Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

“No, don’t!” Amber’s voice was desperate. He glanced at her. “Please don’t kill him!”

  No time to debate. As Justin picked himself up, the steel gate broke along one side, letting in a tide of people even more hideous and misshappen than the pregnant one had been. They tripped over one another in their haste to attack. Justin was swallowed up by their ranks.

  Lito and Amber rushed through the hatch he’d just opened. He tried to slam it back shut, but several gleaming blue arms snaked through, keeping the metal from sealing. They shoved against it, almost flinging him away, but he leaned on the door and pushed against their weight.

  “Careful, don’t let them scratch you!” Amber appeared at his side, helping him hold the hatch shut. The flailing limbs sticking through the crack stank like burnt, rotted meat. “I thought you were dead!”

  “Me too! Where’re Ray and the others?”

  “Out there somewhere! We got separated!”

  There was no way they’d be able to close the door again. They were steadily losing inches as the crush of bodies piled up on the other side.

  “Go on!” Lito told her. “Up the hall! I’ll buy you as much time as I can!”

  Amber shook her head. “You don’t get to play hero twice! On the count of three, we go together!”

  She counted it down, and they jumped away from the door and ran. Behind them, the hatch clanged open. Snarls and screeches filled the empty passage. Lito threw a few blind shots over his shoulder, considered trying to make a stand, but there was just too many of them. He and Amber charged up the corridor with both their flashlights gleaming against the floor and walls.

  Ahead, the hall turned to the left. They careened around the corner and skidded to a stop.

  The deck ended in a ragged line just a few steps ahead. The flooring had corroded straight through, the cancer in its bowels slowly eating its way upward, leaving a black pit several yards long just in front of the door at the end of the hall. Amber shone her flashlight into it, but Lito could see no bottom, just random jutting pipes, and a few slabs of rusted metal.

  “We gotta jump,” he said.

  “I can’t make that!”

  “Yes, you can. I’ll go first so I can catch you.”

  Before he could talk himself out of it, Lito backed up for a running start, charged at the hole, and leapt across. In midair, reaching for the other side, the thought crossed his mind that this was a lot easier than it looked; he was going to hurdle right over the entire pit as nimbly as a gazelle.

  Then the jagged edge of the metal deck on the far side struck him in the stomach and knocked all that optimism out of him.

  He fell backward, sliding into the hole, scrabbling at the remains of the corridor floor, but there was nothing to grab, no place to get a grip…

  Just before he dropped, a hand latched onto his wrist. He looked up into Ray’s face. Tuan stood just behind him, holding the door open.

  “You made it,” his second-in-command said through clenched teeth.

  “You know me, I never miss a party.”

  “Save it, shithead. This is kinda tearin apart the gunshot wound I got savin your ass last time.”

  He and Tuan pulled hard enough for Lito to swing a leg up onto the deck. By now, the howls of the tourists were echoing around them against the cold steel walls. They would be coming around the corner any second.

  Amber came next, and they caught her easily. No sooner had she gotten on her feet than the crush of fiends rounded the corner and began tumbling off the edge without even slowing, their phosphorescent bodies visible as sparks of light as they fell into the pit. They seemed to get the idea after a few seconds and stopped pushing, just stood on the far side and roared with frustration.

  “Where’s Cherrywine?” Amber asked Ray.

  “I don’t know. She ran and I couldn’t follow.”

  “Then we have to find her!”

  “I wouldn’t even know where to start. There’s hundreds of those things out there, and she didn’t have a gun or even a flashlight…”

  “No. Goddamn it, no.” Amber shook her head and then burst into tears for the first time all night. She threw her arms around Lito and sagged against him.

  He held her until Ray finally said, “There’s a stairwell outside. I think it’ll take us topside, but we better hurry. A whole platoon of them split off to follow me and Tuan, and I don’t know if we lost ‘em.”

  They filed out of the security corridor, sealing the hatch behind them to block out the cries of the damned.

