The Raven (A Jane Harper Horror Novel) (31 page)

“Thanks,” I say, and then pull myself along the wire. The cable is strong but thin and freezing cold. My hands burn from cold after just a few pulls. But the downward angle of the taut wire also makes the going easy, and I’m quickly a quarter of the way across.

The cable suddenly bounces. I’m tossed back and forth, up and down. I squeeze my hands tight and clench my legs together. But I’m tired and beaten. My fingers spring loose from the cable and I fall back. My back arches painfully as my descent is quickly arrested by my secured belt.

Willem saved my life. Again.

“Sorry,” Willem says.

With a grunt, I pull myself back up and grip the cable. I look toward my feet and see Willem sliding toward me. The cable shook when he climbed on.

Okay, so he nearly killed me, too.

Not that he had much choice. There are three Draugar standing by the cable. They’re just staring at us right now, but that will soon change. The horde knows where we are and where we’re heading.

I redouble my effort and make decent time. Before I reach the bottom, the cable starts wobbling and shaking. I glance back, wondering if Willem is having trouble, but he’s almost caught up to me. It’s the Draugar. All three of them have taken to the cable and are clumsily pulling themselves along.

Ignoring our pursuers, and that my hands feel like they’ve been dipped in gasoline and set alight, I complete the journey and stop just before the harpoon gun to which the cable is attached. I unbuckle my belt and fall to the deck a few feet below. I pull myself aside in time to miss Willem’s drop to the deck. He frees himself from the cable so fast that I realize he didn’t bother buckling himself to the cable. He could have fallen at any time.

My body protests as I stand, but we’re far from safe. The Draugar giving chase have only covered half the distance, but they seem to have gotten the hang of it. They’ll be here soon. I draw my sword and swing it at the cable. A loud metallic
twang
rises up the wire, but the blade can’t cut it. My arms vibrate from the impact, and I nearly drop the sword.

My body is rebelling against me. I won’t be able to stay on my feet much longer. We need to get the hell out of here.

“Jane,” Willem says, and he actually grins. He takes his ax from his back and gently whacks a metal pin where the cable connects to the harpoon gun. The cable shoots free, springing away like it was fired from the cannon. The three Draugar fall without a sound.

With the cable detached, the
Raven
starts to drift backward, away from the conjoined fleet. “You know how to reverse out of the prop foul?”

I take the key from my pocket and toss it to Willem. He heads for the bridge. “My father taught me.”

Mention of his father sours my stomach. Jakob is still alive, hidden within the bowels of an infested cruise liner and perhaps just moments away from sacrificing his life to save ours.
Not just our lives
, I think.
He’s saving everyone on the damn planet.
That’s what I understood. That’s why I let him do it. Because if he hadn’t, I would’ve.

“C’mon,” Willem says when he reaches the stairs.

“Can’t,” I say, pointing my sword to the nearest ship, still within leaping distance. “We have company.”

Draugar approach from every direction.

Willem charges up the stairs without a word. If we don’t get out of reach, there’s no way I can stop that many, not even if I didn’t feel like I’d spent the day playing Roller Derby with a bunch of roid-raged women.

The
Raven
’s engines roar from beneath. The ship slowly inches backward. Willem needs to gently unravel the prop fouler line so that it falls away instead of just rewrapping around the prop in the other direction. It makes for slow going, but we
are
going.

Five Draugar, some of the healthiest looking I’ve seen thus far, reach the nearest ship. They leap out, arms outstretched, and smack into the side of the
Raven
. There are four splashes as the failed long jumpers drop into the ocean.

Four splashes.

I step closer and see the fifth zombie’s hands clinging to the lower rung of the forward rail. I lean over the rail and look down at the man. He’s athletic and strong and dressed in tight exercise clothes. Must have been working out when all hell broke loose. He looks up at me with fluid white eyes but doesn’t bother trying to climb up. He knows it’s no use. So he just stares. She’s watching me. The Queen is watching me.

“I know you can see me,” I say. “I know you can hear me.”

No reply. Just an angry scowl.

“I hope you like barbecue,” I say.

A hint of confusion emerges on the twisted face. When I grin, the scowl becomes a sneer. The man opens his mouth to retort on behalf of the networked Queen, but before a word can escape, I jab my sword into his skull. The hands go slack, and the Draugr falls into the dark ocean.

