But not here.
Definitely not here.
Not with that awful noise in the background.
The sound that stirred him back to attention didn’t come from one of the three living dead though—it came from the main door to the hospital. Someone had inserted a key into the lock.
A moment later, Dr. William O’Loughlin came into the room. He shut the door behind him and walked over to the first patient room, completely unaware that Lightoller was sitting over in the corner.
Lightoller watched the doctor whisper to himself, seemingly grief stricken, and then finally revealed his presence. “Need something?”
Dr. O’Loughlin jumped at the sound of the voice, and then looked over at Lightoller, alarmed, trying to catch his breath. “Jesus. You scared me. What on earth are you doing here?”
Lightoller stood up. “I should ask you the same thing.”
“I’m a doctor. This is a hospital.”
“Have you forgotten what the captain said?”
“No, and I haven’t said a word to anyone.”
“You just came by to do what then?”
“To check on the patients.”
“They’re not patients. And you know it.”
“They may be dying, but they are still human beings. I don’t expect you to understand.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“Am I not allowed to offer my prayers?”
“You can pray all you like, doctor, just not here. This room is off limits, captain’s orders.”
O’Loughlin hung his head and began pacing around the room.
“This isn’t about praying, is it? What are you really doing here?”
“I told you,” O’Loughlin scowled. “I came to check on them.”
“To see if they were still alive?”
“Yes to see if they were still alive.”
“You feel guilty.”
“What if I do, is that so wrong? They don’t deserve to be locked up.”
“They’re not locked up.”
“You know what I mean. They’re sick. They’re not criminals.”
“That may be, but whatever sickness they have is causing them to act violently. What do you suggest we do with them, let them roam free on the ship attacking other passengers?”
“No, of course not. But I don’t think we should just wash our hands and leave them to die either.”
“They can’t be saved.”
“How do you know that? We haven’t even tried. We expected them to be dead by now. But it’s been over twenty-four hours since they last had any food or water. Are we to just let them starve to death? It’s inhumane. Who are we to play God?”
“I’m not playing God,” said Lightoller. “There are two-thousand other passengers on this ship. Somebody has to look out for them. I won’t risk endangering their lives. I won’t have that on my conscience. If three people must die to ensure their safety, so be it. I’m sorry if a few of them had to be your friends, I truly am, but your job here is done.”
O’Loughlin stared at the floor. “What do you know about saving lives?”
“I have a job to do just like you. Need I get the captain to remind you of your responsibilities?”
O’Loughlin shook his head and sighed.
“It’s time to go, doctor.”
April 14, 1912
O’LOUGHLIN
Time to go back, O’Loughlin thought, checking the time.
It was after midnight, over two hours since the confrontation with Second Officer Lightoller. Since then he had been going over everything in his head, hatching together a plan.
The pros and cons.
The risks and rewards.
There was a lot to consider. The second officer was right in that they couldn’t let the virus get beyond the confines of the hospital, and O’Loughlin was determined to not let that happen. A catastrophe like that would be career ending. Where they disagreed, where their professions collided, was in the treatment of the patients.
Lightoller wanted to simply walk away, a valid approach last night when a quick death seemed imminent, and one that O’Loughlin had accepted at the time. The virus had taken hold so monstrously fast that he’d never imagined they’d still be alive twenty-four hours later.
But somehow they were.
And that changed everything for him.
If they’ve been able to survive this long, perhaps they could make it until they reached New York. There was a limited amount of testing and evaluation that could be done on the ship. On land, they could have access to much better medical services and equipment. More doctors. More opinions. Maybe even find out who the mystery man was that infected Elise. If they could find out the origin of the virus, maybe they could find a way to treat it.
Maybe.
Or maybe it would all be wasted time.
O’Loughlin had never been one to settle for the easy answer. In medicine there were few. Around every corner lay a tough decision. This time was no different. But if there were even a slight chance he could save those three, two of them his colleagues, then he would do whatever he had to do, even if he had to do it alone.
He wouldn’t just let them starve.
So he gathered together a tray with two loaves of bread, three empty glasses, and a large pitcher of water. Not a meal worthy of first-class, but it was something. And then he quietly headed back to the hospital.
The stairwell was empty when he arrived. Most in steerage were probably sleeping, and those that weren’t were probably one deck up in the general room. O’Loughlin carefully set the tray down by the stairs and then unlocked the door to the hospital. Before going back for the tray, he made sure that no one, particularly Lightoller, was inside the hospital waiting for him.
He brought the tray inside and set it on the exam table and then shut and locked the door.
His friends were awake and active, as usual. The virus had a stimulating effect.
A heavy wooden bench sat directly between the two patient rooms. O’Loughlin pushed the bench over until it was in front of the door to the first patient room, hoping the bench would act as a barrier just in case he wasn’t strong enough to keep his sick friends from pushing the door open completely.
The plan was simple.
He would open the doors just far enough to slide the bread into the rooms, and then do the same with the water. As long as he kept his limbs out of the door, everything would be okay.
