by catt dahman
Lowe promptly apologized and said the man was worth ten of the crewmen from Titanic.
Almost every survivor cited some heroic action of another.
Men and women stepped up and showed the best of humanity.
Chapter Eight: Titanic is Lost
Those crushed beneath the heavy funnel made the water run red with their blood; it was as gruesome sight as one could imagine.
As men fell in the water, they spied the two boats that finally slipped free and swam to them. Some made it, and others did not. Those injured or exhausted held on to the sides of the boats, but within ten or fifteen minutes, they slipped away as they froze or had heart attacks.
There was a huge roar of machinery shifting to the bow, and maybe the monsters bellowed their anger. The lights went out. The ship, with a mighty groan, split into two parts, and the bow, with all the machinery stuffed into it, plunged to the bottom of the sea.
Everyone on the end sank into the sea. The stern floated there on the water, just half a ship, but it filled up quickly. Those on it, and there were hundreds, realized in those precious seconds, the stern would fill since it was twisted away and also it would slip into the water. Some jumped off, preferring the cold water to falling from a great height.
The open end tilted toward the sea little by little until it, too, was almost straight up in the water. Men, women, and deck furnishings slid across the decks and into the water. Some held on to the railing that was several hundred feet in the air. All fell screaming. A few held on until the stern dropped into the icy sea.
There once had been a massive ship over eight hundred feet, floating majestically on the water, all lit up and furnished with the most expensive décor and carried an expensive cargo. Now several hundred bodies floated on the surface of the water in the darkness, and the Titanic was settling into a watery grave over twelve thousand feet deep.
For many, it was like watching a beautiful dream end. But a nightmare was beginning.
Chapter Nine: Boat Seven
At first, there were hundreds of voices calling for help. Those going into the water felt a sudden shock; then, they began to shudder and lose control as their extremities froze. However, if they had no life belt, they could no longer tread water and would drown, but there were no more than a handful without life belts.
Besides drowning, there were other ways the passengers died. Most froze to death after ten or fifteen minutes in the cold water; they suffered acute stabbing pain until they died.
A few died of heart attacks from the shock or fear. Many had broken legs, arms, ribs, and even broken necks, but it depended on where they were when they fell into the water. If they were holding onto the stern’s railing, they fell two hundred feet, and their bones snapped like twigs.
Some of the passengers had been killed by the first funnel that fell, yet the other three funnels crushed many, either killing them or injuring them severely. A few dead bodies floated among the living, bobbing in the ice water.
Crewman Hogg told the passengers they would look for survivors in the water. He and the other men pulled hard on the oars, ignoring those who protested going back towards the wreckage. Bits of furniture, deck chairs, linens, and every sort of rubbish imaginable floated about the lifeboat.
“They will swamp us,” Maggie Darby said. Her husband was the injured Lewis Darby who had been attacked by the fish below decks. “And we have to row to the rescue ship for Lewis.” She cried incessantly as she watched the water; their small lamp only lit a little of the area, but it was horrific to view.
Hogg was confused, “Do you see a rescue ship?”
A woman, floating in the water, raised her head, her frozen hair almost a solid piece; she reached blue fingers towards the boat. Her moaning was deep and constant as she suffered. Her eyes were frozen in an open stare. Her lips and tongue were already unmovable from the cold. Her pale pink gown of silk was brittle.
“I agree. We cannot go back,” Caroline Prescott protested. “What is wrong with them?”
“The water is just below freezing, Ma’am. What is wrong with them is that they are dying. Salt water can get below freezing and still be water instead of ice.”
To their port side, a man floated on his back with his arms twisted backwards, broken along the joints and down the bones, so his arms moved like being boneless, like a loose tentacle. A terrible gash was opened on his forehead, but the blood did not run; it was frozen. The more disheartening issue was that he was groaning and whining as he died. Fifteen minutes in the water was a lifetime of hell for him.
