Deadshifted (25 page)

“Don’t come!” said another voice—Jorge. And then he grunted, like he’d just taken a blow.

Nathaniel came back overhead. “I’ll be at Le Poisson Affamé for as long as it’s above water. Come and try to save your friends.”

Claire shook her head, watching my face. “He’s taunting you. He knows you’ll go, which means you shouldn’t.”

If Nathaniel had had Asher to lure me with, he would have. Which meant Asher was free, but—“You know who else knows I’ll go? Asher.”

Her face went grim. She bobbed a little as Hal, her faithful steed, panted. He was tiring, not made of steel after all. “We can’t manage without you just yet.” She looked pointedly at Emily.

“I won’t abandon you three. But the second you’re safe you’re on your own.”

“Fine,” Claire said, angry with me for not listening to her advice.

“If that’s the way it has to be,” Hal said, more kindly.

Going toward the main staircase was still heading toward the bow and the fancy restaurant up top. I picked up Emily, which set my shoulder rattling around in its socket like a loose doorknob, and started walking.

*   *   *

We had to go more slowly now, not just because we were tired, but because we were fighting the tilt of the boat. Hal staggered and then I staggered—we reached the staircase, and hauled ourselves up using the railing as much as the stairs. Luckily we were only going up one flight, and Emily thought this part was some sort of fun game. I was concentrating on my grip and her. Until Hal started cursing, I didn’t look up.

“What?” I asked, then I saw—the entrance to the third floor was barricaded off with chairs from the promenade. They were organized, stacked on top of one another, not just slid over like loose billiard balls on a tilted table. “Oh, fuck.” I would have let go to cover Emily’s ears, if I could. “They must have been trying to protect themselves from the gunmen.”

If we’d all been able-bodied, maybe we could have broken our way through; the chairs weren’t nailed into place. But there were so many of them that I couldn’t see through to the other side, and we were at a disadvantage in height—there was a chance they’d fall in on us. Then the lights flickered and went out, replaced by dim emergency lights, making wrestling with furniture an even worse idea.

“You still have that key?” Hal asked, sounding as winded as me. I nodded. “Fourth floor then. We can climb down to the boats from there.”

*   *   *

We climbed up to the fourth floor, an increasingly laborious process, and fought up to the rooms on the higher side of the ship—the lifeboats on the lower side wouldn’t do us any good. It was hard to get out of the stairwell and across the hall to unlock the nearest door, as the
Maraschino
continued its inexorable rise. I pushed Emily inside, then got in myself, holding the door open for Claire and Hal. With him beneath me, I was finally in a position to see how tired he was. I could see the strain on his face.

“Go for the window!” I encouraged Emily, ahead of all of us. She fell to all fours and started crawling, which made a lot of sense. I followed after her, the traction of the carpeting helping, bracing off doorjambs and the edges of the desk and bed.

Emily reached the balcony doors before I did. “Hang on, Emily!”

Her chubby hand reached for the latch, and I put on an extra burst of speed, getting there just as she slid the door open. Sea air and cold rain punched in and took my breath away. Together, she and I made our way out; more slowly, Hal and Claire followed. Hal made sure to put the balcony chair in the way of the door closing behind us, so we wouldn’t be trapped outside.

There was no light pollution now. The emergency lights didn’t bother illuminating the water outside, it was just us and the waning moon, shining through small breaks in the storm clouds—and the third-floor lifeboats swinging below. If it were dry, if we were all able to walk on our own, if it weren’t dark outside, we might have been able to reach them, in theory, clambering down the outside of the ship as it tilted down. But our situation being what it was—I looked down at the swinging lifeboats, my stomach swirling with the ship. Then it began to rain. “This is suicide.”

“Can you manage it?” Hal asked aloud of Claire. And I realized what his other problem was. If his wife touched salt water, he’d lose her to the sea.

“Of course,” she said, far more confident than I felt. “We’ll get down there and hide inside. They’ll detatch when the ship goes down.”

I looked around. How would they take Emily? If I managed to get her out there with them, how would I reach the bow? Climbing safely out there was one thing, a one-in-a-hundred chance, but then climbing back? Was there a chance I could just throw the girl out to them? Not with my shoulder—

“We’ll be fine,” Claire said.

