Island 731

18.

Hawkins followed the barrel of the hunting rifle like a donkey behind a carrot. If anything in front of him so much as twitched, it would get a .44-caliber round before Hawkins bothered to introduce himself. The only other person wandering the ship was Bray, and he stood just behind Hawkins, brandishing a fire ax. Everyone else was locked inside the ship’s lounge on the first deck.

After the attack, Drake and Blok had run around the Magellan’s upper decks, closing and locking outside doors. Since the wheelhouse window had been punched in by the refrigerator, they’d locked that interior doorway, too. With the crew sealed inside, they had gathered in the lounge. Hawkins and Joliet had tended to Jones’s wounds—a bump on his forehead and a few scrapes—using the ship’s lounge as a makeshift medical room. While Drake fumed, pacing back and forth, deep in thought, Hawkins had offered to search the ship, level by level, to be sure they were alone. Drake agreed, but sent Bray along for backup.

They searched the first deck first, making sure that the lounge level was clear. Then they headed down to the lowest deck so they could work their way up. It had taken them twenty minutes to inspect the third deck, which housed a large generator room, laundry facilities, and several storage rooms including large dry, cool, and frozen food stores. They’d moved up to the second deck, searching from stern to stem. They’d found a few spots of blood—presumably Jones’s—in the prop motor room where the attack had taken place. They still didn’t know exactly what had happened. Jones had gone in and out of consciousness, but had never stayed awake long enough to give an account of what happened. And Bennett had been in the generator room. The winch room, upper generator room, and switchboard were all clear, as were the workshop, exercise room, and empty crew quarters. As they neared the front of the ship, Hawkins and Bray grew tenser. The science crew quarters were just ahead. This is where they’d had their own encounter with whoever, or whatever, had taken DeWinter.

As Hawkins nudged open one door at a time, sweeping the room with the rifle, he replayed the events in his mind. The invader had smashed their door, nearly knocking it in. After giving up, he ran straight to the rear of the ship, disabled Jones, and took DeWinter. He then ran up to the main deck, rounded the port side of the ship to the bow, and jumped into the water, crossing the distance to shore like an Olympic swimmer, all while holding an unconscious—or dead—woman over his shoulder. And he did all of that fairly quickly, sprinting to the back of the ship, up, and then back again.

But why? Why come after Joliet on one side of the ship and then run all the way to the back to take DeWinter? Something nagged at him. The answer was there, at the fringe of his thoughts. But other questions rose up, vying for attention. The horn that sounded before the attack. They had all heard it, but it didn’t originate from the Magellan. Did it come from the island? Or perhaps a passing ship? There was no way to find out, or even attempt to communicate. The idea that rescue might have passed by the island infuriated him. Made him want to punch something.

Then he rounded the corner and saw the door to his room. “Oh my God.”

“I told you,” Bray said. “It’s crazy.”

Hawkins had a hard time taking his eyes off the bent metal door, but dutifully checked the two rooms and single head on the way to his room. With the way clear, he searched his own room and then turned his attention back to the door. The top right of the metal door was bent inward. When closed, a two-inch gap separated the door from its frame. But the bent metal was just part of the picture. Large dents pocked the white door’s surface. At the center of each dent, the paint had chipped away to reveal the gray metal beneath.

“These dents are at least an inch deep,” Hawkins said, rubbing his fingers over the surface of the largest of the dents.

“I’m telling you, the guy had a sledgehammer,” Bray said. He raised the ax over his head and pretended to strike the door.

Hawkins shook his head. “The angle is wrong. The dents wouldn’t be so straight.”

“Maybe he used it like a battering ram?” Bray offered.

“The shape would be more rectangular.” Hawkins traced a finger around one of the nearly circular indentations. “You’d lose a lot of force using a sledge like that.”

“Then what do you think?” Bray asked.

Hawkins stood to the side and motioned Bray closer. “Feel this.” He pointed to the largest dent.

Bray rubbed his hand over the surface of the dent.

“Feel the ridges?”

Bray nodded.

“Three of them, right?”

Bray felt the ridges with his fingertips. “Yeah. So?”

“Make a fist,” Hawkins said.

Bray looked dubious, but complied. Hawkins directed Bray’s fist, placing it in the hole.

“Your hand is a little smaller,” Hawkins said. “But it fits.”

“Geez, he was punching the door?” Bray said. “The guy must have been huge. And there’s no blood? How could someone do this without breaking their hand to bits and not opening a wound?”

Hawkins shrugged. “A glove?”

“An armored glove,” Bray added.

