By Blood We Live Part 49

"Good Lord, no. G.o.d himself couldn't sink this s.h.i.+p."

Simon would have crossed himself, vampire or no.

If I ever find myself in a similar situation again-G.o.d forbid!-I will do so, too.

By this time I realized-and the UnDead are more sensitive to such matters than the living-that the deck under my feet was just slightly out of true. With all that water in the compartments below that didn't surprise or upset me. I climbed to the Marconi shack on the Boat Deck-the room where the telegraphers sat pecking frantically at their electric keys. "We've sent word to the Californian, but she hasn't replied," said one of the young men, when I asked. "Probably turned off his set and went to bed. b.a.s.t.a.r.d nearly blew my ears off earlier tonight, when I was trying to deal with the pa.s.senger messages. The Carpathian's about sixty miles south of us. She'll be here in four or five hours, to take the pa.s.sengers off."

Four hours would put its arrival in darkness, I reflected as I made my way toward my own stateroom and what I hoped would be a rendezvous with my pursuer. Five hours, at dawn.

Which meant that the moment Miss Paxton was safely out of the way I would have to get that trunk, one way or another. And be where I could get into it come first light. Never, I vowed, would I travel again if I could help it: it was just one d.a.m.n complication after another.

I could scent Miss Paxton's dusting-powder as I entered the corridor leading to my stateroom. The scent was strong, but she was nowhere in sight. In the other cabins I heard the murmur of voices-a woman complained about having to go out on deck in the cold, which was prodigious-but there was certainly neither panic nor concern. I took a few steps along the corridor, listening, sniffing.

She was in my stateroom.

Of course. She'd got the maid to let her in.

This would be easier than I'd thought.

I closed my eyes as midnight moved into the icy heavens overhead. Reached out my mind to hers, where she waited in the comfortable darkness of my room. Laid on her mind, one by one, the fragile veils of sleep.

Gently, gently... I'd done this to her before, back in London, and had to be all the more subtle because she knew what it felt like, and would resist if she recognized the sensations again. But she was tired from prowling the s.h.i.+p by night in quest of a clear shot at me, by day in search of my trunk. I could feel her slipping into dream. I murmured to her in the voice of the River Cher, beside which she and her idiot brother Lionel had played as children; whispered to her as the breeze had whispered among the willow-leaves on its bank.

Sleep... sleep... you're home and safe. Your parents are watching over you, no harm can come to you....

One has only about ten minutes, at the very outside, at those turning-hours of noon and midnight, when the positions of earth and stars (as Simon has explained it to me) are strong enough to counterbalance the terrible influence of the tides. It was excruciating, keeping still, concentrating my thoughts on those of the young woman in my stateroom. Feeling those seconds of power tick away, calculating how many I'd need to stride down the hall, open the door, and bury my fangs in her neck...

An image I had to keep stringently from my thoughts while my mind whispered to hers.

Sleep-rest-you'll sleep much easier if you take off those itchy heavy silver chains around your neck. It's safe to do so-you're safe... They're so heavy and annoying....

I felt her fumble sleepily with her collar-b.u.t.tons (Why do women persist in wearing garments that b.u.t.ton up the back?). Saw her in the eyes of my heart, head pillowed on velvety hair half-unbound on the leather of the armchair. Fingers groping clumsily at her throat...

Sleep- The catch was large, solid, and complicated. b.u.g.g.e.r. She must have chosen it so, knowing it wasn't easy to undo in half-sleep or trance. d.a.m.n, how many minutes-how many seconds-left...?

Gentle, gentle, Lionel is asking for the necklaces.

You have to take them off to give them to him- I heard her whisper in her heart, Lionel, and tears trickled down her face. In her dreams she saw her brother, plump and fatuous as he'd been in life, holding out his hand to her. Got to have silver to wear to my wedding, old girl. Not legal if the groom's not wearing silver. New rules.

She let the revolver slide from her fingers, brought up both hands. The catch gave, silver links sliding down her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Seconds left, but enough- I strode forward down the corridor and that G.o.d-cursed, miserable, miniaturized hair-farm of an American matron's Pekingese threw itself out of the door of a nearby stateroom and fastened his teeth in my ankle. The teeth of such a creature would hardly imperil a soggy toast-point, much less a vampire in full pursuit of undefended prey, but the UnDead are as likely as any other subject of Lord Gravity to trip if their feet come in contact with a ten-pound hairball mid-stride. I went sprawling, and although I caught myself as a cat does, with preternatural speed, the damage was done. The Peke braced his tiny feet and let out a salvo of barks, his mistress appeared in the stateroom door just as I was readying a kick that would have caved in the little abortion's skull, and shrieked at me, "How dare you, sir! Come to mummy, Sun!"

