by Mira Grant
“Men are weak,” said Jacques dismissively. “Nothing which wants to survive should keep its genitals on the outside of its body. Where is my wife?”
The doctors stepped away from Michi’s corpse. The gelatinous rot had continued to spread across her face. The shape of her skull was outlined in slime, a grinning death’s head replacing what had been a beautiful woman.
“Ah,” said Jacques. He walked forward, stopping just shy of the cot, hands fluttering in front of him like wounded birds. “Ah,” he said again, and it was a sound of protest, not of understanding; it was the sort of sound a man who had just received a grievous wound might make, too small and soft to be anything but fatal.
“I’m sorry,” said Dr. Vail.
His head snapped up. “You are sorry?” he asked. “Did you do this thing? Did you fail her, reach your hands into her chest and squeeze her heart until it ceased to beat, close her eyes because you were tired of their accusations? Is this on you?”
Dr. Vail lifted her chin and said, “Every death under my care is on me, Mr. Abney. That is what it means to be a doctor. But I did not shoot her. I did not introduce the toxins into her bloodstream. No one here is guilty of murder. I did the best I could.”
“You say no one here is guilty of murder, but she was, my Michi,” said Jacques. “She killed men who stood between her and what she wanted, as easily as she put knife to sturgeon, bullet to lion. She was a huntress, and she murdered a thousand times over to get what she desired. I murdered by her side. Would you truly look me in the eye and say there has been no murder here? Even when to say otherwise might save you?”
“There has been no murder here,” said Dr. Vail.
“Ah.” Jacques looked back to Michi. “What is wrong with her face?”
“The poison that killed her spread through her system before she died. It damaged her tissues. I’ll be honest: we don’t know why, or what effects it had on her body as a whole. It’s going to take time and study before we know that.” Time, study, and a goddamn CDC team. Michi was a novel biohazard now, and only the fact that the sirens were an even greater threat was keeping Dr. Vail from evacuating the medical bay. There was no point in running from the danger when the danger was everywhere.
“I see.” Jacques studied Michi, lingering on the damage to her cheeks, the translucency of her forehead. “There was nothing you could have done.”
“No.”
“She was dead as soon as the bullet broke her skin.”
“Yes.”
“Who fired the gun?” Jacques turned away from Michi, prodding the fallen guard with his toe. “The team that accompanied my wife, who pulled the trigger on the bullet that took her life? Who killed her? Tell me, or I will start making guesses.”
The guard groaned. Another guard stepped forward.
“Davis,” he said. “I was there. I saw him pull the trigger.”
“Ah,” said Jacques, and sighed. “Taken. Too much mercy. Too much mercy in the world.” He prodded the fallen guard again. “I should shoot you for the crime of sharing a uniform with the man who killed my wife, but it would be to waste a bullet, and I have better things to kill. Stay out of my way.”
He turned, then, and walked to the door, which he opened without checking for sirens. He stepped out onto the deck. The door closed behind him. The sound of gunfire began only a few seconds later, calm and methodical, one shot at a time.
“I think we should stay here,” said Dr. Odom.
The guard on the floor groaned.
“My name is Olivia Sanderson,” said Olivia, not lowering her arm. The flashlight was obscenely bright after the darkness of the tunnel and the perpetual twilight of the lower decks. “Please, we can’t stay out here. We need to get to cover.”
“How did you make it this far without getting eaten?” The second voice was also male, and slightly more familiar than the first. “They’re everywhere lower down.”
“I was in a tube. I have a tranquilizer gun.” The words sounded senseless. Olivia resisted the urge to look over her shoulder, to confirm the tube was still there. “They didn’t know I was there, because I was in a tube. I wasn’t making any noise. Please, we can’t stay out here.” Maybe if she repeated herself often enough, they’d understand her urgency. She wasn’t just talking to hear the soothing sound of her own voice; she had things to say, important things, and if they didn’t listen, they were going to die. They were all going to die.
