Dan Simmons - The Terror

Fitzjames grabbed up his lantern and was out the door in a second, leaving his smoldering jacket behind in the boiler room. Goodsir and Des Voeux followed him as they ran forward past scattered casks and smashed crates and then squeezed between the black iron bulkheads that held what was left of Erebus ’s fresh water supply and the few remaining sacks of its coal.

They passed a black opening to a coal bin and Goodsir glanced to his right and saw a shirtless human arm protruding over the iron rim of the door frame. He paused and bent to see who lay there, but the light had moved away as the captain and mate continued to run forward with the lanterns. Goodsir was left in the absolute darkness with what was almost certainly another corpse. He stood and ran to catch up.

More crashes. Shouts now from the deck above. A musket or pistol shot. Another shot. Screams. Several men screaming.

Goodsir, outside the bobbing circles of lantern light, came out of the narrow corridor into an open, dark area and ran headfirst into a thick oak post. He fell on his back into eight inches of ice and sludgy meltwater. He couldn’t focus his eyes – the lanterns above him were only swinging orange blurs as he struggled to stay conscious – and everything at that moment stank and tasted of sewage and coal dust and blood.

“The ladder’s gone!” cried Des Voeux.

Sitting arse-deep in vile slush, Goodsir could see better as the lanterns steadied. The forward ladderway, made of thick oak and easily able to support several large men hauling hundred-pound sacks of coal up and down, had been smashed into splinters. Fragments hung from the open scuttle frame above.

The screaming was coming from up on the orlop deck.

“Boost me up,” cried Fitzjames, who had tucked his pistol into his belt and set down the lantern and was now reaching up, trying to get a handhold on the splintered frame of the scuttle. He started pulling himself up. Des Voeux bent to boost him.

Flames suddenly exploded above and through the square opening.

Fitzjames cursed and fell onto his back in the icy water only a few yards from Goodsir. It looked as if the entire forward scuttle and everything above it on the orlop deck was on fire.

Fire , thought Goodsir. Acrid smoke filled his nostrils.

There’s nowhere to run . It was a hundred degrees below zero outside and a blizzard was raging. If the ship burned now, they would all die.

“The main ladderway,” said Fitzjames and got to his feet, found the lantern, and began running aft. Des Voeux followed.

Goodsir crawled on all fours through the ice and water, got to his feet, fell again, crawled, then ran after the receding lanterns.

Something on the orlop deck roared. There came a rattle of muskets and the distinct blast of shotguns.

Goodsir wanted to stop in the coal bunker to see if the man belonging to the arm was dead or alive – or even attached to the outflung arm – but there was no light when he got there. He ran on in the dark, ricocheting off the iron, coal, and water bunker bulkheads.

The lanterns were already disappearing up the ladderway to the orlop deck. Smoke billowed down.

Goodsir clambered upward, was kicked in the face by a boot belonging to the captain or mate, and then he was on the orlop deck.

He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. Lanterns bobbed around him but the air was so thick with smoke that there was no illumination.

Goodsir’s impulse was to find the ladderway up to the lower deck and keep climbing, then keep climbing again until he was outside into the clean air, but there were men shouting to his right – toward the bow – so he dropped to all fours. The air was breathable here. Just. Toward the bow was a bright orange glow, far too bright to be lanterns.

Goodsir crawled forward, found the port companionway to the left of the Bread Room, crawled farther. Ahead of him somewhere in the smoke, men were beating at flames with blankets. The blankets were catching fire.

“Get a bucket brigade,” shouted Fitzjames from somewhere ahead of him in the smoke. “Get water down here!”

“There’s no water, Captain,” shouted a voice so agitated that Goodsir could not recognize it.

“Use the piss buckets.” The captain’s voice cut like a blade through the smoke and shouting.

“They’re frozen!” shouted a voice that Goodsir did recognize. John Sullivan, captain of the maintop.

“Use them anyway,” shouted Fitzjames. “And snow. Sullivan, Sinclair, Reddington, Seeley, Pocock, Greater – get the men to form a bucket line from the deck down here to the orlop deck. Scoop up as much snow as you can. Throw it on the flames.” Fitzjames had to stop to cough violently.

Goodsir stood. Smoke swirled around him as if someone had opened a door or window. One second he could see fifteen or twenty feet forward toward the carpenter’s and bosun’s storerooms, clearly see the flames licking the walls and timbers, and the next second he could not see two feet in front of him. Everyone was coughing and Goodsir joined them.

Men shoved against him in their rush to get up the ladderway and Goodsir pressed himself to the bulkhead, wondering if he should go up to the lower deck. He was no use here.

He remembered the bare arm flung out of the coal bunker below in the hold deck. The thought of going down there again made him want to vomit.

But the thing is on this deck.

As if to confirm that thought, four or five muskets not ten feet in front of the surgeon fired at once. The explosions were deafening. Goodsir flung his palms over his ears and fell to his knees, remembering how he had told the crew of Terror that scurvy victims could die from the mere sound of a musket shot. He knew that he had the early symptoms of scurvy.

“Belay that firing!” shouted Fitzjames. “Hold off! There are men up there.”

“But, Captain…” came the voice of Corporal Alexander Pearson, the highest ranking of the four surviving Erebus Royal Marines.

“Hold off, I tell you!”

Goodsir could now see Lieutenant Le Vesconte and the Marines there silhouetted against the flames, Le Vesconte standing and the Marines each on one knee, reloading their muskets as if they were in the midst of a battle. The surgeon thought that the walls, timbers, and loose casks and cartons toward the bow were all on fire. Sailors batted at the flames with blankets and rolls of canvas. Sparks flew everywhere.

The burning silhouette of a man staggered out of the flames toward the Marines and clustered seamen.

“Hold your fire!” shouted Fitzjames.

“Hold your fire!” repeated Le Vesconte.

The burning man collapsed into Fitzjames’s arms. “Mr. Goodsir!” called the captain. John Downing, the quartermaster, ceased beating a blanket against the fire in the corridor and stamped out the flames emanating from the wounded man’s smoldering clothes.

Goodsir ran forward and took the weight of the collapsing man from Fitzjames. The right side of the man’s face was almost gone – not burned but clawed away, the skin and eye hanging loose – and parallel marks ran down the right side of his chest, the claw marks cutting deep through eight layers of fabric and flesh. Blood soaked his waistcoat. The man’s right arm was missing.

Goodsir realized that he was holding Henry Foster Collins, the second master whom Fitzjames earlier had ordered to go toward the bow with Brown and Dunn, the caulker and his mate, to secure the forward hatch.

“I need help getting him up to the surgery,” gasped Goodsir. Collins was a big man, even without his arm, and his legs had finally given way. The surgeon was able to hold him upright only because he was braced against the Bread Room bulkhead.