Dead Waters

25

The second I got Jane back to my apartment in SoHo, she showered for an eternity, and when she was through she zonked out immediately, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind was wrapped up in too many things. Jane’s mark was just one in a long list of things bothering me, along with the Inspectre showing signs of his age in the face of dealing with his recently reborn friend. Both those things were out of my control right now, but there was one thing I could help myself with—learning to control my power better. If I was going to absorb downloads of raw emotion from some of my psychometric readings, I needed to learn how to contend with them better.

I went to the built-in bookcase in my living room that took up the greater part of one wall. The backlog of moneymaking collectibles that I had been nabbing with my powers were starting to take over, not only the shelves but the rest of the room. I could work on controlling my powers using them, all the while sorting much of this stuff for return to potential buyers at the same time, but not tonight. I had a feeling that the metal plate I had pulled from the boat-wreck salvage in the lighthouse would be chock-full of all the emotional power I wanted to contend with.

I grabbed a bowlful of Life Savers off one of my end tables and placed it on the floor next to me. I snagged my shoulder bag off the couch, pulled out the piece with SLO etched into its rusting form, and pushed my power into it. My one concern was that I might be visited in the vision by Cassie or Mason Redfield as I had back when I started shopping for dressers for Jane, but I had to try. I hoped that slowly coming to terms with hunting down a dresser for Jane, albeit unsuccessfully so far, would help keep it at bay.

The good news was that I didn’t feel any panic over the tattooist or Mason Redfield rising up as I entered the psychometric vision. The bad news was that a wave of completely different and instant panic rose over me instead. It was daylight on the river, and whoever’s body I occupied was drowning. I felt deep gulps of river water sliding down their throat, filling their lungs. This isn’t really me, I thought to myself. I’m not really drowning. Try as I might, the sensations were all too real and I could feel myself giving in to the panic. The person I was flailed their hands and one of them came down on a large piece of floating wood. Their fingers wrapped around it and grabbed on. Using their last bit of strength, they pulled themselves up out of the water onto the sizable piece of wood, coughing up large streams of water and the contents of their stomach.

Now that I had a brief second to catch my breath, I took in what I could. I was male, dressed in clothing styled like those of the turn-of-the-century ghosts out on the Hell Gate Bridge. The board beneath the man bore a full version of the metal plate I held in my hands with the word SLOCUM etched into it. My personal panic started to calm as I slipped into my investigator mind-set, but I could feel that the man was only starting to panic more. I could see why.

Fire and chaos were all around him on this cloudy day. The remains of the General Slocum were sinking in large, fiery pieces all around him, the cries of the dying and drowning filling the air. Ships didn’t sink this way. I had seen Titanic and a few other disaster films. Ships went down as whole objects, maybe even a few pieces. This steamer was shattered. Had the woman in green done this? I didn’t see her in any of the surrounding chaos, and frankly, I wasn’t sure she even had this kind of power over water.

As I sat on the board, holding on for dear life, I got my answer. The surface of the water broke before me and the roll of something gray and slimy passed by until one end of it poked up. A tentacle. It belonged to something huge. It rose up out of the water several stories before crashing back down on one of the large pieces of ship that was still floating, tearing it in half.

The man didn’t have time to take it all in. Another tentacle rose and wrapped around the floating piece of wood he was on. It tugged it under the surface, dragging him down. This time he was lucky enough to have gotten a deep breath in, but his luck was about to run out. I felt a crushing sensation against his spine from the tightening of the tentacle, and as he went deeper a shape rose up to meet him. Even with daylight up above, it was hard seeing through his eyes in the murk of water, mud, and blood, but one thing stood out as his breath left him and he began to fade. An enormous yellow eye.

I never wanted to be stuck in someone’s death. I had no idea what effect it might have on my brain or if it would be like needing to wake up while falling in a dream. I pulled myself out of my vision and checked my vitals. My heartbeat was steady, but not thumping in my chest, which was a good sign. The hypoglycemia from using my powers kicked in, but that was to be expected. I still felt a little bit of emotional strain of the victim in my head that I couldn’t shake, but I was thankful it didn’t belong to any of the other people who had been haunting my visions. When Jane’s hand came down on my shoulder out of nowhere, I nearly screamed.

“Got a sec?” she asked. “I couldn’t sleep.”

I closed my eyes and tried to shake the psychometrygenerated emotions off of me, but managed only to make myself dizzy on top of slightly disoriented. “Actually, can it wait?” I asked, trying to control the fear and anxiety in my voice. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”

“Oh,” Jane said. I looked up from the broken piece in my lap. Jane’s face was a mix of disappointment and sadness.