“Good.” Hal said, and started sinking. I thought he was putting Claire down; it didn’t register until a second later that he was falling.

“No!” Claire shouted. “Not yet. No!” Her voice rose up an octave, becoming a harsh animalistic scream as they both dropped to the ground. She clutched him to her chest where they fell. “No!”

“What’s going on?” Emily asked, looking scared.

“I don’t know—” I looked at Claire accusingly. Had she sucked the air out of him too?

Claire glared back at me and then bent over, sobbing as she ran her hands over Hal’s chest. “I can’t hear his heartbeat anymore.”

“Oh, no—” I pressed Emily to me for a second, trying to give her some wild comfort, and then moved both of them aside.

*   *   *

CPR hardly ever worked by itself on anyone. That’s what the TV shows don’t show you. You do CPR until someone with a defibrillator comes, and that’s what works, if it’s going to. Even then it’s doubtful. CPR doesn’t get your heart back into a working rhythm, all it does is keep your oxygenated blood moving to keep your cells alive, in case the electricity can slap your heart into working order again.

But I didn’t know what else to do. I found his sternum with the heel of one hand and started compressions.

Claire clawed at his shoulder with one hand while I pumped. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to be,” she told him. “We were supposed to make it safely to the lifeboat.”

If I talked to her, I’d slow down, and if I slowed down, there was even less of a chance he’d wake up. You were supposed to do CPR until help arrived, or the patient woke up and shoved you away.

“Please, Hal, wake up,” she begged him, sobbing against his side. She kissed his lips, and I knew what she was doing, she was trying to give him more life.

I kept going because stopping would mean I’d given up, and it wasn’t my place. I was tired and my shoulder was screaming; my compressions weren’t effective anymore, but I felt like I had to try. It kept raining, and rumbles of thunder interrupted Claire’s sobs. I didn’t know how long I’d gone for, or how much longer I had in me. I was just a machine that did this because it was easier than admitting that he wasn’t going to come back.

She put her hand out and rested it on mine. “Stop.”

I kept going for another three beats.

“I’m sure. You can stop. His heart hasn’t started up again.” There was another thunderclap, louder now; we were in the middle of the storm. It shook our bodies, and I had a foolish idea to run some piece of metal up on a kite and see if Hal’s heart could be restarted by lightning.

Emily was crying behind me, and Claire propped herself up with her arms, her legs together behind her, resting herself across Hal’s still chest, and I realized the enormity of the task he’d left me with. Now I’d need to rescue Claire somehow, too.

The lifeboats were nearer, tilting toward the body of the
Maraschino
as she fell into the ocean on her other side, but I did not have Hal’s strength. How would I get both of them out of here, as exhausted as I was, with a shoulder on the verge of going out? There was no way.

Claire was still sobbing. Not knowing what else to do, where to go or what to say, I stroked his wispy hair, and then awkwardly patted her.

Pressing off his chest with both hands, she rose up and howled. Her voice went from low to sonic and high, wild, a keening banshee whale-song that made my teeth ache. It was the sound of the unabashed grief of a creature that wasn’t meant to ever have what she loved die.

The sound exposed her for what she was, an alien creature that didn’t belong on this side of the waves. Where salt water sprayed up from the splashing ocean, or down from her tears, scales glimmered on her legs, and they were lengthening. Her hair grew to wreath her, damp and dark, like a spreading bed of kelp. She was wild and I had never seen anything so beautiful and frightening at the same time. She put out her hand to me, her transformation half complete.

“Give the girl to me,” she commanded, in her otherworldly voice.

Without thinking, my body obeyed. I grabbed Emily and handed her over, even as I questioned the action. “Why?”

“Because she belongs to the sea.”

“She’s human!” I protested, although Emily didn’t fight. She was looking at Claire with complete awe.

