The Aeschylus (31 page)

Moments later, he dropped the wrench, unable to finish the job. The world about him felt unbearably heavy, and he could do nothing for a time but close his eyes. When he opened them, Ari was there. The man had come to the lab looking for his friend, and here he was. Dominik threw his arms around him, and for a long moment, they comforted one another.

At last, Dominik looked up. “We're never getting out of here, Ari. I was wrong to say we should play along. I was wrong
to think they would ever honor what they told us. God help me Ari, I was wrong.”

“You did what you thought was right. So did I. The question is, what are we going to do now?”

As Dominik looked up, he saw something on the other man's face he'd never seen before, not in all the time he'd known him. He saw Ari's tears were not those of sadness, but of anger.

“We have to get out,” his friend whispered.

“We have to get out.”

“How?”

There were no windows in the laboratory, but Dominik could feel his gaze being pulled in the direction of the crater. He could feel it calling to him, its voice whispering in his mind.

A way to control it
. That's what they wanted.

“Well,” he said to Ari. “I say we give them what they want.”

The twilight grew deeper as Zofia progressed further and further down. Lucja passed out next to her sister, her sleep filled with restless dreams. Zofia herself slept in silence. She remembered nothing of the morning, knowing only that she was prey and all the world around her was her predator. She didn't recognize who it was that held onto her skin or the voices of the men coming in and out of the room. She only knew she wanted to sleep, and when she slept, she wanted to remember her mother. Magdelena had always told her sleep was the magic cure, and that when she woke, she would feel better. But that was not true this day. Each time Zofia wakened, the pain in her head was worse. At one point, she thought she heard her father's voice and lifted the blankets to see if it was him. But she saw only monsters in the room and descended back under the covers, sobbing. When the monsters were gone, she slept again. Even in sleep, she could feel the pain in her chest, the raggedness of her breath. That made her dream of a rhyme she used to say playing
Klasy
when she was a kid. That had been two years ago.
Throw the rock, jump the stone, fall on your bottom, the next one goes!
She was not good at
jumping on one leg like the other kids, but she'd made it through the game once, jumping on all the squares on one foot and laughing when her friends applauded. The game had been fun even if she wasn't good at it, even if she had been out of breath at the end. Her mother had been so proud of her when she did. She wished she could go back and try it again. She wished her mother were here now to hold her and sing to her and to tell her everything was all right. At least she felt warm in the bed now, just like when her mother used to pick her up from the crib and hold her. She still remembered that. Why didn't more kids remember that? That had been the best, safest feeling in the world, being carried in those arms. Under the blankets, she crawled until she found a shape and pretended it was her mother. She curled up to it, letting one thumb slip into her mouth. She didn't suck her thumb any more, not really (that was for babies), but it felt good to do. She let herself curl up and squeeze that shape, remembering the soft features of her mother and what it felt like to be snuggled around her.

It was there that she died, squeezing her sister's arm, oblivious to the tears of her father and the men clustered around him in the confines of the bunker. It was some hours later, in the middle of the night, before they discovered she had stopped breathing.

The Aeschylus and The Island:

Present Day

The discharge from the barrel of the rifle drifted up, mixing with the black smoke around him. Everything was burning now: the oil tanks, the buildings, even The Carrion. The tentacles shriveled in the heat, emitting soft, shrieking sounds as they withered and bled. It wouldn't be long before they were all smoldering, just like them.

Mason lowered the rifle and watched the boat disappear across the horizon. There was nothing else to be done. With both helicopters destroyed, his old compadre had just taken the only means of escape, and he managed to do it with all of his idiot friends in tow.
Civies
, no less, every goddamned one.

He heard footsteps behind him, and he turned to see Melvin limping across the deck. His pants were torn, a piece of shrapnel embedded in one thigh. “They get away?”

Mason nodded. “Yeah.”

“You hit 'em?”

“I hit the boat. It's damaged, but not enough to stop them.”

“So they got away.” It sounded like a resignation.

