The Cold Beneath

by Tonia Brown

  I, on the other hand, took full advantage of this panic, as well as the ensuing noise, bending low to scoop the shells from Bathos’s pocket as I retrieved his gun. Under the continuing howl and sounds of rending flesh, I was able to empty the gun and reload it without attracting attention. But when I closed the gun again, the revenant chose that exact moment to pause in his feast.

  The metallic click of the gun reseating echoed about the room.

  Parker snapped his face to the sound, to me, turning his empty eye sockets my way as if they could still perceive what was happening. The revenant then smiled, wicked and mean.

  “Your warmth …” he hissed.

  “You want me?” I asked. “Then come and get me.”

  With a flick of his blackened tongue over his blood-covered lips, Parker rose and stumbled toward me. I braced the shotgun on my good shoulder, taking aim and letting him get almost upon me before I fired. The thing reeled away as its head exploded in a cloud of blood. The shotgun was much more devastating than the handgun. It didn’t just blow out the back of the head in a flowering rupture as the handgun had done. Instead it destroyed the thing’s head in a single, wet eruption. Parker’s body stumbled a few times, clawing at the spurting stump of neck, before it finally collapsed on the floor.

  Adrenaline-fueled and unable to believe it was over, I cocked the second shot and aimed at the door, half expecting more to come after me, but none did. As I stood ankle-deep in the remains of nine men and the sleeping forms of six sickly others, the whole ship was once again silent. The madness was over. For now.

  But my own insanity had just begun.

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  Twenty-Two

  The Hardest Choice

  Before I continue with my tragic tale, I must once again pause and beg the Lord to forgive me. To forgive all of us. In His infinite wisdom, He is bound to absolve the men of their conduct, for what they did was not their fault. And for me and my treacherous deeds? Surely He knows there was no other way. He knows that I didn’t want to do what I did. He knows what had to be done. But alas, I suspect it is far too late for even the most holy love of our Lord to save my tarnished soul. I expect I shall suffer in the hottest bowels of Hell for my hand in all of this. For although the men acted in a way forced upon them, I made my choices of my own free will.

  In my defense, I tried my hardest to avoid it. I tried to envision scenarios in which the task that befell me wasn’t the only way. But, alas, the fates were against me, and what happened happened. I will do my best to limit the description of my deeds, for the sake of decorum, but in the wake of what I just outlined, there cannot be much worse said.

  I stood in the midst of nine dead, but only seven suffered the twofold death. This left me with an awful choice. Did I store the other two corpses only to deal with their inevitable return? Or would I do them the honor of releasing them from this torturous existence before it could claim them?

  Simply put, did I leave their remains intact or destroy the corpses’ brains?

  It was an appalling idea, I know, but what choice did I have? If I stored the bodies in the bay, they would reanimate, of that much I was sure. And there was also a good chance that they might do so before I could get them down the stairs by myself. I was weak with fear and cold and hunger. Though Geraldine’s mixture kept the frost from claiming me right away, it wouldn’t be long before the cold would be too intense for even the vitamins to combat. Something had to be done.

  So I did it.

  I did it with compassion and the knowledge that it was my only option. I did it with mercy in my heart and tears in my eyes. I helped myself to the bounty of Lightbridge’s weapon cabinet, reloading the pistol I had taken from Kidman, I then returned to the infirmary to put a bullet into both Bathos’s and Kidman’s skulls. The report of the gun seemed so loud, so very loud in the absence of the wailing dead.

  Upon releasing the two men from the terrible chance of returning, I snatched a lantern and made my way to the cargo bay. There were still a few dead unaccounted for from the wreck, men I was sure would return. Then there was the matter of Herron. We had last left him struggling under Shipman’s snapping jaws. Yet he wasn’t among the revenants that stormed the infirmary, so I traveled with caution, expecting him to leap out from every corner, lurk in every shadow.

