“And look here, the bone!” shouted Thomas “Empty—empty within, not so much as a trace of marrow.” Thomas had cut a section off the broken bone, and he held it up to the lamp they worked under.
“What’s it all mean?” Ransom asked, astonished.
“It appears… no—it is a fact that whatever this thing is… it utilizes every ounce of fluid in the body—to the absolute final degree.”
“But how? Shriveling every organ… and-and the bone marrow?” Thomas sounded and looked as if he might bolt.
“Hold it together, Tom… Tommie!” shouted Declan, steadying his own nerves.
“I don’t think I can take this, Declan!” Thomas tossed his forceps and the bone segment he’d cut onto a steel tray, creating a clanging metallic response so loud it felt as if the room shook. Then he started for the door, but Ransom grabbed him.
“Hold on, son. You’re seeing this thing through; you came to me, remember?”
“I need a drink… water, absinthe, whiskey, something… .”
“There’s the sink—running water. Have at it, but you get straight; we’re all seeing this through till dawn.” Ransom remained a barrier before Thomas.
Declan went to his friend and placed a hand on his back. “We’ve two more bodies yet to go, Tommie. Buck up. This thing… whatever it is… it could devastate all of Ireland if not Europe. We’ve got to confront it here and now.”
“You want to die like them?” he nodded at the petrified corpses. Suppose we’re already… that it’s already inside us, Declan, draining us like… like it did to Uncle Anton and the other two?”
“We have to put slivers of the organs beneath the scope, Tom—all of them, and document the condition of the body and the bone with photographs to… to document what we do here for others to know, to learn, and to understand.”
“And if it kills us?”
“And yes, if it kills us in the bargain, then… well then so be it. We are men of science after all. Dr. B says men of science must be brave beyond compare.”
Thomas snickered at this. “So where the hell is he?”
“No matter he can’t live up to his theories, he made us scientists, Thomas.”
“A fine speech, Declan, but I’m scared—damn scared—and no braver than Dr. B. Seeing the condition of McAffey’s heart… his insides. Suppose we have it, and it’s eating us alive as we speak, from the inside out, and we haven’t time to see our mothers, our family, and we die alone like these poor bastards did? What then?”
Ransom stepped forward and slapped Thomas across the face. “Declan is right. We make a stand. Here, now!”
The slap to his face sobered Thomas who now nodded repeatedly and looked sheepishly into Declan’s eyes. “You’re right—the both of you. I’m all right. You needn’t worry.”
“Then get to work; get that camera Dr. B keeps tucked away; we have to document everything, Tommie—each step we take.”
Thomas snatched open a metal cabinet and located a compact, state-of-the art camera and began working to bring it to bear on the bodies. “Absolutely,” he muttered, looking as if pleased he had something solid to hold onto and something to focus on. “When Dr. B comes in tomorrow morning, we’re going to show him what we’re made of.”
“Exactly,” replied Declan.
“No matter his and the dean’s reaction, they’ll know we’ve done first rate work.”
The look of the sleek camera and Thomas’ enthusiasm for this work reminded Alastair of his best friend back in Chicago, a photographer named Philo Keane, another good reason to see Chicago again once before he dies. Lately, Ransom had been feeling a strange sense of foreboding creeping in like an unruly fog he could not shake off. Perhaps he’d had some odd and nebulous premonition of this night’s coming for him, but no recognition of befriending the young interns amid this evolving mystery. It’d gone from a missing person’s case to three bodies riddled with a frightening disease organism no one seemed capable of giving a name to. Again Ransom looked from one to the other of the blackened bodies that had only hours before been sentient men full of life. Their skin made him think of blackened, smoked fish without the pleasant odors.
Ransom backed into a wall to lean against something solid, feeling a rush of fatigue trying to take him down. Declan noticed and shouted, “Not you, too! We’ll need every pair of hands.”
“What bloody good can I do? I’m not a medical man.”
