Carpathia
Page 27
Quin and Lucy reached under the boat and hauled the bundle of blankets in which Abe lay wrapped out into the open air. They carefully unwrapped the first few layers around him and then cried out in surprise when the blankets collapsed into an empty pile of cloth. A white mist leaked out of the fabric and soon reformed in front of them as their undead friend.
"Thank you," Abe said. "That may have been the longest day of my life."
"Last night was certainly the longest of mine," Quin said.
"Worse than when the Titanic sank?" asked Lucy.
Quin weighed the two torturous nights back and forth in his hands. "Close enough," he finally said.
They laughed together at that, and Quin reveled in delight at the sound, holding onto it for as long as he could. The three of them stood there in silence then, watching the last bits of the sunset fade across the sky from crimson red to black. None of them wanted to speak, for they knew the questions that must be asked, and they feared the answers.
In the end, Lucy could take it no more. "What do we do from here?" she said.
Quin and Abe glanced at her and then traded uncomfortable looks. "I suppose my plan's the same as ever," said Quin. "I'm heading to New York to look for work."
Lucy nodded. "And I have university starting in the fall. It's a long time until then though."
They both remained quiet then, waiting for Abe to speak.
"I want to live," he said.
"Even like this?" Lucy said.
He raised his eyes to peer at her, but his gaze was so intense that she had to look away. He nodded and looked down at his hands, which Quin thought seemed as human as ever, if a bit pale.
"I'm a monster," he said. "I know. But that doesn't mean I have to live like one."
"How can you say that?" Lucy shuddered. "Don't you have to feed on human blood?"
"We don't know that," Quin said. "We don't know anything other than what Uncle Bram wrote in that blasted book, and who can say how much of that was true."
"Some of it, certainly," Abe said, "but maybe not all."
Lucy's head bobbed up and down as she considered this. "And what happens if it turns out that it is?" She looked up then to see the look of dismay on Quin and Abe's faces. "I don't mean to– I just killed a vampire last night. I don't know if I can handle doing that again."
"Would you kill me, Lucy?" Quin had to strain his ears to make out Abe's whisper. "I don't mean that as an accusation. I'm being serious. Would you do it if I asked you to?"
Lucy lowered her face into her hands, and her shoulders began to shake. "You can't ask that of me, Abe," she said. "You can't. Not ever."
Abe sighed. "I don't plan to Lucy, but if the monster inside me turns out to be something I cannot control…"
Lucy turned toward Quin then and buried her face in his shoulder. Her tears soon soaked through his shirt.
Abe looked to Quin and gave him a helpless shrug. Quin gave him a grim nod. "Should it prove necessary, I would be honored."
Abe's shoulders relaxed at this. He stuck out his hand for Quin, who shook it, ignoring just how cold his old friend's skin had become. "Take care of her," Abe said.
"You know I will."
Lucy released Quin then and flung herself into Abe's arms. "Stay with us," she said. "Don't leave."
Abe put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back far enough that he could look down into her eyes. "I would like nothing more," he said. "But not now. Not yet. Not until I know I can trust myself."
"I was wrong before," she said, sniffling away her tears. "I know you're a good man. We can trust you."
Abe shook his head. "You never were a very good liar, Lucy. That's how I always knew you never loved me."
"I did too!" she said, indignantly. "I still do."
A wan smile crossed Abe's face. "Not the way you love Quin."
Lucy opened her mouth to reply but found she had nothing to say. She clung to Abe again, holding him closer and tighter. "I don't care," she said. "I'm never going to let you go."
"But you can't hold me, darling, no matter how hard you try. No one can." He leaned over and kissed her on the top of the head. The next moment, he was gone, nothing left of him but a white mist on a wind blowing west.
Lucy stood there alone for a moment, then turned and walked to Quin, who had been waiting for her with his arms open wide. She tilted her lips up toward his, and they met in a long and lingering kiss.
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. "Would you consider looking for a job in Boston instead?"
Quin smiled down at her and nodded. "I won't leave you, Luce," he said. "I promise."
