“Holy crap,” said Hector. “It’s true.”
Suddenly the echoing void seemed very haunted. Several of the guys began babbling at once: “I knew it!” “Let’s get the fuck outta here, then!” “I fucking knew this would happen.”
“Hold on,” said Julian, clinging to his composure. “We don’t know how old those footprints are. They could’ve been here for weeks. Months. Maybe a rescue party came through, anything! All I know is, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” I loved Julian just then.
“I don’t know, dude,” said Shawn. “Does anybody else smell smoke?”
“I don’t smell anything,” said Jake, all jumpy.
“I do,” said Lemuel. “It’s stronger the higher we climb.”
“Shut up, man, there’s no smoke!” Jake was on the verge of panic.
But I could smell it, too, the faintest tang of burnt wood. Shushing the boys, I called out, “Hello? Is anybody there?” We waited.
Julian broke the silence. “Come on, we’re wasting time. If you think about it, the frost in here probably condensed out of the air as soon as the heating plant shut down. Those tracks were probably made before the ship was even abandoned . . .” He trailed off, listening hard.
We all flinched as somewhere above us a door was thrown open. Hectic footsteps pattered a short distance and stopped. I leaned out over the glass-and-chrome balustrade, shining my beam up at the higher galleries. It’s just the other guys, I thought.
For a second I saw nothing, until I turned the light straight up. Then I froze as if electrocuted. Staring directly at me from the top floor were four horrific creatures—I only had a glimpse before they vanished, leaving a red afterimage of gleaming saucer eyes burned in my retinas—but I knew I had seen something like giant black birds with vicious beaks. Monstrous hooded crows. It can’t be, I thought, scalp prickling.
Then we could hear them moving again, and ghastly croaking sounds as they scuttled, heedless of the dark, down toward us. The boys were practically jumping out of their skins, knowing I had seen something terrible. They were desperate for a signal.
I couldn’t think of what else to do. “They’re coming!” I said sharply. “Move!”
We fled, tripping over one another as we chased my spot of light down the concourse. Knowing the guys were all but blind, I tried to keep up a running patter that they could follow: “This way, this way! Keep up! No, left, left! Watch the stairs! Now down! Keep going! Careful! Watch it! Don’t let anybody fall behind! Ow! Wait up!” I had no idea where I was going.
The sound of our pursuers was lost in the tumult, but I imagined those wicked beaks jabbing at the back of my neck.
“Where are we going?” Hector panted on the escalator.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just go.”
“Lemuel is falling behind,” he said urgently. “We can’t keep running like this!”
“In here!” I shouted, lunging through the next open doorway I came to. It was a bank, with a glassed-in counter and currency exchange rates posted on a board. I had to stop short to keep from tripping over velvet ropes, but someone piled into me from behind, and I went flying into a leaf litter of scattered money. If not for my thick winter padding I might have been seriously hurt, but as it was, the only thing damaged by contact with the parquet floor was my flashlight. Slammed down with the force of several bodies behind it, the bulb winked out.
Then I was the blindest of all, seeing nothing but the light’s residual dazzle. “Is everyone here?” I shouted.
“Yeah, we’re here,” said Hector, waving his flashlight. Soon I could see them all, six fireflies in the night.
“The door!” I yelled. “Somebody shut the door!”
“There is no door,” said Julian.
“What?”
“It’s an electric gate—it won’t budge.”
This unbelievable bit of bad luck left me stunned. With no way to shut ourselves in and no back door, we were cornered, and if we tried to run with only those feeble reading lights to guide us, we would break our necks. I tried to remember if on our way up we had passed any possible escape routes, but nothing came to mind. There was no time anyway. A crust of frozen sweat fringed my hood as if the ice were closing around me.
Hector called, “Lulu, we need your light!”
“It broke.”
“It broke?”
“Damn!” said Cole. “What the fuck we gonna do?”
“I . . . don’t know,” I said.
“Oh God, oh God . . .” moaned Jake.
Icy-calm, Julian said, “We better do something. They’ll be here any second.”
