The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  That was always the last to go.

  He’d had dead men blink on command for him.

  Except he must be hallucinating voices. Because a woman was talking. Not that he could make out the words. Just that it was a female yelling something.

  Must be an angel. Except this angel sounded mad as hell.

  The clamp around his neck loosened. The air bag deflated. The blackness opened on the center of a new scene. And sound became intelligible.

  “Nice and easy, Moose. I don’t want any trouble from you,” the angel said.

  “No, ma’am,” Moose replied, sounding contrite, a side of him that would have been unimaginable a few moments ago.

  Terry found himself on his hands and knees, trying to bring the floor into focus.

  “Are you all right, Dr. Ryder?”

  He forced himself to look up. The pain in his neck made him regret the effort. “Don’t know.”

  “Just stay where you are. Moose, you lie face down on the floor, hands behind your head.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Now, Moose!”

  Terry tried to look up again. He saw a tiny woman wearing an MP armband over the sleeve of a regulation, crisp white shirt and an empty holster strapped to a pair of creased black trousers. A more improbable adversary for Moose he couldn’t have dreamed up if he’d tried. But there she stood, holding the muzzle of her automatic pistol to the temple of a giant three times her size who docilely did what she ordered.

  Terry gingerly moved his neck again, having neither felt nor heard any grinding or crepitus the first time, a pretty good sign that Moose hadn’t snapped any vertebrae. His muscles protested, locking themselves into a spasm, but he managed to massage them out of it, and got to his feet, albeit unsteadily.

  “Are you sure you should be doing that, Dr. Ryder?”

  “I’m fine,” he lied, supporting himself against a bulkhead.

  “I’m so sorry, Doc,” Moose said, openly weeping. “So sorry.”

  “Are you going to be okay with him?” Terry asked his rescuer, not eager to leave her alone, but intent on getting to sick bay and down to work.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You saved my life. Thank you.”

  “I did my job. Besides, I owed you.”

  Terry took a closer look at her. It wasn’t unusual to encounter service personnel that he’d treated in ER. The skin around her blue eyes drooped, puffy and dark from lack of sleep, but her spikey black hair gave her a youthful aura appropriate to a high school senior, not a sailor on a warship run amok. “Have I seen you at the hospital?”

  “You saved my husband’s life New Year’s Eve five years ago. He’d been in a bad car accident. You probably don’t remember, but you were very kind. And what helped most, you spelled out his chances without any bullshit, so I trusted you.”

  He didn’t remember. Probably because the case turned out fine. It was the bad endings that stuck. “Well, it’s me who owes you tonight,” he said, and turned to leave, then paused. He didn’t know her name. “I’m sorry, what do they call you?”

  “Moose!” his former attacker said.

  “Not you!” he said, and laughed in spite of everything.

  “Chrissy,” she said, transferring her gun to the left hand while bringing out a set of wrist ties.

  “Hi, Chrissy,” Moose said.

  “Shut up, and put your hands behind your back,” she ordered, beginning to smile despite the tough talk.

  Moose obeyed.

  Terry shook his head, still grinning, until he saw Chrissy’s hand begin to tremble as she tried to attach the ties.

  He immediately stooped to help fasten them.

  “Is what happened to him going to happen to me?” she asked without looking up.

  “How long have you had the tremor?”

  “A couple of days.”

  “That’s how it starts, Doc,” Moose added.

  Chrissy looked at Terry, her eyes searching his for reassurance. “No bullshit, Dr. Ryder. Do you have any idea what’s doing this to us?”

  “No, not yet, but I intend to find out.” He finished securing Moose’s wrists for her, and added, “Can you call for some kind of backup?”

  She nodded.

  He’d nearly arrived at sick bay when the general’s voice crackled in his headset.

  “Ryder, I need you on the bridge, now!”

