Kraken

by Eric S. Brown

  “Tell me about it,” Spraker sighed. It wouldn’t be the first time a cruise ship had wandered into somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be, but Spraker had a bad feeling that something more was going on in this case.

  “Get me that ship’s captain on the line pronto,” Spraker ordered his comm. officer.

  “This is the United States frigate, Peart. These waters are off-limits to civilian vessels at this time. Please confirm your identification and we will render any assistance you may need,” the comm. officer, Megan, broadcasted over the open channel. After a few seconds ticked by, she repeated the message before finally turning back to Spraker.

  “The Pleasure Bound isn’t responding, sir,” the comm. officer said, frowning.

  Spraker raised an eyebrow at Arron.

  “She’s dead in the water too, sir, and looks to be drifting,” Luke told them. “Whatever is going on with her is likely a lot more than just a comm. issue.”

  “Should we check her out?” Arron asked.

  “I would love to,” Spraker sighed, “but Captain Marcus would have our heads. Let’s call it in and see what his highness advises.”

  Spraker nodded at Megan. “Get me the Whiteside.”

  “You’re on, sir,” Megan nodded back at him.

  “This is the Peart. We’ve stumbled onto a large, civilian vessel adrift at the edge of the exercise parameter. She’s not responding to hails. Please advise.”

  ****

  Lex staggered along the corridor. The Pleasure Bound’s red, emergency lights cast strange shadows along the walls and over the doorways of the cabins lining the corridor’s sides. He was surprised the ship’s backup power was still functioning. His whole body ached with sheer exhaustion. In the last three days, he had gotten little more than a few hours of sleep. Partly because every time he closed his eyes, the nightmares came and partly because he was too afraid of what might find him while he slept. He had to stay alert, be ready, in case they did find him. Not that he could fight them. If they found him, he was as dead as the rest of the Pleasure Bound’s passengers and crew.

  The air stank of rotting flesh, stale blood, and stagnate water. Lex had ripped a piece of cloth from the bottom of his T-shirt and wrapped it over his mouth and nose but it didn’t really help. The smells were terrible and ever present as he continued his trek towards the upper decks. Every so often, he would come upon a body and be forced to either step over it or slide passed it by pressing himself against the corridor wall if there was room to do so. More often though, he saw pieces of his once fellow passengers; a mangled hand here, a discarded foot there. The worst he had come across so far was an unidentifiable chunk of meat that was clearly human floating in a puddle of red tinted water just inside one of the cabin doors he passed.

  Lex clutched his makeshift spear in a white knuckled grip as a fresh wave of nausea rolled over him. The corridor seemed to swirl around him. He paused, fighting it back, until he could move again without the risk of being doubled over by dry heaves. There was nothing in his stomach to come up but he had to keep reminding his body of that. He knew he was sick, sicker than just from the sights and smells around him. The water Lex had been living on during his time in the storage room was likely contaminated from something.

  Something moved behind him. Lex whirled around but whatever had been there was gone. Whether it had rounded the bend in the corridor or disappeared into one of the open cabins, he didn’t have a clue and didn’t care. His heart pounded in his chest. A sickly sheen of sweat coated his skin. His haggard eyes swept over the corridor, desperately searching for whatever had made the noise he had heard. He raised his makeshift spear, trying to seem larger and tougher than he was. He had read somewhere that if you came face to face with a predator, you should try to convince it you weren’t worth the fight it would take for it to have you as its next meal. His nerve broke almost instantly. Yeah, that’s crap, he thought and turned, breaking into a full-out run. His feet slipped out from under him on the wet metal floor and he crashed downward onto it with a loud grunt. Lex’s breath was knocked from his lungs. Even as he gasped for air, he threw himself to his feet, and started to take off running again but a voice stopped him.

  “Stop right there or so help me God, I will shoot you,” a woman aiming a .38 at his face shouted at him.

  “Whoa,” Lex blurted out, jerking his hands above his head and letting go of his makeshift spear. It clattered to a rest next to his feet. “I’m human!”

