by Brian Lumley
“‘Something like that,’ he said. And: ‘Are you going to try the batteries?’
“Then, as I took out my cell phone and opened up the blister pack containing the batteries it used, abruptly he moved closer still, and his next few sentences tumbled out of him all urgent like and garbled. ‘How do I look? You’ve got to tell me! I have to know if I look…okay? See, I don’t feel too good. I don’t feel very well at all…’
“My fingers felt like rubber as I fitted the batteries, but the tiny pilot light on the phone at once lit up. It was working! ‘You look just fine,’ I told him. A lie, because he looked like shit, but I daren’t say that. I wanted him to be okay, and as yet there was very little to say he wasn’t—but at the same time I wasn’t taking any chances.
“He cocked his head a little on one side, smiled and said, ‘I look fine? Oh, really? You think I look okay?’ But his smile was all wrong.
“‘Yes, I really think so,’ I lied again, and began dialling my family’s number in Limassol, Cyprus. The phone burped once, twice, three times…and I could have screamed my frustration out loud, except I didn’t dare. But after the fourth burp, finally it was answered, by my mother.
“‘It’s Nick.’ I barely croaked the words out, then cleared my throat and repeated them. ‘It’s Nick, aboard the Evening Star. Mother, listen very carefully. We’re in trouble. Tell the company that the Star is shipwrecked on a rock, but I don’t know where. Tell them we’ve been boarded by—’
“But that was as far as I got, for moving so fast I barely saw it, my good ‘friend’ reached out and slapped the phone out of my hand. As it fell to the collar he brought a clenched fist down on it so hard that the thing splintered into little shards of plastic! And:
“‘That’s enough,’ he said, in that terrible monotone. ‘See, I still haven’t made up my mind. I can see you’re scared of me, and maybe you’ve a right to be. I still don’t know for sure.’
“But I knew for sure. For by now the sun had sunk more yet, and as the gloom deepened so his eyes were beginning to shine a gleamy yellow!
“Trembling, I left my shirt in a little pile and pulled my shoes on. And he said, ‘Are you going somewhere? Myself, I was thinking of just…of just waiting here for a while.’
“‘Waiting for what?’ I asked him. ‘Another fifteen or twenty minutes and they’ll be coming out onto the decks. So you and I, we have to hide ourselves away.’
“He didn’t seem to be listening. His feral eyes had gone to an empty carton of milk and the rind of an orange, the remnants of my last meal. ‘I see you’ve eaten,’ he said.
“‘Are you hungry?’ I asked him. ‘If so, I have some food.’
“‘I found food below,’ he answered. ‘It just made me throw up. So either it was off…or I am.’
“Coming to my feet with my shirt in my hands, I unfastened the top of my coveralls. ‘It’s getting chilly,’ I said, making to put my shirt on.
“He had come to his feet, too. The way his eyes roved over my upper body before focussing on my neck…I knew there was nothing anyone could do for him. Or if there was, I would have to be the one who did it.
“Then, the way he leaned toward me telegraphed his intention, but knowing how very quick he was I beat him to it. As he himself had pointed out, it was a matter of survival. I’d kept the Verey pistol wrapped in my shirt, my finger on the trigger. In the act of reaching for me he saw the weapon’s muzzle poised only inches from his face, and as his mouth fell open in a big round O of surprise, so I fired at him point-blank.
“The charge hit him in the left eye and lodged there, half in, half out of his skull, ejecting its hot gasses and driving him backwards to the rim of the collar. There he stood flailing his arms, until the final brilliant starburst cooked his brain and went on to incinerate his head from the inside out.
“As his arms flew wide he stiffened, then slumped down into himself, toppled backwards over the rim, and went crashing down onto the pool deck twenty feet below…
“After that I stood there for quite a while—oh, perhaps a minute—before I could get anything working again. But shadows were creeping and I knew I must get moving. The trouble was that I couldn’t leave this man I’d killed lying where he was in full sight of who or whatever would soon be coming out into the night. If they saw him there, then they’d start looking for who put him there.
