Chapter Ten

 

In the night, Ceely wakes with cold feet; Caesar has stolen the covers once again. She puts her cold feet on his, searching them out under the blanket, and he grumbles an objection, half asleep, even as he pulls her closer and nuzzles his nose into her hair. She almost lets the strong arm around her lull her back to sleep, but then something nags at her; maternal instinct. For a moment she is transported back in time, to when Josie was a colicky baby. But as she sits up, the present crashes in around her; she is on the ship, her daughters are dead. McKenzie is in the other room, and although she doesn’t want to care for the boy, there is something about seeing a child sleeping and safe that her body needs at the moment.

Only, when she leans out of the captain’s sleeping quarters, the cot under the window on the far wall of his office is empty. The rest of the room is dark and still. She checks the bathroom, the door is open and there’s no one inside. Her heart starts to pound faster in her chest, she hurries into the bedroom and shoves the sleeping man, then starts pulling on her shoes.

“Caesar, wake up! McKenzie is gone.”

He sits up, rubbing sleep from his eyes. His words come out slurred. “That’s impossible.”

She hurries to the door and tries it, but it seems to still be locked from the inside. She calls, “Hurry!”

Caesar comes, keys in hand, he tries them in the door and the handle turns, but the door itself does not move. He puts his shoulder to it and shoves. He speaks aloud what they both suddenly realize. “Something is wrong.”

“Yeah. Could he have disabled the lock somehow?”

“It’s not the lock, it’s the door. It’s like it’s blocked or jammed.” He puts his weight into hitting it once again. It goes nowhere.

“Is there another way out?”

“Smash the window and get a rope around the railing? Maybe you could fit through and climb up to the deck.”

She huffs. “Have you seen my hips?”

“Once or twice… Gonna have to be the ventilation system, then.”

“Let’s move the desk.”

They push the solid and massive desk to the far wall with a few shoves and determined grunts. He knocks everything off of it with a sweep of his arm, jumps up and gives her his hand. Up she goes and they stand close together on top of the desk, inspecting the metal, mesh mouth of the ventilation duct. A screw in each corner, rusted.

“Grab and pull.”

They lace their fingers inside the grate and pull. The metal bends outward, groans as they strain. One screw rattles, but Ceely and Caesar let go in the same instant, catching their breath.

“Again.”

Without having to discuss it, they focus on the weak corner. The thin metal stretches, Ceely winces as it digs into her fingers, but she pulls, and Caesar is so tense that veins stand out on his tattooed arms, they shake at the elbows. Sweat dots his face. It snaps off all at once, and she stumbles, would go over the edge of the desk and hit the ground if Caesar didn’t snag her wrist. The grate hangs by one corner, swings down.

“Up you go,” he says. He kneels and cups his hands.

She takes the boost, even as she’s shaking her head and muttering, “Here we go.”

It’s hard work pulling herself into the ventilation shaft. The metal is cold, slick on her coveralls, she has to shimmy to get her bottom-heavy back-half into the tight, square space. She can’t get on her hands and knees, has to just lay on her stomach and use her forearms to pull, her toes to push herself forward a few inches at a time, like a worm.

“Coming up,” Caesar calls, when she has moved out of the mouth.

The metal of each section dips under their weights and snaps back into place as they shimmy forward. It’s taxing work and getting warm in the cramped space. Sweat prickles on Ceely’s crown and starts to drip down her face; the AC is not on, for once.

She passes over the grate of the next room; that’s only Caesar’s bedroom. Jesus. She shimmies on, panting and sweating. She feels seventy years old -give or take- feels truly old for the first time. Has to stop and catch her breath when she reaches the intersection of the ducts and can turn left to find her way toward the hall. It’s tight around the corner.

It's a long drag to the midpoint of the wide, white hallway. It’s empty below as she peers through the grate. In the distance, she can see a bar welded across the door to Caesar’s office.

“I’m at a grate.”

“Keep moving, I’m coming.”

“Someone wants to keep us in.”

“What?”

Ceely has wiggled further up, keeping her toes at the edge of the grate. Looking over her shoulder at Caesar, who is army crawling toward her in the dark air shaft, she says, “A metal rod welded to the door.”

