Sea Sick: A Horror Novel (10 page)

The paperweight was as solid as Jack had hoped it would be and he heard it shatter the woman’s skull.  She crumpled to the floor like a curtain cut from its railing.  Jack had come up against the infected dozens of times now, ever since his first encounter in
High Spirits.
It seemed like the best way to put them out of action was blunt-force trauma to the skull.  He was sure of that now.

His first success had been the unopened bottle of Glen Grant
from his suitcase,
which he had used to bash in the face of an elderly woman when she’d attacked him in the corridors of B Deck.  There had been many other incidents since then; ending with the glass-cube paperweight against Vicky’s skull.

Ivor
lay dead on the floor, but Jack knew it would only be a matter of time before he was on his feet again, windpipe dangling down his chest but still snarling.  The retired Major would have to be dealt with soon
,but there was a bigger threat at hand first.

Heather was still sitting up on the examination table, reaching out at Doctor Fortuné who was frantically cleaning his wound in a nearby faucet.
Heather, who had just been declared medically dead by a professional, was almost free of her bonds now, with
only
the ones wrapping her legs remaining.  Jack still didn’t have the ability to hurt the girl, regardless of whether she was dead or alive, so he grabbed more tape from a nearby cabinet and wrestled her back down to the table.  He managed to secure her without being bitten and was confident that she would be held in place long enough for him to get his ass out of there.

Not that there’s anywhere to run.

Jack picked up the bloody paperweight from where it lay discarded on the floor.  He turned to Ivor’s bleeding corpse and knelt down beside it.  It felt wrong to bludgeon the skull of a dead man, but it had to be done.
Jack raised the paperweight above his head, like a caveman brandishing a rock.  He brought it down on Ivor’s forehead just as the old Major opened his blood-soaked eyes.  Jack was just sorry he hadn’t done it soon enough to spare Ivor from coming back.

Jack stood up and looked himself over.  His red t-shirt was darker in patches where blood stained the fabric.  He had it on his face and hands too.  It stirred memories in him that he wished he could erase:
memories of his partner lying dead in his arms, another innocent victim of humanity’s rotten core.  Jack reconsidered if his fate aboard this ship was really as bad as he thought.  It certainly was no worse than the life he’d
lived before, with a lifetime’s experience of watching rapists and murderers go free.  At least the infected had an excuse for their violence.

Jack placed the gore-encrusted glass cube down on the nearby desk and took in some deep breaths.  Death surrounded him, the room was filled with it, and he felt nauseous.  He also felt weary and disorientated, lost in an endless abyss of screaming terror and unbearable pain.

Something clamped down on Jack’s shoulder, making
his
trapezius muscle burn hot with searing splinters of agony.  He spun around.

Doctor Fortuné was infected; and he’d turned.  Stupidly, Jack had left his back to the man and had paid the price.  He’d been bitten.

Jack punched the doctor away,
then placed a hand to his ragged shoulder, felt blood coursing from the wound.  Jack had been torn to shreds a dozen times by the infected passengers – a dozen different ways on a dozen different nights – but he had never been merely wounded.  What would happen now?  Was he infected with the virus too?

Of course I am.  That’s how it happens: by being bitten.

Doctor Fortuné launched another attack.  Jack dodged to the side and pushed the man to the floor, then made a run for it.  He flung open the door to the office and sprinted out into the corridors of C Deck.  He left the medical bay behind him and headed into the passenger section of the deck.  It was
filled with eyebleeders.  They wandered between the cabins,
dragging anyone uninfected from their rooms as they opened up to see what the commotion was.

Jack skidded on his heels, but his knees were weak and
he tripped.  He fell helplessly
to the bloodsoaked carpet and ended up on his back,
looking up at the chaos that surrounded him. People were
being torn limb from limb, their flesh gouged by human teeth, children and adults both.  Jack was powerless to help any of them – he always was.  Every
night
he was an impotent witness of
a thousand deaths.  But tonight, for some reason, the eyebleeders were ignoring him.

