Nathaniel pointed the gun at us, and Asher moved to stand in front of me. “You know I could have killed you already, but I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I do want you dead—but more than that, I want to take something of yours. Your woman and your child. I’ll take them away from here and make you wonder every waking moment of your days if they’re still alive, or if I’ve killed them. If they cursed you when they died. Maybe I’ll even raise up your child as my own. You can spend the rest of your life imagining him calling me Father.”
Despite saying he didn’t want to kill us, he pointed the gun straight at Asher’s head—and then twisted it up, to aim it at Kate. “Your woman will come over here or I’ll shoot them.”
Asher flung his arm out to block me. “They’re already going to die.”
“Are they? Can you be absolutely sure?”
The water lapped higher behind him, making some of the fallen tables float. I pressed against Asher’s arm.
“I was doing what I had to do to survive. What was your excuse? You could have been anything! You could have worked for anyone!”
Nathaniel’s lips lifted up in a cruel smile. “So could you.” He shot the ceiling in front of Kate, and both Asher and I jumped.
The faucet sound got louder, and some distant part of the structure groaned, as if he’d wounded the Maraschino itself. Kate began to scream around the gag. I thought she was reacting to Nathaniel pointing the gun at her, but I realized she was shouting a word. “Water! Water water water!” rising in volume each time.
“You come here, or I’ll shoot her,” Nathaniel said, addressing me, and then bringing the barrel of the gun down. “Or I’ll shoot both of you and be done with it.”
I stepped around Asher’s arm with finality.
“Edie, don’t you dare,” he said as Nathaniel returned the gun to point at him.
Kate kept screaming, and water kept rushing in, and it seemed like I didn’t have a choice. All I could do was walk slowly toward Nathaniel and block Asher from his gun—when Kate got torn in two.
She shrieked as she came unglued at the seam of her belly, like a doll torn between two dogs. Dark things rolled out of her, dripping down. Worms, cascading out, slithery and black, born one after another.
The previously unflappable gunmen startled at this. They were human, and the sight of a human unraveling and worms shedding out was beyond the pale; even Nathaniel was stunned. Jorge tried swimming away from her in midair, while Marius was impassive; he’d already seen worse in the Dolphin. The still-armed gunmen stepped back into Marius’s kicking range, and he gave me a look with his eyes: Whatever you’re going to do, do it now!
There was only one thing left that I could do. Nathaniel wanted me? Well, he could come and find me then—I intentionally slipped and fell, sliding for the far side of the room.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“No!” Nathaniel and Asher shouted behind me in unison, and I heard the sounds of a fight break out. I had time to register the heat of the friction burn the carpeting gave me as I crossed the entire room on my ass, slid into the water at its bottom, and was blasted with salty cold.
I was lucky not to be impaled on an upturned chair. If the water’d been any shallower, or if my ass had been sliding down tile—I splashed around without thinking about it, sputtering up. My feet found purchase on things that were already sunk in the room and I bobbed.
I was a poor swimmer but an excellent floater, courtesy of my God-given body fat. What I wasn’t counting on was the cold. All the heat was leaving my body—I could feel the tables and chairs submerged below me and even stand on them for now, but for how long?
There was a splash beside me as someone slid down in the dark. I bit back a yelp of surprise and ducked, so that only my eyes were above the waterline.
The sound of struggling up above continued. The emergency lighting would have shown me Nathaniel’s life jacket, so whoever had followed me down had to have been one of his guards.
Something moved beside me in the water, waving like a snake—one of the worms that had emerged from Kate. In the seawater it was a patchy sickly green, like a glow stick left in a dirty gutter outside an all-ages club.
Every sphincter in my body clenched, but the awful thing slid on by. It had other places to be, and that was frightening too. It was one thing to be in a room that was filling with water; it would be another to be forced to swim out of here and into the open sea where a monster was rising up.
I heard a gurgle of air escaping from beside me, too near. I’d backed away from the worm without thinking, and gone nearer whoever else had fallen down. But he hadn’t come down here on his own—blood was billowing out from his face in a slow wave. Marius must have kicked him and broken his nose, and in falling he hadn’t been as lucky as me. The wind had been knocked out of him, or he’d been kicked senseless, and his face was underneath the rising tide.
