Cryptophobia | Book 2 | Hell & High Water [Fear The Unknown]

by Henderson, G. D.

  “Give it to me”, Lori opened her hands to take the gun, placing the axe down beside her.

  “Okay”, Rachel replied, handing it to her. Lori inspected the gun, keeping the barrel away from the both of them and her fingers far away from the trigger.

  “I think there’s a safety measure on and I’m sure there’s something you put in it that has the bullets. I don’t think he’d have given it to us if it wasn’t loaded, but we don’t know how many bullets it has left, that’s the problem. We should probably save it for if we seriously need it”.

  There was a moment of silence, before Rachel broke it.

  “Do you think they’re alive?” Lori glanced up at her.

  “I hope so, honestly I do… but so much shit has gone on today…”

  “You think it might be hopeless…”

  “That’s not what I’m saying exactly, I’m just saying… we should probably expect the worst, just in case. If they’re late, it could be that they just found it more of a challenge to get here with those things crawling all over the ship. Jesus fucking Christ, is that what I’m calling them now? Things?”

  “Can we call them people anymore?”

  “If we have any humanity left ourselves, yes”.

  “You saw them, they tear people limb from limb. They’re more violent and ruthless than animals. You can’t call that a human being. They’re not so different from cannibals and serial killers, in fact they’re both”.

  “Touché, even so, we should consider the fact that those things have your family trapped somewhere”.

  “They would have replied to me by now, they would have said something”.

  “When did you last message them?”

  “Some time ago”.

  “No news is good news then, at least until it’s bad news”.

  “We should look for them”.

  “That’s not a good idea, what if they get here and can’t find us? No, let’s hold our position and wait, they’ll come, otherwise they’ll text you”.

  “I’m worried, Lori”.

  “I know...”

  “And I’m terrified, look at my hands, I’m shaking like a fucking leaf, my palms are sweaty, my face is fucking waterfalling and my heart feels like it’s gunna burst from my chest any minute now”.

  “I know… I feel the same”. Rachel glanced towards her.

  “You could have gone you know, I wouldn’t hate you”.

  “And leave the one thing worth waking up to everyday behind? What would I go to? What would I live for?”

  Rachel was silent for a moment before replying.

  “I won’t contest that, I just want you to know how much I love you and how glad I am that you did stay. I don’t think I’d be able to think straight or find the courage to fight if you weren’t here with me”.

  “Always”.

  Before Rachel could say another word, her phone vibrated. It was a text from her grandmother.

  “Who is it?” Lori asked, as Rachel propped her head up and began looking around.

  “My grandmother, she says that they can see the lifeboat and asked if we were on it… but...”.

  “She must be close… or at the very least on the same side as us. Ask her where she is”.

  Rachel tapped away at her phone and waited for a response.

  “But...?” Lori replied.

  “Huh?”

  “You said but as though you wanted to say something further”.

  “Oh? Yeah… she texted me”.

  “So?”

  “My grandmother rarely if ever texts me”. Rachel’s phone buzzed again and she glanced down at it. “They’re close by, I told them that we’re still on the ship”. She began glancing around, surveying the immediate vicinity for her parents and grandmother.

  “Have you told them where we are? We could meet them at a middle point or something”, Lori suggested.

  “They can’t move, nan said that there’s crazies around, they don't want to take the chance. I think they are a floor above us, she said she can see some lifeboats below her. She said we should have gotten onto the lifeboat, but I’m not going without them”.

  “Once we regroup we can attempt to lower another one, there’s one just over there”, Lori pointed; it was fairly exposed though, with the time it would take to lower it, they could be overrun.

  “It’ll take too long to lower”.

  “There is an emergency automatic lowering system, I saw those staff members using it for the other one, we’ll just follow the procedures like the security officer instructed”.

  “We don’t have the time to do all that now without endangering our lives in the process and there’s no guarantee we’ll get the chance to do it afterwards either”.

  “Then I’ll do it”.

  “What? No, that’s crazy talk, we need to stick together, I’m not leaving you here on your own, what if they swarm you?”

  “You have to trust me, Rachel, I can do this. Go and find them and bring them back here, I’ll lower it and come find you if needs be”.

  “No, no I’m not leaving you beh....”

  Lori took Rachel by the sides of her face with her hands and pulled her closer.

  “I can do this, I want to do this. When you find them, we’ll need to get out of here fast, which means we can’t afford to waste even a single second, or face being killed. If by some chance you’re being chased by those crazies for example on the way back, we can get our asses out of here pronto”.

  “But what if they find you? What if I’m not here to help you?”

  “I won’t stay out in the open, I’ll hide, they won’t find me”.

  “Lori...“

  “I won’t let them get to me, have faith in me”.

  Reluctantly Rachel agreed, kissing Lori’s hands.

  “Okay”.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you, a world without you isn’t a world worth living in”.

  “I won’t die”.

  “You can’t guarantee that?”

  “I’m promising you that”.

  “Can you?” Rachel replied, gazing up into her girlfriend’s eyes.

  “I’ll damn well make it a reality, my reality, our reality”.

  “Okay, I have faith in you”.

