Reborn

by Kate Danley

  Matt took advantage of the captain’s distraction to leap forward, driving his shoulder into Marcos’ gut. The two of them fell back onto the ladder. Matt yanked him up by the shoulders—and the captain’s right arm came off in Matt’s hand.

  Matt flung the useless arm aside and glanced back at Tanis. “Go,” he said, as the captain leapt up and whipped at Matt with his remaining hand, clawing at Matt’s face with his nails.

  She wasn’t going to leave Matt here to struggle with this demon alone. Dashing over to her hammer, which had come to rest in the bramble’s nest of explosives, she grabbed it, sparing a second to look at the timer. Four minutes.

  She yanked the hammer free, whirled around, and saw Captain Marcos with his knees on Matt’s chest and his fingers trying to dig at Matt’s eyes. She pivoted, putting all her weight behind the hammer, and drove the claw down into the captain’s back, cracking his ribs.

  Marcos reared up with an anguished cry and fell against the bulkhead. Clumsily, Tanis pulled the hammer out, then helped Matt to his feet. Together they ran up the ladder.

  As soon as Tanis and Matt climbed up onto the deck, Matt shouted across to the Demeter, “Get away!”

  To Tanis’ surprise, Carrie didn’t question it, but immediately put the boat in gear and pulled away.

  “Can you swim?” Matt asked Tanis.

  “I can dog-paddle.”

  “Good.”

  They made it to the rail. Just as they were about to jump overboard, bloody fingers clutched at Matt’s throat from behind.

  “Die!” Captain Marcos said, his ribs stabbing through the flesh of his back like bloody sails.

  Matt shoved Tanis and she fell overboard into the choppy sea.

  The water felt like concrete when she hit it. The air was knocked out of her lungs. She tried to suck in a breath and water filled her throat. She tried to cough it out, clawing through the water, clutching for air. Pumping her legs, she didn’t know which way she was propelling herself—sideways, down, or up. She opened her eyes and tried to search through the murky salt water for some sign of the surface, but the stinging pain was too much for her. She shut her eyes again and began to drift down.

  All at once, she was lifted out of the sea by an explosion that boiled through the water and sent her sailing to the surface like a bobbing cork.

  She could see the Demeter, knocked sideways by the force of the shock wave. It righted itself and rocked, back and forth, like a child’s toy.

  Twisting around in the water, Tanis looked for some trace of the other ship. Nothing. It was as if it had never been there.

  A hand grabbed at her from beneath the water. She beat her legs out, kicking with all her sapped strength.

  Something broke the surface of the water with a loud gasp. Matt Cahill, spitting up bloody foam.

  “I really could use two arms,” he said, beating at the surface feebly with his bloody left arm.

  She swam to him and held him in her arms, helping him tread water.

  The Demeter’s rocking had subsided and Wilson was yelling out to the others. He had spotted Tanis and Matt bobbing like flotsam and jetsam in the waves.

  Tanis waved to Wilson frantically. The Demeter swung its nose in their direction and came chugging towards them.

  Matt was looking at the horizon, at the Byzantine ship, sitting, becalmed, on the surface of the sea.

  “We did it,” he said. “We stopped it.”

  Tanis couldn’t help herself. She kissed Matt’s face. It was a celebratory kiss, she told herself, not a romantic kiss. The first one was anyway.

  Then they noticed something moving on the great hulking ship. The oars. They stirred. They reached out. They dipped down. They began to stroke the sea, calmly, deliberately. They began to propel the ship forward.

  The damned ship hadn’t been stopped at all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The Demeter

  The engine sputtered and coughed but refused to turn over. Carrie tried it again. It struggled but refused to come to life.

  Tanis struggled for breath herself. She’d been on the boat for what must have been five minutes by now, but she still couldn’t get enough air in her lungs.

  She looked around at the rest of the crew of freaks on the Demeter. They were wet and bedraggled and looked like they’d been sucked down to hell and spit back out.

