So, this is my last entry. Before I finish and explain the fate of all who were left aboard the Seastar, I want to… to apologize. Especially to anyone who had a friend or loved one aboard the Seastar—truly, I am sorry for all the lives lost… and especially the lives I knowingly and willingly took.
I have tried, and failed, to find any good way of describing what infection feels like. By the time I stood on the deck with Lily, the whispers coursing into my brain had become so deafening that I could scarcely hear the din as the crowd surged, screams echoing with maddened passengers swarming from the aft stairwell, while security and crew fought to keep them back. I suspect the chaos was Passenger X’s attempt at distraction—after all, I’d just exclaimed to Lily the dangers of infected passengers boarding the lifeboats, and there was a chance that we might have rallied and convinced the crew to screen everyone before evacuation.
But there was no chance of that now, with panic driving people in a stampede.
Several of the aggressive infected were quite near us, and Lily cried, “What should we do?”
FatefateasI predicted All equally dead DEAD can’t escapeFATE
“It’s… it’s taking me,” I gasped.
I probably would have succumbed right there, and let the madness stroll me down to my cabin for a barbecue, had Lily not hauled me and Benjamin through the panicked tide, somehow getting us upstairs and into a cabin. Leaving me on the floor by the door, she took Benjamin to the sofa and fastened his lifejacket. Riffled through his green backpack—found a small pool floaty that she inflated for him. Then she rushed to the balcony, scanning the outdoors. Suddenly jerked back as shrieks rang out from above, and she yanked the balcony door closed and drew the curtains shut.
We’re all going to die… it’s foreseen… can’t preventFATE
I curled on the floor, head in my hands.
“… We’re safe in here. We’ll just wait for help to come,” Lily reassured Benjamin. It seemed her plan was to wait out the crisis, hoping the coast guard would find the Seastar and locate any survivors. However, there was a problem with her plan… not all the infected were outside, after all.
I was still in here.
Lily knelt in front of me…
“Friend,” she said, “I have to ask… are you going to turn on us?”
“F-fate fate f-fate…” I said.
She rubbed her face, wiping tears from her eyes. Tears for me? A flutter in my chest—then I realized she was holding my knife.
Oh. Of course. I was a danger to them, after all. She gripped me by the collar. Lifted me toward her. And then—she opened her hand, dropping the knife, and slapped me—hard.
WHAP!
“Snap out of it!” Lily barked, as I clutched my cheek. The voices were still whispering fateFATEfate but she shook me hard enough to rattle my teeth. “Don’t listen to the voices! You said burning yourself in your cabin is the price you pay to stay and help us survive, right? But we’re not safe. So you’re not finished yet! You of all people in the world are on this ship, friend. Remember what I told you that first night? If this is the Titanic, you’re the only one who can see the iceberg! So use those special eyes and SEE.”
… and maybe it was because her face was so close to mine, her disheveled hair brushing my forehead. I became acutely aware of my own heartbeat. That reminded me of what my brother said—that hope was the thing with feathers. That fluttering in my ribs… hope?
See the iceberg… Of course, I couldn’t see the future anymore. All I could see now was the filaments. But the filaments… they were almost like… like spider webbing… I turned my head, following the trail of that glowing strand out of my ear, ignoring Lily’s questioning of “Hey—hey, are you still with me.” I remembered how I’d seen dozens of those strands on deck, how they all converged—
Below.
And suddenly I understood what was at their center. Like the spider lurking in its web.
“I have to go,” I said.
Lily drew back. “Ok. What are you going to—”
“If I can destroy Passenger X, that might free the infected people…” I paused, wincing as the voices changed to laughter. When had I ever succeeded in changing fate before? “I’ll probably fail,” I admitted, “so in case that happens—Lily, you are going to have to take Benjamin, and jump.”
“What? But—”
“You’ve got to!” I snapped. “Your only hope is to get away from the Seastar. As soon as the lifeboats have moved away from the ship, you and Benjamin jump from the balcony. Make sure your life jackets are on tight. Bring that inflatable thing with you. And once you hit the water, no matter what the crew or anyone else tells you, do not climb into any liferafts. There are infected on board those vessels. Even if people seem to be behaving normally—wait until the coast guard arrives. The only chance you have is if you stay in the water. Do you understand?”
Lily nodded.
It was unlikely she’d survive.
After all, her hands had been cold.
