Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  Dear Ms. Vukovic:

  Thank you for your letter of concern about your nephew and others in camp. It is true that we have had several unexplained incidents. But these have all been taken care of properly. The three victims have all been given necessary medical care and are recuperating nicely. Rest assured that steps have been taken to ensure nothing more of this nature occurs.

  There are only three more days left of camp, and I have instructed staff to keep a close eye on your nephew and his cabin mates. I can assure you that he is safe, and we will return him in the same condition as when he came to camp.

  Yes, to your question, Luc has done well, especially in camp skills development—one of our most proficient campers with the bow and arrow. During the month, we had hoped to make more progress in development of his group socialization skills. Unfortunately, he remains a bit of a taciturn loner, perhaps his natural temperament.

  But this brings me to your apparent major concern about the aggressiveness of one of his Lakota Sioux tribal mates.

  Your letter is a bit confusing. There is no one in the entire camp who picked the Native American name Lone Wolf. Nor is there anyone in camp fitting your description. And that includes the four campers from San Francisco. I’m afraid Lone Wolf doesn’t exist, at least here at Camp Little Bighorn.

  I hope all this eases your stated concerns. We would very much like to see Luc return for camp next year.

  Thank you for your support,

  —Daniel Manspeaker, Director Camp Little Bighorn

  Double O—filming/narrating the excited boys leaving cabins for the lake and the big final camp competition, the canoe race with deletions:

  I’m tracking the Lakota Sioux cabin dudes again, the boys stepping out of the cabin. Whoa—! Two big lads from the Cheyenne cabin, directed by Big Bear with a cast on his hand, throw water balloons. Nighthawk is hit squarely in the face and chest and completely soaked. From his squished-up, red face, I know he is very angry. But he is too little and frail to retaliate physically against the bigger bullies.

  Later during the canoe race, the Sioux paddlers move in too close, bumping and overturning the Cheyenne canoe…the boys all swimming to shore for safety, except for Big Bear with the cast. He tries to swim one-handed, but stops suddenly in the water—

  Oh my God!…It’s almost as if he is wearing weights on his feet, because he quickly sinks out of sight.

  I contact the Camp Director who calls the authorities. All activities are halted, as the authorities investigate the unfortunate drowning. The camp is a confused mess. The campers’ guardians have been notified, but no one can leave for a day or so until released by the authorities. Red Deer will tell stories and other activities will be conducted in cabins and circle.

  Last Day—Double O—filming campers getting back on bus for home, with deletions:

  The campers are all now smiling, bumping, and joking with each other. The month has been a great success. Even Nighthawk has a big smile on his face as he climbs aboard.

  SIREN

  by Jonah Buck

  August 2, 1917

  Sebastian Barnevelder listened as the U-boat slowly failed all around him. As the stricken vessel lay at the bottom of the Atlantic, steel popped and groaned and squealed.

  There were a dozen ways to die down here on the ocean floor. Water hissed from tiny fissures in the submarine’s seals, filling the cramped, dark space with the icy black sea. The surviving men were unlikely to drown, though.

  First the air would go bad and poison them. Or the rising water would squish all the air in the submarine into a smaller and smaller space until the pressure built up and everyone’s lungs ruptured.

  Most likely though, the incredible pressure of trillions upon trillions of tons of water would crush the U-boat and the men inside like screaming grapes in a wine press. No, nix that.

  There wouldn’t be time to scream. The water would obliterate them before anyone could blink, let alone scream. The bulkheads would pancake together and reduce the crew to a thin, red gruel. Everyone on board would be reduced to something the size and shape of a wad of chewed gum.

  Good, Sebastian thought. He stood in the ankle deep water, so cold he hadn’t been able to feel his toes in hours, and watched Captain Englehorn pound on the busted emergency radio unit.

  There was no help coming. Even if the radio’s guts weren’t spilling out, by the time the German Imperial Navy could steam out to their position, everyone aboard U-697 would be dead anyway.