Clinging to a deck chair was a woman, her fingers like blue claws. She was as stiff and inflexible as the ice itself. Her face was a mask of pain and fear. Several were on deck chairs or tables, freezing into statues.
Hogg and Jewell continued to row back amid the bodies.
“Help me,” a man called out.
“We have about got you.” Hogg and the other men pulled him aboard, stripped away his sodden clothing, and dressed him in rugs, or blankets and whatever they could find. He could not stand or unbend his near-frozen body. He shivered and shook uncontrollably while his eyes rolled with the pain. Hogg wondered if he would survive; he most surely would lose appendages and flesh to frostbite.
Hogg reached for another man, and he and the other men lifted him, but dropped him with shocked yelps, wiping their hands against their chests in revulsion; he was bobbing along with his lower half mangled and the other part gone. Three more were that way as well. It made them anxious to reach for anyone who was not moving and making sounds.
“What happened to them?” one of the women asked. She was so afraid that she would have climbed onto the floor of the boat had there not been a slight bit of water there.
“Big fish,” Lewis muttered, “little fish. They are all here. If you wait a bit, they shall come and gobble us up.” He had not spoken before, but only wept with pain as a sort of poison filled his leg where he was bitten. The injury hurt as if someone were stabbing at his raw flesh, and it burned and throbbed. He thought the poison was inching up his leg. Lewis ran a high fever.
His wife tried to sooth him. She did not know what was wrong with his leg except it was bleeding frightfully and it happened below decks. If he had not been injured, however, he would have been left behind to drown. “It’s the ague. Rest now.”
“Did you not see my leg? The fish tried to eat me,” Lewis moaned. His brow was feverishly pink.
Weller, an Able Seaman, shook his head, “’Tis no big nor small fish that done this. It is just from the crash to the sea.”
“’Ello?”
“There. Row,” Weller said, “we’ve a live one.”
They pulled a man and a woman from the cold water. They were like two frosty, clothed statues, marble of white and blue. They were both stewards.
When they pulled another from the sea, he was snatched from their hands amid a spray of bright red blood.
Hogg screamed, falling back into the boat and still holding a bluish-colored hand and shoulder, but the rest of the man was gone. Erick Digby leaped to his feet in fear, and the waves from something large rocked the boat so that he fell overboard into the sea.
“Swim, Man,” Hogg called. He tossed the hand and arm into the water.
The megaladon had turned and surfaced now so they could see his back, fins, tail, and the enormous mouth full of teeth. As he swam towards them, he scooped bodies from the water and swallowed them whole, like a whale eating krill.
Everyone screamed.
With the shark having a mouth that large, the boat could fit length-wise. He could swallow the boat in one knock back, but he seemed disinclined to eat the wood of the lifeboat and instead, it ingested the people who were freezing in the water.
Erik Digby howled with the pain from the water, held out one hand helplessly, and waited to be saved, but the survivors in the boat were so frightened, they did not row toward him but sat, holding the oars as weapons.
Their hea
ds swung back and forth, watching the water. The mighty shark snapped up Erik Digby by his middle so the man was able to scream a good long while as the shark carried him along, impaled on a giant tooth.
One of the women fainted.
“DIgby, Digby….” Hogg called softly.
“Do something,” Caroline Prescott demanded.
“Why, I don’na rightly know what to do,” Weller said, his eyes large with fear. His accent grew more pronounced with emotion. “Help me get this man out of the water, yes?”
They pulled another from the water who was not only alive, but also squealing with terror as he watched the giant fish. He kicked madly to help himself into the boat.
The shark came around again, brushing against the bow and scratching the paint from starboard side; the passengers shifted.
“Be still,” Hogg warned, but they did not listen to his advice. The Prescott family bunched up at the back, pushing against Maggie Darby and her injured husband. A woman adjusted the girl, Bernice, who had lost her arm in some accident. “Sit down and come afore.”
“Do something,” someone screamed again.
“Stop bunching up. Come afore. Hurry,” Hogg said.
With his big snout, the shark brushed the bow again, teasing his prey.
