Shot the monster.

Fed the hens.

Fed myself.

Slept a bit.

What to do now, then?

I sat in the tiny cabin I’d been assigned as a passenger, legs folded underneath myself on the floor as I organized my personal belongings in front of me. I’d already done this twice before over the near-week I’d been alone. I knew exactly what belonged to me. I had done the same with Mr. and Mrs. Statler’s things, bringing them back to my own cabin for simplicity’s sake. Mr. and Mrs. Statler … the couple had been the only other passengers on this journey with me. It was nice to have a little company, especially in Mrs. Statler, who had been the sole woman besides myself. I tried not to think too much about her now, lest I call to mind the images of her eyes spinning in their sockets and her teeth gnashing as her throat was ripped out of her still-living body.

Dammit, I’d done it again.

I took a deep breath and sat back on my heels. This was a bitch of a thing to do sober. It was time to consider an alternative.

The liquor cabinet.

Was there a different word for it when it was on a ship? Probably. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I just knew there was alcohol behind that door.

I stood in front of the door now, looking at the padlock that was looped through iron fastenings, keeping the liquor locked tight out of my reach. It was similar to the lock in the brig, but that one’s key had been kept nearby, easy to access in an emergency. This one had not been stored nearly as conveniently for my sake. I had reasoned, to my own dismay, that it must have been on the captain’s key ring—which, unfortunately, had been on the captain himself when the man had gone overboard. I had already tried without much luck to pry the lock open, tried to wrestle it off with what little strength I could muster. That had not worked. But I was not one to give up so easily—if I were, then I would not be around at this point at all.

So I considered the lock. And then, I considered what it was attached to. The iron fastenings were screwed into the wood of the cabinet. Maybe I could bypass the lock completely with the right tools. And so, I set about finding those tools immediately.

I knew there had to be some assortment of tools stored on board, but while I was sure of that fact, I had not found them. Perhaps I never would. I knew where only a few things were on the ship—most of my time was spent in the kitchen (galley, I suppose) or in the different personal quarters around the ship. I had only touched the wheel to secure it, and hadn’t dared to lay a finger on the sails. Mostly I only bothered with what I needed to survive.

It didn’t take me long to give up on looking for some kind of specific tool. I decided to try something else. There was a flat notch in the head of the screw, and I thought to myself that the stiff, sturdy butcher’s knife in the galley might suit my needs. I took that, and lined the blade up with the notch in the screw. It gave me good leverage at least.

At some point, I swear it did occur to me what a bad idea this all was.

I opted, however, to ignore the little voice telling me so, too tempted by the promise of the spirits and the relief they could supply. I was able, with care, to unscrew one of the four screws I’d need to get the door open. In the glow of this success, I did not take nearly as much care with the second.

It only took one good crank to send the knife spinning, digging the blade deep into the palm of my right hand.

“SHIT!” I shrieked as the knife clattered to the floor. I stumbled backward and into the big wooden table behind me. Leaning against the table heavily, I clutched my hand to my chest as I stared at the blood that had begun to speckle the floor. That was not good.

When I had recovered enough to look at the wound, I saw that it was very deep, and the blood flowed freely from it. I grit my teeth and forced myself to move. As with any woodworking tools I had not found any medical supplies. This ship had not had a doctor—though the cook had told me he’d been a surgeon in some war at some point. Good for him, but a fat lot of good it did for me. I would have to figure this one out on my own.

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I made my way back to my cabin in a daze, trailing blood down the hall. All I knew about wounds was that you had to keep pressure on them to stop the bleeding, so I did my best. I kept my hand pressed to my chest while I knelt on one of Mr. Statler’s shirts, ripping a strip from it with my free hand. I wrapped the strip around my palm and tied it as tightly as I could manage, but by the time I had finished my blood had already soaked through.

“Didn’t Mrs. Statler have a sewing kit?” I muttered to myself. I hadn’t seen one in her luggage, but she seemed the type to carry one. I turned to her bag, and dug through it with the urgency of a dog in a rose garden. Nothing. Perhaps the captain would have something in his quarters? I doubted any of the crew would have kept anything.

