At the Midway (61 page)

"We'll use the port mains!" Garrett coughed.  Then he saw one of the fire teams had already attached hoses and ordered his men to take hold.  Before he could give another order, a badly burned gunner came up and shouted something in his ear.  Fear struck Garrett's face.  With a twirl of his arm he commanded the men to continue, then he left with the gunner.

Amos had taken hold of the nozzle.  As he walked backwards, the hose was yanked out of his hands when the other men pulled in the opposite direction.  His curse was cut short when something knocked him hard on the back of the head and sent him sprawling.  With lights shooting in his eyes, he turned over to see what had hit him.

Poised behind a lifeboat was one of the creatures from William Pegg's nightmare.

Amos shook his head.  It was not the beast that had struck him, but the lifeboat.  Although cleared for Action Stations, the jib locking it below the gundeck had broken and the davits had dropped down.  The boat swung back and forth with a violence the ship's motion did not explain.  He soon saw why.  The creature was nudging the boat with its snout.  It seemed to be...
enjoying
the sight of it rocking in the davits.  Amos was amazed by its ability to keep pace with the
Florida
--until he spotted a huge flipper draped over one of the gun sponsons.  It was hanging onto the ship!  A fact soon proven when Amos began to slide starboard.  The creature's weight was so great it was causing the battleship to list.  He grabbed hold of a pylon to keep from sliding further.

The creature banged its snout against the boat again, this time knocking one of the pulleys loose.  Amos had to move fast to keep from being crushed.  Splinters of painted wood exploded off the lifeboat's hull.  It twisted sideways when the boatfall caught at the bow.

A dark blur darted at him.  Something white flashed--then stopped.  A scream of horror boiled in Amos' gut as the creature held its head inches from him.  So close.  Its eyes molten malevolence.  Blank hunger.  The devil out of disguise.  Its teeth, at this angle, seemed larger than its body.

The enormous black eyes appeared to glisten and shift.  Then quick as a gun-spring it streaked sideways and grabbed a man trying to hide behind the turret.

Amos crawled as fast as he could to port, then stopped to watch as the creature made a quick snack out of the petty officer it had captured.  Amos had no idea of the man's identity, was too frightened to care, so long as he had not been the snack.

Why was that?

And then came the same wondrous realization that had struck William Pegg in the whaleboat: the duff sauce!

The creature remained hitched to starboard for another minute, apparently waiting for another morsel to present itself.  Then it grew tired of all the smoke and all the waiting.  When it fell away, Amos could feel the weight shift off the
Florida
.

1616 - 1630 Hours

It was the helmsman who first noted they had been boarded again.  The wheel jerked in his hands.

A lookout shouted.  Grimly, Singleton and a midshipman stepped through the blood of the dead OOD to look through the bridge screen.  Noting the jagged, fatal shard still jutting from the casement, Grissom punched it out with an angry fist.

Below, they could see the almost loving grip the beast had on the sponson.  They shouted unheard warnings to Amos as he backed towards it, then watched stupefied as the creature declined the easy meal and instead strained after the hapless man at the turret.

Inside the wheelhouse, Lieutenant Grissom called the ordnance officer to the voice tube.  "Wepeat my od-has!"

Because of Grissom's missing teeth, the chief engineer at the other end was finding it impossible to understand him.  The ordnance officer leaned over the voice pipe and repeated the exec's commands.

1616 - 1630 Hours

Garrett wasn't thinking.  He strongly suspected he wasn't thinking.  Had he been thinking, he would never have thought up the idea.

There had been a small explosion below the ammunition hoist leading to the starboard casemates.  No one knew what had caused it.  Had fire from the deck flashed through the trunk to the handling room, there would have been a lot less left of the lower tier.  In fact, all the pounding had ignited a cordite charge.  The flood cocks had been opened, but only a small amount of water was coming in.  This had prevented the magazine from instantly going up.  But the fire still burned and at any moment they might be watching Hell from the front row.

When Garrett arrived, men were attempting to douse the fire by pouring bucketfuls of water through the scuttle in the door.  But the water was hitting only the bottom of the magazine. Through the vent, they could see the fire was at the top.

"We're finished, Mr. Garrett," the injured gunner said.  "You've got to tell the captain."

"Abandon ship?  Hell if I'll be a meal for those things."  There was no more time to talk, no time to take into account, to press issues, to pray.  Buttons flew as Garrett began ripping off his tunic.  As an officer, he had not stripped down to his skivvies like the others.  "Fuck, fuck, aw, fuck, fuck...."

The diminutive stature that had made his life an ongoing battle for status finally found some use.  Ignoring the amazed shouts of the onlookers, he squeezed through the scuttle and leaped into the middle of the smoldering magazine.

There was a half inch of water on the deck.  His tunic was already soaked from dragging it through.  He gave the briefest glance at the smoke oozing down from the upper racks, then began beating at the shoots of fire with his wet garment.  He had to stretch the length of his body to reach them.  Every time the wet cloth struck, a loud hiss popped out of the bags.

"Fuck, fuck, aw, fuck, fuck...."

As much as he needed the help, he could not open the hatch to let the others in.  The sudden draft would have fueled the fire and ignited the packed charges.  This was a bitter one-man show.  He felt he was only delaying the inevitable.  The magazine would go and he would be the first with the news--an atomized human broadcasted over several miles of desolate ocean.

Fire singed his hands.  Again and again he dunked his tunic in the pool of water at his feet and flailed at the bags.  Every breath he took was weighted with reluctance as the fumes burned his lungs.  He counted it lucky to still be conscious, but the smoke curls had dissolved into a solid mass at the ceiling--a cloud that moved steadily down.  Torn by a fit of coughing, he leaned down to splash water on his face.

What was this?  He reached down again.  His hand and half his forearm disappeared.  Whatever had jammed the flood-cock was gone.

