Carpathia (7 page)

  Quin barked a short laugh. "You must admit this is a situation that might call for it."

  "Hey, we may be in the water, but the
Titanic'
s still afloat, isn't she? That's something."

  As the words left Abe's lips, a series of loud cracks and bangs erupted from the direction of the ship. Although Quin hadn't much experience with firearms, the flat, lethal noises sounded like gunshots to him. He supposed that Abe, who'd often gone fox hunting with his father Lord Godalming, would recognize if that were so.

  "Are they shooting people?" Quin asked aloud.

  Abe shook his head.

  "Are you saying they're not?"

  "I'm saying I don't know. I've never heard anything like that."

  A board zipped by Quin's head and landed with a splash behind him. Abe gave up his grip on the deck chair and swam for it. Quin kicked along after him for a moment, peering back over his shoulder at the ship as he went.

  Then Quin spotted what was making the noise. He stabbed a frozen finger up at the
Titanic
's towering bulk. "It's not the people," he said. "It's the ship!"

  Just above where the ship had entered the water, the whole thing snapped in half. It broke, not clean and sharp like a dry matchstick but instead crumbled, sheared, and tore away with a mighty, extended screech that sounded like the protestations of a choir of angry demons.

  As Quin and Abe watched, the top half of the ship – no longer held in place by its lower half, like a knife stabbed into a steak – toppled back into the water, landing on its keel. As it fell, Abe pointed toward the waters behind the ship. Scores of people floundered about in the shadow of the gigantic ship as it came rushing down at them like a great tower chopped off at its base.

  Quin could do nothing but watch the massacre in helpless horror. He couldn't have reached any of the people under the falling ship in time, and even if he had, what could he have done, other than be crushed with them? Some part of him hoped that the water would cushion the ship's fall some. Perhaps the wave it caused as it fell would shove some of the people out of the way like beachside swimmers riding the surf.

  In his heart, though, Quin knew each of those poor souls – every last one of them – was doomed.

  "Dear God." Abe's voice sounded hushed, almost reverent. The words formed not a prayer but a profession of awe at the horrible spectacle playing out before them.

  The ship fell over like a gigantic tree felled by an impossible blow. It was so tall that it seemed to take minutes to topple into the water, and when it hit it threw up a wave large enough to swamp any smaller boat that might have been nearby.

  "Lucy–" Quin heard himself say.

  "She's all right," Abe said quietly. "She had plenty of time to get far enough away. Didn't she?"

  Quin nodded, although to reassure himself or Abe, he wasn't sure. "Right."

  And then the wave that rushed out from the side of the ship nearest them came straight for them.

  Quin had been to the beach at Whitby and had swum in the sea many times. He'd watched the waves there roll in through the worst storms of his life, ones that had ripped the roofs off buildings and even knocked a rickety old building or two down flat. This wave from the
Titanic
's crash back into the sea dwarfed every one of them.

  "Hold on!" Abe shouted.

  Quin did the best he could to maintain his grip on the deckchair. He took the deepest breath he could grab and then wrapped his entire body around it. He clutched it to him with all the strength left in his worn and coldnumbed arms.

  Rather than crashing into him, the wave rolled right over him as if he wasn't even there. He rode up the face of it for an instant, then pierced straight through its surface, and it enveloped him.

  In his shock at the fall of the
Titanic
, Quin had forgotten about the frigid temperatures of the water in which he was swimming. When the wave tumbled over the top of him, knocking him back into the blackness, he felt like an icy hand had grabbed him and was trying to shove him back down into the water because it just wasn't done with him yet.

  This time, though, Quin was expecting the wave, and he fought back against it as hard as he could. He let go of the deckchair when he realized it wasn't holding him up but helping pull him down, and he punched through the water with his hands, scrambling for the surface.

