But there was still an hour of darkness left; he could worry about visibility if he lived that long.
The steps were slick. He looked down to see drops of slick liquid, black in the dim light, scattered in some places with small pools in others. The dinosaurs would likely be massacred by the machine guns, but if the bloody footsteps on the stairs were anything to go by, they had at least managed to take a few of the security guys with them.
The bottom of the stairs presented him with three options. The first two were corridors that ran along the wall of the container deck, one backwards towards the rear bulkhead just one container-length away, another forward, disappearing into the distance.
The third option led into the warren of passages between the containers, into the unseen middle of the mound, the center of the ship.
Eddie chose that one, moving at the fastest pace he could maintain without making too much noise or winding himself. He passed a couple of intersections and, when he judged himself to be approximately in the middle of the container deck, he turned towards the bow.
He should eventually come up on… something. He just hoped it wasn’t the security dudes and their tommy guns. At least not at first.
“Blood soon,” he promised the blade in his hand. “Very soon.”
Something flickered under a light about a hundred feet away. She smiled; it was too small to be a human.
“Here, lizard, lizard, lizard,” he whispered. “Come to papa.”
The creature had stopped right outside the pool of light, half in the shadows. If he hadn’t seen it move, he probably would have walked right into it.
But he had and, knowing where it was, he could see the darker shape that gave its position away. He advanced openly, daring it to come meet him.
“Not so tough without your friends, are you? Harold would have kicked your asses if you’d only come after him one at a time.”
The lizard didn’t move. He was twenty feet away. Ten. He could smell it, a rancid, animal odor.
Now, the dinosaur backed away, never taking its eyes off him.
He didn’t slow. It wasn’t moving fast enough to escape.
He raised the watermelon knife.
The creature must have realized that the gesture meant danger. It skittered back against the wall, its claws clattering against the metal floor.
“You should have run while you had the chance,” Eddie said. Even though the monster was nearly out of range, he lunged at it.
It twisted aside, but not quite fast enough. The knife bit into flesh and one tiny claw fell to the deck, irrigated by monster blood.
That enraged it. It hissed, lowered its head and charged.
Eddie was expecting that. It reacted exactly the same way untrained humans did in a knife fight: letting the pain take over and charging blindly.
He stepped aside and took its head off with a mighty blow.
“No wonder dinosaurs went extinct,” he said. “You guys are too stupid to understand that your necks are long and thin and easy to chop through.”
He turned to walk again, to search, but the need had disappeared.
“Oh, hi guys,” he said. “You want to be cut, too? Bring it, then.”
Ten or twelve of the little bastards had appeared out of two cross passages. Maybe they’d been attracted by the other one’s hiss, maybe they’d been waiting in hiding while the other one scouted. Eddie didn’t care. This was the fight he’d come looking for.
The dinosaurs began to fan out, looking to flank him.
“No, no. Fuck that,” he said. Then, without hesitation, he screamed loudly and charged into their midst.
The dinosaur in the middle definitely wasn’t expecting that. All it managed to do before Eddie closed the gap was cock its head in a surprised fashion. Then the blade bit into its neck.
The angle wasn’t right to lop the neck in two as he’d done with the others, but the dinosaur still fell to the ground, twitching.
He wasted half a second pulling the knife free, and that almost cost him. A second dinosaur went for his leg as he was struggling to release the blade. He knew that if they hamstrung him, he was toast, so he reached down with his left hand and pushed the monster’s face away.
It snapped at him, and he pulled up a hand missing the tips of two fingers.
“Oh, you bastard,” he shouted.
He closed on the retreating form and, ignoring the pain in his bloodied hand, he grabbed it from behind the head, and then knelt on it, falling with all his weight. He heard ribs crack inside the small creature. Then he stood and stomped on it, leaving it alive, but mortally wounded.
In his rage, he didn’t register the one now biting his thigh until standing straight brough a bright flame of pain. He hacked at it until it let go.
Now, the rest were all over him. They’d abandoned the old wolf tactic of snapping at his rear and had come at him all at once while he was butchering their friends. One of them took his already mangled left hand in its mouth and tried to drag him to the floor. Another scratched at his back. The rest tore into his legs.
Eddie lopped off another head. How many left? Seven? Five?
He buried his knife into another, causing a river of blood to spurt. “Die, you shit.”
It obeyed but, as he was pulling the knife out, he felt something give in his leg. Hamstring. The bastards had finally torn it out.
He screamed in frustration and agony as he toppled over onto his back. Heads filled with razor teeth nicked and gashed. His left hand was pretty much chewed to pieces, and that left only his knife hand to fend off the mouths.
“Gotcha, you fuck!” he said with satisfaction as another head rolled off to join his collection. The remaining number almost seemed manageable.
If he’d been in good shape, he would have kicked their scaly little asses.
But he wasn’t. He was on his back, bleeding out. Too weak to move his good arm away when one of them closed its jaws around his forearm.
That ended the fight. The next one went for his neck and tore it open.
He was going to die very soon, he knew. He’d expected that.
