by Jonah Buck
She looked back to try to see the plane. Aside from a few pieces of debris floating on the surface, there was nothing left. It had slid off the ice and promptly sunk, taking Fletch with it down to the bottom. Denise wished there was something she could have down for him, but he’d taken an entire blast of shrapnel. He’d been dead even before the plane hit the water. Even if he hadn’t been, Denise sure couldn’t do anything for him now. If she tried to dive beneath the surface of the water a second time, she didn’t think there was a good chance that she’d make it to the surface again.
Her jacket was slowing her down. It was waterlogged and heavy, only serving to drag her down after Fletch and the airplane. She stopped paddling for a moment and nearly sank beneath the water again as she ripped the jacket off and threw it away.
The water was almost starting to feel warm compared to the air. The thin sheen of water on her face and in her hair wanted to frost over in the air. Denise knew she had to keep moving. If the water was actually starting to feel vaguely comforting, it meant her body was already unable to cope with the cold, and her internal temperature was plummeting.
She swam toward the netting on the side of the cruiser, her arms and leads growing leaden as she moved. Even though she was determined to keep moving, each stroke was harder than the last. Denise had already lost the ability to feel her fingers, and a shark could have swum past and eaten her feet off, and she wouldn’t even know. She knew that her soggy boots were only slowing her down as she moved, but she didn’t think she’d be able to tread water and take them off at the same time.
As she reached the side of the cruiser, she could hear thumping and small arms fire from overhead. Metal scrapped and scratched as the flyrannosaurus tore after the crew, trying to dig them out of hatchways and other hidey-holes. They couldn’t use the big guns or the flak cannons on something that had landed on their ship. They didn’t have anything designed for this kind of situation. Screams drifted down from above. It didn’t sound like the ship’s crew was doing any better in defending themselves against the monster than the soldiers on the ice had. Anyone below decks would be relatively safe, but not everyone had made it down there before the creature landed.
Denise reached out and clutched the netting dangling from the side of the ship. Her hands didn’t want to grasp anything. She could bend them around the ropes, but it was hard to pump the strength into them required to actually get a grip. It was like trying to climb a ladder with flippers.
She stuck her arm through one of the gaps in the netting all the way to her elbow and hauled herself up a little bit that way. Her feet scrabbled at the base of the netting and finally found some purchase on the ropes. Flailing her other arm upward, she hooked it through the next section of netting and managed to pull herself most of the way out of the water.
Her entire body shuddered. The cold breath of Antarctic air hit her all at once. The wind felt like frozen steel scalpels raking across her flesh, slicing it off a layer at a time. Water poured from her clothing and dribbled back down into the sea as she managed to lift herself up a little higher. All the liquid that had soaked into her remaining clothes felt like it weighed a ton. It felt like a hand was hanging onto the back of her shirt and gently but steadily trying to pull her back into the water.
She clung to the ropes for a moment, unable to control the quivering in her limbs. Denise didn’t have a plan anymore. The plane was destroyed, and Fletch was dead. Her Nitro Express was somewhere at the bottom of the harbor, lost during the crash. She had no way to defend herself, and no way to get back to shore.
However, she knew she didn’t want to go back into the water. That meant death. If she wanted to live, she could haul herself up onto the ship. There were no other options. There was no other plan. She could keep climbing and maybe survive. Maybe. Or she could die right here and now.
Denise reached up again and pulled herself a little higher. Her breath came in ragged, painful gasps, and she couldn’t stop her teeth from chattering. Just being exposed to the chill air was still shockingly painful. It wasn’t quite cold enough for the saltwater on her body to freeze into a sheen of ice, but it was still trying its damnedest.
She kept most of her weight on her arms as she moved upward, hooking her elbows through the netting because she didn’t trust her hands to grip properly. Her feet weren’t any more reliable. In order to make sure they were secured on the netting, she had to look down and inspect them. It was like trying to control her body via remote control.
