by Sara Clancy
“Or maybe it was some weird tourist attraction that got swept up in the storm.”
He pushed his glasses higher up onto the bridge of his nose. “A tourist attraction?”
“What? Ghost tours exist. Having it on a ship would be a good gimmick.”
He fiddled with his glasses again, the lenses reflecting what little light touched them.
“We should hurry this up,” Jezebel said as dread twisted around in her stomach.
Fear was a strong motivator and they both stormed up the stairs without a care if it could hold their weight. Their moment of bravado didn’t last. Patches of the upper floors had crumbled in on each other, reducing the area to a maze of splintered and gaping holes. Water trickled in places unseen, adding their sound to the strange noises of the ship while creating a perpetual dampness. Stale air, sinking of sea water and decaying wood encased them. Jezebel’s first step cracked the wood. She jerked slightly, kept from falling by Henry’s sudden grip.
“Why don’t you lead the way?” she asked.
“Because I’m disposable or because you think I know the ship?”
Jezebel forced a smile. “What makes you feel better?”
Deciding against seeking answers, Henry carefully crept in front of her. The low beams forced him to keep his head tilted to the side. At other times, he had to duck. For all the drawbacks, his longer reach did come in handy. He was able to stride over holes that forced Jezebel to leap. Some of the planks wiggled, threatening to snap under them. It prompted them to keep moving. A few bunks were the only things of notice and Henry quickly stripped off the sheets. They were old and riddled with stains that Jezebel didn’t want to know about.
“Are you sure you want to touch those?” she asked. “I’ll bet you fifty bucks that they’re infected with something.”
Henry helped her over the stones, his long condor arms proving quite useful. It was still close enough that his mouth curled with disgust.
“Best case scenario, we’ll be able to somehow boil them. Worse case, we can use them as a sack to carry the rest of it.”
“Any way can I leave the whole carrying task to you?”
He gave her a sharp look and held out the bundle for her to take.
“Please,” he said at her hesitation. “Just until I can get up?”
It was then that she noticed the awkward position he had distorted himself into. His legs began to shake with the strain of holding himself in place. Which wasn’t the greatest thing, given that a tumble to either side would drop him right back to where they had started. She hastily took the bundle, allowing him to grab a hanging beam to steady himself.
The next flight of stairs was tilted onto a sharp angle but seemed sturdy enough to get them up to the next floor. Odd items were scattered across the ground. Shards of glass caught the low light, their shine muted by the layer of dust that had clustered over the surface. The rest was reduced to random shapes that tried to catch their feet. She didn’t see what she kicked. By the sound of it, it was solid and metal. It clattered across the floorboards before suddenly falling silent.
Henry readjusted his water-smudged glasses and squinted. “Guess there’s a hole there.”
“No,” she said as her eyes adjusted, allowing a darker form to take shape. “There’s something there.”
The words hadn’t passed her lips before a deep rancid odor hit them. They both gagged. Jezebel doubled over, covering her mouth with both her hands as vomit splashed onto the back of her tongue. She swallowed thickly to try and force it back down. Henry made a pained sound, pushing the side of his finger under his nostrils, trying to block the stench.
“That can’t be a good sign,” she mumbled into her palm.
“What is that?” Henry asked.
Still wrenching, she straightened as much as she could, and peered into the shadows. She stilled.
“Oh, God,” she groaned.
Concern entered his voice as he leaned forward and readjusted his glasses again. “What?”
“That’s a body.”
They turned to each other, leaving the rest of their concerns unsaid. By the stench, whoever lay a few feet away from them had been dead for a while. They couldn’t be part of the tour group. So, who the hell are they?
“We should look.” Henry added in a weaker tone. “Shouldn’t we?”
The distant rumble of thunder was low and soft. Still, they both flinched as if it had come from right above them.
“The storm’s coming back? Is that possible?” Henry asked.
“Let’s just grab some stuff and go.”
