Past and Present
Chapter 14:
Michael Loarn was jolted out of his stupor of reading by a large wave shoving the ship upwards quite suddenly. He suddenly realized he had been drifting in and out of sleep while reading, and some of the details had been quite wrong (
)
“Well well,” came Jack’s voice from behind him. “Look who’s back in the land of the living.”
“What are you talking about?” Michael asked slowly, feeling groggy and unaware.
“Well you’ve been staring at that damned book for hours. If the ship hadn’t jolted you out of it, you’d still be staring at it.”
“Well, it’s quite interesting to me,” came Michael’s sarcastic reply. He started to open the book back up.
“No you don’t!” Jack grabbed his arm and spun Michael around to face him. “I need to talk to you!”
“About what?”
“Well, you’ve been too busy to notice, but there’s something very strange going on with the crew. They seem very nervous around the passengers.”
“What exactly do you think is going on?”
“I don’t know yet, but we’re coming to another port in Southern Ireland, before the final bit of the journey, and I suggest we get off the ship then.”
“No,” Michael said sternly. “We’ve wasted enough time already. I want to get to the continent, and I’m not waiting to find another ship we can travel on anonymously.”
“You don’t understand I saw-” Jack’s voice was cut off by the sound of an explosion going of somewhere on deck.
“Sh*t! Come on!” Shouted Jack, grabbing Michael out the door. Michael wriggled out of his grasp and dashed back in the room. “What the f*ck are you doing?” Jack screamed. Michael emerged a second later holding the large decrepit book.
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They dashed up the stairs onto the deck. A horrific scene met their eyes. The explosion had been a small one, but had gone off in the middle of a densely packed group of people. The devastation of life around them was impossible to take in all at once. To Michael, it seemed a horrific picture like something out of Bosch or Goya.
Taken individually each scene of awfulness was hard to take in. A man clutching his head, half his face normal, the other half a bloody, indistinguishable mess. A woman screaming and cradling the lifeless body of a child. A young boy clutching his groin and shrieking, while his parents tried to comfort him. An old man knocked on his back, desperately trying to shove a tangled mess of stringy organs back inside himself. A-
Michael tore his eyes away from the carnage. He didn’t know where to look, everyplace was filled with terrible images. Then the door to the bridge opened, and out came the crew, this time with assault rifles in their hands, and balaclavas on their heads.
Their leader came over to a group of those unaffected by the explosion that had gathered near Michael. The figure took off the balaclava and revealed the face of a woman. She had striking blue eyes that would have been breathtakingly beautiful in any other circumstance, but now served only to intimidate and terrorize the soul.
“That was a taste of what happens if you resist us,” she said in a Orleans accent. “You need to accept that the UFR now controls this ship, and its passengers.
With that she strode back into the bridge amid the cries of the wounded.
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duh, duh, DUH! And with that, I leave you till next time.
