“Shadows!” I reprimanded. I was already scared enough; I didn’t need to hear any more Vincent Price bullshit from them. “Are you helping us or not?”
They didn’t answer me. “Goddammit—if you brought me here the least you could do is help!” I stood and pulled the sheet off us. “Rory, I’ve got to go back out there. I need a key that Raluca has—”
“Why?” He gathered the sheet up to his chest, as if it would still hide him.
“Because I’m still searching for my friend. And because we can’t stay here. We’ll wind up like they did.” I pointed at the corpse crowd. Now that we were out from underneath the sheet, the windows set into the doors let in some ambient light, enough to see the feet of the first row.
“He can stay here. If he leaves the light off,” said the Shadows from somewhere in the dark.
“I’m coming with you.” He dropped the sheet and practically ran for the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We looked both ways in the hall, and then trotted back the way he’d come. I didn’t know what I’d do if we heard or saw anyone—we weren’t armed—but luckily no one met us. We opened the last set of doors, out to the tender dock. It was a wide room with garage-like doors that opened out to the sea. Emergency lighting illuminated bodies, and waves from the storm outside grasped like hands, slapping and spraying, reaching in and then sloshing back out. I was about to run across when Rory grabbed my bad shoulder.
“Fuck,” I hissed.
“Hang on. If they’re military, they might have thermal imaging.”
The kid had a point. And way to get his head back in the game. But his hand on me was still like ice from our time in the freezer.
“Where do you think Raluca fell?”
“Over there, I think.” He pointed across the berth. If she was still there, if the ocean hadn’t pulled her out.
“I’ll go. Just—here.” I handed him the papers I’d stolen from Dr. Haddad that I still hadn’t gotten a chance to look at yet. “Find Nathaniel Tannin’s room number for me.” I crouched and crept toward where he’d pointed.
I couldn’t imagine two boats managing to stay close to each other with all these waves. I’d probably find out if they had thermal imaging just a second after I got sniped. I snorted, and stayed low, hoping that the spray of water, the fog from outside, and the residual chill from the morgue would hide me—or that no one was even looking in the first place.
The standing water that had gotten trapped inside and the rocking of the waves gave the floating bodies a mockery of life, making them look like they were restless and still breathing. Unlucky helpers, and the sick who’d been queued up for transport outside—the rescue boat must have always been a sham. Nathaniel knew that, as did the officers who were keeping the Maraschino hidden by the storm, communications cut—none of the people in here had ever had a chance.
I found Raluca. Machine-gun fire at close range had practically sawed her in two, opening her up like a massive shark-bite. Her radio was still in an outstretched hand. I took it from her and tucked it inside my sling. And then I realized with revulsion that I’d have to stick my good hand into the carnage of her lower half and into her pockets to search for the master key.
That key felt like the only way I’d find Asher. Only my determination to not go through the rest of this alone—the next eighteen years or the next five fucking minutes—made me plunge my hand in, almost blind.
I felt things inside her quivering.
Guts didn’t quiver—although whatever I was feeling made mine shake. Bile rose, and only a more profound revulsion about possibly puking into a corpse stopped me from throwing up again.
Raluca was definitely dead. There was no way any part of her had survived. She was practically torn in two. And yet something inside her that wasn’t a heart was moving, thrashing around in slowing circles like a lizard’s dropped tail. I saw the end of it, dark and leathery.
Rory hadn’t been lying. The worms were real.
Had they attacked her after she fell? Or were they inside her all along? I didn’t want to know. I found her denim waistband with my fingers and tried not to look as shoved my hand in.
It took me two pockets to find and pull out a keycard drenched in gore. And just in case it was hers and not the master key, I kept going on the other side. It was just as well—there was no way I would ever talk myself into doing this again.
