Blood Cruise
Page 37
The woman told herself that what happened wasn’t her son’s fault. She forgave him. She has forgiven him ever since, blamed herself instead. He never asked to be changed. She made that decision for him, and he has never forgiven her. She misses the man in the photograph. She hid his beloved face under a towel before she severed his head from his body.
One night, when the smell in the flat had become unbearable, impossible to hide, she dragged his exsanguinated body to the bathtub. She started by bisecting the body at the waist, then chopped off his arms and legs and cut them into smaller pieces. Back then, she still believed in God, and she agonised about what would happen to her husband’s soul after what they had done. But it was in that bathroom she came to understand that hell is not a place apart, separate from the Earth, from life.
She spent the next few nights dragging sacks of meat and rocks to Nybrokajen harbour and throwing them into the water. And, of course, she caught the infection from the boy eventually. Was it a mistake or did she let it happen? She doesn’t know. Her son looked after her during the change, fed her. Men and women would ring their door with his hand in a firm grip, convinced they had helped the poor lost child find his way home. The boy fetched many more than they needed. He enjoyed it far too much, even then. It was just a game to him, and he never tired of it, just like the Old Ones had told her he wouldn’t. She had to tame her instincts quickly to be able to keep an eye on him.
The woman closes the locket, walks to the dining area, lifts up one of the bench lids and takes out an ice-axe. She weighs it in her hand. She and her son have cheated death for more than a hundred years. This far, but no further.
She thinks about all the things she used to believe about vampires long ago, in a different life: all the myths that turned out to be lies and superstition. Everything would have been so much easier if she could have relied on the sun that is about to rise. But they can be killed with fire – fire purifies, fire devours – and then water, deep enough to hide the evidence.
That is how it has to happen.
She doesn’t look around the caravan before she leaves; this is not where her memories are. The newborns watch her, several hundred pairs of eyes following her silently as she walks between the rows of cars.
As the woman breathes in the petrol fumes she sees signs of life behind the car windows. Half-filled plastic bottles of soft drink. Blankets. Sweet wrappers. She stops by a blue Nissan with decals on the inside of one of the back-seat windows, clutching the ice-axe. She watches one of the newborns, who has stopped in front of a silver car and is staring in through the windscreen at a baby seat. Perhaps he is starting to remember something from his previous life. Perhaps it is his car. His child.
The woman thinks about the boy and girl she tried to save up in the mess. It may have been the last good deed of her life, and it was futile. She has to cause one disaster to prevent a much larger one. This too is unfathomable, what she has to do, but at least she won’t have to live with it afterwards. If her plan works, everything will be finished the same moment she puts it in motion. And she is going to take as many newborns with her as she can: the newborns who have put all their instinctive trust in her. The woman aims her ice-axe at the plastic tank under the car, striking it until it punctures. Petrol gushes out onto the floor. There’s a clucking sound from the car’s insides. She moves on to the next one.
*
One floor up, in the narrow stairwell outside the car deck, Vincent unwraps the scarf that has been tied around his wrist, tears a strip from it with his teeth and hands it to Madde, who takes a swig from the vodka bottle before folding the strip in half and pushing it inside.
‘Is this how you do it?’ she asks.
‘I think so,’ Vincent replies, and hands her a lighter, while Marianne helps him wrap the rest of the scarf back around his wrist.
*
Dan Appelgren turns the water off and steps out of the shower, wipes the condensation off the mirror and feels instantly better when he notices that his muscles and features are resurfacing. I’m going to look like myself again, and for a long time too. No more hours at the gym. This is the mould I’m cast in now, just like Adam is never going to be anything other than a toddler with a Napoleon complex.
He pulls on the clothes he’s found in a bag in the suite: jeans, a dark-blue knitted jumper that smells strongly of fabric softener. He fixes his hair, leaves the bathroom and walks to the window. Far away, on the horizon, he can see another cruise ship on its way from Åbo.
The Baltic Charisma is only about an hour from the Finnish archipelago.
Albin
Albin’s entire body is shaking. He has stuck his tongue between his teeth to keep them from chattering. The vibrations from the engines are strong down here in the control room; he can no longer tell which quivering is his and which belongs to the ship.
A picture of a naked girl has been taped to the wall. She has one hand between her legs, spreading herself open with her fingers so you can see straight up her, almost as though she wants to turn herself inside out. But it is the men on the floor who have been turned inside out. What used to be inside them is now spread out around them. Albin can see the engine room on the other side of a big window. A small group of men in boiler-suits are staring back at him and banging their heads against the glass. They want to get in, so badly they have beaten their foreheads bloody, leaving gory smears on the glass.
Albin turns away, trying to see if the vibrations are visible on the surface of the water in the nearest bucket, but Calle picks it up before Albin can tell.
Calle takes up position in front of the orange metal cabinets full of flashing buttons and windows with various gauges, locked hatches. ‘Are you ready?’ he says, looking at Filip, who has also picked up a bucket.
Lo glances surreptitiously at Albin. He knows she is worried about him and he wishes he could reassure her, but he is locked inside himself, and the more she looks at him like that, the harder it is to come out. Every glance is a reminder of how weird he is being.