  “Really?” the woman snapped at him. “I never would have guessed.”

  She was younger than he was. Lex guessed she was in her early twenties. Dirty and matted red hair clung to her forehead and her shoulders. Her eyes were green and filled with a mixture of fear and anger. She looked like the kind of person who worked out. Her body was lean and hard. She carried herself with a confident posture that left no question that she meant business. Even so, Lex could see the last three days had taken a toll on her too. Aside from the filth covering her, the woman’s eyes were sunken in and her skin was an unhealthily pale.

  “Wait,” Lex pleaded. “I’m a survivor just like you.”

  The woman kept her gun trained on him but said, “I’m not going to shoot you unless you give me a reason, okay? The last guy I found alive tried to rape me in my sleep so cut me some slack.”

  Lex’s eyes bugged at what she had just said. “I am so sorry,” he offered.

  “Shut up,” the woman ordered. “We’ve all been through hell on this ship. What’s your name?”

  “Lex… Lex Iver.”

  “From the looks of you, you were a passenger like me,” the woman gestured at his ragged clothes.

  Lex nodded. “My wife and I…” His voice went out on him as fresh tears stung his eyes.

  “I get it,” the woman said, filling the unexpected silence. “I’m Trish. You can put your hands down now, Lex. You look like an idiot.”

  Lex lowered his hands but didn’t move to retrieve his spear.

  “It’s good to meet you, Trish,” Lex said, finding his voice again and trying to muster up a smile. “I thought I was the only person left.”

  “So did I,” Trish admitted. “It’s a big ship though. There have to be others.”

  “Like the man…” Lex started and then stopped.

  “You and him are the only two I have seen so far,” Trish said, glancing around the corridor before she looked back at him. “We can’t stay here. We’re too out in the open.”

  “Those things are still aboard then?” Lex asked.

  “Some,” Trish answered, trying the door of the cabin next to where she stood. It wasn’t locked and slid open easily. She gestured for Lex to go on in ahead of her. Once he had, she followed him in and slid the door closed behind them. The room was empty other than its bunk and several cases of half unpacked luggage.

  Trish dug in one of the pockets of the jacket she wore and tossed Lex a small, half empty bottle of water. She kept her gun in his sight but at least it wasn’t aimed at him anymore.

  Lex caught the water, unscrewing its lid, and downed it in one gulp. The water was warm but it tasted like heaven compared to what he had been drinking in the storage room. He stared at Trish, trying to figure her out. She was being rather trusting for a woman who claimed to have recently fought off being raped. He supposed she was as desperate for help and the company of other people as he was.

  “How did you survive?” Trish asked, taking a seat on the room’s bed.

  “I’ve been hiding in a storage room, down below. It’s taken me this long to work up the nerve to try to get off this ship. You?”

  “I’ve been moving around the ship, bouncing from cabin to cabin sort of, hunting for others left alive and food.”

  “I miss food,” Lex said before he could stop himself.

  “How long since you last ate something?” Trish asked.

  “Since before those things showed up.”

  “That explains why you look like crap warmed over,”
Trish laughed.

  “You don’t look so hot yourself,” Lex pointed out with a wry grin.

  The moment was what they both needed. For a brief second, there were no monsters, pain, or hunger, only two human beings connecting.

  Trish dug in a different pocket and shoved a smashed up pack of crackers at him. What was left of the crackers in the pack was little more than crumps but Lex took it, shaking them into his mouth.

  “Best crackers I’ve ever had,” he licked at his lips.

  “You got a plan?” Trish asked.

  Lex shrugged. “Not really. I figured I would work my way up to the main deck and find one of the motorized lifeboats. Maybe make a run for it.”

  Trish frowned.

  “You got a better idea?” Lex asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Trish answered, “but yours sucks. Even if you found one of the motorized lifeboats and managed to get it into the water, the sound of its engine would draw those things on you like zombies swarming a car.”

  Lex’s shoulders slumped. “You’re right. I figured I could outrun them though.”

