100 Fathoms Below

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Tim picked up the bulkhead-mounted phonetalker of the direct circuit from the torpedo room to the control room, while Jerry poked around in Lieutenant Carl French’s body bag. He had no idea what Jerry was looking for, and at the moment, he couldn’t concentrate enough to care. After witnessing the murder of Senior Chief Farrington and the mass drowning of the crewmen Matson had locked in the torpedo tubes, he was operating entirely on instinct, falling back on his training, which told him he needed to alert the captain. But what was he going to tell him? Sorry to break the news to you, Captain Weber, but our hospital corpsman is a murderer and…

And what? He had seen Matson bite Farrington on the neck and slurp up his blood. He had seen the corpsman throw Farrington around like a child’s toy. It was clear Matson wasn’t human anymore. He wasn’t the same man who had started this op just a few days ago. Now he was… something else.

Tim wanted to push the absurd thought away, but it kept forcing its way back into his mind, demanding to be taken seriously.

Matson was a vampire.

I’m sorry to break the news to you, Captain Weber, but our hospital corpsman is literally a dead man walking.

But as it turned out, Tim didn’t have to worry about what to say after all, because the circuit sat silent the whole time. Finally, he hung up the handset.

“There’s nobody in the control room,” he told Jerry.

Jerry turned away from the body bag, pocketing something Tim couldn’t see. “That can’t be right. There’s always somebody in the control room.”

“Nobody picked up,” he said.

He didn’t like it. Something must have gone very wrong in the control room. It wasn’t just that no one had answered. There was a row of warning lights in the control room that alerted the crew to any actions taken with the torpedo tubes. When Matson flooded the tubes, it would have tripped those lights. Someone should have seen it and called down for an explanation, but no one had.

“What the hell is going on up there?” he asked.

“We’ve got to go,” Jerry said.

Jerry was keeping a cool head, which Tim appreciated since he himself felt on the verge of panic. He was perfectly happy to let Jerry take the lead, even though he outranked the planesman. They picked up their lanterns, switched them on, and left the torpedo room. The bottom-level corridor was dark as a tomb. All the lanterns that had been mounted to the bulkhead were smashed—Matson’s handiwork, no doubt. As they walked, their footsteps echoed off the bulkheads. The only other sound was their breath. Tim suppressed a shiver and forced himself to keep following Jerry down the corridor toward the main ladder. He had no idea who or what might be hiding in the darkness mere inches from them, deftly avoiding their lantern beams. Maybe Matson, or whatever Matson had become.

Vampire. The word echoed in his mind. He did his best to ignore it, but it stuck there.

Matson would return soon—he was sure of it—to flush those drowned bodies out into the depths of the ocean. He didn’t want to be anywhere near the torpedo room when that happened. He quickened his pace, but the walk to the ladder still felt like an eternity. Matson hid in every patch of shadow they passed, behind every cluster of pipes along the bulkhead, in every dark-shrouded doorway, ready to leap out and kill the two of them as quickly and easily as he had killed Farrington. And then it would be into the torpedo tubes with them.

Jesus Christ. He couldn’t even grasp it. Nothing made sense anymore.

Jerry stopped at the bottom of the ladder. Tim came up behind him, expecting him to start climbing, but he was looking up at the top. Tim followed his gaze and saw only darkness in the hole above. Shit. Someone had smashed the lights on the middle level too. Matson and maybe others. LeMon and Bodine… They were smashing lights all over the boat.

It was starting. Whatever their plan was, this was the first step: to kill all the lights on Roanoke. And what would come next? More murders, more bodies for the torpedo tubes?

“We have to get to the control room,” Jerry whispered.

Tim agreed, but after receiving only silence on the circuit, he had a bad feeling about what they would find up there.

