Stranded (2 page)

Salt water filled his mouth, nose, and eyes. And then his lungs. It froze him inside and out, running through the gaps in his hood into his gear, filling his boots and his gloves. If he didn't drown, frostbite was guaranteed. He spit water, gasping for painfully cold, but welcome, air. The ship leveled out. For a brief moment, he stood on a calm, horizontal surface staring at a mountain of a man instead of a wall of water. Serge stood in front of him, unmoved, staring ahead steely-eyed and fixed like the giant statue of the fisherman in Noah's hometown, Gloucester. The world was right for a second. And then it went right back to hell.

“Get inside,” Serge shouted. Noah shoved off the crate, across the slick surface, holding on to Felix as the wounded man hobbled along beside him. If he complained or protested, Noah couldn't hear him. By the time they reached the bulkhead door, Brewster had steered them directly into another monster. They went vertical. Then it fell out from beneath them and crashed to the surface of the water. Noah and Felix were thrown through the door, slamming into the deck. Felix landed on top of him, howling with pain for the first time. Noah's breath was gone; his twisted back ached from the twin impacts as he tried to squirm out from under the injured man.

“Jesus Christ, Cabot!” He felt Felix being lifted away, but no hands returned to help pick him up from the floor. He got to his feet and glanced through the door at the men he'd left behind. “Cabot!” the third officer, Chris Holden, yelled. “What the hell are you looking at? Give me a hand here!” He refocused his attention on Felix and slipped back under the man's arm, assisting him to the first deck and their meager sick bay.

*   *   *

The hospital compartment of the ship was a narrow room with a rolling examination table, a pair of bunks built into the wall opposite a sink, a short counter, and a supply closet. Most of the ship was close quarters, but the hospital—built with the intention of being used rarely, if ever—exemplified the term. Noah helped Holden lift Felix onto the exam table. Felix lay down while Holden grabbed the autodial phone handset from the wall and hailed the wheelhouse. “Pereira's injured. We need Mickle, A.S.A.P.” He hung up and turned to Noah. “What happened?”

“A cable broke and a bulk container came loose. It hit him hard.”

“You think? Where the hell were you?”

“I was breaking ice off the gunwales.”

Holden's eyes narrowed and he gave Noah a withering stare before he turned his attention to the wounded man, wiping blood from his face, searching for the wound. “Where are you hurt, Felix?”

Felix gritted his teeth and said, “Ribs hurt. Hard to breathe.”

A moment later, the ship's medical officer appeared in the doorway. Second Officer Sean Mickle shoved past Noah to attend to Felix, asking him more questions while he helped the man out of his weather gear. Felix answered his questions haltingly. He was in pain and short of breath. Lifting his arms looked like agony. “I'm going to give you some tramadol for the pain, okay?” Mickle told him. Felix nodded.

Holden looked at Noah hovering in the doorway and shook his head. “What? Are you waiting for a prize? Shove away. Get back to your cabin.”

“My cabin?”

“Yeah, your cabin. Get out of here.”

Noah didn't wait around for Holden to repeat the order. If he did, he knew it would come with twice the force and profanity, as well as an added watch shift. He stalked out of the sick bay, headed from First Deck five levels down to his one-man room on D-Deck. The ship was operating with a small company of sixteen men instead of its full complement. Most were quartered on B- and C-Decks nearer the galley and the day rooms. Noah's cabin was as far below as he could be without setting up a cot between the shaft generators.

He climbed down, careful to hang on to the rails of the steep ladder as the vessel continued to struggle against the waves outside, pitching and falling in the violent sea. If he fell and cracked his skull open, there was no one around to take him back to the sick bay. Again, he doubted it would be a problem for anyone but him.

