“So how does he know so many languages?” Claire asked, looking back at me, using a normal voice.
“Um. Shouldn’t we be listening?” I whispered.
“I am,” she said, with a toothy smile.
Seeing as she’d heard us the other night, and now I knew she was a siren—“As a shapeshifter he knows the past of everyone he touched before. When he was younger.”
“And how did a nice girl like you meet someone like him?”
Little did she know. “I worked in a hospital wing for supernatural creatures once upon a time. We treated shapeshifters, daytimers, and weres.”
“Daytimers?”
“Humans who were exposed to vampire blood.”
“Ah.” She made a thoughtful face. “We don’t have vampires under the sea. Our monsters are much bigger, and much worse.”
“How did you all meet?” Emily asked. Her parents were seemingly forgotten in all the excitement, or because of something Claire had done.
“That’s a very good question,” Claire said, smiling down at the child. “Hal was a soldier on a ship a long time ago. When it got torpedoed during the war, some of my sisters and I went to sing for it.”
Some remnants of Greek mythology jostled free in my mind, and I squinted at the older woman. “Are you singing for this one?”
“If you’re asking if all this is my fault, no. Although I am reaching the time when I need to go back.”
There was a hitch in Hal’s step when she said this—I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been walking right behind him.
“Anyhow,” she said, going on with her story, addressing Emily, “I was swimming, watching the sailors drown. There were a lot of sailors drowning in those days. Sometimes we had to fight with the sharks to get the chance to kiss them.”
“You kissed boys?” Emily asked, more disturbed about this than the sharks.
“A lot of them.” Claire looked back so I would know she was telling this story for my benefit as well. “Not every siren wants to see the world above the sea. But if you do, the only way you can get there is by kissing the air out of a man.”
I blinked. Was she saying what I thought she was saying?
“Not just any man,” Hal interrupted.
“No, only the right one. I had to kiss hundreds of sailors to find him,” she said, squeezing Hal close. “But when I did, I knew.”
“For living in the ocean your whole life, you weren’t a very good swimmer. We nearly died before we got rescued,” he said, and I could almost hear his grin.
Claire squealed. “I’d never had legs before! It was hard!”
I was having a hard time parsing their couple’s humor with presented facts. “Do you ever feel bad about all the ones that drowned?” I asked because I didn’t want to be the only one who felt bad right now.
“Not originally, no. I was like a child then. Does a child feel pain when she loses a toy, when she knows a shinier one can be gained? I was, as your kind say, shallow. Most sirens are. Not a lot of encouragement for introspection, under the sea.”
“Like Ariel!” Emily exclaimed, catching on.
“Much the same. Only with less singing.” She smiled at the girl indulgently. “You all are the first humans I’ve gotten to tell my secret to, since I shared it with Hal all those years ago. It’s nice.”
I’m glad someone here felt better about things, I thought darkly. But no matter how strangely—horribly?—it’d begun, their relationship had lasted for decades. Would Asher and I get that chance? My heart ached. I couldn’t believe I’d let him go again. I hoped I wouldn’t be made a fool for leaving his side.
We reached the freight elevator, found it empty, and Hal pushed the button for the lowest floor. Claire pressed a finger to her lips and gave Emily and me a meaningful glance as it lowered.
The doors opened onto a kill zone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I realized we were lucky: Whatever ship the soldiers had come in on hadn’t held enough of them to man all the doors. And why would they need to anyhow, if they cleared every room as they came through it, and they were the only ones with guns on board? Passengers and crew were the proverbial fish in a barrel.
The slaughter began six feet from the door. I didn’t know if those trapped down here had been waiting for good news, or their turn on the “rescue” boat, but they’d gotten bullets instead. Bodies were everywhere, some of them still leaking warm blood. There were spatters on the walls from exit wounds and smears where people had fallen, bleeding. And there were more ropy loops of “intestine” here, worms evacuated from human bodies. I didn’t point them out.
