The Last Passenger

by Manel Loureiro

  “Kate,” the voice repeated.

  She began trembling incessantly as fat tears fell down her cheeks. That voice. She knew it so well. She had missed it so much. That voice.

  She whirled around, propelled by disbelief and hope. She was ready to see the body from which that voice originated. Ready to be drunk on happiness.

  Smiling, he watched her as he leaned against a door frame, his hair uncombed. Vibrant, confident, charming.

  It was him.

  As he had always been.

  Kate wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand and broke into her first genuine smile since he’d died.

  “Hello, Robert.”

  XXXII

  They stared at each other for what seemed like forever. Robert grinned, his eyes crinkling with the familiar fan of wrinkles around his eyes that she’d always covered with kisses. Kate wept openly, caught between the most intense extremes of pain and joy.

  Robert was within her reach, but she knew he couldn’t be real. He’d been dead for a month, and his cold gray ashes were in a ceramic black urn in her cabin.

  “It can’t be,” Kate said, shaking her head as her insides tore apart. “I know you can’t be here.”

  “I’m here, Kate. Right in front of you. I’m as real as that silly camera around your neck, which is actually mine, or at least it used to be. We bought it together in New York. Remember that day we thought the world might end because it was raining so hard?”

  Kate could hardly see through her tears. Of course, she remembered that day. On a walk through the city, Robert had laughed elatedly about his new camera, just like a little kid. They’d stopped to watch a mime in Central Park before the rain drove them back to their hotel. While the downpour outside threatened to wash the city away, they made love for three hours. The people in the next room had complained about the noise, and in response, Robert made outlandish excuses to the concierge while she remained in bed mortified and holding back waves of giggles.

  She remembered it all so vividly that it hurt.

  “You’re gone, Robert,” she sobbed. “You were hit by a fucking drunk driver who sped off.”

  “True,” he answered seriously. “But somehow, I’m here for you, Kate. I’m here. I don’t really know why or for how long, but I’m here.”

  “How do I know you aren’t a hallucination?”

  Robert sighed. Kate saw that he was dressed in the same cream-colored suit that he had put on the day he was killed. Even his tie was the same. With a spark of tenderness, she noticed that the knot of the tie, which she had tied herself, was exactly the same. When she’d arrived at the hospital to identify his body, emotional and screaming his name, the tie was gone. The paramedics had removed it, trying to save him. They returned it inside a plastic bag, a wrinkled ball that was stained with blood—his blood. But the knot had still been tied just as she had always done it. Just as she had learned from tying her father’s tie as a little girl.

  “Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out, right?” Robert said with a playful half smile.

  The expression was so familiar that Kate shook like a tree branch.

  It was him.

  “Have you come to take me away?” she asked. “What’s it like? Will it hurt?”

  “Kate,” sighed Robert, shaking his head patiently. “You are not dead. Now are you going to spend the whole morning being the clever little reporter, or are you going to kiss me?”

  Kate heard herself laugh like an enthusiastic little girl before a giant iridescent soap bubble, wanting to touch it but fearing it might burst.

  “I’m not going to disappear, Kate.”

  Her feet, which had been soldered to the floor, came to life. Pressed up against him, she breathed in his aroma, the same combination of cologne and musk that she remembered so well. He felt hard, smooth, and hot, just as she remembered. She ran her hands up his body and around his neck, while he laced his hands around her waist before lowering them to her ass.

  Kate closed her eyes in bliss as an animalistic growl, of both liberation and submission, escaped her throat. The mixture of relief, pain, joy, and excitement she felt was unbelievable. Robert scratched his stubble against her cheek, and instinctively, she looked up and parted her lips.

  The passionate kiss was long and intense. Kate couldn’t stop caressing her husband’s face. It was like this was their first time again, and she eagerly devoured what was in front of her. Their two bodies fused together as if they were simply extensions of a singular entity that was impossible to pull apart.

  After a few minutes they parted, breathing hard. Kate’s eyes burned with the bright flame of excitement that had been extinguished.

  “Robert, why here?” Kate asked, her cheek nuzzled against his chest so she could hear his heart. “Why now? Why is this happening, love?”

  Robert kissed her on the forehead and rubbed her back. “I have no answers to your questions, Katie. Some things can be explained, and others can’t. There are rules. Rules that cannot be broken. Just know I’ve been allowed to come here for a reason. To help you.”

  “I don’t like this place.” She buried her nose in his chest to breathe in his musk. “It’s probably teeming with rats.”

  “Oh, there aren’t any rats. That’s for sure.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because if there were rats, every last one of them would have poked its whiskers out to have a look at your amazing ass.”

  Kate playfully slapped his shoulder and was taken aback by the sound of her laughter. It was lighthearted, carefree, and full of life. In this dark, dirty part of the ship, it sounded completely out of place and somewhat disconcerting.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” she whispered. “I don’t ever want to let you go, Robert. Stay with me.”

  Robert let her go and sighed. “I don’t want to leave you, either,” he said. After a moment of hesitation, he added, “There’s something important you need to know. Don’t ask me how I know it or who told me because I can’t explain that.”

