The Turning

by Micky Neilson

  It was difficult to pinpoint, but there was a wrongness about the ship. Tony got feelings about things sometimes, bad feelings before bad things usually happened. As he raced up the steps, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this particular operation was going to be unlike anything he and his team had come up against before.

  ***

  It had started to rake through the barrier, trying to get at the soft other inside. But then another barrier had opened nearby and it turned to see this new other. The new other was big. Lots of meat, lots of fat. And it was there for the taking.

  Kill.

  It had moved more quickly than the other could react. It leapt atop and locked its jaws on the neck, tasted warm divine essence, felt the life-beat slow until the other moved no more, fought no more. The warm essence flowed, and it was good.

  But there was so much more to be had. It had tasted so many, but it had not truly fed.

  Several organs, including the stomach and liver, were devoured first. It then settled in and bit deep, tearing into the fat and the meat of the other’s body, ripping it from the bone. This meat was good. Tender. The fat was juicy.

  After a few moments, even the pain in its forelimb began to fade. The beast decided that it would stay here and eat for as long as its hunger demanded. When the meat and the fat and the tendons were gone, it would crack the bones and get at the marrow. After it had eaten to satisfaction, perhaps it might rest.

  ***

  Alexander sat on his bunk, duffel bag sitting on the mattress next to him. He was listening to the radio. The Coast Guard boarding team would be using an encrypted channel, but perhaps by eavesdropping on the Rapture crew he could keep tabs on the Coasties.

  As he saw the situation, there were three immediate potentialities: one, the beast would attack a member of the boarding party, who would then engage, and consequently die a horrible death. This would draw the others, who would meet similar grisly fates. Two, the animal would attack a victim in some area of the ship that was monitored by video surveillance and the boarding team would respond, and consequently all die gruesomely. Three, the animal would hide or kill in some area with no video monitoring, and the team would be forced to go on a ship-wide search until the mutt either revealed itself or was discovered, at which point the team would respond, and, yes, once again they would all die horribly.

  The most immediate concern was that the guard served as more of a complication than anything else. In a perfect world, Alexander could dispatch the beast just before the ship docked at Ketchikan and sneak his way off. If needed, he could even provide a distraction. One way or another, he would disembark the ship and deliver Father Dearest his precious pills.

  Just then a crackly voice came over the radio and announced to all crew that the Coast Guard would be conducting a sweep of the ship. This was followed by an announcement over the comm, by the captain, reminding all passengers to stay in their cabins and other areas designated by crew until they had passed through the “storm.” The hunter smiled.

  So, it appeared the number three potentiality had won out. For the time, at least. The Coasties were unaware of the wolf’s location.

  Alexander stood and slipped the duffel bag onto his back. He then walked to his cabin door and hovered in front of the peephole—which provided a view of the entire port side hallway for the aft section. He watched, and waited.

  ***

  Ginny peered over the railing next to the port side glass elevator doors, down onto the atrium. She saw only one person there, the same Filipino man whom she had spoken to earlier. He was now very clearly dead.

  A dismal gloom settled in on Ginny like a winter frost. For an instant her mind ran away with her, tormenting her with a scenario in which she was the only person left alive on the vessel aside from Vera and… Brandon. Or whatever he had become. Just her and the old gal and the beast, stalking the empty halls, sniffing them out.

  Vera, think of saving Vera.

  If Ginny couldn’t get ahold of the physician, then she would just have to bring Vera to the infirmary. She walked back to the room, removing the key she had taken from Vera’s nightstand, forcing herself not to look at the body of Sal, circumventing the circle of blood growing around him.

  She entered the room, removed a blanket from the bed and laid it down next to the old lady, who was floating in and out of consciousness.

  At least she’s alive.

  Ginny intended to keep her that way. She rifled through the papers on the coffee table. Not finding what she was looking for, she went to the nightstand and there it was: a foldout map of the ship. Vera had spoken of it once during dinner. She spotted the infirmary, just towards the middle of the vessel from the forward-most elevators. She folded the map and tucked it in her pocket.