But this was the best I could do. I drew a breath. “Good luck, Lily, Benjamin….” I turned away, shouldering my bag and reaching for the door when Lily called back:
“Wait! Friend…” I looked up, and she asked softly, “What is your name?”
I think I must have looked at her very blankly, because she added:
“I mean I know you from the bar, but—you’re… drinks like a fish and tips well. We were never properly introduced.” She spread her hands and repeated, “What… what’s your actual name?”
Only in that moment did I realize that her calling me “friend” this whole time had not been some cordial acknowledgement of familiarity, but just the opposite. For all the shows I’d enjoyed and tipped, I truly was wallpaper to her—had never registered enough for her to learn who I was—and her calling me “friend” was just a chummy way of addressing a stranger.
“Oh,” I said. Blinked. I think I chuckled. Maybe I sighed. “Cass. Cassandra Caye. But… you can just call me ‘drinks like a fish and… tips well.’”
“Good luck, Cass.” Lily looked guilty. If I had to guess, she’d intended to ask Roy from the bar about my name, but hadn’t gotten an answer before circumstances went sideways. No matter, Lily. Names don’t matter much anyway to the dead. Which we would all soon be.
Beginning with me.
Highway
After leaving Lily and the boy, I descended to the cabaret lounge, loading my bag with more bottles and rags, fully expecting to fight my way down to the lower decks. And yet, none of the people I spotted on the stairs seemed to take much interest in me. In fact, the only close encounter I had was when I descended the grand staircase, pausing to make eye contact with a gentleman at the café who had just stabbed his wife in the eye with a dessert spoon. He looked at me, examined the eyeball, and swallowed it. Seemed to consider my eyes for a minute, as if wondering how they might taste, but then turned back to the twitching body of his wife. I heard him call gleefully to me, “Care for a treat?”
I shook my head and continued downward, and he returned to her, scooping the other eye into a teacup, then rising and meandering in search of another victim as the filament pulsated in his ear, and I heard it whisper, MoreEYESon thelifeboat bringathermos moreeyes…
Then I was in the stairwell to the lower decks with my flashlight, following the glowing strands into the bowels of the ship.
In the long corridor dubbed the “highway,” blood glistened across the walls and floor. I stepped over a young man moaning for help. Idiot, I thought. DyingDYING is your fate—
And then he was there. Standing right in front of me in the highway, the dark figure at the center of the web of strands. Passenger X.
Teeth bared in that same grin. His tongue, I realized, was chewed to bits. And he was still chewing on it. Disgusted, I reached into my bag, pulled out one of my Molotovs, and lit it.
The dead man only grinned as I took aim—threw!
His teeth clacked. For a second, everything seemed to slow, as if the ship itself inhaled. The strands curled in a glowing web around him. And then—a shockwave outward. Ripples in the concrete floor.
Oh, I thought. THAT’s where that came from.
I’d forgotten about the damage in the highway—forgotten how he could crack and warp concrete as well as interfere with electronics. Then I slammed into the wall. The bottles in my bag all shattered. My flashlight skittered away and winked out. Glass bit into my palms as I tried to sit upright, and the dead man was suddenly on top of me, his weight pinning me.
I rammed my forehead into him—only for him to shove me back to the concrete. Glass tangled my hair and bit into my skull. I felt his lips on my cheek, mangled tongue seeking. But it’s already got me, flashed through my mind.
Then his mouth was on mine, his dead mutilated tongue in my throat, and I gagged, flailing. Drowning. The whispers were a roar, filling me up inside, all those glowing strands flowing into me. I felt my body jerk, contort, with the whispers raging through me.
Suddenly, he went limp.
I hurled him away and sat up, coughing and gagging, and spat out bits of the dead man’s flesh. And then I stood, fumbling in the darkness, slipping on the concrete slick with spilled alcohol and broken glass, and then I saw…
EVERYTHING.
The Azure Seastar
My glowing eyes went wide. I gaped at the sight of—a woman beneath my hands, screaming, as I jammed my thumb into her eyeball—
—the taste of severed fingers in my mouth—
—the cold metal of the balcony rail as I climbed over it and scrambled forward to snarl at a cowering family inside their cabin—
—all of it, all of it! I could see through the eyes and ears of every infected person!
