Standing behind the body was Jerry White. Both arms of his uniform were wet with fresh blood, his nose was swollen and bloody, and he had one hell of a black eye.
“Gentlemen,” Captain Weber said, catching his breath and looking around the room. Of the eleven men who had started the expedition, only six were left. “The control room is ours.”
Jerry’s eyes rolled back in his head. His legs gave out under him. Tim jumped forward and caught him before he struck the deck.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
When Jerry White awoke and opened his eyes, he could see out of only one. The other was covered by a large bandage, as was his nose, and both gave him a sharp pain when he touched them. He sat up slowly and carefully, wincing as his sore body complained, and realized he was in a dark, tightly confined space. His heart raced as his mind conjured images of torpedo tubes and coffins, but after a moment his confusion passed and he realized he was in a rack in the berthing area. He was so tired and so sore that it took great effort for him to slide the curtain aside and let in the berthing area’s red light. He was on the bottom rack of a triple-decker bunk—not his own, although the sailors who had shared it were likely dead now and wouldn’t mind. The wounds on his arms had been bandaged, although the work looked rushed and sloppy. His injured knee had been set with a splint consisting of two wooden stakes and a whole lot of gauze. With Matson dead, he supposed the others had done the best job they could of patching him up.
The last thing he remembered was limping into the control room and staking Lieutenant Commander Jefferson before he could bite Tim. After that, the world had gone black. The fact that he was in a rack and not dead told him the vampires hadn’t won.
The curtain in the doorway was pushed aside, and Tim walked into the berthing area. Jerry turned, wincing as every nerve ending complained.
“You’re awake,” Tim said, a big grin on his face. “The captain said it would be okay to come check on you. You look like something ate you and shat you back out.”
Jerry tried to laugh, but everything hurt too much. “You’re the one who almost got eaten, as I recall.”
Tim sat down on the rack across from him. “Thanks for that. You saved my life. Again.”
“I’ll put it on your tab,” he said. “Is everything …?”
“Back to normal? Hardly, but the boat is operational. As far as we can tell, Jefferson was the last of them. Captain Weber put a skeleton crew, including me, to work piloting the boat. The rest of the survivors have been doing a search. They haven’t found any more bloodsuckers, but they did find bodies. A lot of bodies.”
“Damn,” Jerry said.
Most of the bodies, Tim explained, had been piled in the captain’s stateroom, which looked like something out of the Jonestown massacre, but the search party had only to follow their noses to find more in the auxiliary engine room, the garbage disposal room, and the wardroom. They checked the torpedo tubes as well, but all they found was the missing part of Lieutenant Duncan’s corpse.
“I take it we have you to thank for Duncan losing his head?” Tim asked.
“I never did take kindly to bullies,” Jerry said. He nodded at his knee. “Who do I have to thank for this?”
“One of the ensigns had some emergency training from back home, and it turns out Oran Guidry knows a thing or two about patching people up after a bad fight. You’re probably going to need a cast on that knee, but the splint will have to do until we reach land.”
“How long will that be?” Jerry asked.
“To be honest, I don’t know. Getting out of Soviet waters is our first priority right now. We may be shorthanded, but everyone’s pulling their weight. We had to train some men to work the essential stations in the control room. I’ve got Aukerman, a PO from engineering, covering sonar while I’m down here. I made him promise if he hears so much as a peep to come get me. They’re learning on the job, but it’s slow going. I think you’ll be the only one getting any sleep for a while.”
“How many of us are left?” Jerry asked.
“Not a lot. Twenty-three. When we searched the boat, we didn’t find any more survivors. Only the crewmen who were in the reactor room survived.”
“Christ,” Jerry said. “There were a hundred and forty men on this sub when we launched.”
“We’re practically a ghost ship now,” Tim said. “I guess we’re just like our namesake, like you said—the colony where everyone disappeared.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?” Jerry said.
“Shoot,” Tim said.
