Deck Z - The Titanic

by Chris Pauls

  Weiss flanked him, running his stick-blade right between the red eyes of a foul-mouthed zombie dressed for church, in an expensive suit and silk tie. The German withdrew the blade quickly and jabbed it through the neck of a second female demon in a prim, floor-length ivory dress. With a start, Weiss realized that it must indeed be Sunday morning, though he had lost all track of time. Have I unleashed Armageddon? Weiss punched through a third zombie’s forehead with his blade. I set this in motion. God help me, I won’t let it get off this ship.

  Captain Smith dispatched monster after monster. When he wasn’t removing heads with short, powerful strokes, the captain was punching through skulls, using his glove and the rapier’s pommel as protection for his hand.

  A massive bearded zombie, missing a shirt and oozing sickness from sores on his back and neck, managed to grab Weiss as the scientist was withdrawing his blade from a fallen foe. The creature threw Weiss into the wall, hard enough to dislodge an electrical junction box.

  Weiss fell to the floor grabbing his right shoulder, now dislocated. His cane lay to the side. Blinding pain shot through Weiss as he reached for his weapon.

  An anguished moan from above rattled in his ears. Weiss realized he couldn’t grab the cane, and looked up in terror. The zombie’s bearded maw was about to rip open his head.

  26

  DECK Z, AFT CORRIDOR.

  SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 1912. 12:45 P.M.

  “Mr. Hargraves!” shouted Captain Smith, occupied with three approaching members of the zombie horde. “Please assist Mr. Weiss!”

  Hargraves turned and kicked at the bearded zombie descending upon the scientist. As the zombie tumbled, Hargraves swung his fire ax, severing the beast’s head mere inches from Weiss’s own.

  “Well done,” shouted Smith.

  “I’m in your debt, Mr. Hargraves,” said Weiss, grimacing at the pain in his shoulder as he moved gingerly to his feet.

  Weiss took in the scene as Hargraves returned to the captain’s side. They were badly outnumbered in the narrow hallway. Side corridors offered no escape, only more cabins and dead ends. Some two dozen monsters remained, with no telling how much more wickedness yet to appear from the passenger rooms or adjacent hallways.

  Just then, a cabin door opened near Captain Smith. An elderly woman in a nightgown peeked out, apparently awakened by all the clatter. When she saw the carnage, she screamed a stream of hysterical Italian. Half a dozen zombies turned toward her.

  “Inside and lock your door!” shouted Captain Smith, slicing down two beasts from behind, but not before one had pressed the woman back inside her cabin. Another flung the door wide, and more followed the scent of healthy flesh. The woman’s screams soon faded to silence beneath the gruesome sounds of monsters gnawing her apart.

  “There’s another watertight door ahead—we could slam it like before!” shouted Andrews. He had exhausted his ammunition and was reduced to swinging his lantern wildly. One swing made solid contact with a ghoul’s cheekbone, sending a mass of decomposing flesh to the floor.

  One zombie, a woman in a black shawl now living her own funeral, came for Smith. Out of breath and exhausted, he smote the unseemly wretch with his sword, ending its misery. At the same instant, the damaged junction box exploded, sending sparks into the air. The windowless corridor descended into darkness as all the electric lights went out on Deck Z.

  “Bloody hell!” shouted the captain, wielding his sword blindly in front of him. With painful slowness, his eyes adjusted to the dark. The only sources of illumination were two flickering lanterns that Mr. Andrews had abandoned on the corridor floor. To Weiss, the monsters seemed to grow in the low, murky lantern light, casting long shadows that hung over the men like a gang of Brockengespensts.

  “Close ranks!” cried the captain. All would be doomed if they did not fight together in the black. Then he noticed one of the lanterns bouncing away down a side corridor.

  “Stand and fight, man! That’s an order!” he yelled, but Andrews kept running. “The man isn’t a sailor or a soldier,” Smith shouted over to Weiss, “but I never imagined him a coward!”

  Weiss and Hargraves found their way to the captain, forming a crude wedge. Hargraves battled bravely with his ax, while Weiss struggled to fight left-handed, clumsily wielding the knife-stick. His dislocated right shoulder alternately pulsed with piercing pain, then dull aching. Sensing weakness, another group of monsters down the hall started for Weiss. In the dim light, their dull nightgowns and caps matched their lifeless expressions.

