by Muriel Gray
“Then what can we do?”
“We can contain it.”
Cotton looked away, hand over his mouth, shaking his head as though his denial would make it all come good.
Esther spoke quietly, but there was fire beneath the calm. “Right now, all it wants is me.”
Matthew turned back and looked at her with an emotion she hadn’t seen before. “It can’t have you.”
She returned his gaze for a moment then let her hands fall to her side. She turned from him, walked across the deck and picked up the AK47. Pulling the strap over her neck, Esther bent down and fished the handgun from the gore and wiped it on her sweatshirt, leaving a bloody smear. “It’s not going to.” She handed him the gun. “You might need this. Just in case your company man on the fishing boat decides to take his chances.”
He looked down and took it. When he looked back up again she had tears in her eyes.
“You get these men three quarters of a mile away from this floating death-trap. You radio a constant SOS and don’t let that fucking fishing boat near you. I reckon it’ll disappear pretty sharp anyhow when it realizes that Bluebeard is out of the picture. You give me fifteen minutes’ grace, and then no matter what, you blow this fucking thing out of the water.”
He started to shake his head again.
She put a hand up and touched his lips with a finger. “You have no choice. I have no choice.”
“I do have a choice. I can stay.”
She shook her head. “You’ve saved me once, Matthew. I can’t tell you how badly I need to save myself.”
He looked at her, struggled with the urge to throw her in the boat, then gently took her in his arms and held her.
Esther’s body was rigid, unresponsive, and her inability to return his embrace made it impossible not to think of the reasons why her declaration was so horribly true.
“Go,” she said in a small muffled voice into his chest. “And start the clock from now.”
The heart. That was all it needed. She had performed well. Even as she had spoken the words it had taught her, it had felt that final surge of power so near it could almost taste the final journey back to whole flesh. The fury it was containing at the painful and damaging interruption was boiling in its blood, threatening to erupt into unplanned violence. But it was not a creature of unthinking reaction. It had not been so as a man, and neither would it be in this new and temporary identity. It hung in the shadow of the bridge wing, clinging to the underside of the metal lip, and sniffed the air through the holes in its face it used as nostrils. Her scent was so strong it was practically visible now. She smelled alive. It ruminated on the order of the actions it would enjoy after it had performed this last delicious task.
It tracked her easily and purred at the back of its throat at how that clean smell of living, self-repairing cells, of healthy growing hair and fingernails, would shortly be replaced by the nourishing, cloying and sensuous odour of her death.
She didn’t even watch the boat depart. As soon as she had helped lower it to the water, Esther was gone from Matthew’s sight. Ernesto started the engine and the boat chugged away from the towering cliff of rusting metal that had been their home for so many years. Already the bosun was busy on the VHF calling for help and Matthew watched the lights of the distant fishing boat and wondered how long it would be before they started to grow even more distant. He sat with the flight-case on his lap, fingering the battered dog-tags that were fastened around its handle. What in Christ’s name had he agreed to do? What kind of man left a young girl alone to fight for the lives of nineteen strong, healthy men, even a girl with an AK47 and a rage in her heart that could tear down buildings? He knew she had a plan, but that flimsy hope didn’t excuse his madness. The possibility of opening this doomsday box seemed very remote to Matthew Cotton. He looked up at the retreating ship and frowned. As the lifeboat turned to port and chugged around the stern a dark shape caught Cotton’s eye. He watched it go and then quickly scanned the boat to see if any of the men had caught a glimpse, but they were engrossed in their own survival. It was as well. How, Cotton wondered, would they have dealt with the thing that must all along have been silently watching their evacuation only metres above them? Something very dark, very fast and very agile, its movements a cross between a rat and a lizard, that had just scuttled down the side of the accommodation block, onto the deck and out of sight.
