POPCORN

by Victor Gischler

  Even with the laughter bouncing off the walls, he had to ask? “Nothing. Told him a joke. Can’t you tell?”

  “You don’t understand, son. There’s a lot more going on here than you think.”

  “Captain, two of our cooks have gone missing, and you dismissed them both. There’s no way those men could have gotten off the Victor. It’s impossible.”

  He shrugged. “So where are they, then? You can’t blame a man without evidence, can you? All the evidence I have tells me that if they’re not here, then they’re not on board. Doesn’t that make sense to you, son?”

  One of the other boys raised his hand like he was still in school. Looked like he should still be. “Sir?”

  The Captain nodded at him.

  “Couldn’t Revel have… eaten them? Isn’t that what he does?”

  The Captain let his head hang low again. “Don’t be silly. He couldn’t eat the bones. None of you could eat the bones. Did you find bones? Big ones? Skulls?”

  The boys looked around, all a little gape-mouthed and squinchy. High shoulders and itchy scalps. And when they were done doing that, they started looking at me. Surely Sticks had an answer, right? He wouldn’t be trying to take over for more…sinister reasons, would he?

  Would I?

  I wagged my finger at the Captain. “If you want to be Captain, Captain, okay. I can accept that. But the next man who goes missing—”

  “Deserts.”

  “GOES MISSING, I said, the next one, we’ll have to do this all over again.”

  He reached out his hand, held it hanging in the air. He wanted to shake on it. I couldn’t believe it. If I had taken over, if I had really been the captain, I wouldn’t have let my mutinous ass get away with what I’d just done. I’d’ve locked myself alongside the madman in the back, I would’ve.

  But not this Captain, the bleeding heart who thought we were all his sons, though he didn’t have the spine of a father.

  So what could I do? I shook his hand and we parted ways, my section guys now looking at me with the same suspicion they had for Revel.

  And, you see it coming, don’t you, son? The next man to go missing? The Captain.

  VII

  Revel was right, too. We found the two missing cooks in a place they couldn’t be. What I mean by that is that we had looked all over the ship for either missing men or missing bodies. We looked only in places where one might be able to fit as a full-grown man.

  No one had even thought to look in places where a full-grown man could not fit, like in the cooler, in the deep pans used to store the meat.

  Once we’d run out of meat, the cook had shoved the empties to the back of the cooler and we’d forgotten about them… until the third cook got lathered up over the smell and went poking around.

  Funny thing, the men had been butchered so perfectly, all the excess blood washed away, that at first he didn’t realize that these were the parts of his fellow cooks.

  It wasn’t until he saw the hands and feet, tucked under the more appealing roasts and steaks.

  Ain’t no animal got hands and feet like a human one. So he was squealing like a madman before even finding the skulls, already skinned, with the faces right beside them in a heap.

  When I told this kid Ensign Spot Face (we weren’t that creative) to find the Captain and bring him down to the cooler, well, nowhere to be found.

  “And you’ve looked everywhere? Even the impossible places?”

  He looked down, around, blinking. “Well, not back there with Revel. I’m not going back there.”

  “You had orders!”

  “You can’t order me to die! You can’t do that!”

  I grabbed him behind the neck and pulled him close, growled in his ear, “That’s the whole point of this war, kid, ordering people to die.”

  Tossed him back and took the lead, dragging these asses behind me, just as Revel opened up his lungs and screamed, and then yelled my name—“Sticks, you bastard! You goddamned fuggin’ bastard! Sticks! Jimmy Sticks!”

  So loud that it started my ears ringing. So loud I was sure the Nip u-boats on the lookout for us would zero right in after this.

  But I squeezed my way past seamen with gritted teeth and their hands over their ears, a whole trail of momma’s boys behind me, until we reached Ravel’s prison and swung the door open.

  He was straining at his chains, and it looked to me as if several links were near their breaking point. His face was madness, boiling red, crazy eyes. “Sticks! Why would you do this to me? How could you do this?”

