Adrift 2: Sundown Read Online Free PDF Page A

weaponry had sunk hours earlier, but in its heyday the Shanty had been just about the largest dragger money could buy.
    Two huge freezer holds—once piled floor-to-ceiling with squirming life plucked from the Atlantic—devoured the majority of the space on the boat. The engine room took up most of the rest. What was left over was all about compromise: humans were afforded very little space to live and work in, no more than skinny corridors connecting a few anaemic rooms which were barely big enough for the average man to stand up straight in.
    The deck area, when the Shanty had been a working vessel, had been a complicated network of potential death traps which tested the awareness of the boat’s crew continually, underlining that people and their comfort were strictly a secondary concern. After all, it was the fish in the Shanty’s belly that truly mattered.
    The larger of the two holds was reliving its glory days; once more it carried precious cargo.
    Herb had two of the crew place Dan inside, atop a pile of rags and filthy blankets. All of Herb’s attempts to wake the man—up to and including delivering a slap that made his palm sing—had failed. Whatever was wrong with the guy was far beyond the medical knowledge of anyone on the trawler. If he had a role to play in destiny , Herb thought sourly, Dan Bellamy would have to come through whatever was ailing him of his own accord.
    He padlocked the hold, slipping the key into his pocket, and made his way back out onto the deck, his head bowed against the wind and rain until he reached the wheelhouse. Three of the crew were in there, watching him nervously, but Herb moved right past them, stepping into a smaller room to the rear which his father had turned into a sort of private office.
    Inside, there was a small desk and a couple of chairs and not much else, other than a half-empty bottle of brandy which was rolling slowly from one side of the room to the other with each wave that buffeted the hull. Herb snatched up the liquor and slumped into one of the chairs, and for a while he focused on nothing other than the pleasant burning sensation in his throat as he took large gulps.
    Through the gathering fog which the alcohol lowered across his thoughts, the question came, as he knew it would.
    What am I doing?
    Herb knew what he ought to be doing, and that was running; pointing the Shanty at some remote island somewhere and never looking back. He had always wanted to run, to just pick a direction and get as far away from the fanaticism of the compound on which he had been raised as he possibly could. In the end, he told himself that he stayed for his brothers, but would have readily conceded that it was more likely a simple matter of cowardice. Even if he had managed to flee, his father would have come after him. Rennick blood, after all, came with a sacred obligation.
    Even if Charles Rennick had let his youngest son go, some other part of the Order would have hunted him relentlessly, until they were certain that he was dead—along with everything he knew.
    He had failed.
    Failed to run.
    Failed to persuade his brothers that mass murder would cost them all their souls if not their lives, that they were far from the good guys with a noble burden that their father had always maintained.
    And, even while Herb was aboard the Oceanus, surrounded by death and madness, he had tried to save a man—just one man; to do one thing that was good amongst all the horror…
    …and that man was dead.
    Corrosive memories flooded back to Herb, crystal clear and debilitating: the wall of fire and the hideous monster that strolled through it nonchalantly, laughing as it prepared to devour him; the security officer blowing his own head off rather than face the abomination on the other side of a barricaded door. Edgar, pushing Herb inside the shipping container and locking the doors, turning to face the monster that he knew was behind him.
    And screaming right outside those doors as the last