Blood Cruise

by Mats Strandberg

  He walks to the stall, close enough for her to see his shoes under the door. There’s a muffled sound: a gasp. He relishes the moment.

  This is divine justice. And he is his own god.

  Albin

  They have just reached the grey steel door at the end of the hallway when a screeching, grating sound erupts in the stairwell. Albin can’t stop himself from looking down.

  A man is handcuffed to the railing on the landing below. Albin can make out a shiny, bald head, a broad back.

  ‘Come on,’ Calle says, pulling on his hand.

  ‘Is he one of them?’

  ‘No. I talked to him a little while ago.’

  ‘All the ones outside were normal before too,’ Lo retorts, and moves next to Albin. ‘And why would someone have handcuffed him if he was completely harmless?’

  ‘They do that sometimes when there’s no more room in the drunk tanks.’

  ‘Is that really allowed?’ Lo says. ‘That’s messed-up.’

  ‘It’s for their own good,’ Calle says, but Albin can tell he doesn’t really agree with it.

  ‘If they get in here, it’s gonna be “Bye and bon appetit”,’ Lo says.

  Albin looks downstairs again. And the man tilts his head back and stares straight at them.

  ‘There you are!’ he shouts. The handcuffs clatter and rattle as he pulls them against the railing again. ‘Have you found a key yet or what?’

  ‘No, I haven’t found one,’ Calle says.

  The man stops moving and his shoulders sag. ‘You fucking suck,’ he says. ‘Am I just supposed to sit here and drown when the ship sinks, huh? The newspapers are going to hear about this, how you treat your passengers. Or is that why you want me to drown, yeah? So they don’t find out that—’

  ‘I’ll try to find someone with keys,’ Calle calls to him, ‘but we’re not sinking.’

  ‘Something’s going on, though. I heard over the speakers that there’s an emergency meeting upstairs.’

  ‘There’s no need to worry,’ Calle says.

  Lo glances at Albin. They all know what an enormous lie that is.

  ‘Come on,’ Calle says, and puts his hands on their shoulders, but Albin can’t tear himself away.

  The man downstairs has started crying. ‘Lillemor told me not to go,’ he says, so quietly Albin can barely make out the words. ‘She’s always hated the sea. She’s never been on a ship her whole life. But now I wish she were here with me … How selfish is that?’

  Albin looks away. It feels like the ship is closing in around them and soon it will crush them alive.

  ‘We’re not going to sink,’ Calle says again. ‘Don’t worry.’

  This time, Albin and Lo move away from the railing with him. He opens the steel door and a din of loud voices spills out from inside.

  Dan

  ‘There’s something I’d like to show you,’ Dan says.

  Jenny tried to run when he kicked open the door to the stall. It was a pathetic attempt. He fills practically the entire opening, but she still tried to squeeze past, so he slammed her head into the wall behind the toilet until her eyes rolled back into her head.

  He waited, gave her a few slaps. Now her eyes are clearing once more.

  She has to see. She has to understand. That’s the whole point.

  The newborns who have followed him in are crowding around them, silent, waiting.

  Dan lifts up his hand and sinks his teeth into it, then bites until the sound of fragile bones being crushed echoes against the tiles. Blood fills his mouth and runs down his chin. He sucks his hand, hard, licks the edges without looking away from Jenny for so much as a moment. He’s giving her a show.

  ‘Hang on, you’ll see,’ he says, wiping his chin.

  Jenny has started crying softly. Each streaked tear is proof that he has defeated her.

  ‘I could have made you virtually immortal,’ he says, ‘but I’m not going to.’

  He grabs her chin and forces her to look at his hand, where the wound is already closing. There is a faint crunching from bones knitting themselves together inside his flesh.

  She doesn’t get it. She never gets anything. Stupid fucking cow.

  ‘See?’ Dan says. ‘You could’ve been something else, something better, just like me, if only you had been a bit nicer.’

  Now who’s a has-been? Now who has the power to say no?

  He is going to kill her; he is going to kill her so she never wakes up again. Adam has shown him how.