“You can assist me; I’ll tell you what to do.”
Ransom shoved off the wall. “Whatever you say, Dr. Irvin.”
“That sounds good, but come sunup, I may be kicked out of the university.”
“In which case, you go to another!” replied Ransom.
“Records follow a man,” continued Declan.
“You will do fine; you, young man, are meant to become a doctor.”
Thomas smirked. “Goes for both of us! We’ll find a little hamlet and set up a surgery and veterinary, won’t we, Dr. Coogan? That’s what and how exciting for us? Shitty deal, and what’ll they do with you, Detective?”
Alastair took in a deep breath of air and immediately regretted doing so as the odors coming off the bodies attacked his senses far worse than when they’d entered the room. “I don’t have so much to sacrifice as you young lads; you have your entire lives ahead of you. Relatively speaking, I’ve lived a life, so what can they take from me that they haven’t already stolen?”
“Stolen?” asked Declan, staring at the big detective.
“Home, my comforts, my geography, friends, loved ones, people I step aside for, dignity, position, my notion of who I am—all gone. Stolen.”
The two interns looked at Ransom as if seeing him for the first time.
“Are you… you know, guilty of what they say?” asked Thomas. “I mean are you on the run after all?”
Declan asked point blank. “Who has stolen your life?”
“I am guilty of being a bastard, boys.” He tried to laugh this off. “Guilty of many a mistake, of murder some would say although I don’t see it that way, but this last bit of trouble, honestly… ironically enough, I am innocent of it altogether.”
“Innocent of what?” asked Thomas, pressing the point.
“Of this charge that they hung on me.”
“You mean if-if Reahall returns you?” asked Thomas. “Perhaps, sir, you should leave now. Since he’s hot on your heels.”
Declan gritted his teeth. “We need all hands, Thomas.”
“Will you be able to live with yourself, Declan, if Mr. Wyland here is thrown into jail and sent back to—where to?” he ended by asking Alastair but did not wait for an answer, rather blurting out, “Chicago—Reahall thinks you escaped from there with a murder indictment hanging over your head. What is it they say in America? Wanted Dead or Alive?”
“How do you know what Reahall thinks?” asked Declan, confused.
Thomas shrugged. “Remember when we first went to the police about my uncle, remember?”
“Yes, so?”
“You were with me, but you got so angry at their lack of interest that you stormed out ahead of me—remember?”
“Yes, but I went out for a smoke and to clear my—”
“Constable Reahall… he took me aside.”
“He did?”
“Told me about a former police detective late of Chicago who might be of help to us.”
“How kind of him,” muttered Ransom.
“And he added that I should take care around the man—you, sir. Said you were reported to’ve killed a priest in Chicago—cut off his gonads, he said.”
“Gonads? You… you cut off a priest’s testicles?” Declan demanded of Ransom.
“Constable Reahall said all that did he?” asked Ransom.
“Yes—yes, he did.”
“And the monies you two gathered from concerned relatives to pay my fee? Did that also come from the constable?”
“Petty cash he called it.”
“Then yo
u are working for Reahall, eh? A snitch, a spy?”
“Damn you sly dog, Thomas!” Declan stormed about in a little circle. “You told me lies atop lies. Why didn’t you confide in me?”
“When have you ever kept your calm, Declan? I couldn’t trust your knowing and tipping off Detective Wyland here.”
“So the highly acclaimed, well-reputed detective from the United States,” began Ransom, “has been made the fool by two young lads with scalpels. Might’ve expected it of gutter snipes, but here, you two?” Ransom laughed heartily at himself.
“All I cared about was finding my uncle, and I couldn’t refuse the money,” began Thomas, his hands raised. “A-And I couldn’t be without your well-reputed expertise.”
“Of course… of course.”
“Sir, I didn’t know you then, but I now know your heart is true. I’ll not give away any words between or among us.”
“A lot of good that does now with Reahall like someone’s hound on my heels.”