What he didn’t expect was the way he went.
A sudden jolt rocked the ship, a massive, unexpected impact. Eddie could still see clearly as one of the containers at the very top of the pile was knocked out of place.
With a deafening screech, it slid off its perch and ground its way into the corridor space between the piles.
Then it screeched all the way down.
It wasn’t moving very fast when it reached Eddie and his opponents.
But it didn’t need to move very fast to crush a few living creatures into pulp.
Eddie died with the satisfaction of knowing his tormentors perished with him.
Chapter 21
The sudden jolt threw them violently towards the left of the ship. Cora slammed into a shelf laden with bags of rice which collapsed onto the next shelf over with a resounding crash. As shelves toppled like dominoes, she was peripherally aware of her companions being thrown around like dolls.
“The fuck was that?” Mary asked, all pretense of being a high-class, dreamy-eyed bimbo gone as she groaned on the floor.
“If felt like we hit something,” Lai said. He’d worked himself back into a sitting position. Blood flowed down his cheek from a new cut just above his eye.
Cora reflected that they were starting to show the wear and tear of several days in hostile territory.
A groan ahead of her alerted her that someone was under the mess of collapsed shelves. A quick headcount told her that everyone was accounted for except Ania and the cook. She looked back to where Ania had been sitting: she was still there, looking around in alarm. Being seated had saved her from getting thrown around like the rest of them.
Mary was already on her feet. “Help me get him out!” she said.
They hauled the bags of rice into a pile in the far corner and then, once enough of it was out of the way, Cora, Mary and the doctor
lifted the heavy metal rack off the man trapped beneath. They’d found the cook.
His arm lay at an ugly angle, and he was breathing wheezily. He suddenly coughed and blood dribbled down.
“Move over,” the doctor said. “I want to have a look.”
Taking care not to move the man’s arm, Dr. Pendalai pressed his head against the cook’s chest and listened to him breathing. He looked up at Cora, and she was dismayed to see that the normally composed doctor looked alarmed. “This ship has to have an infirmary. I need to know where it is, and we need to get this man there now.”
“Why? What’s wrong with him?”
“He was crushed pretty badly, so I can’t know the extent of the internal damage. What I do know is that a rib broke and punctured a lung. It might collapse, it might fill with fluid. Neither case is a good outlook. We need to get him stabilized.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Cora shot back. “Walk up to the Captain and request the use of his facilities?”
“You’re the soldier. Figure it out. We need to move now.”
Cora growled at him. The guy acted like brass, even though he’d probably never worn a uniform in his life, much less been an officer. “Give me a minute.”
“Hurry,” the doctor replied. Then he turned back to his patient, ignoring Cora as she left and Mary who wept at his shoulder.
Cora walked out onto the deck. The ship was enormous; how the hell was she supposed to find one specific room here? Sked would know… but Sked was nowhere to be found. He and that lunatic girlfriend of his were probably stealing anything not nailed down.
Then it hit her. Screw maritime law. The one place on any ship that was always easy to find was the bridge. Its windows looked out over the entire expanse of the vessel… and anyone on deck could pretty much locate it by looking up.
She looked up, spotted the nearest staircase that appeared to lead in the correct direction and started climbing.
After a couple of flights, with the sun just about to rise and the eastern sky ablaze with pinks and oranges, Cora found exactly what she needed. A slim man with ebony skin wearing sailor’s garb—the sailors on this ship didn’t wear uniforms, but she’d spent enough time at port to recognize the way the civilian merchantmen dressed—descended the stairs two-by-two.
He didn’t recognize her as a threat, merely giving her a nod and a distracted “hello” as he hurried past.
Correction. As he tried to hurry past. Cora’s arm around his throat stopped the man’s forward progress, and her gun against his temple attracted his undivided attention. “I need you to take me to the infirmary,” she said. “And if you pretend not to be able to understand English, I’ll kill you right now and find someone who does. Nod if you’d like to live.”
The man nodded.
“Good. We’re going down these stairs. You ahead, I’ll follow. Try anything, and I’ll shoot you in the head. I won’t miss.”
They reached the storeroom. The doctor took a look at the sailor and seemed to grasp the situation immediately. He said: “Take his legs. I’ll take his arm. Get us to the infirmary now.”
They walked along the ship, out in the open. It was impossible for a group carrying a wounded man to skulk effectively.
Worse, whatever had happened to the ship had woken everyone. Dozens of people roamed the decks: sailors, young people she assumed to be the passengers, even armed security forces in black. All of them were heading forward or to the other side of the ship.
None of them gave the group a second glance.
“I don’t like this,” Cora said. She addressed the sailor. “What’s going on? What did we hit?”
“We didn’t hit nothing,” the man replied in an accent she couldn’t place, perhaps Western African by the way his English sounded like he should be French… but wasn’t, not quite. “We aren’t even moving. It hit us.”
“What did?”
“One of the monsters.”
“But they’re tiny…. Oh,” she said.
“One dem big ones from the tanks,” the sailor clarified.
“You brought those here? The big ones?”