Coming to a hopeless decision, I said, “Everyone be quiet! Turn off your flashlights and don’t move!”
“Dude, you’re fucking crazy!” Shawn said. “We have to book it outta here!”
Grimly, I said, “There’s no place to go, and no time. All we can do is hide.”
“Then we’re fucked! No way!”
“She’s right, man,” Julian told him, disgusted to have been left with this poorest of options. “If we just sit tight in here, they might lose us in the dark. It’s a big place. Everybody come in from the doorway! Line up against the wall.”
I didn’t care that Julian was giving orders. “Hurry, do what he says,” I whispered.
“This is nuts,” Hector muttered, brushing past me.
“Shhh. Quiet.”
There was no sound outside. Without even the toy flashlights, it was a total abyss.
“Listen,” Hector whispered. “If they come through that door, two of us rush them with the rope stretched between us and drive them back to the railing. Then we all dump them over.”
“Why the hell not?” said Julian.
“I’ve wrestled before,” offered Lemuel. “I’ll take one end.”
“Aw, shit. Gimme the other,” said Cole.
Touched by their futile machismo, I said, “Good idea. Now hush up.”
Silence settled in our bones like the cold, freezing time itself. I would have given anything to be able to run in place and get my blood going. My hood was cinched to a tiny peephole, and my face still ached. Gradually, I became aware that I was looking out the peephole. It wasn’t light exactly, more like shades of black, but I could see it: a snow-strained gloom filtering through the atrium skylights. Moonrise.
My concentration was broken by shuffling footsteps on the landing, coming our way.
“How much time left?” Hector whispered, startling me.
The time! I had forgotten. Checking my watch, I said, “We’re due back in less than twenty minutes.” My voice shivered apart. “I’m sorry, you guys.” The glowing watch face was like a beacon—Julian hissed at me to kill it.
All of a sudden, Hector blurted, “I love you, Lulu.”
The words just dangled there for what seemed like ages. I was glad he couldn’t see how they hurt me, how I couldn’t bear to hear that just then. There was enough to mourn without that.
Then I heard Lemuel say, “So do I.”
Shawn protested, “Since when, dude? I’ve loved her from day one.”
“Oh, great,” said Jake. “Take a number. While we’re at it, she might as well know I love her, too.”
Cole started to speak, and Julian cut him off, snarling, “Will you assholes shut up?”
The steps neared, loud as hoofbeats in the silence. As they reached a crescendo, I wanted to scream . . . then they stopped. We could hear snuffling breaths right outside the door. What were they? Their clothes rustled stiffly as they shifted in place, peering in, and I realized I could smell them: an oily, burnt odor like smoked mackerel. I found Hector’s hand in the dark and gripped it.
The bird-men came in.
The silence blew up.
The boys rushed the invaders, sobbing and screaming their lungs out as they attacked. At most I could see a dim scuffle, but I could tell that Hector’s plan to drive the creatures over the balcony had failed—the fight remained in the bank lobby
. Staying well clear, I backed into a corner and waited for death to find me. I wasn’t frightened anymore; what I felt was a great sense of pity for my poor boys.
Something happened—I was blind again. Not because of darkness, but because of too-bright light. I jerked back as if I’d been punched, squinting in pain. The ceiling lights were on! Shielding my eyes, I said, “Hey!”
Cries of surprise were coming from the stalled combatants as well. My teammates found themselves entwined with four of the filthiest, most unkempt men I had ever seen. They were black with grease and soot, bearded like Rasputin, and dressed in heaping layers of mismatched leisurewear. Strapped to their faces were cones they had improvised from some insulating material, and goggles. They looked medieval, pagan, but not exactly dangerous. In fact they looked terrified.
“What the fuck, man,” said Julian, getting to his feet. “Where did you guys come from?”
One of the men said, “I might ask you the same question.” He had an English accent.
We all went stock-still as Mr. Noteiro’s voice boomed over the ship’s PA system: “RETURN TO THE LOWER PROMENADE, LADIES AND GENTS. DON’T MAKE US COME LOOKING FOR YA.”
