I’d have to. I could barely lift my injured arm. Worse, if I turned my head in that direction, I could actually smell pus and rotten flesh. Forget antibiotics and stitches. I was praying I’d keep the damn arm.

  “Can you walk?” Gaston held his hand out to me. His grip was greasy and cold. I wasn’t the only one pushing things to the limit.

  I walked.

  Five more days brought me to my knees. We hadn’t seen any more soldiers, but we’d seen signs. Flattened ground where someone had made camp. Candy wrappers written in Spanish. Narcorette butts.

  When I collapsed, Gaston got this worried look on his face. I couldn’t tell if it was for me, or because we’d stopped.

  “I gotta rest. Mwen pa byen.” I’m not well. I was lapsing into Creole, not a good sign. I tried to stay awake, but I had no strength.

  Darkness claimed me.

  * * *

  I only remember bits and pieces of the next few days. Gaston carrying me in his arms like a bride over the threshold. Feeding me. Forcing my cracked, peeling lips open and pouring water or fruit juice into my mouth.

  Sometimes he disappeared into the jungle at night. Once I heard distant cries for help and guns going off. Or maybe I dreamed it. When he came back that night, I saw a double image of him, the Gaston I knew overlaid by a ghostly spectre riddled with bullet holes. My heart stuttered like the machine guns I'd dreamed—or heard?—and I rubbed at my eyes. When I looked again, only one Gaston stood before me. Still, it took me a long while to get back to sleep that night.

  Gaston smelled of dirt and mold and rancid beer, but I smelled worse. Every time I moved my shoulder, hot fluids oozed down my back and arm, filling the air with the reek of spoiled meat. I was turning into one of those animals you see on the road in the summer, all putrid and gassy.

  When we reached the first road, I was sure I was hallucinating again. I’d been doing it for the past two days. Weird visions of Gaston’s mother kneeling before a black candle. Him sitting Indian style, watching me while I slept, a nasty, hungry look on his face. When I cried out in fear, he told me to hush.

  “You always safe wit’ me, brother.”

  Gaston made us wait until dark before we started down the highway. He seemed to know where he was going.

  I don’t know how many miles he carried me before we came to a road sign.

  Gaston read it out loud. “Guyana, 5 kilometers.”

  He didn’t sound happy. I wanted to shout for joy, but my mouth wouldn’t work. I wanted him to shout for me. Instead, he sighed and kept walking.

  Dawn was still hours away when the border came into view. We moved into the high grass of the savannah bordering the highway. Under cover of darkness, Gaston crawled the last hundred yards, me laying on his back and holding on with my good arm.

  Once we crossed the border, he set me on the ground.

  “Pierre, dis be all for me.”

  “Then rest, brother. We safe now. In the morning we’ll make our way to camp.”

  He shook his head. “No, you doan’ understand. I can’t go to camp wit’ you. I got a job to do.”

  I tried to make sense of his words, but it was hard to concentrate. “You can’t leave me. Mwen malad.” I’m sick. He knew that. How could he go?

  “I gotta make them pay, brother. You take dis.” He put something in my shirt pocket. “When the sun come up, walk down da road. Make sure you go in da right direction.” In the darkness his teeth glowed white as he grinned.

  “Fuck you.” I tried to smile back. I don’t know if I did. I hope so.

  “Goodbye, mwen fré, my brother. I see you back home.”

  He got to his knees, held out his hand to me. I took it, gripped it as hard as I could. I refused to let go, even when he tried to pull away.

  “Doan’ go,” I pleaded.

  I passed out with his hand still cradled in mine.

  * * *

  Bright sunlight, the first in days, woke me. I still held Gaston’s hand. I opened my eyes.

  I was alone.

  And still holding Gaston’s hand.

  The flesh was green and gray and falling off the bones. Greasy slime covered my palm, and I dropped the loathsome remains. Sickened, I wiped my hand across my shirt. Something rattled in my pocket.

  I reached in and drew out a simple metal chain. On it were two dog tags and a Saint Christopher medal.

  The one Gaston always wore.

