Read Adrift 2: Sundown for Free Online Page B

Almost five in the morning. It was late in the year, and dawn wouldn’t break over England for a couple of hours yet. Sunrise had been their final deadline for returning the Three to the earth, where more of their kind were supposedly hibernating. If that were true, by the time light washed across the land, the rest of the nest would surely realise that their kin were not coming back.
    Herb was sure that they would not attack the surface in daylight. The texts weren’t lying about that part: the vampires had demanded total darkness aboard the Oceanus, and had been sealed in the shipping container to avoid all light during their transportation. The notion that sunlight might actually kill them was fanciful; just another part of the false mythology that had been allowed to spring up around the vampires over the centuries, but they avoided light nonetheless.
    If there were more vampires out there, ready to rise and avenge the death of their kind, he figured he had around twelve hours of daylight to figure out how to deal with them; twelve hours to unwrap the riddle of Dan Bellamy.
    Twelve hours.

4
     
    Click.
    Barry Reid shut the front door to the farmhouse softly behind him, and his face twisted into a sour grimace.
    Rain again.
    He stepped out into the still-dark morning with a sinking heart, and felt the downpour plaster his prematurely greying hair to his forehead in seconds. The weather forecasts had been right: a storm had blown in from the Atlantic overnight. Just like every other damn night.
    The year was shaping up to be the wettest on record; a hard-won accolade in the UK. Winter lurked around the corner, and the sun had barely shown all summer. Instead, there was the endless rain. In some low-lying coastal areas, that had meant flooding, and vaguely hysterical responses from a government that did all but declare it was going to be tough on weather and tough on the causes of weather .
    Barry’s farm, a few miles inland from the coastal town of Brighton, had not flooded, but the inclement weather had a profound effect nonetheless. Most people probably assumed that drought was a farmer’s worst enemy, and they weren’t exactly wrong, but wet day after wet day could be just as troublesome.
    Amazing how something as simple as an extended period of rain—as damn arbitrary —could put a man’s livelihood at risk. The silage crop had suffered a near-fatal blow from the lack of anything like a summer. Without silage stocks, Barry was forced to resort to buying in animal feed to get the cows through the winter, and the price of the stuff just kept on going up. Meanwhile, the supermarkets continued to drive the price of milk down, and Barry found himself caught in the middle, slowly having the life squeezed out of his business.
    Getting up at four every morning was starting to feel a lot like drowning, and every hour spent tending to the farm as it haemorrhaged a little more money had become a dreadful burden that squatted heavily on Barry’s soul. He could almost see the pennies draining away in front of his eyes, minute by minute. Now, each morning when Barry left the farmhouse and headed for the tractor to begin his first circuit of the land, he carried a vague sense of dread with him which lasted all day.
    And he got soaked, of course. There was always that.
    Barry broke into a trot as a fork of lightning gave the darkness an early taste of the daylight to come. For a moment, his land lit up around him, bright and bleached of colour, but he paid it no attention. His surroundings were as familiar to him as oxygen; he could have navigated the farm wearing a blindfold.
    The house behind him, garage to his right. Outbuildings to the left—mostly containing tools and supplies, along with a few chickens. A small barn directly ahead that was a prelude to the much larger version further down the dirt track that led to the heart of his two hundred acres. He usually parked the tractor in the larger barn, but had been so