And part of him knew why.

Jack’s vision went cloudy and a dull buzzing seemed to fill his skull.  It was becoming hard to think…or feel. His entire body went numb.  It was only a few minutes more before Jack lost all sense of himself and his eyes began to bleed.  He got up off the floor and joined the shambling mass of infected.

Day 103

Jack woke up screaming.  He leapt out of bed and immediately started trashing the room.  He rammed his fists into the television, making them bloody with glass splinters.  Then he ripped the bedside cabinets away from the wall and hurled them across the room.  He kicked holes in the wall.  He pulled doors off their hinges.  None of it made him feel any better. 

When security finally came to apprehend him, they locked him inside the ship’s brig and left him there.  The tiny, square room kept Jack safe from the infection that night and he sat there in silence until he fell asleep at midnight.

Day 104

Jack woke up and smashed the room up again.  He spent another night in the brig.  It was safe there.

Day 198

Jack had given up hope.  The last of it had disappeared the night Ivor and his family
had died in the medical centre.  It had made Jack realise that, no matter what he did, he couldn’t stop the infection. He couldn’t prevent the passengers from turning into monsters.
Nor could he find out what was the cause
of it all.  Even if he did know where the infection had started, it wouldn’t do any good.  It would still kill everybody just the same.

Jack had stopped trying to find answers, had stopped wondering why this was happening, or whether or not he was in hell.  He just dragged himself out of bed at 1400hrs each day and went outside, performing the same rituals over and over. They had even started to become comfort him in some strange way.  Jack looked forward to the seagull at his window, prepared himself for the boys racing down the
Promenade Deck
, and was beginning to feel ownership of the green towel on the lounger.  The recurring elements of his day made him feel in control, made him feel that he was the master of his own existence.  It was all he had.

The sun was out on the pool deck, as it always was.  One of Jack’s few blessings was the warmth of its rays.  It was the only thing that still connected him to the world.  He was stuck on a cursed ship in the middle of a featureless sea, but he still shared the same sun as people in Mexico and Japan and England.  He was still connected to them in some small way.

For a change, today, Jack decided to take a dip in the water.  He took off his t-shirt and dropped it onto the floor.  Then he stepped in front of a small boy running around the edge of the pool and caught him as he was about fall.  The boy wouldn’t know it, but Jack had just saved him from a nasty knee-scrape.  Jack received no thanks however; he never did whenever he saved the boy.

Jack sat on the side of the pool and dangled his legs in the crystalline water.  Once he was ready to engulf himself in the cold kiss of the pool, he slid down beneath its surface.  The water was cold enough to make him shudder at first, but after a few quick breast strokes
,
Jack’s body adjusted.  The sun beat across his shoulder blades and the soothing sensation flowed down all the way to his toes.  Kids swam and played all around him, splashing the water and throwing inflatable balls to one another.  In spite of Jack’s usual depression, he actually found a moment of brief respite.  The pool was relaxing and Jack
started to feel happy.  But he knew it was only temporary.  The pool would soon lose its charm if he were to spend more than a day or two coming there.

Jack waded over to the edge of the water and placed his forearms against the cool cement of the pool’s coped edge.  He let his legs float away behind him and closed his eyes, trying to blank his mind, to
forget that he was trapped in a bottomless limbo. 
Stuck on a floating hell in the middle of the sea, removed from reality and
forced to endure a never ending day of misery and despair.
  Jack wondered if it was his punishment.  Was this what he deserved for what he had done? The murders he’d once committed?

Have my actions damned me to hell?  Am I evil?

Jack had never thought of his actions that night as murder – more as justice that would not be rendered in any other way – but perhaps some celestial judge saw it differently.  If there was a
God
, maybe
He
saw murder as a sin regardless of its motives.  Jack could admit that he was a killer, but there was no way he would ever admit to being an evil man.  In the grand scheme of things he was firmly planted on the side of good.  Especially when compared to the countless wicked souls he had spent his entire life apprehending.  He’d spent a majority of his existence trying to help others, trying to make the world a safer place. If this was his reward – damnation – then God could go straight to Hell.

