“Before you go, let me be absolutely clear with both of you. When you find those three,” Smith said, “I don’t want you to try and save them, nor do I want you to try and restrain them. I want you to put them out of their misery.” The two senior officers responded with icy cold expressions. “Get the guns. It’s time we end this madness.”
LIGHTOLLER
The guns were in a locked storage chest in Murdoch’s cabin. White Star policy ordered that there be a minimum of four revolvers on board, one for each of the senior officers—Smith, Wilde, Murdoch, and Lightoller—and that they be held and maintained under the care of the first officer.
Murdoch sifted through the chest and handed Lightoller one of the four-inch-barreled Webley revolvers, and then set a box of ammunition on the floor between them.
“What should I be expecting down there?” asked Lightoller. He broke open the top-loading revolver and began inserting the rounds.
“What do you mean?”
“At the hospital. You were just down there, right? I saw the look on your face when I said that I’d start there. What should I be expecting?”
Murdoch finished loading and looked up at Lightoller. The troubled look on his face told terrible tales worse than any words could.
“Expect hell,” he finally said.
Lightoller nodded. “Better take some backup then.” He pocketed a handful of ammo. Murdoch did the same, and then relocked the remaining contents of the chest.
They left the room and hurried off in opposite directions.
Wilde and the junior officers must have done a good job clearing the way; the ship was as still and serene as Lightoller had ever seen it. The fact that it was so late, and the coldest night so far, also didn’t hurt. His hands, however, ached with each powerful gust of wind, as he held the revolver stoically down by his side.
He ran into Sixth Officer James Moody on the aft well deck. At twenty-four-years-old, Moody was the youngest of the junior officers. Lightoller had served briefly with him on the Oceanic.
“How is it?”
“Quiet. No trouble,” said Moody. “Just finished clearing the general room and smoke room.” Moody noticed the gun in Lightoller’s hand. “And you, sir?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
Some passengers stepped out of the entrance to the second-class staircase above. Moody quickly moved in and began ushering them back inside. Lightoller continued through the door to the third-class stairwell and down to D-deck into the hell Murdoch had said to expect.
It poured out of the hospital.
Dark red blood.
Everywhere.
There were a number of bloody handprints on the floor with small pieces of pink flesh sprinkled about like dead bugs caught in tree sap.
The hospital door was half-open. Lightoller raised the revolver and pushed open the door the rest of the way.
From somewhere came a scream, breaking the eerie silence of the stairwell. Then the sound of stomping feet, running.
For a moment, Lightoller considered taking the bait, but it seemed he wasn’t the only one with that idea. The scream had stirred something else awake.
Lightoller cautiously stepped inside the hospital. The door to the first patient room was wide open, its contents gone except for an arm. The back of the door had long valleys of missing wood where the patients had tried to claw their way out. Tried. And they had come damn near close to succeeding, but the door was otherwise still in one solid piece. They hadn’t escaped then, as Lightoller had assumed. No, someone had come in and opened the door, and the bread and water strewn across the floor gave the guilty party away.
“O’Loughlin,” Lightoller whispered.
The doctor had attempted to do what any doctor would have done in his position.
He had tried to save them.
And I should have known, Lightoller thought.
But where was the doctor now, and where were the patients? Of them only one remained, still hopelessly stuck behind the closed door of the second patient room.
Her.
The first.
Elise Brennan.
The captain gave specific orders on what to do if they found any of the patients.
Put them out of their misery.
Here goes.
Lightoller hunkered into the corner next to the second patient room, cocked back the hammer on the revolver, and then swung open the door. Elise stumbled out into the exam room confused and disoriented, grasping at air. She crashed into a bench and almost lost her balance.
Lightoller slowly came out from his hiding spot behind the door and whistled.
“Hey you.”
He raised the revolver.
Over the course of twenty-four hours, the once attractive Elise Brennan had morphed into nothing short of an abomination. In her diary she had wrote about being stuck in the neck with a needle on the dock at Queenstown. Since then her neck had gone from red to purple to black, and had grown like a tumor out of control into something that now resembled a second head. And this new head pulsed angrily, having already eaten most of her nose and one of her eyes, and threatened to take the rest of her face. Elise deserved death like a caged animal deserves freedom.
She took one step toward Lightoller.
Her last step.
The bullet opened a fissure between her two heads causing a fountain of blood and brain matter to spray up and rain down. She collapsed to the floor and writhed, severely wounded but still moaning and trying to crawl on her hands in an expanding pool of dead blood.
It took one more shot for Lightoller to finish the job—this one sailed directly through her brain stem. She went limp immediately.
One down. Two to go.
He left the hospital.
Crimson tracks led around the stairs to the men’s lavatory. Inside, a corpse lay broken and destroyed in the corner. The victims head looked like it had been smashed against the washbasin until its brains fell out. Despite the face being horribly rearranged, Lightoller knew immediately who the victim was; they had left an arm back in the hospital room.
Put them out of their misery.
Someone had gotten here first.
