by Diane Carey
“Faith!” Robin jumped, physically startled by the sound of the warning bell. It wasn’t the danger klaxon—they’d heard that during one of the safety drills. This was something else. The ship was trying to alert them about something.
“What’s that?” Adam asked.
“You’ve taken command!” Ned snapped. “Do you not know everything?”
“It’s a proximity alert!” Leigh said. “Another ship!”
Stewart yelped, “Maybe the Virginia’s come back!”
“Oh, Christ, we’re in such deep poop!” Dylan moaned.
The captain made a sound of struggle, drawing their confused looks, but it was Leigh who acted. She stepped to a com link in the wall and called up the information from the charthouse navcom.
“It’s not the Virginia,” she said. “It’s got a… an I.D. signal… no name… the identification only says C904.”
“What’s that mean?” Dylan asked. “What kind of ship doesn’t have a name?”
Leigh shook her head at what she was seeing on the alert screen. “This can’t be good…”
Adam wasn’t about to let this turn of events disrupt his moment of glory. He gestured to Dan and Chris, then pointed at the captain. “Bring him.”
They dragged Captain Pangborn away from the cremation of his bell and headed down the companionway. Mary and Dylan, Stewart and Leigh followed, until only Ned and Robin lingered behind, in the company of the deep sleepers who offered no salvation.
“Sweet mountain air…” Robin murmured.
Ned nodded sadly and met her eyes. “Mutiny in Neverland.”
14
The captain’s hobbled legs could only move so fast. The captain was nobly silent. He made no struggles. Ned, struggling plenty on the inside, shuffled at the back of the group with Robin, neither of them with their hearts in it. Ned had the feeling they were heading full-long into a catastrophe. He would’ve washed his hands of it, but for the sakes of the ladies.
Who was in that ship just coming to their side? He tried to judge by watching the captain’s face, his eyes, his demeanor, but he gave away nothing. Did that mean he knew these people and thought things would go his way? Ned couldn’t divine.
They stumbled down to the starboard hold, where the loading bay was, and sure enough the accordion tunnel was extended, linking Umiak to another ship. Whose? Why?
Adam boldly peered down the tunnel, with the other teens behind him. Ned hovered at the middle of the group, and they edged bit by bit forward, trying to see past the hissing steam venting from both sides of the just-securing tunnel. If the steam was venting, then no one had come inside yet.
There were two other passageways leading off from the tunnel’s sides, but Ned didn’t see anyone peeking from them. They were only utility passages, which had ladders leading to the upper scaffolding. No one should be up there either.
Or had they already been boarded? How did these things work? Could strangers just walk aboard?
He wished he had spent less time polishing the poor dissolved bell, and more learning the ship.
Adam suddenly stopped and backed up two steps. The whole gaggle of cadets bumped backward into each other. Beside Ned, Chris and Dan still held the hobbled captain, who made a disgusted grunt.
There were people walking toward them through the tunnel, through the veil of steam, which now turned yellow as it vented the last residual gases. The tunnel was huge, big enough to emit a stream of the enormous cartage containers, but even so the small group of humans somehow looked big and imposing. Perhaps they just walked big.
The steam softened to reveal seven people, brimming with weaponry, dressed in horrid mismatched clothing that demonstrated personal statements of ruggedness and threat. They had nothing in common in their dress or deportment, no sign of unity for crew or cause. They dressed to be frightening—and they succeeded in that singular goal. They were all types of people—a big-boned, clearly pregnant woman with her hair done in three colors. A dwarf man with muscular arms and teeth filed to points, and his face tattooed with tiger-stripes. Flanking him were three more men with thick boots and jackets of synthetic leather, each with his own style, except that two had the same craggy, jaundiced face. Twins. It was easy to see why they were jaundiced… they both had thick homemade cigars clenched in their teeth, and smoke writhing about their bald heads. The third man was actually wearing a skirt or maybe a kilt, and his socks were bunched around his ankles. If it was a kilt, he was wearing it all wrong.
