Beautiful Dreamer, Part Three

Day 8

Nelson-Casseus Suite

ALL POWERFUL, Atlantic Ocean

We didn’t talk about what happened after we got back to the room. We didn’t talk about it last night, either. We need to talk about it, though. Even if we don’t talk about how Jayden killed a man, we need to talk about what we do now. We can’t try the Captain’s radio. If there are still announcements going like this, someone is obviously still there, and we can’t take anyone on, not in our condition, and I severely doubt whoever’s there would be letting all this happen if they were serious about the passengers’ safety. A distress signal is just out of the question. Jayden is avoiding confronting the problem now, avoiding me, but if we’re going to get off this ship, we can’t go on like this.

It’s about noon when the silence finally gets to me.

“What now?” I ask quietly.

Jayden coughs onto the back of his hand and then wipes it on his forehead. The blood on his hand blends with the sweat on his forehead, leaving behind a diluted light red streak that makes my heart drop.

“We have our other two choices,” he says equally as quietly, “try to get Winters’s help or escape on a lifeboat.”

“Do you think it’s really worth trying to contact Winters? We haven’t seen him this whole time.”

Jayden chews his bottom lip. “I don’t know. He was your dad’s friend. You know him better than I do.”

I shrug. “Dad knows…knew him better than I do. I honestly just know him as that OK but kinda crazy rich guy that my dad hangs out with.” I inhale deeply then slowly let the breath out. “Although, I never imagined he would let something like this happen. He’s not cruel. Maybe…maybe he doesn’t know about it. I mean, like I said, we haven’t even seen him out and about yet…”

“You really think that’s worth us risking our necks to tell him?”

I purse my lips. Jayden makes a good point. This is Winters’s responsibility; he should’ve been coming out and checking on all of us anyway. If he’d done that, he would know what’s going on. It’s not up to anyone else to tell him. We have to look after ourselves. Besides, someone told the crew to lock up the concert venues. Someone killed Dad and Aunt Luli. If Winters didn’t do it, then who? Then I think about the headline from the day that the cruise disembarked: “Modern Midas Hides Golden Hand from Ailing World”. The media blamed Dad for what happened with those Red Lungs-infected rioters before we left for the cruise. I still don’t know why they did it. What did Dad even do to incur their wrath? People ended up dead because of it on both sides. We never wanted that. I don’t think Winters wants his passengers dead, either. Dad would be so disappointed in me if I left this ship without at least trying to help him.

“We need to go see him,” I say reluctantly, “or at least try. Just one try. That’s it. If we can’t, then we’re on the lifeboats immediately. Clean ourselves of this nightmare.”

I watch the line of Jayden’s jaw clench.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. We’ll try tomorrow. Rest today, mentally prepare, and if it doesn’t work, we’re leaving. Do you know what we need for the lifeboats?”

I flip the map over for emergency evacuation information. “Nothing. There are life vests aboard, a first aid kit, three liters of fresh water per person and one food ration per person that the lifeboat is designed to hold, which is—one hundred and fifty. Shit.”

“Well, at least we won’t have to worry about that. I don’t suppose that there’s anything about how to launch the lifeboat?”

“That’d be convenient, wouldn’t it?”

Jayden collapses on the bed and stares at the ceiling. “Maybe they’ll be with the lifeboat…somehow…”

I lie down on the bed beside him. “Of course. Any brand that meets Winters’s paranoid standards would be prepared for any eventuality.”

“You sure you want to stop by his floor first?”

I close my eyes and picture the middle-aged multi-billionaire dying alone, his eyes red-rimmed and his body emaciated after Red Lungs has ravaged him, his hand clinging to a bloodstained monogrammed handkerchief. Dad and Aunt Luli’s bodies from my dream flash before my mind’s eye. The image makes my stomach churn.

“Yes.”

“LEAVE!” Mom’s voice screams in my ear.

I bolt upright, hand over my chest. My head darts about, but it’s only me and a very confused-looking Jayden in the room.

“What’s wrong?” Jayden asks, propping himself up on his elbow.

“Nothing. I just…I thought…” I shake my head and lie back down. “Never mind. It’s stupid.”

He wraps his arm around my shoulders and holds me close. When are our fevers going to break? I’m so tired of all our physical contact feeling so sticky and warm and sweaty…well, at least, uncomfortably so. Still, I wouldn’t move away from him for anything. There’s only one thing that I need to get off my mind.

“Are we going to talk about the man?” He doesn’t say anything for a few moments, so I continue, “The one that you…killed?”

Jayden still doesn’t answer, and I let him have his silence.