Those aft fell out of the boat. Those who remained in the boat were splashed as many fell in. They were shocked at how the water felt like fire upon their skin. The droplets were as painful as hot needle pricks. They fell onto one another, trying to avoid the splashes.
Hogg groaned, and Jewell yelled. Bernice never awoke, and Lewis did not look as if he cared; actually, the water cooled his fever and soothed his poisoned leg. He did not care that he was in the water. Lewis and Bernice, both injured badly and not wearing life belts, began to sink and were bitten before they could sink very deep. Red bubbles burst on the surface of the water.
“Come on, ye mean bastard. I will poke your eyes out,” Weller yelled.
In response, the leviathan made a pass, grabbing bodies that floated motionlessly, as well as Maggie Darby and the Prescott men. Caroline Prescott wailed and tried to strike the creature as it passed her, but only managed to skin her hands raw on his rough skin.
“We are comin’ to get ye,” Weller promised, “We’ll not leave you.”
Caroline Prescott screamed harder as the pain of losing her family and the pain of her body filled her mind. She held bloody hands aloft, the skin so abraded that she could hardly stand the additional agony.
The megaladon swallowed Caroline Prescott and kept coming, bumping his huge mouth against the lifeboat. Three women fell out and into his maw. With a quick dive and a wave of his tail, he swam away, gathering more of the dead.
The men turned the boat. Weller shook his head and muttered to himself.
Margaret Hays clutched her dog, Lady, closer to herself, and Dorothy Gibson set her face into her hands and cried as they heard the calls for help.
While they found five more survivors floating, two died quickly in the chilly air. The men rowed for all they were worth, leaving the bodies behind, and hoping morosely that the shark would stay away, eat the dead and dying, and leave them alone.
If the shark had been serious about the attack, he might have crushed the little boat into matchsticks and consumed them. While they had suffered losses, they had also been fortunate. Maybe the beast had simply been playing a devilish game with them.
As they rowed hard and left the dead behind, they calmed. One of the women cried bitterly over her husband whom she had left behind. “But maybe he found a later boat, yes?”
Hogg nodded, “To be sure, Ma’am. Indeed, I am sure many will join us when we are rescued.”
“I hope ‘tis soon. I swear, but I am about to freeze my n…nose off,” Weller chuckled. For having just rowed through a field of the dead and dying, his passengers were strangely composed.
“A bloody bandage. Is someone injured?” Jewel asked. Faintly, he thought of a red-haired young woman, her face drawn with pain, and her shoulder wrapped in red cloth, but that was a passing wisp of an idea. He did not know why he had even imagined such. It was the anxiety, doubtless.
They hardly recalled the other events that had befallen them so terribly as they focused on the shipwreck. As for the dead, they remembered them as having frozen, and some families in the boat had stood and fallen over the side, they believed, and drown, but the memory was hazy. As they rowed farther from the debris, they remembered less.
“Look!” Hogg almost fell over the side, gathering an unexpected survivor into their boat. It was Rigel, the First Officer’s dog. How Mr. Wilde’s Newfoundland had gotten out and into the sea, they could not begin to guess, but they dried him and petted him. Some were immediately enamored with Rigel as he had shown his mettle merely by surviving.
Like the mist they were escaping, the memories floated away until no one remembered seeing a big fish at all. They would have laughed at the idea, had they not been so distraught over the sinking of the ship and the many losses they had suffered.
Chapter Ten: Boat Five
Quartermaster Robert Hichens was steering the Titanic when she hit the iceberg, and while he had been ordered by Officer Lightoller to the lifeboat to take command, he was in deep despair. One minute he had been at the wheel with Mr. Moody, and then the next there had been chaos. He could not forget the sight of the ship sinking and passengers and crew tossed into the drink.
“Officer Lightoller said to row to the lights of the rescue ship and then back to help survivors,” Hichens said.
“Do you see a rescue ship, Man? I was on lookout and saw nothing around,” Fred Fleet said as he scowled. He was distraught.
