was in the eye of the storm.
As the flash faded, Vega saw a man smashing his head into the ground repeatedly, trying to purge it of the poison within; his face already a ruinous catastrophe of gristle and bone. Smashing and smashing until what was left didn't even look human.
Vega had seen, and now he understood. Death had come to the Oceanus. It circled the ship like a vulture.
The sky cracked once more, and then all thoughts fled.
And there was only running.
"Vampires," Mark repeated in disbelief. "Are you fucking kidding me? That's your story? Fucking
vampires
?"
He let out a chuckle and surprised himself with how shaky his voice sounded. The combination of darkness, distant gunfire and Herb’s oddly placid demeanour had wormed its way under his skin. He wasn’t sure what he thought Herb’s story was going to be, but he was damn sure he hadn’t expected
vampires.
Herb sighed heavily.
"That's right," he said. "Vampires. We gonna do the
I don't believe this shit
dance for a while now? Because believe me, friend, our time is fucking short, and that dance can last a long time. Trust me. I
know
."
Something about the steely note in the man's voice made Mark swallow the sarcastic response that had been gathering in his mind. He searched his thoughts for a question that seemed appropriate and came up empty. What was the protocol when someone—an apparently dangerous someone; maybe even a
terrorist
—told you that vampires existed, and they were likely hunting you at that very moment?
None of the questions that popped into his mind felt anything less than ridiculous, but it was obvious from the silence in the conference room that nobody else planned on speaking.
"How?" Mark finally said.
"
How
?" Herb barked a laugh that made Mark's nerves sizzle. "
That's
your question?"
Herb's laughter dissolved into coughing and a sharp intake of breath.
"I don't know how," he said. "I know
what
and I know
why
. The 'what' is a creature that has existed since before our species discovered fire. Something fucking old, man, you understand? Something you haven't seen before."
Mark snorted.
"And you have?"
Herb laughed again.
"No," he said. "I haven't seen anything personally. I didn't even believe this shit myself until a few weeks ago; not really. But according to those who
do
believe, the reason we haven't seen them is because they don't come around all that often. Sometimes there are gaps of decades without activity. Sometimes, centuries. They live a long time; they hibernate, understand? We're not talking about
Dracula
or fucking
Twilight
here, right? No swooning women, no tortured love story, no nibbling on people's necks. These things aren't like us. They were
never
like us. They are something else. Animals that we don’t understand. An apex predator."
"This is bullshit," Ferguson snapped, and Mark flinched. For a while there, listening to Herb speak, the darkness had once more fooled him into thinking they were alone in the conference room.
"You guys are not actually listening to this, are you?" Ferguson growled.
Mark said nothing. The sound of Steven Vega's gun firing until the bullets ran out dominated his thoughts. Vega was ninety percent arsehole, but the other ten percent didn't strike Mark as the type of guy to start shooting in a public area unless he absolutely had to. Yet it hadn't sounded to Mark like a gun
fight
. More liked panicked fire from a single weapon. A whole clip emptied at something that didn't shoot back.
Vega had to have been scared by something.
This can't possibly be true.
Can it?
"Say we believe you," Mark said cautiously. "What's your role in this? Why disable the ship?"
Herb drew in a breath. Mark couldn't see the man's face, but he got the impression that Herb was searching for the right way to say something that he knew they would find it difficult to believe.
"There is a world...beneath our world," Herb began in a faltering tone that sounded to Mark like he was trying to remember a memorised speech, and then he tutted, apparently at himself.
"Look, I only know what I've been taught," Herb said. "What I've had to listen to since I was a kid. Trust me, I understand what this sounds like. The story goes that these things live underground, mostly, and only come to the surface to feed. Once, their existence was common knowledge, but that has been eroded away. There are secrets that have been kept from the general population for centuries. Since before the damn printing press was invented, right? Information that has been allowed to slowly dissolve over time."
Mark frowned when Herb fell silent.
"Go on," he said.