I held the keycard out, damp with blood and worse, and I wanted to run to the open door and wash my hands in the sea. It wasn’t safe—and I stopped to wonder if it, whatever it was, had me. I waited half a second. I wasn’t thirsty. My attraction to the water was just me wanting to get clean. Right? I stepped away from her body and found a puddle, one that was seawater and not blood, and tried to rinse my hand and the key off.
I looked back. I couldn’t see what I’d felt move inside Raluca anymore. And the thought that maybe it had ditched her and was out here somewhere with me … not worrying about snipers, I ran back to meet Rory at the door.
“Did you find it?”
“Yeah.”
“Is she dead?” Rory asked, with a mixture of denial and hope.
“Oh, yeah.” His expression fell. “Sorry.” At least I hadn’t told him that I could have worn her colon like a glove. “Did she seem well when you all came down here?”
“Yeah. Why?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
If the medical ship had never been a rescue ship, why was it here now? Why were they shooting people? The first and most plausible reason for that was that they didn’t want any survivors. The second was that whatever we’d gotten exposed to, they couldn’t let back out.
“He’s in room eight twenty-two,” Rory said, and handed my papers back to me. “Should we go try out your key?”
The emergency lights were just bright enough for me to see the tracks of fresh tears on his cheeks. Everything he’d been through—it wasn’t fair. I needed to find Asher, but I also had to live with myself afterward.
“Yeah. But we have to make one more stop first.”
* * *
We listened—the people canvassing the ship would have no reason to hide themselves, seeing as they were probably covered in body armor. I assumed they would be coming up through the ship slowly—possibly even going down belowdecks to finish the crew off first. I knew from experience that a clearing a cruise ship room-to-room would take a long time.
Rory and I reached the staff elevators, but instead of pressing 8, I hit the 6. Rory gave me a questioning look but didn’t say anything.
He followed me as I got my bearings and we jogged down the hall. There was no point in going to my empty room—I knocked on the room next door instead.
The door shifted as someone inside leaned against it to look out, and I relaxed—they hadn’t both gone over the balcony at least. I heard the latch go, and Hal opened up the door. “You’re back! What happened to you? You look like hell.”
“Things aren’t good.” I pulled Rory inside behind me and quietly closed the door. “There was supposed to be a medical rescue ship for the sickest patients. Instead men with guns got off it and started killing people.”
Hal’s face turned steely—his hearing aids must have been in.
“Why?” Claire asked. She was turning her wheelchair around to face us.
“We don’t know. I wasn’t there, and I don’t think they took the time to explain themselves to Rory.” I nodded at the boy, by way of introduction. “This is Hal, and Claire—” I looked around as an afterthought. “Where’s Emily?”
“She wanted to take a bath,” Claire said.
Rory and I both blanched. “No. No no no—” I turned away from Claire and started beating at the bathroom door. “Emily? Emily—you need to come out here right now—”
There was no answer. “What’s going on?” Claire demanded.
“Emily?” I beat on the door harder. “Emily, get out here!”
The bathroom door’s
lock unlatched and a bedraggled Emily opened the door. Unbraided, her wet hair was past her waist. She was covered up with a towel, and her glasses were covered in fog. She peered out and spotted me and her face brightened. “Did you find my daddy?”
I exhaled in a rush. “No. Sorry, but no.”
“What happened to your face?” she asked next.
My cheekbone hurt where Rory’s thrashing had hit it. “I gave you a black eye. Sorry,” he explained. I shrugged, and hissed at accidentally moving my bad shoulder.
“Explain what all this is about,” Hal said, trying to take charge.
“I can’t. There’s no time.” They deserved answers—and I still needed to explain what had happened in the morgue to Rory—but I had to get to the eighth floor before the gunmen did, just in case Asher was there. “My plan is that I take this master key and go upstairs to try to find my boyfriend. I wanted to warn you all about what was going on, but—” I put a hand to my stomach. “I have to try to find Asher still. He’s not dead. He can’t be.”
“And just where do you suggest we all go?” Claire asked archly.