She was going to die, and she was never going to make it back to the lab to tell Tory and the others that she’d reached the top deck, that she’d done what she had set out to do. That wasn’t acceptable. That couldn’t be allowed.
“Why should we believe you?” The first voice again. If they would stop shining that light in her eyes, if they would let her see who she was talking to, she was sure she could get through to them. She could make them understand.
“Daryl, we saw her come out the hatch,” said the second voice. It wasn’t just familiar: it was calmer, more reasonable, like it was willing to accept that maybe, just maybe, the entire world wasn’t out to get them. “She’s human. Far as we know, these mermaids aren’t shape-shifters.”
“They could have people working for them. People on the inside.” The first man’s voice was flagging. He was starting to sound unsure.
Olivia knew how to deal with the unsure. “Why would anyone work for them?” she asked, voice as level as she could make it. “They’ve been eating everyone they could get their claws on, or taking them into the water. Nobody comes back once they hit the water. So no, I’m not working for them. No one’s working for them. Please. I came up here to find the captain. He needs to tell us why the shutters aren’t down but the internet is. Can you take me to the captain?”
“No,” said the first man. The light was lowered. Olivia realized, with a start, that she was talking to the men who’d found her screaming after Ray died.
“He’s gone,” said the second man, before she could ask why not. “The damned mermaids got into the control room while we were working on the servos. Ate him, and the first mate, and two of the navigators. The place is a slaughterhouse.”
“Why are you outside?” she asked, eyes going wide. “It’s not safe.”
“Turns out the mermaids don’t like the taste of emergency flares,” said the second man. “There were only six of them up here. They killed most everyone, but we were able to drive them down the sides of the ship.”
There was nothing to stop the sirens from coming back up, nothing to prevent them from setting their claws to the steel sides of the Melusine and slithering back to the place where they’d been damaged and driven away. If they had been animals, maybe they would have written the top deck off as dangerous and left it alone. But they weren’t. They were smart, they were intelligent, and intelligent things knew how to hold a grudge—knew how to get angry, and stay angry, and take revenge. They’d be back. They had to be back. Olivia shifted her weight from foot to foot, looking at the two men.
“Why aren’t the shutters down?” she asked.
“The captain’s dead,” said Gregory. “We finished the repair, but we don’t have the code. That died with him.”
“Besides, we don’t want to trap those things on board,” said Daryl. “Leave the walls open and they’ll leave.”
“They’re still coming,” said Olivia, more heatedly than she intended. “They’re coming up the sides of the ship, and they’re not going to stop until they’ve killed us all. They didn’t leave any survivors on the Atargatis, remember? They don’t stop. They don’t back down. They hunt until there’s nothing left.”
“Like it’s better to trap them inside?”
“At least then there’s a limited number of them!” Olivia shook her head. “We need to close the shutters. Where’s the switch?”
Daryl and Gregory exchanged a look. Gregory said, “It’s in the control room. But I told you, we don’t have the code.”
She smiled grimly. “Let
me worry about that.”
Luis had been staring at the door for the past ten minutes. “Tory should be back by now,” he said.
“You’ve already said that,” said Theo. “Repeatedly. I don’t think it’s going to make her come back any faster.”
“I don’t see you doing anything to make her come back.”
“There are reasons for that,” said Theo. “I still can’t stand, for one. More importantly, I don’t think anything can make her come back. We lack the resources to send a rescue party. We have no weapons, and no more bodies to spare. If you want to go after her, please, feel free, but understand that there will be no one to go after you. More, that you’ll be leaving the rest of us defenseless.”
“I wish you’d stay, Mr. Martines,” said Jillian, not looking away from her laptop. She was typing rapidly, barely keeping up with the messages popping up from Holly, working at her own computer only a few feet away. The lack of internet wasn’t a problem, thanks to a direct cable connection, and text was the perfect solution to their communication problems. “We’re nowhere near an antitoxin, but we need to keep working.”
