Dan turned in the direction of the voice, and squinted, trying to see beyond the feeble glow of the candle held in Katie's trembling hands.
"Who's there?" Dan said, trying to bolster his tone with a little steel and failing miserably.
The man who had spoken shuffled toward them slowly, limping heavily. In the half-light, Dan saw a dark blood stain that covered his right thigh.
"Edgar Rennick," the man said with a nod. "I guess I'm here to help you fight some vampires."
*
"Fuck," Mark spat as the screams died above him. The three security men were Vega's guys; probably the closest thing the ex-marine had on the Oceanus to friends, and Mark wouldn't miss them in the slightest, but their departure had left him with only one gun, and he'd already wasted three of the bullets.
And Vega had wasted another.
"Thirteen rounds left," he muttered to himself, checking that the gun was still safely tucked into his waistband.
"Just make sure you save two," Herb said darkly, and Mark felt a surge of impatience that just kept on rising until it reached a dizzying crescendo. It all hit him at once, Vega blowing his own head off, the death of a man that predictably came with trying to drop from one deck of the ship to another in perilous conditions; Herb's ridiculous vampire story, the thing that had tried relentlessly to break into the conference room, the endless darkness. The storm. The damn ship itself.
This wasn't how things were meant to be going. Right now, Mark was supposed to be ending his shift and heading to one of the bars where, if he was lucky, he'd find some young single women who appreciated a man in uniform. Hell, maybe he would even have asked Katie to join him for a drink, and maybe she would have agreed.
The worst thing he was supposed to face on the Oceanus was a stern rebuke for socialising in the out-of-bounds passenger areas.
Instead he was soaked and terrified, in the company of a terrorist or a lunatic or both; carrying a dead man's gun and blindly running from something that couldn't possibly exist. It all swilled around in his mind until the noise of it deafened his thoughts and left him trembling with anger.
"Enough," he roared. "Enough of your bullshit, and your cryptic comments. I plan to get off this ship, and you're going to help me do it, or so help me God, I'll..."
"Kill me?" Herb finished in an amused tone. "Already gave you the chance to do that, and
you
refused, remember?"
Mark sucked in a deep breath, and forced himself to calm down when he realised that he had bunched both fists and was preparing to start swinging. He didn't understand what was happening on the Oceanus—not one single fucking bit of it—but he could not shake the feeling that Herb was his ticket off the ship. At the very least, Herb was the man who would help him understand, and understanding was surely the first step.
"Why did you try to warn me, then?" Mark snarled. "Back in climate control. Why try to help me if this situation is so fucked?"
Herb didn't respond for a moment.
"I don't know," he said finally. "I wanted to do something good. To save someone, maybe even stop it all somehow. It's too late now. It doesn't matter."
The resignation in Herb's voice somehow made Mark even angrier, but the impulse that he felt, the genetically hard-wired urge to start throwing punches, would not help. He let the anger leak away, sucking in deep, calming breaths, and tried to think clearly.
"What if we take a lifeboat?" Mark said suddenly. He couldn't believe he hadn't thought of it before. The Oceanus held enough lifeboats to carry thousands of passengers to safety, each large enough in its own right to withstand the waves of the Atlantic until help arrived.
"No survivors, remember? Herb said. "No witnesses. My father's ship is out there. It's not a warship, exactly, but he's done his best to turn it into one, and his best involves a
lot
of money. He'll fire on anyone trying to leave the Oceanus, and he is fully prepared to search for survivors when this is done and ensure that word of what happened here never reaches dry land."
Mark seethed in frustration as another idea crashed and burned.
"So what's
your
plan?" he barked.
"My plan?" Herb said. His tone suggested he hadn't thought about it. "My
plans
are toppling like dominoes. Plan A was to try and stop all this madness before it even started. Plan B was to be on that chopper if Plan A failed. Plan C involved you putting a bullet in my head."
Herb grunted amusement at his own words.
"I'm not sure my plans are worth all that much."
"Then what's your plan now, huh?" Mark snarled. "Wander around this ship with me until one of your damn vampires turns up and kills you? Keep pissing me off until I decide you're worth a bullet after all? Huh?"
Herb didn't respond for several seconds.
"I don't know," he said quietly. "Running and hiding will get us nowhere, and one way or another we'll be dead by dawn no matter what happens. Unless..."