She couldn’t use what was left of Skinner. It had been watching them all the time. She knew it, had felt its eyes boring into her. They were joined now in a way that would not please it if it knew, but that in itself was only of minor use. The trick now was speed. Esther burst through the door of the accommodation block and ran down the corridor of B-deck, her heart already starting to pound with adrenalin. The radio room was on the next deck up and she slowed as she approached the stairwell, only too well aware of the variety of planes the bastard could come from. The safety-catch had been off the gun since she’d picked it up, and her finger stayed poised on the trigger. But there was no possibility of Esther firing in error. This is what she had trained for. Not just at camp, but her whole motherless, loveless, hard, uncompromising life. She kept low, glanced around and proceeded up the stairs as quickly as she could while covering her back. At the top of the landing the corridor ran both to the right and left.
The radio room was to the right, but the left-hand corridor afforded a view past rows of cabins that culminated in a large black window. She moved forward, then halted. Esther turned quickly. It was fleeting, but her reactions were sharper than they had ever been. She saw the dark, damaged, hacked-open face appear briefly at the edge of the glass, and before the foul torso could follow it on its course up the metal cliff outside, she let go a round of bullets that made the window explode.
“Fuck you!”
Esther was gone before the glass had settled, not waiting to see if her handiwork had yielded results. She ran on, the gun held at an angle that could shoot behind her, and burst into the radio room. There they were. The corpses of two innocent men, one intact, one half-eaten, lay sprawled on the floor of the cabin. Esther put a hand to her head, trying to block out the stuff she remembered about them from her brush with supernature. This was not a time to dwell on the personal details of these men and their families. Those men were gone. All that remained was this mess of skin and bone and flesh, the stuff that already had the sweet odour of decay, the way that bodies in heat always have. What she was about to do was not to defile them, but to avenge them. She took a deep shuddering breath, and with her shooting hand still reassuringly around the trigger and her face towards the door, she dipped her other hand into the slime that had once been Pasqual Sanquiloa’s body. She would have liked to have closed her eyes in disgust as she smeared her face and body with the internal juices, feces and unclotted blood of the man who lay before her. But closing her eyes for even a second now would be suicide. Instead, Esther Mulholland kept her eyes open, and only the slight, down-turned tremble of her mouth would alert an onlooker to the fact that the girl inside this warrior, painting herself for battle, wanted to run screaming as far away as she could get from the stink of death in which she was bathing.
Hatred was life itself. But that truth was only part of the dark secrets it had learned in the timeless, indifferent, pumping heart of the jungle. It had been hatred that had kept it intact and brought it back from the brink of the abyss, but right now it was hatred distilled into revenge that was charging its stolen blood. The bitch had missed its torso with her weapon, but a bullet had torn away a piece of flesh from its newly-repaired neck.
It hung from the metal wall on one arm and fingered the wound. A memory came back from its days as a humble, mortal priest, and it chewed it over as it squirmed under the impossible healing process that was fuelled only by its dark prayers and ritual.
The man that it had been had found such variety, such fulfilment and pleasure in killing, when he slaughtered those base savages in the deep, green, diseas
ed world of the forests. The best had involved a mother and her two-year-old child, and it cursed itself that no such pain could be inflicted on this childless whore. There was no pain abroad in the human world that could match the agony of a parent watching its child die slowly. What else would do? It could consume her as she watched or, more entertainingly, it could make her eat herself. It could do so many things. Hatred, far more than love, was the very core of invention.
It swung through the shattered window into the corridor and took a moment to let the flesh of its neck join once more. Then it lifted its head and followed the heady scent of her living flesh along the corridor to the cabin that had temporarily been its larder.
It was just a distant, indistinct crackle of a voice but it was enough to excite the quiet tension on the boat. Felix Chadin had taken his orders from Cotton seriously, despite their baffling nature, to ignore any hailing from the boat in sight called Lucky Lad. It hadn’t been necessary. Not long after he had started to put out a distress call, the boat had not only remained silent but had moved off and was now almost out of line of sight.
This new transmission was from something they couldn’t see yet. A container ship, Chadin thought from the garbled voice. But whatever it was, it was less than eight miles away. It meant safety.