  14

  Cherrywine had to wipe sweaty strands of hair out of her eyes as she pelted through the dark mall. The creatures chasing her gave off enough of a glow for her to see where she was going. She could hear them back there, slavering at her heels, but didn’t stop to look back as she climbed a set of stairs leading to the upper level.

  As she sprinted through darkness, she realized it might’ve been a bad idea to leave the others. She was no good in a fight, wouldn’t have known what to do with a gun if she had one, but one of the few activities that held her interest in high school—which seemed so long ago when she was taking off her clothes and jiggling her ass against the erect penises of strangers for money—was running. She’d always been able to run like the wind. And when she’d seen the army of horrible nightmares charging at them, it was all she could think to do. So she just put her head down, pumped her arms, ignored the awkward shoes on her feet, and said a prayer of thanks they weren’t her stripper pumps.

  The upper story of the mall took a sudden turn. She followed it, and the wall of the cruise ship loomed on her left. She let her fingers brush along it as she ran to help keep herself oriented. When debris popped up, appearing suddenly out of the murk, she hurdled the messes rather than try to go around. That bobbling blue light at her back was giving her a headache.

  The line of stores cut off abruptly at the edge of her vision ahead. When she got closer, she understood why: the entire upper floor of the mall and the ancient deck below had collapsed into a chasm so wide she couldn’t even see across it.

  Behind her, one of the creatures gave a triumphant howl.

  A sliver of ledge no more than six inches wide clung to the wall beside her, nothing more than a shelf of rusted, sheared-off steel. Cherrywine eased out onto it, sliding the soles of her borrowed shoes along it and flattening herself against the wall. She worked her way out an inch at a time, trying not to look down at the yawning darkness in front of her.

  The creatures reached the edge of the pit. Several tumbled over the edge into the abyss. A few tried to crawl out after her on the narrow ledge, but with their awkward bodies and twisted limbs, they were too uncoordinated, and ended up falling after their freakish brethren. The rest stood at the edge, hissing and squalling in futile rage as she escaped, like a pack of hunting dogs braying at a treed raccoon.

  She’d outsmarted them. She’d never outsmarted anyone in her life. A nervous giggle escaped her.

  Cherrywine kept moving. The farther she got from the creatures’ glow, the more total the darkness around her became. Soon she was in the middle of a void so black it made her eyeballs ache. Fear almost caused her to freeze up, but she focused on moving her feet along the ledge with one hand stretched out along the wall in front of her.

  It was this hand that first encountered the metal bar, the only deviation in the smooth steel bulkhead. She felt along until she realized it was a ladder, bolted to the wall, for what purpose she had no idea. Cherrywine stepped onto its rungs, praying it would hold her weight, and climbed downward.

  The descent seemed to take hours. The only proof she was getting anywhere came when that blue glow reappeared below her, bleeding into the darkness. She almost stopped climbing until she realized it came from the bodies of the fallen mutants. They lay crushed and broken among the wreckage at the bottom of the pit, surrounded by glowing puddles of irradiated blood, enough to create a world of eerie blue glow down here. She reached the bottom and stepped off t
he ladder, then stood uncertainly as she tried to decide what to do next.

  Tears pricked her eyes. Cherrywine swiped at them angrily. She just had to keep moving, find Amber and the others. And be ready to run.

  The bottom of the pit was a junkyard, with mounds of debris piled everywhere. She picked her way through the crushed remains of shops, decking, and rusted pipes, and almost bumped into a figure that stepped out from behind a huge slab of steel.

  She leapt back with a short scream. In the faint blue light, she recognized Eric, standing ramrod straight in front of her, eyes staring dead ahead above his crushed nose.

  “E-Eric?” she asked. She was so relieved to see anyone that had a normal arm and leg count, she didn’t even care that it was him. “Is that really you?”

  He didn’t answer, just cocked his head to one side as though listening to something.

  “How’d you get here? We thought you’d left to get help and—”

  Eric seemed to notice her for the first time, but his eyes were glassy and empty. She remembered that look, the one he’d given her while he was throttling the life out of her back aboard the yacht.

  “I won’t let you stop it,” he said simply.

  Cherrywine swallowed. “What do you mean? Stop what?”