Simple.
He grabbed the food tray from the examination table and placed it on one side of the wooden bench. Then he moved the bench out about six inches to give space for the door to open, and then sat down next to the tray.
The door trembled in its frame as Dr. Simpson and William Dunford went to work playing the drums on the other side. They voiced their discontent with the most unnatural of sounds.
O’Loughlin ignored their warnings, and went ahead and turned the doorknob.
The door came open in a hurry and slammed against the wooden bench, pushing it out a few extra inches. A second later, an arm emerged through the opening. The fingertips were worn down to the bone, oozing congealed blood.
O’Loughlin froze, staring at the arm he was sure belonged to Dr. Simpson.
A ghastly odor wafted outward from the room—the stench of death and decay.
And it was in that moment that O’Loughlin realized he had made a huge mistake.
He pushed back hard against the door punishing the arm in the doorjamb. He continued again and again, pushing back, expecting his assistant surgeon would eventually retract his arm and allow the door to close. But it seemed their sanity wasn’t the only thing the virus took.
Dr. Simpson showed no willingness to retreat, no sign that he felt any pain at all, despite the grotesque popping sound that accompanied the breaking of his forearm. He kept clawing outside the door, moaning more voraciously than ever, determined to seize O’Loughlin between his ruined fingers.
O’Loughlin looked down at the
tray of bread and water next to him, and wondered how he could have been so foolish. He might not have been in the room last night when Elise went crazy, but he saw firsthand the destruction she had inflicted—the dead look in her eyes that followed it. Yet he allowed his good feelings toward his former associates, perhaps even his ill feelings toward Lightoller, to cloud his better judgment.
And now here he sat looking down at a useless tray of bread and water. Trapped. While the former shells of his associates pushed back against the door, wanting to get out, wanting to get him.
The useful tray was across the room sitting on his supply cart.
He’d only have a few seconds.
He used all his strength to push the bench back as far as he could—Dr. Simpson’s arm still dangling battered and bruised in the doorjamb—and then darted across the room. As he came to the supply cart, he could already hear the sound of the wooden bench’s stumps rapping against the floor behind him. His friends were slowly inching the door further and further open. Luckily, O’Loughlin found what he needed right away. It was right on top where he had left it, still filthy with blood from the previous night.
The amputation saw.
He got back to the bench just as Dr. Simpson was wedging part of his shoulder and head around the door. What O’Loughlin saw then nearly caused his heart to stop beating.
The right side of Dr. Simpson’s face looked like it had exploded, leaving a gaping hole where most of his teeth and some ragged remnants of muscle tissue were left exposed. Because of this, his mouth was locked in a permanent, drooling snarl. A few scattered hairs of his mustache remained on the other side.
But his eye was the worst part.
The right eye looked strangely like a fishing lure bobbing on the surface of a lake. Only the lure was a bloody elongated eyeball and the lake was the skinless socket of a half-wrecked nightmarish face that belonged only in the furthest reaches of hell.
The left eye, however, was still intact and usable. And it was staring right at O’Loughlin.
Inch by inch, the wooden bench slid further out. The creature that was Dr. Simpson was almost free.
O’Loughlin unfroze and lunged forward, jabbing the pointy end of the saw into the assistant surgeon’s face. Then he pulled the saw out and did it again.
And again.
Like he was hammering a nail into a wall.
Each time Dr. Simpson withdrew his head a little bit. On the final time, as O’Loughlin pulled the saw back out, the dangling right eye caught the teeth of the saw severing the optic nerve that held it in place. The eyeball bounced off O’Loughlin’s coat and landed on the tray between the bread and water.
The head was now out of the way but the broken arm remained. O’Loughlin hurried to push the bench back to its original position, accidently spilling some of the water from the pitcher in the process, and then got to work on the arm.
Sawing.
Forward and back. Forward and back.
Oily, dark blood seeped out of the arm and ran down the doorjamb.
Dr. Simpson still showed no sign he felt any pain and increased the pressure against the door.
The bench slid back out an inch.
O’Loughlin struggled to push back against the door as he put most of his weight into sawing through the arm. He was halfway through the bone, the most strenuous part, when the battle came to an abrupt end.
He slipped and fell backward, his head nearly striking the exam table, and landed on his back a few feet from the first patient room. The amputation saw flew out of his hand and skittered across the floor, far out of reach.
He looked down at his shoes.
A small puddle was in front of the bench. The pitcher of water had defeated him.
A moment later, his friends plowed through the door and lumbered over him, hungry.
This is it, O’Loughlin thought.
William Dunford looked slightly better in appearance than Dr. Simpson, despite missing his right arm. It lay behind him on the floor, the hand still heavily bandaged. His face was a pale grey color, though still recognizable.
The smell that poured out from the room made O’Loughlin start to cough, a smell that no living thing could possibly produce.
But the two men standing in front of him weren’t living things, O’Loughlin now knew, not anymore. These two were something entirely new. Not alive, and not dead. Existing somewhere in between.