  The sounds behind me: men gagging, up-chucking, a chain reaction of it.

  It was only then that I saw what they had seen: the captain, what was left of him, strung in bit and pieces and large flaps of flesh all over that room.

  His head had been removed from his body and impaled on a valve that was eye-level with Revel.

  Limbs and organs were tied off by the ropes in his guts, decorating the room like American downtown Christmas pretties. The heart, the liver, his legs, and even his wang and nuts.

  The poor, poor bastard.

  I turned to Revel, still straining and breathing heavy.

  “How did you do it? How did you do all this while chained up?”

  He laughed, but it was wheezy. “You ask me that? You know what happened! Why don’t you tell them? Tell all of them now! What do you have in store for the rest of them, Captain? You are the Captain now, aren’t you?”

  I pulled the door closed while he kept babbling. I turned and stepped carefully across the puke-slicked floor, looked up at the boys’ puke-slicked faces, some of them still gagging.

  They looked at me exactly the way I would’ve looked at me at that moment—full of suspicion, but with no one else to trust.

  I held my shoulders high and back and hope I struck a MacArthur pose, minus the pipe. “Everyone to the control room. Five minutes. Let’s put an end to this.”

  They scrambled. So, there it was. I don’t know how it happened, but I went from non-descript Ensign, just one of the crew, to Captain just like that. Not even a peep from the XO.

  Fine with him if I was the one in charge of the Murder Boat. No one would blame a damned thing on him, and he would go on to helm his own boat, far from whatever Hell we’d sunk into out here.

  That is, if he had lived. But he was dead before those five minutes were up. I found the XO in the control room, hanging. But this was no suicide.

  The rope above was striped red, and one look at the man’s bloody fingertips told the story. He had tried to survive. He failed. As much as war hero as any of the rest of us, then.

  I left him there. As the men trickled in, I didn’t order anyone to take him down. I wanted them to see what this was all about. I didn’t want them sneaking off later, looking for a few minutes of privacy.

  I didn’t want them biting their lips in a dark corner, slapping themselves happy. I wanted them here, right where I could see them. Where no one could take them, including the killer himself if it wasn’t Revel.

  I mean, goddamnit, he might have been some sort of super soldier, but he couldn’t escape chains, could he? He wasn’t magic.

  The men from all sections crowded in, saw the dead XO, and gasped, cried out, cursed, or took it in stride.

  When a couple took it on themselves to attempt cutting him down, I told them, “You haven’t been ordered to do that. Leave him be.”

  Once I had the whole crew there, standing room only and no space between them, I said, “We’re going to stay in this room, all of us together, until we reach Hawaii. We will sleep here, eat here, drink here, shit here, and piss here. But whoever is doing this will not get a free pass to slice us up like he did the Captain.”

  Someone in the back shouted, “The Cannibal says you did it!”

  Grumble grumble grumble.

  “The fuck do you expect a cannibal to say? I tell you this—before he came on board, none of us were dead. Now four of us are! What’s the only thing that has c
hanged? That rat bastard coming along for the ride.”

  More grumbling, this time in my favor.

  Another shout: “what about Revel? Are you bringing him in here, too?”

  “No, no, for God’s sakes, no. He will remain where he is, and we’ll add even more chains to hold him. We’ll keep a guard outside the door, and we’ll switch off every hour. In fact, I’ll take the first hour myself.”

  Another wave of grumbling, until Horsecock said, “If we have to be here, then you have to be here. No point in losing another Captain.”

  That was that. Nearly all of them volunteered for the first hour, and I ended up sending a kid from Arizona I’d only ever seen once, the day we all boarded. I didn’t even know his name. Hell, I didn’t even know his nickname. He went willingly, a sidearm and a knife in his hands. And all of the men watched as he made his way through the crowd, out of the room, and they listened to his footsteps clanking along.

  “Alright,” I said. “Full speed ahead. I don’t care who hears us. We don’t have time to spare.”