“Scientists bring them. We helped unload. This the hospital. I can go now?”
“Help me get him onto that bed,” Dr. Pendalai said.
They lowered the cook gingerly and the doctor opened a number of cupboards.
“I can go now?” the sailor repeated.
“I suppose. I’m sorry I pulled the gun on you,” Cora replied.
“I understand.” The man nodded toward the bed. “He in a bad way. Not breathing good. Hope he okay later.”
With that, the sailor disappeared towards the bow. Whatever was going on was happening up there.
“Doc,” she said. “Do you need me for anything?”
“No.” The man didn’t even turn to look. He was collecting an assortment of paraphernalia, and Cora turned away. She didn’t like medical equipment, it looked unpleasantly medieval to her.
“Then I’m going to see what the hell is happening up there.”
“We could use that gun of yours,” Mary said. “Ania and I can’t shoot. And I think Lai can’t either.”
Cora considered for a moment but shook her head. No one seemed to be interested in what the group was doing, so taking her gun was a small risk compared to flying blind. “We need to know what’s happening here. Most of the things that happened to us can be directly traced back to the fact that we keep getting into situations where we don’t know what’s going on. I want to fix that.”
She sprinted towards the bow of the ship. Even though she crossed paths with half a dozen of the security guys who’d locked up her group, not one of them spared her a second glance.
***
Sabrina watched in delighted shock as Shiva tried again. Mosasaurs weren’t built to move on land, and they weren’t built to climb onto the decks of large ships.
“Go!” she shouted. “You can do it!”
It wasn’t immediately clear what the creature’s objective was. Was the Mosasaur trying to board so it could feed off the scurrying figures? One man who got too close as he emptied his machine gun into her baby found out just how quickly the neck could snap to one side and the jaws could slice a man in two.
Of course, there was no need to bite him. Shiva could have swallowed the man, and ten more, whole.
The ship rocked back and forth. Understanding came to Sabrina.
“Oh, you bright little thing,” she said. She would have clapped, but she needed both hands on the railing to keep her feet.
The dinosaur wanted to capsize the ship. It didn’t know it was a ship, of course, it just knew it was an enemy that it couldn’t attack because it had armor on the side it could reach. So it wanted to get it turned around and attack the soft parts.
Unfortunately, the attempt was doomed from the beginning. This ship might not be modern, but it was built to withstand the rocking of millions of gallons of water hitting it in waves. A single Mosasaur, no matter how unexpectedly intelligent for its kind, was not going to be able to do more than rock it a little.
In fact, it had done much more damage when it had rammed it earlier. The energy in a moving body was much better applied than mere weight. That was what had caused the ship to really move. It had even managed to overbalance a couple of piles of containers. The layered bone plates in a Mosasaur skull were more than strong enough to withstand use as a battering ram.
Just as she thought of that, the ship shook again. Sabrina thought she’d been holding on hard, but the impact knocked one of her hands away from the railing and dropped her to her knees. She looked out over the containers to realize that the Shiva was still propped on the railing, trying vainly to capsize the Stern Liberia.
So Kali was the one making all the noise.
As she stood, a flash of movement on the deck one level beneath her caught her eye because it wasn’t a bunch of Dieter’s security goons trying to get down to the monster or one of the sailors running an
errand. It wasn’t even one of her own analysts trying to find out what happened.
There was none of the hectic desperation that she’d grown accustomed to seeing over the past few minutes. Instead, the movement was slow, measured, furtive.
Sabrina crawled along the railing to get a better angle.
“Damn them,” she said when she recognized the two people who’d invaded her quarters earlier. Whoever these two were, they didn’t seem to have been too badly damaged by her pets. She hated the thought that they’d hurt the Compsognathus she’d had in her room, but she was getting used to the pain by now. She’d known before they’d sailed that none of the small dinosaurs would be coming back with her.
She turned around and spotted a fire extinguisher clipped to a drainage pipe with cable ties and quickly cut it off the wall. Moving carefully—Shiva might not be able to capsize the boat, but it was definitely rocking—she positioned herself above the interlopers and dropped the heavy fire extinguisher on their heads.
At least that was the plan. Just as she was about to release the big red cylinder, Kali decided to slam the ship once again.
Sabrina was thrown back, rolling along the passageway, and she never saw if the extinguisher landed true or not.
***
The ship lurched and saved Sked’s life. He landed on his face and one second later, a fire extinguisher landed right on his left buttock. It hurt like hell and pain shot up his side.
“Ow!” he screamed.
“What?” Akane said. She was still on her feet.
“Just got hit in the ass with a fire extinguisher.” He probed the area, ignoring Akane’s much-too-knowing smirk. “Wait. What?”
“You should have been paying attention,” she replied. “The Sabrina bitch was the one who threw it at your head.”
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
“I didn’t want her to know I’d spotted her. Oh, come on, don’t look at me like that. She’s worth a million bucks dead. Besides, I would have pushed you out of the way if the ship hadn’t suddenly jerked around.”
Lost Island Rampage Page 21