Jerry didn’t argue. “Aye-aye, sir.”
He found Lieutenant Abrams and Oran sitting against the bulkhead. Abrams had a blanket around his shoulders, and a white, square adhesive bandage stuck to the side of his neck. He had been treated, but it didn’t seem to be helping. He looked even worse. His skin was pale, and he was soaked with sweat. He blinked rapidly and turned his head to the side, away from the bright lights above.
“How are you holding up?” Jerry asked.
“I feel like I’m on fire,” Abrams said, squinting at him. “The light hurts my eyes. I know what’s happening to me, White. Please, remember what I asked you to do.”
“It won’t come to that, suh,” Oran said. “I promise you.”
But Jerry knew better. Oran was trying to comfort Abrams, but down in the torpedo room, he had made his true feelings known. No one would survive this.
Tim approached and squatted down in front of Abrams. “What happened?”
“We found him locked inside one of the torpedo tubes,” Jerry said. “We were lucky Matson hadn’t drowned him yet.”
“He should have drowned me,” Abrams said. “That would have been better.”
Tim turned to Jerry. “What’s he talking about?”
“This!” Abrams exclaimed. He tore off the adhesive bandage on his neck to show Tim the bite marks.
“Suh, don’t do that,” Oran said, but Abrams ignored him.
“Matson bit you, sir?” Tim asked, taken aback.
“One of them did,” Abrams said. “I didn’t see who. Matson, Bodine, LeMon, Jefferson, Duncan, Penwarden—what does it matter? I’m going to be like them soon, I know it. I’ve got the fever; the light feels like it’s stabbing into my eyes. I can… I can hear them in my head, calling my name. How much longer will I be me?”
“Now, Lieutenant, you got to stop talking like that,” Oran said.
“Sir, you should listen to Guidry,” Tim said, putting a supportive hand on Abrams’ shoulder. “You’re lucky to be alive. We’re going to do everything we can to keep you that way.”
Abrams looked up at him with dark, sunken eyes. “And when I lose control and tear into your neck with my teeth, Spicer, will you still think so?”
Tim looked at Jerry. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure,” Jerry said. He got up, and they stepped a few paces away from the others. “I don’t know what we can do for Lieutenant Abrams. If there’s a cure, Matson never had the chance to find it.”
“That’s not what I wanted to talk about,” Tim said. “I wanted to apologize. Again. I was stupid. I should have been straight with you from the start about the captain asking me to keep an eye on you.”
“Forget it,” Jerry said. “Water under the bridge. If I’d been in your shoes, I probably would’ve done the same thing. There are more important things to worry about.”
“So we’re good?” Tim asked.
“Depends,” Jerry said.
“On what?”
“On whether we get out of here alive.”
“Something tells me the odds aren’t in our favor.” Tim looked past Jerry’s shoulder into the main part of the reactor room. “What the hell are they doing?”
Jerry turned around to see a group of sailors carrying Matson’s corpse. Captain Weber walked in front of them.
“Putting him somewhere safe, I guess,” Jerry said. “In case he’s not fully dead.”
“Can you really kill something like that?” Tim asked. “Aren’t they supposed to be dead already, technically?”
“Who knows?” Jerry replied. “They left out the chapter on vampires in The Bluejacket’s Manual.”
The sailors carrying Matson passed in front of the reactor. Several of them cried out and dropped Matson onto the deck. One of them shouted, “Captain, look!”
Jerry and Tim hurried over. On the deck, surrounded by a circle of gawking crewmen, Senior Chief Matson’s corpse had begun to smoke. A moment later, his skin started sizzling, stretching like a web over his muscles and bones as it blackened and burned away.
Jerry watched the corpse smolder. His suspicions were confirmed. There was something else besides light and wood stakes could harm the vampires. Something that was right here in the reactor room.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
After seeing Matson’s body burn before their eyes, any lingering doubts about the veracity of Jerry’s story vanished. The elongated teeth in the blackened skull were plain to see, and they were all the proof anyone needed that Roanoke was facing something far more dangerous than a mutiny.
When the smoke dissipated, all that remained of Senior Chief Matson was a charred husk, like a marshmallow held too long over a campfire. With the skin of his face burned away, the horrid fangs looked even longer. Tim shivered at the sight. He couldn’t imagine the pain Farrington must have felt when those teeth tore into him.
Captain Weber broke the stunned silence by voicing the question everyone was thinking. “What the hell just happened?”
“Sir, maybe they—they self-destruct after they die,” one sailor suggested.
“If that’s the case, why would it wait so long, sir?” Tim asked. “Matson’s been dead for some time now.”
“I think it’s something else, sir,” Jerry said. He crouched over the charred crust that had once been Matson. “If the old stories are right, only three things can destroy a vampire. You drive a wooden stake through its heart, expose it to sunlight, or chop off its head. Matson already had a stake through his heart, and his head is still attached to his body. That just leaves sunlight.”
“White, in case you haven’t noticed, we don’t get a lot of sun down here,” the captain said.
“Only, this sumbitch burned up like he was outside at high noon, suh,” Oran said, coming over to them. “Now why would that be, suh?”
“Hold on,” Tim said. A thought had occurred to him. It was far-fetched, but they were past all that. “They haven’t come into the reactor room this whole time, right?”
“On our way back, Oran, Abrams, and I saw a few of them in the corridor,” Jerry said. “They stayed away from the hatch. They didn’t even try to get inside.”
“And when we first saw LeMon, he was just staring at the bulkhead between the forward compartment and the reactor room, remember?” Tim added. “Like he was fascinated by something on the other side.”
“What are you suggesting, Spicer?” Captain Weber asked.
“I don’t know, sir. But there’s something in this room.”
“I had the same thought,” Jerry said. “But what is it? If not sunlight, what?”
Lieutenant Carr, the Engineering Department head that Tim had seen with the others at the wardroom meeting, stepped over to them. His uniform collar bore the insignia of a propeller flanked by two dolphins.
“Sir, if I may,” Carr said, and the captain nodded. “The only thing that’s special about the reactor room is the reactor itself. Is it possible that’s what’s keeping them out?”
The captain tapped his Geiger. “But the radiation level is within safety limits, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir,” Carr said, “but it’s still higher in here, just from proximity to the reactor. Think about it, sir. The sun gives off light and heat. Both are expressions of radiation, just at different frequencies on the same spectrum. Negligible or not, sir, there’s a higher radiation level in here than on the other side of the bulkhead.”
Captain Weber looked skeptical. “But we don’t have any proof of that, Lieutenant. The one thing we know works, that we’ve seen work, is wooden stakes, so that’s what we need. If we have enough of them, we could arm ourselves. But where are we going to find that much wood? There are only so many mop handles on board.”