Edie Spence [04] Deadshifted

by Cassie Alexander

  “Dislocated. How did you—” More slowly than Jorge, he put together two and two.

  “I fell,” I repeated as Nathaniel nodded, to encourage me. “It happens sometimes. Can you fix me?”

  Marius frowned at us both. But at least Marius’s medical service had given him enough experience in what to do. He shook a pillow on the bed out of its pillowcase, and cut it with a utility knife to fashion it into a sling. “You know I have to pop it back in now, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded and looked away.

  Marius took my dangling arm at a ninety-degree angle, twisted it out, and pushed it in, like a kid forcing together unmatched Legos. It didn’t take the first time—it took all my strength not to scream in agony. I didn’t want to give Nathaniel that too.

  The second time it slid home, bone grinding over bone, and it was impossible not to cry out in a combination of pain and relief. Marius wrapped the pillowcase around me, folding my newly reattached arm in across my chest. And over Marius’s shoulder, I could see Nathaniel’s eyes glittering with amusement at what he’d done. He put his arm across his stomach in mocking imitation of me, the sling forcing me to hold my own stomach.

  Jorge kept himself between me and Nathaniel in the hall. “Say the word—” he muttered, and I shook my head.

  “It’s okay. It’s fine.”

  Jorge looked like he was going to argue with me, but the radio at Marius’s waist turned on and piped in Raluca’s voice. “How is it going up there?”

  Marius unhooked it and brought it to his mouth. “We haven’t found anyone sick yet.”

  “Come down and triage with us then—the rescue ship just radioed, it’s near.”

  Marius looked relieved. He wasn’t going to call our “mission” off, but we all knew it hadn’t been fruitful. “We’ll be there soon.” He unclicked the radio and looked at all of us. “Unless anyone here has any objections.”

  I shook my head and looked away. Jorge shrugged, and I didn’t know how Nathaniel responded.

  “All right then. Back the way we came.” He made a gesture for us all to turn around.

  I hung back, and Jorge hung with me. “I mean it,” he muttered.

  “No. But thank you.” My good hand found his and squeezed it, and he squeezed back. We reached the freight elevator we’d first taken up to this floor, and its door slid open—revealing a woman in a room service outfit crouching inside, eating the contents of a tray like a wild animal. Our presence startled her, and she loped past us and down the hall like a startled rabbit. None of us said anything or went after her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Jorge and I lagged behind the other two when we reached the third floor—I was trying to seem meek, and he was being supportive. “You should say something,” he whispered to me.

  “And what? They’ll put him in ship jail?” I would have shrugged, but it would hurt. Plus, Nathaniel still had answers I wanted. Like where Asher was.

  Being fed to fishes.

  Which isn’t the same as already dead—but it’s definitely not good. And how did he know that Asher was a “monster”? Maybe Asher had told him about their shared past in an effort to get him to come clean. But then what had happened to him?

  After my run-in, it was too easy for me to imagine Asher going the same way. I might not be the only one seven months of safety had made soft.

  The only thing I was sure of now was that what Asher had told me was truth. Nathaniel was responsible for whatever was going on here, but I had no way to make him tell me, and I was scared to be alone with him again.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Jorge pressed.

  No. Not in the least. But ahead of us, Marius was using the hand sanitizer station, and Nathaniel was determinedly stalking off on his own past the restaurant’s entrance entirely. I ran to catch up to Marius and hold him back from going into the Dolphin. “Marius—give me the master key. Please.”

  He tsked. “It’s no use. The ships will be full with the patients we have already. Those who didn’t make it downstairs will have to wait for the next round.”

  “They’re not going to make it. Don’t you see? This isn’t anything normal! This whole ship has been infected somehow—” I looked over my shoulder to make sure that Nathaniel was gone. I couldn’t see him in the hall anymore, but I didn’t know where he’d run off too, so I lowered my voice as I pleaded. “Someone did this on purpose. They’re testing things on us. I’ve got to find my boyfriend—”

  “Testing things?” Marius repeated. It’d been the wrong thing to say. I could see his eyes glaze over in the way I knew mine did every time a patient at work told me the CIA had put a radio transmitter in their head.

