Then she thought of Justin and Cherrywine, still down there in that darkness, and an unbearable sadness hit her so hard, it was almost a physical weight, stooping her shoulders and making each foot weigh a ton.
They were at the top of the Atlantic Queen, on the football-field-sized party deck, where the deformed things downstairs had once sunbathed themselves. Now the deck chairs were gone, and the huge swimming pool was empty except for several feet of scummy water at the bottom. The full-size lifeboats had probably been somewhere on the lower decks, but smaller, emergency versions were lashed to the upper deck in recessed rows along both sides of the ship, covered in rotting canvas and tucked under a partial ledge where they wouldn’t make the passengers nervous. From way up here, close to twenty stories above the ocean’s surface, they had an almost 360 degree, unobstructed view of the surrounding sea. The angle, coupled with the coming sunrise, let them take in the entire region for the first time.
“We’re smack-fuckin-dab in the middle of it all,” Ray muttered.
He was right. The water immediately around the cruise ship was clear for a good distance, forming that empty space they’d sailed through in the storm, but beyond that the band of derelict ships stretched for several miles in every direction, clustered around the cruise ship like those rings of debris that encircled Saturn. There were hundreds of crafts. The perspective from up here reminded Amber of being at the top of a tall skyscraper and looking down at a sleeping city.
Lito ran over to the port side railing. “Down there.”
They followed, and Amber looked over the side of the ship. It was a dizzying sheer drop to the calm ocean. “See that huge hole in the side of the ship?” Lito said. “That’s where we docked the speedboat. There’s enough gas in it to get us outta here.”
Amber saw where he meant, but then her eyes were drawn up, to something a few hundred yards out from the cruise ship. She brought up one hand to shield her eyes. “Hey, what is that?”
In the ring of empty water below them was a pulsing aquamarine light so fierce she couldn’t look directly at it. It was the queasy color of the sky flashes, but more concentrated, localized. She instantly felt that disoriented nausea again.
“Is that a buoy?” Ray asked. Right after the question came a disgusting belch. He looked away from the light quickly.
“It helps if you don’t look directly at it.” Lito put a hand in front of his face and squinted through the fingers to cut the glare. “Whatever it is, I saw it in the storm when we came in.”
The glow ebbed and grew, ebbed and grew, in rhythmic cycles, like some kind of phosphorescent beating heart, and even when it was at its weakest, when the eye could almost penetrate through the light, Amber still couldn’t get any sense of what was beneath. She closed her eyes before stomach acid could work its way up her esophagus.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Ray asked. “Whatever’s causin all this.”
Lito didn’t answer. He broke off the examination and pointed toward a rectangular structure on the bow of the cruise ship, on the other side of a rusted metal security fence. “That’s gotta be the bridge. Stay here, I’ll look for a ship schematic.”
He took the radiation detector and hurried away, waving the tiny, silver wand in front of him like a kid with a toy sword, then kicked his way through the gate in the fence. Tuan, Ray, and Amber waited for him, not speaking and trying not to look at the glow. She would’ve given anything for the VHF scanner, but it wasn’t in the rucksack of items Ray had managed to grab. Lito returned five minutes later, carrying a tube of laminated paper.
“What’re we doin?” Ray demanded.
“You’re gettin off this ship, right now. All of you.”
“Sounds good. So what the hell’re you doin?”
Lito held up the tube. “I’m goin to the maintenance room.”
“Goddamn, would you let it go? That fuel hose can kiss my—!”
“This ain’t about the Runner,” he interrupted. “I’m gonna look for the others. If they’re still alive, Jericho and Carlos would’ve gone to the maintenance room, so I’ll start there. Along the way, I’ll look for Cherrywine and…” He glanced at Amber. “…and Justin, too. Maybe we can still get him some help.”
Ray shook his head adamantly. “You weren’t down there with us, you don’t know what it’s like. This ship is infested with those things.”
“Yeah, but they’re all down in the lower decks, and I don’t think they’re smart enough to find their way out. We haven’t had one hit on the detector on our way up here, and I didn’t see any of them in the maintenance corridors.”
“But that’s not the point, Lito. We don’t have time, unless you wanna end up like them.”
“I don’t, and I don’t want Jericho or anybody else to, either. Not even Carlos deserves that.” Lito set his scruffy jaw. “With this map, I can cut down the starboard side of the ship and be there in twenty minutes.”
“Fine, then I’m goin with you.”
“Get the fuck real, Ray. I had to carry your ass up the stairs as it was.”
Ray snorted, looking from Lito to Amber, and flung a hand out at her. “You’re the one he’s got the hots for, you try talkin some sense into him.”
Amber’s cheeks burned, but she told Lito, “You didn’t carry me up the stairs, asshole. If you’re staying to look for the others, then so am I.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant,” Ray grumbled.
“I can’t worry about you while I do this.” Lito stepped closer and slipped an arm around her waist. Her knees actually went weak. She thought that only happened in the romance novels.
Are you shitting me? You’re falling for a pirate with a heart of gold; for all you know, this could actually be a romance novel.
“All right, all that stupidity aside,” Ray interjected, “how do you expect us to get off the ship anyway? Call a taxi?”