A sudden burst of lightning cracked across the sky. The blinding light carded in through the gaps, setting the room ablaze, exposing every corner. It was only for a split second, but enough for them to see them. A dozen corpses. More. Each one bloated and grotesque. Their skin littered with seeping wounds and their limbs blackened with rot. The lightning crackled, reducing their vision to disjointed flashes. In each one, the bodies shifted. Rising to their feet. Drawing closer. Reaching out towards them. The stench became unbearable.
Jezebel wrenched as she screamed, choking painfully. Henry’s cries filled her ears. His arms gripped her shoulders. Dragged her back. Forced her to start moving. The ship heaved under them, rocking as if tossed about on the open sea. Unprepared, they stumbled, each tumbling backwards through the opening in the floor. The stairs bashed her legs as she dropped. Her spine hit the floor, the impact pushing the air from her lungs. She gasped, trying to force her body to work. With a sharp crack, Henry landed and dropped through the floor.
Rolling onto her stomach, she peered through the gap. A gargled noise caught her attention before she could catch sight of him. Trembling, she glanced over her shoulder, back towards the stairs she had fallen from. Shadows clogged the space like a dark smear. A wheezing breath rattled in her ears as a hand emerged from the darkness. The fingers shook, forcing bloody puss to drip free of the ebony skin. Flesh hung limp from the bones, swaying with the motion, squishing against the wood as it clawed its way down the staircase. Jezebel screamed. The figure lurched forward, closing in with the speed of a striking snake, as Jezebel threw herself down the pit.
Chapter 3
Ice covered Annabel’s skin. She jerked her head up, her sister’s screams echoing in her ears. Lightning clashed and a low growl of thunder loomed on the distance. The wind picked up as people flooded into the ship. She barely managed to flinch towards the sound before hands grabbed her arms.
“You can’t leave my mother,” the woman said. “She’s still bleeding.”
“It’s a compound fracture,” Annabel said. A hard blow had broken the older woman’s collarbone, pushing it up through the skin. She had used what material was available to her to pack the wound. “She’ll be okay. She just needs to lay still.”
“No! Help her! We waited our turn. She’s in pain.”
Annabel bit back her comment. There was no reason for the woman currently moaning in agony to believe that Annabel could do more for her. There was no plaster. No proper sling. And, most importantly, no painkillers. Another rumble of thunder made the stones clash together. The crowd muttered and swarmed closer together. There was an uneasy stillness, as if everyone feared mentioning the return of the storm would beckon it back. Annabel finished knotting the cloth around the woman before sitting back up.
“Keep her still.”
The daughter grabbed Annabel’s arms, eyes blazing with fury. “Help my mother.”
“I have,” Annabel said, voice calm but firm. “She’s stable. I need to tend to the people who aren’t.”
Before the woman could protest, she ripped her arm away and got to her feet. Fear was a cold lump in her stomach. Jez will be alright. Keep moving. Keep focused. She moved to the next person, forcing herself not to look at the ship, knowing her resolve would break if she did. There were still too many people needing help for her to be distracted. She’s okay. Annabel kept it as a mantra in the back of her mind.
A constant white noise that let her function. She’s okay.
Finally, with a new burst of activity, people spewed out of the ship. The stampede was led by Jezebel and the lanky man that had offered to help her. The ship trembled with the vibrations of many charging feet. With the sound like cracking bones and a gust of mildew tainted air, the ship caved in on itself.
“Doctor!” one of the tour guides, who she had recently learned was named Rocca, bellowed. In her panic, she switched from English to her native Sicilian and back again.
By this point, Annabel knew that she was the only one in the group with any kind of medical training. Still, as she ran, she couldn’t kill the hope that someone else would answer the call. Someone who had completed training. Someone with an actual doctorate that could take over. Give the orders. Decide the order of treatments. Bile burned the back of her throat as her thoughts began to inch dangerously towards clarity. To calculating how many she had already left to die in favor of someone she thought had a better chance.
