100 Fathoms Below

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The stateroom door shook in its frame as Ensign Penwarden—if the man with those enormous teeth and inhuman eyes was truly Penwarden—threw himself against it again and again. Luckily, Gordon had slammed the door and dogged it down seconds before Penwarden leaped at him. The door was flimsy, nothing like the thick steel of the boat’s watertight hatches, and he doubted the lock was strong enough to keep Penwarden out for long. He and Oran braced the door with the metal-framed desk chair, but the way the door shook with each blow made him think that wouldn’t be enough, either. Nothing would be enough to keep that thing out.

“The circuit!” Gordon shouted, pointing at the heavy phonetalker mounted on the bulkhead. “Get the captain in the control room, now!”

Oran picked up the handset and listened for a moment. He tapped the switch hook a few times, then shook his head. “There’s no answer, suh. It’s like no one’s there.” He hung up.

The door rattled from another blow. Gordon leaned with his back against the door, adding his weight to the barricade. “How can there be no one in the control room?”

Oran frowned. “Maybe they got the rest of the crew already and we the only ones still alive.”

“They?” Gordon said. “You mean there are more of those things out there?”

“It’s like I told you, there’s never just one rougarou,” Oran said. “They multiply like cockroaches, suh.”

Gordon still wasn’t ready to accept a supernatural explanation for this. Rougarou didn’t exist. They were just legends of a semiliterate swamp culture. He saw Penwarden’s teeth in his mind again, long and sharp, and reminded himself that vampires didn’t exist, either. They were folktales, stories to scare children into eating their vegetables and going to bed on time. They were creatures in black-and-white movies he caught on TV on Saturday afternoons, played by Bela Lugosi or Lon Chaney. And yet, he’d seen the teeth, the blood on Ensign Van Lente’s neck.

Penwarden threw himself into the door again, so hard this time that the impact nearly knocked Gordon forward. The door cracked. He clenched his teeth hard to keep from screaming. Oran ran over to the door and pushed against it next to him, helping to keep it braced.

Okay, so barring any rational explanations his brain was still scrambling for, what if Penwarden was a vampire, what then? What could kill a vampire? He went through everything he remembered from the stories. Sunlight. They hated the sun; it burned them. Well, being hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, they were shit out of luck.

Another blow shook the door. The crack grew deeper.

Wooden stakes would work too. Put one through a vampire’s heart and it was supposed to die. But where the fuck was he going to find wood on a submarine? There wasn’t even any wooden furniture they could break up into stakes. Everything was made of metal or plastic so it wouldn’t weaken and rot from moisture. The wood paneling on some of the stateroom bulkheads was fake. If they were lucky, maybe they could find some genuine wooden hangers in a wardrobe, but other than that, he couldn’t think of anything. He didn’t even have a wooden spoon in the galley.

Penwarden’s voice came from the other side of the door. It sounded like a whisper, but it carried like a shout. The sound of his voice made Gordon shiver, but it wasn’t Gordon he was talking to.

“Do you miss your brother, Oran? LeMon is with us now. I made him one of us.”

Oran put his hands over his ears and shook his head. “The rougarou are liars, Lieutenant. Don’t listen to him. Cover your ears.”

“It’s no lie, Oran. I found him while he was sleeping. He thought I was just a dream until I sank my teeth into his neck. Then he knew just how real I am. Pain doesn’t lie.”

“No!” Oran shouted. “He had the fever—”

“We are the fever!” Penwarden hissed.

Gordon’s breath caught in his throat. Oh, God, of course. Now it was starting to make sense. He racked his brain, trying to trace it back to the start. Warren Stubic, the petty officer who had killed himself in the freezer, was the first one they found. But Gordon already knew Stubic from previous ops—ops that had gone a lot smoother than this one. So if Stubic was the first vampire, something must have happened to him before the underway, something that changed him. Bodine had gotten sick next. Stubic must have bitten him and then, perhaps from guilt or perhaps while delirious and looking for a place to cool off from the fever, he had climbed into the freezer to die. Bodine had spread it to Penwarden, then Penwarden to LeMon. Who knew how many others were infected by now? Outbreaks were rarely linear, he knew. They tended to expand geometrically as more and more people were infected. He imagined that the spread of vampirism was no different.

“LeMon tried to call out for you as I drank his blood,” Penwarden went on. “His big brother was all he thought about when he knew the end was coming. You were sleeping just a few feet away, and you didn’t even know. You couldn’t protect him—not from us.”

Oran grimaced and pressed his hands harder against his ears.

“Don’t listen to him,” Gordon said. “He’s trying to make you angry. He wants you to lose control and open the door.”

“Yes, open the door, Oran,” Penwarden said. “I want to know if your blood tastes as sweet as your brother’s.”

“Go to hell!” Oran shouted.

“Hell? There’s no hell, Oran. After you die, there’s nothing. There’s only the grave… and us.”

“Us?” Gordon said. “What are you?”

“Why don’t you ask Lieutenant Commander Jefferson?” Penwarden replied. “He’s here too. He wants to say hello.”

“Bullshit!” Gordon shouted.

But then Jefferson’s voice came to him from the other side of the door. “Open the door, Lieutenant Abrams. Let me in. It’s my stateroom.”

Gordon swallowed hard. They had gotten to Jefferson too. Damn. In the back of his mind, he’d been hoping all this time that Jefferson would turn up unharmed, that his disappearance was just a misunderstanding. Now he saw how naive that hope had been.

“You’re not Jefferson, and you’re not Penwarden!” Oran shouted. “You’re rougarou!”

On the other side of the door, Jefferson and Penwarden laughed. It was a hollow, haunting, malevolent sound.

“It doesn’t matter what you call us,” Jefferson said. “Our only true name is ‘inevitability.’ There’s no escape. Join us, Oran.”

“Join us, Gordon,” Penwarden said. “You don’t know what you’re missing. You’ll wonder why you ever resisted. Join us in the dark. Join us in the eternal night at the bottom of the ocean.”

“The only price for joining us,” Jefferson said, “is your blood.”