Ironclad

by Daniel Foster

  Garret rolled over towards Theo, but moved back at the same time to get a look at him. Theo’s uniform, face, and hands were black and grey like all of them, but beneath the smoke mask, his face was white. He was lying on his side, but as Garret moved away, Theo rolled partially forward, twisting his back at an odd angle. His arm flopped out limply on the deck.

  “Guys…” Garret leaned close. He panicked. “Guys! Theo’s not breathing!”

  Curtis rose quickly on his strong arms. Velvet clambered across the deck.

  Garret rolled Theo out on his back without having a clue whether or not that was the right thing to do. “He’s not breathing!”

  Curtis gripped Theo’s shoulder. Theo looked like a toddler in Curtis’s hand. Velvet laid his ear on Theo’s chest. Soot-covered, half dead guys were crawling and stumbling towards them from all over the deck.

  Garret sat back and yelled at a clump of incoming guys, “Somebody find the doctor!”

  Velvet sat back, pale. “I can’t hear his heart.”

  “Go find Twitch!” Garret told him.

  “Twitch? Why?”

  “He always knows what to do!” Garret yelled at him.

  Velvet stumbled away, eventually gaining his feet and settling into an unsteady run towards the citadel.

  “Come on Theo,” Garret said putting his hands on the smaller boy’s forehead, neck, chest. “Stay with us.”

  “What do we do?” Curtis asked him, eyes wide. It was the first flash of fear Garret had seen from the big guy.

  “I don’t know,” Garret replied, trying to not whimper. Not again, please God not again. Not Theo. He started rubbing Theo’s chest vigorously with a palm, as if the boy was just asleep and Garret could wake him.

  “Come on, Theo, you’re going to be alright.”

  Theo didn’t look alright. His face was slack. His body limp. He looked dead.

  “Come on, Theo.”

  “Out of the way!” It was Twitch, wearing nothing but his underwear, his hair full of soot, running flat out. Garret moved but not fast enough. Twitch flung Garret out of the way, laid a finger under Theo’s nose to check for breathing, then straddled Theo, sitting on his waist. He grabbed the back of Theo’s neck, tilting his chin up, then met the smaller boy mouth to mouth as if to kiss him.

  Theo’s chest rose. Twitch inhaled to the side, then exhaled back down Theo’s throat again.

  “Where’s the doctor?” Twitch yelled as he placed his palms flat on Theo’s chest, interlaced his fingers and began throwing his weight down on the smaller boy hard enough to crush him.

  Garret winced for Theo even though the boy wasn’t feeling anything.

  Twitch breathed down his throat a few more times, then reared back and hit Theo’s chest with a hammer fist. Again. And Again. Garret could almost hear the ribs breaking. Twitch wasn’t much bigger than Garret, but Garret had caught enough of his punches to know he was pounding Theo to a pulp.

  “Come on!” Twitch roared. It carried a lot more authority than when Garret had said it.

  Again and again Twitch pounded on Theo’s small frame.

  Garret sat on the deck, watching the beating, stupefied. If he’s not dead already, Twitch is going to kill him.

  Twitch reared back again, wrapping one hand around the other fist, preparing to bring the both down. Garret dove and caught his arm. As soon as Garret did, Twitch reminded Garret how he’d earned his nickname. Twitch moved so fast it was barely a blur. It looked only like he’d twitched, but he’d dealt Garret such a blow to the solar plexus that it put Garret back onto the deck, gasping for wind.

  Twitch brought his double fist down on Theo’s chest like the creature had hit Garret.

  There was an audible crack. At least one of Theo’s ribs really had broken. Theo jerked and gasped a long shaky breath, then another, then another.

  Twitch slumped with relief and got off of Theo. Men crowded around Theo, sitting him up, patting him hard on the shoulder, doing all manner of things they probably shouldn’t have done. Curtis and Velvet were the first ones there. Garret was still sprawled on the deck. His stomach was aching from Twitch’s punch, but his head was singing with relief. He moved to Theo’s side. The other men made way for him. Twitch was nowhere to be seen. He’d gone back to his hammock without a word.

