The Hope Page 4

  I mean, these rats had survived down here for several years with little or no food. I can’t believe they made it up to the mess or the dining-hall or the food stores or the greenhouses, but then again, who knows? Clearly they had something going for them, something that kept them organised and alive, something that ordered them to bite through solid steel until they died.

  “I thought they were supposed to steal babies out of cabins when their mothers weren’t looking. Isn’t that the story?” I ventured. Charlie had filled my glass without me noticing and I was starting to feel comfortably numb.

  “Now I wouldn’t put it past them,” he commented, “but before I went into that hole, I’d have peed myself laughing at you.”

  He continued his story.

  So I set off along that passageway, me, little Charlie who only needed to shave twice a week, with eleven grown men behind me. We’re used to small spaces on this hunk of junk, aren’t we? But I was coming down with the dose of claustrophobia to end them all. The further we went, the more scared I got that we weren’t ever going to get back out. I’m sure the other guys felt it too, like we were being swallowed and the only way out was either be puked up or wind up as lumps of shit. Don’t laugh. That’s how it felt. The girders stretched ahead as far as the flashlights showed and kept on coming up one after the other. Behind me other beams flashed up, down, around. There was no sign of life, no sign that anything could live there. I wondered if the rats hadn’t all escaped out of that hole already, moved house and left the old one spotless, without even a turd to show where they’d been, ready for the new tenants.

  We came to a pipe which crossed the passage at head-height. I’ve looked for this one on the specs and it’s not marked, but I guess it’s one of the water-coolant feeders for the prop shaft. Fred took out an oilcloth from his pocket and tied it around the pipe so it was a marker buoy. We pushed on.

  You know how I was talking about sensing movement rather than hearing it? It’s a trick we all pick up down here. Well, I started getting that itchy feeling in my head but I didn’t know why. OK, so there were folk moving behind me, but it wasn’t them, I knew about them. It was something else that I couldn’t see except in the corner of my eye. Shit, I don’t know. I stopped and looked around. Couldn’t see a darn thing. Big Fred had noticed it too. He looked at me all calm and steady, and it meant, “Stay cool, don’t lose it,” but I tell you, I was about to run back past the lot of them and to hell with the embarrassment. Cowardice don’t mean shit in that kinda situation. But Fred grabbed my arm, Fred in his Mickey Mouse ear-defenders, and I could willingly have fallen to my knees and worshipped him then and there because he gave me some of his strength. Dumb, huh? Yes, well. He might have been a mean fucker of mothers most of the time but when it really mattered you could count on Fred. That’s why he was boss. He was the strongest link in the chain and – forget the old saying – if he held, then the weaker links like me could sure as hell hold too.

  So I walked on trying to look like I hadn’t gone bugshit for a second and the itchy feeling got itchier, and it also got clearer, targeting itself like head sonar – you know what I’m saying? – and it was pointing upwards, upwards over our fucking heads in the fucking darkness. I poked the flashlight beam up and it was OK for about fifty feet and then it grew fainter and the darkness grew thicker. It loomed over us. That’s the word. The darkness loomed and whatever was in that darkness (had to be rats, didn’t it?) was unseen and watching us and scurrying about in its excitement. I had that thought again about an army with a general. They had us where they wanted us, the perfect ambush.

  It was then that I began to break out in sweat. The noise of the turbines was distant now and all I could hear was the pulse of blood in my ears. Must be like that in the womb, eh? Only there you’re safe and snug, but between those cold slabs of steel rising up for ever you were never safe. The back of my overalls was damp. The handle of the shovel was slimy wet in my palm. I had that thing in my guts like you’re never going to be able to eat anything again. I had that taste in my mouth. And there was so much movement about us. You couldn’t ignore it if you wanted to. Most of the guys’ flashlights were trained upwards and in the half-light you thought you could see things flitting over the walls, scuttling like crabs, luminous swirls you couldn’t make out properly, if they were actually there at all or not your mind playing games. We all wanted to turn back then. If one of us had – if I had – the rest would have gone, sprinting faster than jackrabbits. We weren’t wanted there. Simple as that.