  Shit. “Look, if those flyboys are giving you trouble, there’s still competent MPs around. I’ve got to get set up down here--”

  “It’s the captain. He’s bleeding. One of his own men accidentally shot him in the leg--”

  “Then get the medics to him. They’ll know what to do--”

  “Ryder, the man didn’t just lock himself in the bridge. He and a bunch of armed lunatics blockaded themselves there with enough armaments to blow the controls to smithereens, which they’re still promising to do if we move in. He’s also shut down the computers and sealed access to them in a maze of passwords. Our people need that access to override the bridge and seize control of the ship from the engine room. You don’t get us those codes in twenty minutes, we’re fucked--”

  “Me!”

  “You figure lunatics respond better to talk than to armed soldiers, so it’s your show. The captain may even remember you from the pandemic days--”

  “Son of a bitch,” Terry muttered, reversing direction and heading for the bridge at a run. “Get me the ship’s surgeon, if he isn’t too far gone. Better a co-negotiator who knows the captain well--”

  “That’s the other bad news. MPs just found the good doctor stuffed under the captain’s bed, his neck broken. This commander now has nothing to lose.”

  Jesus. “Then find someone to make me a list of what matters to this guy,” Terry said, reaching a stairwell and taking the steps topside two at a time. “Who and what he loves--wife, kids, girlfriend, boyfriend, dogs, golf--I don’t care, as long as I can tempt him with it!”

  After a few wrong turns, he stepped onto an upper promenade deck that skirted the superstructure just starboard to the bridge. Rain pelted his visor, making him wonder if the outfit came with wipers.

  Crouched in the shadows were a dozen men with guns, all wearing biohazard suits with extra-large hoods to accommodate night-vision goggles. They’d fixed their aim on a shut hatchway and, just beyond it, the wraparound plexiglass that enclosed the bridge. No interior lights were on, nor could he see any of the people holed up inside. But at the far end of the open deck, halfway between hatchway and plexiglass, a group of men and women in white scrubs huddled over the writhing body of a tall black man. Terry made for them.

  Some held IV bags aloft, the plastic tubing connected to their captain’s limbs. Another fitted him with a translucent mask attached to portable oxygen tanks. Others tried to hold him down, and still others pressed wads of gauze into his mangled right thigh, its contents having been shredded from a fusilade of large caliber bullets.

  Fresh blood blossomed from his wound faster than they could soak it up. As they packed in more gauze, then leaned on it to staunch the flow, his teeth chattered, shock sending him into paroxysms of shivers, and his ebony complexion paled to corpse-gray. The rest of his leg lay off to one side, still attached by shreds of skin and sinew, but twisted outward at an odd angle.

  Terry quickly squeezed between the medics and kneeled by the wounded man. “What have we got?” he said, switching on his two-way radio to make himself heard above the din of rain and sea.

  “Severed femoral artery,” a young man across from him yelled, voice cracking from tension like a teenager’s. “I can’t reach it.” His gloved hands were crimson to the wrist from feeling for the transected vessel.

  “It’s retracted too far up the thigh,” added the woman beside Terry. She had blood to her forearms. “We’re losing him. Pressure’s seventy over zip--”

  “Anyone administer hypertonic saline?” Terry’s voice resonated with the cool steady tones that can calm an entire ER.


  “Yessir! Salted to the max. Even his eyeballs are soggy,” a small, dark-haired woman replied.

  Infuse a hemorrhaging man with a concentrated sodium solution, and it sucks most bodily fluids into the central circulation, instantly boosting vascular volume, like a transfusion. This preserves blood flow to the heart and brain at the expense of liver, kidneys, gut, skin, and muscle--all replaceable, at least theoretically. You know the effect is maximum when eyeballs go soft.

  “Good,” Terry said. “Now let’s grab that artery.”

  The woman beside him retrieved a set of sterile gloves from the medic’s equipment box and passed them to Terry.

  He pulled them over the bulkier pair that went with his HAZMAT suit. She moved aside, and he thrust his right hand deep into the trailing ends of muscle and shards of bone that protruded from the near severed limb. “Easy, Captain,” he said. “Sorry we have to meet again under such unfortunate circumstances, but this is going to hurt.”