Finally, she reached the railing over the side of the cruiser’s deck. Denise flopped over the rail and laid on the deck for a moment. Her body wanted to curl into as tight a ball as possible and lay still, but she knew that wouldn’t do any good.
A closed hatch stood in front of her. She looked to the right. The flyrannosaurus stood in front of one of the big guns, its claws wedged through an opening where it had torn the crew door off. There were shouts and screams from inside as the creature tried to fish out some of the sailors trapped inside.
Denise pulled herself to her feet with what felt like a Herculean shown of strength. She took a step forward and ended up stumbling into the bulkhead next to the door. Using the wall to support herself, she flopped sideways and grabbed onto the wheel to unseal the door. Her fingers still didn’t want to cooperate, so she dug in with the heels of her palms and forced the wheel to turn a few degrees at a time until it came open.
One of the ship’s smokestacks had been toppled, and a couple of small fires had started near the cruiser’s bridge. Denise knew she wouldn’t be able to stay in here for long, but she needed to get inside. If the cold didn’t get her, the flyrannosaurus would eventually.
The door creaked upon, and she fell inside. Denise shoved herself back up onto her knees and looked around. There were red emergency lights flashing overhead, but no people anywhere. Most of the crew was probably below decks or dead.
There were, however, parkas and cold weather gear hanging on pegs near the door, waiting for the crewmembers forced to work out on the deck. Denise flapped at her own soaked clothing with her nearly useless hands and ripped off the waterlogged items. She tossed them aside and grabbed a complete set of gear from off the racks.
She threw on a jacket with the name “Langelaan” stitched onto the front. With some effort, she managed to pull a pair of insulated boots onto her feet. All the clothes were a couple sizes too big for her, but she didn’t care. She was dry again, and that was all that really mattered.
Warming up wasn’t an entirely pleasant experience, though. The rush of blood back into her hands and feet stung as her body tried to recover from being dunked in the cold, cold sea. The sensation of feeling coming back into her extremities was a sort of ugly ache.
After a few minutes, she was able to stop shaking quite so badly, though. Still a little wobbly, she took a few steps down the hallway and looked around. Outside, she could hear grinding metal as the flyrannosaurus stomped its way across the deck. Every once in a while, a gunshot would ring out, sometimes followed by shouting in French. Other times, there was screaming.
In some ways, her original plan was a roaring success. The losses to equipment and crew meant that Dagenais couldn’t keep the cruiser anchored here. The damage was too great. Even if his men managed to kill the monster, he would have to take the cruiser back to the nearest dry docks for repairs and restocking. Mission accomplished for Denise.
The problem was, she never intended to find herself aboard the cruiser while the creature was attacking. She was supposed to be waiting for the rescue ship to arrive while Fletch flew back and got Cornelia and Metrodora. Now she was alone and unarmed on a ship with the monster, and a bunch of crew members who wouldn’t be any too happy to meet the woman who had lured the creature to their vessel.
There was a loud squealing noise, and then something outside exploded. Denise was pretty sure that someone had just failed in an attempt to kill the monster, and they’d probably paid for it with their l
ives.
She moved down the hallway, walking in an awkward limp from her earlier impact with the water after the crash. There hadn’t been enough time to form a bruise yet, but Denise knew that her thigh and most of her back was going to be an ugly shade of purple in a few hours.
That was assuming she lived that long, though. She needed to find a way off the cruiser. Eventually, the crew would find her here. The only reason they hadn’t already was because they had other, bigger concerns to deal with right now. Outside, she could hear the pop of rifles followed by more shouting. Once the crew did find her, she wouldn’t last too long. Battered as she was, she couldn’t do much against a press of sailors. As it was, she probably couldn’t win a brawl with a seventh grader.
Half-leaning against the wall she came to a staircase. She could go up, which would take her up to the bridge, or she could go down below decks. She wasn’t sure there was much point in going up. The bridge seemed to be on fire.