“I went down the steel rungs breakneck, dragged the perfect and normal-seeming body with its blistered, bubbling, and barely recognizable head to the rail and dumped it overboard. No time to spare then as I climbed back up to the exhaust array, opened the hatch a crack for easy and rapid access, then stretched myself out flat on the collar to observe the night’s proceedings. This wasn’t simply morbid curiosity; I needed to know just how much these creatures had got it together in order to gauge the odds against my surviving. So in a way I suppose it was morbid curiosity after all.
“The sun was no more than a blister on the sea now, and the shadows were everywhere, lengthening by the second.
“I knew where to look: the stairwells for’ard and amidships. As for the aft stairwells: they were behind the array and there was nothing I could do about that but listen. And I listened so intently that I thought my ears might burst from the silence.
“Then it was time—that preternatural moment when the sun disappears and the gloom deepens—not yet night but no longer daylight, the ever-deepening twilight preceeding their time. It stretched itself out into minutes, and the minutes into half an hour. The shadows gradually merged together and became pools of darkness. Beginning in the east, the stars were flickering into being one by one…
“And then…there was movement!
“Something crept in the dark. Many somethings. Low-burning, lambent candles that weren’t candles at all but eyes!
“They came up out of the stairwells onto the decks…two groups that I could see and one that I could hear…a rustling like bat wings unfurling. The association with bats seemed very obvious. And then I saw those blots of darkness moving out from under the collar and spreading along the deck, that sea of vampires on the swarm, that host of horror!
“Between these groups there must have been…oh, it seemed a thousand of them, men and women alike! And God only knows how many remained below. As for those who had come up aft—I could see that they were cautious, curious, and supposed they’d heard my Verey pistol. I lay very still as they lifted their heads to sniff at the air, the lingering cordite and sulphur stink. Some of them paused at the spot directly below me where my ex-deckhand friend had fallen. There would be blood and shit there, of course. And I saw them follow a trail, go to the rail and look over. But as yet none of them had looked up. Fearing that they might, I drew back out of sight—the trouble with that being that now I didn’t know what was going on down there! But I was still able to look forward toward the prow, see what the other two groups were doing.
“The silence was broken when the aft vampires found their voices and began to talk, all in the same husky monotone of my ex-friend. From what they said it was fairly obvious that they suspected someone—an entirely human someone—was up here on the open deck. Mercifully, they didn’t seem too concerned. But then again, with their numbers why should they be concerned?
“Meanwhile, the two groups amidships and for’ard had more or less held their positions; none of the members of the three factions was mingling with the others. So it looked like they’d formed into three quite separate bands. And for a fact they had chosen or accepted leaders, for there were those among them who strode about giving orders. Good, for it was just such an order that saved my neck.
“My blood froze when I heard boots clanging on the rungs of the exhaust array’s maintenance ladder. The sound paralysed me, freezing me solid. Some curious vampire bastard was climbing up to see what he could see, probably to act as some kind of lookout for the rest of the aft group!
“I had already loaded my Verey pistol; now I rolled onto my back, w
ith my shoulders slightly raised and the weapon pointing down between my feet. The moment a face appeared over the collar’s rim, I was going to send the bastard to hell! After that I would have only one shot left and would have to try to bluff it out. Only one way up onto the collar, and me waiting at the top with a deadly weapon. Perhaps after I’d taken out a second man, then they’d give it up. But if they should send up a third man…well, that would be the end of me.
“But it didn’t come to that, for as I heard the boots climbing higher, suddenly a gruff voice called out, ‘You there! Come down from there and bring on the entertainment.’ God! The first thing I thought was that he knew I was there and was talking to me!
“But…‘the entertainment’? Sweet Jesus!
“Then I heard the boots pause as someone hesitated, and finally I started to breathe again as they went clumping back down the metal rungs.