  “Rules,” Kate said.

  “Rules.” Robert nodded. “But listen closely. There’s something evil on this ship. Dark, voracious, and evil. It’s ancient and very dangerous. It’s wrathful. You and I, for whatever reason, don’t fit into its plans. We shouldn’t be here. If it manages to catch you, it will take you somewhere even I can’t get to. I will lose you forever.”

  “All of this is so scary. I need you.”

  “I’ll be with you, babe. But you need to get out of here. Now. We both play a part in all this.”

  Kate shook her head and clung to Robert harder. The very notion of returning to the top deck of the Valkyrie and leaving her husband was unbearable.

  “I don’t want to leave you. Not after all this time.” She shook her head. “No way.”

  Just then a tremendous vibration pulsed through the Valkyrie, breaking their embrace and knocking them to the ground. A second later the dull blast of a distant explosion seeped down into the depths of the ship. Seconds later the far-off sound of alarms could be heard. The ship lurched as if a torpedo had struck it.

  “What do you think that was, Robert?” She turned back toward her husband, but he was gone.

  She screamed his name until her throat hurt, but Robert had vanished just like Esther. She briefly wondered if she had hallucinated the whole thing, but even her clothes smelled like him. She could still taste him.

  It had been real. She had been with him.

  “Robert,” she whispered.

  A soft light came on to Kate’s right. The service elevator had opened for her.

  “Thanks, babe.” Kate smiled as she got into the elevator. “I’ll come back for you. I promise.”

  XXXIII

  As the elevator creaked and groaned its way up the shaft, Kate tried to collect her thoughts. After the euphoria of reuniting with Robert, the sense of dread at being aboard the Valkyrie had returned once again. She couldn’t get her husband’
s words out of her head.

  There’s something evil on this ship. Dark, voracious, and evil.

  As the elevator rose, the blare of the alarm system became shriller. The stench of smoke and burning plastic became stronger. Something had gone awry upstairs.

  The elevator stopped with one final jerk. Kate pulled the gate open and found her path blocked by a steel plate. She realized she was in first class, and the elevator had been one of the access points sealed off by Feldman’s team. Her anger at being blocked out quickly turned to relief. The steel plates were tangible objects belonging to the real world in which she lived.

  She pushed against the steel. It gave way slightly. When they had made the door, it was only to impede anyone from accessing the restricted area from the outside. Kate kicked the steel door with all her strength. It was like kicking a granite wall. Her foot hurt like hell. She tried again, but this time she attacked one of the welding joints. It was in vain. Without a lever it would be impossible to make the steel budge.

  She was trapped there like a rat. So close and yet so far away. She wasn’t exactly sure what awaited her on the other side, but at least there would be light. Nonetheless, she had no other choice but to go back down into the depths of the Valkyrie and try to retrace her steps.

  The stress of the situation paralyzed Kate; she could do nothing but lean against the elevator wall. Loud cracking broke the silence. To her amazement the metal sheets began to bend as if being hit by an invisible force. The metal heaved repeatedly until the door finally crashed to the floor.

  I’ll be with you, babe, Robert had said.

  “Thanks, honey,” Kate whispered, feeling better than she had since first boarding the ship.

  Cautiously, she leaned out of the elevator and found herself in one of the first-class service corridors. The pale light of morning pushed weakly through the small circular portholes. The light was tinged with the ghostly color of the fog that surrounded the Valkyrie. Gusts of wind lashed rain against the glass.

  The smell of smoke was very strong now. Kate walked down the hall until she came across a staircase and suddenly found herself back in a part of the ship she recognized. It was then that Moore and several of his men appeared from around a corner. A couple of them wore firefighter suits and carried firefighting equipment. The others were holding fire extinguishers and an enormously long fire hose.

  “Make way, Miss Kilroy,” Moore bellowed before roughly pushing her aside.

  Kate was flattened against the wall, but she was oddly happy. Moore had recognized her. The world was spinning in the right direction again. She followed the men out into the rain. It did not take more than two minutes for Kate to be soaked to the bone. The heavy rainfall limited visibility to almost nothing. She caught sight of a few people to her left, at the foot of a staircase that led to the highest point of the ship, a deck that passengers typically couldn’t access.

  She joined the group, but no one said a word. Feldman was there wrapped in a yellow poncho as his men began to climb up the stairs with their gear. Feldman looked so fragile that Kate worried a gust of wind would carry him away. When he saw her, he nodded as if she were just another piece of the puzzle.

  “I was wondering where you might be hiding, Kate,” Feldman said, pointing up and looking serious. “I figured you wouldn’t want to miss this.”

  His tone made Kate frown, but she said nothing and began climbing the staircase with Feldman right behind her. She looked back to check on him, convinced that he was going to be blown out to sea, but Feldman seemed to have some hidden reservoir of energy in his feeble body.

  Battling the rain, they eventually made their way to the upper deck. When they did, Kate couldn’t believe what she saw. Near the bow and just above the bridge, where before there had been a multitude of antennas, it was now nothing more than a few steel joists all twisted and bent.

  “What happened up here?” Kate asked.