I slid the piece of the sign off my lap and got up off the floor. “It can wait,” I said, pushing down the remaining raw emotions. I grabbed Jane by the hand and walked with her over to my sofa. “What’s wrong?”

“When you started with the Department, did they put you through Undead 103?”

“103,” I repeated as I tried to recall it. “Oh yeah. Shamble On?”

Jane nodded. “That’s the one,” she said. “A lot of zombiefighting techniques and the philosophical aspects of confronting them. How did it make you feel when you took it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was so overwhelmed that it kind of blurred into everything else I was learning at the time. Wesker may have just thrown the pamphlet at me and left it at that. Why?”

Jane sighed. “We were going over what to do in the event that one is bitten by the living dead. Wesker suggested that there was only one thing to do in such a case, only one inevitable conclusion. Kill them.”

“Leave it to Wesker to take it as dark as he can right out of the gate,” I said.

“But he’s right, isn’t he?”

“I try not to think about it,” I said. “I take a more optimistic approach to our jobs than that.”

“How so?”

“I do my best not to get bitten in the first place,” I said.

“Seems to be working so far,” Jane admitted with a small smile. “Still, don’t you worry about dying?”

“I didn’t use to,” I said, “but lately? Yeah. Mostly because of the Inspectre. He’s looking and acting old, more so since Mason Redfield came back all rejuvenated.” Jane nodded, but didn’t say anything. “Have I been acting more morose than usual because of it? If so, I’m sorry.”

“No,” she said, quick to correct me. “It’s not that.”

“What, then?”

She squeezed my hands, meeting my eyes with dead seriousness. “It’s just that . . . with this mark on my back, I can feel myself changing. You saw how useless I became on that boat the other night. I can feel it trying to gain control over me. I don’t want it to come to that.”

I didn’t like where this was going. “What are you suggesting?”

“You saw how they protected me,” she said. “Those water zombies. They’re waiting for me to change. I’m slowly falling under her spell.”

“So, we’ll fight it,” I said, and then added, “Together.”

“For how long?” Jane asked. Tears began running down her cheeks. “Wesker’s not having any luck breaking that woman’s hold on me. The magic is too old, too strong. He’s been able to slow it with a few counterspells, but we’re fighting inevitability here.”

“I won’t let that happen,” I said. “I promise that. We’ll find a way.”

“Promise me something else,” she said. “Please.”

“Name it.”

“If I become like her. . . or worse, I want you to kill me.”

The air went out of my lungs and my heart sped up. “Don’t ask me for that,” I said. “I can’t promise that.”

Jane looked angry. “Why not?” she asked. “Don’t you love me?”

I wanted to shake her. “That’s precisely why you can’t ask me to do that to you,” I said. “How can you expect me to strike you down?”

“Listen to me,” she said, grabbing my face and pressing her forehead against mine. “If it actually comes to that, I won’t be me anymore. That’s the point.”

“I’m the glass-half-full kinda guy, Jane. You can’t ask me to do that.”

“Fine,” she said, agitated. She stood up and turned to walk away but I grabbed her arm.

“Jane, don’t.”

She turned back to me, crying. “What do you want me to do, Simon? Do you want me to end up killing you? Because that’s what she’ll want me to do. I can already feel it.”

“You can?”

“Yes! For days now.”

The emotional panic of my vision mixed with my own frustration. “Why are you only telling me now?” I snapped.

Jane softened. “Because I thought if I told you, you’d want me around here less. I mean, what guy wants a homicidal girlfriend, right?”

“I. . .” I couldn’t find the words, which only frustrated me further. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Jane. I mean, I’ve dated girls with far more homicidal tendencies than you.”

“Really?” she said, cheering up a little.

“Really,” I said, calming down. I could do this. I could separate my emotions from the feedback loop of my psychometry. “You wouldn’t be the first. If I had a dime for every time a woman wanted me dead, well. . . I don’t think I can count that high, frankly.”

She smiled at that. “Just promise me you’ll think about the bigger picture if I. . . change,” she said.

“I will,” I said. “I’ll think about the bigger picture, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to kill you if it comes to it. It just means I’ll come up with something.”

“Ever the optimist,” she said and hugged me.

She wrapped her arms tight around me, and despite the fact that it felt good, it took all of my nerves right then to fight off the unbidden image rising up of her crushing me until I was lifeless in her arms.