They Cling to the Hull (Horror Lurks Beneath Book 2)

by Ben Farthing

  Above the suspended web of blood vessels, hills of skin stretched and circled with the movement of machinery within.

  Beneath the web, the salt water was splashing up from the holes in the floor.

  Riley strained to see if any of that water made contact with the blood vessels or flesh between them.

  She couldn’t tell, and she wasn’t waiting around to find out. She’d know soon enough.

  Movement from within.

  Three mutant fiddler crabs raced on their spindly legs away from the rising water towards the stairs. The razor jaws snapped.

  Riley fled.

  She ran into the Deck Two corridor to find Chris limping towards the door. She ran to help him. “Do you still have that pistol?”

  Chris took a moment to process her question and then pulled the plastic gun from his waistband.

  Automatic gunfire erupted from up the stairs. Something louder and bigger than the crew’s rifles.

  “Toss the gun,” Riley said.

  Chris threw the pistol into one of the decaying meeting rooms.

  She helped him to the door. “Help!” she cried.

  A soldier in camo and body armor stormed through the door. “Down on the ground!” he ordered.

  Riley helped Chris comply. “We were hostages,” she cried.

  The first soldier kept his gun trained on them, while another approached and checked them for weapons. “They’re clear.”

  “The ship is sinking!” Riley didn’t have to pretend to panic. If they didn’t get out of here quick, they really could go down with the ship. And with the opened doorway, drowning wouldn’t be the worst possible fate. “The terrorists set off a bomb. There’s water coming up from downstairs.”

  “Are there any more explosives that you know of?” asked the first soldier.

  “I don’t think so. The last bomb, they killed themselves with it.”

  “There’s no more terrorists down here?”

  Riley shook her head.

  A third soldier came in. “Water’s rising fast, sir.”

  “Alright, let’s get out of here.”

  The soldiers helped Riley and Chris up the stairs, away from the Deviser.

  51

  The soldiers carried Chris. Riley followed them up to Deck Three, where they led the way to the Aria’s disembarking station.

  The storm clouds had opened up. Rain blanketed the ocean swells with little pockmarks.

  Riley took in the deep blue of the Pacific under cloud cover. It wasn’t orange. It wasn’t the other dimension. The terraforming hadn’t extended beyond the lower decks.

  She leaned over the railing to look down into the ocean, hoping not to see a web of red blood vessels. But she couldn’t see past the waves and raindrop ripples.

  She could only hope that the salt water would stop it just like it had stopped the fiddler crabs.

  A gangplank connected the cruise liner to a smaller Navy ship. Already, the walkway was a steep path upwards. The Aria was taking on water quick.

  Riley followed the soldiers onboard. Chris was whisked away to a medical bay.

  Before Riley was ushered inside, she saw yellow lifeboats bouncing in the waves. She hoped everyone made it off the Aria.

  Her hand went to her pocket so she could text Krystal. No service. She’d taken her phone with her so she could take pictures of Deck Two for proof that Nathaniel was violating EPA regulations. The idea felt so naive now. That was only a few hours ago, but it felt like a lifetime.

  The small Navy ship bounced on the waves. Corpsmen tended to Riley’s wounds as they traveled from lifeboat to lifeboat, taking on more passengers.

  Riley asked after Chris several times, but they kept telling her there wasn’t any news yet.

  She spent the time peering through the windows into the ocean, praying that nothing was down there.

  About half an hour after Riley boarded the Navy ship, a wave of gasps worked its way from outside. Riley pushed past arriving cruise guests to get back outside.

  Heavier rain drenched her hair and shoulders. The temperature had dropped with the growing storm.

  The Aria sat low in the water. The bottom rows of round windows were already below the ocean’s surface. Waves lapped at the Deck Four walkway.

  Riley looked frantically around for why everyone had gasped. Dark clouds filled the sky. Blue waves with white crests splashed over the railings. She pushed to the edge of the Navy ship, certain she’d see the web of blood vessels just under the ocean’s surface. But the increased rain created an opaque blanket of tiny splashes.

  Gasps again.

  The Aria lurched downwards like it had been tugged. Steel groaned, louder than the soft rush of rain.

  The small crowd took a collective step backwards, leaving Riley at the railing, staring intently into the water.

  Its stern disappearing quicker than its bow, the Aria sank and rotated until its bow pointed at the sky. A muffled crack sounded from under the water. A shockwave rippled outward. The remainder of the ship sank within seconds.

  The ocean scene left behind was one of stormy swells, yellow lifeboats, and small Navy vessels. A larger gray ship lingered far off.

  It took another hour for the small vessel to gather all the cruise guests it could fit. Riley stood at the railing in the rain the entire time, watching the water, looking for any signs of red artery webs, hills of skin, or escaping monstrous crustaceans. She saw only the Pacific.

  She grew confident that the Deviser’s creation had been stopped. If it had kept spreading at the same speed as when she’d last seen it, it would have burst out of the ship within minutes of her escape.

  Sinking the Aria had stopped it.