  Smith continued to carve his way through undead fiends, one after another, inching their group ever closer to the next watertight door. At the captain’s back Hargraves found it wasn’t always easy to swing an ax in such close quarters, and the gentleman made do with the butt of the handle more than once. Meanwhile, Weiss fought purely on guts. He punched his heavy cane up and through the neck of a tall, gruesome beast in a topcoat. Sickly gurgling sounds escaped the gape in its throat as Weiss twisted the blade, turning his own body to avoid the black slime that leached from the wound.

  The pain in Weiss’s shoulder was becoming intolerable. The stick felt heavy and awkward. In a moment of inattention, Weiss missed the sweeping arm of a furious zombie-steward, who sent the German tumbling to the floor again.

  Behind the trio, a brilliant burst of light flooded the hall. The men blinked at the brightness as the intense blue flame caught the zombies’ attention, and they hesitated. Andrews had returned, squash racquet in one hand, burning torch in the other. Crouching to his knees, Andrews used his torch to spark a squash ball, yelling, “Hit the decks!”

  As soon as the ball caught flame, he bounced it off the ground, and swung the racquet hard. The flaming orb flashed through the darkness and struck the savage threatening Weiss in the side of the head. The ball exploded on contact and engulfed the monster in a bright blue blaze. The thing let loose with a horrible, piercing shriek and flailed its arms in an inept attempt to extinguish the flames. The fiery zombie lurched backward, spreading the flames to the stained nightshirts and finery of others.

  Weiss crawled from the fiery chaos and rejoined Hargraves and Smith, while Andrews employed his racquet to send two more fireballs hissing down the corridor, each delivering a shot of hellfire.

  “I slit the squash balls and filled them with kerosene,” shouted Andrews. “Racquet strings for fuses!”

  “Ingenious!” shouted Smith.

  The men retreated down the hall to help Andrews ignite more squash balls, lobbing them in the air for him to launch furiously at their attackers. The improvised projectiles exploded one by one, blasting the beasts back down the corridor. The flames didn’t seem to pain the zombies exactly, but they burned just the same as small explosions knocked the clumsy things off their feet.

  “Well played, sir,” said Hargraves, his face lit orange from the explosions.

  Andrews had cleared a path through the burning zombies to the watertight door, but the passage was not likely to stay open for long. The pile of projectiles had dwindled to almost nothing. Andrews and Smith gathered the last ball-bomb and the remaining lantern, with Hargraves and Weiss following. All four men hurried through flames and sickly black smoke. Weiss had hoped he would never again have to smell the revolting stench of burning putrefied flesh.

  The zombies mindlessly grabbed at the men’s legs as they passed, but Smith cut the way through like an explorer clearing jungle brush with his machete.

  “Stay with us now, Mr. Weiss,” shouted Smith. “We’re nearly to the watertight door.”

  “I will,” Weiss burbled, delirious from pain and nausea.

  “Look there, Captain,” warned Andrews. Ahead, on the other side of the watertight door, more zombies could be seen in the gloom, stumbling awkwardly in the hallway, drawn by the light of the fire. Shutting the door would be no protection after all.

  “Shall we set the whole corridor ablaze?” asked Hargraves.

  “Given the condition of our friend Mr. W
eiss,” said Andrews, “I have a more practical idea.” Andrews doused his lantern. “Follow me.”

  27

  MARCONI ROOM.

  SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 1912. 1:42 P.M.

  Twenty-one-year-old Harold Bride earned two dollars a week as a Marconi man, but he would have done the job for half that amount. A quiet boy in school, Bride dreamed of being a wireless operator. Secret messages flying through the air! And only the magical Marconi men could pluck them from the ether.

  His parents didn’t have much money, so Bride worked to put himself through training. Only eight months after completing his studies, Bride was on Titanic. He imagined the voyage might bring messages of international import or intrigue from presidents and kings, but the actual communications had been rather mundane thus far—mostly of the “I trust you’re having a delightful trip” variety.

  So it was with a secret thrill that Harold Bride received a message from the Baltic, a liner making its way eastward from New York to Liverpool:

  Greek steamer Athenia reports passing icebergs and large quantities of field ice today in latitude 41 51’N, longitude 49° 52’W. Wish you and Titanic all success. Commander.

