Deck Z - The Titanic (19 page)

SAFE HARBOR
.

MONDAY, APRIL
15, 1912. 1:37
A.M
.

A plume of dark smoke spilling from the steamer’s stacks did little to interrupt the serene backdrop of lazy clouds mingling with friendly blue sky. The ship, having completed its journey, cleaved into Plymouth Harbor, leaving in its wake a collection of sailboats whose masts were graced with the orange hue of a beautiful sunrise.

Just ahead to the port side, two fishermen sat in a small rowboat. The one in the bow was trying to get in a final cast before the huge vessel churned up the calm water and ran off the fish. Soon the ship would pass them. Soon it would finally be home.

The painting Thomas Andrews had purchased for
Titanic
hung above the fireplace in the first-class smoking room. It was entitled
Safe Harbor.
Andrews calmly pulled up a chair. He was at peace, smiling at the last thing he would ever see.

BOAT DECK
.

MONDAY, APRIL
15, 1912. 1:42
A.M
.

Weiss heard the moans of the emerging zombies, and he hastened his inspections. All the while, he searched the crowds for the German agent. The man was still on the damned boat; Weiss knew it in his bones. The few lifeboats that remained were filling fast.

Weiss ignored the outer trappings of face after face and focused on spotting those sharp, intense brown eyes. He’d recognize them no matter the disguise. Then a commotion drew his attention. One of the ship’s quartermasters struggled with the next passenger in line.

“I am not ready to leave this ship!” shouted a small woman wrapped in expensive furs and oversized, extravagant jewelry. She clawed at the quartermaster, who looked ready to throw her overboard on general principle.

“Hold her arms tight,” instructed Weiss as he thumbed the well-powdered flesh below her eyes, forcing them open so he could clear the
grande dame
for rescue. She thrashed her head this way and that as Weiss tried to examine her nostrils, ears, and gums.

“The indignity!” she screamed.

“Madame, I assure you, this is absolutely necess—”

“I’m not talking about your bloody health inspection!” squawked the woman. “This brute forcibly removed me from my cabin before I could find my good hair! Wait until Mr. Ismay hears how you treated me!”

Weiss paused, remembering. This was the same woman Lou had pointed out during boarding, the distinguished older lady with the absurd silver-blue hair. “Your
good
hair?” asked Weiss.

“Stolen!” cried Lady Cardeza. “Miss Anna placed it on the wig stand when I went to sleep. Hair doesn’t just stand up on its hind legs and go for a stroll. Where is the captain? I demand an investigation!”

“Put her on a boat,” said Weiss, standing now to survey the remaining passengers. With the sound of the wailing Lady Cardeza fading to the port side, Weiss strained in the dim light to spot the woman’s wig. He cursed silently. Once again, the German agent was one step ahead of him. Weiss had alerted
Titanic
’s officers to watch for a man fleeing the ship, not a woman!

He rushed to the rails. Lifeboats dotted the black horizon, their passengers incredibly difficult to make out with clarity. He swung a kerosene lantern in front of him. Its pale light only served to show how far
Titanic
had dipped into the icy ocean.

Undaunted, Weiss kept surveying the bobbing crafts. Then he saw his target. The silver-blue hair sat atop a large woman, wrapped in a heavy woolen shawl, huddled among at least sixty other passengers on the recently departed Lifeboat 6. Lou was among them.

The Agent was escaping with the Toxic.

BOAT DECK
.

MONDAY, APRIL
15, 1912. 2:14
A.M
.

Twin inevitabilities threatened to stop
Titanic
’s band from continuing to play. The first was the sinking ship itself, its bow now dipping below the waterline. A trio of brass propellers in the stern towered far in the air, assuring that the vessel had only moments left afloat before it would be pulled under.

The second was a multitude of horribly disfigured ghouls marching toward the sound of “Nearer My God, To Thee.”

Wallace Hartley’s violin bow did not so much as quaver.

He and his band had accepted the captain’s call.
There’s nothing more noble than using our God-given gifts
—that was Hartley’s counsel to Mr. Krins, and those words passed the test of truth. The players provided enough distraction to allow
Titanic
’s final lifeboats to launch without being overrun by the dead-faced menace. Each musician understood he would not escape death, yet every one of the seven played on.

Wallace Hartley would never marry Maria. He would never hold her hand, kiss her lips, or see her beaming smile on Earth again. The men had nothing now but their music, which wafted through the air with the utmost serenity. They were oblivious to the carnage raging
around them. Their trust in God’s greater plan was total, and with this song their lives were complete. Drawn to the music like bugs to light, the fiends reached for Hartley as he applied a final, spectacular flourish to his violin and accepted the fate God had determined.

