The hallway curved outward, until he imagined it reached the perimeter of the ship. He could imagine the waves crashing into him, separating only by steel and insulation.
(keep your mind off that you have bigger concerns)
Understatement of the still-fresh millennium.
The hallway curved inward again and the bellow grew louder in volume but maintained pitch and tone, the words distorted nearly to fare-thee-well. A recording.
Near the end, someone had written with blood-smeared hands I LOVE YOU over and over along the wall. A body with a great chunk of throat torn away lay beneath this declaration.
I’m on the ship of the dead. This isn’t the Atlantic. It’s the River Styx. Not surprisingly, this didn’t make him feel any better.
The hallway opened up onto the oval-shaped Grand Lobby. The marble floors were awash with blood and bodily fluids. Torn bodies lay in piles. Some draped the circular front desk in the center like trophies. The stench was like Hogan and Andrea, jacked to the tenth degree.
The other end of the Grand Lobby led into a shop concourse. On the left of the hallway was a darkened wine bar called Sir Elliot’s. Bar stools littered the opening. On the right was a trashed newsstand.
The recording boomed from hidden speakers.
“—YOUR LUXURIANT VACATIONS,” the voice bellowed. Static obliterated its sex. “WHILE MILLIONS STARVE AND DIE UNDER WESTERN IMPERIALISM, YOU FILL YOUR FACE WITH FOOD ON BILLION-DOLLAR ROWBOATS. HOW DOES IT TASTE NOW? HOW—”
Feedback screamed and Riley screamed with it. The recording died and the silence deafened him with its completeness. He looked around, as if to see why the recording had ended. His heartbeat echoed in the stillness.
A diminutive man in a chef’s smock staggered out of the wine bar, meat cleaver in hand, and Riley froze. Blood stained his hairy arms to the elbow. His red-ringed eyes twinkled.
“Messy,” he said conversationally, and then he sprinted towards Riley, raising the cleaver. “Messy, messy, MESSY! NO WAY TO SERVE CUISINE! NOT AT ALL!”
The man brought the cleaver down and Riley thrust the axe out, blade turned away, as if he were bunting. The axe-head crashed against the man’s inner forearm. The impact drove the cook backward.
Riley swung the side of the axe, and it slammed into the side of the man’s face with enough force to vibrate up Riley’s arms. The man’s eyes rolled up into his head, and he dropped with a grainsack thud, the meat cleaver clattering.
Riley staggered into the front desk. The axe shook in his hands. His breath hitched in and out. “Oh shit, oh Jesus, oh hell.”
He couldn’t remember the last physical confrontation he’d had, probably not since he was a teenager, and adrenaline skimmed through his blood, his nerves flashing like Christmas lights.
Anger filled him. This was ridiculous. This was all … so ridiculous. This … this wasn’t right. What in hell’s name had happened here?
“Hey!” he screamed. His voice echoed back and that only made him angrier. This was an ocean liner, for Christ’s sake. “Anyone here? Where are you? C’mon! WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?”
“Everyone’s dead,” a woman said behind him. “Or insane.”
He spun, and the boy and girl, maybe six, cringed behind the woman’s legs. Their eyes ate up their pale, cherubic faces. The woman stared at him, a hand on the backs of their heads, fingers smoothing their blonde hair.
“We’d been hiding in the newsstand.” Her dark hair shined in the lobby light. Blood smeared her summer dress. “He’d been looking for us.”
“What happened here?”
“Don’t you know?” she asked. Her eyes shined with shock, but weren’t red-ringed. Was that how you could tell? He thought of the clerk, Andrea, this cook.
He lowered the axe. “I was … sick.”
“Have you eaten anything?” Her tone added weight to the question.
He shook his head. “I haven’t eaten since …” He looked at her. “… how long have we been at sea? I was unconscious. I …” He looked away. “… I don’t handle water too well.”
She studied him and he couldn’t meet her eyes. “We’ve been at sea for five days. It started getting bad the second day.”
I’m a drugged Rip Van Winkle. “Was this an attack?”
She shrugged, a frustrated gesture. “I guess so. They did it through the meals.” She shook her head. “God, you’re the first person we’ve seen who’s still sane.”
