The Fallen Mason

The prisoner gasped in horror into the face of the corpse that was thrown on top of him. The guard's neck was ripped open in a damp crimson curve resembling a smile. He pushed the lifeless guard's body off of him as the pilot's shots rang out in the cabin. He leapt to his feet and fell over the pilot's back. He wrapped the left arm around the pilot's eyes and jerked his pistol hand upwards at the wrist. He felt the swift current of air as a blade slashed across the pilot's neck. The victim fell through his grip to collapse on the floor.

He was gathering his breath to thank his rescuer. But the words turned to ice in his throat. His savior was in fact the man with the skeletal frame and sunken chest who had died in his arms! He was clutching a crudely sharpened bar of steel caked in layers of dried and fresh blood so tightly that the wielder's own fingers were oozing scarlet in thin lines to the floor. The prisoner somehow remembered that there should be droplets from those wounds...only corpses empty of fluid in that way!

The blood-soaked hand lifted upwards, past the torso wrapped in darkly drenched rags scorched with bullet holes to the owner's face. The velvet mask he wore was ripped away...along with the flesh beneath, exposing muscle and bone. Lidless eyes stared back at him maniacally as he raised the blade over his head, and snapped the arm downwards, hurtling the weapon towards him!

By the time he opened his eyes from flinching, he could hear the gurgling of the copilot behind him as he fell. He didn't look back at him. He wouldn't dare break his gaze from the walking corpse that shambled over the pilot to stare him down with unblinkable eyes and mauled countenance. "We shared a kill", it croaked with a voice that should never have stirred again. "I'll let you live. For as long as it matters."

The prisoner trembled as the murderer lurched past him towards the same exit that he had almost been expelled from an hour before. With an impossible reserve of strength for a broken body, he kicked the door open, ripping it free from the locks and snapping the chains to winch it back into place. He turned to the prisoner and pointed towards him with a smirk as the hot, damp wind again shook its way through the cabin.

"When you see the Boatman, tell him Jack sent you!" And with that, the figure stepped out onto the stairs without an ounce of trepidation, as he if the ship were already moored on solid ground. The winds carried him away before the prisoner could blink.

The prisoner took a moment to swallow his terror. It was then he realized that the airship was in a steep dive, and no one was left alive in the room who understood the controls.