The Raven (A Jane Harper Horror Novel)

by Jeremy Bishop

  No duh.

  “—with any of you.”

  That’s actually a surprise.

  Willem steps closer. “Father?”

  When Jakob’s forehead crisscrosses with angst, Willem adds, “What have you done?”

  Jakob steels himself with a deep breath and asks, “Do you remember the man bit by an orca several months ago?”

  “When we were still in the hospital?” I ask.

  “I tracked him down,” Jakob says.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” Willem asks. “Where is he?”

  Jakob’s lips twitch. “He’s dead. By my hand. I killed him.”

  “He was infected.” It’s not a question. I have no doubt about it. Not only because the man was bit by an orca, which was no doubt infected by Draugar, but because Jakob would never kill a human being, despite his ancestors’ penchant for violence.

  “Part of him remained,” Jakob says. “The pain brought him out.”

  “You didn’t torture him?” Helena asks, her voice cut with concern.

  I turn on her, annoyed, but before I can question her knowledge of Jakob’s character, he says, “It was not my intention.”

  I turn back to Jakob, silently demanding an explanation.

  “I caught up with him in the mountains. He was heading north, for what purpose, I’m not sure. When I confronted him, he attacked. When my blade in his chest didn’t stop him…I took off his feet.”

  “Father…” Helena says, raising her hand to her mouth. For a big Viking warrior, she’s kind of a softy. Then again, she’s religious, and killing whales is quite a bit different than hacking off a man’s feet.

  “He was already dead, my dear,” Jakob says. “If you are here with us, you must believe it.”

  Helena just lowers her head.

  Willem tries to put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs away.

  “His mind only partially returned,” Jakob says. “And only when the pain was greatest. But he knew everything.”

  “He’d been part of the hive mind,” I say.

  With a nod, Jakob continues. “Every word he uttered was a struggle. Against the pain. Against the parasites. But he knew. So he fought.”

  “What did you learn?” Klein asks, more interested in raw information than details of pain and blood, which quite frankly is how I feel, too.

  “That they remembered me,” Jakob says. “They knew my name.” He looks at Willem. “And yours.” He looks at me. “And yours.”

  This news is disconcerting, to say the least, but it’s not exactly helpful. When no one speaks, Jakob continues. “He spoke of the ships. It’s how I knew to look for them. He told me they intended to return again to the mainland. That they were searching for something.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “He could not say. When he spoke of their intentions, there was resistance. Between his words, the Draugar shouted threats. I learned about the boats, but not the purpose for them. I learned there is something in the mountains they desire, but not what.”

  There’s more. I can see it in his eyes. “Jakob,” I say, slathering the word with impatience.

  “Before I set him free, he was able to reveal one detail.” Jakob looks at me. For some reason, he thinks this revelation will affect me the most. “There are three Queens.”

  Well, he was right. This is unexpected and horrible news. I killed the first Queen. Crushed it with my bare hands. But before that happened, I very nearly became the Queen. I offered myself to the thing so that Willem and Jakob could be spared. That’s not how it played out, but if the Draugar remember me, it’s likely they also remember the promise I made. “Do you think—”

  “They remember?” Jakob finishes. His head bobs up and down. “They do.”

  “You knew this when you brought me out here?” I say. It’s a rhetorical question. I already know the answer. He did. “What am I, Jakob, bait?” I don’t give him a chance to answer. “You came out here, convinced all these people to join you. Your son. Your daughter. Your friends—Malik is dead. And you had no intention of collecting a sample, did you?”

  “Jane, you don’t know that,” Willem says. He understands my temperament, that I’m getting close to knocking Jakob’s block off, and is trying to make peace, but I’m not finished.

  “He could have taken a sample from the Draugr after he lopped off his feet,” I say to Willem before turning back to Jakob. “But that’s not what you did, is it?”

  “I burned his body,” Jakob says, a little anger of his own sneaking into his voice. Thataboy. Let’s have this out, Old Norse style. Show me what the old dog has left in him.

