Vampire. The word echoed in his mind. He did his best to ignore it, but it stuck there.
Matson would return soon—he was sure of it—to flush those drowned bodies out into the depths of the ocean. He didn’t want to be anywhere near the torpedo room when that happened. He quickened his pace, but the walk to the ladder still felt like an eternity. Matson hid in every patch of shadow they passed, behind every cluster of pipes along the bulkhead, in every dark-shrouded doorway, ready to leap out and kill the two of them as quickly and easily as he had killed Farrington. And then it would be into the torpedo tubes with them.
Jesus Christ. He couldn’t even grasp it. Nothing made sense anymore.
Jerry stopped at the bottom of the ladder. Tim came up behind him, expecting him to start climbing, but he was looking up at the top. Tim followed his gaze and saw only darkness in the hole above. Shit. Someone had smashed the lights on the middle level too. Matson and maybe others. LeMon and Bodine … They were smashing lights all over the boat.
It was starting. Whatever their plan was, this was the first step: to kill all the lights on Roanoke. And what would come next? More murders, more bodies for the torpedo tubes?
“We have to get to the control room,” Jerry whispered.
Tim agreed, but after receiving only silence on the circuit, he had a bad feeling about what they would find up there.
Jerry went up the ladder first, carrying his lantern so that it shone against the bulkhead as he climbed. Once he reached the middle level, he stopped, shined the lantern around to make sure the coast was clear, then continued upward. Tim started up after him. When his head passed through the hole, Tim did the same with his lantern. The corridor was empty, but that didn’t make him feel any safer. There was something eerie about how utterly abandoned Roanoke looked. Jerry was already halfway up the ladder to the top level. Tim continued climbing. When he had his feet on the middle-level deck, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Someone was right behind him; he was sure of it. He spun around, shining the lantern beam down the corridor, but no one was there—only the sense that someone had been there a moment ago. He climbed farther up.
When he reached the top level, there weren’t any lights by the ladder, but he could see, up ahead in the control room, the dim glow from the LEDs on the instruments. The control room was the nerve center of the submarine, but as he and Jerry approached it, they heard only silence. There was none of the usual chatter, the call-and-response of orders being given and acknowledged, the footsteps of crewmen hurrying to and fro. Just an uncanny quiet.
“Where is everyone?” Tim whispered. There was no way Matson could have fired them all out of the torpedo tubes.
Jerry didn’t answer. He crept forward, and Tim followed, his heart pounding. When they entered the control room, he lifted his lantern, throwing a beam of light into the shadowy room, and everything came into horrific focus. The control room wasn’t empty. There were crewmen everywhere, either slumped over the equipment at their stations or lying dead on the deck. The quartermaster, the navigation supervisor, the messenger of the watch, the helmsman. The officer of the deck sat at the edge of the conn with his feet dangling. He still held the handset of the phonetalker in his pale hand. Tim shined his lantern toward the sonar shack and saw the dark shapes slumped in their chairs.
“What happened?” he asked. “What the fuck happened here?”
Jerry didn’t answer. He walked to the helm, where the planesman was slumped forward against his yoke. Jerry held the lantern six inches from the sailor’s face. His eyes were wide, and he wore a terrified expression as if he were silently screaming. Jerry pressed two fingers to the side of the man’s neck, checking for a pulse.
“Is he …?” Tim started to ask, but he knew the answer already. He could tell just by looking into those glazed, unblinking eyes.
Jerry shook his head. Then he tilted the planesman’s head to one side. A chunk of flesh had been torn out of the other side of the sailor’s neck, leaving a ragged, bloody hole. Jerry let go and backed away from the body quickly. Neither he nor Tim said a word, but they both understood what had happened. The vampires had stormed the control room and killed everyone there. No subtle little welts on the neck this time. The vampires had gone all out, killing the men as quickly as they could.
“Where’s the captain?” Tim asked, looking around the room. Captain Weber wasn’t among the dead.
“Maybe he got away,” Jerry said.
Tim shined his lantern on the terrified faces of the dead all around him. The control room had been turned into an abattoir. Matson alone couldn’t do that. Even he, Bodine, and LeMon together couldn’t overpower this many crewmen so quickly. It had to have been a much bigger group. Jesus, was Roanoke swarming with vampires at this point?
They needed to get off this boat. It was the only way he could see them surviving. But they were hundreds of feet underwater, thousands of miles from port, and likely already deep in Soviet waters. Where the hell could they go?
Jerry pulled a small object out of his pocket and held it up for him to see. “I found his on the WEPS’s body downstairs.”
Tim recognized it as the key to the weapons lockers. So that was why Jerry had been digging around in Lieutenant French’s body bag. There were only two keys to the weapons lockers. The XO had one, and Lieutenant French, the WEPS, had the other. It was a stroke of luck that Matson hadn’t taken the key himself when he killed French. But then, if the slaughter all around him was any indication, vampires didn’t need weapons.
Roanoke had two weapons lockers. One was in the reactor room, the other on the top level, not thirty feet from where they now stood. Tim didn’t know whether a gun could kill a vampire, but he sure as hell would feel a lot less helpless with one in his hand.