Another woman was dressed like an American Indian, with deerskin and fringes and beads, but who also was clearly not Indian at all, but Nordic, with long straight blond hair and crystal blue eyes. Behind them all, as if bracing the rearguard, was a giant man of indeterminate race with a wide black handlebar moustache. Dressed in bright red from head to foot, he towered over the others by at least a head and clearly meant to strike fear with his sheer enormity. He was big, and he liked being that.
They might as well each have had one eye and a club and been roaring, “Death to Caesar!”
Behind Ned, Robin uttered, “Oh—pirates!”
Ned hoped the new people had not heard her.
“Who the hell are you?” the dwarf called out. He had a strong, shocking voice. “Where’s Pangborn?”
“Identify yourselves first,”
Adam countered. “Blow me. Where’s Pangborn? Where’s our shipment? It was supposed to be right out in the open, ready to go.”
The thick-bodied pregnant woman said, “I don’t like this, Detroit. This smells.”
“There’s Pangborn!” the giant said, pointing his broomstick finger at the captain. “What the hell, he’s bound up! Some kind of game?”
Pangborn stomped one foot, but that was the extent of his actions.
Detroit tipped his blocky head, surveying Pangborn and the cadets. “Where’s the regular crew?”
“We’re the crew,” Adam declared.
Four of the boarders laughed. The others were less amused by what they heard.
“Where’s the real crew, junior?” Detroit demanded. “And what’s Pangborn doing tied up?”
“The crew abandoned ship. Captain Pangborn threatened to kill us. We were scared. Can you help take us back to our parents?”
Ned shook his head at Adam’s ploy. What a stock of nerve he had!
“Parents!” Handlebar Moustache snorted.
“Hey!” The pregnant woman hauled off and smacked him across the face with her gloved hand.
“Quit hitting me, Tina!” he wailed. “Always hitting me!”
“Respect!” She held up a warning finger, then pointed at her belly.
He groaned an apology and tried to regain his enormity.
“C’mere, kid,” Detroit snarled, and began to waddle forward with a strangely imposing set to his walk, despite his dwarfism. His beefy arms rolled forward and back, his fists clenched. The others came along with him, creating a bank of bulldogs.
Adam didn’t step back, but began slightly to lean back as if he were about to take a step.
“Ohhh—” Mary moaned, pressing backward into Leigh and Robin.
Ned murmured. “Don’t retreat.”
Adam half turned, as if he didn’t hear. “What now? Throw them some meat?”
“Stand your ground!” Ned hissed. He pressed his hand to Adam’s shoulder as if to support him.
“They’re going to kill us!” Chris gulped, keeping his voice low.
“We’ll find out what they want and give it to them,” Ned quickly said.
“Right!” Dan said through tight lips. “No worries then, eh?”
“I’m worried!” Leigh argued.
Robin, pressed up behind Ned, peeked over his left shoulder. “Invisible… invisible… invisible…”
The troupe of boarders—were they pirates or smugglers or what?—thundered closer and closer.
Suddenly Mary let out a quick shriek and jumped as if she’d been struck. There was a form now between the c
adets and the smugglers, an unexpected appearance, out of the yellow fog, as if conjured by a spell.
Pearl!
The skinny girl knobbed out from the nearest passage in the side of the boarding tunnel. She looked at the cadets with a very odd smile, nodding in agreement with some thought of her own. She flat-footed out of the nook between the two groups.
Behind her, the smugglers stopped in their tracks.
“Hi!” she husked to the cadets. “Hi, everybody! We have some new friends. You’ll like them. They’re big and strong and they have wacky hands!”
Ned extended his hand, but shamefully was too shaken to take a step toward her. Take a step. Take a step toward her, you coward…
At least speak!
“Pearl,” he began, unsatisfied with his voice, “come toward us, now. You belong with us, not them.”
Pearl’s brown eyes dropped in disappointment. “But they’re sweet.”
“Indeed they are.” Ned stepped out forward, finding the stomach to do it. His hand, outstretched before him, white and pasty, looked like an old-fashioned envelope on its way to the post in a Sherlock Holmes story. He felt detached from it, as if it floated free between him and the oddity.