“And the last word goes to Jane Harper,” I say. The ship shakes from an impact. “Or not.”

Free of the prop-foul line, the
Raven
moves away from the glowing island of ships. Draugar gather along the outer fringe, staring at me. I’m tempted to flip them off, or perform Willem’s classic “cocksucker” gesture, but the ship is struck hard again.

The
Raven
’s exterior lights, including several spotlights aimed at the surrounding water, turn on. I run to the port bow harpoon and look over the rail. A passing humpback fin is caught in the glow of a spotlight. I turn the harpoon down and pull the trigger. The explosion of the firing harpoon and its exploding head shake the air just seconds apart. I duck away from the edge as water and whale meat slap against the hull. When I look again, the whale is gone, but chunks of flesh and a severed pectoral fin swirl in the bloodied water.

As Willem brings the ship about, I rush to the harpoon on the other side, searching for a target. I’m surprised when I find none. Where are the sperm whales? The blues? Their combined might could be enough to sink the
Raven
, and I’ve given the Queen every possible reason to unload the big guns without mercy.

The
buzz-whump, buzz-whump
sound of a small speedboat cutting through the waves tickles my ears. There’s another boat moving
out here. Wondering if the Draugar are giving chase, I search for the boat and find it on a collision course with the
Raven
.

I position the harpoon gun toward the ship and place my finger on the trigger. The motor is in the back, which I can’t see, or shoot, but the explosive-tipped spear should reduce the small craft to splinters.

The speedboat comes off a wave. The prop buzzes as it cycles faster in the open air. I aim for where it will land and nearly pull the trigger. A rising humpback causes me to hold my fire. The breaching whale just misses the boat’s aft. A barrage of automatic gunfire draws my attention to the front of the boat as it lands again.

Helena crouches atop the forward deck, holding one of the automatic weapons, but she tosses it away. Klein stands behind the wheel, steering the fast-moving craft, angling it toward the
Raven. They’re alive!

My small measure of relief is short-lived. A blur of white pulls my eyes down. Two ghostly white forms lit by spotlights surge out from beneath the
Raven
’s hull and rocket toward the approaching speedboat. I recognize them immediately. Narwhals. Their sixteen-foot-long, two-ton bodies will make short work of the small craft, which appears to be just fifteen feet long and a small fraction of the weight. But the danger is increased dramatically thanks to the ten-foot-long tusk jutting out of the whale’s head like a unicorn’s horn. That the creatures are now Draugar is almost fitting; their name comes from
nár
, the Old Norse word for corpse.

As the white blurs close in on their target, I aim the harpoon just ahead of the whales, which also happens to be just ahead of the speedboat, and fire.

T
he harpoon launches. Coils of cable unravel as it travels the distance. The tip pierces the ocean, slips through a foot of water, and comes to rest a foot inside the head of one of the two narwhals. Then it explodes and reduces the front half of the creature to something resembling pink-slime beef filler.

But despite my lucky shot, the second narwhal continues forward unscathed.

Klein reacts to the sudden appearance of the whales, and the explosive fate of one of them, by turning the wheel. But the effort is too late. Almost four thousand pounds of fast-moving whale strike the bottom of the fifteen-hundred-pound motorboat, and Einstein’s laws of action and reaction take over.

The ten-foot tusk pierces the hull first, slipping through the fiberglass like a needle through skin. The lance stabs up, emerges from the deck, and punches through Klein’s chest, lifting him high into the air like a speared fish.

The whale’s head strikes next. The ship’s forward momentum is arrested in an instant. Helena, however, continues moving. She’s launched out over the ocean. Halfway through the arc of her flight, she takes control of her body, twisting until she’s facing forward. The chaotic fall becomes a well-formed dive.

God, I like this girl.

She enters the water like a torpedo and surfaces just ten feet from the
Raven
’s hull. I toss a few more loops of cable into the water so that it goes slack. In my current condition, I couldn’t possibly climb up the frigid metal cable, but Helena is strong and wearing gloves, which do nothing to thaw her out—she’s soaked to the core—but help her grip the line.

When she nears the main deck, I reach over the rail, take her coat, and help haul her up. We fall to the deck, cold, wet, and exhausted.