As he descended, the normal oil and machine smells of the ship grew denser, more acrid. Reaching the D-Deck landing, he opened the door and found the passageway hazy with choking white smoke, creeping out from under the door to the instrument room. Noah grabbed a fire extinguisher hanging on the wall next to a red axe and ran for the door. Yanking it open, he released a noxious cloud of smoke and was driven back. Tearing off his soaked cap, he pressed it over his nose and mouth before diving into the room. Through the haze and stinging eyes he could see one instrument rack orange with flame, not white like the others. He dropped his hat and tried to pull the pin on the powder extinguisher. The zip tie securing the pin so it wouldn't accidentally come loose during shipment hadn't been removed. He couldn't do a thing with the goddamned zip tie on.

Noah bit at his glove, yanking it off. He spit the glove on the floor, cursing as he fumbled at his hip. He couldn't reach his pocket knife through his wet weather gear. “Fucking hell!” He fought at the tie with his teeth. After a few moments of painful gnawing, it finally came free. He pulled the pin, kicking at the cover panel on the front of the burning instrument rack, trying to open it. It didn't budge, and he kicked twice more until the cover shuddered and fell away. The hot metal bounced off his arm, sizzling against the wet rubber. Noah desperately needed a breath. Though much of the smoke had billowed out of the compartment into the passageway, the air was still thick and toxic. He struggled not to choke as he aimed the extinguisher at the base of the electrical blaze and squeezed the trigger. The dry powder stream arced out of the nozzle and the output of smoke and chemical stench doubled. He worried that the single can wouldn't be enough. If he could get the blaze under control, however, he could run and fetch another. Water suppression wasn't an option in the instrument room. He'd short out all of the systems on board the vessel, primary and redundant alike. The orange light diminished, however. He continued to spray down the instrument rack until the can was empty and he felt satisfied the fire was smothered.

Sweating and half blind, he wanted to strip off his clothes and wash out his burning eyes. He had to call the wheelhouse to let them know about the fire. Staggering into the passageway, another lurch of the ship sent him sprawling. He banged his head against a valve and bright blooms appeared behind his eyes. And then he saw nothing.

 

2

Noah awoke in the top recovery bunk of the sick bay in a panic. He tried to sit up, but disorientation and nausea made the room spin and he flopped back down on his pillow. He breathed, trying to reason with himself. If he was in the hospital bunk, someone had found him and brought him there. That meant the fire was under control and the ship was all right. A slower heart beat would at least lessen the pounding ache in his skull. He lay there listening, feeling for the storm. The ship was calm. He had no idea how long he'd been unconscious, but it was long enough that they'd come out on the other side of the storm. And unless he was dead or dreaming, they'd come out still afloat.

With spots dancing in his vision, he attempted to sit upright again. Propped up on an elbow, he made it halfway. Sitting on a stool bolted to the wall at a tiny table, Mickle turned away from his paperwork and looked at him with an expression halfway between concern and annoyance. “How you feeling, Cabot?”

“Like hammered shit,” Noah said. His throat was raw and his voice was little more than a dry croak. He tried clearing it and repeating himself, but his voice was even less intelligible on the second attempt.

“Yeah, you ought to feel that way. You took a pretty good hit belowdecks. At least that's what the cut above your eye tells me.”

Noah reached up and pawed at his forehead until his fingers found the wound. He involuntarily jerked away at the pain of his own touch. A little more gently, he explored a raised line of inflamed flesh about three fingers wide, finding it held together with suture glue and tape strips.

“You feel sick to your stomach? Dizzy?” Mickle asked.

Noah nodded, grunting, “Uh-huh.”

“You might have a minor concussion. I can't tell for certain, not without a CT scan, but it doesn't take a genius to see you kicked your own ass pretty well. I'm recommending you stay in your cabin for a day or two. If you start vomiting or your headache gets worse and won't go away, we'll reassess your condition.”

“What if I fall asleep and don't wake up?”

“I'm calling for a medical evac for Pereira when we get to the Niflheim. You can go home with him.”

“That's not what I mean.”

Mickle stood and closed the file folder on his paperwork. He shoved it into a plastic wall caddy and said, “You can't work while you recover. And if it's bad, you need a real hospital.” He held his arms open as if it needed to be emphasized that the ship's “hospital” was only slightly better appointed than a high school nurse's office. At least he had narcotic painkillers.