All the glowing filaments spun out of me now. As if I were some sort of luminescent jellyfish, able to feel each infected person like nerves at the end of my strands. But the glowing strands did nothing to illuminate the blackout; it was not real light, and did not exist in the material plane. When I tried to move, I stumbled over the corpse of Passenger X in the darkness. Frustrated, I felt for the wall. Damn this pitch black! I yearned for my flashlight. The glowing strands responded to my will—almost like flexing my fingers. I reached up, and the strands stretched toward the corridor’s overhead lighting. At my whim, the fluorescent bulbs flickered, and came on—
—bathing the highway in luminescence.
And there—on the floor before me. Passenger X.
Brown matted hair, one eye missing, tongue lolling from his jaw. I gazed on his corpse dispassionately, feeling neither pity nor compassion—indeed, feeling nothing whatsoever save for a mild curiosity… Why had the entity abandoned its previous host? But the answer came to me with the lights.
You see, I’d wondered why it had taken so long for the infection to spread. But now it suddenly struck me, ordinary humans can’t see the strands. With Passenger X as its host, the entity was essentially groping in the dark, blindly fumbling its way around the ship through trial and error. A slow, tedious process. My eyes though. My body. My senses. Using me was equivalent to the Biblical Let there be light! Suddenly, it could see its strands reaching through the material realm!
I was the perfect vessel.
And while this revelation ought to have horrified me—instead, it flooded me with an exuberant delight.
It/I ripped doors off hinges, burst open dead bodies and funneled the blood out from them in arcing red ribbons, spattering the walls and floor, just for the sheer joy of all that it could see and I could do. Brilliant. The more it/I flexed our power, the more COLD I felt, bound to the depths. And with that cold came an ever deeper, growing hunger…
Lower Decks
Looking back now, that time when I was under the entity’s thrall had the hazy quality of a dream—like something happening to someone else. I do not remember wandering through the ship’s bowels, unleashing terror in the staff lounge and mess hall and corridors—though I must have done so, as there was a lot of gore in my visions that was not there in my previous explorations, nor during my encounter with Passenger X, and so I must have put it there myself. I remember nothing at all, save that the Seastar was my canvass and I painted it with blood and anguish, until the hollow ache in my belly became an unbearable bottomless yearning.
FEED, it/I thought.
This desire pulsed across the strands. The infected reacted—eating flesh, seawater, glass. With each rupture of agony in their bodies or minds came a pulse of energy back along their strand. Delicious. Intoxicating. A woman gnawed her knuckles down to the bone. A shirtless old man at the pool crunched into a drinking glass, the glass shattering and lacerating his tongue—
Nooooo. Some part of me flinched away from this. A name.
John.
Oh God, what had I done?
Abruptly, I came back to myself. The fluorescent lights winked out as I huddled on the floor.
No…. no, no no no—not John! The walls painted crimson, the bodies scattered throughout the corridor… was it me all along? All these agonizing deaths I’d foreseen… had I been the reason for them, fated all along? Now that I’d returned to myself, horror flooded me.
CassPERFECTvessel togetherFATEfate together FEED
No. The insatiable hunger carved me hollow… But while I still had some humanity, still had enough agency left to act—
—it was time to fulfill my destiny.
Cabin 4044
I doused myself in a variety of cheap and expensive liquors. Then I sat down in the space formerly occupied by my crispy corpse. In my trembling hand I lifted a matchbook.
“Hope…”
I wasn’t changing anything, of course. In my heart I knew this. Fulfilling my vision meant I’d not only failed to alter my fate, but most likely anyone else’s… But what else could I do?
“Hope…”
I sighed and lit a match.
They say that sometimes people who are about to die see their lost loved ones. I’ve never believed such things. People call my vision “supernatural” but to me there is nothing spiritual about it—all I’ve ever seen is the physical, rotting reality of death. But in that moment, as I lifted the match that would bring my fiery end, I heard… my name. It struck me I’d heard it a few times now. And for the briefest instant, in the golden light of the flame was the brother I hadn’t glimpsed in nearly thirty years. He again called my name, “Hope,” and in that same breath, the match flickered out.
I was so startled that I dropped the burnt-out match. Pawed the sofa, wondering if I’d hallucinated him, and my hands found—a note. The note I’d left scribbled a lifetime ago back when I was determined to try one more time.
“Fire and Ice,” it read.
“Fuck a duck…” I whispered. “What does that mean?”
