The Raven (A Jane Harper Horror Novel) (32 page)

The barrage is enough to tear the
Raven
to pieces, so I don’t bother taking cover. If the Draugar have a destroyer, we’re like Spock in the
Enterprise
’s reactor room—dead—except without the being-reborn Project Genesis stuff.

So I watch.

As the powerful rounds rain down, I’m struck by a realization—this destroyer has really shitty aim. They’re chewing up the water all around us, but not a single round has struck the ship. Not one.

Then the world goes silent, and the destroyer disappears into the darkness once more.

“Are you crazy?” Willem shouts from above as he reappears in the window.

Helena stands up next to me—she’d dived to the deck.

I shrug. “I didn’t think it would matter.”

He shakes his head, exasperated.

I hear a voice. It’s small and garbled by static. “Come—this is—Is everyone—” The voice is coming from the radio.

“This is the
Raven
,” I hear Willem say. “Say again. I repeat, say again.”

The destroyer wasn’t trying to kill us, they were saving us!

I rush up the stairs, pushing my sore legs to the limit, and enter the bridge as the voice replies. “This is the USS
Bainbridge
. Are you okay? Did we get the sonsabitches? Over.”

Willem turns to me and extends the radio in his hand.

Helena enters behind me. “What are you waiting for?” she asks.

At first I think she’s talking to Willem, but then I notice she’s looking at me.

“Why me?” I ask.

“My father made you first mate,” Willem says. He doesn’t need to explain any further, but he does. “You’re the captain now.”

“But—”

“I’ve seen his will,” Willem says. “The
Raven
is yours. It was always intended to be.”

Something about the way he says this triggers a realization. “You knew,” I say. “You knew he wasn’t bit.”

He nods. “I figured it out.” He holds the radio out. “Captain.”

I take the radio from him slowly, the surreal moment dragging out. I push the call button and speak. “This is Jane Harper, captain of the whaling vessel
Raven
. We’re in bad shape but alive. Thanks for your assistance. Over.”

“Copy that, Harper,” the man says. “Maintain your heading, but be ready to power down. We’ll come alongside. Or medics are standing by to receive you. Over.”

“Roger that,” I say with a grin, hearing my father’s voice in my own. “Will do. Over.”

“Sounds like you’ve done this before, Harper. You have a military background?” the man asks.

I think of all the time spent with the Colonel, being taught the same lessons as the men he trained, learning the lingo, and taking more hard knocks than the average recruit.

“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”

T
wo hours later, our wounds have been tended to and we’re enjoying bowls of beef stew in the
Bainbridge
’s mess. We’re warm, bandaged, and safe but feeling a little bit in the dark, since no one has said a word to us in the past thirty minutes. I’m pretty close to pulling a “Harper,” which is the moment my father, or I, lose our patience and tear some unfortunate soul a new asshole until answers are forthcoming. If not for my physical and mental exhaustion, I’d have already started my one-woman war for answers. For now, the stew has bought the crew some time.

While being patched up, we were gently interrogated by the ship’s captain, Kane Gilmour, who looks a little like Richard Gere but with a scruffy beard. He spoke to us one at a time, asking about our encounters with the whales, what happened on the island of ships, the parasites (after I brought them up), and why the
Raven
was outfitted like a “whale slayer.” He started with Willem and finished with me. When I completed my description of the
Raven
’s weapons and their intended purpose, he gave a nod, said, “Awesome sauce,” and left.

We were escorted to the galley a short time later and offered a choice between fish fillets and beef stew. We all took the stew and were pleased when large cubes of corn bread arrived with it.

With my stomach near bursting, I lean back in my chair, stretch, and let out an old-fashioned military-style burp that relieves some of the pressure on my stomach.

Willem chuckles and polishes off his meal.

Helena, however, has only eaten half her food. She sits across the table from Willem and me, looking back and forth at the two of us. “How did you do it?”

“Do what?” I ask, thinking she’s talking about some aspect of our time inside the
Poseidon Adventure
.

“Deal with all this,” she replies. “The first time, I mean. After the island. Our friends are dead. My father. Not to mention all of the people just living their lives on all those ships. They’re
all
dead, and we’re eating beef stew and laughing at burps.”

By
we
, she means Willem and me. She’s definitely not laughing.

I look to Willem. “Some of us did better than others.” It’s an admission that doesn’t agree with me, but it’s the truth. “I hid. Drank. Got in fights. Watched TV. You know, real womanly stuff. Mostly I tried not to think about what happened, but that’s impossible.”

I shift in my seat, battling my physical and emotional discomfort. “Your brother did it right, though. Focused on his family. Forged strong bonds.”

“But,” Helena says. “Your father…”

I know what she’s trying to say. I don’t have a family. But she’s wrong. I hold my hand out to Willem, and he takes it. “Families can be made,” I say and hold out my other hand to her.

She smiles and wraps her fingers around mine.

“We’ll get through it together,” I say. Thinking of family brings my thoughts back to Jakob and his final words to me. “Before I left him—your father—he said something that I didn’t fully understand.”

They both look at me with eager eyes, clearly curious about the last words their father spoke on this earth. “Iluatitsilluarina ukuaa,” I say.

The response is immediate and not at all what I expected.

Both of the somber Vikings break out laughing. Willem’s laugh is subdued, but his face is turning beet red. Helena cups her hands over her mouth in an attempt to mute her laugh, but to no avail.

“What, did he call me a bad word or something?” I ask.

“Depends on your perspective,” Willem says, laughing a little harder now.

Helena opens her mouth to speak, and it’s clear by her expression that she’s about to let me in on the joke. But Willem raises his hand at her. “Wait! Don’t!”