  Until then, Thomas Washington had seemed oblivious to him. Now he stared directly at Terry. He grimaced hard but didn’t scream, then forced a smile as stiff as rictus. “Calm yourself, Dr. Ryder,” he said through clenched teeth. “I took you for a man who would not flap. Of course that was during a flu epidemic, while sunlit waves rolled by and left me deepening down to gloom--”

  “Wacko.” The general cut in, appearing at Terry’s elbow and still communicating through the headset on a closed frequency. “Apparently he’s been spouting that crap all night. His fellow wackos in the bridge are just as bad, but at least they allowed the ship’s medics to fetch him out. They also insisted we treat him here, under their armed watch. They’ll shoot us if he dies.”

  “You’re full of good news, Robert--”

  “It gets better. I just got word that at least one reactor appears to be booby-trapped with shaped charges of C-4, so assume that someone in that bunch has got a detonator and is crazy enough to use it.”

  “Christ,” Terry muttered, reaching deeper into the ravaged thigh. Searching for a bleeder was a job he normally did by feel, palpating through the anatomical landmarks until he felt the warm pulse of a pumper through the latex of his gloves. The thicker HAZMAT material made that impossible. He’d have to grab the artery like a snake.

  “We’ve got fifteen minutes, Ryder,” Daikens said, and retreated to huddle with the snipers.

  Terry’s fingers manipulated their way through a delicate plexus of nerves to reach the still intact femoral vein. It normally tracked beside the artery and would lead him to it.

  The captain screamed through gritted teeth.

  “Christ, give me the codes, Thomas, and order your men to stand down. Then I can give you IV fentanyl to put you out,” Terry said.

  The Captain glared at him again. Are you a torturer now, Doc? his stare seemed to say. Withholding analgesia to extract information? Instead, he launched into another round of strange verse. “So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one seems but uncertain twilight . . .”

  The words vibrated in Terry’s ear with a James Earl Jones rumble. Shaken, he tuned them out and continued to palpate for the bleeding artery. As he worked, his gaze darted toward the bow and beyond, drawn to what he first thought must be an optical trick caused by the drops of rain on his visor. A narrow band of tiny glitter stretched across the night like a string of miniature diamonds. It took him a few seconds to realize that they were the lights of Honolulu.

  Chapter 5

  Terry plied his fingers through the wrecked layers and torn strands of muscle with new urgency. “Talk to me, Thomas!” he badgered to no avail.

  The woman across from him reached to the captain’s groin. She leaned on it with her finger tips, attempting to tamponade the bleeder against his pelvic bones.

  “Sixty over zip,” said the man monitoring vitals.

  The rest of their team applied pressure dressings in restless silence that screamed, This isn’t working!

  Thomas Washington, between howls of pain and chattering teeth, continued his rant.

  A lieutenant approached, carrying a piece of paper. “Here’s the information you wanted, Sir.”

  “Hold it out for me to see,” Terry told him, and squinted at the water-soaked scrawl of what Thomas Washington held dear. Leading off the list were several women’s names--Bunny, Colette, Brigitte, Lucy, Katie, all designated as companions--followed by a few ex-wives, and, a noticeable absence, no children. “Captain! Listen to me. What would Bunny think? Or Colette? Even Brigitte?” he began, resorting to the standard ER chestnut for dealing with a deranged patient--evoke the names of loved ones. “They’d want you to do the right thing, Thomas. Turn the ship’s computers over to us and save your crew. Isn’t that how the warrior they love would act?”

  Thomas Washington grimaced, but never broke off from his rambling diatribe. “I told you, so far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one seems but uncertain twilight--”

  “Damn it, what’s this ‘dark side’ crap, Captain? Star Wars jargon?” Terry interrupted, thinking that anger might reach him--just enough to shock him into answering, yet not enough to piss him off. “Thousands of people are going to die, and you’re spouting Star Wars?”

  The Captain’s jaw muscles bulged as he clamped his mouth shut and stopped talking completely.

  So much for ER chestnuts.

  All the while Terry inched his fingertips through webbings of intact veins and plied apart more sheets of fascia-coated muscles, ticking off the anatomical landmarks as he went. The rain had begun to fall harder now, peppering his hood and visor as he worked. It isolated him in a cocoon of sound that drummed out everything except voices coming through his headphones. Even the frothy clash between steel and sea as the carrier reamed the waves from behind, mounting their backs like a rutting beast and riding them toward shore, raged in silence. It was like watching a movie with the volume down. But nothing blocked the noise of all the helicopters following overhead. Their rotors pummeled the air with the persistence of war drums.

