Issue 2 Preview: Stowaway

The story of the RMS Lusitania is terrifying enough, when you consider what the passengers went through after it was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915. But Heather Albano takes us on quite a different cruise in her alternate history horror story Stowaway, from issue 2 of Spectra Magazine. Check out the preview, and then run for the life boats.

Stowaway

by Heather Albano

Captain sent me next morning to the Doc, and I… You know, I’ve never seen anything so awful as these trenches, and I don’t expect I ever will again. But here at least you know you’re in hell, there ain’t no question of it. The water up to your knees, and straining to hear over the shelling, and men screaming and gurgling if they can’t fumble on their gas masks in time… at least you know. And that’s why I say that morning in the sickbay was worse than anything I’ve seen here in France. Because it looked so normal right at first, but underneath the skin it was so terrible and wrong, to come in and find the Doc quietly going about his business, puttering from here to there, doing things that didn’t really need doing, all calm and pleasant-like, with his eyes fixed and staring and the bite mark on his neck already turning white.

He wouldn’t talk no matter what we did to him–and Captain did plenty, because Garry and Leith were both gone from the sickbay, and worse yet, the three dead men were missing from the isolation ward. We began to get an idea of the shape of the thing, then, but it still wasn’t something anybody could say out loud. I mean, could you’ve, in our place? You wouldn’t be wanting to believe it, would you?

Mr. Smith organized us to look for them, quiet as we could. But the Lusitania was a great big ship–set her on end and she was near as tall as St. Paul’s–so there were lots of places to hide, and we didn’t find them before the attacks started in steerage. And then it happened so fast– One minute I was searching the baggage hold, and the next there was an Irishwoman screaming from the third-class cabins next door that a man was trying to eat her baby, and by the time we got there it was all over. Except it wasn’t over, it was just beginning, and we all knew it.

They must have been at it all night, Garry and Leith and the stowaways. They must have been biting people quiet-like before we started to search. Because we were standing there trying to calm the Irishwoman, and I chanced to look down the corridor–no mahogany here, just steel as far as you could see, painted over but still with the rivets showing–and from around the corner came a troop of steerage folk, walking slow but steady like they were marching in their sleep, with their eyes fixed and ice-cold, and their tongues hanging out and drooling.

Mr. Smith ordered us back, back, into the hold and we slammed the door shut just barely in time. He set about getting out the Remingtons and their cartridges–the one we weren’t supposed to be carrying anyway, but Mr. Smith said it was past time to worry over that. We got ourselves armed–not just the officers, but anyone who could handle a rifle, and that meant me too–and Mr. Smith gave orders for us to clamber up through the cargo hatch. We had to get to the bridge, six decks up, to warn the Captain.

Up through the cargo hatch put us on E deck, where there were more third-class cabins, as well as crew quarters. It was all dark and cramped, that part of the ship. Narrow hallways, painted white or just metal, all looking the same, all dim in the corners because they skimped on light down there. But every man and boy among us knew the ship stem to stern; we knew the quickest way to get to the third-class companionway–stairway, you’d say, but sailors always say companionway. We were hoping as how we could get there before any of the dead things down below followed us.

But there were dead men on E deck, too. Cabin doors would open suddenly, and there they’d be–bulging blind eyes and teeth set like they were smiling–or we’d turn a corner and see a herd of them, and it wasn’t that they were fast, but nothing stopped them. They just kept moving, slow and steady, like a man who’s got his whole mind so fixed on a task he doesn’t rightly hear what you say to him. All we could do is back up real quick and take another route fast as we could, for at least we could outrun them. We tried shooting, but they didn’t seem to really notice that. It was like their whole body had gone dead, not just the skin. Like it had died from the skin on in. They wouldn’t stop coming unless you blew their heads clean off–and to manage that, you had to stand some damn close and hope nothing spoiled your aim.

We made it to the companionway finally, and we scrambled up it to the third-class dining saloon. Nothing fancy about the saloon, nothing like what the first-class passengers had–more like a mess hall where soldiers might eat, hard and bare bones, with long tables arranged in rows and steel-legged chairs ten to a side. The lighting was better here, and we could see children cowering under the tables. Ragged little kiddies, they were–must’ve run away from the horror down in steerage. Mr. Smith said we’d best gather them up and bring them along with us. And we were doing it, and it felt like a good job to do–and then the little girl Seaman O’Neill was carrying sunk her teeth into his neck, and his eyes got real wide, and he shouted, run, lads, just run! Mr. Smith herded us back to the companionway, and told us sharp to get the rest of the rifles up to the Captain, and he’d stay there and see to it none of the dead things got any further up than they were. He had a good many cartridges, but he wasn’t going to last long given all the bullets it took to bring one of those things down, so the other boys and I ran like hell…

Continue reading Stowaway in Issue 2 of Spectra Magazine, on sale now.