Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon (21 page)

Out at the edges of vision, the curving outer hull of the vessel formed the limits of the alien-seeming space. Looking off at it, Sarah could see the shape of what must be the cargo elevator, sticking inelegantly out of the bulkhead. The whole place was damp and stuffy, and the proximity of the power-plant that turned the ship’s screws made for an indistinct, whale-like noise – something between a humming and a keening – that rose and fell gently, depending on where you stood.

The three of them, sailor, scientist, and ex-cop, padded carefully down one of the bigger length-wide aisles in a short column, making their way toward the stern. As they passed intersecting rows, heading deeper and deeper into this jungle, Sarah and Park couldn’t help peering off into the jumbled darkness to either side, looking for they knew not what – but muscles involuntarily coiling and pupils dilated.

At one point, Park stopped dead, causing Sarah to nearly bump into him. Neck twisted and craning off to the right, he'd seen something move – something big. His eyes like saucers, he saw a flash of gray disappearing round the corner.

“What?” Sarah asked, sounding urgent.

“Just a rat,” Park said, his breathing fast and shallow. “But it was a rat the size of a cat.” Finally, he turned and started walking forward again.

Eventually, they reached what felt an awful lot like the very back of the carrier – and, as it was impossible to forget, also the very bottom of it. Along the rear bulkhead was a line of hatches at close intervals, most of them shut, a few standing ajar. The open ones were pitch black inside.

Dietz led them down the row, checking compartment numbers, and glancing at his clipboard. “This is it,” he finally said. The hatch they stopped at was closed. Dietz undogged it, then pulled at the latch. It resisted him at first, then finally swung open with a creak. As it did, a six-inch-high wave of liquid rushed out, soaking them to the ankles. It drained away quickly, spilling out into the dark space around them.

Dietz wrinkled his nose, then squatted down. Looking back up at Park, he said, “I’m afraid that may be your benzene right there.”

Sarah and Park traded looks. He seemed a little disappointed; but mainly he looked on edge. The spookiness of this place was obviously building up and having a growing effect on him. But Dietz just straightened up, smiled, and shifted his grip on the flashlight.

“C’mon,” he said. “Hopefully some of the jugs are still intact. Let’s have a look.”

He disappeared inside.

* * *

Drake, Handon, and Fick sidled up to the back of the growing knot of spectators at the end of the angle deck. Directly ahead of them was a group of young enlisted guys, clearly all together, chatting and joking. They were a bit too obviously displaying the day-away jollity of being off duty, out in the open air – and watching and waiting for the excitement of the British plane coming in to land.

For some reason, their clowning seemed slightly to annoy Fick. He shoved the back of one of them and said, “Knock it off.” When the young sailor turned and looked at him, Fick glared and said, “Seriously. I have PTSD. I’m legally allowed to kill three enlisted personnel a year.”

Drake looked sidelong at him and said, “Jesus, Fick. You can’t talk to people like that.”

Fick straightened up, and pulled at the crotch of his fatigues. “Sure I can. I’m a senior NCO in the United States Marine Corps. I can say any damn thing I want. Hell, it’s expected. Here, watch this.” He tapped at the shoulder of another one of the sailors, a short and very thin guy, who actually looked like a little kid dressed up in his dad’s uniform. “Hey, seaman,” Fick said. “Be careful. You get any skinnier, you’re gonna fall through your own ass and choke to death.”

Handon sputtered with barely restrained laughter.

Now that the poor kid was turned around looking at them, he seemed even younger. Fick looked concerned. He said, “Your mother know you’re here, Seaman?”

“Yes, Master Gunny.”

Fick seemed to take a second to consider that. “She know you’re staying the night?”

With this, both Handon and Drake lost it.

Screw it
, thought Drake, shaking his head. He knew what Fick was like. He’d always known. And he couldn’t fire the man, or even discipline him, even if he wanted to. It wasn’t just that Fick was indispensable. It was that some guys were so good at what they did, they got a pass on everything else. Life had always been like that.