  “That’s a big gamble to take. I know you have to have seen how fast those things are and they’re even faster in the water.”

  “What other choice do we have?” Lex argued.

  “Like I said before, this is a big ship. We keep hiding and wait for help to come. That’s the safer thing to do.”

  Lex shook his head. “It’s a big ocean out there too. We don’t even know if the crew managed to get out a distress call. This ship has to have drifted off course by now. I mean, only God knows where we are. How can you be so sure anyone will ever find us?”

  “Faith,” Trish flipped open the chamber of his .38 and counted the rounds in it. “Faith and hope. I’ve got four rounds left in this thing and there are two of us now. Maybe we should make sure a distress call gets sent out.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “The backup power is still on,” Trish pointed out. “All we have to do is make it to the bridge.”

  Lex grunted. “Okay. Sounds like a plan to me. I’m in.”

  Trish smiled at him. “I figured you would be.”

  Patting the bed, she added, “But first, we both need some rest. You look like you need it even more than I do.”

  Trish got up and moved aside gesturing for Lex to lie down. “I’ll take first watch. You got four hours. Make ’em count.”

  Lex didn’t argue. He hit the bed like a falling rock and stretched out. The last thing he saw before his eyes closed and sleep took him was Trish taking a seat on the floor in front of the cabin’s door with her pistol ready in her hand.

  ****

  Lex dreamed of Mary. The two of them lay on the Pleasure Bound’s sun deck. He held the latest Harrington novel in his hands but not even its epic space battles could hold his attention. His eyes kept leaving the words on its page to roam over Mary where she was sprawled out in the new two piece bathing suit she had picked up just for their trip together. Her skin was tan and he knew from experience just as soft as it looked. She was so beautiful. How a geek like him had ever gotten so lucky in finding a woman like her, he would never know.

  Dark sunglasses covered Mary’s eyes and her head bobbed in time to whatever music she was listening to through the earbuds of her MP3 player. Knowing her, it was some Seattle band. When the two of them had met and she had taken him to her apartment for the first time, there was a small, almost shrine to Eddie Vedder. As their relationship went on, that wasn’t the only thing that surprised him about her. She seemed the epitome of normal and boring by most folks’ standards in public but underneath all that was a woman who loved the grunge scene, practiced survival skills, and bordered on being a full out “prepper.” The only celebrity she was more a fan of than Vedder was Robert Downey Jr. Mary swore he was God’s gift to woman. That didn’t bother Lex, though. In some ways, he was like Downey. He was quirky, smart, and cute according to Mary and she loved him. And when she said those three words, “I love you”, to him, Lex more than knew they were true, he felt them in his soul.

  The sun was at its zenith in the blue sky above them. There were plenty of other people on the sundeck with them but to Lex, there was only Mary and himself. This was as pretty close to paradise. No work, no deadlines, no bills to worry over, just the best view in the world as Mary rolled over to lay on her stomach, and a good book in his hands.

  Like all good things in the world of man though, it was too good to last. The sun was eclipsed by blackness as storm clouds came thundering in out of nowhere. The rain fell suddenly in waves so hard the drops felt like small stones pounding on his skin. Only it wasn’t rain. It was water from the ocean spraying upwards over the edge of the deck. Mary was screaming, her beautiful features twisted by fear as she pointed at something behind where Lex sat. Lex started to turn but out of the corner of his eye he saw some thing grabbing ahold of Mary. Its arms wrapped about her body. Her skin tore and bled as its tentacles snaked over her naked flesh. Her screams of fear became shrieks of pain.

  Lex threw his novel aside, leaping to his feet, to run to Mary as she wailed his name. He never made it to her. The deck in front of him exploded, sending splinters flying to imbed themselves in his legs and the arms he desperately flung in front of his chest to ward them off. The next thing he knew he was on the deck and rolling in the opposite direction he had been running. He caught only a glimpse of the monstrous thing that rose through the shattered deck and writhed about in the air over him before he woke up.