  Starting with the elderly woman’s upper body, she lifted her onto the blanket. She then moved down to Vera’s feet and pulled them over. She removed a shoe from the closet and used it to wedge the door open. Then she grasped the upper corners of the blanket and lifted, circling around so that she could haul Mrs. Spears out of the room head-first.

  Once in the hall, Ginny pulled the blanket to the opposite bulkhead, and hugged it as she dragged Vera past Sal. It was fairly slow going; she would take several steps backward, struggling to maintain balance as the ship tossed, and then have to stop. Then she would take several more. During this time she was acutely aware of how vulnerable she was.

  Easy prey.

  Within a few minutes she was at the glass elevator bank. There were these elevators, which only descended as far as deck two, but the glass elevator doors faced a large open space bordered by more elevators, and Ginny knew they all went down to at least deck one, because she used them to get to dinner back when… back when life had been normal.

  She pushed the down button, and when a car arrived, she dragged Vera inside and hit the button for one. At the bottom she lifted Vera up under the arms, spun around and hurried out backward before the elevator doors closed.

  Ginny stopped and laid her patient down, catching her breath. She checked Vera to make sure she was still breathing. She was, though it was shallow. Somewhere out in the storm, thunder rumbled.

  “Stay with me, old gal. We’re gonna make it through this. You wait and see.”

  Another moment passed as Ginny dragged Vera to the starboard side and a smaller elevator near the metal staircase that led to deck A. When the smaller car arrived, she repeated the process she had used in the previous elevator, dragging the woman into the stark white, narrower space when the car hit bottom.

  “Almost there, sweetie. You hang tight. We’re almost there,” Ginny said between grunts as she hauled Mrs. Spears toward the admitting area. Several backward steps, then several more; she looked back over her shoulder and stopped, emitting a kind of hopeless bark. There was a woman, a nurse there in the middle of the floor. She was missing most of the right side of her neck, and everything between it and her right shoulder looked like a mix between raw hamburger and spaghetti.

  Just then the captain’s voice came over the comm, reminding passengers to stay in their cabins until the ship was past the storm.

  “Oh fuck off,” Ginny said in exhaustion.

  Despite the tears running down her cheeks, she continued on, slipping just a bit in the blood on the tile floor. “It’s alright, Vera; you’ll see. We’re gonna be alright.” Did her voice sound just a little less convincing than it had a few minutes ago? She hoped not.

  Ginny moved finally into the infirmary proper, to a room that contained a bed. Sweating, exhausted, using the last bit of strength in her arms, she maneuvered Vera up onto the mattress and covered her with the blanket.

  She checked to make sure the old woman was breathing. Still shallow, but she was hanging in there. Ginny slumped into a nearby chair. “See? I told you we’d make it.” She took several long breaths. “Now I’m going to find you some help, and everything’s gonna be right as rain.”

  Somewhere deep down, Ginny
knew that the only person she was trying to convince at this point was herself.

  ***

  “ETA to Ketchikan?” Tony asked. He had established a command post on the bridge and was now standing before a row of monitors that displayed various areas of the ship. Waves pounded the bow outside; sheets of water pummeled the observation windows. Lightning rippled through the blackened clouds.

  “One hour,” an officer called out.

  Despite the maelstrom just outside the bridge, meteorological reports all indicated that they were pushing through the tail end of the storm. With any luck, they were heading for calmer seas. Weather conditions at Ketchikan were relatively calm with light snowfall. Captain Gentili was hoping the weather there held; if the winds and waves there were too high, the Rapture would be unable to dock.

