boy to take him on alone.
'What do you want?' I said, not expecting any sort of answer.
The man with the one good eye and the one pustulent hole, turned to face me. 'Nothing you'll give us willingly,' he said with a light Spanish accent, a voice you could have heard on the street and not thought about twice.
Even on the other side of the boat I could hear the sailor's teeth chattering with fear. The boy was almost within touching distance now and the sailor was still trying to cram the key into a lock that didn't seem to want to take it. I didn't think there was any way he'd get it open in time, but then the key snicked into place and the gun was out of the lockbox and in his hand. He might not have been a soldier, but the kid was standing right next to him. Even with his hands shaking so hard that he could barely hold the weapon, he managed to put three bullets straight into the boy's chest.
The boy staggered back a few paces – then kept on coming. Not enough stopping power, a voice inside me that belonged to my husband said. Another part that was still the little girl who'd been afraid of the dark was gibbering in fear of the unnatural things that couldn't be killed. But I was a scientist and nothing was irrational, only yet to be understood. I'd seen soldiers walking around with injuries that should have laid them out cold, because the body's own anaesthetic had kicked in and they just didn't know how bad things were yet.
But there were some injuries no one walked away from.
'The head!' I shouted. 'Aim for the head!' After I'd said it I let out a half-hysterical choked laugh because maybe we were in a zombie movie after all.
The sailor turned to look at me, as if he was about to ask me if I was certain, and for a moment I wanted to kill him myself. Then he turned back round, the boy's hands were only inches from his throat, but the gun roared one final time and the target was right in front of him. He didn't miss. The bullet tore through the boy's left eye and exited messily out the back of his head. He let out one quick, surprised cough, a trickle of arterial blood from his nose joining the gush from his head – then dropped on top of the sailor like a marionette with its strings cut.
The sailor screamed an almost unearthly wail of complete panic. I thought he must have been hurt in some way. Maybe the boy had been carrying a knife, though I hadn't seen it. But then he pushed the boy off him and shoved himself to his feet, his mouth still open as the scream went on and on. His whole face and his white t-shirt were drenched in the boy's blood, black and shiny in the moonlight. Infected, I realised. He thinks he's been infected.
And by the time I'd realised that it was already too late, because the sailor turned wide, desperate eyes to us for just one second and then turned and leapt over the side of the boat. Another second later, and the remaining three infected turned their heads to us, moving in an eerie kind of unison.
The sailor had taken the gun with him, out of reach into the depths.
Still, I knew they could be killed now. Haru was huddled behind me, whimpering. His stock of courage seemed to have been entirely used up dragging me over the side. Now he was hugging the boom as if it might offer him some sort of comfort.
The boom.
I pushed Haru out of the way, not really caring when I heard his head crack against the deck. He swore viciously in Japanese. The boom was tied off – of course it was. They'd been trying to get away from a boat full of god knows what, but it was important to keep up maritime discipline.
Fuck!
How could a rope that thick be knotted that tightly? My fingers picked at it feverishly but all I seemed to be doing was unravelling it. Haru pulled himself up from the deck, groaning, and he must have realised what I was doing because his fingers started working alongside mine. Maybe he'd picked up a thing or two since he'd been serving Queen M because the knot finally began to loosen.
But shit – shit! – they were spreading out, the three of them fanning across the deck. One towards us, two towards the other sailors cowering uselessly in the stern. There was no way I was going to get all of them. Then the boom was free. Haru and I heaved on it together, and for once things were going my way because it swung easily, quickly, well-oiled and beautifully counterbalanced. Even though I think they were expecting it they weren't expecting it so fast. It took one, then two of them, and swept them clean off the deck and into the water.
'They'll come back!' Haru said. 'They'll climb back onboard!'
'Then stop them!' I screamed because, for fuck's sake, did I have to think of everything myself? And clearly I did because he was still standing there, looking baffled. 'Get rid of the grappling hooks – or use one to hit them with if they try to climb the sides!'
He nodded once and then again, jerkily, but he still just stood there. His eyes were so wide that I could see the whites all the way around them. Shock, I thought. But I didn't have any patience for that. I wasn't exactly feeling on top of my game either, but I intended to finish the night alive and I needed Haru moving and functioning to help me achieve that. I yanked his shoulder round to turn him in the right direction and then shoved him on his way. He stumbled, then kept on walking and I had to assume he'd do what I told him because there was still one more of them on board and I'd caught a flicker out of the corner of my left eye. I knew she was coming straight for me.
I felt like a creature composed of pure adrenaline. My senses were hyped, the smell of the invaders almost making me gag, only made bearable by the background salt smell of sea water that seeped through everything. Like a vague buzzing in the back of my mind, a half-recalled memory, I felt the pain of the bruises on my side, and my dislocated shoulder, but they weren't enough to distract me.
Later, I'd wonder if that was what my husband felt when he went on those missions he could never tell me anything about. He'd always said danger was a high and I'd thought yeah, that's the cliche, but really isn't danger just frightening? In that instant I understood that it was absolutely both. And this, this moment when my actions would decide whether I lived or died, was the purest of my life.
The thing was smiling at me as she walked forward, not a sneer or a grimace of anger but a real grin. Up close I suddenly saw that her cheekbones had the same angles, her eyes the same tilt as the dead boy's. Her son, I thought, but she didn't seem to care that he was dead. She just seemed… happy.
Her split tongue flickered out, lizard-like, through the open lips of her smile.
I didn't have any weapons, not even a knife. The boom was over the other side of the boat now. Even if it swung back, it would hit me and not her. And if I let her touch me, it was all over. She walked forward and I walked back, a pace at a time. One step from her. One step from me. Two. Then three. I was nearly at the railing and after that there was nowhere else to go but into the water.
'What do you want?' I said to her again. 'I'm a doctor. I can help you with… whatever the hell it is that's wrong with you.'
That made her stop, just for a second. She held up the jagged stump of her right hand, eying the protruding bone as if she hadn't really noticed it before. Then she looked back at me. 'But why would I want to change?' she asked in the sort of warm Jamaican accent that made you feel as if the words were hugging you. 'Everything's perfect just the way it is.'
And then she took one last step forward, and instead of stepping back I stepped forward too. I put my hands on the lapels of her denim jacket and I dropped back, foot out and into her stomach. It had been years since I'd learnt this. Since he'd made me go to self-defence classes, then made me practice with him at home, again and again, because London's a dangerous place and he couldn't bear it if anything happened to me. But I guess he was right, that once you've learnt it you never forget. It seemed to take no effort at all to pull her over my head and then kick off with my heel and flip her over the railing. Less than a second later, I heard the splash as she hit the water.
I lay there for a second, shaking. She hadn't touched me. No part of her had touched me, I was sure of it. But the adrenaline had burnt itself out, purpose served, and all I could feel now was the desperate, paralysing fear I should have been feeling earlier.
It took us another forty-five minutes to reach the flagship. There was a radio on the boat but a rebounding bullet had taken it out and there was no way for us to let anyone else know what had happened.
Haru and I spent the time keeping watch, peering uselessly into the dense night for signs of any more pursuers. The sailors had wanted to tip the infected boy's body overboard but I'd persuaded them not to. When we got back I needed to study it, figure out just what the hell was wrong. Grumbling, they complied. The neat routines of their work broken up by the wide detour they took around his body and the pool of blood spilling out of it.
