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Terror Krakens

Page 5

by Eric S. Brown


  Lancaster didn’t know what to make of the damage to the hatch but he trusted the old man that the storm hadn’t caused the damage. The whole mess was flat-out weird. On the upside though, it made their task of getting aboard the cruise ship easier.

  The Princess Dream was drifting on the water, her engines silent and moving so slowly that Hall and the others were able to secure their small boat to her. Sure enough, the hatch gave way and splashed into the water as they tried to open it.

  “Howard, Hall, I want you two to stay here,” Lancaster ordered. “Be ready to get us loose and out of here fast if the need to comes up. Everyone else, you’re with me.”

  Everyone in the party was armed. Most carried M4s though Higgins insisted on carrying an old-school, pump-action shotgun. He was set in his ways and refused to change.

  Burke made the leap first. She landed in the hatch, feet slipping out from under, and caught herself on the edge. Straining, she heaved herself up. A quick scan of her surroundings told her the ship was on emergency backup power from the dim red lights of the corridor beyond the hatch. She went to work getting the rope ladder ready for the others to leap onto. They followed her over, one by one, until they were all aboard the ship. Lancaster stole a final glance at Hall and Howard on the boat behind them and then followed Burke as she took point leading them into the corridors of the Princess Dream.

  They had barely moved a few feet into the ship when the smell hit them.

  “What the frag is that smell?” Mathews covered his nose and mouth with one of his hands.

  The ship stunk like a slaughterhouse with the smells of rot, blood, and human waste.

  “Ugh, where’s it coming from?” Leonard piped up.

  “Quiet,” Burke snapped at them. “Just keep moving.”

  The small group walked along the corridor leading away from the hatch. As they rounded the first bend, they came upon the rotting body of a man dressed in what looked to be a security uniform. Even in his state of decay, it was clear that something had eaten parts of him. His neck was a mangled mess of torn flesh and his ribs were cracked open. Entire patches of meat were stripped from his legs and arms. On the floor near him lay a pump-action shotgun. Burke knelt and picked up the weapon, examining it.

  “This guy didn’t go down without a fight,” Burke said. “He got off a couple of shots at whatever did this to him.”

  “Great, Burke.” Mathews frowned. “Somehow that just makes it seem worse.”

  Leonard lost it. The smell and the sight of the dead man were too much for him. He dropped to his knees and started vomiting.

  “Get it together, boy,” Higgins barked at him. “The rest of us ain’t got time for your weak stomach.”

  “Back off,” Lancaster said, stepping between Higgins and Leonard. “You okay, Leonard?”

  “Sorry, sir,” Leonard said when the dry heaves shaking his body stopped. He had already vomited up everything his stomach had to give. “I think I’m okay now.”

  “We need to keep moving,” Burke told them all. “Whatever did this could still be around.”

  “Yeah, about that…” Mathews said. “What in the devil did do this?”

  Burke didn’t answer. Lancaster gave Mathews a glare that told him to shut the frag up.

  As they moved through the ship, they came across bodies everywhere, all like the first in that they had been pecked at by something, meat stripped away from their bones. Some bodies were worse than others. All of them were rotting though. Whatever had happened aboard the Princess Dream had to have happened at least a couple of days ago.

  “It’s like something killed every single person on this ship and then ate them,” Leonard muttered.

  “That would explain why she’s running on backup power and adrift,” Higgins commented coldly, as if all the carnage around them was just another thing to deal with and had no meaning. “We need to get to her engine room and see what we can do about getting her main power back online.”

  “What we need to do is get the hell out of here,” Mathews countered.

  “That’s enough, Mathews,” Lancaster warned him. “Burke, you got any ideas on what did this?”

  “Frag me if I know, sir,” Burke answered, “but I can tell you as I sure as heck don’t want to meet it.”

  “Hey,” Leonard called out, directing everyone’s attention to something smeared on one of the corridor walls. “What’s this crap?”

