TITANIC ~ A Yoonmin Story

I Trust You

As the ship tilts further everything not bolted inside shifts.

Cupboards burst open in the pantry showering the floor with tons of china. A piano slides across the floor, crashing into a wall. Furniture tumbles across the smoking room floor.

On the A-Deck promenade passengers lose their grip and slide down the wooden deck like a bobsled run, hundreds of feet before they hit the water. Pae Sulgi, Jimin's maid, slips as she struggles along the railing and slides away screaming.

At the stern the propellers are a hundred feet out of the water and rising. Panicking people leap from the poop deck rail, fall screaming and hit the water like mortar rounds. A man falls from the poop deck, hitting the bronze hub of the starboard propeller with a sickening smack.

Swimmers look up and see the stern towering over them like a monolith, the propellers rising against the stars. A hundred and ten feet. A hundred and twenty.

At the stern rail a man jumps. He falls seemingly forever, right past one of the giant screws. The water rushes up and Mijeong watches in horror as the sounds of the dying ship and screaming people come across the water.

The Titanic's lights are blazing, reflecting in the still water.  Its stern is high in the air, angles up over forty five degrees. The propellers are a hundred and fifty feet out of the water now. Over a thousand passengers cling to the decks, looking from a distance like a swarm of bees.

The image is shocking, unbelievable, unthinkable. Mijeong stares at the spectacle, unable to frame it or put it into any proportion.

"God Almighty." Wan Bao states as the great liner's lights flicker.

In the darkness of the engine room, Chief Engineer P'ill Seunghee hangs onto a pipe at the master breaker panel. Around him men climb through tilted cyclopean machines with electric hand-torches. It is a black hell of breaking pipes, spraying water, and groaning machinery threatening to tear right out of its bedplates.

Water sprays down, hitting the breaker panel, but P'ill with not leave his post. The breakers kick with a loud clunk. He slams them in again and a blast of light shines out. Something melts and arcing fills the engine room with nightmarish light.

The lights go out all over the ship. Titanic becomes a vast black silhouette against the stars.

In collapsible C: Somun Yongjoon has his back to the ship, unable to watch the great steamer die. He is catatonic with remorse, his mind overloaded. He can avert his eyes, but he can't block out the sounds of dying people and machinery.

A loud cracking report comes across the water.

Near the third funnel a man clutches the ship's rail. He stares down as the deck splits right between his feet. A yawning chasm opens with a thunder of breaking steel.

Kim Namjoon is clutching the railing on the roof of the Officers' Mess. He watches in horror as the ship's structure rips apart right in front of him. He gapes down into a widening maw, seeing straight down into the bowels of the ship, amid a booming concussion like the sound of artillery. People falling into the widening crevasse look like dolls.

The stay cables on the funnel part and snap across the decks like whips, ripping off davits and ventilators. A man is hit by a whipping cable and snatched out of sight. Another cable smashes the rail next to Namjoon and it rips free. He falls backward into the pit of jagged metal.

Fires, explosions and sparks light the yawning chasm as the hull splits down through nine decks to the keel. The sea pours into the gaping wound.

Back inside the engine room it is a thundering black hell. Men scream as monstrous machinery comes apart around them, steel frames twisting like taffy. Their torches illuminate the roaring, foaming demon of water as it races through the machines. Trying to climb they are overtaken in seconds.