“What’s the worst thing you ever ate?” Curtis asked the table.
“Well,” Fishy said, chewing speculatively on his potato. “I was helpin’ my Pa hang the tobacco one day, and I accidentally took a swig out of his spittoon.”
There was gagging all around the table.
“I drank white shoe polish once!” Pun’kin volunteered. Laughter rolled around him. He got defensive. “I thought it was milk!”
That only brought more laughter.
“Now how old were you,” Fishy asked.
“Oh, it was a while back,” Pun’kin mumbled.
Fishy smelled fresh meat and swooped in for the kill. “It was last month, wasn’t it?”
“Fishy, you know that ain’t true! I been with you in bootcamp longer than that.”
Fishy replied, “And they called you a boot licker, didn’t they?” He turned to Garret. “Hey Lover Boy, I can’t remember, were Chief Dodson’s boots white?”
“Mama told me to be polite!” Pun’kin protested, coloring up.
Garret gritted his teeth as he picked a wood splinter out of his mashed potatoes. “Let it go, Fishy.”
Theo had given up on the toast. He ate quietly, soaking the conversation in, like he soaked everything in. He seemed perfectly happy to sit beside his brother and watch the world go by.
Next to Theo, Burl was looking with distaste at his spoonful of apricots. “Why is it always apricots?” he whispered, but Twitch heard him.
“They feed us apricots so we don’t get scurvy,” he replied.
“What does that mean?” Burl dared to ask.
“It means you poop yourself to death,” Fishy said.
“That’s not what it means,” Twitch crabbed.
Sweet Cheeks said nothing.
“I heard they turn your insides orange. Like really bright orange,” Fishy said.
Pun’kin interrupted. “My poop’s orange!”
Fishy lowered his voice conspiratorially, “I heard last year on the Kentucky, this officer got killed, and when they opened him up—“
“What do you mean opened him up?” Pun’kin asked.
Fishy rolled his eyes, “When you die on a ship and they don’t know why, they cut you up to see if they can figure out why you died.”
“No they don’t,” retorted Curtis.
Fishy grinned deviously. “I swear they do. Carve you like a Christmas ham.”
Twitch shook his head and went back to his food.
“Oh my. What did they find?” Sweet Cheeks asked flatly, closing his sketch book.
“Well,” Fishy said, leaning in. Everyone but Sweet Cheeks and Twitch joined him. “When they scooped his eyes out—”
“They don’t scoop your eyes out!” Curtis barked.
“How do they do that?” Garret asked, curious in spite of himself.
Fishy licked off his spoon, slowly, using his tongue around the edges. “They have a spoon, like this one, see? But rounder, and they sharpen it all the way around.” Fishy leaned toward Theo, reaching slowly for his face.
“Then they drive it in right here,” Fishy made a faux lunge. Theo squeaked and lurched backwards, landing on the deck.
Everyone laughed. Garret helped him up. Theo’s face was red. He sat back down, but closer to Burl than Fishy. Theo kept his head down and pushed his food around.
“Hey Velvet,” Fishy called, “what took you so long?”
Velvet was approaching, grey with ash and carrying his food, but he was almost sneaking towards the table as if he’d just stolen the food he was carrying. They all sat up a little bit more. Whenever one of their number was trying so hard not to attract attention that he was attracting everyone’s attention, that meant he’d heard a juicy piece of news.
Velvet sat and looked around at all of them with a conspiratorial grin. “Hey guess what I heard? You know those prisoners we got from the British ship? Well, I guess they aren’t prisoners since the Captain took their cuffs off, but still kind of because—”
“What’d you hear, Velvet,” Pun’kin asked.
“You know how we couldn’t figure out what kind of uniforms they were wearing? It’s because they’re not Navy. They’re ground troops.”
Fishy rolled his eyes. “Army uniforms don’t look like that.”
Velvet smirked. “American Army uniforms don’t. They’re Germans,” he said. “Storm troopers.”
Well if you’da asked me how my day went… Garret thought with annoyance.
