The Raven (A Jane Harper Horror Novel) (11 page)

I focus on the yellow and place my crosshairs dead center.

What I’m about to do goes against everything I’ve done for my entire adult life. I haven’t always been the most passionate antiwhaler in the world, but I do believe in the cause and that harpooning is a cruel and disgusting way to kill an animal. What I’m about to do is wrong, but it’s unavoidable.

“It’s not a whale,” I say. “Not anymore.”

Then I pull the trigger.

The explosive charge that fires the harpoon is louder than any handgun I’ve handled, and it nearly knocks me over. I keep my grip on the large cannon and watch as the harpoon, trailing its white cable, soars down toward the ocean, piercing water, then whale.

The harpoon slips through the waxy oil and strikes the hard surface of the whale’s skull. The resulting explosion launches a spray of seawater, red, meaty mist, and globs of yellow. A fortunate sea breeze carries the fleshy debris away from the
Raven
, but not before
I’ve caught a whiff. Coppery blood, cordite, and something fishy fills my nose, amalgamating into a scent that instantly sours my stomach.

But the horrible smell doesn’t stifle my excitement enough to stop the war whoop that comes unhindered from my lips. I step away from the cannon and up to the rail, looking over the side to see what’s become of the bull Draugr.

Willem and Malik step up to the rail beside me.

“Did I get it?” I ask. The water swirls with gouts of red blood turned pink as it mixes with seawater. Trails of yellow spiral up from below. It must be dead. Really dead. It has to be.

Then the whale’s fluke, which is like a muscular hang glider notched at the center, rises from the water and slams back down. There’s enough power behind the strike to convince me that the whale is not yet out of commission.

Malik begins hauling in the harpoon line, while Willem rushes back to his post. I just stand and watch as the whale pulses its tail down into the water and slides beneath the surface.

It rises again, coming alongside. When its head—what’s left of it—clears the water, I see what’s become of it. The whale’s brain is located at the center of the head, between the eyes. It’s so well protected that even after two explosive harpoon strikes, we have yet to reach it. What we have managed to do is separate the entire upper jaw and case. The lower jaw dangles uselessly below a huge empty space from which gouts of blood pour.

One more shot should finish it
, I think.

Malik retrieves the spear, but he is moving more slowly to rearm the charges without Willem’s help. I really need to learn how to do this stuff, but now is not the time. I’m liable to blow off my hand, or worse.

I look back to the whale, hoping it’s still in range. But it’s moving away.

Not away. In a circle.

It seems we’ve managed to injure it after all. Or perhaps the parasites’ control can’t overcome the whale’s nervous system’s response to the catastrophic injury.
Or maybe there aren’t any parasites at all
, I think. As fear grips my chest, I look out at the whale, searching for some sign that it’s more than just a whale. Or less than a whale. I find my proof on the whale’s lolling tongue. It’s not pink, like it should be. It’s white, covered in thousands of parasite larvae anxious to be passed on to the next unfortunate host.

As the whale falls behind, continuing its spiral through the waves, the
Raven
comes about, performing a tight turn that brings the ship on a collision course with the whale.

“To the bow!” Willem says, rushing toward the front of the ship, where Helena stands alone.

I follow him as quickly as I can, while Malik stays behind, rearming the harpoon. When we arrive at the bow, Helena isn’t manning the harpoon, she’s standing beside it, clutching the rail.

“Helena,” Willem shouts, sounding annoyed. “What are you—”

She turns toward his voice, eyes wide, and shouts, “Hold on to something! Jakob’s going to ram it!”

I catch sight of the whale just twenty feet out and closing fast. The
Raven
is going to strike the beast’s side. Before I can react, Willem wraps an arm around my waist, lifts me off the deck, and deposits me between him and the rail. I see the muscles in his hands flex as he grips the rail and holds me tight. I’m pinned in such a way that I can look down over the rail, and my gaze casts downward just as the two titans of the sea collide.

The ruined whale doesn’t stand a chance against the ice-breaking hull of the
Raven
. The sixty-foot body bends at the middle and then splits, falling away to either side. For all the violence of the collision, I barely felt the impact, though that might have been because of the human safety belt enshrouding me.

With the collision over, Willem steps away. I’m about to thank him when I feel the engines of the
Raven
kick into high gear. We turn north and haul ass away from the whale. “What the hell? Why are we leaving?”