  Especially Dr. Dorcott. She was still lashed to the cleat at the rear of the boat and had been twisted and turned when the boat nearly capsized, the fishing line cutting into her flesh as she was flung into the water and back onto the boat with violent rapidity, again and again. It almost robbed her of her composure.

  The rest of them were not much better off. Lowell had been cast overboard and Carrie had to pull him back in with a wooden boathook. Wilson was the only one who looked positively refreshed by the experience. He shook himself dry and looked out at the Byzantine ship as it rowed past them.

  “There she goes,” Wilson said. “Right past us, like an arrow from a bow.”

  “Can’t you get that engine started?” Matt snapped to Lowell and Carrie.

  Lowell was in the trapdoor, half-submerged, looking at the engine, which was swamped with water. “I don’t know about boats,” he said. “I know about trucks. And if this was a truck engine, we’d be fucked.”

  Matt watched the Byzantine ship as it headed away from them. Towards port. Towards Seattle.

  “How can we stop it?” Tanis asked.

  “We have to get on board,” Matt replied. “We have to blow it up.”

  “You said if we went on board we wouldn’t get off.”

  “That’s what I said.” Matt’s face was a mask of determination.

  The engine sputtered, coughed, then turned over, chugging to life. Lowell jumped out of the trapdoor and slammed it shut.

  “It’s running. Don’t ask me how, but it’s running.”

  Carrie shifted the gears.

  “Take it slow,” Matt told her. “Don’t push it.”

  “Which way do we go?” Carrie asked.

  Matt looked at her and she nodded. She pointed the boat towards the Byzantine ship and they slowly crawled in its direction.

  “You don’t want to get near that galley,” Dr. Dorcott said, picking at her split lip. “Trust me. You want to get as far away from that ship as possible.”

  Matt looked back at the doctor, still tied with fishing line to the cleat on the back of the boat. “If we go there, you’re going with us.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” she said. “That’s one of the main reasons I’m telling you to put this boat in gear and head out to sea. A long, long way from here.”

  “What’s going to happen when that ship hits port?” Tanis asked.

  “You saw the video feed,” Dr. Dorcott said. “It’s full of resurrected men. And they’ve been dead a lot longer than you were. They’ve been waiting for over a thousand years. And they’re impatient.”

  “For what?”

  “For their deal to be fulfilled.”

  The engine spat a puff of smoke. Carrie threw it into neutral and let it ride for a second, then shifted it back into gear again. The motor purred like a kitten.

  # # #

  “Good going, Carrie,” Lowell told her.

  They moved closer to the Byzantine vessel. It loomed above them, more like a mountain than a ship.

  The freaks grew silent, in quiet awe.

  “What the hell,” said Wilson, breaking the silence, “it’s just a ship. So it’s full of zombies. It can’t have more than a few hundred. What’s a few hundred zombies against five freaks?”

  “Stop trying to cheer us up,” Carrie said.

  Matt bent down and untied Dr. Dorcott.

  “You’re letting me go? Or you’re going to throw me over the side?” she asked, tentatively rubbing her skin where the fishing line had scratched her raw.

  “If we go over to that ship, you’re going with us,” Matt said.

  “As I said,
it’s not actually in my wheelhouse. But I would like to see it. In the flesh, as it were.”

  Matt turned around and faced the Byzantine galley. Its oars were moving up and down, up and down, so close that he could have reached out and touched them. The hull of the ship rose like a cliff face in front of them, high and impenetrable.

  “How the hell do we get on it?” Lowell asked.

  Matt pointed to the side of the ship, to the oars as they swiveled and turned through worn and burnished holes. “There,” he said, simply.

  “Aren’t there oarsmen on the other side of those?” Tanis asked.

  “Let’s find out,” Matt said.

  The holes were large enough for a man to crawl through and low enough for them to jump to from the deck of the Demeter.

  “How much explosive do we have left?” Matt asked Lowell.

  “Enough,” Lowell replied.

  “All right,” Matt declared. “Let’s get ready.”