“Because what we need, more than anything else right now, is to understand these things,” spat Luis. “We need to be killing them, not comprehending them.”
“Since when are those different things?” Jillian did look up this time, turning to frown at him, like a mother frowning at a willfully obtuse child. “Once we understand them, we’ll be better prepared to destroy them.”
“I thought they were your life’s work.”
“No, Mr. Martines. Proving they existed was my life’s work. We know they exist now. One more mystery of the sea has been solved. I never said I wanted to protect or preserve them. Honestly, as long as I get a few to take apart at my leisure, I don’t care if the navy wants to roll in here and nuke them all into the mythology they swam out of.”
Luis stared at her. “That’s not what you said before.”
“I was talking to an audience before,” she snapped.
Theo smirked. “People always did think of you as the conservationist in the family,” he said.
“Most people don’t know me very well,” she said. “Mr. Martines, if you must go after Miss Stewart, I’ll understand. I’ll even walk you to the door, so that I can lock it behind you. But if she hasn’t survived, neither will you.”
Luis opened his mouth to reply, and stopped as the phone on the wall rang. “Who’s calling?” he asked.
“Pick it up and find out,” suggested Theo.
There didn’t seem to be a way to refuse. Luis crossed to the phone cautiously, like he thought there was a chance the sirens might have figured out how to work the ship’s communications system. But it could also be Tory. He lifted the receiver and brought it to his ear.
“Hello?”
CHAPTER 35
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 3, 2022
The control room was as bad as Daryl and Gregory had said; maybe worse, since they hadn’t said anything about the way the blood coated the fluorescent lights, distorting the lighting. Pools of deep shadow were scattered randomly through the room, making it hard to tell the blood and slime on the floor from the hardwood surrounding them.
There was a hand. A human hand, bitten off during the attack and left behind. There was a heavy ring on the third finger, and the stone at its center glimmered obscenely, as bright as if nothing had happened. It was wrong. All of this was wrong.
“This is Olivia Sanderson with Imagine Entertainment, coming to you live from the bridge of the Melusine,” Olivia muttered, and forced herself into the room, heading for the ship’s controls. Daryl and Gregory stayed by the door, watching for sirens, unwilling to go back into what must have seemed like a killing chute.
“Did the captain have time to activate the distress beacons before he died?” asked Olivia, looking at the controls. She had a video, somewhere, of herself giggling and preening for the camera, the captain’s hat perched on her head, while he walked her through the ship’s essential systems. It had been a filler piece, intended for release only if they ran out of more interesting footage to roll.
“I think so,” said Daryl. “Check for a blue light.”
Olivia scanned the controls, finally shaking her head. “Nothing.”
“Then look for a glass slide over a black button.”
“Black? Not red?”
“People push red buttons. It’s best if no one is tempted to push the distress system controls to see what will happen.”
The logic was sound enough. Olivia kept looking until she found the little glass slide with a bloody fingerprint in the middle. The captain hadn’t activated the distress signal before he’d died, but he’d been reaching for it, intending to call for help. She reached for it, and then hesitated.
If she called for help, was she going to be leading more people to the slaughter? She had no way of knowing whether she’d be in a position to speak to anyone who wanted to come to their rescue, or whether they’d believe her if she did. “Under attack by mermaids” didn’t sound reasonable even to her, and she was the one living through it.
In the end, did it matter? They needed help. Anyone who didn’t believe in mermaids when they reached the Melusine would start believing shortly thereafter. She flicked the shield aside and pressed the button.
“All right,” she said, turning back to the door. “How do I activate the shutters?”
“You need the code,” said Gregory. “Neither of us has it.”
“No,” she said. “But this room has a phone.” She picked up the receiver nested in the middle of the console, briefly grateful for the old-fashioned design of the ship’s communication system. If the phone had been portable, it could have been lost with the captain. Then she paused.