“We will ‘ave one yet. We could be pulled down by the suction of the ship.”
“Suction? Why, she is gone, Mr. Hichens.”
“I still ‘ave my fears of it.”
“You need forbearance, Sir.”
Arthur Peuchen listened to the crewmen argue for a little while and finally broke in, “Why don’t we allow one of the women to steer, and I can man the oars.”
He was the only male passenger allowed on the boat and had shimmied down the rope to get into the lowered boat. He had been sent aboard to help row, but the doings here were troublesome.
“Enough. Be quiet. I am in charge of this boat,” Hichens yelled.
“I only thought….”
“Sir, it is not your place to think. I am in charge,” Hichens yelled louder.
They were not away from the wreckage.
“I can hear them calling for help,” Ellen Barber said. She reached for Mrs. Cavendish, her mistress. Mr. Cavendish was left on the ship.
“Be quiet, will you?” Hichens snapped.
“Excuse me?” Julia Cavendish grew angry, “She is my maid, and you will not speak to her that way. We can all hear the cries for help. That might be my husband back there.”
“Or Edgar,” Mrs. Meyer said. She had been forcibly put aboard the boat when she had wanted to stay with her husband. She was angry with the crewmen for making her go.
“I am doing what I can. Blame Mr. Leeni for not being able to row.”
“Mr. Hichens! He has broken his arm, so please have some courtesy,” Maggie Brown spoke up, “He fought frightful creatures to make it to the boat deck and was sent to help us by Mr. Lightoller himself. With the chaos, he simply did not know his arm was shattered.”
Mr. Leeni sat, rocking his poor arm. Even at gunpoint, he would never tell of the fearsome, eyeless abomination with a short, rearing appendage as his nose, and dark grey platelets of skin like armor. Along the torso beneath the muscular, fingerless arms, hundreds of tiny, thin legs wiggled as if he were part centipede. When he roared, the little legs danced with infernal glee.
Standing as high as a man, it had no legs of its own to walk on, but rather a mass of the tiny legs forming a base on which it slid on. Thick, clear ooze seeped from beneath its lower parts.
The creature’s m
outh was full of razor teeth, and the monster attacked a woman, ripping away her throat and sucking down the bloody spray. So grievous was the damage in the one bite that her white gown turned crimson all the way to its hemline.
It turned to Mr. Leeni and chattered, unnerving him so that he broke and ran for all he was worth. One of the monster’s massive upper arms caught him as he ran, and he heard his own bone snap as pain welled up in his chest. The man wheezed out a cry, but still ran, climbing ladders with one hand and never daring to look behind him.
“Just sit there, then,” Hichens ordered.
Mrs. Meyers told him, “I heard the order, just as you did, before the ship sank. They called us to help those in the water. Mr. Peuchen, please remind him.”
Peuchen shrugged and looked away. He had no authority.
“Give me the oar,” Maggie Brown demanded, “these women have husbands back there. If we can save one, then we shall.”
“There is naught but stiffs back there,” Hichens snarled. Several of the women dropped their faces into their hands to weep.
Mrs. Brown was livid, “Oh, do shut up! Ladies, we shall row this boat ourselves and do it correctly. Now take up the oars, and let us look for survivors. Do not listen to his ramblings.”
“Over there,” cried one of the women as they rowed into the field of floating bodies.
They pulled the man aboard. He was one of the stokers and almost blue with the chill, “I will help row as soon as I can move my fingers without their breaking off.” He had gone down with the ship but felt no cowardice in being rescued by a lifeboat.
Maggie Brown said as she nodded, “That’ll keep you feeling warmer.” She gently helped him remove his sodden clothing, removed her own furs, and covered him fully. “You may look silly, but I will wager you feel better.”
“God bless you, Mum,” he said, thinking Mrs. Brown was an angel.
“What are you all about? Stop taking people in; the suction and wreckage….” Hichens stood over Mrs. Brown.