Chapter 213 - A Story in the Darkness
In the darkness, he suddenly felt as though something had moved. At the same time, a faint noise occurred, and the boy and Sato stopped in their tracks.
While keeping their guns aimed forward, the two scanned with only their eyes, trying to identify the source of the noise. Something was emerging from a cabin whose door had been left open.
It was a plump, fat rat. The rat, the size of a kitten, did not flee upon seeing the boys, but instead walked nonchalantly down the corridor and vanished into the darkness. It looked as if it were saying, "I am the master of this ship."
"...It was huge."
The boy spoke without thinking, but Sato silently peered into the cabin the rat had emerged from. Soon, his voice was heard: "Take a look."
Inside the cabin was a corpse. Whether it had been eaten and scattered by rats after death, not much flesh remained on the corpse, which had apparently been shot in the head. The corpse, with a hole the size of a pinky tip in the forehead of its exposed skull, was slumped against the bed.
A single spent shell casing lay on the floor. From its size, it looked like a handgun casing. No gun was found in the room, and the owner seemed to have left the room immediately after firing.
"An infected... maybe?"
"I don't know. With it eaten and scattered like this, I can't even distinguish if it was human or infected before being killed."
The rat from earlier had apparently grown that large by eating this corpse. He didn't know the reason why the corpse, which looked like flesh clinging to bone, had been shot. Had they become an infected for some reason, or were they shot and killed as a result of a conflict between living humans?
"We'll likely find out what happened once we get to the bridge. Let's hurry."
After reporting the discovery of the corpse to the other teams via radio, Sato tossed a chemical light onto the floor and began moving toward the depths of the ship again. The chemical lights, emitting a fluorescent orange glow, followed behind the boys in dots.
As they proceeded further, the cabins began to line only the hull side of the passage, and on the opposite side—the side corresponding to the center of the ship—a wall without doors continued. Surely, staff facilities were located behind this. When collecting bedding or cleaning, there should be employee entrances on each floor so they wouldn't have to use the passenger stairs or elevators.
Soon, they found a door with a "Staff only" plate attached. He tried turning the doorknob, but as expected, it didn't move. A card key authentication device was installed beside the door; it seemed they couldn't proceed further without a staff card.
He hadn't noticed until now, but card key authentication devices were also installed on the cabin doorknobs. However, now that the power for the entire ship was out, those devices were not functioning. In movies, door locks are released when the power goes out, but in reality, the locks likely wouldn't be released for security reasons.
"We're breaching. Cover me."
At Sato's words, the boy took the object he had been carrying on his back. It was a battering ram, essentially a log with two handles attached, used by special forces to destroy doors during a breach. Carrying a ram as heavy as a machine gun had been quite painful, but finally, that effort was about to pay off.
Gripping the handles of the nearly ten-kilogram ram with both hands, he swung its tip against the vicinity of the doorknob with momentum. With a roar, the door buckled, and the door, its lock mechanism destroyed, slowly opened. Immediately, Sato, who was waiting at the side, kicked the destroyed door open and stormed inside with his gun leveled.
"Clear."
The employee section appeared to be empty. True darkness stretched out in the employee passage where the emergency power had failed, and the only thing to rely on was the flashlight attached to the gun. The boy shouldered the heavy ram again and followed after Sato with his own gun leveled.
Unlike the passenger section, which had beautiful carpets and luxurious decorations, the employee section was simple and gave the impression that function was prioritized. The boy crouched and touched the floor, but not much dust had accumulated. He didn't know how long cleaning had continued after this ship departed, but it seemed not much time had passed since everyone disappeared.
No corpses were found in the employee section either. Since boarding the ship, the only corpse they had seen was the one being eaten by the rat earlier. He didn't know what had happened, but the lack of corpses was also a strange story. Or was it simply that, because the ship's interior was so vast, there happened to be no corpses in the places they had passed through so far?
There was no particular communication from the other two teams, who had also breached and were now heading for the top deck. They had been ordered to share immediately if they made contact, and to escape immediately if the threat was great. They had been instructed beforehand to share information if they found anything, so the lack of communication likely meant they hadn't found anything yet.
Even so, despite it being his first time on this ship, there was no hesitation in Sato's stride. It was as if he knew which passages to take and which stairs to climb to reach the destination.
When asked about it, he replied nonchalantly, "I've done training for storming ships, after all." It seemed he had conducted training to suppress ships several times before, for counter-terrorism and inspections to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Thanks to that, unless it was a very unusual ship, he could somehow understand what kind of structure it had to some extent.
"Well, I've never done training using a luxury liner like this, though."