My brother had always loved poetry. The line he always recited to me, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” was from an Emily Dickinson poem. But “Fire and Ice” was the title of a different poem, by Robert Frost. Why, to my future self, would I invoke a poem about the world’s end…?
I recited the poem:
“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice…”
I paused, struck. If I had to perish twice…
Twice.
Suddenly, the meaning clicked.
My visions were of the future, but this entity drew my visions into the present so that it could interact with the material world. If it had the power to use my attunement like that, to affect time and fate and my special sight… what if I could also use it? And, just once, change fate?
Burning myself would mean fulfilling my own prophecy. It didn’t even mean destroying the entity—after all, Passenger X had been dead yet still possessed. There was every likelihood the entity would continue to use my corpse, no matter how crispy. My note was telling me not to perish by fire. No, but instead by…
Well, granted there wasn’t any ice. But there was plenty of cold, cold depths that could swallow the Seastar and all her lifeboats, and ensure this abomination inside me never, ever reached the shore.
“Hang on Lily, Benjamin,” I growled, rising to my feet. “It’s time to change fate!”
The Bridge
A thick fog wreathed the Seastar in an unnatural cloud when I emerged from the lower decks. Rain slammed the windows. It was as if all the weather and the world had responded to the conflict swirling inside myself, and as the entity fought to wrest control away, rain slashed through the sky, and the ocean itself seemed disturbed. I wondered if this was how Lily and Benjamin would die—drowning in the volatile depths I’d stirred. But I pushed these doubts aside as I forced my way onto the bridge.
Barricaded inside, the captain and a handful of crew panicked when the door ripped off its hinges.
“Look out!” cried a man, and lunged at me.
I ducked his punch, grabbed him and whispered in his ear, “You are mine,” taking his mind so violently and swiftly that he did not have time for the usual moaning. He tackled his other crewmates for me while I grabbed the captain. The captain was a burly man, but he was nothing against my glowing filaments, and I tossed him down and bent my lips to his ear, feeling the rush of those cold whispers rise inside me and through my lips and tongue you are mine youaremineyouaremineyouaremine—
He looked dazed as I straightened. Clapped his hands to the sides of his head, trying to shut out the filament already worming deep into his skull.
Oh, oops.
I had to be careful about using this power. I’d meant to talk to the captain, not infect him. Oh well. I willed him to grab the intercom, which I sparked to life, and had him bark into it: “All passengers and crew, abandon ship! Repeat, abandon ship! Repeat, abandon ship immediately, get into the water! A-abandon… you aremineall MINE…thessshhh mineMINE mminnneaaa…” The captain’s words garbled around both my commands and the entity’s.
The force of the thing’s will was like a tsunami bearing down on me. But you know, I’d learned the futility of meeting force with force in aikido. My might was inconsequential. Miniscule. I was always smaller than my opponents. So I gave way, letting it shout through the captain’s mouth:
“YOUAREMINE ALL MINE YOU AREMINE—”
And I reached over and cut the mic—then hit the alarm.
A piercing siren blared.
CASSANDRA, boomed the entity. She didn’t even know your nameCASSANDRA perfectCASSANDRA. And I understood at some primal level the bargain that it offered me. In exchange for these people who had always overlooked me, the entity would give me all of its gifts. And people would know me now. No longer a passive bystander of death, but its deliverer! Not merely its prophet, but its architect! CASSANDRA, it boomed, WE CAN DEVOUR THE WORLD!
But inside me still was a quiet voice. My quiet voice. The voice of the wallpaper, pondering Lily and the song she’d dedicated to me. Pondering John and his kindness. Pondering Benjamin, and the reasons I’d stayed on the ship—so that I could use my eyes to see the iceberg, and steer fate. I pondered its offer that we “devour the world.” Now, said that quiet voice, why would I ever want to do that?
And then, as the thing channeled all its roaring fury into a bottomless hunger that carved me so hollow I was nothing but a gaping void, I succumbed to the entity’s demand to FEED, unleashing the rage of every infected and sucking the energy from them, drinking them dry. My thirsty, glowing filaments pulsed with their suffering. But what the entity didn’t realize is that I had surrendered to its will intentionally—and as it/I drank, I poured the energy along those filaments into an enormous swirling funnel, and with all its primordial might, I punched DOWN. Straight through the hull. The Seastar—I ripped a massive hole in it and split it wide and let the water flood in. The great mass of metal groaned, and listed, as the cold depths rose up to swallow us.