It smelled awful—the scent when fear and death make you evacuate your bowels, plus all the warm must of what’s normally hidden inside our bodies. Nurse-stomach battled pregnant-stomach and pregnant-stomach won. “I’m going to be sick,” I said, and looked for someplace safe to throw up, where I wouldn’t be desecrating anyone’s body. Emily clung to my leg, her face buried in my thigh, trying not to see.
“Don’t remember what you see here,” Claire told Emily, her voice taking on that echoed rasping sound, and the little girl nodded.
“Can you use that on me?” I asked.
“I’d rather not. You might need to react to something suddenly.”
I gave her a grim nod and swallowed air, so maybe it could hold everything else down.
Hal picked his way through the small lobby as if it were a minefield. Reaching the other side, he waved to me. “Come on.”
* * *
It helped that Hal had been a sailor. I supposed that at their core all ships were alike. We followed him down a narrow hall, punctuated with the occasional corpse. All of the fallen crew down here looked surprised, like statues frozen by Medusa in an unending moment of horror. I didn’t know what they’d been forced to see down here, but I couldn’t imagine the crew had fared any better than we had. Worse, probably, since there’d been no way for them to throw themselves overboard.
We were quiet as Claire tilted her head back and forth, and I wondered darkly if she could use voices like sonar. We didn’t stop to go into any of the rooms on either side—from what little I could see through their windows they all appeared to be storage. But I did know it was getting louder ahead of us, and there was a sensation of movement from the decks beneath our feet.
Hal paused and turned back. “We might not be able to hear one another after this next set of doors.” He pointed at his own ears. “There’s a reason I’m almost deaf.”
“That’s good, right? They won’t hear us coming.”
“Yes, but—” Claire shook her head, pointing at her throat. Her vocal skills wouldn’t work down here. We’d be on our own. I nodded.
Hal pushed the doors open slowly, crouching, carefully looking around. Behind him were engines that never stopped thrummed. Pistons as big as sofas pounded up and down, keeping the Maraschino still on its space of real estate in the sea. Machinery ran from side to side, reaching the actual edges of the ship. The room had to be three floors tall with catwalks running up and across each side. Where a row of computer terminals lined the bottom-most floor, the remaining crew had been murdered to a man. I wondered where our informant with the broken leg was now, and if we found him, how we’d get him free.
I scanned around, and spotted two parcels of C-4 on each side, in between the giant ribs of the ship, two floors up—and saw a man dressed in body armor wiring up a third one, on the right-hand side. I shook Hal’s sleeve and pointed. He nodded when he spotted him.
I made a gesture to Hal, nervous to talk even though the sound of the machinery in here was overwhelming. What’s the plan? I tried to say with my hands.
Hal held one hand out and made the other into a walking person, two fingers walking quietly along to indicate stealth. And then a sudden rude shoving motion, where we’d push the soldier over the edge, onto the pistons below.
As plans went, it wasn’t a great one. But when life gives you lemons—o
r mercenaries employed by someone psychotic—you do whatever the fuck you can. I nodded.
Then I pried Emily away from my leg. “Stay hidden down here, okay? Like hide and seek,” I whispered over the diesel engines. She nodded, and crouched down behind a desk.
I crawled up diamond-deck stairs, this time ahead of Hal. The soldier hadn’t looked up from his task. I wasn’t sure if C-4 required that much attention, or if he was just that confident that there was no one left who could put up a fight. His gun was slung over his shoulder, across his back, and he was using both of his gloved hands for his task. Feeling like I was pretending to be a ninja, I crept closer, using the ribs of the ship for cover, until he was only ten feet away from me. He looked like he had fifty pounds on me, between muscle and armor. I was going to need every foot of my head start. I was bracing, gritting my shoes onto the deck for traction, when he looked up.
I didn’t stop. I ran straight for him, with whatever adrenaline I had left inside. With all my fear of never seeing Asher again, of dying right here, of the worms that might be growing inside me, of the baby that might already be dead—I used all of this to run straight toward him. He lost a moment to surprise and another one to pulling up his gun, and I hit him. He was like a wall.