  The red emergency lighting sent ghastly shadows across the captain’s face as he glanced up at Sebastian. “Barnevelder, what’s the situation in the engine room? Any way we can get in there and access the emergency pumps?”

  “No, sir. I can see through the porthole on the door. The hull’s completely blasted out. There’s nothing left but twisted metal and a little bit of Lieutenant Zeller.”

  Captain Englehorn nodded but his expression was hollow.

  The air inside the submarine always stank of sailors and diesel, but a new smell overwhelmed even those omnipresent odors. The pungent scent of mortal terror hung in the air. It wept out of the pores of every man onboard.

  Every man except Sebastian Barnevelder.

  Germany had resumed unrestricted submarine warfare against Britain a few months earlier in hopes of bringing the Great War to a close. The German public was hungry, and their army was bled dry in the French mud. Something needed to change, and it needed to change soon.

  At the time, Sebastian had hungered for missions like these. Germany’s great foe, the United Kingdom, was an island nation. It received its supplies, everything it needed to wage war, from across the seas. Food. Munitions. Colonial recruits. Without those, the British couldn’t continue the war.

  To a submariner like Sebastian, the math was simple. Knock Britain out of the war, and France would be left to fight Germany by herself. For years the German submarine fleet had been cooped up in coastal waters. Weak-kneed politicians in Berlin feared the international fallout from another Lusitania, even if the British often used civilian ships to ferry in war materials.

  “Then they brought it on themselves,” Sebastian would often tell his wife, Laura, on his rare shore leaves. She would usually purse her lips but not say anything as she sipped her tea. She’d heard this screed every time he came home, and she humored him by allowing him to vent it every time.

  Laura grew up in London, the daughter of a Rhenish banker working in one of the company’s foreign offices. She’d picked up her tea habit there, something she’d never dropped even after moving back to Germany, and she spoke flawless English.

  He knew she didn’t approve of the war, but Sebastian had lost a brother in the meat grinder outside Verdun. Above all, he just wanted the war to end before he lost more friends and family, and of course the answer seemed painfully OBVIOUS to him.

  Many decisions were so much simpler when the consequences were fuzzy, faraway problems that happened to other people. Simple answers to complex problems had an unshakable allure. Let the submarine wolf packs out to hunt, cripple British supplies, and the war would end.

  That’s why Sebastian had been so thrilled when the orders came down. At long last, the government had called open season on all British shipping. The submarines would be loosed into the Atlantic, sowing destruction in their wake. The war to end all wars would be over by Christmas with the German Empire victorious.

  Oh happy day.

  The narrow strait between Britain and the rest of the continent was thick with shipping. U-697’s torpedoes sent thousands of tons of war material down to the bottom of the sea, taking hundreds of lives with it into the depths.

  Sebastian rarely knew what cargo a ship held, and frankly, it didn’t matter. The point was to strangle the British one ship at a time, slicing through each individual capillary of their trade network until the nation hemorrhaged itself into peace talks.

  Two weeks ago, they sank a Danish ship moving at full steam toward
the English coast, the Haugaard. A couple of outdated British warships, part of the “live bait” fleet the English maintained to free up their dreadnoughts, protected the Haugaard.

  Captain Englehorn put a torpedo straight into the Haugaard’s guts. The ship blew apart like a vase shattering. Secondary explosions tore the ship to steel confetti before it could even sink beneath the waves. U-697 disappeared into the sea before the rickety picket ships could pinpoint its location.

  That was two weeks ago.

  A week ago, the submariners took a brief leave in Kiel so the U-697 could restock its armaments and make minor repairs. Merchant ships from all over the world now littered the bottom of the English Channel. They’d gone through all their torpedoes even faster than expected, racking up hit after hit. It was enough to puff him with pride.

  Sebastian received a packet of letters when they docked, a true bright spot after working for weeks at a time in the cramped confines of the U-boat. News from home, from his sweet Laura, was a precious commodity. The letter he read last was the most recent from Laura. Her tone had grown gradually bleaker as the war pressed on her.