  When I followed the steps to the lower deck, I was met by a sight most foul and repulsive. What remained of Herron lay at the foot of the stairs, on his back and pawing with a bloody stump at the bottom step. The revenants that attacked the man didn’t leave much of him behind. His legs, his left arm and most of his right arm were shorn from his body, lying in chunks across the room from the rest of his corpse. The sight of his torso was sickening, his clothes and flesh shredded in great swaths of blood and bile and filth. He moaned in torment as he writhed and rapped at the bottom step with the remainder of his right arm.

  It occurred to me that in his search for warmth, he had wriggled his way across the room and was trying his best to pull himself up the step. I lifted the lamp over him, shocked at the sight but still curious as to how such a mangled corpse could remain in motion. As soon as the light touched him, he started in with that howl I had come to know so well, and wriggled in violent lurches, struggling to gain purchase against the steps. He was trying to attack me. Even in his eviscerated and quartered state, he was trying to launch an assault. The inquisitive part of me sought answers, but the humanity in me demanded his suffering end.

  With a single shot, I set him free.

  The other corpses in the storage unit were just that, corpses and nothing more. None of them showed any inclination of returning. For a brief moment, I wondered if I had imagined the whole thing. Had I gone mad? Then, as I studied them, I saw that each one had suffered from some injury to the head. Whether it was by flame or blow, each body bore a ruined skull. This corroborated my theory that what was happening to us stemmed from some sustained activity of the brain beyond death. As long as the brain remained intact and unharmed, the corpse would reanimate. All of the asphyxiation victims had returned, as did Tipton with his broken neck, while the men who died with skull injuries remained still as the grave.

  Yet I emptied my gun into them all the same.

  Fresh fear was still upon me, and though my eyes saw the truth, my hands couldn’t reconcile the fact that those men weren’t coming back. It might have been a temporary madness that spurred me, or perhaps a long-term lunacy from which I still suffer. Rest assured that I took no joy in my actions. It was a terrible deed, and for it I seek the mercy of our Lord. I fear that such mercy, even if granted, will not keep my soul from the fires of Hell.

  I set about on a series of tasks made up in my mind. Firstly, I checked the boilers and to my delight discovered that they weren’t ruined, just out of coal. After filling the bins and relighting them, I stoked them as far as they allowed, almost shouting with glee when the power returned. But there was neither time nor call for celebration. There was too much work to be done, and much of it grim.

  Second of my tasks was the tending to my own ill health. I cleaned my simple wounds, marveling at how little I suffered when compared to the others. I ate a quick meal, even though my appetite was stolen by the knowledge of the dreadful tasks that lay ahead of me. Yet I had to eat, or I would accomplish nothing more than passing out. As I supped, I pondered the possibility of my own return. When I died, for I was now convinced that my demise was a foregone conclusion, would I come back just like the others? I thought I would … no, I knew I would, and I wondered if there was something that could be done about it. I could have, and perhaps even should have, taken my own life then. I could have pressed the barrel to my own temple, steadied my shaking hand, and ended this torture.

  But I didn’t. And even with all I have seen, all I have done, I still cannot. Is it cowardice that keeps me alive? Or is it distaste for the immorality of such a desperate act? I am unsure.

 
Next on my mental list was dealing with the injured men in the infirmary. To my dismay, I found that while five of the men were still showing signs of life, the sixth had passed on. It was the lad who had taken one of Bathos’s wild shots. In all of my running about, I had forgotten his injury, and he bled to death as a result of my negligence. It was my fault. I allowed him to lie there and suffer while I dressed my own wounds, warmed my body and filled my belly. Now he was dead.

  Without hesitation, I raised my gun and released him from our shared curse.

  As I stood over the cold corpse, I stared at the other men. In their bandages and bindings and beds, they looked so helpless. So feeble. They teetered on the precipice of this life, ready at any moment to plunge into the darkness of the beyond. Would they survive until rescue arrived? Geraldine was doubtful, and so was I. It was my professional opinion that none of the men would live to see the next morning, perhaps not even that night. And when they did go, they would return. All five of them. Then I would be left to deal with a new horde of revenants, alone.