  After about a quarter of an hour of this – those things above us waiting for the right moment, waiting for the order to be given – we came to the end of the passage. To be more precise, I nearly fell over the end of the passage, because there was a drop of about ten feet into a chamber. Fred held on to me and I didn’t look back at him but shone my flashlight around. I felt the others clustering behind me to get a look.

  I’ve checked the specs for this chamber too and it’s not there. I’m not saying it was built and then deliberately left off the specs. More like it was not built, or at least built accidentally, formed in the spaces between other chambers, the gas tanks, the side of the Hope, hell, I don’t know. Negative space, do you see? It exists solely because it occupies a place where other things don’t exist. A void. No man’s land.

  The floor was about six inches deep in water, its surface shivering with the vibration of the ship. It looked almost solid, jelly set in a series of tiny troughs and peaks. There were a couple of rats swimming in it, but I didn’t mind them any more. They were only rats, not particularly big ones either, and they looked jittery – probably scared of us.

  There was nowhere to go but down and Fred indicated he would go first. I blessed him for that. He knelt on the lip of the passageway and lowered himself over none too gracefully. His hands gripped the edge and then he dropped himself into the chamber. I shone the flashlight after him. He signed for me to follow. I copied what he’d done and landed with a boing of pain in my ankle-bones and cold water soaking into my socks. Benjamin came next and fell on his ass, but that probably did more damage to the ship that to his ass. One by one, the rest came, Stan last.

  Something was wrong. Someone was missing. Fred took a head count and Falstaff wasn’t there. I can’t say I liked Falstaff. He was a notorious faggot and he’d tried it on with me more than once. It’s hard to say no when the other guy is six foot four, wears an earring the size of a woman’s bracelet, and has a scar as wide as a whore’s pussy across his forehead, but I’d managed to stay virgin. Heh! Anal virgin, at least. I mean, not that I’ve got anything against them, understand, and we’ve got to take love where we can find it and all that stuff, but it’s not for me, OK? And I just didn’t like him as a human being, that’s all. He’d been taking the rear – ha ha! Sorry – so nobody had seen him go. He might have run off but we didn’t think so. I could have been any one of us and we just hadn’t heard a darn thing. We were one down and we hadn’t even met the enemy proper, but Big Fred wasn’t stupid enough to send a man to look for Falstaff. Fred knew that something was up, and anyway, if Falstaff had simply chickened out on us then he was on his own, period.

  I felt even more exposed in that chamber. There was so much blank space above us and, as far as we could tell, nowhere for us to run except back up the side and through the passageway. Robinson signed that we should do just that. Stan nodded, even though the whole expedition had been his fault. But Fred wasn’t looking at them. He had sloshed off to one end of the chamber, his body haloed by his flashlight, the shotgun pointing forward in the crook of his arm. He crouched down to inspect the wall. We joined him.

  He was peering into a hole slightly bigger than a man’s fist, scratched at the edges like the one in the engine room, which meant something had bored through here too. I smelt ammonia, piss, whatever, coming from outta that hole – unhealthy and biological. Perhaps we were in one of the drainage tanks where all the johns in the entire ship pour i
n. Perhaps it was due for a flush and feeder pipes were about to rain down on us. Imagine being drowned in piss. That struck me as quite funny, which gives you some idea of how bad things were.

  Charlie had gone quiet, as if he was turning a page in his head which he would rather have left flat. While he was telling the story he was staring into space, watching the scenes in his head and recreating them for me, as a good storyteller does. I was convinced this was only that, a story, no more.

  He snapped awake and fixed his eyes straight at me.

  “I know what you think heaven is,” he said, “clouds and angels and shit. What do you think hell is?”

  “Rocks and devils and burning and lots of shit,” I answered. There was no point in dreaming up a more sophisticated version to impress him. Charlie knows me inside out and what’s the point in pretending he doesn’t?

  “Yup. Because that day, I found the next best thing to the real thing.”

