“She must be close… or at the very least on the same side as us. Ask her where she is”.
Rachel tapped away at her phone and waited for a response.
“But...?” Lori replied.
“Huh?”
“You said but as though you wanted to say something further”.
“Oh? Yeah… she texted me”.
“So?”
“My grandmother rarely if ever texts me”. Rachel’s phone buzzed again and she glanced down at it. “They’re close by, I told them that we’re still on the ship”. She began glancing around, surveying the immediate vicinity for her parents and grandmother.
“Have you told them where we are? We could meet them at a middle point or something”, Lori suggested.
“They can’t move, nan said that there’s crazies around, they don't want to take the chance. I think they are a floor above us, she said she can see some lifeboats below her. She said we should have gotten onto the lifeboat, but I’m not going without them”.
“Once we regroup we can attempt to lower another one, there’s one just over there”, Lori pointed; it was fairly exposed though, with the time it would take to lower it, they could be overrun.
“It’ll take too long to lower”.
“There is an emergency automatic lowering system, I saw those staff members using it for the other one, we’ll just follow the procedures like the security officer instructed”.
“We don’t have the time to do all that now without endangering our lives in the process and there’s no guarantee we’ll get the chance to do it afterwards either”.
“Then I’ll do it”.
“What? No, that’s crazy talk, we need to stick together, I’m not leaving you here on your own, what if they swarm you?”
“You have to trust me, Rachel, I can do this. Go and find them and bring them back here, I’ll lower it and come find you if needs be”.
“No, no I’m not leaving you beh....”
Lori took Rachel by the sides of her face with her hands and pulled her closer.
“I can do this, I want to do this. When you find them, we’ll need to get out of here fast, which means we can’t afford to waste even a single second, or face being killed. If by some chance you’re being chased by those crazies for example on the way back, we can get our asses out of here pronto”.
“But what if they find you? What if I’m not here to help you?”
“I won’t stay out in the open, I’ll hide, they won’t find me”.
“Lori...“
“I won’t let them get to me, have faith in me”.
Reluctantly Rachel agreed, kissing Lori’s hands.
“Okay”.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you, a world without you isn’t a world worth living in”.
“I won’t die”.
“You can’t guarantee that?”
“I’m promising you that”.
“Can you?” Rachel replied, gazing up into her girlfriend’s eyes.
“I’ll damn well make it a reality, my reality, our reality”.
“Okay, I have faith in you”.
“Do you trust me?”
“I trust you”.
Rachel pulled Lori into an embrace and after some time, Lori Pulled away.
“Don’t make it seem so final, we’ll be back together shortly. Go, find your parents and nan and let’s get out of here”.
“Okay...” Rachel took a breath, “Okay, I’m going”.
“Do you want the gun back? You’ll probably need it more than me”.
“Yeah, okay, give it to me”. Lori handed Rachel the weapon. Rachel’s hands couldn’t refrain from trembling and the weight of the gun seemed to increase as she held it. Lost on the dizzying premise that she would most likely be forced to use it, it took Lori calling out her name to return her to reality.
“Rachel”.
“Y… yes?”
“Don’t you die on me either, yahear?”
“I hear you, I won’t”. Rachel kissed her girlfriend and reluctantly parted from her.
She ran down the outer decks of the starboard looking for any set of stairs that led to the upper deck, not knowing what she might encounter when she got there. Crazies didn’t seem as frequent as they had previously appeared, though what that could be attributed to was anyone's guess. Whilst it seemed ideal given her situation, she wasn’t about to count her blessings just yet.
Taking the first set of steps she encountered to the upper decks, she slowed down, remaining vigilant, checking every glass pane or open doorway before slipping by.
Floor vibrating footsteps or otherwise, stopped her dead in her tracks. Initially she had assumed it was merely the ship, but as she progressed it became abundantly clear that this was something more, it wasn’t a steady vibration, rather steady clearly defined footsteps, but what was capable of creating such heavy vibrations and was that a question Rachel wanted answered?
Creeping forward, the vibrations only got heavier, then just as suddenly as they had started, they stopped. Rachel came to a more open and exposed vicinity of the deck and peered out to see if the coast was clear, before traversing across it, but what she saw made her heart skip a beat.
Hunched over a pile of corpses was a colossal sized monstrosity, a trail of bloody footsteps leading away from behind it.
Was this thing responsible for the heavy footsteps? It had to be, but where the fuck had it come from? Even without seeing its face - heavily assuming it had one - Rachel knew this thing was nothing that could be remotely considered normal. Multiple arms protruding from its body, what looked to be skulls and bones protruding from its back and towering at over 7 foot tall, there was no possible way the existence of something like this would have gone amiss until now, just what the fuck was it?
She gazed upwards and spotted her mother and grandmother waving to catch her attention at the opposite end of the clearing and on the level