Hope fueled renewed effort.  Garrett beat at the flames like a blind maniacal matador.  He knew success was within reach when he heard men calling for him to get out--not because he might blow up, but because he would
drown
.  Desperately, he propped himself on a powder carriage.  He caught sight of one last tongue of flame.  He threw the soggy tunic at it and heard a satisfying hiss as it was doused.  Then he jumped off the carriage and half-swam to the ladder.  He climbed to the hatch.  A cluster of hands pulled him out.

"You did it, Mr. Garrett!  By Godfrey, who'd've thought--"

The ensign did not hear.  For him, the world had been reduced to one gigantic cough.

On the Cliffs of Time

Below the reef.

The mother Tu-nel followed the blood trail.  Swooping across the coral like a dark cloud. Parrot fish flitted out of her wide path.  Larger life--hammerheads, rays--had been absent since her arrival.

The visible trail was as pronounced as the olfactory one.  Wending downward, she soon found her dead progeny.

Green Stripe's neck was curled around a stubby pillar of apple-green coral, the result of her death spasm--her final attempt to bite her own wound, an ancient animal conviction that pain was an enemy to be attacked and slain.

The mother nibbled at the enemy: the gaping wound in her daughter's neck.  The neck juggled.  Lifelike.  Like life.  When her nibbling and nudging stopped, so did like-life.  Slowly, she realized she herself was the like-life and that her daughter had no life.

The young male was ravenous.  The sailor in its belly only reminded him of his hunger.  Detecting fresh blood, he bore down.

And nearly lost his life in the effort.  The mother whipped around to intercept him, knocking over several mounds of coral making her turn.  Had the young male not flinched in time, she would have bitten through his neck.  They raced nearly a league before the female broke off her chase.  She did not want to leave her daughter too far behind.  There was a chance like-life would return.  If so, the young female would need help getting to the surface to breathe, just as when she was born.

The young male had not been taken by surprise.  The giant female often thwarted him when he tried to share a meal.  But as he cautiously made a wide turn and watched from a distance, he was puzzled by the way she doted over the corpse.  Why wasn't she eating?  If she would only hurry up and finish, he'd be able to take what was left.  If she rushed, he could get most of what remained before Green Stripes arrived.

He did not recognize the corpse.  To him, Green Stripes was an animate being.  He could play, flirt, bond with her.  This was not Green Stripes.  Merely food.

It had been four years since he was separated from his own mother near Bogoslof Island.  It was not unusual for young Tu-nel to lose track of their mothers during the commotion of the mating season.  After the ritualized chaos, mothers and offspring would use their songs to locate each other.

Only this time, the young male had been baffled by the noise of steam engines as a large whaling fleet coursed through the Bering Strait.  He had been lucky enough to find a large female and her green-striped daughter.  And unlucky enough to have his shoulder mauled when he first tried to join them.  But he persisted and the giant female grew tired of chasing him away.  Intuitively, he knew it was dangerous to remain in close proximity.  But the other side of intuition needed the adopted mother, no matter how grave a threat she posed.

He circled for a quarter of an hour, antagonized not only by hunger, but also by the awful noise from the
Florida
.

He was wary of returning to land, so full of smoke and noise, but the smell of blood sharpened his appetite to an unbearable pitch.  The ship had proven a meager source of food.  So, as the men overhead battled to save their vessel, the young male slipped into the lagoon and headed for Sand Island.

1647 Hours

Sergeant Ziolkowski looked almost fondly at his ruined leg.  It would be gone, soon, and he was offering his farewell.  The medical assistant with the landing party had given him a blue pill only a few minutes before being killed.  Opium.  And it worked wonderfully.

He had been carried to one of the launches.  As the two smaller serpents bounded up the beach, the lieutenant in charge of the party and several others made a futile attempt to reach the compound and the fieldpieces.  In their haste, they did not moor the launch.  Gradually, the Top found himself adrift in the middle of the lagoon.  Everything wore a gentle glow.  His leg throbbed--he didn't care.

The screams on shore faded.

Sun and thirst woke him.  The air simmered and swam.  A halo of smoke shown above the superstructure of the
Florida.
  From the funnels, Ziolkowski assured himself.  He hummed the melody to a marching ditty, then brought forth the words that went with it: "
Prettiest white girl you ever seen....  Then she had her nigger baby....  Hi-Ho! the rolling river...!
"

At least singing sounded more sane than talking to himself.  He looked woefully at his leg.  The surgeon's mate had put a splint on him and made a rude bandage around the wound, but it looked awkward and ineffective.

"Least the damn thing hasn't begun to stink."

He believed the broken leg had saved his life.  Watching the beasts rampage through the compound, he had little doubt everyone was dead.  Not even the Rexer could have--

He bolted up.  Where the hell was his gun?

And where the hell was Sand Island?

Turning painfully, he discovered the island several hundred yards to stern.  He was over halfway to Eastern Island.  He couldn't see much.  As low as the island was, he was even lower.  The only movement came from some curious clouds of smoke.

"Ah...."  He lay back and closed his eyes.  It could have been a minute later when he heard movement in the water.  Only then did he remember the Chinaman who had tried to cross the lagoon alone--the brief ripple and disappearance--and fear curdled his stomach.

Something nudged the gunwale.  Ziolkowski watched the sky turn left, then right.  The launch was being gently shoved, then pulled.  He closed his eyes, not wanting to see the end.  There was gentle movement.  Perhaps this was death, a somnolent excursion to nowhere.

"Who's got who by the ass, now?" a voice murmured.

The sergeant's eyes popped open.  A rope had been looped over the peak.  Pushing himself up, Ziolkowski found himself face to face with a man struggling to haul the launch with a small rowboat and the force of his slim arms.