Cassie Alexander - Deadshifted

“That’s a very good question,” Claire said, smiling down at the child. “Hal was a soldier on a ship a long time ago. When it got torpedoed during the war, some of my sisters and I went to sing for it.”

Some remnants of Greek mythology jostled free in my mind, and I squinted at the older woman. “Are you singing for this one?”

“If you’re asking if all this is my fault, no. Although I am reaching the time when I need to go back.”

There was a hitch in Hal’s step when she said this—I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been walking right behind him.

“Anyhow,” she said, going on with her story, addressing Emily, “I was swimming, watching the sailors drown. There were a lot of sailors drowning in those days. Sometimes we had to fight with the sharks to get the chance to kiss them.”

“You kissed boys?” Emily asked, more disturbed about this than the sharks.

“A lot of them.” Claire looked back so I would know she was telling this story for my benefit as well. “Not every siren wants to see the world above the sea. But if you do, the only way you can get there is by kissing the air out of a man.”

I blinked. Was she saying what I thought she was saying?

“Not just any man,” Hal interrupted.

“No, only the right one. I had to kiss hundreds of sailors to find him,” she said, squeezing Hal close. “But when I did, I knew.”

“For living in the ocean your whole life, you weren’t a very good swimmer. We nearly died before we got rescued,” he said, and I could almost hear his grin.

Claire squealed. “I’d never had legs before! It was hard!”

I was having a hard time parsing their couple’s humor with presented facts. “Do you ever feel bad about all the ones that drowned?” I asked because I didn’t want to be the only one who felt bad right now.

“Not originally, no. I was like a child then. Does a child feel pain when she loses a toy, when she knows a shinier one can be gained? I was, as your kind say, shallow. Most sirens are. Not a lot of encouragement for introspection, under the sea.”

“Like Ariel!” Emily exclaimed, catching on.

“Much the same. Only with less singing.” She smiled at the girl indulgently. “You all are the first humans I’ve gotten to tell my secret to, since I shared it with Hal all those years ago. It’s nice.”

I’m glad someone here felt better about things, I thought darkly. But no matter how strangely—horribly?—it’d begun, their relationship had lasted for decades. Would Asher and I get that chance? My heart ached. I couldn’t believe I’d let him go again. I hoped I wouldn’t be made a fool for leaving his side.

We reached the freight elevator, found it empty, and Hal pushed the button for the lowest floor. Claire pressed a finger to her lips and gave Emily and me a meaningful glance as it lowered.

The doors opened onto a kill zone.

I realized we were lucky: Whatever ship the soldiers had come in on hadn’t held enough of them to man all the doors. And why would they need to anyhow, if they cleared every room as they came through it, and they were the only ones with guns on board? Passengers and crew were the proverbial fish in a barrel.

The slaughter began six feet from the door. I didn’t know if those trapped down here had been waiting for good news, or their turn on the “rescue” boat, but they’d gotten bullets instead. Bodies were everywhere, some of them still leaking warm blood. There were spatters on the walls from exit wounds and smears where people had fallen, bleeding. And there were more ropy loops of “intestine” here, worms evacuated from human bodies. I didn’t point them out.

It smelled awful—the scent when fear and death make you evacuate your bowels, plus all the warm must of what’s normally hidden inside our bodies. Nurse-stomach battled pregnant-stomach and pregnant-stomach won. “I’m going to be sick,” I said, and looked for someplace safe to throw up, where I wouldn’t be desecrating anyone’s body. Emily clung to my leg, her face buried in my thigh, trying not to see.

“Don’t remember what you see here,” Claire told Emily, her voice taking on that echoed rasping sound, and the little girl nodded.

“Can you use that on me?” I asked.

“I’d rather not. You might need to react to something suddenly.”

I gave her a grim nod and swallowed air, so maybe it could hold everything else down.

Hal picked his way through the small lobby as if it were a minefield. Reaching the other side, he waved to me. “Come on.”

It helped that Hal had been a sailor. I supposed that at their core all ships were alike. We followed him down a narrow hall, punctuated with the occasional corpse. All of the fallen crew down here looked surprised, like statues frozen by Medusa in an unending moment of horror. I didn’t know what they’d been forced to see down here, but I couldn’t imagine the crew had fared any better than we had. Worse, probably, since there’d been no way for them to throw themselves overboard.

We were quiet as Claire tilted her head back and forth, and I wondered darkly if she could use voices like sonar. We didn’t stop to go into any of the rooms on either side—from what little I could see through their windows they all appeared to be storage. But I did know it was getting louder ahead of us, and there was a sensation of movement from the decks beneath our feet.

Hal paused and turned back. “We might not be able to hear one another after this next set of doors.” He pointed at his own ears. “There’s a reason I’m almost deaf.”

“That’s good, right? They won’t hear us coming.”

“Yes, but—” Claire shook her head, pointing at her throat. Her vocal skills wouldn’t work down here. We’d be on our own. I nodded.

Hal pushed the doors open slowly, crouching, carefully looking around. Behind him were engines that never stopped thrummed. Pistons as big as sofas pounded up and down, keeping the Maraschino still on its space of real estate in the sea. Machinery ran from side to side, reaching the actual edges of the ship. The room had to be three floors tall with catwalks running up and across each side. Where a row of computer terminals lined the bottom-most floor, the remaining crew had been murdered to a man. I wondered where our informant with the broken leg was now, and if we found him, how we’d get him free.

I scanned around, and spotted two parcels of C-4 on each side, in between the giant ribs of the ship, two floors up—and saw a man dressed in body armor wiring up a third one, on the right-hand side. I shook Hal’s sleeve and pointed. He nodded when he spotted him.

I made a gesture to Hal, nervous to talk even though the sound of the machinery in here was overwhelming. What’s the plan? I tried to say with my hands.

Hal held one hand out and made the other into a walking person, two fingers walking quietly along to indicate stealth. And then a sudden rude shoving motion, where we’d push the soldier over the edge, onto the pistons below.

As plans went, it wasn’t a great one. But when life gives you lemons—or mercenaries employed by someone psychotic—you do whatever the fuck you can. I nodded.

Then I pried Emily away from my leg. “Stay hidden down here, okay? Like hide and seek,” I whispered over the diesel engines. She nodded, and crouched down behind a desk.

I crawled up diamond-deck stairs, this time ahead of Hal. The soldier hadn’t looked up from his task. I wasn’t sure if C-4 required that much attention, or if he was just that confident that there was no one left who could put up a fight. His gun was slung over his shoulder, across his back, and he was using both of his gloved hands for his task. Feeling like I was pretending to be a ninja, I crept closer, using the ribs of the ship for cover, until he was only ten feet away from me. He looked like he had fifty pounds on me, between muscle and armor. I was going to need every foot of my head start. I was bracing, gritting my shoes onto the deck for traction, when he looked up.