Two down. One to go.
As Lightoller went to leave, he heard whimpering coming from one of the stalls. He tapped the Webley’s barrel on the stall door and said, “Hello?”
After a brief hesitation, the person in the stall unlocked and opened the door.
Lightoller peered down at the older gentleman sitting on the toilet, fully clothed. Seeing the gun pointed at him, the old man reared back and surrendered his hands in the air. They were covered in blood.
“Christ,” said Lightoller. “So...you did this?”
The old man looked confused for a moment and then shook his head. It was obvious he understood very little English. “I help,” he finally replied, still blubbering like a baby. “Doc—tor.”
Lightoller let the word settle in his brain.
Doctor.
O’Loughlin or Simpson?
Where were they?
“Up,” Lightoller said, backing out of the stall. “You’re coming with me.”
The old man followed Lightoller back to the stairwell. A lighter set of red footprints led to a door to a section of second-class rooms left of the hospital. He had been so focused on the hell pouring out of the hospital earlier he hadn’t noticed this door was cracked open. He could already hear voices on the other side.
Going through that door was like stepping through a portal into another dimension. The stillness of the small third-class stairwell was gone. Here was what he had expected to find all along.
Chaos.
People were everywhere, crowding the halls. A middle-aged woman with short curly brown hair approached him and tugged at his coat.
“Officer, officer!”
“What’s wrong?”
She led him all the way down the hall and then around the corner to the right. As they passed the landing to the second
-class staircase, Lightoller realized the old man he had found in the lavatory wasn’t behind him anymore. The halls were even more crowded on this end, everyone pushing forward to get a better view of something. When they noticed Lightoller in uniform, most people calmly stepped aside and cleared a path.
The crowd thinned out at a narrow hallway that led to a final set of rooms in the section. At the end of the hall, hunched over on the floor with its back to the crowd, was the last of the three patients.
Dr. Simpson.
Beneath the doctor were two bodies. The first was a half-naked woman with a large hole for a stomach, the contents currently being consumed by the doctor.
He had torn through her clothing.
He had chewed through her skin.
He had pried open her ribcage.
All to get at the warm meat inside, the vital organs and intestines that had once worked around the clock to keep this woman alive, now used as fuel for an appetite that had no end.
Lightoller tried to quiet the crowd around him as many yelled and cried and demanded that something be done, while the doctor plunged his head inside the dead woman’s chest cavity and removed her heart with all the ease and indifference of a vulture. When he was done eating her heart, he stopped for a moment and crooked his head back at the crowd gathered thirty feet behind him. Then he made a move for the second body causing Lightoller to step out from the pack.
The second body lying motionless under the doctor appeared to be that of a young boy of nine or ten. There was some blood on his face and his clothing, but no visible signs of decay, or in the case of his mother next to him, disembowelment.
Lightoller strolled toward the doctor with the revolver raised out in front of him. Dr. Simpson stumbled to his feet. The first shot hit him in the upper chest, near the heart, the second a few inches to the left. Lightoller was surprised as neither shot put the doctor down or even slowed his forward progress, if anything they only seemed to make him angrier.
For the third shot, Lightoller aimed higher and put a hole in the neck. But still, nothing.
He had one shot left and no time to reload. In a second, the doctor would be upon him.
Lightoller pulled the trigger and watched as the bullet shattered the doctor’s teeth and split his head open between his jaws. A spray of bone fragments and dark red blood exited Dr. Simpson’s head from the rear. He wobbled in place for a moment and then toppled to the ground.
Lightoller took a few steps back so the doctor wouldn’t land on his feet. He reached in his coat pocket, took out a handful of bullets, and then quickly reloaded the Webley.
“Just in case,” he said, and fired a final shot through the side of the former doctor’s head. The crowd behind him breathed a collective sigh of relief.
“Is anybody hurt?” Lightoller asked.
“Charles,” a familiar voice said from somewhere in the back. People moved out of the way to allow First Officer Murdoch to the front. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
Murdoch looked over Lightoller’s shoulder at the corpses down the hallway. “Fine, huh? I heard the gunshots. What happened?”
“Just following orders.”
“All three?”
“No, just the one with the busted head. But there are two others. One is in the third-class hospital, the other in the lavatory. You find anything?”
“Yeah, there’s a bunch of injured people at the main hospital.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know...a dozen or so.”
Lightoller sighed. “I was afraid of that. We’re gonna have to quarantine them.”
“The staff is doing their best to work on them right now. Can’t find O’Loughlin though. Went to his room but the door is locked and he’s not answering.”
“It doesn’t matter. O’Loughlin can’t help them anyway. If they’ve been bitten, they can’t be saved. We have to gather them all together, and we need to clean up this mess.”
Murdoch stared passed him. “Um...Charles.” The expressions of many in the crowd followed Murdoch’s lead, overcome with disbelief.
“We have to get everyone back to their—” Lightoller finally realized Murdoch wasn’t listening to him anymore. “What...what is it?”