There was a sign on the side of the wall with arrows pointing up and down. She couldn’t read most of the labels because they were all in French. There was one she could actually puzzle out just fine, though. Radio.
She started down the stairs. If she could reach the radio equipment, she could at least contact Cornelia and Metrodora back at the station and tell them what had happened. She limped down the stairs as something huge struck the deck overhead. The impact was followed by the screech of metal and the boom of a couple of grenades. The flyrannosaurus screeched like a scalded cat, and then there was more shouting and screaming.
Denise didn’t think the creature could destroy the entire cruiser. The ship was made of tons and tons of armored steel. One forty-foot insect couldn’t wreck the whole ship just by itself. It couldn’t seem to burrow through the reinforced decks or the hull, even if it could rip off doors and equipment.
However, just because the creature by itself couldn’t destroy the ship didn’t mean the cruiser wasn’t in serious danger. If no one stopped the fire in the bridge relatively soon, it could spread to the rest of the ship and maybe even the ammo stocks or the fuel storage. If the flames reached either of those areas, the damage would be catastrophic.
She pushed down the stairs one level and followed the signs pointing her toward the radio room. She turned a corner and saw figures moving down the narrow hallway toward her. Denise ducked back into the opposite hallway and tucked herself into a narrow space between some lockers.
The sailors had seen her, but she didn’t hear any shouted orders or feet pounding toward her. She realized that they didn’t know who she was. All they saw was the outline of another human being in a military jacket before she disappeared. They didn’t see enough for them to register that she didn’t belong here.
A minute later, they walked down the other hallway, and Denise could see them hustling away. They were each holding what appeared to be a propane tank, probably scavenged from the kitchen. No doubt they were taking the canisters up to the surface in some kind of scheme to blow the creature up, probably by luring it over the propane tanks and then igniting them. Not a bad idea. It might even work.
A modern military vessel like this didn’t really have defenses against something landing directly on its deck. Cruisers like this were supposed to lob shells at other ships from miles away and help protect the massive battleships. The days when pirates might swing aboard and attack the crew with drawn cutlasses were long gone. Even if they hadn’t been, nothing could have prepared the sailors here for dinosaur-sized pirates that could spray acidic digestive juices and shrug off weapons fire from anything smaller than a howitzer. The crew was doing its best to improvise, just like her.
For now, Denise knew that she needed to get in touch with the others at Merovée Station. They were still expecting Fletch to fly back and pick them up. They needed to know that the plan had changed. Then, she needed to find a way to get off this ship before the crew found her or the situation deteriorated even further.
She could smell smoke in the air now. It was an unpleasant chemical odor, the smell of burning paint peeling off the walls, melting equipment, and spilled fuel. The air increasingly smelled like the inside of a truck engine. That wasn’t a good sign. Some of the crew must be trying to extinguish the flames, but it couldn’t be easy with the flyrannosaurus picking off anyone who popped their heads above deck at the wrong moment. There was a decent chance that the ship’s command structure was pretty scrambled as they took casualties, too. That would only slow down efforts to issue commands and deal with the situation.
Denise crept down the hallway and spotted the door to the radio room. There was a figure in front of the equipment, his back to the entrance. He was speaking rapidly in French into one of the handsets. There were multiple banks of equipment, and voices came through several receivers, all speaking over each other.
She recognized the voice of the man speaking into the handset, though. She’d been hearing it all afternoon. It was Colonel Ozias Dagenais.
If she hadn’t heard his voice, Denise probably wouldn’t have recognized him. She’d seen pictures of him in his office, but he didn’t look like the man in those photographs anymore. His face was puckered with burns that hadn’t healed very well, and a series of gashes that Denise recognized as claw marks ran down the side of his cheeks.
Denise had known that he’d made it out of Merovée Station when the security protocols broke down, but evidently he hadn’t made it out whole. There wasn’t much resemblance between the scarred and burned man in front of her and the man from the pictures in that office.