The undead.
It was time to panic.
O’Loughlin rolled on to his chest and crawled toward the main door. His two undead associates hurried after him, tumbling over the wooden bench, knocking the two loaves of bread and the remaining water to the floor.
O’Loughlin carefully stood up, unlocked and threw open the door, but something from below prevented him from crossing the threshold.
He looked down.
The something was William Dunford—he was holding on to O’Loughlin’s ankle with his left, and only, arm. Behind him, Dr. Simpson was unsuccessfully attempting to stand up in the puddle of water. O’Loughlin worked to shake his leg free, but Dunford had a powerful grip, and he used it to pull himself closer—his mouth open, ready to feed. He kicked Dunford repeatedly in the face with his free leg, yanked and twisted and squirmed, and still couldn’t detach the steward from his ankle.
Then he heard the scream.
O’Loughlin looked out into the stairwell at a young woman no more than twenty-five standing at the base of the stairs. She stared at him with a look of horrified shock. O’Loughlin stared back blankly, gasping for each breath, as all the world around him seemed to fade into a dreamlike silence.
He didn’t ask her to help him. He knew he didn’t deserve the help, and she didn’t deserve to be put in that kind of danger. She was too scared to move anyway, too scared to speak or even scream again. Her look expressed all of his worst fears coming true. And his, all the guilt.
“Go find help!” he yelled.
But she didn’t move. She had her eyes fixed on him, slowly widening, while the thing that was once William Dunford wrapped its solo arm around his right leg from behind and slithered up toward his waist.
She finally conceded and ran up the staircase after a second creature, one with only half a face, clutched the good doctor’s shoulders from behind and took a mouthful of flesh from the side of his neck.
SMITH
For the second night in a row, Captain Smith found himself being woken suddenly by one of his officers. This time it was First Officer William Murdoch, who was more distraught than Smith had ever seen him. Murdoch spit out the entire story as fast as he could.
A young woman from steerage had practically jumped into his arms, he recounted, begged for him to do something. Through her sobs, she tried to explain. She spoke of horribly disfigured monsters on D-deck, creatures Mary Shelley couldn’t even imagine.
Murdoch didn’t believe her.
She was delusional.
Then he went down to see for himself.
She had stayed up on the boat deck under the watch of Sixth Officer James Moody, defiant in her unwillingness to follow Murdoch back down there.
Upon reaching the landing on D-deck, the first officer understood why.
“As I came down the stairs I could see the hospital door was open,” Murdoch told Smith. “And when I got closer I saw blood all around the door, and all over the floor. Some even on the walls. So I carefully stepped inside the hospital...and I swear to God, sir...” He paused to gather himself. Smith now noticed Murdoch was trembling. “It was like a damn butcher shop in there.”
Having heard enough, Smith immediately ordered Murdoch to wake the others and then meet him on the bridge. Less than ten minutes later, all the officers gathered in the wheelhouse waiting further orders. Of them, only Murdoch and Lightoller had any clue why they were there. The captain first spoke with his second in command, Chief Officer Henry T. Wilde, in private, and then after Wilde left the bridge, turned and addressed the rest of the group.
“I’ll try to be as brief as possible, gentlemen, because we don’t have a lot of time. I promise to give you a more thorough explanation later.”
Smith took a deep breath.
“Mr. Murdoch has brought to my attention a very serious situation on D-deck. There were three patients staying in the hospital down there who were carrying a deadly virus, and despite our best efforts to keep it contained, keep them contained, it seems they’ve somehow escaped. I can’t stress enough how dangerous these individuals may be. The virus causes them to become extremely violent and noncompliant, as both Lightoller and Murdoch can attest.”
“How will we know who they are?” asked Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall.
“You’ll know,” Lightoller replied. “Trust me.”
“The biggest problem is we don’t know where they are,” Smith continued. “Most likely they are still down on D-deck. So for now we’re going to order all passengers not already sleeping to their staterooms, hopefully to limit any further contamination. Chief Officer Wilde has already begun gathering as many crewmembers as possible to assist in the lockdown. I’m going to remain on the bridge with Quartermaster Hichens so you can find me here if you need me. Pittman, Boxhall, Lowe, and Moody. I want you guys to spread out and take different sections of the ship. Be on the lookout for anything suspicious, and more importantly, make sure everyone gets to their rooms. We don’t need passengers panicking, or worse, curious. Be as respectful as you can, but don’t be afraid to exercise force if you must. As I said, we mustn’t allow any further contamination of the ship. Please go now and be careful.”
Smith checked the time. 12:54 a.m.
“Report back in an hour.”
The four officers nodded and then hurried out of the wheelhouse. Smith signaled for Murdoch and Lightoller to follow him outside, beyond the listening range of Quartermaster Hichens who was at the wheel.
“I want you to go down to D-deck and find those three patients. Start at opposite ends and then meet up in the middle.”
“I’ll start at the stern,” said Lightoller, “with the third-class hospital.”
Murdoch seemed more than satisfied with that arrangement.
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