“Willem,” I growl, “I swear if you don’t—”

“Daughter-in-law,” Helena blurts out with a guffaw. “He said, ‘Good luck, daughter-in-law!’”

That wily SOB.
I try to fight it, but a smile creeps onto my face, which is likely growing as red as Willem’s. When the door to the mess bangs open, I’m grateful for the distraction. That is, until I hear the tone of our visitor’s voice.

“Harper!” Gilmour shouts. He enters with two other officers and a few sailors.

“What’s going on?” I say, sounding a little defensive because it looks like I’m about to be thrown in the brig.

But Gilmour pounds straight past our table and heads for the flat-screen TV mounted in the back corner of the mess.

I stand and follow him. Tight wraps on my legs, coupled with some military-grade painkillers, dull the pain from my injuries, but the ache seems to have grown worse, or maybe I’m just noticing it without zombies or whales trying to eat me.

“What’s going on?” Willem asks.

Gilmour turns on the TV and steps back with a remote in his hand.

“Three fifty,” one of the other men says.

Gilmour changes the channel, punching in the numbers with enough force that the remote makes a crunching sound with each push. The screen goes black while the satellite TV connects to the selected channel. Gilmour looks back at us. “Nuuk has been quarantined.”

Helena pushes past some of the men blocking her view of the TV. “What!”

“Came through ten minutes ago,” the captain says.

The channel connects, and an image is displayed on the screen. It’s a helicopter view, Nuuk. The patchwork of islands filling the harbor and the brightly colored homes, not to mention my towering apartment building, are easy to identify.

I notice the lack of channel logo or graphics and ask, “What channel is this?”

“It’s a secure military channel,” Gilmour says. “This is a live feed from a recon Comanche.”

The aerial view sweeps down toward the harbor. Lines of docked ships stretch along the dock…which is covered in corpses.

“What happened?” Willem asks.

When the view shifts from the dock to the long, pebbly beach just beyond, I know the answer to that question. Thirty now empty lifeboats line the shore. They didn’t carry survivors. They carried Draugar. That’s why only injured, immobile, and weak Draugar remained behind. The rest—thousands of them—were sent to Nuuk.

The camera pans up, revealing a city in ruins. Smoke billows from several fires. I can see people running. And more chasing them. Cars race down streets, careening into everything and everyone.

“No!” I shout. “God damnit!”

Willem puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes. He calms me and reassures me all at once.

“You know, I thought you all might be suffering from some kind of delusion,” Gilmour admits. “Whales are one thing. They were attacking us all day.”

“They weren’t attacking you,” I growl. “They were distracting you.” I point to the screen. “From them.”

Gilmour frowns. “Parasitic zombies are a little hard to swallow. But now…” He motions to the TV. “I mean, there it is. Reports coming out of the city support everything you’ve said.”

“What are you doing about it?” Helena asks.

“Right now?” Gilmour says with a shrug. “Nothing. We’re waiting for—”

“Take us there,” I say.

“What?”

“The three of us,” I say. “Give us weapons or not. But take us there.”

“There is an army of those things running around the city.” Gilmour shakes his head. “Even if you weren’t torn to bits—which you are—the three of you aren’t going to take back the city on your own.”

“I’m not interested in Nuuk,” I say.

“You’re not?” he says.

“You’re not?” Helena repeats.

“They’re just passing through. They’ll head for the mountains.”

“How could you know that?” Gilmour asks.

“Because she knows what they’re looking for,” Willem says, understanding filling his eyes.

Gilmour crosses his arms. “And what might that be?”

I look up at the screen and the ruined city that was my home for the past few months and Willem’s home for most of his life. I clench my fists, doing my best to contain my anger. We’ve come so far and sacrificed so much. We thought we’d won. And Jakob…he gave his life—for nothing.

Not nothing. He killed a Queen. And that means there is only one left, trapped somewhere in the mountains of Greenland. But she’s not alone. There’s something else out there that the Draugar want just as much.

I set my eyes on Gilmour and give him a look that says I’ll rip his nuts off if he doubts what I say next. When he gives a slight nod of agreement, I tell him.

“The host.”

“What’s the host?” he asks.

I’m about to shout, “How the fuck should I know!” when I remember some of Talbot’s last words and lower my head.

I was right. I was right about everything.

“It’s an alien,” I say. “A fucking alien.”

Most of my acknowledgments over the years have featured long lists of people who contributed to the initial writing effort in some way, whether it is research, advance reading, brainstorming, etc. But for this book, I just sort of disappeared into my imagination, lost in the voice of Jane Harper, which is to say, I had a lot of fun writing this book! There are, however, plenty of people to thank in getting this book into readers’ hands.

To Scott Miller, my agent at Trident Media Group, thank you for your resolve, commitment, and hard work. At 47North, I must thank Alex Carr, who saw potential in a wise-cracking, foul-mouthed, kick-ass heroine. Also at 47North, thanks to Katy Ball, Patrick Magee, and Justin Golenbock. Your support means a lot, and I’m looking forward to knocking this one out of the park with your help. I must also thank Jeff VanderMeer, whose supreme edits greatly improved this book.

And finally, my dear family. Hilaree, my wife, and Aquila, Solomon, and Norah, my wildly creative and fun children—I love you guys and am thrilled to be sharing the adventure of life with you.

Jeremy Bishop began his career as an artist and comic book illustrator, before turning to screenwriting, and eventually fiction. His first novel, the post-apocalyptic zombie epic
Torment
—a #1 Horror bestseller on
Amazon.com
, was a self-publishing success story. In addition, as bestselling author Jeremy Robinson, he has written more than thirty sci-fi, thriller, and action/adventure novels and novellas, five of which are published by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. His novels have been translated into eleven languages. He lives in New Hampshire with his family.