“You don’t think McKenzie could have done that, do you?”

“No. Welding is too tricky for an eight-year-old.”

“Alright, get your foot on there.” He takes a few deep breaths, while Ceely twists in the dark and gets the sole of her boot on the corner of the grate. Caesar pushes himself up, palms on the metal mesh and broad shoulders bending the metal top of the ventilation shaft upward. He doesn’t count, just orders, “Push.”

They push. He pushes as hard as he can, sweat dripping off the tip of his nose and falling through the grate, to the hallway floor. Ceely pushes at first, then bangs her heel down on the corner, trying to make something snap. It’s no use.

Caesar stops pushing and collapses into a heap, head spinning. “Shit. I pulled something.” He rubs his shoulder.

“Are you dizzy?”

“Yes, and my head is pounding. It’s hot, too.”

“This one isn’t budging, should we try another?”

“Unless we wanna die in here.”

“Try one of the rooms, or to the next grate in the hallway?”

He thinks for a moment. “The vent in our room slopes down, that’s probably for easy access, and condensation might drip onto the grate and corrode the screws over time. The one at the opposite end of the ship is probably the same. The library. We’ll try there.”

He shimmies backward, Ceely follows. The shafts don’t run length wise up the hallway. At the corner he backs down the shaft the way they came, then starts crawling up the entire length of the ship. Ceely lags behind, breathing heavily, worried that she may have a heart attack. She is dizzy, and resting doesn’t make the feeling go away. She feels like she can’t breathe; it’s the air. It has turned poisonous, smells of combustion, faintly burning fuel.

She starts to think she won’t make it. That it will all end in that fucking metal coffin, and none of it will have mattered. Her building the submarine, shooting the creature, getting transported here, through time. Meeting Caesar. Fighting him every step of the way. Her struggle to get back to her girls, their bodies in a chest freezer… It’s all pointless, it’s all random, there was no greater meaning to any of it, if she dies in a ventilation shaft, poisoned like a rat. She’s not sure she ever thought any of it had meaning, hasn’t thought about it. These are the kind of things that just don’t matter, anymore, once you’ve lost your children, but she still feels indignant, somehow.

“I can see light,” Caesar calls. “Keep moving.”

“I can’t.” Her arms have lost all strength, they’re limp noodles.

“You have to. Come on, we’re almost out.”

Black dots swarm over her vision. She presses her face to the cool metal underneath her.

“Hey. Ceely.” Caesar shimmies backward, he tries to turn in the small space but can’t. He cranes and folds himself as much as he can, reaches, and his fingers can only just touch hers. She is nearly unconscious, grumbles when she hears her name, but her fingers stretch out and her hand fits into his. He pulls, dragging her although it’s not easy, and she groans again as she slides up the metal ventilation shaft. He drags her into his lap. Pressed together, they hardly have an inch to move, but he manages to push them both toward the grate with his feet, then gets a hand through the grate and drags them the last stretch.

Both of their faces crowded at the end of the vent, he touches her cheek and gives her a little shake. “Hey, we made it. We’re almost out, but I need your help. Ceely!”

She doesn’t stir. She is still breathing, faintly.

He braces himself, gets both hands on the vent, which doesn’t slope downward the way that he thought it would. It just ends; he can see shelves of books and boardgames, tables and cozy armchairs all in faint glow of twilight coming from the window. He can see the door that would lead to salvation. He takes a few seconds to breathe. It does him no good, the air is tainted. He pushes, face contorting, muscles crying out, the thing bends but doesn’t give, nothing snaps. He realizes all at once that no human being could push their way out, he yanks and wrenches and finally bangs his fists into the metal at each corner, hoping just one screw will bust, breaking skin and maybe his knuckles, drawing blood that drips down onto the dusty metal.

A last-ditch effort, he shouts out of the vent. “Help! Anybody!”

He winces; his head throbs. The desperation sinks in, it’s all over. He pulls Ceely closer, squeezes her tight against him. He can’t save her, but he was never going to; at least they are together at the end. He gives her a kiss on the head and hopes she feels it somehow.