“I’m Riley.”
“Sheila.” She looked down. “This is Dylan and Sara. I don’t know where their parents are. I couldn’t leave them, though.”
Riley nodded. “What do you want to do?”
Sheila’s face screwed up into a strange expression. “Everyone’s dead and nothing’s steering this monster except maybe a boat version of autopilot. The only thing to do is get off.”
They went back into the newsstand while Riley kept lookout. His chest felt decidedly hollow as the main question hovered over him: How can I get off?
When they returned, Sheila’s hands held onto the children and two bulging plastic bags.
“How can we leave?” he asked, taking one of the bags. He opened it—bottles of water, single-serving packages of pretzels. He pulled out one of each and opened them. His stomach roiled, but it roiled over a sucking pit of nothing.
“Find one of the tenders—those boats we used to cross from the dock to the ship.” Her tone suggested he should know this, and he chased pretzels with water, not pointing out he’d been stoned to a fare-thee-well at the time. “There are four openings and we need to launch it without killing ourselves.” She frowned, as if realizing how unlikely that last part was.
He kept his voice even. “Can you drive a boat?”
“I can try. My husband used to own a boat in the 1990s.” She looked away, biting her lip. “I gotta do something. I can’t just … stay here.”
“Where are the tenders?”
“Deck 8. I checked the map.” Sheila glanced at Dylan and Sara. “Will you hold one of their hands?”
He nodded. Sara was as unmovable from Sheila’s side as her thumb was immovable from her mouth, but Dylan numbly took Riley’s hand, letting Riley lead him away from his sister.
The walk back was slow. Riley looked ahead while Sheila watched from behind. He kept the bag in the hand he held Dylan’s so he could keep the axe free.
Riley slowed when they reached the dead clerk, nudging Dylan behind him. Sheila looked over Riley’s shoulder and gasped. She quickly swallowed and looked down at Dylan and Sara, who looked up at her with all the animation of dolls.
“Look at the ceiling, guys.”
He led them around the corpse and to the right-hand hallway. He poked his head around the corner and stared at the piled bodies further down. “This is lodging. How do we get to the tenders?”
Sheila pointed to the right. He saw signs for a beauty parlor and a book store. “Through the salon and out onto the decks. There are station doors inside, but …” She looked at the bodies and shook her head. “I don’t wanna go down there.”
Riley nodded. Every organ inside seemed to pulse.
The salon’s door was metal-framed with pebbled glass. He nudged it open. One of the stations immediately to the left reflected the rest of the parlor. He saw his haggard face repeated on broken mirrors. “C’mon.”
Barbicide stained the floor and the room reeked. The four perm chairs had been upended. No bodies, but a fat trail of blood led down the back hallway to the right.
“Door’s over there.” Sheila pointed towards the far left corner. With each glass-crunching step forward, his heartbeat grew more leaden. He had to breathe through his mouth in order to get enough air and, still, he felt light-headed.
Two steps led to the deck door. Sheila was reaching for the knob when something crashed in the back hallway. They heard slow, squishy footsteps and something metallic being dragged.
Riley nudged the boy towards Sheila. “Go.”
/> She took the boy’s hand and the bag. “Riley—”
“Do you want someone following you?”
She bit her lower lip, then got the kids out quickly. Riley caught a salt-choked whiff of ocean. His stomach cramped and he couldn’t shrug off the insane relief he felt when the door closed.
He turned back. Two stations dominated the center of the room, obscuring his view, but he saw a bloody white shirt, a tattered burgundy dinner vest.
He circled around, axe at his chest. His pulse pushed at his Adam’s apple. Here’s your choice. Deal with the open water … or stay on this ship. With this.
The man stepped out and it was the clerk from his acid-trip fever dream. His back was stooped, his face dotted with blood. His red-ringed eyes bulged. He dragged a fire-extinguisher by the hose, the bottom dented and greased with blood.
“Have you eaten, sir?” The muscles of his arm bulged as he hefted the extinguisher. “Gotta eat, sir, gotta eat—”
The clerk swung the extinguisher low and it bashed into Riley’s thigh. The pain was instantaneous, seizing-up his entire leg. He cried out and fell.