At last, he says, “I did what I had to do.”

I stare into his eyes, but his gaze is distant. With a sigh, I rest my head on his shoulder and my hand on his chest. “We should rest. We’ll worry about everything else tomorrow.”

* * *

Jayden and I creep through the corridor leading to the locked double doors guarding the entrance to Winters’s private floor. I don’t remember how we got there, but I don’t question it. My fever has spiked so high lately, it might be making me delusional and causing me to have lapses in my memory. Over the speaker, the Bing Crosby recording of “Beautiful Dreamer” plays on loop. The corridor is empty, no living or dead bodies in sight, not even crew members. The air smells sterile—too sterile compared to the rest of the ship, as though someone just swapped down the entire area with gallons of bleach. It reminds me of a hospital, and a chill runs down my spine. I wait for the inevitable flashbacks to Dad’s ER visits and chemotherapy visits, but they never come, only dangle over my head like a sword hanging by a single thread.

As we approach the doors, “Beautiful Dreamer” slows until the words are too prolonged to be recognized. Beneath Bing Crosby’s voice is another familiar female voice singing slightly off-tune. My heart sinks, and I glance to my left to find a figure that has become too frequent a visitor in these dreams.

“Please leave,” I whine at the pale man with the scythe. He shakes his head. His abyss-black eyes penetrate mine. “Why are you doing this to me? To us?”

“You must leave.” His eyes glow bright blue. “Before it’s too late.”

Jayden reaches for the door handle. As he’s about to grasp it, two large hands made of fresh, raw, glistening flesh ending in broken black nails grab him around the wrist and mouth and yank him away from the doors. I have barely registered what’s happened when an identical pair of hands wrap themselves around my waist and my mouth—I’m torn between screaming and vomiting from the smell and taste of rotting flesh—and pull me back into overwhelming nothingness. All the while, the man with the scythe watches. His marble-like eyes fade from bright blue to midnight black.

* * *

I throw my arms out as I awake and hit Jayden in the face.

“Ouch! Geez, Ava! What was that?” he cries and rolls away from me.

“Oh God, I’m sorry. Did I break anything?”

He feels at his nose. “Not this time. Not that it’d really matter, I guess, but I suppose we don’t need another thing to worry about.” He turns back over and drapes his arm over me, forcing me to lie back down. “Bad dream?”

I nod.

“Prescient?”

I hesitate. “We won’t know until it comes true. You?”

He chews on his bottom lip. I grin a little. Even on death’s doorstep, he’s adorable. “Yeah, but like you said, we won’t know it’s prescient until it comes true. What was yours about?”

I let out a small breath. “If I talk about it, I’ll lose all my nerve.”

For a second, I think he’s going to push back. Instead, he nods. “Me, too.”

“Try to get some more sleep?”

“Sure. Could be our last.”

Morbid. “Like always.”

Day 9

Mitch Winters’s Secluded Floor

ALL POWERFUL, Atlantic Ocean

The sun has started to rise when we dress and leave for Winters’s floor. No one disturbs us on the way. Not even any bodies disturb us—where have they gone? I suppose some of the survivors, however many there might be, could have gone through and cleared out all the bodies and druggies, but would anyone have cared to at this point? I try not to dwell on it; my imagination has been running too wild with my fever running so high.

With our floor just below Winters’s, it doesn’t take long for us to reach the entrance to the secluded floor. The air smells sterile…like in my dream. A chill runs down my spine, and I grab a hold of Jayden’s arm. He stops and flashes me a reassuring smile, but it wavers. The hairs raise on the back of my neck. Someone is watching us, but I don’t dare look for fear of alerting whoever—whatever—they are.

“Jayden,” I hiss and tighten my grip as he reaches for the door, “stop. My dream…”

“What about it?” He turns to me, but he doesn’t lower his arm.

“It involved this, this moment, this hallway. We need to get out of here.”

“What? But it was your idea—”

“I changed my mind. Trust me.”

Jayden’s hand twitches and then reaches for the handle of one of the double doors. I mentally curse at him and at myself for not telling him about my dream when I woke up last night. My heart flutters against my chest as I wait for the demons’ hands to reach forward and drag us into the darkness. Any minute now…any second…he has his hand on the handle and is opening the door almost painfully slowly. Maybe my dream was wrong. Then again, why is Winters’s normally secluded floor suddenly unlocked if—

“LEAVE!” Mom’s screeching voice echoes throughout the corridor.

I cringe and cover my ears. To my surprise, Jayden does as well. He can hear her?

