Charlie walks out of the bunks in the early evening. Her joints feel tight and sore, it hurts to turn her neck. She tries to stretch but her stomach lurches when she bends over, and that ends the attempt at ridding herself of the stiffness. There’s a slickness to the floor. The damp air has gotten worse, thicker, and it wicks onto the cold metal of the ship. Everything feels wet and chilled.
In the hall, her eyes track movement beyond the door to the mess. The trickle of light from the room doesn’t give her a chance to see it clearly, but it’s gone by the time she approaches the doorway anyway. Trying to ignore it, whatever it is, she takes one final glance down the dark passageway, then enters the mess hall.
There are more inside than she’s used to seeing these days. Most of them are sailors, Max being the only researcher other than herself present. There are probably a dozen people gathered, but there’s no conversation. The silence is deafening. More than that, there’s tension in the quiet. Charlie feels uneasy the moment she steps inside.
Max sits in the corner, a scowl on his face and Charlie decides he’d not make the best company, so she chooses to find a seat near Lewis instead. He seems wary, his eyes scanning the room as she sits beside him. It’s when she leans over to try and see what exactly he’s looking at or for that he notices her presence. With an uncomfortable sigh, his concentration breaks and he slumps back in his chair. Lewis looks a lot smaller than he did when they boarded days ago. He’d seemed larger than life, his personality bolstering his already impressive physical presence. Now, a lot of his muscle mass is gone, his dark skin has gotten pale and baggy, his beard has thinned out, and his eyes have dimmed.
“What’s going on?” Charlie asks.
Lewis nods slowly. “Something.”
Charlie squints in the dull lighting, trying to get a better look around.
“Don’t know what,” Lewis continues, “but something’s up. Don’t like it.”
“It does feel...strained.”
Lewis looks down at Charlie. He thinks for a moment before responding. “Mmm. Not scared though, right? This ain’t--well it ain’t from seeing shadows in the dark.” He felt a strong enough rapport with Charlie to bring up that which he was still uncomfortable mentioning, the things they’d all been seeing.
“You think it’s unrelated?”
“Do you think it is?”
Charlie thinks for a moment. She had just seen something in the hall, but it wasn’t the cause of the immense pressure she was feeling now. It was almost--
“This is too normal.” Lewis interrupts her thoughts. “People pick up on agitation in the air and internalize it. I can see it in you right now, and a bunch of others in here. But the source…” He shakes his head. “Whatever’s out there is beyond me, that monster, but I got a sense for people, and this, right now, this is people. Just need to find which ones.”
His eyes pass over the room again and again. In the dim light, he searches the faces of each person in the room one at a time until he finds what he’s looking for. Three sailors sit at the opposite end of the room, huddled close together.
Lewis grimaces. “I might not be able to do nothing about Julia and the funhouse she’s turned this place into, but I know how to break the tension in this room right here.”
“How?” Charlie asks.
Lewis says nothing. He stands up and walks to the other side of the room. Glaring at the three men he’s targeted, he walks to their table and bends over. Wrapping his arms around them from behind, he looks down from above and their heads turn up to meet his eyes.
“Boys,” Lewis says, “you know, a captain’s got a good sense for what’s going on in his ship. I know when she’s got mechanical problems, I know when she’s off course, and I know a hell of a lot about the people running her. Now, you three are giving me a downright nasty feeling right now. Tell me honestly, besides the headache, hair falling out, you know, all the shit we’ve got going on, are you doing alright? Got something heavy on your minds?”
Lewis exhales slowly, his eyes switching between each of the men he’s got in his arms. His mouth is curled in a smile, but it’s anything but friendly. The man on Lewis’s left swallows, a bead of sweat dripping down his cheek.
And the tension breaks. The first man, on Lewis’s right side, leaps up, a serrated knife in his hand. He lunges at Lewis, pushing him back against the wall behind him and holding the knife to his throat. At the same moment, the man on the left gets up as well. He pulls a revolver from his waistband, Lewis recognizes that it’s his, one that he keeps locked in his quarters on the upper deck. The sailor turns the gun on the room, waving it around the mess hall.
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People are already getting up, voices raised, but the gun keeps them from acting. Charlie stays planted in her seat, overwhelmed and unsure.
“Nobody move,” the man with the gun says, “I know he’s our captain, and that a lot of you might be thinking now’s the time to jump in and protect him, but goddamnit I will not hesitate to blow your brains out if you try anything.”
The third of the trio gets out of his seat, unarmed, and turns to face Lewis. “Captain.” He nods.
Lewis smirks. “Mutinous bastards.”
“Ain’t personal, we just recently had our eyes opened to the fact that maybe your leadership ain’t been doing us no good.”
He turns to the room, looking around while his partner continues waving the gun at anyone and everything he thinks might be moving. Taking the role of the mutiny’s leader, he addresses the dozen or so people around them.