Lito stepped away from Amber. On their own recognizance, her fingers held on to the tail of his shirt for just a split second before letting go. He patted one of the lifeboats. “I’m gonna lower you down right next to the speedboat. You jump onboard, and drive it outta here.”
“We’re not leaving you,” she blurted.
“And I’m not askin you too. Just get away from the ship, where you’re safe. Circle if you have to. I’ll find the others, bring them back up here where the reception is better, and give you a call on the walkie.” When neither of them said anything, he raised his eyebrows. “The longer we argue, the less time we have.”
“If you’re not gonna listen to reason, fine, let’s do it,” Ray agreed.
The two of them inspected the rigging and handcrank pulleys for lowering the lifeboats, to find the one most serviceable. The cables were steel, rusted badly, but Lito said they would hold. He and Tuan pushed one out over the water, where it dangled on the other side of the railing, twenty stories in the air.
They helped Ray aboard first, then Amber. The fiberglass boat swayed but seemed sturdy. When Tuan’s turn came, he shook his head and saluted Lito.
“Guess he’s comin with me?”
“I think he had a thing for Cherrywine. Just take him with you, so at least someone is watching your back.”
Lito returned the salute. “All right, glad to have you, soldier.”
Amber and Ray took only the revolver, and Tuan’s other radiation detector. Lito handed her the speedboat keys last of all. She looked up at him and said, “If you…if you do see Justin…”
“I’ll bring him back.”
“That wasn’t what I was gonna say. It’s just…I can’t stand the idea of him stuck on this boat, ending up like one of those things. I should’ve let you…” She couldn’t finish.
He nodded. “I’ll make it painless.”
Amber started to sit down, but he leaned over the railing and grasped her upper arm. She closed her eyes, turned her face upward, and waited for his lips to touch hers.
“What are you doin?” he asked.
/> She opened her eyes to find him staring at her with his head cocked to the side. Hot embarrassment burned across her skin. “Oh…oh, I thought…you were…”
“Keep it in your pants, gringa,” he said, flashing that too-charming grin. Then it fell away, and he growled, “Forty minutes. Don’t give me any longer. And if that thing shows any sign it’s about to blow…just cut and run. Don’t even look back.”
She nodded, then settled down on the seat opposite Ray. A few seconds later they were being lowered smoothly down the side of the Atlantic Queen. After several feet though, they came to a stop, and Lito yelled out above them, “Hey, catch!”
Amber looked up and managed to snag something oblong and heavy before it crashed onto the floor of the boat. Her hands recognized the smooth glass surface of Eric’s hideous statue before she’d even looked at it.
“I’m gonna want that back!”
She grinned and stuffed the figure back into her pocket as they dropped away toward the sea.
3
Carlos and Jericho fled blindly through the corridors of the ship until they were sure they’d lost the mob. After that, Jericho made him stop so they could decide what to do next.
They had two flashlights, Jericho’s tool bag and machete, the shotgun, and the AR, all of which had about ten shots between them.
“We’ll never make it back out dat way,” Jericho wheezed.
“We don’t gotta go that way. Let’s just find the hose and—”
“Fuck de hose! Everybody else is dead! We’re lost, and we’re gonna die on dis ship! Don’t you see dat?”
“We ain’t lost.” Carlos aimed his flashlight at a sign mounted on the wall. They were covered in dust, but the writing underneath was still visible. “Chief Maintenance and Parts, that’s what you need, right?”
“Well…yeah…”
“All right, we go there, find the shit, then get up topside and catch a ride back to the Steel Runner. Yo, easy as shit, homey.”
Jericho said nothing, seemed to calm down. It was a new sensation for Carlos to have people listening to his orders for a change; he could get used to that, when he had his own crew. For now, he just had to keep this chickenshit moving. He led the way down through the corridors, following the signs until he reached a swinging door leading into a shop that looked like an auto garage. Parts and tools were scattered across the bare concrete floor, and there were shelves lining nearly every wall, with marked bins sitting side-by-side.
“Okay, do your thing.”
“‘My thing?’” Jericho laid the shotgun on a metal shop table and walked over to the bins. He used his flashlight to scan through the tags on each, then grabbed out a fistful of coiled hoses that looked like limp snakes. “You see dese, idiot? Dey’re rotted through! I’d have to find a metal pipe and den try to solder it to fit de gaskets!”
Carlos gritted his teeth. “Back on the raft, you said you could rig something up. Can you do it, or not?”
“Dere’s tings trying to kill us!”
Carlos held up the automatic rifle and pointed it at him. “That ain’t what I asked.”
Jericho studied him for a long moment. He must’ve seen something in Carlos’ face, because his next words were, “It was you. You sabotaged de Runner.”
“That’s right.” Carlos pulled the shotgun out of his reach. “Now get to work muhfuckah, or I’m gonna use those ugly ass dreadlocks for target practice.”
4
The lifeboat leaked. Water seeped up through the cracked fiberglass almost as soon as Amber and Ray touched down on the ocean surface. They hurried to get it released from the cables, and Amber used the plastic oars to maneuver them to the gaping hole in the Atlantic Queen’s side.
