Deadshifted (13 page)

“Who are you?” I asked. I waved Emily over, and she came back, walking as far around the weird woman as she could. When the girl reached me, I shoved her into the bathroom behind me and said, “Whisper, lock the door.”

The strange woman polished off Emily’s sandwich and moved on to the chips that’d come with it, stuffing a handful into her mouth. “I’m so hungry!” she complained around them.

“You need to go,” I said, my voice low, trying to sound threatening.

“But you have so much food!” she protested, eyeing my room service buffet.

Food deprivation issues made people do strange things—I’d fished hidden sandwiches out from underneath people’s pillows at the hospital before. But that was no excuse for this woman to be here in my room now. I walked around her so I wouldn’t be between her and the door—and so I’d be right by the phone.

“Get out—or I’m calling security,” I bluffed.

“I will when I’m full!” She began eyeing the collection of room service trays behind me, and took a threatening step forward.

I could go for the phone—or the desk chair. For some reason, the chair felt safer. I hoisted it up and waved it at her like I was a lion tamer. “Get the fuck back. I mean it. Do it now.”

She knelt down with a grunt. The collection of fries that I’d licked all the salt off were sitting on the top of the trash. She picked them up and shoved them toward her maw. Just seeing her do that made me want to throw up all over again.

“Get out, get out, get out!” I screamed with increasing volume.

She looked up at me and screamed back, just as loud as I had, a guttural animal sound. Something frothed inside her mouth. Loud knocking started on the other side of our cabin door and a male voice asked. “Is everything okay?”

Emily unlocked the bathroom door and raced out, shrieking, “Daddy!” The strange woman tracked her motion, turning with frightening speed to lope after her, like she was a cheeseburger on legs. Emily opened the door and made it into the hallway, the woman hot on her heels. I threw the desk chair onto the bed and ran full speed after them—and reached the hallway just in time to see Hal step forward and clock the woman upside the head with a cane.

She went down with a crack, and Hal stood over her, ready to wallop her again. When she didn’t move, he looked at me as I panted in the doorway. “Are you okay?” he asked with a shout.

I nodded and took in the situation. The downed woman was breathing, but not much else. “Shit.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Major concussion? Subdural hematoma? Shit shit shit.

I knelt down. I didn’t want to touch her, she was probably covered in germs, but—I folded her eyelids up and checked for blown pupils, then I felt over her head for dents. She wasn’t bleeding, but he’d hit her hard, and she’d gone down solidly. She was hot, like the children had been before.

“I said—are you okay?” Hal asked again, interrupting me. He pointed to the side of his head. “My hearing aids are out.”

“Yeah, I’m good, thanks.” I glanced over to Emily, who was staring up at Hal with a mixture of awe and disgust. “Are you okay, Emily?”

“You’re not my daddy,” she told Hal with disappointment.

“Nope,” Hal agreed. Then he knelt beside me. “Is she still breathing? I hit her pretty hard.” He was still overly loud—loud enough for himself to hear.

“She’s still breathing.” Though not much else. I knew I ought to try to wake her up, to check for brain function—but I couldn’t get the image of her rooting in my trash for licked fries out of my brain.

“Claire said she was threatening you, that I needed to get over here.” He looked from her to his cane.

I nodded emphatically so he’d know what I meant even if he couldn’t hear me. “I’m glad she heard us. Thank you.” I wasn’t sure I’d be able to explain it in court if this woman was dying now, but Emily and I had definitely been in danger.

He squinted, reading my lips. He probably needed glasses, too. Then he smiled widely. “You’re welcome!”

Claire came out of their room, rolling her wheelchair over to us, fighting the rocking of the ship. “How did you know?” I asked her.

“My ears are as good as my legs aren’t.” She looked down at the woman. “Oh, my.”

“Oh, my, is right.” With extreme reluctance I patted the woman’s rotund stomach. It was taut, but I couldn’t feel a baby inside—and frankly, the woman looked too old to have kids. Although these days with IVF, who knew?

“You two get her into her room—I’ll go get help from up the hall. Can you help me, little girl?” Claire asked Emily. Emily nodded and started pushing Claire’s wheelchair, although I could tell that Claire was doing most of the work.