“The third deck is where the lifeboats are. Maybe if you get into them and hide inside—” I suggested, the taste of my own lies thick in my mouth.
“Is your man higher or lower?” Hal interrupted.
“Eight twenty-two,” Rory said.
“Then we’ll go there, with you,” Claire said, as though that were a reasonable request.
I started shaking my head. “I’m not sure what we’ll find there. Maybe nothing—or maybe more people with guns.”
Claire snapped her fingers at the young girl. “Emily, grab your clothes, go put them on fast, please,”
“This isn’t what—” I protested.
“We’re going. You’ve already left us behind once. We won’t let that happen again,” Hal said with finality, agreeing with his wife.
“I don’t mean to be horrible,” I said, while knowing fully that I did, “but I have no idea how we’ll manage to take along someone in a wheelchair.”
Claire gave me a dangerous smile. “Who said I’d be going in that?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
We were the most motley crew I had ever been a part of. Me, one elderly man carrying his thin elderly wife piggyback, a freaked-out teenager, and a wisely scared kid. Going where? Up to the room I hoped my boyfriend and baby-daddy was being held hostage in. Yee-fucking-haw.
Before we’d left the room, Hal had commandeered the radio and flipped through all the stations like someone familiar with the task. The medical station was silent now, which made sense since Dr. Haddad and Raluca were gone—and most of the other stations were people shouting in languages we couldn’t understand.
“We should probably hurry,” Hal had said.
“When we get there, I’m going in with you,” Rory told me.
I frowned at him. “Why?” His kind of brave was the kind you got from shooting people on a screen, with a respawn point.
He cast a glance full of aspersions at the others and shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t want to be left out.”
Maybe even video game players had pride. “Fair enough.”
We crept up to the eighth floor quietly, using the freight elevator at the end of the hall. At least it wouldn’t announce to anyone else what floor we were getting off on. I knew if we met anyone with a gun we’d just get mowed down where we stood, torn in two like Raluca. Hal couldn’t run while carrying Claire, and Emily’s legs were little. She was trotting along like Whisper the pony, holding the elastics of the mask I’d given her like reins. Like so much else I’d already been through today, it was too awful to really think about. Like what would happen if we did get up to Nathaniel’s room and Asher was gone. The dead kind of gone.
We walked down the hall as the numbers rose, and when we neared 822 Hal put his hand out for the key. I shook my head. I wasn’t going to let him go in first, especially not with Claire clinging to his back. I waved my hand so that everyone else would press against the wall to one side, and then I crouched down so that I wouldn’t get shot if the person inside the room was shooting at chest height.
The sound of the lock would give whoever was in there the upper hand. I reached out, slid the key through the sensor, saw the green light, and waited for the sound of shouting or shooting. When nothing responded, I reached up and pulled the lever of the door down and quietly opened the door.
I was almost disappointed. If there was no one guarding in here, then there was nothing left to guard. These rooms weren’t all that different from the ones on the ninth floor—the only difference was the ceiling height. I took off a shoe to keep the door from closing behind me, not so that those in the hall could come in and rescue me, but so that I could quickly run out, and then crept in. I crawled like a monkey holding a piece of fruit to my chest, with my two feet and one good hand. Rory followed me, with slightly more grace.
The first bedroom was full of kid things. Diaper bags, diapers, scattered toys—at least I was in the right place. Rory inhaled to say something and I shook my head before he could speak. Even though it looked abandoned, I still didn’t feel safe. I stood, though, and peeked into the attached bathroom. There was a woman’s makeup bag on the countertop, presumably Liz’s, and oddly unlabeled bottles of pills. I picked one up; it was nearly empty. Whatever was in there hadn’t saved her.
I ducked through the living area, empty, Rory silently behind me, and we walked toward the darkened bedroom on the other side.
I caught a whiff of Nathaniel’s aftershave, and it stopped me cold. I flung out my good arm to press Rory back. In the silence that followed, I could hear my own heart.
“I think we’re alone,” he whispered.