  Alpha Squad was in the process of conducting their sweep of the ship’s forward section; Lorenzen had all crew sections below deck one. It was obvious that the animal (if that’s what it was) was not in the theater, so that eliminated forward decks two, three and four. Bangan took decks one and five, Didier six and seven, Taormina deck eight and the spa/steam rooms, and Marston the gym and a quick sweep of the top deck.

  Bravo Squad didn’t have the luxury of skipping decks in the ship’s aft: Becket was assigned crew areas, Carmine deck one and both levels of the dining area, Dominguez decks four and five, Ocampo six and seven, and Dryer deck eight and the top deck aft.

  Both teams would repeat the process once the fore and aft sections were cleared, as they worked their way through the larger sections to midships.

  USCG Ketchikan had been conducting communication checks with the bridge for the past several minutes, and had now arrived. The Rapture’s Chief and a handful of crewmen had proceeded to the tender port to assist in onboarding. Along with the Coasties came the harbor pilot who would bring the ship into dock.

  Minutes later, the lieutenant’s radio squawked: “This is Alpha Two, sweep complete. Over.”

  Tony responded, “This is Alpha Zero. Roger, Alpha Two. Stand by for further orders. Out.”

  One by one, other members of the lieutenant’s team began reporting in, receiving the same response from Tony. And then Chief Bangan called in: “This is Alpha Two. I have one deceased, inside stairwell… deck seven.” Tony knew very well that Bangan had seen his share of grievous injuries, but even he sounded somewhat sickened by what he had found. He provided some details, but what it boiled down to was that Findlay’s head had been wrenched from his body.

  Tony sent a flash message to the Operations Specialist on the cutter Liberty, providing a report on what Bangan discovered.

  Very few animals would be capable of what he had described. A bear seemed the most obvious, but how likely was it that a bear either had managed to sneak on board unobserved or was somehow smuggled on? Several crewmembers had caught glimpses through the bridge’s observation windows of the struggle that had unfolded down on the crew deck, where the Chief Security Officer had been lost. Visibility had been limited, but what they had seen they described as a large, dark figure, sometimes on four legs and sometimes standing on two. Bears were known to do that, but it still seemed… off. Everything about this situation seemed off.

  Tony reached into his front pants pocket and retrieved a wallet. He flipped it open and thumbed through a couple pictures—him and his parents, his dog Frosty, and an old picture of Jen that she didn’t know he kept.

  I’m gonna make up for those lost years. We’ve got a lot of living still to do.

  He closed the wallet and replaced it. As more personnel reported in, he ordered them to stand fast until the initial sweeps were complete, at which point the next stages would begin.

  Captain Gentili had done an admirable job of keeping passengers out of the common areas. It was fortunate that the attacks happened while many cruisers were at the show. But the show was now over, and the folks who were being told to continue waiting in the theater would be getting restless. There were also knots of people in various other parts of the ship—the shops, Kids’ Camp, the casino—who had no doubt been asking questions and not been getting satisfactory answers. The longer these passengers were held, the more upset they would become. All it would take would be a handful, in some cases even just one panicked or hysterical person: from there it would spread immediately all across the ship.

  Lorenzen reported having eyes on a casualty in the aft section of the I-95. It was an engineer, also decapitated. Tony acknowledged.

  Lorenzen and then Becket were the last to report completion of their sweeps. No one had found any sign of the animal. Tony ordered both teams to begin stage two. The sooner they found and neutralized the threat, the better.

  A radio communication arrived from the cutter directly to Captain Gentili. After receiving the message, Gentili ran a hand through his thinning hair, his features drawn. Tony had heard part of it but received his own version of the message seconds later when Cutter Liberty informed him that “Orders from Ops Cent as follows: Rapture denied entry at Ketchikan pending containment of threat.” Tony wondered if this was coming directly from Homeland Security. His gut told him yes.

  Tony acknowledged receipt of the message. It struck him that the higher-ups were treating this whole situation almost like some epidemic, like an infectious disease. He wondered why. He also learned a long time ago not to question orders.

