Beauty & the Beast (24 page)

He let out a scream and staggered backwards, clutching at his face.

Cat front kicked, aiming for center chest, his vagus nerve—and instant paralysis—but he blocked and deflected with an elbow and forearm. The force of the kick only pushed him further away from her.

Holding his arms up defensively, he shook his head to clear it. He circled the furniture in retreat.

Lightning flashed.

A second later thunder rolled. So close she could feel the rumble inside her chest.

When Cecilio brushed his face, pink, rain-diluted blood dripped from his fingers.

She tried another kick, but he kept out of reach.

He was looking around at the floor, obviously trying to locate the gun that had slid under the chaise lounge.

“Your sister will die,” he said. “Even if I kill you and find the chip, I will not make the call.”

It was a desperation ploy on his part. He was trying to force her to act in anger, and to make a mistake.

She feinted a drop-down move for the gun, but instead of reaching under the chaise, she jumped onto the elevated platform, complete with its own set of springs, and vaulted off, throwing everything she had into a flying kick. She had him dead to rights, but as she jumped the ship climbed a big swell. Cecilio lurched sideways, and she sailed past her target, hit the wet stone floor and skidded. She crashed into one of the chairs, slipping on the deck before she regained her feet.

Behind her, Cecilio had already overturned the chaise, bent over, and was wrapping his fingers around the gun.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The panicking passengers slowed Vincent’s progress toward his designated muster station. As the ocean liner yawed sickeningly, he steadied himself on a handrail, out of the wind and spray. He couldn’t see more than a dozen yards into the darkness. In his head he tried to calculate the height of a wave necessary to make a ship this big roll like that. The storm was intensifying. The bow slowly swung into the gale force wind, meeting the huge jumbled waves head on. Wind-driven rain, freezing cold, sheeted down the teak deck; it was like standing in a free-flowing creek. Vincent was soaked to the skin. People in hot orange life jackets huddled together at their lifeboat stations under rows of spotlights. Faces bloodlessly pale, they looked doomed. It was their worst nightmare come true.

His too.

He couldn’t help but visualize the crew suited-up in their foul weather gear piling them all into the lifeboats and then lowering them into the churning maelstrom of the Pacific. As a physician—or a beast—he could do little about it, except to try his best to keep alive as many of his fellow passengers as possible, for as long as possible in the hope that sooner or later rescuers would arrive.

Finally he reached his destination but Bethany, her father, and the bodyguard were not there. He went up to the frightened crewman in charge of their station, who was holding tightly to a bullhorn and saying, “Please, do not panic! The situation is under control!”

“Have you seen Forrest Daugherty and his daughter?” Vincent shouted at him. “And their bodyguard?”

The man shook his head. “I’m sure they’ll be along shortly, Mr…”

“Keller. I’m Dr. Keller,” Vincent said.

“Oh, Dr. Keller.” A stout woman wearing glasses raised her hand. “The girl told me to let you know that they went to get Sprinkles and they’ll be right back.”

He stared at her in horror. “Her father? Went down there?” He turned to the crewman. “Where the fire is?”

“Sir,” the man said, “I’m sure they will be right back.” But he lowered the bullhorn, at a complete loss.

“If my wife comes, tell her that I went after them, all right?” Vincent asked the woman. “Her name is Catherine.”

“All right.” The woman nodded. He could see that she was trying very hard not to panic.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said, and she gave him a weak little smile.

Vincent ducked under a steel arch, out of the screaming wind, and through a doorway to the nightclub where Fidela had sung. Under the still-turning glitter ball, rows of padded chairs were deserted. Wheeled beverage carts had been left overturned. Hawaiian hors d’oeuvres, serving trays, linen, and silverware were strewn over the plush carpet. The wait staff had disappeared.

The ship climbed another towering sea and he had to brace himself or slide across the carpet along with the dishes and glassware.

Then the heavy door to the stairwell on his left banged open. A crowd of men stumbled out—the ship’s fire response team. He counted ten. They were wearing black Nomex suits with oxygen tanks, protective hoods, and full-face breathing masks. When they took their hoods off, their eyes looked exhausted, dulled by shock. He had seen the look more than once when he’d been a firefighter in New York and knew what it meant: The fire had the upper hand and it wasn’t going to let go. As far as he was concerned, that changed nothing.