  “Why, Jakob? Why did you maim, torture, and kill a man? Why did you set him on fire? What did his screams sound like as he burned? Human? Something else? Why?”

  “Because it was the right thing to do!” Jakob shouts, his face turning red. “Because he wasn’t a human being anymore! Because if I let him live, the others would know we survived, that you survived!”

  His last statement sucks away some of my anger.

  “The parasites were fleeing his body,” Jakob says. “They had to be destroyed. They all need to be destroyed.”

  I agree with this. With everything. Even setting the poor bastard on fire, but something still feels wrong. “Why me? I don’t understand. Why me?”

  “Because the only time I saw fear in his white eyes was when he spoke your name. You killed their Queen, Raven. They remember that. They fear you. You are not bait. You are the spear tip.”

  “She’s nothing,” an unfamiliar voice says. When the group turns around, the only person there is Nate. “’Sup, peeps,” he says.

  We’re all so confused by the strange voice that we keep looking around. When it’s clear there is no one else there, I ask, “Nate, was that you just now?”

  He doesn’t reply. He’s placed one hand over his right eye.

  “You feeling okay, son?” Talbot asks.

  “Huh?” Nate says, looking confused. “Sorry, I have a killer headache.”

  Speaking of killing someone. “That why you didn’t respond when I was yelling at you?”

  “You were yelling at me?” he asks. The question sounds earnest, but I’m not buying it.

  “When you were standing on the upper deck? When we were busy fighting the zombie-whales? Ringing any bells?”

  Nate’s face screws up with a mix of emotions. I don’t think he’s feeling any of them. It’s more like he’s not in control.

  Not in control…

  “Mind moving your hand away from your eye, Nate?” I ask.

  He looks at me. “What for? My head is raging, man. Frikken eye feels ready to burst.”

  I take aim with the grenade launcher. “Open your eye.”

  Everyone takes a few steps away from Nate, but no one says a word. If anyone is afraid I’ve gone off the deep end, the fear is erased when Nate says, “You belong to us,” in a voice that is not his, and then adds, “Dub-TF, Jane, chill,” in his own voice.

  “She doesn’t belong to you,” Jakob says.

  Nate cringes away from Jakob. “The hell, man! I don’t want—she will join us soon—anybody!”

  “He can’t hear it,” Willem says. “He doesn’t know.”

  “Know what?” Nate shouts.

  I look down the sight of the grenade launcher. Everyone takes a few more steps back.

  “Jane!” Nate pleads. “What—”

  “Show. Me. Your. Eye.” I don’t need to follow the statement with a threat. He sees my finger go to the trigger.

  He pulls his hand away but still has the eye clenched shut. I aim the Mark 14 toward the closed eye. The sight slightly magnifies the target, giving me a closer look without actually stepping forward.

  The eye flicks open a few times, and then snaps open wide.

  “Nate…” I whisper.

  The kid’s eye is gone. All that remains is the clear membrane that used to house it. A clear fluid now fills the orb, and w
ithin that fluid wriggles a single, white parasite.

  The kid’s face reflects abject fear. “What is it? Why are you looking at me like that? I see you, Jane Harper.”

  I stride forward, filled with rage, not because I’m face-to-face with a parasite that knows my name but because of what it did to Nate, and what I know his fate is going to be. I should probably shoot him here and now, but I can’t bring myself to do it.

  Nate backs away from me, but he doesn’t seem to have full control over his limbs now. “Jane. What’s happening? What are you doing? Wait. Wait!”

  When I reach the kid, I turn the grenade launcher around and slam the butt of the weapon into his forehead. He crumples to the floor, unconscious.

  The crew gathers around.

  “Why didn’t you kill him?” Helena asks. I don’t get the sense that she wanted me to kill him, just that she’s confused why I didn’t.

  I frown. She’s not going to like the answer. “For the same reason Jakob didn’t immediately kill the Draugr he found in the mountains.” I look her in the eyes. “We need answers.”

