They all turned. The officer behind them was as big and bearish as his voice suggested.
“We’re sorry, sir,” Fishy said, “but we don’t know what else to do. We haven’t been trained on a gun yet.”
The officer’s insignia identified him as the gunnery officer, their new superior.
“My fault sir,” said Twitch, who had just reappeared around the divider, breathing hard and wiping his hands on a grease rag. “I left them with incomplete instructions.”
Theo appeared behind Twitch, and Sweet Cheeks behind him. Sweet Cheeks was aggravated—with Twitch unless Garret was mistaken.
The big gunnery officer surveyed the open breech on the gun, Garret and Fishy on traverse and elevation, and the rest of the guys with two loaded ammo carts and ramrods in hand.
“If you’ve never done this before, then you did well, sailor. Carry on.”
Twitch nodded. “Aye sir.”
The Russian bear disappeared, and they heard him talking to the next gun crew down the line. Twitch’s name was mentioned several times. Instead of taking charge and issuing more orders as Garret expected, Twitch joined them at the gun port. The shore grew closer.
“What do we do?” Garret asked him.
“Follow orders,” Twitch muttered.
“But—”
“Follow orders,” Twitch said again.
A thick dragging sound came from beneath, starting at the bow and moving quickly astern. The sound dropped away behind the ship. They all looked at Twitch, but he was inserting a measuring stick (Garret could only guess where he’d found it) up inside the gun breech.
“Sandbar,” Sweet Cheeks muttered. “It won’t be long now—”
A deep metallic pop interrupted him, ringing through Kearsarge’s bowels. It sounded like a steel beam popping as they sometimes did in the night, only much heavier, as if something much larger had sprung free.
The rushing sound of the water on the hull grew frothier. Slowly, Kearsarge began to fight her way back towards the center of the river. Her engines throttled up again.
Weary mutters of relief came from the gun crews, Garret’s included. Smiling widely, Pun’kin clapped Garret and Sweet Cheeks both on the backs. Twitch emerged from the gun breech, measuring tape in hand and shook his head in Sweet Cheeks’s direction. “The erosion’s bad, gonna throw the seating way out, and I’ll bet this breech hasn’t been oiled in a month,” he growled.
None of the rest of them knew what that meant, but they trusted Twitch to handle it. Now that the stress was suddenly relieved, fatigue came galloping back. Fishy sighed and lay back across their gun in relief. Floyd sat down and put his head in his hands. Garret became aware again of how badly his back was hurting. This time it was throbbing instead of tingling because of how tense he’d been for the last few minutes.
Garret sat down on the train platform and leaned back against the gun, dimly praying no one else would give him another order that night. He was too tired to be suspicious of what he had just seen, and wouldn’t have known what to do with a suspicion if he’d had one.
Garret and his friends did get one more order, a minute or so later. It came from the Russian bear this time, but it was an order to rehang their hammocks and get back in them. Most of them went to sleep before their heads touched down. Garret almost shuddered with relief when he laid back. Nearby, Twitch lay in his hammock, which was stretched ridiculously tight, staring at the deck above him. Garret rolled over and hoped his back would stop hurting. He was asleep long before it did.
W
After the exhaustion of coaling and then the stress of the run-aground scare, Garret and his buddies were gone so deep asleep that they were beneath even their dreams. So it created a very special sort of agony when the bugler blasted their sleep to pieces with “Reveille,” as loud and irritating as he could play it.
Within the first week of basic, Garret had grown to hate Reveille. His hatred was passionate, and he fed it and guarded it jealously, as if it were a treasured pet. In Garret’s opinion, they needed something like a funeral dirge to awaken them, not a bouncy, perversely happy bugle to shatter their nerves at the crack of dawn.
While Reveille blasted, a hatch opened nearby and someone started shouting, “Turn out, turn out! On the double, men! No time to trice up.”
Garret had been so deeply asleep that he didn’t jerk at the sudden noise, his mind just slowly crawled its way to wakefulness. Then it reconnected with his body. He ached from head to toe.
