Stranded (29 page)

They rounded a corner and banged through another door. Noah didn't look back again. The image of the ship's master was seared into his brain like a camera flash. Felix stumbled. Noah pulled him closer and the man cried out, his knees buckling. “Come on. A little farther. Stay with me.”

Connor kicked open a door and shouted, “In here.” Noah wanted to keep running, put more space between him and the Old Man. But Felix wasn't in any shape to push harder, and Delgado had also reached the limits of how far he could run. Brewster wasn't running to catch up to them because he'd already won. He'd struck first and left them limping. It wouldn't be long before the door opened and Brewster followed to spear the last of the wounded left on the battlefield. They had to find a place to hide and regroup. The drilling platform—at least the inhabitable parts of it—wasn't that big and whether they ducked into a room here or kept going, they couldn't evade him for long.

Noah followed Connor into the cabin and slammed the door shut behind him, throwing the dead bolt. But he knew they would have to put their backs against a wall and fight eventually.

 

29

The sounds in the hall outside went from loud panic to occasionally broken silence in very little time. Although they hadn't had to convince David to be quiet—he could barely get a breath, let alone make a sound—Felix was another matter. Connor was on his knees putting the finishing touches on a field dressing over the wound in Felix's stomach. Henry's knife had taken a deep bite when he tackled him. Although it tore halfway across his stomach, the cut had sliced through skin only, not muscle. Felix's viscera was contained. He was bleeding badly though, and was growing deathly pale. With the dressing, he might live, but he needed better tending than a torn bedsheet-as-bandage and reassuring words. He needed antiseptic, stitches, sterile dressings, and most of all, painkillers. They all needed better than they had.

Noah had lost his crowbar in the hall. He'd been so focused on getting away, he hadn't even heard it hit the floor. It might be right outside the door or still in the cafeteria for all he knew. Either way, it was out of reach. Aside from a desk lamp and a chair, there was nothing in the room he could use as an improvised weapon.

Checking the dead bolt on the cabin door for a third time, he tried to calm down, to tell himself they were safe. He tried to stop picturing Brewster killing his own reflection … killing himself … and think of an actual strategy for dealing with a situation he couldn't avoid much longer. The door was the final barrier between him and his father-in-law's rage. There was no walking away from the Old Man, choosing to pretend the hatred wasn't as near as it felt. The cabin door was the last thing standing between Noah and inevitability. And it wasn't built to withstand that kind of assault. The crew rooms were designed for privacy and to protect a few personal effects from casual theft. The door would only slow a motivated person from entering. Crowbars and oversized pipe wrenches were ready at hand nearly everywhere a person turned. Noah tried to remember if he'd seen a fire ax anywhere in the short time he'd been aboard. There had to be one. He tried not to picture it hacking through the door, before slamming into his chest. He tried instead to imagine the weight of it in his hands, reassuring and heavy. Long and deadly. But thinking of having an ax was as helpful as checking the lock again. It changed nothing. He put an ear to the door.

“What d'you hear?” Connor asked.

Noah shook his head. “Nothing.” But that wasn't entirely true. In his head, he could hear the shouts and cries of frightened men. He could hear the sound of knife against flesh, and blood falling to the floor. He heard all the sounds of the last hour repeating in his head on a loop, threatening to drive him insane. As much as he wanted to stay silent, to pretend there wasn't a red line leading to their door and that being quiet was the same as being invisible, he needed to banish the sounds in his memory. But they lingered.

Anyone with his eyes open could see how to defeat the sickness. There were four who proved the point.
No. Three,
he thought. The fabled “last of the Holdens” had been stabbed in the face. And that meant Holden didn't prove anything anymore. If he wasn't dead, he was dying, and there was no one to help him. In the rush to save themselves, they'd left him behind. Him and John Boduf. Had he gotten away or did they leave him lying on the floor, too? Noah's gut called him back. The image of Brewster, waiting, pushed him away. Noah imagined his father-in-law returning to the cafeteria to finish what he started.

“How does he know Abby's alive in your world?” he whispered. “We were alone when you told me that.”