  Chapter 17

  “Chief,” Fishy protested quietly, “my brother can’t go back down there.”

  “He has to, son,” Greely said. “No one’s exempt unless the doctor signs off.”

  “The doctor is a really nice man,” Burl put in quietly.

  “Not the surgeon, son, the doctor. He’s the medical officer.”

  They all clammed up as two officers opened the door to their left and strode quickly past them. The doctor wouldn’t sign it. They all knew that. They also knew that this wasn’t a good place to be having this discussion, but they’d had to make due. They were on the berth deck, as far towards the stern as enlisted men were allowed.

  The space in which they stood had once been occupied by Kearsarge’s stern torpedo tubes, but the tubes had been removed in the refit and the ports sealed over. So now all that remained was the huge curved gear rail, imbedded in the deck, fifteen feet in radius, on which the torpedo tube used to pivot.

  That, and six worried sailors.

  “Chief, he could die,” Garret said quietly, when the officers turned into the warrant officer’s bathroom down the way.

  “I think he already did,” Curtis put in.

  “Men, if we don’t have enough hands to put that fire out, we’re all gonna die,” Greely said as he wiped the soot from his own face.

  They slumped with dejection. They were all sick, weak, and blackened from head to toe. Someone had finally figured out where the fire had begun, not that Garret could see how that helped anything. It had started in the port boiler room at the bottom of a pile of coal. In trying to keep up with how hard Maxwell was running Kearsarge, the supervising engineer had requested more and more hands until he had men bumping into each other—a crew shoveling coal out of the bunkers and another full detail shoveling it into the boilers. Larger than normal piles had begun to accumulate in the engine room them. The largest pile in the corner against the bulkhead between the boiler room and the bunker had been the cause.

  The boiler room was dark, and with all of Kearsarge’s boilers running full blast, it smelled strongly of coalsmoke and flame, so by the time anyone noticed a wisp of smoke rising from the pile in the corner, the fire beneath had already superheated a lower portion of the bulkhead and set fire to the coal inside the bunker.

  The officers were talking of normal causes, such as friction caused by the rolling motions of the ship, or spontaneous combustion, but among the enlisted men, there was talk of nothing but the saboteur.

  Regardless of how it started, Kearsarge now had a fire in her belly that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was eating through the coal reserves, and despite their best efforts, it was growing. Strength and hope were beginning to wane all over the ship.

  For the first time since Garret had known him, Fishy didn’t have a joke. He was quiet and tense. “But Chief,” he said, “Theo’s got a cracked rib. Surely that will get him off.”

  “I know he’s your brother,” Chief Greely replied tiredly. “And a broken rib hurts like hell, but it won’t stop him from shoveling.” The Chief shook his head tiredly. Garret suddenly realized how old Master Chief Greely was. His face was lined and his hair had greyed long ago. He probably shouldn’t have been down there in that blazing, choking hell anymore than Theo should have.

  “Then we have to hide him,” someone said. It was Twitch, joining the group, wiping his face and hands with a damp rag. The rag came away black.

  “Even if we could find a place where no one would look, they’d still know he was missing because he didn’t show up for his shift.” It was Velvet who’d said it. He was the only one in the group who wasn’t standing. He
sat on the deck, resting heavily against a bulkhead, eyes closed.

  “Not if the Chief wipes him off the duty roster,” Twitch said quietly.

  The Chief looked up at that. He squinted in thought. They all watched him, waiting. After a few seconds, he began to nod slowly. Then he nodded once, firmly. “I can’t get to the roster, but I know who can. He and I go way back, and he owes me.” Greely glanced around, then assumed the relaxed in-charge air that came so effortlessly to him. They all loved him for it.

  “We’ve got less than twenty minutes until Theo’s watch comes up. You men have that long to make him disappear. I’ll handle the roster.” With that the Chief was gone out of the store room, moving like a much younger man.

  Garret and Fishy and Curtis and Velvet and the rest looked around at each other, sharing a relieved moment, before Velvet put in, “So where are we gonna hide him?”

