Dan Simmons - The Terror

“I want you to shut the fuck up and then die slow and hard,” said Hickey.

Robert Golding laughed a demented boy’s laugh. The barrels of the shotgun he was holding beat a tattoo on the back of Goodsir’s neck.

“Mr. Hickey,” said Goodsir, “you do realize, do you not, that I shall never serve your purposes by dissecting my shipmates.”

Hickey showed his small teeth in the moonlight. “You will, surgeon. I guarantee you will. Or you’ll watch us cut your pieces off one at a time and then have us feed them to you.”

Goodsir said nothing.

“Tom Johnson and the others are going to find you,” Crozier said, never removing his gaze from Cornelius Hickey’s face.

The caulker’s mate laughed. “Johnson already found us, Crozier. Or rather, we found ’im.”

The caulker’s mate reached behind him and pulled a burlap bag from the snow. “What’d you always call Johnson in private, King Crozier? Your strong right arm? Here.” He tossed a naked and bloody right arm, severed just above the elbow, white bone gleaming, through the air and watched it land at Crozier’s feet.

Crozier did not look down at it. “You pathetic little smear of spittle. You are – and always have been – nothing.”

Hickey’s face contorted as if the moonlight were changing him into something nonhuman. His thin lips drew far back from his tiny teeth in a way that the others had seen only with scurvy victims in their last hours. His eyes showed something beyond madness, far beyond mere hatred.

“Magnus,” said Hickey, “strangle the captain. Slow.”

“Yes, Cornelius,” said Magnus Manson, and shuffled forward.

Goodsir tried to rush forward, but the boy, Golding, held him fast with one hand while holding the shotgun to his head with the other.

Crozier did not move a muscle as the giant lumbered toward him. When Manson’s shadow fell over both the captain and George Thompson holding him, Thompson himself flinched just a bit, Crozier sagged back, lunged forward, freed his left arm, and thrust his hand into the left pocket of his greatcoat.

Golding almost pulled the shotgun’s trigger, thus almost blowing Goodsir’s head off by accident, so startled was he as the captain’s coat pocket burst into flame and the muted double boom of an explosion rolled past them and echoed back from the seracs.

“Ouch,” said Magnus Manson, slowly raising his hands to his belly.

“God-damn it,” Crozier said calmly. He had inadvertently fired both barrels of a two-shot pistol.

“Magnus!” cried Hickey and rushed forward to the giant.

“I think the captain shot me, Cornelius,” said Manson. The big man sounded confused and a little bemused.

“Goodsir,” shouted Crozier amid the confusion. The captain whirled, kneed Thompson in the bollocks and broke free. “Run!”

The surgeon tried. He pulled, shoved, and almost won his freedom before the younger Golding tripped him, knocked him onto his belly, and set the full pressure of his knee on Goodsir’s back and the full force of two shotgun barrels against the back of Goodsir’s skull.

Crozier was loping for the seracs.

Hickey calmly seized a shotgun from Richard Aylmore, aimed, and fired both barrels.

The top of a serac splintered and fell at the same time that Crozier was thrown forward on his face, sliding on the ice and on a film of his own blood.

Hickey handed the shotgun back and unbuttoned Manson’s coats and waistcoasts, ripping open the big man’s shirts and filthy undershirt. “Bring the fucking surgeon over here,” he shouted at Golding.

“It don’t hurt much, Cornelius,” rumbled Magnus Manson. “Tickles, more like.”

Golding shoved, prodded, and dragged Goodsir over. The surgeon put on his glasses and inspected the twin wounds. “I’m not certain, but I don’t believe the small-caliber bullets penetrated Mr. Manson’s subcutaneous fat, much less his muscle layer. It’s little more than two minor punctures, I fear. Now may I go attend to Captain Crozier, Mr. Hickey?”

Hickey laughed.

“Cornelius!” shouted Aylmore.

Crozier, leaving a trail of blood and shredded outer clothing, had gotten to his knees and begun crawling toward the seracs and serac shadows. Now he painfully got to his feet. He staggered drunkenly toward the ice columns.

Golding giggled and raised his shotgun.

“No!” cried Hickey. He pulled Crozier’s big percussion-cap pistol from his coat pocket and took careful aim.

Twenty feet from the seracs, Crozier looked back over his shredded shoulder.

Hickey fired.

The bullet spun Crozier around and dropped him to his knees. His body sagged, but he flailed and thrust one hand down onto the ice in an attempt to rise.

Hickey took five steps forward and fired again.

Crozier was thrown backward and lay on his back with only his knees in the air.

Hickey took two more steps, aimed, and fired again. One of Crozier’s legs was knocked aside and down as the bullet tore through the knee or the muscle just below the knee. The captain made no sound.

“Cornelius, honey.” Magnus Manson’s voice had the tone of an injured child. “My stomach is starting to hurt.”

Hickey wheeled. “Goodsir, give him something for the pain.”

The surgeon nodded. His voice, when he spoke, was very thin and very tight and very flat. “I brought an entire bottle of Dover’s Powder – mostly made from a derivative of the coca plant, sometimes called cocaine. I’ll give him that. All of it, if you like. With a chaser of Mandragora, laudanum, and morphine. That will take away the pain.” He reached into his medical kit.

Hickey raised the pistol and aimed it at the surgeon’s left eye. “If you even make Magnus sick to his stomach, much less if your fucking hand comes out of that bag with a scalpel or other blade, I swear to fucking Christ I’ll shoot you in the balls and keep you alive long enough to make you eat them. Do you understand, Surgeon?”

“I understand,” said Goodsir. “But it is the Hippocratic oath that determines my next actions.” He brought out a bottle and spoon and poured out a tiny bit of liquid morphine. “Sip this,” he said to the giant.

“Thank you, Doctor,” said Magnus Manson. He slurped soundly.

“Cornelius!” cried Thompson, pointing.

Crozier was gone. Bloody smears led into the seracs.

“Oh, fuck me,” said the caulker’s mate with a sigh. “This arsehole is more trouble than he is worth. Dickie, have you reloaded?” Hickey was reloading the pistol as he asked the question.

“Aye,” said Aylmore, lifting the shotgun.

“Thompson, pick up the extra shotgun I brought and stay here with Magnus and the surgeon. If the good doctor does anything at all that you don’t like – even farts – blow his private parts off.”

Thompson nodded. Golding giggled. Hickey with his pistol and Golding and Aylmore with their shotguns advanced slowly across the moonlit ice and then tentatively, single file, into the forest of seracs and shadows.

“He could be hard to find in here,” whispered Aylmore as they stepped into the stripes of moonlight and darkness.

“I don’t think so,” said Hickey, and pointed at the broad smear of blood that led straight ahead between the ice columns like a telegraph code of black dots and dashes between the shadows.

“He still has a little pistol with him,” whispered Aylmore, moving cautiously from serac to serac.

“Fuck him and fuck his pistol,” said Hickey, striding straight ahead, his boots slipping a bit on the blood and ice.

Golding giggled loudly. “Fuck him and fuck his little pistol,” he said in a singsong voice, snickering again.

The blood trail ended forty feet in at the black polynya . Hickey rushed forward and stared down at where the horizontal smears became vertical smears on the side of the eight-foot ice slab. Something had gone into the water here.