A loud bang echoed from the captain’s egress on the far side of the control room, the corridor where the captain’s stateroom was. It sounded as if someone was coming up the fore ladder from Officer Country. No, not someone—multiple someones. He heard footsteps on the deck.
Both men switched off their lanterns, although Tim wondered why they bothered when it was obvious the vampires had no trouble seeing in the dark. They bolted back the way they came, out of the control room and into the waiting darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Gordon Abrams waited in silence for a full fifteen minutes after the last time he heard either Jefferson or Penwarden speak from the other side of the stateroom door, and he gestured for Oran to do the same. The time passed excruciatingly slowly. With his ear pressed to the door, Gordon was convinced he would hear something outside that would prove they were still there—a footstep, a whisper between them, another threat to get them to open the door. But when those sounds didn’t come and fifteen minutes had passed, he slowly and quietly pulled the chair away from the door.
“What are you doing, suh?” Oran asked in alarm.
“I’m going to see if they’re still out there.”
“Suh, don’t!” Oran protested. “That’s crazy!”
“We can’t stay locked up in here forever,” Gordon said. “We have to find Captain Weber and tell him what’s going on.”
“He must know by now, suh,” Oran said. “If he ain’t dead already, I mean.”
“We don’t know that. We have to assume he’s still alive and still in command. Since the circuit isn’t working, it’s up to us to find him and warn him about what’s happening on his boat. You can stay here if you want, but I’m going.”
“Like hell, suh,” Oran said. “I ain’t stayin’ here by myself!”
“Then you’ll have to come with me, because I’m out of here,” Gordon said.
“Suh, it’s suicide!”
“Duly noted,” Gordon said. “You coming?”
Oran sighed. “Aye, suh.”
Gordon unlocked the door and opened it slowly, just enough to peek out into the corridor. Not only was the battle lantern on the Officer Country bulkhead out, but every other lig
ht on the middle level was as well, leaving the corridor in complete darkness except for the light from the stateroom’s lantern. It was quieter than he had ever heard on Roanoke. Something was terribly wrong. No submarine should be this quiet.
In the light that seeped out into the corridor, Gordon could see Ensign Van Lente’s body on the floor. He didn’t see Jefferson or Penwarden, but that didn’t mean anything. It would be easy enough for them to hide in the dark and wait for the two men to come out of the stateroom. They could be just a few feet away from him right now, cloaked in darkness, and he wouldn’t know it. He and Oran could be walking into a trap. In fact, chances were good that was exactly what would happen. The vampires, rougarou, or whatever they were didn’t strike him as the sort that would just give up after a short wait. But Gordon knew they had to risk it. They had to find the captain.
“Let’s go,” he whispered to Oran.
Gordon crept out into the dark corridor. He saw a trickle of light at the dead end of Officer Country, coming down the fore ladder from the captain’s egress above. He turned the other way, toward the open corridor, and thought he saw movement in the distance. He strained, trying to focus on the black-on-black shadows in the dark. Had he really seen anything? Or was his mind playing tricks on him, showing him a bogeyman everywhere he looked? Then, like a field of stars on a moonless night, multiple pairs of eyes turned his way—glowing eyes that seemed to reflect a light that wasn’t there.
“Oh, fuck,” Gordon muttered. He turned, grabbed Oran by the front of his coveralls, and swung him toward the nearby ladder. “Get moving! Go!”
Oran darted to the ladder, disappearing for a moment in a shadowy corner near the ladder’s foot, then scrambled up it to the top deck. Gordon kept his gaze on those glowing eyes. How many pairs were there? Four? Five? His fear made it hard to count. All he knew was that it was more than just Jefferson and Penwarden. He felt along the floor until he found Van Lente’s sidearm. Snatching it up, he aimed down the corridor at the shapes moving toward him in the dark, their eyes blazing with unearthly light. He squeezed the trigger over and over again until the slide locked open, the magazine empty.
He had to have hit them, but the shapes kept coming. He threw the gun down, turned, and ran for the fore ladder. He remembered the broken light in the mess at the start of it all, and the broken lights in the head later, and how no one had seen it happen either time. These things could move fast when they wanted to, he realized, but they were only toying with him now, letting him run, confident there was no escape. Well, fuck that. That was their mistake, not his. He grabbed the rungs and scaled the ladder faster than he ever had before. He had his back to the figures as he went up, leaving him vulnerable, but he couldn’t think about that. He just kept climbing as fast as he could. He heard their footsteps behind him, but he couldn’t tell how close they were. The sound was muffled by the pounding of his heart in his ears. Then he was up on the top level and in the captain’s egress.
Only a single battle lantern still worked up here, taped to the bulkhead across from the captain’s stateroom. The door to the stateroom was closed. Gordon saw Oran at the other end of the captain’s egress, standing at the entrance to the control room, his form silhouetted by the twinkling LEDs of the instrument panels. He stood so still and so silently that he reminded Gordon of a deer in the headlights, frozen in terror.
Gordon started toward him. They didn’t have any time to waste. The creatures that had come after them on the middle level would surely follow any moment now.