Hawkins could have spent a long time looking over the door and trying to theorize how it had been decimated, but they weren’t here to play detective. They had a ship to search. After clearing the next room, the pair headed up to the main deck, which held most of the ship’s labs—hydro, wet, computer, biology, and more—as well as a machine shop, the ROV bay, specimen freezers, which currently contained the dissected sea turtle, and the medical bay.

They searched stern to stem once again. Not because it was more efficient or had some kind of strategic value, but because of what they might find in medical. Sanchez. Joliet hadn’t gotten a good look at his body, but she’d been positive the man was dead. Had there been any doubt, she would have been the first person back to check on him. So after checking the rest of the interior main deck and coming up empty, Hawkins and Bray slowly approached the door to medical.

The metal door lay open. Darkness concealed most of the room. The only light came from the open door, which created a cookie-cutter streak of light across the white tile floor. But it was enough. A pool of dark red lay at the end of the light’s reach. The scent of blood hit Hawkins so hard, he could taste it like a mouthful of pennies.

Hawkins covered his mouth with his arm, stifling the odor and a groan. He paused at the door. The dark room would be the perfect place for an ambush. But he had no choice. He stepped into the room, cutting the beam of light with his shadow, and reached for the light switch. He flipped the switch and nothing happened. “Lights aren’t working,” he said. “Must have broke the bulbs.”

“There’s a portable lamp to the left, I think,” Bray said. “The bright kind. For doing surgery or putting in stitches. That kind of thing.”

Made sense, but with Cahill dead, if anyone needed stitches, they’d be the messy kind that leave ugly scars. Hawkins could do the work in a pinch—he’d helped sew up a few wounded animals—but animals never complained about scars.

“If you cover me,” Bray said. “I’ll switch the light on.”

“I won’t be able to see you.”

“If something happens, I’ll fall to the ground and scream. Just keep your aim up.” Bray slipped past Hawkins. “Ready?”

Hawkins tried to think of another way to do this, but couldn’t. “Fine.”

Bray moved into the darkness slowly, hands extended to keep from walking into a wall. He disappeared from view a few feet from the doorway’s light.

Hawkins kept the rifle against his shoulder, but pointed away from Bray. He’d been taught to keep the safety on until he’d picked a target. Helped prevent hunters from accidentally shooting each other. But he ignored that rule now. Whatever they were looking for was strong enough to bend a metal door and fast enough to abduct a crewmember without being seen. If he had to fire, he suspected he wouldn’t have time to disengage the safety before pulling the trigger.

A loud crash of metal on tile floor spun him toward Bray. When the big man shouted, Hawkins’s finger went to the trigger.

“Fuck!” Bray shouted. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Hawkins slowly took his finger off the trigger, which he’d begun to squeeze. That the weapon was far from sensitive had been a blessing twice now.

“Tripped over a chair,” Bray said. “Found the light, though.”

With a click, the floor around Bray lit up. He stood next to a lamp that looked like it could have been used on a film set. Bray loosened the joint, adjusted the lamp so that it faced the room, and retightened it.

“There,” he said, but Hawkins didn’t reply.

The bright lamp lit the horrible scene in stark detail. Sanchez lay in a cot across the room. The floor around the bed was covered in congealed blood and the once-white sheets were now dark red—brown where the blood had begun to dry.

Hawkins inched closer to the body, lowering the rifle as he stepped forward. Sanchez lay on the cot, but no longer in one piece. His body had been separated at the center, the two halves joined by drying entrails. His eyes were opened wide, turned to the ceiling, his face contorted in an expression of raw pain. He’d either regained consciousness before the attack, or the pain had woken him. Either way, he’d experienced the agony of being split in two.

Bray groaned and backed away, performing the sign of the cross and saying “Oh God,” again and again.

Hawkins forced himself closer, looking for details about how this had happened. When he found it, he backed away, too. A portion of the man’s right lower leg had been crushed, the flesh stretched and purple. The same mark had been left on his shoulder.

“He was pulled apart,” Hawkins said, his voice almost a whisper.

“What kind of person could do this?” Bray asked.

Hawkins wasn’t sure if Bray was referring to the brute strength it would take to rend a man in half at the waist or the mental state a person would have to be in to perform the task. He looked back at his friend, who did nothing to hide the fear and revulsion on his face. “Maybe ‘what kind of person?’ is the wrong question.”

Hawkins forced himself back to the bedside. He took a blanket from a neighboring bed, opened it, and flung it over the body. He turned back to Bray. “Because I can’t even begin to imagine a human being capable of something like this.”