  “What else explains it?” I tried, realizing as I said it that it only made me sound more mad.

  Marius shook his head and sliced both his hands through the air. “I cannot take any more crazy talk!”

  “But it’s true—”

  “No!” he interrupted. We were right in front of the Dolphin’s entrance. He straightened his shoulders, and it was clear he was scraping the last of his cruise-ship-employee diplomacy from the bottom of its barrel. “If you’ll both excuse me,” he said, including Jorge and I, “I have an actual job to do. Raluca needs me.” He turned and then disappeared inside, leaving Jorge and me alone in the wide hallway with the Dolphin’s wafting smell. It hadn’t gotten better in the meantime.

  Jorge gave me a side eye. “That … is not the direction I thought you were going to go with that.”

  “Me either.”

  “Is it true?”

  I nodded. “I can’t prove it, but it is. And that other man—Nathaniel—he’s in on it. And he knows that I know. It’s why he tried to pop my arm off like a Barbie-doll head.”

  “How did you find out?”

  I had no idea how to explain. I gave him a wan smile. “Would you believe I’m psychic?”

  Jorge snorted. “I’d believe anything for a shot of whiskey right about now.”

  Raluca’s megaphone came on inside the Dolphin. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she was giving orders. “She’ll need our help to get everyone on the rescue ship.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Call me back when it’s called a cure ship.”

  Jorge was right. What would the rescue ship be able to do for the dying people anyhow? What was the cure for people who wanted to drink so badly that they’d throw themselves overboard or drown in tubs? What a cruel place they’d inadvertently chosen for their sickroom, with water painted on every wall. Dolphins, indeed. I snorted, and for the first time in my life I wished I was a doctor—not that the cruise ship doctor had seemed to be having much luck.

  Why was Nathaniel here among us—just to watch? He’d let his own kid and wife die. What kind of man could do such a thing?

  A man who’d known all along he wasn’t going to get sick.

  He’d been here with us, exposed to all the same environmental factors. He must have access to some sort of cure.

  Jorge and I walked into the Dolphin’s entrance partition. The doctor had abandoned his post, probably to help Raluca, but there were still printouts scattered across his makeshift desk all marked up like homework.

  “I’ll be there in a second,” I told Jorge, and gestured to my slinged arm. I wasn’t going to be good for lifting anyone anyhow.

  Jorge made a face but let me be. Once he’d left the doorway, I started rifling through piles of paperwork. What was it Asher had said Nathaniel’s last name was? Tannin? Some of the sheets were sorted by restaurants eaten and at what times—but one sheaf was alphabetical. I furiously flipped through these until I got to the T’s, and as I did so I heard a rustling beyond the curtain. I grabbed the papers five-deep so I’d be sure I got them all, and shoved them into my sling. Dr. Haddad appeared, looking gray.

  “Did you figure anything out?” I asked him, so I looked like I had a reason to stay behind.

  “I tried. I sorted by restaurant, by dining time, by
hometown, by recent travel, by airlines, but I couldn’t find any commonalities—other than everyone affected being here.” He sat down in his chair and breathed like someone with heart failure, his lungs searching for, but not finding, enough air.

  “You don’t look well.”

  “That’s no concern of yours.”

  Outside of the curtain’s Raluca’s megaphoned voice was getting quieter as it moved farther away. “You should get on the rescue ship—”

  “Just as captains go down with the ship, doctors should go down with their sickrooms.” He stirred the papers in front of him restlessly, seemingly more out of habit than need.

  I prepared to back out of the room to inspect the papers I’d swiped, but then I paused. “Where … is the captain?”

  “Isolated above. All the officers are quarantined off by floor—the ones upstairs are taking shifts manning the ship.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “They’re still on the radio with me. Luckily when the quarantine went in place, we had a good crew.”

