Borealis(22)

He tipped over his cot, the four metal legs jutting up like the stiffening legs of a dead gazelle, and quickly scrambled for the first-aid kit. His located the white aluminum box but his big fingers, in their panic, fumbled at the latches. Out in the corridor, McEwan’s bullish laughter erupted. Charlie froze. A second later, the cabin door buckled down the center in a perfect vertical stress line through the center of which projected the tapered iron tip of the ice axe. There was the sound of splintering wood as the ice axe was withdrawn. A second strike punched a fist-sized hole in the flimsy door.

“Mears!” McEwan shouted from the other side. “Goddamn you, Mears, you’re f*cking it all up!”

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the first-aid kit popped open. Charlie fumbled the flare gun out, shaking the flare cartridges into his lap.

“Mears!”

McEwan rammed the door with his shoulder, the weightless wood disintegrating nearly to sawdust. The big man stumbled a few steps, the ice axe now poised over one shoulder like a baseball bat. When his eyes lit on Charlie, who was crouched in the farthest corner of the room, they seemed to briefly emanate a fiery luminosity. Like the eyes of a lion.

“Goddamn you, Mears, you stupid son of—”

Flare gun raised, Charlie slammed the trigger. All in a single second there issued the faint hiss, the acrid burning smell, and—finally!—the belch of dazzling pink radiance from the muzzle of the flare gun. Almost in slow motion, Charlie watched the sparkling pink ball of fire propel across the room, flagging behind it a blackish contrail of sulfur-smelling smoke.

McEwan shrieked and attempted to sidestep the assault, but his great bulk moved too slowly; the sparkling magnesium flame, pink as a neon strip-club sign, drove itself into Billy McEwan’s face where it seemed to grow brighter and larger, expanding, breathing like new lungs, and the ice axe clattered heavily to the cabin floor. McEwan’s screams reached a girlish timbre, enough to fuzz out Charlie’s eardrums, while his large, club-like hands began pawing at his face. The pink, starlight brilliance of the flare quickly diminished, and between the swiping of McEwan’s hands, Charlie could see the charred, smoking crater that had replaced the man’s left eye—

“Muh—!”

The half-word was actually punctuated by the expulsion of thick, charcoal-colored smoke from McEwan’s mouth. As Charlie watched, McEwan accomplished a single uncertain step forward before his bones surrendered, sending him face first—not to the floor but toward one of the jutting metal legs of the overturned cot. There was a wet crunch as the metal pole impaled itself through the center of Billy McEwan’s chest, followed by the softer susurration of McEwan’s heavy bulk sliding lower and lower on the implement until, eventually, and like the conclusion of some dramatic stage play, Billy McEwan came to rest against the underside of the cot, the cot leg glistening with blackish-red gore, projecting from between his shoulders. In seemingly no time at all, a dark oil slick of blood expanded from beneath McEwan, filling in the grains of the cabin floor.

Charlie sat wide-eyed, staring, hugging both his knees with one large arm. The flare gun was still in his right hand, still pointing in the direction where, less than five seconds ago, McEwan had been standing. Smoke still trailed up from the muzzle and the entire cabin was suffocating with burnt sulfur.

How much time passed while he sat there, the gun still aimed at the empty space across the cabin, Charlie could not be certain. But when he finally lowered his arm, the muscles had tightened and grown sore, and the flare gun felt like it weighed two hundred pounds.

Eventually, he pulled himself up off the floor, his entire body trembling like an electric cable. The cabin floor was now soaked in McEwan’s blood. He refused to look at McEwan’s face—at the blackened, roasted divot where his left eye had been…and where wisps of ghost smoke still spiraled from the gaping socket.

He toed the ice axe across the floor, leaving an arc of blood in its path. The ice axe was wet with blood; it took great control over his tensing stomach muscles for Charlie to reach down and pluck it from the floor. The blood around its hilt had already begun to congeal—How the hell long had he been sitting here?—and it made his arms weak to carry it through the doorway.

The corridor was pitch-black, the lights having burned out in their fixtures, with only the faintest suggestion of light issuing from beneath the closed door of the head. His heartbeat suddenly in his ears, he proceeded down the corridor toward the head, one hand trailing along the wall. The whole corridor was canting to one side, taunting his equilibrium. He passed Mike’s stateroom, his fingers running over the cupboard door still nailed across the frame…

As he approached the head, the ghostly bluish light outlining the door, the sound of gravelly respiration could be heard coming from the other side. The sound of it caused Charlie to freeze just on the other side of the door, his skin suddenly clammy with sweat. Shaky-handed, his fingers tacky with McEwan’s blood, he reached out for the door and gripped its anchor-shaped handle. Tugged on it. Heard the bolt retreat from the frame. Opened the door—opened—

“Oh, Joe—”

He lay crumpled, nude, curled like a prawn on the floor of the claustrophobic little bathroom. Lids fluttering, only the milky whites of his eyes shown while a greenish, sudsy foam bubbled out of his mouth. The muscles in his thighs were so tense, Charlie could make out, beneath the taut, bluish skin, the individual filaments of musculature like piano cables strapped over the leg bones. Vomit pooled beneath Joe’s head while a fouler, darker substance seeped from Joe’s rear.