  “Do you trust me?”

  “I trust you”.

  Rachel pulled Lori into an embrace and after some time, Lori Pulled away.

  “Don’t make it seem so final, we’ll be back together shortly. Go, find your parents and nan and let’s get out of here”.

  “Okay...” Rachel took a breath, “Okay, I’m going”.

  “Do you want the gun back? You’ll probably need it more than me”.

  “Yeah, okay, give it to me”. Lori handed Rachel the weapon. Rachel’s hands couldn’t refrain from trembling and the weight of the gun seemed to increase as she held it. Lost on the dizzying premise that she would most likely be forced to use it, it took Lori calling out her name to return her to reality.

  “Rachel”.

  “Y… yes?”

  “Don’t you die on me either, yahear?”

  “I hear you, I won’t”. Rachel kissed her girlfriend and reluctantly parted from her.

  She ran down the outer decks of the starboard looking for any set of stairs that led to the upper deck, not knowing what she might encounter when she got there. Crazies didn’t seem as frequent as they had previously appeared, though what that could be attributed to was anyone's guess. Whilst it seemed ideal given her situation, she wasn’t about to count her blessings just yet.

  Taking the first set of steps she encountered to the upper decks, she slowed down, remaining vigilant, checking every glass pane or open doorway before slipping by.

  Floor vibrating footsteps or otherwise, stopped her dead in her tracks. Initially she had assumed it was merely the ship, but as she progressed it became abundantly clear that this was something more, it wasn’t a steady vibration, rather steady clearly defined footsteps, but what
was capable of creating such heavy vibrations and was that a question Rachel wanted answered?

  Creeping forward, the vibrations only got heavier, then just as suddenly as they had started, they stopped. Rachel came to a more open and exposed vicinity of the deck and peered out to see if the coast was clear, before traversing across it, but what she saw made her heart skip a beat.

  Hunched over a pile of corpses was a colossal sized monstrosity, a trail of bloody footsteps leading away from behind it.

  Was this thing responsible for the heavy footsteps? It had to be, but where the fuck had it come from? Even without seeing its face - heavily assuming it had one - Rachel knew this thing was nothing that could be remotely considered normal. Multiple arms protruding from its body, what looked to be skulls and bones protruding from its back and towering at over 7 foot tall, there was no possible way the existence of something like this would have gone amiss until now, just what the fuck was it?

  She gazed upwards and spotted her mother and grandmother waving to catch her attention at the opposite end of the clearing and on the level just above her, but with that monstrosity obstructing the way, there was little chance of them making it down to her unnoticed and unharmed.

  As though that wasn’t enough, the pressure was further piled on with the encroaching threat of crazies just merely around the corner from where they stood, twitching erratically but seemingly keeping their distance from the colossal monstrosity.

  Rachel had to think fast, she needed a distraction or she needed to be a distraction, there were no two ways about it. Her eyes darted left and right, up and down, looking for something to distract it with or at least a place to run towards if she was the distraction. She could always try her hand at shooting at it, but as completely inexperienced as she was, she’d sooner shoot herself and draw the attention of every crazy in the vicinity. It would be just her luck to not only injure herself, but draw every crazy motherfucker right to her location.

  Texting her grandmother her intentions and clear instructions to make their way down to the lifeboats below where they would find Lori the first opportunity they got to escape, she braced herself for the worst case scenario.

  Her grandmother was quick with a reply, demanding she not be so foolhardy and ready to risk her life; that her father had already tried to be a hero.

  That reply sank Rachel’s heart like an anvil in the Mariana Trench. What did she mean? Where was her father?

  Quizzing her grandmother's abrupt revelation, the reply sent her into a spiral of despair. He was dead, died attempting to save them, died in quite possibly a horrific manner, a subject matter her grandmother refused to disclose, instead focusing her efforts on persuading Rachel to leave the two of them behind.

  Blinded by anger infused despair, regret at not being able to rekindle her relationship with her father before hearing this and the stifling fear that he died believing she hated him, Rachel’s sense of fear vanished altogether, replaced by sheer unyielding determination to prevent her grandmother and mother from experiencing the same fate.

  No longer contemplating how to merely create a distraction, she did the unthinkable and sprung out from her hiding place.

  “Hey, motherfucker! Look here!” She snapped viciously, wiping sorrowful tears from her eyes and standing strong… at least until the colossal catastrophe manifested turned to face her.

  CHAPTER 24 - LORI & RACHEL

  4:49pm - 10 hours, 2 minutes since outbreak in London.

  3 hours, 39 minutes since outbreak aboard MS HotS.

  . . .

  . . .

  Lori, having managed to start the mechanism that would lower the lifeboat, took cover somewhere close by and kept an eye out for crazies lurking nearby, attracted to the area by the racket of the machine.

  A few wandered by and found nothing of interest, before provoking each other, or what certainly looked like it, with a series of aggressive undertones. Their mannerisms were odd, communicating with each other at times on a primal level with biting, shoving and grunting, at other times in a more sophisticated way, talking, but not in a way that made sense. Their interactions seemed disjointed, hostile and creepy at best.

