Steven Kent - 100 Fathoms Below

Shit , Jerry thought. He had a bad feeling where this was going.

“Your little stunt on Philadelphia cost a good navy man his career,” Duncan said. “I hope you’re happy.”

“Sir—”

“Save it,” Duncan interrupted. “I’m watching you, White. You step out of line, you screw up, you so much as miss a button on your uniform, and I will be on your ass. Don’t doubt it for a second.”

Duncan walked off. Jerry stayed where he was, watching him go. Damn. Just when things were starting to look up. He glanced nervously at the other men moving through the corridor, hoping they hadn’t seen what just happened, but on a submarine, privacy was as scarce as sunshine. Everyone knew everyone’s business. Of course they had seen. He could feel their eyes on him. His cheeks burned. They would talk about it too. There was no stopping it. Gossip ran through a submarine faster than beer through a sailor on shore leave.

Welcome to Roanoke, Jerry thought. Only three months to go.

Sailing deep and slow to avoid detection, it took a week for Roanoke to reach the international waters south of Kamchatka Peninsula. For Warren Stubic, that week passed agonizingly slowly. The dull pain behind his eyes had stayed with him since the day of the launch. It was getting harder to concentrate on his duties, on studying for his quals, or on the “hot run” drills they ran in the torpedo room, where they practiced what to do if a torpedo blew inside the tube. Now, on top of everything else, he was feeling physically ill as well.

It had started slowly, with the glare of the boat’s fluorescent lights intensifying an already blinding headache. But in the couple of hours since his watch section ended, the throbbing had worsened to the point where a mere glimpse of a light fixture felt like staring into the sun. It burned his eyes and pierced his skull like daggers.

Then there was the heat. He was sweating like a sumo wrestler, really burning up, but it didn’t feel like any fever he’d ever had. It felt as if someone were stoking a coal forge in his chest.

Stubic locked himself in one of the stalls in the head. Everything in the head was stainless steel: sinks, stalls, toilets, and all of it reflecting the searing light from the overheads into his eyes. But where else could he go to be alone? He couldn’t let anyone see him like this. They would make him go see Matson, the hospital corpsman, who would need to know when it started and where he’d been, and soon enough, everyone on the damn boat would know he had been to a brothel. Sailors gossiped worse than his grandmother’s canasta circle, especially on a submarine, where there wasn’t much else to keep them entertained. Worse, it would turn into a black mark on his record, and then he could kiss his navy career goodbye. Being a navy man like his father and grandfather before him was all he had ever wanted. He couldn’t lose that. He just couldn’t.

But his eyes were burning. His head was burning. His whole body was burning. He just wanted to stand under a freezing-cold shower for half an hour. Or even just 10 minutes. Hell, he’d settle for five minutes—anything to stop the feeling that he was burning up from within. But it wasn’t allowed, not on a submarine. Water was too scarce. They had to distill potable water from seawater, which gave them only a limited supply for drinking, cooking, and bathing. When you took a shower on a sub, you were supposed to turn the water on and wet down, then turn the water off and soap up, then turn the water on again and rinse off. You couldn’t ever leave the water running anywhere, not even while brushing your teeth. If Stubic turned on the shower and let the cold water run over him for as long as he wanted—dear God, what blessed relief that would be—it would draw attention, and that was the last thing he or his career needed.

Maybe the fever would break on its own. Maybe he could just ride it out and not have to see Matson. Yes, that was it. He just had to tough it out, soldier through it, walk it off, as his high school coach used to tell him.

But he kept having flashes of that Filipino girl with the strange jade-green eyes. Every few minutes, the memory barged into his mind, like an unwanted guest. The girl… the hallway… the eyes in the dark. Those eyes—what were they? Something had been with him in that pitch-black hallway. Something whose eyes weren’t… Weren’t what? Weren’t human? That was ridiculous. What else could they be?

Had those glowing eyes even been real, or were they something his feverish mind had dreamed up—a false memory?

But instead of comforting him, the thought filled him with terror.

What had happened in that hallway?

Why couldn’t he remember ?

Stubic heard someone come into the head, enter the stall next to his, and latch the door. He heard the sailor urinating, the sound amplified by the stainless steel toilet, and winced as the noise sharpened his headache. Sweat rolled down his face. God, all he wanted was to be somewhere cold. It was too hot here. Too hot everywhere aboard Roanoke. He wanted to be anywhere else, anywhere that was cold.

He heard the toilet flush, the stall door open, and the sailor begin washing his hands at the bank of sinks along the bulkhead. Stubic stayed still, not wanting to be noticed, just wanting to be left alone—but a scent came to him on the air. Not the usual stench of the head, but something sweet, enticing. He had never smelled anything like it before. It compelled him to stand up, unlock the stall door, and walk out into the head.

Steve Bodine, the helmsman, stood at the sink, washing his hands. He looked up when he heard Stubic approach.

“How’s it going, Stubic?” he asked in his pleasant Oklahoma twang. He turned off the sink and did a double take. “Jesus, man, are you all right?”

“I’m—I’m fine,” Stubic said. That scent… It was coming from Bodine, from inside him, somehow.

“You don’t look fine to me,” Bodine said. “In fact, you look like hammered shit.”

Stubic blinked rapidly, squinting against the painful light.

Bodine moved closer. “Hey, man, you want me to get the hospital corpsman?”

“No, no, not Matson,” Stubic insisted.

He stepped closer to Bodine. Somehow, he could see the network of veins and arteries running beneath Bodine’s chestnut skin. He could see the blood moving through them, pushing forward in time with Bodine’s pulse.

A pulse that Stubic could hear as clearly as the ticking of a grandfather clock.

“What are you doing, Stubic?” Bodine asked, taking a step back.

Bodine’s blood—that was what he smelled, the source of the sweet, enticing scent. Stubic hadn’t been hungry all day. Just the thought of eating had sickened him. But now, suddenly, he was hungry. So very hungry.

He reached for Bodine quickly, faster than he ever thought he could move.

To Lieutenant Gordon Abrams, the department head in charge of the galley, operating the mess on a submarine felt a lot like tending bar. He got to know the crew the way bartenders got to know their regulars: by listening to them talk. And boy did they love to talk. Through first meal, lunch, dinner, and midrats—those midnight meals for sailors still on duty—every day of every operation felt like a new episode in an ongoing soap opera. If a realistic movie was ever made about life on a sub, it would be a lot less Run Silent, Run Deep and a lot more Peyton Place. But you couldn’t seal 140 men in a can for three months and not expect their deepest, darkest shit to come to light. If any sailor was nursing a grudge, picking fights, cheating on his girl back home, or even suspected someone of pissing in the showers, Gordon was usually the first to know.