Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

By the time they got back to the cabin, Darryl had curled himself into a ball. He was so small-maybe five-foot-four, and skinny as a rail-that he looked like a kid with a tummy ache, waiting for his mom.

Charlotte sat down on the edge of the bed and asked him what he'd already taken. When he also showed her the acupressure band, she said, “No telling what some people will believe.”

She bustled in her bag and pulled out a syringe and bottle. “You ever heard of Phenytoin?”

“Same as Dilantin.”

“Ooh, you do know your drugs. Ever taken it?”

“Once, before a dive.”

“I hope not too soon before a dive.” She readied the syringe. “Any bad reaction?”

Darryl started to shake his head no, then thought better of shaking anything unnecessarily. “No,” he mumbled.

“What's it do?” Michael asked, as she rolled up one of Darryl's sleeves.

“Slows down the nervous activities in the gut. It's a seizure med, and, technically speaking, it's never been approved for seasickness.” She swabbed a spot with alcohol. “But divers like it.” She readied the syringe, then had to wait again as the ship took what felt like a series of body blows. “Hold real still,” she said to Darryl, then plunged the needle into the freckled skin of his upper arm.

“Give it about ten minutes,” she said, “and you ought to start feeling the effect.”

She slipped the used needle into an orange plastic sleeve and the bottle back into the bottom of her bag. For the first time, she looked around and seemed to take in the cabin. “Man, it looks like I did get the best room on board. I didn't believe it when the Ops told me that, but now I do.” She wrinkled her nose at a sudden gust from the head. “You boys ever heard of Lysol?”

Michael laughed, and even Darryl faintly smiled. But when she'd gone, Michael started pulling on his parka, boots, and gloves. The cabin was foul and stifling, and the action outdoors was too tempting to resist.

Darryl rolled his head to one side and fixed him with a baleful glare. “Where,” he croaked, “do you think you're going now?”

“To do my job,” Michael said, slipping a small digital camera deep inside his parka; the batteries could die quickly in the cold. “Anything I can do for you first?”

Darryl said no. “Just call my wife and tell her I loved her, and the kids.”

Michael had never really asked him about his family. “How many have you got?”

“Not now,” Darryl said, waving him away. “I can't remember.”

Maybe the drug was working faster than expected.

Michael left the light on in the cabin and made his way carefully down the corridor, then up through the hatchway, and he was just about to continue on to the bridge-he thought he could probably get some decent shots by leaning out a porthole or doorway- when he saw, through the sliding door, an apparently seamless picture of gray sea and gray sky, a panorama in which the horizon was unrecognizable and the world was reduced to a scene of flat, inarguable desolation.

He could visualize the finished shot already.

Putting up his hood, he fumbled for his camera with his gloved hands, and let it hang just below his neck. He had to use both hands to pull back on the door handle, and when it slid open even a few inches, the wind reached in and grabbed him by the collar. This was probably, he realized, a very bad idea, but then sometimes his best shots had come from his worst ideas. He pulled harder, then slipped through the crack, the door sliding shut again the second he let go.

He was on the deck, just below the bridge, with ice water sluicing down around his feet, and the wind pummeling him so hard that tears were whipped out of his eyes and his forehead burned. He wrapped one arm around a metal stanchion and pulled off one glove with his teeth, but the ship was heaving too much to frame a shot. And each time he tried, some part of the boat got into the picture. He didn't want that. He didn't want anything identifiable, anything concrete, to intrude on the image. He wanted a pure, almost abstract picture of empty, disinterested, all-powerful nature.

He waited for the ship to roll on the coming swell, then lunged for the next handhold, a steel armature that housed one of the lifeboat rigs. From there, looking out over the rail, he'd have nothing to worry about-except for the freezing salt spray that dashed into his face and doused the camera. He snagged one arm through the rail, as he had before, and raised the camera. But just then, the ship was canted at a forty-five-degree angle, and all he could get was the turbulent sky. He slipped a foot or two forward, waiting for the roll to correct itself, raising the camera. His fingers were already freezing, and he found that he couldn't open his mouth to breathe without the wind taking his breath away. He tried one shot-still at too much of an angle-and was about to try another when a bullhorn directly overhead blared, “Mr. Wilde! Get off the deck! Now!”

Even in the roaring wind, he could make out the voice of the Ops, Lieutenant Healey

“Right now! And report to the captain!”

Before Michael could even turn around, he saw the sliding door opening and Kazinski, in a waterproof jacket over his running shorts, reaching out to him with a yellow life preserver. “Just grab it!” Kazinski shouted, and Michael, slipping the camera back into the top of his parka, fell back to the stanchion, then put his gloved hand out toward the preserver; his other hand was almost completely numb.

Once Michael had hold of it, Kazinski reeled him in like a fish, slammed the sliding door latch back, then stood there, brushing off the ice-cold water and shaking his head in dismay. “All due respect, sir, but that was truly a numbnuts thing to do.”

Michael did see his point.

“The captain's up on the bridge. If I were you, I'd be prepared to have him tear me a new one.”

At the moment, Michael just wanted the feeling back in his fingers. He wiped the hand briskly back and forth on his pant leg, but the cloth was so wet it didn't help much. He unzipped his parka, and shoved his hand inside, into his armpit.

Kazinski gestured at the stairs leading up to the bridge, as if it were the way to the gallows. Maybe, Michael thought, it was.

He went up them slowly, and as soon as he entered the brightly lighted bridge, Captain Purcell swiveled in his chair and said, “What the hell do you think you were doing out there? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

Michael shrugged and finished unzipping his coat, letting the flaps fall open. “Probably not the best idea,” he offered, knowing how feeble it sounded, “but I thought I might get some great shots for the magazine.”

The other two officers seated in front of the navigation consoles stifled their amusement.

“I'm used to some pretty harebrained stunts from the scientists I have to ferry around down here,” Purcell said, “but I figure they're so smart, they're entitled to act stupid sometimes. You, I can't figure out at all. You're no scientist, and you're sure as hell no sailor.”

Ensign Gallo, who was standing at a silver wheel mounted on a freestanding console, said, “Barometric's falling again, sir.”

“What to?” Purcell barked, swiveling back in his chair and adjusting the headset that had slipped askew while he was chewing out Michael.

“Nine eighty-five, sir.”

“Jesus, we're in for it tonight.” His eyes scanned the glowing screens and dials, the sonar, the radar, the GPS, the fathometer, all of which showed a constantly changing and multicolored stream of data.

A spattering of hail clattered against the square windows on the westward side, and the ship heaved like a great hand had just slapped it. Michael snatched at one of the leather straps that dangled from the ceiling and hung on tight; he'd already heard tales of seamen who had been flung from one end of the bridge to the other and broken arms and legs in the process. He wondered if his public flogging was over, or if he was supposed to wait around for more.