both hands couldn’t cover. Blood gushed over the splintered bones that jutted from his skin.
The man sagged to the ground.
Eric dropped O’Neil’s sword and caught him. He pressed a hand to the hole, feeling the old-timer’s final breath against his palm.
“Marcus,” he cried. “Marcus! Look at me—”
But the man’s eyes rolled white and he fell slack in Eric’s grasp.
“What is it?” Stooky was wailing. “What the hell is it?”
Eric lay Marcus on his back and looked. The crew had surrounded the severed head, aiming weapons at it. The thing rocked back and forth on the floorboards, one bulbous eyeball pressing on the wood as it continued to chew what it had torn from Marcus’s breast.
Eric’s stomach boiled, threatening to flow over.
The head swallowed, and a mass of gristle dotted by long gray chest hairs slid out of its stump. Its mouth stretched into a smile, dragging its lips over those enormous teeth to reveal its gums.
“Yessss,” The head said. “I taste … at last …”
The thing fell still once the last word trickled from its malformed lips.
“Destroy it,” Lorris cried.
But before anyone could act the huge teeth slipped back into the tribesman’s mouth, his bulging eyes deflated. Bone popped and clicked beneath the skin, changing to regain a human shape.
The men aimed their pistols.
“No,” Hollis barked. “Save your gunfire for the others.”
Above them, the footsteps had moved out of earshot.
“Oh, Lord,” Stooky said. “You think the whole lot of’em are like that?”
Eric opened his mouth to respond, but stopped short when a warm liquid soaked through the knees of his pants. He looked down and saw blood spilling across the floorboards in an arterial flood.
He snatched up a lantern and aimed it at the breach in the ballast hold.
The blood from below had risen, now churning and frothing like some hellacious concoction brewed up by a witch.
“They done this,” O’Neil said. “Them darkies called up the Devil and changed themselves into demons!”
Eric grabbed the sword he’d used on Marcus’s killer, salvaging it before it became submerged. His gaze remained fixed on where the ungodly carvings lay hidden by the deluge. There, a dozen reddish-purple protrusions had sprouted from the floorboards, root-like tendrils fanning outward from the hole. They slid along the deck and coiled around support posts, budding fresh offshoots as they grew. In seconds a quarter of the hold had become overrun, ensnared from floor to ceiling by the strange vines that climbed the walls like ivy.
No, Eric thought. Not vines … Veins!
“It isn’t just the slaves that have changed,” he said. “It’s the whole damn ship.”
“Run!” Stooky wailed.
The group raced across the hold, chased by bizarre sounds with unknowable origins. The entire ship groaned, every timber calling out in harrowing tones that haunted Eric’s ears. Hollis shoved him aside while they ran. Eric charged into the stairwell after him and dashed up the first flight—
But halted at the switchback.
Shapes flashed at the landing above, glimpses of movement punctuated by horrific screams and terrible ripping noises. Three pistol shots cracked one after the other, the final report joined by a cloud of splinters that exploded out of the staircase’s uppermost riser. Eric held his breath, his attention flicking between the chaos topside and the unfathomable nightmare filling the slave hold below.
He looked down and cursed.
The surge of blood had overtaken the lowest step and was climbing higher. And what about the veins? How long before—
A savage roar returned his attention topside.
One of the indentured servants leapt into view, dropping to the deck within arm’s-reach of the stairwell. A bright tongue of blood hung from his lower lip to the tip of his chin. He saw the group gazing back, and his eyes implored them. When no one made a move, he reached out and clasped the edge of the nearest step, hauling himself forward. Eric moved to go help, but halted when the man tumbled over the edge, revealing that he’d been torn in half below the navel. He rolled down the stairs in a blur of sickening sounds and flailing arms, leaving a trail of his intestines and other internal organs that spilled out in his wake. His hollow torso hit the switchback with a stomach-turning thud.
“God help us!” Lorris howled.
Hollis slammed him to the wall, covering his mouth.
Everyone looked up.
Summoned by the man’s words, half a dozen Ashanti appeared at the upper hatchway, gazing down with reflective eyes. Their skin glistened with the splattered viscera of their victims. They looked huge in the glowing moonlight, standing two heads taller than any man Eric had ever seen. Some had draped themselves in tattered cloth that hung off their silhouettes like pelts. Others quickly joined the first group, and soon their numbers filled the stairwell opening, one hundred slavering souls hungry for revenge.