“There are three people missing,” Vincent said as he stepped up to them. “One has a serious heart condition. I think they went down to the Deck Four hold to free their pet.”

“Really dumb idea,” one of the fire crew said.

The ship lifted and dropped and Vincent’s stomach flew up into his throat. He frowned at the man, feeling a dangerous spark of anger, but stifled it. Although he had heard good things about the professionalism of cruise ship fire crews in general, he wondered about this one’s training and experience level. A real fire on a real ship was a different sort of animal than a few days putting out staged fires on a classroom ship in dry dock—Vincent knew that from experience on the Hudson River. The confined spaces. The combustible and toxic materials. The walls of steel that could not be cut with an axe. This crew might be in way over their heads.

“Dumb or not,” he said, “they need to be rescued. How do I reach them?”

The crewman who was in charge stepped forward. “These elevators are no longer functional. They automatically shut down during a fire. If you want to get down you’ll have to take the stairs like we did.”

Vincent turned for the stairwell door. A gloved hand on his arm stopped him. Stenciled lettering on the man’s fire suit read C
APTAIN
. He glowered into the crew chief’s weather-seamed face.

“I don’t see how they could have made it down to Deck Four using the stairway,” the man said. “That’s below the level of the fire, as far as we could tell.”

Another crewman offered, “Unless they made it down before the elevator shut down, or detoured around the fire, used a different staircase…”

Vincent shrugged off the restraining hand.

“Is this the fastest way down?” he said. “That’s what I need to know.”

“You can’t go down those stairs,” the chief said emphatically. “You won’t survive two minutes without a fire suit. The fire is out of control. We couldn’t make a dent in it.”

“Where is it centered?”

“Just aft of here. Somewhere on Decks Seven or Eight. Couldn’t find the exact starting point. Couldn’t get that close. Too hot, even for these suits.”

“How do you know where it started if you didn’t find it?” Vincent said.

“The ship still has engine and electrical power. If it started lower than that we’d already be dead in the water. In this kind of storm, trust me, no power means disaster.”

The chief took a breath, then he swiped his forehead with a palm. “This shouldn’t have happened. The fire suppression system totally failed. Which is impossible. It has built-in redundancies, duplicate automatic-sensing suppression systems. The fire should never have gotten this far out of control. I think someone tampered with the system.”

“What do you mean ‘tampered’?” Vincent said, his eyes narrowing.

“Some of the bulkhead doors were locked open, which allowed the fire to leapfrog. We couldn’t close them to seal it off—they were too hot. I think it was arson. I think there’s a terrorist on board, and he or she had the fire suppression weak points figured out. Unless there’s a miracle this ship is going to burn to the water line, capsize, and sink.”

“You’d better go back up top, sir,” another crewman said. “Pray your friends are up there too and that you just missed them in the confusion.”

“If someone was down on Deck Four they could still be alive,” Vincent said. “They could close themselves off in an airtight room away from the fire and theoretically survive until their oxygen ran out.”

“But that isn’t going to do them any good when the hull breaches and the ship goes down,” the chief shot back.

As if to punctuate the remark, the entire ship shuddered from the impact of a huge sea breaking over the bow.

Vincent made a decision. “Give me your suit,” he said to the nearest firefighter. “And the O-two tank.”

The crewman just stared at him.

“I was FDNY before nine-eleven. My brothers died in the Towers. Don’t make me ask twice…”

“You’re crazy,” the other man said. “You don’t know the layout of the ship. Going down there at this point is suicide.”

“Do it,” the chief barked. “Strip off your gear and hand it to him. The suit is no use to anyone now. How he wants to die is not our problem. We have to report to the captain.”

Vincent kicked off his shoes and climbed into the suit and zipped it up to the chin. It had built-in boots and gauntlets. It felt familiar and reassuring, like putting on body armor. He shouldered the air tank and pulled on the hood, which had a headlamp. As he shoved past them for the stairwell door he also took a battery-powered lantern from one of the men.

