“Well, it’s good to meet you all.” Jack turned to the doctor. “How is Heather doing, Doc?”
“I think she is stabilising, but we need to get her to a hospital as soon as we reach port. How did you know this was going to happen? All of your questions this morning…?”
“I don’t know,” Jack lied. “I just had a bad feeling. But you’ve helped her, right? She’s going to be okay?”
“I believe so. As long as I can keep her heart rate under control.”
A noise from behind the doctor made everyone in the room jump. It was Heather on the examination table. She was having some sort of seizure, but, almost as soon as it had started, it stopped. Doctor Fortuné hurried over to the girl and placed his stethoscope against her chest, moving it around frantically. The concern on his face made it obvious that her heart was doing things it wasn’t supposed to. He started performing CPR, pressing down on Heather’s chest and using a breath pump on her face. He kept at it for several minutes while Jack started to get worried. The girl’s parents were frantic.
“Get away from her, Doc,” Jack warned. “I don’t think you should be that close to her.”
Ivor shoved Jack hard. “What are you playing at, man? She needs help.”
Jack ignored the shove and rushed towards Doctor Fortuné, tackling the medic around the waist and moving him away from Heather.
Vicky wailed in torment while her husband shouted obscenities.
Heather sprang up on the bed. The little girl glanced around the room curiously like a freshly hatched vulture. Vicky cried out with joy and raced across the room to her daughter.
There was no time for Jack to stop her.
Heather leapt off the table and met her mother in an embrace. Vicky squeezed her daughter tight, tears streaming down her face. “Thank God,” she said. “Oh, thank God.”
Heather bit her mother’s neck, tearing her jugular in two. Blood arced high enough to splatter the florescent lights overhead and cast spotty shadows over the room.
Ivor screamed, probably for the first time in his life if his tough military exterior was anything to go by. Doctor Fortuné stood there, stunned, but Jack acted fast. He grabbed Heather around the throat and dragged her back towards the examination table.
“Get something to tie her down,” Jack shouted at the other two men.
Jack expected Ivor to resist him, but the Major was more than willing to comply. He and the doctor upended the room looking for something to use for bindings, and eventually they found several bundles of dressing tape and a roll of bandages. Quickly, they brought it over to Jack.
“Ivor, grab her feet, and I’ll get her wrists. Doc, you strap her down.”
The doctor ran the tape beneath the examination table and wrapped it up around Heather’s body in tight circles. Heather kicked and squirmed, and by the time Jack was done, she looked like an Egyptian mummy. The final roll of tape was used to bind her forehead to the table, keeping her head in place.
With one crisis over, Ivor’s focus turned to his wife who was bleeding on the floor. The husband dropped to his knees and cradled his wife in his arms. “Jesus Christ, we need to help her. Doctor, do something.”
Doctor Fortuné grabbed a bundle of gauze and bandages and did his best to cover Vicky’s neck wound. The blood seeped between his fingers, but slowed down a little. The final thing he did was inject her with something, which Jack presumed was a clotting agent. Ivor kept his hand pressed tight against his wife’s neck, placing as much pressure as he could. The ex-army man didn’t need to be taught basic first aid.
“Is that all you can do?” Ivor shrieked. “You have to stop the bleeding.”
The doctor shook his head. “I cannot. I am not a surgeon.”
Ivor began to sob, holding his wife in his arms. The doctor looked shaken, so Jack put a hand on his bony shoulder and turned him around. There was only a small window of opportunity to get answers.
“What do we do, Doc?” Jack asked. “What’s wrong with the girl?”
The doctor stood in a daze for a moment, staring down at Heather on the examination table. The girl was gnashing her teeth, as though she were chewing the very air itself. Her eyes were red and bleeding. He went and placed his stethoscope against the girl’s chest, then looked at Jack with a complete lack of understanding written across the creases of his face.
“This cannot be,” he said.
Jack stared hard at the man. “What? What is it?”
“She has no heartbeat.”
“Are you telling me that she’s dead?”