  “And all of them are still well? None of them is sick?”

  “Not last time I radioed, no. What are you getting at?” He didn’t sound angry, just exasperated and tired, and took another wet-sounding breath.

  I shook my head. I didn’t know, yet. But the utter destruction of an entire ship full of people was a tall order for any single man. Nathaniel must have had help, and it made sense for that help to be on the inside. And if Asher was right, he’d held the right patents to afford it.

  Dr. Haddad didn’t notice my distraction; he was too busy staring off behind me. I turned to see what he was looking at, and saw where the curtains had parted and a slice of the ocean was visible through the window outside. Shit. Him too. I stepped in front of the window, blocking his view, and knelt down to be in his field of vision. “I’m sorry, I lied to you earlier. I am pregnant, and I cannot have this baby alone. I need to find my husband. Do you have another master key?”

  His eyes focused on me slowly. “I gave my last one to Raluca.”

  “Where’s Raluca going now?”

  “First floor. Where the tender boats dock.”

  “Which side of the ship? How can I get there?”

  “The freight elevator and down. It’ll be aft.”

  Which the fuck way was aft? “Down by the morgue?” I guessed.

  “Yes.” He tilted his head so that he could see past me to the window.

  I knew what was coming for him, and I knew I didn’t know how to help. Should I do what he’d done to the others and tie him to the table bodily, or should I just leash him by his foot?

  “Before you go, can you get me a glass of water?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry—” I stepped away from him. “I’ve got to go.” If Raluca got on the medical ship, I’d lose my chance to snag her key. I closed the curtain so he couldn’t see out anymore. It felt like the only thing I could do. Then I ran into the Dolphin to follow the volunteers down.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Every jogging step jostled my arm in its socket, and the manifest papers I’d swiped and hidden chafed. The wait on the elevator seemed interminable. I paced in circles trying to figure out how I’d get Raluca—or Marius, as a distant runner-up—to give me a key. I couldn’t exactly go and get into a fistfight with anyone in my current state.

  The freight elevator doors opened, and I jogged down the hallway to the morgue—I knew I was going the right way from all the flower petals people moving bodies had tracked back to the elevator doorway. If I went past the morgue, hopefully I’d run into them—there was no way transferring so many people over would be a quick process.

  The sound of gunfire stopped me in my tracks.

  I wanted to pretend I hadn’t heard it. I paused, trying to convince myself that it’d been some weird engine noise—but no, another staccato burst and panicked shouting, coming my way—fast.

  Without thinking, I ducked into the morgue. Who would look for survivors in here? And maybe I could get some answers. I tapped the nearest body with my shoe.

  “Shadows—what’s happening?”

  The body didn’t answer me.

  “I know you’re in there.” The sound of screaming stopped, but the gunfire didn’t. I looked furtively at the doors, and they burst open. I bit back a scream and dropped to the floor, before I saw that it was Rory.

  “You!” he said, recognizing me.

  “What’s going on out there?”

  He looked around the room, realizing where he was, and he froze, as still as all the other occupants. “Rory—get away from the window.” When he didn’t move, I ran for him and pulled him aside. “What’s happening?”

  He blinked and shook his head and didn’t stop shaking it while he talked. “Why did I come here? Did I want to die with them?”

  I realized his parents were in here. “No.” I grabbed his nearer shoulder with my good hand and looked frantically around the room. “Shadows—” It was too bright in here with the lights on but I knew there were pools of darkness inside each half-opened mouth. The sound of gunfire was getting closer. “I know you can hear me. Can you hide us from this?”

  I didn’t see which corpse they were speaking from this time, but I heard their voice, gravelly and low. “Turn off the light and cover yourself.”