The zombies’ grasp fell short. For as Hartley held his final note,
Titanic
broke in half, sending a wave of water across the deck that washed the band away from their tormentors and into the frigid sea where each man would sleep. Heroes to the last, the seven men believed God’s mercy had spared them from a fate worse than death.

Captain Smith tried to wrench himself free, but the handcuffs clanked and held firm. He’d left the key in King’s office for a reason. Something like a laugh escaped from his blackened mouth as he held the pegs of
Titanic
’s wheel.

When Smith had locked himself in place, the ringing in his mind had reached a sharp, shrill crescendo and then fallen away as something inside him snapped for good. Outside sounds entered his head, but what he heard was no longer recognizable as music. Screaming passengers sailed past the wheelhouse, and the sharp metal cuffs tore into Smith’s wrists as he struggled to break free and chase them. Then, with a sickening lurch, he was tossed forward into the wheel as the bow dove completely underwater.

Captain Edward J. Smith was pulled directly into the Atlantic along with the front end of his finest ship, but he felt no pain, no sorrow, no regret. Only his body sank like a stone.

The deck shifted beneath Weiss’s feet as
Titanic
broke in two. While the stern appeared to settle back to even keel, the bow on which Weiss was standing was nearly gone. He tightened his life jacket and backed
up two steps to get a running start. With a deep breath, he sprinted for the deck’s edge just before it disappeared, vaulted over the brass railing, and flung himself into the ocean.

The icy water sent an electric shock through his skull. His plunge took Weiss deep below the surface and into utter darkness. The frigid water numbed the pain in his shoulder as Weiss let the lifejacket return him to the surface. When he finally broke through, he erupted in a long spasm of sputtering gasps.

A deck chair floated next to him, and he tried to pull himself atop its wooden frame. But it did little to keep his body out of the glacial water and he abandoned it. With surprising strength, he began swimming toward Lifeboat 6.

Panicked screams surrounded him. Hundreds bobbed in the water, each person desperately searching for something to cling to as the freezing water drained all feeling from their bodies.

Where the black waterline met the night sky, lifeboats slowly rowed away from
Titanic.
Passengers pleaded with crewmen to return for those in the water. As he swam, Weiss spotted a few zombies along the surface, but to a creature, they sank like anchors. Their awkward movements were too clumsy and slow to even tread water. Weiss suspected the pressure of the deep would eventually crush the creatures’ skulls into oblivion.

“Mr. Weiss!”

Weiss shook the saltwater from his eyes. Lou was waving at him from Lifeboat 6. “You can make it, Mr. Weiss!” Lou shouted. “You’re doing it!”

He wasn’t so sure. Even though he’d only been swimming for minutes, his arms weakened and his progress slowed. The lifeboat was perhaps fifty yards off and moving away, as its two able seamen rowed like mad. In the boat, the matron in silver-blue hair shifted and smiled in his direction.

“Lou!” Weiss shouted, hoping his voice could still carry across the water.
It has to be you; you’re my last hope.
Weiss prayed she would understand, and that he was not sentencing her to death. “Fourteen trunks!” Weiss cried. “It’s the lady with the fourteen trunks!”

Lou looked puzzled—perhaps Mr. Weiss had become delirious. Why was he shouting about Lady Cardeza? Was there something in one of her trunks? But no one had been allowed any luggage …

Lou scanned the passengers in her lifeboat, and then she understood—there was Lady Cardeza’s silver-blue hair, askew as always, but it was atop the head and body of someone decidedly larger and more rugged. It was a man, in fact, hiding beneath that shawl and disguise. Mr. Weiss was alerting her to Hargraves in a way that the thief wouldn’t understand.

Lou started worming her way past the other passengers to the back of boat. Hargraves seemed to be staring off elsewhere, not moving, apparently huddling against the cold. A hawk-nosed woman grabbed Lou and tried to pull her down into a seat, lecturing her on the dangers of rocking the boat. Lou escaped the woman’s clutches and kept moving.

“You’ll sit like you’re told!” commanded McCarthy, one of the two seamen rowing the boat. He reached for Lou, but she squirted past. “There’s no time for monkey play!”

Lunging out of his seat, McCarthy latched onto Lou’s collar just as she reached Hargraves and snatched the blue hair from his head.

“Imposter!” Lou cried.

The other passengers gasped. “Coward!” shrieked the hawk-nosed woman. “Women and children first!”