Before I can ask, large, calloused, masculine hands cover my mouth and rip me away from Jayden. Whoever it is slams me to the floor and straddles me. Soon, the figure comes into focus, and I recognized him immediately: the burly man from the mixed-genre concert. My head turns back and forth as I frantically look for Jayden, and I soon find him pinned by one of burly man’s thugs a couple feet away. The burly man uses one of his large, meaty paws to turn my face back to him. His eyes are redder than before, his lips drier, and dried blood trails down from both corners of his lips.

“Little witch,” he growls. “Looks like you’re sick. Best to take care of you before you get everyone else sick.”

He wraps his hands around my throat and presses his thumbs into my windpipe as he squeezes. Tighter. Tighter. Tighter. I gasp for breath. One hand tries to pry his off my throat while the other digs my nails deep into his skin and claws at his face. Drops of his blood fall on my face. The burly man roars in pain, but his grip does not let up. I dig my nails deeper and swipe across his face again as I still try fruitlessly to pry his hands off of me.

Darkness and spots start to fill my vision. My grip weakens. He squeezes tighter, and my clawing hand drops to the floor. The darkness closes in around me. Perhaps it’s best this way. Just a few more moments of agonizing life, and then I can join Mom, Dad, and Aunt Luli in the sweet release of death…

The weight suddenly lifts off me. Air returns to my lungs in a sweetly painful surge. After my sight has returned to me, I see that the burly man has collapsed beside me. Maybe he’s dead, maybe he’s unconscious; either way, I don’t want to wait to find out. My heart leaps into my throat at a realization: Jayden is still wrestling with his own attacker a couple feet away, so I don’t know who saved me. Whoever it was, they’re probably still here, and in the midst of this madness, they might be our friends…or they might be toying with me…

My eyes search desperately for my rescuer. I want to help Jayden or at least assume some sort of position where I don’t look like such a sitting duck, but I’m frozen to the floor. Then I see him step out of nothing beside Jayden and the thug, the pale man with the scythe. His black, marble-like eyes land on me and momentarily flash bright blue. They return to black as he reaches for the thug atop Jayden and places his hand gently on the man’s shoulder. The thug convulses several times before collapsing beside Jayden. The pale man with the scythe looks to me, puts an elongated finger to his lips, as though to signal “shh," and then steps backward into nothingness again as Jayden shoots up.

“I…what—”

“Never mind.” I tremble like a newborn faun as I get to my feet. I squeeze my eyes tightly to fight off the tears and keep myself from passing out from the shock.

“Are you OK?”

Jayden swiftly closes the gap between us and presses his hand to my forehead. He’s so warm. Am I that warm? I try to clear my throat, but it turns into a coughing fit. When I open my eyes again, I have to force myself to not cry at the sight. Blood splattered all across my arm. I glance up at Jayden, wondering how he’s holding up so well, when I see the trickle of blood going down one side of his mouth.

“Jayden, be honest with me,” I tell him, doing my impression of Dad’s no-nonsense tone, “are we going to make it?”

He doesn’t meet my eye. Instead, he grabs my hand and starts pulling me away from Winters’s floor. “Forget Winters. He’s on his own. We need to get out of here.”

* * *

An eerie calm has settled on the upper deck since we last ventured out here. The fighting must have retreated to some other dark corridors of the ship, for even very few dead remain here. Jayden and I still cling tightly to each other’s hands as we hurry across the deck. Our footsteps echo on the hardwood; my breath catches with each thud. My chest aches, but I won’t take a break.

As we approach the nearest lifeboat, I spot five bodies sprawled along the side of the ship, three women and two men. They seemed to have had the same idea as us, but their bodies were so weakened by Red Lungs that they had to grip at the ship’s railing, leaving bloody handprints in their wake. Somewhere along the way, they just gave up and collapsed where they stood, dying sometime afterward. I take in a deep, shuttering breath, willing myself not to cry. I can’t keep crying like this, or I’ll give myself a horrific headache.

“I don’t see any devices or instructions out here,” Jayden remarks as he paces beside the lifeboat, searching.

“Try inside. I’ve read that some lifeboats have on board launching so that they can be launched with everyone inside in case of fires—”

I scream as a woman’s hand grabs my ankle. I look down as Jayden rushes to my side. It’s one of the three women who had tried to reach the lifeboat, her dull, half-living blue eyes staring up at me pleadingly.

“Please…” she manages to croak. She grabs further up my leg with her other hand. “Please…help…”

My heart flutters. I want to help, I really do. “We can’t. You won’t survive the trip.”

“No…please…” She reaches for a needle that I hadn’t seen lying beside her and holds it up to me. “Help.”

