by Mark Woods
While all this was going on, meanwhile the Vampyre child, Sacha, was headed straight for the bridge.
She had no idea what was going on on-board this ship, but knew there could be no good reason why the crew were trying to take their blood and just figured her best bet to cut the head off the snake was to take out the man she thought was in charge. The man they’d seen back up on the top deck and that she assumed must be the Captain.
Without someone to issue any orders, with any luck, she thought, the rest of the ship would quickly descend into even more chaos than it was in already, with every crew member fighting for themselves and their own survival, much like what had happened back on The Bellastaria.
She had no idea what had happened back there on the ill-fated cruise ship either, other than someone – or something - had obviously wanted to disrupt the so-called proposed peace talks that had been due to take place during the course of the cruise, but had good reason to assume that the ship blowing up and then sinking beneath the waves hadn’t been part of the plan.
Now, just as back then, Sacha’s main priority was escape – but she also wanted to prevent anyone from getting in her way and trying to stop her.
And the best way to do that, she thought, was to take out the person in command.
There were two crew members up on bridge, neither of which were the Captain, as Sacha stepped into the room. Both men were arguing over what they should do – whether they should follow protocol and lock down the ship, or whether they should wait for the Captain’s return, wherever it was he had gone – and so at first, didn’t notice her.
Then one of them turned
“Hey little girl, what are you doing up here? Shouldn’t you be down below decks with your mo…” the first of the two crew members started to say, but then Sacha was on him before he could finish. As he leapt on the man, she ripped out his jugular.
As the first man fell to the floor, the second crew member began fumbling for his gun, but before he could pull it out and fire it, Sacha sprung straight off the first guy and buried her teeth in the second man’s crotch.
Biting through the thin fabric of his uniform, Sacha ripped off his manhood and spat it away. Thick crimson blood instantly began seeping through his trousers as he started screaming, “Oh fuck! Oh fuck! Oh fuck! Please, God, no! Please, God…oh fuck!”
“Your God has abandoned you,” Sacha said, and using her talons to open his throat, bent her head to feed on her latest victim.
She was not hungry anymore, and had long since drank her fill, but the man’s blood – enhanced not only by his fear, but also the pain he’d experienced in the moments just before he’d died – was simply too good to pass up, she thought.
And besides, if she did somehow manage to escape this ship, she had no way of knowing quite when she might get another chance to eat this well again….
***
The Captain was one deck down in the Radio room, radioing the mainland and informing his superiors of their current situation in regards to the survivors they’d rescued off The Bellastaria, when all hell first started breaking loose on his ship.
As soon as he heard the sirens, the Captain feared the worst.
He already had a good idea what must have happened.
The worst case scenario they’d always prepared for, had been warned was a risk - the escape of some of their test subjects or worse, some of their subjects attempting to take over the ship – was finally happening.
There was no possible way it could just be a drill, he thought.
No, this was for real…
If the alarm had been raised, the shit must well and truly have hit the fan.
As the Captain rushed up to the top deck and quickly headed for the bridge, he saw Rogers emerging from one of the other doors that led up onto this level.
“ROGERS!” he bellowed. “What the holy fuck is going on? Why isn’t protocol being observed, and why haven’t those two idiots on the bridge already initiated lockdown?”
In the case of an emergency, all crew members had been advised to hit a switch that would activate water-tight doors all across the ship that would essentially cut off and compartmentalize the vessel, sealing off access between decks.
“I don’t know,” Rogers reluctantly admitted. “I’ve been trying to reach them since the sirens first started, but so far there’s been no response. All I’m getting over the walkie-talkie from anyone else left alive is the sound of gunshots and screams. Our men are being slaughtered like animals…”
“Fuck them,” the Captain told him. “They’re supposed to have been trained for just such an emergency, but these past few months, they’ve all started getting sloppy. I know what’s happened. They’ve forgotten their training in their blind panic, and if it’s anyone’s fault they’re being gutted like pigs, it’s their own.
“We need to take back control of this situation, and swiftly – it’s up to you and me now, Rogers. We need to consider implementing Order 46.”
They finally reached the bridge, but as the Captain prepared to enter, he pulled back and hesitated, drawing his gun.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…” he cursed.
The little girl from earlier was there on the bridge, drenched in blood, her cute little dress now stained crimson - presumably with the blood of the two men lying dead at her feet. As the Captain approached, the little girl looked up and hissed at him, dropping the now lifeless corpse of the crewman she had been feeding on to the deck.
“Back up, back up,” the Captain hissed at Rogers, who was following close behind, even as someone else suddenly then came out on deck, calling out for Rogers by name.
“ROGERS…ROGERS…show yourself, you fucker. It’s all over,” both men could hear the voice, coming from somewhere just below them, saying. “I’ve got your pet doctor here; you might as well just show yourself and give yourself up or else I’m going to blow his brains out right here, up on the deck of this ship!”
“Fuck!” This time it was Rogers’ time to curse. “I thought I already dealt with that fucking prick.”
“Who is it?” The Captain demanded.
