by Jonah Buck
She shoved the door open as hard as she could with just one hand. Her other hand was already squeezing the trigger of the machine pistol.
The ship’s captain and his immediate subordinates in the bridge weren’t wearing any padded armor, not that it would have done them any good. There was one guard standing in the middle of the room, a massive bruiser carrying a Maxim machine gun in his muscular arms. A belt of silver bullets hung from the side of the weapon, ready to use against any creature that tried to break into the ship’s control center.
Denise’s first blast from the machine pistol tore the guard apart. He dropped the huge machine gun, where it clattered to the floor. The men running the ship turned in horror to look at the intruder. There were four of them, each with a machine pistol of his own.
Two of them never even had a chance to draw their weapons. Denise’s gun chewed through them and threw them against the walls. Blood flashed in the muzzle blasts. The third man managed to claw his weapon free before Denise swiveled her machine pistol onto him. He went down, his chest a gaping mass of red mush and protruding bone.
A bullet crashed into the wall next to Denise, smashing a hole through the map hung there. Denise turned to the last man and speared him through the forehead with a final shot. He flopped to the ground like a bird blasted out of the sky by a lightning bolt, dead as the Roman Empire but bearing an almost comically surprised expression.
None of the men were Herschel Hobhouse. Denise looked again, kicking one corpse so it was face up. Her eyes hadn’t deceived her the first time, though. Everyone here was simply part of the crew, not the head of Yersinia’s bioweapons division. Another staircase on the opposite side of the bridge led back down onto the deck. After making his announcement, Hobhouse must have gone down below.
Dammit! Denise fired the last of her current magazine into the radio equipment. Now at least, even if the crew somehow got the fire below decks under control, they wouldn’t be able to radio out for help. She grabbed another couple of magazines off the corpses at her feet.
She glanced up and saw a group of Yersinia men running from a stairwell near the prow of the boat. They didn’t look like they were fleeing. The man in front gave a series of hand signals, and they fanned out and started moving toward the bridge. Presumably, they heard the gunfire from behind them and realized they must have found the source of all their problems.
Denise debated running back down the stairs and joining Balthazar at the ship’s stern. If she ran, she could probably make it before the Yersinia team made it to her position and gunned her down.
Then she noticed the Maxim machine gun sitting on the ground. The belt of silver bullets lay spooled on the ground, sparkling in the moonlight. An alternative to running occurred to her.
Grabbing the Maxim, she hefted it up. “Urrgh,” she said. The thing was heavy. With a heave, she dropped it on top of a desk next to the window. Adjusting the aim on the massive weapon, she aimed it at the man giving hand signals.
A second later, he all but ceased to exist. The Maxim frappéd him into a pile of dog food. She tilted the weapon back and forth, sweeping the deck.
Some of the Yersinia men tried to find cover behind wooden crates, but the machine gun chewed the planks apart and tore the crew members apart. There was precious little cover on that part of the deck to begin with, and soon there was a scattering of severed limbs and shattered bodies littering the ground. The last couple of Yersinia men scampered back to the door and plunged down the stairs, deciding to take their chances amid the flames and monsters rather than deal with Denise anymore.
Alright, time to go. There wasn’t anything else she could do. Hobhouse was God only knew where on the ship, and the boilers were ticking time bombs by this point. This party was all but officially over. Hobhouse would either go down with the ship, or he’d make it back to the island and live to regret not going down with the ship.
She scampered back down the stairs, leaving the big machine gun where it sat. Foul smoke drifted upward and stung her eyes. Moving through the dining room, she kept her machine pistol raised, ready for anything that might come running in at her.
Balthazar and the dinghy were just a short jog away. All she had to do was get to the other side of the ship. She put some more hustle into her step as she crossed the dining room.
From what she could see, the cargo hold was a pit of flame now. The raging inferno spat streamers of flame upward against the night sky, illuminating the deck. Embers shot toward the stars, drifting toward the hateful moon as it slid toward the horizon.