“She has no family anymore. I can give her one. She will sing forever with me.” Claire petted Emily awkwardly with one hand, leaning up to do so as her change progressed. Things fluttered at the sides of her neck now, with ridges and wicked-looking spines. I took an involuntary step back, and slid a bit, the moisture of the deck overwhelming the traction of my shoes. Her eyes dared me to challenge her—and then she grabbed Emily and rolled backward, like a shark thrashing off a bite. She pulled the little girl toward her unhuman face and kissed her.

“Wait!” I screamed, but it was done.

Emily looked stunned as Claire released her, only to take her up again, beneath one arm. Her awkwardness in her new form only made it more horrible as she clambered toward the railing, balancing between her tail and her free arm, hauling Emily. Then with incredible strength she pulled them up and over the railing. They slid down down down to the sea, leaving me alone with Hal’s corpse on the deck.

I couldn’t even process what had happened. I ran up to the top of the railing and looked down. I couldn’t see where Claire and Emily had fallen in; it was as if the sea had eaten them both whole.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

A wave pushed the
Maraschino
sideways as I watched the ocean nearing. How much longer would we have now? There must be some time left, if Nathaniel was still risking being on board. Another wave hit, timed with a distant flash of lightning, and staring out I could see the “rescue” ship. Two more snaps of electric light and I could make out the outline of a helicopter on its bow, before the thunder hit me. It shook me—and the life rafts, dangling below. There was no way I’d try to reach for them now.

I let go of the railing, and let gravity pull me back to Hal’s body. We were both cool and clammy, only he was dead and I was alive. I still had places to be.

*   *   *

Going with the tilt of the ship was more disorienting than fighting against it. I stumbled through the room we’d just come through, and an overstuffed purse slid and tumbled off the bed, sending lipstick tubes and individually wrapped tampons rolling down the floor alongside me.

I made it into the hallway and then back toward the stairs. I was wet from my time outside in the rain, and the smell of the sea was still strong on me—that, plus the tilt, made it feel like the sea was coming for me, like an opening mouth. I ran up not only afraid of what I was running toward, but increasingly horrified by what was gaining behind me.

I reached the ninth-floor landing and only found doors out to the deck.

“Fuck.”

Not being Asher, or having had a chance to memorize the entire ship on my own, I’d taken the wrong stairwell up. I was half a ship away from the Le Poisson Affamé. My choices were to get across the deck somehow, or go back down.

The emergency lighting still worked, showing me all the pools that had started to drain, making the decks even more wet. And the plastic railings no longer kept the wind out; instead they acted like miniature sails, keeping the
Maraschino
in a slow spin. Beneath my feet the boat shuddered at irregular intervals, and I imagined room after room burping out air. I stood in the doorway trying to master my fear as a patio umbrella tumbled by outside.

But this was still somehow better than going back inside, and maybe getting trapped there. Taking my cues from Emily, I hit the deck on all fours.

*   *   *

It wasn’t long before my hands were numb, my shoulder agonizing, and my feet soaked inside my not-nearly-waterproof-enough shoes. The divots between the fake-wood planks were the only things I could hold on to, and they were peeling back my nails. One by one, deck chairs liberated from gravity slid past, and tables took heavier falls. It was like a horrible video game, only I didn’t have any extra lives.

I chose the higher route toward the building that the restaurant occupied—even though climbing down would have been easier, I was too afraid to get any closer to the waves. In a way I couldn’t express but felt, I knew the
Maraschino
would reach its tipping point soon, where it would be flatly sideways, before it twisted and flashed its belly to the sky.

I reached the building, barely. It swooped in an organic fashion that had probably seemed sexy to the engineers at the time, but now felt like it would be the death of me. My hands couldn’t get traction on its smoothly curved sides, and as the ship leaned my shoes were having less and less luck.

Then doors opened as I reached them. “Edie! Get in!”

I startled and almost lost my grip—and a hand lunged out to catch me. Shivering in the dark, I found myself beside Rory, both of us leaning against a marble counter. As my eyes adjusted to the red-tinted
EXIT
lights I realized with some irony that we were in the spa, now that the
Maraschino
’s deck had eaten off not only the polish from my nails, but several of my actual nails too.

“You’re alive!” Rory gasped.

“You too!” I twisted in his grip and he let me go. “Where’s Asher?”