Without waiting for further orders, Horst rushed inside, disappearing into the swirling cloud, his pant leg the last trace of him to vanish. Carll went next into the mist, beckoning for Johann to follow. Taking a deep breath and ignoring the awful taste of the air outside, Johann plunged ahead, surrendering himself to the oncoming cloud, and by the second step the pale light surrendered to darkness. Although he couldn’t see the smoke that enveloped him, he could feel it all around, wet and sticking, coating the skin of his face and hands in a slick oil. Sound, too, was muffled, the churn of machinery dulled down to a rapacious rumble, drowning out the march of Horst and Carll’s boots across the grated metal floor, echoes becoming impossible to discern from original sounds.
He felt alone and isolated, lost in a black void, wanting to call out for the others but unable to. Cracking open his mouth to try, the vapors rushed in and he gagged. His thoughts lost clarity as a bout of lightheadedness hit, his brain a ticker-tape machine spitting out endless reams of meaningless gibberish he couldn’t fully decipher. He couldn’t feel the gun in his hand and that scared him worst of all. A soldier could face blind danger and his training would guide him, but to do so unarmed? It was unimaginable.
A hand crept over his shoulder, slow, like a long-legged spider, and he flinched, drawing up both arms. Dr. Oelrich’s voice shouted into his ear, “Hold your nose and mouth shut and blow.”
He did and his ears popped, releasing the pressure. Sound returned; a mad orchestra of metallic clangs, percolating humming, and the hiss of superheated fluid. And then, a moment later, light: Carll’s metal cigarette lighter, waving in the clouds ahead of him, illuminating a halo of swirling wisps. Quickening his step, he caught up to the other two soldiers. They stood in place, staring down at the floor with looks for astonishment and disgust on their faces.
An engine worker’s body was curled there, twisted and broken like an abused toy, head crooked at an unsurvivable angle. His jaw was gone, face ending at a row of exposed top teeth, tongue flat to the floor like a dead slug.
Horst kicked the corpse onto its back. The head swung back to face them. A crude bisected oval with six short rays protruding from its center had been cut into his forehead, the wound rough and wild, not at all reminiscent of the surgery of even an untrained blade. If Johann had to guess, he would have said it was done with a thumbnail.
“This … no sense,” Carll said.
Dr. Oelrich leaned down and inspected the body. Glancing up, his blue eyes cut through the gauzy smoke that snaked around them. He pointed at a large crater in the center of the dead man’s chest. “His heart’s gone.”
“Less sense,” Horst said.
A sound cut through the drumming of the engine, a guttural, crackling moan. They turned, Dr. Oelrich jumping to his feet, and faced the noise. It came from deeper inside the engine room, far past the reach of Carll’s lighter, where the smoke congealed into a moving black mass.
Something caught Johann’s eye, a flicker of motion, perhaps, or the shimmer of almost unperceivable light against the rolling mist.
He could feel the gun in his hand again, but instead of reassuring him, it brought only dread. He knew that a blind man’s hearing intensified because of his missing sense, that the human body compensated for its needs by accentuating the tools necessary for survival. Something was triggering his body’s primitive early warning systems. The sudden re-emergence of the gun’s weight in his hand suggested he would need it soon.
“You said they’re all dead,” Horst said to Carll.
Dr. Oelrich turned to Felix, just emerging from the haze in the doorway. His voice was accusatory and terse. “Is there anyone else aboard that you have failed to mention? Are you sure that everyone is accounted for?”
“Everyone,” Felix nodded. “Except, well, we still don’t know where Bennie Leland is.”
Dr. Oelrich pushed the corpses’ head back toward Felix with the tip of his boot. “Could this first mate do this?”
Staring at the corpse, Felix said, “No.”
The moan returned, louder now, clearer, closer.
Horst brought the butt of his revolver up to his face and cracked back the hammer under his jaw. He took a step out of the cigarette lighter’s illuminated ring, fading into a silhouette, then a shadow, then nothing at all. Johann called to him, “Horst, what is it? Can you see—”
The answer was two sharp metallic blasts—Horst’s gun firing off two rounds. The shot sent a quick flash of orange lightning through the air before the room came alive in light and color, the particles of coal dust trapped in the smoke smoldering mid-air. The room’s temperature, already uncomfortably warm, skyrocketed.
