by Chris Pauls
The Agent’s eyes twitched madly as the ship’s bow began to dip into the Atlantic. “Some people most certainly do, Herr Weiss. Some people do. And it will be even more horrific than I dared dream, thanks to you. Imagine the havoc, the power in just a single drop. That’s all it will take to—”
“You took everything from me!” screamed Lou, as she dropped from the hatch at the end of the hallway. The Agent wheeled around, and as he did, a bright white flash burst from Lou’s outstretched hands. The flare gun’s recoil sent the girl reeling backward into the wall as the burning projectile struck the Agent hard in the middle of his chest. The shell bounced to the ground and exploded, blinding Weiss as he rolled away.
The Agent slapped wildly at his burning hair and jacket. He careened into the wall and stumbled recklessly down the hallway. Lou braced herself, reloaded, and fired again. The flare hit the Agent square in the back, knocking him down. He rolled on the floor to douse the flames, then got up and disappeared into the stairwell.
Weiss was trying to blink the sight back to his eyes. “Louise!” he called out. She ran up to him, and he smiled as his hands found her shoulders.
“It’s Lou,” she said.
“Lou,” said Weiss. He could see her smiling at him. “Are you hurt?”
Lou shook her head. Weiss asked anxiously, “Where did Mr. Hargraves run off to?”
“I didn’t see. Too much smoke. But he’s gone now.”
Weiss scooped the girl off her feet, exhilarated despite himself. “Where did you run off to?”
“Doesn’t matter anymore,” Lou responded. “I heard what Mr. Hargraves said and …” She dropped her eyes, a guilty look coming over her face, then threw her arms around him tight. “Now I know what’s what.”
Weiss suddenly understood and returned the embrace. The flare was originally meant for him. “Lou. I’d give my own life if I could bring your mother back. I’m sorry.”
“I know,” she whispered. “But we have to stop Mr. Hargraves.”
“You must get off this boat,” said Weiss. “Leave Hargraves to me.”
“You can’t do it alone,” said the girl. “I’m helping you, and I’d like to see you try and stop me.” She balled her fists.
Weiss laughed despite himself, bending over to pick up flare balls that were rolling very slowly toward the bow of the ship. “Let’s get going, Lou. I don’t know how much longer Titanic has.”
Weiss and Lou took off at a run and up the narrow stairwell the Agent had taken. They stopped short at a jog in the stairs. Ahead, a makeshift gate had been forcibly moved aside and a young officer lay motionless on the steps, his head twisted at an awkward angle.
“Crikey, the monsters must have fought their way up,” said Lou.
“I don’t think so,” said Weiss. He approached the dead man warily. The officer’s eyes remained open with a terrified expression. But except for his ruptured neck and the pool of blood draining from it, he was otherwise uninjured: nothing had feasted on him, nor did he show any signs of infection. The dead man hadn’t been ravaged by a zombie. Weiss knew a different kind of monster had caused the wound.
39
FORWARD STAIRWELL.
MONDAY, APRIL 15, 1912. 12:22 A.M.
Kabul clanked against the captain’s side as he and Andrews raced up step after step, past Deck G, past Deck F, on their way to the bridge. The sound of a woman screaming echoed in the stairwell. The captain cursed loudly and picked up his pace. Andrews followed as closely as he could. Even at sixty-one years of age, Captain Smith wasn’t easy to keep up with.
Finally, they found the source of the screams: Two small children and their mother cowered on a landing, chased into the corner by a hulking zombie. From half a flight down, Smith called out. “Hey, you big ugly lout! Over here!”
The creature grunted at the sound of the captain’s voice and turned. It was Joe Clench, or what was left of him, and he made the most imposing and horrifying zombie Smith and Andrews had seen yet.
Clench roared at the two men and took an awkward step toward them, away from the mother and her children. Not a brow raised in recognition on the behemoth’s face. With plodding steps it descended three stairs. Blackish ooze ran from the corner of the monster’s mouth. The repugnant effluence dribbled down to stain his uniform. The man was gone, but the rotted body lived.
“Run up those stairs as fast as you can,” shouted Smith to the mother. “Get up top and board a lifeboat. We’re abandoning ship.” Without a word, the family ran.