  He lost himself in himself again and carried on the story.

  As we were standing around feeling threatened and incompetent, like you feel when someone’s looking over your shoulder when you’re taking a leak, a dozen rats, maybe more, burst out of the hole as if they’d been shot out of a gun, and you could hear their squealing through the ear-protectors. I’ll admit I fell over in shock, dropping my flashlight and shovel and getting the crack of my backside full of water, but those little fuckers weren’t hanging around. Their eyes were big and wide, like this, and they crossed that chamber in two seconds flat, no bullshit. We were terrified that they were terrified. I remember getting to my feet and backing away from the hole like the others. It didn’t even cross my mind to pick up my shovel. I saw Benjamin muttering to himself, a prayer most likely, to one of the black men’s gods, eh? What was worse was seeing Big Fred scared, although you wouldn’t have known it for sure the way he levelled the shotgun at the hole and slipped his finger round the trigger.

  Then I understood why there were no rat corpses at the first hole and so few rats down here. The rats hadn’t just been trying to get into the engine room.

  They had been trying to get out of here.

  Something in that hole scared rats shitless. Ate rats, dead or alive, bones and all. Even cleaned the place of rat turds. I did not want to know what it was.

  The ammonia smell got stronger. My nose hairs felt like they were burning.

  Whatever finally came out of that hole might have been a rat once, but equally it might have been a fish or a bird or an insect or a snake. Christ, I can’t even describe it really, other than it was white and covered in a pale grey slime like human spunk and it was about two foot long. Hairless stumps for legs, a cluster of pink eyes at the front and a mouth full of steel teeth. No shit. Steel. Maybe it had learned to grow steel teeth as normal animals grow bone. Don’t ask me. God knows what might evolve in the deepest parts of this floating shitheap.

  Whatever it was, it was mad as hell.

  Big Fred shot it, though I think he only pulled that trigger in shock, and the thing exploded white pus against the wall. It had no skeleton. It was a fat sausage of flesh and pus and Fred popped it open.

  But it wasn’t alone.

  Another appeared in the hole, stretching up its squidgy head to get a good look at us, and then it launched itself in our direction. It got Fletcher in the neck. Thank God Fletcher got in the way of Fred. I mean no disrespect for the dead, but if it hadn’t been for Fred I wouldn’t be talking to you today. Its teeth wrenched part of Fletcher’s throat away and it burrowed into the wound, contracting its body to fit. It sucked itself in. Fletcher’s face said he didn’t know what was going on, didn’t feel it. The tail end of the thing vanished, squirting blood out behind it, as Fletcher sank to the floor, his flashlight beam waving uselessly. His eyes rolled up. The front of his overalls was soaked with blood. If he was screaming, I couldn’t hear it. In fact, the whole thing happened in this appalling vacuum of silence, the way nightmares do.

  More of the things squirmed out of the hole. Some plopped into the water and began swimming like they were nicely at home there, thank you, nicely at home anywhere. Others shot themselves into the air, whirs of white and teeth. Fred managed to blast one in mid-leap and it became a spray of globules splattering him in the kisser.

  A heavy weight thumped my shoulder and tumbled off, and I looked up without wanting to look up. They were falling from above too. The one that had bounced off me flipped itself over and made a beeline for my foot and I stamped on it. Stamp! Like that. You should not exist, you slimy bastard.

  They fell like snow from a night sky and landed on our heads and faces and necks. Robinson had one removing his ear and another working at his nose and his mouth was drawn wide with a scream I was glad I couldn’t hear. Stan was swinging a sledgehammer at one in the water. There was a spurt where the hammer hit and he drew the hammer’s head up with the thing stuck to it, flattened in the middle but solid at either end and a stream of fluid coming out of where its asshole must have been. It was wriggling and I swear if Stan had given it a chance it would have torn into his face, half-squelched to death as it was, but he brought the hammer up and brought it down on to another thing at his feet and the two things mashed into each other so you couldn’t tell which was which.