  With the nearing gunfire, there wasn’t much time. I grabbed up a sheet from the ground, stained with frozen everything, put Rory in the corner of the room where I could find him, and put the sheet around his shoulders like a cape. Then I raced back to swat the light switch down, and ran as carefully as I could in the dark back to his side. I pulled the sheet up over both us, like we were children hiding from monsters beneath our own bed.

  There came the sound of scrabbling on the outside of the sheet, and then a weight pressing down around us, like when my cat Minnie joined me on the bed at night—if Minnie had had a hundred more legs and they all ended in claws.

  “Not him, not him, just you,” the Shadows said.

  “Kick him out,” a voice suggested.

  “Let him die,” said another one.

  “What?” Rory said. I clapped a hand over his mouth, and wrapped my slinged arm around him.

  “Stop scaring him!” I hissed. “Haven’t you fed enough?”

  “Never,” they whispered back.

  Rory started to wrestle me, and whapped his head back, catching me in the eye. I let him go involuntarily. “What the—” he began.

  “Stop it! They can’t hurt you!” It was a total lie, but the guns were getting closer, and it was too easy to imagine each short burst extinguishing a life. “Just calm down!”

  The thing atop the sheet curled up on us like an icy snake, and Rory’s breathing sounded like a runaway train in my ear. “Hold your breath,” I whispered just as the doors to the morgue swung open. I could see a flashlight beam swirl around the room.

  I’m not sure what the Shadows showed instead of us, but it worked—either that, or whoever held the flashlight didn’t want to spend long in a room where the occupants were clearly dead.

  “Clear!” said an unfamiliar male voice. The light from the hallway and the flashlight beam disappeared, and the sound of tromping continued on outside. The weight on top of us scrabbled off, melting away, and Rory and I were alone in the dark.

  “What was that?” Rory whispered, his voice breaking in panic.

  “I’ll explain in a bit, but I need to know what’s going on first. What happened with the rescue ship?”

  “C—can we turn on the light?”

  “That’s probably not wise,” answered the Shadows from beneath us.

  “Shush. Please. Although thank you,” I told them, and then snapped my fingers for attention in front of Rory, even though I couldn’t see his face in the dark. “What went on?”

  “They—they—” it took him a moment to get himself under control, but then the words poured out like water. “The rescue ship sent a smaller boat over, and we opened
the doors up for it to dock—and some of the people started trying to throw themselves overboard. Even the weak ones still wanted to get into the water. We tried to hold them back, but we couldn’t. They were too strong. One fell in, and we put a spotlight on him, but we couldn’t pull him out—he was too far away. And then this thing, I swear I saw this thing crawl out of his mouth, like a giant worm. The size of my arm.” He grabbed hold of me in the dark for strength. “I don’t have one of those inside of me, do I?”

  “Of course not,” I said—although I didn’t know for sure. “Where did the people with guns come from?”

  “The medical boat. When their transfer boat docked, twenty men got off with guns. They were never here to help us, were they,” he said, not actually asking a question. “Is that what happened to my parents? Worms?” His voice broke at the thought.

  I couldn’t lie to him twice. “I honestly don’t know, Rory.” There wasn’t any time to comfort him, so I just pressed on. “Where’s Raluca?”

  “She got shot.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. I just saw her fall down.”

  I had to grit my teeth to stop from groaning, and I spoke more slowly. “Focus, Rory. Where’d she fall?”

  “Back by the boats. I was a faster runner.” I heard him swallow in the dark. “I just left her behind.”

  “It’s okay. Anyone would have done the same in your shoes.”

  “I got scared,” he explained.

  “It happens. I know.” All the video games I’d imagined he’d played, all those times he’d seen people die on screen, but the real thing was something else. It always was. “Where’s Marius?” I asked gently.

  “He ran off. I think he got away. I think. I’m not sure.”

  The darkness hid my frown. “Shadows—is it safe to go out in the hall?”

  Their piecemeal voices spoke in eerie synchronicity. “Nowhere on this boat is safe anymore, not even for us. It rises now. He’s calling it, and it comes. It will eat all of us, dead or alive—”