Adrift 2: Sundown by K.R. Griffiths Page A

course. He was alone beneath the bridge.
    Do this quickly , he thought, and he ran to the nearest body, patting down a pair of trousers which were soaked through and sticky to the touch. Empty. He moved on quickly to the next body, kneeling on something slippery and soft, gagging as he tried not to think about what it might have been.
    Again he searched through pockets and again, he found them empty.
    His pulse raced almost painfully. Every second he spent among the bodies felt like he was taking a bigger and bigger risk; each body searched, another round in a game of Russian roulette.
    This is crazy, Sam. Get the fuck out of here. Do you know what will happen if the cops turn up and find you here?
    He patted the next couple of bodies down quickly—too quickly, almost, to be certain their pockets were empty—and shot another glance at the distant supermarket.
    And a bomb detonated in his central nervous system.
    Movement in his peripheral vision.
    Close .
    He looked up into the shadows, certain that he had seen something moving toward him. Moving above him.
    What the fu—
    Sam’s eyes widened even as his left hand closed around a promising lump in a sickeningly moist pocket; a small bag of something that had been so important only moments earlier.
    There was something up there, clinging to the struts beneath the bridge, hanging in the shadows like a bat.
    Something big .
    Watching him intently.
    Sam squinted.
    Saw it clearly.
    Should have run , he thought, and his sanity began to dissolve, melted by the heat of terrible eyes which glowed a furious crimson in the gloom, puncturing his soul like scalding needles.
    Taking him.
     
    *
     
    Sam’s body walked away from the bridge at a casual pace. By the time his feet reached the entrance of the busy supermarket and his left hand pulled out the small flick-knife he always carried for emergencies, Sam was long gone; broken and banished to a shrieking cell in the deepest recess of his mind.
    Still, his body carried on, piloted by another; muscles moved by something dark and terrible and unfathomable.
    It wanted to play.



 
9
     
    One day, you will remember how to enjoy new experiences.
    The words of Dan’s therapist came back to him as Herb led the way onto the deck of the trawler. Twenty-four hours after his first cruise began, and around seven hours after he had committed his first murder, Dan was about to experience yet another first: a helicopter ride, in the company of disciples of an insane cult which genuinely believed that the world was about to end at the hands of vampires, and which had, to all intents and purposes, kidnapped him.
    Maybe that counted as two firsts . Even three.
    Either way, his therapist had been dead wrong.
    He stepped out onto the deck, blinking at the grey sunlight filtering through the clouds, and did his best to remain invisible. It didn’t work; he felt the eyes of every man on the boat boring into him. The crew—most of whom looked bizarrely young; some even younger than Herb himself—regarded him with open hostility and more than a little fear.
    Herb led him past the battered container to the helicopter which took up the remainder of the foredeck. He waved half-hearted introductory gestures at the crew as he passed by them, reeling off names, but Dan didn’t try to commit them to memory. There was a Jay, a Stephen, a Christian, a Lawrence, but he couldn’t have put a face to any of those names if asked. He didn’t want to.
    “And that’s Jeremy,” Herb said finally, pointing at a man standing at the bow, who was by a distance the oldest person on the trawler. Jeremy didn’t speak or acknowledge Herb’s gesture. He stared at Dan across the deck, studying him as a surgeon might study a patient’s wounds, as though trying somehow to solve him.
    Dan stared back for a moment, but it was he who blinked first. Jeremy looked twice his age, but he was large and appeared physically fit, with stern eyes under a heavy brow. Staring down a