Carpathia (6 page)

  Before he could break into the clean, cold, precious air though, something snagged his ankle again, much like the bulkhead door had done before. He reached down to see what it was and to pull his sole remaining shoe free from it if he could, but he saw that the question wasn't what had caught him but who.

  At first Dale thought that the man who had grabbed him must have been drowning too. He couldn't think of any other reason for anyone to be in the water. As much as it hurt, the only way anyone would be in the near-freezing sea would be because the alternative seemed worse.

  Despite identifying with the man holding onto his leg, Dale struggled to kick free. He could tell from the burning in his lungs that he couldn't last much longer, and if the man didn't let go they'd both drown for sure. Try as he might, though, the man's iron grip never slackened for an instant.

  Dale bent over then and tried to pry the man's hand off his leg with his fingers. As he reached down, he got his first decent look at his attacker. He was a thin man, young, with ruddy hair and the flat nose of an Irish boxer, and rather than panicking he did the last thing that Dale expected. He looked up at him and smiled.

  Dale stared at the man, then noticed something about his attacker's teeth that transformed his shock into sheer terror. The man's incisors were as long as fangs, and he wasn't smiling any longer. He was baring them.

 
 

 
 
 

"If we don't make it through this," Quin said, "there's something I need to tell you."

  "Oh, for Lord's sake," Abe said, as he held up his arms to help catch the lifeboat the sailors and a few other passengers on top of the roof were struggling to free. "Let's not ruin the moment, shall we?"

  "What?"

  Abe gave him a sidelong look. "I know just how this will go. You'll confess something horrible, and I'll want to tear your head from your shoulders, and it's only bound to distract us while we should really be concentrating on other, more important things."

  With each of his last words, Abe jerked his head toward the boat above him. One of the officers was sawing at the ropes lashing down the boat with his knife. He had made some progress, but it was slow work. Even once he severed that rope, though, there would be more to go.

  "If I don't say it now, then I might never get the chance," Quin said. "Once the ship goes down, there's no telling what might happen to any of us."

  Abe let loose an exasperated sigh, never taking his eyes off the boat looming over their heads. Quin kept at least half an eye on it himself. If the lines holding the boat snapped and it fell at them, it might well knock them straight into the sea.

  "Fine," Abe said. "But be quick about it then, like a razor to my throat. Just tell me. How long have you been sleeping with her?"

  "What?" Quin's jaw dropped. He forgot about the boat and turned toward his friend. "What are you talking about?"

  "You're surely speaking about the lovely Lucy. How long have you been inducing her to cheat on me?"

  Quin stood aghast. "I've done no such thing. There is nothing – I repeat,
nothing
– I mean,
no way
that I would ever betray your friendship."

  Abe frowned. "Really? I could have sworn… there were all the signs."

  "Of course not!" Quin did a double-take. "Wait. What signs?"

  "The long hours you two spend together. The easy way you have with each other. The secret smiles she gives you when you're not looking."

  "There's absolutely nothing going… she smiles at me?" Quin couldn't help but find himself smiling in response.

  Abe clapped him on the back of his neck. "Well, old man, if you say there's nothing going on between you, then I suppose I have to believe you. Have to admit, though, that I didn't think there could really be any other explanation – unless of course the two of you were talking about me the whole time instead."

  Abe removed his hand from Quin's neck and sidled a step away. "I mean, that's not it, is it?" He rubbed his own neck now, blushing.

  Confused, Quin narrowed his eyes at Abe. "What is it you think you're getting at there?"

  Abe grimaced. "Not the love that dare not speak its name?"

  "The love that–? Oh, dear God, no! That's not it at all."

  Abe's shoulders slumped in relief. "Well, I can't tell you how glad it makes me to hear that. I mean, after all, that would have made our last moments on this planet more than a hair uncomfortable, I think, don't you? I mean, it's not that you're unattractive, but I don't really–"

  Quin put up a hand to cut his friend off. "Abe?" he said. "Shut up."

  Abe nodded. "Capital idea. I think you're absolutely right about that."

  The ship began to pitch forward at an even steeper angle. Abe grabbed Quin by the arm and pointed toward the stern. "Dear God," he said. "Would you look at that?"

  Quin couldn't help doing just that. He stared aft along the ship and watched as the back rose farther and farther into the air, like lost Atlantis rising out of the ocean. It wasn't until he started to lose his balance that he remembered that he was standing on the other end of that same ship.

  Quin threw himself back against the railing and caught onto it with both arms. An instant later, Abe landed there right next to him. "In my wildest dreams," Abe said, "in my worst nightmares, I never thought it would end like this."

  The rear end of the ship continued to tilt up, steeper and steeper, until it struck Quin that they were no longer standing on a ship but clinging to the side of a skyscraper. He'd read that the
Titanic
stretched longer than the Empire State Building stood tall, and staring up the length of it, he wondered how anyone could ever have been arrogant enough to conceive of something so large. Both Quin and Abe clung to the railing as the planet shifted under them and the railing transformed from a barrier between them and the sea into a scaffolding that ran up the length of the ship until it disappeared, too small at the vanishing point to see.

  Quin couldn't muster up as many words as Abe. All he could say was, "Duck!"

  He grabbed Abe's shoulder and hauled him down tight against the railing. A moustachioed man wearing nothing more than his nightclothes and a lifejacket came tumbling toward them, spinning and somersaulting down the steep-canted decking. He smacked into an exposed bit of pipe as he went, leaving a splash of blood behind on the
Titanic's white wall.

  Quin braced himself for impact, but the man only brushed by him, not saying a word or uttering a complaint. He left only a rush of wind to mark his passing, and then a splash close behind him.

  "Jump!" Abe shouted as he grabbed Quin by the shoulder of his jacket.