The captain felt a pang of guilt—by sending Clench and the other men off for welding torches, he’d sentenced them to a horrible fate. “I won’t let you suffer any further, Clench,” said Smith, “even if you were a pain in the arse.” The captain tried to draw Kabul, but it didn’t come out cleanly, stopping in the sheath. That was all the time the zombie needed to reach the small landing.
“Run, Captain,” hollered Andrews.
“Never!” growled Smith. Finally, the blade slipped free. A skillful feint to the zombie’s midsection drew its arms down, then Smith swung mightily at Clench’s defenseless neck and buried the blade several inches deep.
But Kabul was no longer up to the task. Weakened earlier by holding back the bakery fan, the blade snapped at the nicked point that caused it to stick in the sheath. Most of Kabul remained lodged in the beast’s vertebrae. Smith was left with little more than the hilt and a pitiful stub of metal in his hand.
The zombie didn’t even react to the sword stuck in its gashed neck. As in life, Joe Clench wasn’t one to let a flesh wound stop a fight. One arm swiped viciously, sending the captain sprawling to the ground. Kabul’s hilt spun away, and the zombie fell on top of Smith, enveloping him in its massive arms. Its clawing and gnashing about the captain’s head was shocking and relentless.
“Hey, Mr. Clench!” yelled Andrews, from two steps below.
The zombie turned at the sound of a living voice. As it did, Andrews leapt and punched with all his might, using the rounded portion of Kabul’s pommel, and struck the zombie dead in the mouth, knocking out its remaining teeth. Andrews kept pummeling its face until Mr. Clench fell away.
Andrews tried to help Smith to safety, but the captain would have none of it. He charged the zombie as it rose, despite the fact that it could no longer see. The force of Andrews’s blows had knocked out the ghoul’s eyes, which now dangled grotesquely from their sockets.
Smith wrenched what was left of Kabul from the zombie’s neck and rammed the broken blade into its ear, all the way up to the knuckles. Clench fell to the ground like a tree. Exhausted, the captain regarded yet another of his former crew members he’d been forced to kill. “Good-bye, Mr. Clench, I’m sorry.” Then he slumped to the floor himself.
As Andrews approached, Smith said firmly, “Don’t touch me.”
Then he looked up, and Andrews was stunned at the many deep gashes and black-colored cuts atop the captain’s head. The captain sagged against the landing wall, his head hung low.
“I am going down with the ship, Andrews,” Captain Smith said. “You are to report to the bridge and convey my order to launch all lifeboats.”
“The men need you, sir,” protested Andrews. “What if the chaos down here also reigns above? You can will yourself to remain in control.”
“My will,” scoffed Smith, “is to not endanger anyone aboard this ship. I can’t be trusted with command any longer.”
“You still possess all your faculties, Captain,” Andrews pleaded. “Perhaps you don’t have a lot of time, but neither does Titanic. This ship needs its leader.” He picked Smith’s cap off the ground. “There are innocent people to save. Be a beacon to them, sir.”
Andrews handed Smith his cap. “This will cover most of the wounds to your scalp. And as the hours pass, if your condition worsens …” Andrews sighed. “The sea awaits.”
Captain Edward Smith donned the cap, stood up, and nodded. “You’re quite right, Thomas. I will fulfill my duties, ‘til t
he end.”
Smith reached out to shake Andrews’s hand, then realizing that was no longer prudent, saluted him instead.
40
MARCONI ROOM.
MONDAY, APRIL 15, 1912. 12:29 A.M.
Radio operator Harold Bride returned from a trip to the wheelhouse, where he had breathlessly reported the news to First Officer Murdoch that a ship, Carpathia, was coming as fast as she could. “Less than four hours away and putting all her steam into it!” The news seemed to brighten the dark mood on the bridge. Bride was determined to find more help.
“Always seems to be a dozen ships around until you really need one,” groused Jack Phillips, tapping away on his wireless with tobacco-stained fingertips. The senior Marconi man knew the ship was compromised, but his faith in the indomitable Titanic was steadfast. After all, other ruptured ships had stayed afloat for days. Still, the peculiar guttural rasp from below made listening for incoming messages more difficult than usual. “I’ve been sending CQD! CQD! for an hour. Maybe we’d have better response if I said we were overcome by pirates.”
