Borealis(23)
Charlie bent and clamped one hand around Joe’s knobby, bluing shoulder. Touching his flesh was like petting damp, featherless gooseflesh and Charlie instinctively recoiled, leaving bloody fingerprints on his pale flesh. Joe rocked on the hump of his spine; membranous webbing veined with black, pubic-like filaments revealed itself as his legs parted. The membrane pulled taut then retracted like a mesh of elastic, clapping both of Joe’s knees together with a hollow pop.
Charlie shuddered and threw himself backward, spilling back out into the corridor and down hard on his ass. The head of the ice axe clanged hollowly against the wall. A pathetic cry escaped him. As he watched, an inky jet of bile squirted from Joe’s mouth and dribbled from both nostrils.
Managing to stand, righting himself against one wall, Charlie began staggering backward down the corridor. Framed in the fading blue light of the head, Joe continued to convulse on the head floor, the chalky, foul-smelling liquid maintaining steady evacuation from his body. One of Joe’s hands slid blindly through the pool of thickening black fluid. There was the sound, sssssllllit, of the sliding, the fingers—
A moan escaped from Joe’s mouth, bubbles of dark green foam snapping and popping, but was instantly amputated by a wet, muddy cough, which sprayed thick crimson clumps of fibrous tissue onto the floor.
Charlie turned and ran, slamming one shoulder against something solid and immobile in the darkness. Stars exploded before his eyes. He reached out, sightless, grasping: a pipe. Cold as ice. Above, the vents pumped frigid air into the corridor—uhhhhhhh, they moaned like the damned. In his frustration, he swung the ice axe into the pipe, piercing its shell without difficulty. A sludgy black stream of frozen water spouted from the rent.
Heating ducts filled with water…
They were floating on a frozen coffin.
Who’s “they”?
Sammy Walper—dead. Bryan Falmouth—abandoned ship. Billy McEwan—impaled on an overturned cot leg. And Joe… Jesus f*cking Christ, Joe, what the hell?
There would be no reasoning with Mike. The man was already too far gone. And he was determined to navigate the Borealis back to Saint Paul Island. As keenly as he had ever understood anything in all his life, Charlie Mears knew he could not let that happen.
“You’re not getting back,” he bellowed, his voice like thunder in the lightless corridor. “You’re going to stay out here.”
He was speaking to the barricaded cabin door—Mike’s old stateroom—behind which the trawler’s mysterious guest was held prisoner. If he could—
But a fresh thought stopped him cold.
He was alone with his breathing again, his heartbeat. Reaching out, he tugged at the panel of wood—the cupboard door—he’d nailed across the cabin’s doorframe. It was still securely in place…
Kill her, a voice spoke up at the back of his head. Strangely, a woman’s voice: eerily similar to Johanna’s. You have to kill her, Charlie. If she reaches land…if she reaches Alaska…
He knew what would happen. All that had transpired aboard the Borealis was a microcosm, was the world in miniature.
With the curved head of the ice axe, Charlie pried the cupboard door off the doorframe, the nails groaning as they were extracted from the wood. He kicked the door open with one boot; it swung inward, hinges squealing, upon a murky darkness. A smell not unlike something fetid and rotting struck Charlie and he shrunk back from the doorway, the ice axe, as if in protection, held up before his face.
The room was empty.
Charlie slumped against the bulkhead. He clutched the ice axe tighter. Someone had let her out, of course. Someone—McEwan before going f*cking screwball? Bryan, just prior to flinging himself into the frozen sea? Or was it possible, he wondered, that she let herself out? Anything, it seemed, was possible.
The Borealis jerked and seemed to come nearly to a stop. Charlie stumbled forward, spilling into Mike’s empty, reeking stateroom, the ice axe clattering to the floor somewhere ahead of him in the darkness. A moaning, clangorous sound shrilled up through the flooring: banshee cries. Charlie actually felt the trawler’s hull cutting through clutching mires, an unseen net of impenetrable ice, and the grinding of metal being sheared away grew to an intensity so great he had to clamp both hands over his ears. Something somewhere in the distant bowels of the ship popped—Thwanggg!—and the Borealis shuddered forward again, clear of whatever it’d run over.
The fuel lines. The thought blossomed in his head like a dazzle of Broadway lights. The fuel lines are down in the engine room.
Fumbling around in the darkness of Mike’s stateroom—
(not Mike’s stateroom)
—his hands eventually fell on the ice axe. He gripped it and slammed back out into the corridor, the red emergency lights wholly useless save for drenching everything in a foreboding vermillion, and hurried toward the rung ladder leading down into the engine room. He moved quickly by the galley, food articles and utensils tossed in tangled nests, broken coffee mugs, oily petrol seesawing across the tabletop, operative notebooks and Penthouse calendars, Scotch-Brite scouring pads, flecks of cornflakes sprayed in Big Dipper fashion along the sticky countertop, a sepia-toned map of the Aleutians, unfolded like an accordion—
Belowdecks, it was intestinally dark. The cold was instantly unbearable. The last rung of the ladder had been swallowed by dark, standing water, atop of which a film of filthy slush had already begun forming. Unfortunately, Charlie didn’t see this until he’d already driven his boot straight down to the floor—hearing the plosh; feeling, a second later, the ice water seeping through the worn creases of his boots. His foot bristled with needles then went immediately numb.