Adrift

by Jazzaman

Rose

The insides of the ship were just as Rose Stem had expected. It was the usual dull, cream-white walls that were for most part, hidden behind groups piping. Her hooves plodded loudly on the rubberized coating on the floor, echoing in the small space.

Every twenty feet or so a fluorescent lighting fixture protruded from the ceiling, the flexible wire housing spanning between. Of course, they weren’t any use, as the ship didn’t appear to be under any form of power, leaving the narrow hallways of the superstructure in solid darkness. The only source of light was from Roses flashlight, which she held in her mouth as she made her way down the hall, the white beam slicing into the darkness and casting long shadows over the pipework.

The Everfree groaned ominously around her as she cautiously progressed down the dark hallway. Each hoofstep earned a low moan from the floor panels that didn’t seem to like her weight.

As she walked, she shone her flashlight into any room with the door ajar, not bothering with the ones closed. This seemed to be a crew quarters, and the periodically placed doorways were crew bunkrooms. Scattered possessions and furniture in a few of the rooms set her a little on edge. It almost looked as if there had been means of a struggle. Bed sheets lay unmade, chairs upturned, belongings scattered over the floor.

“I don’t think there’s anypony here,” she murmured quietly to herself around the flashlight. “I don’t think there’s been anypony here for a while.”

While Rose considered herself more of a happy-go-lucky pony, the pitch-black hallways and eerie ambience from within the ship managed to quell her normally-cheery demeanor.

She continued on for a few more minutes, struggling to locate the engine room. Down, her greatest hint was to go down. However nothing made any sense. All of the signs that normally directed to different part of the ship seemed to be totally inaccurate. Rose found herself questioning her own direction when she mounted a flight of stairs, and stumbled across a room containing a massive bilge pump. If all of her years of nautical engineering experience had taught her anything, it was that the machines to pump water from the ship were usually mounted much lower in the decks. She left the room, still unsure of anything, and didn’t stumble across it again.

She felt like a pony in a cartoon, with some masked villain creeping around ahead of her and turning the big arrows upside down.

In the darkness, the only sounds she could hear was noise of the ship and the unsteady echo of hoofsteps on the steel grating. Rose stopped dead in her tracks and the hair along her spine prickled. Hoofsteps rung out behind her, like an echo, but she wasn’t moving anymore...

Slowly, she craned her head back to face... a dark hallway, the same as it had been since she entered it.

She forced herself calm and assured herself it had only been an echo, then turned back to face the way she had been going and continued on with her task of locating the engine room.

“Honestly,” she grumbled. “It’s a giant ship. The engine room can’t be that hard to find.”

She didn’t get far before a brutal stench hit her nostrils. She could only compare it a precious experience of hers, in which a rat had been trapped in heat exhaust... the smell of burnt flesh. A warm breeze gusted against the nape of her neck, fluttering her mane and intensifying the putrid smell, accompanied by a raspy, scratchy, grating noise.

She froze, afraid to move. There was another gust from behind, and another... and another.

Breathing.

Rose screamed and broke into a gallop, kicking her previous notion of caution in the head. Something was behind her. The second pair of hoofsteps she had heard before found its way to her ears, only this time it was louder, more insistent.

It was running.

Rose dared not turn back, let alone confront whatever was behind her. The sound of her galloping hoofsteps drowned out the ones of her purser. She rounded corners, blasted through open doors in a desperate attempt to escape whatever it was she was supposed to be running from.

She thundered around a corner and into a very degraded hallway. There must have been a pipe leak at one point in time, because the floor and walls were almost red with rust. Her hooves came down on a weak floor panel, and her right leg busted through the weakened floor, disappearing to the knee. With a sudden loss of balance, she flailed for a second, then fell over on her side.

Breathing heavily, Rose quickly righted herself and pulled her hoof free. She stared back the way she had come... There was nothing. No pony, no beast, no monster, no breathing thing; Just a quiet, dark hallway. Rose breathed in deep, diaphragm shivering from either fear or exertion.

If the creepy appearance of the Everfrees’ exterior had her unsettled before even boarding, now she was absolutely terrified. Her mind tried to convey what had just happened into a logical explanation, and the best it could do was: “Just the ship settling”

“Just the ship settling,” she repeated aloud, as if hearing her voice say it made it true.

She looked back down the hall.

‘ENGINE ROOM’, was painted on the door ahead in large, red letters. Rose was slightly taken aback, and a little annoyed, that a mad dash through the bowels of the ship had taken her to her location, yet level-headed, logical searching had completely failed her.

Her expression changed to one of duty, as she remembered she had a job to do. She grasped the large spoked iron wheel of the door and forced it clockwise. The wheel ground against its rusted fitting with a squeal before the rust broke—giving up, it rotated easily.

The locks inside the door disengaged with a quiet ‘thunk’ and the door swung open with a squeak opening into a large room. This was a hollowed out section on the lower deck of the ship. Unlike the hallways she had scoured before, this room was quite large, the ceiling towering twenty-five feet above. Two engines sat parallel to each other, aligned in the center of the room. They were worn, and definitely old, but appeared in nice and working condition.

A quick once-over with her eyes proved to Rose that the engines and drive system were in working order, and a small grin teased at her features. That was the thing about engines: they never really seemed to break down unless you treated them wrong.