The woman’s room was two up and across from mine, and the door was still barely open; it hadn’t clicked fully shut. I ran over to prop it open with a room service tray, trying to ignore the thirty or so she had stacked inside.

Then it took a lot of heaving and hoing—bodies were awkward to move. Thank goodness Hal was strong.

“She’s got a fever,” Hal over-enunciated to me.

“I’d noticed,” I muttered. I was trying not to breathe the woman’s air, and ignore that I was covered in her sweat.

“She’s very hot!” Hal reexplained.

I nodded again. “I KNOW.” I hauled her torso forward until we reached the end of her bed. “Help me get her sitting up.” I didn’t want her drowning in puke before the cavalry came.
If they came,
more like.

There were food trays all over the room. I wondered if finding out we were all on room arrest had triggered some kind of hysteria in her. I knew my room looked like I shouldn’t be one to talk, but this was absurd—and all her trays were empty.

“I’ve heard of feeding a fever, but this is ridiculous,” I said after taking a look around.

Hal grunted, the kind of noncommittal noise that people who couldn’t hear well made to keep conversations afloat. He did seem remarkably composed for a man who’d just brained someone into unconsciousness. Did he have a touch of Alzheimer’s, or was he just old school? Despite his strength he looked ancient enough to have been in any of the last five major wars.

I stood and my back popped. This was not what Asher had in mind when he’d left me up here to stay safe, and so much for wearing the mask. Hal dusted his hands off and looked to me for direction.

“Shouldn’t someone stay?” he shouted.

Technically? Yes. She could have a bleed inside her brain, above and beyond whatever ailment she’d had that’d made her go crazy and attack us. But there was nothing I could do about it right now, and I didn’t think the doctor below could even monitor her, much less do any pressure-relieving trepanation that didn’t involve a corkscrew or a beer tap. It hadn’t exactly been an ICU facility when I’d been down there for my pregnancy test.

And if I were honest, I didn’t want to be here when she woke up. Being in her room, trays practically licked clean—right down to tiny ketchup and mustard bottles, emptied—stacked on every available surface, made my hackles rise.

“They’re going to send help—but they warned it might be quite some time,” Claire said from the hall. Emily was sitting on her lap now, and Claire was running fingers through the girl’s long hair, which had somehow come out of its braid. “They said we should wash our hands, and each get back to our own room for the duration of the quarantine.”

I snorted. “I bet they did. Did they say the word
quarantine
?”

“No. But what else could this be?” she said sensibly.

I stood over the insensate woman with her weird stomach and her weirder ways. It was stay here and watch her for signs of life like a hawk—and being afraid of her if she did wake up—or take the cruise employees at their word and walk away. I shook my head. I didn’t want it to be me who stayed here, but Emily was too young, and Hal and Claire were too old.

There was a lick of froth at the corner of the woman’s mouth now. Left-sided heart failure? Or … rabies? I frowned.

“Come out of there, you two. You’re not responsible for her—and I, for one, don’t want to catch what she has,” Claire said, absolving us all in one cantankerous swoop.

I put a hand to my stomach, weighing alternatives.
Being in here is not good for you, baby, and that’s all that matters.
I quickly followed Hal out the door.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

As the woman’s door locked shut behind us, trapping us all—or just me—with the consequences of our decision, chimes blared again overhead. I jumped like it’d caught us doing something shameful. Maybe because it had.

“Hello, guests, sorry to wake you. This is Captain Ames again. Just a reminder that we need you to continue to remain in your room, for the safety of yourself and other guests.” He coughed a bit and waited for attention. “However, we are in need of additional medical crew. If you have any expertise in a medical field and possess current qualifications, we would appreciate it if you would report to the Dolphin restaurant on the third deck. But be aware that if you do so, you might not be able to return to your cabin, possibly for the rest of the voyage, so please do not leave small children unattended. And remember, volunteering is voluntary!” he said, and chuckled, as though he’d made a hilarious joke. The chimes descended, and the intercom clicked off.

“You look pained, dear. She’s going to be fine. And if she’s not, well, it’s no business of ours.”