“I’m not sure,” Willem says, looking back at the whale halves we’re leaving behind.

“Our sample is right there!” I shout and storm to the bridge stairs.

My leg hurts so bad that I make the climb about half as fast as I want, but my arrival on the bridge is no less dramatic because of it. “Why are we leaving!” I demand.

Jakob keeps his eyes on the sea ahead, unfazed by my outburst. Talbot, on the other hand, looks up from the radar, looking a little worse than someone who’s just seen a zombie-whale split in two should. “More whales are coming,” he says. “A
lot
more.”

H
ow many more whales?” I ask. My blood is pumping from the confrontation with the sperm whale and I feel ready for a fight, but I’m not stupid. If the odds are stacked against us, I’ll happily retreat. Even my father subscribed to the “live to fight another day” theory. “Wars are won by surviving,” he’d say. “Not dying.”

“Hard to say,” Talbot says. “They keep popping on and off. Like the first. But the signals are spread out. Were I to guess, I’d say six. Maybe seven.”

I’m not a fan of maybes. I turn to Nate and find him sitting at one of the workstations. He’s got his knees pulled up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them. And, damnit, he’s got tears in his eyes. But I’m not about to coddle the kid. “Nate, how many came at the
Arctic Rainbow
?”

His eyes flick toward me. Mixed with the tears is an angry fire. He twitches oddly, distorting his expression for a moment, and says, “How could you do that?”

Apparently he saw me blow the front half of Moby-Draugr’s head off. I know where he’s coming from, understand his passion and revulsion. But there is a single glaring flaw in the kid’s logic.

“It wasn’t a whale,” I say.

“Certainly looked like a whale from here!”

I take a step toward him, clenching my fists. “Kid, I swear if you don’t man up, like right now, I’m going to toss you overboard and let you find out firsthand if those are the nice kind of whales or the undead, man-eating, parasite-controlled sonsabitches that we’re fighting on behalf of you and every other whale-loving, tree-hugging, daisy-smelling asshole on the planet.”

He stares at me. His stunned expression morphs to confusion. “Did you say parasite controlled?”

“Yes,” I say. “It wasn’t a whale. It was a Draugr. The same thing that attacked your ship. Although somehow you didn’t notice.”

“I don’t remember what happened to the
Rainbow
,” he says. “We were attacked, but I thought maybe the whales were just finally fighting back? Maybe they wanted to take back the ocean from all ships, you know? And the
Rainbow
could be fine for all we know. Did you find a debris field? An oil slick?”

The kid makes a good point. We found neither. It’s not conclusive, but it could mean the
Rainbow
didn’t sink. There’s just one problem with his theory. “And yet you were found in a life raft.”

“I don’t remember why,” he says with a sigh, eyes cast downward. “Draugr…” He says the word slowly, trying it on for size.

“Draugar if there is more than one,” I add.

Then I give him the whole spiel, the one I’m already getting a little sick of repeating. Not that I’ve had much call to. Áshildr Olavson and her relationship to the present-day Olavsons, the parasites, how they infect, preserve, and sometimes gnaw on their mammalian victims. I don’t spare him the gory details; his horrified reactions to them is what gets me through the story without yawning, which probably says some awful things about me, but I also don’t give a shit, so I’m good. When I finish explaining their collective hive mind and its relationship to the Queen, I jump into the worst of it.
“The worst part is that we think the host is at least partially aware of what’s happening but has no control over it. Imagine watching yourself slaughtering and eating people, but not being able to stop it. Killing a Draugr is a merciful end for the host.”

“But—”

“Just shut up for another minute, kid,” I say. “How’s your Greenlandic history? Spend much time there?”

“Yeah,” he says. “About a year.”

“Been to the Viking ruins?”

He nods.

“Remember what happened to them?”

He thinks for a moment. “The colony disappeared. No one knows what happened to them.”

“Really?” I ask. “When did the colony disappear?”

“Umm, fourteen hundreds, I thi—” I can see the kid connecting the dots. “You think these Draugar wiped out the Norse colony?”

