Killer Cruise (Project 26 Book 11)

  Project 26

  P26 – Project 26

  26 books, each one representing a different letter in the alphabet, with each letter in turn represented a horror-related concept that starts with that letter.

  The owner of JEA, catt dahman, challenged several JEA authors to participate in this grand project. The project consists of an assortment of anthologies, novels, and short story collections.

  Over a year in the making, the creative range and scope of this project is both awe inspiring and terrifying. We challenge you to collect them all.

  Project 26 Titles:

  Arachnattack

  Backwoods Bonfire

  Carnival of Chaos

  Dance with the Demon

  Extraterrestrial

  Festival of the Flesh

  Go-Lem

  Haunted House Harbor

  Insectile Illusion

  Jurassic Jackaroo

  Killer Cruise

  Lacrimation of the Leviathan: From the Case Files of Det. Mansfield

  Black Magic Massacre

  Nocturnal Nightmares

  Orleans Occult: Bourbon Street Lucifer

  Psycho Path

  Quarantine

  Repercussions Run Rampant: Reports of Revenge, Regret, and Retribution

  Slaughter on the Seas

  The Thicket

  Ungodly Undoing: Tales of Ubiquitous Umbrage

  VampZ Vendetta

  Wolvz: Whispers of War

  Xperimental Genocide

  Yeti, Yearning

  Zombies: Zero Hour

  Project 26 Contest:

  J. Ellington Ashton Press ran a contest for all 9 anthologies (see list below) that are part of Project 26. The rules of the contest were as follows: From our 9 contest anthologies, JEA would award to authors a gold, silver or bronze status depending on the number of stories they had accepted.

  Gold: 9 stories accepted in 9 anthologies

  Silver: 8 stories accepted in 9 anthologies

  Bronze: 7 stories accepted in 9 anthologies

  The Big Prize: All winners would be listed at the front of all Project 26 books, along with their medals.

  Below are our winners. Congrats to everyone!

  Gold:

  Dona Fox

  Roy C. Booth

  Essel Pratt

  Roma Gray

  Silver:

  Justin Hunter

  Bronze:

  Toneye Eyenot

  ML Sparrow

  Contest Anthologies:

  Extraterrestrial

  Quarantine

  Zombies: Zero Hour

  The Thicket

  Psychopath

  Slaughter on the Seas

  Dance with the Demon

  VampZ Vendetta

  Nocturnal Nightmares

  Killer Cruise

  Mark Woods

  Edited by: J. Ellington Ashton Press Staff

  Cover Art by: Michael Fisher

  http://jellingtonashton.com

  Copyright.

  Mark Woods

  ©2017, Mark Woods

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book, including the cover and photos, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher. All rights reserved.

  Any resemblance to persons, places living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Introduction

  Writing a book is hard.

  It is a long and lengthy process that involves a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, and a lot of painful editing.

  I know I always say that, but it’s true.

  This book is also long past due.

  It was supposed to come out as part of J.E.A’s P26 last summer, but things such as real-life kept getting in the way.

  Hell, at least you didn’t have to wait as long for this as you’re going to have to for George. R. R. Martin to finish his a song of ice and fire series on which Game of Thrones is based!

  This story almost never came to be.

  Back when I was writing the vampire novel, Feral Hearts, with six other authors, the plan was always to release a companion volume with other authors called Lycanthroship.

  Unfortunately, things went a bit awry.

  Authors left the Press, things stalled, and the book went into what is commonly referred to as ‘Development Hell.’

  A few years later, I decided to try and kick-start the project because I’d had so much fun writing Feral Hearts, and wrote the opening chapter for this book as my contribution, but found combining all the author’s separate stories into one narrative too much of a challenge.

  Fellow author, Ed Cardillo – one of my co-authors on Feral Hearts – also attempted to do the same thing, but likewise found it too much of a struggle and so my story lay abandoned.

  Then I was approached to submit to Wolves vs Vamps 2, and suddenly my story had a home. It won not only its round, but also the award of best story overall, and as I edited it, I came to realise that actually, my story was not quite done yet.

  There was more I still needed to write.

  When someone dropped out of writing for the letter, K, for J.E.A’s P26, foolishly I volunteered to step in. Originally, I planned to write about Killer Kangaroos, but after starting the story realised it would need a lot of research as I didn’t know enough about Australia and time was against me.

  And then I thought of this, thought of how I felt the urge to expand this story, and just like that Killer cruise was born.

  I’m just sorry it took so long.

  Blame it on the Lycanthroship curse….

  And so, here it is, finally…the last P26 book, and the last part of my P26 trilogy that started with The Go-lem, continued with Arachnattack, and now concludes here. Needless to say, all three stand-alone, but they can also be read together as – as fans of my work will know by now – everything in my writing is all connected somehow.

