The Explorer's Apprentice

85:Death of Titanic

 Marley Faulkner

Death is a plague, ferocious and consuming, as it eats away at the cold night air. Everywhere Marley steps, she can smell it.

She can taste it.

It’s on her skin, in her hair, beside her, under her—she’s absolutely riddled with it, it’s a cancer. The sea devours the massive ship like a child’s toy, as if mocking the very name ‘unsinkable.’ If the sea could laugh, Marley is certain that that’s just what it would be doing now—cackling and hooting at the irony it’s caused.

The moon is bright and sorrowful as dying screams pierce the air. Bodies fall over the side of the ship—or the little deck that’s left of it anyway—and bump and crash into nothingness. Bodies drown in the starving sea, and it gets them with the velocity of a trap. Water wraps around their ankles and pulls them completely under. It’s as if the sea has a mind of its own, and it’s ferocious. Bodies bob to the surface and lay there, face down, like dolls. Bodies—it’s such an eerie and empty-sounding word, not fit to describe an actual person’s individual spirit. But the way Marley sees it, the second that last ounce of life exits a broken body, a body is all that’s left. The soul is gone, and only its hollow shell remains—a memory of everything the deceased used to be. A body is something concrete for others to hold onto—family, perhaps, or friends or lovers.

“We have to stay on this ship as long as possible!” Jack puts his hands on her shoulders and she looks him in the eyes. They’re wide, surveying the scene with the same astonished horror that Marley is, but they shimmer with hope. “Come on!”

They skid up the sliver of remaining deck, shoving against thousands of other passengers—left behind yet still alive, just as they are, and trying to figure out how to live to reach tomorrow. Jack’s hand is still warm in her own, and it’s amazing how strong and healthy he feels. Marley finds this so comforting— there’s still beautiful, pure life among so much tragic death. Jack is a beacon, an angel in hell.

The water has reached all the way up to the fourth smokestack and it shifts with a stomach-churning groan, unable to sustain so much liquid pressure.

“Come on, Rose!” Jack leaps onto the deck below that’s now the highest of them all. The further the head sinks, the higher the tail rises.  He reaches out his hands for her and she follows, her breaths coming out as something between a gasp, a scream, and a sigh all at once. “I got ya!”

Water breaks windows and sucks men into the great ship with the power a black hole. Water rips apart families and shows no mercy. It eats babies and wives and gobbles up the elderly. It roars for more and can never be satisfied. It’s as if water is a famished, spoiled rich man who cannot be content until he has claimed everything at the dinner table for his own.

Water has completely consumed at least a quarter of the last, giant smokestack, and it’s finally starting to give way. The sharp sound of destruction cuts through the night like a medieval sword.

Marley sees it start to fall before anyone else does. “No!” But of course, there is nothing she can do to stop it. In a battle between Humanity and Ocean, Ocean always wins, and Humanity was a fool to test that theory.

The giant smokestack, as big as half the world—the fourth smokestack that Uncle Brock had mentioned was completely pointless and existed only for an attractive appeal—finally falls to its demise, bringing the three hundred souls swimming and bobbing in little lifeboats below down with it.

Marley is continuously forced ahead and she’s so close to every stranger around her that it’s hard to tell where one person ends and another starts. It’s dark, slanted puzzle. And with each beat that Marley’s living heart takes, the end of the boat seems to get higher and higher. It seems to touch the sky—kiss the moon before its final end.