Adrift 2: Sundown Read Online Free Page A

oblivion that had been so cruelly snatched from him at the last. Once, he had thought he could go through with killing himself; had believed that suicide was the only way to stop the terrible pain that buzzed in his head incessantly. But he had made a promise that he would never go through with it.
    A promise .
    Tears filled his eyes; blurred his vision.
    He lifted the gun unsteadily.
    Kill him.
    For her.
    He choked back a sob as grief and despair overwhelmed him, and aimed the gun at the old man’s face.
    Kill them all.
    The thought erupted into his shattered mind so easily; so naturally . Kill them all . Just like that. He pictured himself pulling the trigger again and again, could almost see the perforated bodies dropping around him. The blood. His mind pitched alarmingly; a feeling like a rollercoaster cresting a huge drop and plummeting toward the ground. A wave of dizziness and nausea washed through him.
    Dan’s hands shook wildly, and the air around him congealed. Suddenly, his chest felt like it was being crushed in a vice, and each attempt to draw in a breath lodged white-hot razors in his throat.
    Familiar sensation.
    Crawling up my neck.
    Unsafe. Get away.
    Must get away.
    Adrift on the terrible black river, surging and boiling; carrying me toward something awful. Something unstoppable, and—
    His head felt like it was cracking open; as though the contents were seeping out, expelled like toxic waste.
    She’s dead...
    Dan blinked, and suddenly he wasn’t seeing an old man kneeling in front of him anymore; wasn’t seeing the ship and the falling rain. He wasn’t even seeing the face of his dead wife. All were gone, torn away like a band-aid; reality submerged beneath a terrifying vision of cascading dark water.
    The black river roared, and the dam that he had sought to build with medication and therapy finally crumbled.
    Dan’s mind began to flood.
    Somewhere through the tears and the blackness that ringed his vision, spreading like a cancer, he vaguely understood that Charles Rennick was rising to his feet, grasping for the gun frantically.
    Dan squeezed the trigger, and the back of Rennick’s head exploded. He died instantly, but when his body collapsed to the deck in the blood and the rain, Dan stood over the corpse and fired again.
    Again.
    Again.
    And with each bullet fired, the corpse at his feet twitched, and the darkness in Dan’s mind intensified.
    After the fourth shot—which took out most of Charles Rennick’s jaw—Dan felt the gun slipping from numb fingers that no longer seemed to belong to him, clattering to a deck which he could no longer see.
    The world tumbled and spun as the boiling black tide swept away his thoughts.
    Foul water in my mouth—
    Can’t breathe—
    Dan bent double and retched as a flare went up in his mind; white-hot pain that lanced across the back of his skull. His jaw clenched involuntarily and he bit deeply into the soft flesh of his cheek as his neck began to spasm.
    Tasted blood.
    And the river took him.
    The last thought that went through his mind before the seizure snatched away his consciousness and he collapsed to the deck was that there was, at least, a fair chance that he might never wake up.

 
2
     
    A stunned silence fell on the deck of the trawler, and for a moment even the ocean seemed to hold its breath.
    Herb watched in open-mouthed astonishment as Dan Bellamy collapsed.
    The guy hadn’t spoken a word in hours, and Herb might even have assumed that he had lapsed into unconsciousness in the container, if it weren’t for the occasional low moan of despair or soft grunt of pain. In that heavy darkness, Herb got the distinct impression that he was sharing the space with a broken, tortured man.
    Herb’s oldest brother had given his life so that Dan would live, because Dan was the only man in recorded history who had killed a vampire. That made him important, but as earnest and certain as Edgar had been that Dan might hold the key to resisting the