The extinguisher slammed into his kidneys. Riley screamed. He saw a red bulge rearing and he tried to block with the axe. The head smacked the man’s forearm, and the extinguisher flew over Riley’s head, crashing somewhere.
The clerk pounced and Riley pushed the axe-handle between them. The man was small but whipped and snapped like a downed power line. He grabbed hunks of Riley’s hair and yanked. The pain peeled Riley’s lips away from his teeth.
The clerk bashed Riley’s head into the floor. A white light exploded in front of Riley’s eyes. Riley heaved against the man with the axe handle, as if doing bench-presses. The clerk’s hands left Riley’s hair and moved across his face, thumbs digging for his eyes.
With a knot of strength that dug cannibal-teeth into his kidneys, he shoved the man back. The clerk tensed against the side of the salon door. Riley swung the axe one-handed, a wide, strengthless move, and the side of the axe-head collided with the clerk’s jaw. The clerk jerked right, his temple slamming into the salon door’s pebbled glass, cracking it.
Riley pushed himself forward, shrieking with his kidneys, and drove his weight into the clerk. The clerk’s head bashed a ragged hole through the glass, the breaking shards tearing the man’s throat out, transforming his scream into a choked, wet gargle. Blood flew in thick spurts.
Riley jumped, cringing, away from the spasming body. He stumbled into one of the station chairs and dropped the axe to cling to it. His entire side was an icy lump.
He looked at the door leading to the deck and thought of seeing the cobalt waves of the ocean crashing, of smelling that sea air. He fell to his hands and knees and retched yellow bile laced with threads of blood.
Nope, sorry, I can’t.
A hiccup burned his throat. He thought of the magazine back in his cabin, foretelling the demise of his company. He might’ve been a stranger to that version of Riley Christopher McCarrick, CEO of a dying company, husband of a dying marriage.
He thought of Andrea, carrying a knife and screaming to be let in. He thought of Andrea and Hogan killing each other. It could’ve been him.
I can’t stay here, he thought, then said it aloud. His voice was a frog’s croak.
He crawled to the steps. At the top, he grasped the doorknob, his fingers grinding blood into the brass. He leaned his head against the door, taking deep breaths. He could hear the crash of waves outside, a seashell roar. Tons of open water.
(don’t go out there! you can’t!)
“You act like I have a choice,” he croaked. He turned the knob and pushed. He winced against the dull brightness, the sea wind pulling his clothes and filling his face with its nauseating scent. As his stomach clenched, he crawled out onto the wooden planks of the deck, letting the wind slam the door closed behind him.
He crawled forward, side brushing the wall, head down, breathing shallowly. His heart trip-hammered in his chest, his pulse a bass drum explosion in his head.
He was doing it. He was outside, he was next to water, and he wasn’t stopping. He might not survive—the idea of settling a small boat into the water with two adults and two children all but assured this—and he was starving, beaten half to death, and nauseous, but still whole. Still moving.
Doctor, I believe I’ve finally conquered aquaphobia.
He barked laughter in between retching, and kept crawling.
He made his way down the deck to where he hoped Sheila, Dylan, and Sara waited.
The Agonizing
Guilt of Relief
( LAST DAYS OF A READY-MADE VICTIM )
BEN RACED down Mitchum Street, last year’s boots pounding the shoveled sidewalks, trying to outrun the brightening streetlamps. Not for the first time, he wished he had a car.
Goddammit! he thought and didn’t know if he was cursing the school therapist or himself.
The street blurred by, houses closed off with curtains and blinds, their Christmas lights dark. The corners of months-old Clinton/Gore and Dole/Kemp lawn signs poked out of the snow, reaching for him.
The tall fence of McMillian Elementary reared up, and his boots slid on a patch of ice. A quick grab of a post saved him from a bone-rattling crash. He dashed across the lawn on a diagonal, kicking up wet clumps of snow, hoping he wasn’t too late, hoping—in spite of the twenty-degree day—Jude had waited like Ben asked.
He skidded to a stop at the edge of the playground, taking in the empty swings, the barren slide, the abandoned merry-go-round.
