Carpathia (24 page)

  Blackness beckoned from beyond.

 
 

 
 
 

Quin thumbed on the flashlight the doctor had given him but kept it aimed at the floor. He didn't want to alert anyone inside to where he was, although he guessed that it might already be too late. To anyone inside the hold beyond, he would be silhouetted in the doorway. He might as well have placed a target on his chest.

  "Can vampires see in the dark?" he asked Lucy in hushed tones.

  She shrugged at him as if to say, "How would I know?"

  Quin sucked at his teeth, then brought the flashlight's beam up to see what lay before them. It cut through the inky blackness and illuminated along its length parts of a hold almost as large as the first one they'd entered. No stairwell ran through the center of this one though. All Quin could see were the remains of wooden crates someone had smashed open, letting their contents spill across the floor.

  "What was in those?" Lucy whispered as she moved past him and entered the room beyond. Her soft footsteps echoed with a hollow metal sound.

  Quin shrugged as he joined her, leaving the door open behind them. He shone the light into one of the broken crates. "Whatever it was, it was packed in dirt."

  "No," Lucy said, her voice tightening with every word. "I don't think the dirt was the packing. It was the contents."

  Quin froze as he realized what she meant. The crates they saw spilled open all around them – countless numbers of them crushed together so that he couldn't tell where one ended and another began – they weren't just crates.

  They were coffins.

  Lucy gasped. "God," she said. "How– how many of them are there?"

  "I don't know." Quin swept the flashlight's beam around the room. Everywhere he turned it, he spotted more of the destroyed crates. "What did this?"

  "Don't you mean who?" Lucy crept closer to Quin. He was sure she would have clutched at his arm if she hadn't still been holding her crucifix and stake.

  "Do you think they were smashed open from the inside, or did someone else do this? And if so, who?"

  "That's not what concerns me the most at the moment," Lucy said, her words barely louder than her breath.

  "What's more important than that?"

  "If there were vampires in those boxes," she said, trembling through her resolve, "then where are they now?"

  Quin shuddered at the thought of so many of the violent, bloodsucking creatures infesting the ship. If they were loose, did the people aboard the
Carpathia
have even a ghost of a chance of survival? To think that the survivors of the
Titanic
had already endured so much, and had now to suffer through this, boggled Quin's mind. He found it hard to believe that a loving God would permit such things to happen.

  Quin brought the flashlight up to see if there were any hatches that let into this hold. He knew there had to be – at least originally, according to the shipbuilders' intent – but he didn't see any sign of them at first. Then he spotted them both.

  There were two of them set into the room's high ceiling, both painted black and closed up tight. Quin played the light's beam across them and between them, trying to find their edges. As he did, he spotted something hanging in the rafters that held up the deck above the hold.

  "What is that?" Lucy asked as Quin held the beam on one of the dangling things. It seemed like someone had tied a sack of something long and heavy to one of the rafters and left it to hang there like a drying side of beef.

  Quin peered at it, moving closer as he focused on it. It took him a long time to realize just what it and the others hanging all around it in other parts of the rafters were, because it was upside down. Then he realized that the thing was a person.

  "Lucy." Quin reached back with his arm to guide her toward the still-open door. "We need to leave here. Now."

  "What is it?" she said, still not understanding. "What are those things?"

  "They're people, Luce."

  She choked back a gasp. "Are they vampires – or victims?"

  Quin shone the light back up into the rafters again. He couldn't tell for sure. Maybe they were both.

  "What time is it?" Lucy asked. "Has the sun come up yet?"

  It was Quin's turn to shrug helplessly. His watch had been damaged the night the
Titanic
sank. He'd hoped to replace it in New York – assuming he managed to survive that long.

  "It's possible, I suppose," he said. "Do you think they're just sleeping?"

  "If they are, then they're vampires. If not, they're dead instead." She groaned. "I'm not sure which would frighten me more."