  He smiled at her, but there was nothing friendly about it; it was cold and indifferent and as empty as his eyes. Maybe it always had been, and she wondered why she didn’t see it when he’d first walked into the strip club and given her an extra fifty bucks for a handjob in the champagne room.

  “The Big Plan, of course,” he said simply. “My destiny.”

  Intuition told Cherrywine it was time to run again. She wheeled around, but he grabbed her, his fingers sinking into her arm. The fight that had swept over her on the houseboat reared up again, and she kicked out blindly, the toe of her boot thudding against his shin. He grunted and stumbled backward, tripping over debris, but his grip never let up. Eric went over backward, dragging Cherrywine with him.

  “Let go!” she screamed. They rolled through the wreckage, her using her free hand to slap at him. His breathing roughened, and she realized she could feel his erection against her leg again.

  Her fingers found the hot lump of his nose. She wrenched.

  Eric bellowed in pain, the cry echoing against the cold steel around them. Cherrywine ripped free of his grasp, got to her feet, and took off running.

  She heard him scrambling up, the clumsy crash of his footsteps, but when she looked back, she found that he was falling behind. He might be in good shape, but spending six hours a day on a stripper pole in positions that would tax a yoga master had her body operating at its peak. Cherrywine leapt over obstacles, while Eric blundered through them.

  And then she skidded to a stop at the edge of another precipice.

  The deck ended again in front of her, the unearthly glow revealing a drop through twisted wreckage. Somewhere at the bottom, she could hear the crash of the ocean.

  Eric stood behind her. She turned to face him. He grabbed her again, but this time, his arms slid around her waist, drawing her close, and he pressed his lips to hers, a more gentle kiss than she would’ve thought him capable of. Eternal optimism had plagued Cherrywine throughout her life, and, even now, she allowed herself to hope that everything would be all right.

  When they parted, he whispered, “I won’t let any of you stop me.”

  He put a hand on her stomach and shoved. Cherrywine felt herself tilting backward, over the edge, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of hearing her scream.

  She fell only a short distance before striking a jutting shard of metal. Something in her arm snapped, with a brief flare of pain like the striking of a match, but before she could worry about that, she was falling again, tumbling through darkness, smashing into other obstructions along the way.

  By the time she hit the water below, Cherrywine was nothing but torn skin and broken bones.

  15

  Justin stood amid the other mutated tourists, but he was oblivious of them. His thoughts were a blue-hued blur, his entire identity erased by the boiling agony in his veins. He wanted to rend, wanted to tear something apart with his bare hands, but only one image could get through the jumble of his brain.

  A girl. One with short, dark hair. He felt like he knew her name once, but couldn’t remember it now. He wanted to find her. To kill her. Or was it kiss her? He couldn’t remember.

  But he knew where she was going. Up. To the higher areas of this place. He would go there too. It took incredible effort for him to stay focused on this goal as he made his way back into the dark mall concourse.

  The other creatures followed him.

  1

  “That piece of shit,” Ray growled. “Oh, that son of a whore.”

  Lito grunted with the effort of helping him up the stairs. “I knew his mom, and she was no whore. That woman would be ashamed of her kid.”

  “If it turns out he’s the one that sabotaged the Steel Runner and got us into this mess, I swear, I’ll kill him before the Dominican ever gets a chance! Shit, I told you, Lito, I fuckin told you that kid was bad news!”

  “I know, I just didn’t think he’d be capable of something like this.”

  They had gone up fifteen flights of stairs by Lito’s count, with Ray leaning on him heavily. Tuan led the way with his AK-47 and a flashlight, and Amber came close on their heels, testing the air with the radiation detector to ensure they didn’t get ambushed by more mutants. All the landings they passed seemed to lead to passenger room floors, the last place they wanted to go. So they kept moving toward the upper decks, and Lito used the opportunity to fill them in on what had happened since he’d left.

  Except for one thing.

  “I’m sorry about Carlos,” Amber said, “but honestly, I’m more worried about Eric being on this ship.”

  Lito mulled that for a second. “Me too, actually.”