  As he went, Quin spotted a woman rolling through the water below him, being pulled farther into the darkness with every instant. He reached out for her, but she was yanked past him before he could even bring his arm toward her. From her pale color, he wondered if she might already be dead, and then he realized that he would be if he didn't keep fighting the mighty pressure from that massive wave.

  A moment later, Quin returned to the surface. After his last dunking, this had seemed almost too easy to endure, and when he spotted Abe's head emerge only an arm's length away, he allowed himself the ghost of a smile.

  Then he spied the
Titanic
, and he stared at it aghast. The bow had disappeared beneath the waves, but the stern was rising into the night sky once again. Would it keep breaking and slamming back into the water like a breaching whale slapping its tail? How long would it be until the horror came to a once and final end?

  "Over there!"

  Abe tapped Quin on the shoulder, and Quin spun about in the water to see that Abe was pointing with his other hand at something large and white floating in the water. It took Quin a moment to recognize it as one of the collapsible lifeboats, perhaps the one he and Abe had been standing ready to help deploy when they'd been on the ship. The water had washed it off the
Titanic
's roof and sent it floating away, capsized but still floating on the surface.

  Several people had already clambered on top of the white-bottomed boat, lying there like beached seals warming themselves on a sun-scorched rock. The waves that had rushed from the sinking ship had shoved the tiny craft farther and farther away, and it would be a long swim to reach it. Still, there seemed like no other recourse, not if Quin and Abe wanted to live.

  "That's our chance," Quin said, already crawling through the freezing waters separating him from the overturned boat. "Come on!"

 
 

 
 
 

Brody Murtagh backhanded Trevor McPherson across the jaw so hard that it would have shattered the bones of a living man. The man only cried out in surprise rather than pain though and glared back at the Irishman as they trod water next to each other in the wake of the sinking
Titanic.

  Just about everyone else unfortunate enough to find themselves in the water was shivering against the near zero temperature, but the two men and their companions didn't feel it at all. The grave had long since robbed them of any fear of the cold.

  "What the bloody hell was that for?" Trevor rubbed his jaw.

  "For not listening to me," Brody said. "'Stay away from the ship,' I said. 'Give the thing a wide berth,' I said. And what good did that do poor Brigid now, can you tell me? Just tell me that."

  Trevor stared at Brody, refusing to utter a word.

  "It's not a rhetorical question, laddie," Brody said at last. He turned to the two others with them. "What do you think's happened to our blessed Brigid now?"

  "I couldn't rightly say." Fergus Kielty moved away from Brody as he spoke, eyeing the man's hands as he went. "But if she was dumb enough to ignore you, then maybe she got what she had coming."

  "Aye," Siobhan Kelly said. "But then it wasn't her bloody idea to drag us out here into the middle of the North Atlantic all by our lonesomes now, was it?"

  Brody glared at Siobhan, but as he did he spotted a man swimming toward them from behind her. A grin played across his lips. "Now, you're the one who spent the whole trip so far whining about how damned hungry you were, and you're going to complain to me because I brought you out to the greatest buffet you've ever seen?" Brigid had all of her immortal life ahead of her, barring an unfortunate incident, and what does she do? She gets careless. She goes wandering off after a quick kill, something too shiny for that little bird to ignore, and what happens to her?"

  "Just what you said would happen." Trevor gave Brody a sullen glare. "She gets too close to the wreck, and a wave sucks her down."

  "Right," said Brody. "Knocks the wind right out of her. In case you hadn't noticed, my friends, we don't carry too much air in our lungs in the first place."

  "Well, we don't rightly need it now, do we?" said Fergus.

  "That's my point." Brody began to swim around Siobhan with long, languorous strokes. "It means we're not so buoyant as the breathing folks, and it doesn't take much to sink us."

  Siobhan let out a little gasp, then breathed in deep and rose just a bit in the water. "Do you think Brigid is dead? Well and truly, I mean?"

  "For her sake, let's hope so," Brody said. "Otherwise, she's going to spend the rest of her days trying to walk across the bottom of the Atlantic."