“He claimed he just wanted you out of his jurisdiction, but I suppose that was a lie.”
“We’re wasting time on this business!” shouted Ransom, realizing he’d frightened Thomas with his tone. “Let’s get this ghoulish work done, shall we?”
“Yes… yes, of course—” replied Declan, adding, “might say we’re all sacrificial lambs, eh?”
Alastair Ransom’s laugh now filled the operating theater.
“What’s so funny?” asked Declan.
“No one’s ever called me a lamb before! A lion, a tiger, a bear, yes, but never a lamb. And Thomas—”
“Yes, Mr. Wyland?”
“You tried to get me to leave for my own sake; I appreciate that, lad.”
“I don’t wish to see you behind bars, or under Reahall’s thumb, sir.”
“Oh come now, Tommie, so melodramatic!” Declan interrupted. “Once Dr. Bellingham sees what we’ve done here—our sacrifice, the authorities will applaud us all.”
SIXTEEN
“My God, Kelly—you’ve got them running around in circles; they’re turning the ship around to search for Alandale,” Ingles whispered in her ear as the others rushed along the corridor, going topside. “We’ve got to inform the captain of what we know.”
“No, we can’t!”
“Why in God’s name not?”
“We don’t know that the captain isn’t the carrier, David.”
“Juris Forbes? That’s crazy. Forbes has dedicated his life to this search mission and… and science.”
“Exactly… exactly what that thing would do—learn how to get back to Titanic. Why couldn’t that fool Ballard have left it alone… have left it to its fate, but no… damned glory hound in a sense raised the Titanic anew.”
“Hold on. When Bob Ballard found the Titanic, why didn’t you investigate him?”
“I did.”
“You did?”
“You bet, and for all I know someone on Bob Ballard’s team may well have been the carrier at that time; however, there was no way to get inside Titanic, to dive Titanic as we are about to do.”
“And the French team that came after Ballard?”
“Checked out and cleared. No one was killed among them, same as Ballard’s expedition.”
“That’s your measurement? No one died?”
“Afraid so. Remember we’ve only recently seen the development of dive technology that can get the carrier inside Titanic’s hull at those depths. So he, or she, or it—whatever or whoever the hell it is today on board Scorpio, it has only come because there is a way now… a way to recover its young from the depths.”
“I… the—the thing that killed Alandale has been just waiting all these decades… waiting in the wings for technology to catch up?”
“Not waiting; continuing to survive… feeding.”
“I see.”
“It’s left a trail, but the trail hasn’t been one of reproduction but destruction—always obscured because it takes on another human form with each mutation—getting stronger with each feeding.”
“But it finally got it right—aboard Titanic in April of 1912.”
“Yes, and now its final hope at reproduction—to retrieve those eggs frozen in time… frozen inside Titanic.”
“Whoa… what eggs? You lost me. I know nothing about any eggs.”
She took a deep breath of air. “To be exact, they are egg-sacs, hatchlings first discovered during the Fiore autopsy.”
“Hatchlings?”
“The creature’s initial attempts at reproduction failed. The earliest attempts, aborted or rather miscarried, if you will—stillborn, but later attempts proved quite successful.”
“You’ve completely lost me now!” David closed his eyes and shook his head.
“You haven’t read far enough along in the journal, David! You have to read on!”
“Damn, if this thing can reproduce—lay eggs, you say! Then why doesn’t it just reproduce again rather than kill good men like Alandale?”
“I’ve surmised that after so many attempts, it can no longer reproduce. I mean, apparently, it has the ability to reproduce without a mate like a lot of creatures in nature, but it has only so many shots at it. At least that’s what I’ve surmised, and what my ancestor began to believe near the end.”
“Near the end? Did Declan Irvin die on board Titanic?”
“You know how many died aboard Titanic.”
“By most counts it falls somewhere between 15-to-1600.”
“And Thomas Coogan? And Alastair Ransom?”