“They're going to the island.” How Mason knew, he wasn't sure. Maybe it was the way the boat had turned before he had lost sight of it. Maybe it was the fact that it was damaged and
was probably low on fuel. But he thought it was probably the girl. They'd have a fat chance in hell of finding her, but he didn't think AJ could resist being the hero. So he was going to try, and drag the rest of his new friends down with him.

Mason tossed the rifle to his medic. All he had now was the knife, not that it mattered. He had a feeling they'd all be in the water within an hour or two, and the time they had left would not be pleasant. They were asphyxiating. The smoke was roiling in great, black waves from the lower decks, its taste thick and greasy in his mouth.

Two more pairs of boots came thudding across the walk. Peter and Christian stepped from behind the haze, both looking haggard and disjointed. The side of Christian's face was streaming blood, a thousand minute cuts from glass debris stitched across his hairline. Peter was covered in soot. He looked tired, an old man in a young man's body.

“Jin's dead,” he said.

Did those things get him?
It was on Mason's lips, but he bit it back. Of course they got him. It was a stupid question, and they didn't have breath to waste on stupid questions. With Jin gone, they had no engineer.
No engineer, no pilot, no second in command, and no goddamned way out. CATFUed.

Something cried out from the northwest stairwell. Mason braced himself to put down another blackened figure, but it was only the new kid. He came hopping up the stairs like a madman, the lower half of his body blazing fire. “Help me!” he yelled. “
For God's sake, help me!
”

Peter and Christian ran to him, the former stripping off his jacket in mid-stride.

“Leave him,” Mason said. He knew how this was going to end, he just had the gift.

“
Agh!
”

Peter tossed the jacket over Nick and then hammered at the fire with his feet. Christian joined in, both of them stomping furiously. From a distance, they looked like a couple of droogs kicking the shit out of a homeless man. Melvin made
a move to help, but Mason snatched his arm. No, he needed Calle right where he was.

At last, the fire dissipated.

Nicholas rolled in pain, and Mason was pretty sure a few of those tolchocks had caught him in the ankle. Doped up or no, those had to hurt like hell. He was a tough kid, Mason would give him that.

When he was finally able to sit up, Christian put one arm under his shoulder and helped him to his feet.
To his foot
, Mason corrected, not for the first time. The kid was in agony. His face was red, his eyes streaming tears. Mason wondered if it was from the pain or if his body had tried to put itself out when it realized it was on fire. The human body did such odd things in extreme stress.

Then Mason saw there was something wrong with him. The veins on his neck were standing out. His eyes had taken a decidedly milky tone, and his movements... they were strange in some way he couldn't describe. Nicholas, after all, had been wounded before any of the rest of them, hadn't he? And so Doctor Grey had been right: The Carrion were claiming him.

With Christian's help, the boy hobbled over to stand in front of his commander. “What the hell is going on here, sir? I was up there, and... and you shot at them. You shot at Gideon and the others. You're trying to kill them, aren't you?”

“Yeah,” Mason said. He had no more use for lies.

“I won't be a part of this! I—”

But that was as far as he got. Mason's knife was suddenly in his stomach, the blade buried to the hilt. A lot of guys preferred the armpit or tried to go through the chest wall, but that was too difficult. As for the throat, that was too messy. The gut was soft and pliant. It was intimate. A placed cut to the abdominal artery would kill you just as quick if done right, and Mason knew just the spot.

The kid's mouth opened in an
O
, and then his body slid to the floor.

“I told you to leave him.”

Mason wiped the knife on his jacket, then turned back to the rails, not waiting to see the reaction from the others. His
men were either with him, or they weren't, and if they weren't, then they'd all die out here. Maybe it didn't matter and they would die anyway. They were only four now.

Four of nine.