  I didn’t have to look at the tags to know they were his. Just like I recognized the rotted hand in the grass. I knew it as well as my own.

  Had he died when the firecrackers hit? Or maybe when the bullets took him in the jungle? Had he ever been there with me at all? If not, how could I have killed those South-Am soldiers when I could barely stand? I had a lot of questions, but I knew I wouldn’t get answers, not until I got home and spoke to his mother.

  I wondered what kind of trouble he’d be causing for the South-Ams. I remembered the hungry look I’d seen on his face in my dream and thought that maybe I was better off not knowing.

  I hung the dog tags around my neck and wrapped his hand in my shirt. He hadn’t left me behind.

  I wasn’t going home without him.

  JG Faherty is the Bram Stoker Award®-nominated and ITW Thriller Award-nominated author of four novels, seven novellas and more than fifty short stories. He is the author of The Burning Time, Cemetery Club, Carnival of Fear, The Cold Spot, He Waits, Hellrider and the Stoker-nominated Ghosts of Coronado Bay. In 2014, he released Castle by the Sea, Fatal Consequences and Thief of Souls.

  Faherty writes both adult and young adult horror, science fiction and fantasy. His works range from quiet, dark suspense to over-the-top comic gruesomeness. His short story with a new take on the zombie apocalypse, “Martial Law,” is featured in the Grey Matter Press anthology Equilibrium Overturned: The Heart of Darkness Awaits.

  He enjoys urban exploring, photography, watching both good and bad horror and science fiction movies, hiking, playing the guitar, good wine, and Guinness–not necessarily in that order.

  As a child, his favorite playground was a 17th-century cemetery, which many people feel explains a lot.

  Invisible fingers tightened around Palmveist’s throat. He was in the water again, drowning a hundred million miles from shore beneath a black velvet sky filled with diamond flecks. Intense cold embraced his body, invaded his marrow. The flicker of sanity in his consciousness that told him to breathe, told him he was only dreaming, also tried to reason that the deadly chill had been there all along. It hadn’t left, really. When he went into the drink the first time, ice had formed somewhere deep beneath his bones. In his soul, perhaps? That vein of permafrost would always exist under the surface, a reminder he’d cheated death. Barely.

  The last bottled sip of breath burned in his lungs.

  Breathe, an inner voice bellowed. For the love of God, now!

  He woke enough to expel the stale air from his chest and to drink in a gulp of new. The ice jumped out of his soul and onto his skin, and the illusion of freezing to death, of drowning, continued for another tense second. Then Palmveist shot up in his bed, a scream lodged in his throat. He expected to taste the foul brine of the Atlantic and even believed he saw another man lolling in the waves beside him. It was the face of one of the many doomed on that night, the living dead—not to be alive much longer, the man clearly knew that, judging by the wideness of his eyes.

  Palmveist blinked, and he saw that the dead man floating nearby wore his own face. He had returned fully from the dream to his rented room above the hardware store and woke staring at his reflection in the mirror above the sink.

  Gooseflesh prickled on his arms and legs despite his dressing gown and the warmth from the iron radiator ticking in the corner. The sensation of freezing in the water, of sinking and choking, persisted. So, too, the certainty he wasn’t alone. There was someone else in the room with him.

  Edgard Palmveist pinched his eyes and willed his galloping heart to calm. Someone? Not exactly. It was a ghost that had haunted him for thirteen years, from the moment he jumped into the ocean with two life jackets tied around his waist.

  * * *

  Palmveist dressed in his work clothes, went through the motions of buttoning buttons, combing his hair and adjusting his spectacles.

  He plodded along the sidewalk. Ghosts? “No,” he huffed aloud.

  The cold March day pressed down from a sky the color of slate. His breaths came with difficulty. For a terrible instant—

  He wasn’t standing on Main Street in Little Dodd, Connecticut; he was once again falling, falling, given no other option but to jump. The behemoth had split in half, forcing Palmveist to dive into the black water to save himself from going down with the ship.

  He struck the Atlantic, like so many others, so many bodies already frozen to death ahead of him. He didn’t want to die, no, and so he started moving, swimming. Screams filled his head. Most were his own, contained internally by ears that went numb before hitting the water, partially deafened by the death throes of Titanic as she surrendered to the Atlantic.

