The family headed for the consultation room and Jack started to go with them, but Ivor put a meaty fist against his chest. “I’m not sure what your situation is, friend, but I politely request that you stay away from my family.”
Jack could tell it was a veiled threat and decided not to push it. If his plan worked then the doctor would help the young girl, if not then the night would end as it always did and nothing would be any worse off. Jack’s only intention was to find out if the infected passengers could be helped – or even cured. Maybe if he found a way to save them, he would be released from the hellish prison he found himself in every day. Perhaps that was the reason he was here.
He needed to stay close to see what happened, so Jack took a seat on the same green bench he’d been sitting on earlier in the day. From inside the nearby office, he could hear the voices of the worried family and the concerned doctor. Ideally, Jack would like to have been involved in the conversation, learning whatever he could. He was almost certain that the little girl was the one to bring the virus onboard, but he had no idea how she’d caught it in the first place.
Jack looked at his watch. It was five-past-eight. There wasn’t long left. All around the ship there would be infected people gearing up to explode in fits of animalistic rage. There was nothing to lose now, so Jack stood up and pushed open the door to the doctor’s office.
Ivor glared at Jack as he entered, but didn’t say anything. His little girl was laid out on the examination table, breathing in shallow gasps. Her condition was bad. Jack already knew that, of course, but he had never been this close to one of the infected right before they turned into an eye-bleeding monster.
“How is she?” Jack asked.
“She’s tachycardic,” the doctor replied. “You were right to bring her to me. I’ve given her something to slow her heart rate, but it is still worryingly fast.”
The girl’s mother, Vicky, was sobbing on a chair in the corner, while her husband stood beside her. Jack went over to them both. “I’m sorry for deceiving you both,” he said.“I could just tell that she needed help.”
“Thank you,” Vicky told him between sobs.
“How did you know?” Ivor asked. “You’re not even a nurse.”
“No,” said Jack. “I’m not. I’m a police officer, and ex-army like you. I guess I’ve become pretty good at sensing danger.”
Ivor seemed to lower his guard and shook Jack’s hand. “Major Curtis.”
“Sergeant Wardsley. Pleased to meet you, sir.”
Ivor laughed. “Been a while since I had a sergeant calling me that. Takes me back.”
“You been retired long?”
“Good ten years now. I married Vicky two years before I signed out. Wanted to spend time with her. Have a family while I still had some lead in my pecker. A few years later we had this little gift from God, Heather.”
“Well, it’s good to meet you all,” said Jack. He 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,” said Jack.“I guess 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.
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. The doctor started performing CPR, pressing down on Heather’s chest and using a breath pump on her face. He kept at it for several minutes and Jack started to get worried. The girl’s parents beside him were frantic.
“Get away from her, Doc,” Jack said. “I don’t think you should be so close.”
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 the girl.
Heather sprang up on the bed. She glanced around the room curiously, like a newly hatched bird. Vicky cried out with joy, raced across the room towards her daughter. There was no time for Jack to stop her.
Heather leapt off the table and met her mother in an embracing hug. Vicky squeezed her daughter tight, tears streaming down her face. “Thank God,” she said.
Then Heather bit into her mother’s neck, ripping her jugular vein in two. Blood arced high enough to splatter the florescent lights 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 was standing there stunned, but Jack pushed past him and acted fast. He grabbed Heather around the throat from behind and dragged her back towards the examination table. “Get something to tie her down,” he shouted at the other two men.
Jack had expected Ivor to resist him, but the Major seemed more than willing to comply. He and the doctor upended the room, looking for something to use for bindings. They eventually found several bundles of dressing tape and a roll of bandages. They quickly 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. The little girl kicked and squirmed against him. By the time he was done, Heather 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 dying on the floor. He dropped to his knees and cradled her in his arms. “Jesus Christ, we need to help her.”
Doctor Fortuné grabbed a bundle of gauze and bandages and did his best to cover the wound. The blood still seeped between his fingers, but it at least slowed down a little. The final thing the doctor did was inject her with something, which may have been a clotting agent. Ivor kept his hand tight against the wound, 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. Jack put a hand on his bony shoulder and turned him around. There was only a small window of opportunity to get as many answers as he could from the man.
“What do we do, Doc?” Jack asked. “What’s wrong with the girl?”
The doctor stood in a daze for a moment. He stared 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.
Doctor Fortuné placed his stethoscope against an area of the girl’s chest beneath the bandages. He moved the head of the instrument around for a few moments, 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?” Jack asked. Such a thing was impossible, but it didn’t surprise him in the least. The doctor could have told him anything right now and he would have accepted it willingly. That was how horrifyingly bizarre his world had become.
The doctor took a penlight from his breast pocket and shined it into Heather’s eyes. She snapped and hissed as his hand got closer.
“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 either and they se
em 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 work feverously. He knew that it wanted to taste human flesh. If they unbound the girl 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.
Passes it on…
Before Jack had chance to say anything, Ivor wailed in horror. Vicky had gouged her fingernails into his cheeks and was pulling his face towards hers. The infected woman’s strength must have been twice what it usually was. Ivor was powerless as she sunk her teeth into the flesh beneath his left eye. It almost looked like they were kissing passionately, but Ivor’s screams said otherwise.
