Sea Sick: A Horror Novel(32)
Jack stood up and breathed in a deep lungful of sea air. The view from the ship was unending darkness, slithering away for a hundred miles in every direction. If Jack really was in Hell, then it was at night time that he truly felt it. The world was absent.
It would be happening soon, so Jack needed to hurry. His cabin was two decks below and the elevator was slow. He raced down the stairway to the pool area and headed for the Promenade Deck. It was deserted, which allowed him to sprint at full speed. There was probably less than five minutes left now until the attacks, but Jack was confident that he could make it to his room in time, just so long as nothing got in his way.
Jack hurried inside the corridor he used to get to the elevator and was grateful to find that it wasn’t being summoned by anyone else. He stabbed the CALL button and waited.
The elevator began to rise.
The doors opened.
Someone was standing inside.
The elevator’s occupant had a gun and it was pointed at Jack. “Hello, pardner. I was hoping to bump into you again.”
Jack’s eyes went wide. “Donovan?”
***
Donovan escorted Jack down to the Orlap Deck, the gun buried against the small of his back the whole time. If the weapon went off, Jack’s spine would be shattered.
And it might stay that way, he thought grimly. I might never recover.
“Okay,” Donovan said as the elevator doors opened. “Get out.”
Jack stepped out onto the steel walkway and headed left under the direction of his captor. They were heading towards the blue crates and the other pallets belonging to the Black Remedy Corporation. The plastic boxes had been pulled free of their cargo areas and placed on the floor in parallel lines. All of the crates were open, displaying millions of dollars in US currency.
Jack whistled. “That is one big shitload of money.”
“Certainly something, ain’t it?” said Donovan.
“What the hell is it all for? Why have you gotten it all out on display?”
“In the interest of openness, Jack. Think you and I both want answers.”
Jack nodded. “Okay. You think maybe we can be open without the gun?”
Donovan seemed to think about it, then decided to holster the gun in a leather slip on his hip. “Fair enough, but you just behave now, y’hear? You already know I’m not afraid to use it!”
Jack’s eyes went wide. “What? You mean you remember-”
“Blowing your ribcage to pieces? Yeah, I remember, alright. Yet, here you are now, all alive and such. Ain’t it the darndest thing?”
Jack was short of breath. He was excited to find yet another person in the same predicament as he was. “How long…how long have you been reliving the day?”
Donovan headed between two pallets and reached into the darkness. He came out with two foldable deck chairs. He handed one to Jack and the two of them took a seat opposite one another. “Let me see now…” The man let out a big sigh as he thought about it. “Guess it must be a good six, seven months now. How ‘bout you?”
“I lost track, but I guess about the same. How come I’ve never seen you before? I mean, up until the last couple of days.”
Donovan spread his arm in a wide semi-circle. “I have a job to do: to stay here and keep an eye on this here cargo. I take my profession very seriously, pardner.”
“So you’ve just been sitting down here on your own for half a year?”
“That about sums it up. Figured whatever’s gone wrong will right itself soon enough. Least I thought so, until I met you and your lady friend, that is.”
“Tally? What did you do to her?”
“Nothing,” said Donovan, looking ready to leap up at the slightest hint of aggression. “After I shot you dead, she backed off. We had ourselves a little chat and we discovered that we were in the same boat. Which is why I’m now happy to be more…cooperative.”
“You mean you’ll answer my questions?”
“If you’ll answer mine.”
“Okay, deal.”
Donovan got up from the chair, making Jack flinch, but then stepped away and went over to the same pallets from where he’d gotten the deckchairs. He came back with a bottle of bourbon whisky.
Jack grinned. “I think we may have just gotten off on the right foot.”
“You a whisky man, Jack?”
“Scotch usually, but what you have there is close enough for me.”
There were no glasses, so Donovan took a swig and handed over the bottle. Jack took a swig of his own and gasped as the liquid burned his gullet. Then he glanced at his new companion curiously. “What time do you wake up every day?”
“6AM, same as I have my whole life. It’s a sin to waste the day.”
“I wake up much later than that,” Jack said, his head aching as he thought about what the discrepancy could mean. “In fact, I wake up eight hours later than that.”
Donovan whistled. “I’d expect as much from a listless teenager, but a grown man…? Now that’s a crime.”
“Well you could say that I had a few problems even before I came aboard this hell-forsaken ship. Guess that’s not really important now though?”
“I guess not. So what do you make of all this? Your pretty little angel said we were under some sort of spell, that some fella hiding onboard is pressing the cosmic reset button every night.”