"What you need to understand is that
vampire
is just a word, right? What you're thinking of when I say that word is a myth built on faded memories; told and retold until it becomes meaningless. A Chinese whisper. The creature that the word refers to might more appropriately be labelled a demon. Or a monster. It doesn't matter. 'Vampire' works because much of the whole vampire myth as we know it, if you trace it backwards, has its roots in the existence of this creature, but only one element of the vampire story as you know it is wholly true."
Mark realised he was holding his breath. Herb's words—as incredible as they were—were delivered with utter sincerity that made something in Mark's gut squirm.
"Which is?"
"They consume humans. Throughout history, when there have been mass disappearances—if you believe my father's version of events—that is down to people like me serving up sacrifices to keep these things at bay."
"And nobody has noticed this happening," Mark said dubiously.
"There are no survivors," Herb replied. "Never have been. That's part of the deal."
Mark snorted.
"There's, what, three thousand people on this boat?" he said. "If that number of people went missing anywhere in the world
somebody
would notice."
"Yeah," Herb said. "There hasn't been a sacrifice on this scale in centuries. Maybe millennia, if my father is to be believed. Not since the Incas. He says it's because there are a lot more of us now, so the price is steeper, but that's probably just another of his bullshit theories. Whatever it is these things
want
; however they think, it won't be as logical as that."
Herb took a deep breath, and when the silence didn't crack, he carried on.
"Since I was born, I've been prepared by my father, just as all my ancestors have been prepared, to be ready to make a sacrifice if
they
call for it. They haven't called on my family in generations, so until very recently, as far as I was concerned, I was raised by the family from hell, and I was the only one that wasn’t batshit-crazy. It turns out they were right, and after all this time, it's the Rennick family's turn to make an offering. Nice deal for me."
He spat those last words out like they were rotten.
"A little over two months ago, my father received contact, and demands were made. A large sacrifice. The Oceanus was the perfect choice: a large number of people in a confined space. Easy to cut communications. The ability to do it all at sea, where there was no chance of them coming into contact with the general population. The vampires agreed."
"If any of that is true," Mark said, "you and your family have got to be just about the most evil motherfuckers on Earth."
Herb snorted.
"Funny," he said. "When I first found out what was expected of me, I told my father the exact same thing. I asked him what was stopping us from just dropping these bastards into the sea instead of putting them on the ship. You know what he said?"
Herb paused a moment, until he was certain that no reply would be forthcoming.
"He said that if we didn't fulfil our duty, many thousands more would die. The entire vampire species would retaliate, and nobody knows for sure how many of them there are. Maybe millions. Nobody would be living in comfortable oblivion any more, watching TV and going to work and having safe, happy children. Instead, they'd be fighting, and they'd be dying."
Herb grimaced, as though remembering the taste of something sour.
"My father always said that our role is to offer sacrifices in isolated places, to maintain the ancient peace between the species, whether we like it or not. We keep the vampires away from humans, and we keep the knowledge of their existence secret. The world gets to keep turning."
Herb chuckled darkly, and when he next spoke, his tone dripped with bitterness and regret.
"He said we're the
good guys
."
Mark opened his mouth, though he wasn't entirely sure what the next words to spill from his lips might be, and then he snapped it shut again when the door to the conference room burst open and Steven Vega hurtled inside, panting for breath.
"Barricade the doors,
"
Vega roared, and Mark's blood ran cold.
The moment stretched out, until it felt to Dan like the air around him was ready to snap. When the helicopter had roared over the ship, Katie grabbed his hand once more, and dragged him back through the security suite and out onto the balcony that overlooked the park two levels below their current position.
It all seemed to happen so quickly. At one moment, Dan's mind had been equally divided between apprehension and confusion, but when the chopper dropped the huge box directly onto the people gathered below it, and the screaming and the gunshots started, he realised that the confusion part no longer mattered.
All that mattered was that the worst had happened. Hell,
worse
than the worst. Dan had been preoccupied with the thought of hijackers, but what unfolded in the park below them, lit sporadically by bolts of lightning, was far beyond anything his mind had been able to conjure up.