And the next second Miss Paxton, collar unb.u.t.toned, hair tumbling over her shoulders, and gun in hand, was in the door of my stateroom, taking aim at a distance of six feet...

And midnight was over.

I fled. Mrs. Harper (I think that was her name), straightening up with her struggling h.e.l.l-hound in her arms, effectively blocked the corridor for the instant that it took me to get out of the line of fire, and I pelted down the staircase, into the nearest corridor, with Miss Paxton like a silent fury at my heels.

There were people in the corridors now, my fellow-pa.s.sengers in every imaginable variation of pyjamas, sweaters, coats, bath-robes, and life-jackets, all of them carping about having to go out on the boat-decks and all of them impeding Miss Paxton from taking aim at me-and me from getting far enough ahead to lose her. I strode, dodged, slithered bow-wards along the B Deck corridor, making for the cargo-well that would give me swift access to the bowels of the s.h.i.+p. The lights were still on, but if they went out-as I thought they must, with the holds flooding-she would surely be mine.

The deck was definitely sloped underfoot when I reached "Scotland Road" on D Deck again, now milling with crewmen. At the head of the spiral stair going down to E and F, I stopped short with a jolt of sickened shock. Beneath me a pit of green water churned, eerily illuminated by the lights that still burned on the levels below.

That water looked awfully high.

The gun cracked behind me and I spun; there were still crewmen in the corridor but none were between me and the emergency-ladder from which Miss Paxton had just emerged and not a single one attempted to stop her. I don't think the mad b.i.t.c.h would have cared if they had. Maybe her tales of my perfidy had spread widely among the crew: maybe they had a better idea of what was going on below our feet than the pa.s.sengers or I did. The fact remained that she had a gun and a clear shot and I knew that even a glancing wound from it could prove fatal. I hadn't drunk the blood of thousands of grimy peasants, factory-workers, prost.i.tutes and street-urchins over the course of fourteen decades to let myself be put out of the way by an enraged middle-cla.s.s virago.

I did the only thing possible.

As she fired I fell against the rail, tipped over it, and dropped straight down into that seething jade-green seawater h.e.l.l.

It was every bit as cold as I'd been led to expect.

My mind seemed to fracture, to go numb. I screamed, and my mouth and lungs flooded with water-it's a d.a.m.n good thing I'd quit breathing many years previously. I remember staring up through the green water and seeing Alexandra Paxton looking down at me, gun still in her hand.

I was conscious, but I felt my ability to act at all-to summon my limbs to obey my disoriented mind-bleeding out of me like gore from a severed femoral artery. I couldn't move until she left, until she was convinced that I was dead, and she seemed to stand there-gloating, I expect, the miserable cow!-forever.

Then she spit at me, and turned away.

It took what felt like minutes of slow, clumsy thras.h.i.+ng before I could thrust myself to the door into what I think was F Deck. My fingers were like cricket bats and I don't know how long I spent simply trying to get the door open. My brain was like a cricket bat, too, trying to fish a single wet noodle of orientation-where the h.e.l.l was the stairway up to E Deck?-from the swirling maelstrom of horror, shock, terrifying weakness and nightmare panic.

And I knew with blinding certainty that, watertight compartments be d.a.m.ned, the s.h.i.+p was going down.

Voices, impossibly distant, came to me from all parts of the s.h.i.+p.

Voices that said, "She's sinking by the head."

Voices that said, "You must get in the boat, Mary. I shall follow later."

Voices that said, "Get back there, you. Women and children first."

Nearer, feet thudded amid a frightened yammering of Swedish, Gaelic, Arabic, j.a.panese: third-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers trying to find their way up the maze of stairways to the decks above. Crewmen shouted at them to go back, to stay in their cabins, they'd be called when it was time for them to get in the lifeboats. But I'd gone to sea, G.o.d help me, as a living man all those years ago, and I knew jolly well how many people could fit into a boat the size of the mere sixteen that were in t.i.tanic's davits.

I had to get up to the decks before they started letting those foreign swine take up boat-s.p.a.ce that I'd paid for with my first-cla.s.s ticket. And I had to get there before the foreign swine realized that there wasn't going to be enough room for them in the boats, and took matters out of the crew's hands and into their own dirty paws.

