Adrift (Book 1) (20 page)

It hadn't seen Elaine.

Couldn’t have, or it would surely have charged forward and torn her apart instantly.

She backed up the steps quickly, and heard the creature following her along the corridor toward the stairs, but it moved slowly. The progress it made sounded almost leisurely, not like the movement of something that was focused on chasing her.

She reached the top of the staircase, and almost toppled over when the floor behind her suddenly flattened out. Only when she was certain that she had put herself out of sight around the corner did she let herself breathe.

Once more, she extended her arms to the hallway walls, feeling her way along the corridor. The turns she had taken earlier had slipped from her memory completely, but she knew that one of the hallways nearby had open doors: the electric locks that had released just as the one in her own cabin had. There were several cabins close to her, if she could just find the entrance to them.

One of them had to offer a hiding place worth a damn.

As she moved, her mind raced ahead of her, and she tried to figure out just what the hell she had seen in that flash of lightning.

It looked tall, but thin. Definitely not human; an animal of some sort. She had the impression of leathery skin, almost reptilian. Only one detail truly stuck in her mind: the talons that hung from the creature’s oversized hands.

Vicious claws. Weapons designed to kill and maim; they looked to be a couple of inches long at least, and Elaine didn’t think she’d be able to forget the way looking at those talons as they ripped apart human flesh had made her feel; not if she lived past a hundred years old.

It wasn't like any creature she had seen before, but there was no mistaking its intent.

Elaine had loved animals since she could remember, and like so many little girls, when she proudly told her father one day that she wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up, he expected her to outgrow it. Yet she never did. Caring for animals was so much more than a job to her; so much more than a salary.

There were very few animals that scared Elaine and certainly none that a British vet would come across in the course of their everyday work. Other people were scared of spiders or snakes, and Elaine
got it
; understood that those creatures were creepy, but there was little to be afraid of, and certainly not in the UK where poisonous critters were all but absent.

Elaine reserved her fear for bears and sharks and alligators: creatures whose fearsome reputations were well-earned. They
deserved
her fear, but having never seen one of those particular killing machines up close, they hardly mattered.

But as she had looked at the gore-stained creature that was now pursuing her, she was reminded of one time that she
had
been scared; of a family trip to London Zoo when she was a kid, and of staring at a lion lazing in the sun in its enclosure.

At a distance, the big cat had looked almost cute; just an overgrown version of her parents’ own little ball of fluff, really. Until it turned and looked straight at eight-year-old Elaine, and she saw something wild behind its eyes. Something ferocious and calculating. Looking into the predator’s eyes and realising that it was looking right back at her, that hot summer day had suddenly seemed terribly cold.

She felt an echo of that feeling now.

What the creature
was
didn't matter; not in the slightest. What mattered was that it was a large animal, and it had claws built for killing and a taste for human blood, and that she had to get away
fast
.

Her right hand suddenly stopped grazing the hallway wall, and she felt air. A corner, leading at a right angle into another dark corridor.

She couldn't be sure if she had been that way earlier, when her mind had been preoccupied with the dark and the disappearance of her husband. Now that she was concerned only with flight, it didn't seem to matter.

Any direction would do, as long as it wasn’t
back.

She started up the corridor and paused, listening intently.

The creature behind her was sniffing loudly.

It grunted.

The bottom of the stairs
, Elaine thought.
It's still coming this way
.

She allowed herself a faint flicker of hope. It wasn’t actively chasing her. Maybe she had been lucky, and it really hadn’t seen her at all. Maybe it couldn't see in the dark any better than she could.

The creature snorted out a breath.

"You're bleeding, humannnnn. I can smell your blood. I can smell your fearrrrrr."

The words were raspy and malformed. Spoken as though the mouth that delivered them was not designed to speak words at all.

Terror gripped Elaine, and for a moment she froze on the spot as her mind went blank, save for a single, utterly horrifying thought.

Not an animal.