How about that? I thought. Turns out I am the iceberg.
The entity realized now its mistake—by forcing me to surrender to its hunger, it had given me too much raw power.
But I wasn’t done.
The lifeboats.
Each boat had to go. I sank them one by one. Oh! It tried to stop me. But it wasn’t used to having a living, breathing host.
I am sorry to say I probably drowned a great many people. I hope some survived, either jumping off the boats before they sank or swimming out from them as they were going under. As I destroyed each boat, I grabbed the infected by their tethers and dragged them deep into the depths. I didn’t have the attention to spare to notice whether there were any human survivors or not. Or to save them if there were.
By the time there was only one lifeboat left, I’d all but lost my mind, singularly focused on dragging this last vessel into the sea, then drowning myself, so the infection would never reach shore—
The tether snapped.
I felt it like the shock of a door slamming.
And I was back to myself, tumbling to the deck on the bridge of the Seastar.
Rescue
If you have never seen a cruise ship sink—well, imagine a skyscraper, listing at some absurd angle, all that steel and glass reaching toward the sky as if in one last gasp. Such a massive vessel does not sink immediately, but more at a pace like an iceberg melting, looming drunkenly sideways in its slow and inevitable descent.
No living passengers remained.
I have no idea how many jumped overboard at the announcement to abandon ship. But certainly, by the time I regained consciousness, there was not a single living soul aboard the ship. The infected had all torn each other and any survivors apart in that last feeding frenzy. And as I crawled out to the deck, pulling my way up the railing along the listing surface, there was no one there to greet me save the corpses. Exactly as I’d foreseen them. But fresher now, and real. My heart sank as I thought of Lily and Benjamin, wondering if they’d made it out. The thick, unnatural fog shrouding the ocean made it impossible to see if there were any survivors. I couldn’t even make out the waves, lost in mist below as they lapped against the ship. The Seastar was quiet as a mausoleum. Nothing but a tomb being slowly engulfed into the cold, hungry abyss.
I called out into the fog, heart fluttering in hope of a response…
None came.
A life preserver—one of the last still hitched to the railing—kept me afloat after the Seastar went under.
It was a fishing vessel that eventually found me, adrift and barely conscious, out on the open ocean.
The end
… and now, we are back to where I began.
No distress signal was ever sent. But of course, the coastguard assumed that the suddenness of the storm and the alleged “rogue wave” were the reason for both the Seastar’s lack of communication and its disappearance. The sole escaping lifeboat was recovered, but though some coastguard members claimed horrifying details in their reports, these reports were quickly shushed. Inquiries from family and loved ones were met with vague assurances from the coastguard about how they were “searching for survivors” and would “notify the families of their findings,” but overall, they have remained tight-lipped.
So.
I began this account for two purposes:
First, to share the truth—and also my regrets. I did what I did to keep this abomination from spreading, but that is cold comfort to those who lost their lives or loved ones.
Second, I wrote this in the hopes I might hear from someone—anyone—who survived.
Lily, I left several messages on your phone, as well as with Roy at the bar. Hoping against hope that somehow, you and Benjamin made it back.
I cannot tell you how tremendously it lightened my heart to get your message!
You left me such a kind voicemail, explaining the NDA’s you (and, I presume, other survivors) had to sign after being picked up by the coastguard, how you were kept in quarantine for weeks while they monitored you for symptoms, how they asked countless questions about what happened aboard the Seastar, but offered no answers in return… it is no wonder you were unable to reach out sooner! I’m so glad you both survived. And not only you, but others as well!
That is good.
But… I regretfully must decline your request that we meet up. Oh, not because of the NDA, it’s… well. I remember all too well, during those many years, what it was like when I’d meet someone, only to shake their hand and know their time was up. That all their future plans were fruitless. How do you tell someone anything when you know they’re going to die? What do you even say?
And so I’d… spare you that. There’s no point to our meeting, you see.
I’ve discovered—and I have no regrets, mind—that changing fate comes with a cost. And I am so very glad for the lives I did save. Yours, and the boy’s, and others. I truly hope those lives are lived long and well, and I should like to think they will be…. I do very much like to think so!
But there is little sense in visiting me, because for the past few days—since the most recent post actually—I’ve noticed that regardless what I do, even if I bathe them in warm water or hold them under a hot bath, my hands are always cold….