The doctor took a penlight from his breast pocket and shined it into Heather’s eyes. She snapped and hissed as his hand got close to her mouth.
“What do you see?” Jack asked. “Why are her eyes bleeding?”
“I don’t know. It’s some kind of subconjunctival haemorrhaging. Her pupils are not reacting to the light and are unable to focus.”
“She’s not breathing,” Jack noted.
The doctor looked at the girl’s chest. It was completely still. “I believe she is dead,” he stated matter-of-factly. “At least, she should be.”
“What the hell are you lunatics talking about?” Ivor shouted from the floor. Vicky was growing weaker in his arms. “If she’s dead, then how on earth is she moving, you imbeciles?”
No one said anything. The situation was beyond rationalization. Jack stared down at Heather and watched her mouth working feverously. He knew that she wanted to taste human flesh and, if they unbound her, she would immediately attack the nearest person in sight. Maybe it was a biological imperative of the virus coursing through her body – a way of spreading itself to new hosts. An infected host bites an uninfected host and passes on the virus through saliva.
Jack frowned and began to understand something. Passes it on…
Before he had chance to say figured anything out, Ivor wailed in fright. Vicky had gouged her fingernails into his cheeks and was pulling his face towards hers. Her strength must have been twice what it usually was, for Ivor was powerless as she sunk her teeth into the chubby flesh beneath his left eye. It almost looked like they were kissing passionately, but Ivor’s screams suggested otherwise.
Jack grabbed Ivor around the collar and tried to drag him away, but Vicky hung on with her teeth. Jack pulled harder, until the flesh of Ivor’s cheek ripped away. Ivor stopped his screaming long enough to get to his feet, but continued whimpering like a little boy. He stumbled away from his wife and shook his head. “What in damnation is happening to my family?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “Just keep away from your wife.”
Vicky rose to her feet awkwardly like a puppet risen up on tangled strings. She scanned the room with feral eyes. There was a brief moment of inactivity, a brief pause while nobody moved, but then she lunged. Her bloody fingertips stretched towards the gaping wound on Ivor’s face, as thought the sight of her husband’s blood excited her.
Ivor probably could have killed most men with a single punch to the throat, but he was unwilling to retaliate against his own wife, so he allowed Vicky to collide with him, and the two began to wrestle. Jack came up behind the Vicky and grabbed her in a full nelson, pinning her arms above her head while restraining the movement of her head – and jaws.
“Okay,” Jack said, struggling to restrain the woman in his arms. “Ivor…listen to me. I need to know exactly how your daughter could have caught this thing. Has she been in contact with somebody else who was sick? What about you and your wife? You both have it, too. Have you been exposed to anything?”
Ivor was flustered. Understandably so, for his family was dead, yet he somehow found the strength to concentrate and answer. “We came straight from the airport in Palma. We were with a bunch of other passengers the whole time who were all perfectly fine.”
Jack needed more. He needed answers. “You and your wife were arguing the day you came onboard. What about?”
“Arguing? I don’t know what you’re talking abou
t.”
“Yes, you do,” Jack said, still struggling to restrain Vicky thrashing about in his arms. “Does it have something to do with why you’re sick?”
“Of course not.”
“But you admit you were arguing?”
Ivor shook his head and seemed to battle with the fringes of despair. “We…we were arguing about what was for the best. I had an old friend from the forces waiting for us in Germany, all ready to help us disappear. Vicky was having second thoughts.”
Jack was confused. He’d expected the conversation to lead somewhere else. “Second thoughts about what?”
“Vicky turning herself in.”
Jack frowned. “What the hell are you talking about? What did she do?”
Before Ivor had time to answer, Doctor Fortuné let out a sudden yelp. Jack turned his head to see that Heather was partially free from her bindings and was now sat up on the examination table. She was munching on something, and when the doctor turned around he was holding out his right hand and trembling. He was missing a thumb.
Jack thought about what happened to Vicky after her daughter attacked her and reached an unwelcome conclusion. “Doctor, I’m sorry, but you’re infected now. You need to isolate yourself somewhere, quickly.”