For a moment, the glow of the flames prevented her from realizing just how close to dawn they really were. In addition to the glow all around her from the fire, the horizon was starting to turn a shade of faded pink. It wasn’t exactly a sunrise yet, but in half an hour or so, the sun would sneak into view and banish the nightmares on Malheur Island for another month.
She stepped out of the dining room, and then Hobhouse shot her. The bullet tore into her upper arm and took a hunk of flesh with it. For a second, Denise didn’t even feel a thing except for a strange tug at her arm, but there was a surge of hot wetness followed by a howling red wave of pain.
Hobhouse stood pressed up next to the door, a revolver in his hands. He’d heard what happened above and laid out an ambush for her. She swung her own weapon around, but Hobhouse swatted it away. Her arm hung at her side, leaking blood down her elbow. It felt like someone had filled her arm with fire ants and then told them their favorite soccer team had lost.
Raising his revolver again, Hobhouse readied the kill shot. Denise swung her good arm back around and backhanded him with the machine pistol. The gun crashed into his face and tore a chunk out of his cheek.
Reeling backwards, Hobhouse tried to level the revolver again, but Denise closed in on him. She shoved his gun away and tried to maneuver her own weapon into his gut. He squirmed and twisted away. They were both dancing inside the other’s range, trying to stay out of the others sights by ensuring their opponent never had a chance to get off a proper shot. Whoever made a misstep first would take a bullet from point-blank range.
Denise gritted her teeth. The pain in her arm was ferocious, demanding her attention. But she couldn’t check the wound. She couldn’t take her focus off Hobhouse for a second. If she did, she’d get something a lot worse than the wound on her arm.
Hobhouse tried to kick her, and she countered by stepping inside his range again. They were practically chest-to-chest. Their eyes glared at each other from no more than a few inches away as they tangoed through a dance of death.
But Hobhouse had the advantage. He had full use of both his arms. Denise needed to finish the Yersinia executive off quick if she had any hope of surviving. She looked around and figured out her best option.
“You bitch,” Hobhouse spat. “You’ve ruined everything. Everything! The research we pulled from this project would have guaranteed us government projects until I was old enough to retire. Hell, with the bonuses, I could retire tomorrow if you hadn’t stepped in. You should be dead.”
Denise expressed her counterpoint to his argument by head-butting Hobhouse in the face. He lurched backwards, hands clutching at his face. It was the same mistake Jubal Hayes made earlier. She charged forward and augured her shoulder of her good arm into Hobhouse’s chest. Even though she’d used her other shoulder, the impact sent a wave of pain down her other arm that made her want to curl up on the deck and puke.
Hobhouse tumbled backwards, falling on his butt and rolling backward, right to the very edge of the open cargo elevator shaft. Denise kicked him in the ribs as he tried to reach for his revolver. Denise’s boot lifted him clear off the ground, knocking him to the very rim of the shaft.
“No, you’ve ruined everything. Because of you, Gail is dead. Because of you, Harrison is dead.” She punctuated her statements with more kicks. Hobhouse used his arms to try to deflect the blows, but her boots still landed punishing blows to his chest. “Shinzo and Ra
zan and Marlow and even Jubal. You helped kill them, all for your little test here. There’s a lot of horrific creatures on this island, but you’re the only one who’s a monster.”
She delivered one last kick, rolling Hobhouse over the edge of the precipice. Before he fell, though, he lashed out with one hand and clamped down around Denise’s ankle. He plunged over the edge, but he only fell a few feet before Denise became his anchor.
The sudden force of arresting Hobhouse’s fall caused Denise’s leg to jerk out from under her. She landed on her tailbone with a tooth-rattling impact. Her arm sent a blaze of howling white noise up to her brain like a swarm of enraged hornets. For a second, the pain took her breath away and dulled the entire world. It was like the sensation overwhelmed the operating capacity of her brain, and she couldn’t process anything else for a moment.
Shaking her head, the next sensation she felt was the realization that she was sliding across the deck toward the fiery pit below. Hobhouse was trying to climb up her legs, and in the process, he was pulling her down into the ruined cargo hold.