Handon felt the deck rumbling, and looked back over his shoulder. One of those big flight-deck tractors had just been brought up on an aircraft elevator, and was now rolling slowly toward them, waiting for the crowd to make way in front of it. Handon recognized it as part of the standard equipment of the red-shirted firefighting and crash-and-salvage crews. One of these was always on hand for every aircraft recovery.

Though Handon couldn’t say for sure why.

* * *

Dr. Simon Park stared mutely down at his shirt as tiny dark-red circles of blood began to appear and then grow, seeping out and staining the fabric – both at the outside edge of his waist, and on the inside of his left arm, just below the elbow. He couldn’t feel any pain.

He couldn’t really feel anything.

Looking up again, dazed, puzzled, he could see Sarah Cameron’s strong back and shoulders struggling against the outside of the storage room’s hatch, which bucked and vibrated with the furious, mindless, implacable force being hurled at it from within. Aside from the scrape of the big metal hatch going in and out of its frame, and the inhuman hissing, Park could also just make out something else, underneath all that – quiet but horrifyingly audible.

A wet, gurgling noise – desperate, pleading.

Finally Park realized what it was. It was the sound of a man trying to breathe with his throat torn out. And it was the sound of him trying to cry for help – for someone, anyone, to please come and help him.

Ten seconds ago, life had been just fine, and just like real life is supposed to be – not like this horror movie that had spun up all around them, too quickly for anyone to track, and too bizarre to feel real. And also much too fast for Park to react to.

His mind, overloaded, was closing down.

Though, at the same time, some small, alert, struggling part of his consciousness, way down beneath the surface, was also speaking to him – speaking in the voice of the Alpha operators. But he couldn’t make out what it said. It was too quiet, too weak, beaten down by the soul-scraping noises coming from inside that room, and by the nightmare violence that fought against the hatch, which was the only thing between it and them.

Finally, the little whisper of the voice faded to silence.

And Simon Park’s mind shut down.

Little Wet Noises

JFK
Stores [10 Seconds Earlier]

“Hmm,” Dietz had said, puzzlement in his voice. “That’s weird. I guess I can see how these might have got knocked over in the battle.” He was kneeling at the center of a tiny cone of light, at the foot of some metal shelving, inside the otherwise dark storage room. Liquid still pooled on the deck up to the soles of his boots. And he was holding an empty gallon jug, which had been ripped open somehow, and was now empty of all but a few drops of the benzene fluid it had held.

During all this, Park stood in the doorway, with Sarah about two feet inside the dark room. They watched Dietz move around in the thin glare of the flashlight, which Sarah was holding for him.

When Dietz held up the deeply scored, nearly shredded jug, Sarah squinted at it – and in the next heartbeat backed away toward Park, shielding him with her body, touching him behind her with her left hand, never turning away.

One heartbeat was all she had.

Because in the next, a humanoid figure rose up from the shadows deeper inside the room, from around the corner, and fell on Dietz like a wrecking ball. Before he could raise a hand to defend himself, before he could make a sound, it had torn his throat out and spat it in his lap. Blood shined in the wobbling light as it flowed freely over Dietz’s torso and soaked his jumpsuit. Neither Park nor Sarah really saw what had done this yet – it was all just motion and violence and shadows, a vague impression of malevolence and brute physical force.

But then the thing turned toward them. It tensed, crouched – and emitted that blood-freezing, unrelentingly evil shriek that Park had not heard since his nightmare run through the surface streets of Chicago. Both he and Sarah knew what it meant, and both knew what was going to happen next: the Foxtrot was only a few feet from them, and when it leapt, unleashing that horrific coiled energy, the two of them would go down under its flailing, crushing weight, and its slashing teeth and nails.

And then they would be gone.

But it wouldn’t be fast, and it wouldn’t be pleasant.

But then, instead of feeling it crash into them, they felt the room exploding in noise and light.

Park felt something tug at his waist, and his arm.

And the undead nightmare facing them spun around again, back toward Dietz – who somehow hadn’t died yet, and had managed to unsling and discharge his shotgun. He had been able to fire it – he just hadn’t been able to aim it, hitting Park instead of his own killer. But the crushing noise that overloaded the air did cause the creature to stay its leap – and instead turn and fall again on Dietz, who made little noises that would haunt Park’s dreams until the day he died.