Rose turned her light to the various gauges and valves adorning the walls and control panels near the two monster engines.

She tapped the glass next to a pump system for the fuel tanks and a little bubble of air snaked away and up the pipe. It read fine. “Three quarters still left in the fuel cells,” she mused happily. Her eyes drifted to a yellow button that served as the backup lighting. She pressed it, and two orange-white lights flickered to life on the ceiling.

It was a little bit of a hassle to check the oil, but after a moment, she nodded approvingly. “We’re in ship-shape... mostly.” She shrugged. “Not really... but we’re pretty good.”

She gave both engines a quick checkup, mildly surprised to find that there really wasn’t anything odd with them. After fiddling with the various knobs, levers, switches and valves into their appropriate settings, her hoof founds its way down to the Master Ignition Switch. She pressed it in, and there was a click from the electrical panel on the wall.

She closed her eyes as the glowplugs primed, waiting for the satisfying sound a diesel engine roaring to life. Instead, her ears were assaulted with a high pitched wail. It was a terrible, evil sound. They were foals, screaming, violins played with a rusty saw, screaming from the tandem engines like tortured souls.

Rose dropped to the floor, covering her ears with her hooves. Diesels shouldn’t make that noise, they couldn’t make that noise. Her head felt like it would split in two, her stomach boiling. Rose pushed her ears as flat against her head, mouth open in a silent wail. The screaming didn’t seem to stop; in fact, it seemed to be getting louder, the bloodcurdling, tortured screams stabbing into her mind like hot knives.

A memory of hers tried to dig its way out of her mind, asking for recall, one she had tried so hard to forget, one that had so nearly ruined her life. “No! Shut up!” she screamed, bringing her hoof down forcefully on the emergency stop button. The screams slowly died down as the engines returned to their dormant state.

After a few moments, she regained some of her composure, but shaking violently. The engines’ horrifying screams, or whatever they had been, had brought forward a memory that she had so much difficulty coping with all those years ago. Her mind drifted again, unable to shake the memory. She began to recall that horrible night at the hospital, the night that had changed her life forever.

She was so caught up in her thoughts that she failed to notice the groaning from the fuel line above her head. The rusty bolts sheared from the ceiling with unexplained force as the pipe snapped in two, raining its contents down upon Rose.

except It wasn’t fuel.

Blood spilled from the ruptured pipe, chunks of flesh and bile accompanying it, raining sloping to the floor and over the poor mare below, the smell of rotten flesh quickly replacing the oily smell. Rose got her senses about her fast, and sprang away from the torrent, her scream echoing off the steel walls.

Shreds of flesh and hide had found their way into her mane, blood and bile had stained her coat a sickening shade of crimson yellow. It had gotten in her mane, and snaked its way to her mouth whilst she screamed. Her eyes went wide as her taste buds screamed their protest to her body and she heaved; the second time she emptied her stomach’s contents onto the floor.

Hyperventilating, shaking like rattle, her eyes welled as she struggled to register something. This was all too much.

“Wha?” she stammered, lips failing to form words. “N-no! What is this!?” she yelled to the ceiling. It took her awhile to focus behind the tears, but her eyes eventually found a plaque, mounted on the side of one of the engines.

‘Midnight’

The memory returned, this time stronger and more vivid than ever. She found herself drawn seven years into the past, unable to shake the trance coming over her.

She cried out in pain as she was rushed to hospital, doctors and nurses quickly rushing her through the white, sterile halls. She wasn’t injured or sick, but her reason for being there was just as important—she was in labour.

It was the foal of a stallion, whom she had met at a party in her more adventurous years. She hadn’t believed her doctor when she had gone to him, complaining of feeling ill and having him tell her that there was a tiny pony inside her.

It had taken nine hours, nine hours before it was over, and at the end of it all, she had given birth...

to a stillborn.

It had been a miscarriage, her own child tragically taken from her before she had even seen it. It’s father had never been more than a stud who got lucky, and now with the death of her to-be foal, she couldn’t take it. She slipped into a depression, lasting months. Therapy seemed to help sometimes, but progress was a word hardly used for it.

Rose wanted nothing more that her child... she had even already named her.

“Midnight,” Rose squeaked, her voice barely audible, tears streaming from her eyes. What had remained of her cheery attitude had completely vanished. Only pain and suffering filled her. She stood up and ran as fast as she could and left the way she had come, unsure of where she was heading and not really caring.

It was only after the bulkhead door had mysteriously shut and locked itself behind her, did the two massive, grey, lumps of engines churn to life, the normal rhythmic thumping of a typical diesel engine resonating gently throughout the ship.

Comments

[Iron Sides]

Wow, creepy shit goin on in that vessal. Remind me to never board a dark ship like that without a few men and bright lanterns...

[Jazzaman]

2281275 you and me both brother

[Lee]

remind me just not to board the bitch and nuke it instead

[Boss_Hoss1]

[Paddle Steamer]

2283054 I would just blow it out of the water and call it a day. Did someone ask for 6" High Explosive rain? No? Well too bad, you're getting it anyway!

So is this the future? Because ponies shouldn't have anything but steam engines and oil/gas/magic lamps, not electrical flashlights and diesel engines.

[Railroad Brony]

2281275 I think you forgot to include several assault rifles in that list.