  My dearest Sebastian,

  I know you won’t approve, but I have decided that I must act. With all the resources devoted to the war effort, there’s precious little food being brought into town. I’ve been eating nothing but canned beets for the last week because it’s all I can get from the market. I hear it’s only worse elsewhere, that the countryside is starving as all the crops are requisitioned for the army.

  That’s why I’ll be boarding a Danish ship, the Haugaard, in a couple of days. Denmark is neutral in the war, and the company operating her needs someone who can read and write English for business transactions. All it will take is a quick trip across the Channel, and then they’ll board me in London. The ration books here are worthless when there’s no food to be had. If the war lasts much longer, I’m worried there will be riots or outright famine or both. It’s a hard choice, but I know the British will surrender before they let London go hungry. When the war is over, we’ll be together again.

  Stay safe.

  Love,

  Laura

  Sebastian had clutched that letter so hard it tore in his hands. The sudden sweat from his palms smudged the ink until it was unreadable. His stomach filled with hot, panicky acid. He checked the dates on the letter and then checked them again.

  The Haugaard was entered in U-697’s logs as a confirmed kill a few days after the letter was written. Sebastian knew with the certainty of the damned that Laura had been aboard that ship.

  Frankly, he didn’t even remember much that had happened since he read those words, since they scorched their way into his brain like a red hot brand.

  The rest was just a daze. Firing a torpedo at that merchant marine ship. Launching an emergency dive as a British spotter plane droned over the horizon. Hollow boom boom booms as the depth charges poured off the deck of the destroyers overhead. Screeching steel and screaming men as the engine room hull ruptured in a tornado of hot metal and freezing water, sucking submariners into the blackness. Howling, uneven descent into the depths, expecting the submarine to collapse at any second.

  Since they’d hit bottom, the screams had stopped. However, the atmosphere inside the submarine was oleaginous with gurgling fear.

  Sebastian was the only one who didn’t feel it. He could sense it crawling around inside his crewmates on pinching crab legs, wriggling nodules of dread metastasizing in their hearts.

  Sebastian was beyond that. He was beyond any feeling except to the black hope that the U-boat would implode soon and end this farce.

  He scuttled down the hallway, using the emergency lighting to guide his way. Someone farther back in the crew quarters had firmly lost every last shred of his sanity. “Still more majestic shalt thou rise. More dreadful, from each foreign stroke; as the loud blast that tears the skies, serves but to root thy native oak. Rule, Britannia! Rule the waves: Britons never will be slaves.” The voice bawled out a few more verses of “Rule, Britannia!” before warbling off into hysterical laughter.

  Something banged into the side of the hull a bit ahead of Sebastian. He twisted his head to listen. This wasn’t the creak and groan of stressed metal. This was an entirely different sound, like something outside was knocking on the U-boat’s exterior.

  Sebastian stopped walking and stared at the opposite wall. There was something about that tapping. It reminded him of something.

  Knock-knock-knock. The sound came in an uneven cadence.

  He followed the noise like it had sunk hooks into his eardrums and was reeling him in. An icy razor of memory scraped across the inside of his skull, beckoning him to follow the noise as it moved toward the engine room.

  Voices cursed and shouted from a nearby doorway. Sebastian glanced inside the radio room. A group of his crewmates stood next to the upended equipment. Heinrich Rosenblum hunched with his back to the wall like a cornered rat while three other sailors surrounded him.

  “C’mon, Heinrich. Just put the pistol down,” the radioman said.

  Rosenblum shook his head. Beads of sweat dripped off his brow. They resembled blood in the red lighting. He held a service pistol in his hand. The weapon looked like an extension of one of the shadows that now lurked in every corner of the U-boat.

  One of the other submariners glanced up. “Sebastian, help us talk to Rosenblum. He’s got a bad case of the sea sillies.”

  Sebastian propped himself in the doorway and watched without saying a word. The sea sillies. That’s one word for it.