They were battered and torn. Mason himself was shot in the leg. They had no food, no water, and no way off of the platform. Nothing but the will to survive. Beyond that, Mason hadn't been oblivious to what the good doctor had told them; he knew what being wounded meant, even if they did manage to survive the fire. The Carrion had an
in
now, didn't it? It was reproducing itself at this very moment, the spores climbing through the holes in their bodies, through the cuts on their skin.
Christ
. Since this morning, things had developed a habit of going downhill, and the worst was yet to come. They'd all be like the RDF soon, skin blackening, body temperature escalating until the mind was in permanent fever dream.

Mason wondered if he had made the decision to kill the kid because he was infected, or because he was about to become insubordinate. Because right now, insubordination didn't count for a whole hell of a lot. As for the other reason... well, that would mean Mason was the biggest hypocrite in the world, wouldn't it? He could feel The Carrion moving through his own bloodstream, pushing its way through his circulatory system like a rude guest.

“What now?” Christian asked. He was calm, eerily calm. They all were. They weren't
docile
. No, that wasn't right. There was something bubbling beneath the surface in them, something like pale fire, just as it was with him. They'd watched him kill Nicholas without the slightest protest or the slightest surprise, and he could sense they wanted more. At the end of the day, there wasn't any better way to shrug off defeat than bloodshed, was there?

“The primary objective is lost due to circumstances beyond our control.” He spoke without turning to them, still staring at the sea. “But we still have our secondary objective, don't we?”

“Sir?”

“They're going to the island, like I said. I for one am not going out without making sure they're buried there. The Marine Corps didn't raise me to be a quitter. The same with you, Vy. And the same goes for the army for you, St. Croix.” He did turn around then, sensing the need in them and feeding off of it. “No one's coming out here for us. I think we all know that by now. At least, not by the time this place collapses. So if we have any chance at all, it will be getting to the island, and getting that goddamned boat back. If we can't do that, then we can at least track down the ones responsible for this. I want to watch what happens when we wipe that fucking smile off of their faces. Because believe me, they are smiling. They're smiling because they think they've won.” He looked at them in turn, seeing the hunger and hate in their eyes and loving it. Hunger and hate would keep you alive.

“How we gonna get there, Boss?” Melvin asked.

“I don't know, but I'll think of something,” Mason said, and he would. In spite of the terrible pain in his leg, he was feeling... well, he was feeling
good
. Or perhaps
energized
was the better word. He thought he could run a hundred miles, even on an injured leg. Hell, he could run on the surface of the water if he had to. Bullet or no, infection or no, he wouldn't be stopped, not before he had his say. No goddamned tentacle or spore or creature from the black lagoon was going to keep him from paying his old pal AJ one last visit. AJ might think he could run, but the island wasn't far enough, not nearly far enough.

For the first time since that morning, Mason found himself thinking inexplicably of his retirement. He thought of the countryside, an old church, and an old groundskeeper who would tend the garden and plant the flowers. It had been a nice dream, as foolish as it was, as soft as it was. No, this is where he belonged. He belonged here in the shit, fighting for every last inch, fighting for every last breath before the darkness closed in. He wanted to stay alive just long enough to wipe the
smile off of AJ's face. And to find a cure, if there was one. Ha! Now there was a laugh.

No more use for lies,
he thought again.

The only thing that might hold him back was his leg. In spite of how good the rest of him was feeling, the sonofabitch still hurt. It was a weird thing, but as he gazed down to the surviving tentacles, he thought about how soothing they looked, how good it would feel to just settle down and stick his leg into one. He was quite sure it would feel warm, like draping your thigh in a hot tub.

Then, he pushed the notion away. It was a strange, strange thought. And even if he had nothing to lose, the idea was still pretty goddamned weird.

Around him, The Aeschylus creaked and groaned as the fires raged. Like Mason, it seemed to know that its end was coming.

The walls emerged from the mist like enceintes on a castle, barring entry from the sea as surely as any mountain or reef. When AJ saw them, he half-expected to be fired upon, as if there might be a legion of soldiers hiding inside. That was foolish, of course. He had seen maps of the island and knew it was full of dead men. Its purpose had long since departed, its inhabitants swallowed by an age long gone.