  “That rich gringo?” Ray grunted, either in pain or disbelief. “Who gives a shit about that bastardo?”

  “Easy for you to say. You didn’t see him when he attacked me. Like he turned into a robot. He’s totally lost it.”

  “I saw it, too.” Amber admitted. “Back on that houseboat. Plus, he tried to strangle…” She stopped just short of saying the blonde girl’s name.

  Lito wouldn’t feel bad no matter what happened to Eric—that fucker deserved whatever he got—but, as Amber had reminded him once already, the fate of the other white kids was his responsibility. “We’ll look for her. Justin too, if you want. But there’s one other thing you need to know. And you’re probably not gonna like it.”

  Ray tripped over debris on the dark stairs, then hissed in pain and stopped to hold his side. Lito let him sit down to rest. “I don’t think it can get any worse.”

  “I’ll put it this way: the radiation could be the least of our problems.”

  “So tell us already.”

  “I will, but first…” He turned to Tuan, who had taken up a post at the next staircase landing to guard the door. Lito had gotten a hunch at some point since he and Eric parted ways, an idea that grew in the back of his head, and now it was time to see if he was right. “Tuan,” he asked, “what year is it?”

  Ray and Amber waited with curious expressions as he got the idea across as best he could to the soldier. As Tuan began to understand the question, he squinted in confusion and held up fingers to answer.

  2143.

  Lito nodded. It was so obvious now, he couldn’t believe they hadn’t thought to ask before.

  “Wait, what’s he mean?” Ray demanded. “I don’t understand.”

  Lito told them what he’d been holding back, about the calendar in the security office somewhere below, from the year 2027.

  “Dios, dios, dios,” Ray chanted. “Are you tellin me…Tuan’s from the future?”

  Lito shot another glance up at the Vietnamese youth, who was trying hard to follow the conversation. “I don’t think he realizes
that, so let’s not freak him out just yet. But yeah, I think he and those other soldiers got caught up in whatever’s happenin here, their ship protected them from the radiation, but they still ended up here with the rest of the derelicts.”

  “It all makes sense.” Amber crouched on the stairs below and looked up at Lito. “That’s how so many of these ships from centuries ago can look brand new, and why the newer models are so ancient. They haven’t been just sitting out here since they disappeared, they’ve been…what? Jumping through time?”

  “I think so. That would explain the flashlight back on the pirate ship. It was still running because the fucker had probably just come from 1970, just a few hours before.”

  “Fuck the flashlight,” Ray said. “You know what this is? It’s the answer to the goddamn Bermuda Triangle. Every boat, every plane that’s ever disappeared out here—that ever will disappear—they just got…blipped to a different time, like changin the fuckin TV channel or somethin. And the people on them turned into those things.”

  “Might be the answer,” Lito agreed, “but it still ain’t the cause.”

  “Is it random?” Amber wondered aloud. “Or is there a pattern? I mean, why here, why now?”

  “Before we get all wrapped up in the Hardy Boys Solve the Mystery of the Sargasso, here’s my point. Remember what Tuan said, about the bright flash turnin day to night? If that was, like Ray put it, the channel bein changed, then that means the radiation has somethin to do with this, and the next time one of those flashes hits, all these ships are gonna jump again. And, for those boys and girls playin the home version of our game, if we’re all still here when it happens…”

  “We’re goin wherever they go,” Ray finished for him. “All right, I’m terrified. What are we gonna do then? We still need a way outta here.”

  Lito jabbed a finger upward. “First, we get to the top deck, out in the open. I wanna see where we are.”

  2

  The top of the staircase ended at a wide set of double doors that had all but fallen off their hinges. Moonlight filtered in around the edges, and when they pushed through, the four of them found themselves outside once more. The storm had passed, leaving the sky without a trace of clouds. The glittering palette of stars and the orange haze of daybreak to the east were so comforting it made Amber realize that she’d never truly expected to see them again. She stood for a moment and sucked in lungfuls of fresh oxygen, heavenly after the stale, musty air in the lower decks of the cruise ship.