Noah carefully swung his legs over the edge of his bunk. “How is everyone else?”

Mickle chuckled under his breath. “Good. Aside from bruises and a touch of frost nip, you and Pereira are the only casualties of the storm. And despite your best efforts, you're both alive. So that's something.”

Noah sighed. Pushing off the bunk as gently as he could, he hopped down, landing hard on his heels. Making contact with the deck sent a wave of pain shooting up his spine and into his skull that made his vision go gray and the room spin. Holding on to the ladder he should have used to climb down, he took a moment to reorient himself. He felt Mickle's hands on his arms, steadying him, but he couldn't see more than a shadowy silhouette of the man. The second officer was professional and occasionally cordial, but they weren't best friends. Noah imagined his concern came from not wanting to have to do the paperwork associated with a shipboard death.

“You all right?”

“I'm fine,” Noah said. He stood up straight, holding up his hands to show he was steady on his feet. Mickle let go and stepped back. “I've been hit harder. But you don't want to hear about my love life.” Noah winked. Mickle didn't laugh. Although Noah's wife, Abby, had always told him how funny he was, he knew he wasn't. Still, it didn't stop him from trying.
Maybe I ought to,
he thought, looking at Mickle's flat expression.

“Well, Superman, you should get some rest. Let yourself get over the bump and the shit you breathed in putting out that fire. Good job, by the way.”

“Thanks. How bad was it?”

Mickle shrugged. “Not my specialty. Martin is looking at it; you'd have to ask him.” He turned to leave and hesitated in the doorway. Martin Nevins was the ship's engineer and mechanic. He had a dark sense of humor no one on board seemed to fully appreciate. He was one of Noah's few allies, or at least he had been before Noah filled one of the racks with flame retardant powder.

“I'll drop in on him when I head for my cabin.”

“I wouldn't. He's not happy. Anyway, Brewster reassigned you. You're on C-Deck now. D-Deck smells like a refinery took a shit, and he doesn't want anyone sleeping down there. It's a good thing for you he did. You probably smoked the equivalent of ten packs of unfiltereds in the time you spent in that room. You inhale any more and you'll wish you'd chosen coal mining as a career instead of merchant shipping.” Noah smiled weakly at the medical officer. This wasn't the career he'd chosen; it was what inertia chose for him.

His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all Gloucester fishermen, and he'd practically been raised on board deep sea trawling boats. As soon as he was old enough, he went out with his old man and the old man's old man to work. While other kids were playing baseball and studying for the SATs and going down to Boston for a good time, he was out at sea. But cutbacks and catch restrictions put a hurt on his family's livelihood. Never rich enough to afford more than a couple of small day boats, his father retooled the family business after federal regulators effectively banned cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine. His father refurbished and refitted the boats to take the summer people out for twelve-hour deep sea fishing “adventures.” He would smile, his weathered face wrinkling like a man twenty years his senior, and go on for the tourists about how there had been Cabots fishing these waters for as long as these waters had Cabots sailing on them. A bumper sticker was his only admission about how much he hated playing charter tour guide for out-of-towners looking to turn his hard work into recreation. On the rear of his pickup truck, a red rectangle read, “Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he'll starve.”

“You used to be able to walk across the harbor, Noah,”
his dad had told him.
“It's true. There used to be so many boats, you wouldn't get your feet wet going from one end to another. Not now,”
he said, pointing to another new harbor hotel built where an auction house or a packaging plant used to be. Noah had looked at the three or four boats they left behind as they motored out on an “Evening Harbor Cruise.” His old man had kept a straight back and square shoulders. But the slouch was in his voice. The defeat of losing the only thing he'd ever known and having to start over. Of having nothing to give his only son.

Noah had been a good, if often absent, student. He didn't have to work hard to get decent grades; he more or less fell into them. So when he applied to the University of Washington, the only one surprised he got in was the guidance counselor who'd told him his options were the military or penitentiary. The only one disappointed was his mother.

“There aren't any schools closer? There aren't any schools in Boston?”
she asked.