The mouthwatering smell of fresh bread was drifting from the bakery, just around the corner from where Garret’s hammock hung. That helped a little. In the crew’s galley, just down the way, the cook and his white-shirted guys were rattling pans and tossing slabs of sausage into sizzling skillets. The smell made Garret want to melt into a puddle and flow across the floor towards the food. He felt like he hadn’t eaten in a year.
“Bread…” Theo mumbled sleepily, a big childlike smile on his face.
“We won’t get to touch it,” Twitch said as he creaked to a sitting position. “Not until it’s stone cold anyway.”
“What?!” Pun’kin demanded as if he’d just overheard a presidential assassination plot.
“Turn out and trice up!” This time the voice yelled it in Garret’s face, and shook his hammock on the way by. Garret blinked. Then like a déjà vu nightmare, he heard, “Grab your clothes bags and ditty boxes. Report for muster, on the double!”
“Chief Greely,” Fishy begged, clinging to his pillow. “Can’t we have breakfast first?”
Chief Greely, Garret recalled. That’s his name. As a Master Chief, Greely wasn’t a commissioned officer, but an enlisted man, like themselves. Garret pushed himself up on his elbows. His buddies were all in various stages of waking and climbing shakily down out of their hammocks.
“Sorry men, report for muster, on the double!”
Had this been a normal morning, there would have been grumbling in the berth. Had this been a morning after a long night of drills, the language would have been colorful and inventive. This morning, they were so far beyond exhausted that no one was saying anything. When they’d been awakened for the run-aground scare, they’d been asleep for such a short time that being frightened awake created a sort of delirium in which they could both joke and work. Or at least that was what Garret surmised, because now the night had caught up with them.
Garret put his hands on either side of his throbbing head. After coaling, they’d all taken a sailor’s bath, which was only from the waist up and with no mirror. The early sun poured through the open gun port, illuminating their sorry condition in dawn’s rude light.
Theo had scrubbed his face ‘til it shone, but had forgotten to get around his eyes, so he looked like a raccoon. Pun’kin, on the other hand, had cleaned only around his eyes, so he looked like a circus clown. Come to think of it, he was whistling like a clown too. Loud and off key.
What’s wrong with him? Garret wondered.
“Pun’kin,” Fishy grated, “you’re making us want to choke you.”
Only Twitch and Sweet Cheeks had done a reasonably good job of cleaning themselves. Garret didn’t know how bad he himself looked, nor did he care. Master Chief Greely was already gone. An officer ran past them down the citadel and started yelling at another gun crew further down.
A couple hammocks away, Floyd was blinking owlishly at Garret, his hair sticking straight up in the back. His face was wan and his arms looked as rubbery as Garret’s felt.
“We must be in Delaware Bay by now,” Floyd said. “What do they plan to do? Throw us all overboard?”
“Suit me fine,” Garret groused.
“I once knew a guy who slept so long that he choked to death on his own eyebrow hair,” Sweet Cheeks offered tiredly.
Nobody responded.
“Well,” Pun’kin said loudly, making everyone grit their teeth. “My Daddy always said even the best road’s got some puddles.�
�
Garret climbed down, aching everywhere.
“Pun’kin,” Fishy said, “next mending Sunday, I’m paying Twitch to sew your mouth shut.”
W
Three minutes later, Garret and his buddies stood at attention on the upper deck, the highest deck of the ship. Hundreds of men stood around them in formation.
At least they were standing in the fresh air instead of the sweaty reek of the ship’s interior. The smell of fresh bread only went so far, but the stink of a warship went on forever. Enlistment posters had filled Garret and his friends with romantic delusions of sailing proudly into battle and coming home heroes. In reality, they spent most of their time cleaning the ship. Holystoning the decks, polishing the brightwork, and scrubbing the paint was unbelievably hard work, and it kept the ship looking clean as fresh linen, but no matter how hard a crew worked, warships still reeked. The upper deck was covered with giant horn-like air intakes that drove fresh air into the ship’s bowels whenever she was underway, but Garret wasn’t convinced any amount of ventilation would be effective in a warship that was filled to capacity with hundreds of perspiring guys.
