by Matt Forbeck
Quin turned to see a sweat-coated man dressed in coalstained clothes walking toward them from between a pair of boilers to his right. He carried a battered shovel with him, but he held it as a tool not a weapon. He was curious about the stranger who'd entered his steamy realm in the middle of the night, but he did not fear them.
"Just passing through." Quin put his stake and crucifix behind his back as he tried to brush by the man. He felt Lucy take them from him, freeing up his hands. "Don't mind us."
The shovel shot out then and blocked the way forward. Quin hauled up short, and Lucy pressed up against his back for one surprised instant.
"There's nothing back there but the cargo holds," the man said, his blue eyes standing out against his soot-darkened skin like a lantern on a moonless night. "There's naught to see for good folk like you."
Lucy giggled then. Shocked by the lightness of the sound, Quin turned to gape at her, but she wasn't looking at him. She'd turned all her radiant attention on the stoker.
"Forgive us, sir," she said with a lusty smile. "We didn't mean to disturb you. My friend and I were just looking for a little bit of privacy. Away from my parents' cabin, if you know what I mean."
The man's face broke into a knowing grin. "Say no more," he said. "You're not the first young couple to wander past my post here." He winked at Quin, who hoped that the darkness of the engine room – which was lit only by the hellish fire from the boilers at this hour – might mask the furious blush that had rushed to his face.
"A word of advice," the man said. "On your way back, don't come through here. My shift changes soon, and the bloke who takes over from me isn't nearly so understanding."
"Right," Quin said, nodding his thanks as the man lowered his shovel to let them past. "Truly appreciated."
Moments later, Quin and Lucy found a door that permitted passage through the next bulkhead, and this stood unlocked. Passing through it, they emerged from the engine room and found themselves in a large, dimly lit chamber that stretched full across the ship from port to starboard – at least thirty yards, Quin guessed – and roughly as far back along the ship's floor, where it terminated in another bulkhead. Every sound they made seemed to echo in the high-ceilinged chamber, especially the clacking of Lucy's shoes as they wound their way through the place, slipping around boxes and pallets filled with goods and luggage.
"There are two doors through the next bulkhead," Lucy said. "Should we take the one on the right or the left?"
"I don't suppose it much matters." Quin fingered the rope of garlic around his neck. The stoker hadn't seemed interested in it. Perhaps he thought they were stealing away down here to cook dinner. It seemed hot enough that they might have been able to pull it off. He loosened his collar for some relief.
"The left it is then."
Lucy led the way now, despite Quin trying to step in front of her and cut her off. Her eyes shone with some strange mixture of curiosity and mounting fear, and he found he could not move fast enough to stay in front and offer her protection. He took his stake and crucifix back from her then and hefted the wooden weapon in his hand. If he couldn't stand between Lucy and danger, he'd have to keep himself ready to strike at any threat on an instant's notice instead.
Quin craned back his neck and stared up the steel stairwell that led toward the decks above from the center of the room's floor. It snaked back and forth until it disappeared through the ceiling and came out through the floor of the Main Deck. A pair of hatches framed it fore and aft, wide enough to lower a truck through and still have room to spin it about on the end of the crane.
As large as the room was, it didn't have much to fill it. Quin supposed that the Carpathia would be packed with emigrants – people like Lucy, Abe, and him, he reflected – on the way to the States, but would have far fewer passengers on its return trips. It was a shame that the ship didn't carry more in terms of American exports to sell in Europe, but he'd heard that the rumblings of troubles on the Continent had caused such trade to slow. No one wanted to ship material overseas if they thought that a war might disrupt their chances to get paid for it – at least not the kind of cargo you'd find on something other than a warship.
Beyond this hold, they found another just as badly lit as the first. This was smaller than the previous one, just as wide across but not nearly so long. A set of stairs rose out of the floor here too, but there was only room for one hatch near it, not two.
"Can you imagine being lowered all the way down through that shaft?" Lucy said. "It would feel like descending into a mine."
She spoke with a strong voice rather than a whisper, but Quin could barely hear her over the thrumming of the engines. The drive shaft that turned the ship's propellers had to run somewhere under their feet, Quin guessed, but he didn't see where or how they could get to it. Not from here.
The dull pounding they'd been following had long since stopped. It had grown in intensity for a minute and then ceased altogether. Faced with no better choices, they'd decided to keep moving back through the holds until they found something of interest or ran out of ship. He guessed they'd just about done exactly that, but he saw one more bulkhead loom before them, and Lucy pressed on toward it.
She reached the door before him and put her hand on it and pulled. It refused to give.
Lucy turned toward Quin and spoke straight into his ear, her breath warm against his skin. "It's locked," she said. "The first one that's been locked since we went below decks."
Quin gave her a grim nod. "Not a good sign," he said. "Get your things ready. I'll get the lock."
