Deadshifted (18 page)

“What is that?” Jorge stood at the edge of the second fancy bathroom in this suite, a finger pointed at the pedestal tub. I looked where he pointed—and I’d never been so glad I’d just puked.

There was a person in the tub, facedown. The jets were still on, making the water froth and the corpse—now that it had been down for longer than anyone could have possibly been holding his breath—jiggle and dance.

“He’s dead, right?” Kate asked.

“He’d better be,” Jorge said, picking up a decorative vase with a heavy base.

I reached over, took a lily out of the vase, and walked over to the side of the tub. I had to see who it was. Just in case.

I poked the body twice. It floated farther sideways but did not otherwise respond. I angled the stem in so that it slid beneath the person’s face, leveraging it toward me. An overly long tongue dangled out, bloated and purple, but as the face turned it retracted, disappearing inside a water-swollen jaw. Not Asher, I realized with full-body relief.

But.

Dead people’s tongues didn’t disappear. Fall out, maybe. But not move. Especially not after they’d been cooked.

I’d never seen someone boiled alive before, and some function of the fancy jet control was keeping the water piping hot. The musky scent in the air was stewed human, mixed with churning effluvia. There was a greasy film, which provided just enough tension to create bubbles. Still—something about the way that tongue had moved was wrong. Not that I wanted to reach in there and find out, not even with my worst enemy’s hand … I grit my teeth. Real nurses don’t hide—from anything.

“Hang on.” I hooked the stem into the man’s mouth and used it to keep his head tilted up at me. I dug around, trying to determine if I could even see a tongue. I couldn’t, but—I floated his whole body back inside the tub, and intestines were spooled out underneath. Somehow they were wrapped around one of the jets near the floor of the tub. He’d boiled and split open, like an overripe sausage.

“He’s clearly dead. Can we go?” Kate said from the doorway.

“Motion to leave, seconded,” Jorge said.

There was no point in searching further. It was wrong, but it wasn’t Asher—and there were still hundreds of rooms to go. “Sure.”

I dropped the lily, and it bobbed inside the tub with the rest of him.

*   *   *

Marius’s group was waiting for us in the hall. “Sorry,” I said, apologizing for our delay. “There was a dead man floating in a tub.”

Tan-man stood a little behind the other two—which was why they didn’t see him shaking.

“Oh, my God—” Kate gasped and pointed at him like he was unclean. Nathaniel glanced at him and watched him slide down the closed door beside them both, making no effort to catch him. Marius turned and, seeing the man fall, whirled into action.

“Are you okay?” He went into medic mode, helping Tan-man lie down without hitting his head. “No fever,” he announced to the rest of us, gawking above.

It wasn’t a seizure, it was just profound shaking, the kind that in the hospital made the monitors scream that your patient was having ventricular fibrilation,
Come defib me!
—when really he was just cold.

Or—I groaned. “How long’s it been since you had a drink, sir?”

“A few hours.”

The whites of his eyes were subtly yellowed—I hadn’t seen it before, I’d been too wrapped up in my own problems. But I bet the rest of him was yellow too, underneath all that fake tanner.

“You’re detoxing?” Marius accused him.

“I told you I didn’t want to come along! That doctor made me!” the man shouted, from the floor.

No wonder he’d been trying to steal Valium—benzos were among the only things that helped when detox was inevitable.

Marius looked up at me. We both knew the score. The good news was, Tan-man wasn’t dying of whatever mysterious ailment was going around. The bad news was, Tan-man would be useless to us here, or more useless than he already had been. “We’ve gotta get him downstairs,” Marius said, leaning forward to indicate that “we” meant me.

I shook my head. Even if finding Asher was statistically impossible at this point. “I don’t want to go.”

“I’ll take him,” Kate volunteered.

Marius grabbed the man by the shoulders. “Can you stand?”

“Yeah. Maybe.” He let Marius hoist him aloft, and Marius looked at the woman.

“Go straight back the way we came. No detours.”

“Sure.” She herded the man slowly, him leaning on every passing door, and cast a glance back at me, eyeing my belly. “You should try to be safe.”

Easier said than fucking done, but I smiled and waved anyhow.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The four of us looked at one another in the hall.

“I believe Edie and I would like to be paired together now,” Nathaniel said, gazing coolly at me.

Jorge’s face screwed up into a question, but I shook my head so he wouldn’t argue. “You’re right. I think we would.”