Her cabin was located on the fifth deck. The number was 5-62: deck number and location on the ship. Dr. Toth’s lab was on the third deck, and was two halls over from the position of her room. That would make the number …
She punched in 3-45. The phone began to ring. She took a deep breath, running and rerunning the math inside her head, trying to find a place where it broke down. There was no directory, and the ship’s computer was covered in blood and slime. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to pull up the information she needed if this didn’t work.
“Hello?”
She gasped. “Luis! You’re there!”
“Olivia?” He sounded bemused but not displeased. “Where are you? Is Tory with you?”
“What?” Her delight dimmed. “No. She should be back in the lab by now. Is she not in the lab?” Of course she’s not in the lab. He wouldn’t be asking me if she was here if she was there.
“No,” he said, in unconscious echo of her thoughts. “She didn’t come back. Where are you?”
“I’m in the control room. Everyone here is dead.” That seemed like an impolitic way to say things, so she backtracked, amending, “The captain and first mate are dead. I found two of the crew. Daryl and Gregory. They’re alive. They’re watching the door while I call you.” And they’d run at the slightest sign of trouble, because that was how they’d stayed alive as long as they had.
She couldn’t even blame them for that. Survival was a human instinct, at the end of the day, and they had every right to hold on to their humanity, especially here, when it felt like the world was going to end.
“Is Mr. Blackwell there?” she asked, before she could follow her own thoughts down the rabbit hole of morbidity and distress. “The captain’s dead. I need to lower the shields, but I can’t do that without the security code.”
“Yeah, he’s here,” said Luis. “Was Tory okay when you left her?”
“She was right behind me,” said Olivia. “She said she was going back to you. She should have come back only a few minutes after she left.”
“Well, she didn’t.”
Everything inside Olivia felt like it was being washed in gray. Of course Tory hadn’t
made it back to the lab. There was no way they could both have been lucky enough to make it to cover, no way they could both have rolled the dice and come up with a natural twenty. It was just her. Just her. She’d come onto the ship with Ray, and when she’d lost him she’d tumbled into Tory like an out-of-control satellite, and now she was being punished for daring to think she might not have to be alone. She was always going to wind up alone.
“Put Mr. Blackwell on the phone,” she said, and her voice was dull and dead, and that was all she deserved.
There was a scuffle, followed by silence, followed—at long last—by a new voice coming on the line, calm and urbane as always; she wasn’t sure Mr. Blackwell could get upset with all the pot he had running through his system. “Miss Sanderson?” he said.
“I need the code to lower the shutters.”
There was a pause. “Ah,” he said finally. “The captain is dead, then, I assume?”
“Yes. So is the first mate, and everyone else who worked in the control room. I set off the distress signal—they didn’t have a chance—but I don’t want to stay in the open any longer than I have to, so please, what’s the code for the shutters? I have two engineers here who say the repairs are done.”
The shutters wouldn’t save her. Or maybe they would, if she went back into the access tube and climbed down, back into the belly of the ship. She’d have to leave Daryl and Gregory behind. Neither one of them would fit in that safe, narrow space. If she moved quickly enough, they wouldn’t even see the code she used, and she’d know they weren’t going to jam the door open trying to follow her. She’d know she was safe.
What then? She couldn’t hide in a hot, claustrophobic tube until rescue came. She’d pass out, lose her grip, and fall before anyone came along to save her. Maybe it was better to stay where she was and admit that sometimes, safety was for other people.
“Miss Sanderson, do you have a plan for what happens after you lower the shutters?”
She wanted to scream. Mr. Blackwell could afford to sound calm. Mr. Blackwell was in a room with a door that locked, with people who could defend him if the sirens came. They didn’t have guns, but they had science, and they had tools. They had a chance. She had Daryl and Gregory, and she didn’t know either of them well enough to know what was going to happen to her if things got bad. “No,” she said. “I’m just going to lower them. That’s what I came up here for.”