Robert Walker - Titanic 2012

“Finally dead, you life-sucking maggot!”

Ransom fought to stand up only to find his feet on the ceiling. A moment later, he was slammed hard to one wall, when he realized what was happening. “This is it, the finale!” he shouted just to hear himself. The entire ship was lurching, lumbering like some dinosaur in her death throes. Titanic was readying to dive.

Ransom found no way to brace for it. Then he heard a terrible rending and tearing of metal followed by the sensation that the ship was suddenly racing and spiraling downward like a runaway elevator car. He, Declan, and the remnants of the creature were all headed for the bottom. “With God knows how many others,” he said to himself.

At the same time, Ransom felt the enormous pressure against him, building, he feared exponentially, and he felt confidant he need not put the gun to his own head, that Titanic would save him the trouble and the messiness of suicide.

It was a long and heart-rending, freezing freefall of a ride. It had Ransom pinned to the floor like one of those butterflies stuck through with a needle and mounted on a wall.

He tried to raise his gun to finish himself off, to do the deed, but it was impossible to move his limbs; he was plastered to the wall or was it the floor. No telling anymore. Likely not till he hit bottom.

These thoughts filled his mind when suddenly the seal all around the closed, locked door burst due to the incredible pressures as the ship sank deeper and deeper toward the bottom. The explosion of water into the freezer quickly began to fill the room, lifting Ransom’s body and sending him floating for the wall that had become the ceiling here. He held tight to the gun, assuring himself it was the best way to go even as the freezing water was claiming him, hypothermia setting in. Suddenly, his hand was shivering to badly to align the muzzle with his temple, and he was going in and out of consciousness with the freezing cold while thinking this is how I’ll go… frozen like a damned block of ice.

The descent was like riding a giant bullet to the bottom, and the bottom came faster than expected, the powerful jolt of the ship’s nose digging deep and sending a jarring, powerful reverberation through the body of Titanic ’s remains, the jolt also sending Declan’s body smashing against the opposite wall along with Alastair, like a ragdoll, hitting the same wall, pounding his head so hard against it as to mercifully kill him.

Ransom’s final thoughts as the ship had plunged and just before its violent stop were of Jane Tewes’ face, her smile, her open arms that very last night she’d held him to her breasts.

Titanic continued her screeching and moaning from her steep descent of two and a half miles to the ocean floor until her bow dug out a sixty-foot trough to lie in for eternity. By the time Titanic hit bottom, few survivors in the water remained alive, almost all were victims of hypothermia. Aside from Alastair Ransom and Declan Irvin, others who had remained aboard for the ride to the bottom either did so because they had become trapped inside the hull or had intentionally wanted to go out this way. Among them were some of the richest families on board who had secretly locked themselves away in a cargo hold, the one that included the bolted down automobiles in the sealed cargo hold at the bow below decks. They’d climbed into the cars for one hell of a ride.

No one caught inside Titanic , hiding in cubby holes and even sealed compartments could have long survived what most assuredly felt like an elevator ride straight to damnation at impact against the ocean floor, two and a half miles below the surface.

Mercifully, Declan and Alastair had come to form a still life not unlike the paintings of the Madonna and child, as Declan’s body had been thrown across Alastair’s lap. Neither man suffered the agony of a slow death here.

They would also never know if Thomas had survived, and if Thomas had saved the journal.

Two and a half miles above the final resting place of Titanic , lifeboats remained in the water as did survivors screaming for the boats to return for them, but the screams quickly diminished, soon dying altogether. The forty-nine degree water temperature claimed anyone remaining in the sea. Those dead with life jackets attached in dull gray and beige floated on the calm sea like so many mannequins disturbed only by huge air bubbles still rising from Titanic ’s descent, the surface waves sending the dead in all directions from the exact spot where Titanic had lifted her aft section to tower above the sea, to then pivot like a giant top, and to finally slip below the surface like Neptune’s play toy.

Men, women, and children in the life boats who hadn’t fallen asleep had seen Titanic ’s bow dip below the water and her aft section with the enormous propellers rise to what seemed a mile in the star-filled sky. Some aboard the lifeboats had called for Lightoller and other officers to do their duty, to do all in their power to save as many of those in the water as possible. “The damn boats are only half filled!” shouted an American woman named Molly Brown. “Do something!”

“Do what?” began a chorus of crewmen in reply.

“There’s naught to be done!”

“The cries’ve ended; they’re all dead!”

Lightoller finished for the other crewmen in all the bobbing lifeboats. “Do you wish to share your lifeboat with the dead? Shall we have a vote?”

This rhetorical question silenced the passengers, but Lightoller, losing his calm for a moment, added, “Then please do shut up! We-We had to ferry away from the ship! Else… else it would have sucked us down with it.” He then exchanged a look with Thomas, both of them knowing that Captain’s Smith orders went against all that was human nature. Self-sacrifice was all well and good, but no one knew if he had it within them until faced with such an awful circumstance as this.

Murdoch had escaped it; gotten around the problem with a bullet to his head. Smith had wandered about in a daze there at the end. Lightoller had last seen him returning to his berth. He imagined that the old man had simply laid down in his bed until fate—which seemed to have stalked them all tonight—came for him.

Nothing noble in it, Lightoller told himself. No winners here. Thomas Coogan could no longer meet his gaze.

Thomas said nothing. He knew of Captain Smith’s orders for the lifeboat operators to maintain a position in close to the ship—that the plan was they all go down with the ship, leaving not one possibility that any of the disease organisms be transported to a port of any kind other than on the River Styx.

A shivering, drenched Charles Lightoller, who’d jumped ship at the last moment and had a life and death struggle with the sea when caught up in debris pressing him under, had somehow gotten a hold on collapsible B, which was over-loaded with survivors, but then life boat #14 came and crewmen lashed collapsible B to #14. Once aboard B, Lightoller made his way onto the less crowded #14, and being the most senior officer, he took charge even as his teeth chattered and his body shivered.

He now moved among the passengers on board the boat, sadly only half full. He made his way to sit alongside Thomas Coogan and the dog beside him. “Appears our plan did not completely succeed, Thomas, and I am sorry for the loss of your friends left aboard.”

“You saw Ransom. He was going after Declan; they may well have gotten onto another lifeboat the other side of the ship where Mr. Murdoch was in charge.”

“I’d’ve insisted he get aboard, but we still had women and children to board. Damn people. Why couldn’t they’ve all cooperated? No one wanted to get on the bloody boats!”