“Fuck,” he panted, his exhale a white puff. A stitch burned in his side, matching the molten core of anxiety in his stomach.
Jude hadn’t waited—of course Jude hadn’t waited. How could Ben expect Jude to wait when he was over an hour late on the last day before Christmas break? Which meant Jude was at home, with their father, who’d bragged about early shifts all week.
“Fuck,” he panted again, the stitch abating, the anxious core growing, spreading tendrils to his limbs.
He knew he needed to run, but a darker part whispered that he was already too late, so why hurry? What could he possibly gain? Wasted effort.
He started shuffling across the yard when he heard the thunk of a metal door closing and a woman’s voice: “Ben? Ben Sheever?”
He turned to see a young woman, holding a large pile of children’s workbooks and construction paper, across the playground area, in the near-empty teacher’s lot. “Hi, Ms. Quinn.”
“Looking for Jude?”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said through gritted teeth, then made his jaw relax. Ms. Quinn had at least tried to help, had been the one adult who had tried to do the right thing. “Yes, Ms. Quinn.”
“You just missed him,” she said, walking to her car. “He left a few minutes ago. Thought of inviting him back in, but I knew he’d say no.”
She shot him a look that, even across the playground, he read loud and clear. Jude inexorably always loved his teachers, even if his teachers didn’t love him back, but Jude had soured on his third grade teacher, in the midst of the meetings and statements and counselors, by the time Halloween rolled around.
He started back towards Mitchum Street, the idea he might catch Jude before the boy reached home squirting much-needed adrenaline into his muscles, banishing the dark whispering. “Thanks, Ms. Quinn,” he said, meaning it.
“And, Ben—?” she called and her voice was a fishhook; his head turned, saw the look on her face, and stopped. He wondered if the school board president had come to talk to her, as he had come to talk to Ben’s father. Ben didn’t doubt it, but it wouldn’t have been over beer in the kitchen, with statements like “I’ll take care of it.”
The school board president wasn’t Ms. Quinn’s friend, as he was Ben’s father’s.
“Take care of Jude,” she said now.
“I will,” Ben said and started running.
He heard a startled cry of pain as he reached the house, and
he sprinted faster, taking the porch steps three at a time and banging through the front door.
“Oh great,” he heard his father say from down the hall, “the goddamn cavalry.”
He burst into the kitchen. A tableau from hell in front of him: Jude crumbled against the refrigerator in one corner, holding his arm as if it were broken; their father at the kitchen table in the other, the top button of his Cobb County Sheriff’s Office uniform undone, holding a bottle of Rolling Rock and glaring at it.
“Jesus,” Ben breathed, and went to Jude. Jude burrowed into his chest. Ben felt the arm under the long-sleeve—a too-large hand-me-down from Ben—and didn’t feel a break, although Jude grunted when Ben’s probing fingers squeezed.
“Look up, dude,” Ben whispered, tilting Jude’s chin. Their father had clipped the boy along his right cheekbone, not hard enough to break—their father was good like that—but enough for the skin to swell and darken. It reminded Ben, absurdly, of water in a balloon—the gentle sloping rise. He didn’t press against it.
Rage thrummed through his bloodstream. At his father for doing this. At himself for not getting to Jude in time.
At Jude, for not knowing this would happen.
He’s getting bad again, a voice murmured in the back of his mind.
“What the fuck, Dad?” he yelled, his anger belied by the crack in his voice.
“Watch your language,” Marcus Sheever muttered, not looking away from the Rolling Rock. Ben saw that Marcus’s knuckles were chaffed and his head rang.
“What happened?”
Still their father wouldn’t look up. “Caught him playing with my beer.”
Jude sniffed against Ben’s shirt. “I was getting him his drink. That’s all.”
Ben looked back and didn’t miss the flicker in Marcus’s eyes. He could see it all: their father coming home, Jude—against all logic—excited and eager, running to the fridge to get Marcus his one beer of the evening, Marcus getting annoyed, grabbing at the bottle but Jude not letting go quickly enough, Marcus winding up while jerking the beer from the boy.
Bones are Made to be Broken Page 17