Cassie Alexander - Deadshifted

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.”

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!”