I wondered if being so personally near death had given Claire a ruthless clarity that I lacked. “It’s not that—well, it is, but—I’m a nurse. I should go help.”

Claire shook her head with finality. “You’re pregnant. You only have responsibility for one person right now.” She shot my belly a meaningful look. “You owe nobody nothing. You should go back to your room and rest.”

I was a little sweaty from the effort of moving that woman. But not sick-sweat, I was sure. I sighed. “You’re right, I should.” I put my hand out for Emily, and after a moment’s hesitation she took it, hopping off Claire’s lap.

*   *   *

When Emily and I made it back into our own room, she turned toward me. “That lady was weird.”

“Yeah, she was,” I agreed. I wondered what kind of person I was for just leaving her over there. It wasn’t like me to panic like that, but she’d scared me and something more primal had taken over. I’d lost whatever moral high ground I’d had this morning in the process—but I knew Asher wouldn’t care. He wasn’t the type of person to have problems with what I’d done.

My eyes found the clock. He had less than ten hours now. I wondered if his interrogation of Liz had been profitable. Whatever that woman had was not meningitis—it didn’t map to any illness I knew. But I had a hard time believing that Nathaniel could have come up with an entirely novel disease. Genetics didn’t work like that. You based things on other things, borrowed DNA, jumping genes. So far it was too hard to create anything new out of whole cloth.

So what mapped with fever, sometimes to the point of seizures, and weird hunger, with a dash of froth?

Not rabies, given the number of trays in her room—when you were rabid, your throat constricted and hurt too badly to swallow; that’s why rabid creatures perpetually drooled. And it would be too effing ironic for me to see someone with rabies now when I’d already survived being exposed to were-blood on a full moon night.

The left-sided heart failure I didn’t want to think about. There were meds to help it—but if you were so far gone that you were frothing because your heart and lungs weren’t talking right, your outlook wasn’t good.

Last but not least, there were esoteric genetic diseases that caused strange behaviors. Prader-Willi syndrome caused chronic hunger and disinhibition, which made you want to eat whatever you could. Families with people who suffered from it had to lock their afflicted relatives safe inside houses, and/or strap them down. And Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a rare illness that made people want to eat themselves. The only solution for that was highly experimental drugs, brain stimulation, or pulling out all your teeth to stop you from eating your own lips and fingers. Just the idea of it made me ill. And I couldn’t get away from the image of that women digging through my trash to eat my pre-licked fries.

“Are you going to be sick again?” Emily asked.

I barely managed to nod before I made it into the bathroom to throw up.

*   *   *

This time, no strangers came while I was gone. And I hoped Emily’d learned her lesson about opening the door for just anyone. But I couldn’t blame her for wishing her father would return, when I was still waiting for Asher. I wanted him to come back and tell me everything was going to be all right, even if it was a lie.

He’d never broken a promise to me before, and that was the only thing that kept me here now. The hope—as impossible as it was beginning to seem—that he’d be back by morning like he’d said he would.

Emily slept on the couch, limp like a puppy, completely passed out. I threw a sheet over her, and then I tossed and turned on the bed, not even trying to sleep, just thinking What-If thoughts. Every flicker of the show Emily had left on seemed like the shadow of the door opening, and I got up periodically to touch her forehead and make sure she wasn’t getting hot.

At 5
A.M.
, she threw the sheet off. I stood up to check on her again, and if I hadn’t been listening so hard for my own door I might not have heard it—the sound of the next door over clicking open, and then sliding shut.

Was her dad back? With news? Had he seen Asher? And would he take Emily off my hands? I pulled Emily’s room key out of my pocket. Even though Asher would know I wouldn’t leave a child unattended in our room for long, I felt compelled to write him a note with the stationery on the desk.

Next door. Be right back!
I signed my name underneath, like he wouldn’t know it was me if he returned while I was gone.

*   *   *

I tiptoed next door and knocked softly. I didn’t want to interrupt anyone doing anything private, but I did want the girl off my hands. I knocked a little louder, but hopefully too quiet for Emily to hear, just a wall away. After long enough, I gave up and tried the lock with my loaned key.