  Before Matt could say another word, Lowell hoisted up the suitcase with the remaining explosives in it and jumped up onto the gunwale. Timing it to avoid the sweep of the oar, he pitched the suitcase into the oar hole, then leapt after it. He clutched on to the side of the galley and clambered into the hole, disappearing into the darkness.

  Just then, Carrie pointed up to the deck of the galley. Something was moving out from the surface of the ship, something long and snakelike, with an ornate spigot on the end.

  Dr. Dorcott looked suddenly afraid. She leapt up onto the gunwale herself, ready to dive for the Byzantine ship.

  “What is it?” Wilson asked.

  “Greek fire,” Dr. Dorcott said as she jumped for the oar hole.

  Then a spout of fire shot out of the spigot. Burning liquid, like napalm from a flamethrower, rained down hell on the Demeter.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The Dromon Galley

  Tanis flew through the air.

  She leapt from the Demeter just as the flaming liquid had poured from the Byzantine ship. She hadn’t had enough warning to time her jump properly, so she struck the side of the galley with her outstretched arms and slid down the wooden hull, tearing her flesh.

  Twisting around in midair, she clutched at a huge oar as it descended towards the water. She hit it and the air was knocked out of her lungs. Seizing the oar’s rough wooden surface, she wrapped herself around it and hung on.

  She looked down at the Demeter. The boat was engulfed in flames. As far as she could tell, all the freaks had jumped, either into the water or onto the Byzantine ship—she couldn’t tell which. But there was no retreat. The Demeter was done for.

  Tanis swung her legs around the oar as it began to rise. She inched her way forward, towards the galley. What was on the other side of the oar holes, she didn’t know. But it was the only destination open to her other than the roiling sea.

  Out of the frying pan, into the fire, she remembered her mother saying whenever Tanis made any decision. From hell to Hades.

  She approached the opening, crawling up the oar. The rim of the hole was framed with brass, and she reached out to it, her hand slipping on the cold metal.

  The oar shifted, making the turn from up to down. It was now or never. She dropped off the oar and pushed herself towards the dark hole. Her hands slapped at the brass surface, and she slipped down, feeling her body fall.

  At the last second, her fingers gripped an engraving in the brass. She hung there, her legs dangling, the choppy sea far below her.

  Tanis pulled herself up, muscles and tendons strained past the limit of endurance. She could smell the fetid air from inside the galley. Her legs swung up and her heels hooked on the edge of the opening. Pausing only long enough to take a deep breath, she propelled herself into the dark bowels of the Byzantine ship.

  And into the lap of a living corpse.

  The corpse was dressed in rags and it clutched the oar in front of it as if that were all there was in the world. Its skin was withered and wrinkled, like ancient parchment. Its flesh looked like it would crumble to dust if she touched it, but her shoulder rested in the living corpse’s lap and it supported all her weight without a whimper. It felt like she was sitting in an old leather chair. The corpse didn’t even acknowledge her, but rather just kept pulling on the oar, as did the one next to it on the bench. They put all their strength into moving the oar and didn’t even turn their dead eyes towards the woman who had invaded their space so abruptly.

  Tanis crawled gingerly off them and stood on the deck, her eyes adjusting to the dim interior, her stomach roiling at the stench.

  The dark aisle, the low ceiling, and the heavy oppression of the sheer number of slave corpses toiling at the oars filled Tanis with a sense of dread. There must have been hundreds of them. Maybe more.

  But as her pupils dilated, she could just make out Lowell and Carrie standing under the curved beam of the galley’s interior. They were going through the suitcase, pulling out tubes of explosives so intently that when Tanis walked up to them, they jumped.

  “Tanis,” Carrie said. “You made it.”

  “Barely. Who else is here?”

  Carrie and Lowell exchanged a look.

  Someone spoke up from the depths of the ship. “We’re it,” the voice said.

  Tanis strained to see who was speaking. It was Dr. Dorcott, bending over, full of curiosity, examining one of the oarsmen as he rowed.

  “But Wilson?” Tanis asked. “And Matt?”

  “They’re not here,” Carrie said bleakly.