“I
know
they did.” I give him the lowdown on Jakob’s great-times-ten-grandpappy, Torstein, and his history with the Draugr. I end my tale at the Arctic island. “Torstein and his men entombed themselves behind corpse doors and stayed there until—”

“Three months ago,” he says. “I remember your story. You’re saying all that crazy stuff is true?”

“Kid, even pissed-off whales don’t attack ships this big, definitely not after they’ve taken a harpoon to the head.”

“I remember,” he says. “I remember the dead whale we found. It called out. It wasn’t dead at all.”

“A Draugr.”

“There were ten,” he says. “Whales. Including the bull, so maybe nine now.”

“Too many,” I say to no one in particular. I turn to Jakob. “Where are we heading?”

“West,” he says. “Then south. Our target remains the same, but we’ll avoid the whales.”

“What if they chase us?” I ask.

“They haven’t course-corrected yet,” Talbot says. “If we’re gone by the time they get here, I don’t think they’ll—”

“If there are more sperm whales, they can echolocate us from eleven miles out,” I say.

“Not to mention hear our engine from more than a hundred miles away,” Nate adds. Kid knows his stuff. “You can’t hide from them. This is their territory.”

I sense that Nate is about to dump some antiwhaling propaganda and quickly whisper, “Not whales.”

He pinches his lips together and takes a long, slow breath through his nose.

“Assuming they course-correct, how long do we have?” I ask.

Klein starts talking to himself, rattling off numbers. “They’re eleven miles out?”

“Roughly,” Talbot says. “Moving at thirty knots.”

“And we’re at twenty, tops,” Klein says. “They’ll catch up somewhere between seventeen and twenty hours, depending on when they course-correct.”

“Is that before or after we reach our target destination?” I ask.

“Before,” Jakob grumbles.

I cross my arms over my chest. “Then we have seventeen hours to eat, rest, and get ready for a hell of a fight.” I share a look with Jakob, and he grins.

“Geez,” says Nate. “It’s like being on a Klingon Bird of Prey.”

“Klingons don’t have anything on the Vikings, kid,” I say, putting a hand on his still-wet shoulder. “Let’s go find you some clothes. I think we have a red shirt around here somewhere…” The one thing you can count on in
Star Trek
is that the away-team crew member in the red shirt will bite the dust first. They have a nearly 100 percent mortality rate.

“That’s not funny,” he says, understanding the reference. He looks at Talbot. “That’s not funny.”

Talbot shrugs. “I can’t fathom why it would be, son.”

My grin is hard to hide. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Klein, you look about the same size. Can you find something for Nate?”

“Nothing red,” Nate says.

The Trekkie banter is a welcome change from the heated battle. A little calm before the storm is always a good thing. Of course, the coming storm is going to be unlike anything any of us have ever conceived of before. Seventeen hours. Until what? A fight for sure, but the outcome is anyone’s guess. The
Raven
is built for the fight, but nine whales? I’m not sure the ship’s hull can take that kind of pounding. But the hull isn’t the main concern. As a former antiwhaling crusader, I know that the weak spot on any vessel is the propeller. A suicidal Draugr might be able to gum it up with whale meat, or possibly even destroy it. If that happens, we’re dead in the water. And if we’re dead in the water, well, we’re just plain dead.

W
ith time to kill and Nate’s needs being tended to by Klein, I retreat to my room to change the dressing on my wound. We’ve got about seventeen hours, give or take, before the fleet of whales—which did adjust course to pursue the
Raven
—catches up, right around sunrise. During that time, we’re supposed to eat, sleep, and prepare our souls, whatever that means. But it’s what Jakob requested, and no one argued; by this time tomorrow we might all be dead.

So how does one prepare one’s soul? I doubt any two people on board would agree on how that’s done. Hell, I don’t even know what I believe. The Colonel was Catholic, born and raised, but I don’t know if he truly believed or if he was just going through the motions. I have no memory of him going to confession. If he did, I imagine he spent as much time doing Hail Marys as he did fighting wars. The man’s language alone was probably enough to earn him a cozy plot of beach beside the lake of fire.

Maybe I should pray for him? Catholics do that, I think. Pray for the dead.

I decide that wherever my father is now, the prayers of a nonbeliever for anything other than self-preservation won’t do him a hell of a lot of good. I consider praying for myself, but the same
conundrum exists: To whom do I pray, and for what? Salvation? Protection? Forgiveness?