Sea Sick: A Horror Novel(22)
“I don’t know. It’s some kind of subconjunctival haemorrhaging. Her pupils are not reacting to the light either and they seem unable to focus.”
“She’s not breathing,” Jack noted.
The doctor looked at the girl’s chest. It was completely still. “I believe she is dead,” he stated matter-of-factly. “At least, she should be.”
“What the hell are you lunatics talking about?” Ivor shouted from the floor. Vicky was growing weaker in his arms. “If she’s dead then how on earth is she moving, you imbeciles?”
No one said anything. The situation was beyond rationalization. Jack stared down at Heather and watched her mouth work feverously. He knew that it wanted to taste human flesh. If they unbound the girl she would immediately attack the nearest person in sight. Maybe it was a biological imperative of the virus coursing through her body – a way of spreading itself to new hosts. An infected host bites an uninfected host and passes on the virus through saliva.
Passes it on…
Before Jack had chance to say anything, Ivor wailed in horror. Vicky had gouged her fingernails into his cheeks and was pulling his face towards hers. The infected woman’s strength must have been twice what it usually was. Ivor was powerless as she sunk her teeth into the flesh beneath his left eye. It almost looked like they were kissing passionately, but Ivor’s screams said otherwise.
Jack grabbed Ivor around the collar and tried to drag him away. Vicky hung on by her teeth at first, but then the flesh ripped away and she fell backwards. Ivor stopped his screaming long enough to get to his feet but was still whimpering like a little boy. He stumbled away from his wife and shook his head. “What in damnation is happening to my family?”
“I don’t know,” said Jack. “Just get away from her.”
Vicky rose to her feet, awkwardly, like a puppet raised by tangled strings. She scanned the room with feral eyes, snarling like a beast. There was a brief moment of inactivity, a brief pause while nobody moved.
Then she lunged. Her bloody fingertips stretched towards the gaping wound on Ivor’s face. It seemed like the sight of the blood attracted her.
Ivor probably could have killed most men with a single punch to the throat, but he was unwilling to retaliate against his wife – he looked like he would pass out at any moment. Vicky collided with him and the two began to wrestle. Jack came up behind the infected woman and grabbed her in a full-nelson, pinning her arms above her head while restraining the movement of her head (and her lethal jaws).
“Okay,” said Jack, struggling to restrain the woman. “Ivor, listen to me. I need to know exactly how your daughter could have caught this thing. Has she been in contact with somebody else that was sick? What about you and your wife? You both have it too. Have you been exposed to something?”
Ivor was flustered. Understandably so; his family was dead. “What? No. We came straight from the airport in Palma. We were with a bunch of other passengers the whole time who were all perfectly fine.”
Jack needed more. He needed answers. “You and your wife were arguing the day you came onboard. What about?”
“Arguing? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do,” said Jack, still struggling to restrain Vicky thrashing about in his arms. “Does it have something to do with why you’re sick?”
“No! No, of course not.”
“But you admit you were arguing?”
Ivor shook his head and seemed to battle against the fringes of despair. “We…we were arguing about what was for the best. I had an old friend from the forces waiting for us in Germany, all ready to help us disappear. Vicky was having second thoughts.”
Jack was confused. He’d expected the conversation to lead somewhere else. “Second thoughts about what?”
“Turning herself in.”
Jack frowned. “What the hell are you talking about? What did she do?”
Before Ivor had time to answer, Doctor Fortuné let out a sudden yelp. Jack turned his head to see that Heather was partially free from her bindings and was now sitting up on the examination table. She was munching on something. The doctor turned around with a mortified expression on his face. He was holding his right hand out in front of him. It was missing a thumb.
Jack thought about what had happened to Vicky after Heather attacked her and quickly reached a conclusion. “Doctor, I’m sorry but you’re infected. You need to isolate yourself somewhere, right now.”
But the doctor wasn’t listening. The man stumbled around the room, delirious, and gushing blood from his thumb-stump. The sudden commotion caused Jack to lose his concentration and his grip on Vicky loosened. She pulled free of his grasp and pounced straight for her husband. She tore out his windpipe before he even had time to scream. Ivor crumpled to the floor, dead.
Jack acted quickly, scouring the room for something with which to defend himself. Even though he knew dying would result in nothing more than waking up again at 1400hrs, he couldn’t help but fight back. It was his instinct; a human behaviour rooted deep inside him making it impossible to accept death willingly (even when it was only temporary). There was also the fear that, eventually, the spell would end and whatever happened to him would be permanent. There was a part of Jack that longed for this and welcomed an end to his nightmare.