Go!

She hurried down the pitch-black corridor, forcing herself not to run blindly, scraping her fingers on the wall once more and searching for another corner. If she took enough turns, maybe she had a chance of losing the monstrous creature pursuing her in the maze of hallways.

Somewhere behind her, she heard the clicking of talons as the creature ascended the stairs. It was still moving at what sounded like a leisurely pace, but not with the sort of caution that Elaine had been forced to adopt with her vision compromised by the darkness.

Because it can see just fine
, Elaine thought abruptly, and she knew it was true. Knew it deep in her gut. Plenty of animals had excellent night vision. It was one area where the human body was sorely lacking. Evolution hadn't given mankind the ability to see in the dark, because it hadn't needed to. Humans had enough advantages; they were at the top of the food chain as it was.

Or at least, they were supposed to be.

Elaine's breath came in ragged, shallow gasps, and her feet began to move more quickly despite her inability to see.

Panic was taking over, she realised. Dulling her ability to think and forcing her to move quicker and quicker despite her blindness.

She was just about to give in to the overwhelming fear and sprint forward when she saw another flash of lightning illuminating the hallway up ahead. There had to be a window nearby, and that meant she was close to the exterior of the ship once more. Close to the cabins that might offer her a place to hide. She committed the scene in front of her to memory as the light faded:
about twenty yards forward, then left
.

And then she ran.

Katie was still clutching Dan's hand, though she was no longer tugging him along impatiently. Movement now was a matter of balancing speed and terror, and the latter was winning. When they crept from the closet, they moved with aching slowness, and stopped dead every few yards when they heard distant screaming.

It sounded like the creatures were moving through the decks, massacring what remained of the passengers.

At one point, Katie froze and squeezed Dan’s hand in a crushing grip when screams drifted down from directly above them: a cacophony of confusion and pain and horror.

"It's in the bridge," she whispered.

Dan tried not to picture the strange creature erupting into the mass of bodies gathered in the bridge.

Almost managed it.

They hurried their steps a little, putting the shrieks of agony behind them, moving around the edge of the park warily until Katie pulled Dan to the left, entering a mall area. Dan was grateful to put some walls around himself again: out in the open he had felt horribly exposed. Almost as blind as he had been in the supply closet, but knowing that there was open space all around him; that something could be lurking just yards away and he would not see it until it was far too late.

With each step they had taken around the park, he had expected to feel sharp claws tearing into his flesh at any moment. The smell hadn’t helped: although he couldn’t see the ruined corpses that littered the park, the metallic stink of blood was heavy in the air, and the images his mind conjured up were probably even worse than the reality. Beneath his feet, the floor was wet and slippery.

He tried vainly to persuade himself that was just the rain.

They were both soaked by the time they entered the shopping area that bordered the park.

The mall was a part of
Park Avenue
, which stretched right around one side of the ship, selling designer clothes mainly, along with gifts. The section that Katie aimed for contained a half-dozen shops and a couple of tiny water fountains that had been stilled when the power died.

Once they were inside the mall, Katie paused, and they both listened intently. It sounded quiet, but not quite silent.

Somewhere up ahead, Dan heard heavy breathing. A bubbling choke.

A moan of pain split the darkness, and made them both jump.

"Somebody's injured," Katie whispered.

Dan was amazed to find himself thinking that other people's injuries were none of his business, and that every second they dallied in the mall was another chance to run into one of the creatures that had massacred the passengers.

Did it really take only minutes to become a callous, heartless bastard? At what point did fear of people become misanthropy?

"We have to help them," Katie said, and Dan grunted softly, still debating in his mind whether he had the confidence to tell Katie that the injured person was none of his concern.

He let her lead him along until the debate became moot. They followed the noise, until it sounded like they were only a few feet away, and Katie hissed into the darkness.

"Hey, are you okay?"

A man's voice whimpered in response.

"Over here," Katie said, and took a few paces forward.

