Carpathia

by Matt Forbeck

  When he emerged underneath the boat, gasping for air, the first thing that popped into his head was that as hard as getting under the boat had been, it had been like strolling along the Promenade Deck when compared with being dumped into the sea from the Boat Deck. Abe broke the surface next to him a moment later. It was too dark under the boat for either of them to see each other, but he recognized his friend's voice when he spoke.

  "I don't know how much more of this… I can take."

  Quin shushed him and whispered. "If they figure out we're down here, they'll be looking for us when we come up."

  "All right," Abe said, his voice much softer. "Just let me catch my breath."

  They remained there for several minutes in the pitch dark, the icy water slapping against them. Quin reached up and grabbed onto the overturned seats above his head and hung there, grateful to not have to tread water any longer. He heard Abe do the same.

  "Could you hear her?" Abe said after a while.

  "Hear who?" Quin's first thought was of Lucy, but he realized that Abe couldn't have possibly meant her.

  "Titanic. I couldn't tell for sure. I thought I might have heard her still going down."

  "Sound travels funny underwater. What did you hear?"

  "Shouts. Screams."

  Quin knew the sounds. He'd heard them too. They'd not been from the boat but from the people it had left behind, he felt sure. He couldn't bear to mention it.

  "Do you think she's hit the bottom yet?"

  Quin shrugged, then realized that Abe couldn't see him. "I doubt it. It's a long way down to the bottom of the ocean, isn't it?"

  "Let's hope we don't have to find out."

  Something bumped into the side of the boat just then, hard. It startled Quin enough that one of his hands lost its grip.

  "What the bloody hell was that?" Abe said.

  "No idea."

  Quin heard movement on the boat above him, and he grew more frightened. Until now, everyone atop the overturned boat had remained still, not making a sound. He'd assumed they were watching the waters before them, making sure that no one else tried to join them in the relative safety of their rare, dry perch. Now, though, they scrambled about the wooden surface, shuffling back and forth like dancers on an open deck.

  "We need to get up there," Abe said.

  "Let it play out," said Quin.

  "Something's happening up there. We can't just wait for it to pass us by!"

  Quin sighed. Of course they couldn't. "Just wait a moment," he said. "Just until we can make sure we won't come up right in front of them."

  "We can't just hang here forever."

  Quin shushed him once again, and Abe shut his mouth. "Follow me."

  Quin hauled himself hand over hand along the bottom of the boat until he reached the point at which he estimated himself to be as far away as possible from the crewmen who had kept them from the boat. He listened hard, and he heard shouts from above, and then a huge splash coming from somewhere on the other side of the boat.

  "Now," Quin said.

  Without another word, he slipped under the water again and began hauling himself down and then back up around the lifeboat's collapsible canvas edges, which had never been deployed before the ship wound up in the water. The moment his head entered the water, he heard screaming once more. He'd braced himself for it, hoping it might have diminished a bit while he and Abe had been waiting under the boat.

  Instead, the scream proved to be much louder. The best Quin could guess, the sound came from just about where he'd heard the heavy splash a moment ago. He did his best to ignore it and tried instead to take it as a blessing that something had happened that he could be sure would distract the people on top of the boat.

  As his head broke the water on the far side of the boat, Quin heard shouting even louder than screaming, and this time from many voices raised at once. One word they kept saying rang out over the rest: "Shark!"

  The word triggered something primal in the back of Quin's brain. He scrambled up on top of the boat as fast as he could, not giving a damn if anyone heard or saw him. He found Abe there at his side, clambering up right next to him.

  As they went, Quin pulled on the legs of a man lying on top of the boat. The man slid off and into the icy waters below with not a word of protest. Quin didn't know for sure if the man was dead, but he assuaged his conscience with the knowledge that if the man hadn't yet stopped breathing he would no doubt have done so soon, with or without Quin's accidental help.

  "Hey!" a man standing nearby said as he spun around. He was a hard-faced, middle-aged man with a severe, wide mustache from which hung frost that was mutating into icicles. He wore a long Norfolk jacket, which marked him as a passenger rather than one of the crew. "Where did you two come from?"

  Abe sprang to his feet and helped Quin to his. "We're not going back into that water," Abe said. "You can't make us."

  "Fair enough, dear boy," he said, sticking out his hand. "Colonel Gracie. Call me Archie."

  Quin shook hands with the man, wary for any tricks, and gave him his name. Once Quin had finished the ritual with Archie without being thrown into the water, Abe followed suit.

  "It's one hell of a spot to find ourselves in, men," Archie said. "The world's largest ship sunk from underneath us, my pal Clinch gone missing, and now sharks circling around us. I don't mind telling you I've had better days."

  "I think we can all report the same without fear of contradiction, sir," Abe said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Dushko stood on the edge of the iceberg and peered out at the ocean around him through his telescope. He had not yet found anything he'd come searching for. Not Brody nor any of his compatriots. Not even the Titanic.