  They all stared at each other and the pressure returned to their corner of the old torpedo bay. A crewmen stuck his head in the room and grabbed something off a nearby shelf. They all tried to act relaxed and nonchalant, as if it was perfectly normal to find a bunch of men standing around in a blocked off torpedo bay doing nothing. He gave them a weird look, then left.

  Velvet gestured to where the man had been standing. “This is a battle ship. Every inch of it is used for something. There’s no guarantee that someone won’t poke their head in.”

  “Floyd!” Twitch snapped, channeling all of their tension. “Either be helpful or shut up.”

  “There’s a fire on the ship,” Floyd protested, getting to his feet. “Which means there’s no place we can be guaranteed that nobody’s gonna be. I was trying to tell you all that when the Chief was still here, but—”

  Garret laughed with relief. “Yeah there is! Come on. We gotta hurry.”

  Less than a minute later, they were back on the gun deck beside Nancy. Garret, Fishy, Curtis, Burl, and Velvet were all trying to lift Theo, who was breathing but unconscious, out of his hammock and lower him onto the deck. All they were managing to do was get in each other’s way.

  “Pick up on his other leg, Fishy.”

  “How is pulling on his arm going to help?”

  “Burl, you couldn’t pull the skin off a pudding.”

  “Just let me do it!” Curtis said.

  “For God’s sake,” hissed Twitch, who had just appeared again. He had a stretcher under his arm. “Just take hammock and all.”

  They looked at him in confusion, but he was already directing traffic. “Curtis, stand to the side, reach under his hammock and lift him up about a foot. Garret, Fishy, get to either end and unhook it.”

  Before Garret could ask how, Curtis did as he was told, cradling Theo like a baby and lifting him up to shoulder height. As soon as Theo’s small weight lifted off of the hammock ropes, they went slack, making the hooks easy for Garret and Fishy to remove.

  Meanwhile, Twitch had laid the stretcher on the floor.

  “Did you find Sweet Cheeks?” Velvet asked him.

  “And Pun’kin,” Twitch replied quickly. “They’re going to try to clear the way for us. We can use sick bay as an excuse until we get to the conning tower foundation. Then we have to turn the opposite way, so we can’t be seen after that.”

  Twitch snatched the blankets off of Curtis’s and Sweet Cheeks’s hammocks. “Fishy, take his feet. Velvet take his head,” Twitch ordered.

  They obeyed, then stood together, picking him up.

  Twitch began a lightning fast process of wrapping the blankets tightly around Theo and the stretcher, then tying their corners together. He talked over his shoulder as he worked. “The rest of you, spread out in front of us and find a way to keep people out of our way.”

  Twitch finished. Fishy shot a dubious look from his mummified brother to Twitch.

  “Well I didn’t have any rope handy,” Twitch retorted. “Let’s go.”

  Garret followed Curtis quickly towards the ladder nearest the conning tower. He wondered how he was going to “keep people out of the way” all the way down to the berth deck.

  As soon as they stepped off the ship’s ladder, Garret felt exposed. They were on a large section of open deck between the wall of the drying room and the base of the conning tower. The petty officer’s bathroom was directly across the way, and the large refrigeration unit was behind them.

  Garret looked nervously around for anyone. Even Curtis was shuffling his feet.

  “For God’s sake,” Twitch hissed again as he dropped off the bottom of the ladder. “Try not to look like you’re robbing a bank.”

  Twitch turned back to help them hand Theo and his stretcher down the ship’s ladder. The ship’s ladder was steep and they had to hand Theo almost straight down. Twitch’s blanket wrapping job looked ridiculous, but it did keep Theo plastered securely to the stretcher.

  A door closed nearby. Garret glanced around the corner to see two petty officers emerging from their quarters about fifty feet down the passage way. Garret hesitated, but Curtis was already in motion.

  “Sir,” he said as he went. “Sir, uh, can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Twitch et al were already moving quickly and quietly the other way around the base of the conning tower, carrying Theo between them. As they crossed the opposite passage way, Garret caught sight of the master-at-arms and the paymaster, both emerging from their adjoining offices at the same time. They were forty feet away, and Garret had no idea how he was going to distract two senior officers, but he was going to try. Fortunately for him, he’d only taken two steps in their direction when Sweet Cheeks appeared out of the woodwork almost as magically as Twitch could have. Sweet Cheeks snapped to attention in front of the bored little paymaster and the surly master-at-arms. Garret was too far away to hear what he was saying to them, but Sweet Cheeks made it look gravely important. Neither of them noticed as Garret, Theo, and everybody else slipped away down the narrow corridor between the dispensary and the band room.