Living in Port Cavell I’d heard too many stories about sailors climbing onto other sailors’ backs to survive to want to be near one waking up. Whoever this man was, he’d watched Kate die, and he’d been willing to sacrifice me—not to mention all the other people who’d already died because of the machine gun that was pulling him below now.
I couldn’t stop shivering anymore—I couldn’t stay here much longer. I didn’t have to bend over to hide; the water was so high I was standing, and soon I’d have to swim.
What kind of monster would you have to be to murder four thousand people? I’d been willing to throw a lot away to find Asher—how much greater destruction would I find myself capable of to save my own child? I wasn’t like Nathaniel, but—
The man beside me gurgled again in a final-sounding way. I reached for him and unbuckled his life vest with numb fingers, slinging his limbs out of the armholes one at a time. I pushed him away when I was done. It wasn’t the same as holding him under the water with my own hands, but it was close enough. We were swimming in the same blood-colored sea.
“Edie!” Asher called down to me. The fight above me was through.
I took another cautious look around to make sure I didn’t see orange anywhere before I shouted out my location.
“Edie!” Asher shouted, voice breaking with desperation.
“I’m here! I’m fine! Come get me!”
Movement above blocked out the lights so I couldn’t entirely see what was going on, which frightened me. It was a taste of what it would be like when the ship succumbed to the waves, and everything was dark.
“Hurry, please!” I shouted up.
“Hurrying!” Asher shouted back.
Asher managed to get Jorge and Marius down, and between the ropes that they’d been hung by and their own strength, they were able to lower a rope. I caught hold until they’d pulled me firmly up onto the damp carpeting, and then I clambered as they pulled. On my way I passed by Kate, still twitching and spewing out worm after worm to drop back into the rising sea.
“She’s still alive—” I said with sorrow.
“That’s not living,” Marius said, giving me a final heave up into Asher’s arms. He held me for a second, and then shook me once, hard.
“That was reckless and dumb.”
“Says the man who said he’d be back in a day!” I shook him off. “Besides—you needed a distraction. Where did he go?” I looked around as if talking about Nathaniel might make him emerge, like saying an evil spirit’s name.
“When the fight broke out he dove aside.” Jorge clenched his fists. “I’d like to see him again though—without a gun.”
Asher’s face said he had more to say to me, but that he’d wait until we were alone.
“Let’s get out of here and find a lifeboat—” I said.
“If there are any left,” Marius said darkly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Asher held my hand like he was never letting go. “That was stupid of you.”
“Well, you know. I’m stupid and lovely,” I said, with a snort. “You couldn’t fight him if you were busy protecting me. I took a chance.”
“A shitty one.”
“But it worked. Now we just need to get off this boat.”
Outside, the storm had passed and it was almost dawn. The surface of the sea was eerily calm now in a way that I knew had horrified ancient mariners, courtesy of high school English class, as the Maraschino continued her stately descent. There were life rafts scattered around the surrounding sea, bright orange dots, but I couldn’t see anyone on board any of them—maybe as the ship sank they’d been knocked loose?
The rest of the life rafts were still attached to the third floor, and we were up on the ninth. It wouldn’t be safe for us to go back inside the ship, we all knew that without saying it aloud, although climbing down the outside of the ship still seemed like suicide—what I hadn’t wanted to do with Claire and Hal and Emily hadn’t gotten any safer since.
“If we follow the vertical railings—” Marius pointed to the welded pipes that went from floor to floor, providing the structure for the plastic sheets that blocked the wind.
“Sure.” Jorge grabbed hold of the first one and shimmied down it until his feet were on the balcony of the next floor. “I hope none of you is afraid of heights,” he called back to us.
Marius followed him. Asher and I were bringing up the rear. Asher watched me mount the pipe. “Be careful.”
“I will.”
By holding on to the edge of the railings above, aligning my body with the pipe, and going slowly, I could just about get my feet down to the railings of the floor below us. It was an easier reach for the taller men, but I was managing, floor after floor. The thought of getting off this boat—even if was onto a smaller one—gave me wings.
Then the first wave hit. Not the Maraschino—but me. My stomach cramped, the muscles there turning into a knot. I groaned involuntarily.
“Edie?” Asher asked. Marius and Jorge were already down another floor.