by Ben Farthing
“I don’t know. We have to stop your bleeding.”
Chris lifted a hand to point through the door. “Make sure it stopped.”
Riley knew he was right. She had to make sure the terraforming had quit, that the approaching evil couldn’t get a foothold. But she couldn’t just leave Chris here to bleed out.
Relying on first aid she’d seen in movies, she used Chris’s belt and his bunched-up shirt to keep pressure on the wound. She pulled it tight until the bleeding slowed.
“I’ll be right back,” she couldn’t hear herself say.
It took focus to keep her balance on her aching legs and with her painful breathing. But she staggered back into the central room of Deck Two. She saw what her cloudy mind had tried to refuse to see.
The bombs had decimated the doughy machinery. Before, it had been like rising bread dough, lifted up to press against the ceiling and then bulging outward. The corpses shoved into it had been fully enveloped in the expanding foreign flesh.
Now, the bombs had worked better than Riley dared hope. Shriveled and burnt chunks of dough littered the floor, interspersed with the dead strands. Only the lowest part of the great ring of dough remained.
Riley approached what looked like a massive bird’s nest made of burnt pizza dough. It was waist-high. The first hole they’d blown in the side of it now served as an entrance to the ring.
Corpses stuck out from the dough. At least their feet and ankles.
Riley looked around for any sign that the machinery still worked. Somehow, this doughy growth was powered by dead cruise guests, sent silvery liquid through these thousands of strands, and prepared the space to welcome the foreign dimension. Now there were no lights in the tangles under her feet. Did that mean it had stopped?
In the center of the nest, the explosion had punched through the floor below. Riley could see down into Deck One.
A yellow lifeboat on its side. A pile of steel studs.
It was still the tainted space she’d explored. Only now, there was no dark fog to block her view. The floor of Deck One was only twenty feet down. When she’d been down there, Deck One had seemed at least twice as high, even before the fog stopped her from seeing any higher.
Destroying the machinery must have sent a shockwave through the already-changed space but not fully brought it back.
Riley leaned her head down through the hole. Deck One was thick with arteries. Red threads were woven around each other, crisscrossed between the detritus.
The Deviser’s creation was getting closer. She could sense it in her gut.
A fiddler crab with lanky legs and sharp pincer jaws skittered under the pile of steel studs. Riley went still so it wouldn’t notice her.
She held herself so stiff that it worsened the pain in her ribs.
Her job wasn’t done yet. The gathering of blood vessel cords meant that the Deviser’s creation was still approaching. If it brought enough of itself into this terraformed space, would it then be able to keep going?
She thought of the fiddler crab she’d seen earlier. It had shriveled up upon touching this reality.
More specifically, when it touched salt water.
Gears turned in Riley’s head.
A hand rested on Riley’s shoulder. She jolted and nearly fell down the hole into Deck One. She turned around.
Chris had made his way over. “It’s still there?” she barely heard him ask.
She nodded.
“The Navy’s coming.”
Riley finished the thought for him. “That’s not enough. They’re here for the cult. They won’t know what’s coming.”
Chris breathed deep, swallowing his own pain. “If that thing gets a foothold, it could keep coming through.”
Riley felt empty. They’d stopped the terraforming, but the doorway it had created remained open.
“We still have to sink the ship,” she said. “Earlier, I saw that crab monster disintegrate when it touched our ocean water.”
Chris finished her thought. “So if we flood Deck One, nothing else should be able to come through.”
“Exactly.”
“But I’m out of explosives.” Chris closed his eyes and breathed deep. He was going to pass out any minute.
“What else can we use?” Riley asked.
“Maybe there are cleaning chemicals that could work,” Chris said between breaths, “but we’re running out of time. The Navy will get here and stop us.”
Riley’s mind raced. “I might have an idea.”
48
Riley was on her own for this. No way could Chris help in his condition.
Riley guided him back to the corridor, sat him against the decaying wall, and made sure the makeshift bandage was still stopping the bleeding.
Then she got to work.
Dead cords still layered the floor, all connected to the blasted dough pile in the middle.
Circling the edge of the room, she ripped every strand before it disappeared into the walls. Silvery liquid dripped out. Riley hoped that it didn’t need to be lit up and powered to do its job and that enough of the liquid remained in the tubes.
Her arms ached from the repeated effort of ripping the tubes in two. Her ribs screamed in pain if she bent over too quickly. Making it halfway down one wall took her ten minutes.
She checked down the hole in the center of the floor. The web of arteries was even denser. Now, where multiple strands crossed at the same point, chalky flesh was growing.
They were running out of time. The thing was building itself, gaining its foothold.
Riley assessed how many silvery strands she’d ripped. This had to be enough.
She scooped up as many strands as she could into her arms and dragged them to the decimated dough ring at the center. She heaved her armful down into the hole. The broken ends fell twenty feet to the Deck One floor. The slack between ends slid rapidly into the hole.
Riley dragged the rest of the broken strands to toss them in.
The safest next step would be to run to the stairwell, down to Deck One, and then find the dangling tubes. But in the time it had taken to throw down the dead strands, the chalky flesh on the taut artery web had doubled. Something was growing. Building itself.
