Sea Sick: A Horror Novel

“Okay,” said Jack, struggling to restrain the woman. “Ivor, listen to me. I need to know exactly how your daughter could have caught this thing. Has she been in contact with somebody else that was sick? What about you and your wife? You both have it too. Have you been exposed to something?”


Ivor was flustered. Understandably so; his family was dead. “What? No. We came straight from the airport in Palma. We were with a bunch of other passengers the whole time who were all perfectly fine.”

Jack needed more. He needed answers. “You and your wife were arguing the day you came onboard. What about?”

“Arguing? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do,” said Jack, still struggling to restrain Vicky thrashing about in his arms. “Does it have something to do with why you’re sick?”

“No! No, of course not.”

“But you admit you were arguing?”

Ivor shook his head and seemed to battle against the fringes of despair. “We…we were arguing about what was for the best. I had an old friend from the forces waiting for us in Germany, all ready to help us disappear. Vicky was having second thoughts.”

Jack was confused. He’d expected the conversation to lead somewhere else. “Second thoughts about what?”

“Turning herself in.”

Jack frowned. “What the hell are you talking about? What did she do?”

Before Ivor had time to answer, Doctor Fortuné let out a sudden yelp. Jack turned his head to see that Heather was partially free from her bindings and was now sitting up on the examination table. She was munching on something. The doctor turned around with a mortified expression on his face. He was holding his right hand out in front of him. It was missing a thumb.

Jack thought about what had happened to Vicky after Heather attacked her and quickly reached a conclusion. “Doctor, I’m sorry but you’re infected. You need to isolate yourself somewhere, right now.”

But the doctor wasn’t listening. The man stumbled around the room, delirious, and gushing blood from his thumb-stump. The sudden commotion caused Jack to lose his concentration and his grip on Vicky loosened. She pulled free of his grasp and pounced straight for her husband. She tore out his windpipe before he even had time to scream. Ivor crumpled to the floor, dead.

Jack acted quickly, scouring the room for something with which to defend himself. Even though he knew dying would result in nothing more than waking up again at 1400hrs, he couldn’t help but fight back. It was his instinct; a human behaviour rooted deep inside him making it impossible to accept death willingly (even when it was only temporary). There was also the fear that, eventually, the spell would end and whatever happened to him would be permanent. There was a part of Jack that longed for this and welcomed an end to his nightmare.

A glass-cube paperweight sat on a nearby stack of papers. It seemed heavy. Jack wrapped his fingers around it and felt confident that it would do the job he needed it to. He hefted it through the air with all his might. It cracked against Vicky’s skull just as she turned to face him.

The paperweight was as solid as Jack had hoped it would be and he heard it shatter the woman’s skull. She crumpled to the floor like a curtain cut from its railing. Jack had come up against the infected dozens of times now, ever since his first encounter in High Spirits. It seemed like the best way to put them out of action was blunt-force trauma to the skull. He was sure of that now.

His first success had been the unopened bottle of Glen Grant from his suitcase, which he had used to bash in the face of an elderly woman when she’d attacked him in the corridors of B Deck. There had been many other incidents since then; ending with the glass-cube paperweight against Vicky’s skull.