  Quin turned the light straight up, and it fell upon a man wrapped in a weathered coat, hanging from the rafters by his ankles. As the beam struck him, the man winced, much in the way of someone cringing when the lights were turned on in a bedroom so early that the sky was still dark outside. The man craned back his neck and opened his eyes to stare down at the light.

  Quin had never in his life felt as much like prey as he did at that moment. The man stared down at him, temporarily confused, but with awareness growing in his soulless, dark eyes.

  "Now." Quin turned and ushered Lucy toward the doorway. "Now, now, now."

  Lucy moved fast, her heels clacking against the steel floor as she went. Quin wanted to gather her up in his arms and run, but that would mean dropping the flashlight and the stake in his hands. He didn't want to leave them so defenseless.

  When they were mere feet away from the door, Quin heard something large and light rustle above him, and the man he'd seen on the ceiling flipped down to land in front of them, standing directly between them and the open doorway. The man hissed at them like an angry snake and drew back his lips to expose long fangs sprouting from his mouth.

  "Where do you think you're going, little dogies?" the man said. He stood tall and broad, with a square chin and long, lanky hair, and he spoke in a Yankee accent that Quin couldn't quite place. "Didn't anyone ever tell you it's rude to enter someone else's bunkhouse without an invitation?"

 
 

 
 
 

Lucy thrust out her crucifix before her, and the vampire standing between her and Quin and the door flinched. "Get back, you filthy beast!"

  The man put up his hands as if Lucy were holding a gun on him. "Now, just relax there, little lady. There's no need to pull those kinds of tricks around here. We're all harmless enough – once you get to know us."

  Quin slashed out with his stake and caught the man on the side of the head with it. He went down as if Quin had struck him with a club, collapsing to the floor in pain. Quin pushed Lucy toward the open doorway, a rectangle of light caught on the edge of the hold's pitch-blackness.

  He followed straight behind her, but as he stepped past the vampire who had accosted them, the man's hand snaked out and caught Quin around the ankle as fast and as hard as a whip.

  "You think it's that easy to beat me?" The man stood up and hauled Quin's feet out from underneath him as he went.

  Quin hit the steel deck hard, landing on his shoulder and rattling his bones. The stake fell from his hand, but he managed to keep a grip on the flashlight. He wondered if that meant that he'd at least be able to get a good look at the face of the man who was about to kill him.

  "Damn, you folks reek," the vampire said, screwing his face tight as he yanked Quin upside down into the air and held him there, dangling from one ankle. "And the living say the dead smell bad."

  It was the garlic around his neck, Quin knew. Hanging around his neck, it must have been far enough away that the vampire hadn't minded it when he was laid out on the floor, but now that the tables had turned, the rope of the pungent spice disgusted the creature.

  Quin kicked out with his free foot and caught the vampire in the chin with his heel. That only served to enrage the man, who squeezed Quin's ankle tight enough to make him holler out in pain. "Run, Luce!" he shouted straight after that.

  Quin couldn't say he wasn't afraid of dying, but having brushed so close with death during the sinking of the
Titanic
, he'd become accustomed to the idea that it didn't bother him as much as he once thought it would. At that moment, his greatest fear wasn't that some man-sized tick would feed on his blood but that the same thing might happen to Lucy. As terrified as he was for himself, he felt far more fear for her.

  Quin wanted nothing more than to see the door that led out of the room slammed shut and locked tight. If that meant that Lucy would get away clean, he could stomach having his only avenue of escape cut off. It would have been a small price to pay. Instead, he heard Lucy rush toward them, her heels clacking out a furious beat.

  "No!" Quin said. "Leave me! Run!"

  Lucy stabbed at the vampire with her stake, but he batted it aside with his free hand. As he indulged in a rough chuckle at Lucy's efforts, he gave Quin a good shake that rattled his eyes in their sockets.

  He stopped laughing when Lucy smacked him across the cheek with her crucifix.