“‘The entertainment’ consisted of the last handful of human beings, captives of the vampires. They’d been saving them, keeping them back, for this. And despite that I was now mindless with terror—or perhaps because I was—I had to know what was happening. Turning over onto my stomach again, I inched forward until I could see over the edge of the collar. A handful of survivors were dragged up from below decks, mainly girls and young kids. They were all naked, sobbing, and clinging to each other, incapable of accepting what was happening to them. For even now—to me, let alone to them—it was beyond belief, as I watched mass rape turn to murder, and blood-lust to cannibalism!
“But there are some sights that simply weren’t meant to be seen, acts that could blind a man simply by watching them, and living human flesh being carved and passed around in rough red lumps is one of them…
“Well, I didn’t go blind, though I’m sure I wished it. And there was the same monstrous activity in the other groups amidships and for’ard; they had captives, too. And all of them went the same way. But those monsters—those monsters who had been men—they made it last. And it lasted, and it lasted.
“And all the while I lay there, half-delirious yet scarcely daring to breathe, where finally I curled myself up into a ball at the foot of the exhaust array…
“Their moaning woke me up. It was the twilight before the dawn, and they were moving off in dribs and drabs, disappearing back down into the darkness as the first pink flush lit the eastern sky. And I had made it through a second night.
“Well, and it seems I made it through last night, too, but not on the collar. From dusk till dawn I was breathing all that stale diesel stench inside the leading exhaust stack. I’d found a way to jam the maintenance hatch behind me. And you know, for all that the place is a rat-hole, it was the only place on the ship that I felt safe? There was just the once I stuck my head out, and that was last night in the twilight when I heard that first helicopter coming in. To the crew of that chopper, it must have looked like the Star was abandoned, like a modern Marie Celeste. But when they touched down and the rotors slowed to standby, God, I wanted to leap out of hiding, wave my arms and stamp my feet, yell and warn them off! But I didn’t, and you know why I didn’t. They were at the stem and I was at the stern…they wouldn’t hear or understand me, but I knew there were those who would.
“You want to know what happened to the people in that helicopter? It was like darkness fell on them, swift as the shadows when a cloud passes over the moon. And the pilot, poor bastard? They dragged him out of there onto the deck, and fell on him in a swarm. And that crew were gone as if they’d never existed. So that when I ducked back into my hidey-hole and jammed the hatch shut again I was feeling so suicidal that it was all I could do to keep from tossing myself down the flue onto the iron guts of the big engine and finishing it. And I vowed that I wasn’t coming out again, that I would rather shrivel and die there in the greasy stinking darkness than be drained off like so much juice from a ripe fruit!
“And the fumes in there got to me. I don’t know if I slept or what. If I ate anything I immediately threw up. When I drank it was all I could do to keep it down. But I wasn’t coming out, not ever, not even when it was daylight again. I’d quite literally resigned myself to dying in there. What with the fear and the fumes—I don’t know—I suppose I was out of my head.
“When I heard your choppers circling I thought it was some kind of dream, a mental mirage, and for a while did nothing. My head was swimming and I could scarcely get to my feet. The luminous dial of my watch told me it was daylight, and the sound of the choppers was getting louder.
“Suddenly the survival instinct kicked in and I had to know. When I came out of hiding onto the collar, the fresh air nearly did for me. After all that shit I’d been breathing, it was like good wine, a champagne overdose.
“And the rest…well, the rest you know. So if what you’ve told me is true and you’re going back there, what can I say but God help you?”
Rusu lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply and trickled the smoke out through his nostrils, lay back and fell silent.
And Trask said, “Thanks, Nick. You have helped us, but even if you hadn’t I think you’ve helped yourself.”
Lardis nodded and said, “You’ll dream this stuff for a long time, Nick, but eventually you’ll find a way to switch off. The mind is clever at switching off. There’s a thousand things that I no longer let myself dream.”
“One last thing,” said Trask. “This story you’ve told us—don’t tell it to anyone else. They wouldn’t believe you anyway, but if they did it might prevent us from doing our work. Do you understand?”