The Oceanus wasn't the target of hijackers, or even terrorists, but something else. Something that he caught glimpses of in the fractured light, but which his mind refused to accept.
If he had been pushed, the best word Dan could have come up with to describe the creatures that fanned out through the park was
monsters
.
They looked like nothing he had ever seen before: bigger than the average person, and vaguely humanoid in shape, but also somehow insectile in their movements. They were fast, but there was also order in the way they moved, an unmistakable intelligence. The creatures were operating like a well-drilled team, spreading out from the epicentre that was the shipping container uniformly.
A rampaging wave of teeth and death.
Dan saw only three, but they killed with extraordinary, machine-like efficiency. Every movement seemed calculated to cause maximum damage; each swing of the gangly arms tearing flesh apart like wet paper.
Dan and Katie stood, rooted to the spot, for what felt like an eternity, watching the massacre unfold in brilliantly-lit snapshots like a grisly slideshow. Every few seconds, lightning split the sky, and the pile of bodies in the park seemed to grow exponentially.
Dan's mind raced to understand. The creatures were killing at will, but the sheer number of bodies just didn't tally. It seemed like the creatures moved through a space and left insanity in their wake.
Many of the people down there, Dan realised, weren't being torn apart by the monsters.
They were killing
themselves
.
Lightning forked across the sky, and Dan saw a woman standing in front of one of the park's perfectly manicured trees.
Smashing her head against the trunk until she collapsed to the floor, unmoving.
He saw a man smash a wine bottle and savagely drive the broken neck into his own throat, ripping his life away with a single, terrible swipe.
Other passengers leapt for the railings at the edge of the deck, hurling themselves into the sea, and the screams of relief that emanated from them as they plunged toward the freezing waves made Dan think that they hadn't jumped because they wanted to escape.
They wanted to die.
The air was ripe with fear. It reached out invisible fingers and clutched at Dan's muscles, paralysing him.
Forcing him to watch.
The park became a killing field, and it happened so
fast.
Already the three creatures had disappeared from his sight. Those left alive in the park tried to bludgeon themselves to death with whatever was close to hand.
Dan saw a woman upend a chair and fall upon it, driving the leg through her eye and into her skull like a spear, and he dropped his gaze, unable to look on the insanity anymore, trying to focus only on not letting the terror he felt cause him to black out.
And he saw something below him that drove all other considerations from his mind in an instant.
One of the hideous creatures barrelled into the ship's interior, two floors directly below his position.
Run
, Dan thought, but his limbs would not comply. He stared, transfixed, at the darkness below, waiting for the next flash of lightning to illuminate the ruined corpses that decorated the park.
Hoping to see that the creature had turned back; that it wasn’t at that very moment heading straight toward him.
You have to run.
Dan almost shrieked when Katie grabbed his arm firmly, and dragged him toward the nearest doorway.
The fear caught in his throat.
Someone else was screaming, and they sounded terrifyingly close. The scream became a gurgle, and Dan heard wet smacking sounds as Katie closed the door gently. A half-second later, he felt her breath in his ear. The words hissed from her lips, hot and trembling.
"It's on the stairs."
If Dan
had
yelped in surprise when Katie grabbed him, he would almost certainly have drawn the creature straight to them. The realisation made his bladder loosen with terror. He tried to breathe evenly, but he wasn't sure he could manage even that without crying out, and so he settled for holding his breath.
The darkness in the room was absolute, but Dan didn't think Katie had pulled him back into the security suite. Even without visual cues to aid him, he sensed that they were standing in a much smaller space. Some office, perhaps, or...
Dan reached out a hand carefully, and brushed his hand against a wooden pole. He realised it was the handle of a broom, and that Katie had pulled him into a storage closet, even as the broom fell in the darkness, clattering into other cleaning supplies. The noise sounded impossibly loud.
Dan froze.
No way out.
For several seconds, he and Katie stood unmoving in the silence, and Dan desperately prayed that the noise he had made had gone unheard.
Silence prevailed for what felt to Dan like a lifetime.
Click.
Click, click, click.