“Read on in the journal.”
“One of them—Thomas, Declan, or Ransom had to carry the journal off the ship; one of them survived.”
“And so too did the creature, unfortunately.”
“Damn… were they on the same lifeboat?”
“Possibly, yes. Really, no way to know. Mr. Ismay, the owner, was among the survivors—and while he was depicted in the press as having dressed in women’s clothing to get a seat aboard a lifeboat, perhaps that was not such an exaggeration after all.”
They each took a deep breath and held their silence for a time. She finally said, “I am sorry about Alandale—the real man, that is. But what is worse than allowing that thing to take out individuals, David? Imagine what might—no, what will happen— should it return to free its disease-spreading, awful progeny upon the masses.”
“Egg-sacs… Jesus help us. How many eggs are we talking about here?”
“Hundreds, maybe thousands. I don’t know for certain.”
“Each… each of which has the potential to infiltrate a human host?”
“No one aboard Scorpio will survive, and once Scorpio returns to Woods Hole and land there’ll be no stopping this thing. It will explode exponentially.”
“Presumably each would find a host…”
“Lay its own eggs.”
David quaked inwardly with the image. “This is all so freaking Stephen King.”
“No David, King deals in fantasy; try Crichton. There’s science in this, not supernatural but natural. This thing lived on Earth long before mankind arrived. You’ve got to believe me… and you have to read on in the journal.”
“I intend to… seeing Alandale like that… like Fiore’s body… like McAffey and O’Toole.”
“God, I have lived with this bottled up inside me, and all alone for so long.” A tear formed in her eye, but she quickly wiped it away, turning her face from him. “You must read on,” she insisted. “It’s so important that you understand the entire picture, David.”
“You’ve read all our files, haven’t you?” he asked.
“And I picked you because you went back for Terry Wilcox. Risked your life for a friend. I want you as my friend, David.”
“But you know Forbes; you’ve known him for years,” countered David. “How can you suspect him of such horrors as this? Of killing his colleague and friend, Alandale?”
“This thing has no friends or colleagues. Yes, I knew Forbes year
s ago, but even then he was aloof. Cold even, a real loner. He could be the carrier. I couldn’t confide in him. What if—”
“He has been stand-offish, true.” David replayed moments in his head. “But… but there could be many reasons for that.”
“I don’t want to sound like a TV psychiatrist, but David, how much do we really know about anyone?”
“You could say the same of me, and I might say the same of you, Kelly.”
“Whatever do you mean?” she asked, shocked.
“First time you came aboard… you fawned over Alandale, remember, and me beside him—not a word to me.”
“But I knew precisely who you were; I thought—”
“You managed to make me feel like a member of the crew. A high school dropout, you know?”
“Yes well but… I know men. I knew you would pursue me only if I seemed unobtainable.”
“Did you now?”
They had come out into the bright afternoon sun and stood on deck. He turned to her and said, “At some point, you have to trust someone.”
“I have—you!”
“At some point then we have to trust a third party.”
“But with Forbes, like I said, I have always felt a certain coldness. A heavy emotionless feeling coming from him, and given his OCT—”
“OC-what?”
“Obsessive Compulsion for all things Titanic, David. It has been absolute. It runs the man’s life to the point I’ve always suspected him.”
“That describes millions—do you recall James Cameron’s box office take for Titanic?”
“Regardless, he’s made a career of it. Hence why I’ve remained so close to him.”
“Yet you gained his support, and he’s never taken your body over. He doesn’t suspect you of being—of stalking him like some vampire hunter?”
“He has been in a unique position to be here, and frankly, I believe this thing—this creature—has gotten so good at using its host’s body, David, that it can slip in and out without completely destroying a host.”
“Hold on. Are you saying that it only temporarily inhabits one body, uses it up but once sated that it can control itself in a second body? Hide in plain sight?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Titanic 2012 (inspector alastair ransom) Page 18
