Bradley stormed down the corridor toward the hanger and threw the door inward.
The smell struck him in the face like an uppercut.
He recoiled and eased into the room more slowly. There were corpses scattered all across the floor. Five were lined up like matchsticks on tarps in the center, while two more lay at angles to them.
There were standing pools of blood everywhere, connected by arterial arcs and smears where the bodies had either crawled or been dragged through their own rapidly fleeing lives. A pair of tentative steps deeper into the room and he could clearly discern Henri’s hair and suit jacket on the corpse closest to him. He was facedown, his arms splayed above his head. Van Horn was on his back a dozen yards away, his throat opened into a startled crimson gasp.
Bradley momentarily froze as the scene played out in his head. His first thought was that Bishop must have attacked them in his desperation to escape the ship, but the level of carnage was staggering, inhuman. And the bottom line was that Bishop had merely broken Aronson’s nose and left him unconscious. He hadn’t slit the man’s throat, for Christ’s sake.
So if it hadn’t been Bishop, then who…?
Bloody footprints led away from the corpses. They grew fainter and less distinct as he followed them with his eyes to the ground right in front of him. He leaned over to better see the question mark-shape of a bare human footprint. The five toes left ovals, above which tiny dots marked where toenails had barely tapped, like those of a dog.
He quickly straightened and spun toward the doorway. The tracks faded with each step as they crossed the threshold into the hallway. He followed them out the door and to the right, where they disappeared into a puddle of rainwater at the foot of the door that led to the stern.
Bradley cracked open the door and rain immediately filled the gap. A peal of thunder greeted him.
His heart thudded so hard that the edges of his vision throbbed. What the hell was going on here? Van Horn and Renault…both dead? A feeling of dread washed over him with the deluge as he shoved the door wide open with trembling hands. Lightning flared, illuminating the raging black ocean, which appeared to boil with the impact of raindrops. Another clap of thunder boomed.
It hadn’t been Bishop who had slain his men. No, it had been something else entirely, something that had preceded him out this exact same doorway, something that had somehow found its way onto their ship and even now roamed it, out of sight.
Whatever footprints had been transferred to the deck had been washed away by the rain. Waves pounded against the hull and washed over the gunwales, sweeping across the stern, ankle-deep. Bradley battled through the fear. Maybe he was wrong in his assessment. Bishop had been in the Navy after all, and it certainly didn’t train its men to be teddy bears.
He walked farther onto the deck and had to shield his eyes from air that seemed to have been transformed into water. The stern was empty. Through the submersible’s A-frame launch he saw only an eternity of chaotic waves. He scoured the ground for any sign of passage, then turned back toward the ship, the bulk of which rose above him like a four-story building capped with a massive satellite assembly that the wind threatened to tear right off. The porthole lights inside the cabins were attenuated by the fog. The external stairs to the 01 Deck were empty in front of him.
Bradley held his arms out to the sides for balance as the ship rocked, sending the floodwaters first one way, then back the other, trying to rip him off his feet. The vessel slowed and banked eastward toward the island, where the mouth of a marginally calmer bay yawned wide for them.
Another fork of lightning split the sky. The water on the ship’s siding reflected it with a ghostly luminescence.
Movement.
He thought for a second he saw something moving up there.
A dark shape.
Here one moment, gone the next.
Clear up near the bridge. Its banks of windows stained the clouds like a forlorn lighthouse.
The resultant clap of thunder made his heart skip a beat.
His breathing grew fast, shallow.
He tried to pinpoint where he had seen the motion, but only saw the swirling fog and sheeting rain.
This was idiocy. If what he feared were true and their prey had somehow boarded the Huxley, the last thing he should be doing was standing out on the deck alone. Images flashed through his mind. The bodies trapped underwater in the hull of the Mayr, the recorded bedlam in its corridors, the specter hauling the corpses down the stairwell, the Second Mate taking his last stand against an intruder with only a fire extinguisher—
A burst of lightning and Bradley saw it. A human form bathed in quicksilver, scaling the side of the ship from the third deck to the fourth. In one swift motion, it scurried up over the top of the pilothouse and disappeared into the forest of antennae and parabolic dishes.
“No,” he whispered, his voice obliterated by the thunder.
He could no longer see movement. What could it possibly be doing up—?
A steel guy-wire snapped like a cracking whip. The radio tower wobbled. Another line flailed into the air. A heartbeat later, the entire assembly toppled away from him and vanished over the opposite side of the vessel.
“No!” Bradley shouted.
His feet were rooted to the canting deck. He couldn’t look away from the roof of the pilothouse for fear that he would lose sight of what he knew was up there. As long as he could see it, he was—
The grim realization struck him as the inside of the pilothouse windows were painted with black spatters that cast eerie shadows into the mist.
A hatch led from the roof to the chart room to grant the engineers access to the communications array.
He glanced toward the island. They were cruising at an angle directly into a bay surrounded by a horseshoe of rugged crags and endless trees.
His heart clenched in his chest.