  Off to the west, hundreds of frozen corpses bobbed up and down in the icy waters, but not a single person stirred among them. A couple of lifeboats partially filled with survivors roamed about that floating graveyard, hunting for those in need of aid, but even from here Dushko could tell that they were wasting their time. Anyone who had spent the last couple hours in the water would be beyond their assistance.

  That didn't stop them from trying, though, and Dushko had to at least admire their persistence. The living often fought on long past the point they had any hope of success. That was what made them so damned dangerous.

  As Dushko surveyed the flotsam from the wreck, a lone bat flapped overhead, then spiraled down to join him on the iceberg. Dushko had no doubt that anyone who might see the bat would wonder how such a creature could find itself here, so far away from wherever any of its kind might call home. He knew better, of course.

  A moment later, Trevor spoke from behind him. "You missed one hell of a party, boss."

  Dushko collapsed his telescope and put it in his pocket. He did not bother to turn around to see Trevor as he spoke. "Did you enjoy yourself?"

  Trevor snickered. "You know I did. Has it been so long since you've indulged yourself? Have you forgotten what it's like?"

  Dushko ran his tongue across his fangs, feeling their sharp tips. "Have you forgotten why we had to leave the United States of America?"

  "Come on now," Trevor said. "Are you here to give me a spanking and send me back to my coffin? I thought we were all grown-ups here."

  Dushko gritted his teeth. "Adults do not run off on some insane hunt and put the rest of us all at risk."

  "This wasn't a risk," Trevor said. "It was a massacre. These people never stood a chance in the first place. It seemed like a shame to let all that food go to waste. Didn't your momma teach you better than that?"

  Dushko smirked. "My mother has been dead for a very long time," he said. "And I do not think it is me who is in need of a lesson."

  Before Trevor could respond, Dushko turned on him and backhanded him so hard that the blow embedded the man into the wall of snow and ice behind him. Trevor tried to stand up, to shove himself out of the hole he found himself in, but Dushko was on him before he could manage it.

  "Do you re
alize what you have done?" Dushko loomed over the injured vampire. "Do you even understand why it is we had to leave the States behind and escape back to my homeland?"

  "Because you got scared," Trevor said. "Because you've been dead so long you've forgotten what it's like to live."

  "Very prettily worded," Dushko said. "It still does not change the fact that we would certainly have been discovered there if we had remained much longer. As a group, we'd started taking too many chances. We had grown too bold."

  "And so what if we did?" Trevor trembled, and not from the cold. "What's so wrong with that? Should we worry that the sheep might know that wolves live among them?"

  Dushko scowled down at Trevor. "You underestimate your prey. These are not sheep. They have weapons, and they have science, and they grow stronger with them every day. And we are not so many that they might not be able to wipe us out once they learned of our presence."

  Trevor extracted himself from the iceberg and staggered to his feet. "Let them try," he said. "They're cowards, every one of them. A few public feedings, and they'll be too frightened to do anything more than hide in their burrows and make messes in their pants."

  "So now," Dushko said, "are they rabbits or sheep? Or do you have some other metaphors you would like to stir into that terrible stew of an argument you are concocting?"

  "The hell with you," Trevor said. "You think because you're older than the rest of us – because you got yourself some schooling – you're better than anyone among us. Just remember this. We're not sheep either! Or rabbits, or metaphors or whatever the hell you're nattering on about."

  "No," Duskho said. "No you are not such gentle or harmless things. You are like mad dogs. Vile, rabid things that wreak havoc and put the rest of us in danger."

  "So you say." Trevor sniffed at Dushko. "Brody begs to differ with you. He says we're wild animals, and you're trying to keep us tamed and chained. There's only one solution for a wild animal that makes sense. You got to break free."

  Dushko grimaced. "I can see why you feel that way. The restrictions of modern life chafe at me too. But it is better to live within your borders than to die outside of them. Those that refuse to do so are a danger to us all. That is why we had to leave New York for the old country."

  "And if we refuse to go?"

  Dushko looked Trevor up and down. The man had gorged himself on blood, and he looked younger and healthier than Dushko had ever seen him. With that rejuvenation, though, had come a willfulness the man had never displayed before either, and Dushko knew that he had to root this out – for the good of them all.

  "Then I will do for you as I would for any other rabid monster that threatens the pack." Dushko held his hand before him as if he could use it to weigh the responsibilities burdening him at that moment. "I will put you down."

  Trevor tried to meet Dushko's steely stare but failed. He turned to flee, transforming into a bat as he went.

  Dushko charged at him, morphing into a magnificent wolf in mid-leap. He reached out lightning fast, and his jaws closed on Trevor's wings.