I staggered my way up to the top deck but before my head could even fully clear the hatch, my stomach dropped. There were stars overhead, and though the sky still bore the dim tones of twilight, I knew I had run out of time.

My injured hand went almost forgotten as a spike of nerves shot through me, along with the thought of that … thing … being able to move freely, potentially escaping, overpowering me—I as much as ran back to my cabin to fetch the musket.

His back was to me when I entered the part of the hold that housed the brig. When he looked over his shoulder at my approach, I could see his eyes widen, and his nose twitch. Quickly, he turned away.

“What happened?” he asked without facing me. He sounded as though he was holding back tears, or vomit.

“I slipped,” I replied through clenched teeth as I tried to re-wrap my makeshift bandages. The blood had slicked them too much. I was bleeding too much. I couldn’t make a fist. My finger wouldn’t wrap around the trigger.

“There’s a medical kit in the galley,” said the creature.

It was the most we had ever spoken to each other. I didn’t like it one bit, but it did give me pause. “I looked there already,” I snapped.

“There’s a crate under the portside counter. Should be some needles, thread, something you can stitch yourself up with,” he went on as though my tone hadn’t been hostile in the slightest. His sentences were short, and when he finished speaking he gagged. “Please go,” he added, with the same whimpering quality in his voice that he had when begging for his very life.

I realized what that had to mean. He was starving and I was standing here gushing the only thing he craved, mere feet away from him. It had to be everything he could do not to lunge at me right this second, I thought, realizing with horror the position I had put myself in—put us both in.

I backed away slowly at first, then broke into a run. Upon reaching the galley I paused to take a breath, just for a moment. He had held himself back. He had tried to help me. I hadn’t thought …

I hadn’t thought he was still him enough to do that.

There was a twinge of guilt for what that would mean shooting him over and over, if he was capable of true self-control, true empathy.

No, no.

I had more important things to do than feel guilty.

“Which side is fucking portside?” I grumbled, and made quick work of finding out the answer.

In no time at all, I had found the crate in question, and uncovered the wickedly curved needle and uncomfortably thick thread that would be my saving grace. Among the stuff you would expect—clean bandages, the like—I was overjoyed to find a flask. One sniff at its contents told me this stuff likely wasn’t meant for drinking. Nonetheless, I couldn’t bring myself to pour a drop into the gash on my hand without at least a swig for courage first.

So a swig it was. The small act sent my head spinning for a moment, and I coughed, feeling my stomach turn. But it worked as intended, and then it worked again as I poured a healthy amount of the remainder onto my palm.

The pain was searing. I couldn’t hold a cry back from my lips, and it took me a moment to find my breath again.

“You can do this,” I told myself, “Come on, Carmen. Don’t give up now.”

And I dug the needle into the sensitive flesh.

Every stitch was excruciating but I did it. I don’t know how. I was in a haze, mechanically making each movement the same as the last. If anything the details only came to me with a delay—I did not notice how my skin tugged with the pull of the needle until I had pierced myself again for a different stitch. I did not think of the way my flesh moved as I forced it back together until it was mostly secured in place. When I had tied the sutures off, I almost collapsed with relief.

“Bandage it first,” I muttered aloud.

So I bandaged the wound.

“Go shoot that bastard, and then you can rest.”

The word bastard tasted wrong in my mouth. But I repeated it, to try and steel my nerves once more.

“Go shoot that bastard!”

I could hear him moaning before I even reached the brig. He was nearly doubled over, and as I neared him, the moan crescendoed into a full wail of pain, almost a scream. I had never heard such a sound, not from human nor animal.

“Shoot me!” he shrieked. “Fuck, quickly, shoot me, I can smell you—your blood, your blood, god, it tortures me. I can smell it, I can almost taste it in the air and I can’t take it.”

The desperation broke his voice. It cracked, raw and rough from the screaming. Any guilt I felt was replaced by a new surge of fear, almost paralyzing. The reflex of taking the shot I’d taken half-a-dozen times before was all that saved me, and in my terror-filled haze I almost didn’t feel the pain rip through my still-tender palm as I squeezed the trigger and his screams fell abruptly silent once more.