Willem must have seen all this because once Helena is safe on deck, the
Raven
’s engines roar. We pull away from the island at full speed.

“What about Klein?” Helena asks, pushing herself up. Her lips are blue, and her body is starting to shake.

I shake my head. “He didn’t make it.”

She clenches her fists and whispers a curse. The anger gripping her face is suddenly replaced by concern. She looks around the deck. “Where are the others?”

“Willem is in the bridge,” I say. “Talbot is dead.”

My silence about Jakob is deliberate but quickly noticed. Helena grips the arm of my sweater, twisting the fabric. “Where is Jakob?” she asks.

I look at the glowing island of ships, but I can’t bring myself to speak.

Helena twists her fist. The sleeve constricts my arm. “Where is my father?”

“Doing what needs to be done,” I say, never taking my eyes off the cruise ship.

Helena follows my gaze and looks at the ship. “No…”

A muffled
whump
makes me jump. The sound is so deep and powerful that it shakes my body. A sharp crack tears through the air
and is followed by a fireball like something out of a sci-fi apocalyptic film. The orange glow, traveling at the speed of light, illuminates everything for a mile. The boom, traveling at the speed of sound, arrives next. It knocks Helena and me to the deck, which is good, because a hot pressure wave follows.

The ship is lifted up and tilted at a sharp angle. Helena and I slide across the deck on a collision course with the port rail. The ship rights itself a moment before we hit, sparing us further pain. While the ship cants back and forth, finding its equilibrium, Helena and I clutch each other, ducking our heads beneath our arms as glass from the shattered bridge windows rains down from above.

When the sound fades, the glass stops falling, and the ship is no longer wobbling like a Weeble, Helena and I separate and get our first look at the aftermath of the explosion.

The gates of hell have been opened in the North Atlantic. The cruise liner—what little hasn’t been reduced to confetti or already sunk—is burning with flames that reach hundreds of feet into the air. The surrounding ships are shredded, sinking, and burning as well. It’s the world’s biggest bonfire. If there are any astronauts looking down at this part of the world tonight, I have no doubt they’ll see the orange glow as easily as I do. We’re a half mile from the burning fleet, but I can still feel the heat. Helena’s soaked clothes are actually steaming.

“He did this?” Helena asks.

I look up at her. She’s even more beautiful in the orange glow. I nod. “He died well.”

Despite the tears threatening to spill from her eyes, she smiles. “He died amazing.”

“Yes,” I say as one of the large ships overturns and slips beneath the waves. A series of secondary explosions rips through the night
as fuel tanks erupt and add to the column of fire. Even the water surrounding the ruined fleet is burning. “He did.”

An impact rocks the ship.

“Fucking serious!” I shout, annoyed that this fight is not yet over. The fleet is destroyed. The Queen is dead. And they’re still taking potshots at the
Raven
? Unless… “What happened to the blue whales?”

“They left an hour ago,” Helena says. “Most of the whales did.”

“Where?”

Helena looks straight ahead and points. “North.”

As I stare into the darkness to the north, I see something large faintly glowing in the light cast by the massive fire. “What the hell…”

The ship is struck again. I feel the jolt, but it’s nothing compared to the impacts delivered by the sperm whales that attacked before. A juvenile humpback breeches and slams itself onto the deck. It doesn’t come close to landing on us, but we back away as it flops back into the ocean.

“I think they’re pissed,” Helena says.

She’s right. They’re not going to let us leave without a fight. “Where’s the grenade launch—”

“Jane!” Willem shouts from the bridge.

I look up and see him leaning out one of the shattered windows. His face is covered with bloody cuts, probably from flying glass, but he appears to be okay, that is, if you ignore wide-eyed worry.

He thrusts a finger north, pointing toward the faintly lit object. “Take cover!” he shouts.

Take cover?

He shouts again. “It’s a destroy—”

A sound like the world’s largest chain saw revving up pulls my attention north. In the distance, I see twin spikes of fire. The light illuminates the giant ship that I quickly recognize as a US destroyer. Bright orange tracer rounds flow toward us like twin laser beams, chewing a path through the water, straight toward us. The buzz of the twin chain guns is joined by the slower but louder boom of two 57mm close-in guns. The big gun fires two rounds every second.