  Flashlights flickered their beams crazily around the chamber, showing up thing after thing falling down headlong, teeth bared. White, black, white, black. I was hypnotised by the sick beauty of it.

  Out of nowhere, one plunged into my face and I thought that was it, I was about to die in that shitty, filthy place with those unreal things. My fingers slithered on its skin. I felt it tense itself to strike and wondered how much it would hurt, and suddenly the thing was off my face and its smothering stink was gone. Benjamin, his eyes so white they seemed to glows in the blackness of his face, had plucked the thing off me and was holding it at arm’s length.

  I remember this bit clearest of all, because that thing squeezed itself out of his hand, and do you know what it reminded me of most? Toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube. And it slithered up his arm, white on black, and it headed for his armpit and it vanished into him in a second flat. Benjamin lifted his arm slowly and inspected the hole in his body as if it was no more than a surprise attack of bad body odour. You know, just slightly confused. Hey, what da fok’s goin’ on? Then he jerked. The thing must have reached his heart. He virtually jumped over on to his back. Then he was making spastic movements in the water and I couldn’t watch any longer. As I turned away, I found Fred grabbing my arm and pulling me with him. The glare of his flashlight caught one of the things on the floor and he loosed off a cartridge at it without pausing to consider. I had a vague idea that someone else was running after us, maybe two or three people. Fred let go of me long enough to pump the shotgun and fire again, a soundless flash of flame followed by an explosion of white flesh and liquid, then he pulled me along once more until we made it to the entrance to the passageway.

  Of course, it was ten feet up, but Fred boosted me over the edge with ridiculous ease and threw the gun after. I picked it up and pointed the flashlight down the passage. I prayed there were none of those things along there, but God’s intercom wasn’t on. I saw at least half a dozen scuttling in my direction.

  I pumped the gun as I’d seen Fred do, took aim and fired, but I knew sweet nothing about guns and I missed and damn near broke my wrist on the recoil. The beam arced up vertically and the gun leapt out of my hands. At the same time, Fred scrambled up and over, caught the gun, pumped, fired and pointed at the entrance with his free hand. I saw Tommy appearing, hauling himself over with his face looking like it was thinking about something else, nothing to do with the present. He groped for a handhold, with his body jackknifed over the rim, stomach to the floor of the passage. I saw a flash of light behind me and guessed that Fred had taken out another of the things. I reached for Tommy and pulled at his sleeve, and as he came over I saw Stan’s hands, one clutching his flashlight, a blinding
circle.

  Tommy and I did try to pull him up as quickly as possible but we were dazzled and when you’re as scared as we were no part of your body seems to work properly except your bladder. Sounds like I’m making excuses, doesn’t it? In that passage, dark everywhere, the floor wet with blood and water and God knows what, it was a miracle we got Stan out at all.

  He was very calm about it. We pulled and at last he came up from out of the chamber. If we had been quicker, he might have been OK, who can say? But there was one of the things attached to the back of his leg, steel teeth sunk into his flesh and pulling one of his tendons free.

  Tommy produced a bowie knife from his belt and took a slice off the thing’s back. He took two more chunks out of it before it let go and fell off.

  We got to our feet and propped Stan between us. Fred took in the situation at a glance and set off ahead, gun poised. Nobody else was coming out of that chamber, it was obvious. No man, at least. All we could do was follow Big Fred, the man with the gun, and move as fast as possible.

  And if I’d known at that point that Fred had run out of cartridges, I wouldn’t have gone a step further. Fred realised this, I think. At least, he never told us this tiny, unimportant fact – “Uh, sorry guys. No shells.” – until much later.

  For minute after minute we limped on, with every step expecting to feel something fly at our backs or flop on to our heads and bite.

  Fred stopped short. The flashlight was pointed dead in front of him.

  There was the pipe with his oilcloth tied around it and on it squatted one of the things, the biggest one I’d seen yet, coiled over the pipe with its tail end hanging down and twitching and twisting. It was looking at us with all of its eyes, looking at Fred to be exact. From its teeth dangled a large gold earring, with the ear still attached.