I didn’t hit him with nearly enough energy to send him over the edge of the rails. He took the blow and spun, yanking the gun up. I managed to shove it back down so his hand couldn’t get ahold of the trigger. We spun together, wrestling over the gun, whirling around each other until we’d changed spots like dancers, the barrel of the gun still pointing at the floor. I saw Hal near as we whirled and Claire leaned over and caught the soldier’s neck from her perch on Hal’s back. I half expected her to snap it, while I tried to leverage his rifle out of his hand. I saw her lips move and knew she was trying to say something to him with her voice, but between the engines and his armor, he couldn’t hear; he still fought me. So she kissed him instead.
Suddenly I’d won my fight. His hands reached up to clutch his throat, and the gun dropped, forgotten in breathless terror.
I watched him slide to the floor as though he were sinking into water, his lips the only visible part of him with all the armor on, turning from pink to a hypoxic shade of blue. She’d kissed the air out of him, asphyxiating him on dry land.
The soldier forgotten, Hal turned toward the package of C-4 affixed to the wall. He did something nimble with his fingers and unfastened a timer, still clicking along even though it wasn’t attached to anything anymore. He showed it to me.
We had seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds on the clock.
I turned in stunned horror—and I could see another row of C-4 packages affixed between the ribs of the ship on the other side. Eight in a row.
We’d never get to all of them in time, no matter how fast we moved—much less if we did it at Hal’s speed. If we tried, we’d die.
I looked back to Hal, who’d already moved on down to the next bundle of explosives. “One side will have to be good enough,” he shouted at me.
If only one side of the ship took on water, not both, it would at least buy us some time. The Maraschino would sink like a leaf, instead of a rock.
“Go get Emily—run!” Hal shouted over his shoulder. I nodded and raced back down the catwalks, reluctant to leave him behind, but scared shitless at the thought of sharing this much space with so much seawater.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“Come on, come on, come on—” I found Emily under her desk and scooped her up, even as she fought to stay behind. Sharp pain radiated out from my shoulder, and I ignored it.
“We can’t leave them!”
“We’re not! They’re meeting us!” I said, even though I was unsure. I shoved her through the doors to the engine room and kept going.
They told you to never take the elevator in an emergency. I looked for the doors marked STAIRS down the hall and ran for them, hoping that Hal would do the same. How far away would be safe? Was anywhere?
The sound of the engine room faded as we raced down the hall, passing sign after sign saying we were almost to the stairs, until my own panicked panting was the only thing I could hear. How much time had passed? Where were Hal and Claire? I closed the most recent set of doors behind us; they were fire doors like we’d had at the hospital, and ought to buy us some time.
Then chimes rang out overhead, and a voice I recognized started speaking in a different language. “Ang barko ay kailangang lisanin, pakiusap, gumawa ng paraan para makapunta sa isang ligtas na lugar at gawin ito sa maayos at mahinahong pamamaraan.”
Asher was alive. Tears of relief filled my eyes—and I saw Hal and Claire coming at me down the hall. I opened up the door for them, flagged them in, and slammed it shut, for all the good it would do.
“Aceasta nava este evacuat. Vă rugăm să face un fel de punte barca de salvare într-o manieră ordonată.”
Hal threw his shoulder against it. “Keep going!” He waved Emily and me on.
“Not without you!” Emily screamed, taking hold of his free arm.
“Hierdie skip ontruim. Maak jou pad na die reddingsboot dek in ’n ordelike wyse.”
Claire looked down at something she held in her hand. “We don’t have long now. Brace yourselves!”
“This ship is being evacuated.” Asher’s warning was finally in English. “Please make your way to the lifeboat deck in an orderly fashion. Edie—I’m meeting you there.”
My heart leaped up into my throat just as Claire yelled, “Hang on!”