  For Bride, a warning of icebergs topped his personal list of “most compelling messages received so far.” Bride immediately shared the message with Jack Phillips, Titanic’s senior wireless operator.

  “You know the policy,” said Phillips, more jaded about such missives after five years at sea. “Passenger messages first. They’re payin’ the bills, ain’t they?”

  Bride acquiesced, but that didn’t mean he agreed. Surely reports of field ice were more important than inquiries about the accommodations or Great-Aunt Helen’s health. Bride excused himself, message in pocket, and headed down the narrow passageway that connected the Marconi room to the officers’ quarters and wheelhouse.

  On the bridge, Mr. Henry Tingle Wilde was in command, though his head was elsewhere. He stared out at the black waters as the ship pushed ahead at top speed. It was only because of a last-minute change of orders that Wilde was even on Titanic. He had been serving as chief officer of Olympic only days before receiving this surprise assignment, and he’d had misgivings from the start.

  There was something peculiar, even sinister about the new liner. I don’t like this ship, Wilde wrote to his sister at the start of the voyage. I have a queer feeling about it. But even the surest of hunches couldn’t have foreseen a cannibalistic plague belowdecks. Would Titanic ever reach shore? One thing’s certain, Wilde promised himself, I will never sail on Titanic again.

  “I’ve a message from Baltic, a warning of ice ahead!”

  Bride was nearly out of breath, more from excitement than exertion. Lost in his thoughts, Wilde barely heard the young radio man.

  “Sir?” said Bride, offering the message. “A message from Baltic? I believe it’s urgent.”

  “Ice, yes, ice ahead,” said Wilde. And where was Captain Smith? Why hadn’t he called the bridge yet?

  Bride cleared his throat to remind the chief officer of his presence. Wilde shook free from his reverie and said, “We’ll be sure to alert the men in the crow’s nest. Thank you for your diligence. Such warnings are routine at this time of year. A ship this size has little to fear from ice.”

  Bride hadn’t sailed on many ships, but he knew when he was being dismissed. He saluted Mr. Wilde and set off in search of someone who might take the threat more seriously: Captain E. J. Smith himself.

  The captain proved a hard man to find. The young man first looked in the captain’s quarters, then the first-class dining saloon, but no one had seen the captain for many hours. Bride needed to return to the Marconi room very soon—his absence had extended well beyond the ordinary breaks he and Phillips allowed one another. Bride hurried down the open boat deck, imagining where a sea captain might be when not commanding his ship. Then the Marconi operator spotted J. Bruce Ismay speaking to a man with a chiseled face and two elegant ladies in deck chairs, which were turned to take advantage of the high sun.

  “Mr. Ismay!” Bride exclaimed. “Excuse the interruption, but have you seen the captain? He’s not on the bridge.”

  Ismay looked Bride up and down, not placing him despite the White Star uniform.

  “Harold Bride, sir. Radio operator,” said Bride, answering Ismay’s unspoken question. “I have an urgent message for the captain.”

  Not in front of Kaufmann, thought Ismay, who had ten lies at the ready to explain the captain’s mysterious whereabouts. “The captain,” he said, smiling easily, “is attending to some private business at the moment. I’ll take the message and personally make sure he receives it at the first opportunity.”

  “It’s a message from the Baltic, Mr. Ismay,” said Bride, handing over the paper on which he’d typed out the wire.

  Ismay squinted at the type, then patted his pockets in an unsuccessful search for his reading spectacles. He nodded for Bride’s help. The Marconi man looked uncomfortably at the listening passengers: “A warning of ice ahead, sir.”

  Marian Thayer sat forward in her deck chair, putting one hand to her mouth and reaching over with the other to touch her friend, Emily Ryerson. “Ice!” Thayer exclaimed. “Are we in danger?”

  “Danger?” laughed Ismay, shaking his head. He held up Bride’s message to passengers strolling past on their afternoon walks. “Ice! Cubes of ice up ahead! Alert the stewards! Man the Punch Romaine!”

  To Bride’s chagrin, the women giggled demurely. He was learning an important lesson: Experienced seamen apparently were used to receiving ice warnings. His concern only betrayed his inexperience.