“What’s a storm trooper?” Curtis asked.
Theo had lost his embarrassed flush. He and Burl were sitting close together, eating and watching raptly as the conversation bounced around them.
“They’re killers,” Velvet said with an evil grin. “Killers from the cradle.”
Fishy shrugged. “Eh, sounds like the stuff our Marines say about themselves.”
Velvet shook his head. “Do they start training our Marines when they’re eight years old?”
“They don’t train them at eight!” Curtis said.
Velvet just raised one eyebrow at him and said, “They have to kill their first man at nine years old. When they’re ten, they take them out into the Black Forest in the middle of winter and leave ‘em butt naked. They have to make their way back a hundred miles to camp. They have to eat bugs and bark, make fire so they don’t freeze, protect each other from the wolves. It bonds them together into a fighting unit.”
Sweet Cheeks offered lightly, “Yeah, I hear they have to eat each other’s shit to prove how loyal they are.”
“They don’t eat shit!” barked Curtis, whose only conversational job seemed to be to disagree with everyone else. “And they don’t eat bark, neither.”
Garret looked at his rock-hard toast. If the Germans were eating what he was eating, then maybe Velvet wasn’t that far off.
“Well what do storm troopers do?” Pun’kin asked.
“They’re specialized shock troops,” Twitch said quietly. Everybody turned except Sweet Cheeks, who clenched his jaw as soon as Twitch spoke.
“Specialized in what?” Fishy asked.
Twitch played with his food.
“Infiltration,” he said at last.
W
Garret was coming down the citadel, fuming, orders in hand. I went through bootcamp so I could be the Captain’s mailman. He slowed as he approached the galley. Laughter was coming from behind Nancy’s blast shield. Men were gathering around. Garret glanced at the orders in his hand, then worked his way into the small crowd. Some of the men at the rear were standing on tiptoes curiously.
“Move aside,” Garret said gruffly as he came through. “This is my gun.”
He actually wasn’t doing anything related to the gun, but they didn’t know that, so they grudgingly parted for him. In the middle of the clot, Twitch, Fishy, Burl, Pun’kin, and Sweet Cheeks were standing in a circle, passing around a big pickle jar and laughing until they cried.
The pickle jar was stuffed full of something orange. Garret squeezed in beside Sweet Cheeks as Twitch handed him the jar. It was one of the huge old jars that had probably contained six quarts of pickles before it had been cleaned and repurposed.
Now it contained about five quarts of marmalade cat. Bert, who never recognized a bad idea until he’d already tried it, had somehow managed to climb his entire self down into the jar. Garret couldn’t imagine how he’d done it. The stupid cat filled every inch of the jar. Only his tail was sticking out above the rim, straight and bushy as a Christmas tree. His orange body was packed so tightly into the jar that it didn’t seem to have any shape, just fur filling the jar to the rim, and one feline face, smashed against the glass, green eyes glaring at them all as they laughed. His back was moving up and down in indignant little huffs, so at least he was still breathing. Somewhat.
Sweet Cheeks, who was laughing so hard he could barely stand, fluffed Bert’s tail and then reached out to pass the jar to Garret who w
as, by now, laughing too. As Sweet Cheeks handed the jar over, his sketch pad fell out from under his arm, landed on its spine and began to fall open. He smoothly nudged it closed with a toe before anyone got a glimpse of the open pages.
Garret tried to hand the jar to Fishy, but Fishy, who was laughing so hard he was crying, held up his hands and backed away. “I’ve got to go find a hammer,” he said.
Twitch took the jar. “We could leave him,” he wheezed. “Mount him on Nancy’s barrel like a hood ornament.”
Sweet Cheeks offered, “If we had the lid we could label him Catus Stupidus and put him back on the shelf.”
Garret was on duty. If he got caught belly laughing at the ship’s mascot instead of delivering the orders, there’d be hell to pay. With a final headshake, he stepped out of the circle and headed for the berthdeck. Between the laughter, the excitement, and the horror of the Lion experience, Garret had forgotten that the Hollow Man had promised that they would meet again that night.