Spotting her sister amongst the swell of bodies broke that line of thought. Her melted makeup made her wide eyes look like hollowed pits. Each step was a slow drag of feet. With her hands up, locked in place as if fending off an invisible attacker, it was impossible to miss the violent trembling.
“Jez!” Annabel grasped her sister’s shoulders, bringing her mindless trudging to a halt. “Jez, what happened? Are you hurt?”
“The ship.” Jezebel’s voice was her distinguishing feature. The soft, high octave was either deemed attractive or annoying. Now, however, it made her sound so much like a child that Annabel dragged her into a tight hug.
Locked in a state of shock, Jezebel only stared blankly ahead, her arms still high and a cold sweat beading across her skin.
“Doc!” Rocca screamed. “We need help!”
Not about to leave her sister alone, she grabbed the nearest functional person she could find and dragged them closer.
“Take her up to the others and get her to sit down. Don’t leave her alone until she’s settled.”
There was no argument and they joined the line of the walking wounded, trying to find a bit of shelter. The light rain had started to pick up as she tended to the people that had been pulled free from the ruins. Crushed limbs. Broken scalps. Punctures and pouring blood.
“Did anyone find any supplies?” she called out to the salvage crew. “I need whatever you can find!”
Rocca came closer. All of her facial features were large and broad; perfectly designed to express emotion. It seemed that the only way she was able to conceal it was with a fixed, tight smile.
“There’s these sheets.”
She didn’t need to look at the sheets. The smell was enough. “I can’t use them. It will just invite infection.”
“Could you keep your voice a little lower,” Rocca said, smile still in place.
A growl of approaching thunder instantly shifted the conversation.
For the first time, the tour guide’s smile fell. Without it, her horror was clear and consuming. “The storm’s coming back.”
“We need to get these people off of the beach,” Annabel said as she used the injured man’s shoelaces to form a tourniquet for his arm. It won’t work, the voice of her professor snapped while she countered with, There’s no other choice. Squeezing her eyes shut, she drowned out the thoughts with math. “We can rig up stretchers with the sheets and bits of the ship, but there’s not enough able-bodied left to carry everyone. Anyone capable of walking will have to.”
Rocca didn’t respond until Annabel finished the last knot. Then she grabbed her by her upper arm and dragged her a few feet to the side. Just far enough that they couldn’t be overheard.
“We haven’t got everyone yet,” she whispered, her accent twisting her words. “Half of the numbers are still missing.”
“We have no shelter. We have no medical supplies. I can barely see what I’m doing and that storm is coming,” Annabel said as calmly as she could.
Rocca nodded and licked her plump lips. “I saw some lights on the hillside when I was in the water. A village. If the locals saw us, they’d be heading down to help. We just have to wait a little longer. Is that at all an option?”
A streak of lightning answered for both of them. Now or never.
“I’ll get everyone organized.”
False hope damages people, Annabel recalled her professor telling them. You owe your patients the truth. Before Rocca could leave, Annabel caught her arm.
“Not everyone’s going to survive the trip.”
Rocca stared at her, her eyelashes fluttering as the rain gathered strength. “Why would you tell me that?”
“So you’re prepared,” Annabel said.
The woman yanked her arm free and, with an icy, disgusted scowl, went about organizing the group. Annabel didn’t have time to contemplate the look. People were already calling for her. Pleading and sobbing for medical help. There are fewer voices now than there were before. Burning tears began to swell in her eyes. She angrily brushed them aside, and with a final deep breath, started moving again.
The growing wind made working with the sheets difficult. They flapped in the breeze as people, blinded by rain and the gathering night, struggled to work the ends around strips of wood. In the end, only a few stretchers were possible. Lacking for people to actually carry the worst of the wounded, most ended up being dragged, their feet scraping along the gravelly path.
“I can’t walk!” someone shrieked at Annabel as she organized another patient into the stretcher.
She didn’t bother to glance in their direction.