The struggle was literally h.e.l.lish: I refer specifically to the Fifth Circle of Dante's h.e.l.l, where the Sullen bubble in eternal stasis in the mud beneath the waters of the River Styx. I can only a.s.sume that the Styx is warmer than the Atlantic Ocean in mid-April. Water at a temperature of thirty degrees has exactly the same effect on the UnDead as it would on the living, only, of course, more prolonged, since the living wouldn't survive more than a few minutes even were breathing not an issue. Beyond the paralyzing cold, there was the sheer hammering disorientation of ocean water-living water-itself. For long periods I became simply immobilized, my brain shrieking, fighting to make a hand move, a foot thrust against the metal walls that hemmed me in; it was like trying to remain awake in the final extremities of exhaustion. I'd come out of it, twist and thrash and wrench myself to push along a foot or so, then sink back into an inactivity I couldn't break no matter how frantically I tried.

Those periods got longer, the moments of clumsy, horrified lucidity shorter and shorter. And around me I could feel the walls, the hull, the decking tilting, tilting, as the weight of the water in the bow doubled and quadrupled and quintupled, and I hung there helpless, aware of the sheer, horrifying depth of the ocean below.

I wonder I didn't go mad. Not with fear that I would die when that final hideous tipping-point was at last reached and the s.h.i.+p began her lightless plunge to the bottom: with the appalling certainty that I would not and could not.

Ever.

Whether because the water conducted sound, or for some other cause, as I spastically, intermittently, agonizingly crept and pushed my way toward the stairways and survival, I was completely aware of everything that was pa.s.sing on the decks above. Even above the cheerful ragtime being pumped out by the s.h.i.+p's band, I could hear with nightmarish clarity every conversation, every footfall, every creak of the tackle as the crew loaded up the lifeboats and lowered them to the surface of the sea far below. The s.h.i.+p's officers kept saying Women and children first and the women and children-brainless cretins!-kept finding reasons to remain on the main vessel where it was warm. A number of men got into those early boats unchallenged, since there were so many women who weren't interested: I learned later one of them was sent off with only twelve people in it. The miserable Mrs. Harper got off accompanied not only by her husband but by her wretched Pekingese.

But around me the walls changed their angle, with what to me seemed to be fearful speed, until even those first-cla.s.s idiots on deck (I use the term advisedly) realized there was something greatly wrong. By the time I dragged myself at last, shaking and dripping, up a maintenance ladder onto D Deck, and stumbled toward an unguarded crew ladder to go above, the bow of the s.h.i.+p was underwater and all but four of the boats were gone.

I won't go into a detailed description of the behavior of the some two thousand men and women in compet.i.tion for the approximately one hundred and sixty available pa.s.ses out of the jaws of death. Anyone who has lived for close to two centuries in a major city like London has had ample occasion to view the behavior of mobs, and the pa.s.sengers of the t.i.tanic actually acquitted themselves fairly mildly, all things considered. Yes, the crew members had to form a cordon around one boat and threaten to shoot any non-lady who tried to board; yes, the men did rush another of the boats (I was too far back in the mob to get on, d.a.m.n those other selfish b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to h.e.l.l).

Astonis.h.i.+ngly, the lights remained on and the band continued to play, giving an eerie disjointedness to the scene but somehow, I think, keeping everyone just on the human side of total panic. G.o.d knows what it would have been like in darkness, with no sound but the groaning of the s.h.i.+p's overstrained armature readying itself to snap. I had long since given up any thought of getting my trunk to safety, or of Alexandra Paxton. I learned much later she'd gone straight from shooting me (as she thought) to the Boat Deck, and had gotten off fairly early in the proceedings. She returned to England and lived, I regret to say, happily ever after.

The b.i.t.c.h.

For my part, my only thought was getting into a boat and trusting to luck that the rescue s.h.i.+p would arrive while night still lay upon the ocean. The richest people in the world were aboard the t.i.tanic, for G.o.d's sake! Other vessels must be racing one another to pick them up.

Mustn't they?

In addition to the regular lifeboats the t.i.tanic carried four canvas collapsible boats, and two of these were a.s.sembled and put in the lifeboat davits as the last of the wooden boats was lowered away. The other two, lashed uselessly to the top of the officers' quarters, were too tangled up in rope to be dragged to the side, but men swarmed over them, trying to get them into shape to be floated off if and when, G.o.d help us all, the s.h.i.+p went under.