Garret had forgotten, but the Hollow Man had not.
W
Late that night, long after his friends had knocked off their last duty and hit their hammocks, Garret was still scrubbing. Theo—sweet little Theo—had offered to come and help Garret scrub down the ship’s ladders and decking, but Theo was already so tired he could hardly stand up. Garret had thanked him then told him to get some sleep.
Now, two hours later, Garret was kinda wishing he’d taken Theo up on his offer. This wasn’t a fun job to do by himself. Garret hadn’t been anywhere near the thirteen inch ammunition room when the accident had happened, but he’d heard it was bad. The blood trail he was trying to erase would appear to agree.
Mr. Sokolov had been running a training drill with the thirteen inch guns. He’d been drilling the entire process of loading the guns, so everyone from the powder magazine crews to the turret crews had been training. Apparently, someone on the handling room crew didn’t secure one of the thirteen inch shells properly in the hoist. When they began to raise the shell to send it up three decks into the turret, it broke loose. Another member of the handling crew happened to be walking beneath the hoist, even though he wasn’t supposed to be. Thirteen inch shells weighed half a ton each.
They had carried what was left of the man on a long path from the handling room to sick bay. Now Garret had been handed a mop, a scrub brush, and a bucket, and told to erase all the signs of their passage.
There was only one sign, really. Blood. Lots of it. Had Garret not seen the things that the creature had done, he would not have believed one human body could contain so much blood. But he’d seen worse. Much worse. Not that that made the job any easier. That was one of the odd things he’d noticed about the horrors he’d experienced. Just because one eventually began to grow numb, that didn’t mean they weren’t still affecting him on the inside.
At the moment, sitting on a tread of the last ship’s ladder he had to clean, Garret was reaching back and scrubbing between his legs, just for a change of position. He’d been scrubbing on his knees too long. Water ran red everywhere. He’d given up trying not to get the blood on him more than an hour ago. He was soaked with bloody water now, turning his white uniform a light, diluted pink.
Suddenly, Garret wasn’t alone. Normally, that wouldn’t have been a frightening feeling. He was on a ship full of people, and the lights were up, but the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.
Oh no… Garret’s heart seemed to shrink within him.
Then the Hollow Man was there. Garret couldn’t see him, but he could feel him as strongly as he could feel the tacky speckles of blood that the scrub brush had flung back on his face.
Follow me, the Hollow Man said.
Garret kept scrubbing as if he hadn’t heard. The Hollow Man did not repeat himself. Garret felt the cold ring around his finger, then the wire running to his heart. He dropped the scrub brush and was drawing a breath to beg for mercy when the wire drew tight, and his heart quit beating altogether.
Garret hit his knees, then his face. The pressure on the wire released and his heart stuttered, then regained rhythm.
Follow me, the Hollow Man said calmly, then Garret felt him begin to move away. Garret pushed himself up to his knees. He was still soaked with blood water, but beneath that, he’d broken out in a cold sweat. He got to his feet shakily and followed the feeling of the Hollow Man’s presence.
They didn’t have far to go. The Hollow Man ascended the ship’s ladder, and Garret followed as best he could. The ladder landed on the berth deck, almost directly in front of sick bay, where the blood trail ended.
The Hollow Man, however, turned towards the turret column, the massive steel cylinder on which the turret rode on the deck above. On the side of the turret column was a door. It had never been there before. And this time he knew he wasn’t dreaming.
Garret took a wary step closer. It was a normal United States Navy door, equipped with oversized hinges, seals, and dogs for battening it down to water tightness. It looked like all the other doors aboard the Kearsarge.
Except that it had never been there before. Garret was certain of that. He’d walked past the forward turret cylinder a hundred times over the last few days. Moreover, the door couldn’t lead anywhere. The inside of the cylinder was filled with the house-sized gears and electric motors that rotated the turret.