  Btw, for your information, Killer Kangaroos is still coming…the story has been started, I just don’t know when it will be finished yet.

  In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Killer cruise, and I hope you think it was well worth the wait…

  Sparkymarky

  Part one: Lycanthroship

  1945, London

  Lottie's Tale

  Charlotte was having that dream again; the one about the wolves. The same one she’d been having every other night, ever since she first received the news six weeks ago that she was going to have a baby. Charlotte, Lottie to her friends, was two months pregnant. She was going to be a mum. No matter how many times she repeated that fact to herself, she still could not quite believe it.

  If only she knew the current whereabouts of the father then things, right now, might not have seemed so bad, but Lottie had seen neither hide nor hair of him in at least eight weeks. Not since just before she’d finally learnt the reason behind the recent bout of unexplained sickness that she’d been experiencing of late.

  Now Lottie was facing the very dismal prospects of giving birth alone, of becoming a single mother in a country still recovering from war, and that scared her almost as much as her dreams.

  The father, to the best of her knowledge, was an American Serviceman, stationed over here on active service, who had seemingly vanished completely off the face of the Earth.

  She knew the rest of his unit were still around because she had seen them, some of the last fe
w remaining American soldiers still waiting to be returned back home now that the war was finally over, but of the man she believed was the father of her baby, there had been absolutely no sign whatsoever in weeks. Even those he had fought alongside, both here and overseas, and who he had, supposedly, counted amongst his closest friends, claimed to have no idea where it was he might have gone – for he had given them no explanation as to where he was going, and had received no orders that they were aware of – and it was almost as though he had vanished into thin air like he were some kind of ghost.

  They might have just been covering for him, but Lottie didn’t think so.

  She had a good nose for bullshit, and was convinced that all those with whom she’d spoken had been honest with her. If they’d have known where he was, she was certain they would have told her, for they seemed just as perplexed about his disappearance as she was.

  Lottie felt abandoned and alone.

  Even her own mother no longer wanted anything to do with her - accusing Charlotte of bringing shame upon the family for having allowed herself to fall pregnant out of wedlock – and if it hadn’t been for her older sister, Elizabeth, then Lottie knew she would’ve probably ended up on the streets by now.

  Three weeks ago, she had fallen drastically behind on her rent, through no fault of her own, and her landlord had threatened to cast her out. Her pleas to his better nature had fallen on deaf ears and her sister, Elizabeth, hearing this, had leapt to the rescue, promising to take her in and look after her all through her pregnancy. Left with no other choice, and with no-one else to turn to, Lottie had reluctantly accepted.

  Elizabeth had always been their mother’s favourite when they were growing up and, because of this, in the past, Lottie had always previously felt a touch of resentment towards her older sibling, but beggars could not be choosers and besides, Elizabeth was the only one, Lottie thought, who knew what she was going through – not least because, not so long ago, she had been through a similar situation herself.

  Unbeknownst to either of their parents, Elizabeth was not the saintly figure she made herself out to be. Just like Lottie, she, herself, had ended up with child on two previous occasions, but unlike her sister, Elizabeth had been much cleverer than her and had managed to abort both pregnancies long before their mother – a devout Catholic - had ever so much as caught a sniff of her condition.

  This made her much more sympathetic towards Lottie’s needs, and was one of the main reasons why she had offered her younger sister a roof over her head.

  Now all Lottie had left to deal with was the very real fact that she was about to have a baby, alone, without any kind of help or support from the man she believed to be the father, the one responsible for putting her in this position in the first place.

  No big deal.

  Elizabeth had promised to do what she could to help support her, but had warned her that other than help put her up temporarily, there was very little else she could do. Lottie understood, and understood perfectly. Times were hard, and she was just grateful for what little help her sister could give her, besides, this was her problem, her mess after all; she was the one who had gotten herself into this situation, and now she was the one who had to deal with the consequences.

  With no way of her being able to afford the baby’s upkeep, there was only one reasonable, sensible solution left open to her, Lottie thought. She would have to give the baby up for adoption. She had already resigned herself to the thought of giving up her child – there were plenty of childless couples out there willing to pay a pretty penny or two for the privilege of taking the baby and raising it as their own, especially now that the war was over, no questions asked. Though it was not what Lottie ideally would have wanted, in truth, she knew she had no other choice.

  There was no way, she thought, she could ever possibly afford to raise the baby on her own – no, much better it go to someone who could love it as their own.

  Hell, Lottie could barely afford to take care of herself, she thought, let alone a new born child.