Filip swings his bucket back and forth a few times and then a glittering arc of water splashes into the cabinets. He tosses the bucket aside; it clatters when it bounces on the floor and Albin reflexively glances down at the bodies. They are not moving. Antti picks up his bucket while Calle and Marisol empty theirs. Water sloshes across the floor. The puddle is about to reach Albin’s trainers.
And then the room goes dark. The thudding against the window to the engine room increases in frequency, as if the creatures on the other side have suddenly become more eager, or maybe anxious.
The vibrations change in the dark.
‘Abbe,’ Lo whispers with tears in her voice. ‘Abbe?’
He can’t answer.
‘Are you okay, kids?’ Filip asks. ‘The emergency lights will come on in a minute. Don’t be scared.’
He sounds scared saying it. He thinks he can fool Albin and Lo just because they are children, but he can’t even fool himself.
Madde
They stand dead still in the narrow stairwell, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the darkness. The faint light from the emergency exit signs bathes everything in a green glow. Through the door a floor and a half above them, Madde can hear the sound of running feet. She tries to keep completely quiet, but her breathing sounds far too loud in the dark. Before the lights went out, she could see the door to the car deck on the next landing. Beyond that the stairway spiralled out of sight on its way to the lower decks.
She listens to the sound of the Charisma’s engines. Have they changed? They have, haven’t they? Aren’t they a little slower?
‘Can you hear it too?’ she says softly.
‘Calle,’ Vincent breathes. ‘They did it.’
Without warning, the lights switch back on, fainter than before, flickering. A door opens further down the stairwell and Madde’s heart almost stops. She thinks she can make out the sound of feet shuffling against the plastic carpet. How far down are they?
She has to get out of here, up into the fresh air. Anywhere is better than here.
A new shuffling comes from below. It sounds closer this time.
‘I’m sure it’s locked anyway,’ she says, pointing at the door to the car deck.
‘I have to try,’ Vincent replies. ‘Calle must be there right now. But I understand if you want to take off.’
She looks at Vincent’s fractured wrist. Looks at Marianne. ‘We stick together,’ she says. ‘But hurry up.’
They start descending again in the flickering light. Madde fiddles with the lighter, nearly dropping it when she spots a shadow on the wall by the foot of the stairs. Someone is coming towards them. She curses.
The creature down there snuffles as he appears around the bend in the stairs. His hair is long, gathered up in a ponytail. Large parts of his face are missing: craters covered by thin, wrinkled scar tissue. His nose is gone; there are just two holes straight into his skull. She can feel Marianne stiffen.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Madde says. ‘Please, okay, let’s go. We have to go.’
The man’s eyes glint in the light that ebbs and flows, as though the stairwell is breathing …
‘Yeah,’ Vincent says, pulling on Marianne with his healthy hand. ‘Come on.’
But Marianne isn’t moving. She just stares at the man.
Madde’s mother was a hunter; they spent a lot of time in the woods together, walking the dogs. She taught Madde which mushrooms were edible, how she could make sure she wasn’t walking in circles by observing the sunlight on the trunks of trees, what to do if she came across a bear.
You have to be super-super-quiet. Back away slowly. Don’t turn your back. Don’t show weakness. Don’t look him in the eye. Don’t run.
But now, Madde does the complete opposite. She screams, turns on her heel and starts running back up the stairs.
Marianne
Marianne can’t take her eyes off the creature that was once Göran. He is standing right in front of the door to the car deck, staring back at her with what appears to be anguish. And a part of her, a very dangerous part, wants to run to him and comfort him, even though she knows it is no longer him, even though she knows he would kill her given half a chance. But he is suffering. She doesn’t want him to suffer.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers.
It is her fault he is one of them now. He came back down here for her.
‘Marianne,’ Vincent says, ‘we have to get out of here.’
A woman in a blood-soaked hoodie appears behind Göran. The words SEXY BITCH sparkle in rhinestones across her chest. Her teeth snap when she spots them.
Göran puts his foot on the first step. His beautiful eyes are dead now, pale imitations of the eyes that looked at her on the dance floor. When she gazes into them, all her strength evaporates.
‘Come on,’ Vincent says.
‘You run,’ she says. ‘Do it for me. I’ll only slow you down.’
And she means it. Madde did the right thing. Vincent shouldn’t risk his life for her again. He should find his friend.
She wants to thank him for everything he has done so far. She wants to tell him she hasn’t felt so alive in years. So needed. That that is enough.
She starts walking down the steps towards Göran.
‘Marianne, what are you doing?’ Vincent says. He grabs her arm again, but she twists free.
‘Run,’ she hisses. ‘I’ll hold them off.’
This is how she is going to die. For once, she is going to be strong and brave. And Vincent is going to survive. One person is going to remember her this way, as the strong and brave Marianne, and then it won’t have been in vain.
But Vincent wraps his arm around her waist and pulls. Her knees and hips ache when she is forced to jog backwards.