  “The Greek fire got them,” Dr. Dorcott said enthusiastically. “No one alive has seen that weapon. Not for a thousand years. Some people didn’t even believe it was real. What a privilege it was to see it in action.”

  “A privilege? It almost killed us.”

  “Well, something is going to kill us,” Dr. Dorcott said. “We might as well face that. We were dead the moment we decided to go on this ship. Every second we exist is pure gravy. Let’s enjoy it. Otherwise we’ll just be like this one.” She gestured towards an oarsman, blindly rowing them on.

  “Why don’t they react to us?”

  “Because they’re dead. They can only do one thing at a time. They’re dreadful at multitasking. And right now, that one thing is rowing. When they get to land? That’s when the real fun will begin.”

  “Come on, we’ve got to blow this ship up,” Lowell said. “We’ll place charges against the bulkheads here and over there.”

  “Where is the timer?”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “So how do we set it off?”

  “Press this button,” Lowell said, displaying a red button connected with short wires to a bundle of explosives.

  “That’s suicide.”

  “You bet. So is that one,” he said, gesturing to another button and another bundle.

  “I’ll do it,” said Tanis.

  “Sorry,” said Carrie, “I already called it.”

  “Get out. Swim. Get away. We got this,” Lowell said.

  “I can’t leave you,” Tanis said. “Not now.”

  “She’s right,” Dr. Dorcott said. “It’s too late.”

  “What do you mean?” Lowell asked.

  “Look.”

  They followed her gaze to the back of ship. To the ladder that led up to the deck. To the men in white robes descending the ladder with short swords in their hands.

  They looked stronger than the oarsmen, less desiccated, more alive. And their eyes gleamed with an eerie yellow light.

  Tanis gripped her hammer, ready to fight.

  “Who are they?” Tanis asked.

  “Those are the lords. They’re the ones whose job is to kill us,” Dr. Dorcott said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The Dromon Galley

  The dead lords approached, their daggers held like a wall of spikes in front of them.

  Tanis wielded her hammer above her head. Lowell’s hands started to burn. Carrie began to glow brilliantly.

&nb
sp; “How exactly will that power help you?” Dr. Dorcott asked.

  “It’ll help them spot you,” Carrie replied.

  The dead lords struck, their daggers thrust forward.

  Tanis blocked a dagger with her hammer, twisting in and forcing it aside.

  Lowell grabbed the nearest dead lord by the hand and felt it sizzle and burn.

  Carrie glowed with a white-hot light, and the dead lords blinked and winced, their eyes blinded by the intensity of it.

  Dr. Dorcott tried to run but was enveloped by the dead lords. The last Tanis saw of her, she was being swallowed by them, carried into the mass of white-robed men like a paramecium being eaten by an amoeba.

  Then something happened to Carrie. Her light went out and they were all plunged into darkness.

  Tanis struck out with her hammer, feeling the satisfying thunk of metal hitting bone. She crouched down and lunged forward, pushing through the robed figures like a wide receiver doing an end run down the football field.

  Thrashing with her hammer from one side to the other, she knocked the lords aside and would surely have reached her goal if she’d had one. But there was nowhere to run but further into the hell that was the Byzantine ship.

  She stumbled over a hatch and fell headlong onto the deck, dropping her hammer as she fell. By then her eyes had adjusted enough to the dimness to allow her to see a lord looking down at her, his eyes glowing with the sickening yellow light, a dagger up-reached, ready to strike at her. She felt in vain for her hammer on the deck around her.

  Just then a set of fangs fastened on the wrist of the hand that held the dagger. A growling, snarling beast leapt on the lord from behind and brought him down on top of Tanis. Wilson’s dog, his mouth foaming in fury, bore down on the hapless lord’s back and tore at his desiccated flesh.

  Tanis struggled out from under the lord as Wilson’s dog continued to rip him apart. Twisting around on her stomach, she crawled to the nearby hatch and lifted it open. She could pry it open only enough to allow herself to crawl inside and drop headlong down the ladder, further into the bowels of the ship.