Sea Sick: A Horror Novel Part 6

"Sergeant Wardsley. Pleased to meet you, sir."

Ivor laughed. "Been a while since I had a sergeant calling me that. Takes me back."

"You been retired long?"

"Good ten years now. I married Vicky two years before I signed out. Wanted to spend time with her. Have a family while I still had some lead in my p.e.c.k.e.r. A few years later we had this little gift from G.o.d, Heather."

"Well, it's good to meet you all," said Jack. He turned to the doctor. "How is Heather doing, Doc?"

"I think she is stabilising, but we need to get her to a hospital as soon as we reach port. How did you know this was going to happen? All of your questions this morning?"

"I don't know," said Jack."I guess I just had a bad feeling. But you've helped her, right? She's going to be okay?"

"I believe so. As long as I can keep her heart rate under control."

A noise from behind the doctor made everyone in the room jump. It was Heather on the examination table. She was having some sort of seizure.

Almost as soon as it had started, it stopped. Doctor Fortune hurried over to the girl and placed his stethoscope against her chest, moving it around frantically. The concern on his face made it obvious that her heart was doing things it wasn't supposed to. The doctor started performing CPR, pressing down on Heather's chest and using a breath pump on her face. He kept at it for several minutes and Jack started to get worried. The girl's parents beside him were frantic.

"Get away from her, Doc," Jack said. "I don't think you should be so close."

Ivor shoved Jack hard. "What are you playing at, man? She needs help."

Jack ignored the shove and rushed towards Doctor Fortune, tackling the medic around the waist and moving him away from the girl.

Heather sprang up on the bed. She glanced around the room curiously, like a newly hatched bird. Vicky cried out with joy, raced across the room towards her daughter. There was no time for Jack to stop her.

Heather leapt off the table and met her mother in an embracing hug. Vicky squeezed her daughter tight, tears streaming down her face. "Thank G.o.d," she said.

Then Heather bit into her mother's neck, ripping her jugular vein in two. Blood arced high enough to splatter the florescent lights and cast spotty shadows over the room.

Ivor screamed, probably for the first time in his life if his tough military exterior was anything to go by. Doctor Fortune was standing there stunned, but Jack pushed past him and acted fast. He grabbed Heather around the throat from behind and dragged her back towards the examination table. "Get something to tie her down," he shouted at the other two men.

Jack had expected Ivor to resist him, but the Major seemed more than willing to comply. He and the doctor upended the room, looking for something to use for bindings. They eventually found several bundles of dressing tape and a roll of bandages. They quickly brought it over to Jack.

"Ivor, grab her feet, and I'll get her wrists. Doc, you strap her down."

The doctor ran the tape beneath the examination table and wrapped it up around Heather's body in tight circles. The little girl kicked and squirmed against him. By the time he was done, Heather looked like an Egyptian mummy. The final roll of tape was used to bind her forehead to the table, keeping her head in place.

With one crisis over, Ivor's focus turned to his wife dying on the floor. He dropped to his knees and cradled her in his arms. "Jesus Christ, we need to help her."

Doctor Fortune grabbed a bundle of gauze and bandages and did his best to cover the wound. The blood still seeped between his fingers, but it at least slowed down a little. The final thing the doctor did was inject her with something, which may have been a clotting agent. Ivor kept his hand tight against the wound, placing as much pressure as he could. The ex-army man didn't need to be taught basic first aid.

"Is that all you can do?" Ivor shrieked. "You have to stop the bleeding."

The doctor shook his head. "I cannot. I am not a surgeon."

Ivor began to sob, holding his wife in his arms. The doctor looked shaken. Jack put a hand on his bony shoulder and turned him around. There was only a small window of opportunity to get as many answers as he could from the man.

"What do we do, Doc?" Jack asked. "What's wrong with the girl?"

The doctor stood in a daze for a moment. He stared down at Heather on the examination table. The girl was gnas.h.i.+ng her teeth as though she were chewing the very air itself. Her eyes were red and bleeding.

Doctor Fortune placed his stethoscope against an area of the girl's chest beneath the bandages. He moved the head of the instrument around for a few moments, then looked at Jack with a complete lack of understanding written across the creases of his face. "This cannot be," he said.

Jack stared hard at the man. "What? What is it?"

"She has no heartbeat."

"Are you telling me that she's dead?" Jack asked. Such a thing was impossible, but it didn't surprise him in the least. The doctor could have told him anything right now and he would have accepted it willingly. That was how horrifyingly bizarre his world had become.

The doctor took a penlight from his breast pocket and s.h.i.+ned it into Heather's eyes. She snapped and hissed as his hand got closer.

"What do you see?" Jack asked. "Why are her eyes bleeding?"

"I don't know. It's some kind of subconjunctival haemorrhaging. Her pupils are not reacting to the light either and they seem unable to focus."

"She's not breathing," Jack noted.

The doctor looked at the girl's chest. It was completely still. "I believe she is dead," he stated matter-of-factly. "At least, she should be."

"What the h.e.l.l are you lunatics talking about?" Ivor shouted from the floor. Vicky was growing weaker in his arms. "If she's dead then how on earth is she moving, you imbeciles?"