  “We’ve lost our entire communications system,” growled Moore, who looked very pale.

  “How? Was it an accident?”

  Moore shook his head, enraged. “Someone came up here and cut the main power supply to the communications network. The system was designed with an emergency backup to avoid losing power in case of an outage.” He pointed to the center of the destruction, where two of his men were cleaning up the debris. “Fifty high-capacity generators.”

  “Were the generators not working properly?”

  “The generators worked fine,” Moore replied. “There was a power surge, and fifty fucking generators exploded at once because someone made a bridge that connected them all.”

  “Any idea who did it?”

  “Not yet, Kate,” Feldman’s voice came from behind her. “But we’ll get to the bottom of it soon. By the way, where have you been?”

  “Are you implying I was involved in this?”

  “I’m not implying anything,” Feldman replied coldly, the shadow of mistrust fluttering in his eyes.

  Feldman looked as if he had undergone chemotherapy or was suffering from some strange disease that was eating him from the inside out. His face was shriveled and covered with little veins, erasing his previously smooth, healthy skin; his trademark hawkish look had been replaced by a dull, confused expression, like someone on the verge of dementia. The change was so devastating that it made Kate sick, and she was unable to shake the memory of the shadow that had chased her earlier—whether it had been an hour or seventy years ago, she couldn’t really say.

  “Someone has done my ship harm,” Feldman barked. “My poor Valkyrie. Anyone who attacks her attacks me.”

  “It wasn’t me, Isaac,” she said in slow, clear speech. “I’ve been inside the whole time.”

  “You weren’t in your cabin,” Moore shouted without turning away from the damage, “and you weren’t in any of the common areas.”

  “Where have you been, Kate?” Feldman asked.

  Kate hesitated and both men took note.

  “It wasn’t me, Isaac,” she repeated. “You’ll have to believe me whether you like it or not.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Moore grumbled. One of his men had just whispered something in his ear. “In five minutes there will be no doubt. Let’s go to the control room.”

  Feldman nodded with a maniacal grin. He was losing his mind, skidding into a darkness filled with suspicions and imagined threats.

  They went down toward the bridge. When they entered Kate noticed a few changes that made her feel that much more uneasy.

  First, the back wall was empty. All the modern navigation equipment was gone. Where the sonar and satellite had been was now occupied by a few wires hanging out of the wall and a few sad metallic brackets. Kate could understand that the radar and communications system might not be working, and that, of course, this would constitute an enormous problem, but what she couldn’t understand was why the sonar and meteorological station had been removed.

  Harper was there, without the bushy mustache and with his eyes brown again. But he still had on the same uniform Kate had seen him wearing in the dance hall. When he saw them he clicked his heels to the floor and saluted them.

  “Guten Tag, meine Herren,” he spat. “I trust all of our troubles will soon end. We cannot have a relaxing cruise if these incidents continue. Someone has to take responsibility for this mess.”

  “Not to worry, Herr Kapitän,” Moore replied. “We’re on it. We’ll soon smoke out that Communist agent.”

  Communist agent? Kate thought it better not to ask. She had bigger problems. Two of Feldman’s men stood at the door holding assault rifles across their chests, and they were looking right at her.

  XXXIV

  They entered the radio room, where the security screens were. The same operator was seated as usual, but this time he had his headphones on and looked to be deep in concentration. Kate noticed a new sign on the door with an illustration of a technician fixing an old radio; his hand was inside the device, and all of his hair
was standing on end as if he were getting shocked.

  The operator looked at her and arched his eyebrows in a gesture of recognition. Kate sighed in relief. At least he had not gone crazy.

  “Hello,” Kate said, hoping for a friendly smile. “How did the Knicks do yesterday?”

  He looked at her perplexed. “The what?”

  “The Knicks.” She pointed to the television screen, which was off. “The basketball game.”

  “Basketball?” The man looked at her like she had just asked him to plant a field of barley on the moon.

  Kate tried to choke back her growing sense of dread. She was in her own reality, that was for sure, but it was a reality composed of dozens of subtle changes. The whole scenario was maddening.

  “Do we have the images?” Moore demanded.

  Harper was at his side, imposing and princely in his uniform. Feldman, hunched over, leaned against a corner and gave a deranged, breathless laugh.

  “Yes, sir,” the operator answered. He punched in a series of commands, and one of the screens blinked to life.

  It was a closed-circuit black-and-white video. In one corner, numbers furiously ticked as the video advanced. It showed the deck where the antennas had stood.

  “This is from yesterday afternoon,” the operator said, fast-forwarding the recording. The numbers went wild as the rain formed complex patterns through the speeding images. Suddenly, the operator paused the video. “It’s here,” he murmured with the satisfaction of a professional marveling at a job well done. “Look closely.”

  All that could be seen was the bridge until a dark figure walked into the frame from bottom left. It was Senka. She was unmistakable with her long blonde hair and cargo pants. But she was walking strangely, as if someone were pulling invisible strings to make her move.

  Senka stumbled forward a few steps, tripping over her own feet. Suddenly, she stopped, tilting her head to one side like a cat trying to hear the rat inside a cupboard.