Only the footsteps of the two echoed in the silent ship passage. They proceeded through the bleak passage and climbed several more stairs. There were no corpses, no infected, and no living humans. To be honest, climbing the stairs was tough because he was carrying the ten-kilogram ram, but he couldn't complain.
"This is the bridge."
Saying so, Sato pointed the muzzle of his gun at the door in front of them. Apparently, they used to conduct bridge tours during voyages in the past, but now they rarely did so due to counter-terrorism measures. The door, with a large warning plate in English stating it was off-limits, looked sturdy, but strangely, it wasn't locked. A faint light was leaking through the gap of the half-open door.
Sato pushed the door lightly with his muzzle, but there was no sign of anything happening. After confirming no traps were set, Sato and the boy stormed into the bridge all at once.
The impression the boy had upon seeing the bridge of a luxury liner for the first time was that it was like the observation deck of a skyscraper. He had an image of a ship's wheelhouse being narrow with many machines, but the bridge, which was dozens of meters wide, was spacious with consoles equipped with displays arranged here and there; it even looked like a corner of some office building. Perhaps to allow the crew to approach the voyage relaxed, there was even a space with ornamental plants and sofas at the edge of the bridge. The wall at the front of the wheelhouse was entirely glass, providing a panoramic view of the outside scenery.
However, admiring the elegant working environment came later. Leveling their guns, the boy and Sato proceeded inside the wheelhouse and confirmed no one was there. There were no corpses here either.
"I wonder where this ship was planning to go."
It would normally be neat and tidy, but apparently, that wasn't the case during a voyage in an apocalyptic world. Nautical charts and maps were spread out on several tables in the wheelhouse, with circles and crosses drawn everywhere with felt-tip pens.
Perhaps to ensure smooth communication with foreign passengers even in a critical situation, dictionaries of various languages were piled on the floor and tables. Snack wrappers and empty plastic bottles scattered on the floor told Sato and the boy that people had been here too.
"Search the interior. Tell me if there's anything written. Notebooks, sticky notes, anything."
At Sato's instruction, the boy walked through the wheelhouse. As for Sato, he was gathering the nautical charts spread on the tables and the memos scattered on the floor, trying to investigate what had happened on this ship.
The boy also went around the wheelhouse, checking if there was anything with useful information written on it. English newspapers were scattered on the floor, but the dates were all around the time the infection began to spread globally. Since he was poor at English, he couldn't grasp the content of the articles, but he could still tell they were writing about things like "pandemic" or "murder." Black-and-white photos of some city engulfed in flames or soldiers shooting the infected were printed on the crumpled newspapers.
He had thought that ships were things that changed course using a large steering wheel that one could wrap their arms around, but apparently, that was a story from old movies. When the boy headed toward the exact center of the wheelhouse, the place closest to the bow, there sat a seat and console like the cockpit of a passenger plane, along with throttle levers and joysticks.
Apparently, modern ships don't involve turning a steering wheel while standing; all operations can be performed with levers and joysticks while seated. The monitors provided at the two steering seats lined up side-by-side were pitch black, with a slight layer of dust accumulated on the surfaces.
On the floor by those steering seats, a single notebook had fallen. The notebook, housed in a genuine leather cover, was bulging as if the cover were about to burst due to the numerous sticky notes attached and memo papers sandwiched between the pages.
It didn't seem like a simple lost item, the boy intuited. Dust had accumulated on the steering seat console as well, but there was one spot exactly the size of the notebook where no dust had accumulated. This notebook had been placed on the console, but it had likely fallen to the floor due to the impact when the ship ran aground at the Reclaimed Land.
Could this be a message someone left behind? Thinking so, the boy picked up the notebook and took it to Sato, who was spreading the logbook over the nautical chart table.
It seemed Sato had been comparing the logbook with the maps on the nautical chart table, investigating where this ship came from, where it was headed, and which ports it had called at. When the boy handed the notebook he had picked up to Sato, he began reading the notebook written in English.
When Sato opened the notebook, several memo papers and photos sandwiched between the pages fell to the floor. As the boy was picking them up, his eyes stopped on one photo.
It was a photo of foreigners who appeared to be a parent and child. A middle-aged man wearing a passenger ship uniform and a white hat stood smiling, lined up with a woman of about the same age, with a girl who looked like their daughter sandwiched between them.
When he turned the photo over, a date that seemed to be when it was taken was written there. About a year ago, shortly before the pandemic began.
"The owner of this notebook is the captain of this ship. It seems he left a diary of what happened on this ship."
When told that, the boy looked back; Sato had a furrowed brow. Apparently, the contents of the diary were not pleasant.
Waiting for your opinions and impressions.