Happy Friday feline fanatics!
Time for another chapter of my b-movie creature feature madness that is Lava Cat Cruise Ship! If you missed the latest chapter, find it here. And if you are new to LCC and want to start at the beginning, you can find the first chapter here!
And hey, of you feel like binging the whole thing on your Friday night, consider becoming a paid subscriber to access the full ebook - and the ebook for the companion novel, Zombie Shark Highway! Hey, two books - pretty great.
ANYWAYS, let’s get to the mayhem, meowing and LAVA!
TWELVE
Eidon winced, holding his leg where the giant cat had clawed him.
"You're hurt," said Celia, her blue-painted lips pursed in a frown.
"I'm fine."
Franklin gasped, gaping down at Eidon's wound. "It doesn't look fine!"
Eidon closed his eyes. He didn't want to see it. The pain of it was bad enough, and touching it was worse -- slick, warm wet beneath his palm.
"Look at all the blood," Franklin whispered.
A wave of sick washed over Eidon, and he breathed deep, the sulfur air burning his nose and lungs.
"I don't know if you think you're being brave," Celia said, resting an impatient hand on her hip, "or if you're just stupid, but that leg is going to keep bleeding if you don't wrap it up. And since these monsters seem to have an appetite for what's in our veins, I for one don't want to be near you when they get a whiff of this. So do both me and Franklin a favor and wrap it up."
"How do you want me to do that?" Eidon snapped. "You want me to use my shirt?"
Celia said nothing, folding her arms across her chest.
Eidon sighed, breathing shakily through the pain. As much as he hated Celia's tone, he couldn't deny that she was right. He had to wrap the wound.
He forced himself to his feet and limped toward the door that lead into the control room. "There should be a first aid kit inside."
"It’s locked," said Celia, but Eidon tried the handle anyway. She was right. The knob wouldn’t budge. Locked.
Eidon cupped his hand over his eye and squinted through the window -- the glass was grimy, covered in a brown grunge, and the light inside was too dim to see by.
"How are we supposed to get inside?" Franklin asked.
Before Eidon could decide on an answer, Celia appeared beside him, pulling a safety pin from her hair. Dark curly tendrils fell over her shoulder as she jabbed the little pin into the lock. After a couple twists, a click sounded, the knob turned, and Celia pushed the door open.
A smell wafted out from the murk -- old blood.
Cautiously, Eidon stepped inside, Celia behind him. The last time he'd been in the control room, he'd been nearly blinded by its fluorescent lights and gleaming white surfaces. Now, the lights were out, the surfaces splattered with the same grunge that covered the windows. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the dark, and when the shadowed objects began to take shape, Eidon stumbled back, tripping over his own feet and landing on his elbows.
The control room was littered with the mangled, torn limbs of the crew, bullet holes spider webbed by cracks in the glass of the windows. And claw marks, they trailed through the pools of brown sludge on the ground, a sludge that Eidon now realized with his eyes adjusted, was the blood of the crew.
The creature had been here. No, several of them. The entire bridge read like a forensic report of the massacre that happened when the sabres found their way inside.
"It's like they knew," Eidon rasped. "Like they knew attacking the bridge would cripple the ship."
Celia stood behind him, her blue lips pale and sea glass eyes wide with fear. "How would they know that?"
Eidon couldn’t say. Whatever the answer, it was clear the grinning smilodons were a lot smarter than anyone could have guessed. And that meant, the danger was far greater than they could anticipate.
Eidon pushed himself off the ground and approached the controls, a couple dark screens above them. He pushed a couple buttons, not at all sure what he was doing, but it was enough to light the screens up -- four separate camera views, a shot of the main elevators, the atrium, the cloud deck and one of the restaurants. Sleuthing its way through the shadows of the atrium, they could see one of the creatures.
The screen flickered and another set of camera views displayed -- hallways to passenger cabins. Two more creatures stalked one of the corridors, another two eating together at the carnage of what used to be a waiter.