Riley steeled herself for the jump down. She made sure she had enough clearance on the landing and then slid down an armful of strands like a fire pole.
Several broke under her weight, but she reached the floor of Deck One intact.
The crack in her ribs rubbed together during the descent. She breathed slow and shallow to control the pain.
She took in her surroundings.
The ceiling was still visible. The room itself stretched out farther than she could see. Leftover ship parts still lay scattered around the room. The fog that had gathered up to ankle heigh was now gone, too.
A web of pulsing red arteries was suspended at chest level. It extended all around, out of sight in all directions. Every string of it stayed perfectly level at chest height.
She stood in an open spot, the twisted blood vessels less than ten feet away.
Riley couldn’t hope to spot the end of the trail of arteries—the piece that flew from surface to surface, hunting down people to drag them back along its length to wherever it came from. She could only move ever so cautiously and hope that it didn’t notice her.
She gathered up the dangling tubes. Silvery liquid dripped onto the floor. Deck One was already terraformed, so the liquid did nothing.
Riley searched frantically for a hole down to the subdecks. Without the orange mist, it was harder to spot.
She crawled under the red web, dragging along the leaking strands. They rubbed against arteries and chalky flesh.
After a few panicked moments, she found a hole down to the maintenance deck. The hole revealed a woven steel walkway, the walls lined with plastic conduit and metal pipes.
The limp tubes were just barely long enough to reach. She stuck the broken ends down into the hole.
The silv
ery liquid dripped down into the maintenance deck. Each drop smacked against the steel walkway and echoed down the corridor.
Now that she was attempting her plan, Riley felt certain it would fail.
If Riley could terraform the lower hull of the Aria, it should turn as decrepit and decayed as she’d seen in Deck Two and Deck One.
The gaps in the floor and walls she’d seen on those two decks had appeared quickly.
She hoped holes in the floor of the maintenance deck would appear as quickly. Flooding the decks with salt water would kill the rest of the mutant fiddler crabs. It should stop the Deviser’s creation from crossing over, too. It had to.
A tearing sound grabbed Riley’s attention. A hunk of chalky flesh clung to an intersection of arteries. It was dry and formless, the size of a basketball. It flopped out from itself with another ripping sound. It extended, unfolded, hooked onto another suspended blood vessel.
Now that she’d noticed it, Riley heard ripping all around her. Another noise joined it, a gentle clanking like finely oiled gears. Throughout Deck One, the web of arteries was building itself.
Far back into the terraformed deck—past stacks of cafeteria trays, piles of art deco wainscoting, and toppled lifeboats—a low mass was rising up towards the ceiling. It extended to either side and as far back as Riley could see. It grew higher toward her like a slow wave.
She squinted, trying to understand what she was seeing. What she’d first thought of as chalky flesh now looked like boney hide, like the inside of a turtle shell, as if the entirety of Deck One and wherever it led were already inside this self-building creation. The wave of boney hide lifted higher. Great wheels turned within, stretching the skin in slow rotations.
The longer Riley looked, the deeper she saw. This fleshy surface was just that: a surface. The true form of the Deviser’s project confused her senses. She felt in her fingertips the scent of rotting grass clippings. She smelled a goal of infinite expansion. Her tongue tingled with a vision of all existence reforming itself into the raw matter the Deviser needed to further its construction.
Her ribs hurt.
The pain snapped Riley’s attention away from the slowly approaching, nearly-here, apocalyptic tidal wave.
All Riley had to stand in its way was its own organic machinery.
The dead strands now dangled from the hole in the floor of Deck Two, down past the red web of arteries, and through a hole into the maintenance deck.
Riley hugged the bunch of dead strands, squeezed tight, and slowly dropped to her knees. It was like squeezing out a gigantic toothpaste tube.
Liquid splattered against the maintenance deck floor.
Riley squeezed out the tubes again, getting every last drop she could. She peered down into the hole.
A silver puddle covered the walkway left to right and was five feet wide.
It wasn’t enough.
One hole in the hull wouldn’t sink the ship. There were failsafes against that. She’d seen Titanic. Even that would have stayed afloat if the iceberg had only punctured in one spot.
If she had all the time in the world, she’d run back up to Deck Two, throw down more strands, and find another hole down to the maintenance deck.
But she didn’t have that time.
The suspended blood vessel web was closing up around her, boney skin connecting the arteries. She ducked underneath and thought of blanket forts as a kid.
Riley had one more option.
She didn’t want to try it. She shouldn’t have to. Dad’s pocket watch was still worth enough money to let Riley escape minimum wage. She deserved a better life.
But right now, she felt purpose. Problems like money could be figured out later. This was the moment life had led her to.
It wasn’t a pocket watch. It was an inter-dimensional hand grenade.
Riley pulled the watch from her pocket. She twisted the lower half over and over until it wouldn’t twist anymore. Then she leaned down into the hole and chucked the watch as far as she could.
She didn’t wait to see the results. On her hands and knees, she crawled like mad for the stairwell.