Shaky with gratitude, I happened to glance behind me and only then cried out.
On the other side of the bank’s frosty security glass was a mass of bodies, perhaps a hundred or more, slumped together under a mantle of crystal fur like the ash-smothered victims of Pompeii. Their curdled eyeballs seemed to stare right through me.
“Well, Phil,” said one of the bird-men, his voice a muffled squawk behind the mask. “I told you they was bloomin’ kids.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Why didn’t you guys tell us who you were?” I asked. “You scared us to death!”
The one named Wally said, “We tried to, but you just ran away.”
“You lads had us half believing in ghosts,” said another, Reggie. “The mind plays tricks in a place like this.”
“We didn’t know what to think,” said Wally.
“We felt the same way!” I said.
A third man, Dick, spoke up. “But we’d have more cause to be suspicious, wouldn’t we? You might expect to find poor sods like ourselves on a derelict ship, but who, I ask you, would ever dream of findin’ a group of choirboys on bleedin’ holiday, much less a wee moppet like yourself?”
“We thought we’d gone mad,” said Reggie.
“Didn’t you hear us hail you?” asked Julian a little belligerently.
Dick replied, “We live in a right fortress of mattresses up there, so we wouldn’t, would we?”
“I guess not.”
“Warmth has been a rather abiding concern, I’m afraid.”
Hector asked, “How do you get around in the dark like that?”
The one named Phil said, “We’ve come to know this bloody scow like the backs of our hands, son. In the beginning, we used torches, same as you. Still and all, you took us by surprise with that ambush.” He swiveled his sore neck. “Nice scrimmage, that.”
“What a way to break the ice,” said Wally.
As they showed us their shortcut to the promenade, we briefly explained our situation (which must have seemed nonsensical to them—they offered no comment), and they told us what had happened to them.
They were a singing group—The Blackpudlians—a Beatles tribute band from England that had been booked to play twelve days of Christmas gigs as the ship steamed from the British Isles to New Brunswick and back again, skirting the arctic ice cap. The onboard festivities were to have culminated in a New Year’s Eve party the last night of the voyage. But it turned out to be a different kind of carnival.
“Blue meanies,” said Wally, laughing unsteadily—it was almost a sob.
“Blue meanies,” agreed Dick. “While we were having tea with Mr. Coffey in the Lido Lounge.”
“I remember I was in the middle of spreading clotted cream on a perfectly toasted currant scone, when there was an alarm, and Mr. Coffey had to excuse himself. ‘What’s this, then?’ says I. ‘We’ve not hit an iceberg, I hope.’ And he laughs back, ‘I’ll remember that when I’m handin’ out lifejackets.’” Wally shook his head.
“Weren’t no iceberg,” said Reggie gravely.
“Course it weren’t no iceberg, you sod,” Wally said. “After a few minutes we hear crockery breaking and see a brawl at another table—”
“This madwoman’s attacking her ’usband—”
“Now, we don’t know it was her ’usband, Dick.”
“—and she’s got the poor bloke in a clutch like a bleedin’ boa constrictor—”
“Looks like she’s off her bloody nut.”
“—Kisses the man—”
“No bloomin’ peck on the cheek, I can tell you.”
“—Whole place goes mad. Chaps at the next table try to intervene, she drops her ’usband and pounces like a leopard—this is a high-class woman dressed for a proper tea, mind you. Second man goes down—”
“Sturdy-looking chap, too.”
“—Now the stewards arrive, and there must be a dozen stout fellows pitching in to restrain the woman, who looks the very devil: blue as a coot, slippery with blood and jam, but she’s holding her own! At last they seem to gain the upper hand—”
“We’re all standing about with our mouths hangin’ open like bloody carp.”
“—People are administering CPR to the two men on the floor, kicking biscuits this way and that, when suddenly another woman joins the fray!—”
“Frightful, really.”
“—My first thought was that she was simply hysterical—”
“People were, you know. I was a bit cracked meself.”