Chadin looked up towards the Lysicrates, and despite the grim nature of their situation, felt the urge to smile. Sohn Haro, however, was not smiling. He stared down at the open case on his lap, the key to the detonator already inserted in one of the holes. The piece of paper that Cotton had torn from the log-book aboard the lifeboat was clutched in his hand. It was thorough of Matthew to leave it with Sohn before they turned back and dropped him on the Lysicrates, but he wondered if any insurance inquest would genuinely accept this scribbled note as evidence of the chief engineer’s diminished responsibility. After all, Cotton, as acting captain now that Skinner was dead, was asking him to do a crazy thing, a murderous thing. What sane captain would ask his engineer to sink nearly twelve million pounds worth of steel in a part of the ocean that could never be explored? What captain would ask him to sink it with that captain and the girl passenger still on board if they didn’t get off in the next fifteen minutes? And all Sohn Haro had to prove to a tribunal why he would do such an insane thing was a torn piece of paper signed by Cotton reading, “I, Matthew Cotton, acting captain of the MV Lysicrates, order Sohn Haro, chief engineer of the MV Lysicrates to detonate the mines planted by the late Captain Lloyd Daniel Skinner, thereby sinking our vessel, in order to preserve the lives of the remaining crew members.”
Insane. Clearly. And yet Sohn Haro had every intention of following his orders. The ship contained evil and death on a scale that he neither understood nor cared to understand. The eighteen terrified men on board this lifeboat would testify to the madness that had overtaken the ship in the last forty-eight hours and Haro was not afraid of any tribunal. He was afraid of other things. He was afraid of what was on that ship with Cotton and the girl, and he was afraid that they would never get off before he turned the key and pressed the buttons as instructed. Because, make no mistake, in exactly fifteen minutes from now, that was exactly what he intended to do.
The dark power from having taken her was already burning in its veins. The neck wound had closed fully in a matter of minutes. It moved cautiously along the ceiling of the corridor, and as it moved it allowed itself the delicious savouring of the joy to come, when it would unite with its new disciples on the mainland that it could smell nearby. There was so much to teach, so much suffering to inflict that would build the momentum of the Dark Sun’s destiny. It would remake the world, and the world would be its to command.
It stopped above the door to the radio room. Her smell stopped in this room, and her last frantic thoughts had come from here only minutes before, garbled waves of panic and rage and revenge beating as loudly as a drum from the brain it would soon enjoy scooping from her skull. It had halted, however, because those thoughts had also stopped.
A blackened tongue darted from its over-wide mouth and licked at bared, pointed teeth as it thought. Her involuntary mental noise had been quieted once before. In this very place, when it had been feeding and she had approached unannounced. How had the bitch done that? It ruminated about that irritation, about how she must have learned that secretive cerebral control from the state of knowledge that it so jealously coveted but would have for itself so soon. And then it sniffed the air again. There was no doubt that she was in there. Her scent stopped. She could think herself invisible if she liked, but its visceral senses would always find her. It shuddered with the pleasure of what was about to come, then dropped lightly from the ceiling, and slithered through the cabin door.
Cotton had left the handgun with Sohn. What use would it be here? They had plenty problems of their own in the lifeboat. Renato needed help fast, and it sure wasn’t going to come from the Peruvian fishing boat whose hull would not be painted, Cotton was quite certain, with the words Lucky Lad. He had watched the lifeboat chug away again, a hand held up to Sohn, every face in the boat turned upwards to him, and his heart had grown twenty pounds heavier. But there was no time for delay. He had to find her.
The boat had put him back on board near the bow, and he ran along the side of the holds, the deck pounding under his feet. Esther had given Matthew the greatest gift in the world. It was so precious, so unexpected, that the joy of it made him want to cry. As he ran, with the sea air blowing his hair, Matthew Cotton knew that for the first time since Heather and Molly had died, he wanted to live. He wanted to grieve properly, with dignity. He wanted to take full advantage of his new self-granted permission to remember them both. And he wanted to unfreeze his heart and mind, those organs that had atrophied almost beyond recognition.