Jack grabbed Ivor around the collar and tried to drag him away. Vicky hung on by her teeth at first, but then the flesh ripped away and she fell backwards. Ivor stopped his screaming long enough to get to his feet but was still 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,” said Jack. “Just get away from her.”
Vicky rose to her feet, awkwardly, like a puppet raised by tangled strings. She scanned the room with feral eyes, snarling like a beast. There was a brief moment of inactivity, a brief pause while nobody moved.
Then she lunged. Her bloody fingertips stretched towards the gaping wound on Ivor’s face. It seemed like the sight of the blood attracted her.
Ivor probably could have killed most men with a single punch to the throat, but he was unwilling to retaliate against his wife – he looked like he would pass out at any moment. Vicky collided with him and the two began to wrestle. Jack came up behind the infected woman and grabbed her in a full-nelson, pinning her arms above her head while restraining the movement of her head (and her lethal jaws).
“Okay,” said Jack, struggling to restrain the woman. “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 that was sick? What about you and your wife? You both have it too. Have you been exposed to something?”
Ivor was flustered. Understandably so; his family was dead. “What? No. 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 about.”
“Yes, you do,” said Jack, still struggling to restrain Vicky thrashing about in his arms. “Does it have something to do with why you’re sick?”
“No! No, of course not.”
“But you admit you were arguing?”
Ivor shook his head and seemed to battle against 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?”
“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 sitting up on the examination table. She was munching on something. The doctor turned around with a mortified expression on his face. He was holding his right hand out in front of him. It was missing a thumb.
Jack thought about what had happened to Vicky after Heather attacked her and quickly reached a conclusion. “Doctor, I’m sorry but you’re infected. You need to isolate yourself somewhere, right now.”
But the doctor wasn’t listening. The man stumbled around the room, delirious, and gushing blood from his thumb-stump. The sudden commotion caused Jack to lose his concentration and his grip on Vicky loosened. She pulled free of his grasp and pounced straight for her husband. She tore out his windpipe before he even had time to scream. Ivor crumpled to the floor, dead.
Jack acted quickly, scouring the room for something with which to defend himself. 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 making it impossible to accept death willingly (even when it was only temporary). 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 this and welcomed an end to his nightmare.
A glass-cube paperweight sat on a nearby stack of papers. It seemed heavy. Jack wrapped his fingers around it and felt confident that it would do the job he needed it to. He 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 the woman’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. It seemed like the best way to put them out of action was blunt-force trauma to the skull. He was sure of that now.
His first success had been the unopened bottle of Glen Grant from his suitcase, which he had used to bash in the face of an elderly woman when she’d attacked him in the corridors of B Deck. There had been many other incidents since then; ending with the glass-cube paperweight against Vicky’s skull.
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. The retired Major would have to be dealt with soon ,but there was a bigger threat at hand first.
Heather was still sitting up on the examination table, reaching out at Doctor Fortuné who was frantically cleaning his wound in a nearby faucet. 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 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’s anywhere to run.
Jack picked up the bloody paperweight from where it lay discarded on the floor. He turned to Ivor’s bleeding corpse and knelt down beside it. It felt wrong to bludgeon the skull of a dead man, but it had to be done. Jack raised the paperweight above his head, like a caveman brandishing a rock. He brought it down on Ivor’s forehead just as the old Major opened his blood-soaked eyes. Jack was just sorry he hadn’t done it soon enough to spare Ivor from coming back.
Jack stood up and looked himself over. His red t-shirt was darker in patches where blood stained the fabric. He had it 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 reconsidered if his fate aboard this ship was really as bad as he thought. It certainly was no worse than the life he’d lived before, with a lifetime’s experience of watching rapists and murderers go free. At least the infected had an excuse for their violence.
Jack placed the gore-encrusted glass cube down on the nearby
desk and took in some deep breaths. Death surrounded him, the room was filled with it, and he felt nauseous. He also felt weary and disorientated, lost in an endless abyss of screaming terror and unbearable pain.
Something clamped down on Jack’s shoulder, making his trapezius muscle burn hot with searing splinters of agony. He spun around.
Doctor Fortuné was infected; and he’d turned. Stupidly, Jack had left his back to the man and had paid the price. He’d been bitten.
Jack punched the doctor away, then placed a hand to his ragged shoulder, felt blood coursing from the wound. 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 merely wounded. What would happen now? Was he infected with the virus too?
Of course I am. That’s how it happens: by being bitten.
Doctor Fortuné launched another attack. Jack dodged to the side and pushed the man to the floor, then made a run for it. He flung open the door to the office and sprinted out into the corridors of C Deck. He left the medical bay behind him and headed into the passenger section of the deck. It was 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. He fell helplessly to the bloodsoaked carpet and 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 of 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 seemed to fill his skull. It was becoming hard to think…or feel. His entire body went numb. It was only a few minutes more before Jack lost all sense of himself and his eyes began to bleed. He got up off the floor and joined the shambling mass of infected.
Sea Sick: A Horror Novel Page 7