No one said anything. The situation was beyond rationalization. Jack stared down at Heather and watched her mouth work feverously. He knew that it wanted to taste human flesh. If they unbound the girl she would immediately attack the nearest person in sight. Maybe it was a biological imperative of the virus coursing through her body a way of spreading itself to new hosts. An infected host bites an uninfected host and pa.s.ses on the virus through saliva.

Pa.s.ses it on...

Before Jack had chance to say anything, Ivor wailed in horror. Vicky had gouged her fingernails into his cheeks and was pulling his face towards hers. The infected woman's strength must have been twice what it usually was. Ivor was powerless as she sunk her teeth into the flesh beneath his left eye. It almost looked like they were kissing pa.s.sionately, but Ivor's screams said otherwise.

Jack grabbed Ivor around the collar and tried to drag him away. Vicky hung on by her teeth at first, but then the flesh ripped away and she fell backwards. Ivor stopped his screaming long enough to get to his feet but was still whimpering like a little boy. He stumbled away from his wife and shook his head. "What in d.a.m.nation is happening to my family?"

"I don't know," said Jack. "Just get away from her."

Vicky rose to her feet, awkwardly, like a puppet raised by tangled strings. She scanned the room with feral eyes, snarling like a beast. There was a brief moment of inactivity, a brief pause while n.o.body moved.

Then she lunged. Her b.l.o.o.d.y fingertips stretched towards the gaping wound on Ivor's face. It seemed like the sight of the blood attracted her.

Ivor probably could have killed most men with a single punch to the throat, but he was unwilling to retaliate against his wife he looked like he would pa.s.s out at any moment. Vicky collided with him and the two began to wrestle. Jack came up behind the infected woman and grabbed her in a full-nelson, pinning her arms above her head while restraining the movement of her head (and her lethal jaws).

"Okay," said Jack, struggling to restrain the woman. "Ivor, listen to me. I need to know exactly how your daughter could have caught this thing. Has she been in contact with somebody else that was sick? What about you and your wife? You both have it too. Have you been exposed to something?"

Ivor was fl.u.s.tered. Understandably so; his family was dead. "What? No. We came straight from the airport in Palma. We were with a bunch of other pa.s.sengers the whole time who were all perfectly fine."

Jack needed more. He needed answers. "You and your wife were arguing the day you came onboard. What about?"

"Arguing? I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do," said Jack, still struggling to restrain Vicky thras.h.i.+ng about in his arms. "Does it have something to do with why you're sick?"

"No! No, of course not."

"But you admit you were arguing?"

Ivor shook his head and seemed to battle against the fringes of despair. "We...we were arguing about what was for the best. I had an old friend from the forces waiting for us in Germany, all ready to help us disappear. Vicky was having second thoughts."

Jack was confused. He'd expected the conversation to lead somewhere else. "Second thoughts about what?"

"Turning herself in."

Jack frowned. "What the h.e.l.l are you talking about? What did she do?"

Before Ivor had time to answer, Doctor Fortune let out a sudden yelp. Jack turned his head to see that Heather was partially free from her bindings and was now sitting up on the examination table. She was munching on something. The doctor turned around with a mortified expression on his face. He was holding his right hand out in front of him. It was missing a thumb.

Jack thought about what had happened to Vicky after Heather attacked her and quickly reached a conclusion. "Doctor, I'm sorry but you're infected. You need to isolate yourself somewhere, right now."

But the doctor wasn't listening. The man stumbled around the room, delirious, and gus.h.i.+ng blood from his thumb-stump. The sudden commotion caused Jack to lose his concentration and his grip on Vicky loosened. She pulled free of his grasp and pounced straight for her husband. She tore out his windpipe before he even had time to scream. Ivor crumpled to the floor, dead.

Jack acted quickly, scouring the room for something with which to defend himself. Even though he knew dying would result in nothing more than waking up again at 1400hrs, he couldn't help but fight back. It was his instinct; a human behaviour rooted deep inside him making it impossible to accept death willingly (even when it was only temporary). There was also the fear that, eventually, the spell would end and whatever happened to him would be permanent. There was a part of Jack that longed for this and welcomed an end to his nightmare.

A gla.s.s-cube paperweight sat on a nearby stack of papers. It seemed heavy. Jack wrapped his fingers around it and felt confident that it would do the job he needed it to. He hefted it through the air with all his might. It cracked against Vicky's skull just as she turned to face him.

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 gla.s.s-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 Fortune 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 a.s.s out of there.

Not that there's anywhere to run.

Jack picked up the b.l.o.o.d.y 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 brandis.h.i.+ng 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-s.h.i.+rt 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 s.h.i.+p 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 gla.s.s 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 Fortune 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 pa.s.sengers 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 Fortune 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 pa.s.senger 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 ma.s.s of infected.

Day 103.

Jack woke up screaming. He leapt out of bed and immediately started tras.h.i.+ng the room. He rammed his fists into the television, making them b.l.o.o.d.y with gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+p'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 pa.s.sengers 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 h.e.l.l. 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 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 owners.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p in the middle of a featureless sea, but he still shared the same sun as people in Mexico and j.a.pan 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-s.h.i.+rt 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-sc.r.a.pe. 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, splas.h.i.+ng the water and throwing inflatable b.a.l.l.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.ned me to h.e.l.l? 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 G.o.d, 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 d.a.m.nation then G.o.d could go straight to h.e.l.l.

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 pa.s.s 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, s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 a.s.sortment 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.