Chapter Twenty Six
It was about fifteen minutes later, and we still hadn’t found Shasa and Aura. We checked almost all of the upper decks, and only found guards who had been attacked and were either unconscious or in no condition to walk away. It was obvious to us that it had been our sisters who had attacked them, but one of them, who was clearly dead, but wearing a different uniform, seemed to have died from something or someone else...
“Where could they have gone?” Niyol contemplated out loud, “They clearly fought off their attackers, so they couldn’t have been caught…”
Niyol and Sefarina had obviously not been in a similar situation to me and my brothers. I shuddered thinking about the many eyes that stared at me in the gloomy darkness, and the way they had held me against the wall. I never wanted to walk down a metal corridor ever again.
“Perhaps they went downstairs after all…?” Sefarina wondered. The way she said it made me think that she was implying that we go back down into the depths of the boats. But I couldn’t. Not again.
We continued walking the length of one of the top decks, until we found the bridge, which was also completely deserted. Seeing the steering wheel by itself, surrounded by blinking lights and flashing computer screens, reminded me of a ghost story, albeit a modern one. There was something very strange happening, and the weight crushing my lungs began to get heavier. Something wasn’t right.
And that’s when I shouted out: a short, loud gasp that stopped everyone in their tracks.
“You don’t think… they’ve been caught do you…?”
Niyol shook his head immediately, but everyone else seemed unsure.
“They’re both tough as nails!” Niyol told us, another idiom that was lost in translation.
“Then where are they?”
“They’re probably just down where you guys were.”
That comment didn’t make me feel any better. I turned to Gamba and Madz.
“What should we do? I can’t go back down there again…”
“You wait up here with Sefarina, and we’ll go and…” I quickly cut Gamba off.
“No!” I told him, “We’re not splitting up again! Look what happened last time!”
“Okay, fine,” he accepted, “we won’t. We’ll all have to go back down there together.”
“No, I can’t. Really, I can’t!”
“What else can we do then?”
I wanted to curl up into a ball on the floor and scream for as long as I possibly could. But I didn’t. Instead, I looked from one face of my companions to the next and realised that they were all as terrified as I was. They didn’t know what to do either.
“If we go, we have to go quickly, but we can’t get lost…”
“We won’t!” Madzimoyo reassured me, and within seconds we were back on the spiral staircase, descending into the bowels of hell.
As we got further and further down, my legs began to shake wildly, and I thought that I might collapse. I stopped myself, just for a second, to regain composure, and then continued.
“It’ll be alright,” Sefarina comforted me, but even she didn’t sound convinced.
We soon got to the floor that I assumed was the one we had been attacked on. I couldn’t really tell if it was the same floor, because they all looked identical: like one long thin metal coffin.
As we walked cautiously towards the room full of sewage and waste, I decided that this was in fact the stupidest idea we had ever had. On the top decks, at least we had a chance of escape, but down here we really didn’t. Just as I was about to make this suggestion to my teammates, I heard the noise that made my heart pump like a gazelle being chased by a lion: the sound of hurried footfalls.
I knew they weren’t Shasa’s or Aura’s because there were many of them, and they were much heavier than two women’s.
“Oh shit!” Gamba cried out, realising that he too had fallen into the same trap again.
“RUN!” Madz screamed for the second time, which made me panic even more as I started to have flashbacks of the previous battle.
We all began to sprint as fast as we could back towards the stairs, and within minutes we were back at the top of the staircase, but were stationary. I heard Gamba grunting and groaning as he tried to open the door that lead to the outside, but couldn’t.
My heart raced faster and my breathing got shallower, and I realised that I was pretty close to having a panic attack. The walls seemed to be closing in on me, and the ceiling began to drop towards my head. The stairs seemed to grow longer and taller, but everything else was getting closer.
“We have to find another way off the ship!” Gamba screamed out.
“NO!” Sefarina cried, peering down the thatched steel staircase and seeing the bobbing heads of enemy guards hurrying up towards us.
“Just go back!” Niyol shouted, pointing towards the door one floor down.
Sefarina grabbed my hand and held it tightly as we ran towards the closed metal flap. As she pushed its handle down I squeezed her hand so tightly that I thought I might break her fingers, but she didn’t let go. We both rushed through the hole, onto another floor that looked just like the rest, and for some reason, both started to run, hoping that we might magically find a secret exit.
I heard our brothers rushing behind us, and following them were the soldiers sent to attack us. Our footsteps vibrated around the long tube, and the noise was beginning to deafen me. The dim colours merged into one horrible hue, and the walls seemed to transform into soft flesh. We were in the stomach of a monster, and were going to be digested.
Just as we turned a corner, we both screamed in alarm when we saw more guards rushing towards us. There was no way out. We couldn’t fight them off this time, even though there were more of us to go into battle. I was sure of it.
We span back, and I caught my brothers’ eyes. They knew we were cornered again. Gamba looked at me in horror, realising that I wasn’t prepared to fight. I had already given up, and that meant that we had already lost.
“In here!” Niyol shrieked, thrusting open a metal door and jumping into a room that lay behind it. After Madzimoyo threw himself inside, Gamba pushed me and Sefarina in, and then entered in last, closing the door behind him and leaning against it. Niyol joined him, both of them foolishly thinking that their strength alone could hold off a group of trained assassins.
I glanced around the room, frantically looking for a way out. But there wasn’t one. It was just an empty metal room with a desk and a bookcase in it. We were trapped.
“What’s wrong with you?!?” I screamed at Niyol, “At least out there we had a fighting chance!”
“Hold it together!” Gamba ordered me, grabbing my shoulders and pushing me backwards.
“We’re trapped!” I told him, now in hysterics, “We’re going to die in here just like Captain Harris!”
“Shut up!” Gamba pulled me close, hugging me tight and patting his hand against my dreadlocks. “We’re not going to die here!”
Suddenly, everything went dead quiet. Even though the hum of the engine continued in the background, it seemed as if everything was at a standstill.
“What’s going on?” Sefarina called, worry drenching her voice with its malicious tone.
Then we all heard it. A soft hissing sound. And we all knew exactly what it was.
I immediately pulled away from Gamba, allowing him and Niyol to tug at the metal door. But it wouldn’t budge an inch. White wisps of smoke poured in from the bottom of the door, so we all jumped backwards, realising that there was absolutely nothing that we could do.
In hopelessness, Gamba turned to me with an expression I had never before seen on his face.
“I’m so sorry,” he told me, “this is all my fault. I’ve failed to protect us…” His eyes rolled backwards and his body began to go limp. He staggered to his knees and then dropped face first onto the hard iron floor.
I reeled backwards, holding my breath t
o make sure that I wouldn’t suffer the same fate, praying that I might suddenly find some way to escape this awful situation. Niyol also dropped to the floor, collapsing next to Gamba, and Sefarina followed.
Madzimoyo and myself pushed ourselves as tightly as we could against the wall at the back of the room, hoping that maybe we might pass through the steel sheet into the cold ocean world that surrounded the boat.
I reached out and took his hand in mine, and then turned and stared at him. He looked as petrified as I felt, and I suddenly remembered what it felt like in the comfort of Aqua Island, before we had ever had to go on a mission before. And I wished that I could go back to that moment, and say no to going on this mission and investigating this ship.
But then, the room started to swirl around me, and my eyes grew tired. Even though my mind tried to fight against it, my body was so exhausted, and I just wanted to sleep…