  Quin glanced down past his feet, which stood on one of the railing's posts, and saw the sea rushing up toward them. He had just enough time to grab a deep breath and crouch for a leap when the water smashed into him and knocked him from the ship.

  To Quin, it felt like the entire ocean had hit him. It washed him and Abe clear of the ship, which continued to founder behind them.

  Freezing blackness enveloped Quin, and he knew at that moment that he would die. A sense of terror seized him as he realized that Abe had lost his grip on his coat and been spun away, leaving Quin alone in the icy, inky depths, countless miles from the nearest land. For that instant, he resigned himself to his impending death.

  Quin tried to pray, to beg God for forgiveness for his sins and to watch over his family and his friends, to console them over his loss. But he couldn't find the words. He couldn't bring himself to do it.

  Horror overwhelmed him then as he came to understand something he'd struggled with for years but always in the end denied, even to himself. When it came down to it, even in the direst moment of his life, at which he felt sure he would die, he didn't believe in God. He would drown here in the North Atlantic, and that would be the end of him.

  The thought that no Heaven waited for him threatened to send him spiraling into despair, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that there was then no Hell to take him either. And then the need to breathe caught fire, and his brain refused to spare him the effort to worry over such philosophical fears. Instead, it forced him to swim as hard and as fast as he could to climb and claw his way toward the unseen surface.

  In his mind, Quin had already given up hope. He knew he had no chance. His will to live, though, shouldered his higher thoughts aside and forced his arms to move and his legs to kick up, up, up, until he either broke through to the atmosphere again or died in the effort.

  
Why not?
he thought. If he only had this one life to live, he had to do everything he could to keep it. God might not care if he lived or died – if there was a God in any case – but
he
damn well did.

  Quin swam toward the surface of the sea with renewed vigor, not knowing how close he might be. He shoved aside any fears that the lack of air would force him to open his mouth and breathe in lungfuls of seawater instead. He had no control over that. The only thing he could do was keep swimming until he gave out, so that's what he did.

 
 

 
 
 

Air leaked from Quin's lips as he swam, and it encouraged him to see it rising in the same direction as he was moving. The fact he could see it at all spurred him on again, as he knew that he must be getting closer to the surface. The moon hadn't been shining that night, only the stars, but the lights of the
Titanic
still burned when he and Abe had been washed off the ship. He had to be getting closer to them.

  The last bits of used-up air escaped from Quin's lungs, which now burned to breathe in something – anything – to sustain his effort to live. His arms felt as heavy as lead, but he kept moving them, using every last iota of energy he had left to him. Then the lights that had been growing before him began to dim. Blackness ate at the edges of his vision, and he felt like he was falling back down a long tunnel even though his arms and legs continued to propel him forward.

  Quin broke through the ocean's surface, his arms still reaching upward and his legs still kicking below. He gasped for air as he flailed about, and his body didn't quit trying to swim up into the open sky above until his vision slid back down through the tunnel that had encroached on its edges and he snapped back to the horrible reality around him.

  Quin hadn't truly felt the cold until then. The lack of oxygen and the resultant surge of adrenaline through his body had pushed aside such concerns, but now it bit like a tornado of thousands of razors spinning around him. He hollered out loud in both shock and relief.

  Quin saw that he had his back to the ship, so he spun about in the water to see what had happened. He got just a glimpse of the massive ship towering over him, people still losing their grip and slipping and toppling from it. The sheer size of it made him feel as insignificant as a bug in a pond, but compared to the ocean itself,
Titanic
seemed like little more than a stick floating next to him.

  Much of the fore part of the ship was submerged now as it sunk into the water at a snail's pace, a single row of portholes slipping under the waves at a time. Quin thought about swimming for the ship. It might be going down, but it had taken hours to get into this position. It might remain afloat for a while longer, he suspected, and at the least he figured being aboard the ship might be better than freezing to death in the ocean.

  "Abe!" Quin hadn't seen a sign of his friend underwater, and now that he'd managed to find some air for himself, he hoped to find him. He spotted a deck chair floating in the water and headed for it, calling out as he went. "Abe?"

  It was then that the lights on the
Titanic
went out.

  A collective gasp went up from every living soul on the ship and in the water around it. To Quin, it seemed like he had just seen the ship die from its mortal wound. The lights had gone out in its eyes. All that was left now was for the ship to bury itself at sea.

  The lights flickered on for one more instant, as if the ship were fighting to survive as hard as the people stranded with it. Then they went out again, plunging the entire area into utter darkness.

  Screams of horror filled the night, hundreds of people terrified for their lives. Having been caught in the blackness underwater just moments ago, Quin's eyes were quick to adjust to the lack of light, and he soon could see the outline of the ship towering over him, a mountainous hulk of blackness against the brilliant stars filling the cloudless night sky.

  "Quin!" someone shouted off to the right. He knew it could only be one person.

  "Abe!" Quin shoved his deck chair in front of him and kicked toward Abe's voice. The chair made for a lousy raft, unable to support much of his weight without sinking, but it proved to be better than nothing. Holding onto it gave him some strange comfort, as if it confirmed that he wasn't alone out here in the freezing waters with nothing at all to help him.

  "Dear God, Quin," Abe said. "After that wave hit us, I thought I'd lost you for sure."

  "I thought we were both dead."

  Quin could see Abe grinning bleakly back at him. The starlight surrounded them, coming not only from the sky but also reflecting off the water all around them. In it, he could see the whites of his friend's teeth and eyes.

  "That too," Abe said. "It's a miracle we survived."

  Quin grunted as he pushed the deckchair toward Abe, who grabbed on to the other end of it. This made it even more useless as a flotation device, but Quin felt the tradeoff was worth it. "For now," he said.

  "You're always such a pessimist," Abe said.