  Above their heads, the knocking noise came again. Everyone glanced up, as if their eyes could pierce the steel hull and see what was happening outside. Their attention snapped back to Rosenblum as he tried to snake around the closest man, and the other three sailors jerked to cut off his escape route.

  “Let’s just talk about this for a minute, Heinrich,” the radioman said, making soothing hand gestures. “There’s still plenty of time for a rescue party to find us. Plenty of air for everyone. We just have to stick things out a little longer.”

  Sebastian and everyone else in the room knew that no one was coming. There would be no rescue. Not from this black hell. The iron jaws of knowledge couldn’t shut out hope, though.

  “No. No, I don’t want to suffocate down here like a convict in a gas chamber,” Rosenblum said. “Can you taste it? The air is already starting to go bad. I’d rather just do it now. Do it quick.”

  “You can’t fire a bullet in here. It could pierce the hull. Then we’d all be in a mess of trouble,” the radioman said in his calmest voice. “You don’t want that do you? No, just hand us the gun. You can do it.”

  Rosenblum’s eyes looked too wide for his skull. They flitted about like caffeinated bats, never landing on any one of the men but instead ping-ponging around the cramped room.

  The knocking sound came again, as if it were trying to get their attention. No one bothered to look up this time. All attention was focused on Heinrich Rosenblum.

  Sebastian had thought about taking the same path as Rosenblum a few times since he discovered Laura’s demise. He’d just functioned like a piece of machinery each day. His hands didn’t care if he was hollow inside. They could perform their tasks on rungs and levers without conscious thought after months of raiding trade routes.

  He might have done it, but the throbbing ache inside his soul made it nearly impossible to engage in a course of action. Slitting his wrists with a shaving razor. Blowing his brains across the room. Even jettisoning himself out of a torpedo tube. They were all possibilities, but he always felt like he was trapped beneath a massive boulder, crushing out any self-agency.

  The radioman grabbed for Rosenblum’s pistol when his eyes darted away. He was too slow. His hand grabbed onto Rosenblum’s wrist, and he tried to wrestle the weapon out of his grasp. Rosenblum snaked his arm around, trying to free himself.

  “No! No, just let me— ”

  The pistol
went off.

  The submarine’s walls didn’t collapse inward. A billion tons of black water didn’t smash their way inside and chew them to bloody lumps. Their world didn’t end in a single cataclysmic instant.

  But that was only because the bullet went straight into the radioman’s chest. He jumped like Rosenblum was a hot stove. Falling flat on his back, he tried to look at the wound in his sternum. He attempted to say something, but all that came out was a wheeze and a streamer of blood.

  “Gott in Himmel!” Rosenblum shouted, clasping his hands to the sides of his head. More shouting erupted as the rest of the crew stampeded down the cramped halls to see what had happened.

  Rosenblum was crying as he pried his hands away and inserted the gun barrel into his mouth, angling the weapon upward. One of the remaining men in the room made a lunge for him, but Rosenblum’s finger was already on the trigger.

  Another crack of gunfire echoed through the submarine. The top of Rosenblum’s head vaulted upward like an egg starting to hatch. Cordite and blood scented the air inside the radio room.

  “What the hell is going on?” Captain Englehorn yelled from the control room.

  The bullet was lodged somewhere in Rosenblum’s skull. If it had catapulted loose, they’d all be dead before their ears registered the gunshot.

  The only thing under more stress down here than the ship’s hull was the crew’s psyche. Things were starting to fall apart.

  Sebastian stepped out of the doorway. All he could feel was a slight twinge of envy that Rosenblum and the radioman had found their own peace. He felt like the last shriveled brown leaf on a tree at the end of autumn, already dead but refusing to fall to the ground for some reason.

  He just hoped Laura had died as these two had, quickly and with a minimum of pain. Most likely, she’d been blown apart before she even became aware her ship was under attack. The Haugaard’s boilers exploded with the torpedo strike, probably killing most of the passengers and crew in a single smiting blast of fire and steam.