  “Imagine the fight, Mr. Kaufmann!” exclaimed Ismay. “In one corner, we have some ice! In the other, sixty-six thousand pounds of the world’s mightiest steel! I’m no betting man, but if I were, you can be certain where my money would be.”

  “I’d need more information to make that bet,” said Kaufmann. “For instance, I’d love to hear more about the private business keeping your captain from his command. Could it be related to the reason I’m not allowed belowdecks?”

  Bride bowed his head and made to excuse himself. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ismay. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “You did the right thing,” said Ismay, slapping Bride on the shoulder and ignoring Kaufmann. “You’ve alerted the officers on the bridge, correct?” When Bride nodded, Ismay continued, “Very responsible. I’ll make sure the captain receives this message as soon as his business is finished.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bride, eager to take his leave. “Thank you, sir.”

  Ismay smiled at the ladies, folded the message, and secreted it away in his breast pocket. He walked Bride a few steps down the deck and gave him a long, direct look. “Send a wire for me to the White Star offices in New York, and keep it confidential, understand?”

  “Certainly, sir,” said Bride, hurriedly fishing for a pencil stub and scrap of paper from his pocket. “What is the message?”

  “Due to arrive earlier than expected. Stop. Monday night. Stop. Extra security necessary for disembarkation. Stop. Crowds could be dangerous. Stop. Be prepared for all contingencies. Stop.”

  28

  DECK Z, POTATO ROOM.

  SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 1912. 2:30 P.M.

  In the dark, with only the illumination of the dying flames in the corridor behind as a guide, Andrews quickly led the men down a side hall and into a storage room. They stumbled inside and locked the door. “Hopefully,” Andrews whispered in the dark, “the zombies won’t have seen our escape. If we remain quiet, the locked door should dissuade any that wander this way, at least until we can get you right, Mr. Weiss.”

  Andrews relit his lantern with his pocket lighter. The men were surrounded by splintered crates full of potatoes stacked nearly to the ceiling. At the sudden light, a few rats skittered out of sight underneath the wooden pallets that kept the crates off the floor. An earthy, damp smell hung heavy in the humid room.

  Weiss slumped to the floor a
nd Smith propped the scientist up against the crates. He tried to put on a brave face but winced at the slightest contact with his damaged shoulder. Weiss’s arm hung at an odd angle, and he seemed on the verge of passing out.

  “Mr. Hargraves, you don’t happen to have anything that could put a man at ease, do you?” the captain asked. “A flask, perhaps?”

  “I wish I did,” the gentleman replied. “We could all use a slug of medicine right now.”

  Moaning sounds outside the storage room grew louder. Andrews piled heavy potato crates against the locked door as an extra precaution. He looked pale as an onion in the dim, flickering light. “Our kerosene supply is low,” he warned. “Should I extinguish the lantern so we can conserve its fuel for more tactical purposes?”

  “In a moment,” said Smith. “I have some work to do first. All right then, Mr. Weiss. Try to breathe.” The captain knelt at Weiss’s side, bending the scientist’s elbow at a ninety-degree angle so Weiss’s clenched fist rested against his stomach. Weiss groaned in agony. “Please … stop …”

  “I know what I’m doing, Mr. Weiss.”

  Smith took a few deep breaths to focus. As Weiss grunted in pain, memories arose that Smith preferred not to revisit, memories of war that he had taken to the sea to forget. Smith had never fought zombies before, but he’d seen the carnage of combat. For a moment he was back on a bloody battlefield, mending a man who had been one of his closest friends. Despite Smith’s best efforts, his friend did not survive.

  Edward Smith had been a young man then, a cavalryman in the British Army and foolishly cavalier about many things: Britain’s place in the world, his own abilities as a soldier, a future he saw as assured. Smith was a proud member of the Guides, elite warriors assigned to protect the British Consulate in Afghanistan.

  Kabul.

  There had been a treaty in place, a promise of peace. Vain men with far more authority than Smith grossly overestimated the protection that piece of parchment and the British Army’s reputation provided. To this day, Smith couldn’t believe no one saw the uprising coming, himself included. When thousands of angry Afghan soldiers pounded on the doors of the consulate, only four Brits and sixty-odd Indian soldiers were inside to defend it.