She threw out her good arm and used it as a break against the pulling force of Hobhouse. The machine pistol clattered out of her hands and skittered across the deck, well out of reach. Denise cursed and tried to kick Hobhouse free, but his grip was like iron.
As he pulled himself up her legs, he kicked and thrashed. The soles of his feet were probably burning. Even though only her feet and lower legs were directly over the flames, the heat was enough to make the sweat dry on Denise’s face even as it sprang out of her pores. Dangling directly over the flames, Hobhouse would no doubt be sizzling like a hunk of fat left on a barbecue.
A moment later, Hobhouse reached up and clamped a hand onto her knees. She looked around. There was no way she could reach the machine pistol, and she couldn’t seem to knock Hobhouse loose. She needed another option to get rid of him.
Hobhouse’s other hand appeared at the rim of the elevator shaft, his revolver still gripped tight in his soot-blackened fingers. He hauled himself up until his face was above the level of the elevator shaft. A triumphant smile was on his face as he started to angle the revolver toward Denise.
The smile disappeared off his face a split second later as he realized what was pointed at him. The barrel of Denise’s Savage 99 elephant gun came to rest against the skin of his wrist, just below the hand attached to Denise’s leg.
The muzzle flash froze everything in time for a single second, as if a giant strobe light had gone off. One moment, Hobhouse was there, his revolver pointed at her chest; the next moment, there was only a severed hand attached to Denise’s knee. The only other signs Hobhouse had been there were a splash of blood and a burn mark on her pants from the muzzle.
All around her, the elephant gun blast seemed to fill the entire world. But Hobhouse’s scream rose even above the blast of the huge gun. The scream went on and on, as loud as any or the roars from the creatures on Malheur Island.
She’d fired the gun with only one hand, not wanting to risk further damage to her injured arm. The recoil flipped the Savage 99 out of her grip and sent it sailing backward. Denise nearly lost a finger in the trigger guard as it launched away from her, twisting her whole body off balance. Rattling across the deck, the gun slid under the railing and fell off the side of the boat down to the sea below.
Denise pulled her legs back over the edge and plucked off the hand still clutching her knee. The severed hand flopped to the deck, and Denise pushed it over the edge of the elevator shaft with the tip of her boots. The flames roared below.
She checked her bleeding arm. It hurt like all hell, but she could move it a little. Hobhouse’s bullet had taken a chunk of flesh and a little muscle with it. In time, it would heal. Her other arm had nearly been wrench out of its socket by the Savage 99, but she could still use it. Frankly, her whole body felt like a second-hand piñata. Once she actually stopped moving for a few hours, she’d probably stiffen up and all but fossilize.
That was a worry for later, though. Right now, she had to get off the Shield of Mithridates. She looked up and saw more dinghies from the island buzzing in to help their stricken mother ship. Denise had no interest in being aboard when they got here, not that they’d be able to help by this point.
Most of the crew still aboard were probably dead already, either eaten alive, burned to cinders, or shot dead by herself. Not bad for an evening’s work.
She took off toward the ship’s stern, angling back toward where Balthazar should have a dinghy of their own at the ready. The rest of the Shield of Mithridates was already a wreck.
Flames were starting to spread up to the ship’s dining room now, and soon they’d devour the bridge, too. No one would be able to contain this, let alone get the ship into working condition.
As Denise half-ran, half-limped away, she noticed that the ship was listing to one side ever so slightly. Somewhere down below, part of the hull had given way, buckling under concentrated heat. Seawater was already moving inside the ship. Now, it was a race between the flames and the sea to see which one could gobble up the luxury freighter first.
Denise reached the rear of the ship. Balthazar was already standing in one of the dinghies, starting to lower it into the sea. He saw her and took his hands off the ropes. A pair of dead Yersinia men lay nearby, their efforts to abandon the ship in vain.
“You look like hell,” he said.
“Nice to see you, too. Ready to go?”