  The substance was like a grayish slime. It looked to have been splattered over the wall as if by a shotgun blast. Once Leonard called her attention to it, Burke took a closer look around. There was a lot of the stuff in some places, the places where there were dead security personnel or someone with a gun near their corpse.

  “I know this sounds like a pretty wild leap, sir,” Burke told Lancaster, “but I think that goop must be some kind of blood. Likely from whatever killed these people here.”

  “That is a pretty crazy assumption to make, Burke,” Lancaster said, not sure if she was just messing with him or being serious.

  “I got movement!” Leonard screamed, opening fire with his M4 at something at the distant end of the corridor. His bullets sparked against the wall down there, flashing brightly in the dim lights and ricocheting off the metal walls and floor.

  “Hold your fire!” Burke yelled, moving to Leonard and grabbing his arm.

  His head snapped around toward her, his eyes wide with fear.

  Burke took his M4. “You idiot! Did you ever stop to think you could be shooting at a survivor?”

  Leonard went pale. “I … I …”

  “Leonard, clearly, you’re not cut out for this,” Lancaster growled. “I want you to head back to the hatch and wait for us there.”

  “Yes, sir,” Leonard stammered. “Sorry, sir.”

  Burke gave him his M4 back. “Don’t shoot at anything else until you’re one hundred percent sure you know who it is. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Leonard nodded and then headed back the way they had come, shoulders slumping.

  “Kids today,” Higgins snorted. “We’re lucky he didn’t shoot one of us.”

  “Everybody just keep it together,” Burke cautioned the group.

  Taking point again, Burke led them onward. Higgins, being the master of nautical engineering and knowledge that he was, seemed to roughly know the lay of this particular class of cruise liner, telling Burke which way to head in order to get to engineering. Lancaster wondered if they should make for the bridge first but before he could tell Burke, something came skittering along the ceiling of the corridor like a sprinting spider. The thing hung upside down from the ceiling, hurling itself forward with the tentacles that extended from its main body. The thing resembled a cross between a squid and an octopus. It gave a high-pitched screech, flinging itself downward at Burke. Had it been anyone else on point, they likely would have been killed by the monster but not her. Burke’s reflexes were almost super-humanly fast as she threw herself to the side while bringing her M4 to bear on the monster coming at her. The M4 roared on full-auto, punching gaping holes through the monster’s body. Gray blood exploded from the thing as her bullets ripped through it. The creature flopped onto the floor near Burke and lay there twitching until she put a second burst of fire into it.

  “What the hell!” Mathews shouted, looking along the corridor to see if there were more things like it coming their way.

  Burke was shaking from her close call.

  “That thing nearly had me, sir,” she told Lancaster.

  “Hey, that thing looks like what took Harold and Watkins out,” Mathews commented.

  “It sure does,” Burke agreed. “Exactly like that thing.”

  “Just one creature couldn’t wipe out an entire ship the size of this one,” Lancaster said.

  “No,” Burke frowned, “but a swarm of them could.”

  “Frag, you don’t think …?” Mathews asked.

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions, people,” Lancast
er cautioned them.

  “The evidence is laying right there on the floor in front of you, Lancaster,” Higgins growled. “What else could have done all this?”

  “Then we really do need to get out of here,” Mathews said, glancing up and down the corridor they were standing in. “Before more of those monsters show up. This whole ship could be crawling with them.”

  “It is,” a voice said from around the bend in the corridor. “Hold your fire. We’re coming around.”

  Everyone stared at the far end of the corridor as three people emerged from around it. One was a giant of a man, big and burly, carrying a shotgun. His face looked like a razor hadn’t touched it in at least a few days. Eyes sunken, the man looked exhausted. To his right stood a woman dressed in a security uniform also carrying a shotgun. She had a tough-as-nails appearance and had to be in her later thirties. Her hair was black and her body well-toned. The uniform she wore was stained by the same kind of grayish slime that had come out of the creature when Burke had blown it away. The third member of the little group was a younger woman, maybe in her early thirties or late twenties. Her youthful features made it hard to tell. She was dressed in a tattered and filthy red shirt above a tight pair of jean shorts. Her skin was an almost sickly pale, making the freckles on it stand out that much more. Long red hair spilled over her shoulders. The younger woman had the stare of someone who had seen too many horrible things and had been shaken to the edge of her sanity.