“Your guess is as good as mine. I imagine everybody was talking about the same things 'round here. William probably said something, comparing notes. I want to know what gave him the idea he could choose my reality instead of yours. What'd make him think that's even possible?”

“I have no idea,” Noah lied. From the moment he'd heard Abby was alive, he had imagined living in Connor's world with her and Ellie, having a second chance and being happy, but it was just a pipe dream. He hadn't thought through whether it might actually be possible. But fantasies of reunions and rebuilt lives were a distraction. They had Brewster and his collaborators to focus on. Thinking about being happy wasn't anything they could afford.

The lull in conversation emphasized how bad off they were. The best anyone could say about David Delgado's breathing was that it was labored. He wasn't dying, and they weren't trying to cut open his trachea to shove a pen casing in to help him get air. That said, each gasp was raspy and dry and sounded exhausting. He wasn't going to be doing any sprinting or fighting. He barely had the wind to sit upright.

Felix, who had been spry and on the mend before breakfast, was now on his back in a bunk with a Sharpie marker clenched in his teeth, trying to push through the pain of having been slashed open. He was off the clock as well.

Noah counted out in his head the number of crewmen still alive. Both ships had set out with a complement of sixteen able men. Noah's team left the ship with their eight strongest and arrived at the Niflheim with seven—Holden paying the toll along the way. Among Connor's shipmates, Puck and Brewster were definitely dead, presumably along with Holden … again. Who knew about Boduf? Assuming he'd gotten away, that left twenty men total on the rig, including three killers. Noah wasn't just afraid that number would shrink; he knew it for a certainty. Brewster hadn't murdered a man only to have a change of heart and stop. He'd made a choice to cross the line. And he hadn't just stepped over it; he'd sprinted past without looking back. And now, he and his monsters stalked the halls. If there was any comfort to be had, it was that Boucher wasn't stalking anywhere—not after what Connor had done to his knee. Even if Brewster and Henry brought him a crutch and some dope from sick bay, his career as a killer was over for the immediate future. Still, he was free to move around, however clumsily, and scout while the rest of them hid in bedrooms like children afraid of the dark. Regardless of Boucher, Noah and the others were in trouble and in poor shape to get out of it.

Brewster's blitz attack had left them separated and weakened in a matter of only a few minutes. Among the number in their room, Connor and Noah were the only ones who'd escaped without injury. Depending on what the Old Man brought for round two, though, their fitness might not matter at all.

“Where did you say you stored the guns?” Noah asked.

Connor's eyes narrowed. “They're in the rig manager's office.”

“And you have the key to the gun locker?”

“There isn't one. A locker, I mean. Or a key.”

“I thought you said—”

“I said I put 'em in a cabinet. It's just a regular ol' cabinet behind the desk. It locks, but I have no idea where the key might be. I been using a paper clip to close it up.”

“They were storing a rifle like that?”

Connor shook his head. “There wasn't a rifle on the rig until William brought one. It's his.”

Noah's inclination to think of the men from Connor's ship as reflections of themselves was more than a little accurate. Brewster had brought a pistol from the
Promise
for his own reasons, whatever they were. In Connor's world, that was a rifle. Like the view through a mirror, their worlds were the same but the perspective was off, flipped around. A gun, a rifle, a death, a life … and a living wife.

He shook his head to clear it of distractions.
Focus,
he told himself. Putting his ear to the door again, he held up a finger to ask his roommates for quiet. They obliged him as much as crushed windpipes and barely contained panic would allow. He heard nothing outside the room. Turning to Connor, he said, “I'm going out. I've got to get to those guns first.”

“You think he hasn't found them? We been in here at least a half hour.”

“I'm hoping he hasn't thought of them yet. I guess that's not likely, since he brought them both, in a way. But I haven't heard any shooting, so maybe there's hope.” He wanted to take comfort from the observation, but couldn't. That Brewster hadn't shot anyone didn't mean he wasn't armed with more than a butcher knife. It only meant he hadn't found himself in a position where the firearm was his best weapon. Yet. “I'm going.”