They plunged downward.
Eric seized the iron gate and flung it shut.
“Brace it!” he yelled.
The men threw themselves against the bars while Eric fumbled for his keys, frantically tearing the ring from his belt. The slaves clogged the steps. Their bodies blocked out the last of the night’s moonlight, and Eric realized in the rush to flee the slave hold the lanterns had either been dropped or forgotten. With no time to dwell on it, he reached through the bars in total darkness and jabbed his key into the lock with only Lady Luck to guide him.
Click!
He snapped his hand back, feeling the cold touch of death when one of the tribesman’s fingers grazed his skin. He heard the gate shudder and clang, noises which quickly intertwined with guttural croaks and animalistic snarls.
Light sparked in the darkness.
Then again.
On the third flash, a small flame illuminated Hollis holding a candle. He held the light forward, and the crew flinched backward at the leering faces it revealed.
“Holy God,” one of the men cried.
Terror gripped Eric’s soul and paralyzed his body. All he could do was stare, gape in awe and disbelief at the inhuman heads pressed against the bars.
Rats.
They snarled and roared, snapping jaws that cast streams of saliva into the air. Drool spilled over ranks of sharp fangs.
Eric shook his head at the sight, his mind caught in a whirlpool spiraling toward insanity. Beneath the beasts’ veil of long gray fur he glimpsed the workings of some terrible amalgamation, a blasphemous combination of rodent and man.
Their reaching arms clawed the air mere inches from the men.
“What now?” Lorris cried. “We’re trapped!”
Eric wrapped his wife’s handkerchief around the tip of his cutlass and touched it to Hollis’s flame, indicating for the others to add whatever fuel they could find.
“Look at them,” Sisk said, his voice cracking.
One of the creatures wedged its face between the middle bars, stretching the skin to either side. The long blades of its two front teeth slid closer. Then something tore and the rat’s nose slid off center, followed by a snap of bone. Suddenly the monster’s face spilled through the narrow gap, stopped short when its shoulders hit the bars. Clear of the gate, the beast’s broken skull reclaimed its original shape, reforming amid another series of sickening pops and cracks.
Its black eyes fixed on the group, radiating fury.
Hollis, Sisk, and O’Neil all snapped up their pistols and fired. They pulled their triggers simultaneously, imploding the rat-thing’s face in a flash of smoke and exploding brains.
The headshot slave continued to thrash, gore spilling from the huge crater Hollis and his men had blasted in its skull. The thing slumped against the gate, its hair and claws dissolving into wisps of steam until only a naked tribesman remained.
“I ain’t stay’n here to die,” Stooky shouted, eyelids peeled back i
n horror. He turned and fled in the only direction available: down the stairs to the slave hold.
“Mister Stokes,” Eric yelled.
He grabbed for the deckhand’s shoulder but jumped back when he found Marcus’s corpse lumbering up the steps. The man’s blood-darkened clothes contrasted with his granite-colored skin and puffy mushroom eyes, appearing eerily luminescent in the torchlight.
The dead man lunged, arms outstretched. He bared his teeth to reveal a new set of incisors pushing through the gums, knocking loose the last few human teeth still clinging to the meat.
Stooky stumbled over his own feet in his haste to get away, and Marcus crashed into his chest, pushing him backward.
Into the gate.
The rat-creatures’ arms clasped Stooky’s body in a bloody embrace. He freed one arm and managed to hold Marcus at a distance, keeping the dead man’s mouth from closing on his face. Behind him, half a dozen snapping jaws attacked his scalp.
“Help him!” Eric shouted.
He seized Marcus by the shirt and heaved the man aside, sending him down the steps. His pallid body tumbled into darkness, landing with a sickening splash.
The crew moved in, blades drawn. They hacked and slashed and stabbed. Eric shouted for Hollis to shoot one of the creatures when it snatched the cuff of his shirt, but the man kept his distance, choosing to reload his pistol despite still having one shot remaining.
“Damn you,” Eric cursed.
He tore away and waved his makeshift torch in the faces of the rats while the others pulled Stooky free.
Once liberated the deckhand spun and spit at the Ashanti horde, an action that revealed the bald patch of bone now shining on the back