Eyes shut, he relaxes into his fate.

A scratching at his ear and his brain draws him up, out of the oblivion. His vision is blurry, but he blinks in the dark and looks out of the grate once again. And is startled to find a small, dark face looking back at him.

“McKenzie! What the hell is happening?”

He doesn’t answer, just keeps unscrewing the grate, it takes a very long minute, then the thing falls and clatters to the ground. Caesar scrambles out, then drags Ceely out after him, it’s tricky lowering her while standing on a chair and with a hurt shoulder is tricky, clumsy work but then they are on the ground, and he is shaking her again to rouse her.

The air is not so foul in the med bay, with the door open out to the hallway.

“Ceely, come on. Wake up.”

McKenzie appears with a tank of oxygen; not the kind stocked in the med bay, but the kind for scuba diving.

“Good job!” He straps the plastic mask to her face, and sees her breath fog it up a moment later. It eases his fear enough for him to look around, at the open door, and his mind starts to turn again. McKenzie didn’t do all of this. He came to save them, he knows what is happening. “Hey! Who did this?” When the boy stays silent, blinking and wide eyed, he prompts him, “Come on.”

“Perry.”

“Do you know where he is?”

McKenzie shakes his head.

“Okay. You stay with her.”

He sets her head down gently, then climbs to his feet and runs up the hall. Pounding on the door to Jacob’s room, he finds his key and flings it open. “Jacob!”

Inside the room, two figures jolt upright in the bed. Roshin is a dark blur, jumping to his feet and flinging himself against the wall in a defensive stance. Caesar takes in the sight, meets Jacob’s gaze as he is still trying to wake up, sitting on the bed. Throws him the keys.

“Get everyone awake and out of their rooms. Bring them up on deck. Ceely’s in the med bay with McKenzie, bring them too, and hurry!”

He runs up the hall, to the stairs, and takes them, going down. The AC hasn’t been on the whole while that they were crawling through the ducts, but the ship’s engines are on, and they shouldn’t be. He thinks he knows what Perry did, hooked up the ship’s exhaust to the ductwork. Carbon Monoxide could have killed all of them while they slept, if Ceely hadn’t woken up.

At the door to the lowest level, he slows down. Keeping his eyes peeled, his stance wide and his hands ready, he eases in. The cavernous room is dark. He doesn’t switch on the lights, taking a few seconds for his eyes to adjust.

The door to the engine room has been axed and kicked in, it hangs off of one hinge. Perry must have managed to get his hands on a replica of the captain’s master key, which could control almost all other locks on the ship, but not the engine room. The engines are too important; too expensive. It was Caesar’s worst fear that the engines might be tampered with, and that they would all be dead in the water. It would have been disastrous, emasculating. He changed that lock out with his own two hands, their first day at sea. Good thing; if Perry hadn’t lost precious minutes taking an axe to the thick metal of the door, they might all be dead, poisoned, right on schedule.

The engines are massive and unharmed. No figure moves in the dark, there is no whisper of breath, Caesar can feel no eyes on him. Perry has come and gone. The only change to the engine room is that the exhaust has been rerouted up into the ductwork, as Caesar had expected. It’s a sloppy job, the exhaust hose is ripped from the outlet on the wall, not carefully disconnected, the bolts are still in place, but mangled. It is duct taped to mouth of the ventilation system, while the outlet is left uncovered, a gaping hole looking out at the dark waters and grey sky of the twilight, lightening out to the east.

Caesar rips down the hose, drags it to the outlet, and wedged the edges back inside of the remaining pieces. It’s not a good seal, but it’s much better than it was. He can ask Ceely to repair it, later, if she is recovered.

He heads out of the engine room, up the first set of stairs. Men are standing in the doorways of their sleeping quarters, some pulling on clothes as they step out into the hall. Jacob and Roshin have woken them all, and probably gone to collect Ceely.

Caesar looks down the hall, but he can’t linger; he thinks he knows where to find Perry. The murderous rat. Taking the stairs up in a few long steps, he rushes past crewmen who are still confused as to what is happening, and up the stairs, heading for the deck.

Dark fury is taking hold of him. His fists are clenched, hungry.