  Screaming, he paddled. For how long, he couldn’t be sure, because the rules of time had lost all meaning. His arms stiffened but still worked, according to the splashes as his body cut the ocean’s surface. As a boy growing up in Sweden, he’d swum in cold water on plenty of occasions. Maybe that helped save him.

  A shadow loomed ahead, lolling on the waves. His first thought was that he’d come across a coffin. The oblong length of wood materialized—a stateroom door, torn loose in the night’s violence. He scrambled for the door’s edge. Somehow, his fingers grabbed hold. It wasn’t the safety of a lifeboat, and the Atlantic feasted on his body’s heat without mercy. Still, he was alive.

  The foul, fishy stink of the ocean poisoned his desperate sips for air. Sobs reached beyond the ice in his ears. The cacophony echoed into the distance. A ghostly wind’s howl replaced it, and Palmveist blinked. The dark panorama of black sky, and blacker ocean, sank. He rose up from the waves to find himself in the present, holding onto a different door—the worker’s entrance to Bridgeport Tool and Die. The image of the stateroom door hovered before him, growing less distinct between the shutter-clicks of his eyes. The wind howled.

  Right before the memory evaporated, he again saw the dark shape and heard the scrape of nails digging into the wood. Someone else had been holding onto the stateroom door.

  * * *

  He’d landed a decent job as a machinist, thanks to the man who owned the hardware store and rented him the upstairs room.

  The smell of the gear grease and the heat from the metal drill nauseated him. Everything, in some way, reeked of that night, now nearly thirteen years gone. Sweat flowed as it normally did, and his flesh crawled. It was the Atlantic, soaked deep into his soul and now leaching out of his pores.

  During work breaks he sipped water. His stomach knotted, and his gorge threatened to rise. How much of the murderous ocean had he swallowed that night? Enough to gag on, so many seasons later. Enough to drown.

  Only he hadn’t drowned, Palmveist’s inner voice reminded.

  Water was no substitute for ale, and the memory of a stout, cold drink worsened the ache in his gut. Industrial ethyl alcohol lurked somewhere under the same roof, but the federal government of his adopted land had poisoned all of it to prevent bootleggers from defying the Eighteenth Amendment, curse those pure Protestants and the Anti-Saloon League. The temptation to drink even a finger of the stuff was great. Plenty—thousands, in fact—in nearby New York City had and they’d paid with their lives. Legalized murder, according to the growing throng of voices calling for repeal.

  A drink. A night on the town with a fine lady. Anything to feel whole again.

  He worked, sweated and did his best to ignore the sensation of being watched.

  * * *

  Other hands, clawing for purchase on the stateroom door.

  Palmveist sat on the edge of the mattress. His dressing gown hugged his skin with an awkward, damp fit, like the clothes he’d worn on his leap into the ocean. Bare feet absorbed the chill radiating up from the wooden floor. The lone candle on the nightstand launched flickers off the mirror and the porcelain sink. He fell into the whirls and concentric ripples of his imagination. Holding onto the door, drowning—dying. The screams, the jagged wind tearing above the water and his heart pounding in counterpoint. It was difficult to see clearly given the dark and bitter cold, the latter attempting to freeze his eyes shut.

  “Hold on,” he said to the owner of those other hands holding the stateroom door, first in Swedish and then in English, his second tongue.

  Only when Palmveist blinked away enough ice to see clearly, that other soul was gone, lost to the ocean’s hunger.

  The cold worked its way up from the floor and into his soles, radiated into his blood, deeper. He forgot how to breathe because he was there again, alone and clinging to the stateroom door. The other man had let go and surrendered. But he wouldn’t—he didn’t want to die. A new and prosperous life waited somewhere ahead in the distance, but it was still so far away as to be completely out of sight, almost beyond his ability to believe. On this deadly, dark night, the unfeeling stars over his head seemed closer.

  Let go, too, a voice whispered. Less pain this way.

