“What happened?” he asked. “What the fuck happened here?”
Jerry didn’t answer. He walked to the helm, where the planesman was slumped forward against his yoke. Jerry held the lantern six inches from the sailor’s face. His eyes were wide, and he wore a terrified expression as if he were silently screaming. Jerry pressed two fingers to the side of the man’s neck, checking for a pulse.
“Is he…?” Tim started to ask, but he knew the answer already. He could tell just by looking into those glazed, unblinking eyes.
Jerry shook his head. Then he tilted the planesman’s head to one side. A chunk of flesh had been torn out of the other side of the sailor’s neck, leaving a ragged, bloody hole. Jerry let go and backed away from the body quickly. Neither he nor Tim said a word, but they both understood what had happened. The vampires had stormed the control room and killed everyone there. No subtle little welts on the neck this time. The vampires had gone all out, killing the men as quickly as they could.
“Where’s the captain?” Tim asked, looking around the room. Captain Weber wasn’t among the dead.
“Maybe he got away,” Jerry said.
Tim shined his lantern on the terrified faces of the dead all around him. The control room had been turned into an abattoir. Matson alone couldn’t do that. Even he, Bodine, and LeMon together couldn’t overpower this many crewmen so quickly. It had to have been a much bigger group. Jesus, was Roanoke swarming with vampires at this point?
They needed to get off this boat. It was the only way he could see them surviving. But they were hundreds of feet underwater, thousands of miles from port, and likely already deep in Soviet waters. Where the hell could they go?
Jerry pulled a small object out of his pocket and held it up for him to see. “I found his on the WEPS’s body downstairs.”
Tim recognized it as the key to the weapons lockers. So that was why Jerry had been digging around in Lieutenant French’s body bag. There were only two keys to the weapons lockers. The XO had one, and Lieutenant French, the WEPS, had the other. It was a stroke of luck that Matson hadn’t taken the key himself when he killed French. But then, if the slaughter all around him was any indication, vampires didn’t need weapons.
Roanoke had two weapons lockers. One was in the reactor room, the other on the top level, not thirty feet from where they now stood. Tim didn’t know whether a gun could kill a vampire, but he sure as hell would feel a lot less helpless with one in his hand.
A loud bang echoed from the captain’s egress on the far side of the control room, the corridor where the captain’s stateroom was. It sounded as if someone was coming up the fore ladder from Officer Country. No, not someone—multiple someones. He heard footsteps on the deck.
Both men switched off their lanterns, although Tim wondered why they bothered when it was obvious the vampires had no trouble seeing in the dark. They bolted back the way they came, out of the control room and into the waiting darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Gordon Abrams waited in silence for a full fifteen minutes after the last time he heard either Jefferson or Penwarden speak from the other side of the stateroom door, and he gestured for Oran to do the same. The time passed excruciatingly slowly. With his ear pressed to the door, Gordon was convinced he would hear something outside that would prove they were still there—a footstep, a whisper between them, another threat to get them to open the door. But when those sounds didn’t come and fifteen minutes had passed, he slowly and quietly pulled the chair away from the door.
“What are you doing, suh?” Oran asked in alarm.
“I’m going to see if they’re still out there.”
“Suh, don’t!” Oran protested. “That’s crazy!”
“We can’t stay locked up in here forever,” Gordon said. “We have to find Captain Weber and tell him what’s going on.”
“He must know by now, suh,” Oran said. “If he ain’t dead already, I mean.”
“We don’t know that. We have to assume he’s still alive and still in command. Since the circuit isn’t working, it’s up to us to find him and warn him about what’s happening on his boat. You can stay here if you want, but I’m going.”
“Like hell, suh,” Oran said. “I ain’t stayin’ here by myself!”
“Then you’ll have to come with me, because I’m out of here,” Gordon said.
“Suh, it’s suicide!”
“Duly noted,” Gordon said. “You coming?”
Oran sighed. “Aye, suh.”
Gordon unlocked the door and opened it slowly, just enough to peek out into the corridor. Not only was the battle lantern on the Officer Country bulkhead out, but every other light on the middle level was as well, leaving the corridor in complete darkness except for the light from the stateroom’s lantern. It was quieter than he had ever heard on Roanoke. Something was terribly wrong. No submarine should be this quiet.
In the light that seeped out into the corridor, Gordon could see Ensign Van Lente’s body on the floor. He didn’t see Jefferson or Penwarden, but that didn’t mean anything. It would be easy enough for them to hide in the dark and wait for the two men to come out of the stateroom. They could be just a few feet away from him right now, cloaked in darkness, and he wouldn’t know it. He and Oran could be walking into a trap. In fact, chances were good that was exactly what would happen. The vampires, rougarou, or whatever they were didn’t strike him as the sort that would just give up after a short wait. But Gordon knew they had to risk it. They had to find the captain.
“Let’s go,” he whispered to Oran.
Gordon crept out into the dark corridor. He saw a trickle of light at the dead end of Officer Country, coming down the fore ladder from the captain’s egress above. He turned the other way, toward the open corridor, and thought he saw movement in the distance. He strained, trying to focus on the black-on-black shadows in the dark. Had he really seen anything? Or was his mind playing tricks on him, showing him a bogeyman everywhere he looked? Then, like a field of stars on a moonless night, multiple pairs of eyes turned his way—glowing eyes that seemed to reflect a light that wasn’t there.
“Oh, fuck,” Gordon muttered. He turned, grabbed Oran by the front of his coveralls, and swung him toward the nearby ladder. “Get moving! Go!”
Oran darted to the ladder, disappearing for a moment in a shadowy corner near the ladder’s foot, then scrambled up it to the top deck. Gordon kept his gaze on those glowing eyes. How many pairs were there? Four? Five? His fear made it hard to count. All he knew was that it was more than just Jefferson and Penwarden. He felt along the floor until he found Van Lente’s sidearm. Snatching it up, he aimed down the corridor at the shapes moving toward him in the dark, their eyes blazing with unearthly light. He squeezed the trigger over and over again until the slide locked open, the magazine empty.
He had to have hit them, but the shapes kept coming. He threw the gun down, turned, and ran for the fore ladder. He remembered the broken light in the mess at the start of it all, and the broken lights in the head later, and how no one had seen it happen either time. These things could move fast when they wanted to, he realized, but they were only toying with him now, letting him run, confident there was no escape. Well, fuck that. That was their mistake, not his. He grabbed the rungs and scaled the ladder faster than he ever had before. He had his back to the figures as he went up, leaving him vulnerable, but he couldn’t think about that. He just kept climbing as fast as he could. He heard their footsteps behind him, but he couldn’t tell how close they were. The sound was muffled by the pounding of his heart in his ears. Then he was up on the top level and in the captain’s egress.