  27

  You’re not really going to go through with this,” Helena says. She’s put herself between the mess hall door and me, Jakob, and Klein. Willem and Talbot are on the bridge, keeping watch. Helena was supposed to be with them, but it seems her conscience has gotten the best of her.

  I glance past her wide shoulders and see Nate strapped down to a table. It’s a horrible sight; I’ll admit it. He’s still unconscious, and his face is coated with dry blood from where I struck him. His arms are pulled up and tied to the table legs, as are his feet. Two thick ropes at his waist and chest bind his body to the table.

  “It’s necessary,” Jakob says.

  “I don’t believe that,” she replies. “If we start torturing people, are we any better?”

  My patience evaporates. “Helena, I like you, but you need to open your eyes. We’re not thugs or terrorists or even ‘the man,’” I say with some air quotes.

  “I work for the man,” Klein says.

  I thrust an index finger at him without looking. “Shut up, Klein. We’re not doing this for kicks. What happens in this room will probably join my fresh collection of nightmares for the next few years. Maybe forever. I really don’t want to go into this room. I don’t want to talk to Nate or see that thing in his eye. I don’t want any of this to be real. But it is. It’s fucked up, but this is the world now, even if the world doesn’t yet know about it. But they will. If these parasitic assholes take the fight to mainland Greenland, we’re going to have fifty-eight thousand Draugar to deal with. And when the bloodbath ends—if it ends—everyone you know and love will be dead or worse.

  “I’m going into this room. Right now. And I’m going to do what needs to be done so we can avoid that happening.” I step up close to her and crane my head up to stare her in the eyes. I’m dwarfed by her size. It’s a real-life Hulk Hogan–versus–Andre the Giant moment. But there are no body slams or chest slaps. She just frowns and steps to the side. I’m not sure if it’s because she’s taken my explanation to heart or if she just doesn’t feel like crushing me. Either way works for me, though a small part of me wishes she’d beaten me to a pulp so I wouldn’t have to take part in this interrogation.

  Jakob and Klein follow me into the room. Klein turns and closes the door, blocking out Helena’s scowl. Nate hasn’t regained consciousness yet, so we gather by his feet, where Jakob is rubbing his thumb across the edge of a knife.

  My imagination gets the best of me, and I picture the blade being used against Nate, who has really done nothing to harm us. “Jakob,” I say, “if I’m understanding this right, the parasite doesn’t give answers in response to pain, the pain simply helps center, or bring back, the mind of the host.”

  “That is how it seemed to work, yes,” he says.

  “So as long as we’re talking to Nate, we don’t need that.”

  He nods.

  “Then put it away until we do,” I say. “Our job isn’t to terrify Nate.”

  Jakob closes the folding knife and slips it into his pocket.

  Klein walks to Nate’s head. “I’d like to make a few points before we start. I may not be running around the globe shooting people, but I am a spy. And a good one. From what you said”—he points at me—“Nate might just have one parasite inside him, currently located in his eye. But it’s shown it has at least partial control over his body and speech, though the kid doesn’t seem aware of it. The really worrisome part is that while Nate has just one parasite inside him, it seems clear that it is still part of the collective.”

  Sonofabitch, he’s right. Nate might be unconscious, but I have no doubt the parasite is still wriggling around beneath his closed eye. The kid might not be aware of what’s going on, but the parasite is likely still monitoring his senses. Which means it’s hearing us now, which means—“They’re listening to us.”

  Klein nods. “Unless we kill the kid, toss him overboard, or lock him in a soundproof room, everything he hears, sees, smells, feels, or tastes is going straight to them. He’s the ultimate bug. And I’m fairly certain he was meant to be a bug. Maybe not specifically for us, but for whoever came along and picked up his distress signal.”

  “You’re sure?” Jakob asks.

  “I wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the coordinated attack,” Klein says. “The only way the Draugar whales could have known Jane and Willem were out of ammunition is if Nate saw this, understood it with his human mind, and then the parasite communicated the information with the collective, allowing them to seamlessly, precisely, and effectively assault the ship in a way we could not defend against.”