Surrounding Horst, misshapen figures lurched through the glowing, rolling plumes of smoke. Necks craned at crooked angles away from their bodies, two men stumbled toward him, arms outstretched, mouths open. Johann retreated back a step, backing into the corpse on the floor, when he saw the chests of the men approaching Horst. They had been torn open like the dead man at his feet, leaving behind gaping craters, twisted knots of veins and arteries dangling like tangled cords.
Their foreheads were desecrated with symbols.
“Shoot them,” Dr. Oelrich ordered, shouting.
“I did,” Horst yelled back before firing again, this shot entering the closest dead man’s eye and exploding out through the back of his skull. The man kept coming.
Horst leaped back, narrowly avoiding two pairs of grasping hands, and fired again. And again. And again, until his revolver was empty, none of the shots having any stopping power. Carll took aim and fired, too, his shots tearing through the dead men, cutting through their flesh but not stalling their movements.
Behind them, in the deepest recesses of the engine room, among the manifold pipe work and fuel-loading chutes, Johann caught sight of three more figures. These stood motionless with perfect upright posture, so different than the clumsy, shambling bodies that approached. He couldn’t see details, but the general outline of their bodies told him he wasn’t looking at normal men. It was more like catching a glimpse of a trio of ancient stone-carved statues, exaggerated perfection still communicated through centuries of weathering.
Felix was already running for the door with the doctor not far behind, both men yelling, neither in any recognizable language.
With his gun empty, Horst resorted to his blade, slashing at the hands that groped for him and severing their fingers.
Hands latched onto Johann’s ankles, pulling him back, tripping his feet out from under him. Falling, he braced himself for the fall but not the sight of what held him: the jawless dead man, now in motion, eyes rolled back, tongue wagging.
Turning the gun on the walking corpse, he fired twice in quick succession, the shots rocking its head back in a spray of blood and skull fragments.
Carll stomped down on the jawless corpse’s wrists until it released Johann, then reached down and helped him up. Together they emptied their revolvers into the dead man, each shot blasting it to the floor. Dragging itself up, its face half missing, remaining teeth splayed at strange angles, the dead man reached for them. As they scrambled backward, turning, a fresh burst of smoke erupted from the furnace, blanketing them.
At his side, Carll collided with a shape emerging from the cloud. He struck out with the handle of his revolver, landing a vicious strike to the back of a shaved head, realizing too late that it was Horst retreating. Horst turned, screaming, blood rushing from the blow, and wrapped his arm around Carll, drawing him in, his other hand ramming his hunting knife into the smaller soldier’s stomach, tearing it back, and reinserting the blade.
Johann yelled, raised his empty gun, and pulled the trigger.
Horst roared at him and tossed Carll away like a wet jacket. He took a forceful step toward him, but then paused, seeming to reconsider, and then stepped back into the rolling waves of smoke.
Johann dropped down to Carll. Horst’s knife had torn through the tough abdominal muscles and offered a glimpse into the dens
e, purple knot of viscera beneath. Blood seeped up like oil, a red so deep it was black, pooling out onto the deck. Carll’s hands dropped over his wounds, fingers pushing on the loops of small intestines pushing up through his broken flesh. He screamed.
The dead men broke through the smoke, fingerless hands first, reaching for Johann. He bolted away, but slipped on Carll’s spreading blood and fell onto the dying man. The screams became wailing shrieks as the two men rolled. Pulling himself up, Johann forced his eyes shut to block out the emerging image: on his side, Carll’s gut had released its organs like a bloated eel torn apart by its emerging offspring.
Nubbed arms looped under Johann’s armpits, locking him in an embrace, dragging him back, away from Carll’s endless, soaring cries. The dead men were cold against his skin, even in the heat of the engine room. With no fight left in him, no further courage to summon, no second wind to bolster him onward, he let the cold hands turn him. They propped him up, holding him still in an awkward forced kneel on the bloodstained deck.