“Not something you see every day.”
“—but it was plain as day this woman was as daft as the first, strangling the life out of some poor steward while the rest of us were still in shock from the previous bit. Then things became really queer: The body of the first man—and I say body because he was plainly as dead as a haddock, in spite of their attempts at resuscitation—unexpectedly lunged up and seized hold of a good Samaritan who had been attempting mouth-to-mouth on ’im! Grabbed the fellow’s head in the middle of a breath and held on tight while the other man thrashed about like a hooked fish, trying to break off the unholy kiss—”
“I’ll never forget the look in their eyes, mate. It was bloody rape.”
“—So then Phil says to us, ‘I must go, lads,’ and that like breaks the spell, and we all bolt for the exit. But as you may imagine, that was only the beginning. Out in the corridor we can hear the whole bloody ship going mad. Through the windows we can see a full-fledged melee on the lido deck—a whole crowd of men stampeding like antelopes and being picked off by nasty devils that had only just been society dames—”
“Sheer bedlam . . .”
“—Some of the men were lowering lifeboats, but I could tell we didn’t have a hope in hell of pushin’ through that lot—”
“Bloomin’ Dante’s Inferno.”
“—so I figured we’d best get to our lodgings and shut ourselves in good and tight. Just hold out until the cavalry arrived.”
“Problem was getting there.”
“Yeh, there was no way down. Every stair was full of people flockin’ up, slaughtering an’ being slaughtered, and for the moment the slaughterees—such as ourselves—were still sufficiently numerous that the four of us were able, just for that brief moment, to stand apart from it all and consider. But the window of opportunity was closing even as we watched.”
“The blue meanies were multiplying.”
“Quick as a wink, those monstrous women and murdered men were taking over the ship, like some . . . chemical reaction spreading outward, some elemental change. Soon we’d have the whole nest after us.”
“Dick said—good on yer, mate—‘We have to get off this concourse,’ and it made perfect sense: The public areas were the killing fields. So we found a staff-only door and slipped inside a short corr
idor piled with racks of empty bottles, leading to the lounge scullery. There was no one about, and we didn’t think it likely that anyone from the crew would return to ordinary duty, but of course it wasn’t the crew that we feared—”
“God, the fear! Miracle that alone didn’t kill us.”
“—so we ducked into the first available foxhole: the wine closet.”
“Brilliant. Really brilliant.”
“It couldn’t have been better suited to our purpose. A small room, yes, but stout as a keep to protect the really expensive vintages—well insulated, and with its own humidity and temperature controls. Even a spyhole to view the kitchen.”
“Not to mention floor-to-ceiling shelves of the finest grape.”
“All it lacked, in fact, was a means of locking ourselves inside, and Dick made short work o’ that.”
“Dick knows fuck-all about drums, but he’s a right genius when it comes to bending a handle.” I gathered that this was a private joke among them. “Isn’t that right, Dick?”
“Sod off. It was simple: We broke the outside door handle so nothing could get in. There was a mallet and chisel for opening crates—it was easily done.”
“But you puzzled it out, lad,” said Phil. “Credit where credit is due.”
“Hear hear,” said Reggie.
Ignoring them, Dick continued, “And that’s where we stayed, dashing out now and again for the niceties, but never losing sight of that door. You can be sure we took every bleeding precaution not to lock ourselves out. Twenty-two days we lived like that.”
“Didn’t you ever wonder what was happening in the rest of the ship?” asked Hector.
“Course we did. But let me tell you something, lad: When you’ve seen what we had, and every so often you hear a figment from your worst nightmare scratching at the door, it tempers your curiosity. I think we’d be there still if it hadn’t been for the cold.”
“Bloody hell, that was torment.”
“The ship’s power failed not long after the meanies came. Day by day we watched the thermometer drop. Not as fast where we were as outside, but too fast for comfort. I don’t know why we thought it would stop at zero C, but it was a blow when it didn’t.”
Xombies: Apocalypse Blues Page 17