He stole his stare back from the pilothouse and its blood-spattered windows, and ran back through the door into the main corridor.
“Abandon ship!” he shouted as loud as he could.
Just like theMayr, the Huxley was doomed.
What in God’s name had they done?
“Abandon ship!”
Forty-Two
Ambitle Island
“We have to keep moving,” Bishop said. His teeth no longer chattered, but his arms still shivered around her.
Courtney didn’t want to get up. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt safe, if only for this one moment in time. She was drenched, freezing, and long past the point of exhaustion. She wasn’t even sure if she had the strength to stand, let alone walk barefoot across this harsh terrain toward God only knew what. It was only a matter of time before those on the boat figured out their deception and dispatched men to hunt them, if they hadn’t already. There was already a team on the island, tromping through the forest in search of the survivors from the work boat, and whatever else stalked the jungle. She thought of Ty, and what those on the ship were convinced he had become. The tears flowed once more. She remembered her brother, lying on the bed in the infirmary, his skin covered with scaly silver growths. Heat had positively radiated from him. He had taken her hand in his and given her a smile meant to reassure her, but the blood shimmering on his gums and lining his teeth had produced the exact opposite effect. She recalled catching golden reflections from his eyes before they drifted back up into his head as she stood from his bedside and walked away from him for the last time. She’d been unable to even tell him that she loved him for fear that her voice would betray her. That was now her cross to bear. Rather than stay by Ty’s side, she had used her work as an excuse to distance herself from him, to protect herself when he was the one in need of protection. He had needed her and she had abandoned him.
She wiped away her tears and concentrated her will. If Ty had somehow managed to survive and reach the island, regardless of his condition, she was going to find him. And nothing—not the fear, the cold,
the exhaustion, or the prospect of what he had become—was going to stop her.
Using the trunk of a ceiba tree for leverage, she struggled to her feet and truly looked around her for the first time. A high rock shelf separated her from the furious Pacific fifty feet down and to the west. To the east, the impossibly forested slope ascended into the mist where the dormant volcano slumbered. The path to both the north and to the south was little more than a happenstance pattern of jungle growth influenced by the sandpaper wind, thick with brine. She knew only that somewhere across the sea to her left was New Ireland Island, and beyond it, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, just not their current location on this godforsaken rock.
“I say we head north,” Bishop said. “If I remember correctly, there’s only one formal settlement on this island, a Tolai village with a Catholic mission. Surely they’ll have some way for us to contact the mainland and arrange for transport—”
“I can’t leave,” Courtney whispered. “Not yet.”
“What are you talking about? If they find us again, they’re going to kill us. You realize that, don’t you?”
Courtney started walking to the north. The underbrush groped for her torn scrubs.
“Wait a second.” Bishop grabbed her by the arm and spun her around. “You can’t just go wandering off on your own.”
“Watch me.” She shrugged out of his grasp and shoved through the branches and vines.
Lightning stabbed white spears down through the canopy. The wind screamed along the rocky coast. The trailing thunder made the ground shake. Or at least she hoped it was the thunder.
“Wait up,” Bishop called. He crashed through the shrubs behind her until he caught up and took her more gently by the wrist. When she turned around to yank her hand from his grasp, he pulled her to him and kissed her. Caught by surprise, it took her a moment to ward off the shock. When she did, she brought him closer and kissed him even harder. She poured all of her conflicting emotions, all of her fear, into a desperate passion, and from him drew courage and strength. Her hands traced the hard muscles of his back, so firm under her touch, even as his surprisingly delicate palms caressed the gentle slope of her lower back and the upper curve of her buttocks. She pressed her hips against his and found him willing. A part of her needed him right now, needed to exert a measure of control over an untenable situation, to banish the horrors of the world around her, if only for a few precious minutes. Recognizing as much, he withdrew his mouth and leaned his forehead against hers. His breath was warm on her lips.
“Wherever you go,” he whispered, “I go.”
“Thank you,” she said through the ghost of a smile.
“We just have to be careful.” He caressed her cheek as he spoke. “We can’t charge headlong into the unknown, not when our lives are at stake.”
She could only nod.
“I think that if your brother was among the survivors, he would have tried to reach the village. Don’t you?”
Again, she nodded.
“Then that’s where we need to go, but I’m sure we aren’t the only ones who’ve made that assumption. That’s where the others will be going, too, and we need to make sure that we stay as far away from them as possible. They aren’t going to let us go a second time.”
She leaned away from him and looked up into his eyes.
“I know,” she whispered.
Courtney released him and stepped back. She held his hand a moment longer as if to squeeze every last drop of reassurance from it. When she turned away from him, he spoke to her back in a soft voice.
“And if they’re right about your brother…are you prepared to find out that there’s nothing left of him?” He paused. “Are you ready for the fact that he—whatever he may have become—might be beyond saving?”
“Yes,” she whispered. Tears once again welled in her eyes.
She remembered the predatory crimson eyes of the man on the other side of the isolation shield as he paced back and forth, seeking a weakness in the barrier he could exploit to reach her.