Dan felt the blood under his feet almost immediately, and when he stepped on a leg, he muttered an apology before realising that the injured man was still a couple of paces away. He felt around with his foot.

Definitely a leg.

Just not attached to a body.

Dan's stomach heaved, and he was glad of the darkness as he clapped a hand over his mouth and choked down the urge to vomit.

Katie let go of his hand.

"Oh shit," she breathed.

"It's bad," the injured man stammered. It wasn't a question. "It ripped me open. I can still feel it inside me. I can feel it in my head."

The man
laughed
, and Dan’s fear ramped up to a whole new level.

"We can't move him," Katie said firmly, and Dan felt despair well up inside him. Callous or not, he had a feeling that this might not be the only injured person they would come across. He pictured stumbling across dozens of injured passengers, all of them needing help; all of them unmovable.

All of them standing between him and Elaine.

This is hopeless. We have to leave him.

"Kill me, please," the man half-whimpered, half-giggled. "You have to kill me; you have to make it stop."

"You can't think like that—" Katie started to say, but the man interrupted her, snapping with surprising conviction.

"You don't understand," he growled. "It's inside my
head
. You have to kill me. Or give me something I can use; I'll do it myself."

The man snarled the last in a tone that Dan thought almost sounded like
eagerness
, before lapsing back into shallow, wet wheezing.

Dan had taken a couple of steps backwards, stunned at the sudden ferocity in the injured man's tone. When Katie grabbed him, he let out a small yelp. The bravado he'd felt in the cupboard; the adrenaline rush of surviving the encounter with the creature, seemed to be fading away rapidly, leaving him feeling weak and dizzy.

"We can't help him," Dan said in a faltering voice. "We can't even see what his injuries are."

"So…what?" Katie snapped, "We
kill
him?"

"I can't kill anybody," Dan moaned. "Look, I get that you have to do your job. If you need to stay and help him—"

"Don't give me that shit," Katie said hotly. "I'm pretty sure my job is finished. This is nothing to do with that. This about the fact that we are human beings, and there is a guy in agony here that needs our help."

"What would you have us—"

"Just fucking
kill
me," the injured man roared. The words twisted into a hideous scream, and Dan's nerves crawled with terror.

"Shut up," he hissed frantically. "They'll hear you, shut
up
."

The injured man sucked in a lungful of air and screamed again; a shriek that became a high-pitched giggle. Dan thought it was the sound of madness; the sound of a mind snapping. Maybe the pain, or the horror of what had been done to him. It didn't matter. The bastard was wailing like a siren, and Dan didn't think it would be long before he drew the wrong sort of attention.

He moved on autopilot.

Lifting the broom.

Swinging it at the noise the man made.

Feeling the crunching impact.

Wincing in disgust at the way it felt.

Swinging it again.

And again.

Until the screaming stopped.

When it was done, Dan let the broom fall from trembling fingers. He wasn't a violent guy; never had been. Even when he was a kid at school, fighting was something he studiously avoided. He got picked on sometimes, as the kids who generally had their heads stuck in books sometimes did, but he endured the mockery and the occasional shove in the playground with a smile. He couldn't remember
hitting
anyone in his entire life.

And now he had killed a man on the first day of his honeymoon.

Not for the first time, Dan cursed his decision to ever leave the safety of his house. The world outside had terrified him
before
; all that had changed in the two years he had spent hiding away from it was that now he knew that his fear of the world had been justified.

"You killed him," Katie started to say in an accusatory tone, but the words dried up when another shriek split the night.

A noise that could not possibly have come from a human throat. It sounded almost like the whine of a circular saw, powering up to an ear shattering howl before fading away again.

The silence the shriek left behind felt different than it had before. Darker, somehow.

And then they were moving again, Katie pulling Dan along by his limp hand as his thoughts tossed and roiled on the dark river that ran through his mind. As they entered the ship, and Dan felt the huge space around him narrowing to a small corridor, he heard a wheezing choke somewhere behind him and knew that what he had done to the man had been far worse than murder.