  Filip

  The general manager is standing at the front of the mess, talking so quickly he is tripping over his tongue. Filip feels sorry for him. Most of the people in the room know Andreas well. He supervises all customer-facing staff on board, but no one thinks of him as a leader and, clearly, Andreas doesn’t either. Now he is suddenly the highest-ranking officer on the ship.

  And no one knows what has happened up on the bridge or down in the engine room.

  The ship’s signal booster has been disabled, the radio destroyed, they can’t reach the satellites and DSC and VHF have been sabotaged, even in the lifeboats and life rafts. They have no way of contacting anyone. They don’t even have flares. They are completely cut off.

  On the Baltic, no one can hear you scream, Filip thinks, and almost lets out a chuckle, a laugh of desperation he can’t afford. Not now, not here.

  As long as the autopilot keeps the Charisma on her pre-programmed route, no one outside the ship will suspect there is anything amiss. If there is enough fuel in the tanks, the autopilot can take them all the way to Åbo. Once they reach the final inputted waypoint, the autopilot will continue on its last set course and the Charisma will likely ram into the pier or run aground.

  ‘Once we get close enough to Finland, we can use the regular mobile network,’ Andreas says. ‘We can call the Finnish police for help, or the army …’

  ‘But that’s hours away,’ someone says. ‘What do we do until then?’

  Filip looks around. All the familiar faces look so different, naked with fear, but he is feeling strangely calm. It is worse than he thought, much worse, but at least now he knows what he has to deal with.

  The mess is warm and damp with so many bodies crammed into it. He tries not to think about who is missing, about what might have happened to them, but he can’t hold down the thought of Pia, or the knowledge that neither she nor Jarno are here. Raili’s face is ashen and her eyes are red. Marisol is holding her, but she doesn’t even seem to have noticed; she just keeps twisting her wedding ring.

  Jenny still hasn’t turned up.

  Calle is missing too. The vodka bottle was almost empty; other than that, there was no sign that he’d even been there. He’s probably gone back out into the ship to look for his boyfriend. It is an idiotic decision, and Filip totally gets it.

  He lets his eyes rove across the room. Mika has sat down on a chair by a table at the front. He is pale; his thin hair is slicked to his scalp.

  There is a handful of strangers here too: one-night stands or relatives. He realises one of the strangers is the woman he saw hovering near the dance floor at Starlight. She has rammed her hands deep into the pockets of her baggy cardigan. She looks younger, healthier. It must have been the flashing lights of the dance floor casting unfortunate shadows, creating illusions. She is the only one in here who doesn’t seem to be sweating, despite her cardigan. Her eyes are alert, watchful, but she hasn’t lost her head.

  Lizette gets up from a chair in the middle of the room. She’s the new chief housekeeper, head of the cleaning staff, and Filip has never seen her out of uniform before. Now she runs her hand through her tousled hair and looks around. ‘We’re safe here,’ she says. ‘I and a bunch of others are planning to stay here until help comes from outside. You can’t make us—’

  ‘But what about the passengers?’ one of the cooks puts in. ‘Are we just going to leave them to their fate?’

  ‘Exactly,’ a girl who works as a croupier in the casino says. ‘It�
��s our job to do everything we can to—’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do for them now,’ Lizette declares, and spreads her arms like a conductor trying to make her orchestra play more softly. ‘We don’t even know what’s happened to all those people.’

  People look at each other uncertainly. No one wants to be the first to agree.

  ‘If you want to head back out there, be my guest,’ Lizette tells the croupier. ‘But no one can force us to go on some kind of suicide mission. Or am I wrong, huh, am I?’

  She turns to Andreas, raising her eyebrows dramatically. This time, there is a murmur of agreement.

  They still don’t get it. Many of them haven’t been out there yet.

  ‘There is no guarantee that we’re safe in here either,’ Filip says, exchanging a look with Marisol. ‘People in here could already be infected. They may not even know it themselves yet.’

  More furtive glances criss-cross the room, an entirely new kind of fear in them.