The blood drains from my face. “No, I can’t…we can’t—”

“Give it to me.”

I flinch at Jayden’s voice. It sounds so weary, so defeated, and yet determined. When I turn to him, there’s not that same wild, crazed look in his eyes as when he killed that man who attacked us. All I see is acceptance, the knowledge that he has a job to do. He walks around me to one of the dead men, removes the man’s belt, and walks back to the woman. He takes the needle from her and then glances up at me.

“Get in the lifeboat and figure out how to work it,” Jayden instructs. “I’ll be in soon.”

My eyes dart about the deck in search of danger. Nothing. “OK. Be quick.” I feel like a bitch for saying that, but I don’t trust how quiet it is.

Before he can respond, I climb into the lifeboat and frantically look for some sort of instructions. I find what appears to be some sort of control panel, and beneath that, printed directly on one of the panels, are instructions for lowering the lifeboat. With a sigh of relief, I dive into reading them, again and again and again, trying to analyze and memorize them before Jayden finishes. All too soon, I hear him clank down the ladder and plop into the lifeboat without saying a word. The tension wraps around my body, squeezes me like a boa constrictor, but I don’t dare try to ask him anything or even try to comfort him. We’ve pushed our luck enough already.

Praying that I have read the instructions correctly, I run through the steps of launching the lifeboat using the onboard system. The ropes lower us slowly. I anxiously watch the receding railing for any crazed passengers or crew. A foot above the water, we stop, and I initiate the release of the lifeboat. We land with a hard splash that causes me to stumble backwards into Jayden’s arms. Our eyes meet for a moment before I throw my arms around his neck.

“We did it,” I whisper. “We really did it."

Day 10

ALL POWERFUL Lifeboat

Atlantic Ocean

I lean against the edge of the lifeboat and stare where the All Powerful had been, although we stopped seeing it hours ago. I’m too weak to do anything else. The rocking of the ocean has made me dizzy and nauseated. Jayden and I haven’t said a word to each other since launching the lifeboat, and maybe it’s for the best. I don’t think I could open my mouth without vomiting right now. At the same time, being left alone with my thoughts has led me down some dark avenues. Those unfortunate souls still left on the ship, delusional and violent from the fever…at least, whoever’s left of them…Dad and Aunt Luli, trapped with so many others sick and suffering, tearing each other down in a desperate attempt to get free…what did they do with Dad’s and Aunt Luli’s bodies? What will happen when there’s no one left to dispose of the deceased?

For a split second, I think about Mom’s mask lying beside Jayden’s plague mask on the loveseat in our suite’s sitting room. I had thought about taking it with us, to remember her, to remember Dad—since Dad’s mask ended up wherever Dad’s body did—but when the time came to leave, I couldn’t get myself to touch it. It’s tainted now. Cursed. I won’t taint their memory by attaching them to something that has seen so much misery, disease, and bloodshed.

I imagine how, years from now, when the world has recovered from the pandemic and casual sea travel has begun once again—if the world ever does return to such a state of normality—another cruise ship will stumble upon ours and board it, finding the extravagant technology and decorations juxtaposed with the bottles, cans, needles, and corpses. They will find a beautiful blue, green, and gold bird mask and a plague mask in one of the suites. They’ll be repulsed by the plague mask, and it will fuel their morbid theories, but the colorful mask will call to them until they pick it up. The moment they touch it, they will hear a woman faintly sing, off-tune, “Beautiful Dreamer”. Thus will begin the legend of the ghost ship All Powerful and its crazed, reclusive owner Mitch Winters and the thousand tales of how he lured five hundred passengers on board just to kill them, the only clue to their fates being the blogs, vlogs, and videos people managed to create in their fever-, drug-, and alcohol-induced hazes, their ghosts doomed to wander the corridors, suites, and concert venues for all eternity—

“Ava!” Jayden grabs my shoulder. I weakly lift my head to see him pointing to the other side of the lifeboat. “Look!”

I push myself over to find a ship from the U.S. Coast Guard approaching us. For a moment, I let hope lift the weight from my chest. It’s over. It’s finally over. We can hitch a ride home, and even though we’ll be forced into quarantine until they can take us to Jayden’s colleague’s lab, anything will be better than the madness we’ve just survived. I’ll take ten years of the two of us in a padded cell with two meals a day served through a slot in the door if it means never seeing or thinking about the All Powerful again.

Then I see him on the bow of the ship: the pale man with the scythe. He stares directly at me with his midnight-black eyes. Suddenly, those marbles glow bright blue, and a tight-lipped smile crawls across his face.

The End