“When you were in the control room with the vampires, were you scared?”
Tim nodded. “Scared enough my poopie suit almost lived up to its name. What about you?”
“I wasn’t,” Jerry said. “It’s the strangest thing. I knew what I had to do, and I figured either I would do it or I would die. I was … calm. When I saw Jefferson, I just came up behind him and …”
“Staked him.”
Jerry nodded. “I was close enough to Jefferson that he could have knocked my block off, but I wasn’t scared. I don’t know why.”
“The same reason you weren’t scared to run into that burning engine room on Philadelphia,” Tim said. “You’re braver than you give yourself credit for.”
“Or stupider,” Jerry said.
Tim grinned. “Or maybe it’s because Jefferson wasn’t the first XO you had trouble with.”
“Philadelphia’s XO wasn’t a vampire—just your garden-variety asshole,” Jerry said.
“What happened on that boat, Jerry?” Tim asked. “You never told me.”
Jerry sighed. He settled back against the pillow, groaning with discomfort. “It’s a long story. Maybe some other time.”
“If I’ve learned one thing on this underway,” Tim said, “it’s that you never know how much time you’ve got left. Best not to put things off.”
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right about that,” Jerry said. “Back on Philadelphia, I was friends with a radioman named MacLeod. This guy had always wanted to be in the submarine service, ever since he was a kid. It meant something to him, and he worked his ass off to get there. But to join the navy, he had to hide who he was. Do you know what I mean by that?”
“I’ve heard a few stories,” Tim said.
“Personally, I didn’t care about that stuff. MacLeod was a good sailor and a friend,” he said. “I don’t know how, but our XO, Lieutenant Commander Frank Leonard, found out. Only, he didn’t report MacLeod. He held the knowledge over him instead. He rode MacLeod hard, even harder than Duncan rode me. He was on the guy’s back about everything, chewing him out, treating him like shit. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Leonard had a taste for drugs when he was off duty—coke and pills mostly—and whenever we were in port, he would turn MacLeod into his errand boy, making pickups from his dealer. It didn’t just put MacLeod’s career at risk if he got caught; it could have landed him in jail. But it was either that or Leonard would spill the beans about him being gay, so MacLeod thought he didn’t have a choice. He bit the bullet and did as he was told.
“I was furious when I found out about it. I wanted to report Leonard, but MacLeod begged me not to. He said if I did, the navy would find out the truth about him and kick him out. That same fear of being found out was why he never went to the COB to complain about Leonard. But I did it anyway. I knew I couldn’t prove anything about the drugs without MacLeod’s help, so I did what little I could. I filed a formal complaint about the way the XO was treating him. There was an investigation. Leonard had been up for a promotion at the time, but after the investigation he was passed over. It was his third time getting passed over, and you know how it goes in the navy: three strikes, you’re out. That was the end of his career. Of both their careers, it turned out, because MacLeod was right. The truth about him came out in the investigation and he was discharged, just like he always feared would happen. He never spoke to me again. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I wonder sometimes.”
“It was a tough call to make,” Tim said, “but you definitely did the right thing. If that was who Frank Leonard was, he didn’t deserve to be in the navy.”
“Yeah, but MacLeod did. That’s what stinks.”
He took a deep breath through his mouth. He hadn’t expected to tell this story to anyone, on Roanoke or anywhere else, ever again. He just wanted to put it behind him, but he was surprised how good it felt to get it off his chest.
“Anyway, I learned my lesson: keep my head down and don’t get involved. That was the plan for my time on Roanoke. Guess that went right down the shitter, huh?”
“I’d say risking your neck to kill vampires and save your crewmates is getting pretty damn involved,” Tim stood. “Get some rest. I’ll come back to bother you some more later.”
“No rush,” Jerry said. “I feel like I could sleep for a week.”
Tim turned around to leave the berthing area, but a sailor appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, as if he had run all the way from the control room.