“Is it there?” Lito’s voice crackled on the walkie.
“It’s here,” she confirmed. The speedboat’s huge chrome-plated engine caught their flashlight beams and reflected them into blinding starbursts.
“All right, we’re goin. I’ll keep tryin you when we’re on our way back.”
She helped Ray transfer over to the other craft just before the lifeboat capsized and sank. It took Amber a few minutes to figure out the speedboat’s controls, then she started up the engine and backed out of the little artificial cove, scraping the sides against the jagged edges of the cruise liner’s hull.
Ray stretched out across the padded bench at the rear with the walkie on his bandaged stomach. “Just take us out a few hundred yards and we’ll wait.”
“Screw that,” Amber said. “There’s still a sea monster out here that could flip us right out of this thing.” She throttled up, spinning the steering wheel to turn them around.
“Then where are you goin?”
“To find out why the hell all this is happening.”
“Oh shit.” Ray’s head popped up to watch as she steered the speedboat toward that sickly, pulsing blue light.
5
Lito waited until he saw the speedboat emerge and roar away, then signaled to Tuan. They pelted across the long deck, toward a stairwell entrance beside the bridge that, according to the schematics he’d found, would lead them down through the engineering levels of the ship. Ten minutes later, they were once more charging through lightless corridors, but making better time than he’d figured. Tuan used one of his fancy Geiger counters to take readings as they went, leaving his machine gun to dangle on its strap against his back.
“Chinga. Shoulda kissed her,” Lito mumbled. Tuan gave him a puzzled look. The kid was a more pleasant traveling companion than Eric. “Let that be a lesson, my man: always kiss the girl. It may be your last chance.”
Tuan shrugged in confusion, then went back to studying the detector screen again as they walked.
“Ya know, it’s kinda nice to have someone around that can’t understand a word you say.” Lito’s voice echoed a long way in the deserted corridor. He considered shutting up—at the rate they were moving, they could come up on more of the creatures before either of them had a chance to react—but as long as the detector was silent, a little conversation, even one-sided, might put them at ease. “Course, it’s also probably good that you got no idea you’re about a century and a half in the past right now. I have no idea what’s gonna happen to you when we get outta this, but I promise I won’t let ‘em lock you up in a lab somewhere.” He snorted. “Like anyone’s gonna believe all this anyway. We’ll just be more Triangle lunatics.”
They came to a juncture. Most of the hallways in this part of the ship were labeled—they undoubtedly saw more traffic than the dank maintenance tunnels where he and Eric had boarded—but Lito still needed to check the schematic to get his bearings. They were nearing the engineering offices. He and Tuan started down a long hallway with no other doors, and a vented ceiling from which most of the metal panels were either missing or rusted through, revealing a narrow crawlspace of pipes and ductwork. Withered, skeletal legs dangled from one of the open sections, as though the person had tried to cram themselves into the tight space to escape. They gave the dead appendages a wide berth.
For the first time, Lito wondered what it must’ve been like on this ship when everything went to hell. The panic and crazed fear would’ve created chaos. Had the passengers mutated all at once, or had some of them changed before the others and then started killing the rest? Had they seen the derelicts? Or were there even any derelicts to see? This Atlantic Queen might’ve been one of the first vessels collected by the Bermuda Triangle, nearly 14 years from now.
An even bigger idea hit him. If they got away, they could stop this from happening, warn the cruise line company, or even the passengers. They could save all these people from their horrible fate. He’d always loved sci-fi stuff as a kid, so he understood the disastrous concept of paradoxes, but he didn’t know if his conscience would allow this maritime disaster to happen if he could prevent it.
“So Tuan,” Lito said as they walked. He suddenly wondered what else it might be possible to change in the future. “Tell me more
about this war of yours.”
“Biiiig war,” the soldier repeated in his limited English. And he had that tone again, as if Lito should know all of this.
“I know, I know, it’s a big war, but just humor me, kid. Tell me who America’s fightin this time. Korea? Some turban head in the Middle East? The Germans again?”
The nationalities were the only part Tuan seemed to comprehend. He sighed in exasperation and slipped the detector in his jumpsuit pocket long enough to make a fist with one hand and whap it into the palm of the other, then gave what sounded like another recitation. “All to stand. All to fight. All world. Together.”
“The whole world, huh?” Lito stopped to look at him. “Well if the whole world is joinin together and holdin hands for a change, then who the hell’re you up against?”
The younger man swallowed, his narrow eyes stretching open to their fullest in the middle of his round face, and whispered, “Filament.”
The word meant nothing to Lito, but the reverence with which the other man said it gave him chills. “And this…Filament…the war with them started in 2143?”
Tuan didn’t get this one. Lito thought the numerals were the problem again. He wrote ‘2143’ in the dust along the corridor wall, and, when that still didn’t work, he conveyed his meaning with individual tick marks, spelling out each number as ‘II I IIII III’.
“Start?” Tuan asked. He shook his head. “First battle…” He proceeded to write the year out in hashes, using slashes for zeros, until he’d written, ‘II / / IIIIIII’.
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