The broom had been lightweight, after all. Not a weapon to kill a man with; even an already injured one.

He was still alive.

Dan had stumbled up one flight of stairs and was halfway up the next when he heard the man scream once more in the distance.

Just once.

*

The
Les Aventure
restaurant seated a hundred diners in the finest luxury imaginable. It was one of a handful of eateries on the Oceanus that required booking to be made in advance, and no passengers were allowed to eat there two nights in a row, in order to ensure that everybody had a chance to sample the world class cuisine served up by a chef who'd had a brief stint on television several years earlier.

Dan smelled the blood as soon as Katie led him inside. There were other smells; exotic spices and meats that made his mouth water and left him with an overpowering urge to vomit. Somehow, despite everything that had happened, his stomach was craving food.

Just biology, carrying on as though nothing was amiss.

He couldn't help it. The journey through the park and the encounter with the injured man had already left him queasy. The smell of food, mixed right in with the stink of death, finally overcame his resistance, and he retched loudly. When he finally came up for air, after spitting out a thin string of acidic bile, he was struck by the notion that he had taken a young lady to a fancy restaurant, and had pissed himself and thrown up in the process.

Terrible date
, he thought, and he giggled.

Actually
giggled.

The sound of it in the darkness was almost more terrifying than all the other dreadful noises he had already heard. That giggle was the sound of madness, cracking open his mind with a crowbar and trying to force its way in.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and focused on his breathing, just as he had with Katie. He tried to picture himself standing in the terminus, breathing in and out, controlling his anxiety.

It all seemed laughably far away now; the fears that had crippled him for so long rendered petty and irrelevant. He had lived in fear for such a long time, almost growing used to it; wearing it like a comfortable shirt, yet the things that had terrified him meant nothing; not when there was real fear out there in the world. Real fear that came complete with talons and the coppery stench of blood.

A semblance of calm returned, and he opened his eyes.

And saw Katie, bathed in the glow of a candle.

"Matches behind the bar," she said, as if an explanation for the sudden appearance of light were required.

Dan looked at her face, and saw the terror he had been feeling mirrored there. Katie’s pretty features were pale and tear-streaked, her eyes wide and a little unfocused. He guessed that maybe she was having the same sort of trouble he had been: trying to keep the catastrophic images branded onto her brain at bay.

Katie’s face was etched with concern as she looked at him, and Dan knew that was because of the bizarre giggle that had escaped his lips. He met her eyes and nodded reassuringly, hoping that the gesture conveyed that he was okay; uncertain whether it was a lie or not.

The light helped, a little. Just having something to focus on, something other than darkness, made Dan feel better and helped him to banish thoughts of blood and violence to the back of his mind. Being able to see again was like dropping an anchor into reality.

Yet as soon as he saw the warm glow of the candle, he knew that they needed more.

"We're going to need more than light," he said suddenly, surprising himself again with how confident he sounded. How clear and purposeful.

Katie's brow furrowed.

"I don't know what the hell is happening on this ship," Dan continued, "but as long as those things are aboard, all we're going to do is keep running in circles until they pick us off."

"What about your wife?"

"We'll go to the cabins," Dan said with a firm nod. "But first, this place has to have a kitchen, right?"

"Sure," Katie said uncertainly.

"Good. We'll go there first. We're going to need weapons. Knives;
anything
. We can't outrun this, and I'm not sure we can hide, either. At some point, I think we’re going to have to fight."

Dan couldn't believe it was his own voice that he heard.

Maybe I did just lose my mind after all. Maybe I puked it right out
.

"We're going to have to fight," he said again, firming up his tone a little so that it didn’t sound quite so obvious that he was trying to persuade himself.

"Smart," a man’s voice said quietly, making Dan jump. "And yet, very stupid at the same time."