“Spicer, the captain wants you back in the sonar shack now!” the sailor said. “We’ve got a bear on our tail!”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Tim’s first thought was that the Victor that had tailed them before was back. During the time the crew lost control of Roanoke, it had strayed fifteen miles north along the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, which could have given the Victor plenty of time to find them again. The captain had changed their bearing as soon as he had control once more, setting course for the closest American territory—the Aleutian Islands to the east, 1,200 miles off the tip of the Alaskan peninsula. But for the moment, they were still in Soviet waters. If they wanted to get out in one piece, they were going to have to shake the Victor off their tail.
Captain Weber had already ordered Roanoke rigged for ultraquiet by the time Tim arrived in the control room. The screw was slowed, and their speed was reduced to two knots. The control room was still rigged for red, casting everything in a crimson tint. The bodies, both human and non, had been cleared out to make room for the captain’s skeleton crew: a quartermaster, one man in Fire Control, a diving officer, a planesman, and a helmsman. That was it. There was no officer of the deck or chief of the watch. The surviving crew of Roanoke was stretched thin, which left the watchstanding sailors to take their orders directly from Captain Weber himself.
“Spicer, I want your eyes and ears on the Victor,” the captain told him.
“Aye-aye, sir,” Tim said, bolting for the sonar shack.
He took a seat in front of his console and slipped the headphones on. The vampires had broken the lights in here too, but there was still plenty of illumination coming off the display screens, which apparently hadn’t bothered their eyes as much as the overheads. It was Aukerman who had first spotted the Victor. Seated at the next console over, the engineer turned emergency sonar tech pointed out the anomalies in the cascading waterfall display, although Tim had already spotted them as soon as he sat down.
There was surface traffic as well. Two ships floated 500 feet above them, to their north and east. Tim concentrated on the noises they made, identifying one of them as a destroyer, probably Kashin class, a guided-missile ship built in the 1960s. He pegged the other ship as even older: a Sverdlov-class cruiser, a gunboat from the 1950s. That was a stroke of luck. The Soviets could just as easily have had planes patrolling the skies and dropping sonobuoys that could pinpoint Roanoke’s location in seconds. They could have had ships dropping acoustic gear that actively pinged every cubic inch of ocean around them. Instead, the Soviets had sent two antiques to patrol these waters. Their outmoded technology was probably the only thing that had saved Roanoke from being spotted already—spotted and torpedoed. The ships were ancient by technological standards, but that didn’t make their weaponry any less lethal.
Still, as long as Roanoke stayed below the thermocline, he was confident the surface ships wouldn’t see them. The submarine on their tail was another matter. The Victor didn’t look as if she had spotted them yet. She wasn’t running on quiet, just patrolling as normal, but that could change in a matter of seconds.
Captain Weber came to the door of the sonar shack, silhouetted in the red light from the control room. He wore a somber, tense expression. “We’ve drifted right into Victor fucking Central, Spicer, and the timing could not be worse. Has she detected us yet?”
“There’s no indication she has, sir,” Tim said.
“Excellent. Keep an eye on her. If that submarine increases her speed so much as half a knot, I want to know about it.”
***
With only twenty-three men left aboard, the submarine was eerily quiet. Twenty-three living men, Jerry reminded himself. There were a whole lot more corpses being stored in the wardroom and the empty staterooms until they could be dealt with properly.
The berthing area wasn’t far from the mess, which normally would be so filled with boisterous conversation and sailors horsing around that Jerry wouldn’t expect to get a moment’s peace. Instead, it was deadly silent, which, he discovered, was worse. He strained his ears to hear anything, even the sound of Guidry in the galley, making cold sandwiches for the remaining crew, but there was nothing. Even the culinary specialist had probably been put to use somewhere. He got the feeling the whole middle level was empty except for him.
And then he heard them—footsteps in the corridor outside. They stopped right outside the berthing area.