  Riley didn’t know the consequences of dropping the terraformed Deck One to the bottom of the ocean. Was there still an open doorway where the Deviser’s self-building creation could reach through? Would the orange and blue ocean mix?

  Or would the Pacific kill any invaders? Riley had never seen the doorway itself. She imagined it was merged space somewhere on Deck One. The salt water might destroy the foreign matter in the merged space and shut the doorway.

  If it didn’t, there was nothing she could do now.

  She felt confident that sinking the ship was the right choice. She desperately hoped everyone had escaped before it sank. But at least the Deviser’s creation hadn’t taken over the ship as it sailed back for California.

  A corpsman found Riley to tell her that the doctors were ready to update her on her husband. It took her a moment to realize he meant Chris.

  She went inside to learn that Chris had lost a lot of blood, but transfusions had stopped that threat. Punctured organs had leaked other threats, but the surgeons had helped there as well. Chris would recover.

  They asked about the gunshot wound. Riley played dumb. They told her someone from the FBI was flying in to talk to her.

  Riley shrugged. An investigation didn’t worry her. Nathaniel’s cult had hijacked the ship, at least for a few moments. The FBI would blame them for the ship sinking. Riley had enough emails saved over the past year of trying to recover Dad’s watch that would prove she wasn’t friendly with her uncle.

  She wandered back to the large room with the cruise guests, not sure what to do next.

  Riley spotted Krystal. She was holding a blanket around a tiny old woman’s shoulders.

  For the first time since she’d bought their tickets, Riley relaxed. She joined her friend in helping the guests.

  Epilogue

  Riley stretched the packing tape over Krystal’s last box. Krystal walked in from the kitchen, still staring at the diamond on her finger.

  “We get it,” Riley laughed. “You’re engaged.”

  Krystal squealed. “I know, right? I landed a good one.”

  Riley was happy for her friend, but the apartment would feel empty until she found a new roommate.

  “Aw, don’t be said,” Krystal said. “We’ll still get lunch every week. But you’re pa
ying, with that big raise.”

  The coffee shop had made her a manager. Not a huge raise, but enough to cover the apartment by herself if she wanted. Which she didn’t. Instead, she’d quit her gig work delivering food and finally enrolled at the community college.

  Her life’s purpose wasn’t to work at the coffee shop. It probably wasn’t to be a nurse, either. But maybe once she figured out a purpose, a nurse’s salary would fund it.

  Anytime her mind wandered back to her reason for being, she thought of those few hours on the Aria when she’d helped Chris stop that madness from spreading into this world. There hadn’t been any doubt in why she was doing what she was doing.

  But there was no practical way to seek out another situation like that. Plus, it would be stupid. She’d almost died. And almost been yanked away into another dimension.

  And Chris had told her to avoid anything like that. He said he’d made the mistake of thinking only he could stop it, and it had almost cost him everything.

  While Krystal took one last stroll through the half-empty apartment, Riley opened her phone and scrolled to Chris’s contact info.

  They kept their conversations vague, assuming the FBI might still be watching them.

  The feds believed Riley’s reason for being on the ship. It helped that it was true, and there were plenty of emails and texts of her trying to get Dad’s watch back and then discussing her plans with Krystal.

  The feds were less ready to believe that Chris was a random passenger who just happened to be taken hostage by the terrorists. They knew he’d been in Richmond. They knew that Nathaniel was connected to the old billionaire lady who died in Richmond. So they pried at Chris, trying to figure out his involvement.

  But Riley covered for him. She said they’d hooked up on the cruise before she tried to steal from Nathaniel, and that’s how he got caught up with the cult. Captain Silva told his own story to exonerate the two of them. Based on the FBI’s questions, it didn’t sound like her and Chris’s story lined up with Captain Silva’s, but that wasn’t enough to accuse either of them of being involved with the terrorist activities.

  After all that, Riley still found herself wanting to call him. It wasn’t romantic—not that she was ruling out that possibility. It was a desire to understand what they’d stopped from happening. What risks might still exist. And why Chris—after purposely boarding a cruise ship he knew came from the Deviser—now said they should never investigate any of it again.

  And maybe just a little, a desire to feel a taste of that purpose she’d felt when they’d stopped the Deviser’s creation.

  Chris’s finger hovered over Riley’s contact info.

  He sat in his parents’ backyard, overlooking a sprawling vista of southwest Virginia’s rolling hills. Thunderclouds gathered in the distance, but that was common for afternoons in the mountains.

  It was Saturday, which meant he had a short respite from his long-term substitute position at the middle school. Free time made it harder to keep his mind from wandering.

  Lately, in the months after they’d stopped the Deviser’s creation on the Aria, he couldn’t get the Deviser out of his head.

  But he’d stuck to the warning he’d received. Stay away. The Deviser’s Technicians still remembered him. They still remembered Eddie.

  Chris didn’t want to know what a Technician was. He trusted the warning.

  After he’d recovered from the gunshot wound, he’d thought of that moment again. He’d realized he recognized that voice.

  Roberts. Micah Rayner’s right-hand man. A cultist for the Deviser, until inside the Richmond building, he’d realized the Deviser was anything but benevolent. The bodyguard had saved both Chris and Eddie’s life multiple times.