“Are you prepared to find out that he might want nothing more than to kill you like he did all of the others?”
In response, she shouldered her way through the trees toward the answer she couldn’t find the voice to vocalize.
Forty-Three
R/V Aldous Huxley
Scott Aronson reached the end of the corridor on the 03 Deck. He had already awakened the Master of the Ship and his First Mate, as well as a handful of grumpy chief scientists whose annoyance was as thinly disguised as their contempt for his station. Under different circumstances, he would have happily broken their noses and left them crying on the floor. He tried not to think about the fact that that was exactly what had happened to him, but the pain and the watering eyes made it impossible to forget. When he got his shot at Bishop again—and he would get another crack at him—he fully intended to return the favor. And then some. The merciless throbbing in the center of his face and the taste of his own blood in his mouth was bad enough, but the embarrassment…well, that was far worse than the injury itself. And it had been a cheap shot to boot. When his turn arrived, he was going to make sure that Bishop saw it coming. He wanted to see that flash of recognition in the man’s eyes when he understood what was about to happen and that there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop it.
He smiled to himself and paused at the foot of the stairs leading upward to the 04 Deck. His radio crackled at his hip.
“Oh-Two Deck clear,” a static-addled voice said.
“Oh-One Deck, as well,” another added. “Although there’s some sort of commotion coming from the Main Deck under me.”
Aronson unclipped his transceiver and brought it to his lips.
“Oh-Three Deck all clear. Moving on to the Oh-Four. Hold…I want an update.”
“With all these pipes and crates, they could be hiding anywhere,” a fourth voice said.
“Keep looking. We rendezvous on the Main Deck in five minutes. If they aren’t in the pilothouse, they have to be either outside or holed up in one of the labs,” Aronson said. “And give me an update on that ruckus.”
He clicked off and returned his walkie-talkie to his hip.
This door-to-door nonsense was getting them nowhere. It was a waste of time and they all knew it. If he were the one trying to hide on this vessel, there was no way anyone would ever find him. There were gaps beneath every floor where pipes flowed and service access panels that led to hollow compartments and ladders granting easy access to hidden nooks on every level. But eventually, his quarry would have to come out, and when they did, he would be ready.
He ascended the stairs toward the chart room for formality’s sake. If Bishop and Martin had made a break for the communications network or the wheelhouse, the third shift duty officers would have blown the whistle on them in a nanosecond.
A cool breeze caressed his face. Even through the clotting blood in his nostrils and sinuses, he could smell brine and ozone. For the briefest of moments, it soothed the ache in his nose and behind his eyes.
At the top of the staircase, he turned left into the chart room. The shelves at the rear had collapsed, scattering large books of maps all over the wide table and floor, where puddles had formed.
Bang!
Aronson nearly jumped at the sound. He looked up at the ceiling, toward the source of the sudden noise. The wind threw the roof-access hatch open again. Raindrops and runoff poured through the gap. Lightning burst in the clouds above, highlighting the wet rungs of the ladder leading up to the empty space where the radio tower should have been.
This was all wrong.
There was no reason for Bishop to try to reach the roof, and disabling their communications was contrary to his best interests. It was theoretically possible that the ferocity of the storm could have torn the tower from its moorings, but they were constructed to withstand far harsher conditions than this.
Pages of maps riffled on the cold wind that blew down from above. He studied
the pools on the floor and noticed a series of indistinct wet footprints leading back out of the chart room and toward the pilothouse, where they petered out in front of the reinforced steel door of the bridge, which stood wide open.
Warm fluid trickled down the back of his throat from his sinuses. For a second there, the organic smell of blood overpowered even the scents of the ocean and the rain.
Monitors beeped beyond the threshold, through which he could see straight out into the indigo-flashing belly of the storm, thanks to the slanted wall of windows.
As he passed through the doorway, an alarm sounded to his left. He turned toward the sound to find a man draped over the console. Warning lights blinked all around him, where the screens and housings were spattered with copious amounts of blood.
“Jesus Christ!” he gasped, and fumbled with the transceiver hooked to his belt.
From somewhere below him, he thought he heard people shouting before a voice erupted from his unit.
“I’m on the Main Deck now. Someone’s hollering to abandon ship. It’s chaos down here.”
“We’ve got an even bigger problem up here,” Aronson said. With his free hand, he drew his sidearm. He turned away from the shipboard technician and saw the Second Mate crumpled on the floor between the bridge and the windows, which were crisscrossed with black arterial spurts. Beads trickled from them in thin rivulets. The man’s face was a shimmering scarlet mask, his throat a tattered mess of macerated flesh and severed tendons and vessels. His uniform shirt was saturated with his lifeblood.
Lightning flashed through the windows above the corpse, illuminating the sheer forested slopes of Ambitle Island directly off the bow, looming up into the clouds.
There was a clamoring sound on the far side of the bridge. A monitor toppled from its perch and hit the ground with a shower of sparks. A shadow crossed the wall.
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