Still, the worst thing a sonar tech could do was get cocky, because that led to sloppiness, which led to mistakes. Tim forced himself to focus. His mind was still moving in a thousand different directions, trying to process everything that had happened—the horrible deaths, the sudden revelation that vampires were real—but he pushed himself to concentrate on the Soviet submarine instead. He couldn’t let anything distract him or they could wind up dead on the bottom of the ocean. He sure as hell hadn’t survived a horde of hungry vampires just to become fish food.
So he watched the screen and listened to the sounds the Victor made—and it didn’t sound right. She was traveling at nine or ten knots, not trying to be stealthy, her engine banging and clanging. But something was missing, something important that he couldn’t put his finger on. He had memorized all the common sound signatures that Soviet boats made—it came with being an experienced sonar tech. But this sounded so unusual, so off, that he reached for the console and hit a few buttons to record it. It was standard operating procedure. When sonar techs heard something they didn’t recognize, they recorded the sound and compared it to other audio recordings later, to identify it.
But as he listened, it came to him what was missing from the Victor’s sound, and he sat bolt upright in his seat.
As far as he knew, the US Navy was the only submarine service with quiet boats. Soviet subs ran loud. No other militarized nation with a navy even had nuclear-powered subs. They still had diesels, loud as trucks underwater. American subs ran quieter than the rest of them because their screws were specially designed and shaped to reduce cavitation—the formation of air bubbles—and therefore remain quiet enough not to be detected by sonar.
The Victor’s screw wasn’t causing cavitation. Tim could hear her engines, but her propeller was as silent as their own.
And that just wasn’t possible.
Too late, Jerry realized that they had been wrong. Jefferson wasn’t the last of the monsters. All this time, in the quarantined isolation of the torpedo room, in the same dark space where the vampires had hidden themselves before launching their attack, PO3 Warren Stubic had lain frozen in his body bag. But the cold hadn’t killed him, because cold didn’t kill vampires. It had only left him dormant, hibernating while he slowly thawed. Now he was back, the one who had brought this curse onto Roanoke in the first place, patient zero of the vampire outbreak. And Jerry was alone with him in the berthing area. Alone and incapacitated.
But something was wrong with Stubic’s eyes. No inhuman glow came from within them, and they didn’t appear to be focused on anything, not even on Jerry. Being frozen solid had damaged his eyes somehow. Stubic was blind.
Jerry’s rack was at the back of the berthing area, built into the farthest bulkhead from the doorway, but he couldn’t stay there. Confined to such a tight space, he was a sitting duck. He tried to slide out of his rack as quietly as he could, but the injured knee was too sore and too stiff for him to move silently. He squirmed his way to the edge of the rack, then dropped to the floor. He stifled a cry as his broken nose, fractured eye socket, and broken knee all felt the impact. But it didn’t matter—Stubic heard him anyway. The vampire’s head snapped in his direction, and the lips pulled back in a rictus grin to reveal long viperine fangs.
The berthing area was wide enough for two rows of freestanding bunks between the rows built into the bulkheads. If he could keep the bunks between himself and Stubic, he might be able to make it out. Jerry grabbed the corner of the nearest bunk in the middle and pulled, dragging himself along the floor.
Stubic groped his way into the berthing area. “Don’t bother trying to hide from me. I can hear you.”
Jerry pulled himself farther along the floor. Stubic moved through the bunks and sniffed the air, trying to catch Jerry’s scent.
“Who are you? Spicer? Goodrich? No.” Stubic inhaled voluptuously, like a kid smelling candy. Then he grinned, his fangs glistening in the red light. “White.”
Shit. Jerry glanced at the curtained doorway of the berthing area—too far away for him to make a break for in this condition. He thought about shouting for help, but that would just give Stubic his exact location, and he knew how fast these creatures could move.
“Aren’t you tired of always following orders, White? ‘Aye, sir. No, sir. Please, can I have some more, sir.’”
Stubic was inching closer. Jerry pulled himself forward, gritting his teeth against the pain in his injured arms. He slid from behind one bunk to behind another, but the doorway still seemed miles away. Stubic cocked his head, listening to the sound of Jerry’s coveralls sliding against the deck, and gave a wry smile.
“Instead of doing what you’re told, wouldn’t you rather take what you want instead? Answer only to yourself and your desires? Wouldn’t you rather be at the top of the food chain, instead of the bottom?”
Jerry’s arms hurt so much, he could barely move them, but he had to keep going. He grabbed the foot of the bunk and pulled, sliding himself around it. Stubic paused, tilting his head to listen. The smile remained on his face, sharp and malevolent.
“I can make that happen for you, White. I can give you the gift of the green-eyed queen. I can make you like me, and then you’ll never have to follow orders again.”
Green-eyed queen? What was he talking about? Keeping his eyes on his pursuer, Jerry continued pulling himself toward the doorway. Suddenly, Stubic moved, fast as a cat, from where he had been standing amid the bunks. Jerry turned, and there he was, standing right before him, blocking his way. Jerry’s heart sank. Stubic had known where he was all along, and had only been toying with him.
In a single arcing movement, Stubic picked Jerry up off the deck by his coveralls and slammed him into the side of a triple-decker bunk so hard that the curtain rod came loose and fell to the deck with a loud metallic clang. Jerry’s face and broken knee shrieked in agony.
He gritted his teeth against the pain. “We killed the others. We’ll kill you too. One blind vampire can’t take over an entire submarine.”
Still holding him by the coveralls, Stubic grinned, his lips pulling back from his fangs.
“Who said there would only be one of us?”
“Captain, sir, there’s no cavitation coming from the other sub,” Tim reported, moving one earphone of his headset aside so he could hear. “I don’t understand it. The engine sounds Soviet, but the screw isn’t making any noise at all.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Spicer,” Captain Weber said from the door of the sonar shack. “A bear’s screw is loud as a lawnmower. They’re reliable that way.”
“I know, sir. Is it possible she’s one of ours? We’re close enough to Alaska that they might have come looking for us.”
The captain shook his head. “The navy wouldn’t risk sending another boat into Soviet waters just to find us.”
“Then I really don’t understand what this is, sir,” Tim said.
The captain straightened, his eyes widening in realization. “This is it, Spicer. This is what they sent us to find! The prototype submarine. She’s real, and we’ve found her.”
Tim looked at the screen again, at the shapes the sonar vibrations were creating within the cascading colors. The next generation of Soviet submarine? Was it possible? He felt as if he were looking into the future. Ten years from now, twenty, thirty, would some other sonar tech be sitting where Tim was and looking at the same readings on their screen, listening to the same sounds? And if they were, would they have learned about this very moment during their training—the moment a US Navy submarine picked up the first of a brand-new class of Soviet submarine on sonar?