And under she would go. I knew it, could hear with the hyper-acute senses of the UnDead the snapping creak of her skeleton cracking under the weight of water pulling her down, and the whole stern end of her-G.o.d knows how many tons!-that was by this time lifted completely clear of the gla.s.s-smooth, obsidian ocean. The lights were beginning to glow red as the generators began to fail. As I fought my way through the mob to one of the collapsibles, a dapper little gentleman who'd been helping with the ropes turned to the officer in charge and said, "I'm going aboard." When the officer-who'd been fighting off would-be male boarders for some minutes-opened his mouth to protest, the dapper gentleman said, "I'm Bruce Ismay; President of the White Star Line." He stepped into the boat.

As it swung clear of the deck I reached the rail: You may be President of the White Star Line but if there's room for you, there's room for me...

And I froze. I could have batted aside any of the officers who tried to prevent me, and the leap would have been nothing. For one moment, just before the men began to lower, less than two feet separated the boat's gunwale from the rail; with a vampire's altered muscle and inhuman strength, I've cleared gaps four and five times that with ease.

Two feet of s.p.a.ce, with running water not all that far below.

Had I been a.s.sured of the return of my immortal soul by so doing, I could not have made that jump.

And by the time I fought my way to the place where the other serviceable collapsible was being lowered, it was away. A number of pa.s.sengers jumped at this point, when the boats were close enough to have picked them up. If you walked forward, it wasn't all that far to the surface of the sea. I made my way to the roof of the officers' quarters and joined the struggle to get the remaining two collapsibles unraveled from the snarl of ropes, get their canvas sides put up (the designer of the d.a.m.ned things is another on the long list of persons I hope will rot in h.e.l.l), and get them to the rails: if one fell upside-down (which it did) it was too heavy and too clumsy to be righted. I could feel the angle of the deck steepening, could tell by the dark water's advance that the s.h.i.+p was being pulled forward and down.

At 2:15 the bridge went under. A rolling wave of black water swept over the roof of the officers' quarters and floated the right-side-up collapsible free. I scrambled aboard, fighting and clawing the army of other men trying to do the same thing; glancing back I could see the t.i.tanic's stern, swarming with humanity like ants on a floating branch, lift high out of the ocean. It was a fearful sight. Voices were screaming all around me and if I'd ever had a doubt that a vampire could pray, and pray sincerely, it was put to rest in that moment. I shrieked G.o.d's name with the best of them as I threw myself into that miserable canvas tub and we oared away, gasping, from the great s.h.i.+p as she snapped in half-dear G.o.d, with what a sound!-and her stern crashed back, the wave propelling our boat on its way.

I saw her lights beneath the water as the bow pulled down, dragging the stern after it. The stern rose straight up for a moment, venting steam at every orifice and wreathed in the despairing wails of those wretches still trapped aboard; pointed briefly like a stumpy accusing finger at the beacon-cold blazons of the icy stars...

...then sank.

With my trunk aboard.

And no rescue-boat in sight.

It was twenty minutes after two in the morning. Dawn in the North Atlantic comes, in mid-April, at roughly five a.m.; first light about a half-hour before that.

Dear G.o.d, was all I could think. Dear G.o.d.

The men-mostly crewmen-around me in the boat were praying, but I was at something of a loss for words. What I really wanted was for a light-proof, unsinkable coffin to drop down out of the heavens so I could go on killing people and drinking their blood for another few centuries. Even in my extremity, I didn't think G.o.d would answer that one.

So I waited.

The collapsible's sides never had been properly put up. We started s.h.i.+pping water almost immediately and barely dared stir at the oars, for fear of altering the boat's precarious balance and sending us all down into those black miles of abyss. This consideration at least kept the men in the boat from rowing back to pick up swimmers, whose voices hung over the water like the humming of insects on a summer night. Some sixteen hundred people went into the sub-freezing water that night-I'm told most of the other boats, even those lightly laden, held off for fear of being swamped. One American woman tried to organize the other ladies in her boat to stage a rescue at this point and was roundly snubbed: so much for the tender-heartedness of the fair s.e.x.

The cries subsided after twenty minutes or so. The living don't last long, in water that cold.

Then we could only wait, in fear perhaps more excruciating than we'd left behind us on the t.i.tanic, for the canvas boat to slowly fill with water, and sink away beneath our feet.

