The remaining crew members who were alive were like us, alerted either by the explosion or Asher’s warning, swarmed upward like so many rats. We were at the bottom of things, having started at the lowest floor. I was sure there was shouting, but I couldn’t hear it; my head still rang like I was standing too near a church bell. I held Emily close as humanity pressed upward above us, panic blocking all the doors.
“Edie!” Claire called, just a step behind me. Her voice could cut through the sounds in my head.
“We’re here!” I shouted back. I picked up Emily on every other step, swinging her forward like a cane. Every time I moved her my shoulder stung.
“Don’t stop!”
I wasn’t planning on it! But I didn’t say that to her, because to say it would be to use air to do anything else but breathe, and breathing was all I could manage right now as we raced from floor to floor. People who hadn’t made it, who’d been broken by the escaping mob, gunshot, or mentally bereft by the worms, reached out, trying to grab hold of us so we could help them. It was what I imagined it would be like if I were to run out of hell, with endless hungry hands reaching out for us either side, and the stairs slippery with blood.
I thought could taste salt in the air, but I didn’t know if it was from above or below. I didn’t want to look back—I was scared I’d see the sea coming up behind me. No matter how much air was trapped on board the Maraschino, it wouldn’t be enough to keep us buoyant for long.
There was a pause from somewhere up above. It rippled back in line as people stuttered to a stop, hitting one another. I halted before I hit someone, and felt Hal against my back. The staircase started to drift higher on one side. We needed to get off the stairs before they became unusable, before instead of stairs they turned into a slide back down.
“What’s going on?” Hal asked—I could only hear him because his mouth was near my ear and he was shouting half-deaf-loud. And then I heard a sound that cleared out all the others in the hall, the sharp staccato of a gun, cutting through all the fuzz inside my brain.
I froze in fear, reduced to something animal inside by sheer terror and seemingly endless exertion. I couldn’t think of what to do next, I could only hear my own heartbeat pumping in time with sound of bullets ricocheting down on us from above. And then screams, loud enough and long enough to get through the cotton in my head. What sounded like endless screaming.
A voice cut through the chaos and terror, the hissing of a hundred hydras. “Hold on to Emily!”
I did as I was told because I had to obey. I would have done it anyway, but Claire gave me no choice. I grabbed Emily, and Hal in turn grabbed me, hauling me down two steps to the landing we’d just passed. We stepped over mob-crushed bodies, and he shoved us inside the door into the hallway behind it. I recognized the carpeting—we were back on the residential floors.
“There’s more than one stairway up,” he said, slamming the door. “Unless they’ve sent reinforcements over, they can’t be covering every one.”
“What floor are we on?” Claire asked. The church-bell sound diminished as she talked.
“Two. One more to go.” I saw-heard Hal say.
I was too busy panting to participate in conversation. Emily was as white as a sheet, scared by everything she’d seen. She looked like I felt.
“Can you run?” Hal asked me, soliticiously.
“How can you be this strong?” I asked aloud, but I couldn’t hear my own voice.
He laughed. “I keep good company. Come on,” he said, and started running down the hall.
The floor tilted beneath us, as if we were in a fun house at a haunted amusement park. I was having a hard time herding Emily. Like it or not, I was nowhere near as strong as Hal, and I couldn’t keep carrying her. I set her down, and she started to cry.
“I know, baby.” I wanted to cry too. “How much farther?” I asked Hal, sounding much too loud in my own head.
“We’re halfway there.”
I realized where we were going. To one of the main public stairwells, the ones that’d been guarded with the quarantine, back in the day. That didn’t seem safe to me, but the announcement chimes sounded overhead before I could say so. The shipwide intercom was at the same deafening volume, and a voice that wasn’t Asher’s echoed overhead.
“If you’re still alive, Edie, I have some people you might be interested in saving.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Nathaniel. I didn’t have to see him to hear the sneer.
There was the sound of a scuffle, and then a nervous voice. “Edie? You can save us?” It was Kate, and she sounded scared.
“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?