About the Author
Matt Forbeck has worked full-time on fiction and games since 1989. Frankly, he is a creative machine, and thus utterly perfect for Angry Robot. His many publishers include Adams Media, AEG, Atari, Boom! Studios, Atlas Games, Del Rey, Games Workshop, Green Ronin, High Voltage Studios, Human Head Studios, IDW, Image Comics, Mattel, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Playmates Toys, Simon & Schuster, Ubisoft, Wizards of the Coast, and WizKids. He has written novels, comic books, short stories, non-fiction (including the acclaimed Marvel Encyclopedia), magazine articles and computer game scripts. He has designed collectible card games, roleplaying games, miniatures and board games. His work has been published in at least a dozen different languages.
Matt is a proud member of the Alliterates writers group, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, and the International Game Developers Association. He lives in Beloit, Wisconsin, USA, with his wife Ann and their children: Marty, and the quadruplets: Pat, Nick, Ken and Helen. (And there's a whole other story.)
forbeck.com
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my understanding and kind editors and the rest of the team at Angry Robot. Special gratitude to Lee Harris for catching my mistakes and to Marc Gascoigne, our Robot Overlord, for his continuing inspiration.
In memory of the more than 1,500 souls who lost their lives when the Titanic went down on that fateful night in April of 1912. You may have been gone one hundred years, but no matter how much time passes, we shall never forget.
The Angry Robot Theme Song Remix Contest
Before I set down to write Carpathia, I had the honor of working with songsmith John Anealio on the song "Angry Robot," which you might recall is the name of the publisher of this book. John had created a short version of the song as the theme song for the Angry Robot podcast hosted by Mur Lafferty, but he wanted to add some verses to make it complete.
John and I had met at the World Fantasy Convention in 2010, and we'd hit it off. Since I was an Angry Robot author, he contacted me to see if I'd be interested in helping him out with the lyric. I grabbed that chance by the throat and throttled it good before John had a chance to change his mind, and in short order we had made a great little song even better.
Then Marc Gascoigne – our esteemed publisher – had the idea of offering up the separated tracks of the song for a remix contest. The prize would be a role in Carpathia as a character to meet a grisly death.
The entries were so good we had a hard time choosing a winner, but in the end we settled on Dale Chase's excellent rap-laden entry. Denis Cherryman took second place, and David Ritter claimed third.
While we'd only promised prizes for the top three winners, we were so taken with the many of the other entries that we decided to toss their creators' names into the book too. They included Justin Achilli, Raleigh Blum, Mike Crooker, David Griffiths, Trevor McPherson, and Chooch Shubert.
For fun, you might want to go back through the book and figure out their individual fates.
If you'd like to hear the songs entered in the contest, John assembled them all into an album you can download for free.
http://bit.ly/iMroft
And you can get the original on his site too.
http://johnanealio.com/track/angry-robot
A Note About Our Winner
I had the hardest time working our
first-place winner into the book for one reason. Dale is African-American, and according to history there weren't any African-Americans on the Titanic. There was a single Haitian family on which I could have modeled Dale's character in the book, but I decided I wanted to be truer to him than that.
Carpathia is fiction, sure, but it's historical fiction. The horrific elements in the book work that much better because they're grounded in the historical reality. So I decided to come up with a plausible story for how an AfricanAmerican musician could have wound up on the ship.
In my research, I stumbled across a popular song from the African-American toast tradition, called "Shine and the Titanic." It's about an African-American stoker who tries to warn the captain about the disaster and then swims all the way back to New York to save himself from the sinking ship.
Of course, things don't work out well for the fictional Dale Chase in Carpathia, but I'd promised the real man a momentous death for his character. I hope he enjoys the terrifying end I delivered.
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Icy dead people
Text © Matt Forbeck, 2012.
Original concept by Matt Forbeck and Marc Gascoigne.
Cover art by Nick Castle.
Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
All rights reserved.
Angry Robot is a registered trademark and the Angry Robot icon a trademark of Angry Robot Ltd.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold and destroyed" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.
ISBN 978 0 85766 202 6
EBook ISBN 978 0 85766 203 3
Printed in the United States of America
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