“If you’ve got half a brain, you’ll agree with me. Just take a moment to think about it. We’d all appreciate a bit more honesty in this situation, wouldn’t you say?”
There’s a mumble in the crowd, but it's shapeless, without answer.
“How about it captain?” He turns back to Lewis. “How long were you planning on keeping up this charade of pretending what we’re all seeing ain’t nothing to worry about? The shadows on the walls, things moving out of the corner of your eye. We’ve all seen them, and all your silence is doing is making all us seem crazy. Are we all crazy, captain? Or is it just you?”
Lewis opens his mouth to respond, but he’s interrupted before he can.
“Or how about the food?”
There’s a mumble of confusion in the room now, questioning looks, and eyes wandering behind the mess hall’s counter.
“When were you gonna tell us that we’re a few days out from starving?”
The murmurs grow louder, more excited.
The mutineer nods to the room. “It’s true.”
“Are you done?” Lewis’s voice calls all attention back to him. “You’re right, on both counts. It’s true, but if me keeping secrets is enough a reason for you to pull this stunt, then you obviously ain’t the veteran sailors I thought you were when I brought you on.”
Lewis seems to inflate as he speaks. His voice is booming, swelling with every word as he seems to grow in size, regaining his lost strength.
“No captain of yours has ever told you everything there was to know. A captain keeps secrets because there are some things that don’t do you no good to know. Yeah, I seen the shadows, but maybe if there’s a voice aboard saying they ain’t nothing to worry about then we don’t go nuts trying to figure out what the hell they are. And yeah, food’s running short, but the fuck are you do knowing that other than freak people out?”
The man holding the knife to Lewis’s throat trembles as the captain he threatens glares straight into his eyes with a power that makes him forget he was ever afraid of the unseen creature lurking outside.
“I do what I do to keep everybody on this boat safe and sane. Clearly, I ain’t done a good enough job of that though, and now I gotta straighten things out a bit.”
A questioning look passes across the face of the group’s apparent leader. Then Lewis roars, loud and powerful enough to rival Julia’s own bellowing. With his right hand, he grips the wrist of the man with the knife and twists it. There’s a disgusting cracking sound as the bone inside splinters. The knife drops free and Lewis grabs it with his left hand, kicking the broken wristed sailor to the floor just as the man with the gun swings around to point it at Lewis. But Lewis sweeps his right arm around and throws the sailor’s aim high and wide. The gun fires, deafening everyone in the room, but the bullet bounces harmlessly off the ceiling. Bringing the knife in underneath the arm of the shooter, Lewis thrusts it through his armpit and up and out of his shoulder. The assailant wails in agony, though he cannot hear his own screams over the ringing in his ears. The pistol falls from his hand and clatters onto the floor. Lewis ignores it and --leaving the knife behind--barrels straight into the unarmed leader of the mutiny. He knocks him flat on his back against the table, and before he can even try to fight back, Lewis brings his fist down onto his face, knocking him unconscious with a single blow.
Lewis grunts, his chest rises and falls with heavy breaths. He stands back to his feet, wiping blood from his knuckles onto his shirt. He looks around the room and picks up the gun. The key to its safe should be on his belt, looped into a big key ring he carries on his person at all times. He can’t tell at a glance, but he’s sure that it must be missing. Stuffing the gun into his waistband, sound starts to return to the ears of everyone who was left deaf by the gunshot.
With the ringing subsiding, Lewis hears no voices. Everyone stands motionless. The two attackers who are conscious are the only ones making any noise, and that’s mostly just pained moaning.
“Anybody else think they can run this ship better than me?” Lewis asks, his voice still booming.
Nobody answers. Some people look terrified, others smile and nod in support of their captain’s actions, others still seem almost blasé, like such an event couldn’t even phase them anymore. One person, however, bears a different face. Max stands in the corner, about as far as one can get without leaving the room. His face looks indignant. Lewis recalls that one of the first things the mutineers had said was that they “had their eyes opened.” He couldn’t prove it, Max would certainly never admit to it, but Lewis felt deep in his gut that he was the one who had sowed those seeds.
And then Lewis falters. The wave of strength passes, and ailments of reality return to him all at once. He stumbles to a seated position at the table right beside the man he just clocked in the nose.
“So long as we’ve all reached an understanding,” Lewis says, his face faded now. “Somebody get these fuckers’ wounds patched up, then lock ‘em up somewhere.”
Rat is the first sailor to move. “Should we put them in with Jessica, then?”
Lewis shakes his head. “No. She don’t deserve that.” He thinks for a moment, and his kindness wavers. “Put ‘em in the torpedo room.”
Rat’s eyes widen.
Lewis nods. “Fate can decide if they should live.”