If He thinks I could have done any better, I suggest He tries living on this rotten earth for a while.
Then perhaps He’d understand what the few decent souls left in the world are up against.

Jack had never been one for contemplation or philosophical thinking, but he had found himself turning to it more and more lately, if only as a way of keeping sane.  He would
ask himself questions to try and occupy his mind and then obsess desperately over the answers.  It was one of the few good ways to pass time.  Jack knew, though, it would only be a matter of days now before his mind started
to unravel from the strain of it all.  The loneliness and isolation of his resetting world would eventually drive him mad.  Eventually he would run out of questions to ask himself.

“Jack?”

The sound of his name shocked him.  He glanced up to find someone standing at the edge of the pool looking down at him.  The sun, shining behind, presented the figure as a silhouette, but Jack could still tell who it was.  It was the brunette waitress.

Jack’s mouth dropped and he tried to swallow.  Then he tried to speak, but failed.

The waitress smiled at him but she seemed weak and weary.  She was not wearing the uniform she’d had on when Jack had originally met her.  “I think you’ve been looking for me,” she said to him.  “Come with me, Jack.  I think I know what’s happening.”

***

Tally’s cabin was at the
aft
of A Deck, which she told him meant
at the back
.  When Jack had previously searched for her, he’d knocked on just about every cabin door on the ship. Most did not open and there was no way to tell if anyone was inside simply ignoring him or if the rooms were empty.  He’d eventually given up on finding Tally, and it seemed that as soon as he did,
she
found
him
.

Her room was nice, personal, with a wide assortment of chintzy knickknacks adding to its charm.  Jack took a seat on the foot of the neatly-made bed and Tally sat down on a chair beside the room’s cluttered dressing table.

“So, what do you know?”Jack asked before she even had time to settle in her seat.

“The day is resetting.”

Jack sighed.  “I know that!  The day keeps repeating over and over.”

Tally shook her head.  “No, you do
not understand.  It is not repeating.  It is resetting.”

“What’s the difference?”

“For the day to be repeating it must first exist, an unchangeable part of our timeline.  That is not what is happening.  For whatever reason, this day is being wiped clean at midnight and reset to start over.”

“But the same things happen every day.  Repeating.”

Tally looked at Jack as though he was a child.  “No.  The things that happen on this day are fated to occur.  They happen because they are a culmination of the almost infinite events from the days preceding them.  What people do tomorrow is a product of what they do today.  The world ripples and those ripples do not change.”

Jack tried to understand.  He sort of did.  People kept acting the same way because they were acting however they would have if the day had just gone by once.  There were no factors to make them behave any differently so they didn’t.  Things only changed if Jack did something
to directly influence events.

As if reading his mind, Tally said, “This is why you can change things, Jack.  If the day was repeating, so too would you repeat.  Your free
will exhibits that the day is being reset, and that you are the only passenger of this ship that can still remember the previous version of events that have been erased.  Whoever did this chose you for something.”

“And you,” Jack quickly added.

Tally shook her head.  “No.  At first I was like everybody else.  I didn’t realise what was happening.”

“So what changed?  How come you know now?”

“I am Romany.  My people have dealt with magic for centuries. We have built up certain…resistances.  At first I was oblivious, the same as everybody else, but the longer the spell was in effect the more it failed to get through my natural defences.  At first I just felt a little odd, daydreaming about things that hadn’t happened – or at least I believed so at the time – but then, gradually, I became aware of what was happening.  I stayed in my room for many days, trying to make sense of things.  On one of those days I saw you knocking on doors and asking about me.  I was frightened, of course, and I hid from you, but I also realised that whatever is going on wasn’t just happening to me.”

“What
is
happening?”  Jack urged her to tell him because the anticipation was killing him.  This woman sitting in front of him perhaps held the knowledge to end his suffering.