  Palmveist turned to his left. No one was there. The voice originated in his head, he reasoned. Or from the dark brine of the Atlantic, whose appetite for human suffering wasn’t yet satisfied. Then to the right, where movement formed in the terrifying seascape, one degree darker than the surrounding night.

  A splash of water. Frantic words followed, though at first Palmveist wasn’t sure if they were real or in his imagination.

  “Hurry—or we risk being dragged down with it!”

  It—the Titanic—had already sunk. A lifeboat passed close by, maybe one of the last, and as such, Palmveist’s last chance. The same voice that had told him to let go of the door and drown now attempted to coax him to hold on. He willed his fingers to detach. The ocean lapped him up, but instead of sinking, he was buoyed by the two life jackets still tied to his waist. He paddled, cut water, kicked. The door, which he’d mistaken for a coffin, drifted away. He was back in the drink.

  In the present, a shudder teased the nape of Palmveist’s neck. He fought it, failed. The chill spilled down his spine, blurring the details of the rented room above the hardware store in Connecticut. It struck him that he was only half there, aware of the lamb stew from dinner sitting lumpy in his stomach and the wan glow from the streetlamps, which gilded the window frame. The other half had reached the lifeboat.

  Alive—he so desperately wanted to live. To begin the new life that had led him from Sweden, and all he knew as familiar, to a place called Yonkers, where his older brother and his wife waited. Yonkers. What a strange and mystical-sounding place, promising new opportunities and adventures. First, he had to survive the night.

  The lifeboat towered above him, as big as Titanic in his growing panic.

  “Help me,” he cried out in English.

  “No!” a woman answered.

  He reached up for a hold. The lifeboat renounced its gargantuan mass.

  “No, we’ll capsize!” she shrieked.

  A sharp pain raced up his arm, delivered by the nearest oar. Palmveist slid back into the water. He tried again. The next strike nailed him across his right collarbone.

  “Please,” he pleaded to the dark figures huddled above him. “I don’t want to drown!”

  A small, scared face peered over the edge of the lifeboat. A young girl, he realized. She was wrapped in a shawl. The waif opened the shawl and lowered it toward him.

  “Here,” she said, and nothing more.

  He wound the cloth under his injured shoulder. He was aware of movement—the lifeboat’s or the ocean’s, he couldn’t tell. A numbing fog engulfed him.

  The rescue ship drew near, and the hands of strangers hauled him from the water. He later learned the young girl who’d offered the lifeline to which he’d clung had died from exposure.

  * * *

  His time in Yonkers hadn’t been long or particularly pleasant. Palmveist and his brother’s wife, Hannah, were incompatible beneath the same roof. And there was the matter of the violent nightmares that plagued him, the proximity of Yonkers to the water.

  He moved to Connecticut, first to New London, but the ocean drove him steadily inland, to Little Dodd and the rented room above the hardware store.

  Palmveist blew out the candle and curled his body beneath the covers. He craved a drink, something that would ignite on its way down the throat and warm the insides. But of course, such a luxury here was almost impossible. He often dreamed about returning home to his true home, Sweden. That land, however, was far away, reachable only by crossing the Atlantic. He was stuck with the choices he’d made. Cursed by them.

  The permanent chill in his marrow—his soul—made getting warm impossible. His breaths came with increasing difficulty as the weight of memory pressed down on his chest. The room drifted on imaginary waves of darkness and icy ocean water. He thought that at any moment death would pull him under. He was drowning again; maybe he had been for thirteen years. The stink of the Atlantic ignited on his next shallow sip of air.

  And then he was sure that another presence had invaded the room. His eyes shot open. He sat up, gasping for breath.

  “Who’s there?” he sputtered. “Tell me, who goes there?”

  Nobody answered.

  * * *

  Palmveist was not an unattractive man, but the events of his adult life had heaped decades onto the lines around his eyes and mouth. Without regular contact from the little family he had in America, and no true friends outside his connections at work, he was for the most part alone. He convinced himself the loneliness was to blame. The ghost haunting his life wasn’t born of the supernatural but instead the natural world, in which circumstance had isolated him, an apparition taking form from an absence of human company and comfort.