  Trevor screamed in pain and fear as he took the form of a man once again. Dushko refused to let go of him, and his teeth tore raw red furrows across Trevor's arms and chests as they reformed between his jaws.

  Trevor started to say something then, possibly to surrender or to simply beg for mercy, but Dushko didn't let him finish. Instead, he let go of Trevor's arm and tore out his throat.

  Trevor's hands flew to his neck as he tried to staunch the jets of stolen blood from leaving his body. Meanwhile, Dushko ripped open Trevor's chest with his claws and stuffed his snout into the hole he'd created there. He rooted around inside the chest cavity until he found what he was searching for: Trevor's heart.

  The dead muscle beat once more, pounding the blood of the man's victims through his veins. With a single bite, Dushko put an end to that, severing it from its veins and arteries. A wrench of his neck yanked the organ from its home, and an instant later, Dushko had devoured it whole.

  Dushko wanted to return to his human form then. There were others he needed to deal with: Fergus, Siobhan, Brigid, and most importantly Brody.

  But for all Dushko's talk of restraint, the taste of all that blood running down his gullet proved too much for him to resist. He wouldn't be done with Trevor for a long time.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  "They're dead." Lucy leaned over the edge of the boat again and pulled another person from the water by the edge of his lifejacket. "They're all dead."

  "Of course, they're dead, you idiot," Hichens said. "How long do you think anyone could survive in that?"

  He'd not left his post on the lifeboat's bow the entire night. He'd just sat there and hurled one insult after another at Lucy and Maggie and any of the others determined to help them keep searching for any more possible survivors until they'd exhausted every avenue of hope.

  "Just shut your mouth," Lucy said angrily. "Leave us to our work in peace, you lazy pig."

  "Forget him, sweetie," Maggie said. "He's just like my kids back home: not worth the breath it takes to scold him." She'd given up on arguing with Hichens any longer or even responding to him directly. Instead, she'd gone to take another turn at the oars.

  Lucy took heart in the fact that their efforts hadn't been entirely in vain. She and the other passengers who'd finally sided with her and Maggie had pulled three people out of the drink: two women and a child, all of whom had failed to escape steerage until just before the ship went down. The child had died after they'd brought him aboard, and one of the women already on the lifeboat had spent the entire time cradling his body and weeping over him since, even though Lucy was sure that he was not her own.

  As the lifeboat nosed its way through the terrible flotsam of human bodies littering the sea, Lucy poked at them with the tip of a boathook someone had found stowed under the seats. It had been a long time since she'd seen any of them stir, and she'd started to believe that perhaps the vile Hichens was right. Perhaps there really wasn't anyone else they could rescue.

  Despite that, Lucy kept at her grisly work. To herself alone she admitted that she wasn't only looking for the living but for the faces of her friends among the dead. She knew the chances were that both Quin and Abe had gone down with the ship or perished in the waters afterward, either having drowned or frozen to death. At this point, she'd all but given up hope of finding them alive, but the thought that she might never know their ultimate fate gnawed at her.

  How could she report their deaths to their parents? She knew how heavy her heart already weighed with grief, and she suspected that the news would simply crush their families flat. If she could at least tell them that she'd seen the boys one last time, or if she could even make sure their bodies were recovered and given a proper burial, then maybe that could do some slight good in the face of this devastation.

  Lucy rested her tired arms for a moment and surveyed the waters around her as she let the long pole in her hands drift alongside the boat. The first hints of dawn were breaking behind her, and the light showed her just how many people the disappearance of the Titanic had left in its wake. Hundreds if not thousands of corpses floated on the surface of the sea. Some of them lay there flat, only their backs cresting out of the water. For others, their lifejackets held them upright, their heads slouched over into their chests, making them appear to be sleeping. The lack of any breath wafting from their mouths in the chilly pre-dawn betrayed their true state.

  "So many dead," Lucy said to herself. She wanted to weep. "So many gone."

  It was then she felt the shaft of the boathook move in her hands.

  Lucy looked down into the water and let out a little scream. A man floated there, icicles already formed in his unkempt hair, his skin as pale as the moon. He bore a small gash in the skin over his right eye, but it seemed to have stopped bleeding already. His eyes burned with life, red around the edges, and he had his hand on the far end of her boathook.

  "Please, miss." The man'
s voice was no more than a soft croak. Despite him being soaked to the bone, it sounded hard and dry. "Help."

  "We have another!" Lucy reached down with the hook and snared the collar of the man's coat with it, then used it to haul him closer to the boat.

  Maggie came to her side in an instant. It would have been easier if one of the sailors would have lent her a hand too, but Hichens still refused to have anything to do with the rescue efforts. The other man had kept his hand on the tiller, helping at least that much, and he was all the way at the far end of the thirty-five foot boat anyhow.

  "Grab him by the shoulders, sweetie, then just fall back into the boat," Maggie said. "Just like last time."