I shook my head. I needed to be certain. I was scared. It’d been so long since I’d been scared I’d forgotten that this was how it felt, like something was gnawing a hole in my belly. Like a baby … or a horrible worm.
At that thought, I grit my teeth and took a step in, letting my eyes adjust to the dark.
* * *
The walls were covered up, papered over, including the balcony’s windowed door. After ten more seconds of silence, I turned on the light.
The images on the papers resolved after that. All the bizarre sea monsters that any fevered sailor’s imagination had ever thought up were on display, meticulously illustrated. From old “Here There Be Dragons” sketches, complete with tails, to darker and more menacing void-spaced ones, images defined by darkness and absence that hurt to look at until you looked away—and then you were forced to wonder what they were doing without your eyes keeping them pinned.
And so many maps. Scattered on the bed, the desk, the floor, on paper crisped with age, edges drawn by hand with ink that looked frighteningly like blood, and a handful of more recent ones with radiating depths indicated by progressive shades of blue, like pools spread out on the floor.
“Whoa,” Rory said, and I didn’t shush him. It was good to hear his voice here, to not be in this place alone.
“Yeah,” I whispered back, agreeing.
“What the hell is wrong with this guy?”
I shoved a map away with my foot so that I could step on carpeting instead. “I don’t know.” And with all this crazy on display, I might never figure it out.
Rory looked around the room again, then to me. “I’ll check the bathroom.”
I realized what he was doing half a second too late—trying to save me from seeing another corpse. I raised my hand to protest, then stopped. If I’d had any doubts about Nathaniel’s ability to sacrifice his own child, this room quenched it. If this was what the Shadows were afraid of—well, I understood. A little. And it forced me to confront a darker truth.
A man who was insane enough to create a room like this would have no problems with killing Asher and then lying to me.
“Rory?” I called out, my voice a question.
“It’s empty in here.” He reappeared in the doorway.
“For real?” I didn’t want to go in there; it would smell more like Nathaniel—
“Honest. I’m sorry. I think.” He did his one-shoulder-shrug thing again. “I’m not sure if that’s worse or better.”
“Neither am I.” I stepped closer to one of the walls. Not all of this ink was dry. Not all of this ink was even ink. I dabbed a finger though a map on the bed and left a dark red smear behind, taking out the corner of what could have been a continent … or, if I squinted right, a horrible leering face. My stomach turned again as I looked at the stain the blood had left on my hand. I would have put it to my mouth to hold my nausea back, but that would make me more likely to throw up. “I’m sorry—” I rushed into the bathroom where he’d just been.
“Take your time!” he called after me.
It did smell like Nathaniel in here. His things, razor, toothbrush, were neatly organized, laid out on a towel. Nothing strange in here, not like the crypt-keeper vault his bedroom was. In here, if I couldn’t see the blood on my hands, I could have pretended that housekeeping was on its way soon, with fresh towels. I turned the cold water on and massaged a bar of soap single-handedly, staining it pink. Whose blood was it? Whose?
When I was mostly sure all the blood was gone, I looked up at myself in the mirror, slinged and exhausted. I’d been pushing myself for two days—there wasn’t much of me left to go. The Maraschino took another sudden turn—away from the “rescue” ship, or toward it?—and my stomach lurched again. That was good, right? It meant that things were okay in there? Or … that I was infested, like Raluca had been. One of those two. I looked at myself in the mirror, trying to see the truth.
“Let’s go,” Rory prompted, his voice farther away. I pushed back from the bathroom counter and looked back into the bedroom, where he stood at the entrance to the doorway at the far side. “I didn’t want to wait in there.”
“I don’t blame you.” The bedroom was like a cave, a shrine to one man’s insanity, the man who was currently taking the whole ship down. After this, I didn’t know if we’d be able to stop him. If I’d been able to find Asher, maybe, there would have been a chance. But not on my own, not now.
Edie Spence [04] Deadshifted Page 16