Everyone’s ditty boxes and clothes bags, still sodden from the previous night, lay at their feet. As far as Garret could see in his bleary condition, he and his shipmates were the sorriest looking gaggle of sailors who ever mustered. Faces sagged, and even standing at attention they were limp as sun-scorched tomato plants.
Kearsarge herself looked like she’d taken a barrage of bombs made out of black dust. From his position on the upper deck, Garret had a good view of her smeared and smudged condition. He blinked tiredly and made himself stand straighter. Breathing the salty morning air was helping a little. As far as he could see, the entire enlisted crew had mustered, but not a single officer. So Garret and his shipmates just stood there and waited.
Before his enlistment, Garret had thought the “deck” of a ship was simply the long wooden-planked affair that was always visible in pictures, stretching from bow to stern of a ship, on which sailors were usually pushing brooms or manning guns. In reality, even a man-o’-war as old as Kearsarge was immense enough that she was divided into several decks, like floors in the building, beginning deep in her belly below her water line all the way up to the “main deck.” The main deck was the long one Garret had seen in the pictures.
Kearsarge’s skeleton, bulkheads, hull, guns, bridges, and pretty much everything else in sight were made of massive steel plates and beams, but her decks were wooden to save weight. The upper deck upon which Garret stood was the highest of them. It wasn’t a full deck, but basically the ceiling of the citadel.
Above the upper deck rose Kearsarge’s superstructure. Her cage masts and funnels were the tallest items. They reached into the sky, the funnels exhaling sepia smoke and the cage masts standing up like ten story buildings made of steel lattice. Less than half the height of the funnels, Kearsarge’s pair of giant cranes hung over the decks. Closer over Garret’s head, a webbing of heavy steel beams and skids held Kearsarge’s small fleet of wooden boats.
Garret squinted in the morning sun. He and the other men stood at attention facing Kearsarge’s bow, which was pointed at the sunrise. Beyond her bow, the Atlantic stretched away in a rippling sheet of grey glass, glazed by the sun. A bank of flat bottomed clouds lay low, and the rising sun was caught between them, fiercely orange. The narrow space between water and clouds seemed to pressurize and intensify the light.
Garret squinted at the back of the conning tower and the open-air flying bridges which rose before them. Along the rear of the flying bridge, several chiefs had assembled, but no line officers. The flying bridges were basically large platforms with railing where the officers could easily stand, easily give orders, and easily get blown away by enemy fire. It happened quite a lot, according to Twitch.
A group of a dozen or so officers streamed out of the conning tower and stood along the flying bridge rails looking down at the men. Finally, Garret thought. Still, no one was saying anything, so Garret and his buddies continued to wait.
Where is the captain? Muster for inspection happened every morning, so standing on deck at attention while officers glared at you was routine. This was unusual in that, as far as Garret could see without turning his head, they were all there—every enlisted man aboard. They had been directed to stand at attention in a different formation than usual, one that allowed for more men in a smaller area. When Garret and his buddies had made the hike to the upper deck, he’d seen mess stewards, electricians, firemen, even the chief engineer on his way as well. He couldn’t turn his head to look, but he suspected that every soul on the ship was mustered. It made him uncomfortable. Ships like this one were big, fiddly pieces of steam-driven machinery, enormously complex and in need of constant supervision.
Sweet Cheeks, it seemed, was thinking the same thing. “I guess we just hope nothing serious goes wrong and blows us all to hell,” he muttered.
Talking at attention was expressly forbidden, but they’d been standing there for so long that it was becoming ridiculous. There was nothing Garret hated more than standing around without something to do. Without work, he had nothing to distract himself from his guilt. That thought had no sooner passed his mind than he began to feel a presence. To anyone else, it would have seemed ridiculous to say that Garret began to discern a single certain presence when he was surrounded by hundreds of men, but he did, and his skin began to crawl.
