She took one step toward Lightoller.
Her last step.
The bullet opened a fissure between her two heads causing a fountain of blood and brain matter to spray up and rain down. She collapsed to the floor and writhed, severely wounded but still moaning and trying to crawl on her hands in an expanding pool of dead blood.
It took one more shot for Lightoller to finish the job—this one sailed directly through her brain stem. She went limp immediately.
One down. Two to go.
He left the hospital.
Crimson tracks led around the stairs to the men’s lavatory. Inside, a corpse lay broken and destroyed in the corner. The victims head looked like it had been smashed against the washbasin until its brains fell out. Despite the face being horribly rearranged, Lightoller knew immediately who the victim was; they had left an arm back in the hospital room.
Put them out of their misery.
Someone had gotten here first.
Two down. One to go.
As Lightoller went to leave, he heard whimpering coming from one of the stalls. He tapped the Webley’s barrel on the stall door and said, “Hello?”
After a brief hesitation, the person in the stall unlocked and opened the door.
Lightoller peered down at the older gentleman sitting on the toilet, fully clothed. Seeing the gun pointed at him, the old man reared back and surrendered his hands in the air. They were covered in blood.
“Christ,” said Lightoller. “So...you did this?”
The old man looked confused for a moment and then shook his head. It was obvious he understood very little English. “I help,” he finally replied, still blubbering like a baby. “Doc—tor.”
Lightoller let the word settle in his brain.
Doctor.
O’Loughlin or Simpson?
Where were they?
“Up,” Lightoller said, backing out of the stall. “You’re coming with me.”
The old man followed Lightoller back to the stairwell. A lighter set of red footprints led to a door to a section of second-class rooms left of the hospital. He had been so focused on the hell pouring out of the hospital earlier he hadn’t noticed this door was cracked open. He could already hear voices on the other side.
Going through that door was like stepping through a portal into another dimension. The stillness of the small third-class stairwell was gone. Here was what he had expected to find all along.
Chaos.
People were everywhere, crowding the halls. A middle-aged woman with short curly brown hair approached him and tugged at his coat.
“Officer, officer!”
“What’s wrong?”
She led him all the way down the hall and then around the corner to the right. As they passed the landing to the second-class staircase, Lightoller realized the old man he had found in the lavatory wasn’t behind him anymore. The halls were even more crowded on this end, everyone pushing forward to get a better view of something. When they noticed Lightoller in uniform, most people calmly stepped aside and cleared a path.
The crowd thinned out at a narrow hallway that led to a final set of rooms in the section. At the end of the hall, hunched over on the floor with its back to the crowd, was the last of the three patients.
Dr. Simpson.
Beneath the doctor were two bodies. The first was a half-naked woman with a large hole for a stomach, the contents currently being consumed by the doctor.
He had torn through her clothing.
He had chewed through her skin.
He had pried open her ribcage.
All to get at the warm meat inside, the vital organs and intestines that had once worked around the clock to keep this woman alive, now used as fuel for an appetite that had no end.
Lightoller tried to quiet the crowd around him as many yelled and cried and demanded that something be done, while the doctor plunged his head inside the dead woman’s chest cavity and removed her heart with all the ease and indifference of a vulture. When he was done eating her heart, he stopped for a moment and crooked his head back at the crowd gathered thirty feet behind him. Then he made a move for the second body causing Lightoller to step out from the pack.
The second body lying motionless under the doctor appeared to be that of a young boy of nine or ten. There was some blood on his face and his clothing, but no visible signs of decay, or in the case of his mother next to him, disembowelment.
Lightoller strolled toward the doctor with the revolver raised out in front of him. Dr. Simpson stumbled to his feet. The first shot hit him in the upper chest, near the heart, the second a few inches to the left. Lightoller was surprised as neither shot put the doctor down or even slowed his forward progress, if anything they only seemed to make him angrier.
For the third shot, Lightoller aimed higher and put a hole in the neck. But still, nothing.
He had one shot left and no time to reload. In a second, the doctor would be upon him.
Lightoller pulled the trigger and watched as the bullet shattered the doctor’s teeth and split his head open between his jaws. A spray of bone fragments and dark red blood exited Dr. Simpson’s head from the rear. He wobbled in place for a moment and then toppled to the ground.
Lightoller took a few steps back so the doctor wouldn’t land on his feet. He reached in his coat pocket, took out a handful of bullets, and then quickly reloaded the Webley.
“Just in case,” he said, and fired a final shot through the side of the former doctor’s head. The crowd behind him breathed a collective sigh of relief.
“Is anybody hurt?” Lightoller asked.
“Charles,” a familiar voice said from somewhere in the back. People moved out of the way to allow First Officer Murdoch to the front. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
Murdoch looked over Lightoller’s shoulder at the corpses down the hallway. “Fine, huh? I heard the gunshots. What happened?”
“Just following orders.”
“All three?”
“No, just the one with the busted head. But there are two others. One is in the third-class hospital, the other in the lavatory. You find anything?”
“Yeah, there’s a bunch of injured people at the main hospital.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know...a dozen or so.”
Lightoller sighed. “I was afraid of that. We’re gonna have to quarantine them.”
“The staff is doing their best to work on them right now. Can’t find O’Loughlin though. Went to his room but the door is locked and he’s not answering.”
“It doesn’t matter. O’Loughlin can’t help them anyway. If they’ve been bitten, they can’t be saved. We have to gather them all together, and we need to clean up this mess.”
Murdoch stared passed him. “Um...Charles.” The expressions of many in the crowd followed Murdoch’s lead, overcome with disbelief.
“We have to get everyone back to their—” Lightoller finally realized Murdoch wasn’t listening to him anymore. “What...what is it?”
He turned and looked down the narrow hallway at the young boy standing statuesque, looking down at his mother. The boy then raised his head and stared back at the crowd, as if he had sensed all the eyes watching him.
Everyone fell silent.
Lightoller gripped the revolver tighter, his hands starting to sweat, watching the boy’s eyes carefully examine the crowd. The boy didn’t look lost or scared or upset, as one would expect given the unfortunate state of his mother. Lightoller knew the look well, having seen it many times over the last twenty-four hours. The boy’s eyes were glossed over. His soul had already departed to a better place.