CQD was one of the first codes Bride had learned, a distress signal developed for the world’s new wireless system. CQ, Bride knew, basically meant “stop sending all those damn messages and pay attention!” while the D, of course, was for “distress.”
Bride had an idea. “Try the new one, why don’t you? ‘Save Our Souls’ might scare up something.”
“Anything for a change of pace,” agreed Phillips. He started tapping and employed the latest international distress signal for the first time:
S-O-S. S-O-S. S-O-S.
41
BOAT DECK.
MONDAY, APRIL 15, 1912. 12:57 A.M.
Many concerned faces confronted Captain Smith and Andrews as they emerged on the boat deck. Yet to their great relief, they saw that the zombie menace had not yet arrived topside.
Crew members were trying to organize the rattled passengers, many still in their nightclothes, and announcing that the imminent evacuation was strictly for precautionary measures. Meanwhile, desperate signal flares screamed across the night sky, casting otherworldly light over the crowds on the boat deck. Anxiety had not yet become panic, but anyone with a head for arithmetic could see there would not be enough lifeboats for all.
“Andrews,” Captain Smith said, “we need to find Weiss straight away.”
Andrews ran to a nearby cargo crane and climbed up the ladder into darkness, giving him a better vantage point. He surveyed the deck, his head swiveling from right to left until he spotted his target. “I have them,” Andrews shouted down. He pointed to where Lou and Weiss were standing on a bench and scanning the crowd themselves. The captain hurried over to them.
“We’re trying to find Mr. Hargraves,” exclaimed Lou. “He tried to kill Mr. Weiss! He’s the one who stole …”
“The vial with the Toxic,” finished Weiss. “Hargraves is the Kaiser’s agent, he had it all along.” Weiss gritted his teeth. “I’m not going to let him off this ship. He …”
Smith cut him off. “I’m ordering you to make sure no one is allowed on the lifeboats that exhibits any signs of the sickness. It can’t leave this ship … in any form.”
“But—” Weiss began.
“There is no other way off this ship than those lifeboats. You’ll have no better opportunity to find your man and what he stole. I shall persevere to keep order and ensure the safety of those who are allowed to depart.”
Weiss agreed with the plan. It was more practical than any kind of search he could undertake on his own. Rather than seeking out the Kaiser’s man, Weiss would wait for the Agent to show himself.
Lou then asked, “Where’s your sword, sir?”
“Broken. Its time had come,” Smith replied. “Now go and do as I’ve said.”
“Yes, sir,” Lou barked.
Weiss searched the captain’s face, and what the German found made it difficult to say “Yes, sir,” and obey the order. But he did.
First Officer Murdoch had taken charge of seamen working feverishly to lower the odd-numbered lifeboats on Titanic’s starboard side, while Chief Officer Wilde supervised men lowering the even-numbered boats on the port side.
No good spot existed for Weiss to set up a mass inspection, so he did his best: he formed a line on the engineer’s promenade, port side. His job was to send passengers through to the waiting lifeboats, once they were determined clear of infection. Because the passengers’ numbers were so great, Weiss enlisted several junior officers to assist him. He gave them a rough outline of the situation: a serious infection was present on the ship. They needed to detain anyone who was feverish, complained of headaches, or most serious of all, had any dark fluid coming from their nose, mouth, or ears. Weiss refrained from explaining what happened next. Finally, he instructed the officers to be on the lookout for a man with slicked-back hair and a pencil-thin mustache. The man was a murderer who should be arrested.
Walking up and down the passenger line, Wilde and Murdoch made it known that no one would leave Titanic without verification that they were fit for rescue. The passengers, nearly all first- and second-class, submitted to the inspections—for all they knew, it was normal protocol to answer questions about their general health and to have eyes, ears, and mouth inspected by a medical man before abandoning ship.
As the inspections got underway, Lou stood by Weiss, acting as a second set of eyes to search for Hargraves and the Toxic. They’d seen no sign yet of the man Lou had nearly incinerated just an hour before.
