by M. L. Banner
“We need to get out of here, Taufan,” Jaga announced, as he held him with one hand and rifled through his canvas duffel bag in the back of the closet. He had thrown it there when he arrived.
Of course his robe was near the bottom.
Upon grabbing it, Jaga slipped one arm inside and then moved Taufan to his other hand and slipped in the other arm.
“Okay, my friend. Time for a ride,” he coaxed, holding Taufan over the giant-sized pocket. He had sewed this into this house coat so he could carry his ferret around with him, without anyone knowing he was there.
Taufan hopped in, still whining.
The air in his cabin was getting very stale and hard to breathe. But he needed something more.
Jaga held a sleeve over his mouth and searched the cabin once again, until he found it.
A quick shuffle to his table, which was lower than his previous table and probably why his hand couldn’t find it. Right in the center was his large black Maglite, a gift from a passenger some years ago, and his sea card. He snatched the heavy flashlight, thinking he might need it if there was a fire, and then shuffled back to the door.
Just before opening, he heard voices. Lots of them.
A swarm of people were just outside his door, milling around and speaking to each other in short agitated sentences.
“Jaga, hello,” called out a familiar voice from the crowd, which he recognized as a mix of passengers and crew. Or should that be new crew and old crew?
It was Samuel Yusif, from Somalia. He didn’t bump into Samuel much, because he worked in the kitchen, but he liked him. “Hey Samuel, is there a fire?” Jaga jammed the Maglite in between the door and frame, now wondering why he didn’t grab his sea card too. He stood up again to find Samuel there.
“We just trying to figure this out ourselves too. Dis smell like burned garlic... After de explosion, we see gas in cabins. Come out here. That when—”
“Explosion? What explosion?”
“Some say it bomb.”
Jaga was puzzled by this, now realizing that the explosion must have been what woke him. “Hey look, the smoke is coming into the hallway.” Jaga pointed to a vent in the hall. The same white smoke was wafting out of the vent, but not like a regular fire. This was something else, like a gas.
“It’s poison,” someone yelled out.
“Maybe,” Jaga hollered over the din of harried conversations, “we should get into the stairwell. The ventilation is best there. And if we have to, we can run down stairs and away from the gas or smoke, if it isn’t safe.” He wasn’t about to call it poison, just because someone said this. But he wondered if it was.
His words were having an effect, because the people in his hallway were already moving down the hall and turning into the stairwell.
“Aren’t you coming?” Samuel asked, following the group.
Jaga glanced at his door, propped open slightly by his flashlight. He was going to grab his sea card, but now he was having second thoughts. If this was a poisonous gas, the last thing he wanted to do is breathe any more of it. And right now his skin and throat felt prickly, like they were burnt. Probably just my mind playing tricks on me, but just in case... He snatched the flashlight from the door, which instantly clasped shut. He’d get another card, or ask someone to let him in again, if given that chance. “I’m coming.”
The group of ten or so people, now his neighbors, had already filed into the landing area in between the midway elevators and stairwell. He quickly followed, anxious to get away from the poisonous gas that was slowly leaking into their cabins and hallway.
“I’m so glad you here, Jaga,” Samuel stated. “Now what we do?”
The others cut off their conversations and looked to him. He found this odd, because other than a few friends, people rarely found what he had to say interesting, much less important.
“I think we wait here. The gas doesn’t seem to be moving fast, and I’m guessing that’s because the power outage and probably the explosion automatically closed the vents. We have good ventilation here. So I would suggest we wait for the captain or crew to instruct us and we listen.”
So they quietly waited. But rather than an expected announcement, they heard something strange above them.
“Do you hear that?” someone whispered.
It was like animals... Hundreds of breathless animals, in a stampede.
107
Engine Room
The experienced engine room crew calmly followed protocol immediately upon feeling the explosion rock the ship, even before they received any confirmation from their engineering chief. In anticipation of a gas explosion or even a terrorist attack, they attempted to do what they were supposed to do first: secure all doors. The automatic systems took care of the rest. The protocol and automated systems were designed to lower the possibility of a fire spreading and/or cut off any access terrorists might have to their engines. However, many of the new and inexperienced crew members did the opposite. They panicked.
Bobby Gibson, a retired banker from Cheltenham, ran as fast as he could for the nearest exit, which thankfully was right in front of him. When his new supervisor, Edger Ivonovich, had abandoned him to follow some sort of “emergency protocol,” Bobby figured he’d take his chances topside. He’d get out of here and face the consequences later.
At the small steel door, there was a placard that read “Deck 1” with an up arrow. That’s all Bobby needed. He heaved up on the metal handle until it budged, slowly at first, then finally sliding all the way up with a large clank. He pulled on the same metal latch to open the door, but it was stuck. So he yanked at it with all of his might, and then tugged again, until something in the door and in his back gave way with a loud thunk sound. He held onto the latch, while taking in several rapid puffs of air. Besides whatever he pulled in his back, his chest was beating so fast now, he thought it might explode.
A noise behind him caused him to turn back. He didn’t see them, but he could hear frantic voices coming toward him. Need to move quickly.