“My lips are sealed,” said Rusu. “It’s like Lardis said: I have to find a way to switch off and forget.”
And then, as Trask and his people left him he gave one last shudder and added: “But I don’t think I ever will…”
Out in the gangway, a CPO was waiting for them. “Sir,” he spoke to Trask, “the Captain wants to see you on the helipad ASAP. I’m to take you up there.”
Trask nodded his understanding. “It’s late and he’s getting worried.”
Poker-faced, and possibly bridling a little, the CPO looked at him. “I shouldn’t think so. The Captain of HMS Invincible is a man who doesn’t get worried too easily. I only know that he’s been swapping messages with the Admiralty and the Fleet Air Arm for at least two hours now, and that your escort has been assembled and is waiting on the helipad.”
“Our escort?” Trask raised an eyebrow but the CPO had nothing more to say…
They were marines, and all six of them dressed in alien-looking nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare suits, nite-lite headgear and long-snouted gas masks, carrying NATO standard 7.62 mm laser-sighted self-loading rifles…and Trask just didn’t want to believe it when Invincible’s Captain McKenzie told him these men were his escort.
“What?” The Head of E-Branch could scarcely contain himself. “You’ve been briefed by Gunnery Commander Argyle—who I’m sure must have explained something of what we saw on the Evening Star’s bridge—yet you still expect me to take these men with me, and not one of them knowing a single damn thing about what’s happening here?”
Captain Arthur McKenzie wasn’t used to being spoken to like this, but on the other hand he did recognize Trask’s authority. Unfortunately, however, with the sun already touching the horizon, there was no time left for polite explanations. And, “No,” he answered, “I don’t expect anything of you, Mr. Trask. But the Admiralty, the Fleet Air Arm, and even your own ministerial superior—they do. And on this occasion I’m only following orders. One of these soldiers is a qualified helicopter pilot. His duty is to bring back the stranded chopper. The other five…have their orders.”
“What orders?” Trask was dumbfounded.
“First, to protect you,” said the straight-backed, bearded, broad-shouldered, and unblinking Captain, “and second to immobilize and secure at least one living specimen—which is to say an infected person—from that vessel and return him or her to Invincible for onward conveyance to London and the pro
per authorities.”
“Authorities? Meaning the boffins at Porton Down?”
The Captain nodded. “Who we would assume are the experts in such matters.”
Trask shook his head. “I can’t believe the Minister Responsible—I mean my, er, ministerial superior—would hamper me in this way.”
“Hamper you?” Now McKenzie bridled. “By giving you the protection of these marines, these superb soldiers? Well, allow me to inform you, Mr. Trask, that the only reason you’re going back to the Evening Star at all is that your ‘Minister Responsible’ pleaded your case with my superiors! And what’s more, if you don’t board this helicopter now—without wasting any more valuable time—as your host and the Captain of this warship I may take it upon my own shoulders to redefine the orders I’ve received. In which case I’m empowered to let these men go without you!”
“Captain,” said Trask, a note of desperation creeping into his voice now, “look, you really don’t understand. This infection we’re talking about isn’t anything like you’ve been led to believe it is.”
McKenzie nodded. “I know what you’re going to say, Mr. Trask. For indeed Commander Argyle did brief me. And yes, I’m aware of what you saw on that bridge. The Asiatic plague has mutated and does to men what rabies does to wild animals…turns them into killers. But you see, two of my marines are also carrying dart guns with a powerful sedative that will knock a man down in seconds. And so that I’ll be able to follow their progress, the WO has an audiovisual transmitter in his headset: a camera linked to Invincible’s screens. So I’ll be with you in a lot more than spirit. And believe me, I won’t allow you to interfere. You may advise by all means, but leave the work to the marines. I think you can be fairly certain that they won’t, er, ‘hamper’ you.”
As he finished speaking the Captain turned away and whirled his hand over his head. And on the helipad the rotors of a Mark VI Sea King twitched into life as the marines boarded in single file.