Dan Simmons - The Terror

“Downing!” Fitzjames called to the silhouette of the tall quartermaster who had returned to fighting flames with his burning blanket.

Downing tossed the blanket away and ran back through the smoke. Without asking a question, the quartermaster hooked Collins’s remaining arm over his own shoulder and said, “After you, Mr. Goodsir.”

Goodsir started up the ladderway but a dozen men with buckets were trying to come down through the smoke.

“Make way!” bellowed Goodsir. “Wounded man coming up.”

The boots and knees pressed back.

As Downing carried the now unconscious Collins up the almost vertical ladder, Goodsir came up onto the lower deck where they all lived. Seamen gathered around and stared back at him. The surgeon realized that he must look like a casualty himself – his hands and clothes and face were bloody from crashing into the post, and he knew that they were also black with soot.

“Aft to the sick bay,” ordered Goodsir as Downing lifted the burned and mauled man in his arms. The quartermaster had to twist sideways to carry Collins down the narrow companionway. Behind Goodsir, two dozen men were handing buckets down the ladder from the deck while others poured snow onto the steaming, hissing deck boards in the seamen’s berthing area around the stove and forward scuttle. If the deck there caught fire, Goodsir knew, the ship was lost.

Henry Lloyd came out of the sick bay, his face pale and eyes wide.

“Are my instruments laid out?” demanded Goodsir.

“Yes, sir.”

“Bone saw?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Downing laid the unconscious Collins on the bare surgical table in the middle of the sick bay.

“Thank you, Mr. Downing,” said Goodsir. “Would you be so kind as to get a seaman or two and help these other sick men to a bed in a cubicle somewhere? Any empty berth will do.”

“Aye, Doctor.”

“Lloyd, get forward to Mr. Wall and tell the cook and his mates that we need as much hot water from the Frazer’s stove as he can give us. But first, turn up those oil lamps. Then get back here. I’ll need your hands and a lantern.”

For the next hour, Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir was so busy that the sick bay could have caught fire and he would not have noticed except to be glad for the extra light.

He stripped Collins’s upper body naked – the open wounds steamed in the freezing air – threw the first pan of hot water over them to cleanse them as best he could, not for hygiene but to briefly clear away the blood in order to see how deep they were, decided that the claw wounds themselves were not immediately life threatening, and went to work on the second master’s shoulder, neck, and face.

The arm had come off cleanly. It was as if a huge guillotine had severed Collins’s arm with one drop. Used to industrial and shipboard accidents that mauled and twisted and tore flesh to shreds, Goodsir studied the wound with something like admiration, if not awe.

Collins was bleeding to death, but the flames he’d been caught in had cauterized the gaping shoulder wound to some extent. It had saved his life. So far.

Goodsir could see the shoulder bone – a glistening white knob – but there was no remaining arm bone that he had to cut away. With Lloyd shakily holding a lantern close and sometimes putting his finger where Goodsir ordered – often on a spurting artery – Goodsir deftly tied off the severed veins and arteries. He had always been good at this sort of thing – his fingers worked almost by themselves.

Amazingly, there seemed to be little or no fabric or foreign material in the wound. This lowered the chance of fatal sepsis, although that was still a probability. Goodsir cleansed what he could see with the second and final pan of hot water brought aft by Downing. Then he cut away any loose shards of flesh and sutured where he could. Luckily there were flaps of skin long enough that the surgeon could fold them back over the wound and sew them with broad stitches.

Collins moaned and stirred.

Goodsir worked as quickly as he could now, wanting to finish the worst of it before the man came fully awake.

The right side of Collins’s face hung down on his shoulder like a loosened Carnivale mask. It reminded Goodsir of the many autopsies he had performed, cutting away the face and folding it up over the top of the skull like a tight wet cloth.

He had Lloyd pull the long flap of facial skin as far up and as tight as he could – his assistant turned away to vomit on the deck but then immediately returned, wiping his sticky fingers on his wool waistcoat – and Goodsir quickly stitched the loose part of Collins’s face to a thick flap of skin and flesh just below the man’s receding hairline.

He could not save the second master’s eye. He tried pressing it back into place, but the man’s suborbital ridge had been shattered. Bone splinters were in the way. Goodsir snapped off the splinters, but the eyeball itself was too damaged.

He took shears out of Lloyd’s shaking hands and cut away the retinal nerve, throwing the eye into the bucket already filled with bloody rags and shreds of Collins’s flesh.

“Hold that lantern closer,” ordered Goodsir. “Quit shaking.”

Amazingly, there was some eyelid left. Goodsir pulled it down as far as he could and deftly stitched it to a flap of loose skin below the eye. These stitches he made closer together since they would have to serve for years.

If Collins survived.

Having done the best he could on the second master’s face for the time being, Goodsir turned his attention to the burns and claw wounds. The burns were superficial. The claw wounds ran deep enough that Goodsir could see the always shocking whiteness of exposed ribs here and there.

Directing Lloyd to apply salve to the burns with his left hand while holding the lantern close with his right, Goodsir cleaned and closed the torn muscles and sewed the surface flesh and skin back in place where he could. Blood continued to flow from the shoulder wound and Collins’s neck, but at a much reduced rate. If the flames had cauterized the flesh and veins enough, the second mate might have enough blood left in him to allow for his survival.

Other men were being carried in, but they were suffering only from burns – some serious but none life threatening – and now that the most urgent part of his work on Collins was finished, Goodsir hung the lantern on the brass hook above the table and ordered Lloyd to help the others with salve, water, and dressings.

He was just finishing with Collins – administering opium so the waking, screaming man would sleep – when he turned to find Captain Fitzjames standing next to him.

The captain was as sooty and bloody as the surgeon.

“Will he live?” asked Fitzjames.

Goodsir set down a scalpel and opened and then closed his bloody hands as if to say only God knows .

Fitzjames nodded. “The fire is contained,” said the captain. “I thought you’d want to know.”

Goodsir nodded. He’d not thought about the fire at all in the past hour. “Lloyd, Mr. Downing,” he said. “Would you be so kind as to carry Mr. Collins to that cot nearest the forward bulkhead. It’s the warmest there.”

“We lost all of the carpenter’s stores on the orlop deck,” continued Fitzjames, “and many of our remaining food stores that were in crates near the forward scuttle and bow area, and a good part of the Bread Room stores as well. I’d say a third of our remaining supply of canned and casked food is gone. And we’re sure there is damage on the hold deck, but we haven’t been back down there yet.”

“How did the fire begin?” asked the surgeon.

“Collins or one of his men threw a lantern at the thing when it came up out of the scuttle at them,” said the captain.