Another tug at the door caused it to swing open. Without hesitating, he stepped blindly into a soupy fog on the other side. His skin burned immediately, as the fog—or was it smoke—surrounded him. If there’s smoke, there’s fire, he thought. Yet this smelled like melting fish guts. Something was wrong here and he had to find another way out of the engine room.
Bobby took a quick turn, attempting to return to the way he had entered. He took one step and he ran into something solid; a pin-prick of pain shot through his forehead. He couldn’t see a damned thing in this smoke and his eyes were on fire. So were his lungs. He took another breath and coughed hard.
Now really panicking, he spun farther left on his heel, thinking he had turned prematurely, took another step and this time ran face-first directly into a sharp but equally solid object. Bobby lost it at that point.
“Help me!” he screamed.
Gagging on the smoke, he thrust out his hands and desperately tried to feel his way to the opening. Every square inch of his skin felt on fire. “Hell—cough-cough, plea—cough-cough.”
He found the opening, thrusting his two arms out to confirm it, and then dashed for it. This time he forgot to lift his feet over the threshold of the bulkhead door, designed to be air and water-tight. His feet remained inside the access way, but his body continued moving forward, until he hit head-first on the grated walkway. Bobby no longer felt panic, nor the sting of the toxic gas.
As he slowly died, the toxic gas, finding its release, billowed inside the engine room, filling it up fast.
~~~
Flavio dispatched another one of the island men. This one was loitering by the main entrance of the engine room. At first he was going to shoot him with his rifle. Quick and easy. But he opted for a more silent method and withdrew his Morakniv.
Flavio surprised the man and before he could react, Flavio sliced across the man’s neck and then drove his knife down, deep into the man’s chest, at the same time shoving
with all of his weight to knock the man onto his back. The man did what all do: he clutched his hands around his neck to hold back the flow of blood. With one gloved hand still on the knife stuck in the man’s chest, Flavio placed the other over the man’s mouth to keep him quiet, while Flavio waited for him to die and searched for the others.
It took less than a minute for his target to stop moving. There was no one else around.
Glancing back down at the dead man, Flavio was momentarily jolted. The man’s eyes were blood-red. They were just like Mrs. Williams’ eyes. That meant that his man was symptomatic like her.
He hesitated before extracting his knife, wiping the blood off it onto the symptomatic’s chest. Immediately, he felt a sigh of relief. He probably couldn’t win a hand-to-hand battle with one of these things. Mrs. Williams could certainly kick his ass if she tried. And certainly any somewhat able-bodied man with double or triple their normal strength would be a difficult force to stop. Worse would be several of them at once.
No more stealth, he reasoned, sliding his knife back in its sheath attached to his belt. He left his small pack by the door, stood up and brought his rifle back around, at the ready. He flicked off the safety, did another scan of his surroundings, and then clicked open the main entrance door to the engine room.
His gun was thrust inside, but he held up there, listening. The fluorescents above revealed a misty wasteland. Some sort of fog held to the floor, covering four or five bodies. One wore a black jumper like he’d expect of the crew that worked here. His head looked bashed in and his throat looked ripped out. This told Flavio that more of these island men were symptomatic or parasitic. He wondered if the two men they had confronted in the food area were as well, even though Mrs. Williams said they were not. But she also said something was wrong with them.
As the fog started to inch its way out the door, surrounding his boots, Flavio scrutinized the other bodies. They were the island men, wearing the same dirty clothes and sunglasses—many of them had sunglasses, just like Williams, to hide their eyes. He could only see two of them clearly. Their faces were covered in red sores and their mouths were wide open, like they had suffocated. Their throats were swollen to twice their normal size.
The fog crept up his knee. And that was close enough. He withdrew his rifle from the opening and stepped back, quickly shutting the door and closing off the gas.
He had seen this stuff used before, to kill rats as well as people. He hesitated, thinking about what would happen if someone else happened to open the door. Whoever was in the engine room was probably dead already, or would be soon, and it wasn’t worth risking any others. He flipped his rifle around to his back and undid his leather belt.
It took only a minute to tie up the handle of the door, just enough so that no one would accidentally stumble inside.
He then left the engine room, with the intent of going to try and help TJ with the men targeting the bridge. Even as talented as she was, she’d still need help.
While running, he reported the probable death of all of the engine room crew and the island men who were trying to target that area. He also announced his intent to help Mrs. Williams and that some of the islanders were symptomatic.
Flavio made it to the deck 2 landing, telling Mr. Williams that he intended to ascend the stairwell all the way to deck 8 and then forward to the bridge.
“Flavio, don’t go that way,” Williams warned. “The parasitics are breaking free directly above you. Suggest instead you—” Flavio clicked off the radio.
Right above him were the sounds of many people—he now suspected the parasitics—coming down these stairs, and they were less than a deck away.
108
TJ
After hearing and feeling the explosion, TJ wasn’t sure what to expect. The words of the disgusting Squat man rattled in her brain: “While you’re feeling me out, my men are taking over your bridge and will blow your engines so you can’t go anywhere.” In addition to the perversity of this man, the sheer temerity of these people to come on board and believe they could do what they wanted to her people, pissed her off to no end.