Quin stuffed his crucifix into one coat pocket and pulled the keys from another. As he tried a key in the door, Lucy brandished her crucifix before her like a weapon she planned to use to defend him.
The first key failed, as did the second. The third worked, and Quin gave Lucy a meaningful look before pocketing it. He reached out to open the door, and it gave with a stiff pull, gliding open on well-oiled hinges.
Blackness beckoned from beyond.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Quin thumbed on the flashlight the doctor had given him but kept it aimed at the floor. He didn't want to alert anyone inside to where he was, although he guessed that it might already be too late. To anyone inside the hold beyond, he would be silhouetted in the doorway. He might as well have placed a target on his chest.
"Can vampires see in the dark?" he asked Lucy in hushed tones.
She shrugged at him as if to say, "How would I know?"
Quin sucked at his teeth, then brought the flashlight's beam up to see what lay before them. It cut through the inky blackness and illuminated along its length parts of a hold almost as large as the first one they'd entered. No stairwell ran through the center of this one though. All Quin could see were the remains of wooden crates someone had smashed open, letting their contents spill across the floor.
"What was in those?" Lucy whispered as she moved past him and entered the room beyond. Her soft footsteps echoed with a hollow metal sound.
Quin shrugged as he joined her, leaving the door open behind them. He shone the light into one of the broken crates. "Whatever it was, it was packed in dirt."
"No," Lucy said, her voice tightening with every word. "I don't think the dirt was the packing. It was the contents."
Quin froze as he realized what she meant. The crates they saw spilled open all around them – countless numbers of them crushed together so that he couldn't tell where one ended and another began – they weren't just crates.
They were coffins.
Lucy gasped. "God," she said. "How– how many of them are there?"
"I don't know." Quin swept the flashlight's beam around the room. Everywhere he turned it, he spotted more of the destroyed crates. "What did this?"
"Don't you mean who?" Lucy crept closer to Quin. He was sure she would have clutched at his arm if she hadn't still been holding her crucifix and stake.
"Do you think they were smashed open from the inside, or did
someone else do this? And if so, who?"
"That's not what concerns me the most at the moment," Lucy said, her words barely louder than her breath.
"What's more important than that?"
"If there were vampires in those boxes," she said, trembling through her resolve, "then where are they now?"
Quin shuddered at the thought of so many of the violent, bloodsucking creatures infesting the ship. If they were loose, did the people aboard the Carpathia have even a ghost of a chance of survival? To think that the survivors of the Titanic had already endured so much, and had now to suffer through this, boggled Quin's mind. He found it hard to believe that a loving God would permit such things to happen.
Quin brought the flashlight up to see if there were any hatches that let into this hold. He knew there had to be – at least originally, according to the shipbuilders' intent – but he didn't see any sign of them at first. Then he spotted them both.
There were two of them set into the room's high ceiling, both painted black and closed up tight. Quin played the light's beam across them and between them, trying to find their edges. As he did, he spotted something hanging in the rafters that held up the deck above the hold.
"What is that?" Lucy asked as Quin held the beam on one of the dangling things. It seemed like someone had tied a sack of something long and heavy to one of the rafters and left it to hang there like a drying side of beef.
Quin peered at it, moving closer as he focused on it. It took him a long time to realize just what it and the others hanging all around it in other parts of the rafters were, because it was upside down. Then he realized that the thing was a person.
"Lucy." Quin reached back with his arm to guide her toward the still-open door. "We need to leave here. Now."
"What is it?" she said, still not understanding. "What are those things?"
"They're people, Luce."
She choked back a gasp. "Are they vampires – or victims?"
Quin shone the light back up into the rafters again. He couldn't tell for sure. Maybe they were both.
"What time is it?" Lucy asked. "Has the sun come up yet?"
It was Quin's turn to shrug helplessly. His watch had been damaged the night the Titanic sank. He'd hoped to replace it in New York – assuming he managed to survive that long.
"It's possible, I suppose," he said. "Do you think they're just sleeping?"
"If they are, then they're vampires. If not, they're dead instead." She groaned. "I'm not sure which would frighten me more."
Quin turned the light straight up, and it fell upon a man wrapped in a weathered coat, hanging from the rafters by his ankles. As the beam struck him, the man winced, much in the way of someone cringing when the lights were turned on in a bedroom so early that the sky was still dark outside. The man craned back his neck and opened his eyes to stare down at the light.
Quin had never in his life felt as much like prey as he did at that moment. The man stared down at him, temporarily confused, but with awareness growing in his soulless, dark eyes.
"Now." Quin turned and ushered Lucy toward the doorway. "Now, now, now."
Lucy moved fast, her heels clacking against the steel floor as she went. Quin wanted to gather her up in his arms and run, but that would mean dropping the flashlight and the stake in his hands. He didn't want to leave them so defenseless.