Connor stood. “I'm comin' with, brother.” Felix tried to get up as well, but Connor held him down with a light hand. “Stay here. Stay quiet,” he said. He bent to pick up his crowbar. The tool had never been far from his reach, even after they'd locked themselves in.

Noah smiled. He welcomed the company, even if he feared what it might mean for Connor to leave the room. He wasn't about to ask his friend to once again step in to do work that wasn't his responsibility. Brewster was the way he was, at least a little bit, because of choices Noah and Abby made together. She was gone and he remained. And that meant Brewster was his responsibility. “You got that paper clip?”

Connor pulled the twisted piece of metal out of his pocket. “It'd be irresponsible of me to just leave something like this lying around, wouldn't it?”

Noah unlocked the door.

 

30

The pair crept along as quietly as they could while still moving with urgency. Each little sound—footfalls, breathing, heartbeats—seemed to echo off the laminate floors and pre-fab walls of the corridor. Everything seemed deafeningly loud. Noah started at every odd creak and clang of the platform as it struggled to stay upright and intact against the assault of the weather outside. Without the sounds of men and machinery at work, the drilling platform groaned softly like a barely sleeping patient due for a dose of morphine.

Crouched and hugging a wall as if there was a shadow to find cover in the brightly lit hall, he was strung tight. His heart beat faster and his breath came quicker, dulling his ears. His skin prickled and his scalp tightened, drawing his focus from the corridor and back to his own body. He felt jittery and weak. His muscles had stiffened up and trembled with the exhaustion of having done nothing despite the adrenaline and lactic acid pumped into them. He felt vulnerable and betrayed by his body. If he didn't find Brewster soon, the effects would grow. His head would ache again and his reaction time and judgment would be dulled.

He felt like kicking himself for hiding as long as they had, letting the Old Man get out in front of them. He tried to rationalize it by telling himself Felix and David needed help before they could do anything else. But that wasn't true. David could have patched up Felix's stomach instead of Connor. Noah could have gone after the guns by himself. In reality, his mind simply refused to accept what had happened. He'd never seen anything as coldly vicious as what Brewster did. Not in person, anyway. Not outside of a movie theater where his unconscious mind could contextualize the unreality of what he was watching. This was reality. And reality crashed the system, shut him down for an hour of his life while he rebooted.

Connor paused in front of a door affixed with a plastic plate that read,
MANAGER
. Noah put his ear to the door and listened. It was quiet. He wasn't ready to trust his senses, however, and held his breath as he took another listen, trying to ignore his racing heartbeat. Nothing, again.

He pushed down on the handle. He wanted to burst through—kick the door in. If someone was waiting inside, creeping through slowly just gave them time to take aim. If no one was in the room, however, kicking it down and making a loud noise would give away where they were and what they were doing. Now that they were moving without leaving a trail of blood crumbs, there was no sense in crashing around and drawing attention. Unfortunately, he still hadn't found a fire ax. Unarmed, he needed to employ stealth and smarts before balls. Twisting to the side, he slipped through the opening.

“That's it,” Connor whispered, pointing above the desk at the far end of the room. The cabinet doors hung wide open. Noah thought of a rhyme his daughter loved:
The cupboard was bare, and so the poor dog had none.
He'd worried about Brewster getting to the weapons before them, but their disadvantage weighed on him heavier now that it was certain. His knuckles popped as he clenched his fists.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Connor's face drained of color. He pushed past Noah and ran to the desk only to skid to an awkward stop just short of it. Noah followed more cautiously.

On the floor behind the desk lay Henry. A knife stuck out of his chest and the maroon stain that spread out from the blade covering half of the man's shirt seemed too perfectly formed, like a Halloween novelty. Odors of urine and sweat mingled with the heavy smell of wet pennies. Noah's stomach convulsed. He held in his vomit and backed away. He'd smelled blood and guts hunting with his dad in New Hampshire. That was nothing new to him. But along with those scents came the musk of a deer, the sweetness of pine and fresh air, and the knowledge that they'd cure that venison and save as much as they needed to make their money stretch through the lean winter without having to choose between heating oil and food. They'd even give a little extra to the food bank to help out others. Those were smells of survival. And he was in control of when and where he smelled them.