“Absolutely. I snatched some extra food and gas from the other lifeboats before kicking their motors off. We can go for a long time, and nobody can follow us.”
“Good. I don’t think the rest of Hobhouse’s men have enough fuel to make it anywhere on their boats. They can either stay on the island or go adrift in the Indian Ocean. I don’t think they’ll survive either way.”
“Fine by me,” Balthazar said. “Let’s get out of here. I didn’t think you were going to make it.”
“For a minute, I didn’t think I was going to make it, either,” Denise said.
“You aren’t going to,” a voice said from directly behind her just as a red hot revolver barrel pressed up to the back of her neck.
TWENTY-NINE
I WANNA WATCH YOUR FACE AS YOU DIE
“Turn around real slow,” the voice gurgled. The gun barrel pressed up against her neck burned like it had just come out of an oven. She hissed as her skin blistered. “I wanna watch your face as you die,” Herschel Hobhouse growled.
Denise turned around and came face to skull with the Yersinia bioweapons executive. He must have dashed through the flames and up to a staircase. She didn’t know how he was still alive.
Hobhouse reached out and grabbed her arm as she turned. His grip was as hot and greasy as a newly cooked burger. The skin on his palm sloughed off in an oleaginous film on her arm, leaving little behind but a claw of red flesh and blackened bone. His face had all but melted. Almost every last flap of skin had been singed off, and his head was now nothing but weeping pus and angry connective tissue. Hobhouse’s eyelids were mostly gone, and his eyeballs were almost as red as the rest of him. The veins inside his eyes must have burst, filling them with blood.
Nothing at all was left of his lips and cheeks except for some seared tatters. Denise could see all Hobhouse’s teeth, even with his mouth closed. All the hair had burned from his head, leaving nothing but bright red scalp that gave way to exposed bone. On the rest of his body, his clothes had either melted or burned away entirely. There was almost nothing left of the man except for a vengeful skeleton.
“You two are going down with me,” Hobhouse said. His tongue was a swollen mass, flapping against the ruins of his lips as he spoke. Denise had to struggle to understand his words.
He had to know he was dying. Not even Yersinia’s best doctors could do much for him at this point aside from slather him in lotion so he wouldn’t die screaming. That wasn’t going to stop him from committing one final act, though.
Den
ise didn’t have her machine pistol. She didn’t have her Savage 99. Her personal sidearm was still holstered at her side, but Hobhouse had his revolver pointed two inches away from her forehead, and there was no way for her to reach it before he could pull the trigger. Balthazar was still armed, but her body blocked any shot he had at Hobhouse’s ghoulish frame.
Hobhouse pulled back the hammer on his revolver, leaving a gob of hot flesh on the gun. This was it. This was the end of the line. Denise stared right down the cold black eye of the revolver barrel.
A shriek suddenly filled the night, and a gust of wind hit Denise.
Was she dead? Was that her own scream and the sensation of her soul being ripped from her earthly form by a silver bullet through the brain?
No, it was something else entirely. The shriek was the cry of an ahool tearing through the night, and the gust of wind came from a flap of its massive wings as it alighted upon Hobhouse.
The man screamed as the ahool’s talons sank into his gooey, cooked flesh. He was jerked off his feet as the ahool flew past, barely slowing down to grab its prey. Shrieking in triumph, the ahool flapped up high into the night and wheeled toward its roost on Malheur Island.
Denise blinked. The revolver that had been squarely in front of her face a second before was gone. Hobhouse was gone. The spot on the back of her neck burned in the night breeze.
The flames had reached the bridge of the Shield of Mithridates now, turning the structure into a great pillar of flame. Below her feet, the ship was tilting at an even steeper angle as it took on more and more water. In the distance, the dinghies of the Yersinia men were turning around, realizing that the situation was hopeless. Nothing could save their ship.
“Let’s go,” Denise said. She hopped into the lifeboat, and Balthazar lowered them the rest of the way down to the sea. They uncoupled the ropes tethering them to the ship, and Denise started the motor.