  “Weapons down,” Burke told them, snapping the barrel of her M4 up to target the group.

  “I don’t think so, lady,” the big man told her. “Without a gun in hand, people tend to die fast on this ship.”

  “I won’t ask you again,” Burke warned as she and the lady in the security uniform glared at each other.

  “Let them be, Burke,” Lancaster ordered and turned his attention to the woman she was glaring at. “You three… You were on this ship when…”

  “We lived through the attack,” the woman answered him, “if that’s what you’re asking. Those things hit the Princess Dream hard and fast, sweeping through everyone onboard like a buffet line. The big guy is Ben, I’m Maggie, and that’s Samantha. She’s having a bit of trouble coping with it all.”

  Samantha said nothing in response to Maggie’s comment. Instead, she looked at Lancaster and asked, “Have you come to take us home?”

  “Those things?” Lancaster questioned her, wanting to be sure he understood what she meant.

  “Like that one over there.” Maggie pointed with the barrel of her shotgun at the creature Burke had dispatched. “There were hundreds of them. Most of them are still onboard as far as we know. We killed two on the way here so unless you want to deal with more of them, I suggest we stop shooting the breeze and get moving to whatever boat you came in.”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” Mathews agreed.

  “We can’t do that,” Burke said, her voice level but firm. “We still have to turn this ship away from the base.”

  “Base?” Ben spoke up. “You mean you guys aren’t from a rescue ship?”

  “Not hardly,” Burke snorted. “We’re from…”

  Lancaster stopped her. “Where we’re from is classified. This ship, however, is drifting directly toward it though and we came aboard thinking it had been damaged by the storm in order to turn it before there’s a collision. We honestly didn’t know what to expect here but it certainly wasn’t you or all this mess.”

  “Wait,” Maggie raised her shotgun again. “Are you saying you’re not taking us with you?”

  Lancaster put a hand on Burke’s weapon, keeping her from blowing Maggie away where she stood. “That’s not what I am saying at all. We’ll get you off this ship, sure, but the less you know about us and where we’re from the better.”

  Burke cocked an eyebrow at Lancaster. Not talking about the Meridian Platform seemed pointless as there was nowhere else they could take the three survivors. The only other thing they could do with them was give them a lifeboat and send them on their way. That would be akin to murder with the water likely full of monsters like the ones on the Princess Dream. She didn’t dare call him on that though in front of the others.

  “You need to turn this ship,” Maggie said. “I can take you to the bridge but the powers out as you might have noticed and there are a lot of those things between here and there.”

  “It’s engineering we need to get to,” Higgins told her. “I can get the power online and turn the ship from there.”

  Maggie blinked in surprise at Higgins’ claim.

  “He can,” Lancaster assured her. “He’s qualified to do it.”

  “Okay then,” Maggie said. “The sooner we get it done and outta here, the better. It’s hard to believe those things haven’t made a try for us already out here in the open like this.”

  “Lead the way,” Lancaster said and Maggie did.

  ****

  Maggie didn’t have a clue why they hadn’t been attacked already. It was as if all the creatures aboard the Princess Dream were in some kind of hibernation or something. Other than the one that Burke had killed and the two they had taken out since leaving the armory, there was no sign of the things. It was really creeping her out. She didn’t believe for a second that the creatures had abandoned the Princess Dream. They were still out there somewhere biding their time and waiting to make a move, she told herself. But why wait? The creatures had the numbers. Even if the things somehow understood that the new people who had come aboard were better armed and trained than those they had faced before, the creatures could still easily overwhelm them if they wanted to. Following closely behind Burke, Maggie stayed at the head of the group. Ben brought up the rear with one of the soldiers named Mathews. Lancaster, the guy in charge, kept in the middle of the formation with Samantha between him and the old grumpy engineer named Higgins. Maggie was glad to see the military folks. Heck, she was glad to see any other living humans, but Lancaster had made it clear they weren’t a rescue party. They had their own agenda and reasons for being on the Princess Dream.