The exposed spy calmly rose to his feet and reached inside the shawl, producing the pistol he’d stolen from Kaufmann and training it on Lou. “You are proving to be quite an irritant, young lady,” the Agent said. He then swung the gun toward McCarthy, who was
reaching into his vest. “Keep your hands away from that pocket, sir. I have six shots, and at this range, that means six dead.”

“Hell you say!” came a shout from behind the Agent. A sharp elbow cracked the back of his head as Margaret Brown (or Molly, as her friends called her) sent the man sprawling to the deck of the lifeboat.

The gun flew from his hand, but that wasn’t what caught Lou’s eye. A stainless-steel cylinder also fell from beneath the Agent’s woolen shawl to rattle along the lifeboat floor. Quick as a blink, Lou pounced on the Toxic before the Agent had time to recover.

“Mr. Weiss!” Lou shouted, holding the tube high above her head. “I’ve got it! What we’ve been searching for!”

A surge of hope warmed Weiss’s freezing body, and he swam with renewed vigor. The impossible had happened—they’d recovered the Toxic! And the able seamen had stopped rowing, allowing Weiss to close the distance with Lifeboat 6. He might find his cure after all.

Yet Lifeboat 6 now rocked with the tussle between McCarthy and the Agent over the pistol. Then a gunshot split the air, and McCarthy clutched his gut and crumpled to his knees. The Agent trained his gun on the other able seaman before raising a foot and kicking McCarthy into the ocean.

“There will be no more heroics,” hissed the Agent. He swept his weapon from the front of the boat to the back, finally training the firearm on Molly Brown. “You will not receive another warning.” Then he turned the gun on Lou. “Return it now. Do you really think I won’t shoot a child?”

No one else can die,
Weiss thought. Even in his head, the words moved slowly.
It’s time to put an end to this.

“Lou!” called Weiss. “Throw it into the ocean!”

The Agent cocked the gun. “That,” he said, “would be a very bad idea.”

Lou agreed, though not because she was afraid of any gun.
Let him shoot me,
she thought,
so long as he wastes more bullets.
One day, Mr. Weiss would tell her story, and how she saved the day.

“I won’t, Mr. Weiss!” Lou hollered. “You worked too hard! We all did! You can still find a cure!”

“I can’t save anyone, not now,” managed Weiss, shaking uncontrollably, the bitter-cold water freezing his veins. He mumbled, “But you can …”

“Don’t be a fool,” the Agent said to Lou as he inched down the lifeboat toward her. Two women fainted at the sight of the gun, while others cowered in their seats. “Return what belongs to me … and you will live. You have my word.”

Lou cocked her arm back as if to throw a newspaper, stopping the Agent in his tracks. “Don’t move!” Lou shouted. “Shoot me, and I’ll send this into the water, understand?” The Agent raised his gun but didn’t fire.

Then a sickening, gurgling
whooooosh
caught everyone’s attention.
Titanic
’s stern, now nearly vertical, was being dragged below the surface of the Atlantic. A violent whirlpool formed as the back half of the monstrous ship sank, pulling down everything in its wake. Screams mixed with the rushing, roaring sound of the drowning vessel.

“Mr. Weiss!” Lou called. “Here’s your cure!”

With a hop and a heave as mighty as she could manage, Lou sent the canister flying into the air … and well above Weiss, who watched the Toxic sail over his head and land dead square in the center of the suction created by
Titanic.

“No!” shouted the Agent. In a panic, he shed his shawls and dove heedlessly into the water after the Toxic. He was a powerful swimmer, but the whirlpool sucked him deep beneath the Atlantic. He did not surface again.

Weiss looked to Lou, standing triumphant in the lifeboat. The Toxic was gone, never to be retrieved. Destroying the vial was the closest Weiss would come to a cure.

“Now swim!” shouted Lou. “Please! You can still save yourself!”

But Weiss knew that time had passed. Perhaps if he had escaped another way in the first place. Perhaps if he had sought the captain’s help earlier. Perhaps …

Weiss whispered, “Thank you, Lou.” He could barely see the boat.

“We can make room for you, there’s room!” Lou pleaded, tears in her eyes. “But you gotta swim!”

Weiss was too tired for swimming.

“Go back for him!” Lou begged the seaman with the oars.

Weiss lay back in the water and found his sister in the night sky. He tried to speak, but Sabine shushed him with a pale finger to his blue lips. Then, as if she were sitting in the crook of a branch in their favorite climbing tree, she held out her hand.