TJ was ready to kill and she didn’t care what the repercussions were. She was done holding back, repressing her desire to kill. These men needed to die in the most gruesome ways and she was going to enjoy every moment of it. Then she was going to come back to where they were holding Squat and pop his head like a pimple.
Her smile grew, as did her stride, as she turned off of I-95, hoping this shortcut would get her to the bridge before the islanders did, or at least before they were able to take out the bridge door.
She turned into the extra-dark crew stairwell, barely lit by emergency lights. She punched through the murky area, ascending three steps at a time, and was on deck 8 in barely a blink or two. It was almost frightening how quickly she could move now. At the top step, she froze and came to an abrupt stop.
Before her was a man dressed just like Squat and Skinny: a sheen of dirt, grime and sweat coated his skin, face and clothes. This one had a broken ankle; his foot was bent at a ninety-degree angle. He sat on the decking, legs splayed, making a meal out of someone’s arm.
The man looked up, glared at TJ with his red eyes and brayed a series of cackles at her. TJ instantly knew that this meant, “Stay away, this is mine.”
Below his elbow, in puddles of blood and muck were his sunglasses. Some wore sunglasses and some were wearing black contacts, she reasoned.
But why no smell?
But there was a smell; in between the non-infected blood, she could smell it.
She pulled out the knife Flavio had given her from the fold of her shorts and thrust it into the ear of the dirty parasitic. His head flopped over and the half-eaten arm he’d been munching on, tumbled to the floor. With her other hand, TJ wiped the sheen of dirt and sweat from the man’s face and smelled it, and then him.
Also remembering something she saw in Squat, she pushed the dead man’s head back and glared into his nostrils, which were flared like the others’.
Then she understood immediately: The nostrils were filled with cotton so they couldn’t smell. Their own smell was someone else’s dirt and sweat. They were using a non-infected’s body odor and dirt to cover the island’s infected. These men were infected and symptomatic like her, although some like this one, looked parasitic, all to overtake their ship. And so they wouldn’t go crazy until they needed them to, they shoved cotton up their noses, so they couldn’t smell their own scent masks.
“Those...” So many expletives rapid-fired out of her brain at that moment, they got stove-piped at her tongue and wouldn’t come out. She stepped forward, crunching the dead man’s sunglasses under her feet, turned the handle and threw back the door, not caring whether she was stealthy or not.
She was going to wreak havoc upon these men.
TJ leapt into the hallway and ran around the public stairway to take the starboard hallway toward the bridge.
She turned the corner, past the entrance of Eloise Carmichael’s cabin, and dashed toward the men already there and setting up explosives at the bridge entrance.
One of the men’s radio was hollering at him and he picked it up to answer it, when he saw TJ. The man dropped his radio and stared at the beautiful blur coming right at him. His lips attempted to form words, but all that fell out was, “Look at—” before TJ struck him like a wrecking ball, crashing him hard into cabin 8000’s doorframe.
TJ was able to stop right where she’d struck him, sparing herself from a potentially concussive blow. But something hit her as strongly as the man she’d run into, who now writhed in pain on the floor. The man was not infected. And that meant that only some of their group were infected and others weren’t. This was puzzling.
It was a flash of movement, just out of her periphery. She snapped her head in that direction. There, a few feet from her, was a smiling face, pointing a revolver; the revolver’s chambers were filled with .357 cartridges; it clicked. Before she could r
eact, the smiling face pulled the trigger.
109
Tomas
Tomas Novo, Via de Corvo’s only surviving agent, listened patiently to his boss ranting on the radio.
“Team A. Team B. Report goddammit, report!” Sal hollered, spewing spittle and anger at the radio. Not getting a response, he was naturally inspired to take action, as he always did. He pulled back, portable in his palm. Then, because he got no response, he smashed the radio against the rough stonework of the building they were in. The radio splintered into a multitude of now useless pieces. Sal glared at the cruise ship out the window and then at the broken parts of what was his radio.
Tomas sat quietly behind his boss, unwilling to offer even one thought or suggestion. He’d wait until he was asked. And he certainly didn’t want to venture a guess now, when he was so mad. When Sal got mad, people died. And Sal was as angry as Tomas had seen him in several days.
It was a common theme with his boss: he’d lose his temper and then break something, or someone. Only then was he able to collect his logical thoughts and refocus on the task at hand.
Tomas knew enough to let him be and wait for the anger to pass and his logic to return. Until then, he didn’t make a peep.
“Tomas? Hand me your radio.”
Tomas popped out of his seat and took the few steps to Sal. He laid it down on the table between Sal and the window, through which he still stared at the elusive object that had been avoiding his capture. That was the root of his anger, not being able to easily seize the Intrepid, even though he had thought it would be so easy; even though he had made all the plans he made. He just couldn’t wait to get his hands on it and enough food to supply his people for at least a year or two.
Tomas quickly pulled back and returned to his chair.