  Behind the dispensary and the band room lay the two large brig cells. The brig cells were against the outside bulkhead of the ship. In other words, there was nothing beyond them, so there was no reason for anyone to be coming that way. It was the perfect hiding spot for an injured crewman.

  Garret hadn’t been down this way since he’d followed Commander Sharpe on the night he was almost thrown overboard. But Sharpe said he was going to reassign the guards. That was the whole point.

  They bustled Theo down the passage, and Twitch pointed to the cell on their left.

  “That one,” Twitch said. “It’ll keep him further out of the line of sight from the stair wells.” But as they carried him past the first cell, their plan fell apart.

  “I’d recognize those looks anywhere,” came a thick British accent from the first cell. “Disobeying orders.”

  They all froze midstride. Garret’s heart dropped into his boots. From the pale faces around him, he guessed they felt something similar.

  Behind the first set of bars, an older man with a white moustache and a paunch moved into sight. It was Captain Shearer, commanding officer from the Lion. He was again wearing his uniform, which he had apparently found a way to dry. It was wrinkled and disheveled, but with all his gold trim and his gold buttons, and mostly his expression, he was still an imposing sight.

  “A captain always knows that look,” Captain Shearer finished.

  They all stood there dumbly for a second. Chief Greely would already be erasing Theo’s name from the roster, which meant there would now be no way to hide their attempt.

  Oh fuck… Garret thought. If he yells, we’re done. What’s gonna happen to Theo? What’s gonna happen to us?

  “What are you boys doing,” Captain Shearer asked in a tone that demanded an answer. It appeared that a Captain was a Captain, no matter which side of the Atlantic he was from.

  Velvet was the first one to open his mouth. “Captain Shearer, sir, I uh… we were, uh…” />
  “It’s my brother,” Fishy said. His bravado was gone. Theo was at Captain Shearer’s mercy, and Fishy knew it. He was terrified. “He can’t stand the fumes.”

  Velvet interrupted, “There’s a fire sir. It—”

  “I heard the alarm,” Captain Shearer said firmly. Then to Fishy, “Finish.”

  “Please sir,” Fishy said. “Don’t tell anyone. He almost died on us. Twitch saved him. We have to hide him so he doesn’t go back down there.”

  “You can’t hide him there,” Captain Shearer said flatly. “A mess steward comes down to bring me my meals three times a day. Your brother will be discovered.”

  They all looked at each other. Garret’s hands weakened. Fishy looked about to throw up.

  Captain Shearer turned away and walked back into his cell. “You will hide him here,” he said.

  They all looked at each other behind Shearer’s back. Velvet was shaking his head vigorously. Twitch was sending his trademark narrow gaze after Shearer. Fishy just looked like he wanted someone to tell him what to do.

  “How do we know you won’t raise the alarm,” Curtis demanded.

  Captain Shearer reappeared at the bars. He gripped one of them as if it was a reed, a mere inconvenience that he could smash out of his way if he felt like it.

  “Boy, didn’t your Navy teach you better than that? If you ever question me again, I’ll see to it that Captain Maxwell hangs you from the fighting top.”

  Ridiculous as it was, Garret didn’t doubt that Shearer could see it done.

  Shearer addressed the group. “That was not a request, young men. It was an order, and if it is not obeyed instantly, you can believe I will yell until someone appears.”

  Is he in control? How did that happen? Garret had been behind bars twice, and both times, he had felt like he’d barely had control of his own bladder. Again, Garret suspected that Navy captains might not be human at all, but some hideously devious being that could approximate human voice and appearance when they wished.

  Twitch was looking for the keys, but calmly. Indeed, he and Captain Shearer seemed to be the only calm people in the brig. Sweet Cheeks went to help him. The rest of them stood there helplessly.