49
Chris didn’t want to die.
He sat in the decrepit Deck Two hallway. The ship shifted under him. Riley’s plan must have worked. The ship would flood. The salt water would stop the Deviser’s creation from fully crossing over.
Chris coughed. Blood spurted from his gut through his fingers. He didn’t know how much blood he’d lost already, but his shirt was soaked.
The explosion had knocked him down onto his face. His nose was broken. Blood dripped over his lips, but he couldn’t wipe it away without taking pressure off the gunshot wound.
Damn, that hurt.
Success tasted bitter.
He’d found the Deviser’s next attempt, boarded the ship, found Micah’s cult, recruited Riley to help, and together they’d stopped the terraforming and now cut off the Deviser’s creation from crossing over.
His death wouldn’t change the fact that he’d stopped the Deviser. Not just survived it, like back in Richmond. Not just saved a single person, like he’d saved Eddie. But actually stopped the thing from fulfilling its plans.
But that was bullshit.
That didn’t make dying okay. Eddie was still at home. And sure, his grandparents loved him, but they’d only be around another ten or twenty years.
Chris wanted Eddie to have a father and for Eddie’s kids to have a grandfather.
He wasn’t going to die here.
But he couldn’t get up. Not without taking the pressure off his gunshot wound. And he didn’t think he had much more blood to lose before he passed out.
He tried once more. He shifted, covering the wound with just one hand, so he could use the other to push himself to his feet. But once again, the blood came too fast. He dropped back to sitting.
His mind raced. He would think of something. He had in Richmond. He had so far on the Aria.
Another attempt to stand, this time keeping both hands on his gut. Pain exploded in pockets in his gut, his legs, his ribs. The rotting floor rushed up to meet his chin.
At the impact, blood spurted through his fingers.
Chris lay on the floor with his eyes closed. He harbored no illusion that pure willpower would let him stand up and walk. But there had to be a way to get out of this alive. To get home to Eddie.
His belt. If he could slip it out of his belt loops, he could tighten it around his bullet wound to slow the bleeding. Then he could use his hands to crawl out of here.
That required taking his hands off the wound and letting it bleed faster. Chris had to take that risk. The other option was slowly bleeding out while he waited for Riley to come rescue him.
Chris breathed deep. He took one hand away from the bullet wound. Immediately, the bleeding picked up, making his other hand slippery.
He fumbled with his belt buckle. With shaking fingers, he managed to undo it. But when he tugged on the belt, it wouldn’t come loose. All his weight was sitting on it.
Chris gathered his strength, then lifted up on his knees. He yanked his belt free. He lost his balance and fell back onto his face.
Despair flooded Chris’s mind. This was too much. He was getting so tired. Everything hurt. His head felt light. He tried to pull the belt around his gut, but his arms were moving so slowly.
He thought of Eddie. His son, who he’d rescued from the Richmond building. Who he’d adopted from the foster system. Who he’d worked so hard to help trust and hope again.
Chris tried to fling the belt around his back. All he succeeded in doing was pushing more blood out of his stomach.
Eddie had grandparents who loved him. They would be around long enough for Eddie to finish high school. That would have to be enough.
Chris let his body relax.
Strong hands reached down to take the belt from him. They tightened it around his stomach. It hurt like hell, but the bleeding slowed to a trickle.
Ch
ris gathered the strength to look up. “Riley?” If she was back already, then her plan must have gone perfectly.
But instead of Riley, it was a tall, blurry figure. When it spoke, Chris thought he recognized the voice. “They haven’t forgotten you. The Deviser’s technicians. They remember you and your boy.”
Chris tried to focus his eyes, but the figure was a blurry shadow in a blurry hallway. He tried to remember how he knew this voice, deep and warm, but his thoughts were muddled.
The man lifted Chris to his feet. Chris’s head spun. Dizziness turned to nausea.
The man placed one of Chris’s hands on the wall. “Get out of here. And the next time you see the Deviser’s handiwork, leave it to someone not already marked.”
Chris steadied himself against the wall. By the time the hallway stopped spinning, and he turned around to see who’d helped him, no one was there.
Survival instincts smothered curiosity.
Chris began his slow walk to the stairwell.
50
Riley fled through Deck One.
She spider-crawled under the web of blood vessels and the blanket-fort of flesh that was growing between the strands. She heard metal gears clinking together as the Deviser’s creation built itself.
She raced toward the stairwell, or at least where she thought it was. Lurking claustrophobia weakened her sense of direction.
She passed a hole down into the maintenance deck. The rushing of water echoed up. Salty humidity accompanied the noise.
Motivation fueled her retreat. Success. The ship was sinking.
She wanted to wait for the water to rise to make sure that it had the same effect on the growing creation as it did on the mutant fiddler crab. But that would be pointlessly risking drowning.
A grating wail sounded from ahead.
The Aria’s alarm system. Riley raced towards it.
She finally spotted an end to the insanity of Deck One. A straight wall extended out of sight in either direction. A doorway into the stairwell.
She reached the doorway and crawled through. She turned around for one last look into the terraformed, invaded space.