Despite all that, Garret knew he had no choice, so he stepped up to the door and opened it. There was darkness beyond, and nothing more. The Hollow Man’s presence passed right through Garret, making him gasp, then it moved away into the darkness. It expected Garret to do the same. After a long minute of steeling himself and desperately wishing one of his friends would happen along and miraculously save him, he gave up and stepped through into the darkness.
The door slammed behind him. Then it was gone. He’d expected to find himself cramped up against heavy machinery, but instead, the darkness felt open and expansive, as if he were back on land again.
The darkness began to move around him. It was strange to think of it that way, but that was what was happening. As if it were thick fog, or an intangible lake, the darkness parted before him, dimly revealing the path on which he stood. It was an old road. A dirt road. On either side of it rose tall, smooth barked trees, crowned with yellow leaves.
Garret’s desperation became despair. No, no, no, please… not here again.
Following the Hollow Man down the road was a terrible idea, but as Garret had seen only moments before, disobedience was worse. Garret began to trudge down the road. Again, he did not have far to go.
Beside the road stood a tree. Garret stopped mid step. There were trees everywhere, of course, but they were tall and straight and covered with grey bark and yellow leaves. In other words, they were normal. There was nothing normal or right about the tree that had brought Garret to a halt.
It was short and stumpy, no more than twenty feet tall. It was gnarled and twisted, and its thick black and grey bark was split and curling, sticking out from the tree everywhere. Its branches were gnarled like old, dark hands, trying to open against centuries of arthritis.
The Hollow Man stood before the tree, now fully visible in his draping black cloak. Before him, the body of Ensign Rogers had beenprofaned and disgraced in a way that Garret’s mind was having difficulty processing. His body had been split in two, and somehow grafted into opposite sides of the gnarled trunk. His body was still dead and burned as it had been, but now it was melded with the tree. The splitting black bark was curling into his flesh, and beneath it, Garret could see the dead flesh growing back into the wood in return.
Garret shuddered and turned away. For the first time, he was angry enough and sickened enough to challenge the Hollow Man.
“How could you do that to him?”
“Break up the earth at his feet,” the Hollow Man replied, this time using an audible voice. The voice he chose was a smooth baritone. Its very tones relaxed and engendered trust. Or a
t least, they might have in someone other than Garret.
Garret stood there, quivering, facing away from the depraved thing that had been done to the body of an innocent sailor.
Without moving or crossing the distance between them, the Hollow Man took hold of the ring and pulled, jerking Garret towards the base of the tree. Garret gasped and stumbled forward. He fell at the edge of the road, almost among the tree’s roots.
He knelt there, gripping his chest, while his heart tried to sort out its rhythm again. I’m like a dog on a leash. With the realization, the pile became too high for Garret to hold his tongue. Everything from the creature’s torment to his own sins, which he still couldn’t face, toppled over and spilled out his mouth.
Despite the fear, despite the crushing awfulness of the situation, he looked up at the cloaked figure above him and spat, “I swear I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna find a way. You’re gonna die.”
The Hollow Man did not interrupt him and did not punish him. In fact, Garret felt a sensation from the Hollow Man that he hadn’t felt before. The emotion was foreign, and not at all human, but it seemed akin to pleasure.
Break up the ground at his feet, the Hollow Man said, this time invading Garret’s mind instead of speaking aloud. Garret winced and reflexively covered his ears.
Why me? Garret demanded out of frustration. Why me?!
The earth must be broken by one of her own children. Only then will she produce.
That was of course not at all what Garret meant, but as digging seemed like the least threatening thing the Hollow Man had ever asked him to do, Garret began to scratch at the soil with his bare hand. It was packed hard, even between the tree roots, as if the road had been trodden by thousands of people since long before Garret was born.
Garret made so little progress against the stubborn soil that he was soon scraping at it with his nails. He knew the Hollow Man would not let him go back to the real world until he had done the job to the Hollow Man’s satisfaction, so Garret set his jaw and clawed at the soil until he had blood under his nails.
Once Garret had scratched out a couple small grooves in the dirt, one beneath each half of Ensign Roger’s body, the Hollow Man said, “That is sufficient.”
Ironclad Page 27