Mark waited patiently for Herb to finish the thought, and seriously considered punching him again when it appeared that the man considered that a good moment to stop talking.
"Unless what?" Mark hissed.
"Unless we sink the ship ourselves," Herb said brightly, and Mark's mouth dropped open in astonishment.
"Are you insane?"
"I'm starting to think I might be."
"Look, if you're that set on suicide, why don't you go back there and throw yourself overboard? Go on, I won't stop you."
"Believe me, I've considered it. But I'm not talking about suicide. I'm talking about sinking the ship."
"And how is that any different?"
"It's different because the people out there are under strict instructions to allow no harm to come to the vampires. That's rule number one. No matter what happens,
they
get off the ship in one piece. So if we sink the Oceanus
before
dawn, there'll be a lot of panicking on my father's ship, and a whole lot of debate, but the cavalry
will
come. They'll have to."
"To save the vampires."
"That's right."
"But not us."
"No."
"So, that helps us how?"
"It doesn't help
us
particularly. But there will be a helicopter here, and maybe boats, too. And you've got a gun, haven't you? Sinking the ship might not help us at all, but it will give us a chance, which is more than we have right now."
Mark felt his shoulders slump. The guy
was
insane. He had to be. If it hadn't been for the look he had seen in Steven Vega's eyes before the head of security killed himself, Mark would have believed that Herb's story was lunacy, nothing more.
But he
had
seen Vega's eyes in the soft glow of the lighter's tiny flame. He'd seen the haunted, broken expression in them, and Mark knew that no matter what, whether they were called vampires or something else entirely,
something
was on the ship, and it was killing everybody.
"Sink the ship," he said slowly. "Have you got any idea how difficult that is? How
impossible
? This thing is the size of a goddamned skyscraper. It's not like I can shoot a few holes in the hull and down we go."
"True," Herb said. "But the ship's got fuel tanks, hasn't it?"
"Yeah."
"And you've got a lighter, haven't you?"
Edgar had been watching the man and woman for several minutes, from the moment that he first noticed them approaching the restaurant. The benefit of the nightvision goggles: where they stumbled blindly in the dark, Edgar was able to move silently and accurately past ruined bodies and toppled furniture.
At least, as accurately as his damaged leg would allow.
His right leg had become a searing, white-hot lance driven into his hip, the already-considerable pain left by the bullet that had torn through his thigh now twinned with a newer, even more belligerent brother.
When he had lost his grip on the ladder, he had expected the long fall, and the icy waves, and even as he felt the rope slip from his grasp he had resigned himself to his death, comforted in the knowledge that at least he had done his duty.
The human pact with the vampires would hold. The sacrifice had been made. Once the night of terror was finished, the vampires would return to their metal cage, and would be delivered back from whence they came; back into the bowels of the Earth. It might be centuries before another sacrifice was demanded of anybody, let alone the Rennick family. Edgar had died to save millions. A hero.
He had that, at least. That, and the knowledge that the crippling guilt he felt about leaving Herb, and about watching Seb and Phil fall to their deaths, would be mercifully short-lived.
But the fall hadn’t been long, and it hadn’t terminated in the freezing Atlantic.
Instead, he had landed heavily on the rail that ran around the Oceanus’ top deck, driving that right leg into the implacable metal.
It wasn’t broken; at least, he didn’t think it was, but he had to concede there was a possibility that he had dislocated his hip.
It took him several minutes to pluck up the courage to unwrap the twisted limb from the railing, and he damn near bit his tongue off as the agony blossomed in his mind, but once he was upright, he discovered that he could walk. Just.
Nothing broken, and probably nothing dislocated, either. An onlooker might have said he had been lucky, but nothing about finding himself back aboard the Oceanus struck Edgar as fortunate.
In the distance, he heard screaming, a great chorus of wails that echoed and multiplied throughout the ship.
The feeding frenzy.
He still had the radio and the spare pair of goggles he had stuffed into his pockets, and he tried the former vainly, begging the static and the silence to send the chopper back for him.
His father was listening, Edgar was sure of it. He was also sure that Charles Rennick was a man of his word. The chopper would return at sunrise, and it would return for the sated vampires alone. Nothing else would be considered, not even Charles’ own sons. The pact was too important.