“I said, I can’t walk! You have to carry me!”
“You’re stable–”
“Don’t give me that! This is all favoritism.”
“Walk or stay here and die,” Annabel dismissed as she moved on. “Those are your options. I don’t care which one you pick, just do it quietly.”
Any protests that followed were lost under the other voices and growing storm. Only a few yards separated them from the base of the hill. Given the terrain, however, it was an exhausting battle. A bit of a search and they found a narrow path carved into the overgrowth. It weaved back and forth on itself, creating a slithering path up the side of the hill. The fine layer of gravel that covered the trodden earth caught their feet, keeping them off balance as the rainwater created flowing streams.
Annabel alternated positions with a man whose name she never caught. She knew him more by the wound to his temple than the actual features of his face. He would drag the stretcher, trudging forward with a mindless determination, allowing her to move amongst the others. When he couldn’t drag it another foot, she would cut in to give him a break. With little in the way of upper body strength, those times also brought her to her knees. Everything ached. Her joints throbbed and her tendons strained. She almost sagged with relief each time the man returned.
The dirt path eventually gave way to a stone staircase. Dulled and rounded by erosion, they were easily made slick by the now steady rain. At first, it had been difficult to keep the more disgruntled patients moving. Or, more importantly, silent. Their complaints quickly transformed into paranoid rants. It spread fear like a disease, infecting the others. They trudged higher. In pain and misery, it became easier to believe that Annabel was sadistically leaving them to suffer than admit that there was nothing she could do. That Rocca was leading them astray rather than taking the only option open to them. Annabel kept herself moving, working, fighting down the ever-present knowledge that she was failing. Not just in keeping their bodies together, but in all attempts to offer comfort.
She felt like she was six again. Having just moved into her step-father’s house and trying so hard to get the neighborhood kids to like her. You don’t smile right. She cringed at hearing the echoing memory of Jacob’s voice. A particularly vile kid. Twice her size and vicious. Let’s see if you can cry right. Just like that, she was sitting back on her front porch, hair fi
lled with dirt and arm throbbing from him hitting it. The memory unfolded in her mind’s eye as she kept herself moving forward. Misery had almost made her forget that Kai, her step-father of barely a month, had found her.
“Hey there, Anna Banana.”
She recalled how his nearly constant smile fell when he had gotten a better look at her. The way he had crouched down before her and asked, gentle and kind, what had happened. All she had managed to get past her lips was a repetition of Jacob’s taunts. Freak. Idiot. Weirdo. Now, just like then, she found it hard to dispute the claims.
“Nah,” Kai had dismissed with a wave of his hand. “You know what you really are?”
Annabel shook her head just as she recalled doing so many years ago.
“The world’s best poker player,” he grinned.
“I don’t know how to play poker,” Annabel had pouted.
“That’s an easy fix. You wash up. By the time you get back, I’ll have the cards and some chocolate milkshakes ready. We’ll play a few games.” Parental warmth filled his eyes as he added, careful to keep his tone soft, “Then, maybe later, you’ll be ready to tell me more about what happened. What do you say? We have a plan?”
Tears pricked Annabel’s eyes as she remembered the surge of warmth. It was her first taste of fatherly affection. The first time she had ever called Kai ‘dad’. And perhaps the only time someone not genetically related to her hadn’t taken offence at her placid tendencies.
The passing moment of peace came to an end at the first, monstrous clap of thunder. From that point on, they moved in anxious silence. With each resounding boom, they moved faster, running on adrenaline and terror.
A dull, throaty cry broke across the sky, making most of the travelling party flinch. Looking up into the gloom, it was impossible to see what had made the noise. Silence fell upon the group as they each searched the cliff walls. Another cry and the flutter of wings, and Annabel was left feeling like an idiot. Scared of a crow, she mocked herself as she watched the single bird lazily drift across the sky. A few others must have felt the same, because a flurry of awkward chuckles worked its way down the trail. This moment of levity died down as they carried on.