  Hunched nearby in the shadows, the general held up both his hands, fingers outstretched, then folded in both his thumbs. Eight minutes to shore. That meant they would reach the reefs in five. The Reagan needed at least six to stop.

  The squad of marksmen kneeling farther back in the darkness shifted edgily, their weapons steady, muzzles pointed toward the bridge. A second tier of soldiers positioned behind them, not part of the SWAT team, stirred as well, but in a more unruly manner. They threatened to press forward, a dark curtain of human forms, their guns wavering every which way. With his free hand Terry switched his radio to an open channel. Fragments of their chatter burst over the speakers of his hood.

  “Storm the fuckers.”

  “Let the psycho blow the bridge. That might stop this bucket.”

  “How about I blow Dr. Phil there.”

  These were men ready to break rank.

  “Stay where you are!” the general ordered, voice rock steady. “We need the bridge intact.”

  The soldiers hesitated, neither advancing nor falling back. Eyes glittered menacingly from behind their visors, and their mutterings continued over the headsets in a disembodied, venomous buzz.

  Terry strained even farther up the inside of Thomas Washington’s thigh. “You want to destroy yourself, Captain, that’s fine!” he said, losing patience for real. “But your crew? Your boat? The whole city of Honolulu?”

  A deep chuckle vibrated in his ear. “Oh, my. Do I hear a black angel of doom, breaking a book in a pulpit?”

  Where the hell was he digging up this stuff?

  “Now leave me be, Ryder . . . or I’ll order my men to blow us all to hell . . .” The captain’s voice slurred into a whisper as he succumbed to shock.

  Filtered through speakers, the words seemed to originate in Terry’s own head.

  “Fifty over zip,” said the medic covering vitals. “Pulse
, one-sixty.”

  “For . . . like the dying whale . . . my jets were the strongest and the fullest of trouble . . .”

  Whale? Wait a second. “Hold up that list for me to see again,” Terry said.

  Never ceasing his fingertip advance along the path of the femoral vein, he once more skimmed the water-soaked scrap of paper, focusing on the mini summary of what things mattered to Thomas Washington. It wasn’t Star Wars that this nut was quoting. There, at the bottom, under Prized Possessions, he spotted what he’d barely taken notice of the first time. The guy owned a first edition of the greatest whale story ever told. He’d been quoting Moby Dick.

  The general gestured to catch Terry’s attention, holding up eight fingers, then folding one to leave seven.

  At that moment, Terry touched what felt like a throbbing hose. “Got it!” he announced.

  Without being asked, the woman across from him slapped a Kelly clamp into Terry’s free hand. It resembled a large, stainless-steel, pair of needle-nosed pliers, and he slid the tip of it to where he’d grabbed the artery. Easing the flat pincers over each side of the muscular vessel, he snapped them shut, locking the grips in place. The major hemorrhage immediately abated, allowing the medics to go after smaller pumpers with hemostats--tinier versions of what he’d just used on the femoral.

  “What would Starbuck tell you to do, Captain?” Terry said, hastily launching a strategy that just might bring the captain to his senses. Because sometimes, if you fed into the madness of a patient, his delusion could be manipulated and its blinding grip broken, at least for a few minutes. In this case, that might be long enough to get the passwords. He hadn’t read Moby Dick since his university days, but the movie versions, both the Gregory Peck and Patrick Stewart renderings, were fresher. Several scenes popped to mind, and he more or less remembered some dialogue. If he dressed it up to sound like Melville’s prose, maybe, just maybe . . .

  “Starbuck?” Thomas murmured.

  Terry hadn’t time to be choosy. Through the darkness, he could see swells beginning to bulk up as they neared where reefs of lava rock lay in wait, diamond hard, razor sharp, and able to grind through steel. Nor would Thomas Washington be conscious for much longer. Despite pressure dressings and clamps, a purplish venous ooze seeped from the sodden tissues of his mangled leg, carrying him deeper into shock.