“For whatever good it will do,” Marius said. “This is a useless goose chase. Everyone’s already gone.” Which was, in itself, creepy. Marius gathered himself and held the sheet of paper up with all the names. “Fine. You two—the Kontises; we’ll take the Morkins.”

Marius naming everyone all the time only made it worse. Marius unlocked the door for us and Nathaniel started rapping on it. “Mr. and Mrs. Kontis?” he said archly as we stepped in. No response. He pressed the door open and gestured with his other arm, looking at me. “After you.”

I hesitated long enough that he had to know I was thinking too hard. Should I show him my back so he’d know I wasn’t scared of him, or not, so he’d know I was? I went with caution, edging down the narrow entry hall, my back to the wall, until we reached the cabin’s main living space. I heard the door shut softly behind us.

My back still against a wall, I watched him enter the room. “What’s your game?”

“I have no idea what you mean,” he said, with a malevolent smile. “I’m flattered by your attention to me, but I’ve only just become a widower. I’m afraid a year must pass before we can date.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. I wished Asher had told me more while he could.

“I’ll take this side,” Nathaniel said, and went into a darkened room.

We were
supposed
to be searching. But fuck all these other people, I went into the room after him.

My safe time away from supernatural creatures other than Asher had made me soft. I walked into the room, assuming I’d find him in the bathroom, or at the balcony door, but he was waiting just inside for me. He grabbed one of my arms and twisted it up and behind me, making me rock forward on my toes as he caught me around the chest with his other arm and pulled me close, like we were lovers dancing.

“Let us be clear on two things,” he whispered, his voice in my ear. “I could kill you before they heard you scream, and I could fling your body over the edge without thinking twice.”

“Let go of my arm,” I said, trying not sound scared.

He didn’t. He hoisted it higher. I grit my teeth not to yelp in pain, eyes watering.

“What did you do with Asher?” I hissed.

“Is that his real name?” he said. I didn’t respond. “I suppose next you’ll tell me he’s not even a doctor?” Nathaniel went on, voice dripping with irony like venom.

“Where is he?” I couldn’t turn around, I couldn’t even squirm away from his hot breath in my ear.

“Are you really pregnant by him? I’ll know if you’re lying.”

I didn’t want to say anything. His grip on my arm tightened and pulled.

It went. It just went. I could feel a tearing and then heard a pop and it was too late, he’d dislocated my arm. I gasped and cursed in a huge rush. “Yes! Yesyesyes!” He still didn’t let go. The pain radiated away from my shoulder in waves, like the ocean outside.

“Good,” he said, his voice stretching out the word in my ear like a purr.

I started panting in pain and blinking back tears from my eyes. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

“Revenge. You’ve heard the saying an eye for an eye? Well, I want a child for a child.”

He let me go and shoved me forward with a laugh. My arm flopped down, disconnected from the rest of me. Unwhole, I staggered forward—anything to get away from him.

“Where’s Asher?” I fell to my knees and crawled away before he could think to kick me.

“You won’t be seeing him again. I’m feeding him to the fishes, one piece at a time.” He peered clinically down. “I love how after everything you’ve seen in the past two days, you’re only interested in one man. One would think your nurse’s heart would bleed for the rest of the innocent souls that’ve been lost, and not that monster you were in love with.”

Panic started choking my throat. “What have you done with him?” I begged, my voice raw. I held my loose arm to myself, trying to get my back against a wall, where I could kick out at him if he came for me, someplace where I could protect my belly. “Where is he?” I asked, my voice shrill, as we heard the cabin door open.

“If you want to see what’s left of him alive, you’ll do what I say. Sort yourself out.” He straightened his suit by way of example.

“Edie?” Jorge called from the doorway. “You okay?”

“She’s in here,” Nathaniel said. When Jorge got to the door, he added, “She fell.”

Jorge saw me, eyes wide with panic, clutching my drooping arm. “Oh, honey—” and then he looked at Nathaniel and his fists clenched.

I’d let him get the better of me—and worse yet, I’d have to support him in his lie.

“I fell—I fell!” I said before Jorge could do anything. I could feel myself turning red with pain and shame. I lurched up to standing, ungainly with a quarter of my body knocked out. “I’m clumsy sometimes. I tripped and hit the couch wrong. It’s gone out before.” I held my arm to me tighter. “Please, can you go get Marius?”

Jorge gave Nathaniel a look, and then leaned out of the room to call for Marius without leaving me alone. I would have hugged him, only I couldn’t. Marius came in and looked at me with a cluck.

“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—”