Which, if that was going to be today, it at least wasn’t going to be right this second. Because Sarah used the time Dietz bought them to shove Park out the entrance, dash out behind him, and begin swinging the heavy hatch closed.

But that implacable force slammed into it before she could get it sealed, much less locked. And now the two of them, one living, one dead, one desperate, one frenzied, struggled on either side of the hinged steel plate. If it got the hatch open, she and Park were dead. If she got it closed, they might live.

Sweat popping out of her pores, Sarah put her back and legs into it. Drawing a deep, labored breath, she gasped at Park: “
A little help…
”

Mind shut down, bleeding, body numb and affectless, Park was somehow able to spin back up just enough to obey this instruction. He piled into the hatch beside her, not on the side where blue-tinted hands slapped and pushed and flailed in the crack between hatch and frame, but on the other, near the hinges. And he tried to feel what it might mean for him to have and to apply strength.

Slowly, by millimeters, the two of them shrank the dark crack, fighting the hatch into place. Sarah moved one hand onto the latch. If they managed to move it those last fractions of an inch, she could seal it. And whatever advantages the dead son of a bitch on the other side had in inhuman strength, and single-minded malevolence, and frantic, spasmodic urgency…

It couldn’t fucking well open doors.

The crack disappeared to almost nothing. Sarah steeled herself for one last effort, signaling Park with her eyes. She grunted as if in the last rep of a free-weight superset, and she heaved.

Inside, the shotgun went off again. Sparks leapt from the inside of the frame. And pain shot through Sarah’s right hand.

All just as the hatch had finally slammed shut.

Sarah turned the latch, pushing through the pain she felt.

Nothing. The hatch wouldn’t dog.

Because the latch had just been shot off. Or maybe only damaged. Or maybe it was Sarah’s hand that had been shot off. She looked down to check. It was still there. And it had turned the latch. But the mechanism didn’t engage.

Thanks, Dietz
, Sarah thought.
Thanks for nothing.

* * *

Fick looked up at the descending plane. Thicker clouds were starting to roll in behind it. Almost, he thought, as if the Brits were bringing the bad weather with them. The clouds were close, but the plane itself was actually still a ways out.

“Okay,” Fick said to the others. He’d had his fun with the young sailors ahead of them, and no longer cared to wait around. “That was amusing, but I”ve got work to do.” He nodded, turned, and shouldered his way back out of the crowd.

Drake nodded back, then checked his watch, wondering where the hell Dr. Park was. He’d made it very clear the scientist was expected up top to greet their new arrivals.

Handon checked his own watch, and wondered why Sarah hadn’t gotten Park here yet. It definitely wasn’t like her to be late. But then he had to catch himself.
What the hell do I know?
He had to keep reminding himself that he’d only known the woman for a few days.

But still. He knew it definitely wasn’t like her to be late.

* * *

Dilemma.

The choice between competing alternatives, where the outcome of either choice is likely to be undesirable. Or catastrophic. Or perhaps fatal.

Nearly a hundred feet beneath the feet of the crowd thronging the flight deck, Sarah Cameron, her back pressed to the hatch, had only just clocked Park’s wounds – while for the time being ignoring her own, and keeping both hands and her full weight pressed against the hatch.

Dilemma.

Did she let Park bleed out? Or did she let the door go? Both options were impossible. But then the dilemma unexpectedly resolved itself. From inside the compartment, she could now hear what could only be the sounds of… the thing eating Dietz.

And he still wasn’t dead.

But he would be very soon. Which at least meant he wouldn’t be firing that fucking shotgun anymore. Later, Sarah would have the time and luxury to feel remorse for such an inhuman thought not only passing through her head, but nearly making her laugh. Still, it was hard to deny that the shotgun hadn’t been working out well for them.

And as Sarah slowly let her weight off the hatch… it stayed in place, closed. It still wasn’t dogged. But it also wasn’t being heaved at from the other side anymore. For now, the Foxtrot was further inside, presumably down on the deck, tearing and gorging on fresh lab tech.

And Dietz was making tiny little wet noises, like a baby mouse being played with by a cat. Equally helpless. And equally horrifying to hear.