Jerry went up the ladder first, carrying his lantern so that it shone against the bulkhead as he climbed. Once he reached the middle level, he stopped, shined the lantern around to make sure the coast was clear, then continued upward. Tim started up after him. When his head passed through the hole, Tim did the same with his lantern. The corridor was empty, but that didn’t make him feel any safer. There was something eerie about how utterly abandoned Roanoke looked. Jerry was already halfway up the ladder to the top level. Tim continued climbing. When he had his feet on the middle-level deck, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Someone was right behind him; he was sure of it. He spun around, shining the lantern beam down the corridor, but no one was there—only the sense that someone had been there a moment ago. He climbed farther up.

When he reached the top level, there weren’t any lights by the ladder, but he could see, up ahead in the control room, the dim glow from the LEDs on the instruments. The control room was the nerve center of the submarine, but as he and Jerry approached it, they heard only silence. There was none of the usual chatter, the call-and-response of orders being given and acknowledged, the footsteps of crewmen hurrying to and fro. Just an uncanny quiet.

“Where is everyone?” Tim whispered. There was no way Matson could have fired them all out of the torpedo tubes.

Jerry didn’t answer. He crept forward, and Tim followed, his heart pounding. When they entered the control room, he lifted his lantern, throwing a beam of light into the shadowy room, and everything came into horrific focus. The control room wasn’t empty. There were crewmen everywhere, either slumped over the equipment at their stations or lying dead on the deck. The quartermaster, the navigation supervisor, the messenger of the watch, the helmsman. The officer of the deck sat at the edge of the conn with his feet dangling. He still held the handset of the phonetalker in his pale hand. Tim shined his lantern toward the sonar shack and saw the dark shapes slumped in their chairs.

“What happened?” he asked. “What the fuck happened here?”

Jerry didn’t answer. He walked to the helm, where the planesman was slumped forward against his yoke. Jerry held the lantern six inches from the sailor’s face. His eyes were wide, and he wore a terrified expression as if he were silently screaming. Jerry pressed two fingers to the side of the man’s neck, checking for a pulse.

“Is he…?” Tim started to ask, but he knew the answer already. He could tell just by looking into those glazed, unblinking eyes.

Jerry shook his head. Then he tilted the planesman’s head to one side. A chunk of flesh had been torn out of the other side of the sailor’s neck, leaving a ragged, bloody hole. Jerry let go and backed away from the body quickly. Neither he nor Tim said a word, but they both understood what had happened. The vampires had stormed the control room and killed everyone there. No subtle little welts on the neck this time. The vampires had gone all out, killing the men as quickly as they could.

“Where’s the captain?” Tim asked, looking around the room. Captain Weber wasn’t among the dead.

“Maybe he got away,” Jerry said.

Tim shined his lantern on the terrified faces of the dead all around him. The control room had been turned into an abattoir. Matson alone couldn’t do that. Even he, Bodine, and LeMon together couldn’t overpower this many crewmen so quickly. It had to have been a much bigger group. Jesus, was Roanoke swarming with vampires at this point?

They needed to get off this boat. It was the only way he could see them surviving. But they were hundreds of feet underwater, thousands of miles from port, and likely already deep in Soviet waters. Where the hell could they go?

Jerry pulled a small object out of his pocket and held it up for him to see. “I found his on the WEPS’s body downstairs.”

Tim recognized it as the key to the weapons lockers. So that was why Jerry had been digging around in Lieutenant French’s body bag. There were only two keys to the weapons lockers. The XO had one, and Lieutenant French, the WEPS, had the other. It was a stroke of luck that Matson hadn’t taken the key himself when he killed French. But then, if the slaughter all around him was any indication, vampires didn’t need weapons.

Roanoke had two weapons lockers. One was in the reactor room, the other on the top level, not thirty feet from where they now stood. Tim didn’t know whether a gun could kill a vampire, but he sure as hell would feel a lot less helpless with one in his hand.

A loud bang echoed from the captain’s egress on the far side of the control room, the corridor where the captain’s stateroom was. It sounded as if someone was coming up the fore ladder from Officer Country. No, not someone—multiple someones. He heard footsteps on the deck.

Both men switched off their lanterns, although Tim wondered why they bothered when it was obvious the vampires had no trouble seeing in the dark. They bolted back the way they came, out of the control room and into the waiting darkness.