But the doctor wasn’t listening. He stumbled around the room deliriously, gushing blood from his thumb-stump. The sudden commotion caused Jack to lose his grip on Vicky. She pulled free of his grasp and pounced on her husband, tearing out his windpipe before he even had time to scream.
Ivor crumpled to the floor, dead.
Jack acted quickly, scouring the room for something to defend himself with. Even though he knew dying would result in nothing more than waking up again at 1400hrs, he couldn’t help but fight back. It was his instinct, a human behaviour rooted deep inside him and making it impossible to accept any sort of death willingly. There was also the fear that, eventually, the spell would end and whatever happened to him would be permanent. There was a part of Jack that longed for death and welcomed an end to his nightmare, yet he was finally beginning to get somewhere.
A glass paperweight sat on a nearby stack of papers. Jack wrapped his fingers around it and hefted it through the air with all his might. It cracked against Vicky’s skull just as she turned to face him.
The paperweight was as solid as Jack had hoped it would be and he heard it shatter against Vicky’s skull. She crumpled to the floor, like a curtain cut from its railing.
Jack had come up against the infected dozens of times now, ever since his first encounter in High Spirits, and it seemed like the best way to put them out of action was blunt-force trauma to the skull. Jack was absolutely certain of it now.
Ivor lay dead on the floor, but Jack knew it would only be a matter of time before he was on his feet again, windpipe dangling down his chest but still snarling. But there was a bigger threat to deal with right now.
Heather was still sitting up on the examination table, reaching out for Doctor Fortuné who was frantically cleaning his wound in a nearby sink. Heather, who had just been declared medically dead by a professional, was almost free of her bonds now, with only the ones wrapping her legs still remaining. Jack still didn’t have the ability to hurt the girl, regardless of whether she was dead or alive, so he grabbed more tape from a nearby cabinet and wrestled her back down to the table. He managed to secure her without being bitten and was confident that she would be held in place long enough for him to get his ass out of there. Not that there was anywhere to run.
He picked up the bloody paperweight from where it lay cracked and broken on the floor and turned to Ivor’s bleeding corpse. It felt wrong to bludgeon the skull of a dead man, but it had to be done, so Jack raised the paperweight above his head like a caveman brandishing a rock and brought it down on Ivor’s forehead just as the old Major opened his blood-soaked eyes. Jack was sorry he hadn’t done it quick enough to spare Ivor from coming back.
Jack stood back up. His red t-shirt was darker in patches where blood stained the fabric. He had blood on his face and hands, too. It stirred memories in him that he wished he could erase – memories of his partner lying dead in his arms, another innocent victim of humanity’s rotten core.
Jack placed the gore-encrusted glass cube down on the nearby desk and took some deep breaths. Death surrounded him, the room filled with it. He was nauseous and weary, lost in an endless abyss of screaming terror and unbearable pain. Everyday the same, however different it might appear to be.
Something clamped down on Jack’s shoulder. His trapezius muscle burnt with searing splinters of agony. Doctor Fortuné had turned, and Jack had paid the price for turning his back. He’d been bitten.
He punched the doctor away, then placed a hand to his ragged shoulder and felt the blood coursing from his neck. Jack had been torn to shreds a dozen times by the infected passengers – a dozen different ways on a dozen different nights – but he had never been bitten and left to turn. He had to be infected now. What was going to happen?
Doctor Fortuné launched another attack.
Jack dodged to the side and pushed the doctor to the floor, before deciding to make a run for it. He flung open the door to the office and sprinted out into the corridors of C Deck, leaving the medical bay behind him and heading for the passenger section of the deck.
When he got there, he found it filled with eyebleeders. They wandered between the cabins, dragging anyone uninfected from their rooms as they opened up to see what the commotion was.
Jack skidded on his heels, but his knees were weak and he tripped and fell helplessly to the blood-soaked carpet. He ended up on his back, looking up at the chaos that surrounded him. People were being torn limb from limb, their flesh gouged by human teeth, children and adults both. Jack was powerless to help any of them – he always was. Every night he was an impotent witness to a thousand deaths. But tonight, for some reason, the eyebleeders were ignoring him.