  The vampire dropped Quin and clutched his hands to his face, screaming in pain and staggering away from her. Quin snatched up the flashlight and his own stake and scrambled to his feet. He grabbed Lucy by the hand and darted for the door, but rather than joining him, she held fast, her feet rooted to the floor.

  "Lucy!" Quin pulled at her arm again, but she stood there aghast at the man she'd attacked. Quin had not looked back at the vampire after he'd dropped him. He brought his flashlight up to see what had fixed her attention so.

  The vampire had collapsed to his knees on the unforgiving floor and had taken to keening in a low voice that cracked as it rose and fell. Blood dripped through the man's fingers, which he held clutched over the side of his face where Lucy had struck him. He looked far older, his muscles frail now and his hair growing white. He glared at them both with baleful eyes gone pale with pain and hate.

  A rustling sound had started in the rafters overhead. It began as a whisper and grew steadily from there into a full-throated roar. Quin pointed the flashlight upward and saw the other creatures who'd been hanging upside down moving about now, rousing themselves from their slumber.

  "We need to leave here, Luce." Quin grabbed her by the shoulders and spoke straight into her face. "Now!"

  Luce stared at him in blank horror until something fluttered through the air overhead. This startled her and brought her back to herself. Without a word, she charged straight for the open doorway, and Quin had to sprint to catch up with her.

  As they reached the doorway, Quin paused to let Lucy go through first. As he did, he heard something hiss behind him and felt a clawed hand slash down. The sharp talons sliced open the shoulder of his jacket but did not penetrate his skin.

  He ducked down lower and dove through the door. Lucy slammed it shut behind him, then turned the key that was still in its lock and threw the deadbolt that would keep it sealed.

  Something strong or heavy – maybe both – slammed into the steel door from the other side. Despite the violence with which it had been struck, Quin hoped that the door would hold. It was made of steel as thick as the bulkhead that separated the hold from the rest of the ship, designed to hold back thousands of pounds of water pressure in case the chamber beyond flooded.

  Of course, Quin reflected, he'd thought the bulkheads in the
Titanic
would have held and kept the ship from sinking too, and he'd clearly been wrong about that. Something slammed into the door again, and he grabbed Lucy's arm and took several steps back.

  Quin took the rope of garlic from around his neck and tore it into two separate lengths. He hung the first over the lintel of the door before him, then raced over to the other door in the bulkhead and did the same.

  "Why did you use all of yours?" Lucy said. "We could each have hung a rope over a door."

  "Which would have left us with none at all for ourselves," Quin said. She tried to offer him her garlic, but he waved her off. "Keep it. Yours served you better than mine did."

  The doors shook as something hit each of them, shaking the entire bulkhead. Quin couldn't imagine the vampires would be able to knock them down, but he feared to think what might happen if they got free. Eventually they'd find a way out, and the entire ship would be in danger if they did.

  Quin took Lucy's hand again and headed for the stairwell that led straight up out of the hold they were in. "We can't do this," he said. "We need to find help."

  "What if they break free while we're gone?" Lucy asked.

  "I don't know," said Quin, "but I'm sure of one thing. We'd be better off not being here when it happens."

 
 

 
 
 

"This is complete and utter madness," Captain Rostron said to Quin and Lucy.

  "Captain, sir," Lucy said, "I know how crazed it sounds, but you must believe us."

  Quin leaped in to back her up. "You have an infestation of vampires in your aftmost hold, and if you don't do something about it soon, they're bound to get free and slaughter every man, woman, and child on the entire ship."

  The captain nodded along as Quin spoke. Then he gestured toward Quin and Lucy and looked to Mr Crooker. "Get these people off my deck."

  Crooker hesitated. "Are you sure, sir?"

  Rostron's face fell. "Dear God, not you too. First Doctor Cherryman comes to me with some cockamamie story straight out of a dime novel, and now you don't have the sense to question the outlandish tale these young fools have brought me? I had thought of you as a professional, man."