  Lori could only pray that they left before Rachel returned, but as fate would have it, it was precisely Rachel’s voice coming from overhead that attracted them away from the lifeboat. As they dispersed, Lori stepped out and looked upwards worryingly, who or what was Rachel shouting at and was she okay?

  Rachel stood face to face with a horror unlike anything she had ever seen, a grotesquely figured nightmare. She went white with terror and every muscle in her body solidified like stone, unable to move.

  Standing before her was the horribly disfigured manifestation of all her worst thoughts come true. A slumped mouth, ginger haired, multiple eyed, multiple armed and legged nightmare of destruction, with bones ejecting from places she could only imagine to come from the unstable minds of a horror movie creator. Its legs had expanded to sustain its tremendous upper body mass and what would only be interpreted as feet, consisted of an entanglement of veins, elongated toes and protruding bone.

  In its grasp was that of a dead person it was in the midst of eating, their corpse so horrifically mutilated that it was even impossible to determine whether they were male or female, the gruesome sloshing sound of their guts spilling to the deck beneath it.

  Just the look of this thing made her nauseous and that putrid stench emanating from it was more than enough to make her want to incessantly puke. It reeked of death, a smell she wasn’t familiar with before, but was now bestowed with more than her fair share.

  The absolute assault on her senses, coupled with her own body stiffening fear, were enough to make her feel light headed, but she couldn’t afford to faint here, too much was riding on this crazy stunt she had committed to.

  Her voice, having been silenced, found its zest and confidence again, but not before wading through terror.

  “Yes you, you ugly son of a bitch! If you look that hideous I can’t even begin to imagine what the thing that created you looks like, but I bet it's something even the sci-fi channels would refuse to air!”

  The monstrosity responded with a deep gurgled groan or growl - it was difficult to distinguish which - and dropped its meal to the deck. As though undergoing something of a metamorphosis, its body began to slowly mould itself into something larger, something even more grotesque right before her very eyes

  As it began to slowly approach her, vibrating the deck beneath every heavy footstep, Rachel stepped back, her mouth dry, her palms sweaty, her body as stiff as rigor mortis itself.

  She honestly believed she would have to pour every ounce of willpower into every step she took, given how much willpower it took just to back off, but it was truly amazing just how a little incentive - like a colossal monstrosity storming towards you - could limber up those ligaments and have her springing like a lamb fleeing the slaughter.

  She didn’t look back, she just complied with her instinct to run.

  Closely pursued by her titan sized assailant, she didn’t know where she was going, she only knew she had to escape. Crazies she encountered seemed reluctant to venture anywhere close to her with her pursuer hot on her tail, choosing instead to scamper in opposite directions. She could only begin to imagine why, but it was at least a fret lessened. She dived into a door leading to a covered section of the outer deck, believing it would be too narrow for her pursuer to squeeze through, but alas it lunged through the doorway with a ferocity powerful enough to create a significantly wider opening.

  “Mommy, I want the toy! Come back here, toy!” It roared, a horrifying cacophony of distressed voices. It stampeded after her, smashing anything in its way and flinging debris inches away from her head, in the form of deadly projectiles. It tore through the sheltered section of the deck, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

  Absolute terror was the only thing driving her now. Shaking this thing off was going to be a great deal more ch
allenging than she could have ever anticipated and one false move could see to a grisly death she didn’t want to think about.

  Rachel vaulted deck chairs and tables with hopes that the obstacles would slow her pursuer down, but it smashed straight through them as though they weren’t even there, just a taste of what it could do to her.

  She took a sharp left turn into a corridor, stumbling, but returning to her feet just as her pursuer crashed head first into the doorway and attempted to capture her. Wedged between the narrow walls of the corridor, the colossal monster found itself stuck and unable to proceed any further into the corridor, stunted by its own size. That was the good news, the bad news was that out of all the corridors she could have picked, she picked the one that led to nothing besides a small windowless service cabin that had already been raided for everything it was worth.

  “Oh shit… oh fuck”, she exclaimed, panting with exhaustion and panic. Her eyes darted to every corner and surface of the corridor and cabin, looking and hoping for something, anything she could use to escape or as a weapon; a ventilation shaft, a fire extinguisher, heck even a broken light bulb, but everything, absolutely everything of use had been stripped from the cabin and corridor.

  Hiding in the small service cabin, she watched helplessly as her pursuer edged closer and closer to her the more it struggled.

  She glanced down at her mobile, battery life sixty-eight percent, it wasn’t a great deal, but it was more than enough.

  Her hands trembling and sweaty, she fumbled with her mobile and managed to call her girlfriend.

  With the lifeboat lowered and open, Lori readied the control panel for the next stage of their escape, a long descent and first class ticket off of the MS Hell of the Seas. Likely they wouldn't have long to pander over the specifics once the others returned, so now was the best chance to find out what next to do.

  “Pull the red lever inside to release the safety harness once the lifeboat has made contact with the water”, she read out to herself in a lowered voice, “Okay”. She glanced inside the lifeboat to locate the red lever and spotted a panel of buttons with a steering wheel.