  “Unless …” I whispered to the five sleeping men. I gripped my weapon tighter, allowing its now-familiar weight to ease me into the vile thought. It would be such a simple task. They deserved better than their fates, and I could help each one with a single well-placed shot.

  The temptation was great, but I was too weak to follow through. Too weak to release them from this Hell. I already had so much blood on my hands, I knew my poor soul could not withstand the stain of one more drop. Instead I changed dressings, refreshed the bags of fluids, and administered doses of both morphine and Geraldine’s precious concoction. As I ran the vitamin injection into each sleeping man, I praised her genius. Without her compound, we would surely have frozen to death long before now.

  On the heels of this came the terrible task of tending to the corpses. It took me the rest of the day and long into evening to drag all of the corpses to the cargo bay, collecting the scattering of body parts and organs along the way. I executed my deeds without flinching or hesitating. Though Lightbridge was correct about the weakness of my constitution, he discounted my medical background. Years of learning how to manipulate flesh and metal on the bodies of cadavers had left me with a hardened heart of sorts. I saw the bodies as merely flesh, sacks of skin and bone and nothing more.

  At first I considered burning the lot, but the nagging fear of whatever evil vapors might be carried on the smoke that rose from their tortured flesh stifled my resolve. Once all of the corpses were housed in the cargo bay, I pulled the door to and returned to clean the mess they left behind. It would be at least another day before Lightbridge and Geraldine returned, and I had no intention of spending the time sidestepping great pools of blood, not to mention the fact that I couldn’t bear to look at them. With a bucket of hot water siphoned from the boilers, I mopped up what fluids I could before the weight of my work began to take its toll.

  I ached all over, and was now far bloodier than the partially cleaned floors. I craved a shower, another meal and then a long rest. On my way to the water closet, where a simple warm bath awaited me, the craving for sleep overcame my other needs. I postponed the bath in favor of what I intended to be a quick nap. My body had other ideas. I fell onto my cot, blood-soaked and half crazed, where I slept for what must have been over twenty hours.

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  Twenty-Three

  Lightbridge and Party Return

  It was Geraldine’s voice that woke me.

  “Philip?”

  I stirred. My eyelids fluttered at the sweet call. Could it be her? Or had Heaven sent an angel to comfort me after the horrors I had witnessed?

  “Philip?” my angel asked again.

  I stared at the ceiling, wondering if it was just my imagination, when a second voice joined the call.

  “Wake up, Mr. Syntax,” Lightbridge commanded.

  I lifted my head to see both Geraldine and Lightbridge standing at the foot of my bunk. They had returned, and from the looks of things, neither was worse for wear. I was overjoyed, so happy to see other living folks that I soon found myself in tears.

  “Gere-bear!” I shouted as I sat up. “Gideon! You’re back. Oh, thank God you’re back safe and sound.”

  At this point I got to my feet so I could take my Geraldine into a tight embrace and never release her. But I found this impossible when a young man stepped between me and my love, bearing both a nasty expression and a gun, which was trained on me.

  “What …” I started. “What’s going on?”

  “Please raise your hands, Syntax,” Lightbridge commanded. “Slowly.”

  I did as asked, his cold tone not lost on me. “I don’t understand.”

  Geraldine’s eyes glistened with unspent tears. She stared at me as though I were a stranger, her gaze running the length of my body, then returning to my face. “Philip. What have you done?”

  I looked down at myself and was shocked at the layer of dried gore stuck to my skin and clothes. No wonder they were cautious of me. How I must have seemed to them! I shook my head and held out my hands as I tried to explain myself. “Ah, yes. I know how this looks, and I have quite the tale to tell, so if you would just—”

  “Silence!” Lightbridge yelled.

  I fell quiet at his shout. In all of our time together, I had never seen Lightbridge so angry. He trembled like a chilled man, so much rage was upon him. Nausea swept over me, pulling me down into an eddy of sickening doom.