“It’s that fucking cripple; my former superior officer and comrade-in-arms from back during the war. I had orders to try and recruit him to our cause if he made it off The Bellastaria and onto this ship, but I told our employers at the time that I thought he was a lost cause, would never go for it, and was probably far too moral for his own fucking good, and I was right.
“Fucking arsehole just doesn’t know when to die…”
“Then fucking go deal with him now,” the Captain told him, “and do it quickly. Kill the fucking prick and if you have to, kill Herr Doktor too – it’s not like he’s been particularly successful with his latest experiments recently anyway, and we have enough of his research to continue The Project without him.
“I’ll deal with this…thing.”
The Captain levelled his gun, and fired at the little girl Vampyre, who quickly dodged his bullet as though it were nothing and began moving forwards towards him.
“Fuck you, you little freak,” the Captain said, and fired at the little girl again. “Hey, little girl – isn’t it past your bedtime? Time to go to sleep, you little fucking shit…”
“Fuck you!” the little girl, Sacha, spat back and leapt at him, pushing him back through the window of the bridge in a shower of glass.
“Language,” the captain said as he lay there on deck, bleeding out from several wounds, and lashed out with the butt of his revolver, striking her straight in the face and sending the little girl Vampyre momentarily reeling.
Though it caused Sacha no pain, for she was long beyond all that now, still the shock of the blow reverberated through her for in the end, despite her preternatural strength and unnaturally fast reflexes, when push came to shove, she still possessed the body of a little girl.
She climbed back to her feet and hissed at the Captain once more, baring her fangs at him.
Behind them, out on deck,
Rogers stepped down, away from the bridge, and confronted his former comrade-in-arms. Wilfred was holding Mengele tightly, a gun held at his neck, but Rogers could tell his former commanding officer was obviously hurting, and badly, from the way he was standing and knew he must be close to collapse. However he must have survived being stabbed at such close quarters, whatever he must have done to bandage himself up, it was plain to see he was now literally only just hanging on to life by a thread.
“It’s over, Rogers, it’s all over,” Wilfred said to him. “Whatever sick research project you’ve got going on on-board this ship, it ends right here, this morning.”
For the first time, Rogers noted the sun just starting to rise on the horizon.
In all that had been going on since they first picked up the survivors from off The Bellastaria, he had kind of lost track of time.
“You don’t know what you’re doing here,” Rogers said. “You have no idea who or what you’re fucking with. All this…all this research we’re doing on-board, all the experiments we’re conducting, you have no idea how important any of this is. Fuck, man, as I already tried to explain to you, all this – all this is for the greater good, weren’t you listening? We’re trying to make a difference here. We’re trying to save Humanity…all Humanity. You’re making a big mistake, you have no idea what we’re doing here, and even if you do kill Herr Doktor here, you are only delaying the inevitable.
“This isn’t the only project, you know? There are others. So many others.
“All this, all this is only the beginning of something far much bigger than you could ever possibly imagine…”
Rogers was stalling, playing for time, but there were others joining them up here on deck now, he noted. Other survivors from those they’d picked up earlier – the wolves, plus some of the others that Wilfred had arrived on-board with earlier, minus the ‘mother’ of the little girl Vampyre the Captain was allegedly dealing with behind him. Judging from the state of what had happened to her little girl, Rogers was under no illusion the mother was more than likely dead already, and that was fine.
It gave them one less mess they had to deal with.
“Seriously, man,” Rogers continued. “There’s a war coming…an even bigger one than the one you’ve fighting already against the Lycanthrope and the Vampyre. A war that threatens all life, not just Humanity; a terrible Time of Tides is coming…”
“Rogers,” Wilfred said, interrupting him. “Shut up. I’m done hearing you talk…sick of hearing all your pathetic lies and your feeble excuses for what you’ve been doing here. Do me a favour – shut the fuck up.”
Wilfred took his gun away from the doctor’s head, calmly levelled it at Rogers, and promptly shot him in the face. Rogers, for his part, fell back and toppled overboard, his now lifeless corpse falling over the side and into the water far below.
The Captain stepped out from the stairs leading up to the bridge, where he had been standing, observing what was going on. Sacha, likewise, who had also held back, waiting to see what Wilfred might do, also emerged; following the Captain at a close distance like a cat stalking her prey.
The Captain was holding a gun on her to make sure she didn’t try and jump him, but though Sacha had little doubt she could easily take him out in the time it would take him to fire, she knew she was still riding a high from all the blood she had consumed in the last hour or so and so, wasn’t sure she entirely trusted her judgement right now.
“Your former soldier buddy was right, you know,” the Captain said, edging towards Wilfred, still watching Sacha from out the corner of his eye and pointing his gun at her. As soon as she so much as made a move, he thought, he was taking her out. She was only small, and he was pretty sure if he shot her between the eyes, even her Vampyre healing would not be enough to save her, but he had already seen she was quick.
“You have no idea just how important the work we’re conducting here, on-board this ship is right about now,” he continued. “Let Herr Doktor go, and maybe, just maybe, the two of us can broker some kind of a deal. Just you and me, not any of these others.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, right now you’re pretty much outnumbered,” Wilfred said, for the first time acknowledging the presence of the others gathering behind him. “And I don’t know about all of these others, but I’m not making any kind of deal that doesn’t at least involve the other survivors I arrived with here on this ship.”