  Something smashed into Lex’s forehead knocking him backwards. He flopped over onto the bed once more and felt blood trickling from the area just below his hairline into his eyes. Lex shook his head, trying to clear it as the world around him came into focus. Trish stood over him, her pistol in her hand. He saw his blood on the butt of the pistol and pieced together that Trish had just bashed him with it.

  “Stop it!” she whispered violently at him. “Don’t make me hit you again!”

  Lex realized he had been dreaming and must have woken up screaming. Trish had nearly bashed in his skull trying to get him to shut up.

  “It’s okay,” he assured her, rubbing at his aching head. “It was just a nightmare.”

  Trish looked to relax a bit. “Sorry about your head,” she offered.

  Lex sat up, swinging his feet off the bed and onto the floor. “You did what you had to do.”

  Trish changed the subject. “My watch was just about up anyways. I was going to wake you up in a few more minutes.”

  “I wish you had done it early,” Lex commented. “I don’t suppose you have any painkillers in that jacket of yours, do you?”

  “Fresh out,” Trish told him.

  Lex frowned. “Your turn I suppose.”

  “Forget it,” Trish offered him a hand up off the bed. “We’ve been here too long already even without that outburst of yours. We need to get moving.”

  “To the bridge?”

  “To anywhere but here for now,” Trish said, already heading for the cabin’s door. “We’ll figure out the rest as we go.”

  ****

  Trish led them through the corridors of Pleasure Bound. Lex was more than content to let her do so. It meant she trusted him enough now to let him be behind her; plus, she was the one with the gun. If one of those things came at them, she would have a lot better chance of stopping it than he would with his spear made from a mop handle. Lex had picked up the spear from outside the cabin where they had holed up for his nap. The sleep had done him a lot of good. His mind was clearer than it had been in days. He was sure the clean water and crushed crackers Trish gave him had helped too. His stomach still clawed at him with pangs of hunger, but somehow they didn’t seem as sharp or important anymore. The two of them had a shared goal and it gave him purpose. He was beginning to allow himself to hope they really could reach the ship’s bridge and get out a call for help. Of course, that meant they would still need to stay alive until that help co
uld reach them but hey, they had made it this far.

  They came to stop at the base of the stairwell leading up to the main deck where the bridge was located. There was no sign of the creatures they shared the ship with. Lex used the pause to ask a question that had been bugging him.

  “Trish, I’ve been meaning to ask, how did you get that gun?”

  Trish looked at him as if he were crazy. “Did I hit you too hard a while ago or something?” she snapped at him. “We’re almost to the bridge and you’re worried about where I got this?” She waved her pistol at him.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Lex told her trying not to sound bitter about the hard knot of his forehead. “But yeah, I want to know. If I had one when those things came, maybe I could have…”

  “Don’t go down that road, Lex,” Trish warned him. “Your wife is dead. All the ifs, ands, and maybes in the world aren’t going to bring her back.”

  “Still…”

  Trish sighed. “I got it from one of the ship’s security staff, okay?”

  “They just gave it to you?”

  Trish shook her head. Lex could see this was an uncomfortable topic for her but he couldn’t let it go.

  “It was his. The guy who tried to rape me.”

  “Geez…” Lex said, utterly surprised. “You killed that bastard with his own gun? Somehow that seems kind of fitting.”

  “I guess so, yeah,” Trish kept her face turned away from him as she spoke. “He saved me first you know? If it hadn’t been for him, I’d be dead now. When those things were pouring onto the ship and rampaging everywhere, he got me out of the worst of it. Took us below deck like what you tried to do with your wife. We locked ourselves in his quarters. I figured we were planning to just wait things out. Apparently, he had other things on his mind.”

  “And paid the price for them too,” Lex added.

  “Enough with it, though,” Trish said. “We’ve got more important things to be focusing on than the past.”

  Lex found he couldn’t argue with that and they started up the stair together. Trish stayed in the lead but he followed her closely while keeping an eye out for anything slipping up behind them.