The C-4 they hadn’t gotten a chance to disarm went off. The roar of the engine room caught up with us, like a plane landing on our heads. The fire door bucked and threw all of us back, blown open by the pressure of the explosion below, and almost instantly the ship started listing to one side. I imagined the bottom of the Maraschino broken open like a piñata, and the dead sailors below dropping like gruesome candy, pouring into the sea.
Hal got up first. I was too dumbfounded with horror.
“Go go go!” he shouted, staggering up, I could read his lips. Claire was still clinging to his back. I swept up Emily again, who was screaming; I could see her mouth open wide. But I couldn’t hear her, because my head was buzzing like it was full of bees. Together we raced through the final doors and reached the stairs.
The remaining crew members who were alive were like us, alerted either by the explosion or Asher’s warning, swarmed upward like so many rats. We were at the bottom of things, having started at the lowest floor. I was sure there was shouting, but I couldn’t hear it; my head still rang like I was standing too near a church bell. I held Emily close as humanity pressed upward above us, panic blocking all the doors.
“Edie!” Claire called, just a step behind me. Her voice could cut through the sounds in my head.
“We’re here!” I shouted back. I picked up Emily on every other step, swinging her forward like a cane. Every time I moved her my shoulder stung.
“Don’t stop!”
I wasn’t planning on it! But I didn’t say that to her, because to say it would be to use air to do anything else but breathe, and breathing was all I could manage right now as we raced from floor to floor. People who hadn’t made it, who’d been broken by the escaping mob, gunshot, or mentally bereft by the worms, reached out, trying to grab hold of us so we could help them. It was what I imagined it would be like if I were to run out of hell, with endless hungry hands reaching out for us either side, and the stairs slippery with blood.
I thought could taste salt in the air, but I didn’t know if it was from above or below. I didn’t want to look back—I was scared I’d see the sea coming up behind me. No matter how much air was trapped on board the Maraschino, it wouldn’t be enough to keep us buoyant for long.
There was a pause from somewhere up above. It rippled back in line as people stuttered to a stop, hitting one another. I halted before I hit someone, and felt Hal against my back. The staircase started to drift higher on one side. We needed to get o
ff the stairs before they became unusable, before instead of stairs they turned into a slide back down.
“What’s going on?” Hal asked—I could only hear him because his mouth was near my ear and he was shouting half-deaf-loud. And then I heard a sound that cleared out all the others in the hall, the sharp staccato of a gun, cutting through all the fuzz inside my brain.
I froze in fear, reduced to something animal inside by sheer terror and seemingly endless exertion. I couldn’t think of what to do next, I could only hear my own heartbeat pumping in time with sound of bullets ricocheting down on us from above. And then screams, loud enough and long enough to get through the cotton in my head. What sounded like endless screaming.
A voice cut through the chaos and terror, the hissing of a hundred hydras. “Hold on to Emily!”
I did as I was told because I had to obey. I would have done it anyway, but Claire gave me no choice. I grabbed Emily, and Hal in turn grabbed me, hauling me down two steps to the landing we’d just passed. We stepped over mob-crushed bodies, and he shoved us inside the door into the hallway behind it. I recognized the carpeting—we were back on the residential floors.
“There’s more than one stairway up,” he said, slamming the door. “Unless they’ve sent reinforcements over, they can’t be covering every one.”
“What floor are we on?” Claire asked. The church-bell sound diminished as she talked.
“Two. One more to go.” I saw-heard Hal say.
I was too busy panting to participate in conversation. Emily was as white as a sheet, scared by everything she’d seen. She looked like I felt.
“Can you run?” Hal asked me, soliticiously.
“How can you be this strong?” I asked aloud, but I couldn’t hear my own voice.
He laughed. “I keep good company. Come on,” he said, and started running down the hall.
The floor tilted beneath us, as if we were in a fun house at a haunted amusement park. I was having a hard time herding Emily. Like it or not, I was nowhere near as strong as Hal, and I couldn’t keep carrying her. I set her down, and she started to cry.
Edie Spence [04] Deadshifted Page 19