  "Help!" the man behind Siobhan said as Brody approached him in the water. "I say. You wouldn't happen to have seen a lifeboat going by, would you? My wife is in number five. Her name is Amiee Achilli."

  Siobhan turned around and cackled at the man. "You think if we'd seen a lifeboat we'd still be soaking out here in this frozen stew with you?"

  "I– I meant no harm by asking," the man said. "I just hoped to see her and my little girl again."

  "Don't you worry yourself, mate," Brody said as he came up next to the slim, bald-headed man. "I'm sure you'll meet each other again soon enough, whether in this life or the next."

  The man's voice trembled as he shivered from the cold. "That's all well and good, but I'm afraid I'm not quite ready to give up on this life quite yet. Even if I can't get into that lifeboat, I'd like to know that they're going to make it – that they'll be all right."

  "There are no guarantees in life." Trevor, who had dived under the sea's black surface, emerged from the water behind the man. "Who can do more than hope for the best to happen?"

  "Right," said Fergus. "We've already lost one of our own tonight. I'd thought her invulnerable."

  "You mean the ship?" the man said, turning back to where the
Titanic
had disappeared beneath the waves. "I think we were all guilty of that to some extent. It's hard to believe she's gone, isn't it? And that she took so many souls with her."

  "What's your name, my friend?" Brody asked.

  "Justin," the man said with a faint smile. "Justin Achilli of Atlanta at your service. I'd offer to shake your hand, but I'm not sure I can feel mine any longer."

  "Fair enough," Fergus said. "I've had that same problem for years."

  The others laughed at this, all but Fergus, who only scowled at them.

  "Is there anything around here I could cling to?" Justin asked. "I'd hoped that the four of you might have discovered something stable and laid claim to it."

  One by one, the others shook their heads at him. "We just came out here for a swim on this beautiful Sunday night." Brody smiled, but took care not to show his teeth. His fangs had extended, but he didn't want Justin to see them and spoil all the fun.

  How often, after all, did any of them get to play with their food like this before feasting? If they wished to feed back in the States, they always had to strike fast and take great pains to make it look like an accident. The failure to do that properly was one of the reasons that Dushko had herded them all on to the
Carpathia
, after all.

  Brody hadn't seen the harm in it. Who cared if people knew who he was or what he was? He'd been a killer before he'd died, and he was a killer now. He could handle the heat from such revelations. All you had to do was pick up and leave.

  Not all of them had done so well though. Siobhan, for instance, had been discovered feeding on a child and had to kill off an entire family once they started screaming about it. Brody snickered to himself as he thought about it. That was the first time he'd ever actually heard someone scream "Bloody murder!"

  But once it had happened, Siobhan had refused to leave her home behind. "I've been here since before I died," she said, "and nothing's ever going to make me leave."

  She'd been wrong about that, of course. When the police started poking around, even Siobhan had realized that it would only be a matter of time before she was found out. She'd killed the first patrolman to become suspicious of her, but that had only brought more attention to the murders.

  The cops didn't always care if a family of immigrants turned up dead, after all, but when it was one of their own they went out of their way to figure out what happened and put a stop to it. A certain sense of self-preservation motivated them. A killer who was mad enough to murder a policeman might be mad enough to do it again.

  "Very funny," Justin said to Brody. "I'm glad you're doing well enough here to be able to find the humor in this horrible tragedy. Did you have no one on board that ship that you cared about, sir? Did you think it such a pleasure to be dumped into the freezing drink that you couldn't be bothered to find safe passage for your young lady there?"

  "Now," Trevor said, coming closer to the man. "There's no need to be nasty about it."

  "It's a nasty situation," Justin said. "We're all going to die nasty deaths. Us lot here, we're all going to freeze to death, but all things considered we might be better off than the women and children shoved into those lifeboats. How long do you think they'll be able to make it out there without food and water."

  "Perhaps they'll be forced to turn to cannibalism." Fergus chortled at the thought.