They emerged, the three figures he’d glimpsed moments earlier—lean, gaunt bodies moving with a muscular grace—and at first he thought his initial impression had been correct, that these were statues come to life, statues of ancient gods, but then the stench hit him, a musty mix of clay earth and old rot. He understood that these were not gods, not anything holy, nothing that should exist. The tallest of the three stepped forward with black sockets where eyes belonged, and, head tilting down, seemed to see him anyway. It reached out and wrapped one long-fingered hand around his head.
A voice in his mind said, Your mother awaits her son.
Then there was terrible pressure.
He was dead before his skull imploded.
Chapter 20
It was getting warmer. Placing her hand against the deck floor, Priscilla felt heat radiate up her arm in steady, pulsing waves. Uncomfortable, she stood and brushed a few straggling hairs away from her forehead and was surprised to find her fingers come away wet. Wiping her face, her fingers slid across the layer of perspiration that coated her skin.
“Does it always get hotter at night?” she asked, directing her question at Eli. Slouched against the far wall, his perspiration was all too apparent: beads of sweat swam down his face; dark stains circled his armpits.
He shook his head. “No, ma’am, doesn’t normally at all. I’d say it gets colder. Put on a set of long johns most nights.”
“Then there’s something wrong,” she said.
Mason bristled. “On my laundry list of things going badly, a few degrees of unseasonable heat is pretty low on the wash heap. Fact is, we can’t just wait for the Germans to come down here and shoot us all dead.”
“We’re locked in a cage.” Eli pointed at the barred gate. “I’d like to get out of here as much as either of you, but I don’t see what we can do.”
Mason tapped a finger against his temple. “We can have a plan. Look, we all know we don’t have the chance of a grain of rice in a soup kitchen, but I’m not willing to sit back and wait for a bullet. There are four of us—plus the child—we can—”
“Him?” Eli stammered, gesturing toward Brigham. “He ain’t twitched an eyebrow since they dropped him back in here. That big Kraut scrambled his brains up, I think, left him just a rag doll.”
Dara, still holding Brigham, stared up at Eli with a frown. Priscilla regretted the girl overhearing Eli’s rant, especially his use of the slur Kraut, but his point was valid: Brigham was in no condition to move, let alone fight. And she couldn’t fathom what a little girl with a broken arm could do to help. Turning to Mason, she asked, “What’s your plan? Lay it out.”
His eyes fell to the floor. “Didn’t say I had a plan. I just … I can’t stand this waiting. I remember the men at Portlaoise, waiting in cells like this one, a writ of death hanging over their heads. Look at their faces and you’d see men all hollowed out on the inside, no hope left, no spirit. I can’t afford to be in that position. I won’t wait to have them come in here and murder us. They’re animals. They’d even kill the little girl.”
“No,” Brigham said in a soft but firm voice. Only his lips moved, and barely at that; even his eyes remained unfocused. “They won’t ever touch her. Won’t let it happen.”
For a long moment, no one spoke.
The cabin door cracked open, drawing their attention, except for Brigham, who continued to stare. Old Scratch squeezed through, wide green eyes surveying the cell and the people trapped inside, tail swishing.
“Old Scrat,” Dara said, but where her voice had previously boomed and her eyes brightened when she mispronounced the name, now her tone remained dour.
Priscilla bent down, rubbed her fingers together, and made a swishing sound to attract the cat. Cocking her head, Old Scratch’s furry face took on a suspicious expression and she took a step away from Priscilla. She headed to the far end of the bars, past the gate, and rubbed herself against the cold metal.
“Might as well stand yourself up, that cat don’t come to no one,” Eli said. His face darkened. “Except, that is, for Captain Hilliard. She’d sleep on his lap, but you come near her and she’d bound off, gone like a thunderbolt was gonna hit that spot.”
Sidewinding between the bars, Old Scratch slid inside the cell, her movements still jerky and cautious. Watching her, Priscilla came to a realization. The gaps between the bars were too wide for her, Mason, or Eli to pass through, but Old Scratch could come and go as she wished because the cell hadn’t been designed to keep a cat locked inside. When Felix had built the cage, he couldn’t have known that Priscilla’s team would include a ten-year-old.