  Elizabeth had been much more pragmatic than Lottie and had tried to suggest an alternative solution. She had offered to put Charlotte in touch with the same back-street abortionist who had carried out both of her own terminations, but Lottie would not hear of it.

  Oh, it was true, for a few days there, right after she’d first heard the news that she was pregnant, Lottie had almost, almost mind, been tempted, but in the end, she had politely refused her sister and instead turned her offer down.

  There was no way, she thought, that she could face putting her body through all the pain, mess, and discomfort that she knew was supposed to follow in the wake of such a highly illegal and even dangerous procedure. Some of the stories she’d heard tell about the sort of unscrupulous merchants prepared to carry out such measures was enough to keep her well away from any doctors, let alone those prepared to stoop to such low levels to help boost their income.

  But there was more to it than that.

  There was a moral element to her decision as well, for as far as Lottie was concerned, abortion was only one step up away from murder.

  Though she did not condemn her sister for the choices she had made – and how could she, when she was reliant, at least for the time being, on Elizabeth’s goodwill – the deliberate killing of her own child, her own flesh and blood, was not something Lottie thought she would ever be able to come to terms with.

  She already believed she had gone against the will of God and forsaken her place in Heaven by allowing herself to sin and fall pregnant out of wedlock in the first place. How much worse might her fate be, she thought, if come the Day of Judgement, she then also had to atone for the murder of her child whilst he, or she, were still in the womb? Before they’d even so much as had a chance to draw their first breath?

  There were some sins, Lottie thought, that simply were unforgivable. The killing of an innocent child, before it could even be born, in the eyes of the Lord, she thought, had to be amongst one of the very worst any woman could commit. There was a special place in Hell, Lottie knew, reserved for those who killed their own babies and it was bad enough that her sister, Elizabeth, had already condemned her own soul through her selfish actions. There was no way on Earth, Lottie thought, that she intended to join her when her own Day of Judgement inevitably came around.

  Of course, this was not the only thing that had helped shape her decision.

  There were other factors as well.

  Lottie remembered only too well how, after both of her sister’s terminations, Elizabeth had confessed to her how she had ‘bled down there for weeks’ – no doubt, at the time, in a bid to try and scare poor Charlotte and dissuade her from making the same mistakes that she had in life. Lizzie seemed to have forgotten ever telling her that now – rather conveniently as well, now that she wanted Charlotte to follow in her footsteps – but the memory of those conversations was something Lottie thought she would never be able to forget for as long as she lived. She could barely cope dealing with all the mess produced by her usual cycle every month. She was often prone to what her sister called ‘heavy flow’. There was no damn hosey way, Lottie thought, that she ever believed she’d be able to cope if she were forced to deal with the after-effects of an abortion.

  She just didn’t think she could do it.

  No, far easier to just give birth and then hand the baby over to someone else – if, that was, she could just get through the next six or seven months of pregnancy without being driven crazy first by the dreams she’d just recently begun having.

  The dreams about the wolves.

  They came almost every other night, her dreams, and when they did, they always began the same way.

  Lottie was running through a forest, being chased and pursued by a pack of wolves. In her dreams, just as in real-life, Lottie was pregnant and as she ran, all she could see of her pursuers were shadows, slipping in and out of the trees all around her, slowly gaining on her and boxing her in. She was running o
ut of breath, close to exhaustion, and didn’t think she could run much more, but just as she would start to falter, that’s when Lottie would always find herself breaking out of the trees and coming out into a clearing…

  And as she paused for breath and a chance to catch her bearings, that was when the wolves would finally start to close in.

  Slowly, as they all began to emerge from out between the trees, having run her into a trap and caught her in a pincer movement, the pack would begin to encircle her, and that was when she would always realise the truth – it was not her they were hunting…

  “You can’t have him,” Lottie would always tell the wolves as they started to close in, knowing exactly now what it was they were after. “This baby is mine, you can’t have him…”

  And that was when they would begin to change…

  As one, the wolves would always begin metamorphosing in front of her until they were no longer fully either man nor beast, and it was then, as they started to surround her, that Lottie would always start to feel the pain ripping through her, as the unborn baby inside her slowly began to tear its way out.

  Lottie would always wake up screaming after that.

  Sometimes, her screams were so loud they would wake up her sister; other times, Lottie was able to muffle her terror, just in time, by screaming into her pillow.

  On the worst nights, Lottie would wake up feeling hungry and needing to feed, and not just on any food but on the bloodiest, rawest meat that she could lay her hands on. This, of course, was no easy task with fresh meat still pretty much considered to be a luxury – still in fairly short supply after the War – and so it was on these nights, Lottie would often end up taking to the streets.