She was already closer to him than to them. He had only to widen the gap, to get her before they got her.
He felt the cold moist sprinkle from the yellow mist, beading on his fingertips.
Unable to figure out which hand to hold out, Pearl put both her hands out in front of her, palms down. Two steps got under her.
And then there was… something else. Moisture.
Not the soft yellow mist, but a thick, clear drainage percolating from the area above Pearl’s head, from the sounds of tearing in the skin of the accordion folds of the retractable tunnel.
Collectively all eyes were raised. Tearing, ripping, and zipper-like sound, and the skin of the tunnel began to peel back. With every inch came more clear spurtle brimming as if from a waterfall, puddling around Pearl’s black orthopedic shoes and splashing on her drab clothes. Her callow face rolled upward and she cried, “My birds!”
And down came the birds.
* * *
Perhaps there were two, perhaps three. In the yellow fog, there was suddenly a twist of scales and claws, elongated heads shining in the utility lights, lean ribs, and some kind of legs and slashing constrictor tails. And teeth—teeth.
Ned spread his arms wide to hold back the others, and leaned back, but couldn’t find his feet. Open-mouthed, with all the others open-mouthed around him, he looked, hypnotized, upon the mouth of hell.
He had never seen in life a thing such as he saw now. Only in the thorny grip of a fever after hearing too many tales of the Sidhe had his mind conjured such images of wickedness. The creatures were perfect formations of tooth and claw and whipping gray tail, with slashers on five ends, and they understood the theatrics of terror. They piled onto each other, tangled and hissing, crouching, swirling, and turned their eyeless black heads toward the humans on either side.
Only a step or two from Ned, Captain Pangborn made a roaring noise through his mouth-bond.
Shouts—a scream—the chokes of the astonished broke out in a chorus with the unearthly shrieks of the creatures themselves. Then Ned saw, very clearly, three alien heads and three snouts, hunched shoulders and brandished sets of claws, all turned toward him and the other cadets. The creatures let out screams through their bared teeth, one scream on top of the next.
And there were more teeth inside. Snapping extra jaws.
The dogs of hell, not of Earth, not of Heaven, not of the Veil. Jack o’lanterns!
The breath left Ned’s body as if he’d been punched. He felt the air pump from his mouth and not come back in. Like prey before a cobra, he and his clan were held still in shock as death rolled before them. He wanted to grab out for Pearl, to drag her back, but the seconds shot by while he was bound by fright. Without willing it or thinking about it, he held his ground before a squall line of demons.
Shrouded in gassy stink, the creatures twisted, never still, pitiless in their posture, and they hissed and screamed, rising before poor Pearl, tiny thing that she was. Her shoulder blades came toward one another as she looked up at them.
The creatures hissed again, and one of them retracted its center jaws, then all three pivoted their pod-like heads around toward the smugglers.
Handlebar Moustache, huge man that he was, giant among giants, Hercules and Samson and Mannanan MacLir, stared for a moment of detachment at the drooling creatures before him. Whether possessed by dementia or blunt reality, he fixed his eyes on the nearest creature, digested what he was seeing, reviewed in his mind all the rumors and legends and fact, then raised his sawed-off rifle and blew a hole in his own head.
Mary screamed as the body fell to its knees, and that triggered the slaughter. With blinding speed the three creatures blew toward the smugglers. In the same motion, Ned lashed out and grabbed Pearl by the shirt. He twisted in midair and shoved her at the other cadets, who were bunched in a knot and scared stiff.
Screams, human screams and the whistles of the demons erupted from both sides as a fan of blood and tissue sprayed across the deck. Ned slipped and fell to one knee. Adam fell beside him, and near them the other teens could only raise their hands to protect their faces.
A human hand, torn from its owner, skidded past Ned and struck Robin in the leg. She looked down, saw it, and erupted in a scream. She turned, looked back over Ned’s head. And there went the beads and the deerskin, lashed with intestines. And there went the red leather. The creatures were ripping up Handlebar, though he was already dead.