“Dara, honey?” Priscilla leaned across the floor and brushed the little girl’s hair with her hand. “I need for you to do me a favor. Do you understand? A favor?”
Dara nodded, but tightened her grip on Brigham.
“Do you see how Old Scratch came right in between the bars? Do you think you could do that, too?” Priscilla felt the girl tremble under her touch and understood that she didn’t want to leave Brigham. “It’ll only take a second, baby, just quick.”
Eyes widening, Dara whispered, “Okay, Miss Prissy.”
With a reassuring smile, Priscilla said, “Thank you.”
Gently lowering Brigham’s head to the floor, Priscilla helped Dara off the floor and guided her to the bars. Turned sideways, with her head craned over one shoulder, the girl was able to push herself between the bars. Stuck for just a moment, Dara closed her eyes and pushed with exertion, her small body finally passing through to the other side.
Mason clapped. “Good girl.”
A sound echoed in from the hallway, a metallic click that might have been the old ship settling, or the tip of a boot against the floorboards.
Reaching for Dara, Priscilla said in a quick, hushed voice, “Great, honey, now come on back. Right now, come on.”
The return trip was just as tight, but Dara moved swifter and pressed herself through in a fraction of the time. Once through she wasted no time shuffling back to Brigham.
Standing, Priscilla turned to Mason and Eli. At first they didn’t speak at all, but their eyes communicated more than their lips ever could. Without a guard on the cabin door, Dara could sneak out unnoticed. There had to be an advantage in that, provided, of course, they could convince her to leave Brigham’s side. But what would they send her to do? The key was in Felix’s pocket, but could something else open the gate? Something from the metal shop? If so, could Dara carry it back? And could she roam the halls without being noticed? Priscilla winced at the thought of her getting caught. Murdering a child was something she doubted many men could do, but she had no illusions that Dr. Oelrich or Horst would even hesitate. Could they send a child out into that kind of danger? Did they have a choice?
“There’s a pair of flare guns in the bridge. One of them’s busted, but the other works. They’re stored in a metal box in the corner,” Eli said. “There’s a lock, one of them little combination jobs, b
ut that’s no problem. I don’t know the combination, but I know that the captain kept it written in the ship’s manifest, right inside the cover.”
Mason nodded. “Does Felix know about it?”
“Maybe he does, maybe he don’t.” Eli extended his arms and hands. “I’ve been aboard longer than anyone, but Captain Hilliard and Mr. Leland and I only know about the guns because of the one time, back in ’36, when we was taking on water and didn’t know whether we’d make it back to port. They didn’t have to use the flares, turns out, but I remember them talking about it.”
“But you’ve never seen them yourself,” Mason said. He waited for Eli to nod, then added, “So we’re taking a chance that they’re still there, or that one of them still works at all.”
“We’re not taking any chances,” Priscilla clarified and pointed over at Dara, “but we’re asking her to take a big one.”
“How heavy are the guns? Could she carry them?” Mason asked.
Eli’s jaw tightened. “I guess so. Dunno why not.”
Priscilla held up both hands. “Wait, wait. Think about what you’re asking her to do. They’ll kill her if they catch her.”
“They’re going to kill her anyway.” Mason’s eyes were as solid as marble. She could see this expression was not new to him, that there had been a time when he’d worn it often. She saw the Irish revolutionary in him, the anger and the hurt, the history of oppression and forced starvation. “This is the only chance we have. The only chance she has. Don’t you see that? I don’t understand why you’d object.”
She wanted to tell them there was a difference between waiting for death and putting a child in danger. Her agreement would mean she would have to take responsibility for the aftermath if things went wrong. If the Germans came in and shot her where she stood that very minute the girl would be a victim, but if she sent Dara to her death, she was an accomplice. Sending the child was unthinkable.
Unthinkable, except she did think it, and the more she turned it over in her head, the more she realized she couldn’t find a better solution. Following a deep, faltering sigh, she said, “Okay.”
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