Something struck him hard from behind—a sharp blow just below the shoulder blades, which sent him flying face-first into the door of Captain Weber’s stateroom. He didn’t have time to get his hands up to protect his face before he hit. His forehead struck it, cushioned only by the paper-thin fake wood veneer that covered the door. The door hadn’t been properly latched, and it swung open under the impact. Gordon half fell and half staggered into the stateroom. The lights here had been smashed too, but the light from the lantern in the corridor spilled in after him, illuminating a floor stained red. Piles of dead men in blue coveralls cluttered the center of the room. Some had a smear of blood on one side of their neck, just like Ensign Van Lente. Others were in much worse shape, with their throats ripped out completely, leaving behind only glistening meat and hanging, ragged bits of skin, as if the vampires had attacked them in a frenzy.
A shadow appeared in the light. He heard the sound of the corridor lantern being smashed and was plunged into sudden darkness. Hands pushed him forward onto the pile of bodies. He tried to scream for Oran, scream for anyone to help him, but his assailant’s arm snaked around his neck—so cold, so deathly cold—and cut off his air. He struggled, but his assailant was unbelievably strong.
A moment before he lost consciousness, he felt someone’s mouth against his neck. In a split second, his brain registered that no breath, warm or otherwise, came from that mouth. He felt teeth brush his skin and told himself to fight, to get up and run, that if he didn’t he was going to die. He felt hot pain sink into the side of his neck, and everything faded away.
***
Gordon woke in the dark. He tried to move but couldn’t. An image came to him of a fly wrapped in spider’s silk, waiting to be devoured, and he pushed it away. That wasn’t going to be him. He wouldn’t let it be. He would fight those bastards first. He tried to move again, but he was boxed in somewhere narrow that wouldn’t let him budge.
He could move his head slightly. It was resting on something cold and metallic, and when he lifted his head, he bumped into another cold metal surface. He winced in pain. His forehead was still sore from hitting the captain’s stateroom door. He gently lowered his head again. The metal was rounded, he realized, and damp. In the distance, he heard dripping water. It occurred to him that he was in a pipe of some kind.
Then the panic came. There was only one kind of tube on Roanoke big enough for a man to fit inside.
He began kicking his feet and slapping his hands against the walls. He screamed, but his cries only rang in his ears. No one would hear him through the thick steel of the torpedo tube and the breech door. Somewhere in his mind, he knew this, but he continued screaming. He screamed until he was dizzy and out of breath, and then he stopped. Air was precious in the watertight tube. If no one opened the breech door, he would suffocate. He just didn’t know how long it would take. Ten minutes? Five? Two?
He managed to work his hands up along his sides so that they were pinned against his chest, but he couldn’t get them any higher. He rolled onto his side, then squirmed and wriggled and pushed himself forward with his feet. The back of his head touched the inside of the breech door. He kept pushing himself toward it until he was curled with his shoulders against it. He shoved, but the breech didn’t budge. He pressed more of his weight against it, but it stayed shut.
An even more terrifying thought occurred to him. What if they didn’t intend to suffocate him? What if they were going to flood the tubes with water and then shoot him out into the freezing ocean? Would he drown, or would he freeze to death while still holding his breath? Or would the pressure simply crush the air-filled cavity of his chest? What would kill him first? He remembered the feel of teeth against his skin and raised a hand to his neck. He felt sticky, coagulated blood, and two small welts. God, no! His heart raced, and he felt light-headed with panic. Why hadn’t they drained him? Why didn’t they finish him off? Christ, was this their version of a pantry? Would they come back later to feed on him again? He thought of all those teeth tearing into him …
It was too much to contemplate. The horror of it overwhelmed him, and he screamed again. He screamed until there was nothing left in his lungs. After his air left him, his mind followed. For an interminable moment in the darkness of the torpedo tube, Lieutenant Gordon Abrams went mad.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Tim ran through the dark, following Jerry down the corridor, away from the control room and through Fire Control, toward the main
ladder. Jerry stopped at the ladder and waited there for him to catch up, then ushered him onto the rungs.
“Go, go, move!” Jerry whispered.
“But the weapons locker,” Tim said.
“No time!”
Tim grabbed the side rails, took two rungs, and dropped the rest of the way. He landed on the middle level and spun to look down the corridor. Shapes seethed toward him in the darkness, groping, hissing like animals, their eyes glowing with an unnatural light. Jerry dropped down the ladder and landed beside him. He grabbed Tim’s sleeve and pulled him away from the shadowy figures, but there was nowhere to run. Their backs were to the bulkhead. Tim saw the hatch to the reactor room at the top of a short flight of steps. He ran to it. The silhouettes in the darkness swarmed closer—so close that the hair on Tim’s neck stood up. He didn’t have to look back to know they were reaching for him. He bounded up the stairs to the hatch, spun the handle, and yanked it open. A sliver of light spilled out into the corridor, like a beacon promising safety. The light struck one of the shapes in the dark—it was Matson. The hospital corpsman hissed angrily, showing long, sharp teeth, and ducked quickly out of the light. The other shapes fell back.
“Come on!” Tim shouted as Jerry pounded up the steps.
Together they barreled through the hatch, and Jerry slammed it behind them.
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