As if caught in a nightmare, Ned turned his face up to Robin and saw the wedge of her chin, her mouth open, her stupefied eyes, and the gross, unthinkable scene as his sister reached out with her two beautiful arms and caught a sloppy mass of blood and blue tissue against her chest. She held the mass in her arms and looked down at it. Her lips curled around a silent scream. Ned tried to reach up to her, but couldn’t balance himself to do it on the slick floor.
Beside him, Adam was also looking up at her, his face almost a painting.
Ned seized Adam by one arm and shouted, “Go!” and gave him a heave.
Above him, Robin somehow disappeared into the hold, in a flurry of arms and legs and running feet.
Casting one look back at the ghastly scene, hardly able to interpret what he was seeing, Ned forced his body to find balance almost as if floating above the floor. He took Pearl in one fist and Captain Pangborn in the other, and he tightened his grips, and he ran. And he ran.
15
They raced through the open hold, between the sheer cliffs of stacked containers, running blindly, without care. They might’ve run into anything, more of those creatures, more smugglers, into a blind alley or into a trap. Their minds weren’t in charge. Like deer before lions, they just ran. They ran through a half-dozen hatches, leaping and tripping over the coamings, dragging the captain. Thank goodness Chris and Dan had come to enough of their senses to reach back and help Ned with his burdens.
They stumbled until they were gasping, and finally tumbled into heaps inside the galley. The galley was clean, spotless, gleaming, buffed to perfection by the last galley crew. Almost hospital perfect, and much too bright. Right now, they wanted to hide in a hole, not under lovely lights.
Ned pushed Pearl over the coaming and turned back, his skin crawling, to drag the hatch shut and crank the big locking mechanism. He spun and staggered into the galley.
Chris, Dan, Dylan, and Leigh… Stewart… the captain… Pearl and Mary… and over there was Robin, crouching to the floor behind the serving island, her back to him, shoulders shaking. Ned swept a quick headcount without really thinking about it. He counted colors of hair until he was satisfied he saw them all.
Mary sat shivering on the deck, clasping her knees to her chest, hollow-eyed, mindlessly gasping, “Wha— what—what—wha—what… what… wha—?”
&nb
sp; Though she couldn’t even push out the first word of her question, they all heard it complete in their heads. What are they?
Ned turned to the captain. For a moment they simply glared at each other in a strange depth of understanding.
“You know, don’t you?” he asked. “You know what this pestilence is.”
The captain lowered his chin. His brows went up. Slowly, he nodded.
* * *
“So you’d better unshackle me. I’m your only hope.”
And those were his final words.
The past five minutes had been a black plague of bad news, telling them how dead they were if they didn’t set him free. His litany of cold facts left them shuddering. The cadets were crumpled about the tiny room enfeebled by horror, and plucked to death by the captain’s description of what they were facing, like children around that campfire, listening to that ghost story, and believing every word. For they had seen the befoulment before their own suffering eyes.
The captain knew all about the assailants. He held back nothing, for all Ned could tell, nothing. Would that he had, for the truth was that freakish. Acid for blood… to break prey down to their constituent parts… that was the job of acid. Some kind of drool that hardened into resin… they made their hives with it, some thought… little was known… much was rumored… facts were scattered, myths blooming. What were they? How smart were they? Were they ants or lions? Were they dogs? Not as smart as a border collie but smarter than Irish setters? Or were they as smart as dolphins, but acted like vultures? Cretaceous raptors or some advanced form of nature from a future yet undiscovered? The one consistency was unremitting slaughter and power beyond ken.
Shaking to the bone, Ned wiped his face with his hands and his hands with each other, trying to find some normalcy in the moment. He had kept waiting for the story to have some glimmer of hope, some key to salvation, but no such luck. Pictures swirled in his head of the barbarism they had witnessed and those the captain had described. Ships infested, destroyed. Colonies demolished, taken over, turned into malformed hives. Caves dripping with decomposition. Saliva turned into hardened resin, pressed into service as cells for living bodies used as incubation chambers. And then, what happened to those living ones. Queens and warriors and soldiers and swarms. And so much yet unknown, while the known was bloodcurdling.