When they were mere feet away from the door, Quin heard something large and light rustle above him, and the man he'd seen on the ceiling flipped down to land in front of them, standing directly between them and the open doorway. The man hissed at them like an angry snake and drew back his lips to expose long fangs sprouting from his mouth.
"Where do you think you're going, little dogies?" the man said. He stood tall and broad, with a square chin and long, lanky hair, and he spoke in a Yankee accent that Quin couldn't quite place. "Didn't anyone ever tell you it's rude to enter someone else's bunkhouse without an invitation?"
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Lucy thrust out her crucifix before her, and the vampire standing between her and Quin and the door flinched. "Get back, you filthy beast!"
The man put up his hands as if Lucy were holding a gun on him. "Now, just relax there, little lady. There's no need to pull those kinds of tricks around here. We're all harmless enough – once you get to know us."
Quin slashed out with his stake and caught the man on the side of the head with it. He went down as if Quin had struck him with a club, collapsing to the floor in pain. Quin pushed Lucy toward the open doorway, a rectangle of light caught on the edge of the hold's pitch-blackness.
He followed straight behind her, but as he stepped past the vampire who had accosted them, the man's hand snaked out and caught Quin around the ankle as fast and as hard as a whip.
"You think it's that easy to beat me?" The man stood up and hauled Quin's feet out from underneath him as he went.
Quin hit the steel deck hard, landing on his shoulder and rattling his bones. The stake fell from his hand, but he managed to keep a grip on the flashlight. He wondered if that meant that he'd at least be able to get a good look at the face of the man who was about to kill him.
"Damn, you folks reek," the vampire said, screwing his face tight as he yanked Quin upside down into the air and held him there, dangling from one ankle. "And the living say the dead smell bad."
It was the garlic around his neck, Quin knew. Hanging around his neck, it must have been far enough away that the vampire hadn't minded it when he was laid out on the floor, but now that the tables had turned, the rope of the pungent spice disgusted the creature.
Quin kicked out with his free foot and caught the vampire in the chin with his heel. That only served to enrage the man, who squeezed Quin's ankle tight enough to make him holler out in pain. "Run, Luce!" he shouted straight after that.
Quin couldn't say he wasn't afraid of dying, but having brushed so close with death during the sinking of the Titanic, he'd become accustomed to the idea that it didn't bother him as much as he once thought it would. At that moment, his greatest fear wasn't that some man-sized tick would feed on his blood but that the same thing might happen to Lucy. As terrified as he was for himself, he felt far more fear for her.
Quin wanted nothing more than to see the door that led out of the room slammed shut and locked tight. If that meant that Lucy would get away clean, he could stomach having his only avenue of escape cut off. It would have been a small price to pay. Instead, he heard Lucy rush toward them, her heels clacking out a furious beat.
"No!" Quin said. "Leave me! Run!"
Lucy stabbed at the vampire with her stake, but he batted it aside with his free hand. As he indulged in a rough chuckle at Lucy's efforts, he gave Quin a good shake that rattled his eyes in their sockets.
He stopped laughing when Lucy smacked him across the cheek with her crucifix.
The vampire dropped Quin and clutched his hands to his face, screaming in pain and staggering away from her. Quin snatched up the flashlight and his own stake and scrambled to his feet. He grabbed Lucy by the hand and darted for the door, but rather than joining him, she held fast, her feet rooted to the floor.
"Lucy!" Quin pulled at her arm again, but she stood there aghast at the man she'd attacked. Quin had not looked back at the vampire after he'd dropped him. He brought his flashlight up to see what had fixed her attention so.
The vampire had collapsed to his knees on the unforgiving floor and had taken to keening in a low voice that cracked as it rose and fell. Blood dripped through the man's fingers, which he held clutched over the side of his face where Lucy had struck him. He looked far older, his muscles frail now and his hair growing white. He glared at them both with baleful eyes gone pale with pain and hate.
A rustling sound had started in the rafters overhead. It began as a whisper and grew steadily from there into a full-throated roar. Quin pointed the flashlight upward and saw the other creatures who'd been hanging upside down moving about now, rousing themselves from the
ir slumber.
"We need to leave here, Luce." Quin grabbed her by the shoulders and spoke straight into her face. "Now!"
Luce stared at him in blank horror until something fluttered through the air overhead. This startled her and brought her back to herself. Without a word, she charged straight for the open doorway, and Quin had to sprint to catch up with her.
As they reached the doorway, Quin paused to let Lucy go through first. As he did, he heard something hiss behind him and felt a clawed hand slash down. The sharp talons sliced open the shoulder of his jacket but did not penetrate his skin.
He ducked down lower and dove through the door. Lucy slammed it shut behind him, then turned the key that was still in its lock and threw the deadbolt that would keep it sealed.