  His own words sink in for him too. Sweat trickles down his back and drips from his armpits underneath the nylon of his shirt. His mouth is dry; he wonders if that could be a symptom. He studies his colleagues. He has lived on board with many of them for years.

  If I’m infected, will I attack them?

  For a moment, there is dead silence. He realises the woman from Starlight is watching him. Does she know something? Can she tell from looking at him that he is infected?

  He doesn’t dare meet her eyes.

  ‘There’s one thing I would really like to know,’ someone starts. ‘What kind of illness turns people into psychopaths?’

  ‘Pia talked about Dan Appelgren,’ Mika says. ‘She thought he was infected … and he has an all-access pass, he knows how everything works …’

  ‘Don’t you get it yet?’ Pär the security officer puts in. ‘This isn’t some over-the-hill Eurovision star. This is terrorism. This is fucking Isis. They’ve cut us off from the rest of the world and put some fucking super-anthrax in the water tanks or something. They’re behind this.’

  ‘Let’s just calm down,’ Andreas says, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. ‘No one is helped by us working ourselves into a panic.’

  ‘I think it might be too late for that,’ Lizette mutters.

  Someone puts a hand on Filip’s shoulder, and when he turns around Calle is standing there with a big gash in his forehead and a swollen nose, but very much alive.

  Filip throws his arms around him. ‘I’m so fucking glad to see you. I needed some good news.’

  ‘Me too,’ Calle says.

  Then Filip realises that Calle has brought two children with him. He recognises them: the boy and the girl from earlier tonight at Starlight. Damp has turned the girl’s hair a few shades darker. They watch him silently. Both of them look several years older than just a few hours ago.

  That is what almost makes Filip fall apart. He hides his face in Calle’s shoulder and slaps his back, hard. Wonders what the three of them have been through outdoors. ‘Good news is pretty thin on the ground here,’ he says, lowering his voice, hoping the children won’t hear. ‘We can’t get in touch with land.’

  They let go of each other. Calle looks at him.

  ‘I have to get off the ship,’ a woman says. ‘I’m not going to die on one of these boats.’

  When one of the waiters from Poseidon tries to take her hand, she bats it away.

  ‘As long as the Charisma keeps going at this clip, we can’t lower the life rafts,’ Andreas says. ‘We’d have to slow down to ten, twelve knots to launch even an FRB, and we’re currently doing at least eighteen, nineteen—’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ the woman says. ‘What’s a fucking FRB?’

  ‘A fast rescue boat,’ Andreas replies. ‘They—’

  ‘I wouldn’t get into a raft with any of the passengers anyway,’ Lizette cuts in. ‘What if one of them changes while you’re out there, bobbing on the waves?’

  ‘It has to work!’ the other woman says. ‘Can’t you just put the rafts down really gently and—’

  ‘You can’t,’ Calle interrupts. ‘Some people already tried. It was full of people. One of your security officers was on it.’

  The attention of the room shifts to him, but Filip looks at Pär, the only security officer in the mess. Calle must be talking about Henke.

  ‘Calle tried to stop them,’ the girl says, ‘but the guard said he would rather die than stay here, and then he beat him up.’

  Filip’s eyes go to the cut on Calle’s forehead. What he just told them is impossible to imagine, but a lot of impossible-to-imagine things have happened on board tonight.

  ‘We have to get up to the bridge,’ Pär says, rubbing his eyes. ‘And we have to clear the ship of those fucking monsters.’

  ‘They’re not monsters,’ Raili puts in. ‘They’re people. They’re sick.’

  ‘How can you say that after they killed your husband?’ Pär asks.

  He seems to regret it instantly, conscious of having crossed a line, but Raili just fixes him with a level gaze.

  ‘I agree,’ Antti from the tax-free shop says. ‘Let’s weed them the fuck out of the Charisma. We’ll make mincemeat out of the lot of them and get onto the bridge one way or another.’

  Filip stares at them.

