Only a single battle lantern still worked up here, taped to the bulkhead across from the captain’s stateroom. The door to the stateroom was closed. Gordon saw Oran at the other end of the captain’s egress, standing at the entrance to the control room, his form silhouetted by the twinkling LEDs of the instrument panels. He stood so still and so silently that he reminded Gordon of a deer in the headlights, frozen in terror.
Gordon started toward him. They didn’t have any time to waste. The creatures that had come after them on the middle level would surely follow any moment now.
Something struck him hard from behind—a sharp blow just below the shoulder blades, which sent him flying face-first into the door of Captain Weber’s stateroom. He didn’t have time to get his hands up to protect his face before he hit. His forehead struck it, cushioned only by the paper-thin fake wood veneer that covered the door. The door hadn’t been properly latched, and it swung open under the impact. Gordon half fell and half staggered into the stateroom. The lights here had been smashed too, but the light from the lantern in the corridor spilled in after him, illuminating a floor stained red. Piles of dead men in blue coveralls cluttered the center of the room. Some had a smear of blood on one side of their neck, just like Ensign Van Lente. Others were in much worse shape, with their throats ripped out completely, leaving behind only glistening meat and hanging, ragged bits of skin, as if the vampires had attacked them in a frenzy.
A shadow appeared in the light. He heard the sound of the corridor lantern being smashed and was plunged into sudden darkness. Hands pushed him forward onto the pile of bodies. He tried to scream for Oran, scream for anyone to help him, but his assailant’s arm snaked around his neck—so cold, so deathly cold—and cut off his air. He struggled, but his assailant was unbelievably strong.
A moment before he lost consciousness, he felt someone’s mouth against his neck. In a split second, his brain registered that no breath, warm or otherwise, came from that mouth. He felt teeth brush his skin and told himself to fight, to get up and run, that if he didn’t he was going to die. He felt hot pain sink into the side of his neck, and everything faded away.
Gordon woke in the dark. He tried to move but couldn’t. An image came to him of a fly wrapped in spider’s silk, waiting to be devoured, and he pushed it away. That wasn’t going to be him. He wouldn’t let it be. He would fight those bastards first. He tried to move again, but he was boxed in somewhere narrow that wouldn’t let him budge.
He could move his head slightly. It was resting on something cold and metallic, and when he lifted his head, he bumped into another cold metal surface. He winced in pain. His forehead was still sore from hitting the captain’s stateroom door. He gently lowered his head again. The metal was rounded, he realized, and damp. In the distance, he heard dripping water. It occurred to him that he was in a pipe of some kind.
Then the panic came. There was only one kind of tube on Roanoke big enough for a man to fit inside.
He began kicking his feet and slapping his hands against the walls. He screamed, but his cries only rang in his ears. No one would hear him through the thick steel of the torpedo tube and the breech door. Somewhere in his mind, he knew this, but he continued screaming. He screamed until he was dizzy and out of breath, and then he stopped. Air was precious in the watertight tube. If no one opened the breech door, he would suffocate. He just didn’t know how long it would take. Ten minutes? Five? Two?
He managed to work his hands up along his sides so that they were pinned against his chest, but he couldn’t get them any higher. He rolled onto his side, then squirmed and wriggled and pushed himself forward with his feet. The back of his head touched the inside of the breech door. He kept pushing himself toward it until he was curled with his shoulders against it. He shoved, but the breech didn’t budge. He pressed more of his weight against it, but it stayed shut.
An even more terrifying thought occurred to him. What if they didn’t intend to suffocate him? What if they were going to flood the tubes with water and then shoot him out into the freezing ocean? Would he drown, or would he freeze to death while still holding his breath? Or would the pressure simply crush the air-filled cavity of his chest? What would kill him first? He remembered the feel of teeth against his skin and raised a hand to his neck. He felt sticky, coagulated blood, and two small welts. God, no! His heart raced, and he felt light-headed with panic. Why hadn’t they drained him? Why didn’t they finish him off? Christ, was this their version of a pantry? Would they come back later to feed on him again? He thought of all those teeth tearing into him…
It was too much to contemplate. The horror of it overwhelmed him, and he screamed again. He screamed until there was nothing left in his lungs. After his air left him, his mind followed. For an interminable moment in the darkness of the torpedo tube, Lieutenant Gordon Abrams went mad.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Tim ran through the dark, following Jerry down the corridor, away from the control room and through Fire Control, toward the main ladder. Jerry stopped at the ladder and waited there for him to catch up, then ushered him onto the rungs.
“Go, go, move!” Jerry whispered.
“But the weapons locker,” Tim said.
“No time!”
Tim grabbed the side rails, took two rungs, and dropped the rest of the way. He landed on the middle level and spun to look down the corridor. Shapes seethed toward him in the darkness, groping, hissing like animals, their eyes glowing with an unnatural light. Jerry dropped down the ladder and landed beside him. He grabbed Tim’s sleeve and pulled him away from the shadowy figures, but there was nowhere to run. Their backs were to the bulkhead. Tim saw the hatch to the reactor room at the top of a short flight of steps. He ran to it. The silhouettes in the darkness swarmed closer—so close that the hair on Tim’s neck stood up. He didn’t have to look back to know they were reaching for him. He bounded up the stairs to the hatch, spun the handle, and yanked it open. A sliver of light spilled out into the corridor, like a beacon promising safety. The light struck one of the shapes in the dark—it was Matson. The hospital corpsman hissed angrily, showing long, sharp teeth, and ducked quickly out of the light. The other shapes fell back.
“Come on!” Tim shouted as Jerry pounded up the steps.
Together they barreled through the hatch, and Jerry slammed it behind them.
After the darkness that had filled the rest of the submarine, coming into the brightly lit space was like staring into the sun. Tim blinked, taking a moment to let his eyes adjust, then looked around him. The reactor room. He had been here only a handful of times, during emergency drills. Other than that, there was no good reason for a sonar tech to go into the boat’s reactor room, although being chased through the submarine by a horde of vampires probably qualified.
The reactor room was enormous compared to the other rooms on the boat—spacious enough to give the engineers room to maneuver without stepping on each other’s toes. The reactor was a hulking cylinder of metal that spanned two of the sub’s levels. Crowned with a field of activators and control rods like antennae and winged by two massive pipes, one that brought in the coolant—usually seawater—and another that expelled the superheated water into the steam generator, it looked like something out of a science-fiction movie.
They weren’t alone. Six sailors—human sailors—stepped out from where they had been hiding on the other side of the reactor. Five of them brandished thick steel crowbars. The sixth held a two-foot spud wrench that must weigh twenty pounds. They lowered their weapons when they recognized Tim and Jerry.