  “He’s right,” I say. “Nate was watching us from the wheelhouse roof. He could see everything.”

  “They could see everything,” Klein says. “Just as easily as they can hear us, even now. So if it speaks through him, we’re not talking to a single parasite. We’re talking to the hive mind.”

  “To the Queen,” I say. “Or one of the remaining two.”

  “I’m not sure how they’re connected,” Klein says. “Nate is physically close to the three whales below us, so that’s the initial connection, and they surely contain thousands, if not millions of parasites each, which makes them sizable amplifiers. But there’s no way to know their range. Maybe the three whales are enough. Maybe there are other creatures between us and the Queen.”

  “Or maybe the Queen is in one of the whales,” I say. It’s a horrible thought, but quite possible.

  “Or that,” Klein agrees. “The point is, we’re interrogating them, not the other way around.”

  In other words, don’t reveal anything of strategic importance, like the fact that the prop foul didn’t get too tight and that to free ourselves all we need to do is reverse the engine. “Got it,” I say. “Now let’s wake him up and get this over with.”

  “I am awake,” Nate says, but it’s not his voice. His clear eye pops open. I still expect there to be a human eye there, glancing around at each of us, but the clear orb doesn’t shift. The worm inside it does.

  “What do you want?” I ask it.

  The tiny parasite wriggles in my direction. I can see its two tiny black eyes.

  “To live,” it says. “Same as you.”

  This time, the voice is more like Nate’s. It’s learning his speech pattern, mimicking his inflections and accent.

  “Bullshit,” I say. “Why are you here?”

  “We have the right,” it says. “BT-dubs, we were here first.”

  Could it be true? Did these parasites evolve before the human race? Doesn’t matter, I decide. I can’t trust anything the parasite says. Don’t get distracted, Jane. “Nate. Can you hear me, Nate?”

  “Aww, Jane, don’t you effing like me anymore?”

  The voice of my friend Jenny hits me like a punch to the nuts, if I had them. I step back, the hairs on my arms standing upright.

  “Not your most Van Helsing moment,�
� the thing says, still duplicating Jenny’s voice and speech pattern. “Cool that you kept the cloak, though.”

  I unbutton the cloak and toss it into a chair, suddenly repulsed by it. My repulsion gets filtered through a lifetime of hard-knock lessons combined with a genetic disposition for fight rather than flight, both supplied by the Colonel, and comes out as violence. I step forward, saying, “I want to speak to Nathaniel!” Then I slug him in the shoulder.

  Nate’s other eye pops open, and his body bends against the rope holding him down as a shout of surprise and pain erupts from his lips. Now that the shock’s worn off and he realizes he can’t move, his breathing quickens. If we had a heart monitor, I’m sure we’d see his pulse skyrocketing.

  “It’s okay, kid,” I say, despite things being decidedly not okay.

  His good eye rotates toward me. “Jane! What’s happening? Why can’t I move?”

  “It’s for your own good, Nate,” I say. “You’re going to have to trust me.”

  “You…you hit me,” he says, remembering. “Why did you—you’re wasting your time, Jane—hit me? Who said that?”

  He looks around the room, seeing Klein and Jakob, but somehow knows it wasn’t either of them who spoke. “Is there someone else in—it will be easier if you don’t fight—room?” Nate freezes, going still. “Dubs…that was me, wasn’t it?”

  I place a hand on his arm. “You have one of them in you.”

  His eye locks on me. “Am I…dead?”

  That’s actually a really good question, because it doesn’t seem like it. His mind is compromised, without a doubt, but he seems to be sharing control, and I seriously doubt the parasite has made any changes to his body. Despite being infected, he might still be fully human and alive. Which creates a sort of moral dilemma.

  “Jakob, the man you…spoke to before. He was…”

  “Draugr,” he confirms. “Not like this.”

  He understands the conundrum. What are we willing to do to somebody who isn’t yet against us? Maybe it will be easier, I think, now that Nate knows.

  “Nate, you’re infected, but it’s just one parasite,” I tell him. “You’re still alive. Still human. And in control.”