It was the Hollow Man.
Garret strained his vision, looking everywhere, as far to all sides as he could without making it obvious that he was doing so. He could see nothing that was not part of our natural, normal world. But he could feel it.
The Hollow Man’s presence wasn’t cold like a ghost, or even frightening and overpowering like the creature’s presence had been. The Hollow Man was subtle, less of a power, and more of a terrifying revelation. When the Hollow Man was near, it was as if Garret became aware of a truth that men and women were not supposed to know.
When the Hollow Man was near, Garret felt as though he and all human beings lived in a fiction, every day. As though we go through our lives believing that our world is real and solid and important, when in reality, it is as thin as a vapor, as vapid as a black-and-white flicker show, and it is only the lack of comparison that keeps us from discovering the frailty.
The Hollow Man made it known to Garret, because the Hollow Man was from a place that was somehow more real. Whatever reality he was part of, Garret wanted nothing to do with it, but he had no choice. The Hollow Man was grave and powerful and ancient and hideously intelligent. It was as though Garret had spent his entire life in a warm, dark, safe cave, until the Hollow Man appeared and ripped Garret out into the open, where there was blinding light and fearsome creatures and heat and cold and all things unimaginable.
Garret did not know what the Hollow Man was, but the manner in which it existed was dangerously, horrifyingly real in a way that nothing in Garret’s world would ever be. It was overwhelming for Garret to feel connected to it, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Then, as suddenly the presence had come, it was gone. The tension rushed out of Garret, sealing him again in his safe, normal world, where the worst things that could happen were torture and death. Garret covertly glanced around to see if any of his friends showed any indication of having felt it, but they all looked as bored, tired, and hungry as they had the moment before.
Within a few seconds, the sensations of the Hollow Man’s presence were so fully gone that Garret found himself marveling at how much it had upset him.
“Is this a bag inspection?” Curtis whispered from the corner of his mouth. Nobody dignified the question with an answer for a moment, then in his pinched imitation of the Floating Turd’s chaplain, Fishy said, “If so, then may God have mercy on our souls.”
Theo, who had taken the opportunity to stand next to his older brother, smiled. Garret dropped his eyes to his bag. I
t was a sodden mess, so wet from the night’s rain that it had been a bit of a struggle to carry its dripping weight up onto the deck.
At last, a door in the charthouse opened and the Captain emerged. Though he was in full uniform, no one would have needed his insignia to identify him. His presence did that. It extended around him like a subtle pressure in the air. He stepped to the edge of the flying bridge and looked over his ratty crew.
The captain was of average height, middle aged, and his hair was silvered at the temples, but unlike many of the soft, portly officers Garret had seen, this man appeared to be in excellent shape. He wasn’t physically large, but his motions hinted at athleticism, and there was an aggressive decisiveness to him that made everyone pay attention, even though he hadn’t begun talking yet.
They all waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. He looked over them, all of them. It wasn’t a casual sweep of his gaze, taking in a bunch of misfits he’d been handed. Instead, he scrutinized them, as if to meet the eye of each man under his command.
Garret frowned, trying to figure out why the Captain’s inspection felt so odd. Gradually, it came to him. He’s not looking at our caps or our uniforms. He’s looking at us. Basic training had almost made Garret forget what it was like to be a human being. Chief Dodson had done everything in his power to reinforce it. The Captain’s gaze was personal, and as such, it was a jarring reintroduction to personhood.
Then, despite the distance, Garret was suddenly sure the captain was looking at him in particular. The weight of it was both humanizing and uncomfortably intense. It reminded Garret, ever so slightly, of the feel of the creature’s mind invading his own. He shook the memory off.
The Captain’s posture was confident, but it did not set one at ease. Tension began to grow through the ranks. Thanks to basic training, Garret was used to standing at attention for long periods of time for no good reason, but as the captain studied them, sifted them, the silence mounted until it seemed the captain was the only one who wasn’t nervous.
Ironclad Page 7