  He wonders if they are experiencing that feeling now, the one that came over him at Starlight: that what is happening is just a film. People like Antti and Pär have probably dreamed of being action heroes their entire lives. But they haven’t grasped that they don’t have the starring role in this film. No one in here does. It all revolves around the Charisma.

  Albin

  The voices grow louder, more and more joining in. And the room keeps getting warmer. He looks up at Calle, who is whispering something to his bartender friend.

  Albin doesn’t want Calle to leave them. He understands that Calle has to look for his boyfriend; he just wishes that wasn’t the case.

  ‘We should sink the ship,’ a woman says. ‘That way, at least it would stop and then we can get the fuck off.’

  Calle and his friend turn to her. ‘And let all the other people drown?’ Calle’s friend says.

  ‘Better to have a few survive than none at all.’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Albin sees some people nod their agreement. He thinks about his mum’s wheelchair in flooded corridors and he hates every one of them.

  Somewhere outside the room a heavy steel door slams shut. It sounds like the one he, Lo and Calle entered through moments ago.

  ‘And who gets to choose who we rescue?’ someone else says.

  ‘Women and children first, and—’

  ‘Oh, right, so now it’s like that. Not so keen on that gender equality nonsense now, are you?’ says the old man in the security officer uniform.

  And the voices keep growing louder.

  ‘Can’t we dump the fuel to stop the boat?’

  ‘Too risky. It’s difficult and takes time.’

  ‘We could turn out all the lights, or try to flash them … If all the lights went out, another ship might see and realise something was wrong …’

  ‘You want to go fumbling around in the dark with those things?’

  ‘But we could go down to the engine room and pour water on the main switchboard. If we do a shutdown—’

  ‘I don’t see why we’re even talking about this. We have to reach the bridge and we’re going to get in there somehow, and on the way there we make mincemeat out of any fucker who walks around biting people, and—’

  ‘Shut up, Antti,’ Calle’s friend snaps, spreading his hands wide. ‘You’re as bloodthirsty as they are.’

  Albin notices that there are big pit stains under his arms.

  ‘We have no idea what’s happened to them,’ the friend continues, ‘but they’re people. They’re sick and they need help.’

  ‘Oh yeah, you reckon?’ a voice says. ‘Because it seems to me you’re the ones who need help.’
r />   Several people turn around and someone screams. And even though Albin doesn’t want to, his gaze is drawn to the door as well.

  Dan Appelgren is standing in the doorway, but he is almost unrecognisable. He is swollen, and his eyes are bright red, shining, crazed.

  The doorway is filling up with sick people, sniffing, snapping their teeth. But they stop behind Dan and don’t move, as if they are waiting for something.

  Albin looks at Lo.

  It is like when they used to scare each other at night back in Grisslehamn. Now they have peeked behind that curtain, the curtain whose very existence he could only vaguely sense back then. At last he knows what kind of monsters lurked behind it all along: they are here now.

  Chairs crash to the floor, which trembles underneath Albin’s feet when the people closest to the door run towards the other end of the room.

  Someone has started praying, ourfatherwhoartinheavenhallowedbethyname, hurriedly, as though he wants to make sure he gets to amen before it is too late.

  Marianne

  Her heart is pounding rapidly, even though she is sitting quite still on the sofa: a ticking bomb in her chest that could blow up at any moment.

  At least no one is throwing themselves at the door any more.

  ‘What if we sink?’ asks Madde, who has gone back to stand by the window.

  ‘We won’t,’ Vincent says, and knocks back a quick slug of whisky.

  ‘How would you know?’ Madde says, her voice quavering. ‘Maybe no one’s even there to drive the boat any more.’

  Marianne tries to fight the vertigo that suddenly overcomes her. Here, in a suite that is larger than her flat, she had almost managed to forget that they are not on dry land. A completely irrational fear grabs her. It feels like Madde is going to conjure a new catastrophe simply by talking about it. ‘Be quiet,’ she hears herself say. ‘Just shut up.’

  Madde ignores her. Her back sparkles with gold dust. ‘What if we’re already dead?’ she says. ‘Maybe we’ve gone to hell.’