Outside the door, the thunderous silence gave way to heavy footfalls, each one allied to the strange clicking noise. It took Dan a moment to understand that what he heard must be the sound of claws on the polished floor.
Or talons.
Katie's hand found Dan's face in the dark, and clamped firmly over his mouth.
She didn't whisper in his ear this time; no need to tell him to be quiet. Even if Dan had wanted to speak, he doubted he could have formed the words. He had a feeling that at that moment, his mouth was only good for screaming.
Through the thin wooden door, the footsteps approached fast, and Dan heard heavy, ragged panting. Up close, the thing sounded huge: each breath an explosive grunt that made Dan think there was a bear in the hallway beyond the door.
It's right outside.
Time slowed to a desperate crawl, and for a moment, Dan was back there on that innocuous London street, clutching his wallet dumbly and wondering how the handle of a knife came to be growing from his forehead. Tumbling helplessly on a black current of terror that soon became as familiar to him as breathing.
The sound of something falling to the floor right outside the supply closet snapped him back to the present. Whatever had fallen, it had landed with a wet
slap
that reminded Dan of owning a dog as a kid, and his mother tossing the fat she had trimmed from steaks onto the kitchen floor for the happy mutt to devour.
Meat.
Flesh.
Food.
Dan's fingernails buried themselves into his palms painfully, and Katie's iron grip on his jaw tightened until his cheeks ached, but he could not move, and the pain seemed terribly unimportant. Nothing mattered except the door, and Dan's certainty that at any moment it would burst open to reveal the snapping jaws of the monstrous creature that had decimated the passengers gathered in the park.
Dan's pulse hammered in his veins, and he wanted desperately to kick open the door and flee blindly. This was a nightmare; it had to be. He was still asleep next to his wife, warm and safe. The events of the hours since he had awoken were all so twisted, so unreal. Dan almost felt like laughing. Of
course
it was a dream. Dan should have known, from the moment he left the cabin and ventured out alone into an ocean of strangers.
That wasn't just out of character: it was impossible.
Dan felt his muscles relax a little.
He hadn't taken his medication after all, and the resulting chemical imbalance in his brain was making him crazy.
Time to wake up, now
, he thought to himself, and squeezed his eyes shut, praying that when he reopened them he would see the walls of the cabin, and Elaine snoring softly next to him.
But there was only darkness and terror and a strange young woman's hand clamped over his mouth. The trembling of her body next to his; the sour stench of sweat and fear.
Something thumped against the door, and Dan knew that he had just moments left to live, and suddenly the fear of the world; the crippling anxiety and the isolation he had imposed upon himself for two years made him furious.
Such a waste
, he thought.
It's a wonder Elaine even stayed, let alone agreed to marry me.
He offered a silent prayer, despite not having a religious bone in his body; a promise to God that if He would allow Dan to live through the madness unfurling aboard the Oceanus, Dan wouldn't let anxiety dominate another moment of his life. He would take Elaine dancing; Christ, he'd dance right along the streets with her, oblivious to the stares of strangers that had crippled him for so long and—
Outside the door, someone screamed.
Footsteps, fleeing.
And that terrible clacking of talons, following them.
Moving away.
Dan let out a breath that had become a raging inferno in his lungs, and became aware that somewhere during those terrifying few moments he had pissed himself. Ordinarily, such an occurrence in public would have resulted in all-consuming humiliation, and would most likely have meant another year of Dan refusing to leave the house.
Yet at that precise moment, as he felt the warm wetness at his crotch, he didn't give a damn. Fear of humiliation was suddenly outranked by something far worse.
Somewhere outside, he heard a door opening with a crash, and more screaming,
"I think it's in the security suite," Katie breathed into his ear, making him jump. She took her hand away from his mouth, and Dan worked his jaw, feeling it click into place.
"I'm so sorry," Katie whispered, and there was an odd note of embarrassment in her voice that suddenly made her sound very young. "I think I peed myself."
She sounded mortified.
Dan blinked into the darkness, and forced himself to swallow back the hysterical laughter that threatened to consume him.