"Five," Eidon said, counting the number of great cats.
"Just like Melvin Bruce said," whispered Franklin.
Five. Not a thousand. Or a hundred. Only five. And that was enough to unmake everything. Eidon could only hope the good captain was figuring out how to save them all.
Celia turned from the monitors, and Eidon became aware of her drifting away from them. He watched her go -- he didn’t like her being too far from them, not after everything they'd seen tonight.
She approached another panel of buttons and screens, pointing at a blinking red light.
"What is that?" she asked.
Eidon joined Celia by the red light -- a switch. He flicked it and one of the monitors lit up with a message. A warning from what Eidon could glean.
"What is this?" asked Celia, her voice demanding. "What does this mean?"
It was difficult for Eidon to make sense of -- numbers and charts and graphs and maps.
"I think its saying we're off course." Though he couldn’t be sure. He'd spent most of his life around ships, but the technical jargon that filled the screen needed an engineering degree or PhD. "We're drifting out to sea."
"We're already at sea," said Franklin, not understanding.
"Yeah but the ship's always on a course. We're never that far from the coastline."
Celia placed her hand on Eidon's arm, her cold palm damp with sweat. "Can you fix it?"
He tapped the monitor, doing his best to make sense of the ship's readings. Finally, he got to the heart of the problem, and it set his blood cold. "We're running out of fuel."
He looked to Celia who took a moment to process the information. No fuel meant the ship would die. They'd be stranded.
"Ok," said Celia, doing an unconvincing job of staying calm. "So we need to get the ship back on course. How do we do that?"
"How the hell should I know?"
"You're the captain's kid," she snapped.
"Yeah, exactly," agreed Eidon. "I'm not the damn captain. We need to find my dad."
"Eidon?" Franklin stood over by a big white chair, the chair Eidon had seen his father in a million times -- the captain's chair. In Franklin's hands he held a hat, bloodied and torn, but there was no denying who's hat it was. His father's.
Eidon's stomach twitched in his gut and bile rose in his throat as his feet carried him over to Franklin, taking the tattered hat as carefully as he could.
The good captain.
His father.
Gone.
Tears pricked at Eidon's eyes, and he thought of their fight that morning. Thought of how awful Eidon had been. Why had he been so terrible to his father then? For what?
"Okay," said Celia, slowly, accepting this new reality much easier than Eidon. "We have no captain. We need to send out a distress call. A uh, mayday."
"You know how to do that?" asked Franklin.
"No," she answered, frantically pushing buttons. Apparently she wasn’t about to let that stop her.
Eidon stared at the mangled remains of his father's hat, unable to believe that the good captain wasn’t about to barge onto the bridge, and ask Eidon what exactly he had done to his hat. But the truth of the situation was in the bloodstains in the fabric, in the spatters and discarded limbs that covered the bridge. His father wasn’t coming to help them.
And if Eidon didn't help himself, he'd end up with the same fate.
He placed the hat on the captain's chair as delicately as he could, and wiped the tears from his eyes. His father would be the first person to tell him to get a hold of himself. Work the problem.
And Eidon wouldn't let the old man down.
He hurried over to the controls, typing as fast as he could.
"What are you doing?" asked Celia.
"Sending a distress signal," he told her. It didn't take long to get a response. "There's a ship, another cruise liner!" Hope surged in his heart and Celia smiled, relief flooding them both. "The Alaskan Princess is six hours away. We just have to survive for six hours."
Celia's smile faded as quickly as Eidon's hope. Six hours was a long time.
And then Franklin screamed.
Eidon turned to see the kid sprint away from the main door to the bridge, the snarling, blood-stained face of a smilodon breathing on the glass. Another beast appeared beside it, the two of them ramming the door with their skulls.
Trapped again.
With six hours to go.
Thanks so much for reading Lava Cat Cruise Ship! Tune in again next Friday for Chapter 13. OR you can consider becoming a paid subscriber and download the ebook!