De Voort rolled over to face downward on the deck.
Spooky wiped the blood off the blade then slid it back into his hidden sheath on his forearm; he carefully calibrated the force, as if breaking a board in the dojo, then drove a fist into the nerve plexus at the base of the man’s skull. De Voort went limp.
Just in time. A cry from down the passageway drew his eyes to a young woman, a crew member by her uniform, hurrying in their direction.
“He fell and hit his head,” Spooky said loudly. “He is injured. Run to call for a doctor, please.”
The woman nodded, breathless, dashing off for the nearest intercom handset.
Spooky made a quick inspection of the man’s arm where the knife had mingled both of the men’s blood. The slash was already healing, closing. The Plague had taken. De Voort’s body fat would keep him alive and recovering until medical help arrived, so looking around one last time to make sure he was not observed, Nguyen smashed a fist once more into the base of the man’s skull. He told himself that the result would be sufficient, that the man would be unconscious for long enough.
Leaping to his feet, he followed the trail of blood back to where the two men had met, then inspected his handiwork. The bottle was half empty. He debated with himself whether it would be better to leave the thing there and get every possible drop into the system, or take it down to remove all trace of it.
Finally he decided he had to take it down. They could not afford to risk a cautious captain or crew shutting down the main water system for fear of contamination, prohibiting showers and making everyone drink bottled water until the ship got into port.
He had to hope it would be enough.
***
The restaurants and buffets on the ship were humming that night, filled to capacity with cheerful, unusually energetic people. Every public space was busy and buzzing with conversation. Senior citizens with spry steps took moonlight walks on deck or visited the ballroom to dance to big band swing. Weary staff members found their twelve-hour shifts were not so odious and tiring after all. Pinch-faced losers at the casino smiled as their chips flowed away from them across the tables, shrugging and philosophical. The young and not-so-young partied long into the night, drinking less, talking more, retiring to their rooms by twos.
By morning, there were miracles.
Moshe Capernaum, eighty-nine years of age, blind, diabetic and wheelchair-bound, woke up that morning and walked the four steps to the cramped bathroom of his tiny lower-deck cabin, half-asleep.
“Moshe! What are you doing? Will you kill yourself? Sit back down before you fall.”
Moshe blinked clear brown eyes at his wife Miryam as she fussed him back to sit on the narrow bed. “You are so beautiful, my dear. I love you more now than the day of our wedding.”
“There is no fool like an old, fool,” Miryam said affectionately, holding his hand in her lap. “If only you could see me, you will see how foolish you have become.”
“But I can see you my dear. I can see you clear as the daylight coming in that porthole.” He reached out to touch her cheek. “I was blind, but now I see.”
She marveled, holding his ancient face in wizened hands, suddenly grown strong.
One deck above, Sergeant Jill “Reaper” Repeth, US Marine Corps, started the day as she always did, with a protein shake and one hundred pull-ups on a tension bar she had brought aboard and set up in the doorway of her room’s balcony. Facing out to sea looking over the railing, her head and shoulders rose and fell, eyes on the horizon. Her lungs expanded, pumping the fresh sea air in and out. It is great to be alive, she told herself. She believed it more today than on some other days.
Every day above ground is a good day. Every day I am not being shot at is a good day.
Repeth was one of the One Percent. It was something most Marines didn’t know about, because most Marines weren’t female. Only a small fraction of the Corps was women, because unlike the other services, the Marines didn’t bend its physical standards much to admit them. Measure up or leave.
But the One Percent was a sort of secret club of female Marines that could, would and did beat the men at their own game – that could outperform most of them. Marathonners, triathletes, gymnasts, distance swimmers, biathletes. Thus One Percent, because perhaps one in a hundred Marine women could do it – could perform at this Olympic level of physical fitness.
The cruise line had given her a private room on a middle-high deck, something she would have struggled to afford if she hadn’t been selected through their “Wounded Warrior” promotion that provided free cruises to the nation’s servicemembers. She was glad of it as she finished the hundred, hardly more winded at the end than at the start. She took that as a good sign, knocking out another fifty before stopping.
That was more than she’d ever done before at a stretch. It was true she had an advantage over the average Marine, male or female; she was at least twenty pounds lighter than normal. Missing everything below both knees put less strain on the cardiovascular system; absent lower legs didn’t need blood and oxygen.
Stay positive, stay focused. Ever since the mortar shell that took her feet, that’s what she told herself.
Dropping gently to the floor onto her buttocks, she maneuvered with wiry-muscled arms and leg stumps over to her prostheses. Sitting on the floor she strapped them on, fiddling and adjusting for a longer span than normal. Finally she got them to some semblance of stability, and wobbled to her artificial feet.
Repeth stared down at the legs and the metal-and-plastic structures. They didn’t feel right. Her good mood evaporated. Some days the damn things just didn’t sit well on her, and it looked like this would be one of these days. She wasn’t even going to turn on the microprocessor control and servos that helped her walk and run with a semblance of normalcy. She still hoped she could work up to running a marathon again. Maybe with those bladerunner things.
Sitting down on the bed and taking the prostheses off, she rubbed at the end of the stumps. They always itched a bit, but today they positively screamed to be scratched. She did so, vigorously, and then looked more closely at them. If she didn’t know better, she would swear that the stumps had lengthened slightly.
Maybe they were just swollen.
Repeth shrugged to herself. Rather than fight with the artificial legs, she phoned for a wheelchair pick-up. She’d come back after breakfast and fiddle with the things. She was starving.
Three decks above, in the crowded, well-lit breakfast cafeteria, nine-year-old Gennie Washington scooped spoonful after spoonful of yogurt into her mouth, finishing the bowl in record time. “More, please,” she requested.
Her father Rufous gently patted the colorful knit Rasta hat that covered her bald head. “Anything else?”
“Milk! And orange juice. And bacon.”
“Coming right up, punkin.” Ever since her mother died, he couldn’t refuse her anything, not that he wanted to. The chemo had been hard on her, and getting her to eat so well was a minor miracle. The cruise seemed to be good for her, to lift her spirits, and the oncologists all said that kids made good cancer patients, because they had the best attitudes. Attitude was everything, as his football coaches had all drummed into him so long ago.
He put a tray full of food down in front of his daughter and joyfully watched her eat. It was going to be a good day.
***
“Time to get off the boat,” Larry said to Spooky as they heard the disembarkation announcement for Cancun over the public address system. “Between this guy,” he hooked a thumb at the closet where the taped and frightened staffer had spent an uncomfortable night, “and the commander you knocked out, they’ll be onto us soon.”