“Fair warning,” the chief told him, “you only have about twenty minutes of air left in that tank.”

“Save four seats in a lifeboat for us,” Vincent told him. “I’m not coming back empty-handed.” He pulled down the breathing mask and sucked in a lungful of canned air.

The man who had donated his fire suit said, “Good luck.”

Vincent didn’t answer, not even with a wave of acknowledgment; he was already pushing through the doorway. The door automatically slammed shut behind him. Through the insulated fireproof fabric he sensed the sudden increase in temperature. Heat rose—it was a simple fact of nature. He knew the stairwell doors were shut on the decks below him or it would have been a thousand times more intense. If the doors had been open, the well would be acting like a blast furnace chimney, drawing masses of heat and smoke upward.

It was impossible to keep his feet as he climbed down the first flight of stairs. He bounced between the handrails, and as the ship suddenly rose under him his knees buckled and he found his backside unceremoniously planted on the steps. Inside the suit he was already sweating heavily from the exertion and the heat. Smoke noticeably thickened as he descended the next flight, a choking haze seeping through hairline cracks from below and flowing up to meet him. He was thankful for the bottled air.

Vincent kept steadily climbing downward. He was getting a better feel for the motion of the ship. He could anticipate which way it would lurch and how far it would drop, so he could brace himself.

Three decks down, the headlamp revealed blistering and smoking paint on the inner walls of the stairwell. Steam rose from the step treads under his boots, mixing with the smoke. It was getting more and more difficult to see anything below him. And it was getting hotter. Sweat peeled down his face, his arms, and his back. His toes squished in his socks. He thought about his brothers on nine-eleven, the long flights of stairs they had never made it down. Then he caught himself and put it out of his mind.

Focus, stay focused. Keep moving. Less than twenty minutes of oxygen left.

How was he going to find Bethany, her father, and the bodyguard? Beast out and track them? To do that he’d have to take off the mask; he’d have to breathe the scorching air to pick up the scent. If he did that he’d last no more than fifteen seconds before succumbing, either to heat or smoke, or both. And he wasn’t sure his beast power would function as it usually did—could he even find a trail with so much signal clutter—heat, smoke, airborne debris—to filter through?

If Bethany, her father, and the bodyguard had three decks of insulation between them and the fire and had found a place to hide they were most likely still alive. If the fire had spread downward from Decks Eight and Seven, their chances of survival took a nosedive. If Deck Four was burning when he reached it, he couldn’t remove the breathing mask to beast out. Which raised the possibility that he might never find them in time, not in the heat and smoke, and the unfamiliar landscape. He thought about Cat, and all the other people he could help if he abandoned the search. When to turn back/who to try to save was a firefighter’s most difficult decision. For Vincent it had always been a gut call made at the last possible second. He put that out of his mind, too.

He continued down, but more slowly and deliberately because of the low visibility. Another step. Then another. At the next landing his skin felt like it was going to burst into flames inside the suit. Vincent kept on going. The painted sign indicating Deck Eight had burned away—he only knew what deck it was because he was keeping count. Under its blistering paint the steel wall glowed a dull lavender-red. The roar of the fire mixed with the squealing and groaning of expanding metal. And there were strings of small explosions, like firecrackers. Probably rivets popping free of their welds as the walls flexed; the rivets that held the ship together.

Had the fire crew been right? That unprotected, no one could survive the inferno? Vincent’s upper lip began to curl and a low rumble churned in the back of his throat. The urge to beast out became almost uncontrollable. He realized what was happening. The proximity of death was making the primal part of him want to fight back, to rampage against it with every ounce of fury he could muster. He knew how fast he could move in beast mode. Could he outrun fire? The heat of the fire? Could he cheat death?

The temperature seemed to diminish when he reached Deck Six. He wasn’t sure at first because it was still broiling inside the protective suit. By the next landing, the change was obvious: The smoke had definitely thinned. Timing his bursts of movement between the ship’s lurches and yaws, Vincent scrambled down the stairs and closed the distance to Deck Four.