Sian fell and broke her nose. She rolled on her back and lay stunned. She sneezed blood. A dream-image glimpsed through tears: the lights of the ship, the decks, portholes and festoons, passing like a carnival parade. A jagged gash was ripped in the side of the ship. Hull plates tore with an unearthly scream.
The damaged liner sped on, headed straight for the island.
The Wreck
Impact.
Ghost was thrown across the engine room. He grabbed a railing to stop himself falling against a massive, spinning propeller shaft.
He fell to the floor. An extractor fan broke loose from ductwork and hit the deck near his head. Tool lockers flew open. Punch curled foetal and covered his head as spanners skittered across the deck plates.
A final, cataclysmic concussion. The ship lurched. A section of walkway collapsed. An extinguisher burst, jetting the air with a blizzard of foam particles. Then the engine room was still.
Ghost sat up. He wiped foam from his face and hands. He spat foam from his mouth. The engine room was coated white like heavy snowfall.
‘What did we hit?’ asked Punch. ‘Did we collide with an iceberg or something?’
‘We’ve stopped. We’re not moving. I think we ran aground.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Banged my leg. I’m okay. You?’
‘Fine.’
The propeller shafts were still spinning.
‘Better kill the engines.’
The ship listed at a crazy angle. The engine room was a steep hill. Punch climbed the room and threw each breaker to Off. Engine noise slowly diminished and died. The four great propeller shafts gradually ceased to turn.
He left one of the disengaged turbines running.
‘Better leave this baby ticking over,’ said Ghost. ‘It’ll keep the lights on.’
‘Where’s the radio? Help me look. I think I dropped it.’
Ghost found the radio wedged behind the body of the dead engineer.
‘Jane? Jane, can you hear me?’
No reply.
‘Jane, do you copy, over?’
They sat for an hour. Ghost tried to raise Rampart every ten minutes.
‘Do you think those things are still outside?’ asked Punch.
‘I expect so.’
Punch kicked the engineer.
‘I killed a man,’ said Punch. ‘That’s who I am now. A guy who kills people.’
‘The world has changed. We better change with it.’
A scuffle and a thud. Punch climbed the gantry steps and put his ear to the door.
‘What can you hear?’ asked Ghost. ‘Is someone outside?’
Punch mimed hush.
Three knocks.
‘What do you reckon?’ asked Punch. ‘Open the door?’
Three more knocks.
‘Pass me the gun,’ said Punch. ‘I’m going to open the door.’
Punch unlocked the hatch. He shouldered the shotgun and kicked the door open. Dr Rye stood with a bottle of Chivas Regal in her hand. ‘Ready to go?’ She lit a rag stuffed in the neck of the Chivas. She tossed the bottle at a gaggle of infected passengers massing at the end of the corridor. Burning booze splashed the walls and floor creating a barrier of flame. ‘Let’s not hang around.’
They hurried through the ship. The passageways and stairwells listed at a nightmare angle.
‘Okay,’ said Rye. ‘We’ll need to cut through a couple of public spaces. We’ll need to do it quickly and quietly. Way too many of these fuckers to fight off.’
They passed through the ship’s library. Novels and magazines had fallen from the shelves when the ship ran aground. They kicked through mountains of paper.
‘This is where we cut through the main lobby,’ explained Rye. ‘Could be tricky.’
They hurried along a balcony area overlooking the main lobby, the central communal area of the ship. Ghost stopped for a moment and looked over the balustrade.
Hundreds of infected passengers milling and moaning. Chaos and stench. Rich vacationers mutated to monstrous parodies of themselves. They stumbled over upturned tables and chairs. They rode escalators. They rode glass scenic elevators. They crawled up and down the great sweep of the staircase on hands and knees. They slid on scattered leaflets from the information desk. They tripped on glittering fragments of fallen chandelier.
‘My God,’ murmured Ghost.
Rye tugged his sleeve. ‘Keep going.’
‘How did you get here?’ asked Ghost.
‘I paddled a lifeboat from the rig,’ said Rye. ‘We’ll use the zodiac to get back.’
‘Did you find Jane?’
‘I thought she was with you.’
Jane was hurled forward from the roof of the bridge at the moment of impact like a crash-test dummy propelled through a windscreen.
Mid-air. Body clenched for impact. ‘It will be slow hell,’ said a remote corner of her mind removed from the action. ‘You’ll hit the deck, and lie there, and think you are okay even though your back is broken. Then pain will build and build until it blots out the world.’
Her leg tangled in a decorative light-string hung at the prow. She dangled upside down for a moment, swung and spun, arms flailing, then the festoon snapped in a burst of sparks. She hit the deck, crunching bulb-glass beneath her. She got to her feet. Infected passengers would be on her any minute. She snatched up her shotgun and ran.
The Rampart zodiac was suspended from a couple of lifeboat cranes. Jane lowered the zodiac. It hit the ice. She slid down the crane-rope. She unhitched the rope and dragged the boat across the ice to the water’s edge.
She had lost her radio. She huddled in her coat and waited to see if anyone else made it off Hyperion. Fifteen minutes later they approached across the snow. Ghost, Punch, Rye. ‘I thought you must be dead,’ Jane said. ‘So what happened?’
‘There were hundreds of them,’ she mumbled. ‘It was like they were hibernating down there in the dark.’
‘Where’s Ivan?’ asked Ghost.
‘They tore him apart.’
‘Christ.’
‘Let’s get off this island,’ said Jane. ‘I don’t even want to look at that fucking ship.’
They rode the zodiac to Rampart. They looked back.
The liner was beached three kilometres away, lights still blazing. The prow of the ship had lifted from the water. The hull plates were ripped open.
Nobody spoke.
Rye patched up Sian’s face. Wiped blood from her nose and lashed a splint across the split skin.
‘You’ll be mouth-breathing for a while, but you should be okay.’
She gave Sian a couple of aspirin.
‘Anyone else hurt?’ asked Sian. ‘Nail broke his arm.’