  VIII

  I promoted Villeponteaux to XO, and I told Horsecock he was the top security man on the boat. I just hoped neither of them was our killer. But didn’t it have to be Ravel? It was the only answer that made sense.

  The chains thing… well if it wasn’t real magic, it was some sort of Houdini trick to throw off the scent. And blaming me, trying to get us turned against each other, all part of his plan.

  The three of us huddled together at the periscope, whispering harshly to be heard above the snoring and the chattering teeth. They were a solid mass, sleeping standing up, bracing each other, swaying back and forth.

  “We kill him,” Horsecock said. “We kill him and get him off this boat and tell the brass he went nuts. There’s no other way.”

  I shook my head. “If it comes down to him or us, they’ll want him. He’s a goddamned hero. We’re, what, flotsam? Just a whole lot of flotsam is all we are to the Navy.”

  Villeponteaux gave me a cross look. “I don’t know what that is.”

  “It’s what we are, though.”

  “But what is it?”

  “It’s trash.” Horsecock clipped Villeponteaux on the shoulder. “Now on with it. You want to kill him, too, don’t you?”

  “I don’t want to die, that’s for sure. But I don’t want to die in front of a firing squad neither.”

  “How can they do that to us? Look at the captain! Look at the cooks! We’d be crazy not to!” His voice got a bit loud, brought on moans from the boys. I shushed him and them both and said, “Listen to me. We can’t kill him, and we can’t let him kill us. It’s a stalemate. It might not be a comfortable ride back, but—”

  Then the ghost of a sorry bastard from Pearl Harbor, his face on fire, appeared next to us, screaming. We all jumped back, and we all had wet pants. The moaning from the boys grew louder.

  The ghost screeched, “HELP ME MOMMY HELP ME MOMMY MY MOMMY WHERE IS MY MOMMY WHY MOMMY WHY MOMMY I’M IN HELL YOU BITCH!”

  And then he exploded. Disappeared.

  No one wanted to sleep after that. The next sailor up for watch went to relieve Arizona from guard duty. I grabbed hold of the periscope and held steady. Too groggy to be any use as a leader.

  But there weren’t many other options. I was the middle ground between killing the weirdo and curling into the fetal position. Someone had to keep the fuck calm, right? You’re doing a good job of it now, aren’t you? This is a tough circumstance I’ve put you in and you’re holding your own like a stand-up sonofabitch.

  But we’ll talk about your soul later, champ.

  We had hoped the sound wouldn’t come, but it did. Just as the relief guard’s bootsteps had faded down the passageway, they started back, faster and louder, and we knew. We all turned out heads to the door and waited until the kid showed up, bawling, his arms soaked to the elbows in red.

  “He was like my brother! More than my brother! So much more! And now! Now!”

  I took in a deep breath and pushed him aside and started back along the passage myself, the echo of my own boots reminding me I was alone out here. Just me and Ravel, and the remains of Arizona.

  He had sunk into the corner. I would say he was wide-eyed except that he didn’t have eyes anymore. He didn’t have much, since I could see right through what used to be his chest, all the way to the bulkhead. And the blood, yes, the blood, it was fresh and thick and all over.

  It was still oozing down walls. It made me think for a moment that the poor sailor with the bloody arms back there had done it himself. But no, not in that amount of time.

  This would’ve required hours, keeping Arizona alive until the last possible seconds and yet somehow keeping him from screaming. A drug, maybe.

  Or maybe the bastard went right after his voicebox. A good punch or snip and there you have it. Quiet torture.

  You’re right. How did I know anything about a voicebox? I was a punk kid who thought we were all built by some angry God who had fun kicking us around, and I thought talking was magic. So this is all in hindsight.

  I don’t know how that kid kept quiet. I don’t know if he was awake when he was cored like some sort of apple. I just know what I saw and what I kept seeing and what I’m still seeing now.

  I couldn’t look away. I stared through that hole as if it would show me a secret. The kid back in the control room was still wailing on and on.

  I heard another ghost join in with him and then explode. Soon it was quiet. Not even Ravel was laughing anymore. Not even Ravel.