Edgar was on his own.
He considered suicide, of course.
Didn’t have it in him.
He even considered offering himself up to the vampires, while they were still satisfying their centuries-old hunger. They might even give him a quick death.
Not an option.
For once in his life, Edgar Rennick, the born leader, the man of singular purpose who always knew what to do next, drifted aimlessly around the top deck of the dark ship, wracked by indecision. Only when it dawned on him that Herb might still be alive down there somewhere, locked up in the security suite, maybe, did Edgar decide that he had a purpose after all.
He would find his little brother.
Hell, maybe Herb would know what to do next.
If it hadn’t been for the inferno blazing in his right leg, Edgar thought he might have laughed at that.
He descended toward the park warily, occasionally stepping into the deep shadows to let some runners rush by him. Escapees from the massacre at the park, fleeing to find somewhere to hide.
They were merely prolonging their agony. Better to encounter a hungry vampire than a satisfied one. The satisfied ones, well, they tended to pursue their darker urges.
When he reached the restaurant level, Edgar made his way to the kitchen of
Les Aventure
, one of the Oceanus’ more pompous dining areas, and sought out blades, though he held little hope of being able to defend himself. The only way to deal with the vampires was to evade them. If you got close enough to swing a knife, they had almost certainly already shredded your mind.
There was every chance Edgar would end up using the knives on himself, instructed to mutilate his own body, just as the woman in Brighton had been. It didn’t matter. Holding a weapon was better than the alternative. And if he ran into security—the man who fired so accurately at the chopper, perhaps—he might be grateful that he was carrying a knife or two.
He was still in the restaurant when he noticed the man and the woman heading toward him uncertainly, and it seemed like maybe Edgar had received some good fortune, after all. The woman wore a security uniform, which made her his best chance of finding Herb.
So Edgar watched, and waited, until finally the time came to speak to them.
He ran through a number of options; different stories he could fabricate to get their help, each one escalating in implausibility.
In the end, he settled on the truth.
After all, revealing the great secret to these people would hardly matter. Not when their life expectancy could be measured in hours at most.
*
In the end, Dan simply went along with it because he was too damn weary and frightened to ask the questions that crowded in his mind.
Vampires. Sure. So what? It made as much sense as any other explanation he could conjure up. The truth was that it didn't matter what the creatures stalking the ship were. It might matter later, but for now the only thing that mattered to Dan was getting to Elaine and the limping man—whether he had answers or not—was getting in the way.
They had moved through the restaurant quickly, and that was mainly down to Edgar's intervention. The candles, it turned out, were largely unnecessary. Edgar was wearing a pair of nightvision goggles, and he had a spare.
That raised a whole lot more questions in Dan's mind, not least about the design of the goggles: they didn't look anything like the bulky, straight-from-a-secret agent-movie versions that he'd seen on television. The goggles that Edgar passed to Dan looked more like they were designed for swimming. Just regular old safety glasses to keep the chlorinated water out of your eyes.
Yet the picture they delivered was clear. Bathed in shades of green, Dan suddenly saw the restaurant as if it were lit by floodlights.
Dan had heard that the military had access to technology that could be decades in advance of the stuff available to the average consumer. Which would make Edgar a government official of some sort. Maybe he
was
a secret agent, and this is what spy equipment actually looked like.
More questions, and no time to ask them.
The goggles were a huge help, but actually being able to see...well, in some ways Dan could have lived without that after all.
The restaurant had been turned into a slaughterhouse. Strewn across the tables and piled on the floor he saw chunks of meat that had very little to do with the ex-TV chef whose name was above the door. Not unless the guy's specialty involved matted hair and teeth.
Dan guessed that the restaurant had been full, and nobody had made it out. The floor was slick and dark with blood, and the parts of bodies that he was able to recognise indicated that a lot of people had died there.
Some of them—the ones whose bodies were still mostly intact—looked like they had killed themselves. Dan saw a ghostly green image of a smartly dressed elderly lady, who appeared to be sitting quietly at her table, with a plate of food undisturbed in front of her. From Dan's viewpoint she looked unharmed, and for a moment he thought that maybe she had survived somehow, and was sitting there in shock.