And part of him knew why.
Jack’s vision went cloudy and a dull buzzing filled his skull. It was becoming hard to think…to feel. His entire body was numb, and it took only a few minutes more before he lost all sense of himself. His eyes began to bleed and he got up off the floor to join the shambling mass of infected.
Day 103
Jack woke up screaming. He leapt out of bed and immediately started trashing his room, ramming his fists into the television and making them bloody a covered in glass splinters. Then he ripped the bedside cabinets away from the wall and hurled them across the room. He kicked holes in the wall. He pulled doors from their hinges. When security finally came to apprehend him, they locked him inside the ship’s brig and left him there. The tiny, square room kept Jack safe from the infection that night and he sat there in silence until he fell asleep at midnight.
Day 104
Jack woke up and smashed up his room again. He spent another night in the brig. It was safe there.
Day 198
Jack had given up hope. The last slither of it had died the night Ivor and his family had died in the medical centre. No matter what Jack did, he couldn’t stop the infection. He couldn’t prevent the passengers from turning into monsters. Nor could he find out what was the cause of it all. Even if he did know, it wouldn’t do any good. It would still kill everybody all the same.
He’d stopped trying to find answers, had stopped wondering why this was happening, or whether or not he was in hell. He dragged himself out of bed at 1400hrs every day and went outside, performing the same rituals over and over. The routine had even started to become comforting in some strange way, and Jack looked forward to the seagull at his window and prepared himself for the boys racing down the Promenade Deck. Predicting the recurring elements of his day made Jack feel in control, made him feel that he was the master of his own existence. It was all he had.
The sun was out above the pool, as it always was. One of Jack’s few blessings was the warmth of its rays. It was the only thing that still connected him to the world. He
was stuck on a cursed ship in the middle of a featureless sea, but he still shared that same sun with the people in Mexico and Japan and England. He was still connected to them in some small way.
Jack decided to take a dip in the water today. He took off his t-shirt and dropped it onto the floor. He stepped in front of a small boy running around the edge of the pool and caught him just as he was about to fall. The boy wouldn’t know it, but Jack had just saved him from a nasty knee-scrape. He received no thanks for it, however; he never did whenever he saved the boy.
Jack sat on the side of the pool and dangled his legs in the crystalline water. Once he was ready to engulf himself in the cold kiss of the pool, he slid down beneath its surface. The water was cold enough to make him shudder at first, but after a few quick breaststrokes, his body adjusted. The sun beat across his shoulder blades and the soothing sensation flowed down all the way to his toes. Kids swam and played all around him, splashing water and throwing inflatable balls to one another. In spite of Jack’s usual depression, he actually found a moment of brief respite. The pool was relaxing and he started to feel happy, but it would only be temporary. The pool would soon lose its charm if he were to spend more than a day or two coming there in a row. Everything he did became boring eventually. He couldn’t even gamble in the casino, for he knew the cards before they were dealt.
He waded over to the edge of the water and placed his forearms against the cool cement of the pool’s coped edge. He let his legs float away behind him and closed his eyes, trying to blank his mind, to forget that he was trapped in an endless limbo. He wondered if it was his punishment. Was it what he deserved for what he had done? The murders he’d committed? Had his actions damned him to hell? Was he evil?
Jack never thought of his actions as murder – more as justice that could not be rendered in any other way – but perhaps some celestial judge saw it differently. If there was a God, maybe He saw murder as a sin regardless of motives. Jack could admit that he was a killer, but there was no way he would ever admit to being an evil man. In the grand scheme of things, he was firmly planted on the side of good – he knew it in his heart. Especially when compared to the countless wicked souls he had spent his lifetime apprehending. He’d spent a majority of his existence trying to help others, trying to make the world a safer place. If this was his reward – damnation – then God could go straight to Hell himself. If He thought He could have done better, then He should try living on this rotten earth for a while. Maybe then God would understand the true shithole he had created.
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