  I stepped over to the door and pulled it open. The smell hit me first, the rotting meat of the captain, the congealed blood and bile. Didn’t bother me like I thought it would, though.

  I walked in and turned to Revel. He wasn’t there. The chains were gone. Revel was gone. The Captain’s head stared at me.

  I heard him speaking inside my head: Son, I tried to warn you. I really tried. But now you’re the one. You have to figure this out.

  I poke back to him with real words out of my real mouth. “You did it, didn’t you? You let him go. Both of you were in this together from the start. From before we even left the dock.”

  That’s a funny one. Real good, son. I’m glad you’ve been able to keep your sense of humor. That was the first thing of mine to go.

  “Where is he? Tell me. Tell me, by God, or I’ll shove your pieces into a torpedo tube and let the fish have a feast.”

  Son, do what you have to do. Might take a while, and you won’t be doing those boys a favor, but it’s not about them anyway. It’s about you. So carry on. Do what you have to do.

  And I’ll be damned if he didn’t blink at me.

  IX

  No, no, I didn’t shoot his head out of the tube like a cannonball or anything of the sort.

  I left him be, sprawled all over the empty room, putrefying and sermonizing. Telling me to do what I have to do. Right. When he couldn’t even do what he had to do, now look at him. A sad sorry state.

  I wasn’t worried about Revel right then. Odds were he would hold off on his blood lust until we were fast asleep again, so I needed a way to confound him.

  I could put the boys back into sections so one-third would be able to watch the rest as they slept, rotate every four hours.

  But what if one of those one-third happened to be the one who helped Revel get free? What if that’s how he’s done his magic all along—he had help!

  Each of us could lead a section—me, Villeponteaux, and Horsecock. The other two could sleep while one was one. But me, I didn’t need sleep. I thought about it. I hadn’t slept in six days. I didn’t feel the least bit tired or muddled.

  I was more clear than ever. Of course I should be the Captain, right? Look at that! I was the ultimate sailor. I’d get them all home. I’d do it and still have time to sail right up onto the Japanese coast and beat the emperor silly.

  Then the ship shuddered like it was coming apart.

  I ran back to the cont
rol room. “The fuck?”

  Everyone at stations, with the others standing around, holding tight. Someone shouted, “Sir, they got us! Torpedoed!”

  The shudder kept on, rolling and rolling. The boat was rolling. We were going upside down. The steel moaned and squealed and pipes burst and men with nothing to hold onto tumbled over and banged against valves and jagged steel and each other.

  My fingertips were barely hold of the periscope handles, slipping, slipping, when the boat began to stabilize and right itself, all of the lights going dark as the men fell to the floor again.

  I heard bones crack. Screams like you wouldn’t believe. Bawling. The shuddering faded away and all we had was the dark, the hissing of water through cracked pipes, and the chorus of men turned babies, all “Momma, momma, momma” again.

  I tell you, if I never had to hear anyone call for their mothers again, it would be too soon. And that includes you, boy.

  I blinked and blinked, but the darkness didn’t lighten and the ship felt like it might roll again, but then settled.

  A few lights flickered back to life, not nearly enough, but at least I could make out the shapes of the boys and the controls and the leaks.

  “The fucking trim! You,” I snapped my fingers at one of the kids. “Seaman, get over there and fix this!”

  He got to work, and then some of his colleagues pushed themselves out of the pooling water and did the same, manning their stations and keeping busy. It was no torpedo, I was damn near sure of that. For a moment, I wondered if we would end up like the Nautilus, a plaything for a sea monster.

  “Sir?” A seaman raised his hand like he was in school. “I….don’t…I really…sir, I have no idea where we are.”

  “Figure it out. Find the bearings. Turn us towards home.”

  “No, really, I’ve got nothing. The compass…”

  I made my way across the wounded and weak, stepping on legs and arms and faces in the semi-dark, squeezing past other boys just trying to get the boat working again, to the gyro compass. I expected it to be spinning wildly. I expected it to be broken.