"Your body ... is my ... body."
This frightening voice groaned into my ears, making my heavy eyelids flash open.
I found myself drenched in a dark lamplit room, smelling briny saltwater. Too weak to move, I had no choice but to stare at an uncomforting blue ceiling; first, I thought I might be looking at a gray sky after years of nothing but blackness. I would have welcomed that sight.
The low, croaking voice came again, and I realized by glancing toward my feet that the speech came from a humanoid creature at the far end of the room I was in. The manlike creature seemed to soak up the little light illuminating this strange place. I began to hyperventilate when the solid shadow came closer, taking one unbalanced step after another.
"Your heart ... is my ... heart."
"What are you?" I stared into this pincher-mouthed abomination's six glowing yellow eyes. Confused and panicked, I tried to lift my head. I got it about an inch above the hard ground before I lost sensation in my neck and the back of my skull hit the floor.
Then behind me, there came a woman's cry.
I attempted to glance back, making out the upside-down Nadine behind a steel gate. Her expression registered as horrified in my mind. I didn't believe she was there. Not really. We didn't drown together; I couldn't have died with anyone but myself.
And that's what had to have happened. I was dead and in hell, and now I saw the girl whose life I saved, only to forfeit my own.
One of her white suit legs had tears in it that I didn't recall seeing on the ship. I could make out the vague red scratchings of eyes on her brown skin. She clutched her wounded left leg, wincing in pain.
I attempted to sit up, despite the weakness in my limbs, and this time I managed to do so. I hurried toward the gate while hoping to escape from this hell.
Seeing me, she whispered in her sweet-sounding, childlike voice, "What's your name? Why did you bring me here?"
"I'm Zeke." I furrowed my brown eyebrows. "I don't know where we are. How could I have brought you here?"
"Zeke." She pointed at my chest, making me look more closely at myself.
I saw the bloody eyes on my chest as if they were carved into me with a scalpel. My clothes were tattered, clinging wetly to me and amplifying the room's cold temperature.
These numb marks scared me, but my mind was moving too slowly for me to show how I felt. As I processed this change on myself, I turned again to Nadine and asked her, "Have you seen your leg?"
"The eyes are the same," she said, then pointed a manicured finger at the devil before us. "What's that?"
It croaked, taking another step closer. "Your leg ... is my ... leg."
"Hell, if I know."
"If you're here, we must be dead," she cried out, her panic reaching a breaking point.
"How would you have died?" I asked her, my confusion increasing. I could believe that I had drowned, but the men surrounding her were more than willing to protect her, aside from the fella who attacked her but who was probably still getting his ass beaten in the storage room.
She shook her head, dark brown eyes wide and uncertain. "I don't know. I don't remember dying. And you saved me, didn't you? That man didn't get away with hurting me."
"I did ..." I considered a new possibility that the fella murdered us both, and our memory of escape was only a dying dream. Sorrow washed over me; I didn't accomplish nearly enough in my life. I should have stuck with nursing. I should have helped more people. I should have seen my family one last time. I shouldn't have whored myself out as I did; I should have valued my body more.
The monstrous being croaked out, "You ... are not ... dead."
Nadine and I focused on the black armored being.
"You ... are in ... my prison."
"Your prison?" Nadine sounded shrill; she was pissed. She stood up, her weight on her unmarked leg, and she gripped the steel bars of the dark hallway she was stuck in. Glancing back at that space, I felt it was as void as space. "Why did you bring us here?"
The monster eyed her with its six yellow eyes. "To ... see my ... vision ... fulfilled."
"Let me out!" Nadine screamed at it, face darkened with fury. "You have no right to keep us here!" The gate rattled as she violently shook it. It wouldn't open, but it sure made a racket.
Her anger fueled mine, and slowly I began to feel again, first a pinching pain that started at the center of my back, then that pain spread out. Even though I felt like I was receiving low-quality acupuncture, I had to cherish the return of my bodily sensations.
Sitting up, weak but driven, I analyzed the devilish being before me and wondered what I could do to make him free us from this mysterious place he brought us to.
"Leg ... You won't ... get out ... unless ... I allow you." A sick smile formed on the mouth between the man's slick black pinchers.
Nadine began ramming herself against the steel bars. For such a small woman, her willpower impressed me. Her gritted teeth, furrowed eyebrows, and the rigor of her body showed no signs of relent or submission.
She was a survivor.
I wanted to be one too. If Nadine was alive, maybe I was alive too. Perhaps I was struggling to stay that way; maybe that battle would continue in this otherworldly place?
Taking a few deep breaths, I forced myself up onto my feet. The unsettling creature stood a head taller than me, but that didn't matter: I wanted to be a survivor too. How would I look if I couldn't muster the same strength as the petite woman behind me?
"Why ... do you ... stand ... my body?"
I lunged at the motherfucker.
As soon as I grabbed its armored arms, the room shook, and the lights went out. The monster disappeared, and a forced yanked be backward. I felt the back of my head smack Nadine's face. Then again, all went numb. My brain went blank.
*
I coughed up salt water and sand. Something bit my heel and thrashed it.
I kicked off a wild dog from my bleeding foot, flipping over in the sand. It whimpered, offended by my refusal to let it eat me, and its big paws padded away.
The ocean breeze cut through me like a sword. I shivered fiercely, wrapping my arms around myself as I sat up and attempted to process where I was. I had washed up on a beach. But we were nowhere near land when Morice and Fred tossed me overboard. I thought briefly about Charles, but Nadine came to the front of my mind.
I heard what may have been Spanish from a group of teens walking toward me in bathing suits. Using the Spanish that I knew, I struggled up onto my aching feet and asked where we were.
They glanced at each other and two of the boys came and helped me walk toward a boardwalk ahead, lit up by colorful lanterns. The girls in the group spoke to me, and it was then that I realized they were speaking Portuguese.
So ... I washed up on a sandy beach in Portugal?
I asked them to take me to a hospital, and they did. It wasn't until the white interior of the waiting room met my eyes that I really started to mull over the events of the last hour ... although more than an hour could easily have passed. But I had no way of knowing. I could have been unconscious for hours, or even days.
At least I knew the devil was real. Red eyes were still drawn into my torso, and when I stared at them long enough, I swear their pupils would move around until they met mine.
I remembered the evil being's words:
Your body is my body.