  Lancaster claimed he would take Samantha, Ben, and herself with his people when their mission was completed but she noticed that he kept looking them over as if trying to come up with something else to do with them. She was keeping just as close of an eye on Lancaster and his people as she was on the lookout for a sudden attack from the creatures. If Lancaster did try to leave them, Maggie knew they were going to be forced to fight for their way off the ship. She hoped it didn’t come to that. The woman soldier, Burke, alone was worrisome enough. Burke appeared to be just as deadly as she seemed. She moved like a natural-born killer. There was a predatory edge to Burke that made Maggie sure the woman would have to be her first target if a battle between the two groups did breakout. Maggie wasn’t sure that she could take Burke if it came to that.

  They all reached the entrance to engineering. It was open. The vast room was dark inside. Some of the lights along the ceiling looked to have been shattered. That wasn’t a good sign. Maggie hoped it had happened during the creatures’ initial attack on the Princess Dream and not recently. Walking into a den of the things would be a death sentence that none of them were likely to escape. It would be like kicking a hornets’ nest and expecting not to get stung.

  Burke stopped in the doorway to engineering, motioning for the rest of them to hold up. Only Maggie was close enough to really see into the room with her and she still wasn’t liking what she saw. The others came to a halt, Ben and Mathews aiming their weapons at anything that might be creeping up on them from behind.

  “What is it?” Lancaster asked the two of them.

  “I don’t like this, sir,” Burke answered. “It smells like a trap.”

  “Trap or not, we’re going to have to go in there,” Higgins said.

  “Not necessarily,” Lancaster admitted. “There is another option I’ve been thinking about given our situation.”

  Higgins looked ready to explode. “And what w
ould that be, sir, seeing as how you’ve dragged us all here?”

  “Maggie,” Lancaster said, “are you one hundred percent sure that you three are the only survivors on the Princess Dream?”

  Maggie shifted nervously before answering, “We’re as sure as we can be. We haven’t seen anyone else at all since the attack happened.”

  “We’re it,” Ben said gruffly from where he stood with Mathews. “There isn’t anyone else.”

  “How can you be sure?” Lancaster challenged the big man.

  Ben looked like he wanted to smash Lancaster in the head with the butt of his shotgun for being such an idiot. “You’ve seen the bodies, sir. There’s nothing on this ship but rotting corpses and those creatures.”

  Lancaster thought for a moment before saying, “Burke, it’s your call. Do you think we can handle going in there or not?”

  Burke, surprised by having the decision dumped on her, stared at Lancaster. It wasn’t like him to be so spineless. The carnage they had seen and the monsters must have gotten to him more than anyone had realized.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, sir,” Burke finally answered. “That room is big and there’s no way to know what’s waiting in there until we try it.”

  “Okay then,” Lancaster nodded. “I’m calling this op. We need to get off this ship and back to the platform.”

  “Fine by me,” Burke said, withdrawing from the doorway of the Princess Dream’s engineering section. She moved through the group, Maggie with her, to take up point on its other side. “Let’s get moving then.”

  As the group withdrew along the corridor, something stirred in the darkness of the engineering section. The noises grew louder like dozens and dozens of creatures waking up and skittering about in the darkness.

  “Oh fragging crap…” Mathews muttered. “I think we just woke them up.”

  One the creatures came charging out of the engineering section. The thing sprang forward on four tentacles, hurling itself along the floor toward them. Before even Burke could react, the thing was on Samantha. The young woman screamed as its other tentacles shot outward to wrap about her as the creature attached itself to her. The creature’s beak-like mouth extended from its main body, tearing at her throat. Blood splashed as it ripped the side of her neck open. Several other creatures were already emerging from the engineering section behind it. Neither Burke nor Maggie could get a clear shot at the thing.

 

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