  The metallic click of the young man’s gun sounded as he readied his weapon. He lifted it higher, taking aim at my head as he said, “Let me shoot him now, boss. Save us all the trouble having to hear any more tripe from this murdering scum.”

  “Murdering scum?” I echoed.

  The man lashed out with a foot, kicking me square in the stomach. As I doubled over in pain and surprise, he snatched me by the root of my hair and pushed the readied weapon into my face. “The boss said shut up!”

  “Lent!” Lightbridge shouted. “Back down.”

  The man ignored the command, continuing to sneer as I dangled by the scalp from his hands. He shook me a few times, for good measure.

  “That’s an order,” Lightbridge said. “Drop him.”

  Lent threw me to the floor with an angry grunt. “Don’t deserve to live. Not after what he did to the crew.”

  “But you don’t understand—” I tried to say as I stood, but was interrupted by a blow to the jaw. Stars flew about me as I hit the floor again in a rough heap. I lay there for a moment, disoriented and confused. Rubbing my aching jaw, I looked up to my attacker.

  To my surprise, it was Lightbridge who stood over me, flicking his right hand, shaking off the strike as he stared down at me. “I said be quiet. That’s also an order.”

  I questioned him with my eyes, but not my mouth. I always considered myself a quick learner, and today’s lesson was no exception. Turning my attention to Geraldine, I begged her for assistance with a pitiful glance. But instead of helping me, she placed the back of her hand to her mouth. Her delicate fingers curled as she recoiled away from me in horror, whimpered, then fled from the room.

  Lent snarled like a feral animal. “Come on, sir. Let me end this now!”

  “No,” Lightbridge said. “We will deal with him in time. For now, get him to his feet and take him to the brig.” He turned away in disgust. “I can’t stomach the sight of him anymore.”

  At this, the young man’s lips curved into a wicked grin. “With pleasure. Come on, you!” He once again snatched me by the hair, lifting me to my feet before he turned me about, grabbed my arms and twisted them behind my back. I moaned and winced as white bands of pain arced across my shoulder from my injured clavicle. Lent ignored my groan of pain, pushing me to the door as roughly as he could manage.

  “But you don’t understand!” I shouted as he wrestled me to the door. “Gideon! Please let me tell you what’s happening! I must warn you! Gideon!” My calls for
asylum fell upon deaf ears as I was ushered out of my berth and down the hall.

  Lent manhandled me at every turn, making no pretense of concern for my safety. At the top of the stairs, he released his hold and shoved me hard. I stumbled several steps before I got my feet under me. Lent was on my heels, pressing his gun into my side, ordering me to keep moving. I did as instructed, lifting my hands as a show of good faith. At the bottom of the staircase, we passed the cargo bay, where the door stood open wide. The other four men of the party were gathered at the unit where I had stored the corpses.

  Which explained everything.

  As I slept off the exhausting effects of my attempted cleanup, Lightbridge and his party returned to discover a ship full of half-dried bloody trails, all of which led to the lower deck. There they found the bodies of their fellow crew members stacked like so much cordwood in the cargo bay. Some eviscerated, some dismembered, but every single corpse bearing nothing but a bloody stump from the neck up. And where was the only surviving member? Asleep in his bunk, covered in the sticky life fluids of those very same men.

  The evidence was damning. My fate was sealed. As we tromped past the cargo doors, each man turned to look upon me with such anger and disgust that I was sure there would be no hope for me or my unbelievable story.

  One man, overwhelmed by grief and hatred, darted across the space between us, lunging for me, screaming, “I’ll kill you! You son of a bitch! I’ll rip your coward’s heart out with my bare hands!”

  Thankfully the other men were more levelheaded, and moved as one to stop their friend. They grabbed him by the arms, pulling him back, away from me as I cowered against the far wall. The man struggled at first, but soon buckled into the arms of his companions, weeping with as much abandon as any woman I’ve ever heard. And I didn’t begrudge him his tears, or his anger, misplaced as it was.