Or in my case, for the earth to turn, and the sun to rise, and my flesh to spontaneously ignite in unquenchable fire.

It was small consolation to reflect that such an event would briefly keep my fellow pa.s.sengers warm and, one hoped, would take their minds off their own upcoming immersion.

Should the boat sink before I burst into flames, I found myself thinking, my best chance would be to guide myself, as best I could, toward the t.i.tanic wreck. The short periods of volition permitted by even a long succession of noons and midnights would never be enough to counteract the movement of the slow, deep-flowing ocean currents. Staying in the wreck itself would be my best and only chance.

I could hear Simon's voice in my mind, speculating about how divers were already learning to search for s.h.i.+ps foundered in shallow waters, for the sunken treasures of the Spanish Main and the ancient Mediterranean.

In time I fancy they shall discover even Atlantis, or at the very least whatever galleons went down chock-full of treasure in mid-ocean. You can be sure that whatever science can invent, treasure-hunters will not be long in adapting to their greed.

The richest men and women in the world had been my fellow pa.s.sengers. Very few of them stuffed their jewels in their pockets before getting into the lifeboats. Of course the treasure-hunters would come, as soon as science made it possible for them to do so.

And even as I thought this, I sent up the feeblest of human prayers: Please, G.o.d, no....

As if He'd listen.

At 3:30, far off to the southeast, a flicker of white light pierced the blackness, followed by a cannon's distant boom.

A slight breeze had come up, making the ocean choppy and the air yet more bitterly cold. Tiny as a nail-clipping, a new moon hung over the eastern horizon. Men had begun to fall off the collapsible, which was now almost up to its gunwales in seawater that hovered right around the temperature of ice: fall silently, numb, dead within sight of salvation. I could see all around us the ocean filled with the pale-gleaming blobs of what the sailors called "trash" and "growlers," miniature icebergs the size of motorcars or single-story houses, ghostly in the starlight. Among them, or west and south in the clearer water, I could make out the dark shapes of the other lifeboats. Could hear the voices of the pa.s.sengers in them, tiny occasional drops of sound, like single crickets in the night.

It wanted but an hour till first light. I think I would have wept, had it been possible for vampires to shed tears.

The sky was staining gray when one of the lifeboats was sighted, slowly inching toward us. How far we'd drifted I don't know; I'd sunk into a lethargy of horror, watching the slow growing of the light. It might have been the effect of the water in the boat, which was up to our knees by this time; there were only a dozen men left, and a woman from third cla.s.s. I could barely move my head to follow the lifeboat's agonizingly lent.i.tudinous approach.

Everything seemed to have slowed to the gluey pace of a helpless dream. It was as if time itself were slowly jelling to immobility with the cold. Far across the water-perhaps a mile or two, in the midst of the floating ice-loomed the dark bulk of a small freighter. All around it the lifeboats were creeping inward, some from miles away, like nearly frozen insects painfully dragging themselves toward the jam-pot that is the Heaven of their tiny lives.

And I could see that, even if the lifeboat reached us-and each second it seemed that we'd go down under their very noses-there was no way under G.o.d's pitiless sky that it would reach the freighter before full light.

Don't make me do this, G.o.d. Don't make me...

Like the laughter of G.o.d, light flushed up into the gray sky, turning all the icebergs to silver, the water to sapphire of incredible hardness and depth. At the same time my frozen flesh was suffused with unbearable heat, my skin itching, writhing... my flesh readying to burst into flame.

Hiding in a boiler on the wreck, curled in some corner of the grand staircase or the Palm Court Lounge, I would have only to wait for the treasure-hunters to come.

The cold and darkness would only seem eternal.

Would hope in those circ.u.mstances be more cruel than the comfort of despair?

I closed my eyes, tipped myself backward over the side.

I was about to find out.

Hit.

by Bruce McAllister.

Bruce McAllister is the author of the novels Dream Baby and Humanity Prime and more than fifty short stories. His short work has been collected in The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories, and has appeared in numerous anthologies, including the prestigious Best American Short Stories series. His stories have also been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. He's currently working on two "quiet fantasy" novels, both of which incorporate vampire elements.

McAllister says that he suspects vampire stories are Christianity flipped to its dark alter-self. "In communion we do drink blood, and we're promised immortality, so in one sense vampirism is communion and immortality but without G.o.d's grace," he said. "So that plays a role in the attraction, as does the neo-Romantic gothic feel of it."