The ship’s store of handguns was lost below to the zombie menace. To keep order in any scenario, Chief Officer Charles Lightoller rounded up all weapons he could find for crowd control. Fifth Officer Harold Lowe, a stocky sailor with squinty eyes, revealed a pair of Browning semi-automatics that he’d smuggled aboard. “Thought they might come in handy if I ever ran into trouble,” he admitted sheepishly.
“Trouble it is,” said Lightoller, ignoring the rule violation. “But no shooting. Wave them around and holler a bit if anyone tries to get wise.”
Two Catholic priests wandered among the waiting passengers, offering comfort. Six older men in topcoats gathered around the first stack, smoking pipes and trying to look the part of elders. Lou watched as a tearful father still in his nightclothes bid farewell to his two young sons, touching their chins and transferring responsibility for their mother onto their slight shoulders.
Eventually, a small mob of angry men formed in the inspection line. The largest hollered that they ought not wait any longer. His fellows agreed; they broke out of line and rushed Lifeboat 2, intent on commandeering the craft. Lightoller jumped in after them, brandishing one of the Brownings and threatening to do in any man who didn’t abdicate in favor of women and children. The ploy worked, even though Lightoller’s gun wasn’t loaded.
Weiss was surprised that nearly all of the passengers looked healthy. Perhaps closing the watertight doors had done some good after all. So far, he’d found only two cases of infection, a pair of young, black-haired brothers. Swallowing hard, Weiss had sent them to be quarantined in the officers’ cabins by able seamen. Both children were in the early stages of the illness, with just traces of ooze in their saliva, but each was infected just the same. “We’re going to put you on a better boat very soon,” he told them, offering kindness over honesty. “Invent some games to play while you wait.”
The continued absence of the Agent was making Weiss anxious, and he considered other possibilities: perhaps the Kaiser’s man had commandeered one of the lifeboats and escaped before Titanic’s crew started the evacuation. But surely news of a missing lifeboat would have reached Weiss by now. Maybe the man had his own means of escape—a military craft, perhaps an inflatable. But then what? Such a thing couldn’t traverse the ocean. It would need a ship or submarine rendezvous. While Weiss couldn’t dismiss the notion entirely, it seemed unlikely. The simplest explanation is probably correct, thought Weiss. He’s still on board, and I’m going t
o find him.
Lifeboats had been steadily filled and lowered without incident. Yet a sense of panic was escalating as Titanic’s deck tilted farther toward the water. No rescue ships were appearing on the dark horizon. On one lifeboat, a woman screamed for her husband. Fewer than a dozen lifeboats remained to be loaded, and Weiss would make sure one young lady got aboard. He took Lou by the arm.
“We ain’t found him yet!” cried Lou, realizing what was happening. “And I ain’t leaving until we get ‘im!”
“It’s for your own good, Lou,” Weiss replied, motioning for a nearby able seaman. “Mr. Buley, hold her while I conduct my inspection.”
“Get your mitts off me. You know I got no sickness,” Lou growled, pulling her arms from Buley’s grasp. “No spook ever got his teeth into me and you’re the witness, so you can keep your doctor visit.”
Weiss spoke quietly, so others wouldn’t hear, as he started his exam: “You’ve seen how many have already died on this ship, Lou. More are about to die. Do you know how many of those men standing over there would trade places with you? They’re losing everything. Don’t be a fool.”
“I already lost everything,” said Lou. “Let me help you get Hargraves! He tried to kill me, too, you know!”
“I’m not giving you a choice,” said Weiss, finishing his check, satisfied. He motioned to the able seaman. “Mr. Buley, please escort this young lady to Lifeboat 6.”
“Wait!” cried Lou, pulling away from Buley. “You want me on a lifeboat? Then you come with me.”
Weiss blinked. “You want me to … ?”
“You could find your cure in Iowa, even without that vial. I know you could,” Lou pleaded, touching the tattered cuff of Weiss’s shirt. “I’ll be your assistant. I’m going to be a scientist, you know. And you could stay with us. I’m sure Uncle George would let you …”