When he moved in front of her, he saw the cutlery that she had buried deep into her own eye sockets. The handle of an ornate fork, plunged so far into her head that Dan thought the tines were probably embedded in the back of her skull.
His stomach wanted to retch again, but there was nothing left in there to bring up.
They left the dining room and entered the kitchen, which featured the same bloodstains, but little in the way of actual bodies. Just a single severed head, sitting in a frying pan, as if it had been deliberately placed there. Some sort of twisted joke.
Dan snatched up a hefty-looking cleaver from a magnetic chrome rack that held numerous blades, and headed back out into the dining room, carefully avoiding looking at the obscenity in the pan.
Edgar and Katie followed him seconds later, both brandishing huge knives, and they picked their way across the corpses littering the dining room in silence.
He was glad when they left the restaurant, heading out into a wide corridor lined with expensive-looking artwork. Even the hallways on the Oceanus had been given luxurious purpose: this one had been turned into a gallery of sorts.
It was, thankfully, almost devoid of bodies.
They paused there for a moment, Katie clutching a trembling candle to stave off the darkness, while Dan and Edgar used the goggles to see further afield.
"All clear," Dan said.
He watched for a moment as Edgar pushed a bench up against the doors they had just used to exit the restaurant.
"We need a plan," Edgar said, when he was satisfied that nothing could attack them from behind, and he sat heavily on the bench, clutching at his injured leg.
"We have a plan," Dan said. "I’m going to find my wife."
Edgar nodded.
"I’m here to find my brother," he said, and turned to Katie. "Did you see him in the security suite? A little shorter than me, rarely shuts up. Goes by the name of Herb?"
Katie shook her head.
"We were the only people left in security," she said.
Edgar’s shoulders slumped.
"Then we have to go to the engine room," Edgar said. "There’s a good chance he’ll still be there."
"I
said
I'm going to find my wife," Dan said stubbornly, and was surprised to find he meant it. Edgar was far larger than Dan, and even while the big man was sitting down, Dan felt like Edgar towered over him somehow. He looked athletic, and exuded the sort of confidence that had always made Dan shrivel, but apparently not anymore. More than anything, what Edgar represented, was an obstacle.
"Your wife is dead," Edgar said flatly.
Dan balled up a fist, and wondered if he had it in him to swing it. Almost.
"You don't know that," he barked.
Edgar sighed.
"You're right," he said. "There is every chance she is still alive, but she won't be for long. You've noticed how the screaming has stopped?"
Dan nodded.
"That's because the vampires have cleared the park, and probably the decks around it, too. There will be a few people left, hiding, but right now those things are moving through the ship and tearing through everything they find. They'll be in the cabins, or in the lower decks. There will be plenty of screaming going on down there, I think. Once they are done with that, the fun will begin for them. Hunting down the stragglers. Like us."
Edgar paused, letting his words settle for a moment.
"Things are going to get a lot fucking worse when they've finished feeding," he said. "They've been in hibernation for a long time. Got to wake up starving from that, I'd say. So, step one would be feeding, right? Step two, well, I'm thinking that might be
entertainment
."
Dan hated that word as it left Edgar's lips; despised it for the way it managed to open up a new well of horror and fear inside him.
"I'm just letting you know the reality of the situation," Edgar said with a shrug. "My brother is here somewhere. Same as your wife. But look around you. This is far worse than I imagined. It might be for the best if they are both already dead. Because the ones left alive won't get quick deaths, not when these things have got full bellies."
Dan stared at Edgar, and said nothing, but his mind was full of the sudden certainty that Edgar was hiding something. The conviction in the man’s words, which hadn’t shaken once when he talked about vampires existing, wobbled, just a little, and Dan caught it.
Edgar was not a man to be trusted.
"We can't fight them," Edgar said in a low voice. "So how can we possibly
save
anybody?"
"Bullshit," Dan said quietly. "These things are animals. You can call them vampires, but I'm betting if they catch something like this," he hefted the cleaver, "in the neck, they'll die just like anything else."
Jesus Dan, would you listen to yourself? Have you lost your mind?
"Maybe," Edgar said with a thin smile. "If you could get close enough. But there is a lot more at stake here than you know. Getting off the ship is one thing, but if we actually harm any of the vampires, well...it could have severe repercussions. For the whole world."