He turned and looked down the narrow hallway at the young boy standing statuesque, looking down at his mother. The boy then raised his head and stared back at the crowd, as if he had sensed all the eyes watching him.
Everyone fell silent.
Lightoller gripped the revolver tighter, his hands starting to sweat, watching the boy’s eyes carefully examine the crowd. The boy didn’t look lost or scared or upset, as one would expect given the unfortunate state of his mother. Lightoller knew the look well, having seen it many times over the last twenty-four hours. The boy’s eyes were glossed over. His soul had already departed to a better place.
He was dead.
Lightoller raised the revolver and slowly cocked back the hammer with his thumb.
A short, scrawny man in a flat cap grabbed his arm from behind. “No, what are you doing?”
Lightoller turned and put an elbow in the unlikely hero’s chest, shoving him backward. “Get your damn hands off me!”
“He didn’t do anything! He’s just a child!”
“He’s infected!”
Murdoch stepped between Lightoller and the angry passenger. He brandished his revolver so everyone could see it. “All right. Back up,” he said to the crowd. After creating a comfortable space, he turned and looked back at the young boy. “You sure you want to do this, Charles?”
“If you’re asking me if I want to kill a kid, the answer’s no.”
“I understand, but—”
“But do we have any other choice?”
“Yeah.”
“I wish we did.” Lightoller raised the Webley again. “God, forgive us. I wish we did.”
The young boy began stumbling down the hall, his moans almost inaudible over the loud ruckus generated by the crowd. They were begging Lightoller not to shoot, yelling at Murdoch for being an accomplice to such injustice.
Halfway down the hall, the boy stopped and again examined the crowd, as though acknowledging the pleas to spare his life.
The man in the flat cap tore through the hands holding him back and made a move toward Murdoch.
“Don’t make me do it,” Murdoch said, pointing his revolver at the skinny hero. “Get back!”
The hero gradually retreated.
Lightoller didn’t look back at the commotion behind him, dare he remove his eyes from the infected boy staring gravely at him. He had always lived his life ready for whatever challenge lay around the next corner. He had never backed down. He had never quit. Life was but a series of choices, some tougher than others.
But killing a kid...
He questioned whether he had the guts to pull the trigger, even if it was the right choice, and if he could live with the result.
One of those questions would be answered immediately, the other in time.
The boy snarled and then scampered fearlessly full speed at Lightoller. A second later, he was falling to the ground, dead blood running from the bullet shaped hole in the center of his forehead. There was a snapping sound as the boy’s head whipped forward and then thudded against the floor.
Dead. For good.
Lightoller took a deep breath and wiped away the sweat from his brow. Then he stepped over the boy’s body, walked to the end of the hall, and put a couple of shots into the head of the mother. As he walked back, he met eyes with Murdoch, unsure of what he wanted to say. He needed rest.
“I’m sorry,” Murdoch said.
Lightoller nodded, gathering his emotions.
Many in the crowd were stunned by the young boy’s sudden rage, wondering if the second officer had been right about the boy being infected with something terrible. Others were too overwhelmed with grief to think about anything beyond crying.
“What now?” asked Murdoch.
>
Lightoller filled his lungs again with another deep breath, trying to settle the electric tension that ran from his chest to his fingertips. His heart hurt in more ways than one.
“Get these people back to their rooms,” he finally replied. “I’ll meet you at the hospital.”
Murdoch began pushing the crowd back down the hall, ordering everyone to return to their staterooms. Lightoller went to the main hospital beyond the second-class dining saloon on the starboard side of the ship.
The main hospital mid-ship was much larger than the third-class hospital at the stern. It contained six patient rooms (each with two beds), a waiting and exam room, and a full bath on each end. Two of the patient rooms were designed specifically for infectious cases, but weren’t nearly large or sturdy enough to contain this ugly plague. Either Murdoch had been conservative in his estimate of a dozen infected, or the number had grown in the last ten minutes. Lightoller’s count was closer to twenty. Luckily, no one had turned yet, but many were close to death. Most had been bitten on their hands or arms when they had tried to defend themselves. By now, all had reached the final stages of the virus, becoming docile, looking drugged.
Two of the junior officers, Fourth Officer Boxhall and Fifth Officer Lowe, had found their way down to the hospital having already cleared the upper decks. Lightoller asked Boxhall to assemble a crew of hospital and cleaning staff to begin clearing and disposing of the bodies down deck. Then with the help of Lowe, he gathered the sick passengers into the second-class dining saloon, where they would wait for Murdoch to return before making any more decisions. Family of the infected stayed to comfort their sick loved ones, unaware of the coming quarantine.
Murdoch returned a few minutes later.
“We can’t keep them here.”
“I know that,” Lightoller said. “But the hospital won’t work. We need a room large enough to accommodate this many people.”
“Where?”
“I was thinking the third-class general room.”
Murdoch frowned, considering the idea. “I don’t know. There’s got to be something better.”
“We don’t have a ton of options here.”
“Say we put them in there, then what?”
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