  Looking down at one of the monitors showing a view of the casino, he could see a large, muscular man jabbing his finger at a crewmember standing near closed fire doors.

  Time was not on their side. The lieutenant took a deep breath and let it out slowly, unconsciously placing his hand on the wallet in his front pocket. His team needed to find whatever was killing people on board, and they needed to destroy it. And they needed to accomplish this with a quickness, because until they did so, the Rapture was just one giant, floating powder keg.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Alonso Costanza was fed up with this shit.

  He and Pam couldn't give a fuck about whatever gay-ass show the ship was putting on. They came to relax, gamble and fuck. Ever since he had stopped drinking six years ago and dedicated himself to bodybuilding, he found that the smaller things he used to take for granted became that much more important.

  He and Pam had gambled and lost all the money they brought with them, so that was done. He wasn’t going to be drinking (unlike the dizzy bitches from Tennessee or Kentucky or whatever the fuck who had been getting smashed all night and hitting on almost anything with a dick), so now he was ready to take Pam back to the cabin, rip her clothes off and fuck her cross-eyed.

  But no, according to Captain Cumcatcher and the skinny slope guarding the door, they were supposed to stay locked in the casino until the storm calmed down. Well, there was another storm brewing inside the ship, and its name was Alonso Costanza.

  He was five seconds away from ripping off this gook’s head. “I’m gonna tell you one last time, you talk to whoever the fuck you need to talk to and get these doors open, or I’m gonna break my fist on your fucking face!”

  No bullshit. He had never seen a zipperhead turn white before, but this Chin had gone as pearly-white as the uniform he was wearing.

  “I—yes, sir, I assure you as soon as there is no longer any danger—”

  Alonso shoved his finger into the slant-eye’s chest, sending him back a step. “The only fucking danger you need to worry about is me.”

  ***

  Vera was moaning softly as Ginny plunged into the back rooms of the infirmary. If she could only find the physician…

  She came to a Crew Only door and stepped through into a mid-length passageway. At the end of the passage was another door, and lying half in/half out of that door was a person. Or what was left of a person.

  The ship drove upward and Ginny put her hand to the bulkhead for support. Her left hand was clamped over her mouth and the closer she got, the more her stomach threatened to leap out of her throat. A thought flitte
d through her mind, of something she read or heard somewhere about frogs disgorging their stomachs when they threw up. That was certainly no comfort. Her guts continued twisting as she drew near, a sensation not at all helped by the vessel’s sudden downward thrust.

  An extraordinary-seeming length of intestine lay outside of the man’s shredded lower torso, looking to Ginny like the yieldings of some over-productive sausage machine. There were other sacs and organs as well, unidentifiable, at least to her. The man’s uniform was only white in a few sparse patches. All else was a deeply saturated, dark crimson. Looking down through watery eyes at his nametag, Ginny noted that this was Yuri Vovchenkin, the ship’s physician. His eyes were still open, but there was nothing behind them. If the eyes were truly windows to the soul, she was looking into a vacant room.

  No longer intent on avoiding the blood pooled beneath her feet, Ginny pressed as close to the doorway as possible without making contact with Yuri and called up into the stairwell:

  “HELP!”

  She waited. No answer.

  “Is anyone there? I have a woman here who needs help!”

  Keep searching. Don’t give up.

  Ginny turned and rushed back down the way she had come, once more into the back room of the infirmary, and she screamed at a large, dark form filling the doorway. Her shoulders hunched and her hands flew to her mouth, fists clenched.

  The man lowered his shotgun and put up one gloved hand, palm out. He wore a helmet with goggles, a thick vest, and had all kinds of paraphernalia strapped to his body over a set of very wet, sand-colored coveralls.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay. I heard you calling,” he said.

  A long, relieved breath whooshed out of her. Her shoulders and hands fell. “Oh thank God.”

  “I’m with the Coast Guard. I’m here to help. What’s your name?”