The Vampyre, Viktoryia, was holding Jaqueline back, he noted from the corner of his eye, stopping her from running to him, and he felt more than a small bit of relief that she, at least, out of all them he had arrived here on-board The Daedalus with, was still alive. “I think you’ll find you’re surrounded – game, set, and match, motherfucker. You don’t have anything to bargain with,” Wilfred continued.
“The rest of my men will be up here any minute,” the Captain bluffed. “Then we’ll see who’s surrounded.”
From amongst the wolves, Lukaas suddenly spoke up.
“Actually, I feel the need to correct you there. Do you hear those gunshots and screams coming from below decks?” he asked. “Those are your men. Your so-called ‘experiments’ have broken loose and right about now, are rampaging all over your ship and slaughtering your men down below like cattle because of their own inaction and failure to lock down the ship in time. I don’t really think you can count on any of them surviving to back you up any time soon, what do you reckon? And guess what? You’re next, prick.”
“I don’t care,” the Captain said, lying through his teeth. “My life means nothing to me anyway. If I’m going to die here, this morning, then so are all of you. This whole ship is rigged to explode in the event of it being overrun – what my employers back on the mainland call Executive Order 46 – and unless I put in a code every hour, on the hour, to delay the timer, the whole ship is wired to explode. And seeing as there’s no lifeboats on-board this vessel – my superiors wanting to leave no chance of anyone, or anything, ever escaping in the remote chance of anything like this ever happening – I guess you could say actually, the jokes on you and you, you kind of need me alive right about now.”
“What about the lifeboats we arrived on?” Lukaas asked, and as he saw the Captain visibly pale, knew instantly that the other man had conveniently forgotten about those.
“Fuck,” he said. “You got me.”
Sacha saw her chance and took it.
Before the Captain could even react, Sacha grabbed a hold of his arm, the one holding the gun on her, and twisted it sharply behind his back, ripping his arm out of its socket and sending his weapon flying half-way across the deck. “Actually,” she said, as she forced him down towards the deck, holding him there as he screamed in agony, “I think you’ll find I’ve got you…”
She lashed out with her other hand, opening up his throat with her claws, then allowed him to drop - sending his blood pouring out all across the deck.
Viktoryia looked on with a wistful sigh.
“What a waste…” she muttered, half to herself.
“Don’t let me stop you, feel free to indulge,” the Vampyre-child said sarcastically, causing Viktoryia to throw her a dirty look as if to say ‘what do I look like? Some kind of animal?’
Doctor Mengele was struggling in Wilfred’s grip, despite the former soldier’s attempts to hold him tight, obviously now fearing for his life having seen both Rogers and the Captain so swiftly and easily despatched.
“Please…” he was whimpering. “Please, don’t kill me. Don’t feed me to them…please, I’m begging you. You promised not to kill me if I bandaged you up. You…you promised.”
“I lied,” Wilfred said, and letting the man go, put his gun to the back of Doctor Mengele’s head and pulled the trigger, blowing the other man’s brains out..
The doctor’s lifeless corpse dropped to the deck to join that of the now deceased Captain.
Jaqueline forced her way out of Viktoryia’s grip, and rushed forwards towards Wilfred who was
now finding it increasingly hard to stand up, wrapping him in her arms and showering him with kisses before he too dropped to the deck.
“Oh God, Wilfred,” he heard her saying to him. “I was so worried for you, so worried I might never see you again…
“Wait, what’s this? What happened to you?” she asked, suddenly noticing the bandages around Wilfred’s torso, and the blood, even now, still seeping through. “Have you…have you been stabbed?”
“Rogers…Rogers tried to kill me,” Wilfred said, starting to feel weak now. “Guess I had the last laugh on him though…”
Jaqueline helped him to sit up on deck before he fell down.
“You…you need to get off this ship…” Wilfred told her.
“We all do,” Lukaas said, coming forward. “All of us – especially if what the good Captain there said about the ship being rigged to explode is true.”
He looked over towards Viktoryia.
“He wasn’t lying about the bomb,” she said. “The whole ship is wired to explode, but he was lying about the bomb being set on a timer. I could sense it in his mind even as he talked. In actual fact, the controls for the bombs are right up there on the bridge.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Wilfred told them all, gathered all around him as he sat there, slumped on deck. “I’m dying and not going to make it, but it doesn’t matter. Someone has to stay behind to activate the bombs. Someone has to finish this, once and for all.”
“NOOOOOO,” Jaqueline wailed. “I’m not leaving without you. I won’t do it. We only just met, I can’t lose you already.”
“You have to,” Wilfred said. “Trust me - I’ve been in war, I’ve seen more than my fair share of wounded men before. I know there’s no possible way I’m ever going to make it off this ship alive, but if I’m going to die, the very least I can do is make my death mean something – something you will always remember me for, for the rest of your life.
“I lied to you before,” he admitted to her now. “I’m not psychic, I never was. I don’t have visions, or premonitions, and I can’t see the future…”