Now all he needed was the chance. Living meant not dying. That might be hard. But he was going to try.
“Come to me. Come to me, you sick fucking trash-bag. You nothing. You nobody. You worthless, powerless shit. Come and try to get what you need.” Esther was not saying this. Esther was thinking this. Thinking it as hard as she could, in that place in her head she had discovered that joined them together. The place that also told her so many things about her violator, things it would rather she didn’t know now that she was still alive to use them. As she thought it, her eyes never left the door of the location in which she had now installed herself.
She was crouched for the moment, her right hand tight on the gun, her left hand digging around inside Salvo Acambra’s corpse for anything liquid she could find. It was fully thawed and smelled almost sweet, in the peculiar way that human and chicken flesh share in their decomposition. The dripping of the blood and water from the hanging meat behind her in the warmed walk-in freezer was an appropriate accompaniment to her grotesque task. Esther Mulholland was unrecognizable. Her hair was a matted helmet of blood and gore, her face obscured by a red-brown mask of dried, muddy goo, and her entire naked body was covered with a mixture of fluid and matter that was unspeakable in its repugnance. The result made a figure that was barely human. Only the whites of her eyes blinked clear from the dark, putrid skin she had created over her own, as she continued to concentrate on her thoughts and not what her hand was doing.
“Come to me, He Who Remakes Nothing. He Who Cannot even Remake Himself. Come, you low animal, you failure, you fucking joke.”
And if the slight frown on her brow that was folding the crust of feces on her head and threatening to flake it was an indication of worry that these thoughts were not sufficiently focused, then Esther need not have worried. Her thought process was working fine. It had heard. It was coming. In fact it was very nearly there.
“Vulcan. Vulcan, Vulcan, this is the MV Vulcan calling Lysicrates. Do you read?” Several men cheered, but the sound was half-hearted, empty of any real joy. There was still too much fear, too acute a memory of the horror they had left behind.
Felix Chadin, the bosun, blinked at the VHF and looked across to his superio
r officer. Sohn Haro held up a stalling finger.
The Vulcan was closer now, but what to do? It would be as well not to reply until the deed had been done. The ship would come for them. It could probably already see the Lysicrates, lit as it was under the glare of its two dozen halogen floods. How would the captain of the Vulcan react when he watched that long strip of light extinguish as the ship up-ended and slipped beneath the ocean’s surface?
Sohn shook his head to the bosun, and licked his lips. Their reply would have to wait a few minutes. He looked down at his watch once more, and then at the detonator on his lap. He crossed himself to a god he no longer believed in, then slowly held the tip of the aerial between his finger and thumb, and pulled it out to its full extent.
To be still, completely still, in both mind and body, was a skill that was beyond most humans, even the greatest martial arts teachers in the world. But to be still in the face of the horror that had entered the storeroom beyond the open freezer door was to call on a strength that transcended mere ability. Esther stopped breathing. Only half of its deformed, unholy body was visible from where she waited, but it was enough to skin her soul. It was on the ceiling. She could see the long tendrils of fluid and drool falling from its body like syrup as it moved silently across the top of the door-frame. The stench was overpowering, but Esther’s nostrils were already assaulted to the point of insensitivity by the violence of her own adopted odour. She watched it as it moved with the cautious reptilian gait that hinted at abnormal speed and power, and kept her breathing for later.
Keeping that part of her mind that was the unwanted conduit blank was taking its toll on her reserves. Everything in her body and soul wanted to scream, wanted to run. But she knew it was working. She could feel it when it probed for her. But the best evidence that it was working was that she was still alive. For now. She screwed her eyes shut for a moment, trying to keep her concentration, trying not to let her fear, her hatred, her humanity, leak from this protective shell she had created. She opened her eyes. The blackened shapes of its limbs were no longer visible. She allowed herself a tiny sharp inward breath, as silent as the movement of grass. But even as she took it she knew it had not been silent enough.