  He’d been taken by the building but was somehow, somewhere still alive.

  And Chris trusted him. If he said to stay away, Chris would stay away. Someone else would stumble upon the Deviser’s next attempt at crossing over or at harvesting mankind. Chris could only hope that unfortunate soul would be able to stop it.

  “Dad!” Eddie yelled from the back deck.

  Chris turned around.

  Eddie had grown another seven inches since last summer. In all his preteen lankiness, he was now eye-level with Chris.

  Eddie bounded down the stairs. “Mike’s riding his bike over, and then we want to go to Rodrigo’s house. Can you drive us?”

  “Sure.” Anything to occupy his mind.

  Despite trusting that Roberts was both earnest and correct about his warning, Chris felt on edge. Everywhere he looked, he expected to see warped space like on the top floors of the Richmond building, or on Deck One of the Aria. Every time he heard footsteps outside his bedroom, he expected the monstrous crustaceans to come crashing through the door. In every moment of silence, he expected to hear more whispered warnings from his taken friends.

  It all felt like something was coming. He couldn’t even say why. It felt like his body and brain knew deep down that the Deviser was active again.

  “Dad?” Eddie slowed his walk through the grassy yard. “You zoning out again?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I got lost in thought.”

  “Thinking about the skyscraper?”

  Chris hadn’t admitted to Eddie what had happened on the Aria. As far as Eddie knew, the only supernatural threat Chris had faced was in Richmond.

  “No,” Chris lied. “Just thinking about how great it will be once you can drive yourself everywhere.”

  Eddie didn’t laugh. “I’ve been thinking about the skyscraper a lot. Cam messaged me. She’s been thinking about it, too.”

  “I didn’t know you still keep in touch.”

  Cam lived next door to the Richmond building. Or now, she lived next to the empty lot where it used to be. She’d explored it with Eddie before they’d realized what it was. She’d kept Eddie alive until Chris could find him. Chris loved her for that.

  “We don’t really,” Eddie said. “She messaged me to ask if I’d been thinking about the top floor. She had a weird dream or something.”

  “What about you?” Chris asked, not wanting to know the answer.

  Eddie hugged himself across the chest. “Weird dreams, yeah. Something’s hunting me through the top floor, only it’s also changing stuff all around it as it goes. Making it all better.”

  The Technicians.

  “Dreams are just dreams.” Chris feigned a happy inflection. It soured his twisting gut. “Gotta forget them and go about your day. Come on, I’ll get my keys.”

  Chris put his arm around his son to guide him inside. But Eddie stayed rooted to the ground.

  “You know what’s really weird? I think my dream has something to do with the news about the oceans.”

  A chill ran down Chris’s spine. “I haven’t checked the news today. What about the ocean?”

  “Not just one. All of them. They’ve dropped like eighteen inches in the past six months.”

  Chris sat down on the grass. The world spun. Water levels were dropping. He and Riley had sent the Aria to the bottom of the Pacific. The Aria contained a doorway to the Deviser’s world.

  The ocean was draining into the Deviser’s world.

  Eddie leaned down. “What’s wrong? Do you think it’s related? Do we need to do something? Is this like the skyscraper again?”

  Chris cleared his head. Roberts had warned him, and he intended to heed that warning. “It’s got nothing to do with us.” He stood back up, hiding his imbalance. “I’ll take you to play with your friends.”

  As they walked inside, an understanding grew inside Chris that he wouldn’t be able to heed Roberts’ warning. Eddie’s dream couldn’t just be a dream. Something was hunting Eddie. There was still a doorway at the bottom of the ocean.

  He had to protect his family. He had to warn somebody about the draining ocean. He’d start figuring that out tonight.

  But until then, Eddie was an eleven-year-old who wanted to go play with friends. And Chris was Dad, who made sur
e no matter what dangers the world hid, his son would live today happy and unafraid.

  A SPECIAL THANKS

  Dear strange, adventurous reader,

  I have to thank you. Without readers like you who enjoy the weirder side of horror and suspense, I would be lonely with my stories. But every time a reader enjoys my books, I know I’m a little bit less alone with my strange taste in horror.

  I wrote my first novel, BOOM, when I was just out of college, unemployed, and renting a small room in Richmond, Virginia. But I was unsure of it and so I sat on it for nearly ten years, writing a couple more novels in the meantime. It wasn’t until I was knee-deep in a marketing career, potty training toddlers, and worried about mid-thirties problems like mortgages and health insurance that I thought, “I should do something with these books.” So with encouragement from fellow writers, I dove into the publishing world.

  I can’t thank you enough for making this possible. I’m glad our strange tastes have found each other, and I hope you enjoy my other novels just as much as this one.

  If you can spare a moment, share your thoughts by leaving a review. That small effort on your part means to the world to me. It helps me grow my audience by luring readers like yourself to books like mine. I would be forever in your debt. Not a large debt, but one that lasts forever.

  Thank you again! Let’s meet again soon in another book.

  WANT YOUR NEXT STRANGE HORROR READ?