He must have sensed her presence standing behind him. Dagenais stopped speaking into the radio and turned around, his eyes popping open when he saw her. He reached for the pistol holstered at his hip.
Denise had already picked up a stone paperweight off a pile of messages, though. By the time that flicker of recognition appeared in the colonel’s eyes, the paperweight was already clutched in an angry fist above Denise’s head.
“Surprise, jackass,” she said, bringing the heavy paperweight down on the side of the man’s head. There was an unpleasant sound, and Dagenais went down with a thud. Denise bent down, ready to bash his brains out in case he was still conscious and trying to reach for his pistol. He was out cold, though.
Denise tossed the paperweight to the side and grabbed the man’s pistol out of its holster. She pointed the gun downward at Dagenais, feeling the smooth, hard metal in her grip. Her finger moved toward the trigger before stopping.
A gunshot from here in the interior of the ship might bring unwanted attention. Denise still had to avoid the rest of the ship’s crew as best she could. Pulling the trigger now might send that group with the propane tanks running. Better to just do what she needed to do and get out of here.
At least, that was what she told herself. Dagenais had already caused her untold problems, but he was passed out and defenseless at her feet. He wasn’t going anywhere. Murdering sonofabitch or not, Denise didn’t feel right shooting an unconscious man from point-blank range. Leaving him behind while his ship fell to pieces around him? She could deal with that. Someone might very well yet come by and drag Dagenais to safety. It was more of a chance than he’d given to the crew of the Sulaco.
She stepped over his prostrate body and stepped over to the radio equipment. After a bit of fiddling, she found the frequency for Merovée Station. “Cornelia? Metrodora? Are you there? This is Denise.”
There was a pause, and then a tinny version of Cornelia’s voice came over the airwaves. “Denise? Where are you broadcasting from? What’s going on?”
“Listen. There’s been a change of plans. I’m on the French cruiser right now.”
“You’re what?”
“Things didn’t work out the way we planned. Fletch is dead, and the plane is wrecked.”
“Are you alright?”
“For now, yeah. I don’t have a lot of time to explain. The area around Delambre Station has been cleared. There’s not much
left except for rubble, but you can get to the coast safely now. The big problem is going to be the fly creature. It’s attacking the ship. Call our rescue party. Tell them to pick you up in a few hours. The French cruiser is either going to have to retreat or it’ll be sunk by then. The monster will probably have gone back to its cave, and you should have a straight shot to whatever’s left of the docks by then. Take the motor sledges and get back to the coast after that. It’ll be your best chance to get picked up safely.”
“The creature might actually sink the ship? Denise, what about you? You’re on that ship. What the hell are you going to do if it goes down?”
“I’ll think of something,” Denise said.
A loud warning siren had started to wail throughout the cruiser, threatening to drown out her response to Cornelia. Cornelia said something else, but it was difficult to hear her over the klaxon’s angry caws. Brisk French started to pour out of the speaker system, issuing orders to whoever was still alive to follow them.
Denise set the handset down. Now all she needed to do was think of some way to avoid getting killed in the next few minutes.
TWENTY
SWAT
Denise backtracked until she found the stairs again. She needed to get the hell off this ship and fast. The burning smell was only growing stronger. If she could just get to one of the lifeboats, she could row her way back to shore and wait for the rescue ship to pick her up. Every minute she stayed on the cruiser was another chance for her to be discovered. The fact that she hadn’t been yet was partly because the crew’s attention was spread pretty thin already and partly because they weren’t expecting her here. As far as anyone but Dagenais knew, she’d probably died with Fletch when their plane went down, and no one had given it a second thought since.
She could hear more loud banging noises from overhead. It sounded like she was in a bunker that was being bombed. Some of the clangs and thuds and screeches echoed across the entire ship, sending rumbles through the floor plating.