“Back already, Spicer?” Jerry called. “I didn’t think the Soviets would give up that fast.”
In the murky red light, he saw something small appear at the side of the curtain. From a distance, it took him a moment to recognize fingers grasping the doorframe. A shape pushed through the curtain without bothering to move it aside. The red light fell across the man’s face, illuminating his features. Jerry stiffened.
Warren Stubic, the torpedoman who had frozen to death in Lieutenant Abrams’ freezer, walked into the berthing area.
***
Tim studied his sonar screen. Roanoke was a small target in a vast ocean, and a moving target at that. As long as they remained at ultraquiet, barely making a sound as they drifted out of the Victor’s sonar range, the Soviets didn’t have a prayer of finding them with their outdated equipment.
Still, the worst thing a sonar tech could do was get cocky, because that led to sloppiness, which led to mistakes. Tim forced himself to focus. His mind was still moving in a thousand different directions, trying to process everything that had happened—the horrible deaths, the sudden revelation that vampires were real—but he pushed himself to concentrate on the Soviet submarine instead. He couldn’t let anything distract him or they could wind up dead on the bottom of the ocean. He sure as hell hadn’t survived a horde of hungry vampires just to become fish food.
So he watched the screen and listened to the sounds the Victor made—and it didn’t sound right. She was traveling at nine or ten knots, not trying to be stealthy, her engine banging and clanging. But something was missing, something important that he couldn’t put his finger on. He had memorized all the common sound signatures that Soviet boats made—it came with being an experienced sonar tech. But this sounded so unusual, so off, that he reached for the console and hit a few buttons to record it. It was standard operating procedure. When sonar techs heard something they didn’t recognize, they recorded the sound and compared it to other audio recordings later, to identify it.
But as he listened, it came to him what was missing from the Victor’s sound, and he sat bolt upright in his seat.
As far as he knew, the US Navy was the only submarine service with quiet boats. Soviet subs ran loud. No other militarized nation with a navy even had nuclear-powered subs. They still had diesels, loud as trucks underwater. American subs ran quieter than the rest of them because their screws were specially designed and shaped to reduce cavitation—the formation of air bubbles—and therefore remain quiet enough not to be detected by sonar.
The Victor’s screw wasn’t causing cavitation. Tim could hear her engines, but her propeller was as silent as their own.
And that just wasn’t possible.
***
Too late, Jerry realized that they had been wrong. Jefferson wasn’t the last of the monsters. All this time, in the quarantined isolation of the torpedo room, in the same dark space where the vampires had hidden themselves before launching their attack, PO3 Warren Stubic had lain frozen in his body bag. But the cold hadn’t killed him, because cold didn’t kill vampires. It had only left him dormant, hibernating while he slowly thawed. Now he was back, the one who had brought this curse onto Roanoke in the first place, patient zero of the vampire outbreak. And Jerry was alone with him in the berthing area. Alone and incapacitated.
But something was wrong with Stubic’s eyes. No inhuman glow came from within them, and they didn’t appear to be focused on anything, not even on Jerry. Being frozen solid had damaged his eyes somehow. Stubic was blind.
Jerry’s rack was at the back of the berthing area, built into the farthest bulkhead from the doorway, but he couldn’t stay there. Confined to such a tight space, he was a sitting duck. He tried to slide out of his rack as quietly as he could, but the injured knee was too sore and too stiff for him to move silently. He squirmed his way to the edge of the rack, then dropped to the floor. He stifled a cry as his broken nose, fractured eye socket, and broken knee all felt the impact. But it didn’t matter—Stubic heard him anyway. The vampire’s head snapped in his direction, and the lips pulled back in a rictus grin to reveal long viperine fangs.
The berthing area was wide enough for two rows of freestanding bunks between the rows built into the bulkheads. If he could keep the bunks between himself and Stubic, he might be able to make it out. Jerry grabbed the corner of the nearest bunk in the middle and pulled, dragging himself along the floor.
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