Robert Walker - Titanic 2012

“But by the time you got here, you decided instead to build a controlled fire in the center of the room here.”

“A fire… a controlled fire?”

“I just saw it, Declan, flit across your eyes, your brow—both the truth and the black thing inside you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You’re it.”

“No, that’s ridiculous. Don’t be a fool. I took the Vodka for courage. That is all.”

“To thaw them out—the strongest of the lot,” Ransom indicated the inner freezer. Get them above deck and onto a lifeboat—preferably one that Tommie’s not on. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You are… yes, you are wrong.”

“Then tell me I’m right!”

“Yes, you are right.”

Ransom felt a huge sadness welling up, threatening to overtake him and destroy his resolve. “You’re down here to thaw out your god damned babies! Then get the healthiest above decks, get ’em onto a lifeboat!”

“You are drunk, Alastair, and you sound insane.”

“I wish that was the only problem here, Declan.”

Declan laughed but it was not his laugh; it sounded like something like an animal in pain. Declan turned rather mechanically to show Ransom his back, as if to say he wouldn’t so much as honor Ransom’s foolishness. Then with arms wide, hands open, he turned back to face Ransom, stepped close and suddenly lurched at him with the speed of light, forcing Ransom to fire, putting a bullet between Declan’s eyes.

Declan fell at Ransom’s feet, dead.

Ransom turned his eyes away, groaning, praying a second bullet, this one to his own head, would end the horrible suffering he felt in his heart. Ransom knew that for a time Declan had known he was infected, and he courageously fought its will as it grew in power over him. Isolating himself with the eggs, Declan most certainly hoped the ship itself would end the very thing that had killed Titanic this night. All the while the thing within him was obliging as it wanted its young.

Alastair knew no other cure; there was no other recourse but to end Declan’s suffering as one soldier must do for another. The knowledge he was infected must have been crushing for Declan.

Ransom released a cry of profound sadness, realizing that now he alone was the gatekeeper to this particular corner of Hell. No one in or out, not ever… as Titanic began to tilt so strongly that Declan’s body began to incrementally slide across the room, and now both the Vodka and the whiskey bottle smashed to the floor to paint the metal with a brown, heart-shaped stain.

“Take all the rest of us to hell, God—but you take that boy into your heart.”

Ransom, his back to the wall, slid to the floor, wanting to cry; he had no recollection of the last time he had cried, not even as a child. Life had always been hard for him. Hell, he thought, life was hell and other people made it more hellish. Nature itself was filled with freakish monsters, some human, some animal, some parasitic—all of them feeding on one another like Darwin said, for survival of the fittest.

Death would bring peace. An end to a fevered mind, his pain, his suffering, all his losses. One partition in his mind thought of Hamlet, but this was overtaken by images of Jane and Gabby back in Chicago, his friends Philo Keane and Dr. Christian Fenger. Men who’d helped him escape a certain death by hanging, and then the evolving picture went on about how far he’d come since then while, ironically, how little he’d learned or changed since then. How in a sense he must have been spared so as to be here now aboard Titanic to do the work of… of God or whatever power had moved him to not flee Belfast when he’d had the chance to do so, long before he’d gotten involved with that young man lying dead across from him now.

It was a story never to be told. No one would ever know the lengths to which they’d gone, the three of them.

He ruminated over what precisely had brought Declan Irvin to cross his path and set them on this journey. It was a strange fate for such a trio to have become of one mind bent on destroying a common enemy.

No matter that Declan lay dead, Ransom could not be more proud of him. In fact, Ramsom felt a kinship with the boy—a true bond, and he would proudly have called this young man his son.

He simply could not have allowed that vile creature to use Declan as it had others.

Thomas would get free with the journal; perhaps one day the truth of Titanic ’s ordeal this night of April 14, 1912 would come out. Some day, Declan would be heralded a hero—perhaps the only hero aboard Titanic . Some day.

The ship listed, lifted, then repeatedly groaned like a dying elephant.

He could only imagine the horror of those on the six or so decks still above water over his head. The door he had come through was surely under water by now. The freezer was completely sealed; air tight and water tight. He laughed at the sight of all the provisions around him, enough food and water to last a man years, and none of it useful now.

He hadn’t wanted Declan to die down here alone, but the entire way down, he kept feeling a nagging, clinging doubt about the boy surgeon. How many of those infected corpses had he opened up? He and Thomas. What were the odds Declan wouldn’t get some sort of parasite growing within him? Or perhaps not. Perhaps the carrier had discarded another body for Declan’s in the brief time that Ransom had let the young doctor out of his sight. Then he recalled the stranger at the bar, slipping and falling into Declan, spilling his drink on him. Could that have been the transfer moment?

Alastair felt an enormous grief intermingling with self-incriminations; could he have done anything at all differently?

No one in any way, shape, or form was now coming through that door, and nothing inside here remained alive save him. Suicide? Was it suicide to end it now before the ship took her plunge? Before he reached bottom where he might actually remain the sole survivor of the wreck for as long as he could stand this solitary confinement?

“Is it suicide under such circumstances if I end it before suffering until I run out of oxygen?”

He toyed with the gun about his ear and head, shaking from the cold, still wet from his swim, becoming more miserable by the moment. There came more tearing and rending of the ship, and the angle of the floor was now so sharp as to send him sliding toward Declan’s body. He pictured their eternal sleep together, father and son.

He was about to put a bullet through his mouth and brain as he slid toward Declan’s body when the creature that they had been chasing rose out of Declan’s lifeless mouth. It came out in a filmy, oily black shapeless mass.

Ransom rolled to one side, got to his knees, and watched it rise to the ceiling like a levitating shaman. He then saw a black single eye within the thing, which he imagined to be a later stage development as Declan had declared the damn things eyeless in their egg sacs.

The eye glared at him as if he were a next meal—and he was, should it get the upper hand.

Ransom took aim at the single eye, but the thing darted straight for his eyes. Ransom fired at it repeatedly, and at the last moment, Alastair hit the floor beneath the table, hearing the entity slam into the tabletop. He knew he must avoid its touch at all costs. That if it got close enough to touch him, it would slip into him like quicksilver.

He grabbed for his Woodbine match box, struck a match, and threw it into the pool of whiskey. This sent up an instant plume of fire that caught the creature aflame in mid-flight toward him.

The thing exploded in flame, screeching as it flew about the room in a mad effort to extinguish itself, sucking up all the oxygen with it only to cause the monster to burn faster and faster until it fell before Ransom’s feet as a black and withered ball of oily flesh.