“Big fish,” Lewis muttered, “little fish. They are all here. If you wait a bit, they shall come and gobble us up.” He had not spoken before, but only wept with pain as a sort of poison filled his leg where he was bitten. The injury hurt as if someone were stabbing at his raw flesh, and it burned and throbbed. He thought the poison was inching up his leg. Lewis ran a high fever.
His wife tried to sooth him. She did not know what was wrong with his leg except it was bleeding frightfully and it happened below decks. If he had not been injured, however, he would have been left behind to drown. “It’s the ague. Rest now.”
“Did you not see my leg? The fish tried to eat me,” Lewis moaned. His brow was feverishly pink.
Weller, an Able Seaman, shook his head, “’Tis no big nor small fish that done this. It is just from the crash to the sea.”
“’Ello?”
“There. Row,” Weller said, “we’ve a live one.”
They pulled a man and a woman from the cold water. They were like two frosty, clothed statues, marble of white and blue. They were both stewards.
When they pulled another from the sea, he was snatched from their hands amid a spray of bright red blood.
Hogg screamed, falling back into the boat and still holding a bluish-colored hand and shoulder, but the rest of the man was gone. Erick Digby leaped to his feet in fear, and the waves from something large rocked the boat so that he fell overboard into the sea.
“Swim, Man,” Hogg called. He tossed the hand and arm into the water.
The megaladon had turned and surfaced now so they could see his back, fins, tail, and the enormous mouth full of teeth. As he swam towards them, he scooped bodies from the water and swallowed them whole, like a whale eating krill.
Everyone screamed.
With the shark having a mouth that large, the boat could fit length-wise. He could swallow the boat in one knock back, but he seemed disinclined to eat the wood of the lifeboat and instead, it ingested the people who were freezing in the water.
Erik Digby howled with the pain from the water, held out one hand helplessly, and waited to be saved, but the survivors in the boat were so frightened, they did not row toward him but sat, holding the oars as weapons.
Their heads swung back and forth, watching the water. The mighty shark snapped up Erik Digby by his middle so the man was able to scream a good long while as the shark carried him along, impaled on a giant tooth.
One of the women fainted.
“DIgby, Digby….” Hogg called softly.
“Do something,” Caroline Prescott demanded.
“Why, I don’na rightly know what to do,” Weller said, his eyes large with fear. His accent grew more pronounced with emotion. “Help me get this man out of the water, yes?”
They pulled another from the water who was not only alive, but also squealing with terror as he watched the giant fish. He kicked madly to help himself into the boat.
The shark came around again, brushing against the bow and scratching the paint from starboard side; the passengers shifted.
“Be still,” Hogg warned, but they did not listen to his advice. The Prescott family bunched up at the back, pushing against Maggie Darby and her injured husband. A woman adjusted the girl, Bernice, who had lost her arm in some accident. “Sit down and come afore.”
“Do something,” someone screamed again.
“Stop bunching up. Come afore. Hurry,” Hogg said.
With his big snout, the shark brushed the bow again, teasing his prey.
Those aft fell out of the boat. Those who remained in the boat were splashed as many fell in. They were shocked at how the water felt like fire upon their skin. The droplets were as painful as hot needle pricks. They fell onto one another, trying to avoid the splashes.
Hogg groaned, and Jewell yelled. Bernice never awoke, and Lewis did not look as if he cared; actually, the water cooled his fever and soothed his poisoned leg. He did not care that he was in the water. Lewis and Bernice, both injured badly and not wearing life belts, began to sink and were bitten before they could sink very deep. Red bubbles burst on the surface of the water.
“Come on, ye mean bastard. I will poke your eyes out,” Weller yelled.
In response, the leviathan made a pass, grabbing bodies that floated motionlessly, as well as Maggie Darby and the Prescott men. Caroline Prescott wailed and tried to strike the creature as it passed her, but only managed to skin her hands raw on his rough skin.
“We are comin’ to get ye,” Weller promised, “We’ll not leave you.”
Caroline Prescott screamed harder as the pain of losing her family and the pain of her body filled her mind. She held bloody hands aloft, the skin so abraded that she could hardly stand the additional agony.
The megaladon swallowed Caroline Prescott and kept coming, bumping his huge mouth against the lifeboat. Three women fell out and into his maw. With a quick dive and a wave of his tail, he swam away, gathering more of the dead.
The men turned the boat. Weller shook his head and muttered to himself.
Margaret Hays clutched her dog, Lady, closer to herself, and Dorothy Gibson set her face into her hands and cried as they heard the calls for help.
While they found five more survivors floating, two died quickly in the chilly air. The men rowed for all they were worth, leaving the bodies behind, and hoping morosely that the shark would stay away, eat the dead and dying, and leave them alone.
If the shark had been serious about the attack, he might have crushed the little boat into matchsticks and consumed them. While they had suffered losses, they had also been fortunate. Maybe the beast had simply been playing a devilish game with them.
As they rowed hard and left the dead behind, they calmed. One of the women cried bitterly over her husband whom she had left behind. “But maybe he found a later boat, yes?”
Hogg nodded, “To be sure, Ma’am. Indeed, I am sure many will join us when we are rescued.”
“I hope ‘tis soon. I swear, but I am about to freeze my n… nose off,” Weller chuckled. For having just rowed through a field of the dead and dying, his passengers were strangely composed.
“A bloody bandage. Is someone injured?” Jewel asked. Faintly, he thought of a red-haired young woman, her face drawn with pain, and her shoulder wrapped in red cloth, but that was a passing wisp of an idea. He did not know why he had even imagined such. It was the anxiety, doubtless.
They hardly recalled the other events that had befallen them so terribly as they focused on the shipwreck. As for the dead, they remembered them as having frozen, and some families in the boat had stood and fallen over the side, they believed, and drown, but the memory was hazy. As they rowed farther from the debris, they remembered less.
“Look!” Hogg almost fell over the side, gathering an unexpected survivor into their boat. It was Rigel, the First Officer’s dog. How Mr. Wilde’s Newfoundland had gotten out and into the sea, they could not begin to guess, but they dried him and petted him. Some were immediately enamored with Rigel as he had shown his mettle merely by surviving.
Like the mist they were escaping, the memories floated away until no one remembered seeing a big fish at all. They would have laughed at the idea, had they not been so distraught over the sinking of the ship and the many losses they had suffered.
Chapter Ten: Boat Five
Quartermaster Robert Hichens was steering the Titanic when she hit the iceberg, and while he had been ordered by Officer Lightoller to the lifeboat to take command, he was in deep despair. One minute he had been at the wheel with Mr. Moody, and then the next there had been chaos. He could not forget the sight of the ship sinking and passengers and crew tossed into the drink.