They reach the landing. One more set of stairs to get to the steel door to deck five. It feels impossibly far, but Vincent is pushing her from behind, forcing her to climb on.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she says. ‘It’s better if they take me, don’t you get that?’
‘Shut up and run!’ Vincent yells behind her, and she can hear the panic in his voice.
He is not going to let her off so easily; he is risking his life by trying to save her, so she forces herself to find hidden reserves of strength in her thigh muscles and pushes herself up and up and up. She glances behind her. Göran has reached the landing where they were just standing. The woman in the hoodie is hard on his heels. Behind her, two more of them: men in sporty-looking sweatshirts.
They are coming closer, closer.
‘Let me go,’ she whimpers. ‘Run, Vincent!’
The steel door opens above them and Marianne knows everything is over now. More of them have come; they are trapped in the stairwell. The silhouette of a woman fills the doorway.
‘Duck!’
Madde’s voice. A flame sails through the air above Marianne’s head and disappears behind Vincent. A second later, fire illuminates the stairwell. She sees it spread along the wall of the landing behind Göran and the others. The heat slams into her like a wall; there’s a smell of alcohol and lemon and warm plastic.
‘I’m sorry,’ Madde calls out. ‘I’m sorry I just took off!’
Göran and the others have stopped advancing. They are looking at the flames. The woman’s hood is on fire and she screams when the flames reach her hair.
It starts raining.
Rain? But we’re indoors.
Water is leaking from the ceiling. They are going to drown down here.
Fear sinks its claws into her: being drowned in this stairwell like a rat in a sewer is quite different from being torn apart by them.
Her overheating brain registers the hissing sound and finally manages to make a logical connection: the water is coming from a sprinkler system in the ceiling. The fire is already going out. And Göran has shifted his attention back to Marianne and Vincent.
The adrenalin has injected new strength into her legs. She starts running, Vincent right behind her, Madde impatiently jumping up and down on the next landing, one hand on the door, ready to slam it behind them. Just a few more steps …
A deafening roar fills the world. It is coming from the ship itself; it is making a sound like a wounded animal.
Marianne reaches the landing, Vincent just one step behind. Behind him is Göran, with his wild eyes, his demented urges, his snapping teeth.
Suddenly she can no longer see Göran. The blaring of the fire alarm is back and this time it mingles with Vincent’s scream as his mouth gapes, his eyes open wide. He looks at Marianne and Madde, bewildered, as though he doesn’t understand, just like Marianne doesn’t understand.
She doesn’t want to understand.
And then Vincent topples forward, yanked back down the stairs. As he bounces off the edges of the steps, his hands grope at the smooth walls of the stairwell for something to hold on to.
Göran has buried his teeth in Vincent’s heel, just above the edge of his shoe. His jaw works as his teeth saw through sock and flesh, severing the Achilles tendon. Vincent screams all the way down to the landing, where the woman in the blood-soaked hoodie throws herself on top of him. They disappear around the bend while the deafening alarm blares plaintively. The fire is completely out now, nothing but acrid smoke rising from the plastic carpet in tiny blue-tinted wisps.
‘Vincent!’ Marianne screams, and the two men in sweatshirts look at her and start moving up the stairs, surprisingly swiftly.
Madde pulls her through and gives the door a shove. A sweater-clad man’s arm reaches in through the crack, fumbling around, seeking to grab them.
Madde puts all her weight against the door. There’s the sound of something breaking, an inhuman roar and the arm goes limp. She opens the door an inch or two and the arm disappears. There’s a heavy thud as the man crashes down the steps on the oth
er side, and then the door slams shut with a clang.
The alarm stabs at Marianne’s ears again. They are back on the carpet on deck five, and she can see more of them coming down the wide staircase.
The Baltic Charisma
The ship glides ever more slowly through the waters of the Baltic Sea.
The monotonous sound of the fire alarm follows a dying man into the big void. He has been dragged down to one of the narrow corridors under the car deck. He can no longer feel the newborns tearing at him, can’t see them fighting each other over his blood. He can only hear the wet noises, and the klaxons, again and again, but fainter each time.
*
The newborns on the car deck are unsettled by the blaring sirens. The dark-haired woman has felt the vibrations in the floor change and knows time is short now. This was what the staff were discussing at the meeting. Once the ship comes to a stop, they can launch the life rafts. Then the world will notice that something is wrong. She has to finish this before more people arrive and before any of the infected can get away.
*
The alarm echoes across the dance floor, through the hallways where the emergency lights flicker overhead. It cuts through the wind on the outer decks; it fills the cabins where people are hiding. Some of them open their doors and peek out, trying to figure out what’s going on, what they should do. Others stay put and watch the dawn break outside their windows.
*
The newborn who was once the captain of the ship claws at the inside of the door to the bridge.
*
The klaxons drill into the newborns in the mess, awakening instincts from their life on board, thoughts they can’t formulate in their current state. Nurse Raili has found the breadknife with the bright yellow handle and is stabbing the point into her ear, hacking and twisting until she can no longer hear the blaring. She is barely aware of the pain, because it is nothing compared to the hunger.